by Julie Miller
One by one, they reported by rank, ensuring every man on the team was safely accounted for before detonation. “Delgado, first floor. Exiting the building now.”
“Jones, north entrance. Civilians are clear of the blast zone.”
“Taylor, exiting the building now. Gallagher’s with us.”
Miranda opened her mouth to report in last, but another voice beat her to it.
“Kincaid. North of GSS, approaching Murdock on her three.”
Was she part of this team or not?
“Murdock?” the captain prompted.
“Murdock here,” she whispered, feeling her confidence sink like a stone. Maybe she should be grateful the captain had included her at all. Keep it together. This time she kept her voice low, since the wind would blow the sound straight at the car she was approaching. “I’m twenty yards behind the black car. Two men in the front seat. One in the back. I’m going in to get a look.”
Determined to ignore Holden Kincaid’s imminent arrival and deal with the potential threat herself, Miranda moved up onto the asphalt behind the car and silently angled herself around to get a look in the open window before she was spotted in one of the mirrors. Closer, closer. The man in the backseat was leaning toward the half-open window, clearly intent on the SWAT van, yellow cordon tape and news reporters and cameras gathered around the GSS building.
She quickly processed the details. Gray hair. Gaunt features. Curly gray beard. For a split second she envisioned an older, shaggier version of Nikolai Titov. But the man turned and saw her. Pale eyes. Not Nikolai.
“KCPD,” she announced. “I need you to step out of the car. I just need to question you. Do it now.”
The man thumped the seat in front of him and shouted in a foreign language. His window went up as the front window went down and a hand came out.
“Gun!” she shouted.
The car shifted into gear as the driver popped off two rounds in Miranda’s direction. The engine growled and the back tires spun on the wet pavement.
Miranda quickly aimed as the car lurched forward. Her first shot took off the driver’s side mirror. The front wheels found traction and the car fishtailed into a U-turn.
“Murdock!”
She stood her ground in the middle of the road and took out the right headlight. The passenger-side window went down and a second gun came out. She heard men shouting gibberish from the car—to her? To each other?—in a language she didn’t understand.
More bullets peppered the pavement at her feet.
Miranda aimed for the front tire.
“Fire in the hole!”
The command in her ear distracted her for a split second and her shot pinged off the bumper.
The car picked up speed.
“Murdock! Move!”
Boom! The muffled report of the exploding box thundered through the cold air and shivered right down her spine. “Quinn?”
He’d better have been clear of that bomb.
“Murdock!” Holden Kincaid’s voice dragged her back to the black car barreling toward her.
She raised her gun. But it was too close. It was too late to get off the shot.
The heat from the engine glanced off her body as she leaped out of the way. She landed hip first in the snow and rolled down into the ditch as the BMW blew past her. Pain burned along her forearm and throbbed in her knees and elbow by the time she cracked the ice at the bottom of the ditch and crashed to a stop.
Miranda heard two more shots, but they hadn’t come from her. Somewhere in that roll down the hill, she’d lost her earpiece and weapon. The world of snow, trash and dead field grass reeled through her spinning vision as she pushed herself up to her hands and knees. And then two large hands were helping her to her feet and dragging her up to the road.
“Crazy lady.” Holden Kincaid sat her down on the pavement and knelt in front of her “Cutler said you were fearless.”
“Huh?” She blinked several times and breathed in the cold, crisp air, clearing her head and settling the queasy aftermath in her topsy-turvy stomach.
“Are you hit?” Kincaid’s hands probed her arms and legs, searching for injuries.
“Ow!” Okay, so she must have scraped up her arm pretty good. But the vest had protected everything vital, and neither the bullets nor the car had actually struck her. “I’m fine.”
Her cheek was burning now, too. Maybe that was just the cold, wet glop from the ditch clinging to her.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
She pushed all three fingers away. “Enough to annoy me. Where’s my gun?”
Holden put her Glock into her hand and then helped her to her feet. Miranda brushed aside any further assistance and surveyed the area. She didn’t need to hear Holden reporting in to know the suspects were long gone. “The car got away, sir. Better call a bus. I think she’s okay, but Murdock needs to be checked out.” He covered his mike with a leather-gloved hand. “Can you walk?”
She batted his hand aside and stretched up on tiptoe to speak into his radio. “Cancel the ambulance, Captain. I’m scraped up, but I’m fine.”
Holden grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes. We’re heading in, sir.”
In a way, Holden Kincaid reminded Miranda a lot of her brother, John. Big man. Easy smile. Dry sense of humor. But she pressed her lips tight to hide the traitorous smile that wanted to answer him. She should not like this guy. He was the competition.
Besides, there was another man on her mind. A handsome father who’d kissed her in the midst of danger, who’d stuck by her side despite every effort to isolate herself with the danger of the bomb. A man whose image had gotten inside her head when she should have been focused on the car that tried to run her down. “Is everyone okay?” she asked.
“If you mean the bomb, yeah. The threat is neutralized and everyone’s safe.” Holden gestured down the road, and she fell into step beside him as they rejoined the team at the van. “I think you’re the only one we need to worry about.”
Miranda wiped the moisture and mud off her gun with shaky, numbing fingers before holstering it at her back. She’d missed her shot, gotten a stupid minor injury and was being escorted back to command by her replacement. Quinn and Sergeant Delgado had taken care of the bomb. Captain Cutler and Quinn’s assistant had taken care of Fiona.
She’d fallen into the snow and mud and let the suspects shooting at her get away.
Way to shine, Murdock. Way to shine.
MIRANDA WAS BLEEDING.
Quinn tried to concentrate on the debriefing with Michael and his team up in his office, but all his brain could see at the moment was the blood oozing from the scrape on her cheek. Trip Jones had cut off the shredded sleeve of her sweater and blouse and packed a pressure bandage on the long gash on her forearm and elbow. But there were still broken and muddy reeds of grass stuck in her hair, and the graze on her cheek was bleeding.
This was his building, his problem. The threats were against him—destroy his company, take his daughter. He should be the one getting hurt—no one else. If he had known Miranda was going to be playing chicken with cars and guns, he would have insisted she stay with Fiona in the SWAT van. He would have kept her in his sight while he and Rafe cut apart that bomb and detonated what was left of it outside the building. He would have…
…not done any of those things, he admitted. He’d hired Miranda Murdock specifically because she was a woman who could handle bombs and bad guys and guns. She could think on her feet. Hell, she could think clearly enough when the pressure was on that she still had the time and energy to argue with him. Even now, while she was shivering in her damp clothes, just thirty minutes after the bomb had been detonated and the mystery car had sped off to the interstate and disappeared, she was clear-eyed and contributing to the sharing of facts after the incident. Michael Cutler expected her to be tough. He expected her to be tough, or he never would have hired her.
But that was the logic in his head talking. Something else, closer t
o his heart, something primal that was almost painful to acknowledge, wanted to do something about her getting hurt.
“I got a good look at the man in the backseat,” she said.
Michael sat on the sofa across from Miranda. “Good. I’ll have you sit down with a sketch artist at the Fourth Precinct. Today, if possible.”
“The sooner, the better,” she insisted. “I don’t want to forget anything.”
“You said they were speaking a foreign language? Any idea what it was?”
She twisted her hands together, trying to hide the way she was shivering. “Russian, maybe? Slavic? Like I said, there was a lot of noise and distraction.”
All these grown men around the room, treating her like she was one of the guys, like she was just as impervious to pain as they had to be. Quinn had never considered himself particularly chivalric, but it made good common sense to drape his suit jacket around her shoulders to add an extra layer of warmth. He ignored her startled “Thank you.” But he could feel the verdant gaze that tilted up and followed him all the way across the room to the bar sink where he wet a couple of paper towels with cool water.
Fiona was there in the kitchenette area at her little table and chairs, playing happily away with the walkie-talkie Michael had given her. “Woger that,” she spoke into the mouthpiece, then held it up to Petra’s ear, fortunately oblivious to the details of the adults’ conversation and just what kind of danger she’d been in. “Mudock out.”
Inwardly, he smiled. He was pretty fascinated by the nanny, too. Outwardly? He tried to keep it all cool, calm and collected. But he was quickly failing. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the wound or her hair or the vulnerable extra tilt of her chin as she continued to answer questions.
Miranda clutched the jacket together at her neck when he returned. Seeing her in his coat, on his furniture, in his office—especially with other men in the room—tapped into something slightly more possessive than protective, and eased some of that raw, unsettling need to take care of her. Quinn perched on the edge of the sofa beside her. “Here.” He dabbed away some of the mud and grit from around the scrape on her cheek, then pressed it against the seeping wound. “Did the men sound like Nikolai Titov?” he asked.
She hissed a breath of pain through her teeth before answering. “It was similar. I didn’t understand what he and his associates were saying when they spoke in their native language here, either.” Still stubbornly showing that streak of independence, she took the towels from his fingers and held them against her cheek herself. She turned the rest of her answer back to Michael. “Mr. Titov isn’t the man I saw.”
But Michael was looking at Quinn. “Where are Titov and his associates now?”
“I don’t know. Once David came in, my only concern was the bomb and getting Fiona and the others out of the building. Where they went after that…?”
Quinn didn’t realize that Elise had been tracking his movements across the office, too, until he caught her watching him with a curious frown from across the coffee table. She quickly looked away and crossed to where David Damiani stood near Quinn’s desk. “They’re gone. Nikolai took off with Louis pretty much as soon as David got us outside. I’m assuming he took them to their hotel. Would you like me to find out where they’re staying?”
“Please,” Michael answered. He gestured to Holden Kincaid, who opened the door for Elise and followed her out to her office.
Odd that Titov and his men had skipped out so quickly. Quinn had been certain that they’d had more argument to give about reopening the St. Feodor plant. Maybe, with their Eastern European background, they were cautious about the gathering of reporters outside, and being associated with any kind of attack that could be construed as a terrorist event.
Quinn was still thinking about the curious timing of men with foreign accents watching the building in crisis and shooting at Miranda, and the unexpected visit from Titov, when Rafe Delgado handed Michael a copy of the email Miranda had printed out. “We’ve got this photo and message about the bomb. But who was the first person to find the device? To actually put eyes on it? You, Quinn?”
David straightened from the back of the couch where he’d been sitting. “I can answer that.” He circled around the end of the couch to face the senior officer. “Ozzie Chang, one of our computer geeks, found the email and called me in. I went into the lab myself and discovered it shortly after noon. That’s when I called 911 and ordered the building evacuation.”
“Where was Ozzie?” Quinn asked, rising to his feet. “He wasn’t supposed to be working in the lab today.”
David shook his head. “He was in his office when he called me.”
“He called you because of the email, not because he’d found the bomb itself?”
“I guess.” David’s square jaw clenched before he cursed. “You think he could have put it there?”
“I’m not accusing one of my own people. With the holidays and a nearly deserted building, someone with the right skills could get inside.” Although Quinn couldn’t fathom how an outsider could get into one of GSS’s most secure rooms, he didn’t want to think that the easiest answer was that someone he knew and trusted was behind these threats. Still, Ozzie did have the know-how to hack into GSS from a remote location. The question was why. “I’m just trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense to me. He did come in to help me yesterday, but I sent him on vacation for the rest of the week. What was he doing here?”
Miranda huddled inside his jacket as she stood beside Quinn. “Does Ozzie know how to build a bomb?”
“I hire very smart people to work for me. Anything’s possible.” He still wasn’t buying it. “But what’s his motive?”
“Two and a half million dollars?” David suggested.
“The money’s already been paid. Why risk killing more innocent people and doing millions of dollars’ worth of damage?”
“Maybe he was covering his tracks.”
Quinn raked his fingers through his hair and rubbed at the headache forming at the base of his skull. “This feels personal, not like it’s about the money.”
“I wouldn’t write off the computer geek yet.” David braced his hands at his hips and puffed up, refusing to have his idea dismissed. “There’s one more thing, boss. Whoever put the bomb there used an authorized access code. Nothing was flagged to security when the door opened.”
“Could that code be what the hacker was after?” Miranda asked.
“Or maybe Ozzie punched it in himself.” David’s point was made, even if Quinn didn’t like the idea of a traitor working for him.
Michael Cutler stood and signaled to his men. “Taylor. Trip. Grab Kincaid and go find this Ozzie Chang. And let’s get some detectives to look into his financials. Mr. Damiani, can you get us an address?”
“I can take you there myself.” David nodded and headed out the door with the uniformed cops on his heels.
“Rafe and I will make sure your assistant and the three of you get home safely.” SWAT Team 1 was on the move again. “Chang either saw that bomb and lied to your security chief, or someone used the code to get in after he left and we need him to narrow down the time frame when that could have happened—”
“—or Ozzie has a lot of explaining to do about his loyalty to me and GSS.” Quinn was running through the same possibilities Michael was, and was ready to find some answers. He went to the kitchenette and scooped Fiona up into his arms.
Miranda was already gathering up their coats. “No matter what, I have a feeling there are a couple of detectives who’ll want to question Ozzie.”
“Forget the detectives.” Quinn intended to take the women home and then accompany Michael and his men. “I want to talk to him myself.”
“I AM ONE STEP AHEAD OF YOU, Quinn Gallagher.” The figure sitting in the car laughed. The brilliant self-made man thought he could plan for every situation, that he could control every outcome with his brains or money or business savvy. “Look who has control now.”
The child would have been so easy to take while the big boss of Gallagher Security Systems was playing hero. As suspected, Quinn wouldn’t be able to resist tackling the bomb himself, once he recognized bits and pieces of his own designs all set into place to topple his empire. Quinn was the type of man to step up and take responsibility, to look out for those around him, to notice who needed him and who deserved his help.
He was a born leader, a consummate protector—in every single facet of his life and work. Except one.
And that one mistake, that one oversight—that one glaring example of Quinn Gallagher not giving a damn about the right person—was the reason for being here.
The figure sitting behind the wheel clutched at the pain stabbing straight through the heart. No one should have to suffer that kind of loss. No one should have to feel that helpless—to know everything one tried to get noticed, to make things right, wasn’t enough.
There was only one way to make things right now.
Quinn Gallagher had to suffer in the very same way.
Remembering the success of the day, the driver sat up squarely behind the wheel. Everyone was packing up now. Catching their breaths. Escorting people home. Crisis averted. Now Quinn would go back to his mansion and seclude himself with his thoughts. He’d reflect on every misstep and close call of the past four days, wondering what he’d missed, whom he’d offended, where he’d gone wrong. He thought he could fix this if he surrounded himself with the right people and thought about the game long enough and hard enough.
It was a delight to watch him be confused, angry—to watch the great Quinn Gallagher not have all the answers.
There were so many delicious ways this afternoon could have gone. Property damage. Destruction of the GSS mainframe computer. Loss of lives. Losing the young life most important to Quinn.
But the timing wasn’t right. The game had to be played a certain way, on a certain schedule—mimicking the time frame of the driver’s own suffering—or the satisfaction that was so long overdue wouldn’t be gratifying enough.
It was the only way to make things right.
