by Paige Tyler
Alina didn’t answer. Pushing the image his words had painted out of her head, she continued to scan the floor plans and maps on the table in front of her, trying to see a way three people could pull this off. But she couldn’t. There were too many doors, hallways, and rooms to cover.
She’d been working with Fred and Rodney for nearly four years. They were both well trained and knew how to handle themselves in a tense tactical situation. But there were at least five people in the building across the street, maybe as many as ten. This wasn’t a job that consisted of walking in and eliminating the bad guys. Her team didn’t do that kind of work. They’d been brought in to confirm these people were involved with a scheme to manufacture sarin nerve gas, then take them down while capturing as many of them alive as possible.
Stopping these guys with her full team would have been difficult enough. Trying to do it one man down when they were a team that was already too small for a mission like this would be nearly suicidal.
“You know,” Jodi said in a tone that suggested she knew Alina wasn’t going to like the next words coming out of her mouth, “I could take Wade’s place on the raid instead of sitting on my hands in here.”
Alina bit back a curse. She should have known.
The biggest reason Alina had grabbed Jodi out of the pool of new agents at Langley was because the girl reminded her of herself at that age. Smart, aggressive, eager, and more than a little bit reckless. Alina was taking her training slowly so Jodi wouldn’t end up making all the same stupid mistakes she had made back then. And because she and Jodi had become good friends. Maybe Alina protected Jodi more than she would have another agent in the same situation, but she wasn’t going to apologize for it.
“Forget it, Jodi,” she said. “You aren’t ready for something like this, and you won’t be for a while.”
Jodi made a face. “Are you serious? Dammit, Alina. I’ve been on the team for months, and so far, you haven’t let me do anything but watch computer monitors and listen to radios. This isn’t why I did all that training back at Langley. I’m ready for this. That’s why you selected me to be on your team, isn’t it?”
“I selected you to be on my team because I thought you had the potential to be a good field agent—with the proper experience. And until you get that experience, your job is to watch computer monitors and listen to radios.”
Jodi scowled. “How am I supposed to get any experience if you never let me do anything?”
Alina opened her mouth to answer, but Rodney interrupted her.
“Alina, I’m by the back entrance of the building near the garage. It sounds like they’re loading the truck,” he said softly into her earpiece. “If we’re going to do this, it needs to be soon.”
“Stand by,” Alina said to Rodney, then looked at Jodi. “Anything from Wade?”
Jodi glanced at her phone and shook her head.
“Dammit,” Alina muttered.
She and her team were here to stop this deal. That’s what they were going to do—with or without Wade.
Spinning around, she headed for the door. “I’m on the way down,” she said over the radio. “Rodney, you’ll go in the back as planned. Fred and I will go in the front. Once we get inside, he’ll split off and help you cover the garage, while I handle the conference room.”
The two men acknowledged the change in plans without comment. The adjustment would mean that Alina would be covering the largest concentration of bad guys on her own, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Hand on the doorknob, she turned to look at Jodi. “Stay here and monitor the wire. Let us know if you hear anything.”
Jodi probably would have argued, but Alina opened the door and walked out of the apartment and headed for the stairwell.
Outside, Alina yanked the collar of her leather jacket up as she jogged across the street, trying to keep the cold rain from slipping down the back of her neck. She was only partially successful.
“If this turns into a shoot-out, make sure you avoid those chemical drums,” Alina whispered into her radio as she hopped on the curb and moved closer to the building. “They may not contain nerve agent yet, but we don’t want to breathe that crap anyway.”
Fred reached the front door of the building before she did. After a quick peek through the glass, he picked the lock, then swung open the door. Alina drew her pistol as she met up with him. He did the same, covering her as they both entered.
“We’re in,” she whispered over the radio.
“Ditto,” Rodney responded.
Alina stopped for a moment, listening. She heard soft voices coming from a room down the hall on her left. She didn’t hear any other sounds, not even from the garage where Rodney said he heard them loading the van. Did that mean they’d already finished the deal and were about to move?
She gave Fred a nod and pointed in the direction of the garage, indicating she wanted him to back up Rodney. Tightening her grip on her pistol, she headed for the room down the hall. She was halfway there when she realized something was wrong. It took her a moment to figure out what was causing the hair on the back of her neck to stand up, but then it hit her. The layout of the hallway and rooms off it was wrong. Or more precisely, the drawings Wade had made were off. The room the voices were coming from was on the wrong side of the hall, directly across from an adjoining corridor to her right that wasn’t even supposed to be there.
She shouldn’t have been surprised Wade had screwed up the details. He wasn’t necessarily big on that kind of crap. But combining it with the fact that he hadn’t bothered to show up made her stomach knot.
“We’re in the maintenance bay,” Fred said over the radio. “There are a few drums that might be chemical, but no people.”
Crap.
“Something isn’t right about this,” Alina said.
Her instincts were telling her to bail, but they couldn’t do that. Not until they apprehended the bad guys.
“We’re on the way to your location now,” Rodney said.
“Roger that.”
Taking a deep breath, Alina took another step toward the door. Even through the heavy wood, she could clearly hear the men talking inside. She didn’t have Jodi’s knack for languages, so she wasn’t sure what they were saying, but from the laughter, it sounded like the negotiations were going well.
She glanced over her shoulder to see Fred and Rodney hurrying down the hallway toward her. They looked as confused and worried as she was.
“Jodi, we’re going in,” Alina whispered over the radio before giving Rodney a nod.
Rodney stepped forward to kick in the door when Jodi’s confused voice floated across the secure radio channel. “Guys, something’s wrong. The men are starting to repeat themselves. I think—”
That was all she got out before Rodney’s boot connected with the door, sending it flying back on its hinges. Alina and Fred followed him in, ready to deal with however many armed men they found.
The room was completely empty except for the portable CD player sitting in the middle of the table, Turkish and Arabic voices coming from the speakers.
Alina cursed. “It’s a trap. Get out!”
But it was too late. Men armed with automatic rifles flooded into the hallway. Alina scrambled over the table along with Fred and Rodney just as the men started shooting.
Fred flipped the table over, and Alina knelt behind it and returned fire, putting round after round through the group of men charging through the doorway. At this distance, it was impossible to miss her targets, and several of them went down.
But the reverse was also true.
Rodney went down first, a bullet hitting him right in the forehead. Alina felt her heart break as her friend went down, but she couldn’t even spare him a glance. It was all she could do to drop the empty magazine out of her 9mm and reload so she could keep shooting.
> Jodi shouted over the radio in her ear, but Alina had no more time for her than she had for Rodney. A bullet zipped past her shoulder while another whizzed past her head. Yet a third shattered the wood of the table she hid behind, showering her with splinters. Even though she knew any one of those shots could have finished her, she forced herself to ignore them, to accept that she wasn’t dead yet, and to shoot back as fast as she could.
Just when Alina was sure it was over, that there was absolutely no chance she and Fred would live through this, their attackers halted as another one of them fell to the floor dead. The remaining two spun and fled for the door. Alina clipped one in the hip just as he and his buddy disappeared around the corner.
Alina quickly reloaded in the event that the men came back with reinforcements. She’d just slammed the magazine home when a flash of movement on her right caught her eye. She turned in time to catch Fred as he slumped to the floor.
“Oh God, Fred. Not you, too,” she whispered.
She got her arms around his shoulders and tried to settle him to the floor as gently as she could. Still holding on to her gun with her right hand, she used her left to put pressure on the wound that was soaking the front of his jacket with blood. Those two assholes had shot him before turning tail and running.
Fred gazed up at her, a mix of pain and fear in his gray eyes. He tried to talk, but no words came out. Tears in her eyes, Alina rocked him and murmured that it was going to be okay, even though she knew it wasn’t. As Fred died in her arms, she wondered if the Agency would ever tell his wife and kids what had really happened to him. She doubted it. That wasn’t how they worked.
She was just easing him to the floor when she realized Jodi was still shouting at her over the secure radio channel to tell her what was happening.
Alina reached up to adjust the volume on her wireless earbud, not sure what the hell she was going to tell Jodi, when she realized she wasn’t even wearing her earbud anymore. It had gotten dislodged in the fight. She had no idea where it had gone.
And yet she could still hear Jodi’s voice.
She looked around and saw a radio lying on the floor near one of the dead shooters. It was too big to be one of theirs, but Jodi’s voice was coming out of it loud and clear.
That’s when everything hit her. The prerecorded voices designed to lure them into this room, the way the well-armed attackers had known exactly when to hit them, the low-tech rebels having access to a CIA-encrypted radio frequency, and Wade never showing for the mission. A mission he’d set up almost completely on his own.
Wade had betrayed them. He never showed up because he’d set them up to die.
Heart pounding, Alina ran out into the hall and snatched the radio off the floor. This ambush might not be over.
“Jodi, get out now!” she yelled into the radio as she ran for the front entrance, her heart hammering in her chest. “The mission is compromised. Communications are compromised. Cut and run!”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, “What about Fred and Rodney?”
“Dammit, Jodi. Go now!”
More silence. “Understood,” Jodi finally said, and it tore at Alina’s heart to hear the fear in her voice. “Falling back to rally point Charlie now.”
Alina almost stepped into another ambush outside as the two shooters who’d disappeared earlier stepped out of the darkness and started shooting. She fired off one shot to make them duck, then darted back into the safety of the alcove.
“Negative, Jodi,” she said into the radio as she peeked around the concrete corner of the entryway to make sure the men weren’t coming toward her. “It’s not just the operation that was compromised. It was the team. Don’t use any rally points, safe houses, transportation assets, or money drops that were set up for the mission. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
There was a moment of hesitation, then, “I understand. Good luck, Alina. I hope I see you again.”
“You will,” Alina promised.
She heard the pounding of footsteps over the radio and knew Jodi was on the run.
Alina shoved the radio in her jacket, then stepped out to face the two men. If they still had their radios, they’d know Jodi was making a run for it. Alina would be damned if she’d let them kill Jodi, too.
She walked across the street, ignoring the downpour as she aimed slow, steady shots at the corner of the building the two men were hiding behind. That kept their heads down until she was close enough to put herself right in their sights, encouraging them to come at her.
They obliged, stepping out and lifting their Russian-made automatic weapons. She put the first man down before he got off a shot. But the second one was ballsy, standing his ground and taking time to get a bead on her. He fired first, the round of his AK-47 tearing through her jacket, skipping along the left side of her torso, ripping open the side pocket, and spilling her confiscated radio to the street.
The pain of the wound—and that of Fred’s and Rodney’s deaths—sharpening her focus, she put a 9mm ball round right through the center of the man’s chest. He bounced back off the wall behind him, then tumbled to the wet ground.
Only after she was sure they were dead did Alina finally lower her gun. She put it away, clutching a hand to her side as she bent forward to collect the radio. She’d intended to pick up the radio and toss it in the bushes along with her weapon, but then she heard a thump and clang of a heavy metal door on the back side of the apartment building. Alina breathed a sigh of relief knowing her friend was going to get away, but then she heard another sound that was impossible to mistake for anything other than the pop of a silenced weapon going off.
Alina sprinted for the front door of the apartment building, slamming open the door and racing down the hall as fast as she could. She still had a hundred feet to go when she heard Jodi’s soft voice over the radio.
“Screw you, Wade.”
There were several more pops, then silence.
Alina ran as fast as she could, but it took her a few minutes to find the door that Jodi had shoved open. It was tough, because the building was large and had at least two exits on each side of it. When she finally found her friend, Jodi was curled up in a ball beside a big trash can. Wade was nowhere in sight.
It almost looked like Jodi was sleeping, but the hand she had clenched to her stomach was all the proof Alina needed to know she wasn’t.
Alina gently rolled her friend away from the trash can to find she was already dead. Two shots to the stomach and three to the chest. Since Jodi had cursed Wade before she’d died, the son of a bitch must have shot her in the stomach first just because it would hurt, then followed up with the kill shots to the chest. After he’d let her suffer a bit. He’d always been such an asshole.
Sitting on the wet ground, Alina wrapped Jodi in her arms, squeezing her tightly as she finally let the tears come. A part of her knew she should get out of there before the police showed, but she couldn’t make herself move. She needed time to cry for her friends before she let them go.
Slowly, anger replaced the horrible, soul-crushing sorrow. While she was furious with Wade, she was mad at herself, too. She should have seen this betrayal coming. She’d always had some reservations about him, but instead of trusting the instincts that had been screaming at her from day one that Wade was a piece of crap, she’d gone along with the flow, assuming the Agency wouldn’t have hired him if he was dirty. That assumption and lack of faith in her instincts had gotten the three most important people in her life killed.
Sirens echoed in the distance, but Alina ignored them. The police would congregate around the industrial building first, securing the perimeter, searching for survivors, trying to make sense of the scene, and talking to witnesses from the apartment building. They wouldn’t get around to searching back here for a while.
So she stayed where she was, hugging Jodi to her chest as she
made a solemn promise to all of her teammates that she was going to do whatever it took to track Wade down and make him pay for what he’d done. No matter how long it took or what bridges she had to burn to make it happen, she was going to find Wade, and she was going to kill him. And no one was going to stand in her way.
Chapter 1
Quantico, Virginia, Present Day
“The director wants you in his office ASAP.”
Trevor Maxwell glanced up from the hot dog he was eating to look at the guy standing in front of his table. Short and stocky, the man was regarding him like something to be scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Trevor resisted the urge to bare his teeth in a snarl and took another bite of his hot dog. He wasn’t really hungry, but at least lunch was a pleasant break from the monotony of an otherwise miserable day. And the cafeteria served damn good hot dogs.
Unfortunately, he’d had a lot of miserable days at the Department of Covert Operations, the secret government organization where he worked. It came with being labeled a traitorous freak.
“You have a problem understanding what ASAP means?” the man asked, a butt load of attitude lacing his words.
Gaze never leaving the man, Trevor slowly finished chewing, then swallowed. “It means Dick Coleman wants me in his office as soon as possible. I’ll go just as soon as I finish eating. Because I couldn’t possibly leave before that.”
The man looked like he wanted to say something snide in reply, but when Trevor let his eyes glow coyote yellow and his upper canines slide out far enough to extend over his lower lip, the guy quickly changed his mind.
“Whatever,” the man muttered. “Your funeral.”
The comment probably would have come across as more ominous if the asshat hadn’t shuddered before walking away. But hey, the people who had been brought into the DCO lately didn’t have a lot of experience with shifters, and seeing a man sprout claws and fangs—not to mention flashing gold eyes—was a bit much for a lot of them to deal with. Most of the other people around the cafeteria were regarding him with the same mix of hatred and revulsion. It wasn’t only the muscle-headed thugs Dick—or rather Thomas Thorn, the man Dick answered to—had hired lately. The agents who’d worked alongside shifters like Trevor for years were throwing him dirty looks, too.
