“What kind of personal problems?”
“Let’s just say he had some demons, but he and our TL, Scarlett, had a thing going on beneath the radar. So when the FBI was gunning for Xander, Scarlett was going to be the one to bring him in.”
“Ouch. That had to be a conflict of interest.”
“Well, she kept her feelings on the downlow. None of us really knew for sure—I mean, they had sexual tension, but hell, you can’t trust that, especially in our field where adrenaline is pumping through your veins at any given moment. So Scarlett chased Xander all over the country, trying to see if he was innocent or guilty and, of course, we never doubted him. But as it turned out, some real bad people at the highest level of government were behind the Tulsa City bombing and we were able to prove it.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, right? So I was kinda hoping for an easy gig after that.”
“I should say so.”
A beat of silence passed between them as Caitlin digested the information. Then she ventured to ask, “So is that how your jobs always go? Like life-or-death situations?”
“Mostly.”
“Oh. That’s rough. I hope you have really good life insurance.”
“I don’t have anyone to leave anything to, so I figured I didn’t need to bother.”
Why did that sound way sadder coming out of his mouth than it had in his head? Time to change the subject. “Tell me about this bioweapon we’re dealing with. How bad is it?”
“Honestly, it’s the worst I’ve ever seen. It grows like a supervirus and attacks every major organ, liquefying the insides of the human body within forty-eight hours. It’s nasty.”
He shuddered. “That sounds about as horrific as the briefing suggested. To be honest, I was hoping it was a little more hype than fact.”
“No, it’s the real deal. Since it’s a virus, I’m not even sure we can manufacture a cure. You know there’s no cure for the common cold, right?”
“With all our technology, we can’t cure the cold?”
“Nope. All we’ve learned how to do is manage the symptoms. With this manufactured virus, there’s no time to manage anything once its course is set. It’s one hundred percent fatal.”
“So how do you know this? Was this tested on humans?”
Caitlin rose up, tucking the sheet around her, a frown forming. “Before Tessara acquired the sample, we were given intel on what had been observed from the facility it was taken from. The pictures were...beyond anything I’d ever seen.”
“Where did the sample come from?”
“North Korea.”
“I didn’t realize they had the technology to make something like this.”
“Well, it’s probably not something they like to advertise but they made one helluva scary bioweapon.”
“Here’s my question—why? Why the hell do scientists get in their little labs and go crazy, whipping up this shit that’s end-of-days level of destruction? Can’t we all just stick to the classics and shoot at each other with missiles and shit?”
She chuckled but shook her head. “If you don’t have missiles, you find different ways to level the playing field. I say we end war altogether and then no one will feel the need to one-up the other.”
“Yeah, that may be true but it’ll never happen. Not in our lifetime anyway.”
“Well, if whoever took that sample releases it out into the public, war will be the last thing anyone is thinking of.”
That was a savage truth. “Let’s say, for the sake of scaring the piss out of me, that does happen—how quickly are we talking?”
“Based on what research we were able to get...we could have extinction-level death tolls within months of the original contagion. It was my opinion that once Tessara had been compromised, we should’ve gone straight to the CDC to alert them of the situation but Stan put a gag order on my team. He said the last thing we needed was a terrified mob rushing the hospitals thinking they’ve been infected when they’ve just got the flu.”
He understood the logic. Large masses of people easily whipped up hysteria but he also saw Caitlin’s point. “How close were you to finding that cure?”
“Not close enough,” she admitted. “That’s why I need to get back to the lab. This has been an adventure—and please, don’t take this the wrong way, you’re super fun in bed—but in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about the ticking clock.”
“Ouch, my fragile male ego,” he said, pretending offense but he got where she was coming from. Even earth-shattering orgasms were no match for the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
Caitlin smiled and leaned forward to brush a kiss across his lips. “I’m willing to make it up to you, if you like.”
“I do like,” he said, grinning. “What did you have in mind?”
Caitlin slid down his body and her mouth closed over his semihard erection, sucking the tender flesh to sudden life. And he forgave whatever fake transgression he’d been pretending to hold on to.
Girl had skills.
Well, if the world was slated to end soon, at least he’d go out with a smile.
Chapter 15
Caitlin had never spent a day in bed her entire life but then she’d never had the opportunity to spend it with someone like Zak, either. However, at a certain point, showers were needed, so while Zak went to throw together something to eat, Caitlin used the time to rinse off.
The water pressure was good, better than at her place, but there was precious little in the way of toiletries, so she had to make do with what was available. She grimaced at the industrial-size two-in-one shampoo-conditioner bottle—obviously a man did the shopping for the safe house—and lathered up.
Zak was hoping that by tomorrow they’d have their next location, which would include a lab, so she knew it was likely they’d be heading out of state. She wasn’t much of a traveler—to be honest, flying was her least favorite mode of transportation—but she did it when it was required.
However, usually she didn’t fly without the help of a light sedative to calm her nerves, but now she didn’t want Zak to see her so weak.
There was probably nothing that scared Zak. He was like Superman.
Or Batman.
Or Thor.
She smiled at her own silly humor even though guilt poked at her. She shouldn’t be cracking jokes when the stakes were so high. But like Zak said, sometimes humor helped defuse the tension and helped a person to cope.
Yes, she’d go with that. She was operating so outside her comfort zone that she didn’t know which end was up any longer. She was half under the spray when she thought she heard something. Pausing, eyes closed, she called out with a smile, “You’re supposed to be making us something to eat.”
Suddenly, the loud crash of bodies hitting the floor, grunts and obvious scrabbling popped her eyes open as she frantically tried to see through the blur of shampoo bubbles and the water streaming down her face. She screamed when a knife went flying across the floor, as Zak grappled with a stranger dressed in all black and a ski mask.
Sweet mother of God, who the hell was that?
She watched, frozen in fear, as Zak and the stranger—who really seemed to take a page out of the Bad Guy Handbook—traded blows in a real, live fight to the death.
The assailant got the upper hand for a brief moment before Zak slammed his fist into his junk, rolling him off, but the intruder rebounded quickly, landing a kick straight to Zak’s head.
“Zak!” she screamed but Zak took the hit and charged the man like a bull, knocking him down. The goon fell, his head hitting the tile floor with a hard thud.
She turned the water off and grabbed the first thing she could find to hurl at the attacker. She got lucky, hitting him in the face with a can of shaving cream.
It was a heartbeat long enough to give Zak the chance to ge
t the guy in a headlock. Within seconds Zak had choked him out. “Are you okay?” Zak asked, rising, breathing hard. He handed her a towel, which she quickly wrapped around herself.
She stared in horror. “Is he dead?”
“No,” he answered tersely, grabbing the man to hoist him over his shoulder. “But he’s going to wish he were.”
Zak strode from the bathroom, leaving Caitlin to start to trail after him until she realized she was still clutching a towel to her body. She dressed quickly and found Zak in the garage. The attacker was tied to a kitchen chair and was slowly coming to.
She held her breath as Zak shook the man fully awake. “Wakey-wakey, asshole,” he said, getting right in his face. When Zak was in work mode, he was scary but she was so grateful he was on her side. “Hey, wake up. Got a few questions for you.”
“Eat me,” the man muttered, wincing as he rolled his neck, cracking a few bones with a groan.
“Look, I’m going to skip the part where you pretend to be a badass and then I proceed to beat the ever-loving shit out of you because unlike you, I actually am a badass, so let’s cut to the chase. Give me the name of who sent you and I’ll consider not cutting your balls off.”
Blood trickling from a cut in his mouth, the man just grinned with a “Screw you” and Caitlin knew this guy was going to get his goose cooked.
“Okay, have it your way.” Zak rolled up his sleeves, pausing to say to Caitlin, “Hon, you might not want to watch this,” but when she indicated she wasn’t going anywhere, he just shrugged and returned to the guy with a quick rabbit punch to the ribcage that had enough force to shatter bone.
Caitlin gasped, realizing she was out of her depth. She’d never watched a human being beat another and she didn’t think she should. Zak was right. “I’ll just be inside,” she murmured before practically running from the garage.
She didn’t want to see whatever Zak was going to do to that man.
Her instinct was to beg Zak to go easy, to not beat him within an inch of his life, but her logical brain told her that they wouldn’t get answers going soft. Not to mention, as she returned to the bathroom, she saw the knife the man had been clutching and she realized with dawning horror that the knife had been meant for her.
Being knifed seemed even worse than dying by gunshot.
Whoever was coming after her didn’t seem to care about doing it humanely.
When did poisoning go out of fashion?
It seemed like forever before Zak returned from the garage, his knuckles bloody and his demeanor hard. She was afraid to know if the guy was still alive or if he was dead.
If he was dead...well, it freaked her out to think there was a dead body in the garage, and if he was alive, she was worried that he might need medical attention.
And how did that work?
Were they legally responsible for his medical care? What if he didn’t have medical insurance? Was Red Wolf responsible? Caitlin nibbled at her fingernail, her nerves strung tight. “I don’t understand how this works,” she blurted, looking to Zak for answers. “Is he...dead? Are you allowed to kill people? I don’t know... Are we supposed to take him to the hospital if he’s not dead?”
Maybe she was rambling but she had no precedent for handling the interrogation of a person who had come to kill her.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Is he...dead?” she asked again in a fearful squeak.
“He’s not.”
She sagged with visible relief. “I’m glad. I guess I’m not as bloodthirsty as I should be given the fact that he’d been willing to put that knife in me,” she said, gesturing toward the knife on the table. “I made sure to protect the fingerprints. I used the towel to pick up the weapon. I saw that on an episode of CSI Miami once.”
Zak nodded with a briefly held smile, pausing to press a hard kiss to her forehead. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She was touched by his instant tenderness even though he still had murder in his eyes. “I’m okay,” she assured him, even though little tremors had started shaking her limbs. “What happens next?”
“Red Wolf is sending a retrieval team.”
“What the heck is that?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. We can’t have this guy floating around. So he’s going to be taken to a secure location until he can be properly processed.”
“Processed?” She envisioned a firing squad. “What does that mean?”
He must’ve sensed where her mind had gone, for he chuckled and said, “After we’ve determined he’s of no more use to us, he’ll be handed over to the proper authorities.”
“Oh,” she said, relieved and yet finding the answer a little anticlimactic. “I guess I thought you might kill him.”
“Too much paperwork.”
She laughed, but she wasn’t entirely sure Zak was joking.
“Are we safe? I mean, what if he tries again before your retrieval team gets here?”
“He ain’t going nowhere,” Zak said with a small smirk. What did that mean? Her perplexed expression prompted him to add, “Somehow in the scuffle to subdue him, he seems to have suffered a few injuries that will affect his ability to walk.”
Caitlin’s mouth dropped open. “Did you—”
But Zak silenced her with a kiss before saying, “Hey, are you hungry? I’m starved.” He returned to the kitchen with a seemingly light heart in spite of the savagery that had just happened.
She suppressed a shudder. Was this her life now?
She didn’t know what normal was anymore.
And no, she wasn’t hungry.
* * *
Caitlin was freaked out. If the blanching of her face wasn’t a total clue, the fact that her eyes seemed permanently stretched in the wide, OMG look since he’d emerged from the garage was a dead giveaway.
“You should eat something,” he told her, watching her push her pasta around without having eaten a bite. “Gotta keep up your strength.”
She dropped her fork with a clatter. “This is not my regular Thursday night. I’m not accustomed to having strangers burst into my shower and try to murder me. I don’t know how to process this. And to make matters worse, said potential murderer is tied up in the garage in some disabled state awaiting this mysterious retrieval team. You can pretty much ascertain that this is some messed-up shit and it’s screwing with my brain—the brain, I might add, that is supposed to save the world. Yeah, not exactly hungry.”
Yep. She was freaking out. He wiped his mouth and said, “Yeah, if I were in your shoes, I’d be pretty overwhelmed, too. I wish the situation allowed time for you to slowly come to terms with the situation but honey, time is a luxury we don’t have. I know you’re not digging my methods—totally fair—but that guy in the garage might be our first real lead.”
“How’d you disable him?” she asked.
“I broke his ankles.”
She gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. “You what?”
“Best way to ensure he ain’t running anywhere,” Zak explained with a quick grin but when he realized she didn’t appreciate his humor, he sobered quickly. He had to handle this situation more delicately. Caitlin wasn’t like his buddies at Red Wolf, who should be arriving any minute, by the way. He could sense she was wavering on the edge of information overload. “Okay, that was a bad attempt at smoothing things over with humor,” he admitted. “But you’re right, that guy is dangerous and I couldn’t take the chance that he might get free before the team could get here. Your safety is everything. I’m sorry you think it’s savage but I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
She was more than just a job—helluva time to catch feelings, right? But when he’d seen the guy in the bathroom, knife in hand, he’d gone berserk. If Caitlin had suffered a single scratch, Zak would’ve ended him. Plain and simple. Yeah, bad time to catch feelings. He needed to stay focused. Now m
ore than ever.
“I’m just struggling with everything right now,” she admitted with a scowl. “I need a minute to figure out where my head is at. Everything is mixed up and jumbled. One minute I understand the rhythm of my life and the next, I’m Alice in Wonderland falling down a hole and rabbits wearing ski masks are trying to kill me.” She sniffed. “Ski mask, so original. And whatever happened to poison as an acceptable way to kill someone? He was going to put that very large knife in my body. That seems a little more vicious than necessary. I mean, I can tell you there are a million different ways you can kill a person using science that are way more effective and less messy than stabbing a person.”
“You seem to have very strong feelings about the method in which your assailant chooses to kill you.”
“Well, yes, actually, I do. If he had managed to get past you and finish what he’d started, then it would’ve made a terrible mess and what if there was a struggle? What if I was poked full of holes and then my family had to arrange for a closed casket? My parents would want to see me one last time. I’m their only child. I know they would not agree to a closed casket.”
This was the weirdest conversation ever. “I guess it’s a good thing I prevailed,” he said, struggling to hide his laughter. She glared at his poor attempt as a chuckle escaped. “Look, this is some heavy shit to deal with. I get it. So you do whatever it is you need to get through it. Ramble on about your murder bias or worry about the potential of your murderers messing up that cute face. But at the end of the day, I’m not letting anything happen to you, so you can rest assured about that.”
Her glare softened as she said, “I guess I haven’t thanked you for saving my naked ass.”
His smile widened as his mind wandered. “And what a fine ass it is.”
She blushed with a small smile but waved away his praise. “That’s not the point, but thank you for that, too. Anyway, I’m glad you were there to save the day. Again.”
Soldier Protector (Military Precision Heroes Book 2) Page 13
