Omega Force 01- Storm Force

by Susannah Sandlin

  The camera switched to the news anchor, and people filtered back to their tables or their jobs. Mori looked at Kell, who was still staring at the screen with wide eyes, and she turned to see what he was looking at.

  Oh God. “The governor has identified a local environmental activist as being behind his abduction and possibly the bombing of the Zermurray Building,” the news anchor was saying. The picture behind him was of the Co-Op offices, with swarms of police cars outside, officers moving in and out the door, goddamned Taylor standing on the stoop running his mouth and pointing at her car in the lot.

  And then the background picture changed to one of her. A publicity photo taken a year ago filled up the space behind the newsman’s head. “A manhunt is underway, and a reward has been offered for information—”

  Kell grabbed her arm and steered her toward the door. His voice was low and tight. “Walk out of here now.” He tossed a few bills on their table as they passed it. “When we get to the car, I need you on the floorboard, out of sight. I’m right behind you.”

  “Kell, I didn’t do this.” The light as they pushed through the door blinded her, and she stumbled on the sidewalk. Kell grabbed her arm and propelled her forward as fast as they could go without running. “I swear, I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  He had to believe her. She needed him to believe her. What game was Michael playing this time? One more attempt to force her to come to him for help? Well, it was probably going to work.

  Kell opened the passenger door and waited for her to climb in and slither onto the floorboard, then walked around the car and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “Kell, where are we going?” Was he taking her to the police? They couldn’t go back to the Co-Op or to her apartment. She couldn’t think of anyplace to go except to Michael, damn it. The Co-Op was ruined; she was ruined. But she’d be damned if she let Kell ruin his life, too.

  She sat up and struggled to get back into the seat. “Let me out. You can’t get involved in this.”

  Before she could twist and open the door, he’d cranked the engine and pulled out of the lot. “Get on the fucking floorboard. Now.”

  His harsh tone startled her so that she swallowed hard and curled as tightly onto the floorboard as her height would allow. Sometimes, long legs were not an asset.

  “Kell, you have to understand, I didn’t—”

  “Not now.” Once he’d navigated the Terminator onto Kirby, he sped up and blended with traffic. “We’ll talk later. Right now, you’re on the run. And I’m aiding and abetting.”

  EPISODE 4

  CHAPTER 13

  Somehow, when Kell had slogged through the Ranger School refresher and counterterrorism training with his new Omega Force team, he’d imagined using his skill set to work in tandem with law enforcement, or at least support it from behind the scenes.

  Using his know-how to run from the law while aiding a suspected terrorist — and now kidnapper? Not on the agenda.

  Yet here he was, driving his parents’ ancient behemoth of a car with a silent, panicking woman crouched on his floorboard, his mind ticking through escape routes and assessing options.

  He maneuvered the Terminator through the heavy traffic on Kirby and maneuvered onto I-59, headed toward downtown. The jag-shifters had seen the Olds, so his first order of business would be swapping it for the car Nik had rented.

  Money fell next on the list — cash, to minimize the trail that would be left by using plastic.

  Once those basic needs had been met, he’d figure out what the hell he was doing trashing his career for a woman who, if she hadn’t been lying to him outright, had at the very least been lying by omission.

  “Can I sit up now?”

  He glanced down at a grim-faced Mori, who had folded her long frame into an accordion pleat, trying to squeeze onto the floorboard. He wanted to throttle her and hold her so tightly no one could touch her. And then throttle her again.

  Instead, he growled, “Stay.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a golden retriever.” She popped her head up and looked out the window before slumping back down. “You need to stop and let me out, Kell. You can’t get involved in this.”

  “It’s a little fucking late for that.” Damn it, she hadn’t asked him to pull the white knight routine, so he needed to quit acting like an asshole — at least until he heard her side of things. First, he had to get them somewhere safe. “Sorry.”

  He took a sharp right turn a little faster than he should have, causing the Olds’s granny tires to squeal and Mori’s head to thump on the door of the glove compartment. She rubbed her temple and scowled at him but didn’t speak. Smart woman. He needed to think about where to go that wouldn’t drag Nik and the rest of his team into the toilet with him if this all flushed south. It was definitely swirling in that direction.

  His cell phone vibrated in his jeans pocket, and he maneuvered to pull it out and look at the incoming number. Nik. Kell considered not answering, but his phone shouldn’t have been compromised, unless whoever was having him followed had linked Jack Kelly to Jack Kellison. And he needed to warn Nik and Robin to stay away from his apartment and the Co-Op. Thank God he’d decided to send Gator home with them last night.

  He’d take the risk that the phone was still safe. “Shit creek, man. No paddle.”

  Nik’s words were casual, but his voice was tense. “Where are you?”

  “Going for the rental. Is it still in the same place?”

  “Yeah.” Nik’s exasperated huff of air practically puffed its way through the phone. “She with you?”

  Kell glanced down at Mori, who’d wrapped her arms around her bent knees and rested her forehead on them. “Affirmative.”

  “What the hell are you thinking? Tell me you’re on your way to turn her in and are getting the rental car to protect yourself.”

  Kell didn’t know what he was going to do beyond getting the new wheels. He wanted to know what was really going on before he took a step as drastic as turning Mori in. His gut told him she was in some kind of trouble the authorities might worsen rather than fix.

  One step at a time. “Just stay away from the apartment and the Co-Op — and me. It’s complicated.”

  “Fuck that. You need to go and…Wait a minute.”

  Robin’s voice rose and fell in the background a few seconds before Nik cursed again. When he returned to the phone, he sounded pissed off but calmer. “OK, go to ground and avoid the colonel. Option B as in beta. We’ll figure it out from there.”

  Kell let out a breath of relief and ended the call. They were behind him, and he hoped like hell they wouldn’t live to regret it. While going through their counterterrorism training, the team members had privately come up with safeguard options in case one or all of them was compromised. They’d found multiple safe spots that even the Omega Force brass — the colonel and whomever he worked for — didn’t know about.

  First loyalty was to country. Next, to team. The colonel came in third. Maybe fourth, behind Gator. Kell didn’t know where the hell Mori Chastaine fit into that list, except that she shouldn’t be on it at all.

  Option B was a cheap, utilitarian hotel in extreme far-east suburban Baytown, surrounded by petrochemical plants churning out smoke twenty-four/seven. That would be the next step after the car exchange.

  “Who was that? Who knows you’re with me?” Mori lifted her head and frowned at him, then unwound those distractingly long legs and levered herself into the passenger seat, her right hand on the door handle.

  He watched her out of his peripheral vision. Her eyes scanned the street ahead of them, then locked onto something, her body tensed, her fingers tightened on the handle.

  Shit. She was going to make a run for it if that next red light caught them. He obviously didn’t have the good sense God gave a duck, or he’d arrest her. Since that wasn’t happening, he should let her go, let her run, let her sink or swim in her own mess. Whatever her troubled game was, its players travel
ed in loftier circles than he did. Governors and millionaire shipping magnates were not the type of terrorist he’d been prepared to go after.

  That was his brain doing all the tough talk. His gut remembered the vulnerability she’d shown when he’d touched her, and the open abandon with which she’d given herself to him. She was in trouble, and he had to do something about it.

  Damn it. This nobility shit was seriously overrated.

  With one eye on the smoke-belching truck in front of him, Kell reached over and flipped open the glove compartment, pulled out his spare pair of handcuffs, and snapped one bracelet around Mori’s wrist before she figured out what he was doing. Be prepared, he always figured. Rangers lead the way.

  “What the hell?” Mori pulled against him harder than he’d expected. In fact, she practically jerked his arm off, but he held on to the other cuff, finally snapping it around the Terminator’s gearshift. If she jerked on it that hard again, she’d throw them into reverse and they’d both be shit out of luck.

  She stopped struggling and stared at the cuffs. “Why did you do that?”

  Kell gritted his teeth and gave her a solid glare. “Because you were getting ready to hop out at the next red light and run like a gazelle on the fucking Serengeti.”

  She laughed. How dare she laugh?

  “I don’t see one damn funny thing about this situation.”

  Mori stopped laughing, but the smile lingered. “I bet you were one absolute asshole as a Marine.”

  The woman needed an education, and he knew just the man to give it to her. “Ranger.”

  “Whatever.” Mori slumped down in the seat but didn’t try to slip the cuff on the gearshift — good thing, since a fender bender that put them in a close encounter with Houston’s finest would be counterproductive to an escape.

  “Where are we going, anyway? Wrong direction for the FBI or Houston PD.”

  He glanced at her before snapping his gaze back to the traffic. She was staring out the window, so he couldn’t see her expression. How much did he trust her? Right now, not much. “Somewhere we can talk.”

  She turned to face him. “You aren’t turning me in?”

  The combination of hope and fear in her voice stabbed his conscience like a knife in the chest. He wanted to protect her, but he couldn’t make that promise — not until he knew what kind of shit she was in and how deep. “Not yet.”

  He pulled into a self-park lot a half block from the rental’s location, used the Jack Kelly credit card to pay for a week’s parking, and eased the Terminator into a space. “Reach in the glove compartment and find the key to the cuffs. Don’t think about running.”

  Mori huffed. “Or what? You’re going to chase me down? Shoot me in the middle of downtown Houston? I mean, what part of I don’t want you involved in this do you not get?” She dug around in the compartment, fished out a small pair of silver keys on a plain ring, and began fumbling with the cuff. “Just let me get out of this car and walk. Drive away and live your life. It’s safer for both of us if you —”

  “Who sent the two jaguarundi shifters after me?”

  Mori stopped futzing with the cuff but wouldn’t meet his gaze. Just as he’d thought. A normal reaction would have been What’s a shifter, Kell? Jags are extinct, Kell. Yet Mori was as pale as if she’d seen a fucking Louisiana black bear walking through downtown Houston in the oppressive August heat. She knew about shifters, which raised a whole bunch of new questions.

  “How do you know about them? What did they do?” Her voice barely rose above a whisper, and she finally looked up at him. “Did they hurt you?”

  “Not yet.” He reached over and took the keys from her, quickly unlocking the cuffs. He’d take them with him; he’d never cuffed a woman to a bed with anything more than pleasure in mind, but he had a feeling Mori Chastaine wasn’t going to give up her secrets easily.

  The shifter comment seemed to have deflated Mori, and her shoulders sagged as she got out of the Olds. She didn’t pull away when he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and tugged her to walk alongside him to the trunk, and she didn’t raise an eyebrow when he transferred his rifle and the cuffs to a big duffel that still held the clothes he’d taken to Cote Blanche. Mori’s slight intake of breath was the only indication she’d seen him slip the Beretta out of the case and into his waistband under his shirt before closing the trunk. He’d have put the rifle with it if he thought he could walk with it stuck down his pants leg.

  “Look inconspicuous,” he said under his breath, like a six-foot blond Amazon and a guy with a washtub-sized duffel bag could be inconspicuous under any circumstances. Especially in a city like Houston, where there were underground air-conditioned tunnels so people wouldn’t have to walk outside. “Walk with a purpose, but not like you’re in a hurry.”

  They trekked at a steady clip to the lot where the rental was parked. Kell pulled out the card, found the space number, and detached the key. Escorting Mori to the passenger side of the generic dark-blue Chevy, he unlocked the door, not releasing her wrist until she had slid silently inside. To her credit, she didn’t try to run while he walked around to the driver’s side and got in. The shifter comment had shaken her big-time. Good.

  “I’m stopping to get cash, and then we’re going to a hotel where we can talk. There are some things you need to know about me, and there sure as hell are things I need to know about you — and your friends. Like the shifters and Michael Benedict.”

  Mori’s demeanor morphed from worried to petrified before Benedict’s name was out of his mouth. Bingo. Now he knew who’d hit her. Maybe even who’d sent the shifters after him.

  Who, but not why. That big missing puzzle piece still floated out of reach. Why would the millionaire head of an international shipping company be mixed up in something this ugly?

  He pulled the rental into traffic and wound his way east toward Baytown. It would take longer going along side streets, but the cops would be watching the freeways and interstates, expecting that to be Mori’s logical escape route.

  “You got a cell phone?” He glanced over at her, glad to see she wasn’t crying. Tears, he couldn’t handle. But she appeared to be deep in thought. “Mori? You got a cell phone?”

  “What?” She jolted into awareness. “Sure, why?”

  “Turn it off. It might have some kind of GPS signal that can be tracked.” He thought a moment. “Better yet, leave it on and throw it out the window.”

  She dug in her bag and pressed the off button on the phone. “I’ll turn it off.”

  Great. Now he’d have to make sure she didn’t use the damned thing while he wasn’t looking, or she’d get them both arrested. Or killed.

  He couldn’t help but pity her, even through his anger. She might not have realized it yet, but life as she’d known it was over — or maybe she had, from the tilt of her head as she stared out at urban vistas that grew steadily seedier as they traveled east. With the governor fingering her as his kidnapper, it wasn’t the Co-Op under fire now, but Mori herself. Unless they could somehow straighten things out, she’d never be able to go home again. Assuming she wasn’t in it so deep that things couldn’t be straightened out. Then Kell couldn’t protect her, or wouldn’t. There were lines he wouldn’t cross for anyone.

  He found a branch of his bank with a drive-through ATM and took out the day’s cash-withdrawal limit of $500 using his personal debit card. He stuck the bills in his wallet and tossed it on the console before resuming their twisting, turning route to Baytown. A long, tense, silent hour later, he pulled into the lot of a Super 8 motel tucked within a cluster of truck stops.

  “Welcome to paradise.” He eased through the lot, dodging potholes, and pulled into a parking space in the back. The door to Room 123 lay directly in front of them.

  Thank God they’d made it this far. With the draining of adrenaline came a bone-deep weariness. He hadn’t been able to soak his back or apply a heat pack to it for two or three days, and it was catching up with him. A whole bott
le of ibuprofen wouldn’t faze this kind of ache, and he wondered if Mori would hate him if he handcuffed her to the nightstand while he took a long, hot bath.

  Kell reached over to grab his wallet, but it wasn’t there, and as he raised his gaze to meet Mori’s, he saw his own doubts reflected right back at him. In her hand was his wallet, open to expose his driver’s license. His real driver’s license.

  Judas on a pony, when had he gotten so fucking careless? He reached out for the wallet, and she held on a moment before releasing it with a snap.

  “Nice to meet you, John Kennedy Kellison Jr.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Who was this guy? Sure, Kell had said they needed to talk, that he had things to tell her, but Mori hadn’t figured it was something basic like his freaking name. If he was lying about his name, what else had he lied about? And why?

  Not that she had a lot of room to point fingers without being the world’s biggest hypocrite, but still. At least when they’d had sex, he’d known her name. There’s even more about me, more important things, he doesn’t know.

  Yeah, definitely no room to judge. Open-minded, that was her.

  Kell stuffed his wallet back in his pocket and jerked the car door open. “Inside.”

  Open-minded had its limits. “You need to stop barking orders at me in one- or two-syllable words. It might work for your damned Marines, but it doesn’t work for me.” She knew the difference between a Marine and a Ranger, but he deserved to have his chain yanked and that seemed to do it.

  Mori opened her car door in a vain attempt to catch a stray breeze, but stayed inside while he slammed around in the trunk, grumbling under his breath, retrieving that gargantuan duffel bag. Which did look like something a soldier would carry, she’d give him that much.

  The trunk slammed shut. “Are you going in, or are we going to have this discussion in the parking lot?” Kell — if he even went by Kell — stood outside her car door, the bag slung over his shoulder. He’d put on a shoulder holster and transferred the gun to it, although she’d seen some kind of rifle or shotgun go into that bag.