“I’m at the office. What’s wrong? Are you outside?” His pitch escalated with each question.
“I’m in a cab. What’s Eagle’s address?”
Mac told her and she relayed it to the driver.
“Delaney. You’re worrying me. Is everything okay?”
She heard slamming in the background. “No. But I’m fine for now. I think I’m being followed. Is it safe for me to—”
“It’s the only place that’s safe for you to come,” he said, his voice cool and in control, just like she needed him to be. “And trust me, I’m ready to deal with whoever comes after you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You’re about three minutes out,” Mac said, shoving his hands into his bulletproof vest as a precaution.
He pressed the button to open the huge warehouse-style door and dashed outside, unlocking the truck as he ran. He started the engine and reversed it into the large training area.
“What are you doing? Are you driving to meet me?” Delaney asked, her voice wavering.
“No,” he replied. “Just bringing the truck inside the shop so that when we’re ready to leave, we don’t need to worry about you having to step outside.”
As Delaney relayed to him every street as she passed by, he pressed the buttons that brought down all the metal shutters on the exterior of the building. If any fuckers thought they were getting hold of Delaney once she was inside this building, they had another think coming.
She was close. Very close.
And he was the kind of dead calm that he knew made him lethal.
“Should I look out the window to see if I’m being followed?”
Mac raced to the front of the building so he could open the front-door shutter manually to get her inside. “Keep that pretty head of yours down,” he said, sliding his SIG out of its holster. “I see you. Take a right, then a quick right again onto the lot.” There weren’t any cars behind her, no sign of anyone on her tail. Hopefully the cabbie had lost whomever was after her.
“Which building are you?’ she asked.
“Come all the way to the end. We’re the nondescript gray box with all the black shutters down. Stay in the cab until I come get you. I’ve got the fare.”
When the cab came to a halt outside Eagle Securities, Mac stepped outside and looked around before handing the driver a fifty through the window. “Thanks for getting her to me safely.”
“No worries, boss,” the man said.
Mac clicked the door open and tried to ignore the track marks of mascara that stained Delaney’s cheeks. Beneath the calm, he was pissed. At the situation, and at her for defying the most basic order he’d given for her own security. But now was not the time to discuss that. They’d talk later, when she wasn’t terrified or in danger.
“Straight over to the doorway over there, Delaney,” he said, tipping his chin in that direction. “I’m going to crowd the shit out of you. So hustle.”
Pleased that she did as he said, Mac trailed her until they were both safely inside. He couldn’t speak to her. Not yet. Not when the building needed securing. And most definitely not while she was still sobbing softly behind him.
He secured the door and lowered the metal shutter. If somebody wanted to get to them, they’d need torches and something to blast through bulletproof glass. But he still wanted her away from the doors and windows. “Come on,” he said quietly. “Only a few more steps, Buttons. Then you can lose it.”
On the way to the blacked-out conference room, he hit all the light switches to give the illusion that the warehouse was empty. Only the lights in the room itself remained on, and once he shut the door, nobody would be able to tell from the outside. With four interior walls, no windows, and one metal door, it was as secure as he could get. Plus, it had screens that would show images from all the building’s external cameras.
“Mac,” she said, his name coming out as a sob. “It was him. The guy who came to the apartment and tried to shoot the door down. But he wasn’t looking for me. He was looking for Grigor—Greg. And probably this.”
With one eye on the screens to confirm that she hadn’t been followed, he saw her put an envelope down on the table. “I don’t give a shit about Greg and that envelope right now. Come here.”
She fell into his arms, her fist gripping his T-shirt, and cried against him. “I’m sorry,” she hiccupped. “I should have stayed home, but I got a call and—”
“Stop it, Delaney. Just for a minute. And yes, I’m going to yell at you when that moment’s up, but just for a minute hold on to me.” Mac wrapped his arms tighter around her and kissed the top of her head. Torn between wanting to offer her comfort and doing his job—confirming she was safe and not being followed—he positioned himself so he could do both.
He’d been taught in basic training not to give in to negative thoughts. That’s what Hell Week had been all about. Your mind will give out before your body will. From the moment he’d picked up his phone and heard her terrified voice, he’d refused to believe that it would end badly. He’d ignored his macho ego that said he should just get in his truck and drive straight to her because his mind had told him that by the time he’d gotten into the car and hit the downtown traffic, he’d never find her. He’d ignored the need to go out and hunt down the asshole who’d dared to look at her again. Instead, he’d gone into business mode. Concealment, arms, security, and supplies. But now that he had her in his arms, he allowed his own heart to race for a moment.
In the warm light of the quiet room, Delaney settled, and he got his racing heart back under control. Nobody had entered the business park. Mac placed his hands on her arms and stepped back a little. She looked up at him with an expression that said she already knew she’d screwed up. Maybe it was his military training, but he needed to make sure she’d understood the lesson. It would be impossible to protect her if she didn’t.
“Why were you out of the apartment, Delaney?”
She bit her lip and shook her head. “I know it was stupid, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It was an emergency.”
“You didn’t think to pick up the phone at any point in this emergency and say, ‘Hey, Mac, something’s come up and I need to leave the apartment’?”
Delaney flinched at his words and shrugged out of his hands. “Okay, I get it. I don’t know what else to say, Mac. Can I at least tell you why I left?” Her cheeks looked a little pinker and her tone sounded a little irritated, both of which were better than the ghostly pale skin and sobbing he’d been met with when she first arrived.
“No. Not yet.” He crouched in front of the chair she’d just dropped herself into. “Do you know why the military works?”
On a sigh, she leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes. “Discipline? Chain of command? The opposite of what I did today?” She opened one eye and looked at him.
“Pretty much,” Mac said. “I didn’t tell you to stay home today because I like bossing you around, Delaney, or because I wanted to take control or limit you in some way. I told you to stay home because given that your assailants are unknown, given that we aren’t a hundred percent sure what they think you have, and given that all of our crew have other jobs coming up and we had nobody to leave with you, it was the safest place for you to be.”
Delaney opened both eyes. “I should have called or texted.”
Mac nodded. “You should’ve.”
“Can I explain what happened?”
He stood and grabbed a water from the table, cracking the lid before he handed it to her. Then he pulled out a chair so he could see both her and the screens behind her. “Start at the beginning. What kind of emergency?”
Mac sat back and listened as Delaney relived what had happened over the course of the afternoon. Externally, he remained seated, calm and collected. But internally, he wondered if it was possible to ground a woman for being so stupid while simultaneously wanting to hug the shit out of her for being so freaking brave. He did neither. Instead he b
egan to clarify what she was saying, to see if he couldn’t draw out details she might have forgotten, no matter how small. Mac picked up one of the markers and started to write out the details on the huge whiteboard.
“So, you don’t know where Grigor … Greg … has gone?”
Delaney shook her head. “I figured it was safer for both of us if I didn’t know.”
Fuck. He wished she did know because while he had a shit ton of sympathy for the sister, he had none for the low-grade rat and the mess he’d caused. If they’d known where the two of them went, Mac would have had them hunted down so he could pump Greg for more information. But at the same time, he loved that his investigative journalist still had just as much heart as he remembered. He wondered how hard it would be to tap into the security footage of the Amtrak, then track the train and follow the route to see where Greg and his sister had gotten off. They might lose them out of the station, but at least they’d have a place to start.
“Do you know who Grigor’s boss is? Who it was that he was talking about?”
She stood up and began to pace. “Lemtov.”
Motherfucker.
“So, what’s in the envelope?” he asked, looking at the packet that lay flat on the middle of the table.
Delaney reached for it. “I have no idea,” she said and looked like she was about to rip it open. “He mentioned something about a chemical weapon when he handed it to me but I don’t know what’s in here.”
“Leave it,” he said. “Let’s go open it in the warehouse, where we can use some different tools and preserve any evidence, fingerprints and shit.”
“Fingerprints and shit? Is that the technical term for it?” For the first time since she’d arrived, she had the makings of a smile.
“Yeah,” he said, taking one last look at the screens. He stood and offered her his hand, grateful when she took it. “I think it’s time we ripped apart what happened to you and looked at it under a microscope. Don’t you?”
* * *
Mac led Delaney into the space behind the offices in the warehouse, switching on nothing more than a small table lamp. “It’s probably overkill, but honestly, given that it’s just you and me, I’d rather not have to fight tonight if we don’t need to. Not when you don’t know one end of a weapon from another,” he teased.
She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “I might not be a crack shot like you are, but I know my way around a firearm now, thanks to this guy I know.”
“Just some guy you know? Should I be jealous?”
Delaney knew that he was teasing, trying to take her mind off what happened and get her refocused, but the way her stomach kept tightening, she wasn’t a hundred percent certain that she wasn’t going to puke. Plus, she wasn’t entirely sure of the ground between them. They’d left their conversation that morning on less than stellar terms, but he’d been the only person she wanted to run to. And despite their argument, despite everything that had happened between them, she knew that counted for something. She shook her head and acknowledged what she’d been trying to bury … it counted for everything. Still, if he could fake them being okay for a little while just to get through it, so could she.
“Possibly. The guy has medals and shit,” Delaney replied, and put the envelope down on the table.
“We’re going to take a look at this, make copies even,” he said, looking down at the envelope, “but we will need to update the police and feebs too. Courtesy call.”
“And say what?” Delaney said, placing the item in question down onto the work surface. “I’ve been speaking with a known criminal who stole some information to make up for the fact that an alleged crime boss raped his underage sister, who I just allowed to escape on an Amtrak train to somewhere I don’t know?”
In the half-light of the lamp, he studied her and then shrugged. “Fair point. But we will tell them the truth. Perhaps a bit differently than you laid it out. He called you, and out of compassion and panic you went to help a source. He gave you that information, and now you are calling the police to update them. You aren’t going to prison for that. Plus, this is Eagle’s case now.”
“That’s reassuring, Mac.” She slapped his arm.
“Yeah. Well. Couldn’t you have grown up to be a librarian, Buttons? Life would be a lot simpler.”
Delaney shook her head. “And what? Die of boredom before I turn thirty?”
Mac studied her, his expression suddenly thoughtful. “Guess librarians don’t generally end up in hospitals in Germany…”
And they wouldn’t have been reunited. Her contrarian heart flipped in protest, so she changed the topic to something safer. “Whatever is in that envelope could be the answer to what I’m trying to uncover. Handing it over to the police could blow things wide open before we’ve had time to follow all the leads to see where it ends.”
“That’s the journalist in you thinking. Think with the part of you that wants to stay alive, Delaney. Let’s get some supplies from the infirmary.”
Delaney followed Mac through the cavernous space until they reached a series of rooms at the back of the building. One looked like the kind of showers you saw in a locker room, the other, a dorm with medical supplies.
“We’re set up for basic triage,” Mac said, pointing to a series of shelves containing sterile packages, bandages, needles, and the like. “I’ve got medic training, and so do a couple of the other guys. It’s here in part because we’re tight-assed when it comes to spending money on health care, but it’s also convenient. Nobody has to wait an hour to get stitched up. And, no questions. We don’t have to explain what happened to anybody nosy enough to care.”
“Does that happen to you often?” she asked. The realities of his job were becoming more clear. Never had the word “sacrifice” meant so much to her as when she saw the lengths Mac and the team were willing to go to for their country or simply another person.
“Not as often as you’d think, more often than we’d like.” Mac grabbed a scalpel, some tweezers, a sterile pad, and a pair of blue surgical gloves. “If there is any chance this is going to become evidence at some point, I don’t think I should add my prints into the mix.”
“Damn, I already held it.” She hadn’t thought about prints. Heck, she hadn’t thought of it as evidence. Which showed how out of it she was.
Mac guided her back across the warehouse until they reached the table and lamp. “It was given to you, so that wouldn’t be unexpected. But let’s not add them to what’s inside.”
“This is quite the place you have here, Mac.” Delaney trailed behind him, making out what she could in the dim light. “I mean, I can’t see the half of it. But blackout conference rooms, warehouse training centers, medical rooms … This is a big operation, Mac.”
Mac placed the supplies down on the table and pulled on the sterile gloves. With a snap of the wrist, he opened the sterile sheet and placed the envelope on top of it, then looked up and around the building. Pride etched his features. “It was Cabe’s idea, you know, all this. A plan for when we retired from service. Hell, we just started saving for this five years ago. And Cabe … well, he’s good with the money market. Didn’t turn us into millionaires or anything like that, but gave us seed funding to at least get a place, equipment, that kind of thing. If we didn’t have the volume of work we did, it would be hard to keep the doors open—but we do, and we are. Every dollar we saved is in this place.”
“Shit, Mac, I’m sorry. Let me pay you back for Germany, see if there isn’t something my boss can do to pay for the security, or help or—”
Suddenly, Mac faced her. “I wasn’t telling you because I want anything from you, Delaney. We’re holding our own, even beginning to make some of it back.”
Delaney tucked her long hair behind her ear but it immediately fell forward again. “But I’m draining that.”
“Listen.” He turned and faced her straight on. “You didn’t want to talk this morning. And I’m doing my best to be patient. But I would make the same d
ecision to get on the plane a thousand times over. And a thousand times over again, I wouldn’t take a penny from you for the privilege of doing that. Of helping you. So, stop talking about it like my helping you is some goddamn hardship.”
“It’s not right, Mac. I dragged you into this, and it’s gone way beyond what you probably thought you were signing up for.”
He shook his head. “No. What’s not right is that you were kidnapped and that someone is trying to kill you. Let’s focus on that. Let’s start there. It needs resolving before we can think about anything else.”
Delaney gripped his biceps and stood up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. He sighed as she lingered there. It was too tempting to turn her face to the side and catch his lips with hers. “Thank you,” she whispered, and as suddenly as she’d gripped him, she dropped back to her feet.
Mac swallowed hard. “Steady, Delaney, or I might just think you like me.”
Not knowing what else to say, she looked down and stubbed the toe of her sneaker on the concrete floor.
“Okay,” he said gruffly. “Let’s get this envelope open.” Carefully, he used the scalpel to break the seal at the top of the envelope. “I’m not a forensics guy, but I’d guess DNA could be taken from the licked seal, so let’s leave that intact.” Using the tweezers, he slid its contents out onto the desk—a mix of neatly printed reports and hand-written pages that had been ripped out of a ruled notebook, their edges all tattered as if they’d been removed hastily. “Thought we’d left the pen and paper era behind.”
“Apparently not,” she replied.
One of the hand-drawn pieces of paper contained what looked like chemical formulas, not that she understood what they meant. Hexagons butted up with other hexagons, the letters N, H, and O dotted across them.
“Louisa would be able to tell us what this all means if you don’t mind bringing her in,” Mac said, continuing to use the tweezers to separate the pages. There was an address. “Man, this handwriting is worse than mine.”
Delaney went to grab one of the sheets.
Final Siege Page 19
