“Just give me a second, okay?” His voice cracked.
Is this too much for you? How could it not be? It was almost too much for her, and she wasn’t the one who’d been tortured and had amnesia.
She turned from him, feeling shameful and guilty for what had happened. How could she have missed the Trojan? How had she uploaded a virus from @Anarchy into the servers? She’d run tests on the USB to ensure there wasn’t any malware, but clearly, she’d missed something.
When she felt Jake’s hand settle on the small of her back, she stiffened. He came up close behind her, his face near her hair. “Alexa, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What is it?” She couldn’t move or face him. Her nerves twisted inside her at the feeling of his breath near her ear.
“I remember . . . everything.” His words nipped at her skin, lifting the hairs on her arms.
“Wh—what?”
His hand went to her hip. “The showdown in there was like a smack in the face. Suddenly, I was back in Iraq. I was undercover in an Al Qaeda terrorist cell in Texas.”
Her body stilled at his words, and she inhaled a sharp breath.
“I remember every battle. Every fight. Every man I’ve killed.” His deep voice penetrated her flesh and shot straight to her core. “I remember every moment we were together, too. I remember you, Alexa.”
She lowered her head. So now he knew the truth about what had happened.
“Jake, I’m—”
“Don’t, Alexa.” His hand was gone. “Right now we need to get to a phone. We need to call your government.”
Her voice was a whisper. “Why?”
She pressed a hand to her chest, struggling to breathe.
“I remembered that they’re planning to hit Westminster.”
“Oh, God. The suicide vests.”
“I’m pretty sure they have something much worse for it planned than that.”
Alexa’s pulse throbbed in her neck. Her arm dropped to her side, still holding onto the gun.
“Come on, Agent Ryan, we need to get out of here.”
Agent Ryan? So, he was pissed at her.
Her stomach tucked in as she trailed behind him, her heart betraying her body even though she needed to be strong right now.
A few minutes later, they found their way out to the street, guns tucked safely in concealed holsters. Guests were crowded outside the hotel beyond the perimeter the police had established.
“Let’s go.” Jake grabbed hold of her arm, and the touch of his fingers on her body created a sharp spike of adrenaline inside her. She allowed him to lead her through the throng of people and down the street.
She looked around for their team members, but she’d never been introduced to the guys on Alpha or Beta team. She wouldn’t even know whom to seek.
Alexa stole a glimpse back at the hotel as they began walking with quick steps down the street. The rest of the city twinkled around the hotel, which sat in a darkness of its own making.
“There’s a restaurant up there.”
She looked to where Jake was pointing with his free hand. His other hand tugged at her forearm as if she were a prisoner who might decide to run away.
“Hang on,” she said, just as Jake pressed a hand to the door.
He dropped his arm and peered at her, and there was a blackness, an anger in his eyes that she’d never seen before. His past had hurtled into his mind all at once. He’d gotten twelve years of memories—good and bad (probably a lot of them bad)—and she couldn’t imagine how it must feel to relive so much in such a short period. And he didn’t even have the chance to make sense of it all.
“Did you get hurt?” She touched his shoulder where there was blood.
“No, but I clocked a guy a couple of good times before the son of a bitch got away.”
“You have a T-shirt under there?” She lifted his shirt and was relieved to see a gray cotton tee.
“Take off the button-up. We don’t want you to attract attention.”
His eyes remained on hers as he worked at the buttons, and she tried to look away, but she couldn’t. She was sucked into his pain. She could feel every drop of it.
Alexa only averted her gaze when Jake tossed his shirt in a waste bin off to the side of the little brownstone building. “Come on.” He opened the door and motioned for her to go first.
Her body tensed as she crossed in front of him. Once inside, he came around in front of her and approached the hostess. He began sputtering Spanish, and Alexa was impressed. What else did he know? Of course, she was the same—spoke three languages. Such talents were to be expected in their line of work.
Jake faced Alexa again. “She’s letting us use her phone. She’s grabbing it from the back.”
Alexa watched the long-haired brunette walk away before disappearing behind a door. “How’d you pull that off?” Her Spanish was piss-poor, so she hadn’t understood but every fifth word Jake had said.
“Just offered her that pendant on your neck.”
Her hand darted to the small diamond hanging there. “No.” She rubbed the diamond between her fingers. “My dad gave it to me.” She cleared her throat. “Before he died.”
Jake threaded his disheveled hair with his fingers. “Shit, Alexa. Sorry. I thought it was just a piece of jewelry. You have any euros on you, then?”
“Not on me. Left my purse at the hotel.” She released her necklace and bit her lip.
“Come on. There has to be a locutorio around here. No one will let us use their phone and rack up a bill without something in return.” He grabbed her hand, and they rushed back out into the street.
“What’s a locutorio?”
“A phone booth.” He glanced around and then tugged at her elbow once again.
“Okay.”
With hurried steps, they searched the street for a phone, medics blazing by.
Jake jerked to a stop a few minutes later, and Alexa careened into him, her hands landing on his back.
“Sorry.” She stepped away.
“Here.” He motioned to a building. The locutorio was more like a store. Inside, there were separate mini stalls with phones. Thank God the place was open until midnight, and it was empty.
Jake and Alexa entered the tight phone stall, and they pulled the door closed behind them. “Can you call MI6 collect?” Was that his idea of a joke?
Fortunately, there was a protocol for such events.
Jake leaned against the back wall as she dialed. She noticed his hand lingering at his hip, and he was biting back a grimace of pain. Had he been hurt earlier, or was he feeling the remnants of past wounds? She couldn’t help but worry.
Alexa looked away from him when the low-pitched hum sang from the receiver, followed by a click. “Code: zero nine five three two eleven. I’ve been compromised.”
She waited a few moments, and then there were two more clicks, followed by a ring.
“Alexa? Are you all right?”
Alexa had never been so happy to hear the sound of Laney’s voice.
“I’m okay, but Jason Holms was taken. I’m not with my team anymore. We, eh, Agent Summers and I are looking for him, but—”
“We’ve lost the asset?” Laney snapped out. “Things are a bloody mess over here. We’ve had to shut down our servers to prevent further damage. We have people from GCHQ here. Hell, it’s eleven at night and members of Parliament are crawling up my arse over this! They’ll go ballistic when they hear we lost Holms.”
“I don’t know if Jason was somehow involved in all of this, or if Anarchy discovered his usefulness when they hacked us . . .” God, this is unbelievable. “I’m so sorry, Laney. I followed all protocol when I downloaded Gregov’s files to our server, but I must have missed something. I can’t believe it.”
Then she remembered the reason they had called. “Agent Summers needs to talk to you. He has his memories back.”
Alexa stepped out of the way and handed the phone to Jake, who studied her for a brief
moment, his eyes flickering with confusion. “Ma’am, I’m not sure if these bastards have changed their target now that they know I’m alive, but when I was being held I overheard them speaking in Arabic. I only got fragments because they hadn’t meant for me to hear—but from the neighboring room, I heard them mention the Palace of Westminster. Parliament. I don’t know specifics, though. Sorry.”
Alexa heard Laney swearing, but couldn’t make out the rest.
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know. They didn’t say anything else,” Jake said. “I understand. Yes, ma’am.” Jake handed Alexa the phone a moment later.
She swallowed and held it to her ear. “Yeah?”
“Alexa, this isn’t your fault. These bastards tricked us. There was no way your team could have known you’d been lured to Munich so they could plant a virus in our server. It’s damn genius on their part.” She hissed. “And the virus moved so slow it was undetectable. If Sam hadn’t had concerns about the servers running just a millisecond slower than normal . . .”
“What do you want me to do now? I’m meeting up with Xander soon. Have you heard from him?” Alexa’s voice quavered, and she felt a punch of worry in her gut.
“No, I haven’t. But Alexa, you need to hear me—everyone on your team has been compromised. The virus stole all the data related to Anarchy.”
“They’ve been tracking our every move.” She swallowed. “They knew we consulted with Jason before.” She pressed a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes, trying to come to grips with the information.
“We’ve been playing into their hands like bloody puppets. It makes me so Goddamn sick. We led them to Agent Summers in Montana, and then they figured out we were coming to Barcelona . . .” Laney’s voice was like the edge of a freshly sharpened knife.
“As much as I hate Jason, I don’t think he had anything to do with this. He’s known by hackers all over the world. Anarchy saw their chance to grab him and they took it.” Nervousness spiked through Alexa so fast she thought she’d be sick. “What will you do about Parliament? If we close Westminster, Anarchy will either change the target, or . . . God, I don’t even want to know what they’ll do.”
“I’ll figure that out. We’ve alerted the Americans of the situation in case they’ve been breached as well. But as for you, right now I need you to locate Xander and the others and get everything cleared out of the hotel. Then get to the British Consulate and wait for further instructions. They’ll be expecting you.”
Once they were at the British Consulate, they’d no longer be on the case. They’d be trucked back home, and new faces sent in. Faces that @Anarchy hadn’t already learned by heart.
“My family,” she suddenly cried. Thoughts of her mum, sister, and baby nephew flickered to her mind.
“We have agents on their way to Manchester to protect them—same with everyone’s family.”
“Thank you.” If anything happened to her family, she would never forgive herself. “But ma’am, I can’t sit on the sidelines. I’ve been working this case forever. No one knows them the way I do—”
“We have this, Alexa. You have your instructions. I’ll be in touch.” The line went dead.
Alexa released the phone, her mind and body feeling almost numb.
“Alexa?”
She could barely hear him. She pushed open the door. She couldn’t breathe in that tight space. Out in the open area of the building, she bent forward and pressed her hands to her knees, trying to gather air into her lungs.
Jake’s hand was on her back. “You okay?”
She stood upright a moment later and faced him. They were alone. After all, who used pay phones anymore?
“We’ve got to find Xander, and then I’m supposed to go to the consulate.” She blew out a breath. “They know everything, Jake. I’m done.”
“Anarchy?” His brows pulled together, assessing her.
Alexa cupped the back of her neck with both hands and began kneading the flesh as she tried to find the right words. When her hands dropped heavy at her sides, she told him about the hack and how Anarchy had lured her team to Germany, just like they had roped Jake and his men to Italy.
He rubbed a hand down his cheek, his eyes widening when she finished.
“They brought us to Munich to infiltrate MI6, but do you really think they had you guys go to Italy just to . . . sorry, I don’t mean ‘just’—”
Jake held his hand between them, his eyes growing dark as pain fell over his face like a mask. Not only did he know that he’d lost his team—he remembered every moment of it.
When Jake didn’t say anything, she pushed a little more. “Um. Now that you remember everything, is there anything else about the OP in Italy that could help explain why Anarchy brought you there?” She glanced at her wristwatch. “We should talk and walk. Maybe Xander found Jason.” She could only hope, at this point.
Jake held the door open for her, and they went out to the street. “So?”
“I think the monument is this way.” He pointed down the street, which was still bustling with life, despite the fact that a shooting had occurred just a few blocks away. Maybe the denizens of Barcelona were unaware that there had been a shooting, even though Alexa could still hear the faint sound of sirens in the distance.
“Well, like Trent told you back in Montana, our team was formed at the last minute to go to Sicily. We didn’t have time to follow the proper matrix—to go through the appropriate channels of approval for the kill. The General at CENTCOM got clearance from the President, and so we were sent to Italy, where we broke protocol again by not alerting the Italian government that we were going to use Hellfire missiles against an enemy target. According to the intel, we only had a small window of opportunity to use our Reaper to take out the ISIS leader, Ansari.”
And she thought Jake didn’t break rules.
“You had a drone strike planned?” Her heart started racing in her chest, pounding fast as ideas pushed through her mind.
He looked over at her, the muscles in his face pulled together, and he nodded. “Our pilots are based in Las Vegas, but there are two pilots located at Sigonella in Sicily, as well. The MQ-9 Reaper has a slight delay, and that delay interferes with take-off and landing, which is why we need pilots locally. Drone pilots in Vegas pilot the rest of the mission.”
Alexa knew this because if it weren’t for that delay, Bekas’s wife and daughters would still be alive.
“Anyway. About an hour into the flight, we lost connection with the drone.”
“What?” She stopped, her face screwing tight.
“Drone pilots like to say, ‘No comms, no bombs.’ Something happened to the satellite—interference, maybe—which meant we lost control of the Reaper.”
“So what happened to the drone?”
“There’s a built-in default. If communication is lost, the drone automatically returns to the nearest landing facility. This keeps it from crashing or falling into enemy hands.” His eyes grew darker as he spoke. “The ISIS leader was in civilian territory by the time we got another drone up, so we were called back to the States. I don’t know what the diagnostics on the drone showed—my team was ambushed on our way out of Sicily, so I never saw the report.”
The word ambushed was like a gunshot to her ears—splicing her open to her core as she recalled the loss of life of her own team members. Her emotions became mangled—twisted with anger and sadness as she drew up the images of the bodies lying on the cold concrete floor in Copenhagen.
Her voice was clipped when she next spoke as she tried to stifle her pain for the sake of the current issue at hand. “We need to call Laney back. We need to let MI6 and the FBI know what Anarchy is planning to do.” Alexa spotted the tall monument in the distance. “Let’s meet the team first.”
Jake reached for her wrist, stopping her. “You think it was Anarchy? That they hacked the Reaper? But they failed, right? They didn’t overtake it, even if that was their goal.”
Alexa was shaking her head.
“Could have been a test run to see if they could hack it. Trent should have told us about this. I would have understood Anarchy’s plan if he had.”
“What happened in Sicily was highly classified.” He released a ragged breath. “But what does it matter?”
“Because it tells us Anarchy’s end game,” she said in a rush. “To hijack a Reaper and use the Hellfire missiles.” She stepped closer to Jake and looked at him, her lips parting as worry moved through her. “Bekas’s family was killed by a drone strike, right? He’s going to use our own weapon against us.”
“Retribution,” Jake said beneath his breath.
Alexa turned and hurried toward the monument, needing to see Xander. Maybe he’d be able to help. When she arrived, she checked her watch as she circled the statue. It had been forty minutes, but she didn’t find any familiar faces. “He’s not here. You don’t think something happened to Xander, do you?” She was short of breath as panic crept inside her.
Jake pressed his hands over her arms and pulled her in with his gaze. “Give them time. Maybe he went back to the hotel, or he stopped to call MI6.”
She looked beyond Jake’s shoulders, searching the crowd lingering around the statue. Were any of them members of Alpha or Beta team?
No one screamed military, and most looked like couples in love or tourists. They were taking selfies with the monument behind them.
Alexa pulled away from Jake and sat on one of the steps at the base of the monument. A glow of light splattered the pavement around the statue, offering a romantic setting with the palm trees, water, and beautifully colored homes perched on the hills like layers of a cake. Why couldn’t they be here for some romantic getaway? The work she did was meaningful, but at what point would she ever be able to find meaning in the simple things in life? Like admiring the color of the dark sky as the stars glittered above, with a man she cared about pressing his lips to hers. Or enjoying a steaming cup of tea, her feet kicked up over the side of a rocking chair as she watched sailboats drift by on the Mediterranean Sea.
She was distracting herself right now. She knew that.
In her heart, she knew something was wrong with Xander.
Surviving the Fall Page 20
