We stayed like that for a moment longer, just looking into each other’s eyes. Finally, though, I looked away, breaking the gaze. I felt like we’d actually begun to really reconnect on the deeper level we used to share, the level I’d wanted to get back to since the moment I first laid eyes on him at the wedding three months before. The level where we could tell what the other was thinking by just a smile and a wink, or a quirk of our lips. Where we knew how the other’s day had been just from the set of their shoulders, or the way they walked or sighed.
“I should get going,” I said finally. “The girls are expecting me at the art gallery.”
“Sounds good. Besides, sooner I get started on this work, the sooner we can get out to the storage unit. Here, by the way.” He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and began to type something out. A moment after hitting send, my phone buzzed in my pocket. “The address and unit number so you can just meet us over there.”
I got up from the chair and went to leave.
“One last thing,” he said as my hand touched the doorknob. He opened a drawer in his desk, my back still turned to him. By the time I was facing him again, he was holding out a handgun to me, holster and all. “Take it.”
I looked at it. I didn’t mind guns. In fact, I was even a pretty good shot.
He shook the gun a little. “Please, Vanessa. Just to be on the safe side. It’ll make me feel a hell of a lot better if I know you’re armed.”
I sighed, took the gun from him, and clipped it to the belt of my jeans at the small of my back and pulled my top down over it. “You know, flowers are considered more romantic.”
“Ha, ha. It’s loaded, so be careful.”
“Can you see it?” I asked as I did a little mock spin for him, the weight of the gun simultaneously comforting and uncomfortable as it dragged down my jeans a little.
“Yeah. But don’t worry, it’s not like you’re going anywhere in public with it. You should be fine just being around town.”
“See you soon,” I said, smiling as I opened the door and slipped out.
“Soon,” he agreed, his words following after me as I walked out into the receptionist area and slipped past Gen.
The Curious Turtle was not the kind of art gallery I’d have broken into. Not only because they carried primarily regional artists with a Rocky Mountain and Southwestern flair, but also their security system was just too damned good.
“Wow,” I breathed as I looked over the sensors focused on the large windows that stretched across the storefront. “How sensitive are those?”
“Pretty damned sensitive,” Jessica said with pride.
“And those?” I asked, pointing to the two different motion detectors up in the corners that covered the floor of the gallery’s wide-open space in front.
“Had a mouse in here once that set off the alarms and brought Richard running to protect his investment,” Ashley said with a grin.
“All the doors are covered,” Elise added. “And the windows.”
“Guys replaced the rear door with one that’s reinforced steel,” Jessica said. “Office door was switched out, too.”
“Who installed the sensors?”
“Lacy, of course,” Elise replied. “I keep telling her she needs to open up a side business doing this kind of thing, but she won’t.”
The four of us—Elise, Jessica, Ashley, and I—all stood together in the open space at the front of the Curious Turtle, surrounded on all sides by oil paintings which hung from the walls. Over in one little corner was a display of ceramic pottery and sculptures that definitely took more than just a few hints of inspiration from Amerindian design. Navajo, from the looks of it.
I paced the room, looking around at all the different pieces of art hanging from the walls. They had three primary artists on display at the moment. “All three of you work here, I guess?”
“Well, I just work here part time,” Elise said. “Ashley runs the gift shop, and Jessica operates the gallery.”
Nodding, I turned and looked out at Main Street, at the little post office shop across the way, the kind of place I’d rented more than my share of mailboxes under assumed names. Down on the corner, just to our right, was a little coffee shop as well. It was slow at this time of the morning, but I’d been in there once before when I was craving a latte. Overall, the storefront was in a good position for retail.
“So, what do you think?” Jessica asked. “Think we’re secure?”
“I think,” I said, still looking out the windows, “once you lock this place up, no one’s getting inside without you knowing about it. They did a good job.”
Even as I said the words, though, the irony of Peter and my diverging professions wasn’t lost on me. He made a living securing property and people. I made a living by taking said property. I smiled a little.
Or I had made one. My smile began to fade.
I had a feeling there was going to be more than just one life change for me after things were all said and done here, which was probably for the best. As far as I knew, INTERPOL and the FBI hadn’t figured out who I was yet because of my ghost of a presence in the system during my younger years. Getting out while I was ahead was probably good for my health, and the only way to maintain my liberty long term.
“Hey, Vanessa,” Ashley said after a moment.
“Hmm?”
“We were wondering,” Ashley continued as I turned around to face the three women.
Jessica cleared her throat, smiling a little. “Yeah, Vanessa. Um, we were wondering…you and Peter are mates, right?”
I started to reply, but stopped myself. I was going to say a definitive yes, and thought better of it only at the last moment.
While we’d been getting closer over the last couple of days, closer than we had been in the last three months of my stay in Enchanted Rock, I was still unsure of where we actually stood.
All three of the women gave me a confused look.
“It’s complicated,” I said finally. “Why?”
The three mates of the Frost pack exchanged looks. “You ask her,” Jessica said to Ashley, distressed looks on their faces.
“No, you.”
“Goddamn, you two are such fucking pantie-waists,” Elise said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll just ask.” She turned to me. “Vanessa, we’re not sure. If you and Peter are mates, does that like, make you our alpha, too? Or something?”
I shook my head in disbelief as I laughed a little.
“Or is there like a vote or something?” Ashley asked, wincing a little.
I laughed louder.
“Because if there is,” Jessica added, “we’ve already talked to Rebecca, and we’re all completely fine with you. We like you.”
“Why is she still laughing?” Elise asked.
Oh lord, I couldn’t believe I was in this position—me being nominated by four human women to be their alphas right alongside Peter.
But just as suddenly as my laughter had burbled up to the surface, it stopped.
Behind me, out on Main Street, tires screeched to a halt, and car doors opened and slammed shut.
Without even having to look behind me, I knew what was coming.
“Out the back!” I yelled as I reached behind my back and drew the pistol Peter had handed me less than an hour earlier. “Move, move, move!”
“Flashbang! Now!” boomed a familiar German voice so loudly that the windows behind me shook in their frame. It was a voice I knew too well from my recurring nightmares where its owner chased me each evening through the bowels of their compound hidden deep in the Oregon forests. “Team A, get to the door! Move! Team B, rear of the building!”
“Vanessa!” Jessica screamed, her eyes doing an awfully accurate impression of an owl as she pointed to the street behind me. “They’re here!”
Adrenaline pumping already, I rushed forward, grabbed at the screaming women, and tried to turn them around.
At my back, a metal canister smashed through the Curious Turtle’s front pla
te glass window, sending shimmering shards of razor-sharp death raining down around us and all over the gallery floor. The women screamed louder, their hands covering their hair and faces as the glass peppered our clothes like the worst ever shower of confetti.
“Shield your eyes!” I yelled over the horrific musical tinkling of the glass, following my own advice. “Cover your ears!”
And then the world became a whirlwind of sound, fury, and smoke as the flashbang grenade exploded inside the gallery.
Jaeger-Tech had just made their move. And we weren’t ready.
Chapter Fifteen – Peter
“What is it?”
“Something big. Just picked up something on those forums that Jake first used to find Jaeger-Tech, one of those plane-spotter websites. Tail numbers of some of their planes were spotted down in Durango just yesterday.”
Lacy had called me back into her office just a few minutes earlier, saying she had something I needed to see. I’d come back as quickly as could.
I leaned in closer and eyed the photo of one of the planes we knew Jaeger-Tech used on a regular basis on Lacy’s computer screen. “Shit. Why didn’t we notice it earlier? Shouldn’t this have been something we spotted when they made the flight plan?”
“We would have,” she said, “if they hadn’t changed the ownership on it. This one came in under a completely different name than any of the companies we’d been following. I can’t keep track of all these different things, there’s just too damned much going on with their financial records, and it’s not like I have a mainline into their servers.”
“Shit,” I repeated, sighing loudly. “This was posted earlier today?”
“Just about an hour ago. Had a program running that monitored any updates or new postings made to the forum.”
I leaned forward, eyes narrowed. The image on the screen was of a plane sitting on the tarmac at the Durango Municipal Airport, but the sky seemed off. It was cloudy. The western part of Colorado had been sunny for the last three days, with hardly any sign of overcast.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Can you check to see what day this image was originally created? This doesn’t look like it came from today.”
“Alright,” she said, biting her lower lip in concentration. She pulled up a series of programs on her computer, which might as well have just been magic and hocus pocus to me. The best I could do was work a database, run a web browser, and work a spreadsheet and word processor. There was a reason why I paid her to do this. “Shit, shit, shit,” she mumbled finally.
“What is it?”
“You’re right. According to the hashing—the, uh, think of it as the signature on the file—this picture was originally taken six days ago.”
I swallowed hard as fear gripped my chest. Not panic. Fear. “Check the flight records going all the way back.”
“Already on it,” she replied as she flipped back to another screen, her fingers a blur on the keyboard as she plugged in a new search string and pulled up a series of information. She sighed and swore again.
“What is it?”
“This was their first flight in. Last week. The flight I saw yesterday by the plane with this tail number came in yesterday.” She looked up at me, her big doe eyes watering up. “Sorry, boss, they’ve been here nearly a week.”
My vision went red. I growled and slammed a fist on her desktop, sending her keyboard leaping and her monitor trembling.
She jumped and squealed, “I’m sorry!”
I growled again and spun away from the desk. It wasn’t her I was pissed at. It was my own cockiness at not having had human intel on the ground at the airport. I’d been too intent on drilling the men. I could have sent any of my men down there on rotation to keep eyes on the place all hours of the day. I could have checked every flight. I hadn’t counted on Jaeger-Tech setting up yet another shell company to outflank us.
But outflank us they had.
“What do we do now?” she yelled from her office as she scrambled out from behind her desk and came after me. “Boss! What do we do?”
“Alright, men!” I shouted as I stomped down the central hallway. Already the guys were poking their heads out of their respective offices, looking at me with the same stone-cold eyes I expected them to have every time we were going into something serious. “Office work’s over! We’re going to the storage unit now.”
“What’s up?” Richard asked, his square jaw clenched. I could practically hear him grinding his teeth already.
“Jaeger-Tech’s somewhere near Enchanted Rock. They must have figured out we were tracking their flight plans and slipped in through Durango under a different name.”
“Son of a…” Richard muttered through bared teeth. He went to grab his phone from his pocket just as I withdrew mine and dialed Vanessa.
“No service,” I said aloud as I looked at my phone. I pulled up Vanessa’s number and tried calling. Nothing. Just beeping, like a disconnected call or a busy signal.
“I’m not getting any service,” Jake called.
Richard and I locked eyes, and he just shook his head.
“Texts aren’t going through, either,” Matthew said, his big, dark brown eyes a little frantic. “I can’t get through to Rebecca.”
“Try calling the school,” Jake said as he picked up his office phone and rapidly stabbed in a number.
“What’re you getting?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said in frustration. “No outgoing tone or anything. Just a busy signal, dammit!”
“Can’t get through to the Turtle, either,” Richard said from his office, his handset pressed to the side of his head. He jabbed the switch a couple times and looked back to me. “Nothing.”
“Lacy?” I asked, spinning around to face her. “You getting anything?”
“I’m not even getting fucking internet, boss,” Frank said from his office. “Nothing.”
“All the lines are down!” Gen shouted from the receptionist desk. “Did we pay the bill?”
“Yes, we paid the goddamn bill!” I yelled back.
“I paid mine,” Lacy said, holding up her cell phone for inspection.
Shit. Okay, things were already off to a bad start. Not only had they blindsided us, but they’d cut off communication amongst the group. As of right then, we had six people twisting in the wind, with only one of them armed and dangerous. “They must be using some kind of stingray device or a jammer. Lacy, could they have dropped something into the utilities and locked out phones and internet as well?”
“I don’t see why not. Security around that infrastructure is pretty crappy. I could pull it off if I really wanted to.”
“So we’re cut off entirely?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Alright,” I said, turning to Richard. “You take Matthew to the storage unit like we discussed and start pulling gear. We need to gear up and be ready for anything. Once that’s done we–”
“No.”
Everything stopped for a moment as I turned and looked at Matthew Jones, my jaw clenched, my fists balled up at my side. “What was that?”
“I’m going to the school,” he said, his own jaw set, his shoulders squared back. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. “I’m getting Rebecca. I can go to the storage unit afterwards if you still need someone, but she’s my priority. She’s the only one without a bodyguard with her. Jessica and the others at the art gallery have Vanessa with them.”
One look at him and I knew he wouldn’t back down. There was no question about that. Any of my men got it into their heads they were going to disobey an order, they were going to do it, no matter who that order was coming from.
It didn’t help, either, that I couldn’t threaten him on charges of insubordination. We weren’t in the military, after all. Even worse, he was right. We all had people we loved and they might be in danger. Shit, I had two women I cared about in vastly different ways, and they might both be targets right now.
; I took a deep breath and tried to calm the rage that had built up inside me.
“Okay,” I said, taking another deep, calming breath. In and out, in and out. I focused back on Matthew and nodded. “You get to the high school. Do whatever it takes to get Rebecca out of there, whether or not she has class. Her being there is a bigger threat to them than anything else that might happen. While you’re there, I need you to get Mary as well. Got it?”
“Got it, boss.”
I spun back to Lacy as Matthew disappeared into his office to grab his sidearm and keys. “No way you can fix this from here, is there?”
“Nope. Only if I got to where they were cutting it off, and even then I have no idea what they’re using.”
“Good. No reason for you to stick around, then. Get out of here. Take your grandmother with you.”
“But–”
“No buts, Lacy. This has gone from an intel war to a shooting war, and we don’t have any idea what’s waiting for us. You get out and you take Gen with you.”
“Lacy,” Gen said from behind me. “He’s right. He’s still right. We’re just going to be hindrances if we stay here. We don’t need them worrying about us, too. We need to go, honey.”
Our little mascot’s lips pressed into a thin line, and she looked like she was about to bust out in tears.
My heart nearly broke watching her. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight, but I knew that we already had our hands full trying to watch out for our mates and each other. If she stayed with us, she’d just be one more target for these assholes to come after.
“You’re wasting time,” Richard added, stepping up next to me. “If they’re cutting off communications, they’re getting ready to strike. It’s the way I’d do it, at least. Put us in the dark and, while we’re divided, hit us hard. You take your grandma and go. Get out of here.”
Without another word, she wiped a fist across her eye as she turned to head back to her office, and disappeared inside to pack up.
I turned back to Jake just as Matthew came rushing out of his office and headed for the front door, his truck waiting outside. Moments later his pickup roared to life, followed soon after by the sound of rocks flying from spinning tires as he took off out of our parking lot.
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