Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks), page 11
This terrace was the spot to do it. His gaze landed on the playpen again. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed it. Mike grinned at Gabe. He had to hand it to Gabe’s gorgeous redheaded wife, Jenna. She’d tamed the beast.
Gabe “The Archangel” Jones was one of the toughest, meanest, most reclusive operators he’d ever worked with. Dedicated, driven, focused. A warrior to the end.
He’d either led or been part of teams that had pushed through everything from triple-canopy jungles, urban ghettos, mountains, and swamps for months on end, hunting the bad guys. One time when Mike had picked them up, their clothes were ragged to the point of falling off their bodies, everyone had lost at least twenty pounds, and they hadn’t had a square meal or decent rest in months. But Gabe’s force of personality and leadership had made them go way the hell over and beyond to complete the mission.
He’d even lost a leg a few years ago on an op but it had barely slowed him down.
Yet, here he was, all cozied up in a high-security D.C. apartment complex with designer deck furniture, flowering plants, and toddler toys, reeking of domestic tranquility.
“What?” Gabe narrowed his eyes in response to Mike’s grin.
“Never saw you as a baby daddy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s called maturity. You ought to try it sometime.”
Mike laughed and glanced down at the street ten stories below where rush-hour traffic zipped along. “Sorry I missed Jenna.”
He turned back to his friend, propped his elbows on the terrace wall behind him. Gabe’s wife, who his friend had just informed him was five months pregnant with their second child, was having a girls weekend in West Palm Beach. Jenna had taken their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ali, to visit their friends, Amy and Dallas Garrett, who along with Dallas’s brothers and sister ran E.D.E.N., Inc., a high-risk securities firm. Amy and Dallas had a daughter close to Ali’s age. Jenna and Amy had been close friends ever since they’d bonded during an investigation that had ultimately brought down a secret third-generation neo-Nazi camp in Argentina that practiced mind-control experimentation on unwilling victims. The two women tried to get together whenever time and schedules allowed.
“Might be a good thing Jenna and Ali aren’t here,” Mike added soberly. “And seriously, man, this is a safe house?”
He’d never been in one but had assumed it would be sterile—no personal possessions of any sort, not even art on the wall. Reason: If it was compromised, there’d be no clues for the bad guys as to who was there and possibly why.
“It’s my home. But no one makes it past the front entry that I don’t want inside.”
Judging from all the surveillance cameras and combo locks, Mike didn’t doubt it.
“Anytime you want to tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into,” Gabe added, “I’m all ears. But that’s your call.”
“Appreciate it.” Mike glanced toward the terrace doors, wondering what Eva was up to inside. “In the meantime, I’m still sorting things out.”
Gabe followed his gaze, then tipped up his beer. “So, what are the chances she’s tossing the place?”
Mike grinned and said cheerfully, “I’d say they’re pretty good.”
He’d seen the indecision in Eva’s eyes. She might think she knew everything about him, but she didn’t know Gabe Jones from Adam and that made her nervous. With good reason. Gabe Jones was someone to be wary of even though he was one of the good guys.
“She have anything to do with that?” Gabe lifted his beer, indicating the swelling on Mike’s cheek.
“Yup,” he admitted and carefully pressed the cold soda can against the ripening bruise.
He was going to have to tell him everything—including what he did and didn’t know about Eva Salinas. Which meant telling him about Afghanistan.
So he did. Drew a deep breath and purged. It felt like a bloodletting, and he didn’t stop until he’d spilled every last drop.
When he finished, along with the relief of unloading, he also felt a landslide of shame.
“About time you got that off your chest.”
He blinked at Gabe. “You knew? Jesus. The guys? Do they all know?”
Gabe lifted a shoulder. “We knew something had gone sideways for you. You were career Navy all the way, back in the Task Force Mercy days. And then after Afghanistan, suddenly you weren’t. The next thing we heard, you were hiding out in South America, playing fast and loose with your little cargo business and supporting the local pisco trade.”
Mike stared at the top of his soda can. That pretty much summed up his first couple of years post-Afghanistan. “Couple of years of that hard drinking was all I could take. So I sobered up.” Except for one day each year. And except for wanting a drink every single other day of every year.
“We knew that, too, or we’d never have tagged you for the Sierra Leone mission. You should have come to us,” Gabe added. “We could have helped.”
“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. I was too . . .” He thought of all the things he was, none of them good.
“Stupid?” Gabe suggested.
In spite of himself, Mike grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”
Gabe lifted a dismissive shoulder. “We all have ghosts. Nut up and get over it.”
This prompted a laugh. “How touchy-feely of you. I’m tingling all over.” He held out an arm. “See? Goose bumps.”
Gabe gave him a rare smile. “What can I say? I’m a giver.”
Mike looked up at his friend, who clearly didn’t think less of him, who absolutely had ghosts of his own.
Gabe hitched his chin toward the apartment again. “Want me to run a check on the mystery woman?”
Mike’s phone pinged. He held up a finger and fished it out of his pocket. It was a text from Joe with a document attached. “Funny you should mention her,” he said, “because it looks like Joe came through on that front.”
“Good to know you’re thinking ahead. I’ll go check and see if she needs me to move any furniture so she can look behind it.”
Mike was barely aware that Gabe walked back inside the apartment. He was already engrossed in the background on his mystery woman.
“And we have a winner,” he said under his breath and quickly read the file on Eva Salinas. Good to know she was actually capable of some truth.
Holy crap. Her sheet read like the overachievers handbook. A little reading between the lines and it became clear that little Eva Montoya had been born on a mission. Her parents had set the bar high. From the time she could crawl up on her attorney mother’s lap or charm her JAG attorney father, whose service in the Navy had apparently prompted her to pursue her own career in service to her country, she’d been setting wrongs right.
Girl Scout, student council president, captain of the debating team at University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude, top of her class at U of V law school. Impressive.
And while she did not follow her father’s hellishly big footsteps into the military, she’d had instructor-level credentials in Muay Thai—no wonder she’d made such quick work of him in the alley—and was an expert marksman rank in both long gun and pistol. In short—she was kick-ass.
Right out of law school, she’d joined the CIA as an attorney in support services out of Langley, where she’d met Ramon Salinas, fallen in love, and after a whirlwind courtship, married him.
Should have been a happily ever after, Mike thought. A woman like her sure as hell deserved one. Ramon would have ripped her heart out and stomped all over it, but Mike wasn’t about to tell her that she wouldn’t have gotten that Cinderella ending. He would not talk trash about a dead man to anyone. Sure as hell not to his widow.
He only looked up when he heard the terrace door slide open again and Gabe stepped back outside.
“Everything okay in there?”
Gabe nodded. “I offered her a shower and she jumped at the chance. You look like you could use one, too.”
“For a fact. Might wake me up. We’ve been on the move for longer than I care to remember.”
“That would explain the need for the ugly shirt. Sucker’s so loud it would keep a narcoleptic awake.”
“Listen to you. Another joke from the Archangel. Jenna really has mellowed your ass out.”
“I suspect she’d say that she straightened my ass out. Come on. You can use the shower in our bedroom. Give you a chance to change into something that doesn’t shout South Pacific.”
“I’ll let that pass.”
“As if you could do anything about it.”
Gabe headed back inside, his limp reminding Mike what he’d given up in service to his country and for Jenna. He had saved her from a bomb blast, taking shrapnel in his leg that eventually resulted in amputation below the knee.
“That way.” Gabe pointed down the hall.
Mike hesitated and for a second considered hunting up Eva’s purse and digging around for the flash drive. He’d been itching to plug it into Gabe’s computer and read the information that had driven her to Lima to find him.
But that might break this fragile trust they’d developed and frankly, right now, he wanted a shower more. And he wanted to think about the information Joe had turned up on Eva Salinas, who was not Pamela Diaz or Emily Bradshaw.
The woman was nothing if not inventive.
“Here.” He handed Gabe his phone. “For your reading pleasure. It’s the lowdown on your other houseguest—aka CIA legal eagle.”
16
It wasn’t often Eva was given license to snoop. While she wasn’t a pro, she’d searched as much of the apartment as she could manage under the ruse of using the restroom before Gabe had stepped back inside and offered her the use of the guest shower.
Not that she’d found anything. Not that she’d expected to, she conceded as she stepped out of the shower and into the bedroom. A good operative—and despite the evidence of a toddler in residence, Jones had operative written all over him—would never leave anything in plain sight. What she needed was access to her CIA database so she could find out who, exactly, he was.
What she got, however, was Jones, alone on the terrace, loading salmon steaks on a grill.
“So . . . I figure you have questions,” he said, without turning around. “I know I’d have them if I was in your position.”
Then he gave her the last thing she’d ever expected: full disclosure. And she immediately felt ridiculous for not recognizing who he was the moment she’d met him.
Jones wasn’t merely an operative. He was a member of Black Ops, Inc. Everyone in the intelligence community knew about Nate Black’s band of merry men who, until a few months ago, had run covert ops for Uncle off the grid out of Buenos Aires. The team had recently relocated to Virginia, where they were now a sanctioned entity under the direction of the Department of Defense.
Jones was not only a linchpin on the team, he was a legend in the intelligence and black ops community. She should have tuned in when Brown had called him Angel Boy. He was the Archangel.
Holy, holy God.
Jones had gotten his nickname for his deadly skill with an Arc-Angel butterfly knife—solid titanium, razor sharp, ten inches fully open. No one but a master could handle it the way it was reputed that Jones handled it.
The Archangel and his ilk were the ultimate shadow warriors, rogues who played by their own rules and damn the consequences, often skirting around the dark fringes of international law. Until this past year, when the Black Ops, Inc. team was made legitimate.
“Why?” she asked, opting for wine when he offered her a choice.
“Why tell you who I am?” He extended a glass of chardonnay. “Like you weren’t going to figure it out?”
She gave him a narrow-eyed look.
“You’re CIA. It was just a matter of time.”
“It’s that obvious?”
He adjusted the fire under the salmon. “Relax. You didn’t give anything away. Mike had Joe run your sheet. There are no secrets among spies.”
She joined him by the grill. “I’m not a spy. I’m an attorney.”
One corner of his mouth drew up in a ghost of a smile. “It’s your story. You can tell it any way you want to.” He glanced at her then. “From the sound of things, you’ve been telling a lot of stories.”
Because he hadn’t said it unkindly, she relaxed a little. Apparently Mike had also told him about Lima, which meant he must also know about Afghanistan.
“Where is Brown?”
“Shower.”
“Speaking of showers, thanks. And thanks for letting us crash here.” She lifted a hand toward the grill. “And feeding us.”
“You both look like you need fuel. You’ll work better with some food in you. Then you two can have a sit-down and figure out where you go from here.”
They lapsed into a silence then that didn’t exactly feel comfortable, but was much less tense than before he’d told her who he was.
Eva took the opportunity to size him up. Gabe Jones and Mike Brown could have been cast from the same mold. Jones had a couple inches and maybe twenty pounds on Brown, but both were big men. Both unreasonably attractive. And they both had a look about them. Even though Brown had been out of the game for a few years, his Spec Ops background was evident in the way he walked, the way he constantly scoured the space around them for threats. There was a poised readiness, a situational awareness about him and about this man. When the door opened behind her and Mike stepped out onto the terrace to join them, she had to stop herself from staring.
His hair was still wet. He’d shaved and the effect was stunning. He wore another one of the print shirts she’d bought mostly to tick him off, but partly because he looked so hot in the first one. She could smell him on the light summer breeze wafting across the terrace. Something citrus and spicy and 100 percent male; he must have helped himself to Jones’s aftershave.
He looked refreshed and vital and as gorgeous as the Primetime handle billed him to be.
Their eyes met and held for an explicably long moment before she looked away. Tipping up her wine, she attempted to act as though nothing out of the ordinary happened. But the exchange had rattled her.
The little rush, the undeniable shimmer of attraction was so unwise. If she could have ignored it she would have, but Mike Brown was a difficult man to ignore. So were these unexpected reactions she kept having to him.
Jones made a sound that could have been a laugh when he saw Brown. “For the love of God. Who puked a rain forest all over you?”
Brown walked over to inspect the salmon steaks. “You can thank her. Just my luck I finally get a personal shopper, and she misses the memo about cargo pants and black T-shirts.”
Jones turned back to his grill. “Well, I think you look real cute.”
“See what you’ve done?” When Mike turned to Eva, there was a smile in his eyes that prompted her to smile back before she could check it. “He’s disrespecting me now.”
“I never respected you in the first place,” Jones said with a grin that indicated he lied. “So you can’t hang that on her.”
“Your fault,” Brown insisted with a pointed look at Eva that she made a valiant attempt not to find endearing.
She could not go there.
She walked over to the waist-high wall of the terrace, let the coolness of a soft evening breeze wash over her, and listened without comment as the two friends talked, gave each other grief, and laughed softly—their way of keeping the tension of the current situation under control.
They’d been through the fire together. Their bond ran deep. Men like Jones and Brown didn’t give that kind of trust recklessly.
Reckless wasn’t something she could afford to be, either, but trust was mandatory. Someone wanted her dead and she had no choice but to trust both of these men with her life.
• • •
For her sake, Mike was glad they’d taken a little break. If a quick shower and quicker meal could be considered a break. All in all, it had been less than forty-five minutes since they’d invaded Gabe Jones’s very private sanctum. Gabe had gone to clean up, making himself scarce, leaving them alone in the home office with the computer.
Mike had pulled a chair up beside Eva, chomping at the bit as he waited for her to boot up Gabe’s PC and open the file on Operation Slam Dunk.
He wasn’t sure why he was so anxious. He already knew what was in it. Maybe it was the thought of seeing the lies in black and white all these years later. Or maybe it was that he’d spent the last eight years trying to forget it, and now he was about to lance open a wound that was still painful. Back when it had happened, he’d gone through it in sort of a fog. He’d been in mourning for his lost team, zoned out on the pain meds for his broken collarbone and the debridement of the burns on his leg—and in a state of shock that he had been fingered as the bad guy.
Gabe was right. He’d planned on being career Navy. He’d lived it, breathed it, loved it. And then suddenly the Navy no longer had any love for him. The entire U.S. military had wanted his head on a platter. It had been too much to absorb, to process, and most of all, to deal with.
So he hadn’t. He’d skated through the days, lying to himself, blindly reassuring himself that Brewster would come through. That everything would be straightened out. He’d be released back to active duty, exonerated. A wronged man.
His head had been buried so deep in the proverbial sand that the court-martial proceedings had caught him completely off guard. And he’d folded in on himself, defeated, manipulated, too shocked to even be angry.
The anger had come later—self-destructive, angry years that he’d spent seeking restitution at the bottom of a bottle.
“Mike?”
Eva. He’d zoned out on her.
“Yeah. Sorry. What?”
“Where’d you go?”
To a very bad place.
He glanced into her concerned eyes, and it hit him how dark those eyes were. So brown they were almost black. And God, she smelled good. Like that rain forest Gabe had accused him of wearing.
