Killing Time

15

Mike had checked the time on his phone when they’d walked through the bank’s front doors and he checked it again as they walked back out. In and out in eighteen minutes. No hitches. Not even a close look. In fact, he was fairly certain that if anyone had bothered to look at them, they’d have been as fixated as he tried not to be on the blatant sexuality Eva exuded with every move she made.

Well, hello. He grinned when he finally realized what she was doing. Eva Salinas knew exactly what effect she had on people. Knew it and used it. If questioned, no one in that bank would remember a woman doing business and accessing a safety deposit box. They’d remember a pair of amazing breasts, a blatantly suggestive walk, and off-the-charts sexuality. A trophy every man would go home and secretly fantasize about and every woman would want to forget because she felt inferior.

Once again, he appreciated her intelligence as they walked out into the sunlight and got into the SUV, the flash drive with the data on OSD tucked safely away in her bag.

And he let up on himself a little bit in the hitting-himself-over-the-head department. Sober, he might have had a fighting chance. But stone cold drunk in that cantina? Hell. She’d had him at spandex.

Green called again as Mike settled behind the wheel.

“Are you serious?” he asked after Joe told him where they’d be staying tonight and given him the address. This was the last thing he’d expected.

“As a heart attack.” The line went dead.

Mike grinned, picturing the former CIA, former Task Force Mercy, current Black Ops, Inc. operative. Green stood roughly six foot five, was tough as nails, and the word joke was not in his vocabulary. The man had seen and done things—for his country, for his team, for his woman—that would spawn nightmares for the rest of his life. But Mike had seen Green with his wife and knew that, like the wives of the other BOI team members, Stephanie would help keep those nightmares at bay. Never thought he’d see the day when those guys would all end up married. Very happily married.

Just like he never thought he would quietly envy them for the lapse in judgment that had prompted them to give up their freedom for the ball and chain of monogamy.

He squashed back an unexpected rush of melancholy. Fought the way he felt like a kid with his nose pressed against a candy-store window when he saw them all together, witnessed the love, the devotion.

Cripes. What was up with that? Domestic bliss was not the path for him.

Then why so blue, buddy boy? Damned if he knew.

File it under fatigue. File it under the anticipation of reading the contents of the OSD file. And yeah, okay, fine. Maybe point a finger at the woman sitting beside him in the SUV.

For whatever reason, she tripped triggers and rang bells he’d never heard before. Sure, he loved women. Lots of them. Just never singularly and never for more than a night or two. And never with any promises. Easy in, easy out, no hard feelings, it’s been good to know you. It worked for him. At least it always had.

“So… were you planning to sit here all day or do you have an address?”

Eva’s slightly bemused question snapped him out of his thoughts, made him realize how far he’d let himself wander down justification lane. He didn’t have to justify his relationships—or lack of—with women. Not to himself. Not to anyone.

And he sure as hell didn’t need validation for staying away from her. She was Ramon Salinas’s widow. Enough said.

He spit out the address Green had given him and shifted into gear. “You know how to get there from here?” he asked gruffly.

The startled and wary look on her face told him how cranky he’d come across. Not fair to take out his bad mood on her. Or hell, maybe it was. Twenty-four hours ago, life had been simple. Fucked up, but simple.

“Not precisely but we’ll find it.” She entered the address into the onboard GPS.

Feeling guilty but not really knowing why, he tried to make amends with a less abrasive tone. “Used to know my way around. Things have changed since I spent any time here.” When he’d been in D.C. a year ago helping Joe and Steph, all he’d seen was the airport and a nearby hotel before they’d gone wheels up again.

Forty-five minutes later, they pulled off the street and into the underground parking garage of a high-security apartment complex. He was about to tell her to wipe the GPS history clean—he didn’t want to take any chances on someone finding out where they’d been—when she leaned forward and took care of it. He wasn’t finished being silently impressed with her when she grabbed her shopping bags and opened the door. Not long after, Mike punched in a series of security code numbers that Joe had given him to get them into the building, then into the elevator and finally to the tenth floor.

They were walking down the wide, well-appointed hallway, peripherally aware of a zillion security cameras monitoring them, when the door at the end of the corridor opened up.

A big man with an imposing build and eyes that could drill holes through steel limped into the hallway to meet them. “Nice to know you can still follow simple directions.”

Mike broke into a broad grin. “Hello, Angel Boy. Long time no see.”

“Call me that again, smart-ass, and you won’t be seeing anything but stars.”

Mike laughed and shook his old friend’s hand. “Missed you too, buddy. Eva—meet Gabe Jones. Word to the wise: Don’t try to drug him. He’s not as forgiving or good-natured as I am.”

Mike leaned against the terrace wall, nursing a soda while Gabe stretched out on a chaise longue amid potted plants and a playpen.

Except for their quick sponge baths at the airport and her brief run to the drugstore, it was the first time Mike and Eva hadn’t been connected at the hip since she’d seduced him. They’d arrived at Gabe Jones’s apartment only a few minutes ago and she’d excused herself to use the restroom. They needed to get to work on the OSD file, but at the moment he couldn’t muster the energy. He’d practically been mainlining caffeine in the form of soda since they’d landed and for the moment he simply needed to chill.

This terrace was the spot to do it. His gaze landed on the playpen again. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed it. Mike grinned at Gabe. He had to hand it to Gabe’s gorgeous redheaded wife, Jenna. She’d tamed the beast.

Gabe “The Archangel” Jones was one of the toughest, meanest, most reclusive operators he’d ever worked with. Dedicated, driven, focused. A warrior to the end.

He’d either led or been part of teams that had pushed through everything from triple-canopy jungles, urban ghettos, mountains, and swamps for months on end, hunting the bad guys. One time when Mike had picked them up, their clothes were ragged to the point of falling off their bodies, everyone had lost at least twenty pounds, and they hadn’t had a square meal or decent rest in months. But Gabe’s force of personality and leadership had made them go way the hell over and beyond to complete the mission.

He’d even lost a leg a few years ago on an op but it had barely slowed him down.

Yet, here he was, all cozied up in a high-security D.C. apartment complex with designer deck furniture, flowering plants, and toddler toys, reeking of domestic tranquility.

“What?” Gabe narrowed his eyes in response to Mike’s grin.

“Never saw you as a baby daddy.”

“Yeah, well, it’s called maturity. You ought to try it sometime.”

Mike laughed and glanced down at the street ten stories below where rush-hour traffic zipped along. “Sorry I missed Jenna.”

He turned back to his friend, propped his elbows on the terrace wall behind him. Gabe’s wife, who his friend had just informed him was five months pregnant with their second child, was having a girls weekend in West Palm Beach. Jenna had taken their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ali, to visit their friends, Amy and Dallas Garrett, who along with Dallas’s brothers and sister ran E.D.E.N., Inc., a high-risk securities firm. Amy and Dallas had a daughter close to Ali’s age. Jenna and Amy had been close friends ever since they’d bonded during an investigation that had ultimately brought down a secret third-generation neo-Nazi camp in Argentina that practiced mind-control experimentation on unwilling victims. The two women tried to get together whenever time and schedules allowed.

“Might be a good thing Jenna and Ali aren’t here,” Mike added soberly. “And seriously, man, this is a safe house?”

He’d never been in one but had assumed it would be sterile—no personal possessions of any sort, not even art on the wall. Reason: If it was compromised, there’d be no clues for the bad guys as to who was there and possibly why.

“It’s my home. But no one makes it past the front entry that I don’t want inside.”

Judging from all the surveillance cameras and combo locks, Mike didn’t doubt it.

“Anytime you want to tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into,” Gabe added, “I’m all ears. But that’s your call.”

“Appreciate it.” Mike glanced toward the terrace doors, wondering what Eva was up to inside. “In the meantime, I’m still sorting things out.”

Gabe followed his gaze, then tipped up his beer. “So, what are the chances she’s tossing the place?”

Mike grinned and said cheerfully, “I’d say they’re pretty good.”

He’d seen the indecision in Eva’s eyes. She might think she knew everything about him, but she didn’t know Gabe Jones from Adam and that made her nervous. With good reason. Gabe Jones was someone to be wary of even though he was one of the good guys.

“She have anything to do with that?” Gabe lifted his beer, indicating the swelling on Mike’s cheek.

“Yup,” he admitted and carefully pressed the cold soda can against the ripening bruise.

He was going to have to tell him everything—including what he did and didn’t know about Eva Salinas. Which meant telling him about Afghanistan.

So he did. Drew a deep breath and purged. It felt like a bloodletting, and he didn’t stop until he’d spilled every last drop.

When he finished, along with the relief of unloading, he also felt a landslide of shame.

“About time you got that off your chest.”

He blinked at Gabe. “You knew? Jesus. The guys? Do they all know?”

Gabe lifted a shoulder. “We knew something had gone sideways for you. You were career Navy all the way, back in the Task Force Mercy days. And then after Afghanistan, suddenly you weren’t. The next thing we heard, you were hiding out in South America, playing fast and loose with your little cargo business and supporting the local pisco trade.”

Mike stared at the top of his soda can. That pretty much summed up his first couple of years post-Afghanistan. “Couple of years of that hard drinking was all I could take. So I sobered up.” Except for one day each year. And except for wanting a drink every single other day of every year.

“We knew that, too, or we’d never have tagged you for the Sierra Leone mission. You should have come to us,” Gabe added. “We could have helped.”

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. I was too…” He thought of all the things he was, none of them good.

“Stupid?” Gabe suggested.

In spite of himself, Mike grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”

Gabe lifted a dismissive shoulder. “We all have ghosts. Nut up and get over it.”

This prompted a laugh. “How touchy-feely of you. I’m tingling all over.” He held out an arm. “See? Goose bumps.”

Gabe gave him a rare smile. “What can I say? I’m a giver.”

Mike looked up at his friend, who clearly didn’t think less of him, who absolutely had ghosts of his own.

Gabe hitched his chin toward the apartment again. “Want me to run a check on the mystery woman?”

Mike’s phone pinged. He held up a finger and fished it out of his pocket. It was a text from Joe with a document attached. “Funny you should mention her,” he said, “because it looks like Joe came through on that front.”

“Good to know you’re thinking ahead. I’ll go check and see if she needs me to move any furniture so she can look behind it.”

Mike was barely aware that Gabe walked back inside the apartment. He was already engrossed in the background on his mystery woman.

“And we have a winner,” he said under his breath and quickly read the file on Eva Salinas. Good to know she was actually capable of some truth.

Holy crap. Her sheet read like the overachievers handbook. A little reading between the lines and it became clear that little Eva Montoya had been born on a mission. Her parents had set the bar high. From the time she could crawl up on her attorney mother’s lap or charm her JAG attorney father, whose service in the Navy had apparently prompted her to pursue her own career in service to her country, she’d been setting wrongs right.

Girl Scout, student council president, captain of the debating team at University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude, top of her class at U of V law school. Impressive.

And while she did not follow her father’s hellishly big footsteps into the military, she’d had instructor-level credentials in Muay Thai—no wonder she’d made such quick work of him in the alley—and was an expert marksman rank in both long gun and pistol. In short—she was kick-ass.

Right out of law school, she’d joined the CIA as an attorney in support services out of Langley, where she’d met Ramon Salinas, fallen in love, and after a whirlwind courtship, married him.

Should have been a happily ever after, Mike thought. A woman like her sure as hell deserved one. Ramon would have ripped her heart out and stomped all over it, but Mike wasn’t about to tell her that she wouldn’t have gotten that Cinderella ending. He would not talk trash about a dead man to anyone. Sure as hell not to his widow.

He only looked up when he heard the terrace door slide open again and Gabe stepped back outside.

“Everything okay in there?”

Gabe nodded. “I offered her a shower and she jumped at the chance. You look like you could use one, too.”

“For a fact. Might wake me up. We’ve been on the move for longer than I care to remember.”

“That would explain the need for the ugly shirt. Sucker’s so loud it would keep a narcoleptic awake.”

“Listen to you. Another joke from the Archangel. Jenna really has mellowed your ass out.”

“I suspect she’d say that she straightened my ass out. Come on. You can use the shower in our bedroom. Give you a chance to change into something that doesn’t shout South Pacific.”

“I’ll let that pass.”

“As if you could do anything about it.”

Gabe headed back inside, his limp reminding Mike what he’d given up in service to his country and for Jenna. He had saved her from a bomb blast, taking shrapnel in his leg that eventually resulted in amputation below the knee.

“That way.” Gabe pointed down the hall.

Mike hesitated and for a second considered hunting up Eva’s purse and digging around for the flash drive. He’d been itching to plug it into Gabe’s computer and read the information that had driven her to Lima to find him.

But that might break this fragile trust they’d developed and frankly, right now, he wanted a shower more. And he wanted to think about the information Joe had turned up on Eva Salinas, who was not Pamela Diaz or Emily Bradshaw.

The woman was nothing if not inventive.

“Here.” He handed Gabe his phone. “For your reading pleasure. It’s the lowdown on your other houseguest—aka CIA legal eagle.”