Then before he had a chance to react, she swung around and put the muzzle of a .45 right against his forehead. “Don’t move, you stupid fuck.”
*
Isabella moved with a purpose toward her office. Her anger was giving her a certain snap to her step that seemed to be obvious to just about anyone. The people she passed all jumped out of her way. Those in the elevator actually moved away from her. She could only imagine how scary she must look because she felt like hell on wheels.
Ding went the elevator and she strode out and into the hallway. She’d made it all the way to her office before she realized that Wiggs was standing at the administrative assistant’s desk. The oily smile of the unit chief gave her an inward cringe. How could nobody else notice that this guy was a total snake?
“Hello, Agent Rockwood,” Wiggs said with a sleazy smile. “Let’s have a chat, shall we?”
Isabella tamped down her urge to spit in his face. Leading the way to her office, she flashed what she hoped was a friendly enough smile. “Of course. Come right in. Did you have additional questions about Fullerton?”
The door clicked shut behind Wiggs and Isabella felt a moment’s unease. Why would he close the door? Was it really necessary to have that much privacy for their little chat? Then Wiggs made a show of looking at her desktop. She realized that the investigative materials from the Armeen al Saud case were still there. It was difficult not to sprint over and cover everything up.
“Looks like you’ve gathered quite the stash of information on Hasim ibn Armeen al Saud, hmm.” Wiggs gently used a pen from his breast pocket to push aside a photograph or two. Was he actually afraid of leaving prints? What. The. Hell?
“I was told to investigate,” Isabella said stiffly. “I always try to be thorough regardless of whether or not there is a real case or not.”
“Well there isn’t.”
“Funny that you should say that when Jabar ibn Armeen al Saud was murdered in a home in Baltimore last week. And were you aware that the younger brother is still alive? Asif is his name.”
“I don’t see how that has anything to do with those skeletons discovered at Hansen Pharmaceuticals.” Wiggs folded his arms over his chest and narrowed his gaze. “In fact, I came here this afternoon to inform you that we have determined that the individual packing location of Hansen Pharmaceuticals where the skeletons were located is an isolated incident.”
“Excuse me?” Isabella’s mouth popped open. “So you’re totally disregarding the eyewitness accounts of Marina Reyes and the other young woman that was extracted from that horrible place?”
“Isolated incident,” Wiggs repeated. “You’d better get on board. That’s all I have to say.”
“Who?” Isabella spat.
“Excuse me?”
“Who is telling you to shut this up? Do you have any idea what you’re playing with here? All those bio agents coming in and out without any sort of regulation from Hansen. Hasim murdering his brother. These are related events, Wiggs. With all due respect, I think you’re going to really hate yourself when that bio threat terror turns out to be a real thing and you’re standing here holding nothing but your dick in your hand and saying isolated incident.”
Chapter Seven
Sweat rolled down Trapp’s spine. It was one of those moments in life when time slows to a crawl. Adrenaline flooded his veins and he swallowed back the bile that threatened to overtake him. Then just as soon as the fear surfaced, his SEAL instincts took over. Cold purpose settled bone deep into his psyche and he knew exactly what to do.
“You’re hesitating,” Trapp told his pursuer. “Not committed to the job?”
“What?”
The voice triggered something inside him. She was wearing a mask. Why would she be masked? Why had the other one been masked? This hinted at so much more than he had already discovered. But that would have to wait. The important thing right now was to live.
He struck fast and decisive. Lifting his left hand, he smacked the weapon sideways. Grabbing the barrel with his right hand, he popped the catch and pulled the slide right off the weapon. Then he tossed it aside and yanked the remainder of the gun out of the woman’s hand. He lifted it to pistol whip her with what was left, but she was gone.
Trapp collapsed against his truck. The combination of horror and relief was profound. He was alive. He would let her go for now. She had obviously failed. That would carry more cost than anything he could do to her. Folding at the waist, Trapp sucked in great heaving gasps of air. Why was that woman so familiar? Her voice had resonated with him. It was as if he should know her. Was she spec ops? It wouldn’t necessarily be a surprise. There were so many unit members of every sort mixed up in this mess that he was bound to start running into people that he had known from ops all over the world.
Time to go. It was so time to go. That was all he knew. He climbed into his truck and locked the doors. He wanted to rest his forehead on the wheel and catch his breath for about an hour or more, but this wasn’t the time to give into the urge to collapse. This was when things got touch. And when that happened a SEAL rose to the occasion.
He put the key in the ignition and prepared to start the truck. At this point he would not have been surprised if the whole damn thing blew up. But he’d also been crouched around his vehicle at ground level and hadn’t seen anything suspicious.
“RPG?” he speculated irritably. “Right now I think I would believe just about any damn thing.”
*
Isabella was pretty sure that this was the one and only time in the history of Homeland Security that an agent had been arrested by military police for mouthing off to her unit chief. In fact she wasn’t even sure that she was actually under military jurisdiction. She was still a civilian even though she was a federal officer. Obviously someone wanted her out of the way for good.
“Hey!” Isabella frowned at the guy cuffing her. He was smirking beneath his low slung hat. “There’s no reason to cut off my circulation, you know? I’m not going anywhere. Seriously. This is such bullshit!”
“Ma’am, you need to settle down,” the MP said in a rough tone of voice. “We have authorization to use deadly force.”
“Deadly force?” She cranked her head around and gaped at him. “You do realize that you’re cuffing me because of a disagreement with my boss, right? I told him he’d be standing here with his dick in his hand when America got attacked.”
Wiggs appeared in the doorway of her office. “Rockwood, I never would have imagined it of you.”
“Imagined what?” She had a horrible feeling she knew where this was going.
He shrugged. “You just made a terror threat against our nation. It’s sad really. I’m starting to think that you’re behind all of this. If you just tell me the names of your Navy SEAL coconspirators we’ll go easy on you.”
“So that’s what this is about,” Isabella mused. “How unfortunate for you that I’m not a fucking moron.”
“Isabella, just come clean.” The sanctimonious note in Wiggs’s voice made her want to plant her foot in his balls.
She leaned in close until he did the same. Then she gazed at him in total disdain. “Lawyer.” It was the only thing she was going to say even though she knew that the Patriot Act actually made it possible for them to hold her indefinitely without due process. She was screwed.
Wiggs was already going through the files on her desk. He looked up as she was turned and marched toward her office door. Then he smiled at her as he tossed her work into the shredder. Ryan was dead. Her investigation had come to a crashing halt. And the one thing that kept running through her mind was that she was a complete idiot for not just following Trapp when she’d had the chance. She had to get word to him. He needed to know that Justice was coming for him. Or maybe he already did. Maybe he didn’t need her help at all. Unfortunately that didn’t stop her from needing his. Badly.
*
Trapp’s mood blackened the further down the highway he drove. It wasn’t as
if Isabella’s behavior really surprised him. And if he was honest with himself, he had expected the Justice Department to try and bump him off this investigation in some way, shape, or form. Of course that didn’t mean that he’d expected some half pint female assassin to come after him. Come to think of it, the woman hadn’t had much in the way of skills. He might actually be insulted if he weren’t so busy trying to decide how he knew the woman.
It seemed to take forever to drive from the Homeland Security field office in downtown DC to Yates’s basement apartment in Chantilly. Trapp hated traffic. That was one thing about being overseas on any number of missions out in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic.
Yates’s small off camp living space had basically become the SEALs base of operations for this mission. Trapp now wedged his light truck into the alley beside the assorted vehicles of the other SEALs. He sat for a moment in the cab, still combing through his mental database of female agents for any possible matches for his assailant.
Finally he sighed and got out of the vehicle. He felt a strange pulling sensation, as if some primal instinct he did not understand was telling him he had other places to be. Shaking off the strange sensation, he headed to the door and punched in the access code. He entered into a whirlwind of activity.
Four SEALs were gathered around what Yates often referred to as his “war table”. They had maps, lists, and dossiers and were arguing hotly over some point that Trapp could not begin to guess at. Behind them ranged their women. Some inserted themselves confidently into the discussion and others seemed inclined to stay out of things. Regardless, Trapp knew from talking to his SEALs over the last few weeks that every single one of these women had come to be a vital part of this investigation. They had all brought something vital to the table. The only different was in how their experiences and knowledge led them to participate in what was happening in the moment.
Trapp approached a tiny dark skinned Indian woman named Jaipriya. Her father had once been Jabar and Hasim ibn Armeen al Saud’s accountant. In only the last few days the SEALs had learned an incredible amount about the money trail with her help. It had been instrumental in their discovering many of the bits and pieces about what Trapp suspected was a coming attack on their nation.
“Have they been at this all day?” Trapp murmured to Jaipriya.
She gave a little snicker, lifting her slender hand to cover her mouth. Her dark eyes sparkled and Trapp could see exactly why his SEAL buddy Desmond Sparks had become almost instantly smitten.
Jaipriya finally cleared her throat. “They assure us that everything is well under control. I have my doubts.” She cocked her head to one side, observing the body language at the table. “In fact I would almost think that Tasha is ready to castrate every male in the room—including her boyfriend.”
“You think Yates will put up a fight?” Trapp was amused by Jaipriya’s wit. The girl had unexpected spunk. That was for sure.
“I’m not sure.” Jaipriya murmured. “It’s possible they’ll all just attack each other and save her the trouble.”
Trapp started to respond, but his phone started ringing. He glanced down at the number. It was a military prefix, but not a number he recognized. “Hello?”
“If you want to save Isabella Rockwood, you’d better listen close.”
*
Isabella sat completely still, spine ramrod straight as she attempted not to react to what was obviously intended to be an intimidation tactic of some kind. She still couldn’t decide what could have possibly given the MPs jurisdiction over her supposed “case”. She was currently being held at the military intelligence building not far from the Homeland Security offices. She was in a room with one door and a black one way window. She knew they were watching her. She just didn’t know who they were or why “they” would be so interested in her.
A tiny snort escaped her efforts to stay completely poker faced. Of course she knew why she was here. They were going to make her disappear. That was really going to happen. It was like a bad movie or a suspense novel. If things got truly crazy there would be a biological outbreak of some kind and then she would wind up being the only survivor in some weird zombie apocalypse tale of horror.
Get a grip, Rockwood.
The door opened and a man swaggered into the room. He was wearing fatigues and his rank named him a sergeant. There was something crazy familiar about him. Then Isabella realized that there was a shadow of a bruise covering his left cheekbone. Could this actually be the guy who had assaulted she and Trapp as they had climbed down from the ledge outside Wiggs’s office?
“Isabella Rockwood, you’re in some serious shit,” he blustered.
His nametag read POTTER. Sergeant Potter? Really? She sighed and tried not to give away too much attitude. “And tell me—Potter—what is it that I’ve done? I had no idea that giving my opinion to my unit chief was such a breach of national security.”
Potter slammed his hands down on the tabletop. Isabella flinched in spite of her resolve not to. He smiled. The ass. Then he curled his lip in disdain. “We don’t take terrorist threats lightly.”
“I know.” She spoke quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster. “I work for Homeland Security, remember? I’ve tracked terrorists all over the globe. I’m in the middle of an investigation into a terrorist threat right now.”
“Is that right?” he spat sarcastically.
“Yes.” Isabella struggled to rein in her temper. “And tell me,” she said sweetly. “What do you do? I mean when you’re not getting your ass kicked by a Navy SEAL after trying to jump him from behind?”
There was a momentary flash of surprise, but Potter immediately concealed it behind a smirk. “Little girl, you’ve got no idea what’s going on. None. This is way beyond your pay grade.”
Chapter Eight
Way beyond my pay grade?
Isabella was fuming inside as Sergeant Jackass marched her out of the interview room and down a narrow hallway. The hair on the back of her neck lifted. It felt as though there were hundreds of pairs of eyes on her right now. She knew that had to be her nerves. There was no way that many people would be hanging around this facility with nothing better to do than stare at a prisoner.
Sergeant Potter shoved her forward into the stairwell and Isabella tripped. Potter grumbled something about being saddled with the worst jobs. Isabella fought back the urge to turn around and kick him in the nuts. The guy was such a jerk! She hadn’t done a damn thing. In fact if he were smart, he would be worried that he would do something to put his ass on the terrorist watch list and then their positions would be reversed.
“Don’t think I don’t see all that attitude,” Potter snarled. “You’d better think twice before you try anything.”
“Actually I was just thinking how thin the line is between where I am and where you are,” she said in her sweetest voice. “I’ve hauled suspects in for questioning plenty of times all over the world. I poked my nose into an investigation and someone up the chain of command got nervous. I was doing my fucking job. Sound familiar? What if just by talking to me here in this stairwell, they think I’m telling you something?” She lowered her voice, forcing him to lean in closer. “They’ll think we’re colluding. They’ll think you’re helping me. They’ll think you know something.” Isabella stood up straight. “Then poof! You’ll be in cuffs headed down to your execution too.”
“Execution?” he blustered. Then she saw his gaze flick down and to the left. He couldn’t even look at her. Potter cleared his throat. “Keep moving. You’ve got a paddy wagon waiting for you.”
They had brought in an armored prisoner transport vehicle just for her? What the hell? Isabella swallowed back the fear that threatened to overtake her. This was bad. In fact she had never been so sure something was going to hell before in her life. Maybe Potter didn’t actually know if they were going to execute her or not, but he was certainly feeling guilty about the possibility and that did not bode well for I
sabella.
The two of them clomped down two flights of stairs and emerged in a basement of sorts. The underground parking garage smelled of oil and exhaust. Sure enough, there was an actual military transport vehicle waiting. The engine was idling and Isabella could tell the driver and his crew was getting antsy. This was actually happening. She tried to stay calm.
“Do you hear that?” Potter muttered.
He was glancing around, looking confused. Isabella had been so focused on the Humvee that she hadn’t noticed the low drone of machinery until Potter mentioned it. She cocked her head to the side, wondering what it was from and what it meant.
“We’re underground,” Potter told her. Now he was making full turns and lifting the weapon he carried at his side. Making sweeps of the room with the long barrel of his AR-15, it soon became obvious that he was trying to bolster his own confidence.
The Humvee crew tumbled out of their vehicle. A guy wearing an actual flak jacket and a helmet started waving at Potter. “Let’s load the prisoner and get out of here! I don’t know what’s coming, but it sounds big!”
“You think those SEALs are going to try something?” Potter shouted over the noise.
The cacophony had grown from a dull hum to a grim roar. It sounded like helicopter blades whup-whupping in the air. But why would there be a helicopter anywhere near here? And they were underground!
“Just load her up!” the other man urged. “We’ve got orders. Who the fuck cares what a SEAL team thinks about it?”
Potter roughly grabbed Isabella’s arm and yanked her toward the vehicle. Suddenly, she didn’t want to go. This was almost certainly her death march. At this point there was no reason to go quietly.
“Hey!” Potter exclaimed in surprise when she yanked her arm away.
Isabella cursed her skirt and heels for about the millionth time that day. She staggered back from Potter, losing her balance a little. Hopping, she got out of her shoes and scooped them up into her bound hands. If nothing else, she now had a weapon.
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