Killing Time

37

“Do you know how much freaking paperwork I’m going to have to fill out to explain how a ‘borrowed’ freaking Black Hawk and a ‘borrowed’ freaking flight crew somehow managed to fire off its mini and shoot a freaking Chinook out of the freaking sky? You said this was a training mission. You didn’t say a word about live fire!”

Mike sat on the bumper of one of several ambulances that had arrived at the UWD site on the tail of the Black Hawks, watching and grinning as Gabe patiently waited for the red-faced DEA officer to finish spitting out his tirade. All around them, ATF, DEA, DHS, and FBI agents worked the scene, some of them arranging a makeshift holding area for the UWD members who had been rounded up in the woods surrounding the camp.

Gabe had covered all the bases. There were even female agents on the ground, dealing with the shell-shocked wives, daughters, and sons of the compound.

Mike didn’t know yet how Gabe had managed to charge in and save the day, but he had no doubt the Archangel would be able to appease the infuriated agent.

“You should be lying down.”

Eva. Beside him. Safe and sound. That was all that mattered now.

“I should be right here.” He looped his arm over her shoulder and kissed her beautiful dirt-and-smoke-streaked face. “Besides, you heard Collins. He’s the paramedic. That makes him the expert, and he says my ribs are just bruised.”

“I don’t care what he says. I can see the pain on your face. You need to be horizontal. You need to rest.”

“Chica.” He nuzzled his nose around the shell of her ear. “If I get horizontal, it will be with you. And trust me. We won’t be resting.”

“This dipstick giving you a hard time, Eva?”

Mike groaned when Taggart and Cooper ambled over to the ambulance. “And to think I missed them.”

Cooper hiked a booted foot up on the ambulance bumper. “Just goes to show. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”

Mike looked into the faces of the two men he had thought he would never see again. They were covered in grime and the satisfaction of a job well done. The same faces that had been full of accusation and hatred the last time he’d seen them eight years ago.

He felt a wave of emotion so strong, so massive, he didn’t know if he could contain it. Then he looked at Eva and knew he couldn’t. She wasn’t going to let him.

“Yeah. About that.” He lowered his head, groped for the words he needed to say. “Thanks.” He met Cooper’s eyes, then Taggart’s, and saw the same emotions welling up there. “Thanks for showing. Means a lot.”

Hell. It meant everything.

Taggart looked at his boot tips.

Cooper found a spot in the distance that suddenly demanded all of his attention before getting himself back together. “Yeah, well… Someone’s going to pay us, right?… Because we didn’t do this for old time’s sake.”

Mike burst out laughing, then regretted it when fire bit into his ribs. “There was some mention of money, now that I think about it. Right, Eva?”

She shook her head, disbelieving. “You three are the most stubborn individuals I’ve ever met when it comes to expressing your feelings.”

Then Gabe walked over and joined them.

“How you doing?” He studied Mike critically.

“Fit and fine.” Mike hitched his chin toward the DEA agent. “You settle him down?”

Gabe lifted a shoulder. “Once he found out his name would be leaked to the media in conjunction with taking down six of La Linea’s top-tier management, and in shutting down a major illegal gunrunning op, he decided the paperwork wasn’t such a hardship after all.”

“Something I don’t get.” Taggart crossed his arms over his chest. “I figure when we didn’t check in, you put it together that things had gone south. But how’d you know to bring the birds and the mini and all the alphabet guys?”

“We’ve got a connection at NSA. A friend picked up some cyber-chatter about a gun shipment out of Canada. On a hunch we relayed the info to border control, of which there are two in Idaho. Since Porthill carries the most passenger traffic and East-port carries the most trucks, it wasn’t difficult to pin down which route they were going to take.”

A line formed between Eva’s brows. “You mean there were more trucks on the way?”

Gabe nodded. “One truck, and the driver couldn’t talk fast enough—despite the fact that La Linea threatened to kill him. La Linea, guns, UWD? It only made sense there was a big deal going down, and that you were caught here in the middle of it.”

“The guns were in a refrigerated meat trailer, weren’t they?” Cooper looked smug.

Gabe regarded him with new interest. “And you know this how?”

Taggart glanced at Mike, who nodded. “You might want to look about half a mile north of the shooting range. They hid them in an abandoned mine shaft. Well, it used to be a shaft. Good luck finding a piece of anything bigger than a cinder.”

A slow smile built on Gabe’s face. “Nice work.”

“It was,” Taggart agreed wholeheartedly. “It really, really was.”

“So where’d you come up with the Black Hawks?” Mike asked. “There aren’t any military bases within five, six hundred miles of here.”

Gabe said nothing.

And just that quick, Mike knew.

“Sonofabitch,” he said with a grin. “Uncle’s got a little top-secret Spec Ops training facility out here in the mountains, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gabe had his poker face on, a sure sign that Mike had hit the nail dead center. “I don’t mean to change the subject, but—”

“The hell you don’t,” Mike said on a laugh.

“But,” Gabe pressed on and shifted his attention to Eva, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you before now. We found your Deep Throat.”

The D.C. lunch crowd was long gone at two in the afternoon, when Eva and Mike stepped inside the little corner café. They’d returned from Idaho and what the press referred to as “the assault on Squaw Valley” two days ago. CNN had run an hour-long special on the operation last night, and the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the FBI had received all the credit for the takedown. That was fine with Eva. Let them rack up the win in their column. She wanted her name kept out of it—so did Mike, Taggart, and Cooper. The fact that Gabe had managed to make that happen and keep the Black Ops, Inc. team off the radar as well, told her just how covert he and his teammates ran.

It was also Gabe who had set up the meeting with Deep Throat. She touched a hand to her hair, nervous, as she scanned the few occupied tables. A young couple, clearly in love and oblivious to anything but each other, laughed and made moon eyes over a shared chocolate sundae. A middle-aged man sat in a wheelchair sipping coffee as a younger woman with a kind face spoke softly to him. A pretty blond mommy fed her young son ice cream and laughed when he smeared it in his hair.

All of them were oblivious to everyone around them and the drama that was about to unfold. Eva was hyperaware of the wild beat of her heart and peripherally aware of Gabe, who occupied the only other spot in the restaurant. He’d insisted on being here, just in case. He didn’t acknowledge them, just sat at the coffee bar, his back to the room, his focus alternating between a cup of black coffee and the wall mirror that gave him visual access to the dining area and everyone in it.

An older gentleman with a round belly, wild bushy brows, and a twinkling smile approached them, menus in his hand. “Miss Salinas? Mr. Brown?”

Eva nodded and gave him credit for not staring at Mike—beat up and bruised, his eye still swollen shut.

“Your table is ready. Follow me, please.”

Mike’s strong presence beside her was both unsettling and reassuring—as was his hand on the small of her back as they crossed the room and settled in at a secluded corner table.

“We’ll just have coffee,” Mike said, and their host smiled amiably and left them alone.

“You good with this?” he asked, scowling as only he could scowl when he was worried for her.

“I’m fine. I’m eager to talk with him.”

“I’d like to do more than talk to him,” Mike grumbled.

He didn’t exactly feel gratitude toward the man they were about to meet. Mike considered him a coward who had placed her life in danger. Nothing settled the score in his book, not even her reminders that if not for the mystery man, Mike would still be estranged from Taggart and Cooper, and Lawson and Brewster would still be running their nasty business.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t show. That’s his MO, right? He’s a coward who hides in the background.”

“I’m sure he had his reasons.”

She’d been so intent on keeping Mike calm, she hadn’t realized the man in the wheelchair had rolled up to the table.

When he stopped and met her eyes, she smiled automatically. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought he was. Instead, it was apparent that whatever accident or illness had put him in the chair had aged him. “Can I help you?”

“You can if you’re Eva Salinas.”

Eva glanced at Mike, then back to—“Who are you? How do you know my name?”

“I’m Peter Davis.”

She searched her memory banks. Nothing. Other than the wheelchair, there was little that was remarkable about him. His close-cropped hair was peppered with gray. His eyes were brown. Nothing about him was familiar.

“You don’t know me,” Davis said, reading her thoughts. “But I know your father.”

Her heart picked up several beats.

And then she read something in his eyes. And she understood why he’d come to the table. “Oh, my God. It was you? You gave me the OSD file?”

His expression was grim. “I did. And believe me, I had no idea that my actions would place you in so much jeopardy.”

Too stunned to speak, she simply stared. Her brain clicked into stall mode as she attempted to process his words.

“You sonofabitch.” Mike glared at him. “You almost got her killed.”

Davis shifted his attention to Mike, repentant but not cowed. “I know. Mr. Jones told me everything.” He wiped a hand over his jaw. “I didn’t see that coming. Believe me. I’m sorry.”

“What did you think was going to happen when you gave her that file? And why her?” Mike rushed on, not giving Davis a chance to respond. “Why not come to me or Taggart or Cooper?”

“Mike.” Eva placed a hand on Mike’s arm to settle him. “Let him talk. He didn’t have to agree to meet with us.”

“It’s all right. In his shoes, I’d be angry, too.” Davis faced Mike again, looked him in the eye. “If I could have found you, I might have contacted you. And what would you have done with the information?”

For a long moment, the two men locked eyes. They both knew exactly what Mike would have done. Nothing.

“How do you know my father?” Eva asked, effectively defusing the anger simmering between them. Davis gave Mike a final glare, then turned back to her. “I was active duty until five years ago. Several years before that, one of the enlisted men in my unit had need of a JAG attorney. Your father was assigned to his case. Since I was the aide to the base commander, much of the communication went through me. Your father and I became casual friends. He’s a good man.”

He smiled tightly, then went on. “A little over a month ago, we had a chance encounter at the funeral of a mutual friend. We caught up. He told me about you. He was very proud that you became an attorney. And he told me you’d lost your husband eight years ago in Afghanistan.”

Again he stopped, then drew a bracing breath. “I was in Afghanistan eight years ago. I was General Brewster’s aide.”

Mike went stone-cold still beside her, then erupted with anger. “You knew? All these years, you knew he sabotaged Operation Slam Dunk?”

Davis squared his shoulders. “Not at first, no. But I suspected something was off. Again, I’m sorry.”

“In the interest of time and my patience, leave out the ‘sorrys,’ okay? Just cut to the chase.”

Davis cut Mike a hard look, then addressed Eva again. “Brewster ran a tight ship. He was making end rows against the resistance. The One-Eyed Jacks were kicking some serious Taliban ass. Then this guy started showing up.”

“Lawson,” Mike speculated.

Davis nodded. “Didn’t know who he was—not right away. I just knew there was something off about him.”

“Other than the fact that he was an asshole?”

A small smile lifted one corner of Davis’s mouth. “Yeah. Other than that. The day he showed up, Brewster started making decisions that didn’t make sense.”

“What kind of decisions?” Eva wanted to know.

“Deployment of resources, mission strategies, calls that undermined the progress his Spec Ops teams had made. Then Operation Slam Dunk went down.”

He whipped a hand over his face again. “I knew some of those guys. They were straight shooters. Good men.”

He paused again, then met Mike’s glare. “I was there the night Brewster made the call to stand down. I’ll never forget it. I’d heard your radio transmissions. I knew what was going down out there. And I didn’t understand Brewster’s orders until several days later, when he gave me a stack of files and told me to shred them immediately. Before I could get to it, we got hit by an artillery strike. I ducked and covered, and when the smoke cleared, the files were scattered all over the floor.”

“Let me guess. One of those files was Brewster’s after-action report on OSD.” Mike leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of him.

“Yeah. He’d filed that report himself—hadn’t dictated it to me, so I didn’t know what was in it until I started reading. From the first word, I knew it was all bogus. I knew the op hadn’t gone down the way he’d recorded it.”

“Back up,” Eva said. “Was it protocol to shred official reports?”

“After they’d been transferred to electronic documents and encrypted, yes.”

A waitress stopped by the table then with their coffee, and everyone stopped talking until she was out of earshot again.

“And as his aide, you had access to the encrypted files,” Eva concluded.

“Limited access. Brewster changed his access code weekly. As soon as I read the paper copy, I knew I was sitting on a potential land mine—so I accessed his computer files and copied the report onto a flash drive before he could change his code and lock me out.”

“Why didn’t you do something with it?” Mike cut him no slack.

“What could I do? I was an aide. Who was going to believe me over a two star? And I’d basically stolen the file. It scared the shit out of me. So I sat on it until I could figure out what to do. In the meantime, I filed the paperwork to get transferred out of Brewster’s unit.”

He looked down at his legs, at the chair, breathed deep, and faced Eva again. “Soon after, I caught some action and ended up in this chair. And for too many years to count, I wallowed around in a big pile of self-pity.”

For the first time, Eva saw a softening in Mike’s eyes. He couldn’t relate to Davis’s lie of omission, but he could relate to what the man had been through. He knew all about how easy it was to get caught in a self-destructive cycle. And about sacrificing for your country.

“But I finally got myself together.” Davis glanced toward the table where the woman with the kind eyes waited. She smiled at him and he nodded, then turned back to Eva. “And I knew I had to bring this to someone’s attention. So I started researching Brewster. Did you know he was in the Office of the Under Secretary at DOD?”

Mike swore.

“And while I wasn’t sure where I was going with the file, I did some research on Lawson. I couldn’t get that guy out of my head, you know? Ran across a story about him and this extremist survivalist group, and a lightbulb went on. There was no question in my mind that Brewster and Lawson had been in some unholy alliance in Afghanistan. And no question that someone needed to find out what really happened that night.”

“So you picked Eva.”

“And I stand by my decision. She was the right choice. She had a vested interest. And a reputation for having a cool head. I knew that if she was anything like her father, she’d work through it the right way.”

“So you gave it to her anonymously and your conscience was cleared. Nice, neat, and tidy for you. Deadly for her.”

“Do you think I saw things coming down this way?”

“I think you should have.”

Davis nodded slowly. “Probably. Wasn’t the first mistake I’ve made. And next to sitting on the file for eight years, it’s the one I regret the most.”