by Cindy Gerard
Green had a thing for Stephanie. Interesting
“First you eat,” Green ordered Steph, which raised a few eyebrows and questioning looks. Only when he was satisfied that she’d refueled did he let her get back to work.
“Get me results, people,” Nate said. “And get them fast. We cannot let this happen.”
15
“Colombia,” Stephanie said within the first hour of searching with the aid of her software. “The other IP address is in Colombia.”
Rafe’s expression hardened. “You’re sure?” he asked quietly.
“Positive. Give me a little more time and I’ll get account names for the addresses.”
“Good work.” Green squeezed her shoulder.
“Something wrong?” B.J. asked Rafe when Stephanie and Green had their heads together again over a series of graphs and charts Stephanie used to organize the deciphered messages.
He glanced at her, his dark eyes cold. “I’ll go make some more coffee.”
What in the heck is that about? she wondered. Maybe he was still ticked at her for laying him out.
“Rafe’s from Colombia,” Green said.
B.J. turned back to see Green looking over his shoulder at her. She didn’t know what surprised her more: the warning look on Green’s face—as in “don’t press it”—or the fact that he was talking at all. It hadn’t taken long for her to discover that Green was a man of few words.
“He doesn’t talk about it. But there are bad memories there.” With another meaningful look, he turned back to Stephanie.
Bad memories.
B.J. knew about bad memories—she had her own to deal with.
Everyone had a story. She wondered what Rafe’s was. It was none of her business. She didn’t want it to be her business, because she didn’t want to care. But when he returned to the room a short time later with a fresh pot of coffee and a hollow look in his eyes, she realized that she did. She did care.
And that scared her almost as much as the prospect of a terrorist with an E-bomb targeting the United States.
B.J. immersed herself in helping Stephanie for the next several hours in an attempt to distance herself from Rafe and her uncharacteristic reactions to him. Distance was always the answer. It would have worked this time, too, if everything hadn’t changed around six p.m.
“I’ve got it! The name attached to the Colombian e-mail account is Emilio Garcia.”
When Stephanie announced Garcia’s name, no one was overly surprised. Garcia was a Pablo Escobar protégée who had learned his lessons well from the most notorious drug don in Colombia. Pablo was long dead—killed in a covert U.S. operation that had taken years to come to fruition. However, Emilio Garcia and many others like him had carried on the lucrative trade after his death. Garcia, in particular, had ties to several terrorist groups.
Rafe alone showed no reaction.
“Reed. Get this info to Crystal,” Nate said after Stephanie’s announcement. “See what she can dig up. B.J., call Sherwood.”
An hour later, they had more answers … and every one of them was bad news.
“Okay, Tinkerbell,” Reed said after putting Crystal on speakerphone.
“Give us your worst, darlin’.”
“I’m going to nutshell it,” Crystal said, “because you don’t have time to hear the gory details. Garcia has been in regular communications with a Russian by the name of Serge Bartrev. Former KGB, current Russian mafia. Known collaborator with our favorite fugitive, bin Laden. Missing Soviet missiles, anyone? Gosh, I wonder whose fingerprints you’d find on them when they turn up in some cave in Afghanistan.
“Anyway, lots of back scratching going on between Bartrev and Osama’s camps—which would possibly explain why the E-bomb specs showed up where they did.”
It was pretty easy to piece together the basics after that. Throw Bartrev, bin Laden, and the head of the largest drug cartel in Colombia in a bag, shake ’em up, and you’ve got a recipe for terror—all of it aimed at the U.S.
By the time Crystal was finished with her report, B.J. understood why Crystal Debrowski had been added to the BOI team. She was intelligent, focused, and as tenacious as a bulldog when she dug into a task.
“Good work, Tink,” Reed said.
“I’m still working on your list of senators and congressmen,” she said, “but I hope to have it soon.”
“Keep digging, babe.”
“We’ve got to get down there,” Gabe said to the room at large after Crystal had signed off, “figure out a way into Garcia’s camp, find out what the bastard is up to.”
“Suggestions?” Nate glanced around the room.
“Infiltrate Garcia’s organization?” Savage suggested.
“Right. Without an in, it could take months to get a foot in the door.”
“We have an in.”
All eyes turned to Rafe, who’d been quiet until that point. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “Cesar Munoz is my uncle. He married my father’s sister and is Emilio Garcia’s banker and close personal friend.”
Stunned silence followed his announcement, giving B.J. the distinct impression that she wasn’t the only one who was shocked by Mendoza’s news. Emilio Garcia was the top dog of the cocaine empire in Colombia. Cesar Munoz, one of Colombia’s most powerful men in banking, had been suspected for years of laundering Garcia’s dirty money. The two names were often linked together in reports that came across B.J.’s desk at DIA. And Munoz was Rafe’s uncle.
Finally Nate spoke up. “What have you got in mind, Rafe?”
No other questions. No recriminations, just quiet acceptance that you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives. In that moment, B.J. understood just how deep the bond was among these men.
“It’s been almost fifteen years,” Rafe said, his face and voice solemn. “Seems like a perfect time to get reacquainted with the family, maybe get involved with the family banking business. Should be cause for celebration, don’t you think?” he added, his tone edgy.
Nate nodded. “Lot of opportunities for social gatherings. Introductions to business associates.”
“Yeah,” Rafe agreed. “Associates like Emilio Garcia.”
Alex Brady wanted to chuck his cell phone across the room. But the senator was just winding up to rip him a new asshole. He had no choice but to bear it.
“There has not been one mention of Stephanie Tompkins’s disappearance in the newspapers.” The senator’s voice grated across the airways in an irate, accusatory tone. “Nothing. Not even a whisper of a rumor in a town that runs on gossip. How do you explain that?”
Alex pinched the bridge of his nose, dug deep for patience. “I don’t.”
“Well, what does it say to you?”
“That the Tompkinses are private people who have chosen not to share their dilemma with the media, perhaps?”
“Wrong! Ann and Robert Tompkins dote on that girl. If they believed she was missing and in danger, they’d have every law enforcement agency on earth searching for her! So it tells me that they’ve been in touch with her. That they know where she is and that she’s intentionally flying under the radar.”
That’s what Alex thought, too. “I’ve had men watching the Tompkinses’ house and Stephanie Tompkins’s apartment since this started.” He didn’t bother to report that they’d also blown a chance to have the DIA agent, B. J. Chase, lead them to Stephanie. “She’s not there and they haven’t made any trips that have led us to her.”
“Watching? Your men are merely watching?”
God, he hated having anyone tell him how to do his job. “We are also monitoring their Internet activity and their phone lines. These people are smart. They’re giving nothing away.”
“They have to be communicating with her somehow!”
“I’m certain they are. Look, we’re all over this, okay? Now I’m sorry, Senator, but I’ve got another call coming in. I’ll be back in touch.”
Alex broke the connection and took the incoming call w
hen he recognized his man Smith’s number. “Tell me something I want to hear.”
“Caught up with another person on the list of the Tompkins woman’s friends. A Ben Brommel. Pentagon employee. The guy thought I was hitting on him so I used it, brought up her name as a mutual friend. Brommel gets all quiet and nervous then and all of a sudden he makes excuses and splits.”
“He knows something.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. Smith and I are tailing him now. Looks like he’s on his way home.”
Finally, Alex thought. A promising lead. “Get back to me after you’ve had your little chat. And Bryant … no witnesses.”
Stephanie was taking a well-deserved nap; some of the guys were cooking dinner; others were cleaning weapons, shooting the breeze as they waited. Only Rafe had distanced himself from the activity by slipping quietly out of the house when he’d thought no one was looking.
No one was. No one but B.J.
She found him outside standing alone under the shade of a tall tree that looked like it had been there since the beginning of the last millennium. It was very late afternoon now. The July sun burned warm on her face. What breeze there was lightly rustled the low-hanging limbs, heavy with waxy leaves, and carried the scent of dust and summer and the faint promise of a much-needed rain.
If he was aware that she’d come looking for him he didn’t show it. Instead, the expression on his face held the weight of time. Hard time.
A twig snapped under her foot when she was within a few feet of him. He had to have heard her but he didn’t look her way. He just leaned back against the broad tree trunk, his arms crossed over his chest, his thoughts a million miles away—or at least several thousand miles away in Colombia, she suspected.
“You should go back inside,” he said without looking at her.
“Yeah, I should,” she agreed, stopping beside him. “And I will. In a minute. I need some air.”
He looked across the flat farmland. She looked at him, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to do so. But it was hard not to look at him, a dilemma she found as baffling as her interest. He was a man. Just a man … who made her think of all the things missing from her life.
She wasn’t sure what she’d come out there expecting. That he’d tell her what was eating at him? Which meant she was totally and thoroughly out in left field somewhere. She had her own baggage. She didn’t need to share the weight of someone else’s.
And yet she still stood there, teetering on the brink of inviting him to unburden his heavy load. Of telling him that she had broad shoulders and that she might be able to help.
God. What was she thinking?
Raphael Mendoza was nothing to her. So he was a hot Latino stud. He had a pretty face and a buff body. He liked to tease. He felt pain. He harbored secrets. None of which had anything to do with her.
They weren’t friends. They weren’t lovers. And they weren’t ever going to be, either. For all she knew he had a case for Stephanie.
Just because he stirred something inside her that she’d never allowed herself to feel or explore didn’t mean she was going to act on it. There was something much bigger at stake than what was happening with the ill-timed reawakening of her libido. She needed to get her head back in the game, reestablish her basic ground rules, and maintain her distance for her own self-preservation.
And she needed to do it now. She started walking away.
His soft voice stopped her.
Rafe had always known his past would catch up with him at some point. Never in a million years had he figured he’d be spilling his deepest secrets to a DIA agent who fancied a Glock 19, pissed him off, screwed with his head, and turned him on like a spotlight.
And yet, here he was.
“I grew up in Medellín,” he began hesitantly. “I don’t know how much you know about the history of Colombia, but for decades the country was torn apart by ongoing political warfare.”
“I’ve read about La Violencia,” she said quietly, surprising him with her knowledge of the terminology for a very ugly period.
“La Violencia had actually ended years earlier, but even in the years that followed there was constant guerrilla warfare between the Liberals and the Conservatives, who still take their politics to extremes. Add in FARC and ELN, and everyone suffers from the violence and the poverty. Everyone but my family and the circles we ran in.”
He paused, shrugged. “I was a kid. I wasn’t aware, and I didn’t question. We had money and I liked it. If I asked for something, I got it. We lived in villas, threw big-ass parties, drove top-of-the-line cars, had a private jet, traveled. My sister and I …” He paused again, thinking of Eva, feeling the pain of loss before pulling himself back together. “We went to private schools. Indulged, spoiled children of an obscenely wealthy father.”
He leaned down, snagged a waxy leaf off the ground, started shredding it. “I had just turned fifteen when everything changed.”
He forced himself to go back, to revisit memories that he’d never completely forgotten but that he had worked every day to suppress. “I was visiting my abuela—my grandmother—in Bogotá. She wanted to take me shopping for a birthday gift.” He saw his elegant and fashionable abuela in his mind. Her dark hair had been stylishly streaked with gray and pulled back in a classic chignon. Her clothes were from only the most upscale boutiques in the city. And her skin had been as soft and smooth as silk. “But we never went.
“My uncle called just as we were leaving the house.” He stopped. Swallowed. “My father and mother and my sister… they’d all been murdered.”
He’d never forget the horror and grief on his grandmother’s face after she’d answered the phone that morning. She seemed to age twenty years in that moment.
His stomach roiled thinking of how his mother and sister had most likely been tortured and raped and his father forced to watch before they were finally killed.
“I’m so, so sorry.” B.J.’s voice was hushed, filled with shocked disbelief and an uncharacteristic sympathy.
Hatred for the men who had brutalized and murdered his family coiled in his belly. Among his many regrets was that he could never extract his own pound of flesh for what those men had done.
“What happened next,” he pushed on, “is still a blur but my grandmother threw my things back into my suitcase and rushed me to the airport to get me out of the country. She put me on a plane to a friend’s in Miami right after she shoved a wad of cash into my hand and told me to give it to her friend for my care until she could send more. News arrived shortly after I got to Florida that my grandmother had been killed, too—a bomb leveled her home and killed everyone inside.”
“My God. Who—”
“Killed my family?” he finished for her, then confessed the ugly truth. “I don’t know. Business competitors sending a message to Garcia that they could hurt his ‘family’ anytime? A warning to get out of rival territory? Pick a reason.”
He turned his head and met eyes brimming with both questions and concern before she put it together. The wealth, the extravagance, the execution of his family.
“Your father was a member of the drug cartel?”
He looked away, still struggling with the possibility that his father, whom he had idolized, had been a player in the same dirty game as the men who had ordered his death. “As far as I knew then, he was a top exec at one of Uncle Cesar’s banks.” He lifted a shoulder. “But I’ve since learned that while my uncle keeps up a respectable banker façade, there’s no getting around the fact that he’s tied in with the cartel. With Garcia.”
He stared into space. “I still don’t want to believe that my father was involved, too. But maybe even back then, I just didn’t want to know.”
“You were a boy.”
Yeah. But he’d grown up real fast after that.
“I was also dead, as far as anyone knew. They assumed I died in the bombing that killed my grandmother.”
“If this was a hit by the cartel, why wasn’t you
r uncle killed, too?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Maybe Garcia protected him? Maybe he cut a deal for his life? I’ll probably never know.”
She was quiet for a time before asking, “So your grandmother’s friend in Miami … she took you in?”
“For as long as the money lasted. She kicked me out a few months later. Can’t say as I blamed her. I was pretty angry.”
“More like devastated and disillusioned,” she said, and he heard the compassion in her voice.
