Rhodes's Reward: A SEALs of Honor World Book (Heroes for Hire 4)

by Dale Mayer

  He clasped her hands in his, tugging her forward. “It’ll be just fine.”

  Chapter 15

  She plastered a smile on her face and asked a question as they approached the kitchen. “Do you think we’ll have to go back to Dallas?”

  “I doubt it.” They walked in, smiled at everybody, and filled two cups of coffee, while still talking. “No need for us to drive up there again.”

  On that note he turned to face Levi and asked, “Any update?”

  Levi shook his head. “Nothing worthwhile.” He studied Rhodes and asked, “How you feeling? You took quite a blow to your head.”

  “It doesn’t appear to have broken the skin though, right?” Sienna asked, worriedly studying his head. She turned to look at Ice. “It’s just like a concussion, correct?”

  More comfortable now, Sienna walked around the table and sat down across from Rhodes, beside Ice.

  Sienna looked at Rhodes critically and shrugged. “Obviously whatever it was didn’t hold him down too long. If it’d been me who had been hit in the head …” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t be awake for days.”

  Rhodes glared at her. “You were hit in the head and knocked unconscious—and I tried to get you to stay in the hospital—remember?”

  She winced, feeling foolish, Rhodes’s injury having superseded her own. “I … forgot.”

  “Well, I haven’t. And I’ll have enough nightmares from that one time already, thank you very much.”

  She laughed. “I’m not planning on getting kidnapped or hit in the head again anytime soon.”

  Rhodes turned to look at Levi and Ice. “As we must have been followed to the gas station, and that’s where I was attacked, have you considered we could’ve been all the way here too?”

  “Stone is in the control room right now. He’s been searching for any kind of traffic or suspicious activity around us.”

  Rhodes smiled. “I figured you were on it, but because we didn’t talk before now, I wasn’t sure.”

  Sienna felt her jaw drop as she glared at him. “And you didn’t think to mention that possibility the whole time I drove home?”

  “Would it have done any good?” he asked bluntly. “You were doing what you could to get us here. That’s what counted. And you were doing a damn good job at it. If we’d needed more support from the team they’d have come and helped us. But we didn’t. We were good. You were great.”

  “I just do not think the way you guys do.” She slumped back into her chair and rubbed her temple. “I told you I don’t do trouble,” she wailed.

  “Good thing.” Ice smiled at her and patted her hand gently. “You went through enough yesterday. The wounded leading the wounded home. We’re just grateful you both made it safely here.”

  “What now then?” Sienna asked. “Did you get to update Bullard?”

  “I spoke with him not long ago, told him what happened to you and Rhodes. He’s got some men heading over to check the charity run by J. R. Wilson. Bullard says just his check of the exterior of the warehouse is suspicious as hell. And he wants to have a better look.”

  “Can he do that?” Sienna asked, looking from Levi to Rhodes and back again.

  The corner of Levi’s mouth kicked up. “This is Bullard we’re talking about. And Africa. Although there are rules everywhere, some over there are slightly different. At least for him.”

  She wondered about that. But Bullard had a lot of connections. And he wasn’t green in this field. Whereas she was. She relaxed some at those thoughts.

  Lissa walked in just then. She beamed when she saw Sienna and rushed over to hug her. “Oh, my God! Are you feeling okay? I couldn’t believe it when Stone told me what happened.” She crouched down beside Sienna and gently cupped her cheek. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” And in true Lissa form she wrapped her arms around Sienna and hugged her again.

  Sienna pulled back slightly, wondering how she got so lucky as to find not just these men but these women as well. “I’m fine, honest. It was a bit rough yesterday morning. The worst part was, according to Rhodes, the two guys who kidnapped me were young teenage punks and could barely carry me, so they basically dragged me down the stairs. When I woke up, I had more spots that hurt than I thought were possible.”

  Lissa winced. “That sounds absolutely horrible.”

  Sienna grinned. “Yeah, that wasn’t the highlight of my day. Neither was finding Rhodes knocked out on the ground.” She cast a teasing eye across the table. “No way could I lift him. I was ready to call 911 to get somebody to help me load the lug.”

  Everyone laughed. She looked over at Levi. “Any update on the men who kidnapped me? I understand the attack on the DA’s office probably took precedence, but it would be nice to hear of those two men’s fates.”

  “They will be put away for a long time for hurting you,” Lissa said loyally. She sneaked into a spot between them, the three women now sitting together.

  “Robert said they were still talking, giving up names,” Levi told her. “With any luck this issue will be over soon.”

  “Except for the last guy who killed everybody,” she said bitterly. “I’ll sleep well tonight if they have number seven in jail too.”

  “You’ll sleep just fine regardless,” Rhodes said calmly. “Everyone is out looking for the man. He’s got to be on cameras somewhere in the building. They will find him. Don’t you worry.”

  “Except he followed us to the vehicle and gas station.”

  “But we don’t know if it was him or just someone he hired,” Levi said.

  “So that makes it better?” Sienna slumped in her chair. “That just means there are more assholes out there gunning for us.”

  “But you’re safe here.” Alfred walked in then. He took a look at Rhodes and Sienna and said, “Glad to hear you two are back home. If you want to clean off the table, dinner will be ready in about thirty minutes.”

  Sienna straightened. “Oh, great! I’m famished.”

  Rhodes laughed. “When are you not?”

  Lissa confessed at her side, “I’m looking forward to the next meal too.”

  Merk called out from the doorway, “Are you ladies ever not hungry?”

  Sienna grinned at Merk and Katina as they walked in, holding hands. She turned toward Levi and said, “You should change the company name from Heroes for Hire to Heroes from Heaven.”

  An immediate shocked silence was broken by a giggle, coming from the most unexpected person. Ice couldn’t hold back.

  Levi stood up, raised his chin and glared at her, but no heat was behind it as he said, “The company’s name is Legendary Security. The Heroes for Hire was just a nickname. And it sure as hell won’t be Heroes from Heaven.” He snorted. “Bad enough everybody around here is pairing up. It’s like a bloody love nest instead of a compound.” And he walked out.

  Ice tried to get to her feet, but was laughing too hard. She turned to look at Sienna and said, “Oh, I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.” She reached over and gave Sienna a big hug, “Good for you.” Then she got up and followed Levi.

  Rhodes shook his head. “That’s just demoralizing, that’s what that is.”

  “What, heroes?” Sienna asked. “Heroes for Hire makes sense, and you guys bash that name around lots too.”

  “Yeah, Heroes for the Heart has been mentioned too, but Heroes from Heaven?”

  “Well, I think it’s a lovely name,” Lissa said with a smile. “And I might just keep using it.”

  “Not if you don’t want an all-out war,” Rhodes warned. “As a joke that’s one thing, but don’t ever mean it.”

  Sienna looked over at him. “I guess this is some kind of an ego thing?”

  Lissa looked at him too. “Because Heroes for the Heart sounds lovely too,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  Merk walked around the table, bent down and kissed her. “You are lovely. But there’s no way in hell I would allow a name like that. This is not a romantic retreat here.”
<
br />   Sienna batted her eyes at him. “But it could be.”

  “Ha.” Merk flashed a grin at her. “Not everybody gets to spend the day in bed, you know?” He turned that knowing look on Rhodes before flashing back at her. “Must be nice to have your own hero from heaven.” And he headed into the kitchen to give Alfred a hand.

  Beside her Lissa giggled. She leaned close to Sienna and whispered, “Don’t tell him this, but we spent a lot of days in bed.”

  The two women chuckled. Rhodes stood up. “Okay, my turn to leave now.”

  Sienna quickly but gently kicked him under the table. “You can’t. You’re helping us clean the table and get ready for our meal. Alfred said the food is coming.”

  She and Lissa both hopped to their feet and cleared the cups and collected the miscellaneous dishes. They walked into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and came back with a big white tablecloth.

  By the time the table was set, Alfred brought out the food. The rest of the gang slowly drifted back into the room. Nothing like a meal to bring a family together. And she realized that was what this really was. And she was so blessed to have joined it.

  *

  When he left the military, Rhodes hadn’t expected to end up in a scenario like this. The men he worked with here were his family. They’d been brothers in arms in the military and best friends. Ice had naturally joined them, and Rhodes had never felt like he was losing any part of Levi because of his relationship with Ice. And as they’d all slowly come together with their own partners, Rhodes realized just how special this truly was. With the increasing number they had here to actually maintain a positive happy family, well, it was something out of his experience.

  What would it be like to have their numbers grow further? There were other men, like Logan and Harrison, who had moved into the compound and who knew if Flynn would as well. He’d done well protecting Anna and her animal shelter when he’d been given the chance. The team had discussed Flynn’s execution of that job, and it had been a group decision to bring him on board. Flynn was a character, and Rhodes looked forward to seeing him again, and Rhodes was also dying to meet Anna, as Flynn had a lot to say about her. The last words out of his mouth on the issue had been, “Good riddance.”

  Katina, who’d overheard Rhodes laughing at Flynn, instead of being upset, had just said, “It’d be interesting to get Anna’s take on this.”

  Maybe they would now. As Katina was hoping to have her friend visit her at the compound.

  Rhodes suspected Flynn wasn’t anywhere near as untouched by the Anna experience as he tried to make it sound. And Rhodes had to admit that finding Sienna made him want the same opportunity for all his buddies.

  Alfred sat down at the head of the table as always, with Levi at the other end, and said, “Bon appétit.”

  They all dug in. Rhodes didn’t know what the name for this concoction was, but it was meat and vegetables smothered in one huge flaky pastry, and it was freaking delicious.

  “Bullard phoned,” Levi said when everyone had refilled their plates and sat back down again. “They’re going into the warehouse tonight.”

  Silence. Rhodes glanced over at him and said, “Wish I was there.”

  “He’ll go in with a tactical team and will let us know what they find.”

  “I’m surprised it wasn’t some kind of joint effort with us.”

  “If we had confirmation they were the ones responsible for the goings-on here, then it would have been. But we don’t have that yet.”

  Rhodes glanced at Sienna to see her gaze down on her plate. “It’ll be fine,” he reassured her.

  She lifted her face to his, then swept her gaze over all the people seated at the table and said, “These men are killers. One got away, and we know the charity has offices in Dallas. Is there no way to see what they’re doing here?”

  Rhodes caught Levi’s look as he studied her. He chewed methodically as they all considered the issue. “Find proof they are involved, then we can.”

  She stared directly at Levi for a long moment. Then nodded. “I’ll work on that after dinner.”

  Rhodes turned to look at her, a question in his eyes. But he thought better of it. Maybe she had a few tricks up her sleeve they didn’t know about. He was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was just reaching, hoping she could find something to put this nightmare to rest. For that he couldn’t blame her.

  Chapter 16

  After dinner, Sienna grabbed a cup of coffee and made her way back to her desk in the office. It was late; she was tired, but her mind buzzed. Surely there was more information to find. With no one around to hear her, she freely talked to herself out loud. And that made her feel better as she went over what she knew so far.

  She brought up her notes on her laptop, refreshed the page, then walked to the table where the spreadsheets still lay. Pulling up a chair she grabbed a blank notepad and emptied her mind. She studied the number and letter combinations. It might be names and numbers, but there had to be more to be found here. It would help if she had more sheets, with more data and options, easier to confirm too, because she’d have a larger sample to work with. She took the complex number and letter combinations and wrote down the information she had already decoded with the letters on the side. Then she took a look at the numbers lined up. Was it also in a pattern, or were they something simpler? Like an invoice number, purchase dates, or could they be random? “No, not random,” she whispered. “It’s too specific to be.”

  There had to be a pattern. It didn’t mean she would know what it was. Then she turned to look at the spreadsheets Bullard had sent. These papers had been found in the young IT guy’s desk. She’d started with the first but hadn’t caught anything. Just more numbers. This time just straight numbers and columns. The final column appeared to be monetary amounts—a decimal point two digits in from the right. But no dollar sign. And for this level she doubted anybody dealt in change. But accountants the world over kept precise track of every transaction. She put that page down and picked up another.

  By the time she had the third one, an idea sparked in the back of her mind. She grabbed her notepad and tossed around codes, numbers, and ideas. Finally she sat back and noticed it had been over two hours, and she had a glimmer of truth in her hand. But she needed Bullard to confirm. She also needed to review the names she had gathered so far, including the six dead gunmen.

  She got up and walked back to her laptop. She’d noted the various people her decoding had brought up. She added the six people from the shooting in Dallas, wondering if she should pull up Robert’s name too.

  She went back to the spreadsheets, checked every one that had an R.F., considering the numbers behind it. If he was involved—and that was a small if—he was the only one she knew of who might confirm some of these numbers.

  What if these were bank accounts? What if they were payments into one with his name on it? She had several from the Swiss Bank.

  Back at her laptop again she printed off every Swiss Bank account. Then with a highlighter, she quickly cross-checked them and found nothing. Now that was wrong. She knew something had to be here; she could feel it. And then she saw it. In an attempt to confuse the account numbers, the first and last characters had been switched. And with that knowledge, she quickly decoded all the bank account numbers in front of the initials. Now she needed somebody to confirm the name on these accounts.

  “This is it,” she said jubilantly.

  “This is what?” Rhodes asked.

  Surprised, she looked up to see him leaning against the doorjamb, watching her.

  “I think I solved it.”

  He came around to look at the data she had.

  She quickly showed him how the accounts unscrambled onto the scanned ledger sheets with the ripped edges. “I think these are the accounts and names they belong to.” She sat back. “And I can’t let go of the idea that R.F. is Robert Forrest, the DA.”

  Rhodes shook his head. “No, I don’t think
so. R.F. could mean a lot of people. He’d been with us. He had ample opportunity to set us up or to get rid of us himself.”

  She frowned. “That’s true,” she said slowly. “And if he had hired somebody to go in the building when we were there, it would’ve been a simple enough case to have taken us out. He had a cell phone with him.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t making him be the bad guy. I was just fitting the name to the R.F. initials.”

  “Robert is only one of the many possibilities.”

  She nodded. “And that takes us down a rabbit hole because there’s probably hundreds, if not thousands, of potential combinations.”

  “Hundreds of thousands.” He tapped the papers on the table. “But this is interesting, and very good.” He glanced down at her. “We can ask Bullard if he knows any of these people on his end. And we can also get somebody here on ours, someone a little higher up, to help us out and get some names for these accounts.”

  “In fact, that is something Robert could probably do for us, right?” she asked drily. She glanced down at her watch. “It’s seven. Probably too late to call him now.”

  Rhodes laughed. “We could certainly email him. If he’s working, then he’ll be on it and answer pretty fast.”

  With him sitting beside her, she quickly typed up an email, documenting bits and pieces that she’d found. She hit Send.

  He held out a hand and asked, “You ready to leave the office now?”

  Her laptop dinged immediately. She sat back down and looked. “It’s Robert.”

  She heard Rhodes’s heavy sigh beside her and realized he probably had different plans for her this evening than what she was currently doing. She smiled. Now that she could get behind. Still … “Let me just see what he says.”

  She brought up his email in response. There were only two words, thank you. She sat back, stared at them and shrugged. “Just because I’m excited about it, doesn’t mean anybody else is.”

  He chuckled. “And Robert is probably way too tired to deal with any of this.”