by Dianna Love
Dingo slumped back and stared at the stained acoustical ceiling for a moment, then leveled an I’m-in-a-corner-here look at Tanner. “She won’t breathe a word of anything we do. But I may not be welcome in Atlanta once Sabrina finds out about this and that I kept yet another thing from her.”
“We’re doing that to protect Sabrina,” Tanner reminded Dingo, but he didn’t like holding out on her either. That wasn’t the way Slye Temp operated.
But this team protected their own, including Sabrina whether she wanted it or not.
“Listen, Tanner. We shouldn’t have either one of these women here, but now that Val has shown up she can find something missing faster than you can sneeze. If what Jin told you was true about the Orion Hunters getting to her anywhere, then she’s safer with you. For now.”
Tanner had justified all this over and over in his mind already. Dingo was just getting it straight in his.
But Tanner didn’t want to hear “for now” and be reminded that any day now he’d have to watch Jin be taken away, maybe as a prisoner. “I know.”
Dingo sat up, warming to the subject. “We could bring out four agents who won’t accomplish as much as Val will in one day. She’s that good and has an uncanny ability when she investigates. She gets paid insane sums to find the impossible for a wealthy clientele.”
“Just as long as you can keep her safe,” Tanner pointed out.
Dingo swallowed hard and dropped his gaze to the table, hiding his thoughts for a moment, then his mouth twisted with a droll smile. “Val is trained in weapons and hand-to-hand combat. She was one of the best backups I had at one time.”
When had that been? Tanner wasn’t asking. This whole mission was the longest running FUBAR in history.
He said, “If I thought bringing out the entire Slye Temp organization would find Jin’s sister any faster I would, but we might as well put up a billboard saying we’re looking for her if too many people come on the scene. We scare this bunch off, we’ll lose any chance of stopping them.”
Dingo and Tanner had split up an area one hundred miles in diameter. They’d visit every airport to ask about a female pilot. Dingo had intended to pose as an investigative reporter doing a story on Asian-American women in aeronautics, but Val might actually be a better one to play that role.
Tanner and Jin had a different tactic—pretending to search for a hangar where Tanner could park his Gulfstream IV.
Amanda, Sabrina’s assistant back at headquarters, was compiling driver’s license ID photos for any form of the name Patty Smith starting in the Ogallala, Nebraska area and spreading out geographically from there. Tanner had sent a scan of the photo Jin carried of her sister to Amanda, and given her an age span anywhere from twenty to thirty.
So far, no match had pinged.
That would have been too easy.
Tanner said, “This is going to be like hunting that damn needle in a haystack.”
“It wouldn’t be if we dangled something they wanted in front of them.”
Tanner hit the table with his fist. “No!”
Dingo sat back with a smug look. “It’s like that, is it?”
Jin had been used constantly for someone else’s benefit. He understood that she loved her mother and believed she’d been handed off for her own welfare, but bottom line, she’d been sold to a dangerous organization who had never even allowed her a life.
Dingo waited for an answer.
“We’re not using her.” That was all the answer Tanner would give.
The crazy Aussie’s eyes twinkled. “Just checking, mate.”
“You son of a bitch.”
Jin stepped up to the table at that second and frowned at him. “That is not a nice thing to call your friend.”
“She’s right about that, mate,” Dingo said, as Val slid into the booth next to him.
“That actually fits him,” Tanner explained to Jin, ignoring Dingo’s snicker.
Val smiled. “You two having a bromance moment?”
Dingo and Tanner said, “No!”
Jin caught Val’s humor and her eyes twinkled with mischief. “What is a bromance?”
“Never mind.” Tanner stood up, took one look at Jin and realized she knew exactly what it was. She’d wanted to tease him. Why couldn’t they be just two people having a casual afternoon so he could tease her back about how he’d explain later in bed?
Some days he hated this life. “We’ve wasted enough time here.”
Val jumped up. “Oh, I think this was very informative.” She whispered something in Jin’s ear.
Jin busted out laughing.
Tanner shouldn’t envy the wild blonde for that, but he did. Jin’s smiles were rare and precious. She shouldn’t waste them on Val.
Then Jin turned that vibrant smile on him and he forgot about Val and Dingo even being there. “What?”
“I am feeling better.”
“I’m glad.” He was not putting her back on an airplane after the hell she went through getting here.
Outside, Tanner handed Jin the keys to their Range Rover and Dingo did the same, handing Val the keys to his Escalade.
Jin climbed in on the passenger side of Tanner’s truck.
Val slid behind the wheel of Dingo’s ride and cranked the engine.
Dingo shook his head no and Val just smiled in pure defiance.
Tanner chuckled at Dingo’s grumble. Once he had Dingo’s attention again, Tanner got down to business. “Text me once every two hours and I’ll do the same. If I don’t get a text, I’ll track you by GPS.”
“You’re the one who has to watch out for Bruce Lee wannabes. Nobody is chasing me or Val, but I’ll text you.”
A primary reason Tanner set up this two-hour texting check point was in case someone got to Jin, because that would only happen if they came through him and he didn’t make it.
He strode over to his vehicle and slid in, taking a moment to eye Jin. She was nervous again. He smiled at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Which translated to “something” in female talk. “I’ll wait until you figure out what nothing is.”
She cocked her head at him. “Have you always been this stubborn?”
“Pretty much.”
She muttered something in Korean, or one of the other twelve or fifty languages she knew, then huffed. “I want to know what you will do if we find my sister.”
“When.”
Her face softened at that. “Yes. When we find her.”
“If she helps us, I’ll speak up for her with the State Department, but she has to go in with us voluntarily.”
“I will also have to turn myself in. True?”
“Yes.” Knowing that was coming up soon was digging a hole in his gut. “But I’ll be there with you.”
She tried to smile, but it was sad. “I understand.”
“Talk to me, Jin. I may not be able to snap my fingers and fix this for you, but I’m going to try very hard to keep you from ending up in the wrong place when this is over.”
She picked at her clothes, taking shallow breaths, then raised liquid eyes to him. “I will do what I must, but my time with you has been the closest I have ever been to making my own choices. I have been ... happy.”
A tear escaped and ran to the corner of her lip.
She was killing him.
Tanner leaned over and kissed her tear away then kissed the lips he craved with every breath. Sure, he’d loved the feeling of being inside her all night last night and waking with her next to him, but Jin was more than amazing sex.
She’d found her way into his heart and set up camp.
No one else would ever unseat her from that position and the idea of not being able to keep her with him tomorrow and the next day and the day after that was physically painful.
He deepened the kiss and she touched his face with her soft hands. That touch would bring him to his knees if he was standing right now. He’d never wanted a woman, or anything else in this w
orld, the way he wanted Jin.
When he pulled away, she held his face between both hands, stopping him from moving. Her worried gaze roamed over his face. “Promise me you will not come after me if they do capture me.”
“No.”
“Please, Tanner. I have been willing to risk all to find my sister, but I will not risk you.”
He caught her hand in his, turned it and kissed her palm. “Nothing’s going to happen to me as long as you don’t run into the line of fire. I can do what I need to do as long as you’re safe. I know you can handle yourself, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you fight some nutjob Orion Hunter.”
She blew out a stream of air that sizzled with frustration. “You are a stubborn man.”
“Yes, ma’am. I like getting my way.” He winked at her and settled into the driver’s seat to get rolling. His phone chimed with an incoming call. Sabrina’s ringtone.
“Tanner.”
“Tell me you’re not toting around the woman you brought back from North Korea.”
Shit. “About that—”
Yelling would have been a better sign than Sabrina’s quiet voice. “Do not even think about trying to lie your way out of this. The State Department knows she’s in this country. They want her and the other two now.”
“How’d they find out about her?”
“It doesn’t matter how. We brought her back. They know about it. We hand her over.”
Tanner guided the SUV onto the road and pushed it up to speed. “I can’t do that.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
If silence could be wielded as a weapon, Sabrina’s was deadly.
Tanner said, “Give me a minute to catch you up.”
“Oh, that would be nice since my ass is the one on the line for all this.”
She was yelling. Better.
Tanner explained everything about Pang and the Orion Hunters, that Har was dead, plus the ambush he and Jin went through yesterday.
He wound it all up and said, “She’s here with me now. If we can find her sister before Pang’s canister is loaded, we have a chance at catching him and exposing the entire operation. We need Jin to identify her sister and to translate. If I bring her to Atlanta now and you hand her over, we lose any hope of stopping this.”
“We’ll turn this over to Homeland and bring the FAA in on it.”
“Homeland can’t get in position fast enough and if the FAA shuts down flights in this area, this bunch will know they’ve been found. Then they’ll go underground for a week, a month, or a year. We’ll never see it coming or have any hope of catching them again. Right now, we have the element of surprise. Lose that and the only way we’ll know if they’ve attacked is when millions of people and animals start dying. The damage will be done and irreversible.”
Eighty percent of the Bodine clan had farms, ranches and homes sitting in the direct path of the fallout from the Ogallala Aquifer.
He was failing to bring Martina home. The least he could do was protect his family and every other family that would be affected. Once he returned home, he’d have to face his sister, Lydia, and explain how he’d let her down, because this had already gone so far south that the State Department would refuse Martina any chance of coming to the US to be adopted by his mother.
He must have gotten Sabrina’s attention with that last statement so he gave her the rest. “I believe what Jin’s told me about the Orion Hunters being in our government and law enforcement. We both know it only takes one person in the right position to be dangerous.”
“Like whoever sold us out on the CIA op in the UK two years back.”
“Exactly. With a little luck, we’ll not only stop this now, but possibly turn up a list of the people in the US who are part of the Orion Hunter network.”
Sabrina was tapping a drumbeat on her desktop again. “I’ll send out more agents.”
“Too many people out here will draw attention.”
“If you and Dingo have split up, neither one of you has backup.”
Tanner had to give Sabrina something. She, Dingo and Josh were tight as family. Sabrina would be on the next flight out to be Dingo’s backup herself and bring someone for Tanner.
“Actually, we both have backup.” Tanner hoped Dingo wouldn’t take his head for this, but Dingo wouldn’t hold back on Sabrina at this point. “Dingo has a friend who helped us find the doctor in Chinatown. He says she’s trained and can handle a weapon.”
“Tell me her name isn’t Valene?”
Ah, hell. In for a penny ... “I would, but then I’d have to lie to you.”
Cursing boiled from Sabrina’s end.
Tanner pulled the phone from his ear until that subsided. “You don’t like her, huh?”
“I’d like her just fine six feet under.” Sabrina tapped some more. “Who’s backing you up?”
He glanced over at Jin who was staring straight ahead, clearly worried. “Soo Jin.”
Sabrina chuckled and Tanner smiled until her chuckle turned dark and scary. She said, “You’ve both lost your minds.”
A definite possibility, but admitting that would not be wise. “Based on what Jin has been able to tell us, Pang needed two days to create the chemical and bond it to silver iodide, then they’ll discharge it into a rainstorm. There’s a front coming across tomorrow, maybe first thing in the morning. If we locate the airplane they plan to use, then all we have to do is sit on it and wait for the canister to show up.”
“And how do you and Dingo plan to locate this airplane?”
“Jin said their plans called for using a modified Gulfstream IV, I’m thinking a similar setup to NOAA’s Lockheed Hurricane Hunters. Val came up with a list of seven that are renting hangars in a two hundred mile radius.”
“What if you don’t find them?”
He admitted, “If the four of us don’t find this by daylight, then our only other option will be to flag any Gulfstream IVs with flight plans in this airspace as a potential threat. But if we have to do that, this bunch will come back later and succeed because we won’t have any idea when or where they’ll strike. They may pick another aquifer.”
No yelling, cursing or scary quiet voice. Sabrina was thinking.
Tanner asked, “Did Nick make it back?”
“Yes and he’s the next one on my list.”
“He was helping me.”
“I don’t care. None of you should have withheld information.”
“You might not like that we did, Sabrina, but we did it to protect you.”
“I don’t need your fucking protection!”
That yelling was not good, because she very rarely cursed.
He failed to pull the phone away fast enough that time. When she quieted, he gave another shot at convincing her why the government couldn’t be brought in right now. “The State Department isn’t interested in the Orion Hunters, but the Hunters exist and they’ve infiltrated our government.”
“Do you have proof of that?”
Damn, she had him. “No.”
“The State Department issued a deadline of handing over the Koreans here in Atlanta at two tomorrow afternoon. They don’t know about Har being dead, yet, or that we’ve lost a physicist bent on destroying one of the largest aquifers feeding eight states.”
“Buy me some time is all I’m asking. I should know something one way or the other in the morning.”
“Tanner, we’re out of time. I don’t know how they found out, but the one thing the State Department does know about is Soo Jin. They want her. If you and Dingo find the seeding airplane by tonight, contact me and I’ll let Homeland know about it, but I’ve sent the jet back out to Ogallala. You, Dingo and Soo Jin are to be onboard for an 8:00 AM departure.”
A cold chill settled into Tanner’s insides.
If he took Jin to Atlanta tomorrow, she’d be vulnerable to Orion Hunters who were waiting on her to be brought in.
If he didn’t, he’d leave Sabrina to face the State Department empty handed.
> Chapter Forty
Jin never wanted to fly again, but she would make a deal with the devil to find the Gulfstream IV that Pang intended to use. The one her sister would fly before they killed her.
Tanner parked at the next-to-the-last airport on his list as the sun dove toward the horizon. It would be dark in another hour. They’d driven over a hundred and fifty miles in a drunken path that wound from Ogallala toward Denver.
Dingo and Val had fared no better, but they still had two airports to check.
Jin climbed out and pulled on the slightly-too-big, light jacket Tanner had bought for her in the last town, but everyone was commenting on the unusually warm temperatures.
Rain was coming just after daylight.
She fell into step with Tanner, who slowed his long strides for her. She asked, “What are you going to do if we don’t find the right airplane?”
“I have plan B, but it will only delay their attack and give them the advantage of knowing we’re onto them. Until that happens, Pang has no reason to think you knew what he was doing.”
Jin lifted the white earbuds attached to an iPod Tanner had gotten for her along with sunglasses. She was pretending to be his daughter. With the loose jacket, and as long as no one saw her eyes, they wouldn’t realize she had any Asian blood or that she was a grown woman.
The office for this airport was nicer than the others. Two stories with a tower above the second floor. Large hangars dotted the open space on each side of a dual runway. Small to midsize airplanes were tied down in areas between the hangars.
Tanner held the door for her.
She ducked inside, head down, and immediately started shuffling around like he’d told her to do at every stop while he inquired about a hangar for his Gulfstream IV. So far, everyone had been happy to show him how well their hangar accommodated that specific airplane because they just happened to have one.
None of those had any type of seeding equipment attached to the outside or a vent opening where one might have been inside. Tanner also had his people back in Atlanta running the numbers on every Gulfstream on his list and Dingo’s.
Nothing had popped up and none of the parked Gulfstreams had flight plans filed for later in the week. If any of them decided to take off into a storm tomorrow, Tanner said this woman Sabrina would handle getting those flights grounded.
