“Your fucking team”—Oliver seemed to suddenly realize how he sounded—“I mean to say that your men are insanely loyal to you—even though you’re a corrupt leader.”
“Funny how that works,” Trapp murmured. He twisted one corner of his mouth into a sarcastic grin.
“You will tell those bastards to cooperate,” Oliver announced. He stood up and glared down at Trapp. “If they don’t, I’ll be forced to dismantle their lives. All those dishonorable discharges will really ruin their futures, you know.”
Trapp had to think fast. If his team had taken what was left of Mr. Trips and his antidote, they would have gone to ground someplace familiar. What was safer than Little Creek? A bunch of SEALs on home territory, on a military installation, it was the perfect plan. Plus it was acres and acres of training ground that they all knew like the back of their hand.
“Fine.” Trapp narrowed his gaze on Oliver. “I’ll take you to the stuff, but you have to let Isabella go.”
Oliver attempted to snort as though he were blowing off the request. It was probably a device aimed at attempting to convince Trapp that Isabella was already free because she was on their side. But Trapp hadn’t been born yesterday.
“I want to see her freed,” he told Oliver. “I want to stand outside and watch you release her. I want her to walk away and I want you to leave her alone. If I discover you’ve reneged on your promise, I’ll turn on you so fast that your head will be on backwards before you’ve realized what happened.”
Oliver drew back, obviously surprised. “Fine. Whatever. She’s Homeland Security. You realize that she was never on your side, right?”
“Whatever, Captain.” Trapp shook his head and gave Oliver a look of disgust. “You do realize that you’re about the worst liar in the business, right?”
“I’ll go arrange it.” Oliver didn’t say anything else.
The captain turned around and exited the interrogation room as though his ass was on fire. And maybe it was. There was no telling where Isabella was or what they were doing to her. There was a good chance he was going to have trouble producing her. Trapp didn’t care. By making sure he saw her physically leave, he was giving her the best chance that he could to get away from this business with her life still intact.
Chapter Twenty
Isabella couldn’t stop her reaction when the door of the interrogation room slammed open. She startled, turning wide eyed to stare at the man who appeared in the doorway. He looked disheveled and angry. She’d never met him in person before, but she knew who he was. This was Captain Oliver.
I am in so much shit.
Oliver marched over to the table and put his hands flat on top. Then he leaned forward and glared into her face. “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but you’d better decide what’s more important.”
She swallowed. No fear. It was like dealing with a wild animal. “More important than what?”
“Your life or your precious Naval Commander,” Oliver spat.
It felt like there was a vise squeezing her heart. “Are you talking about Commander Trapp? Because I think he’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself without my help.”
Oliver cocked his head to one side. “Do you?”
The nasty undertone in his voice set off every alarm bell in her body. This guy was unhinged. Was he the one behind these attacks? Was this the American helper that had managed to jerk around just about every US law enforcement agency?
Isabella scrambled for connections. It was totally possible. Oliver was a Navy Captain. Captains outranked Commanders like Trapp. They had access to a lot of resources. Plus, Oliver would have been around when the initial crime happened against the Armeen al Saud’s sister. It was possible that Oliver had been in the background working with Hasim ever since then. If that was the case, then it was very possible that Oliver wanted the bioterror agent. There was no telling what kind of axe the guy had to grind or how he would decide to do it.
“It would seem that our good commander has decided that the price of his cooperation is your release,” Oliver sneered.
He started pacing big circles around the small interrogation room. Isabella’s neck prickled every time he walked behind her. She didn’t like having him out of her sight. The man was a snake. Her mind was spinning as she tried to sort through any number of possible scenarios. She needed to consider everything. What was Trapp trying to do by having her released? Was there something that she was supposed to do for him? Was she supposed to follow and try to set him free when Oliver eventually took Trapp out of here?
“So what’s it going to be?” Oliver asked her.
What was the idiot even saying? It wasn’t like he’d actually presented her with options. What was his angle here and did it even matter? She took a deep breath. “If Trapp was nice enough to buy my freedom, then I guess you need to let me go.”
A cruel smile appeared on Oliver’s lips. “Of course, Agent Rockwood.”
*
Trapp stumbled as he was shoved from behind. It was awkward as hell to walk with his hands cuffed behind his back. With Oliver pushing him around, it was even worse. The man seemed bound and determined to punish Trapp for some imagined crime. It made no sense really, but then men like Oliver never did.
“Keep walking prisoner,” Oliver snarled.
Prisoner? That was rich. Trapp could not help but wonder what personnel actually knew that he was here. If Oliver had been working with Hasim, he was on his own now. That meant he wouldn’t want undue attention brought to his activities. He wouldn’t be broadcasting his plans to anyone. Trapp would have bet good money that nobody knew Trapp and Isabella had been picked up. They could be written off as traitors and no one would know differently.
They emerged from the building into the late morning sunlight. The sky was pale blue and the entire day looked washed out. A pall of dark gray clouds squatted threateningly on the horizon. Trapp swung his head left and right, looking for Isabella in the alley. When he finally spotted her, he could not help but gape. Agent Fullerton—the supposed to be dead Fullerton—was standing beside Isabella. She wore no cuffs or restraints of any kind.
“See?” Oliver actually sounded amused. “She’s safe and sound.” He made some gesture to Fullerton. “And he’s going to let her go.”
Trapp could not help it he turned around and stared at Oliver. “Are you telling me that you think you can get away with stealing some kind of biological warfare agent even though you’re operating right under the nose of the DOJ?”
“I already have,” Oliver said with a shrug. “They all think it’s you and your team. I’m just going after the bad guys and taking care of business. Especially since your team was under my command. I consider it a personal mission to bring you all to justice.”
The man’s hypocrisy was unbelievable. Trapp did not have words big enough to describe it. So he sighed and promised himself that he would somehow manage to clear his team’s good name and bring Oliver to justice.
“So let her go,” Trapp told Oliver. “We’re all just standing here. Don’t you want to go get your stuff?”
“Of course,” Oliver murmured.
Trapp froze when Fullerton pulled out a gun. The man was only standing a few paces away from Isabella. He aimed at her midsection and fired. Isabella jumped and then collapsed to the ground.
“No!” Trapp shouted.
He tried to pull away from Oliver’s hold, but the cuffs were too tight and the captain had been ready for such a move. Trapp was shoved into the back of a vehicle. The hatch closed and he could do nothing but try to squirm his way into a possible position of escape. Isabella could not be dead. It wasn’t true! And if it was, he was going to rip Captain Oliver apart piece by piece.
*
“Come on Isabella. On your feet!”
Isabella groaned as Fullerton nudged her with his toe.
The urgency in Fullerton’s manner was catching. “If we’re going to follow them, we have to go!”
>
Isabella struggled to sit up. Even with two layers of body armor, the bullet from Fullerton’s .45 hurt like hell. Her abdomen was on fire and her ribs felt bruised if not broken. “Oh my God!” she snapped. “It’s like being kicked by a mule.”
Fullerton reached down and dragged her up off the ground. “I hope you’re right about this, because if you’re not I’m going to lose my career.”
“I’m right.” There was no doubt in her mind. “Come on!”
She was already running for the other SUV parked in the alley. She jumped into the driver’s seat, leaving Fullerton to ride shotgun. She threw the vehicle into gear and sped out of the alley. In her hand she held a GPS tracker. The little dot on the screen was pinging at regular intervals from the SUV that Trapp and Oliver were driving.
“Why do I have to ride shotgun?” Fullerton griped. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Is that what finally convinced you?” Isabella wanted to know. She was curious what had changed Fullerton’s mind so completely.”
“I looked into your claims against Oliver.” Fullerton shrugged. He pulled out his phone and opened the screen. “It made no sense that Oliver had denied Trapp’s request for emergency leave five times. The requests were just shy of desperate and Oliver told him point blank that his sister was dead and that there was no point in pursing the supposed leads.”
Isabella grimaced. “How awful!”
She turned a corner and headed for the on ramp. It looked like they were traveling south, toward Little Creek. Would the SEALs have taken the shipments of Mr. Trips to familiar territory like their regular training ground? It seemed likely.
“Where is Rachel?” Isabella wanted to know. “Do you guys have her?”
“Yes.” Fullerton looked grim. “That was actually the other thing that helped sway me. “I talked to her.”
“Did you?” Isabella couldn’t imagine what the damaged woman had had to say. “And?” she prompted. “What did she tell you?”
“She told me that Hasim had told her Mr. Trips was going to clean up the world.” Fullerton rubbed his hands down his face. “When they came to me with that bullshit idea about trapping you—because they thought you were the traitor—I don’t know why I didn’t see that someone else was pulling the strings.”
“Oliver is clever. He’s behind the scenes, but he’s feeding interagency tips up the chain of command and jerking everyone around.” Isabella could not believe the man had managed to fly under the radar for so long. “It’s all the red tape and bureaucracy,” she reminded Fullerton. “We automatically trust someone like Oliver who is in a position of authority. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“And apparently we’re about to come face to face with that same beast,” Fullerton told her firmly. “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. I can’t believe he ordered me to execute you. Like he didn’t think that would be the final straw to tip me off.”
“You’re not a soldier,” Isabella reminded him. “He’s used to commanding SEALs. They don’t blink at an order like that as long as it’s issued in good faith. They’re hardcore. It’s all about the greater good with those guys. Believe me.”
“Time to make it right,” Fullerton growled.
*
The SUV hit rough ground and Trapp struggled not to be flung against the back of the vehicle. He was still trying to work his way free of the cuffs. He’d found a piece of wire in the rear hatch and pulled it loose. Now he was praying that he didn’t accidently shock himself while he attempted to use the coated wire as a lock pick of sorts. What he wouldn’t have given for a set of Marina Reyes’s lock picks right now. He would have been free already.
Oliver’s driving was atrocious. Trapp could tell that they had entered Little Creek from one of the rear entrances into pretty rough country. The camp lay in a coastal area with lowland marshes and hills. Oliver steered them down through a stream and back up the opposite bank. Trapp could only tell where they were from the memory of being here so many times before.
Finally Trapp felt the cuffs click on one side. He drew his wrist slowly from the restraint and flexed his shoulders painfully. He waited, counting to three as he tried to imagine exactly where they were on the camp’s acres and acres of land. When he thought it was the perfect moment, he opened the hatch from the inside.
It flipped up dramatically. The SUV erupted into a cacophony of ringing warning sounds from the dashboard. Oliver started cursing a blue streak. Then Trapp rolled out of the back of the vehicle. He folded himself into position and braced for impact.
He hit with a jarring thud on the dirt road. Fortunately he’d picked a pretty good moment. They’d been going up an incline and the distance was less than it would have been otherwise. He rolled crazy fast toward a ditch. Letting himself just go with the momentum, Trapp did not fight it as he came to rest in a ditch lined with grass, discarded bits of tree, old leaves, and some damp and moldy moss. In the end it was quite soft.
It was so tempting to just lie there for a moment and catch his breath, but Trapp could already hear the screeching sound of the SUV’s brakes locking as Oliver stopped the vehicle. Any second now he would come hunting Trapp. There was no time to waste.
Trapp rolled to his belly and then got to his knees. Keeping low, he stuck to the low trench of a ditch that was a natural feature of the land. He knew from experience that this led all the way to a main road and eventually to the beach. The training area was relatively small even though the joint expeditionary base and Fort Story were acres upon acres of land including several lakes and Little Creek itself. He just had to find his men before Captain Oliver did.
Chapter Twenty-One
Isabella’s ideas ran out as soon as they entered the joint expeditionary base at Little Creek. She was following too closely. Or was she? All of a sudden she could not make a decision. What if something she did ruined Trapp’s plans? Ugh! This self doubt stuff sucked!
“What is wrong with you?” Fullerton muttered. “You’ve sped up, slowed down, and swerved all over the damn place.”
“I don’t know what to do next,” she muttered. “Isn’t there someone we can call or something?”
He glared at her. “We’re a little off the grid here, remember? That doesn’t leave us a lot of options.”
“Well who else knows what Oliver was up to?”
“Nobody.” Now Fullerton rolled his eyes. “That was sort of the point. Remember?”
“Right.”
She felt like an idiot. She had dragged him out here and she didn’t even have a plan. She didn’t know where Trapp would go, what was actually happening, or how she was going to miraculously stumble upon his team. Then she realized that the SUV she’d been following had stopped abruptly in the middle of the road.
Isabella slammed on the brakes. The vehicle fishtailed. The big back end of the SUV swung right and then left. She struggled with the steering wheel as she tried to keep them on the road. It felt like they were going up on two wheels. Finally they came to a rough stop. She immediately swung the wheel to the right and gave the SUV a little gas to get them off onto the brushy side of the road.
“What are you doing?” Fullerton was hanging off the ‘oh shit handles’ like he thought they were going to flip. “We almost rolled over. Haven’t you ever driven one of these things? It’s not a car!”
“Shut up!” she hissed. “Look! Their vehicle stopped. Something happened. We have to go find out what.”
Now Fullerton looked grim. “Okay fine. But you need to calm down or we’re going to die. I really, really do not want to give Oliver an excuse to shoot me and throw me in some gator pit out here.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“No, I’m not.” Fullerton gave her a narrow eyed glare. “They have gators here. You know that right?”
“Hush!” she said quickly. “There’s something in those bushes. Did you see them move?”
Fullerton gave the copse of brush a dark look of foreboding. “It�
��s probably a gator.”
Isabella got out of the vehicle and shut her door carefully, trying to be as quiet as possible. The muffled click sounded like gunfire in the eerie stillness. She flinched, almost certain that Captain Oliver was going to pop out of the bushes and wave a gun in her face. The man was unhinged. It was like something really bad had happened and he was determined to punish the whole world for what he had lost.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s what I need to find out.”
*
Trapp stayed low and kept moving. It felt like forever before he found the spot he’d been searching for. This was where they had almost always made camp during field exercises. The low lying area was difficult to see from the roadways. It had water. And there was ample cover. So it did not surprise him one bit when he felt the muzzle of a rifle nudge him from behind.
“Commander, what are you doing out here?” Bones’s voice was low and careful.
Trapp sprung around and faced the SEAL. “I’m looking for you.”
A smile spread across Bones’s face. “We knew you would figure out where we’d gone.”
“What happened?” Trapp still didn’t know what had gone down out at the site where they’d found the captives.
Sparks emerged from another batch of cover. He was wearing a gillie suit and carrying a rifle cradled in his arms. “The FBI got there and the whole thing exploded. They started accusing us of treason. Let’s just say there was a lot of misinformation going around.”
Trapp grimaced. “No doubt circulated by Captain Oliver.”
“Is that who’s behind the domestic portion of this bullshit?” Yates wanted to know. “If Sparks and I hadn’t been standing by the crates down in the cellar, we would have had no chance of getting that stuff out. One minute we’re trying to check that they’re safe to move and the next Tasha shows up in the truck with the rest of the girls. They’re all screaming that we have to take the stuff and run.”
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