by Edie Harris
Della hadn’t bothered with coffee or doughnuts before diving into the broken cell phone, tablet and hard drive she pulled from Adam’s bag, her own laptop open on the quartz countertop as she plugged everything in and began to work her magic. As Adam’s right hand, Della had put up with Adam’s breed of crazy more than just about anyone else in the family. Tobias’s kid brother may subscribe to a laissez-faire attitude in the rest of his life, but Adam was an exacting taskmaster when it came to the job. He took his work seriously, protecting every Faraday asset online and doing his fair share of investigating—through means legal and illegal—to perform the sometimes ugly duties that came with running part of the world’s leading arms manufacturer.
Now Della muttered to herself as thick silence blanketed the room, plugging cords into devices and typing away with a vicious frown marring her pale face. The trio of delicate hoops piercing her eyebrow blinked in the light as she shoveled a hand through the haphazard white-blond pixie cut. Della hid her true identity under hair dye, skillfully applied liner and lipstick and numerous piercings, and, given what Tobias knew of her history—and the history of her older siblings, Freya and Keir—that urge toward concealment was understandable.
The Quinns had blood in their backstory. But then, what branch of the Faraday family tree didn’t these days?
“So.” Vick grabbed a cup of tea of his own and settled next to Beth, one long arm running along the back of the couch, fingertips stroking over the bare cap of her shoulder. “Everyone’s here.”
Tobias glanced toward the empty entryway to the kitchen. “Not quite every—”
“What’s with the board meeting?” The gravelly Georgia drawl reached them before the owner of that voice did. Gavin Bok limped into the room, pausing to grip the doorframe in one scarred, tattooed hand. Dark blue eyes scanned the room, clear and alert as they hadn’t been in the weeks since he’d given up his undercover work with the Russian mob. Not that Beth’s field partner had planned his exit from the black market arms ring Polnoch’ Pulya—he’d been gut-shot and beaten when Tobias, Chandler and Casey had hauled him out of Moscow and delivered him to Beth’s doorstep, and to see the former Navy pilot steady on his feet was a testament to the man’s iron will.
“Gavin. We were just waiting for you.” Tobias looked to the screen where Gillian stared out at them. “Is the audio working on your end?”
She lifted her energy drink in toast. “Loud and clear.”
“Then we begin.” Taking a bracing sip of coffee, his other hand still locked around Chandler’s firm thigh, Tobias recounted the known facts. “At approximately eighteen hundred hours last night, Adam Faraday was assaulted and kidnapped from an alleyway in historic Boston.”
Gavin, the only person who hadn’t known, tensed and cursed, but otherwise remained silent.
“He was on the phone with Casey when the struggle began,” Tobias continued, his voice cool and modulated though inside he felt anything but, “and was able to provide clues as to the identity of his attackers. Three Latino men, one of whom was left-handed, wearing tourist-style clothing, managed to overpower him and got him into an unmarked black panel van that had been parked on a nearby street. A fourth individual was driving the van, identity unknown.” He looked to Casey. “A contact inside Boston PD was able to provide us with red-light camera footage. The van was a rental out of Logan International Airport, but it was not returned to that location last night, which leads us to believe...”
Casey cleared his throat. “Which leads us to believe they flew out of either a private airstrip or a more rural setting—there’s flat farmland if you drive an hour or so west from the city, mostly abandoned.” He nodded toward Della, who hadn’t bothered to stop clicking and typing during the recap. “We received marginally clear images of the captors’ faces from the footage, so Della is running those against local, national and international offender databases.” Casey paused. “More than twelve hours have passed with no ransom demand.”
He didn’t need to explain further. They all knew if that amount of time had elapsed with no demand, then no demand was forthcoming.
“I spoke with Adam last night,” Della mumbled, eyes glued to her screen. “Must’ve been right before he got Casey on the line.”
Quiet followed that lilting statement, until Gavin lifted a brow in question. “And? What did he say?”
For the first time since Casey had slid the broken tech in front of her, Della looked up, green gaze clashing with Gavin’s blue. “I was instructed not to share.” The hoops in her eyebrow glinted as she mirrored his forbidding expression.
The tension in the room rocketed higher, so Tobias defused it, gently because they were all understandably on edge. “I know what Adam said to you.” Just as he knew that his cousin had been placed under strict orders to only speak to either Adam or Tobias on the matter. Adam’s kidnapping changed things. “Given the circumstances, Della, full disclosure can only strengthen us.” He looked around the room. “Call this the proverbial circle of trust.”
“Dirty laundry, boss, but whatever.” Della shrugged. “Adam asked me to look into a helicopter believed to have been present during the Kabul Girls’ School Bombing last year.” She tipped her head toward Gavin, either oblivious or uncaring of the effect of her words on the rest of the room. “And he said to start by questioning you.”
“Me?” Straightening, Gavin dropped the shielding forearm he had wrapped around his midsection, his glare a ferocious thing. “Why me?”
“Dunno, boyo,” she snapped, lip curled. “Perhaps you ought to unburden yourself to the ‘circle,’ save me the effort of dumping your browser history and credit card statements. Tell you honest, I don’t much fancy discovering whether or not you’ve got an Asian fetish.” Nose wrinkling, Della gestured toward the rest of them. “Trust circle? Your two cents?”
“He prefers busty redheads,” Beth offered wryly. “Never once accidentally ran across any Japanese schoolgirls on his laptop.” And Beth would know, being that she and Gavin had been nigh inseparable in the three years they’d been partners in the field. That time in the field had, unfortunately, included the disaster in Kabul, the catalyst event that had driven Beth from her life as an assassin-for-hire and sent Gavin spiraling into undercover work with the Russians.
“Not helping, B.” Gavin scrubbed a hand over his scruffy jaw and stalked to the coffeepot. “Can’t believe y’all are putting me in the crosshairs here,” he muttered as he poured, but Tobias noticed he didn’t look their way. In fact, his face had gone pale at the mention of the helicopter.
And Tobias wasn’t the only one who’d made that observation. Casey, doughnut long since devoured, sauntered over to the island, pressing his palms flat to the counter and spearing Gavin with an assessing glance. “There a reason why Adam might have told Della to start her line of inquiry with you?”
Before Tobias could interrupt—because it was on his orders that Adam had started down that road in the first place—Gavin turned, mug in hand, and met Casey’s gaze. “Probably due to what I learned while I was under in Moscow. Or...what I think I learned.” He indicated a pair of empty chairs in the living area and, reluctantly, Casey followed him, until everyone but Della sat together. Gavin eyed Beth with tender caution. “I wore that cover longer than I should’ve once I first heard mention of the chopper. Guess I was hoping I could find some sort of redemption for us, B.”
“The bombing wasn’t our fault, Gavin. Rawad al-Fariq was strapped with explosives, and would’ve been whether or not we were there.” Beth lifted her mug for a cautious sip. “I know we’ve been trying ever since to make amends for what we weren’t able to prevent that day. Both of us.”
Vick’s arm visibly tightened around her. “What was it you learned, Bok?”
“That Karlin Kedrov escaped in a helicopter,” Gavin said gravely, naming the villainous leader of the Polnoch’ Pulya, the man who’d orchestrated Beth’s torture, who’d tormented Chandler for almost a year while she
was playing double agent in the organization...the man whom Tobias had killed with a bullet to the head and two to the chest only a few weeks ago, the night that Gavin had been wounded.
Gavin wasn’t done. “The only reason Kedrov survived the bomb blast is because he was halfway out the building on his way to the helicopter. It was a getaway.”
Everyone absorbed that revelation, but Beth was the first to speak, frowning thoughtfully. “We’d seen him enter the building, though. The heat signature never disappeared.”
“But we didn’t clear the building ahead of time,” Gavin said with a shake of his head. “I’ve been thinking about it for over a year now, and the conclusion I keep coming back to is Kedrov, already suspicious, had a body man do a sweep before he arrived.”
“And so the heat signature we were looking at was that guy’s?” Setting aside her mug, Beth leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees and scarred forearms unwittingly on prominent display. Tobias forced himself not to stare at the evidence of her pain, took solace in the fact that both of the monsters responsible for that pain were dead and buried. “Okay, fine, we can argue we fixed our scope on the wrong man, but that just leads to more questions. Like how did Kedrov get out of a building with only one staircase, which I was monitoring like a boss? And why does it matter that he got spooked and booked it out of Dodge on a chopper?” Her frown deepened. “I don’t understand why you’d stay with Polnoch’ Pulya for something so...inconsequential.”
“Because he was tipped off ahead of time—either that al-Fariq was strapped to a bomb or that you and I were on the ground with sniper rifles—and whoever tipped him off provided the bird.” Gavin’s gaze dropped to the coffee mug in his hand. “I stayed undercover because I...think I know where that tip came from.”
Della made an irritated noise from her perch at the island. “Dramatic much?”
Gavin glared at her over his shoulder. “It was a Faraday chopper, okay? That’s why I stayed. Because a few months ago, I stumbled on a burned-out bird hidden on one of Kedrov’s estates, and when I looked closer, I discovered the fireproof floor compartments we’d outfitted all our choppers with.” His eyes closed, as if in pain, and maybe he was. Maybe he was hurting just as badly as Tobias was in that moment, as they all were. “I got the compartment open, and inside were three Faraday assault rifles. The helicopter that got Kedrov out of Kabul was one of ours.”
Rage blasted a path along Tobias’s sternum, choking him with acidic heat he could barely swallow past. “We have a leak,” he said quietly. Dangerously. Chandler’s hand settled on his shoulder, squeezing in a show of solidarity, and he wished—oh, how he wished—he could give in to the firestorm blazing through his bones, but that was not his role. No, right now, his family needed him to be a leader. The leader. “Faraday Industries has a leak.”
Beth’s face had gone stark white. “That’s why Nash asked me about the helicopter, and a mole in Polnoch’ Pulya, when he was...was interrogating me. He and Kedrov wanted to know if I knew.”
“They wanted to know if they still had Faraday on back-channel speed dial,” Casey growled, pushing out of his chair in obvious anger to pace once more.
“And you had Adam looking into this, all on his own,” Gillian said from the flat-screen, her tone bordering on accusatory. “Is there any chance he was snooping too close to the leak, and that’s why...?”
“Maybe.” Tobias’s mind raced as he considered the known facts and pushed aside hypotheticals. “Remember the shell company Polnoch’ Pulya laundered its money through? That shell was operated in consortium by multiple illegal and terrorist organizations, including a couple of cartels out of South America. And Gavin, you were in Chicago as part of your cover before things went to hell, to—”
“To play talking head between the Russian Mob in the city and the Lobos Rojos,” Gavin finished for him. The Lobos Rojos were one of the deadliest drug-running gangs in Chicago, with direct ties to a Colombian cartel.
“Adam was snatched by three Latinos.” Casey stalked his way into the kitchen, taking a loop past the pastry box to grab a bear claw before tearing off a massive bite. He spoke as he chewed. “You’re thinking if the Russians have ties to the Colombians, the same Russians who have one of our people in their pocket—” he emphasized this particular point by shaking the bear claw at the room at large “—then we could feasibly be looking at Colombians in that alley with Adam.”
“If we’re operating on the theory that everything’s tied together.” Tobias remembered the obsessive, panicked nonsense Kedrov had been spouting about the Faradays moments before he’d killed the bastard—you think you can buy your power, but power is earned; power is taken—and combined with Beth’s torture, the helicopter Gavin had found... It wasn’t anything so simple that they could dissect and solve it all now, but there was definitely one thing they could do. “Della, narrow your search on the suspect images from the red-light cameras to Colombians. Specifically, the Marin cartel.”
Both Casey and Vick swore vigorously.
Gillian tapped on the screen. “Hey. Someone fill me in. Why’d the air turn blue just now?”
It was Chandler who answered. “Four years ago, three spies were taken hostage by the Marin cartel, based out of Medellín. Two were CIA, one was MI6.”
“That one would be me,” Vick supplied.
Nodding, Chandler continued. “An extraction team was sent in to rescue Vick and the Americans. I was there, Beth was there, Bok was there—and Casey ran point.” She glanced at a silent Casey before looking back to the screen, at Gillian. “He orchestrated the rescue from inside the Marin cartel, where he had been embedded for a few months as one of the brigadiers in Felipe Marin Donado’s personal guard.”
“Felipe Marin Donado. Why do I know that name?” Gillian’s tone was thoughtful, then she appeared to be typing, the gray eyes behind her glasses scanning her side of the screen as though reading, rapidly. “Holy shit. Pipe? The Pipe?” Her gaze sought Casey where he stood near the island counter. “Go big or go home, huh, brother?”
Still, Casey said nothing, and Tobias suddenly remembered what Casey had been like upon returning from Colombia. His bulldozer of an older brother, who so rarely kept his feelings under wraps, had been withdrawn, only a biting temper whipping out to lash those around him in the weeks after he’d come home. He’d resigned his position with the CIA and onboarded completely with Faraday Industries...and then, one day, he’d magically turned into Old Casey, an aggressive but generally genial man with a protective streak ten miles wide.
And Tobias had never bothered to follow up, after that. He’d been so buried in contracts and service agreements and product launches and negotiations, he could barely grab a few hours per night for sleep, much less stop to examine the temporary odd behavior of one of his siblings. Though perhaps he should have.
Beth looked to Gillian. “How do you know Pipe?”
“Outside of the news?” Gillian shrugged. “He’s sent a few...gifts over the years, trying to convince me to provide him with Faraday weapons.” And the only customer of Faraday weaponry was the United States government, in an agreement that had been in place since the mid-nineteenth century.
“Gifts?”
“You know my Aston Martin?”
“The Vanquish? No.”
“Yes.” Gillian grinned. “I mean, I had it completely disassembled and swept for trackers or explosives, but yeah.” When no one said anything, she threw up her hands defensively. “What? I’d like to see you turn away a ride that sexy. And it’s not like I gave him any guns.”
Everyone knew Gillian had a thing for cars, and not for one second did Tobias believe she’d made a deal with a drug kingpin so infamous he’d loitered on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list for close to a decade. Felipe Marin Donado—or Pipe Marin, as he was more colloquially known—was an intelligent businessman worth hundreds of millions in dirty narcoterrorist dollars, a beloved leader of the people under his protection and a vicious power k
nown for the biblically bloodthirsty manner in which he took on and took out his enemies.
While in Pipe’s care, Vick had lost a couple of molars, a toe, suffered broken ribs and some minor internal bleeding, and Tobias knew that had been the Marin cartel’s version of benign neglect. The two CIA operatives had been in far worse shape when the extraction team snatched them from an outbuilding in the forest where they were being held.
Chandler left Tobias’s side to settle her teacup in the kitchen sink, then turned to face the room, leaning against the counter next to Casey. The ache that had taken root beneath his sternum eased as understanding of what she was doing for his brother dawned.
Bringing up the Marin cartel and rehashing his time in Medellín had obviously upset Casey, so Chandler was standing by him. Knowing he wouldn’t lean on her, wouldn’t trust her, she offered her support. She didn’t want him to stand alone, with whatever was going on inside him at the moment.
Tobias suspected she’d deny doing so if he called her on it, but he knew her and that big bleeding heart she worked day in and day out to keep under wraps. He knew her, and he loved her, and suddenly he wanted to snatch her up and haul her away to some darkened corner of the house where they wouldn’t be disturbed for at least thirty minutes. Thirty very long, very private minutes where he could show her exactly how much he appreciated that bleeding heart of hers.
Her voice, when she spoke, was all business, though. “As I see it, we have two major concerns, the primary of which is retrieving Adam from wherever he’s being held.” Reaching up, she tightened the elastic holding her blond ponytail in place. “The other is to learn why you Faradays are being targeted in recent months, and who’s doing the targeting.” She turned, eying Della and muttering, “I’m surrounded by Quinns, every bloody place I go.”
Della flipped her the bird, not bothering to shift her focus from the laptop.
