Lights Out

by Andersen, Jessica

  It was true. Grant Davis had, in one cold, calculated motion, gotten rid of the three people who knew his secret. By his actions, he’d admitted the truth of Liam’s accusation. He’d ruined a good man to forward his own political career. Now he’d add three lives to the tally on his soul, but that last glimpse Ty had gotten of Grant’s eyes had told the full story.

  Grant didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, three lives were nothing compared to the lure of the main stage at the White House.

  Burning anger flared in Ty’s gut. “Not if I have anything to say about it, he hasn’t. But I need your help. Give me the disarming code, and Gabby and I will make sure everyone knows what kind of man he really is.”

  He didn’t say he’d get Liam out safely because they both knew Liam was clinging to life only through sheer stubbornness. He wouldn’t leave the tunnel alive.

  His fingers tightened on Ty’s wrist, grinding down to bone. “Swear it. Promise me you’ll make sure he doesn’t become president.”

  Something shifted inside Ty, something hard and sure. The realization that in the end, despite the differences in their methods and histories, he and Liam were very alike. He growled, “I swear if we get out of here, Grant Davis is finished in politics.”

  Liam locked eyes with him for a long moment, then nodded. The air seemed to drain out of him and his voice grew weak as he said, “The access hatch is behind the secondary tank. There’s no disarm code. It’s standard configuration. You won’t have any problem with it.”

  Those last few words, almost whispered, confirmed what Ty had begun to suspect.

  Liam Sullivan hadn’t ever intended to kill Davis. He’d wanted an eye for an eye, a reputation for a reputation, and this elaborately planned blackout had been the only way he could conceive to make people listen to him. That didn’t make it right, and it didn’t make him sane, but it did make Ty think the wrong man was leaking his life away right now.

  What would have happened if things had gone differently eleven years earlier? He didn’t know, but he had a feeling a number of lives would be different now. Including his.

  And Gabby’s.

  He glanced at her now, and his heart clutched a little in his chest. She looked so beautiful, so fragile. He wanted to hold her, to comfort her while the world went on around them.

  Instead it was up to him to make sure their worlds continued at all.

  “Thank you.” He gripped Liam’s shoulder briefly, then gestured to Gabby. “Sit with him while I crawl down and disarm the main device in—” he glanced at the display “—eight minutes or less.”

  He stood, trying to find the strange calm that had once steadied him through the hairiest situations, when his assignments had ranged from defusing homemade land mines in the Middle East to precision detonations that could vaporize a single restaurant table while leaving its neighbors untouched.

  Once, that calm had been second nature. Now it eluded him, losing to a tight fear that centered on the woman standing opposite him, the one he paused in front of. He stood there for half a second, wanting to tell her something, wanting to promise her something, but unable to find the words.

  In the end he simply leaned down and kissed her. “See you soon.”

  As she crouched down beside Liam, murmuring softly, Ty shoved some of the camping gear aside to reveal the access hatch. In the dim light, it took a moment for his brain to process the sight of a metal bar bolted across the hatch at an angle. When he did, his curse was low and bitter. There was no way he was getting through the narrow space that remained.

  “What’s wrong?” Gabby said quickly.

  “They’ve blocked the hatch. It’ll open because it swings in, but I won’t be able to fit through. No way in hell.” Ty dropped back down beside Liam. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow, but Ty spared the dying man little pity in shaking him awake. “It’s blocked,” he snapped the moment Liam’s eyelids fluttered open. “I need another access point.”

  Liam’s expression clouded, then went sad. “Aidan. He told the others I wouldn’t go through with it. He was the one who wanted to block the opening.”

  “Well, he did. What’s your backup?”

  “There isn’t one.” Liam shook his head, his eyes full of grief and regret. “We welded the other hatches shut from the inside.”

  It hit Ty then that this could be it. The end. With no way out of the little room and no way to get to the bomb, there seemed like nothing left to do but say goodbye to the people he loved.

  At the thought he looked for Gabby, only to find her crouched down by the hatch, feeling the edges of the opening.

  When he knelt down beside her and took her hand, she turned to him, face set with determination. “I can make it through.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Maybe. But they’ve welded the other exits. There’s no way out.”

  “I’m not talking about escaping.” She turned her beautiful, sightless eyes to him. “If I can get through there, can you walk me through defusing the bomb?”

  Chapter 12

  Dearest Ty:

  I’m not married or in jail, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t take what we have into face-to-face reality. Because of that, and because what we have now doesn’t seem to be enough for you, though it’s everything to me, I think it’d be best for us to stop corresponding. Which is another first for me. I’ve never fallen for a guy online, never fought with a guy online, and I’ve never broken up with a guy before, online or in person. It’s always been the other way around. So thank you for that, my special friend. Thank you for so many firsts even though in the end, they weren’t enough. With love, Gabriella.

  [Sent by CyberGabby; July 28, 3:38:08 a.m.]

  5:33 a.m., August 3 5 Minutes until Dawn Gabby didn’t wait for Ty to argue or tell her she couldn’t do it. She shucked out of his windbreaker and tossed it aside, figuring it would be more hindrance than protection where she was going. Then she tucked in her shirt. Scant preparations, perhaps, but there was neither time nor resources for more. “What am I going to need down there?” she asked, willing him to trust her, to believe that she was challenged but not handicapped.

  And in willing it, she realized that she really believed it now, for the first time ever.

  She was blind, not incapacitated. Ty couldn’t get through the blocked hatch but she could. She couldn’t see what she would be working on, but he could help with that.

  For now, at least, they could fill the gaps in each other.

  He’d been silent for so long she thought he was going to waste precious time arguing. Instead, as she reached for the hatch once more, he slid an arm around her waist and hitched her up so they were chest to chest, breathing the same air.

  “Gabby,” he said, pressing a small pair of pliers into her hand. “You can do this. I trust you. I believe in you. I think…God, I think I’m falling in love with you. I think I fell months ago, when I was pretending to be somebody else who was really me.”

  His words hung in the air, heavy with meaning, with desperation. She could feel the pound of his heart and the rasp of his indrawn breaths, and for the first time since she’d stepped out into the courtyard to rescue Maria from a madman with a gun, she felt like she knew this man, had known him for months, maybe had always known him.

  “Ty,” she said, forming the single syllable with her tongue as she had done so many nights, sitting at her keyboard, chatting with the man she’d come to know and love and depend on. Even though neither of them had been truthful, they’d both shown their true selves. “I feel the same way.” She took a deep breath. “I think I’m in love with you, too.”

  Despite it all, CyberGabby had fallen for the real Ty Jones and TyJ had fallen for the real Gabby Solaro.

  Exultation thrilled through her, hot and hard, and for a moment she felt as though she was back in the Camaro, flying through the night with the wind in her hair. Carrying that joy, that adventure, she leaned in and touched her lips to his.


  There was nothing tentative or questioning in this kiss; it was all raw power and demand, all tooth and tongue and the edgy sensuality she’d thought was gone for good. Only, now she realized it had been waiting for her to grow up, for her to grow out of her shell and come back to life.

  He said her name again and she said his, and there was nothing left to say. There was only another kiss, a soft promise that there would be more to come later. After.

  Then she drew away from him, tucked the pliers in her back pocket and felt her way to the access hatch. The mechanism gave easily beneath her touch and the panel dropped inward on well-oiled hinges.

  Gabby took a deep breath and said to herself as much as Ty, “I can do this.”

  “We can do this.” There was no question in his words, only a quiet confidence she took with her as she wiggled her way between the sharp metal slat and the edge of the hatch, and dropped face-first into a rectangular shaft that sloped gently downward.

  She wrinkled her nose against the smell of dust and oil, and used her hands to worm along until her feet passed through the hatch, and she was able to belly-crawl faster. Feeling the walls of the narrow chute closing in on her, she called, “How far does this tunnel go?”

  The shout echoed in the small space, making her already-sore head pound harder, but there was no time for that pain. Not now, when the seconds were ticking down beneath her skin.

  “You haven’t reached the end yet?” Ty’s voice was distorted and strange, making her feel very alone all of a sudden.

  “Not yet…Wait,” she called, cranking her voice for the added confidence it gave her, despite the echoes. She felt the edge of the shaft, felt only nothingness beyond. “I’ve got it. I’m going in.”

  Before Ty could object, she gripped the slightly protruding edge and used the handhold to work her body and legs out of the chute. The muscles in her upper arms burned with fatigue and strain as she lowered herself, and panic spurted when she couldn’t find the floor with her feet.

  The echo patterns told her it was a small room, probably eight-by-ten, with irregular walls, a ceiling and a floor. But she couldn’t see the floor, couldn’t be sure it was really there.

  “Believe it, Gabby,” she told herself. Squeezing her eyelids tightly shut as visions of elevator shafts flashed in her mind’s eye, she let go of her handhold and jumped.

  The drop was maybe two feet, but it was the longest two feet of her life. The impact jarred her and she fell to her knees, but she’d never been so glad before to skin her palms on a concrete floor.

  She stood and turned to the shaft, calling, “I’m in. I’m okay. What do I do?”

  “First, find the wires that lead down the shaft.”

  She traced her way back up the wall, wincing when her fingers trailed across something faintly moist and slimy, then uttered a low cry when she reached the trailing wires. “I’ve got them.”

  “Good. Follow them to the primary device. It looks like—” He broke off, then corrected himself. “It’ll feel like a flat, smooth box that’s rounded on the edges. There’ll be a couple of knobs on one side. The wires you already found should enter the box on the other side.”

  “Am I going to kill us if I touch the wrong thing?” she called, swallowing around a mass of sick nerves.

  “Not yet.”

  “That wasn’t exactly reassuring.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be. You have the box?”

  Her fingers glanced off a smooth surface that was oddly warm to the touch, as though the detonator was alive. “Yes. I’ve got it.”

  “Okay, here’s what you’re going to do…” As he walked her through the procedure step by step, she unlatched the housing and bared the guts of the detonator, working by feel and trying not to let her hands shake.

  “How much time do we have left?” she asked when he paused.

  “Enough. Now, we’re down to the last step, and this is where it gets really tough.” Ty’s voice went ragged. “You’re going to feel three wires leading from the timer to the charge. One’s hot, one’s cold, one’s neutral. I need you to cut the cold. You cut the hot and it blows. You cut the neutral and it does nothing.”

  “How do I know which one is cold?”

  “It’s black.”

  “Oh.” Sick fear rolled through Gabby, stealing her breath and making her head spin. A bead of sweat formed on her brow and itched, but she didn’t dare take her hand off the wires to brush it away.

  Tracing the outline of the detonator with her fingers, she called, “I feel three wires coming out of a small rectangular box, maybe the size of my hand. There’s a wire on the left, one on the right and one in the middle. Does that help?”

  “There’s no way to tell which way he put it in,” Ty said hollowly. “And there’s no way to ask him. He’s dead.”

  Gabby took a deep breath. “Then guess. If Liam put this thing together, how would he have done it? Isn’t there a standard way of doing it or something?”

  There was a pause, then Ty said. “There’s a military SOP, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I always did it the other way around. Liam knew that. If he was putting this together for me, he might’ve done it that way.”

  Gabby heard the corollary in the silence. Or he might not have.

  “You knew him,” she said. “He trusted you to see the truth when everyone else around you refused. What do you think he did?”

  She knew it wasn’t fair to put it all on him. She could picture the war going on inside his psyche, where what logic told him wasn’t always what his heart believed.

  The seconds bled away. Her heart pushed up into her throat and lodged there, choking her breath to a thin stream of oxygen. “Ty?”

  “Cut the one on the left,” he said finally.

  She wanted to ask if he was sure, but didn’t because she already knew the answer. He was guessing, flying blind. They both were.

  “Left it is,” she said as much to herself as to him, and lifted the needle-nosed pliers into place, working them until the thin wire was poised between the sharpened edges at the back of the tool.

  Gabby paused and took a breath.

  And cut the wire.

  The device gave off a screeching beep that raised the hairs on the back of her neck and had her bracing for all hell to break loose.

  Nothing happened.

  Out in the main room, the alarm on Ty’s watch went off, signaling the dawn.

  Gabby exhaled with a whoosh that turned to a whoop, one that was echoed in Ty’s deeper tones. Heart pounding, excitement hammering through her veins, she dropped the pliers and flung herself toward the narrow shaft, scrambling up and into it and worming her way back up to the main room, back up to the man who waited for her, the man who’d come through for her, just like he’d promised.

  “We did it!” she crowed when she felt the edges of the hatch beneath her fingertips. She reached through the narrow opening to link fingers with Ty.

  “You did it,” he corrected, and pulled her through, pulled her into his arms. “You were so brave.”

  “I was petrified.” She nuzzled against him, needing his warmth and strength. With the danger past and adrenaline fading, she began to shake as reality caught up with her and she comprehended what could have happened to them. What nearly had happened to them.

  “We could’ve died.” Her words came out muffled as she pressed her face against his throat, his jaw, any part of him she could reach.

  “We didn’t.” He caught her lips with his, and his kiss tasted of survival, of life. “Thanks to you.”

  Heat flared and she rose up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck and give herself to the moment, to the man. Where before she’d been afraid of the flare of power, scared of the mad impulses that rocketed through her body, now she gloried in them.

  The kiss spun out in a mad promise of things to come, broken only when a loud clanging sounded at the door, along with the muffled sounds of men’s voices.

>   Gabby drew away from Ty but put her hand in his, turning to face the door as it flung open and the voices came clear.

  For a moment nobody spoke. Then Ty said, “What the hell took you so long?”

  Gabby heard three sets of footsteps, three new voices that sorted themselves into individuals as Ty introduced them. “Gabby, I’d like you to meet Ethan, Chase and Shane.” He paused, and she felt something shift between them when he said, “The four of us are part of an off-the-books black ops team called Eclipse. We’re the guys the Pentagon calls when the regular military can’t get it done.”

  Then he slid a possessive arm around her waist and touched his lips to her cheek. “Only this time, you were the one who got it done when we couldn’t.”

  * * *

  The next few minutes were utter chaos as SAC Epps and a combined task force arrived en masse, five minutes too late as usual.

  Ty was more than happy to let the other agent take over the scene. He urged Gabby out of the room that had nearly become their tomb. Men and vehicles crowded the tunnel outside the maintenance room, crisscrossing the four-lane roadway in crazy patterns of headlight and flashlight beams.

  Ethan, Shane and Chase followed them, and the four members of Eclipse, along with Gabby, formed a loose knot out in the roadway, talking over the situation in low tones.

  “Liam was right,” Ty said, knowing it would take time for it to sink in, for all the pieces to rearrange themselves in his head. “Grant really did set him up. Hell, for all we know, he wouldn’t have carried Liam out of the building if Bradley hadn’t stumbled on them.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Ethan said simply. He gripped Ty’s shoulder and nodded. “We’ll make sure things are set as right as they can be.”

  Ty nodded. “Mission accomplished, then, albeit with some mop-up work left to do.”

  Normally after an op, the teammates might have gone out and gotten drunk together, picked a fight together, but Ty had a strong feeling all that was going to change.

  Liam had changed each of them, inadvertently making them better.

  Ty couldn’t help thinking of how happy Ethan had looked the night before, reunited with Rebecca and their son Jesse. Shane and Chase had also found the missing pieces of themselves over the past two days. Shane had fallen hard for Princess Ariana LeBron, and Chase had been reunited with Lily Garrett just in time to meet the newborn daughter he’d known nothing about.