I was still wondering.
“Megan deserves better than you and the lies you’ve been telling her.”
Luke glanced at me. “Who do you think she deserves? You?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t lie to her.”
Luke laughed. “So much for the grieving widower. You’ve had a thing for Megan since the beginning, haven’t you?”
I shrugged. “I respect her. I care about her.”
“Yet she chose me.”
“She chose the man she grew up with, the man she knew before the CIA. She didn’t know what she was getting after the CIA.”
“But she’s been perfectly satisfied for five years. That must eat you alive.”
I shook my head, denying it even though my stomach curdled a little, my heart skipped a few beats. Was I in love with Megan? I didn’t think so. But she was my last connection to Sam, so maybe there was more there than there should have been. Maybe it was more like infatuation. Whatever it was, I knew she deserved better than Luke. She deserved a man who didn’t keep secrets.
“Did you work for Olsen?”
Luke glanced at me. “I was just as fooled by him as everyone else. He was my mentor. My supervisor. I thought he was the only one I could trust.”
“You worked for him.”
“I did. Because I thought he was right.”
“And when you realized he wasn’t?”
Luke gripped the steering wheel harder than he had to, his knuckles turning white. “I did what I had to do to protect my family.” He glanced at me. “I was just as duped by him as everyone else.”
“You impeded our investigation.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “I did what I had to do to protect my family.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t fucking care what you believe. All that matters is that Megan and Peter and the rest of the Bradford family is safe. And they’re going to stay that way, because I’m not going to let Xander King or anyone else come back and hurt them.”
“Xander King never hurt Megan.”
“He was in Houston for the sole purpose of stopping her from getting too close. He was working for Olsen.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. He told me himself.”
When I didn’t answer right away, Luke shot me a triumphant glance. “Didn’t know we spoke to each other, did you? Didn’t know that I had contact with him quite frequently during that entire ordeal?”
“Why?”
“He was my contact with Edgar. He was the one I reported to and the one who gave me my assignments. He was the one who told me about Emily Greene’s file and gave me the virus to corrupt it. A virus of his own design, I believe.”
“If he was working for Olsen, why didn’t he stop Megan? Why didn’t he kill her when he realized how close we were getting?”
“Because he’s a genius. He knew that when Olsen was caught, he and his associates would be, too. He decided it was better for him to cut and run. Cut and run with the money, of course.”
“The money?”
“Xander King is a multi-millionaire, my friend. He has multiple accounts overseas. How do you think his sister lives in a million dollar house in the same exclusive neighborhood as his million dollar house? He’s good at day trading, but not that good.”
“No one’s that good.”
“My point exactly.”
If I hadn’t already been leaning toward the belief that Xander King was a danger to our organization, I might not have been so quick to believe Luke. But I was and I did.
Would it be a mistake? Only time could tell me that.
My phone buzzed as we took the exit off the interstate that would lead to Gray Wolf Security’s front door.
“We have a problem, Hayden,” Megan said breathlessly into my ear. “Rhett’s little sister might have been abducted from her dorm room.”
“Might have been?”
“I have Kasey and Peter headed over there right now to check it out.”
Great. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse …
Chapter 20
Peter
There were coeds running around everywhere, some of them not really clothed in the sort of fashion that seemed respectable to me. But Kasey was enjoying the view, smiling and winking at each pretty young girl as she walked past us.
“I thought you’d been here before.”
“I have. Several times. When she’s on assignment, Rhett worries about Jesse and sometimes she’ll send me over to make sure she’d okay.” He glanced over his shoulder at me, distracted as another young woman walked by in little more than a bra and panties. “It’s probably just a false alarm, just like all the other times.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Who would want to hurt Rhett’s baby sister? Who would even know about her?”
“It’s not hard to find out things about people, especially with all the social media and shit going on everywhere.”
“Rhett doesn’t strike me as a Facebook kind of girl, let alone Snapchat or Instagram. Not much for selfies.”
“They have the same last name.”
Kasey nodded slowly. “There is that.”
He smiled at another girl walking past us, little more than a towel and a smile to cover her modesty. If I didn’t have a very pregnant girlfriend at home … but I did. And I was perfectly happy in my life.
Kasey turned a corner and pointed. “The third door down.”
I walked over, standing to one side as I tapped my knuckles against the door.
“She’s not there,” some girl coming down the hall from the bathroom said. “She left this morning with a couple of guys.”
“Guys?” Kasey asked. “What’d they look like?”
“Tall, dark. Older. Like you.”
Kasey was wounded. I could see it in the expression on his face. But he simply smiled and turned away.
“I’ve got a key.”
He pulled the key out of his pocket and unlocked the door, gesturing for me to go first. I stepped inside and my first instinct was that there had been a fight. Furniture was overturned and papers were flung everywhere. But the bed was neatly made and there was a cellphone sitting smack in the middle. I picked it up and swiped the main screen, immediately revealing a picture of a pretty, young woman with her hands cable tied behind her back. The picture was time stamped four hours earlier.
“That’s Jesse.”
I had assumed so. I pulled out my own cell and called Megan.
“They’ve got her.”
Chapter 21
Xander
Rhett was shaking uncontrollably, her hands trembling so hard that she couldn’t hold the glass of water a waitress had just brought her. I knelt beside her, my hands resting on her thighs.
“We’ll get her back.”
She met my gaze, understanding in her eyes that my words were likely untrue and that she understood I knew that too. I wanted to take that knowledge away from her, but I didn’t know how. All I could do was rub her thighs and stare her in the eye, let her know she wasn’t alone.
“The call came from the University of Houston,” Porter said, his tone somewhat apologetic.
Rhett just nodded. “They have her. They’ll call back soon and tell us what they want.”
“No,” Hannah said. “They want Xander. You know that. You know they want to kill him.”
Rhett looked up, sorrow on her face. “I know.”
There were no lies anymore, no secrets. It was all out on the table. This was my doing, my fault. Whoever I associated with back before I left the CIA was coming back to hurt not only me, but everyone I cared about.
“We should go to the compound,” Knox said softly. “We’d have more privacy there.”
Rhett suddenly stood up. “Thank you for your help, but we’ll take it from here.”
“Rhett, if they want to help—”
She pulled away from me, pulled away from everyone with just a few steps
to the side.
“Dragon can handle this.” She glanced at me, barely touching my face with her eyes. “You should go to Gray Wolf and let them help you get back your memories. You should probably see a doctor or something …”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“And I won’t let you go through anymore because of me.”
I wanted to smack her, she was frustrating me so completely. I had to rush around and stand between her and the door to keep her from escaping me.
“I’m not letting you go. They’re doing this because of me. It’s not right that you have to face them by yourself.”
“I won’t be alone. I’ll have the entire Dragon team behind me. They’re at the college right now … and Hayden’s on his way here.”
“Let her go, Xander,” Hannah said, grabbing my arm. “It’s what she wants.”
But I couldn’t. I still didn’t know completely who I was. There were small things beginning to come back, but big chunks were still missing. But I knew I’d never known anyone like Rhett, and I couldn’t just let her walk out of my life. And I couldn’t let her go through this nightmare alone.
“Please, Rhett. I need to do this for you.”
Tears filled her eyes, but she shook her head. “It was fun. But we both knew it wasn’t a long term thing.” She touched my face lightly. “Go home to your family. Find out who you are.”
She turned and walked out onto the curb just as an SUV pulled up. In seconds she was gone, like she’d never been a part of my life at all.
“It’s for the best,” Hannah said softly.
“No. No, it’s not.”
***
They took me to their compound and made me sit down with some shrink they said could help me with my memory block. Ten minutes in and I knew the guy was a quack. I was never going to remember everything I’d lost. There was just too much damage. But maybe that meant that I would never become the guy I used to be, either.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Rhett. When Knox came into the conference room where they had me trapped, I asked about her. Asked if they knew anything yet. If any ransom demands had come in. She shook her head. There were no words.
When she left, I wanted to put my hand through a fucking wall. I wanted to jump out the damn windows. And then I saw the file folder she’d left on the table.
I sat down and stared at it, almost afraid of what might be hidden inside. Was this more answers? Or more questions?
It wasn’t what I expected. When I opened it, I found myself staring at computer code. Highly complicated computer code. It meant nothing to me at first. But then I began to see patterns. I began to see a working computer program. I began to see answers.
There were several different things in that file folder. But they all told me a story that I couldn’t have hoped for even in the brightest of moments. I wasn’t the man they thought I was. But I was. I was … both. I was a bad guy, but I’d done good things too, and this was the proof.
I could have kissed Knox Adams!
Now I needed to find a way out of this place.
Chapter 22
Rhett
The ride was longer than I remembered. I curled up in the backseat, my thoughts focused on just one thing: Jesse.
We’d gone out drinking the night before I met Xander.
“You’ve gotten so boring, Rhett. You used to be fun. Before Daddy died, we used to go to that park in the middle of the night, running every time some car turned its headlights on us. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“And you would sneak us out of class and take us for ice cream just because.”
“I remember that, too. We got caught a few times.”
“Yeah, but Daddy understood why you did it.”
He did. Daddy understood everything.
“Come out with me tonight. Blow off some steam. It’s not like you have anyone waiting for you at home.”
“Low blow, Jess.”
“Not if it’s the truth.”
She worried about me. I knew that. She didn’t know what had happened to me just a couple of weeks before Daddy was shot. At first, I was ashamed. I didn’t even go to a doctor. I called a friend of mine, a guy I arrested once for pot.
He was a resident at one of the local hospitals, always willing to patch up one of my buddies in exchange for us turning a blind eye to his pot use. He fixed me up, put stitches in places where stitches should never be. He asked me to go to the police, but he didn’t push me when I refused. I think he knew.
I think Daddy knew, too. He took one look at the bruises on my face—bruises I swore up and down were from a fall from a fire escape during a foot chase—and he knew. Sometimes I thought it might have had something to do with his murder. But then I wanted to believe that his own brothers wouldn’t have turned on him that way. Turning on me was one thing, but turning on a thirty year veteran? No.
But Jesse didn’t know, and I wanted to keep it that way. The less she knew about the realities of the world, the better.
She would learn well enough in her own time.
Like now. Who were the men holding her? What were they doing to her? What if we didn’t hand over Xander? What would they do?
I couldn’t face Kari if I lost Jesse. And the two of them were the only family I had left.
The SUV pulled into the parking lot across from Dragon’s offices a little before midnight. I ran to the front of the building, Hayden calling to me from the parking lot. They were all there: Megan, Waverly, Peter, Kasey, Amelia, and Brian. All my colleagues. My friends.
“I’m sorry, Rhett,” Kasey said, coming to wrap his arms around me. I rested my head against his chest for a long moment, remembering the first time I introduced him to Jesse.
He’s hot, Rhett! You should go out with him.
“Where do we stand?” I demanded, pulling away and pretending I had an iron rod up my ass to keep my spine straight. “What do we know?”
“Not much, unfortunately,” Megan said. “There was a security camera on every corner of the floor where your sister’s room is, but none of them were working during the time period that the men came and went. The security chief at the college can’t explain it.”
“But we did get a good ping off their cellphones as they drove away,” Waverly said. “We think they’re hiding somewhere near the airport.”
“A hotel?”
“Possibly.”
“Have they made any demands?”
Everyone sort of looked at me like that was a question they should have been asking me, not the other way around. And they were probably right. I’d waited all day for my phone to ring again, but it never did.
What were they waiting for?
“I assume they’re after Xander,” I said.
No one disagreed, but Waverly shot a glance at Megan.
“What?”
Megan sighed. “There’s a small possibility that this is about more than just Xander King.”
“You think it’s about Edgar Olsen.”
She didn’t disagree. “He swore revenge on everyone who brought him down. Most of those people are standing in this room right now.”
I looked around the lobby at my friends and colleagues. Hayden and Luke had come into the building, standing back near the doors. Dominic—Hayden’s assistant director—was there, as was Vincent Caplin, the head of investigations. Dominic and Vincent had been part of the original Dragon operations team.
“If that was it, why did they take my sister? Why not someone who means something to the rest of you?” I pointed to Megan. “Your kids? Or you?” I said, pointing to Peter. “Or Dominic’s wife and kids, or Luke? Why my sister?”
“Because she was vulnerable.”
Made sense. Not perfect sense, but sense all the same. But I didn’t believe it.
“They thought they’d killed Xander King a year ago. All of a sudden, they discovered he was still alive. Maybe they tapped his sister’s phone. Maybe they were watching Gray Wo
lf. I don’t suppose it matters how it happened, but they found out he was still alive and he came to us. Why not stop him then? Why not take him out in this building? Why not take us all out? Why take my sister?”
Little looks moved around the room. I could see they were following my logic, that some of them had had the same thoughts. But that didn’t solve the puzzle.
It made absolutely no sense. There was still something missing.
“Megan wasn’t here,” Luke said. “She was working from home that morning.”
“But she’s here now.”
It was almost as if Peter had spoken on some sort of cue. The front of the building exploded. Gunfire sounded from the street, the front windows cascading into a pile of rubble as the bullets smashed through them. Everyone dropped to the ground, some not quite fast enough. I watched, too stunned to move, as my colleagues rushed for cover and Hayden’s arm exploded in a rain of blood. I just stood there. Nothing touched me.
“Get down!” Kasey cried, grabbing me around the knees, yanking me so hard off balance that my head slammed against the marble floor. At the same time, I saw Amelia crawl to Hayden’s side, ripping at the bottom of her blouse to create a bandage for his arm. Luke was crawling toward Megan, Dominic throwing his body over Waverly. Peter was under the reception desk with Brian and Vincent. We all found cover just in time for the shooting to stop.
“Elevators!” Luke called.
Kasey dragged me along, forced me to my feet, and pulled me over the slick floor. I was stunned, not as much from the blow to the head as from the shock of what was happening around me, along with the shock of losing my lover and my sister all on the same day. The shock of experiencing so many tragedies so closely together.
My attack. My dad’s death. My mom’s abandonment of the family. My sister’s marriage. My sister’s kidnapping. And Xander … losing a man I barely knew, a man who didn’t know himself, and yet a man I knew I could have spent a lifetime loving.
My phone rang halfway to the elevator.
“You’re a brave little bitch. Let’s see how brave you are when we rip out your sister’s fingernails one by one. You have exactly an hour to deliver Megan Bradford-Murphy and Xander King to the Hyatt at the airport.”
DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series Page 29
