“How?”
John nodded to the room and Shae stilled. “I’ll walk up to the door. She’ll open it.”
“She could kill you,” Shae whisper-hissed at him.
“She won’t get the chance.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if she tries, I’ll kill her, or you will. Turn on comms so Guardian can hear everything.” John switched on his comms, pulled Shae in for a quick kiss, and then stood, stepping out into the light.
The surprise he expected to see flashed across his sister’s face. Her hands flew to her mouth and she scrambled forward to unlock the door. “John! Oh, thank God! I thought you were dead.”
He lifted his nine mil, stopping his sister’s forward movement. “Stay right there.”
“John, what are you doing?”
“Protecting myself.”
“Against whom?” Lorelei opened her arms, the folds of her silk robe swaying with the motion.
“You. Why did you fake your own death?” He knew Shae was watching from the darkness. A shadow moved in the apartment and John stepped to the side, putting his sister directly between where the shadow had been and where he was.
“The Agency wanted me to go undercover. It was a hard decision, but they convinced me it would be safer for you if you thought I was gone. Then the reports of your apartment and car exploding…” Her voice caught. “John, you’re all I have in this world. I thought you were dead.”
“Funny. I thought the same thing about you. Why did you sell them?”
Lori shifted and he followed suit. She blinked and a small tick of a smile tilted her lips. “You found out about that? The Agency sold them.”
“No, they didn’t.”
She frowned. “How would you assume to know that? I work for them. I know they did.”
“The deputy director of the CIA conferred with all black door operations today. The Agency had no knowledge of them or their use by criminals.”
A man emerged from his left with a weapon trained on him. “Oh, look. We have a draw,” Lorelei murmured. “Why couldn’t you have stayed dead?”
He smiled at his sister. “Because you made too many mistakes, Lori. You never should have stolen Guardian’s property.”
“Guardian?”
“My employers.” He thumbed the trigger back on his weapon; the action made a deafening click in the quiet of the power outage now that the fighting had quieted. “You stole my work. Work I gave to them.” The man on his left moved slightly. “If he shoots me, you’re dead. Again.”
“I’m not too worried. I’ve found death isn’t anything like they portray in movies. You’ll jerk around when his bullet hits you, your aim will be off, I’ll live.”
“It’s not my aim you need to worry about,” John chuckled, his focus staying on his sister.
“Really? What, you have someone hiding in the shadows with you? My men have taken care of whomever was on the rooftop.”
“I’m hard to kill, too.” Shae stepped from the shadows, her aim on the man who had drawn on John.
Lori’s eyes narrowed. “I know you.”
“You introduced me to Maurice.” From his peripheral vision, he could see Shae. Her arm was rock solid as she held her weapon.
“Oh, yes, Amira’s little mole.” Lorelei moved her hand toward the pocket of her robe.
A wicked smile flashed across Shae’s face. “Move any further and you’ll be dead, but no… I’m so much more than Amira’s mole. I’m a survivor, I’m your brother’s lover, and I’m going to ensure you spend the rest of your life in prison for who you are and what you’ve done.”
Floodlights blinded him as the power turned back on. He dove to his left and shouted, “Shae, get Lori!”
He lifted from his roll and charged the bodyguard. The percussion of the man’s weapon’s discharge deafened him, but he was under the man’s arm and the bullet went high. He tackled Lorelei’s minion with a shoulder into the guy’s gut. They went down hard and rolled in a fight to control the weapon.
They wrestled in an ugly display of brute strength. There was no opportunity to pull away and punch, but John threw elbows, bit, and kneed in a deathmatch for control of the weapon. John’s shoulders and arms burned with the effort to keep the weapon trained away from him. The man beneath him grunted with the same strain. John heard more gunshots. Adrenaline coursed through him and clarity sharpened his efforts. He lifted his head and brought it down hard on the nose of the man under him. A spray of warm wetness hit his face. Shouts from somewhere near him registered briefly. He lifted and hammered away at the son of a bitch again.
A sudden slack in the man’s grip fueled him. He lifted and slammed his forehead down as hard as he could against the other man’s face. Another spray of blood covered them both. He blindly grabbed for the weapon and twisted it from the bastard’s hand. Three sharp shots riddled the downed bastard. John lunged to the right and rolled behind the planter.
He wiped the blood from his eyes and stared at the dead man. Where had the shots come from? Friend or foe? He held still, silent and searching the area across from the building exactly one hundred and eighty degrees from the building they’d ziplined from.
He jerked his weapon to the right to cover a slight rustling. Travis held his hand up. John wiped more blood away from his eyes and noticed the Skipper had blood on his shoulder and wasn’t using that arm. “Sniper.” He nodded to the left, the same building John had been searching before Travis surfaced.
John nodded his understanding.
“The team is trapped. Power is going out again. Can you take him out?”
“Not without a rifle.” And a fuckton of luck locating a sniper on higher ground in the dark.
Travis reached down and slid a compact M-24 case along the ground. “Archangel and Alpha told us to bring one. Just in case. Shae?”
He pointed toward the apartment. “She went after Lori.” He hadn’t seen either woman and he prayed Shae was all right, but he had to trust her to do her job. That was what she was trusting him to do.
“I’ll go in when the power cuts. The team is holding. If you want them to move to try to draw him out, talk to Guardian on your comms. They can hear you. HQ is trying to get someone up to that rooftop, but right now, you’re our only play.”
“Anyone else injured?”
“Nothing serious. You?”
“Not my blood. When?” John wiped his face again.
Travis cocked his head as if he was listening. “Ten seconds.”
John nodded. “He’ll have to change scopes or use a handheld infrared to target us. As soon as the lights go out, get inside. I’ll grab the weapon on the way to the northeast corner.”
“The scope isn’t infrared.”
“I won’t need it.” He had a plan. Maybe.
The block went dark and they moved. John grabbed the weapon and used the back wall as a guide to get to the small protrusion at the northeast corner. “Guardian, I’m going to need that power back on, but right before you do, I need someone on the roof to move something. I’ll take my shot then. I’ll count it down; you repeat to the team.” John put together the M-24 in the dark from muscle memory. He’d fired for proficiency at least once every three or four months while he was at the ranch. The action of the weapon was as familiar as breathing. He shouldered it, revealing only the barrel over the lip of the decorative wall surrounding the garden.
“Guardian, on my count. When I say three, have someone on the roof move something and light the block up when I say one. I want to blind that son of a bitch. It should give me a couple seconds to find him.” He drew a breath and exhaled slowly. “Ten.” He closed his eyes and rested them until he said five. At four he opened his eyes and the ambient light seemed much brighter thanks to his eyes adjusting. At three, he prayed someone on the roof got the word. Two, he drew a breath filling his lungs halfway before he stopped breathing and whispered, “One.” The lights snapped on and he searched the edge of the building fo
r… there! He centered the hash lines on the scope and squeezed the trigger. The weapon kicked in his hands, but he focused on the target and watched as the shooter went down. “Guardian, move the team to the stairwell now, now!”
He kept his eyes trained on the edge of the building, but the shooter never reappeared. He heard the team enter the apartment. It sounded like someone kicked the door in. He’d watched the team clear rooms before. Harley and Ricco entered first, then Scuba and Luke, then Coach had the tail. He’d been with them as they cleared so many spaces last year. He kept his rifle at shoulder level, scanning the skyline of the building across from them.
“John?” Ricco hissed a whisper from the other side of the sliding glass door. “I’ll cover.”
He dropped his rifle and hustled his ass into the apartment. “Shut the doors, ballistic glass.”
Ricco slammed the door shut. “This way.”
“Where’s Shae?”
“Through here.” Ricco jogged down a long hallway and John was on his six.
Ricco stopped suddenly and nodded for him to enter a room to their right.
Shae sprinted after John’s sister. The woman had the advantage of knowing the apartment and had a head start. Instinct and training stopped her at the corner to the hall. If the woman had access to a weapon, centering herself in a corridor would paint a bullseye on her. She peeked around the corner and ducked back. With the hall clear, it was a matter of finding the woman and taking her down. The blueprints they’d studied of the apartment flicked through her mind. Bathroom first door to the right. Guest bedroom to the left and a den that had a connecting door to the master suite.
Shae positioned herself and took one more look down the hall. Nothing and no noise. She’d seen the woman flee down this corridor, so now it was a matter of search and destroy. Destroy, damn, don’t you wish. She slid around the corner with her weapon ready. The bathroom door was ajar. She pushed it back as far as it would go and did a quick visual sweep before she lifted onto her toes to look into the swimming pool-sized tub.
Cleared, she moved on to the guest bedroom. She entered the room and cleared the closet while still listening intently in case John’s sister tried to trap her in the smaller room. Empty. She repeated the process of entering the hall. Gunfire from outside paused her forward movement. She cocked her head and listened. That sounded like a high-powered rifle. She crossed her leg in front of her other and sidestepped down to the office. The door was shut. She looked farther to the master bedroom. That door was ajar.
If she owned this apartment, where would she keep her weapons? In the bedroom, yes, but also in the office. The low sound of whirring from the office caught her attention. She lifted to her toes and soundlessly made her way into the bedroom. Cautiously and too damn slow because she hadn’t cleared the room, she made her way to where the office door joined the bedroom. She turned the knob just as the power went out. A muffled curse was her invitation in. There was moonlight from the windows in the bedroom. Shae closed her eyes tightly for a count of ten and then squared on the door and kicked it open, hoping to startle the woman.
Only she didn’t startle Lorelei. No, it was just her damn luck the door slammed into the woman’s face and planted her flat on her back. Out cold. Shae rolled the stunned woman and yanked a set of zip tie cuffs from her tactical pants and snagged her wrists. With a sharp tug, she neutralized any threat Lorelei could have presented. A small Glock 43 scraped across the hardwood floor when she lifted the woman to her side so she wouldn’t choke on the blood flowing from her nose. Shae shoved her hand under Lorelei and snatched it up. She cleared the weapon, which didn’t even have a round in the chamber, and then pocketed it. She toed Lorelei’s hip to make sure she was still breathing, although she’d rather drop kick the useless witch into next month. When the woman groaned, Shae snapped, “Next time, try bringing a big person weapon to the fight, bitch.”
The lights flickered back on a mere second before the report of a high-powered rifle slammed through the apartment. It took every shred of self-control not to rush back out to the terrace, but she had to trust John could handle himself. Her job was dealing with this… the ‘c’ word rattled around in her brain, but Shae had never uttered the most offensive word she’d ever heard, let alone thought about it applying to anyone.
Well, for Lorelei, she’d make an exception.
She rolled her eyes at the sound of the front door crashing in and the men on Sierra Team shouting, “Clear!” as they moved through the apartment. Lorelei moved, rolling slightly. Shae glanced down at John’s sister now that the lights were on. “Oh, damn, I think you broke your nose.” The woman moaned something that sounded like a cuss word. Shae snorted and glanced around the room. “What were you doing in here?” A paper shredder sat beside the desk with a half-shredded piece of paper sticking out of it. “What do we have here?”
She heard the team advancing. She wiggled the paper out of the machine and yelled out, “Office on your right, clear. One in custody.” The door swung open. Travis leaned against the door. His right arm was dangling from his side, but in his left hand he held a forty-five and it was aimed at her. He dropped it after he noticed Lorelei prostrate. “What happened to her?”
Shae looked over her shoulder at the woman on the floor. “Her face met the door when I kicked it. Breakable little thing, isn’t she? Where is John?”
“He’ll be here in a minute. What do you have there?” Travis nodded to the paper.
“Don’t know, but she was trying to get rid of it. I heard the machine running when I circled back through the bedroom.”
“Is it a cross-cut shredder?”
Shae lifted her foot and pushed the front door of the shredder in. It released with a click. She pulled out the bin and chuckled, “Oh, yeah. It’s paper dust.”
“We’ll take all of this in as evidence. Maybe the tech folks like puzzles?”
Shae glanced up as Ricco stopped at the door. John rounded the corner. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. She’s not doing so good.” Shae nodded to his sister. “Can you believe she ran into the door?”
John glanced at his sister and then laughed. Shae blinked at him—the response wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “The door or your fist?”
Shae sighed. “It was actually the door when I kicked it open. I have to admit, I’m really pissed she didn’t put up a fight.” She looked up at the man she loved. “I wanted to hit her. More than once. I should probably talk to Jeremiah about that when we get back. I might have anger issues that I wasn’t aware of.”
“Nah,” Coach disagreed. “We’ve all wanted to hit her more than once. No offense, John. Skipper, I need to take a look at that shoulder.”
“None taken.” John glanced at the paper Travis held in his hand. “What’s that?”
“Something she was trying to get rid of.” Travis held it out to him and then held up his hand. Every member of the team stilled. Travis dropped his hand to his ear cradling the comm device. He nodded. “Roger, copy all, Guardian. Ricco and Scuba, we’re taking everything as evidence. Harley, get over to the other building and pull our cables. There should be a couple of New York guys downstairs to help gather all the equipment and they’ve found the shooter. You dropped him, John. One shot through the heart. Paramedics on scene downstairs. Coach, coordinate treatment for her.” Travis pointed toward Lorelei.
Coach shook his head. “After I look at that damn shoulder, Skipper. She’s breathing and cussing. You’re still bleeding. Priorities.”
Shae glanced back at Lorelei. The woman’s eyes pinned her with a stare. “You should be dead.” The woman hissed the words.
All conversation in the room stopped. Shae walked over and lowered into a squat in front of the woman who’d ordered her torture and death. “Did you tell Maurice to kill me?”
Lorelei smiled and the drying blood from her nose bleed cracked under the stretch of her lips. “I have no idea why you think I would have done that.”
<
br /> “Did you kill Joshua or just order it done, not wanting to get your hands dirty?”
“I know my rights. I want a lawyer,” the woman spat at her.
Shae wiped the spittle off her cheek using every iota of willpower not to draw back a fist and bust a few teeth from the woman’s skull.
John’s combat boots came into view as she stared at the abomination zip tied next to her. “You don’t get a lawyer, Lori.”
Lorelei’s eyes whipped over to him. She rolled onto her back so she could see him better. “I’m untouchable. You can’t prove anything.”
John held out a hand and helped Shae to her feet. “See, that’s where you’re wrong.” He held up the half-sheet of paper. “Stratus is a terrorist organization. Normal procedures don’t apply. Plus, now I have these names. I’m assuming you engineered covers using them. I’m better than you ever were. I’ll find where you cut corners, where you got sloppy. I know your signature, where you let little things slide. You were never patient enough to follow the entire process. I’ll find these people and Guardian will bring them in and turn them against each other. Stratus is dying, and finding these people is nothing but another move in a game of dominoes that Guardian is winning. You’re only one in a vast number of people who are never going to hurt anyone ever again.”
The woman spat at him and kicked out, flailing her legs in an effort to cause some damage. Shae stepped out of the way and shook her head. This pathetic woman wasn’t the monster of her nightmares. She stepped back and found the desk with her hands, still watching Lorelei as she screamed obscenities. John stood in front of her. She lifted her eyes to his. “You were the one with the rifle?”
“There were two of us. He had the high ground.”
“And you still were able to make the shot?” She reached out and placed her hand on his chest.
“Guardian turned on the lights. I knew it was coming. He didn’t. That was my only tactical advantage.” John pulled her into his chest, and she closed her eyes. She sighed deeply and let herself lean against him. “We should help.”
John (Guardian Defenders Book 3) Page 21
