“Is there a particular way of standing?” she asked, holding the gun like in that stupid Charlie’s Angels pose.
“Muzzle down the range!” he shouted, and she quickly did as he asked.
“Sorry, got a little carried away.” Lines appeared between her brows.
“I want to say it’s okay and be cool about it, but gun safety is paramount. That’s a loaded gun. Literally. To answer your question, because this is about learning how to defend yourself—rather than becoming a sniper, for example—I’m less concerned about you achieving a perfect stance. Really, who knows where you’ll be or what you’ll be doing when you need to use your weapon. The key thing is comfort and stability. There’s no point going to all that effort of aiming if a gust of wind is going to knock you off-balance.”
Delaney stood, feet hip-width apart, and arched her back. Mac couldn’t resist. He stood behind her, way closer than necessary, and placed his hands on her hips. The recoil might be a bit of a surprise on the first round, so he placed his hands over hers, bringing her right up against him.
“You’re not going to squeeze the trigger hard, Buttons,” he said against her ear. “I want you to work it slowly back toward you.”
“Is it going to knock me backward?” she asked, her voice as low as his.
“I’ve got you, Delaney. Now work it. I want to see you fire your first shot.”
He felt her sigh, then fix herself. When the bullet fired, he did exactly as he’d promised.
He caught her.
* * *
Who knew firing a gun could turn a girl on?
Shit.
It had been fun handling the gun, learning how to shoot straight, learning how to take care of a weapon. Watching Mac, with those strong forearms and large hands of his, pulling the slide back and forth like a boss. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done anything other than work. Stephen’s idea of a good time had been binge-watching new shows and seeing every Oscar-nominated movie to learn what was successful. She couldn’t blame him. As a screenwriter, it was a way to advance his career. Which matched her idea of a good time … work, work, and more work. So basically the opposite of firing bullets.
But the morning had been entertaining, and informative, and empowering. She’d finally toppled off the fence she’d sat on with regard to guns. Funny how being shot at could change an opinion. And Mac had been so darned competent. She could imagine him in uniform, in command on a battlefield somewhere, shouting orders to his team while gunfire went off around him. While she still struggled to get past the fact that Brock’s death is what had spurred Mac to join the military, there was no question Mac had performed a highly commendable service for his country.
What hadn’t been fun? Well, Mac had stood so close behind her that she could feel the heat of his chest through her T-shirt. And not just the heat. She’d felt the curve of his pecs, the firmness of his abs. It had been chronically hard to focus when he’d wrapped his hands around her. Every single thing she’d loved about him came flooding back. The way he’d always handled her—like he couldn’t keep his hands off her, though back then she’d been so new at the sex and intimacy thing, and he hadn’t wanted to push her. And she loved the way he had so much freaking patience when he taught just about anybody anything.
He was a good man.
He’d helped her. Was continuing to help her even now, as he let them back into the apartment after having helped her find a gun that was a perfect fit in the palm of her hand. He’d taught her how to protect herself and given her a safe place to stay.
It was too easy to fall back into old habits and routines with him. She hadn’t forgotten how to be with Mac. And her body had wanted to be, as he’d put his hand on her hips, holding her gently. He’d turned her on. Again.
She needed a moment to steel herself against him. The ease with which he was edging back under her skin frustrated her. He was slowly winning her over simply by breathing and being himself. He hadn’t taken her to a fancy restaurant or tried to woo her. There were no flowers in fancy vases. Her housewarming present had been three new locks and a doorframe, hardly the stuff of romance novels.
Silently, she wandered into her room and walked to the window with a view over the city. The apartment, despite looking half lived in, was starting to feel more like any home she’d ever had, though she’d only spent a handful of nights there. After what had happened back at her own place—on which she’d had to pay a full six months’ rent—she’d probably never go back. She was terrified of exploring the thought further and concluding that the only reason it felt like home was Mac.
She heard Mac walk past her door as he ordered pizza, followed by the click of his own bedroom door. It felt desperately ungrateful to feel so conflicted when the morning had given her so much joy. Wondering if a cup of coffee and a few moments on the balcony might shift the ever-changing direction of her thoughts to something a little more positive, a little more solid, she headed to the kitchen.
“Okay,” Mac said, joining her. “The guys will be here in thirty, pizza is ordered to come in an hour. We should get started.” He walked to the table, her table, and picked up one of her reference books. A loose paper fluttered to the floor.
“Don’t mess with my stuff,” she said, marching as best she could on her ankle and collecting the paper from the floor. It was an old grocery receipt, but had been her placeholder. Where had it been? She flicked through the book until she came to the chapter heading she was certain she hadn’t read yet.
“What do you think about breaking down the afternoon into three parts? We’ll start with you going through all the pieces of your investigation. We’ll make a list of all the possible leads you’d been chasing. Then we’ll flip to the night the guy tried to grab you. Call up Noah at the police department, see what has progressed. Then, we’ll take all those leads and assign a guy to each of them to shake the tree, deflect the attention away from you. What do you think?”
It sounded like her story was being taken away from her. “How about I tell you the pieces that I could use a little help on if you guys have better connections? I have a list of questions that are still unanswered, and the sooner we answer them, the sooner I can publish the story.”
The coffeepot continued to hiss in the background. Mac narrowed his eyes and walked over to her. “We aren’t on the same page as to what this mission is.”
Delaney placed her arms across her chest. “I wasn’t aware this had become a mission.” Irritation laced her words, but she didn’t care. “I’m a journalist writing a story, and I need to nail down some facts.”
Mac stopped less than a foot away from her. “You nearly got killed. Twice.”
“Says a man who got shot in the line of duty. I’d say you came closer to getting killed than I did.” Mac’s nostrils flared, but she didn’t care. Frustration bubbled within her, and she was more than willing to let it out.
“Says the man who got shot trying to save four aid workers who were being held hostage. Not to write a story.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand.” Stepping away, she put the book back on the table and began to sort through a pile of flight manifests and cargo logs.
“I think I do. My job is to find the person who wants to hurt you.” Mac hadn’t moved, but she could hear that his irritation matched her own. “Right now, I couldn’t give a shit about any other part of it. I just want to know that you are safe. I don’t get why writing a newspaper article is more important to you than staying alive.”
She spun, internally wincing as her ankle rejected the action. “I get that my job is unsafe. I know the risks. My job is to nail the men who insist on arming ill-prepared third-world countries that could end up decimating themselves and the rest of the world.”
“There are professional organizations who deal with that. The CIA, the FBI,” Mac countered.
She’d heard this so many times before. People who didn’t recognize the value of investigative journalism.
“Yes. And sometimes they’re great and do a fine service for the country. Sometimes the bad guys lose. But sometimes those organizations have agendas. Sometimes they are happy to let it happen. There’s a reason for the popular belief that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, even though they vehemently deny it.
“And anyway, it sometimes takes the CIA and the FBI years to do what they need to do because they have to dot every i and cross every t, do it all with visas, and official orders. Journalists can get through the cracks and into the inside of these organizations.”
“Why is it so important to you, Delaney? This,” he said, gesturing his hand over all the work spread around the room.
She wasn’t sure he would understand, wasn’t even sure she could say the words to him without breaking down. “Because I promised Brock. I promised him that if he couldn’t be of service to his country, I’d do it in his place. And I promised my dad that I would always follow my dreams, and my heart, and my goals.” She ran her tongue along her teeth and swallowed down the bubbling rising tide of emotions.
“They wouldn’t want you dead, Delaney.” Mac said it bluntly, which hurt more. He didn’t understand.
“You know, you act like we can just pick up and carry on from where we left off. But this conversation shows you still think of me as I used to be—someone who was curious but not driven. The girl who wanted you to decide if we should go into the lake but who would never just jump in on my own. I’m not that girl anymore.”
“And I’m sure as shit not the same fucking guy.”
* * *
“So, you have evidence of a flight full of weapons leaving an airport in Arizona,” Mac said, looking at the photographs they’d taped to the wall in awkward silence.
They’d worked in silence to set up the dining room as her study because the actual study was being used as a storage room for all the crap Mac had brought with him when he’d gotten out of the service. If Lochlan hadn’t asked him to house-sit, he would have been screwed. At some point, he should probably nail down Lochlan on how long he was going to be out of town. If it was only for a few more weeks, he wouldn’t bother unpacking, but if he’d be gone longer, maybe Mac could open an extra box or two.
The flash fire from their argument had disappeared. It was unresolved, but the energy around it had been quenched. Maybe that was something else that had changed between the two of them. They’d never really fought and it was clear they were going to have to learn how. But it appeared as though Delaney was willing to move on, and he would too.
For now, at least.
“But why Arizona?” Cabe asked as he helped himself to another mug of coffee. It was their third pot, with Ghost and Ryder doing the most damage as they studied the flight manifests.
Delaney stood and moved next to Mac, a move she probably didn’t think twice about, but he knew it had to do with those stubborn-as-shit walls of hers coming down, whether she liked it or not. And, yeah, a small part of him hoped it was because she was beginning to realize that she could depend on him, even if their conversation earlier made it seem like they were just as far apart as ever.
“Why Arizona? Gun laws,” she answered.
“You aren’t some die-hard liberal who doesn’t believe in the right to bear arms, are you, Delaney?” Ghost asked. He said it with a grin, in a teasing way.
“I’m a huge fan of the right to bear arms, especially after what happened the other night. Not sure my bread knife would have been much use if he’d managed to get in. And by the way, Mac took me to the range this morning, so please keep the rhetoric civil.”
To the casual observer, her comments would have sounded like a glib off-the-cuff remark, but Mac could hear the slight hitch in her voice. Despite the morning spent at the range, and despite her big words earlier about the importance of her job and understanding the risks, he could hear the fear. Which meant they’d be spending more time at the range with him up in her space, pressed up against that cute ass of hers, teaching her how to aim straight. It wasn’t a technique they’d ever used in sniper school, but for her, he’d make an exception. Plus, he was going to make plans to take her shooting outdoors, on the move, however she needed to. Should the day ever come when she needed to pull the trigger, he was going to make sure she was as good a markswoman as she could be.
“Arizona ranked forty-seventh on a survey of the hardest places to own weapons,” Mac said. “Few states are as relaxed, except maybe Kansas, which ranked dead last. Heck, I bet students can even carry on college campuses there.”
“We should have set up in Arizona,” Cabe laughed. “Would have saved us a freaking fortune on all those damn licenses we applied for.”
“Except we’d have been living in Arizona, which is about fourteen hundred miles from water. Not the best place for SEALs.” Mac felt Delaney flinch, and he regretted bringing it up. “Okay, so let’s assume lax gun laws making it easy to buy and transport without question is the answer to ‘Why Arizona?’”
Cabe tapped his lips with his index finger. “Where gun running happens, drugs aren’t usually too far behind, one funding the other.”
“Exactly,” Delaney said, pulling another photograph out of her pile and taping it next to the picture of the gun crate. “This was a picture from the inbound flight of a private jet from a small nonpublic runway in Sonora. That whole northwest coast is cartel territory, but this isn’t from them.”
“How do you know this shit, Delaney? You’re a brainiac,” Ghost said. Mac tried to swallow his jealousy at the easy way his team member spoke to her. He felt like doing something to mark his turf, like putting his arm around her or some shit. Anything to take the shiny-eyed look off Ghost’s face. Nobody around the table knew about his and Delaney’s past outside of Cabe and Six because, well, they were guys and didn’t discuss that kind of shit. But he planned to drop a word in Ghost’s ear before the day was out.
“I have a contact at the private airfield who gave me a heads-up. Tracking the flight manifests is a labor of love. These kinds of exposés never happen quickly. Phoenix is technically under the Sinaloa Cartel’s jurisdiction. It’s the launchpad for their entire North American operation. Marijuana, heroin, meth, you name it—it comes into and disseminates out of Phoenix.”
“This can’t be news, though,” Sherlock said, placing his forearms on the large table.
“Yes and no. Phoenix has always been a focal point, given that it’s less than two hundred miles north of the border. But this has always been a predominantly U.S. supply route rather than a collection point for overseas deals. The United Nations is desperate to stop the flow of small arms and light weapons into conflict zones, but the people who trade weapons don’t give a shit about arms embargoes. The Arms Trade Treaty was supposed to regulate the weapons trade by establishing a unilateral standard for the import and export of arms, but when it was adopted as a resolution in 2013, countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran voted in opposition, and countries like China, Russia, and Nicaragua abstained.”
Ryder shook his head. “There’s a shocker, North Korea. And of course Russia is going to abstain. Since the Berlin Wall came down and the collapse of the USSR, they’ve been a major weapons source.”
“National sovereignty is the big issue for most countries against it—they want to defend the right to create rules and regulations for their own country. For example, you can imagine the NRA was very outspoken about it in the past, thought it was some backdoor attempt to impose domestic gun regulations in breach of the second amendment. So even the U.S. balked at agreeing to it at one point. In 2006, when the resolution was first raised, the U.S. voted against it and even now have only signed but not ratified it.”
“Fuck that,” Ghost said. “I don’t care what the law says. I’ll always be armed.”
There were mutters in support around the table. Every one of them had a weapon on him, Mac knew, gun laws be damned.
“We’re getting off topic,” Delaney said, bringing them back to the phot
os. “Suffice it to say that weapons only used to flow one way—out of the arms producers’ countries into those that needed them. But now there’s huge business in backflow and laundering of arms.”
“And that’s happening through Mexico and Arizona?” Cabe asked.
Mac pulled out a chair and listened to Delaney talk. While Ghost had pissed him off, he was right. Delaney was smart. She knew her way in and around the arms trade. As she talked about guns being brought to Mexico ports by water from Colombia, only to be cleaned up and moved on, she talked about crime families as if she knew them personally. When she connected the gun supply routes with drug routes, he began to see the enormity of what she’d been looking at.
“So, what you are saying,” Mac said, leaning forward, “is that this transport network is being made to look like it is run by one of the existing known crime families, but in reality, somebody has layered on top of their infrastructure to set up their own enterprise.”
“Yes. And I believe it’s an underground Russian organization operating out of Los Angeles.”
“Lemtov?” Mac stood and caught the looks that passed between some of the team members who remembered the name from Louisa’s case the previous year.
“Yes and no,” Delaney said, drawing a family tree of sorts on a sheet of paper she’d stuck to the wall. “Lemtov is here.” She wrote his name on the middle of the sheet. She wrote another name above him. Sokolov. “Everyone from Sokolov on down is U.S.-based, but everyone from here up is based in Russia.” She added a few more names along with details of the crime families they were involved with. “Lemtov is organizing weapons. It was one of his bosses who arranged the drop-off of this crate at the airport, along with others like it.” Delaney went back to the photograph that had started their conversation. “They’re transporting at night, when the roads are clear. Less chance of being held up. The manifests declare them as … hang on.”
Final Siege Page 15
