by Vicki Hinze
The urge to move assaulted her, but she rebuffed it, stayed hidden in the shadows between the tombs, gripping her gun, checking her earpiece and sliding her lip mike into place, preparing to aim and fire.
Gravel crunched.
He’d moved again. Quickly, she spun out.
Caught in the moonlight, he dove behind a tomb. But he was too slow. She fired.
He fell, dead before he hit the ground.
“Baxter?” Darcy summoned him via her lip mike.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve just killed Paco Santana. I need a retrieval,” she said, then added directions on her location.
“Darcy?”
Hearing Ben, she turned and saw him coming toward her, putting some weight on his injured leg. It definitely wasn’t broken. Winded, he looked at Santana, lifeless against someone else’s grave. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Thank God.” He hugged her to him. “I couldn’t get here. I tried, Darcy.”
Just as she’d tried with Merry. “Shh, I know, Ben. It’s okay. Everything is fine.”
Baxter came up on them. Darcy had him in her sights, and when he realized it, he shouted, “Whoa, it’s me. It’s Baxter.”
She let out a sigh of relief. “Santana’s over there.”
“Any sign of Kunz?” he asked.
“Check the tapes at Los Casas,” Ben said. “I’m sure he’s hotfooted it to Mexico.”
“No doubt.” Darcy frowned. “He’s very good at leaving others behind to do and take responsibility for his dirty work.”
“Don’t worry,” Ben told her. “We’ll take one battle at a time until we catch him.”
“That could take a while,” she said. “I’m sure Kunz has at least a dozen body doubles. The S.A.S.S. has already gone up against four.” Counting the one here, maybe five. Who knew?
“Okay, so it’ll take a while,” Ben said. “Wars are won one battle at a time.”
Darcy left Ben with Baxter and Santana, got her Jeep and then retrieved Ben. When he slid onto his seat, she said, “I thought about what you said—about the battles.”
“We did win this one, Darcy,” Ben insisted, clicking his safety belt into place.
Leaving Baxter with Santana to mop up, Darcy drove away.
“Kunz and Santana won’t launch that July Fourth attack. The White House will have its fireworks—and they won’t be radioactive.”
“It can’t be this easy, Ben. With Kunz and GRID, it’s never this easy. We’re missing something. Trust me on this. I’ve studied this man intensely for years. Nothing with him is ever this easy.”
“Okay. So what do we do now?”
“First, we think and get your leg checked out.”
“It’s not broken.”
“Great. Indulge me, then and let the doc take a look.” She drove on toward the hospital, wondering why things weren’t clicking into place. Kunz always planned his operations down to minute details. He always had contingency plans. This was all too straightforward for him. “Where’s Wexler?”
“I phoned Bobby Meyers a while ago. He says Wexler’s home in bed with the flu. Apparently, he left a few minutes after I did. Bobby says it hit him hard.”
“Bull.” She looked over at Ben. “Wexler lied to Bobby. He took in the shipment.”
“I don’t think so, Darcy. Bobby says he got sick as a dog all over the pavement. He has to be really sick. Mick swears the water’s contaminated in the cooler. Maybe it is. He’s putting in a fresh bottle.”
Interesting. She filed that tidbit of information. If Wexler was really sick, then maybe he was being gotten out of the way, too. Maybe he wasn’t the one accepting the shipment. He couldn’t have been—unless GRID was done with him and wanted to wipe out their connection by taking Wexler out. Still there had to be someone else involved. But who else could—
Mick.
His name charged into her mind and wouldn’t let go. He’d been at the bar when Needle and Santana’s cohorts were there. He’d been at Los Casas when the truck had arrived. He’d been at Traveler’s Inn when she’d spotted Kunz there. And Mick had been outside the warehouse, dancing with Elizabeth.
Mick had been in all the right places to be doing all the wrong things. Question was, had he actually done the wrong things. All the evidence pointed to Wexler.
And what if that was by design?
She asked Ben, “Did you see Mick tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“What color was his shirt?”
“Shoot, Darcy.” Ben grabbed hold of the dash. “Slow down. You’re going to kill somebody. My leg won’t be any more broken in five minutes.”
Darcy ignored the turn for the hospital, took the one for Los Casas and slammed her foot down on the gas. “It might be if you don’t answer my question. What color was Mick’s shirt?”
“I don’t know,” he said on a huff. “I’m not sure.”
“Think, Ben. Picture him in your head.”
He closed his eyes. “Red. It was red.”
In the bar, it had been red. Outside the hotel, red. Tonight, red. “Dang it, Ben. It’s not just Wexler. It’s Mick, too!”
“No, no way. Not Mick.” Ben shot her a look that she was way off base. “Wexler’s taking the numbers and passing them on. We heard and saw it firsthand. He has the book.”
“Why would he do that? Take the numbers, the meetings, hold the book?” She asked herself more so than Ben, yet he answered.
“Mick’s having an affair with Elizabeth. Lucas meets his women at Mick’s. A neat little arrangement for both of them maybe?”
“I’d say so. And Lucas Wexler doesn’t want that boat rocked any more than Mick does. So Wexler takes the meetings and numbers for Mick and shoots a little pool. Kunz and Santana think they’re dealing with Wexler, only they’re not. They’re dealing with Mick. It’s for protection. Mick knows anonymity is all that will keep him alive when GRID is done with him. Wexler hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing or who he’s dealing with. He sure doesn’t know they’ll kill him when they’re done with him.”
Darcy saw more clearly. “Mick gave them something to make them sick—Grady and Wexler,” Darcy said. “He tainted the water at the station. He wanted them out—away from Los Casas.”
“Oh, good grief. The first truck was a decoy. He’s not yet put through the real shipment.” Ben motioned. “Drive faster, faster.”
“Get me the phone. I need to call this in.”
Ben scrounged through her purse, pulled out the satellite phone and then passed it to her.
Moments later, Maggie was on the line. “Code One, Maggie,” Darcy ordered. “Get forces to the border. Mick is working with GRID and Santana and blackmailing Wexler, who probably figures Mick’s running numbers or some other type of gambling stint. Santana’s dead.”
“Are you sure about Santana? With GRID, we have a lot of corpses turning up to fight another day.”
“I shot and killed him,” Darcy said. “He’s dead.”
“Verified. Hold on.” Maggie was gone a second, and then returned. “Colonel Drake and General Shaw are on the line with me, Darcy.”
“Darcy?” It was Colonel Drake’s voice, and she was severely worried. “Rank it.”
The colonel ranked everything on a scale of one to ten. “Ten, ma’am. Quick upshot. The shipment we followed was a decoy. Kunz has been like a mind thief on this entire operation.”
“Laying down evidence for one thing when he’s been doing something different.”
“Exactly.”
“Langley agrees with you. They’ve believed this operation was secondary to his primary operation.”
“His primary operation?” What did Home Base and Langley know that she didn’t?
“You,” the colonel said. “He hadn’t identified you before now, but he knew you existed. Maybe since Amanda was held hostage there that three months. Maybe another way. We’re not sure yet. But we believe his primary objective on this op
eration was to get you to reveal yourself. You’re our sole source with total recall, so he knew you’d be assigned the mission.”
“What does he want?” Darcy asked, fearing she already knew the answer.
“To to get into your head, intercept you and replicate your mind in the same way he doubled the other operatives. With what you know, he could cripple the country with little effort.”
That feared disclosure being confirmed chilled Darcy to the bone. Kunz had exposed himself as a black-market body double agent with Amanda. As a weaponry “sparks broker” with Kate. With total recall being essential to the mission, Darcy should have realized immediately he was revealing himself as a mind thief. “I believe you’re over the target, Colonel.” A lump lodged in her throat. “I should have picked up on it sooner,” she said, letting her boss hear her regret. “Honestly, I was too busy forestalling hyper-stimulation attacks to think as broadly as I should have been. I’m sorry I let you down, Colonel.”
“You haven’t let anyone down, Darcy. You’ve held up extremely well. You’ve exceeded our expectations frankly.”
“But—“
“No buts,” the colonel interrupted. “None of us considered this a secondary mission. Not with the target being the White House and POTUS.”
“That’s gracious—“
“No, it’s not. Just don’t be any harder on yourself than you are on the rest of us. None of us put it together until now either.”
“He’ll come for me again.” Darcy shivered. “He knows what I look like now.”
“He does, and he’ll try. But next time, we’ll be prepared. He’ll never get this close again.”
Exactly what that meant, Darcy didn’t know. Yet, she was grateful she wouldn’t be facing the challenge alone. Thomas Kunz was pure evil.
The colonel switched focus from what Kunz intended to do here to what he had accomplished. “So where is the decoy shipment?”
“It burned at the warehouse,” Darcy said. “Not radioactive, not filled with bombs, not even with fireworks. Grain would be my guess. I smelled it when I first entered the building where they were holding Ben. I got one whiff of gunpowder. I figure it was the charge Kunz later set to facilitate his escape.”
“Ben is all right?”
“Bruised and battered but okay.”
“Considering how much Kunz loves torture, I’d say that’s a huge win.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where’s the real shipment?” the colonel asked. “Any idea?”
Good question. “One moment, ma’am.” Darcy told Ben, “Call Los Casas. If Mick is back out there, then the shipment isn’t in yet. Who is working graveyard?”
“Bobby Meyers.”
“Give us another minute, colonel.”
Darcy grunted and told Ben, “I’ve got ten that says Meyers has gotten the flu and Mick’s been called back in to cover for him.”
“I won’t be taking that bet.” Ben dialed the phone.
“Los Casas.”
“Mick?” Ben grimaced. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, Ben. What’s up, buddy?”
“Nothing. Just checking to see if Bobby needed any help tonight. I’m feeling a little better.”
“He’s sick with the crud, like the rest of you guys. Called me while I was downtown at the festival. Hey, did you hear the warehouse on Main caught fire?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Ben lied. “You need help out there?”
“Naw. It’s deader than dirt tonight. Ain’t a soul crossed in the last hour. Just marking time.”
“Okay, then. If you need me, call. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Sounds good. Night.”
Ben disconnected the call and then looked at Darcy. “You win.”
Darcy relayed to Colonel Drake.
“Why is the border open this late?” Colonel Drake asked.
“Commercial interests only. It’s so hot here that the loaded trucks overheat during the day. They travel at night for safety reasons—it’s strongly recommended for flammables.”
“Fireworks are that,” the colonel said. “So what’s your ETA?”
Darcy checked her watch. One-twenty in the morning. “I estimate a 1:35 a.m. arrival at Los Casas, ma’am.”
“The shipment has to be coming across the border at any time,” Ben said. “Remember, we’re closed from two to three.”
Darcy couldn’t risk it. “Ma’am, they’ve got a fifteen-minute window before we arrive. And they’ve got a twenty-five-minute window after we arrive. Then the station closes for an hour to do a daily security sweep. You’d better get overt forces in place down there now.”
“They’re already in position, Darcy.” Colonel Drake let out a sigh fraught with relief. “When you called for backup, we included Los Casas in the equation.”
“Did Kunz get to Mexico?”
“We’re told no.”
Darcy didn’t believe it. Not for a second. “Is he at Broken Branch Redemption?”
“Definitely not. We’ve had the compound under surveillance since you left here.”
Where in the world had Kunz gone, then? “Anything else, Colonel?”
She hesitated.
Darcy waited, and then realized what Colonel Drake wanted to know but didn’t want to offend Darcy by asking. “I’m fine, ma’am.”
“Good.” She cleared her throat, but her relief stuck in her voice. “Of course, you are, Darcy. Of course, you are.”
When Darcy and Ben arrived at Los Casas, the FBI already had seized control of and locked down the border crossing.
Mick stood against the cinder-block wall, his hands behind him in cuffs. An armed guard stood a few feet away. Waiting on transport, Darcy figured.
“There’s the shipment.” Ben pointed to an unmarked eighteen-wheeler towing two trailers. It had been pulled past the stalls and up onto the open dirt road. The two men who apparently had been in it were being loaded into the back of an unmarked van. Darcy recognized one of the female FBI agents she’d seen at Traveler’s Inn observing. “Stay in the Jeep, Ben.”
“Why?”
“No sense in testing your leg. It’s done.”
He looked through the window at Mick and sadness filled his eyes. “Mick set it up to look like Wexler had done it all.” Disappointment softened Ben’s tone. Disappointment and disapproval. “Mick wanted to get rid of Wexler to clear the way for him and Elizabeth.”
Darcy recalled the way they’d looked at each other, dancing alone at the festival. Love, pure and simple. “Seems that way to me.” Disgusted, Darcy walked over to the agent guarding Mick, identified herself, then went to Mick.
“Who are you?” Mick asked her.
“A custom’s agent from Seattle.” She shrugged.
His expression didn’t change. He didn't know whether or not to believe her.
She decided to keep it that way.
“How did you know it was me?” He didn’t bother denying his part in the attack. Or to pretend he didn’t know she’d identified him.
“Your red shirt,” she answered honestly, though the reasons had been far more numerous than she’d disclosed.
“My shirt?” He grunted. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She gave him a truth if not the whole truth. She turned her back to him, signaling their conversation was over and started walking back to her Jeep.
The whole truth was that something had warned her about Mick. Something so nebulous she couldn’t begin to describe or explain it, though she knew exactly when she’d first felt the sensation. Insights had come to her with the first fire, along with her total recall.
And tonight both had worked to save thousands of lives.
For someone who had so often in the past five years felt cursed, at the moment, she felt decidedly blessed. She glanced over at Ben; saw him watching her through the Jeep’s passenger window. Decidedly blessed.
Capturing Kunz and winning on all fronts would have been fabulous. Bu
t in this war on GRID, that kind of victory was unrealistic. Kunz was evil. He had tentacles everywhere. And even if they took him out, ten more would pop up in his place.
That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try. Of course, they would. But like Amanda, Kate, Maggie and the rest of the S.A.S.S., Darcy would have to be content to take her successes where she found them—one battle at a time—and to pray for many more victories.
Along the way, she’d be grateful. She had enjoyed some personal gains on this mission, too. She’d faced her guilt, her fear of fire, her debilitating attacks, her fear of failure, and she had, in a very real sense, reclaimed her life. She’d also rediscovered the power of love to overcome even the greatest fear.
Those were pretty significant gains she never again wanted to forget—and since she had perfect recall, she wouldn’t.
Smiling to herself about that, she walked back to the Jeep and got in beside Ben. “I guess we’d better see about that leg.”
“Only if you’re through saving the world.”
“I am.” She sniffed. “For tonight.” The White House was safe and there had been no mention, at least, not yet, of cyanide. Another win.
“For tonight,” he repeated her. Ben laughed and rubbed her shoulder. “You do amaze me, Darcy Clark.”
She tried not to, but she couldn’t help herself. She laughed with him. “Tell me that twenty years from now, and I might just believe it.”
“You got it.” He turned on the radio. “And that, you can commit to memory.”
“I will.” She already had. Darcy smiled. “Finally, a personal perk in having total recall.”
And in not falling victim to the mind thief.
Read on for a Sneak Peek at the next S.A.S.S. Unit novel, Operation Stealing Christmas.
Sneak Peek: Operation Stealing Christmas
Chapter 1
“Jingle bells. Jingle bells. Jingle all the waaaay—” Singing along with the radio, Captain Maggie Holt hit a pothole in the dirt path leading to her office. Her right front tire dropped a solid six inches, jolting her, jarring her teeth. “Wow.”
The red Jeep absorbed the shock without a groan, but her morning’s first cup of coffee splashed all over the dashboard and passenger seat. The cup hit the side of the door and fell to the floorboard, a casualty of the daily war to get to the middle-of-nowhere shack without suffering bodily injury.
