“My father was in...an agency. We were in Italy, and he was working to take down a big crime lord. One night my father was taken, beaten and dumped on the front step of our home. It was his first warning to back off. He didn’t.
“The shooting was his second warning. Mama and I were walking through the marketplace. Then there were two men with guns. She pushed me under a cart and covered me with her body. Her sweat made the perfume stronger.”
He stood and strode back to the minibar. Grabbing a small bottle of scotch, he downed a healthy swallow. He carried the bottle back with him.
“I felt every bullet hit her body. Three hit me, but after passing through… That was my father’s second warning.”
Grace couldn’t say anything for at least a minute. The horror of that day was almost too much for her very maternal heart to bear.
Alex took another swallow of scotch. Then another. “I’m telling you this for a reason, Grace.”
Yes, because she’d pushed him to it. “I don’t think Danny needs to hear this for a good long time.”
“Not for the boy.” He reached across and threaded his fingers through hers. “My mother baked cookies that could make a grown man cry.”
What the hell was that? A little emotional jab as payback for getting him to actually reveal something personal about himself?
“But I didn’t love Mama for her cookies,” he continued with a small smile. “I remember her holding me when I was sick. The way a good report from school lit up her face.”
Now she knew where this was going. “She loved you. I love Danny. I get that. But a little boy should have—”
“A mother who will sacrifice everything for him.” Alex cupped her chin in his hand, looking her in the eye. “Whether we’re three feet tall or six feet, all we need is the unconditional love of a good woman.”
Chapter Eight
They decided to toss the boat Rustikov had mentioned in his initial instructions to Grace. The Intrepid hadn’t factored into their hunt for Danny, but the team hoped it would yield some clues helpful in locating their new prey.
Alex dropped the data he’d been reading on the desk and rubbed his eyes. The registration was either totally bogus—buried in false identities the Devlin Group couldn’t match with known bad guys—or the boat was totally a non-factor. The only thing he knew for sure was that two hours previous, three people had boarded The Intrepid and only two left. The possibility was there Escobar or his employer had just chosen a random boat parked at the marina, not believing they’d make it that far. It was a slim possibility, but real, nevertheless. They might be about to scare the crap out of some guy just looking to catch some fish.
The job of putting together the strike on the boat fell to him, of course. And he wished like hell it didn’t.
Gallagher was the best equipment man in the business, and Alex needed him coordinating and running real-time surveillance on the exterior of the boat while holding a sniper position. That was a no-brainer. The headache came from choosing Carmen or Grace to go through the door with him.
Grace had been his partner in the field, and they’d just proven they still had it—from split-second precision to gut-wrenching orgasm. She was trained and experienced in going into an op like this. Carmen was more the stealthy, undercover type. Grace was a rocket-launcher, and Carmen was poison.
Which made Carmen the natural choice for staying behind and watching the suitcase.
And the three of them were watching him now, waiting for him to assign their roles—all of them knowing the logical choices for each job. There shouldn’t even be a question. But he hesitated, still wracking his brain for any explanation he could give them for leaving Grace behind that wouldn’t blow up in his face.
He’d never been soft on her before. They were younger—wilder—and the danger had just been part of the rush. But now she was not only a mother, but the mother of his own son. Despite her assurances she was doing the right thing, he was having a little trouble keeping himself from locking her in the closet to keep her safe.
He didn’t expect her to be like his own mother—a fresh apron and homemade bread every day—but she didn’t need to go throwing herself in front of bullets, either.
“You want my opinion?” Gallagher asked, clearly picking up on his boss’s hesitation.
“No.” Alex looked at Grace. She didn’t look so soft and maternal now. Her lips were still a little puffy from his kisses—hell, his own back still stung from her fingernails. And she had murder in her eyes. “Carmen, you hold down the fort. Gallagher, you’re in support, and Grace…you’re with me.”
He didn’t like it, but any other decision would not only disrespect Grace, but would make him look weak. And he hadn’t gotten where he was by looking weak.
“Let’s gear up,” he said. “I want it dark, but not so late somebody moving around the marina will attract attention.”
Two hours later, the back of Alex’s neck tingled as they walked quickly toward the boat, guns drawn. It was quiet, too quiet, so he was fairly confident the man who’d stayed behind had done so because he was dead. But until he was sure, they’d take every possible precaution.
He boarded first, almost silently. Away from the light of the dock, he paused, letting his vision adjust, relying on his hearing as Grace did the same. Nothing on the boat was moving. There was only the slow, quiet slosh of water against the hull.
Alex moved toward the cabin and paused by the stairwell leading down to the door. He didn’t like this part. Having only a single door in and out of a site made him jumpy, and he motioned for Grace to hold.
He tapped his earpiece and Gallagher, high above them on a nearby rooftop, responded immediately. “No visible or audible activity.”
That was as much reassurance as he was going to get. After giving Grace the hold signal again, he reached out with his toe and gently nudged at the door. It moved slightly under the pressure, which meant it wasn’t latched, but there was no response from within.
With his left hand he signaled a three-count, then he went through the door. He went high and left, with Grace coming in on his heels, low and to the right. The smell of death hit him simultaneously with the realization there was nobody in the cabin.
Nobody alive, anyway.
Temporarily ignoring the bodies slumped over the small galley table, they swept every nook and cranny of the cabin before holstering their weapons. Alex gave Gallagher the all-clear signal, with orders to continue surveillance on the exterior of the boat.
“Hard to tell how long they’ve been dead, what with this godawful heat,” Grace said, examining the female body with gloved hands. “She must be the one who called Danny’s school.”
When she grasped the man’s hair and lifted his face from the table, Alex’s stomach clenched and he risked the stench to take a deep, steadying breath. “That’s Escobar, Grace.”
She dropped the guy’s head as if it had scalded her and took a step back. Crouching, she examined the features. “No, it’s not. There might be the slightest resemblance, but it’s not him.”
“I told you he was wearing a new face, and that’s the face.”
“No.” She stood again, shaking her head. “No, that’s not him because I’m going to kill Ricardo Escobar. Some two-bit scumbag is not going to steal that from me by shooting him first.”
“Just be glad he’s dead. At least you can give Danny that much.”
“Shit!” Grace kicked the side of the bench seat.
Alex tuned her out and did a visual sweep of the table. Some loose papers with diagrams and scribbled notes he folded up and shoved in his pocket. He took out a tiny digital camera and started taking pictures of the debris lying around the cabin. Wires. Some plastic parts he couldn’t identify. A few aerial photos he tucked under his shirt.
“Evac!” Gallagher shouted into their ear-pieces. “Exterior clear! Scan says you tripped a timer, and you need to go now!”
Grace was one step ahead of him, flyin
g up the stairs. They ran across the deck and leapt to the dock. They were only halfway down the pier when the boat exploded in a massive ball of fire.
Alex curled himself around Grace as the heat seared him and the concussion of the blast made his ears ring. She’d hate his shielding her that way, but he didn’t care. And he wasn’t a bit surprised when she elbowed him in the gut.
“Get off me,” she demanded.
Flaming debris had stopped falling from the sky, so he complied, letting her think it had been her decision. “You intact?”
Grace sat up and rolled her shoulders, wincing a little bit. And it was obvious to him she’d landed hard on her left knee. But she wouldn’t complain. She never did.
“That gets the old adrenaline pumping,” she said, laughing weakly while plucking a splinter from her palm.
“Does that mean we get to have sex again?”
“I need a shower.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
She paused in the act of rooting out another sliver to give him an arched look. “I think we can skip it. It’s not like anybody shot at me or anything.”
“Gallagher?”
A heavily-silenced bullet punched a hole in the wooden dock well to her left, making her jump. “How ‘bout now?”
She laughed and pushed herself to her feet before checking her comm. “Gallagher? I’m going to kick your ass later.”
“Hey, us guys gotta stick together. But you’re attracting a crowd, so either have a really public quickie, or make yourself scarce.”
When they were all assembled back in the hotel, Grace couldn’t help giving Alex another small glimpse of her maternal self.
“Let’s do some quick first aid before we dig into the stuff from the boat,” she said, steering Alex toward the kitchen area.
He’d gotten pretty beat up doing his white knight routine back at the marina. As if she didn’t know how to take care of herself—like all of her experience in the field just mysteriously evaporated during the miracle of childbirth.
But she wasn’t going to get in his face about it, because she’d had a glimpse of where he was coming from. Having his own mother so dishonorably and horrifyingly shot down was going to impact how he reacted to the possibility of the mother of his own son being shot. It was natural for him to not want her involved.
She had to give him credit for his even taking her to the boat. It had just about killed him to do the right thing. He’d done it, though, and she was beginning to think they just might make it through this without killing each other.
As soon as they reached the tiny, semi-private kitchen area, Alex used his entire body to press her against the counter.
“Are you going to kiss my boo-boos and make them better?” he asked in a low voice, and she didn’t look directly at his crooked grin lest she find herself with her pants down around her ankles.
“No, but I think you might need a tetanus shot.”
That took care of the grin. “Oh, no you don’t. But I think an ember might have burned through the seat of my pants if you’d like to kiss my ass.”
Grace put her hand on his chest and gave him a shove backward. “Not now, Alex. We have work to do.”
“So later?”
Probably. “Stop acting like a horny teenager and let me see the damage.”
Neither of them needed more than hydrogen peroxide and the removal of a few more splinters. Grace’s knee ached like hell, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Alex’s shoulder looked like it felt about the same.
Gallagher was pouring over what little they’d grabbed from the boat when they reentered the living room. Carmen had gone out to touch base with a contact she’d made at a shabby local watering hole.
“Guantánamo Bay,” Gallagher said without looking up.
Grace could see he was looking at the aerial photos Alex had stuffed in his shirt. “What the hell does that have to do with this?”
“It seems like whoever took Danny—or paid whoever took him—plans to drop the purloined poison on Gitmo by way of RC airplanes.”
Grace laughed. “What kind of half-assed plan is that? Toy airplanes?”
“Remote-controlled. Fast.” Alex was nodding to himself as he spoke. “Quiet. Expendable. Under the radar.”
“Sounds pretty whole-assed to me,” Gallagher put in.
“But why?” It didn’t even begin to make sense to Grace.
“Whoever’s after this toxin would stand to benefit in some way from the world being really pissed off about the prisoners held there dying. He’s already invested a great deal into the plan, too. Even if it was acceptable to scrap it, he’s too far in now.”
Grace shook her head, then spoke over her shoulder as she went in search of a soda. “This is ridiculous. We have all these random scraps of cloth, and no matter how we try to stitch them together, the quilt’s seriously crooked.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Here’s what we know,” Alex said. “Or what we can reasonably surmise. For whatever reason, somebody wants to wipe out the current population of Guantánamo Bay. They found just the right poison and the right moron willing to sell it to them. We’ve cleaned up several messes for this particular pharmaceutical company in the past.”
“I bet they knew that, too,” Grace interrupted. “So they knew there was a good chance we’d clean this one up as well. They had somebody standing by to grab Danny if The Devlin Group was able to get the poison before they launched.”
Alex nodded. “This was a big operation. It required a lot of planning, a lot of money and a lot of people.”
“If Grace had managed to get the jump on you, their contingency plan would have worked, too,” Gallagher said.
Grace tried not to let her embarrassment at yet another reminder of Alex’s winning technique show. And even she was glad she’d ultimately failed at playing into the enemies’ hands.
“Now…motive, anyone?” Alex asked. “Obviously money, but somebody was willing to write a blank check to put the US on the international hot seat.”
“Oh, well that narrows it right down,” Gallagher said, and then snorted.
Alex shook his head. “Part of this seems almost personal, I think. Somebody knew enough about The Devlin Group to know not only that we’ve worked for that pharmaceutical company before, but where to find Grace. And they knew about Danny and my being his father. Even I didn’t know that. This is somebody who’d been keeping tabs long term without us knowing.”
“They didn’t necessarily know about you being Danny’s father,” Grace argued. “Danny being my son, and my connection with you may have been enough. But I agree even that knowledge means long-term, undetected surveillance.”
“I agree,” Alex stated, and Grace heard the tightness in his voice. “To recap, a psycho with too much money managed to hook up with an outfit with a serious jones for us.”
“Or the psycho with too much money is the outfit with a serious jones for us,” Gallagher added.
Grace was watching Alex, studying the emotions he could probably hide from other people play across his face. She’d not only had years of watching him try to hide his emotions, but years of watching his son do so, as well. And Alex Rossi was hiding something.
He knew more than he was telling his team, and she had to bite down on the inside of her lip to keep from calling him on it right then. Never in a million years would she believe Alex capable of being dirty, but if he was holding back information that could help the team get this job done, she’d be on the phone to Sean Devlin in seconds flat.
For a second her mind considered Devlin—he hadn’t called to follow up with her since her rather abrupt inquiry as to Rossi’s location—but Alex was looking at her with what looked alarmingly like guilt and sadness in his eyes.
“Gallagher, start compiling everything we know or could logically surmise into a report,” he said. “Grace, I need to talk to you
for a sec. Alone.”
And then his cell phone rang.
Chapter Nine
He unclipped the phone as he paused on his way to the bedroom, aware of Grace stopping behind him.
“Yeah,” he said curtly into the phone, not recognizing the incoming number.
“Good evening, Mr. Devlin? Or should I say Mr. Rossi?”
For the second time, Alex’s two identities collided. He’d been anticipating this moment, wondering what his instinctual response would be to contact with the man who’d ordered his mother’s murder. He’d expected fury, victory, bloodlust, all shadowed by sadness for his own loss. Instead he felt nothing but cool and collected, edged with a little thrill that now his game was truly afoot.
“Rossi’s fine, Mr…?”
“The Devlin name has served its purpose, then? It’s been a small source of amusement for me watching you bait me with it for decades, but this is the first time you’ve ever gotten close enough to me to step on my toes.”
Alex bit back a growl of frustration. He wanted a name. Before this thing played out—regardless of the outcome—he would know the true name of the man who killed his mother. “You hide well. But then, cowards always have the best hiding places, don’t they?”
There was a moment of tense silence, during which Alex’s adversary must have shrugged off his anger, because his voice was smooth as Italian leather when he spoke. “Say hello to Carmen, Rossi.”
The emotions came now—fury and bloodlust—knifing into his gut. Shit.
He heard the scuffle as they brought his agent to the phone, and he signaled to Gallagher what was going on. The hissed Spanish and male grunts let him know Carmen hadn’t gone down easy—and wouldn’t.
“Alex?”
“Where are you?” he asked instinctively, even though there wasn’t a chance in hell he could use the information. Assuming she even knew.
“I’m blindfolded, but it doesn’t feel like a boat. Back of a car. Moving, but smooth. High-end.”
72 Hours Page 8
