“Yeah.” Adam nodded, running a hand through his hair. “That’s some fucked shit. No words. And if I could kill Titanium for keeping you from us, I’d do it. Believe me, brother, I would. We need him. The whole operation, Elite Metal, it goes FUBAR without him. And he is the reason you’re still here, so there’s that too.”
Zach walked to the window. Time Square flashed bright lights outside. He’d been watching them for hours, although he could barely see them from the blur of everything around him, thanks to the migraine he couldn’t avoid for too much longer. “I did die that night. Three months in a coma, I woke a shell of my former self. I’ve got shit to deal with which basically makes me useless.”
“Nah.”
What? Zach whirled around. “Oh, you think you know? You’ve been aware of my living for a little over a week.”
“You crashed a plane successfully in the Gulf of Mexico. The Zach I knew was amazing, only I gotta tell you, I don’t think you’d have done it before. We’d be fishing you and my sister out of the ocean.”
He took a deep breath. “I didn’t crash it. I bailed out.”
“Semantics.”
Was it possible? Whatever. He wasn’t going to deal with word choice. “One thing you should know.”
Adam crossed his arms over his chest. “What?”
“Your sister and I? We’re together. The whole unsaid rule about leaving her alone? Long gone.”
Steele raised his eyebrows, and his jaw clenched. “You’re sleeping with my sister?”
“Totally am.”
His old friend huffed loudly. “Did you screw with her to be even with me over something? Fuck with my sister as a dick move?”
Zinc’s numbness passed immediately, and a red hot rage—the likes of which he had only felt the last time he beat Steele’s face—threatened to consume him again. “I’m not that kind of scum.”
“I was willing to forgive you for the beating. The sleeping with my sister? I basically want to pound you into the ground.”
Zinc stepped toward him, knowing the move was aggressive, knowing what it would do. “I dare you to try. And insinuate I would ever hurt your sister again, and I’ll make my first pounding on you look as though it was a walk in the park.”
The door swung open, and Sarah stepped into the room. She groaned loudly. “Is the drama necessary? You both missed each other. Tremendously. You thought he was dead. You thought he should have somehow known you were alive, or he should have taken your body so you didn’t have to watch him move on with life in silence. Ultimately, you missed each other. So hug it out instead of the theatrics, please.”
Hug? Not likely. Adam shifted his posture and as much as he no longer looked as though he was going to hit him, he didn’t seem to want to embrace either. Thankfully.
They’d never been exactly touchy-feely guys.
“And if you do hit him, Adam. Not in the face. He has headaches. If you make them worse, I’m going to knee you in the balls.”
The shot to his kidney caught him by surprise. Adam had always been able to swing hard.
Steele’s intel, which came direct from his woman, told him Sarah’s handler, whose real name was Fredrick Jacobs presently—it had changed three times as far as the records went, sometimes changed by the CIA, sometimes not—was seriously in debt. To the tune of three million dollars. To Nevada gangsters.
They’d expected to only run into him, a little smash and grab the bad guy. Only they’d found him meeting in his apartment with the men who took Sarah off the street. Or at least it seemed he was. Through the open window, Sarah identified a guy who looked familiar. They’d not been able to acquire an adequate headcount. Four guys had grabbed her. With the addition of Fredrick, the number should have made five guys, if they were all there.
They’d hit the bad guy jackpot. And they had the van to manage a bigger job. Though it was taking hours longer. The hot noon sun hit Zach’s head akin to a baking oven.
“Targets located. Confirmed?” Plat’s voice spoke over the microphone in Zinc’s ears.
Zach sat on a bench a distance away pretending to look at his cellphone.
Steele answered before he could, from his local across the street. On the off chance they knew Zach’s face. It had made sense to put Steele closer. “I count four.”
He raised his head at Steel’s words. “There should be five.” He spoke low.
“Confirm, Zinc. Only four. That’s my visual, too.” Platinum sounded no more than a whisper in his ear.
He would love to answer, except his eyes had blurred. Everything around him had an aura, and the auras had started to blend together into a giant ball of he couldn’t see fucking shit.
“I can’t.” He cleared his throat. “Repeat, I can’t see it.”
His head throbbed as though someone had taken a chainsaw and wanted to separate his skull from the inside out. His headaches had never taken him out of a mission before. He’d always managed. What the fuck was going on?
“They’re crossing the street.” Steele sounded annoyed. “Confirm the four so Plat and I can grab them with the van.”
Zach would love to comply and anger at his inability to do so made the whole thing so much fucking worse. “Not going to happen. My eyes have gone.” The other Ghosts would have known what he had meant when Zach said that. It dawned on him perhaps Steele and Plat wouldn’t. “Head injury from the explosion. Flare. I’m out. Repeat, I can’t do it.”
He stood. The best thing he could was move out of the way.
“Roger that,” Plat responded. “I’m fairly certain, although I can’t use my scope out here in the open in Manhattan. There are four. I think. Sarah, bring the van around the corner. Steele and I will take the four who are here.”
“Got it. No further people leaving the building. I’d say we have four. Total of four.”
And Zach was totally useless. He wanted to throw something, only what would he pick? His hands shook, and nausea formed in the pit of his stomach. Having gone through pain and recovery enough, he knew he was minutes away from puking.
Not enough time to hoof it back to the hotel room.
A screeching of tires in the distance caught his attention, and a blurry view of a van in the distance told him the mission was taking place, with absolutely no help from him. He hurried across the street. If he was going to puke, he’d do it in a garbage can.
“Zach? You okay?” Sarah’s voice over the microphone. “We’re still missing the man with the tattoo. The fellow who was outside the shop yesterday.”
Horns honked, making his headache situation worse. The taste of metal filled his mouth. God, it was going to be a bad migraine. Gritting his teeth, he crossed the street.
“Get out of here, Sarah. You managed to kidnap four guys off the street. Don’t worry about the fifth.” He clenched his hands in frustration. What was the point of being here if he couldn’t help? His fucking head. His broken, worthless body. God damn son of a bitch.
“Steel and Plat have it covered. They’re taking off. We’ll meet them at the airport. I’m coming to you.”
“No.” He groaned, finally getting to the garbage can right in time. Everything he’d eaten for breakfast came back, and when he raised his head, it was to find both Sarah and a group of strangers staring at him, the later in disgust.
Sarah brushed his hair off his forehead. “Bad?”
“I can’t believe I had to bail out.” His vision had cleared a bit, it usually did if he puked, but not the pain. “And before you ask, I took the fucking pills.”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t going to question you, love.”
“I don’t need to be babied either.” Bad enough he’d blown his role today. He got to live with looking at pity in the eyes of the woman he was sleeping with.
“Zach…”
He shook his head. Whatever she was going to say—
Zinc caught a glimpse of the guy—the man with the tattoo on his face—the same second the guy saw Sarah. Unl
ike them, the kidnapper seemingly had no worries about getting caught on the street. He raised a gun.
Things moved slow and fast at the same time. Zinc had only known another day in his whole life where the same strangeness of time took place, and that had been Operation Phoenix, when he’d died. He couldn’t think, only react.
With an abrupt shove, he knocked Sarah onto the street as he shouted into his microphone to Steele about the gun. He might have made sense, he might not have. The bullet missed its target. Sarah was safe.
It was a full thirty seconds before he realized it struck him instead.
“We’re coming,” Steele’s voice screamed in his ear. He could hardly hear it. The gunman was still there. He had his weapon raised, and he was going to shoot again. Zinc couldn’t reach his own gun, jammed in his pants, but he could reach Sarah’s. She’d stuck the weapon in her back under her jacket. He pulled it out, and before the man could fire again, Zach laid a shot right between his eyes.
“Zach!” Sarah screamed from beneath him, finally getting out from under him. He dropped the gun, and she grabbed it. Women on the street were screaming, and it wouldn’t be long until there were authorities involved.
Sarah was pale, her eyes huge. He wasn’t in pain, and as he placed his hand over the bullet wound in his gut, he knew his lack of agony was a very bad sign.
“What did you do?” Her voice wobbled before she placed her hand over his bleeding insides.
“Sarah. Stop. Look at me.” He didn’t have long. “I told you. I wasn’t going to die in an explosion.”
She gasped, her mouth quivering. “You aren’t going to die period.”
He was losing a lot of blood, and she was getting covered in it. “You have to go.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
He laughed. “Yes. And I’ve had the goodbye conversation once before with Steele. Terribly reminiscent. You’re a CIA operative. You can’t explain what happened here to the police.” As if on cue, sirens sounded in the distance. “You can’t be here, Sarah. It’s okay. You need to go.”
“No.”
“If you care about me, you won’t let the last things I think about be worrying about you getting hauled in by the NYPD. Please, baby. Go. I’m asking you. My job is to protect you. Getting you to go is the last thing I can do.”
Her voice trembled. “Zach.”
Damn it, she had to run the fuck out of there.
He took her hand off his stomach and replaced it with his own. It wouldn’t do much good. Only what the hell? “You were seriously the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Ever. I wish I had known when we were young and there was time. If I had to live the last three years to have had a blip of happiness with you, then I’m glad for the whole damn thing.”
Tears slipped from her eyes. She’d not lost it during an abduction, a plane crash, or an attempted second abduction, but for him, she cried. Even with her hair shaved and her ill-fitting clothes, she was still the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.
“Go. Hurry.”
She nodded, tears streaming unchecked as she reached over and kissed him on the lips. “I think I’ve always been in love with you, Zach.”
“Sweet lady, you saved my heart. Whatever good there is of me in the world fell for you. Try to remember me well.”
She shuddered, and he pushed her off him with his free hand. “Damn it, Sarah. Go. If you love me, then save yourself. Run. Hide. Do what I know you can do. Call your brother. Be safe.”
Sarah pulled back. “I love you.”
Those achingly sweet words filled with a warmth he shouldn’t be feeling. He leaned back on the ground, closing his eyes to the pain he knew would be coming. She’d gotten away. Sarah was amazing. The cops would never find her.
A wrenching burning started in his stomach, and he tried not to cry out. Some helpful bystander shouted something at him. He didn’t answer.
If there was one thing Zach knew well, everyone died alone.
Screeching tires somewhere caught his attention. The sounds around him didn’t matter, the world faded away. Once again.
Sarah couldn’t stop the tears from falling as she rocked back and forth on a park bench in Central Park. She had to look crazy, and she didn’t care. Zach had taken a bullet in the gut for her. He had to be dead.
He was dead because of her.
Her hand shook as she stared at the burner phone her brother had given her before they’d left the hotel. It didn’t take incoming calls, allowed the user to make outgoing. For an emergency, he’d told her.
In her fog of disbelief, she’d not phoned him yet. How much time had passed? It was almost evening.
Zach was dead.
I got the only man I’ve ever loved killed. A sob wracked her body.
She should have stayed. Fuck the police. She should have—
A large body plopped next to her, and she gasped in surprise for a second before she struggled in the next as the stranger pulled her against him into a hug.
“Relax. It’s me, little sister.”
“Adam.” Her voice broke. “He’s dead. He took a bullet for me. The man with the tattoo, he found us and—”
“He’s not dead. Not yet, anyway.”
“What?” She pulled back. “I saw his bullet wound. I know about these things. His was a fatal injury.”
Adam snorted. “Zinc survived an explosion. Trust me, he should have died. You think something as small as a gut shot is going to kill him? I’m starting to wonder if he’s the bionic man. The doctors have kept him alive, and as we speak, my people are stealing him from the hospital to bring him back home to Texas to recover. There could be complications. Moving him to the medical plane is risky. Fuck, I’d put odds on Zinc living through a bullet wound.”
Was it possible? Her mind was slow, it wasn’t taking information in the way she wanted it to. “He’s still alive.”
“He is.”
She nodded. “How did you find me?”
He pointed to the phone. “Traced it.”
“I thought it was a burner.”
Her brother shrugged. “Yeah but it’s my burner.”
“Adam.” She stood. “If he’s still alive, you have to do something for me.”
“What?”
“You have to go steal a motorcycle in California and bring it to Texas. Adam, please. I need to be with him, and you need to go steal his bike from that bitch, Ally.” She couldn’t be kind right then. Fuck that woman. No way would Sarah be marrying anyone in six months if Zach died, and she wasn’t even engaged to him. “She’s got it.”
Her brother grinned. “Actually, that sounds fun.”
9
Zach sat by the pond listening to the birds in the distance. He didn’t know how long he’d been there, and he was getting a little tired of being alone. Where was Sarah? Where was Adam? Shouldn’t they be here? They’d always been with him in the past.
Only, no. Life drifted by him, and he sat alone, all the time.
A sound caught his attention, a high-pitched beeping, and it seemed really out of place for his lake getaway, so he ignored it.
“Zinc, can you hear me?” He knew the voice, and he whirled around. “Enough is enough with the crap, man. We’re not doing three months of you nearly dead again.”
Titanium. He owed him something, didn’t he? Something he needed to say to the man. Except, what?
The Ghost leader was nowhere to be seen, so Zach shrugged, and he went back to looking at the lake.
Something was wrong…
“The last time, he woke alone.” Sarah turned as the man who had flown them from the plane wreck to Miami approached her. “I don’t know how long he was conscious before anyone noticed. We’d all become convinced he was a goner, and then suddenly, he was back.”
She’d spent four days sitting next to Zach’s unconscious form waiting for him to wake. The doctors had pulled back his pain meds and seemed to feel he would soon start to regain consciousness. His blood pr
essure was good. They’d managed to repair most of the damage to him, although he would likely hate moving around for a while.
A miracle. One of the surgeons who had gone over his case with her when they’d arrived finally had used that word: miracle. No permanent damage.
Maybe Adam was right, maybe Zach was somehow superhuman. He survived where most men fell.
Her brother had gotten back with the bike the day before, and he and several other guys had spent the day stripping the identification numbers and the license plates so it could never be identified. Amazing what the guys here could do.
“He’s not going to wake alone,” she finally answered. “Thanks for coming by again.”
“Let him know we’re all thinking of him.”
She nodded. “I will.”
Sarah heard rather than saw Tungsten slip out. Everyone had been doing that. She didn’t know what would happen to her once Zach woke. At some point, she’d have to let the CIA know she wasn’t coming back. After everything, she knew she wanted to be a plain old lawyer and not responsible for life and death decisions with the possibility of being kidnapped off the street. Titanium wasn’t done with the interrogation of the guys who had kidnapped her or her former handler. She made sure not to ask what would happen to them when he was.
She couldn’t die, not even fakely. If her parents buried another child, it would kill them. Adam thought they could probably work something out. She was working overseas or something, would be the story.
She closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to worry about it yet.
Zach groaned, and she sat straighter, squeezing his hand. “Zach? Can you hear me?”
His lids drifted half open, and he stared at her silently. Finally, she spoke again, “Sweetie, you were shot. You’re going to be okay. I’m here. You’re safe.”
He nodded and then spoke slowly, “Sarah. You’re. Hot. Bald.”
It took her a moment to react. “All of that, and those are the first words you say?”
She laughed until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then for the second time in four days, Sarah Steele cried, holding Zach’s hand.
The Men of Elite Metal: Platinum, Zinc, & Francium Page 19
