Omega Force 01- Storm Force

by Susannah Sandlin

  The way his muscles moved under that tanned skin had certainly caught her attention.

  Mori shook her head. There was no point in even going there.

  She’d started the same chapter of her book for the fourth time, reading aloud to force herself to concentrate, when a knock at her door startled her enough to overturn her wine glass. So damned jumpy. She grabbed a napkin off the kitchen table and dabbed at the wine beaded on the carpet. At least it was white and not a red, or she could kiss that security deposit good-bye.

  A second knock and a muffled voice: “Floral delivery.”

  She peered through the peephole, and sure enough, there was a young guy holding a bunch of flowers. It was the bored look on his face that convinced her he was a flower delivery guy and not a cop or a reporter who’d managed to track her down. Not that she didn’t fully expect that the cops, or federal agents, were parked somewhere nearby and watching her every move. Talk about a creepy feeling.

  Maybe the flowers were from her parents, at least acknowledging her birthday. The day Mori Chastaine turned twenty-five, her world was supposed to change in ways she didn’t want. She had expected the day to be traumatic. She hadn’t expected to spend it sitting in a small windowless room on a hard chair after too many cups of coffee, being questioned about a horrific crime.

  Maybe they were from Dad, trying to make up for abandoning her today. God forbid Paul Chastaine should apologize for anything. Their recent issues had made her realize her father was not a brave man. He was a decent man, in his own way, but he was weak and would always take the easy route. It was a distressing revelation for her at a time when she needed him so badly.

  The delivery boy had started walking away by the time she opened the door. He turned with a smile. “Thank God. You were my last delivery today, and I sure didn’t want to have to haul these back to the shop.”

  She signed for the flowers and dug in her wallet on the counter for a tip, waiting until he was out of sight in the parking lot before turning to look at them.

  No way they came from her parents. A dozen perfect red roses in a cut-glass vase was not their style.

  Michael Benedict was another matter. It was exactly his style — over the top, expensive, and with lots of invisible strings attached.

  Taking a deep breath, Mori pulled the small florist’s envelope from the plastic holder and opened it. Michael had stayed away from her the past couple of months while her parents tried to wear her down about marrying him. But damn it, this was the twenty-first century in the fourth-largest city in America, not the dark ages in a feudal village.

  Whatever unholy promises her parents had made with this man when she was born shouldn’t bind her to him now. She should have a choice where she spent her life, and with whom.

  Did you get my birthday message, Emory? Love, M.

  “What the heck?” She took the note back to the sofa and sat down, staring at the card, trying to figure out its meaning.

  She’d checked all her office messages — besides, he never tried to contact her there. She dug her cell phone from her purse and scrolled through the call log. Nothing from Michael Benedict or Tex-La Shipping.

  What message had she gotten today, except that she never again wanted to start a day sitting in an interrogation room surrounded by grim-faced men and women? Or maybe that was the message.

  “Oh God. It was him.” Her whisper seemed to echo around the small living room. Surely she was wrong. Surely he wouldn’t try to set her up for the bombing of the Zemurray Building.

  Who was she kidding? It was exactly the kind of thing Michael Benedict would do, to force her hand in marrying him. Knowing her father wouldn’t help her and figuring out what might make her desperate enough to turn to him for help.

  Fingers trembling, she picked up the phone to call him, then set it down again. She couldn’t do it, not yet.

  But she could force her parents to talk to her. And pray to God she was wrong.

  * * *

  The Chastaine Quad-D Ranch was a forty-five-minute drive west of Houston when there was no traffic on the Katy Freeway. Which was exactly never.

  By the time she had finally broken loose from the automotive gridlock, Mori had an aching jaw from grinding her teeth and hands sore from gripping the steering wheel of her little hybrid car until it was slick with sweat.

  The farther she got from the city, the more she was convinced she was not only blowing the whole idea of Michael framing her out of proportion, but her sanity also might be in question. She could swear that as she stopped and started and stopped and started with the traffic, she’d seen the same golden eagle sitting on fences, perched on power poles, or flying overhead. Eagles were a rare sight in the concrete habitat, and the idea one might be following her was preposterous.

  Finally free of the worst traffic, Mori floored it — just in case the eagle was tailing her. Who knew what Homeland Security had at its disposal? Mechanical spying eagles might not be outside the realm of possibility.

  She rolled down the window and turned off the AC. Now that night had fallen, the temperature had dropped below ninety degrees. Might be a downright nippy eighty-five by midnight.

  The turnoff to the Quad-D was hard to find in daylight, near impossible after dark, but Mori had driven this stretch of two-lane blacktop so often her muscles had memorized the turns. She slowed and eased the car onto the gravel road that stretched through a grove of live oaks that met in a dense overhead canopy. During daylight hours, it looked like a grand entrance to an estate, so the simple two-story wooden farmhouse that lay at the end of it always seemed out of place, lifted from another vista.

  The upstairs lights were off and her father’s SUV was missing, but a light shone in the front living room and she saw a shadow move behind it, followed by a rustling of curtains. Someone was home and knew she was here.

  Her mom opened the door before she cleared the front stairs. Celia Chastaine was tall and athletic like her daughter, her blond hair streaked with gray now, but Mori recognized none of her own softness and humor. Celia had named her only child after the school where she’d studied in her one failed attempt at escaping family bonds and striking out on her own. Naming her daughter “Emory” hinted at a sense of irony, if not exactly a sense of humor that Mori had never seen.

  “Paul said you’d be here as soon as you got out, to honor your commitment. I thought you’d run away from it. I’m glad you proved me wrong.” Celia moved aside so Mori could enter. The ambiance of the house wrapped a warmth around Mori that even Celia couldn’t completely chill. Her grandfather, Gus Chastaine, had been dead several years, but his sweet, calming influence remained carved into the very walls of the home he’d built. If he’d still been alive, he’d support her. Or at least she thought so.

  Regardless, Mori had no intention of marrying Michael Benedict, even if she had officially crossed her deadline of turning twenty-five.

  “Why didn’t Dad come to pick me up from the FBI offices, or at least send a lawyer?” Mori followed her mother into the living room, where the TV was blaring what looked like some kind of barrel-racing competition. Celia turned it off, and the silence in the room lay heavy.

  Her mother sat straight-backed in the overstuffed armchair at the end of the sofa, looking out of place in the homey, Texas warmth of the Chastaine family ranch. She’d lived here thirty years and still looked like an interloper. “Paul wanted you to think about the consequences of being so selfish. To think about everything that would be lost if you continue to shirk your duty.”

  Mori gritted her teeth but only counted to three before she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m not here to fulfill my responsibility, as you say. I know it looks selfish on the surface, but think about it, Mom. All I’m doing if I marry Michael Benedict is delaying the inevitable, so why not live my life? Find a man to spend my life with who — oh, here’s a radical thought — I might actually love?”

  A vision of Jack Kelly’s startling blue-green eyes came
to her. She didn’t love him, of course. He was just the first man she’d met in a long time she was attracted to, and for no rational reason she could come up with, she somehow trusted him. Plus, he was outside this world her parents lived in, which made him automatically—

  “You’ve met someone. I figured as much.” Her mother’s voice dripped with disgust. “You’re sleeping with him, I guess. At least tell me you aren’t pregnant. Do I need to remind you the child won’t be allowed to live?”

  Mori stared at the woman who’d given birth to her and wondered who the hell she was. Wondered if at some time in her youth she’d been just like Mori but had let herself be warped into a soulless monster by circumstances. “I’m not seeing anyone, and I’m certainly not pregnant. If I were, this is the last place I would come.”

  Her anger brought the details of the room into sharp relief as she got to her feet. The worn, braided rug. Heavy, masculine furniture. Dark, scarred wooden beams on the ceiling. The fireplace it rarely got cold enough to need for warmth. A man’s room for the man’s world they lived in.

  Celia might be willing to live her life on the fringes, but Mori wasn’t.

  “I’d hoped to talk to Dad, to make sure Michael had nothing to do with whoever told the police the Co-Op was involved in the bombing.” She started toward the door. “Because we do good work. Important work. And we do it without hurting anyone. It shouldn’t be jeopardized because of a personal vendetta.”

  She’d pulled open the door, the heat hitting her face like a blast from a steam room. Her mom’s voice came from so close behind her it made her jump. She hadn’t heard Celia get up, much less cross the room that fast.

  “Oh, Michael made that call to the police. We all talked about it weeks ago, Michael and your father and me. It was a warning.” Celia’s voice was low and heated with its own anger. “If you don’t want to see the same thing happen again, you’ll change your tune, Little Miss Independent. Michael’s been a patient and forgiving man, but he’s tired of waiting.”

  Mori turned and locked gazes with her mother. She knew the shock was visible on her own face, because Celia gave her a cold, satisfied smile before closing the door and shutting her outside.

  Michael hadn’t just implicated Mori in the bombing. Celia had implied that he had caused the bombing and her parents had known.

  The little car bounced along the road beneath the canopy of oaks, but at the end of the drive, instead of turning left toward the freeway to take her back to town, Mori steered the car right, driving in a daze. After a couple of miles, surrounded by open land and occasional clusters of trees, she pulled far enough off the road that she could camouflage her car behind a stand of trees grown scrawny by the hot summer and the ongoing drought.

  The waning half moon cast a dim light over the scrub-covered land around her. Mori pulled her T-shirt over her head and shimmied out of her track shorts, then her bra and panties, folding them and nestling them beneath the prickly branches of a mesquite bush about ten yards from the car.

  She raised her head to pull in a deep lungful of air, felt the ancient blood within her stir, and began to run.

  EPISODE 2

  CHAPTER 5

  Kell pulled the Terminator out of his apartment parking lot promptly at 7:00 a.m., hoping to get to the Co-Op offices early enough to catch Mori alone, without Taylor Stedman as a nosy chaperone. He had plenty of time to plan his strategy as the traffic crawled along Westheimer toward the city.

  Homeland Security would be watching the Co-Op offices and Mori herself, but as far as Kell knew, they hadn’t obtained a warrant to search the building. He had no doubt they were working on it. So Kell’s Plan B was to search every nook, cranny, and pigeonhole of the place before anyone else got to it.

  He had devised a Plan A, in case Mori had already arrived. He’d get to know his suspect better, discover her hot buttons (the ones that didn’t involve Louisiana black bears), figure out what drove her, earn her trust. He’d chosen his most nonthreatening, all-American clothes this morning, hoping to look less military and more like a regular guy: his LSU T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes instead of boots.

  Mori’s personal life was a mystery, other than the tidbits she’d dropped on the way back from the FBI offices. She struck him as a loner. No one had come to pick her up when she’d been released. Not her parents. Nobody. Something odd was going on with that. She was pretty. Hell, more than pretty, not that he had any business noticing. She seemed to have a good sense of humor, at least from the glimmers he’d seen in the middle of what had to be monumental stress. Why would a woman like that be so alone? Especially yesterday. When he’d gone home and reread her files, he realized it had been her twenty-fifth birthday.

  Something was seriously wrong with the surface picture of Mori Chastaine.

  The files compiled on her by the colonel had little information other than that she had lived in Texas all her life, was an only child, and had never been married. No known boyfriends. No close friends, period.

  He needed to be her friend. Then he could either stop her or save her.

  As he turned on Montrose, he saw he’d have no luck with either Plans A or B. When he eased the Terminator into the Co-Op parking lot, Mori’s little hybrid was nowhere to be found, but Taylor’s vintage Ford pickup took up two spaces in front of the entrance. Not only because it was that big, but because he’d done a shit job of parking.

  Kell didn’t like Taylor Stedman, thought he was pursuing his own agenda rather than acting as Mori’s second-in-command. The man might not have done anything criminal, but he wasn’t loyal to his employer, and loyalty filled up page one of the Jack Kellison Book of Virtues.

  Of course, working undercover to gain a woman’s trust and then betraying her for the greater good fell into a gray area he didn’t want to think about too deeply.

  That he was judging Taylor for not being loyal to a suspected terrorist was something Kell didn’t want to ruminate on too long, either, because then he’d have to openly admit he was having a hard time thinking Mori could be guilty. And that he didn’t want her to be guilty. Or why he didn’t want her to be guilty.

  Horny. That’s all he was. Too long in the sexual trough of deprivation and neglect with nothing but a skinny, birdlike, frequently naked eagle-shifter to look at.

  No, Kell didn’t like Taylor Stedman, but he did like Taylor’s ride — a hulking vision of fading black paint with a hint of rust. He stopped for a few seconds to admire it before entering the building. If he were to get rid of the Terminator and replace it, he could totally see himself with something like this, working on it on weekends to fix it up.

  The real question wasn’t how a jerk like Tay had ended up with such a cool ride, which probably burned gas and oil like nobody’s business. The real question was, why was he here so early?

  Going into a structure quietly was a Ranger-reinforced habit. He’d spent many hours conducting door-to-door searches in unsafe environments, silent for a couple of very practical reasons.

  First, never give an enemy advance warning so he has time to get ready to shoot your nuts off as soon as you’re within firing range.

  Second, you might stumble across something interesting.

  Like the sight of Taylor Stedman sitting at Mori’s desk, using a brass letter opener to pick at the lock in a bottom drawer. The weasel-dick was so deep in concentration he didn’t notice Kell leaning against the doorjamb watching him.

  “Need help finding something?” Kell crossed his arms as Taylor gasped and jumped to his feet, his face turning a deep shade of late-summer tomato.

  “God, didn’t your mama teach you not to sneak up on people?” Obviously interpreting Kell’s neutral expression as a sign of approval, Taylor took the chair again and resumed his clumsy use of the letter opener. “I want to save the Co-Op, and the only way to do it might be to see what Emory Chastaine is hiding. If we’re the ones who expose her, it makes us look good. All our disappearing supporters will come back when
they see that the rest of us had nothing to do with her crimes.”

  Jack nodded, calming his inner urge to shake the man until his teeth rattled out of their sockets. Sure, he’d been planning to do the same thing — but to save people’s lives, not to act out a fit of petty jealousy. And he had no doubt Taylor resented every particle of Mori’s being. “Find anything?”

  “Just this bottom drawer. It’s the only one with a lock, so maybe she’s hidden something incriminating. You know, some threatening letters or bomb-making supplies.”

  Taylor Stedman had watched way too much television.

  “I doubt she’d be that stupid.” More than he could say for Taylor. If Mori had left boxes of wires, explosives, and timers in the drawer of her Office Depot special, locked or not, he’d eat that whole nasty pile of military Meals Ready-to-Eat he’d stashed in his closet five years ago in case of a hurricane.

  Taylor shrugged. “Keep an eye out for her while I try to get into this drawer. If you see her car pull in the lot, let me know. Don’t want her slipping up on me like you did.” He looked up, the sharp angles of his face narrowing. “How did you get in here without me hearing you?”

  Because the idiot was so intent on his own crime a freight train could have roared past without disturbing him. “Force of habit. You know, from my Army training.”

  “Right.” Tay cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, which made Kell want to throttle him even more. “Did the Army teach you how to pick locks?”

  He’d never met a security system he couldn’t breach or a lock he couldn’t pick, but not for this jerk. That was a solitary activity. “Sorry. I’ll play lookout. You break and enter.”