by Debra Webb
Becca combed her hands through her hair and took slow, deep breaths until the sensation passed. Then she stalked up and down the room with a renewed determination to save herself and break out of here.
Chapter Six
Saturday, October 16, 12:15 a.m.
“Another dead end,” Parker told the empty room. On a weary oath, he pushed back from the wobbly table and stood up from the lousy excuse for a chair. Crossing the small room in two strides, he carefully peered through the crack in the window curtains. No one visible on the nearby rooftops, and down on the street the cars seemed to be a fresh crop than those he’d passed when he walked into the shabby motel a few hours ago.
He longed for the assistance and conveniences of his office, his condo or even the rental outside the safe room, but he needed to be as unpredictable as the enemy. Staying in one place too long or going back too frequently only made it easier for whoever was picking off his team.
Exhausted, frustrated, he wanted to get out in the city to walk and think. And yes, to tempt anyone who might be on his tail. The remainder of the night invited him to search for his opponent’s weak point and go on the attack. Except he didn’t know where to start looking. San Francisco, Nevada or somewhere in between?
After he’d studied the rest of her raw notes, it was clear Rebecca had told him everything about Iraq and it still wasn’t enough to connect any of the dots. Although it would be easy to believe she’d held some essential detail back for the sake of insurance, he knew better.
It had taken him hours to recover from that conversation. Not only because she called him by name and she’d been so open and candid about her experiences overseas. No. It had been the citrus scent of her hair, the fragile skin covering her pounding pulse points. Her defiance and courage despite the odds blew him away and drew him closer simultaneously.
Her pulse had remained steady under his fingertips. Fast with nerves, but steady. Her voice, that cool, cultured sound rippling over him through the darkness, had held the unyielding tone of a woman who knew she was right. Until she’d heard Theo died. Her pulse had gone haywire, stuttering under his fingertips as she processed the news.
He should let her go. Beg her forgiveness. And he would. As soon as he could figure out if he would be doing it for her or to invite the scarred man back for another attempt to nab her. Until he could trust himself with that decision, until he could own it, she’d stay safely tucked away. “Locked away,” he amended aloud.
What a fool! How had he let a rescue turn into this nightmare? He could just hear the men he’d worked so closely with on that last mission cackling over his idiocy. Theo’s life motto had been Think First. He’d drilled it into everyone he served with as if it was his personal mission to teach others that no matter how bad things got, there was always time to think before taking an irreversible action.
Parker hadn’t taken any time to think. He’d been reactionary from the moment he heard about Theo’s murder. Before that, if he was honest. The blackmail note had set his mind spinning out of control. He hooked his thumbs into his back pockets and dropped his head in shame. Reactionary was a pretty word for glossing over an outright kidnapping.
The pure shock of seeing all their names in one place had unnerved him. Still did. The six of them had been deployed to the same base, working with their individual units, until Theo had gathered them for one particular covert operation.
They’d gone out in teams of three, and after more than a month battling rough conditions and unforgiving terrain, they found and dispatched a terrorist cell moving explosives from Iran to Iraq. No one should ever have put all six names together. It should have been impossible. Except someone had proved it was possible, compounding that problem by creating a compelling story designed to discredit all of them unless Parker paid the blackmail.
He glanced back to the table where her devices and his laptop sat open. None of his extensive searches were getting him closer to identifying the source behind this mess. The only thing he labeled progress was discovering that the driver who’d run Jeff off the road couldn’t be Fadi, the young man from the village near the Iranian border. No matter what Jeff thought he saw, Parker’s expert at the office had used amateur radio operators to confirm that the kid was still in Iraq with his family. Too bad he hadn’t found a way to ask if the family still had their gold.
Parker rubbed at his temples, astonished at how small the world had become. It was nearly incomprehensible that he and Rebecca had met the same lanky eighteen-year-old within a few weeks of each other. Fadi had served as a translator first for Parker’s team and then Rebecca’s crew. Logic said someone from that village was behind this, and yet the setup was too sophisticated, the knowledge too complete and the reach too long.
That left him wondering if someone on the base had learned about their operation. If so, what was the end game here? It couldn’t be about the money or Theo would still be alive and Jeff would be home with his wife. And how did kidnapping Rebecca fit in?
He prowled around the shabby motel room and checked in on Rebecca. He’d expected her to be sleeping and found she was marking time in a similar pattern of pent-up frustration in the safe room. He turned up the audio and heard her cursing him in increasingly innovative combinations. As he watched, he wondered if it would take all of his fortune to buy her forgiveness. Rush, reportedly the wealthiest man in the city, might not have enough money to buy that woman’s forgiveness.
No, money wasn’t the right key to her anyway. She’d offered to pay off her captor, and a quick search of her financials proved she had a hefty nest egg at her disposal. Rebecca’s world revolved around the story. Would admitting he was better at being a security expert and a soldier than a wealthy civilian win her forgiveness?
The story. Parker kept circling back to that. The blackmailer claimed the media had been informed of the story. Yet no one had run it. None of his remaining friends on the list had received calls from other reporters. Only Rebecca’s group had started investigating, and they’d interpreted the sudden leap in his net worth as a smoking gun.
The tip in itself could have been a story worthy of a network mention. If her reporter had run with the first suggestion of the story, tossing out inflammatory accusations of corruption, as many might have done in their places, the men on that list would be facing tough questions right now. All of them embarrassed, scrutinized and investigated, blindsided by a media feeding frenzy. Who would gain from that? And why now?
With Theo dead and Jeff still in the hospital, restitution for the stolen gold didn’t seem to be the primary objective at all.
His phone chirped and hummed on the table and Parker hesitated, not sure he could handle more bad news. In his experience no one called with good news at nearly one o’clock in the morning. The screen showed the call was from Tony, one of the men he’d assigned to keep an eye on Rebecca’s apartment in Russian Hill.
“What is it?” Parker asked.
“Flashlight moving around,” Tony replied, his voice low. “Someone is searching the place.”
“You didn’t see anyone go in?”
“Whoever is in there didn’t use the door.”
Parker stifled the first knee-jerk response. He wanted to send Tony in and have him haul the burglar to the office so Parker could conduct an interrogation.
Think first. “Call the police,” he said to Tony. “Do what you can to get a picture and tail whoever leaves the apartment.”
“On it,” Tony said, ending the call.
Parker pocketed his phone and worked through the next steps. Russian Hill wasn’t in Detective Baird’s district, but Parker could make sure he caught wind of the break-in once they had more information. Tony knew how to call in a crime without sharing contact information and he was as good as a ghost at following people. With the apartment empty, they didn’t need to worry about endang
ering anyone.
Glaring at Rebecca’s tablet, Parker returned to the table and closed it. The missing pieces of this puzzle weren’t there. Nor were they in the human-interest story she and Bill had brought back from Iraq. He couldn’t write off the places where her journey and his had almost collided as coincidence.
Someone was pulling on strings Parker couldn’t see, jerking them around like puppets. Her show. His mission. Where did they overlap? He was sure her show was being used as a pawn in the effort to disgrace him and his team, but she’d also been targeted personally.
There was a way to get in front of this. With only two days left, he needed a comprehensive plan to protect her as well as the three other men on the list. He couldn’t dump them all into safe rooms.
He sank into the chair and leaned forward into the table, propping his head on his fists. He’d been through everything, too many times to count. If she talked with army units during her trip to Iraq, those notes weren’t on this device. It was a question to ask when he went back to the safe room.
He used the app to check on her again. She was sprawled across the Murphy bed. He watched for a minute, trying to decide if she was really asleep or faking it for the cameras. Observing her while she was vulnerable made him feel like the worst creep. He switched the view, found the camera fritzed out and took it as a sign to stop being an idiot with her. He used the app to check the cameras outside the building, relieved when he didn’t see anything remarkable.
He should sleep as well. Instead, he started a new search on his laptop, looking at the world headlines during the days and weeks when Rebecca’s crew and his unit were in the same vicinity. Then he saw it: 12 Dead—Village Caught in Cross Fire.
The date of the article matched up, and his blood turned cold, slogging through his veins. Not the village where Rebecca and Bill had been, farther north on the border. The article claimed Iranian smugglers had been outed to US forces and had retaliated against the community to make a point.
Oh, he should have suspected this involved the off-the-books skirmish at the border. He would have thought of this tragedy first, if there had been any survivors. He swore. At the time Jeff, Matt and he had been certain they’d cut off the head of that snake. Someone had clearly survived.
Parker stared up at the water-stained ceiling and replayed the entire week in his mind. It wasn’t the first time and it definitely wouldn’t be the last time those harrowing moments consumed him. Knowing he couldn’t sleep, he reached for his phone and dialed Franklin Toomey, the third name on the list. He stared at the contact listing for a long time but never hit the Call icon.
He’d warned Frank and the others yesterday. The man was on guard. These new details could wait until a reasonable hour.
The blackmail note sent to him made sense now. Raw fear iced Parker’s skin. The restitution demand had little to do with money or family and everything to do with honor. It was about vengeance, and more innocent lives would get caught in the cross fire. Who had the intel, the reach and the nerve to start picking off soldiers on American soil?
Of the six of them, only Theo would have had the names of likely suspects. Killing him immediately made sense now. Kidnapping Rebecca might have been a ham-fisted attempt to force her network to run the story. Instead, the scarred man had pulled Parker right into the heart of his deadly game.
Up against one or more highly-skilled assassins on American soil, Parker needed to dig deep. Gathering intel was step one. Security was step two. Too bad for his Iranian enemy, Parker happened to be an expert in both areas.
He focused his efforts on drawing out and identifying the scarred man, mining every source and latent surveillance camera for more information on Theo’s death and Jeff’s accident. Skilled or not, everyone left a trail of some sort. Parker drafted an email asking a favor of another friend who’d transitioned from the army and landed with Homeland Security. Maybe they had some intelligence on the man with the scar. He paused, thinking through all the pros and cons before he hit Send.
After catching a much-needed nap and making more phone calls, Parker was convinced he’d found the first bread crumbs on that trail. His friend at Homeland agreed to help, and the hotel where the awards gala had been held invited him down to look through the surveillance footage from that night.
Though the Iranians had a head start, he would catch up. He sent a few replies in Rebecca’s name to the emails that seemed most urgent and then closed down her computer. Checking the window once more, he had to give the Iranians points for subtlety. If they were tracking the activity on her accounts or the devices, they were being exceptionally discreet.
He packed the gear he’d brought to the motel room, leaving only a few bread crumbs behind. If the roles were reversed, he would search the vacated room of his enemy. With luck, they’d believe he was off his game and follow his bogus clue, giving him a couple of hours to launch an offensive plan.
Luck failed him. A tail caught up with his SUV within blocks of the hotel. At least it looked that way. He checked his mirrors and swore with mild frustration.
Driving through the city congestion on the weekend had pros and cons. It was easier to lose a tail, but more difficult to confirm one. He just couldn’t be sure the midsize white sedan one car back from him now was following him with a purpose. It was possible he was simply overtired and paranoid. Despite the low odds of figuring this out on his own, he had to try. He couldn’t lead the killers behind the blackmail note and false story to where he was keeping Rebecca safe.
What he wouldn’t give to be back overseas where support and reliable intel were a secure radio call away. He turned onto a famous street no local in his right mind would travel willingly and gently slalomed right and left to navigate the one-way intersections. The white car followed.
At the last possible moment, he swerved into the turn lane for the next block, and the white car followed again. To his right another driver blew through the now-red traffic light to a chorus of angry car horns and squealing brakes.
He glanced up at the traffic camera installed on the light pole to help the city catch drivers misbehaving. Belatedly, he remembered he wasn’t nearly as alone as he felt.
Upon his latest inspection this morning, his SUV hadn’t been tagged with GPS or any other surveillance devices. Pressing the button on his steering wheel, he called Sam at the Gray Box office. Sam could hack into any system, including the city’s traffic cameras. Back when Sam and Rush were setting up protective measures against corporate espionage attempts to steal their tech and worse, Sam had created a specific route through the city so they could both pinpoint pesky surveillance tails and lose them as needed.
“Bellemere,” Sam answered on the third ring.
“It’s Parker,” he said. “I may or may not have a shadow out here in the city today. Can you help me out?”
“Of course. What’s your location?”
Parker heard the eagerness in Sam’s voice and replied quickly, even as he kept one eye on the white sedan in his wake. “I’m in my SUV,” he added.
“All right,” Sam said. “Give me a minute.” It only took a few seconds. “Okay, I can see you. Hmm. Take your next right.”
“Got it.” Parker could practically hear Sam cracking his knuckles. “I think it’s the white sedan two car lengths back.”
Sam hummed thoughtfully again. “Why don’t you cruise out toward the Presidio? Do you remember the route we set up on that side of town?”
“Well enough,” Parker said, picturing the convoluted path in his head.
“Great. Drive happy, my friend. I’ve got your back. In a minute I should have his registration.”
Parker kept the line open, though neither he nor Sam spoke while Parker drove the route. The white sedan, or one like it, stayed close the entire time. No way this was a coincidence. In the quiet car, he second-guessed himself. A
ny smart team would be subtle about tailing him. They’d trade off every few blocks, or hang back. Whoever drove the sedan didn’t seem to care whether or not Parker knew he was back there.
“According to the plate, the car has a California registration and is insured with a rider for one of those rideshare things.”
“Do you think the person on my tail is a fare?” If so, he could try and request any records from the driver.
“Not exactly. There’s no one other than the driver in the car. The view from the last traffic cam is pixelated, but I doubt the car’s owner, one Jenny Swanson, has a thick dark beard.”
Neither did the scarred man or the man running interference for the attempted kidnapping at the gala. Did they steal Jenny’s car or was she a connection to the team giving his team fits? “So I’m being followed.”
“That may or may not be the good news,” Sam agreed. “You want me to keep running this down?”
“Please,” Parker answered. His mind was moving on to the next part of his problem. He wanted to get Rebecca out of the city before the assassin tracked her down again.
“And?”
Parker hesitated, unsure what he was supposed to say. “Thank you?”
“Very mannerly, although not what I was fishing for.” Sam chuckled. “It was a prompt for you to ask for more help. I can send an alert to the police. You’d have some breathing space.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather know exactly where this guy is.”
“You got it.”
When the call ended, he aimed for the condo again, careful to keep the white sedan in sight as he worked through his dwindling options.
If he didn’t get Rebecca to a new hiding place soon, he had no doubt she’d get caught in the cross fire. Rescuing her had been tricky enough. Talking with her had created an entirely different and unexpected set of problems, none of which he could resolve while she viewed him as the enemy.
What he’d learned during his background search on her left him reluctant to just walk in, introduce himself and beg for her understanding. Although she had a mile-wide streak of compassion, she also held grudges. In his case, she should. He deserved each and every terrible thought and word she aimed at him.
