Critical Density

by Desiree Holt

  “And I did so well that I was plucked out of the main building and assigned to one of the GO-Teams.”

  “That’s quite an honor.”

  “It is,” she agreed. “I rocked all the physical training, and working with the remote-control center was a real trip. Knowing we had no limits to where we could go to take photos or video or deliver payloads was, well, exhilarating.”

  Her entire body language changed when she began talking about this and there was an animation about her that hadn’t been there before. He liked it when someone was really into what they did.

  “I’ll bet it was,” he agreed. “Been there myself.”

  “For your SEAL missions, right? But they were probably way above anything I’ve done.”

  He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Everything has a valuable place in the war we seem to be constantly fighting. So where do the gray suits come in?”

  Color leached from her face and her hands curled so her fingers were digging into her palms.

  “My team had an assignment from a black ops agency in the government. Orders came down that a high value target needed to be taken out. The guy was a major threat, a big player in the expressed intention of a terrorist group to make strategic strikes against this country.”

  “Good assignment,” he agreed.

  “We were excited to be chosen for it. Obviously, it had to be off the books. No government agency could claim ownership of it. The target was in a secluded home on the Maryland shore, at enough of a distance from the projected activity that if other people got killed, it wouldn’t be one of them.”

  Viper snorted. “Nice guy.”

  “Yeah, well, none of them are, as I’m sure you know. Anyway, we were dropped about ten miles from it. We staged and the team formed a perimeter while I readied the drone. We were extra careful because of the amount of explosives we loaded onto it.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I set the controls, made sure everything was correct and sent the drone off.” She wet her lips as if they were suddenly dry. “Could I have a refill on the coffee?”

  “Sure. Hold on.”

  Viper refilled her mug in the small galley and carried it back to her. She looked as if she was barely holding herself together and her hands shook when she took the mug from him. He thought it a minor miracle that she didn’t dump it all over herself. He started to say something then thought better of it. Sometimes, if the wrong button was pushed accidentally, everything exploded. Instead, he just dropped back into his seat and waited while she got her shit together.

  “So you set the controls,” he prompted when he thought she was ready to continue.

  “Yes. In the field I use an enhanced tablet to guide the route. Everything’s already programmed in there…” She flapped a hand at him. “Never mind. You don’t need all that right now. Just know that I checked the coordinates at least ten times before we kicked off the drone. Then I manipulated the controller following its path on the map.”

  “So what went wrong? I’m guessing something did and that was what set off whatever’s going on with you.”

  A look of intense pain flashed over her face. “Somehow the coordinates got screwed up. Instead of dumping the load on the terrorist, we bombed a different villa.” She paused then swallowed. “One where Mark Hegman, a high-ranking member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, was having a vacation away from prying eyes. He’s a good friend to the military and is rabid about the war on terrorism.” She looked down at the mug she was holding. “Needless to say, it didn’t make me a very popular person.”

  Well, fuck. She really was carrying a shitpile of trouble on her back. “How did you find out if you were that far away from the scene?”

  Hannah frowned and rubbed her forehead.

  “When the helicopter came to pick us up, the executive vice president of Lowden himself was on it. Pissed as hell and ready to kill someone. He gave us the happy news but wouldn’t answer any of my questions.”

  “That must have been an unpleasant trip back.”

  Hannah clutched her mug as if it was a lifeline. “You don’t know the half of it. The chopper took me to the Lowden campus. The other members of the team were ferried away somewhere and I was hustled into Lowden’s office.”

  Viper kept his face impassive, something he was very good at. He needed to text Rocket, however, and get him started on a search for everything he could find on Lowden Tactical. He’d listen to Hannah’s story, so he knew what they were stepping into, then send off the message. He knew already, though, that he wasn’t walking away from this one. His sensors were working overtime even with the little Hannah had told him. He smelled something real bad here.

  “Did they tell you anything on the way back to Houston?”

  “No, nothing at all. No more details. They just kept repeating the same things over and over. This was a mess that had to be cleared up. Lowden had to be protected.” She sighed. “Not me, of course. I figured out while I was stuck in that hotel that I was going to be the sacrificial lamb.”

  “Okay. Well, we’ve got a lot to discuss here.”

  Like the fact that these assholes are setting her up to take the fall then maybe, probably, making her disappear. For good. That kicks this up to the highest level of urgent.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I hope I didn’t dump too much on you.”

  “Darlin’, you haven’t even scratched the surface of what we can handle.” He gestured at her mug. “More coffee?”

  She shook her head. “My nerves are jittery enough already. As it is, I probably had too much.”

  “How about a glass of wine, then? Red or white?”

  “White, please. And thank you.”

  She smiled, a weary uptick of the corners of her mouth, and his heart kicked over. It was the first smile of any kind he’d seen from her and suddenly he wanted to see many more of them. He thought about Blaze—Scott Hamilton—who’d fallen in love with a recent client and ended up engaged to her. He himself had no wedding plans of any kind—not even anyone in mind who might fit the bill—but apparently life changed course when a person least expected it. Damn. He gave his head a shake. Forget that. At least for now. He needed to keep his mind on business.

  He fetched a glass from the galley but stuck with coffee for himself. He needed every one of his wits at their sharpest for this conversation.

  “So what happened next?” he prompted as he dropped into his seat again.

  “Eric Lowden was waiting for me in his office. They marched me into it like I was going to an execution, which turned out not to be too far wrong. He repeated what I already knew, that the payload had been dumped on Senator Hegman’s vacation site instead of the target. That Hegman was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and carried a lot of weight in Washington. This was just a huge fucking disaster. And on and on and on.”

  “Did he come right out and accuse you?” Maybe there was some ammunition there.

  “He said they were investigating everything, checking every possibility. That in the meantime, they would put me up in a nice place while they created some kind of plan.” She made a rude noise. “Put me up in a nice place. A polite way of saying an expensive prison where I couldn’t see or talk to anyone.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t take you to some out-of-the-way place.”

  “Me, too. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized if they isolated me too much, I might be able to find a way out of it. The one thing they did have respect for was my brain.”

  “And they thought a hotel would be more secure?”

  She shrugged. “Well, it turned out to be, at least for a couple of weeks. Special locks on the doors. Always at least one guard there. Even if I started to scream, they could just knock me on the head and tell people I was crazy. It also made it easy to change guards or add them if they felt they needed to. And there would have been a ton of ways to get me out of that hotel with no one seeing and just make me disappe
ar.”

  She took another sip of wine and leaned back in the cushioned seat.

  “I think that was their original plan. To dump it all on me, bury me and walk away clean. But during all those hours while I sat in that ugly gray room, imagining all sorts of punishment including destroying my future, something came up. Something. I just know it.”

  “Okay. Tell me what happened next.”

  Unlike a lot of people he’d known, Hannah Modell had the ability to stay on point, to relate facts in a coherent manner and not to let emotion color her presentation. He had to admire her for it. He also had to admit that it was sexy as hell, even as he realized that his dick had no place in this conversation.

  “Two men in what looked like matching suits—I think they buy them in bulk online—finally came into the room. Eric had told me I was being ‘comfortably housed’ in a hotel while everything was being examined, and these men would take me there.”

  Viper’s eyebrows spiked. “Comfortably housed?”

  “Uh huh. Long story short, I had thirty minutes in my apartment to pack up everything I could before they stuck me in a hotel suite with a guard on the door. They set up the locks on the doors to the suite, sealing one of them so there was only one entrance and exit. They told me it was for my protection, so I’d be safe from the media and government agencies, and it would just be for a little while.”

  “Was it?”

  “Depends how you measure time. It lasted just a little over two weeks. I had room service because I wasn’t allowed in the restaurants.” She made air quotes with her fingers. “For my own protection. I had my laptop but no internet service. They confiscated my cell phone, although I don’t know who I would have contacted. I’d gotten so wrapped up in my work at Lowden that I lost contact with everyone else.”

  “What about a man in your life? Wasn’t there someone you could reach out to?”

  She made a disgusted sound. “I don’t know if any of my coworkers tried to contact me since I had no phone accessibility and I’m sure anything left for me at the front desk was confiscated. They did not want me talking to anyone. My job had become my social life and I’d virtually cut myself off from everyone else.”

  Viper couldn’t stop himself from reaching across the space between them, setting her wine glass in a holder and taking both her hands in his. They were chilled and had a fine tremor in them. He liked to think he had good instincts about people. That was one of the things that had made him so great as a SEAL. He was encouraged when she didn’t try to pull away.

  “We all do that at some time or other,” he assured her.

  “I was just so involved in everything,” she explained, looking down at their joined hands. “My job at Lowden was an incredible opportunity.”

  “I agree. So what happened after that?”

  “Nothing. I’ve been in that stupid hotel for more than two weeks, shut away from the world, while they ‘handled’ the situation. Nobody would tell me anything. Nobody would answer my questions. I was going nuts.”

  “My guess? And you won’t like it. They were looking for a way to make sure the noose around your neck was good and tight. Their objective is to protect Lowden at all costs. I don’t know who did this, but because you were the remote pilot, you were the most logical culprit. They couldn’t afford to have you running around loose and didn’t want you contacting other people, trying to clear yourself. Asking questions. Maybe finding out things they wanted hidden.”

  “They need a scapegoat,” she agreed.

  He nodded. “It sure can’t be laid at the Lowden doorstep. We don’t know yet if they were involved in this or something went fucking wrong. Either way, they need the blame on your shoulders. And you out of the way. Maybe permanently.”

  “That’s what I keep coming back to.”

  “There’s funny stuff going on here, Hannah, and you were set up to take the fall so the funny stuff could go on. Someone at Lowden went to a lot of trouble to arrange all this. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. Too complicated.”

  She sat up a little straighter, as if his words gave her sudden energy. “Yes. Absolutely. And I wasn’t finding anything out while I was locked away in that hotel. I was going crazy confined to those two rooms and only being able to speak to whoever was guarding my door.”

  “How did you get out, anyway?” He was damn curious to find out.

  “I pulled the door open so my keeper in the hallway could come in and take the room service table. Staff were not allowed in except to clean under strict supervision. I was told to always knock, but I needed to catch him off guard. I stepped back and as soon as he was in the room, I whacked him on the head with a heavy statue I found on one of the end tables.” Her full lips stretched into the first grin he’d seen. “All that physical training with the GO-Team came in handy.”

  He couldn’t help smiling back at her. “So it seems. Then what?”

  “I’d grabbed what I could out of my purse and stuffed it into my pockets, so I got the hell out of there. I knew as soon as the guy I bashed on the head came to, he’d call for reinforcements and they’d come looking for me. Hell, he was probably already on the street while he was making the phone call. If I took a cab, they’d check that out, and where would I go, anyway? At that moment I just needed to get off the street and blend in someplace until they decided I’d left the area.”

  “Those two suits that came into the bar…was one of them the guy who’d been watching you?”

  She shook her head. “No, but they all had pictures of me so they’d know for sure who they were guarding.” She flashed the grin again. “By the way, thanks for helping me get out of there.”

  “Don’t get offended if I tell you the pleasure was all mine. Besides, I can spot situations like that and you didn’t look like a serial killer, so I was happy to help.”

  And by the way, I’d like more of those hot kisses.

  Shut up, Viper.

  “Well, okay. Thanks.”

  “The pleasure was mine. Anytime.”

  He hoped she knew he meant for the kisses and not for her to be in trouble.

  They sat in silence for a long moment. She frowned as she fiddled with her wine glass.

  “So,” she said at last, “I guess I have to figure out what’s next. Of course, I can’t go home. Lowden’s probably got a massive team on my trail.” A tiny laugh escaped her lips. “Maybe I could just fly around in this plane until somehow the truth comes out.”

  “The truth doesn’t usually come out unless you make it happen,” he pointed out.

  “I know, I know.” She sighed. “I just have no idea where to start. Lowden Tactical is a highly respected, powerful corporation. I’m sure once they had the stage set, I’d have disappeared permanently. Getting out of there seemed the smartest thing to do. I just don’t know where to go from here.”

  Viper had already made up his mind, even before he’d heard her entire story. He liked to think he was good at reading people, and right from the start tonight the only vibes he’d gotten from her were good. Each of the Galaxy partners had the authority to take on clients without consulting the others. Their strong bond of trust was one of the things that made the partnership work.

  “I can help you with that. All of it.”

  “You can?” She studied him for a long moment. “But I’m not sure I fit into the kind of cases you said Galaxy takes on.”

  He leaned forward and took her ice-cold hands in his.

  “We take on anything that hits us, any situation where we can help someone who can’t get that help anywhere else. That definitely fits you. I can’t imagine a lot of people would want to go head-to-head with a company like Lowden.”

  “But you didn’t even tell me what you charge. What if I can’t afford you?”

  He grinned and gave her hands a little squeeze. “We can work all that out. Luckily, we have a sliding scale. So why don’t we go back to the beginning. More wine?”

  “Please. I think I’ll nee
d it.”

  Chapter Four

  What do I do now?

  Maybe the question should have been why she had gone off on a plane with a man she’d never met before and knew nothing about. The alternative, however, had been less appealing—locked up in that hotel room until they figured a way to lock her up in jail. And she’d had absolutely no one else to go to. Who would have believed her? She hardly believed it herself.

  So she sat on the luxurious plane and talked until she was hoarse, spelling everything out for Viper, then going over it again. He had turned on a tablet to record it, so that, as he said, he didn’t have to decipher his own miserable handwriting. He took her back to when she’d first been hired by Lowden Tactical, who had referred her, and everything since then, including how she’d been picked for the GO-Team.

  By the time she was finished telling her story and answering questions, she was mentally and physically drained. The dinner she’d eaten hours ago sat like lead in her stomach, and the wine was making her head buzz. But she’d given Viper every bit of information she could dredge up from her exhausted brain. Now she just wanted to curl up in a ball someplace and sleep for the next twenty hours.

  Sleep. Oh, right. Where will that be? She for sure could not go back to her hotel room or her apartment. She couldn’t go to any place where she’d have to charge it, either. Lowden and the Feds probably had a watch on her credit cards and bank accounts. Maybe Viper could find a cheap motel for her someplace until she could access more money.

  Damn! What the hell am I going to do?

  “I’m going to give Saint the go ahead to turn back to the airport.” He unbuckled his seat belt and stood. “Be right back. Why don’t you close your eyes and try to get a little rest? It’s been a grueling evening for you.”

  “Thank you. I might do that.”

  She was grateful that he seemed to know how drained she was. Leaning back in the chair, she shut her eyes and tried to relax. The problem was, she was so tense that relaxing didn’t seem to be in her wheelhouse. She was too preoccupied going over what she’d told him and trying to figure out where she was going to sleep.