Bridal Armor (2 page)

Chapter Two

Mission Recovery Specialist Jason Grant had successfully shadowed Agent DeRossi to Denver, Colorado. On her tail for several days, he knew the hotel she’d been staying in wasn’t within government per diem limits and, thanks to the GPS tag he’d put on her rental, he’d learned she liked to shop in ritzy boutiques.

For as long as he’d been tracking her, he hadn’t recognized any of her contacts. If Deputy Director Holt hadn’t sent him out here personally, he might think this was a wild goose chase. As it was, he was starting to question the rumor claiming she was here on a Mission Recovery witch hunt. Didn’t look that way to him.

Her return to the airport in a flight attendant uniform piqued his curiosity. He hoped whoever she was here to meet appreciated her effort. She looked pretty damned hot.

He’d followed her through the terminal, but if she’d made contact with anyone, it had been too subtle for him to catch. As a well-trained and experienced member of Mission Recovery, getting something by him was highly unlikely and the thought that she’d managed it made him nervous. And definitely ticked him off.

Beyond the windows of the airport, the storm rolled down from the mountains like an avalanche, blanketing the city with snow and ice. He didn’t care for the idea of being stuck in an airport with thousands of stranded travelers, so it was a relief when DeRossi finally started to move.

Until he lost her.

Her curly blond wig was gone. The bright red blazer of the airline she’d falsely represented was absent from the crowd of travelers milling about. He cursed his arrogance. His boss had warned him she was top of the game, but Jason hadn’t been concerned. The woman had been riding a desk for more than three years. However sharp she had once been, she couldn’t be on the top of her game these days.

His gaze continued to roam the crowd. She hadn’t been that far ahead of him. He tucked himself into a place at the end of the escalators where he could keep an eye on the restrooms as well as the main path to baggage claim.

He gave it three long minutes before he admitted the truth. She’d gotten away. Because she’d spotted him or because she’d completed whatever she’d been sent to do here?

He dialed Deputy Director Holt but the call went straight to voice mail. Probably for the best. Reporting a screw-up like losing the target was way, way low on the list of his favorite activities.

Other than telling him to watch her and report her activities, no one had really briefed him on the real reason why DeRossi was in Colorado at the same time as Director Casey. Having her in the airport at the time of his arrival had to be more than coincidence, but so far as he’d been able to observe she hadn’t made contact.

He’d never met a field agent who liked oversight divisions—whether it was the Internal Affairs divisions of police departments or the covert equivalent of the Initiative committee.

An airport security cart whizzed by and Jason decided it was time to get creative. If he could get into the security office, maybe he’d get lucky and spot her on one of the many video feeds they monitored.

He considered fabricating an elaborate story and settled on a lower-risk version of the truth. Following the cart to the nearest security team office, he walked in, credentials ready.

“Can I help you?”

Jason flipped open the wallet with a badge and ID card as he surveyed the entire space. The security office setup was familiar. One uniformed person at the desk, a couple of others in offices that overlooked the small reception area. He glanced at the one closed door and assumed that was where all the real information was hidden.

“Good afternoon.” He smiled, throwing in a little charm since the uniform was female. “I’m Agent Grant. I was tailing a suspect and she managed to ditch me at baggage claim,” he said with just the right blend of irritation and embarrassment. It was a skill he’d picked up during his time in law enforcement.

“I need a look at your cameras, see if I can spot her. Consider it a professional courtesy,” he added. “I really don’t want to have to hear about this mistake for the rest of my life, if I can avoid it.”

She smiled just a little and made a call to her immediate superior. Feeling the eyes on him, he let his shoulders slump as he tucked his badge away, playing the part of the guy who was having a bad day.

It worked. She hung up the phone and walked him over to the closed door.

Two men in airport security uniforms watched the cycling views of the area from the escalators to the exit doors on the wide bank of monitors. Reading the labels under each, he soon had a feel for each area covered by the closed-circuit cameras.

Public areas, employee-only access and the walkways and streets just outside the terminal.
Where was she?
She wasn’t loitering in baggage claim. Not in the rental car line either.

“Who are you looking for?”

“Flight attendant. Female. Blonde. In a red blazer.” And with less than a minute a good operative could have changed any one of those distinguishing features. He’d given her three minutes plus the time it had taken him to get in here.

DeRossi was an oversight agent. Hadn’t pushed anything more dangerous than paper in a couple of years. He wanted to bang his head against the wall for underestimating her. No one working any aspect of covert ops got hired or moved up the food chain by accident.

Still. She’d shown no sign of spotting him tailing her and it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to believe her field skills would be rusty.

“Hot?” one of the guards asked.

“Aren’t they all?” Grant mused.

“Sure,” the guard admitted with a smirk. “But a few stand out. Let me cue this for you.”

Jason waited the few seconds, let the guard zoom in. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said, stopping just shy of a fist pump. DeRossi strolled down an employee access hall with a businessman at her side. There was a brief conversation, then they moved again, out of the camera’s view. “Where did she go?”

“Got her,” the other guard said. “She went into a cab with the dude.”

Jason nearly choked when he recognized the man in the picture. Director Casey was no one’s “dude.” It wasn’t his job to know what DeRossi wanted with the head of his division, but of all the possibilities that popped into his head, none of them were good. The director was here for a family event and with no ties to the bride or groom, DeRossi wasn’t on the guest list.

Hell. Had he just allowed the director to be kidnapped?

Feeling more than a little grim, Jason watched the cab pull away from the curb. Without being asked, the pair of guards brought up visuals from the other cameras stationed around the airport until the cab went completely out of their range.

“The cab is in the lane for the long-term parking lots.”

That didn’t make sense to him. The car DeRossi drove to the airport was parked in the short-term garage. He’d parked on the other end of the same level.

“Don’t airline employees have their own lot?”

“Sure,” the first guard said. “If they’re based here, most of the crews take a shuttle in from home. But if she’s with him...” The guard let that thought trail off, but they all knew what he was implying. A sexual rendezvous wasn’t something Jason wanted to think about either.

“Can you cue up a view of those lots?”

The second guard shook his head. “Closed circuit on a different system through another security contract. Sorry.”

“No problem.” He had a general direction at any rate and the storm would slow her down. He hoped. A situation like this was all about the legwork and though she had a head start, he wasn’t out of the game.

His phone rang and the screen showed Deputy Director Holt’s somber face. Jason answered, braced to admit his momentary setback.

“I just received a new alert of a potential problem child in your area. I’m sending you the picture.”

Problem child in this context could mean anything from an informant to an assassin. “Am I being reassigned?” He wanted to ask more questions, but wouldn’t risk it in front of the guards.

“No. Watch for the paths to cross.”

“If they do?”

“Document, but do not intervene.”

Whoa. That set off all of his internal alarms. “Yes, sir.”

“Any news for me?”

He thought of DeRossi and Casey in the cab and out of his reach. “Not at this time.”

“You lost her,” Holt said with an irritable sigh.

“Not exactly.” It wasn’t a lie. He still had a general direction. “This freak storm is slowing everything down.”

“I need to know what she’s after. ASAP.”

“Yes, sir,” Jason replied. “I’m on it.”

Ending the call, he turned the phone back and forth in his hands, waiting for the picture to come through. When it did he gave a low whistle. A woman with fiery red hair and a grin as satisfied as a cat with a mouthful of canary filled his screen. He vaguely wondered what she’d been doing when the photographer had captured the candid shot. He had the disquieting sense that he’d seen her before. Though he couldn’t place her immediately, he knew it would come to him.

Shaking off the errant thought, he considered how to fulfill his orders. Regrettably, he didn’t have much choice but to go back to square one: DeRossi’s hotel room. He’d searched yesterday and turned up nothing useful. Not even that uniform.

Damn. He’d been played by an expert whose day job of riding a desk was apparently no indication of what she was capable of. The fact that she and his boss were headed by cab to long-term parking when Jason had followed her to the short-term garage initially meant she had a backup vehicle. The logical conclusion was she had a secondary hotel room, too.

Damn.

“Can you access the cameras from the gate areas?” Jason provided the terminal number where he’d found DeRossi this morning. He hoped going back to where she’d been would give him a clue about where she was headed with the director.

Reviewing the video footage from the cameras near the gates did nothing but affirm he hadn’t missed a drop or exchange. She might have done a little shopping in recent days, but everything now pointed to her coming here solely to grab Director Casey.

Thanking the security team, he exited the office and headed for the parking garage. Holt expected a new player to intersect with either DeRossi, Casey or both of them. He had to pick up the trail.

Casey had hired Jason into Mission Recovery. Jason wasn’t sure he could sit back and do nothing but document any danger aimed at the director. As a Specialist, his job was to salvage missions that had gone beyond the hope of regular recovery. Holt knew that, knew the philosophy of the Specialists. Did the deputy director really expect Jason to go against the order to stay out of whatever was going on here? Was he relying on the Specialist philosophy of running toward danger rather than away from it?

Jason struggled to make sense of the limited data he had, to organize that data into the context of the orders Holt had handed down.

The Initiative jumped on internal investigations like kids jumped on candy after the piñata breaks. DeRossi had carte blanche to do anything in the name of her official inquiry. And apparently not even Holt knew precisely what she was after. Did that include giving someone a chance to take out the director? Jason’s gut clinched.

None of it lined up.

What could be so bad that execution was the best answer?

The better question was did anyone, including the deputy director, really believe Jason would stand back and let that happen?

Frustrated, he turned up the collar on his suit coat, not nearly enough protection against the blizzard. Staring out into the storm, he guessed there were two inches of snow on the ground already and about ten more on the way. He had to pick a direction and get moving.

Jason remembered Director Casey’s answer when he asked why he’d been selected to join the Specialists. “You have the best instincts I’ve seen in a long time.”

His instincts were on high alert but he just had to figure out where to aim them.

Casey was here for a wedding. Jason turned in the general direction of the mountain resort hosting the event. Somewhere behind the blizzard was a chalet with a fatherless bride counting on her uncle to walk her down the aisle in just over forty-eight hours. Jason felt his temper rising at the idea that he was supposed to observe and document if the director was threatened.

But anger would only blur the instincts.

Evidence to the contrary, in this weather, he couldn’t see DeRossi going anywhere other than her hotel room to wait out the storm, no matter what her primary plans had been. If DeRossi was out to make a statement, the wedding party was full of covert operatives from Specialists to Colby Agency investigators with plenty of history and exemplary service records. There could be any number of reasons for her to intercept Casey here and now.

A cold wind blew through the parking garage and he took it in, clearing his head. His decision made, he turned back to his car, just as a flash of orange caught his peripheral vision. He spun around, watching an oily black cloud beat back the storm in one small spot among the endless fields of parked cars.

Car bomb.

Something entirely too much like fear detonated in his gut.

Busy airport or not, he just couldn’t believe the explosion was a coincidence. Jason raced to see if losing DeRossi had meant the death of his director.

Chapter Three

Thomas hadn’t stayed alive as the head of Mission Recovery by relying on luck or anyone’s mercy. He tried to tell himself he was following this woman out of professional courtesy, but it didn’t work. DeRossi was a weakness. One he’d purposely culled from his life years ago. He’d never had any real objectivity where this woman was concerned.

They’d parted as friends—or so he’d thought—until she’d landed on the Initiative committee.

Knowing she could look over his shoulder, question any or all of his decisions had only affirmed his choice to avoid a personal relationship—with her or anyone else. In this line of work you could have the job or the life, but not both.

A tiny voice in his head suggested his niece and her soon-to-be husband disproved his theory. What might work for her, however, would never work for him. He was too set in his ways and there was an inherent distance he didn’t think he could bridge.

He scowled, thinking back to those days working with Jo. They’d been good as partners and he’d assumed their chemistry had been more about the rush of fieldwork than any real connection. Except he’d never quite gotten her out of his system.

“Tonight is all you get. I have to be at the Glenstone Lodge by tomorrow.”

She nodded once.

“For Casey’s wedding.”

She nodded again.

“She asked me to give her away.”

Jo slanted him a look with those midnight eyes, then, without comment, pushed open the exit door.

Cold air, swirling with heavy, wet snowflakes, battered them. Visibility was bad even though they were protected by the terminal building. He glanced up. The mountain peaks weren’t even a shadow on the horizon. The roads to Glenstone were probably already closed. “Lord, what a storm.”

More silence from Jo as she stepped into the miserable weather.

He reached to button his coat, belatedly realizing she didn’t have anything warmer than the flight attendant’s uniform blazer.

“Take this.” He draped his overcoat across her shoulders. She graced him with a small, tight smile and rushed toward a waiting taxi. He didn’t know how she managed it on those needles she called heels.

“I was about to give up on you, lady,” the driver said as they slid into the welcome warmth of his cab.

“What does he mean by that?” Warnings clanged in Thomas’s head even as he closed the door. He could overpower her, but he was too curious about what she was really after.

She shot him a look that confirmed he already knew the answer. He gave her points for remembering her field training and planning more than one exit.

Thomas gave the name of the hotel and the driver pulled away from the curb. The typical airport traffic was lighter on the employee access route, but the cab fishtailed a bit in the worsening conditions. He hoped the driver knew which way was which, because Thomas had no idea. It wasn’t quite a whiteout, but the wind had picked up and was blowing snow sideways across the car.

“Hard to believe this is October,” Jo said with a subtle nod toward the driver.

“Looks more like January,” Thomas agreed.

He had questions for her, all of which had to wait until they were alone. He heard an alert on his phone and pulled it from his pocket.

He frowned, recognizing Deputy Director Holt’s personal number on the missed call list. Thomas had left clear instructions for the current cases. He scrolled down to check messages, but between the heaters on high and the interrupted signal he couldn’t make out anything but “committee.” Sitting next to Jo, he assumed Holt was trying to give him a heads up about her.

“Problem?” Her smile was tight and her hands were in her pockets again.

Thomas shook his head. “Nothing Holt can’t handle.”

That answer only seemed to increase her anxiety as her lips thinned and she crossed her arms. When the cabbie turned toward long-term parking rather than the outlying circle of airport hotels, Thomas couldn’t ignore his instincts any longer.

Slowly, his gaze locked with hers, he tucked the phone back in his pocket. Slower still, he placed his hands, fingers spread wide, on his thighs.

When she didn’t move, he arched a brow.

Finally, she followed suit, showing him her hands were empty before folding them in her lap. “Truce?”

“Too soon to tell,” he replied with brutal honesty.

“I know this is unexpected,” she said, her voice pitched too low for the cab driver to overhear. “Work with me. Please.”

He thought of the wedding plans, of his beautiful niece turning into a lace-covered bridezilla monster and decided both he and Lucas had faced tougher challenges. The rehearsal and dinner was hardly optional, but given his current predicament—unarmed in a blizzard with an obviously determined and still-talented agent who had clearly made an effort to get his attention...

“You have twenty-four hours.”

She nodded, her tension easing fractionally.

“I will
not
miss her wedding.”

“Agreed.”

He thought it was an odd response, but the cab pulled to a stop behind a beige compact SUV and their conversation halted.

She paid the driver while he retrieved their bags from the trunk. When the parking lights flashed indicating she’d unlocked the vehicle, he opened the back hatch and put their luggage inside. The engine rumbled to life, startling him, and he looked over his shoulder to confirm she was controlling the car.

“Remote start,” she said hurrying over.

He suddenly caught a whiff of an unmistakable odor of a lighted fuse, a precise scent he’d hoped never to come across again.

“Should have remembered it soon—”

“Jo, run!” But she kept moving closer to the car.

Throwing himself at her, he took them both to the icy pavement. He rolled them into the driving lane, his body the only shelter he could offer.

In his mind, it was Germany all over again, right down to the snowy conditions.

The blast of heat washed over them, obliterating the car and, for a moment, the blizzard conditions. The pavement shook with the force of the car dropping back down to earth and the detached, analytic part of his brain wondered just how high it had blown.

He risked a glance toward the ball of fire. The luggage had been vaporized in the explosion. His clothes, his irreplaceable surprise for Casey and whatever Jo had packed for her little venture were long gone. Reactions and assessment had to wait for later. Right now, they needed to move. Easing his grip on Jo, he looked into her midnight eyes, and weighed the sincerity of the shock and terror he saw there.

He knew she could be a consummate actress; it went along with their line of work. Various scenarios cycled through his mind, all of them bleak. Was she the perp or the victim? Had this been an attempt on her life or his? Both? Maybe she’d changed her mind about killing him or maybe the timing came down to a faulty fuse or signal on the bomb?

He wanted answers, but survival was first and foremost. Going separate ways seemed like the most prudent solution in light of the current circumstances. But the phrase “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” kept nudging him. Was Jo a friend or enemy?

Uncertain, he made his decision based on their relationship prior to her role with the Initiative committee.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” Snowflakes caught in her long eyelashes. “You?”

He gave a snort, but before he could answer, her eyes went wide and she flipped him onto his back. “Your jacket was on fire,” she explained.

Well, her quick thinking and the deep slush seeping through the fabric had put it out now. He made a mental note that her reflexes and physical ability seemed to be in perfect order. It wasn’t all that comforting considering his seemed to be a bit sluggish.

“Thanks.” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, removed the battery and tossed both pieces into the fiery wreckage. “Give me yours.”

She scowled, but did the same with her own cell phone.

“Now let’s move. Stay low.”

“I know the protocol,” she snapped, anger clear in her eyes, intensifying the flags of color high in her cheeks.

The attitude was a good sign. Maybe. He just didn’t have enough facts to sort out the situation. “Prove it.”

“That car was rented in your name. I changed your reservation and picked it up for you days ago,” she answered before he could ask the obvious question. She held up a key fob with the logo of a different make. “My car is two rows that way.”

He nodded and motioned for her to lead. Again.

They moved quickly through the lot, but he knew anyone could be watching, waiting for the right opportunity to pick them both off.

How had the bomb been triggered? And who wanted him dead? There were a number of possible answers to both questions. He mentally narrowed the list to people who wanted to eliminate them both, but that left him plenty of names to consider. And only sprouted more questions as he wondered who knew they were both in the area.

When they reached her car, he noted the license plate and watched her use a compact from her purse to check the undercarriage for problems.

She nodded, convinced it was safe, and they climbed inside. He suspected she was holding her breath the same as he was as she turned the key in the ignition. When the engine came to life and they were still intact, he buckled his seat belt. The action had him thinking of Lucas, and wondering how best to alert his friend to the developing situation.

“What’s your plan?” He cranked up the heater and defrosters while she backed out of the parking space.

“Get out of Denver with all haste.”

He had the wet, singed clothes on his back, his wallet and quickly dwindling options. “I hope you have something a little more detailed in mind.” Her lips were pursed and quirked to the side, a sure sign she was thinking. “Go on, spill it.” Maybe he’d get lucky and she’d give him something he could work with. “You used to like having a sounding board.”

She peered up at the gray sky and he thought this time she might keep her theories to herself. “I’m wondering how you bribe Mother Nature?”

“Pardon me?”

“The storm almost took down your plane.”

“You saw the landing?”

She nodded. “The storm certainly gives an assassin the advantage since you’d be trapped here overnight.”

“Disadvantage,” he argued. “The storm traps the assassin, too.”

She slid a look his way as she merged onto the Interstate. “I’m not the assassin.”

He wanted to believe her. “Says the woman who dropped me off at a car rigged to explode.”

“Relax. I would have been beside you if I hadn’t been picking my way through the snow. It took me back to that night in Germany.”

Recalling the way she’d fiddled with the contents of her pockets, he reached across the seat and searched her.

Conditions were so bad, she had to keep both hands on the wheel and couldn’t counter his search, but she called him all kinds of names in the interim. He didn’t find a remote for the destroyed car, but his fingers closed on a small, flat disk sealed in a thick plastic envelope the size of a quarter.

“Not the assassin?” He held it up then snatched it back when she made a grab. The car swerved and a loud rumble growled around them as the tires rolled over the grooved pavement meant to alert a drifting driver.

“
Not
the assassin,” she insisted. “That is just a light sedative. I brought it along in case you weren’t inclined to cooperate.”

“Any other surprises planted on you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Yes, he would. Her sly smile wasn’t encouraging his trust but it was stirring other feelings he had no business allowing just now.

“Thomas, I know it looks bad,” she said, her tone quiet and serious. “But I am on your side.”

“I can’t even call in my people to assess the device,” he grumbled.

“But—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Everyone I trust is at the top of a mountain.” Without a phone, he couldn’t immediately reach the offices in D.C. He leaned forward, trying to see anything through the storm. “A mountain I can’t even see. We should stop and buy a phone,” he added, spotting a bright neon sign for a superstore.

“Not just yet.”

He swiveled in his seat. “We’ve got a tail?”

“No. But I’d rather put the airport farther behind us before either one of us swipes a credit card.”

Thomas took it as a bad sign that he hadn’t been thinking about that. Sure, he’d flown out here for a wedding and left business to his deputy director, Emmett Holt, but that didn’t give him the luxury of being rattled by events.

“What the hell does the Initiative committee want with me that couldn’t wait until Monday?”

“I can’t tell you right this minute.”

“Jo—” He couldn’t finish the threat. She jerked the wheel right and nearly lost control of the car in an effort to get to the exit ramp.

“Tail?”

“Yes.” She laid on the horn and blew through the light at the end of the ramp. “There’s a gun taped under your seat.”

She pulled a hard left at the next corner and, with him reaching for the gun, his head rapped the door. On a curse, he powered down the window. Maybe the blast of cold air would have the added benefit of an ice pack.

“Stay in the left lane,” he ordered. Thankfully traffic was sparse with the storm keeping most sane people safe inside. “Let him get closer.”

“Are you nuts?”

“I’m open to better ideas.” When she slowed down, he assumed she didn’t have another suggestion.

The car pulled up beside them. The heavily tinted glass made it impossible to identify the driver, but the dark, menacing barrel of the handgun poking out of the back window made the intent clear enough.

He was ready to shoot out the front tire when Jo muscled the SUV into a spin. Like a boxer going for the knockout punch, she used her bigger vehicle against the smaller sedan, connecting and driving the vehicle into a traffic light post. The impact crumpled the hood of the sedan and left them disabled in the roadway.

She shifted into Reverse and for a split second he thought she intended to ram the other car again, but she turned the steering wheel and sped away.