by Dana Marton
“I can have a car sent to your location.”
“Livorno is a three-hour drive from here, sir. Could you find out if they already have someone out our way?”
The colonel promised to do just that before hanging up. Relief coursed through Gabe. And the news only got better.
“This could help with the colonel.” Jake tugged a tattered manila envelope from under his homemade cast.
“What is it?” Jasmine asked, looking as if this was the first time she saw the thing.
“Some documents I’ve been able to find before we ended up here. It should be enough to get an investigation going.”
Gabe reached for it, but his cellphone interrupted. The colonel was calling back.
“A convoy of U.S. troops is on its way to Livorno from the Nato base in Hungary. They’ll be passing through near Venice. I’m sending one of the trucks over to Ponte della Liberta. Can you rendezvous with them at oh eight hundred?”
Gabe glanced at his watch. Just enough time to make it. “Yes, sir.”
“Help is here.” He lunged into action as soon as he hung up, handing the envelope to Mandy, wrapping it up with her in her blanket and picking her up. “You have to help your brother,” he told Jasmine. “We have twenty minutes to reach Liberty Bridge.”
She tried to prop Tekla up as best she could, but the stairs proved unconquerable on crutches. So after Gabe took care of Mandy, he had to go back up and carry Jake down on his back. At least, Jake could take it from there, so Gabe could go back to carrying Mandy who couldn’t move nearly as quickly as they needed to go.
The morning rush was just about over, so they didn’t have to fight any crowds. Since they didn’t have time to wait for the next vaporetto, Gabe hot-wired a motorboat and helped everyone in, hoping to be away before the theft was discovered.
He kept an eye out for the owner, and also for the teams. Hopefully, by the time Brent and his men found the hideaway, Jasmine and her siblings would be getting into the back of an Army truck, heading away from Venice. Gabe drove toward the bridge, grateful that Team B wouldn’t be out there today.
Mandy and her brother huddled under the blanket in the back of the boat, one in worse shape than the other. Gabe stood in the front, steering. Jasmine came up to him.
“So what do you do when you’re not ducking commando teams?” he asked.
Her maturity, capability and ingenuity had more than impressed him. He tried to picture the life she would be going back to when this was all over, but he couldn’t. He knew her heart was in the right place. He knew she was the most remarkable woman he’d ever met. But beyond that, he knew next to nothing about her, and suddenly that seemed intolerable.
“I dabble in SM stuff,” she told him.
SM what? He nearly choked on his own saliva. A picture of her in a studded leather choker and thigh high boots popped in to his mind, her slim hand holding a whip. The image nearly knocked him on his behind.
“Social media consulting,” she explained.
“Oh.” He cleared his throat, his blood pressure slowly returning to normal. “So what happens to your job now that you’ve been away for so long?”
“I have good people in place.” She gave a self-deprecating smile. “Not that I don’t worry about them. I check in whenever I can snag some credits at an internet café.”
Right. She owned the company.
“You’re a good man, Gabe Cannon,” she said out of the blue.
“There’s a village of orphans and widows in Afghanistan who would beg to differ,” he said more to himself than to her.
She tilted her head and watched him for a few seconds. “What are you doing to help them?”
“What makes you think I’m doing anything?”
“Seems to me you’re the kind of man who does the right thing if he can.”
He gave a sour laugh. “Don’t make me into some kind of saint. You’ll be disappointed.”
“So what are you doing for all those people in North Village?”
She’d paid attention. She even remembered the name of the place. “Trying to refit the truck part factory with sewing machines for the women. A friend of a friend get them a Fair Trade contract if the factory is operational by the end of spring.” They were about halfway there. Everything was going great, except he had no idea how he was going to send money after his current gig with XO-ST was over.
“You have a lot of friends,” she observed.
“Doesn’t mean I’m a good man.”
“I think you are.” She pressed an unexpected kiss to his cheek, then went to the back to sit with her brother and sister.
His skin tingled. He was a thirty-six-year-old hard ass commando soldier and his cheek tingled from a kiss. He rubbed his thumb over the spot. Somewhere in the middle of his chest his heart turned over. An unfamiliar feeling. He glanced back at her, and she smiled at him, and his heart turned over again.
Something was going on. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling. Kind of left him off balance a little.
He maneuvered among the water taxis, gondolas and all the private boats that left the harbor every morning, so focused on what he was doing that he barely heard when Mandy said, “I don’t have the envelope.”
Jasmine searched the blanket. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know. I thought I had it with me.”
“I set her down when I went back up for Jake. It might have fallen into the rubble then,” Gabe said, knowing that in all that mess, none of them would have seen it.
“We have to go back for it.” Jake pushed to his feet. “It’s all the proof I have. Without those papers, I’ll never be exonerated.”
“At least you’ll be alive and you--”
Jasmine interrupted. “Drop me here. I’ll take another boat back and meet you at the bridge.”
They just reached the far edge of the harbor, plenty of small boats bobbed unattended in the water around them.
“As long as you can make it to the rendezvous point in time, you can make them wait for me,” she added.
He hated the idea, but didn’t have time to argue, no time to come up with a better plan. If they all turned around, whoever was bringing the truck might think they weren’t coming and take off without them. “Watch out for Brent and his men.”
“They know we were on Soremo, but they don’t know which building. I’ll be in and out before they get that far with their search.”
He sidled over to a pier and let her jump up, then pulled away, not liking the way things were going.
They reached the bridge in another ten minutes, a silver ribbon stretched across the water. Gabe followed along and soon saw the Army truck idling on the mainland end, waiting on the shoulder. He got the boat as close as he could, tied it up, then helped Mandy and Jake.
A corporal met them halfway to the truck, a young African-American man. “Gabe Cannon?”
“That’s me. Thanks for coming.” He didn’t introduce the others, wasn’t sure how much information the colonel had passed on. The less everyone knew the better.
The man helped support Tekla who walked with a bad limp, favoring his uninjured leg, while Gabe carried Mandy. They all tried to look as inconspicuous as possible under the circumstances.
“I’m glad you’re here on time. We need to leave immediately,” the man said.
“We’ll have to wait for my other sister,” Tekla protested.
“That’s a negative, sir. We don’t even have official permission to stop here. We only pulled over so one of the men could check a tire that sounded funny. We can’t wait around and we can’t, under any circumstances, enter the city. We can’t engage in any local trouble in any way. We are not to draw attention to ourselves.”
They were at the truck. The back opened and two men reached down to help Mandy up.
Tekla searched the water, looking sick and desperate, at the end of his rope. “We have to wait.”
While he tried to talk the
corporal into breaking orders, Gabe ran back to the water’s edge to watch for Jasmine, so he could signal as soon as he spotted her. He was sure the truck wouldn’t leave if she was in sight.
But instead of Jasmine, he spotted one of Brent’s men on the bridge. Then another. And another.
The B Team.
He hadn’t been followed when he’d taken Jasmine back to Soremo, he’d made sure of that. He could think of only one other explanation for them showing up here at the exact wrong moment. He patted his shirt, found nothing. Yet it had to be on him somewhere. Brent must have planted a damn tracker on him.
He glanced at the watch the team leader had borrowed a couple of weeks ago. He said he needed it to use the stop watch function for a friendly one-handed pushup competition. Gabe ripped the watch from his wrist and tossed it into the river.
They knew exactly where he was. Brent had probably tracked him on his laptop, radioing his movements to the teams. Which meant he would have seen where Gabe had spent the last hour before heading here. Brent had the location of the house. The A Team was probably there right now--with Jasmine.
He ran toward the boat, just as a bullet hit the fuel tank. The explosion knocked him off his feet. He could see, as he lay there, dazed, the corporal jumping into the back of the truck, pulling a protesting Tekla up behind him. Then the truck shot forward and they booked it the hell out of there.
The corporal and his men could take care of Tekla and Mandy. But Jasmine…
She was all alone against a commando team, battle-hardened men with authorization to kill. A wall of fear hit him.
Gabe dove into the water and swam as if his life depended on it.
~~~***~~~
Chapter Nine
He only had to make it over to the cement pillars that held up the bridge, and climb one. Everybody was watching the burning boat. Since whoever had shot the fuel tank had used a silencer, no shot had been heard. Nobody had any idea what was going on.
Traffic came to a halt, people got out of their cars to get a better look. Gabe grabbed an abandoned motorbike and flew forward between the lanes of cars.
Glanced back. The B Team weren’t pursuing him. They were too busy chasing after Tekla.
Gabe picked up speed, ignoring his wet clothes and the rules of traffic. He had to reach Jasmine before it was too late.
* * *
“Come on out. We won’t hurt you,” one of the men called out one level below her.
They were herding her to the east end of the building from where there would be no escape. She had to reach the staircase to the roof. This end of the building had no exits. No windows either. The place butted up against a warehouse, the back walls were solid brick.
Her chances of getting out of here were slim. At least Gabe had her family. He was the type of man who set things right. He would help Jake and Mandy.
God, she wanted to stay alive to see them again. Jake and Mandy. And Gabe. Because, who was she kidding, she was falling back in love with the man all over again.
“Your brother gave himself up. All we want is to take you in safely,” came the next lie from below.
Jasmine kept low and ducked between fallen beams, trying to steal around the men. She had to find a way to get out. She couldn’t engage them and fight them off. There were nine of them. Her gun only had four bullets. She would save those until the very end.
Which seemed to be suddenly here.
She ducked as a man crept into the room on her right. He scanned the rubble. Hadn’t seen her yet. She could only seem him through a gap in old wallpaper that hung from the ceiling in the corner where she hid. He turned slowly, gun trained. Then looked right at her.
She took her shot and ran like hell, knowing the sound would draw the rest of them.
She was looking behind her as much as she looked ahead. Steel arms snaked out from behind a column and caught her.
* * *
Gabe heard the gunshot from outside and his pulse quickened. The team would use silencers, so it had to be Jasmine. He found the window she’d brought him through earlier and vaulted right in.
Impulse pushed him to rush to her, but his training held him back. Assess. Plan. Execute. He searched the small area he could see.
No envelope where he’d put Mandy down. Either Jasmine had gotten it or Brent had. He moved on without pausing to search. Jasmine came first.
He stole around a doorway. One man stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, watching in case she tried to escape through here. Gabe snuck up on him, shoved his knee in the back of the man’s to bring him down. A hard tap to the guy’s temple with his gun and he was out for the count.
He didn’t want to shoot if he didn’t have to, since he didn’t think the men were involved in Brent’s private agenda. Plus, a gunshot, even with a silencer, could be heard by other team members who were nearby.
He disarmed the guy then crept up the stairs. Saw movement in a doorway. He pulled into the cover of a column and waited.
Troy, the ex-FBI guy, was moving his way. Probably the most decent man on the team, but Gabe had no choice, no time for explanations. He waited until they were in line with each other, then went for it. Beyond a small grunt, nothing betrayed that he brought down another man.
He inched toward the back room where the Teklas had stayed, listening for the slightest noise, the faintest creak. He thought another man or two were ahead, and could hear the soft sounds of others on the level above him.
He reached the door and looked through the open gap. Two men in there. Gabe scuffed his boot on the floor. One of the men came to investigate. Gabe took care of him, then stepped into the room.
The other guy swung and raised his gun. Gabe shot him in the right shoulder and left thigh. That should keep him down for a while. He strode over and ended the man’s moaning by shoving his hat into his mouth, then secured his hands with a plastic cuff.
“Jasmine?” he whispered to the piles of stuff strewn around the room in case she was hiding in there somewhere.
No response came.
He stepped back, retraced his steps to the stairs then stole up to the next floor, gun in hand.
A bullet whizzed by his ear at the same time as he heard a small pop. He ducked, rolled and aimed. And didn’t miss. A debilitating hit, but not fatal. Nobody rushed to investigate. The others must have been out of hearing distance.
He moved down the hallway carefully, then another and another. Ahead, two men were inspecting a giant room, clearing it section by section. Gabe looked at the sagging beam that barely held the ceiling of the hallway above him, slammed the door shut then shot at the beam until it gave, collapsing the ceiling and sealing the men inside.
Not that he had time to gloat. He was too busy running, since his impromptu demolition worked only too well. The partial collapse in front of the door created a chain reaction. Bricks were coming down all around him as he ran.
A falling beam caught him in the back and knocked him to the floor, an avalanche of bricks half burying him. He had barely begun to dig himself free when he caught sight of Brent through the settling dust.
He had Jasmine by the arm, holding his gun to her head.
“You served your purpose, Gabe. I think your contract is going to end here. Short, but productive. Just as I hoped.” He gave a cruel grin.
Gabe controlled his fury. He’d been pegged from the beginning, recruited because of his connection to the target. “Long shot, wasn’t it? Tekla and I were never best friends. Last time we saw each other was a decade ago.”
Brent had counted on the man to come out of hiding, if he thought he could give himself up safely, to a friend. It hadn’t exactly worked out that way, but the stalemate had been broken. Gabe had led them to Tekla’s hiding place. Brent had Jasmine because of him. Man, he hated the thought of that.
“I didn’t bring you here because of your friendship to Tekla,” Brent lectured. “You were brought in for your girlfriend here. When the men I hired took her, th
ey searched the house and sent me every scrap of paper. Most of it was crap. But this one little diary…” He gave a mean laugh.
“A teenager’s diary from ten years ago. Didn’t pay much attention to it first, but I read the damn thing after Tekla took out those men. I figured I might find a clue to where he was hiding. People go to familiar ground when they’re on the run and all that. Nothing about Venice in the diary, I tell you that. But there were pages and pages about you.” Brent sneered.
Jasmine blushed scarlet and wouldn’t meet Gabe’s eyes.
He was too angry at Brent, too worried about her being in the middle of all this danger to feel amused. But he promised himself to enjoy the hell out of this little piece of information the second they were safe.
First, he had to get out of this jam. “Tekla got away. He’s talking to the authorities right now. Whoever has been protecting you won’t take the fall for this. He’ll make you the scapegoat.”
Brent flashed a grin of pure conceit. “I have enough on the man to be sure he’ll never turn against me.”
So he hadn’t simply bought a politician with the promise of a share in the gold. It all came down to blackmail. “What’s next then?” He needed to keep the man talking. His gun hand was almost free.
“I shoot you now, then wait for the B Team to call me with the news that they have Tekla. Once I know I no longer need your girlfriend for anything, I’ll have some fun with her before I shoot her.”
Jasmine stood frozen—her eyes wide, cheeks pale—looking lost in some nightmarish memory. She was too stunned to struggle.
Come on, honey, Gabe tried to tell her with his eyes. Do something. Anything. All I need is a second of distraction.
“You know, reading all those teenage fantasies wasn’t as bad as it sounds.” Brent leered at her, but was still talking to Gabe. “Let’s see what she does with a real man. Maybe I won’t shoot you just yet and let you watch. If you say, pretty please.”
