Collateral Damage

by J. L. Saint

  “And we still have no idea what this is about?”

  “I’ve got two million, but I think it’s more than money and it’s global.”

  “Got it.”

  “See you at o-dark-thirty.”

  “It’s already o-dark-thirty,” Roger replied and hung up the phone. By the time he found a couple of good guys to help out DT, the phone rang again.

  It was Dean, from Langley.

  “You’re up late.”

  “Still at the office and not even close to quitting time. I thought I’d give you the heads up, though.”

  “On what?”

  “Fire and Brimstone are coming your way,” Dean quipped.

  “Meaning?” Roger rubbed the aching knot of tension between his eyes.

  “Not only will the SOB SOO I told you about but also some NCS peeps will be on your doorstep by 0630. My inquiries hit a hornet’s nest. They want to talk to you directly and to your man.”

  “Nice notice.”

  “Yeah, well. They thought it rude to wake you. I didn’t. You’ve hit on something big and the SOO isn’t sharing. He’s shut down tight on all information. You owe me for this one.”

  “I keep hearing that. Thanks for the call.” Roger disconnected. He’d have to call his cousin first thing in the morning. He hated to start the President’s day out with this mess, but better that than it all blowing up in Paul’s face. Part of Weston wanted to believe DT was on the right trail to explain Lebanon. Part of him didn’t want anyone to look at what happened twice. With the CIA and NCS jumping into the situation, it could cause big problems.

  Every time Lauren’s eyes drooped shut and sleep lay but a whisper away, she found herself jerking awake, sure that proverbial bullet headed her way would hit home. She supposed her paranoia was a normal, given the events of the past forty-eight hours. It also didn’t help that an assassin was bound and gagged in a room on the other side of the house.

  Sure, two capable men toting guns were in the house as well as Jack. One guard was inside the room with the tied up gunman—she had a problem referring to him as a prisoner, because he wasn’t a victim or a hostage but a disabled murderer. The other guard sat just outside that door. Jack was on the couch in the living room between her and the assassin. Jack had distanced himself since the attack at the hotel and it bothered her. It wasn’t that she’d expected wine and roses, but the easy warmth they’d shared after making love had been good. Really good. Now it was gone.

  She wasn’t even sure why he’d shut down. He had blamed himself several times for being caught off guard. Had said he should be shot for letting it happen. She’d looked at him and told him to cut himself some slack. He had been shot for starters.

  Also, she’d been the one in the driver’s seat coming to the hotel and aside from the black sedan she saw shortly after leaving Gardner’s, a sedan which had turned off the main road, she hadn’t seen that they were followed to the hotel.

  But Jack hadn’t cut himself any slack and she lay in the dark too afraid to sleep too afraid to get up—

  Her door cracked open, followed by silence, but she could feel him there.

  “Jack?” she whispered, sitting up to blink at the shadows.

  “Yeah.” His dark silhouette emerged into the room. “You have any extra room in that bed?”

  “Too much. I can’t sleep.”

  “Me either.” He set his pistol on the bedside table, emptied his pockets, then ditched his shirt and jeans. Climbing into bed, he pulled her into his strong arms. She sank against his solid warmth and sighed, breathing in the seductive scent of fresh soap and spice. Her cheek brushed along the springy silk of his chest hair and settled over his heart where she closed her eyes and reveled in the rhythmic beat.

  “Thank God you’re okay.”

  Jack’s throat tightened with emotion at the wealth of care in Lauren’s voice. He was the one who was thanking God that she was all right. What he’d almost cost her still had his insides wrenched tight. He couldn’t say anything so he brushed her hair back from her face and kissed her forehead. He didn’t deserve to be in her bed, he’d yet to be honest with her, but he couldn’t rest until he had his arms around her. Pulling her close, he breathed a sigh of relief for the first time since the bullet grazed his head outside Gardner’s.

  She snuggled in closer to him and ran her soft hands over his back and shoulders, kneading as she caressed. The rough tension in him shifted into raw arousal. He buried his face into her silken hair, losing himself in her sweet lavender fragrance. Her breath quickened and his pulse kicked.

  She kissed his neck, his stubble-rough jaw, and pressed herself against his erection. He wanted, needed the soft heat of her skin against his. He pulled off her shirt and filled his hands with her full breasts, caressing her nipples with his palms then sucking on their hardened peaks.

  He shoved down her jeans, leaving her naked to his hands and questing tongue. She matched him kiss for kiss as he edged their passion to a feverish pace with every stroke of his touch, every thrust of his tongue. He went to kiss his way down to the sweet nub of her sex, but she pushed him back and shifted herself over him, her body a seductive silhouette in the shadows.

  “My turn.” Her husky, rich voice sent a shiver right to his throbbing dick, making him swell harder and thicker. She kissed her way down his neck, to the center of his chest and around the hard disks of his nipples. She teasingly nipped and soothingly licked as her silken hair brushed over his skin, taunting him with pleasure. Moving lower, she slid her fingers into his boxers and wrapped her hand around his penis, squeezing up and down his hard length, pumping him into an edgy state of need and want.

  He didn’t care about anything except getting inside her and thrusting them both to another mind shaking orgasm. But she leaned in close before he could move and circled her tongue around the tip of his erection. He sucked in air and fought a strangled groan as she flicked her tongue back and forth along the sensitive groove of his sex then sucked him deep into her mouth. His hips jerked wildly in response. She sucked again, harder, deeper, her tongue sending white hot shards of pleasure to his core.

  He shuddered, feeling close to a slamming orgasm, but wanting more of her before he lost control.

  “Lauren.” Shuddering with need, he urged her head up and guided her to straddle him as he shoved his boxers down and off. “Take me.” He reached to the bedside table and slid a condom into her hand. “Take me inside you. Take me deep.”

  She eased the condom over his erection and positioned herself above him. He reached up and rolled her nipples as he thrust into her, lifting his hips and her knees off the bed. She groaned, and ground herself against him. He lowered and then thrust again, leaving one of her nipples to slide his thumb into the wet groove of her sex and flick the hard nub waiting for him there. Her thighs clenched him tighter, her nails dug into his chest, and she arched as her head fell back. He thrust again and again, driven to take her higher with each heated stroke. Her hips pumped in rhythm to his demands until she shuddered.

  “Jack,” she whispered as if in total heaven.

  He grasped her hips and plunged himself over the wild edge she relentlessly drove him to. He seemed completely incapable of any control where she was concerned. She collapsed on top of him and he wrapped her in his arms, listening as her ragged breaths gave way to exhaustion and sleep. After a time, he eased them on their sides, set the condom out of the way, and followed her into sleep, refusing to think about anything but the waves of pleasure she left rippling through his body, mind and soul. Tomorrow’s truths would take it all away. Tonight was all he had.

  Machine gunfire ripped through Jack’s sound sleep. He couldn’t wake up. He was caught in a choking web of a nightmare from the past. His body jerked as his mind sucked him back into a smoke filled room where the earth opened up and the fires of Hell raced to consume him.

  “They’re here, DT. They’re alive!”

  Jack looked across the smoke-filled room to
ward Pecos. Sweat, fear and the growing heat of the fire eating the floor beneath them were suffocating. Nausea churned in his gut and he gripped his MP5 tighter.

  “See if they’re wired,” he yelled to Pecos, his instincts screaming danger at him as he scanned the room they’d just invaded. Two terrorists lay dead at his feet. It would have been just like the sick sonsofbitches to booby trap the hostages and blow the fucking world up at the moment of seeming victory.

  Down the hall, the Sandman’s gunfire holding back militants from coming up the stairs kept a steady pace. Rico had taken a hit; his right arm hung useless and dripping blood. He’d slung back his machine gun, armed his left hand with his M9 Beretta and kept moving.

  Behind Rico, the door of the armoire seemingly opened a fraction wider.

  “Get down!” Jack yelled. Diving, he shoved Rico aside as gunfire erupted from the slit, catching Jack in the leg. He twisted in mid air and let loose his MP5 in a spray of bullets that chewed and splintered wood in every direction.

  A Caucasian, blond male in full business regalia fell from the armoire and face-planted on the Persian carpet.

  Jack kicked the AK-47 out of reach, flexi-cuffed the bastard then put his muzzle against the target’s head before flipping him over.

  “Well, fuck me and you,” the man whispered, gasping and choking, his blue eyes full of mocking amusement. Coughing up blood, the man died with a smile.

  “Take cover!” Jack yelled, rearing back, his skin crawling with dread as he expected the body at his feet to explode. The threat of a bomb was the only thing that made sense of the dying man’s words. Rico rolled away and Pecos slammed the bathroom door, shutting him inside with the women. Then nothing happened. Just the sound of the Sandman at work.

  Still not trusting that the man wasn’t rigged, Jack finally moved. He motioned for Rico to join Pecos with the Prime Minister and Ambassador’s daughters while he helped the Sandman. They had to get out of there before they burned to death. From satellite images, the west bank of windows would be the best choice to exit.

  He reached the threshold to the hall. He could barely see the Sandman rocking with his MP5. Flames were licking up the walls and smoke was too thick to breathe. Jack moved toward Neil then the building shook, throwing Jack off balance as concrete and glass imploded and slammed the Sandman into the wall. The blast wave hit Jack and knocked him to the ground. He struggled to his knees, going for Neil, who lay unmoving on the floor when another explosion, this one from below, blew everything apart. The surrounding walls, wood and concrete became a wild sea of death that buried Jack alive in wave after wave of debris.

  Jack woke, his body covered in sweat, his heart pounding hard, his chest frozen with pain. The urgency to save Neil still gripped his every muscle. He had to fight against the panic rising in his throat, fight to hold on to Lauren and realize the nightmare wasn’t happening at that moment even as his mind chased after the details.

  Is that how things went down?

  Chapter Thirty

  0630 hours

  Matt? Mitch? Lauren awoke with a start from her dream. She’d been standing in a thick mist, calling to her sons, who were just out of sight. She could hear their laughter, their excited voices as they raced their cars, but somehow couldn’t reach them, nor could they hear her. She shoved the unsettling feeling aside. She’d call them shortly, sure they’d soon be up, jumping on Angie’s bed, demanding to get to Disney World.

  The grayish light of a waffling dawn suffused the room and Jack was already gone. But the spot in the bed next to her was still warm and the mark of his lovemaking still lingered on her lips and inside her core.

  She rose as her mind turned to last night’s discoveries. The sooner they exposed Bill’s crimes and found the roots of his terroristic activities, the sooner she’d get her sons and her mangled wreck of a life back. She’d have to rebuild. Go somewhere. Start new.

  After taking care of essentials and putting herself as together as she was going to get, she found Jack in the kitchen, gripping a cup of coffee. His face grim. His computer sat on the table before him and he wasn’t alone. The man who stood to greet her had her jaw popping open.

  It wasn’t because his handsomeness stunned her. It wasn’t that he was cut from the same ruggedly dynamic cloth as Jack was, only taller. It was because were the man to salt his temples, she would have sworn that President Paul Anderson was standing in front of her.

  Before he or Jack could speak, she stuck out her hand. “You must be Commander Weston.”

  “Roger to you. And you’re Lauren Collins.”

  “Just Lauren, for now. The things I’m learning make me want to change my last name.” She glanced toward the computer. “Have you logged back into the email account?”

  Jack nodded. After arriving at Weston’s house last night, they’d glanced at the account the attacker had interrupted them from doing. Unfortunately neither she nor Jack had been able to discern anything immediately from the incoming entries and there had been no outgoing mail in the account, so they’d put the puzzle aside until morning.

  “We didn’t look at the drafted but unsent emails last night. There are a number of them.”

  “What do they say?”

  Jack looked toward Weston. “Commander?”

  “Go ahead. I’ve got a call into my cousin about the information and the future attacks planned, but we’ve no orders yet about what do to. We’ve got about twenty more minutes before we have to be on post at 0630.” His cell phone vibrated. “Well, speak of the devil.” Weston left the room.

  Jack met her gaze and the grave seriousness in his eyes gut punched her. She grabbed the back of a dinette chair. “What is it?”

  “The email drafts are a diary of sort. An account of activities planned and executed with cold precision.” He turned the computer her way and clicked on the message. It began: The first move is the assassination of Imam Hassan Omar Aziz in Iran…

  Her mouth went numb, her body shook, and her brain fogged with pain and disbelief. “You mean Bill was an assassin? He went around killing people?”

  Jack flinched, his gaze turning darker, his mouth grimmer. “Of sorts. If you read further, you’ll find he didn’t actually do the dirty work. He was more of an intermediary. He hired the necessary people, made sure the job was done, then paid the men—one way or the other.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that risks to the operations received bullets rather than the promised cash. Both of the men who framed the US and Israeli Military for Aziz’s assassination were executed. No evidence of who really committed the crime was left behind, except for your husband’s account of the event.”

  Lauren shook her head, sat down, and buried her face in her hands. “I, oh God, I know this is real, but I just can’t believe all of this. A murderer. A killer. What else? What else is there lurking in the shadows that he lied to me about?”

  Jack flinched again, as if she’d attacked him personally, but answered her, his voice stark. “The attacks on the oil refineries and reserves worldwide. The kidnapping of Ambassador James’s and Prime Minister Shalev’s daughters.”

  Lauren snapped her head up. “In Lebanon? That’s where you were hurt. That’s where you saw Bill.”

  “Yes. My Delta team went in to rescue the women.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. His expression was haggard. He was clearly struggling with something. Then he met her gaze head on. “Bill was there and…I killed him. Shot him to death with a spray of bullets from my machine gun. He died at my feet.”

  Lauren reared back at the harsh ugly reality of the situation and Jack’s hard voice. She’d understood Jack had a job to do. Bill had been involved in something bad. But…Jesus…couldn’t Jack have told her this before now? Her entire world spun in turmoil, one of horror and pain over the reality of what Bill had done and just how he had died.

  Jack had come to her asking about Bill. He hadn’t necessarily deceived her, but… “You killed Bill. You didn’t
tell me.”

  “Guilty. There’s no excuse for what I let happen between us. I did try and tell you. I am no better of a man than Bill was. I’m sorry. I suck at relationships anyway.” He stood. “We’ve got to go to the post. The CIA and NCS will be there shortly. They are going to have more questions than you can answer and they are going to turn you and your sons’ lives inside out. They will leave nothing unexposed until they’ve reached the bottom of the cesspool Bill was in. I’m going to do what I can, but it’s going be rough.”

  Pain slashed through Lauren even as her mind spun from the revelations about Bill. Jack’s knife went deeper than Bill’s betrayals. That was it? That was all Jack was going to say about them together. That he sucked at relationships anyway? Lauren met Jack’s gaze disappointed for the first time since he knocked on her door. “You’re boiling everything we shared down to, ‘I’m sorry and I suck anyway’?” Anger bubbled inside of her. She wanted to yell, but clenched her teeth instead. “What was it, Jack? Pity fucks for a deceived widow?”

  He looked as if she’d punched him, which only made her feel worse. “Yeah. It was what it was.” He collected the computer and left the room, his back and manner as hard and cold as steel.

  Lauren fisted her hand against her aching heart and fought the burn in her eyes and her gut. She didn’t need Jack. She didn’t need anything but her sons back in her arms to protect them and someplace to disappear. She had a life to rebuild for them and come hell or high water nothing and no one was going to stop her from doing that. It occurred to her as she left the kitchen that she hadn’t asked who Bill had worked for. If her husband had been the intermediary then someone had to be calling the shots and that someone just might be the SOB after her.

  Jack and Weston were waiting at the door. Lauren grabbed her purse and waited until they were in the car to ask some of the questions starting to perk in her shocked brain. Weston and Jack were in the front, she sat in the back.