by Dana Marton
Better start with the condensed version. “A while back I worked for a private security firm on contract for the U.S. government. We did international missions. On the last one, my team was sent to Venice, Italy, to pick up a U.S. soldier who’d gone rogue and killed several people.”
She flinched. “PTSD?”
“Nothing like that. Turns out, Jake was the good guy. The men he killed wanted to take him out to cover up a crime.”
“How does that tie to the Congressman?”
“The same bad guy who sicced the killers on Jake and then sent the commando team after him, was also blackmailing Wharton. It all came out when we took him down.”
“Blackmailed Wharton with what?”
“That’s what we wanted to know. Me, another ex-FBI guy on the security team, Gabe, and the supposed rogue soldier, Jake. The FBI got interested, too, so they sent the three of us on a fact-finding mission.” Just thinking about what they’d found made him grit his teeth. “What I’m going to tell you is strictly confidential.”
“You don’t say.”
He shot her a hard look.
She held up a hand with the palm out. “Confidential. Okay.”
“The Congressman’s little brother, Mitch, was involved in something called combat tourism. A few of the teams within the security company Gabe and I worked for at the time, apparently took rich civilians to the war zone. These people were trained for a month then put into real-life combat situations.” Bile rose in his stomach along with fury. “Like a video game but in real life.”
She stared at him. “No way.”
“One hundred percent confirmed.” He filled his lungs with air. “The FBI tasked the three of us with finding evidence that the Congressman knew and turned a blind eye.”
“That’s why you tried to bug his conference room.”
He nodded. “I’ve been watching the Congressman here. Gabe and Jake are in Afghanistan. Jake met an American woman there a little while back who was looking for her missing fiancé. He was Mitch Wharton’s friend. Turns out, Mitch got him into combat tourism, but the friend hit some bad luck and was killed.”
“So the Congressman was being blackmailed with his little brother’s involvement.”
“He wants to run for president. He can’t afford a scandal like this.”
She looked like steam was ready to come out of her ears. “Do you know how hard American soldiers work in Afghanistan and Iraq to do everything right, to prove that we’re there to help? Do you have any idea how damned hard it is to prove to those people that we’re not the enemy? Then yahoos like that—” Her voice broke from fury. “For entertainment!” She swallowed hard, pinned her burning gaze on his face. “I’m in.”
“One more thing.” His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “The Congressman knows that we know. His best bet is to take out everyone who has first-hand knowledge of his involvement. Without us, nothing could be proved.”
“So the three of you are in danger?”
“Jake’s two sisters and his girlfriend, too. They’re currently at a safehouse. That’s why the Congressman’s goons beat me at the mansion. They wanted everyone’s location.”
“Are the women in the U.S.?” she asked, then shook her head the next second. “Never mind. It’s better if I don’t know. I’d like to think I’d be tough if caught, but everybody has their breaking point.”
He drove through town, adding in some details and filling out the story to make sure she had the necessary information.
“So basically I’m looking for any hard evidence that could prove that the Congressman has knowledge of combat tourism,” she said as he pulled the car over at the end of the street, two hundred yards from the mansion.
“Look for anything with the name Brent Foley on it. That’s the guy who was blackmailing Wharton. Or XO-ST. That’s the name of the private security commando team—Xtreme Ops-Special Teams.”
“One more thing,” she said as she put her hand on the door handle. “Who was the hostage you lost to that vest bomb?”
He stared at her, not wanting to answer. Then he did. “My fiancée.”
This was the second time he shared with her something about the day he never discussed with anyone. The first time, when he’d been in the cage, he’d told her about the explosion to play on her feminine sympathies. He’d been building a connection so he could talk her into setting him free.
He wished now that he’d kept his mouth shut on both occasions. Whatever she was going to say, he wasn’t going to like it.
But she didn’t say anything, just turned to leave.
“Be careful.”
“Careful is my middle name.” She slipped from the car and immediately moved toward the shadows of the early dawn, then disappeared behind a tall hedge.
He looked after her, about a million second thoughts assailing him. Just a few hours ago, she’d followed a couple of armed kidnappers, hid on their boat and attacked them in the middle of the night to save a complete stranger. Claire Montgomery was anything but careful. But at the moment, under the circumstances, she was the best person for the job.
He hoped he’d done the right thing by bringing her into this mess. The last thing he wanted was another woman getting hurt because of him.
~~~***~~~
Chapter Four
She snuck back into the small room above the gatehouse the way she’d snuck out. Good thing she knew the location of every camera and motion detector.
She shrugged out of her bloody security uniform—gray pants, gray shirt—then stuffed the garments into her duffle bag. She would wash them at home, then sneak them back in. She couldn’t exactly drop them in the plastic bin that the laundry service picked up twice a week.
She reported for duty one minute early. Jason waited at the door, yawning.
“Going home?” She stifled a responding yawn and tried to look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“Yeah. Ready to hit the hay.”
That made two of them. “Do you know who’ll be on rotating duty with the intruder today?” she asked innocently.
“FBI came to pick him up. You just missed them.” He walked away with a half-hearted wave.
Jason had let the van through without checking IDs last night, and now he was lying about the FBI pickup. He had to be in on whatever was going on. Couldn’t be trusted. She couldn’t trust anyone, really, beyond Troy for the moment.
She scanned the monitors. Everything looked quiet, no movement at the mansion, save the guards. She wished she were on guard duty there. But while she was stuck at the guardhouse, she would make the best of it and look for clues right here.
She pulled up the check-in log and read through it, going backwards. The first oddity jumped out at her right away. The van that had come in the middle of the night hadn’t been logged. Nor was there any kind of record of the FBI showing up this morning.
License plate, time in, time out, name, reason for visit. She scrolled down the screen, scanning row after row of visits from campaign aides and politicians, press, various deliveries and landscaping services, as well as employees. The latter had to drive straight to the back lot after clearing the gate. They weren’t allowed to pull up the circular driveway in front of the mansion.
Hours went by, her eyes watering from staring at the screen, but she couldn’t find anything suspicious in the logs, nothing to report to Troy later. Then again, she already knew that gate security tended to “forget” to log certain entries. The whole XO-ST team could have been here and she would never know it.
The very concept of combat tourism was enough to make her want to strangle someone. It was an insult to the army she’d served and bled in. She wanted to do whatever it took to stop this insanity. Frustration pumped through her as she ate the two power bars she’d fished out from the bottom of her duffle bag for breakfast.
At nine, Brian, another guard, came up to give her a potty break. She ran up to the bathroom, freshened up, then went back down. “Thanks. Appre
ciated.”
He stood in the doorway, leaning his massive muscles against the wall. “No problem.”
Guards at the gate got a short break every three hours and one long break for their meal—breakfast, lunch or dinner, depending upon which shift they were on.
She tilted her head and smiled at Brian. “You been here long?”
The week she’d worked here had been enough to learn everyone’s name, but little more beyond that.
“Couple of years.”
“Must like it, if you stayed,” she observed. “Seems like a pretty good gig. I was considering doing either something like this or joining one of those private security commando units the U.S. hires to do contract work overseas. I’m glad I picked D.C.”
He nodded and walked away.
She ground her teeth. So much for her subtly getting the man to admit that he’d been a mercenary before he’d come here and somehow connect the Congressman to all that nasty business. Of course, nothing in her life had ever been that easy.
She went back to double checking the logs and made a note of the dates and times when the Congressman’s little brother, Mitch, had stopped by for a visit. He was involved in all this, so keeping an eye on his comings and goings seemed logical.
As the hours passed, she was growing more and more dismayed at how little useful information she’d been able to gather. Investigating was a lot different from soldiering. She liked the action a lot more than sitting around, sifting through data.
By the time Brian came to give her a break for lunch, she was sitting on pins and needles, impatient to get into the main building. She walked up to the mansion, in through the servant’s entrance on the side and poked around as much as she could on her way to the kitchen. Unfortunately, neither the bathrooms nor the laundry room, nor the pantry seemed to be a hotbed of criminal activity.
Troy had been caught in the conference room. She meandered that way and noted the computer on the desk in the corner. She pushed a key to wake the machine up. Password protected.
The desk had two drawers. She tried them. Locked.
She glanced at the window. Nobody out there.
She picked a paperclip off the desk and bent it, tried to wiggle it inside the keyhole. She held her breath and focused all her attention on the lock and the stupid piece of metal that refused to do her will.
“What are you doing?” The sharply-spoken question came from behind her.
Nick, the head of the Congressman’s security, stood in the doorway with a scowl on his face.
* * *
Troy rounded the congressman’s mansion in a rented Buick, in case someone on the man’s security detail had been smart enough to survey the surrounding blocks after his capture and had somehow connected his black SUV to him. He had another agent pick up the SUV and drive it around for a couple of days, in case somebody followed it.
The guard stood in front of the guardhouse, watching the street. Troy didn’t look at him straight on, but through his rearview mirror that he’d tilted. The man rolled his shoulders.
Where was Claire?
He shifted in his seat as his cell phone rang. The FBI. He drove on as he took the call.
“Anything new?” He’d left Bureau headquarters an hour before, after he’d fully updated everyone on the new asset he’d brought in.
“We got a match in the database on the fingerprints,” the man on the other end said. “Minor convictions. Nothing to tie them to the Congressman or XO-ST.”
“Of course, not.” He rubbed his thumb over his right eyebrow. “Would have been too easy.”
“Their van failed just about every lab test. Gunpowder residue, drug residue, blood—all positive. They were definitely not in the flower delivery business.”
“Hired killers.” He pulled into the parking lot of a golf store two streets up. Since the store stood on higher ground, he could see part of the Congressman’s mansion from here.
“About that cell phone they got off you last night,” his FBI connection was saying. “We’re seeing some activity.”
That got his attention. “It’s a secured phone,” he said, even as he thought, every code can be broken. He swore under his breath. “Can they access past calls?”
“Not supposed to. None of that info is saved to the phone or the chip…”
“But?”
“But they leave a binary fingerprint, so to speak.”
“So the right person with the right skills can get to it?”
“We only have one man like that at the Bureau. Chances of finding another person with that skill set…”
His heart sank. “But they did it.”
“Calls went out from your unit to previous contacts. They were fishing. Nobody was stupid enough to give them anything. The good news is they think you’re dead. Might take them days to figure out that last night hadn’t gone as planned. They might not realize what happened until a week or two passes and their hired killers don’t show up for the second half of their fee.”
Certainly a nice break, but he couldn’t fully appreciate it. “This means they have the numbers for Jake and Gabe.” The three of them had regular debriefings while the other two were overseas.
“Worst case scenario, someone who can hack into a secure FBI phone, might be good enough to hack into our communications satellite. They might be able to pinpoint Jake’s and Gabe’s location.”
“Where are they?”
“About to get on a military transport plane in Germany to head home. They’ve been instructed to destroy their units.”
Troy relaxed for a millisecond. Then cold spread through his chest as a new thought occurred to him. “If they have Jake’s and Gabe’s cell phone info, could they peel back another layer and see who Jake and Gabe have been calling?”
“Theoretically, no.” The man paused.
“Could your in-house hacker do it?”
A moment of silence stretched on the other end. “He could.”
Jake and Gabe had probably called Jake’s sisters and Allison. If their enemies somehow got lucky enough to pinpoint that location… “You have to send a team to the safehouse.”
“I don’t think—” the man started to say.
But he cut him off, not giving a damn about the chain of command. “Send a team.” He about growled the words, and contemplated putting the car in gear and shooting across state lines himself.
But the Bureau had to have people closer. Time was of the essence here.
Troy looked at the mansion as his fingers tightened on the phone. He’d just thrown Claire into shark-infested waters. He couldn’t abandon her. He needed to stay around to provide backup and protection if she needed it.
Why wasn’t she at the guardhouse? They’d agreed that he wouldn’t call her while she was on duty. She would call him if she needed help.
Except, of course, if they caught her and took her phone from her.
“You need to move those women to another location,” he barked into the phone.
“All right,” the voice on the other end agreed. “Okay.”
* * *
Claire slid the paperclip up her sleeve and straightened as Nick strode over.
She plastered a smile on her face. “I was just wondering what the intruder was doing in here. Maybe looking for money? He probably tried the drawers. I wanted to see if he got in.”
Nick watched her, his eyes narrowed. “Did he?”
She bent to examine the desk. “The lock is scratched. He tried.”
Nicked yanked on the drawer. It stayed firmly in place.
She flashed a derisive grin, even as her heart beat in her throat. “So much for his burglar skills.”
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
She walked out of the room with an apologetic duck of her head. Nick followed. He closed the door behind them with a hard click.
“Sorry, boss. I got distracted on the way to lunch.” She headed that way, but she turned back after a few feet. “Any news from the FBI? D
o they know yet who he is?”
Nick watched her for a second, his gaze cold and assessing. “Some petty criminal. Didn’t even know whose house he was in.” He put on his mean face. “I want everyone to double their vigilance, understood? This can’t happen again.”
She clicked her heels together. “Yessir.”
“The Congressman’s privacy is paramount. He can’t afford a media circus right now. You never heard of the intruder. You never saw anything. He was never here.”
“Yessir,” she said again, heading to the kitchen, while Nick strode down the hallway toward the main part of the house. She glanced after him, dismayed. She’d hoped to get farther than the conference room, but it wouldn’t be good to get caught twice in one day.
She glanced at her watch. She had close to two hours left before her shift was over and she could talk to Troy. Hopefully his day was more productive than hers was turning out to be.
She was dragging from getting even less sleep than usual, annoyed that she hadn’t gotten anything remotely useful all morning. But when she turned into the kitchen, a smile crept onto her face.
Mitch Wharton sat at the counter, flirting with the sixty-something chef. Marnie stood five feet four inches tall, as round as a grapefruit. She had the eyes of a hawk and the voice of a general.
“Nobody makes lamb chops like you do Marnie. Are you sure you don’t want to run away with me?”
“I don’t think that would make Arnold happy,” the woman said, but a pleased smile crept onto her face.
“A vibrant young woman like you is wasted on a senior citizen. That’s all I’m saying.”
Marnie gave a bark of a laugh and shuffled back to the stove where something was bubbling, sending delicious puffs of steam into the air.
Claire relaxed her shoulders, strolled over and took the barstool next to Mitch.
“Hey beautiful.” He winked at her, a schmoozer through and through. “Where have you been all my life?”
He’d asked her the same thing when they’d first met, last week, but now he showed no sign that he recognized her. He was an industrial-size flirt, not to be taken at his word. From what she’d seen of him last time—playing cricket on the front lawn with the kids—even he didn’t take himself seriously.
