by Cherry Adair
"Your brother is a smart man, and one Franco trusts implicitly. I'm sure he's all right. You know how focused he gets. He probably went off to chase some bit of information he needed, and he'll return to find you here waiting for him."
Oliver would be pissed to find her in Los Santos, River knew. He had done everything but send a skywriter to dissuade her from ever visiting him here, up to and including stressing what a perv and all around terrible person his boss was. This, as far as River could tell, was a complete fabrication.
Francisco Xavier appeared to be a loving, and devoted family man, and not the sexual deviant her brother had portrayed. Although some of Oliver’s detail amused River, Carly was right: her brother didn't have much imagination. She'd have to check out some of her brother's reading material while she was here.
#
By the time River and Father Marcus returned to the dining room, the other two men had disappeared inside. Father Marcus walked her to the foot of the Gone-With-The-Wind style sweeping staircase, said goodnight to her, and left.
River went upstairs, hoping she'd see Franco so she could ask if she could join in the apparition hunt, which would be a good distraction from the worry. But she didn't see either man, nor did she hear their voices, so she let herself into her room.
As she went to her suitcase to grab the t-shirt she wore to bed, she noticed that her crimson Chantilly lace el roce bra and matching thong were missing. "What the hell?" River dumped everything out on the bed to be sure. No red lace. "That's damn rude," she muttered as she repacked the case.
Someone had been in her room, rifled through her personal belongings, and had taken her damned underwear.
One of the maids, she suspected. She had more lingerie than any woman could wear. Plenty more where that came from. But not here. Who would be stupid enough to steal something so obvious? She really didn't care that a maid had spotted something pretty and helped herself. If she worked in this overheated, gloomy house and saw pretty red lace, she'd probably have swiped it too.
It wasn't a big deal, she thought as she went to wash her face and brush her teeth. Definitely not anything she'd report to Franco.
She did not look for the book Oliver had used for reference material, figuring she might find more than she could handle right now. He had to have based his vilification of Franco on something, after all. But tonight, that would be asking too much for her poor libido.
Do not, she told herself firmly as she climbed into the high bed and turned off the light, under any circumstances dream of piercing blue eyes, a hard jaw line, and a sexy, unsmiling mouth, which of course was exactly what she did.
#
"Get rid of her."
"Her timing is unfortunate." Franco gripped the phone, sweating, waiting for a reaction from the man who dominated him in every aspect of his life.
Told not to come, in no uncertain terms, River Sullivan had shown up anyway, like a bad penny, unannounced. The woman's inconvenient presence wasn't his fault, and he resented his partner's implication.
The phone line crackled ominously. Dear Lord, he hated these calls, when he went from being the feared el jefe to discussing things like a lowly peon. An assistant. A worm. If his partner hadn’t had so much damned power, Franco would just screw the woman until she died, and be done with the problem. Now that his partner held the keys to the operation, he was walking on pins and needles, doing everything he could not to piss off the crazy man.
"Get. Rid. Of. Her."
Those words, and the calm, smooth voice that delivered them, made him feel as if fire ants were crawling along his skin. Most people would've hated the stinging sensation, but Franco perversely relished it. Truly, it was the only small blessing received from his association with his partner. The tickling of his nerves matched the thrill of a new hunt. Did his partner mean to sanction this kill? If so, this was an order he'd willingly take. And perhaps since his partner only wanted her dead, he’d be none too picky about the method. Maybe Franco would get to fuck her to death anyway.
"Things are moving fast now." The crackling on the line juxtaposed with the velvety voice sent shivers of revulsion and need across Franco's cold skin, causing his balls to curl up tighter against his body with anticipation. "In three days everything will be in place. Either get rid of her before she gets nosey and discovers things she has no business discovering, or she'll have to die."
That was easy for his partner to say when he was physically distant and out of harm’s way. Franco had Father Marcus and a bishop sent by the Pope to deal with, as well as his other duties. "This one can't just disappear without anyone noticing. She has friends, business associates. People know where she is. They'll miss her and come looking."
"And in three days we won't be here. Let them come."
"The fact that she’s here in the first place indicates she's a stubborn little bitch. What would you suggest I do with her?"
"If she doesn't leave by morning, dispose of her."
Franco's heart leapt with excitement. Kill a pale-skinned blonde? Christ, yes. After playing with her for a while, if he could find the time. "Kill her?"
He needed clarification. No wrong moves. His partner was a man without humor. His methods of retribution made Franco's games look like child's play. The student had surpassed the master, and his partner now had skills Franco had only imagined before they met. Franco got an erection just thinking about the other man's methods of persuasion and reward. He both scared the living shit out of him and excited him unbearably. There was nothing the other man wouldn't do, no depravity he shied away from, no punishment too extreme.
Catarina had seen to that. Franco had been encouraged to watch, to learn at the feet of a dominatrix who used blood like an engine used oil.
“Don’t give me fucking details. I’ve got work to do. Just do it.”
"In my play room?"
"My playroom. If you have time to 'play,' then, by all means, do whatever the hell you want with her. Just make sure her body isn't found to lead anyone back to us."
"Don't worry," Franco assured him. "It will be done to your satisfaction."
"Don’t take too long. We have a goal. She isn't part of it. End of story."
"Tonight?"
"With a bishop in the house, you fucking moron?"
"I can make it look like an accident."
There was an annoyed growl at the other end of the phone, underscoring just how incompetent his partner believed him to be. "Never mind. You're incapable of that kind of planning. You play rough, and the girls die. You've gotten away with it so far, but no one believes those were accidents. Let the woman go up to the mine. I'll instruct the men to dispose of her there."
#
After observing the apparition, Xavier had attempted, at length, to convince him to authenticate what he'd seen. Daklin left Xavier to his prayers at midnight, telling him he was going for a run. In his own room, Daklin stripped off the robes, changed into lightweight running pants, and then went out.
By order of Xavier—-ironic that his host wanted to protect the bishop on his run—-fellow T-FLAC operative, and Xavier's personal bodyguard, Ramse Ortiz accompanied Daklin.
"Call me Ram," the operative told him as they moved through the dark village at a fucking excruciating limp that wasn't even a pretense at a jog. Two thigh surgeries down, five to go. He’d pass, thanks.
"How many surgeries?" Ram indicated his bum leg.
Word was Ramse Ortiz had been a physician before switching to full time operative. There was a story there, but Daklin wasn't about to share his medical history with him. "A couple."
"We won't compensate for your speed when we get up there."
Or lack thereof. "It won't be an issue."
"If you say so." Ramse Ortiz had no trouble keeping pace with him on the uneven, wet cobbled streets. It was good to be out in, fresh air that smelled of wet earth and green foliage. It had rained earlier, and the musical score of water dripping from the eaves mingled with the o
ccasional cry of a bird, and the gruff note of a boar calling to its mate from the jungle surrounding the small village.
Ram was six feet of solid muscle. Dark eyes, dark hair. Like Daklin, his sharp eyes saw everything.
A native Cosian, Ram’s father Renán lived in the village. It was he who'd tripped over intel, which he'd passed on to his son, who'd alerted T-FLAC. They, in turn, had put Ram in touch with Father Marcus.
Discovering the priest was a former T-FLAC operative had been a revelation to those sent to investigate Ortiz’s intel. They'd had no idea. Through Father Marcus Cawcutt, they quickly discovered that it wasn't just any explosive compound being excavated in the played-out emerald mines in the mountains shadowing the village; it was E-1x.
Los Santos, Cosio, was the point source of rawE-1x. The discovery was huge. But close on the heels of that earth-shattering intel was chatter that something big was about to go down. Something so large, so spectacularly bad that T-FLAC's intel was lit up like the Fourth of July. A more literally earth-shattering event.
T-FLAC had little time, and a compelling need to discover what, who and where. Ramse and four men had been dispatched immediately to the mining town. But they'd needed someone inside the house who was a confidant of Francisco Xavier. The plot to give Xavier a religious apparition had been born. With Marcus's help, the application to the Pope had been fast tracked so that Bishop Daklin could show up immediately. In the real world, that process would’ve taken months, if not years.
The Pope, aware of the ramifications should this op go south, had reluctantly given, if not exactly his blessing, his okay to the ruse. All the ducks were now in a row.
"In here." Ortiz indicated a narrow staircase inside a small, rundown two-story apartment building on the other side of town. Pitch dark, no sign of life.
The other four members of Daklin's A-team waited on the second floor in a dimly lit one-room apartment. The building, a hovel, was barely habitable by animals, let alone humans. It used to house miners and plant workers, but was occupied at the moment only by their T-FLAC special ops support team. Thick black fabric covered the windows, making the heat inside oppressive.
Ryan Gibbs and Travis Nyhuis occupied the two bottomed out lawn chairs. Daklin and Ortiz squeezed into the small space, then propped themselves up against the wall on either side of the falling-off-its-hinges bathroom door at the back of the room.
Kai Turley, and Angel Aiza, standing in front of the two large screen monitors, turned to greet them.
A jerry-rigged swamp cooler, going full blast, wheezed out muggy, mold-scented air. Unlike the crappy apartment, the tech was state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line. Black power cables snaked across the floor, connected to powerful back-up super batteries. One monitor showed night vision views of the mine building and surrounding area. A light strafed swaths of dark ground, illuminating the patrolling soldiers and long low building that fronted the mine entrance itself.
The other monitor sectioned off the image into twelve squares, each showing an infrared image of various rooms in the hacienda. Any movement and the computer would alert them to the activity and they'd zoom in.
Aiza turned away from his keyboard to address Daklin. Husky, but without an ounce of fat, five nine-ish, his features were unremarkable. He'd blend in anywhere without a second glance. "How far back you want me to go?" He was a fellow bodyguard for el jefe and would be on duty at the hacienda tomorrow. Of Basque origin, and based in San Francisco, he was frequently assigned ops in South America. He could apparently change his vocal inflections to mimic the locals of any Latin country.
"When we went up to his quarters," Daklin instructed. He didn't want to relive the hours spent at dinner with River Sullivan. She was distracting enough in real time.
Agonizing pain shot through Daklin’s leg. He resisted clamping his hand on his thigh. The scars, both surgical and bomb produced, and the pain, were no one's business, and best kept to himself. Hell, even he didn't want to acknowledge just how fucking much pain he was in. It was a sign of weakness he refused to give in to.
His body had always been a dependable machine, trained and honed, kept in prime condition for the work he loved. He'd never given his own physical limitations a thought. Now he had to consider them just to fucking cross the street.
He'd hated living with the uncertainty that the leg might not ever be the way it had been before two encounters with E-1x. This op would remove that uncertainty. There was a simple beauty in that. Daklin hated this agony-ridden body. He, it, craved a drink to combat the pain.
Damn, the beer smelled good. He could practically taste the bitter hops, and swallowed against the phantom sensation of the snap, crackle, and pop of the effervescence trailing down his throat. His fingers flexed, itching for the play of a cold metal can in his hand. Resolutely, he helped himself to a bottle of water from the cooler, then returned to his position on the back wall and cracked the top.
He took a slug of flat, tepid water.
Not the same. Not nearly the same.
He sure as shit refused to end up like his father, a sloppy, belligerent drunk who couldn’t hold a job. At some point, Daklin had felt confident that one day he’d get to the point where he didn’t crave it. Confidence that failure wasn't an option came easy to him; because he could do anything he put his mind to.
He’d goddamn well wanted that life: a life where there were so many good things happening that drinking himself into oblivion on a regular basis wasn’t the one and only thing for which he lived.
Now he was sober by necessity and fucking unhappy about it.
Soon he wouldn’t be sober, and then he’d be dead.
Win fucking win.
A small black lizard scurried up the wall and wriggled through a crack near the ceiling. Daklin propped a shoulder on the filthy, rough-plastered wall and returned his focus to a recorded feed of earlier events at the hacienda.
"Just a head's up," Gibbs told him. He and Nyhuis worked security at the plant. Gibbs was skilled at explosives. Daklin had worked with him a couple of years ago in Spain. The guy was solid and knew his shit. "The connection could go at any minute. Xavier has a jammer scrambling signals. There's a system lockdown in play. The security protocol allows administrators to tightly control which users can execute."
"Is there a fingerprint list?" Daklin asked.
"We found an .exe output file. It blocks unapproved applications. HQ is trying some new shit with the satellite to see if we can't boost the signals from our end. Spotty at best. It's like we're in a giant Faraday cage."
Daklin had already gotten that memo. But they weren’t in a Faraday cage, which was a hollow conductor built to shield its contents from static electric fields and electromagnetic radiation. One the size necessary to cover the valley was physically impossible. Still, a powerful electric force field was blocking and cancelling out electrical charges for miles around. And that was a problem, since it blocked all signals and communications with their other teams, their Control at HQ, and each other.
He rolled the bottle over his sweaty chest. "Let's see what you've got."
Five
The feed showed himself and Xavier entering Xavier's bedroom. He looked like the real deal in the pink cassock, white rochet, and black Chimere. All he needed was a pointy hat and a purer heart and he’d be ready for a goddamn visit to the Vatican.
A large stone fireplace in the bedroom, filled with wood, sat unlit. Thick burgundy velvet drapes with miles of braided gold cording and tassels were drawn tightly over the windows.
"Has Echo located the jammer?" Echo was their eyes in the sky and tech unit on this op. Daklin chugged half the water, eyes on the screen as Xavier proudly pointed out a Saint Mary Magdalene relic, holy water, and a bronze miniature of the crucifixion. Xavier claimed all pieces came from the Vatican as gifts after hours and hours of prayer and devotion. And a shitload of money, no doubt.
He'd offered, and Daklin had declined, a gift of one of his most prized possessio
ns; a small, thirteenth century, Russian pre-Mongolian pectoral brass Encolpion Crucifix cross obtained-—Daklin was sure illegally-—in Russia. Xavier was out to impress, and, if necessary, bribe his way into the Church's good graces to authenticate his apparition.
"All they've told us is that our comms are manually blocked," Ram told him. "It's weirdly erratic. Sometimes, we have the capability. Mostly, we don't. My father says it's been this way for months. He’s always complaining that he never has any bars on his phone."
"We’re all working on finding the jamming device," Turley added. He was a slight, sinewy black guy with intelligent eyes and an upbeat, professional vibe. A pilot, he flew anything with wings or rotors. "None of us wants to go in blind."
Daklin swigged his water. "Thermals?" So far, Nyhuis had yet to contribute. Daklin glanced at the back of the guy's bald head. There were only six operatives in the valley. He couldn't afford any dead wood. "Anything to add, Nyhuis?"
"Nah, not right now." He went back to cleaning his nails with a pocketknife.
Ortiz shook his head. "Nada on the thermals. And nada to our ground penetrating radar. When our comms are down, we're completely blind."
Not being able to communicate with his team on the ground was a problem. Not having the capability to see inside the building that was near the mine, and the mineshaft itself, was a major setback. "We need to fix this ASAP," Daklin said, stating the obvious. Then he addressed Turley. "Find some old fashioned walkie-talkies." With luck, Control might be eavesdropping from his all-seeing, all-knowing, op oversight position from HQ in Montana. They were keeping a special eye and ear on him, no doubt. They trusted Daklin's expertise to do the job, but had told him flat out they were profoundly worried he'd fuck up.
So much for the vote of confidence.
"Any updates on our intel?"
