Special Ops Seduction

by Megan Crane

  The screen changed from Sowande’s face to their client, an older man who looked like what he was. Rich, white, intellectual, and used to getting his way. That his way in this case involved what was supposedly a safe landing space for a renowned biochemist whose work had entirely too many military applications didn’t change the basic facts. By the same token, those facts didn’t make their intellectual client a bad guy. Necessarily.

  “Do we think this could be another kidnapping scenario?” Templeton asked, tipped back in his chair. He let out one of his booming laughs. “Or do we think the doctor and his sister decided that all things considered, they’d rather set their own ransom?”

  It wouldn’t be the first time a victim had taken the reins like that, because why not make money on their own trouble if they could? But again, Jonas hadn’t gotten that feeling from the Sowandes.

  His feelings weren’t always correct, of course. He just hadn’t been wrong in a long, long time.

  “All questions I would like to have answered.” Isaac crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at the screen. “Here’s what we know. Sowande is a brilliant biochemist. His research involves the behavior of a compound colloquially known as SuperThrax, anthrax’s bigger, badder cousin. He first came to the attention of various branches of the U.S. government and military while he was an undergrad at MIT. They really sat up and took notice when he was doing his doctoral research at Harvard. Throw in a few fellowships and postdocs and what you have in Sowande is the world expert on a new form of chemical warfare.”

  “So what you’re saying,” Blue said, sitting back in his chair, “is that our scientist is a popular guy.”

  “He’s not just popular, he’s the prom king,” Isaac replied. “But he disappeared three days before he was supposed to deliver a paper at an international conference in Osaka, Japan. The buzz was, he was going to rip the field wide open.”

  “What he was,” Jonas interjected, “was scared.”

  “More than scared,” Bethan agreed.

  Jonas allowed himself to look in her direction because this was work. This was part of the mission. This had nothing to do with regrets or memories or conversations he should have known better than to try to have on a cold beach. Alone. With no buffer between them.

  “I got the distinct impression that while his sister was furious about what was happening, Sowande himself was more . . . beaten down,” Jonas said, and told himself the tension in his voice was about their missing scientist, nothing more. “He repeatedly described himself as an academic, not a soldier. Not someone who wanted anything to do with weapons.”

  “The sister was furious?” Lucas King asked in a considering sort of voice. “Maybe that’s what doesn’t track? Wasn’t the expectation that she would be a wreck?”

  “I would say she was both,” Bethan replied in that steady, even way of hers that Jonas always admired when it was aimed at someone else. “Those men drugged her and kept her knocked out after they found her in São Paulo, and she doesn’t know how long it took for them to transport her to the Atacama. She also has no way to tell what they did to her. And yet throughout her ordeal, she didn’t give up her brother. That takes a certain level of fortitude.”

  “Are we interested in finding out where she came by this fortitude?” Griffin asked from his preferred position, with his back against a different wall.

  “We’re interested in everything about this case,” Isaac replied. “No detail too big or small when there’s potential chemical warfare in play. But the client swears that the safe house was clean. No one except him knew the Sowandes were coming, no one knew when they arrived in Canada, and he swears that on top of that, no one even knew that the residence was a safe house in the first place.”

  “On our end, we swept the house, made sure there were no eyes on it, and triple-checked the access points.” Jonas stood still and sure, not putting on a show of fidgeting the way Templeton did. “It would take a pretty high level of tactical ability to enter at all, much less enter and then leave with two potentially unwilling adults.”

  “Maybe the question to ask is if we trust our client,” Bethan said. “Was this a distress call or step one in covering his tracks?”

  Isaac shrugged. “Would I trust the guy to have my back? No. Do I trust that he’s probably telling the truth as it relates to an asset I’m pretty sure he was going to use to make money on in one way or another? Sure. I’ll trust that. To an extent.”

  Everyone started talking then, debating how much trust they could or should put into a client like this one. Intellectual, sure, but he didn’t write poetry. He was deeply involved in an industry that could too easily be used to profit off the terrible wars and less publicized, sometimes more hideous skirmishes that everyone in this room had fought.

  Jonas studied the image on the screen, now the biochemical makeup of SuperThrax. It never ceased to amaze him that people started down paths like the one their scientist had only to discover that at the end of it was a weapon that could be used for only one purpose—war. Killing humans on a grand scale. What had Sowande thought studying agents of chemical warfare would lead to?

  He’d known people like this all his life. Standing on a path that was clearly signposted, baffled and a little outraged that it led exactly where it said it would. But that felt a little too much like diving into another part of his past he had no intention of revisiting, so Jonas shoved that aside.

  “I want to know who hired the individuals we met in the desert,” he said when there was a lull in the conversation. “It seems to me that they were working too hard to seem less cohesive than they actually were.”

  “They didn’t make sense,” Griffin agreed. “Bethan walked right into that house, but they took the trouble to wire up the whole town? Who were they expecting?”

  Bethan nodded. “And if they were expecting us, why did they blow up an outlying shed? It was a diversionary tactic at best, but it didn’t divert anything. So why not actually come for us?”

  “Here’s a question,” Templeton said after a moment. “Did you get a sense that the sister was orchestrating the whole thing?”

  Jonas had already considered that option. He looked over at Bethan, who was shaking her head. “She’s certainly not a helpless bystander or any kind of wilting flower. But I would be very surprised if Iyara made that happen.”

  Oz was typing, and the big screen changed again, going dark.

  “There are a lot of people who would like to get their hands on this guy,” he said. “Some of them tried to recruit him, others were less polite with their overtures—and that was when he was still in college.”

  “Being prom king is never worth the crown,” Templeton said. And laughed when everyone looked at him. “But you better believe I looked fantastic in mine.”

  Blue rolled his eyes. “Like they had prom in jail.”

  “I didn’t go to jail, I joined the army.”

  “Like that’s any better,” Blue said with a snort, all navy.

  “We can eliminate most of Sowande’s suitors,” Oz said, though Jonas saw he was fighting back a grin. “They would have to have a particular set of capabilities, like being able to track your extraction from a South American desert to Europe and over to Canada, all without any of you picking up on it. Then they would have to be able to penetrate security measures we had in place in the safe house, secure and abduct two adults and their things, and then disappear, all without leaving a trail.”

  “We don’t know the scientist didn’t do it himself,” August said. “It might be unlikely, but we don’t know he didn’t.”

  “We don’t,” Oz agreed. “Except that he would have to have that same capability to remove himself and his sister from the safe house and then disappear into the greater Montreal area. Again without tripping over any of the safety measures we put in place, which I have to tell you is even more unlikely.”
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br />   “And if he could do that, why would he have been hiding out in that flat in Lisbon?” Isaac asked. “You didn’t find a single security measure. A toddler could have broken into that apartment.”

  “Unless he was setting himself up as a decoy,” Jonas countered. “As bait for a trap that we walked right into.”

  Everyone sat with that for a moment.

  “Anything is possible at this point,” Isaac acknowledged, looking pissed. The way he did when things didn’t go according to plan, because that wasn’t how he rolled. It wasn’t how any of them rolled. They liked successes, not failures. It was why they were all alive.

  The screen changed. “If I map out the necessary skill set against all the known entities that sent Sowande into hiding in the first place, I come up with only five realistic possibilities,” Oz said.

  He flicked through a series of five headshots. Three high-ranking military officers, all currently serving in the Pentagon, and two Fortune 500 CEOs, one on either side of the very thin line between certain pharmaceutical corporations and the military-industrial complex.

  “Interesting,” Griffin muttered.

  That wasn’t the word Jonas would have used.

  “Bring it on,” Templeton threw out into the room, with a big laugh. “It’s going to be fun figuring out how to get a little sit-down chat with security clearances like theirs.”

  “I personally volunteer to break into the Pentagon,” Blue offered. “Because who doesn’t want to break into the Pentagon?”

  “You need to let that Mission: Impossible fantasy go, brother,” Templeton said with another laugh. “You can’t swim into the Pentagon, no matter how impressive you were in the SEALs.”

  “Does Alaska Force break into places like the Pentagon?” Jack Herriot asked.

  “Can Alaska Force break into the Pentagon?” Benedict Morse shot back.

  “We can argue whether or not we’re capable of it another time,” Isaac said, but he was grinning. “For the record, of course we could. The question is whether or not we want to lower ourselves to such parlor tricks.”

  That set off several different spirited arguments, and it took a while for the room to settle again.

  Jonas didn’t engage in any of the arguments. He was too busy going through what they knew. They were all good at reading people, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be played. Anyone could be played. And the minute someone had enough ego to think they couldn’t be, they might as well sign up to learn that lesson the hard way.

  That said, however strange that creepy mining village had been—not to mention the men there—Jonas could have sworn that Iyara Sowande’s reactions, and later her brother’s, had been genuine.

  And the men Oz had presented them with were a very specific type. Three of them were actually in the active military and could send their own commando teams to do their bidding, officially. Two had enough money that they could hire their own. Either way, any one of them could have staged that fight in South America, then turned around and extracted Iyara and her brother from Canada.

  When the room quieted, he said as much.

  “True story,” Blue agreed. “Fun fact, I’ve actually met General McKee. He didn’t think the rules applied to him when he was gunning for his first star. No way that changed since.”

  “What’s the mission here?” Griffin asked coolly. “Are we trying to locate the scientist again? And if we do, where do we take him this time that he can’t be reached?”

  “It’s also possible that the client made a deal with one of these guys,” Templeton said. “And we were just a delivery service.”

  Jonas eyed him. “Then why would the client call us to report them missing?”

  Templeton shrugged. “Because people suck?”

  Isaac frowned at the screen. “Any of this is possible. That’s the problem. The ideal scenario would be if we could round up all five of them, get them in a room together, and ask a few questions.”

  “Good luck with that,” Rory said, laughing.

  But Oz and Isaac exchanged a look, and Jonas stood a little straighter.

  “About that,” Oz said, a strange note in his voice. “As it happens, we’re about two weeks out from an event with all five of them on the same guest list.”

  Isaac nodded, not really looking at anyone, which was weird. “Ordinarily we would figure out the appropriate parameters and send in a team without a second thought. But this is different. It’s . . . delicate.”

  Jonas realized Isaac was looking at Bethan. Both he and Oz were watching her closely. And the longer they did it, so did the rest of the room.

  “I can already tell I’m not going to like this,” she said.

  “It’s your sister’s wedding,” Isaac said in a gentle sort of way that still felt like a bomb.

  Jonas tried to evaluate why that was. Maybe it was the fact that Bethan looked so surprised, as if she’d forgotten she had a sister. Or hadn’t planned on attending the wedding either way. Maybe it was that he’d forgotten she had a whole life outside Alaska Force that he’d gone out of his way not to know too much about. Then again, maybe he was the only one reading anything in her, because a quick glance around the room made it clear that everyone else was gazing at her expectantly.

  “My sister’s wedding,” she repeated.

  Bethan blinked but didn’t otherwise betray any kind of reaction, and still Jonas had the ridiculous urge to dive in front of her as if he were saving her from a bullet. As if she would let him save her from anything.

  Isaac’s gaze turned considering, which didn’t bode well. “Your sister, Ellen, is getting married on your family’s estate in the middle of April. You’re looking at me like you didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, I know it.” Bethan’s voice was smooth then. Easy. “You don’t know my sister. There has been no topic of conversation other than her wedding since she met the lucky groom six years ago. I’ve kind of been hoping that I’ll be unavailable, on some mission far, far away, tragically unable to attend.”

  “Alaska Force is always here to stand as a buffer between you and your civilian life,” Isaac said with a laugh.

  And not for the first time, it hit Jonas that Isaac was . . . different now. Truly a different man now that he and Caradine had stopped sneaking around and could have whatever relationship they wanted to have right out in the open. It had made Isaac more open, too.

  Jonas personally couldn’t understand that kind of thing. Not the appeal, and certainly not the execution.

  “My sister’s great, don’t get me wrong,” Bethan said judiciously. “I’m delighted that she and Matthew found each other. Really. It’s just that if you pictured the most over-the-top, fussy, dramatic wedding of all time, you would have to multiply that by approximately twelve million to even approach the level of the monster my sister and mother have planned. And that’s not even getting into the fact my father is using the entire enterprise as an opportunity to impress his buddies from work. Who are, as noted, a Who’s Who of some of the most powerful men in the nation.”

  She smiled then, a little bit wickedly, in Jonas’s estimation, as the roomful of men gazed back at her in varying degrees of horror.

  “I had to pretend to be a regular person at my sister’s wedding,” Griffin offered. “It wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”

  “Not everybody has to pretend to be human,” Templeton retorted.

  “If you did, you all would have failed at my wedding,” Blue shot back.

  But Jonas was looking at Bethan. He could see the faint hint of color on her cheeks and remembered, against his will, the few self-deprecating things she’d said about her family over the years. Stitched together, none of them painted the picture of particularly healthy family dynamics.

  Then again, who was he to judge such a thing? He’d cut his teeth on dysfunction.

 
And those were his happy memories.

  “This provides us with an opportunity,” Isaac said. “We could potentially walk right in the front door for a change.”

  “And by we, you mean me,” Bethan said. “The front door in question being my parents’ house. The one I’ve succeeded in not entering since I was eighteen.”

  “We can always come up with different strategies if this is a no-go for you,” Isaac said, still studying her a little too closely. Looking for weaknesses, as always.

  There was no reason Jonas should hate that.

  “Not at all.” Bethan sounded the way she always did, Jonas thought. Steady, sure of herself, and committed. It had never occurred to him before that it was as much a mask as anything else. “I’m trying to adjust my thinking on this, from it being the one event I most wanted to avoid this year to something that will be significantly more enjoyable if I have a job to do. Other than, you know.” She looked around the room and smirked. “My primary job, which is maid of honor.”

  “You were going to not attend your sister’s wedding, where you’re the maid of honor?” Templeton asked. “That’s cold-blooded.”

  He sounded impressed.

  Beth was gazing back at Isaac. Serenely. “The issues we have to consider are that my parents’ house has excellent security that will no doubt be on high alert. My sister’s fiancé’s family isn’t military, but they are wealthy. Between the two of them, there’s no way they’re not going to have the place locked down. And that’s not even getting into which guests will come with Secret Service details.”

  “We’ve handled a lot worse,” Griffin protested.

  “I have no doubt that we can handle it,” Bethan agreed. “But if we go ahead and handle it our way, there’s no need to go to the front door. If we want to go through the front door, we need to come up with a softer, gentler footprint than usual.”

  Oz pulled up pictures of the kind of house that as a kid Jonas had assumed was simply a made-up Hollywood thing. A gorgeous, sprawling, gleaming white affair, with a tiled red roof that screamed Southern California. So many graceful arches and different wings that he found it hard to imagine that anyone had been a kid there. It sat at the top of a hill, surrounded on all sides by rolling fields, cypress trees, and vineyards. And in the distance, the Pacific Ocean.