He scratched his bare chest in the region of that ache as his phone chimed again.
“Better get dressed,” he called in the direction of the bathroom. “We’re about to have company, and they’re not going to be happy.”
Maybe the sex had dazed him or maybe he was just an idiot, because he actually expected an answer.
He didn’t get one.
His stomach hit the deck in zero seconds flat. A quick look confirmed that her clothes and shoes were gone, and he knew better than to think she’d up and gone for a walk when her life was in danger.
He’d been played. Again.
Damn it.
Snapping the rest of the way awake, he erupted from the bed and yanked on his clothes, simultaneously barking into the phone, “Meet me in the spare room in sixty seconds. We’ve got a problem.”
He hung up the phone, strapped on his holster and strode to the door.
He left his jacket behind because suits were for civilized people, and he was done being civilized.
The team was already assembled in the spare room when he got there, and from the looks of their take-out coffee cups they’d been there for a while already. He met their stares, owning every skin-crawling second of embarrassment. “I slept with her and she took off while I was zonked out. The last time I looked at the clock was four hours ago, so we can assume she’s already on the island and the mission is FUBARed. Any questions?”
Michael frowned and looked at Jimmy. “Are you sure she didn’t leave under duress? We could check the hotel switchboard. Maybe Tiberius called and threatened her or something.”
“What’s left for him to threaten?” John snapped. “We’ve got Celeste under wraps, and Sydney doesn’t have any other close ties.” At the sidelong looks, he growled, “What, she played you guys, too? Trust me, we’re a means to an end, not close ties.”
For a second he remembered the night before, when she’d whispered love words to him—not the big three, but endearments laced with soft, womanly affection. Acid burned his gut when he accepted that as nothing more than setting the groundwork for today.
He clenched his teeth and gritted. “I want everyone ready to roll in thirty minutes, as planned.”
Jimmy frowned. “He’s expecting us.”
“Exactly.” John nodded sharply. “We’re going to use that against him and take the whole damn island with us.”
“What about Sydney?” Michael persisted. “If she’s there under duress, if she’s innocent—”
“She’s not innocent,” John snapped. “Trust me on that one. And if she gets hurt, then that’s no more than she deserves for serving a master like Tiberius.”
His voice was harsh, his mien harsher, but as he turned away and strode from the room, grief, guilt and anger pinched beneath his heart.
He’d liked the woman she’d pretended to be, damn it. Maybe could’ve even loved her.
In reality, though, Sydney was no better than Rose: both traitors.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ISLAND LOOKS EXACTLY the same, Sydney thought dully as the motorboat approached the pier.
Then again, she’d only been gone a week. She was the one who’d changed. She’d escaped and she’d gotten her sister to safety as planned. But she’d also gotten involved with a man and a cause, and that hadn’t been part of the plan at all.
She’d left Rocky Cliff Island looking for a way to save her own ass. She was returning in order to make things right. Or so she kept telling herself. She had a feeling John would see it far differently. He’d promised to believe her, promised to trust her, but how could a man like him trust her in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
The fact was that when Tiberius called, she’d come running. That was all John would see, she was sure of it.
Tears filled Sydney’s eyes as the boat bumped up against the dock, but she sniffed and brushed them away. This was her choice, her responsibility. She’d been a coward before, hiding behind Celeste’s illness, using it as an excuse to make the choices she knew in her gut weren’t right. But not anymore.
This time, she was doing what was right; she was going to undo what she never should’ve done in the first place.
And then Tiberius was going to kill her.
“Off,” one of the guards said, and shoved her toward the dock. There were three guards on the boat, all heavily armed. They stayed stone-faced as they marched her up the ramp leading from the dock to the mansion.
Tiberius’s grand house sat on the crest of the island’s single large hill. The land rose up through the levels of security, past guard shacks, cameras and patrols to the main house, and then fell away on the other side in a sheer drop of several hundred feet, providing the cliffs that gave the island its name.
The sun shone on the scene with false cheer, but otherwise everything was the same as it had been when she’d escaped. The guard shacks didn’t look any different, the buildings were all placed where she’d put them on the map she and Jimmy had built together. From the movements of the patrols they passed on their way up to the house, she was pretty sure they were on patrol rotation B that day.
All of which meant absolutely nothing under the current circumstances.
They entered the mansion through the front door rather than the side exit she’d escaped through.
The house was a sprawling affair originally designed in the style of the old Newport mansions, with twelve-foot ceilings and exquisitely carved moldings. The main foyer was twice that high and led to a master staircase made of pink-veined marble and granite. Instead of looking grand and lush, though, the place seemed sterile. There was no artwork on the walls, no sense that it was anything but a place of business, as evidenced by the security cameras in the corners, constantly scanning the scene, and the sense of purposeful motion elsewhere in the house.
Sydney automatically turned right, toward the lab and her quarters, but one of the guards grabbed her arm and redirected her toward the big marble staircase. “Not the lab. You’re going upstairs.”
The directive chilled her to her bones, proving that she wasn’t nearly as calm or as brave as she wanted to think.
Prodded by the guards, she mounted the stairs. Instead of turning toward the security hub, though, they herded her down a long hall that ran at a tangent to a wing she hadn’t been in before.
Nerves closed in, nearly choking her and forcing the question from between her trembling lips. “Where are you taking me?”
The guards didn’t answer as they stopped her in front of a grandly carved set of twelve-foot-high double doors, inset with a normal-size door. One of the men knocked, then turned the knob and opened the normal-size door. The other two guards hustled her inside.
The room was a huge salon done in reds and golds, with lush-looking draperies and tapestries. A small dining table for four sat in one corner near a set of ornate French doors, and in the center of the room sat a claw-footed mahogany suite of sofa, chairs, end tables and a low coffee table. Several doors led from the room, all of them closed.
Unlike the rest of the mansion, the salon contained personal touches, including soft landscapes on the walls, and a man’s jacket tossed over one of the chairs.
Sydney’s breath froze in her lungs. She didn’t need to see into the other rooms to figure out where they’d brought her. The place fit Jenny Marie’s description to a T.
She was in Tiberius’s personal quarters.
But why?
The guards shoved her into one of the claw-footed chairs, turned on their heels and left. The moment the hallway door shut behind them, one of the far doorways swung open and Tiberius stepped through.
Tall and gaunt, with thinning gray hair and a Trumplike comb-over, wearing a dull gray suit that hung on his frame, he looked like a college professor, or maybe a mortician. Not a master criminal. Not a killer.
Yet he was both of those things, and so many more, none of them good.
Heart pounding, Sydney stood and faced him, trying
not to show her fear even though she was so terrified her mouth had gone dry and her knees shook.
He didn’t even bother to gloat, merely crossed the room and pressed some sort of mechanism. A panel slid aside in the wall and a hardwired computer station moved into view. “Give me the password.”
She lifted her chin with false bravery. “No.”
He smiled without humor. “You like deals, don’t you? How about this one—you give me the correct password and unlock the computers. Once I’ve downloaded the sequence and pulled the samples from the freezers you so cleverly locked tight, we’ll leave the island together.” He paused and a mad glint entered his eyes. “If you try anything funny, though, like keying in the wrong word, I’ll still be leaving, but you’ll be stuck here, on this chunk of rock…which is set to blow in—” he checked his watch “—thirty-eight minutes and change. It’s not as fitting an end as I would’ve liked, but the result is the same. Boom!” He made an exploding motion with his hands. He mocked a frown. “Oh, and I’m sorry about your boyfriend, by the way.” At her baffled look, he smiled. “Didn’t you know? He and his teammates are trying to sneak onto the backside of the island as we speak. They should be getting here just in time to watch us take off. That is, if you’re as smart as I think you are.”
“No.” At first there was no volume to the word, so Sydney tried again. “No deal.”
“What, you want better terms?” He smirked. “Don’t even think I’m giving you Sharpe. It’s your life for the password, take it or leave it.”
A year ago, maybe even a few weeks ago, she might have been tempted, might have convinced herself it was better to live and fight another day. But meeting John Sharpe—caring for him—had changed all that, because he was a man who fought every fight, every time. And if she was on his team, could she do any less?
“I’m waiting.” Tiberius crossed his arms. “The password, please.”
Sydney bowed her head in submission and crossed to the computer terminal. She touched the back of the desk chair with shaking fingers, pulling it out of the knee hole so she could sit.
Then, before she could wimp out, she snatched up the chair and threw it at Tiberius. He shouted and batted it aside as she broke for the French doors, one of which was cracked open, leading out onto a carved marble veranda with a delicate wrought-iron railing.
Sydney’s heartbeat hammered in her ears.
Footsteps rang out behind her, along with the sound of slamming doors and Tiberius’s shout of “Get her!”
The guards opened fire. As the first bullets whizzed past and slapped into the doorway, sending up chips of wood and marble, Sydney didn’t think.
Screaming, she grabbed on to the railing, swung up and over and let go, flinging herself off the second-floor balcony.
Mercifully the land sloped up beneath the house, so the fall was manageable. She landed in a beach plum bush and cried out when the thorns bit into her skin. Rolling away, she struggled to her feet and started running, heading along the side of the house, along one of the faint tracks she’d found on her guided walks during her captivity.
There were shouts from up above. Worse, she could hear one of the outdoor patrols closing in on her from the side.
Breath whistling in her lungs, she bolted for the cliff.
And prayed she’d find her team in time.
JOHN WAS ABLE TO INSERT his team exactly as planned. The distraction team around the front of the island made a big, loud raid on the docks, and let themselves be repelled after a good ten minutes of gunplay. Under that cover, John, Jimmy, Michael and Drew slipped their stealth-cloaked boat into the landing spot they’d chosen.
Located a solid mile from the main compound, with twenty-foot-high rock ledges on either side of the tiny beach, the landing spot was less than ideal. In fact, it had been on the bottom of the list Sydney had come up with for possible drop points…which was why he’d chosen it.
After her disappearance, there was no way he was using one of her top choices. He still couldn’t believe she’d left, couldn’t believe she’d gone to the island. But surveillance cameras near the Gloucester marina had shown her climbing out of a car under heavy guard, and getting into one of Tiberius’s boats.
Granted, the armed guards suggested she’d been taken under duress, and a check of incoming calls to the hotel confirmed Michael’s suggestion that she’d received a call from the island, but that hardly mattered to John. She’d chosen to give in to Tiberius’s pressure rather than waking him, rather than trusting him to protect her, and that galled him beyond words.
“We’re going in,” Michael called from the helm. “Hang on, it’s going to be rough!”
The tide was on its way out, creating swirling rip-tides that threatened to suck the boat into the nearby cliffs, slam it into the rocks and end the attack before it even began.
Michael fought the controls with grim determination, legs set wide apart for balance, cursing under his breath and babying the powerful engine as he fought the swirling pull of water. Drew had strapped himself into one of the pilot’s chairs and was backing Michael up wherever possible. Jimmy was hanging on to a sideways-facing seat, looking decidedly green. John sat facing forward, braced against the swell, his jaw locked.
He didn’t feel sick, didn’t feel scared. He felt…numb.
There could be no future where there wasn’t any trust, and though he’d fought the realization as long and as hard as he could, Sydney’s actions that morning only proved what he’d suspected from the very beginning: she had her own agenda, and wasn’t above twisting the rules to suit her needs.
She might’ve told herself she was giving in to save him or some such nonsense, but in the end it came down to not trusting him enough to do his job, not trusting him to keep the two of them alive.
Damn her, he thought, raw hurt expanding in his chest. Why hadn’t she just woken him up?
He saw Drew glance back, and though he couldn’t hear the other man’s words over the crashing surf and the laboring whine of the boat’s engines, he read his lips as he said to Michael, “Sharpe’s looking cool. We’ll be okay.”
I’m not cool, he wanted to say, I’m numb.
But because he knew his team needed him to be strong, he unstrapped himself from his chair and took up position directly behind Michael and Drew, hanging on to the back of the two captain’s chairs and riding the heaving deck on braced legs. “Looking good,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
The small gravel strip was no more than fifty feet away, but there was a vicious whip of crosscurrent in the gap, and the intersection of the riptide with the crosscurrent created an area of man-high chop. The cliffs bounced the sea breeze around, creating nearly gale-force winds in that small area, even though the day beyond was bright and sunny.
The comm device inside John’s raincoat crackled with Dick Renfrew’s voice reporting that they were pulling back to wait for further instructions, and god-speed to the island team.
It was time to do or die.
“Hang on!” Michael yelled, the wind whipping the words away the moment they were out of his mouth. “We’re going in!”
He kicked the engines full-throttle, aiming upstream of the current in the hopes that by the time they were through, they’d be on dry land.
Or splintered against the rocks. One or the other.
John hooked his feet beneath the ankle rests of each pilot’s chair and tightened his grip as the boat surged forward with a howl, leaped up the side of a wave and hung there, poised motionless for a moment, before crashing into the trough and burying its nose in the sea.
At a moment when he should’ve been on an adrenaline high, should’ve been bracing for a crash, or prepping for the fight to come, he was wishing he were somewhere else. Wishing he were someone else.
Suddenly, he was beyond weary of the job.
Why bother? There was always another criminal looking to wreak havoc. Every time he and his team took one down, another sprang up to fill
the vacuum created. What would really happen if they all simply quit one day? Would the terrorist community eventually reach some sort of equilibrium?
You’re losing it, John told himself. Get your head back in the game.
He needed a vacation, he thought incongruously, hanging on to the seats as a ten-foot whitecap hit them broadside, nearly turtling the twenty-foot craft. Michael and Drew fought the controls, forcing the boat to churn through the white spume. Jimmy had gone from green to gray and looked like he was praying.
Meanwhile, John was realizing there was really no place he wanted to go. For that matter, what would he do if he up and left the Bureau? Sure, it might be fun to tinker with the house for a few months, but then what? He didn’t have anything else. Didn’t have anything but the job.
And damn Sydney again for bringing that painfully home inside him.
Even as he despaired in his soul, his brain stayed cool, scanning the scene and calculating options. He saw the gap and pointed. “There!”
Michael nodded and aimed the floundering boat through the patch of incongruously glass-smooth water. Like a biker skimming across hardpan after laboring through beach sand, the boat shot forward, gaining momentum enough to slew through the last section of water and fling itself up the beach with a sideways, jolting slide.
“Let’s go!” Drew took a flying leap off the boat and grabbed the towline off the front. Jimmy wasn’t far behind him, moving fast on shaky legs. The two quickly started looking for a stone outcropping to tie off to, or failing that, a crevice they could set an eye-bolt into.
Michael stayed on board, manning the controls in case a larger wave slapped onto the beach and threatened to float the craft off. He called, “Get the line as high as you can, so the boat can move with the tide if necessary.”
Don’t bother, John almost said. We won’t need it past tide change.
The way he saw it, by that time either they would’ve already captured the island or they’d be dead. He didn’t see a viable option that involved retreat.
But he also knew that wasn’t the Iceman speaking, it was someone else entirely, someone who ran on emotion rather than logic. Someone whose heart hurt in his chest. Someone who would do them no good on the mission ahead.
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