DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “When Megan began checking into the accident—despite being sidelined by this other CIA agent several times—she interfered with their own investigation. My colleague tells me that the CIA was on the verge of arresting her when she and her operatives blew the case wide open.”

  “And Hamilton and King were part of this group of CIA agents?”

  “Makes you wonder if it was a coincidence that King chose you to help him figure out who he is.”

  “Do you think he remembered Dragon in some way?”

  “I think he’s a desperate man who’s willing to use any card to get what he wants.” There was a brief pause. “You’re in over your head, Ms. Dennings. If I were you, I’d call the CIA and hand him over. They’ve been looking for him almost as long as I have.”

  “Why? What do they want from him?”

  “There seems to be some evidence that the reason he and Hamilton failed so gloriously at their job back five years ago was because they were working with the rogue CIA agent, Edgar Olsen. They were profiting from terrorist acts overseas and here in the United States.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Ingram Porter made a little bit of a snorting sound. “Have you stopped to ask him how a man with amnesia managed to rent a condo with a monthly price tag of over two thousand dollars? Or how he’s paying your firm to help him discover his own identity?”

  There was a duffle bag in the car that contained more than half a million dollars in cash …

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  “When I was doing the background check on King, I found a bank account with more than ten million dollars in it. The man grew up with a single mother who worked three jobs just to keep food on the table. He made less than fifty thousand a year the entire time he was in the CIA. And most of that he sent to his sister.” Porter sighed. “He was a damn good day trader, but he wasn’t that good.”

  “You don’t know for sure where that money came from.”

  “No, I don’t. But my client is pretty much convinced that he was up to something he shouldn’t have been. That he got in too deep and that’s why he disappeared.”

  “And maybe he disappeared because someone threatened a person he cared very deeply about.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Would the name Sabrina mean anything to you?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then a heavy sigh.

  “Bring him in, Ms. Dennings. A lot of this could be cleared up if you would simply allow me to bring my client in to speak to him. Might even help to jog his memories.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “It’d be better to do this sooner rather than later. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

  You have no idea.

  I disconnected the call and held the phone between my hands, thinking about Xander. It looked bad. Between what Luke had said and what Ingram had just told me, things really looked bad. I needed to put it all into some sort of perspective.

  What did I know?

  I knew that Xander was CIA.

  I knew that Xander worked on the Olsen case in some capacity. What that capacity was, I still wasn’t sure.

  I knew there was a collective they—but did not know if that was the CIA or someone else—who had threatened someone close to Xander to force him to leave his life in Denver.

  I knew Rebecca tried to kill him under orders from that collective they.

  That was all I knew without a doubt. And all that just created a dozen more questions whose potential answers scared the crap out of me.

  I called Jesse without really thinking about it, just needing to hear the voice of someone who loved me. She was laughing when she answered, clearly not alone.

  “I’m at the coffee shop with some friends,” she told me.

  “Good. I’m glad you’ve settled in there, Jess.”

  “Of course. School is a great place to make friends.”

  “Take care of yourself. Stay safe.”

  There was a little pause. “You okay, Rhett? You sound off.”

  “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “This case getting to you?”

  “More than you know.”

  “Well, when you get home, we’ll have a girl’s night. Make some nachos and watch some bad television.”

  I smiled. “Sounds good.”

  I didn’t know what I’d do without my sister.

  ***

  I was dozing when Xander burst through the motel room door, that pretty nurse—Sara—behind him. The nurse came straight to the bed, zeroing in on my infected leg without asking any questions. She touched it and pain shot through my leg like I could hardly believe. I didn’t think I’d ever felt pain quite that intense, not even after my attack.

  “I’ll have to remove the stitches and drain the pus. I can give you a little lidocaine, but it will still be incredibly painful.”

  “Whatever you have to do.”

  She went to work and I thought I’d go out of my mind with the pain. Xander came to sit on the bed with me, his arms around my chest, my hands in his. I was almost afraid I’d break a bone in his hand, I was holding on so tight, but he never said a word, never pulled away, never asked me to stop.

  Sara removed the stitches and drained the wound, then cleaned it with some sort of antiseptic. She gave me a shot in my hip, some sort of antibiotic, she said. It occurred to me that if she’d wanted to hurt me, she could have done it very easily.

  I didn’t miss the looks she shot at Xander while she worked on me, the looks she cast toward his hands wrapped around mine. I could feel the jealousy like it was another person in the room, staring heavily down on me. Could feel the weight of it like it was resting solidly on my shoulders.

  “I’ll come back in the morning and sew it back up. In the meantime, you need to keep it dry.”

  “Is there anything else?” Xander asked.

  She shook her head. “Just keep her still so she doesn’t cause it to bleed.”

  Xander walked her to the door. I watched through the fog of pain, my head spinning and my eyes wanting to close. When he opened the door, he touched her arm to guide her through, their eyes on one another as they spoke quietly in the doorway. I wanted to know what they were saying, but the stress on my body and the exhaustion that had slowly settled throughout the day finally took its toll. I closed my eyes and darkness descended over me.

  Trust was a funny thing. I was in pretty deep shit if I’d just trusted the wrong person.

  Chapter 14

  Hayden

  “Why didn’t he tell you? Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “Because that’s the way Luke works.”

  “Remember the last time he worked like that?”

  Megan threw me a dirty look, but it didn’t hide the fear and the uncertainty that was lying just underneath. She was as confused by Luke’s actions as I was.

  “He went around me, Megan. He told my operative not to follow a direct order. That alone is worrisome. But to know that this case involves a man who was in the CIA? That really scares me.”

  “I know. I don’t know why Luke would do what he did. He must have his reasons.”

  “We need to talk to him.”

  She snorted softly. “Don’t you think I would if I knew where he was? He’s not answering his cell.”

  “I’d guess he’s still somewhere near Rhett and the client.”

  She nodded, her thoughts clearly a whirlwind. I wanted to remind her how Luke had lied to her when he mascaraded around here as Dante Saladin. I wanted to remind her that Luke had made a practice of hiding the truth from her from the moment he supposedly retired from the CIA.

  He was the reason Peter was held by a madman for two years. He was the reason that madman was able to hide from the law for all that time. He was the reason Megan grieved her brother, believing he had died in a car accident. He was the reason Megan cried on her wedding day, left alone at the altar after Luke disappeared without warning
.

  Luke was once my best friend. He was someone who’d inspired me to embrace the Navy SEALs, to be a strong, independent man. I was lost when I met him, a child whose parents had been murdered and whose grandparents could hardly look at him without seeing what they’d lost. I never believed I could be the man my father had always imagined I would be. But then I met Luke and together we made it through the most difficult week a military recruit could face. It made me believe in myself.

  But then Luke changed. The man I knew now was not the man I knew then. And Megan was continuously paying the price for that.

  I went to her and took her upper arms in my hands. Megan and my Sam were best friends from childhood. I’d promised Sam, that no matter what happened, I would always look after Megan. I had no intention of breaking the promise.

  “I’ll find him and I’ll fix this. You can count on that.”

  She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “I know. I just … I thought we’d left all this behind us when Peter came home.”

  “So did I.” I brushed a tear from her cheek. “Maybe this is the end of it.”

  She moved into me and rested her head on my chest. I slipped my arms around her and pulled her close.

  We’d spent a lot of time together after Sam died. We’d both loved her in a way no one else could understand or appreciate. And we grieved hard, both of us, taking comfort only in the fact that the other hurt just as much. It was an odd sort of comfort, but it brought us close, closer than we probably should have been.

  When I thought about moving on, it was often Megan’s face I pictured in my mind, Megan I pictured standing by my side. Maybe it was just our shared grief. Maybe it was our connection to Sam. But I couldn’t imagine anyone else in Sam’s place.

  But then there was Luke.

  I kissed the top of her head.

  “I’ll go to Dallas and find him. This is going to be okay.”

  She nodded, stepping back from my embrace. “Be careful, Hayden.”

  Waverly was in my office when I burst through the door, intent on grabbing a set of car keys and my gun. She watched me blow through the room, watched as I opened and slammed desk drawers.

  “I got confirmation on Rhett’s client. He was CIA.”

  I nodded. “We kind of knew that already.”

  “But we didn’t know that he was assigned to the Edgar Olsen case. That he worked surveillance on Megan.”

  I stopped and studied her face. “What are you talking about?”

  She held up a file folder. “A friend of a friend got me the file on the case. He’s all over it. He and a woman named Rebecca Hamilton were tasked with following Megan around, with watching to see what she discovered about Peter’s car accident. They also worked with a man named Colin Watson.”

  I was checking the clip in my gun, but that name made my head snap up.

  “What did you say?”

  “That they were working with a man named Colin Watson.” She frowned softly. “You know him?”

  “I saw him die.” I ran my fingers through my hair, remembering that night more than five years ago. A man broke into our safe house and chased Dominic and his wife, Amy, through the streets of Houston, finally running them off the road in a deserted part of the county. Dominic was interrogating the man when Dante—actually Luke—came up and shot him without provocation. “It took us a long time to identify him.”

  “He was working with King and Hamilton, following Megan and some of the other operatives here.” She opened her file folder and scanned what was inside for a second. “He was assigned to stopping Dominic from finding some file that his wife’s sister had compiled on the rogue CIA agents. He disappeared a short time later and was replaced by a man named Sheldon.”

  “Sheldon? As in Mark Sheldon? The CIA agent who was arrested not long after Olsen?”

  She nodded. “The one and the same.”

  “Fuck!”

  I sat on the edge of my office chair. This was beginning to look more and more like King was on the wrong side of the equation. No wonder Luke felt the need to go after him.

  “I’m going to Dallas.”

  Waverly grabbed my arm as I tried to walk past her. “There’s something else. Those murders you asked me about a couple of weeks ago?”

  I stopped. There’d been a double murder in the town where my father was born, a murder that was eerily similar to the murder of my parents in New York more than thirty years ago. The similarities had bothered me. It was almost as if someone was trying to emulate the bastard who murdered my parents and then came after me only to kill the love of my life. It wasn’t good enough for him just to steal my parents when I was only six years old. He had to fire that fatal bullet through Sam’s chest, too.

  “There’s been another double murder, very similar to the first.”

  “Where?”

  She bit her lip, her eyes filled with something like sympathy. I didn’t know why. I’d never discussed my parents’ murders with her.

  “Shreveport.”

  It was like a bucket of ice poured over my head. Shreveport. My grandmother moved us there not long after my grandfather died. I went to high school there.

  “I can’t do this right now.”

  I pulled away from Waverly, marching out of the office with a purpose. But I couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that washed over me. It was almost like someone was tracing my movements, trying to get my attention. It had to be a coincidence. Right?

  But I wasn’t sure I believed in coincidences.

  Chapter 15

  Xander

  I watched her sleep, checking her forehead frequently for signs of a fever. Sara assured me she wouldn’t run fever, but I could only trust what was right in front of me. I couldn’t have Rhett out of commission. I needed her to stay with me.

  I paced the room, unable to lay down and rest now. I had this uneasy feeling that things were about to come to a head, that I was about to learn things about myself—and pay for things I’d done—that I couldn’t handle. I knew instinctively that I wasn’t a good man before all of this.

  Who did the things I must have done and still was able to look himself in the mirror at the end of the day? I wasn’t a good man. I was a killer. I was a traitor to my country. I was everything I couldn’t have imagined these last few months when I tried to imagine the person I was.

  It was almost comical, really. I’d imagined that I was a husband, a father. That I’d had some sort of cushy office job. That I’d been a normal, tax paying working slob. It never occurred to me that there was something more nefarious in my past.

  I moved the curtain aside and looked out over the vast parking lot that this motel shared with the shopping center next door. A dark SUV was parked at the back of the lot, the windows dark in the night. But I could have sworn that I saw the brief light of a cellphone just as I pulled the curtain aside.

  Was that our SUV? Was that the same SUV that Rhett and I had driven up from Houston? It was the same make, the same model. But what were the chances?

  Who had Rhett met in that Walmart parking lot?

  I went to the bed and slipped Rhett’s gun out of the holster she’d set under the pillows by her head. It was a .22, but she loaded it with some pretty intense ammunition. I held it in my hand, taking some security from the weight of it, the feel of it. It was familiar. I couldn’t deny that. But I got the sense the gun I normally carried was a little heavier. That it probably packed more of a punch.

  A .9mm, maybe.

  I got up again, the gun in my hand, and paced the length of the room. Things had begun to come back to me, little snippets that had no connection to anything I understood. The face of a woman I had no reference for. The smell of stale coffee and too many cigarettes. The feeling of deep annoyance at the sight of clutter in a car. The blurry sight that came with staring at a computer screen for too many hours.

  It was like the dream of the little girl. There was enough there that it felt like a memory, but not enough to re
ally grasp it. To understand it.

  When Rhett was writhing in pain while Sara fixed her wound, I had had a flash of a woman’s hand in mine, of her screams of pain. But it wasn’t a dark moment. I felt an overwhelming sense of excitement as I held that woman’s hand. It was … confusing. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, couldn’t tell what was causing her pain. And I had no idea why I wasn’t worried or upset.

  But then it occurred to me that maybe I was witnessing a woman giving birth.

  I slipped the picture out of my pocket that the rental car guy had given us. The woman was beautiful. She had a kind face, dark hair, and hazel eyes that seemed to be filled with a great deal of innocence despite the appearance of age on her face. And the baby … those eyes! They were beautiful and kind and filled with intelligence. They say the window to the soul is in the eyes. They had that right on the button with this one.

  Who was she? She’d clearly mattered to me. I knew she was the baby in my dreams, the baby I was watching run through the bright green grass. But who was she to me? Was she my child? With all the snippets of memory that had come back to me, I would have said yes. But it didn’t quite feel right.

  This not knowing … it was beginning to be more of a burden than I could ever have imagined it would be.

  How would it change things when I finally knew everything about my past?

  Rhett’s cellphone lit up with a call. I walked over and watched as it went to voicemail, waiting until the icon showed that it had been received. The call was from Hayden Dubois. He was one of the four names Rebecca had given me. Did he know who I was? Had he known all along?

  I felt a little twinge of guilt as I picked up the phone and pressed the voicemail icon. It wasn’t hard to guess Rhett’s password. She and her sister were pretty close. If it wasn’t her sister’s name, then it was her birthdate.

  The name worked.

  “I need you to call me, Rhett,” Hayden’s voice said on the recording. “I’m on my way to you. We’ve learned some disturbing information about the client. I need to know where you are. I need you off this case.”