COLE (Dragon Security Book 1) (28 page)

Donovan

The ballroom of the Florence Inn Hotel was a literal Who’s Who of Hollywood with a few Silicon Valley refugees and politicians thrown in for good measure. And Kate seemed to be in her element.

She strutted right into that room, a smile glued to her lips and greetings flying as she moved from person to person. I felt like a puppy on a leash being dragged across the floor without any idea of what the hell was going on around me.

“Better watch out for this one,” David said in my ear through the Bluetooth bud I’d placed there as we got out of the car, “she’s ambitious.”

“Mind your business,” I muttered.

The Bluetooth was supposed to be a way for the team to stay connected, not be a gossip channel. We couldn’t let ourselves get distracted from our mission. Even if these people were as overstuffed as the couch in my parents’ den.

About two hours in, Kate grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the dance floor.

“I need a break,” she said with a tired sigh.

“And here I thought it was just you wanting to be in my arms.”

“There is that, too.”

I pulled her into my arms, cradling her against my chest as we began to sway across the floor to a song that wasn’t really intended to be a slow song. But I don’t think she minded, and I knew I didn’t.

“Kind of makes up for the fact that you chickened out of taking me to prom.”

“Chicken out?” I pushed her back slightly so I could see her face. “You were the one who was afraid your dad would have a stroke or something when he found out about us.”

“Yeah. He might still.” There was a twinkle in her eye that I knew. She was teasing me.

“Is there something for him to find out?”

She shrugged even as she rose up on her tiptoes to kiss my bottom lip gently.

“Let’s not get distracted,” Ash immediately said in my ear.

I grabbed her hand and twirled her away from me, causing the guy dancing with some tall, blond woman a few feet to our right to glare at me. I shrugged, pretending to be slightly inebriated by stumbling as I gathered Kate back against me. The guy turned away.

“We better behave,” I whispered against her ear.

“Katie? Kate Thompson?”

I turned, suddenly on alert, tugging Kate behind me. But then my eyes fell on a face I never thought I would see again.

Amanda Graham.

Her eyes widened when she recognized me at about the same moment I recognized her.

“Donovan Pritchard?”

“Hello, Amanda.”

She stared at me for a long moment, making me wonder what was going through her mind. The last time I’d seen her…well, it wasn’t a pleasant moment.

She’d come to the hospital with a group of kids from the graduation party who got word of what’d happened. She came into the emergency room just in time to watch them roll him out of the trauma room to rush him up to surgery. And the screams that issued from her lips…I’d had to grab her around her waist to keep her from following him onto the elevator.

But then Amanda smiled and reached up to kiss my cheek.

“It’s so lovely to see you. I heard you went into the military.”

“I did. I was given an honorable discharge two years ago.”

Amanda nodded, a smile on her lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You should have looked me up when you came back.”

“Do you live in the area?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been in San Francisco for several years now, working at Daddy’s tech company up there.”

“Really?”

“Computers were always my thing. You know that.”

I did know that. She and I had half a dozen classes together our senior year, including advanced computer programming. I was happy to hear she’d continued on with it. When I knew her last, she still hadn’t decided what she wanted to do with her life, just that she wanted to be with Joshua.

She and Joshua were closer than any couple I’d known in high school. It was as if they knew they were meant to be together from the first moment she walked into our sophomore English class, a transfer from some high school in Chicago when her father decided he wanted to move the headquarters of his massive conglomerate to the Santa Monica area. From that moment on I was a perpetual third wheel to their almost sickening romance.

“So you work for your dad?”

“I run the company. His name is just on the door.”

“That’s awesome, Amanda.”

She smiled as she tilted her head in acknowledgement. “I’ve actually been talking to Kate about doing business with her bank. We have quite a few telecommuters from this area, and it would be convenient to have a local bank we can work with them through.”

“We have,” Kate said.

Amanda shifted, hiding her face a little behind a curtain of her long, dark hair. There was something about the movement that bothered me. But then Kate stepped forward and kissed her bare cheek and they started talking about dividends and something I didn’t quite catch and I was suddenly lost.

I’d been very careful since coming to the Santa Monica area to join Gray Wolf to avoid people I knew from the past. But this was…not as bad as I’d thought it would be.

I guess it is true, what they say.

Time heals all wounds.

At the Compound

“Mind your business,” David muttered under his breath as he watched Kate Thompson reach up and kiss Donovan. “Do they really think they’re fooling anyone?”

He’d seen a lot, sitting here watching the monitors day in and day out, but watching Donovan fall for his childhood sweetheart had to be the most interesting thing he’d seen in a while. Watching Kirkland charm his targets was one thing, but this…there was actually some plot to it. It was like the difference between a porn movie and a chic flick.

“Let’s not get distracted,” Ash’s voice announced.

David glanced at the monitor that showed his brother standing just inside the entrance of the ballroom. He didn’t get what was going on with him. Did he not want happiness for Donovan? The man survived an IED attack, for Christ’s sake! Why shouldn’t he find something beyond the drudgery of this job?

But again, Ash had been a different person since Alexi disappeared. It was as if something inside of him just evaporated. He left the Army and drifted for a long time, just moving from place to place with no real purpose. And then when Mom and Dad died a little over two years ago…David knew he came back for him. He hadn’t asked him to, but Ash never did anything anyone asked. Then he started this company and brought in all these buff military guys—it was almost a relief when he brought in petite little Joss until David saw what she could do…he would never mess with her!—and tried to build something like a family again. But David knew he hadn’t forgotten Alexi. He knew about the file in Ash’s desk.

David knew that if Alexi suddenly showed up on the front doorstep, something that was missing in Ash would come back. But David suspected that would never happen.

But why not allow Donovan a little happiness? Someone around here should have it.

David studied the screens arrayed around the back of his workstation, checking the camera feeds as well as the code he was constantly working on, constantly trying to improve the system that kept the operatives safe. He could clearly see all six subjects at the party. Ash was still near the door, Kirkland was flirting with a couple of women by the refreshment table, and Joss was playing dice with a couple of chauffeurs by the back door. Donovan and Kate were still in the middle of the dancefloor, but they were talking to a blond woman they both seemed to know.

David watched for a minute, wondering who the woman was. But then he was distracted by something else. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

There was something wrong with one of the pictures on his video feeds. He began pulling them up, one at a time. Something…something…and then he realized what it was.

He pulled up the camera feed from the safe house, then the one from Kate Thompson’s house. Looking at them side by side, it was so obvious. He should have caught it sooner.

Damn!

Someone hacked his cameras!

Those cameras were supposed to be hack proof, but he of all people knew that anything could be hacked given enough time and patience. Whoever had done this, they were smart. To hack them in such a small amount of time—they’d only been in Miss Thompson’s house for three days, only activated in the safe house for twenty-four hours. How the hell…it didn’t matter how.

“The safe house is compromised,” he said, pushing a button on his keyboard that allowed his voice to be heard by Ash only.

“What do you mean, compromised?”

“Someone hacked the cameras.” He continued to type on the keyboard as he spoke. “I’ve got a team headed over there to check it out.”

“How the hell did that happen?” Ash demanded of him.

David looked up at the monitor that showed Ash. He could tell, even from miles away and through slightly grainy video footage, that his brother was pissed. And he had right to be. This was David’s thing, and he’d clearly messed up.

“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

“You’d better.”

David cleared the monitors, focusing on the code that ran the cameras. It was easy to reverse what the hacker had done, but he had to go a step further, to block the hacker from coming back. It took him a few minutes to search for the backdoor the hacker would have left to make reentry easier. That’s what he would have done. And he found it just as the team he’d dispatched radioed in.

“We’re approaching the house.”

“Proceed with caution,” he told them.

He pulled up the video feeds that covered the outside of the safe house. He identified the dark shapes of the remote team making their way carefully through the front yard. And then the screen went white.

“Oh, fuck me!” David cried, shocked into inaction for a second.

“We’ve got a problem, Ash,” he said a moment later, his voice shaking as he watched one, then two, then three of the members of the remote team begin to reappear on the screen. “You’re not going to like it, but you’re going to have to send them to Austin.”

Donovan

“Alcatraz,” Ash unexpectedly barked in my ear. “I repeat, Alcatraz.”

Tension immediately raced through me. Kate was talking to her manager from the bank, Mrs. Talbot. I moved up close behind her and hissed in her ear, “We have to go.”

She glanced back at me, irritation clear in every line of her gorgeous face until she saw my eyes. Then she stiffened.

“I apologize, Mrs. Talbot,” she said politely, “but it seems we need to go.”

Mrs. Talbot’s eyes narrowed. “Is there some reason why?”

“Yes,” I said in my most authoritative voice, but I didn’t pause to explain. I simply took Kate’s arm and led the way through the crowd to a preassigned door at the back of the ballroom.

“What’s going on?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” I said between clenched teeth as I guided her through a narrow hallway and into a busy kitchen.

“You don’t know?”

“All I know is that Ash gave the signal for imminent danger. We have to go.”

She didn’t argue any more. She simply allowed me to drag her through the noise and mess of the kitchen and out the back door where Joss was waiting with the back door to the limo already open. She slipped me my weapon as I passed her.

We were speeding through the alley behind the hotel before the door was completely closed. Joss opened the petition between the two sections of the car and handed me an iPad she kept somewhere nearby at all times to help facilitate communication.

“Safe house compromised,” was all it said at the moment.

“What’s going on, David,” I said into my phone in the silent car, hoping he was still monitoring our smartphones for communication.

“There was an explosion.”

“What?”

Kate was watching me, her face growing more and more alarmed as she watched the tension build in my shoulders.

“At the safe house,” David quickly explained. “The cameras were hacked and when I sent a team to check it out, there was an explosion as they approached.”

“Anyone injured?”

“No. But the house is demolished.”

“Fuck me!” I whispered under my breath. “What now?”

“Ash wants you on a plane to Austin.”

I nodded even though I knew he couldn’t see me. It seemed like our best bet at the moment. Whoever was after Kate seemed to be a step ahead of us, or at least beside us, since the night the security guard was killed. Moving to another safe house here in Santa Monica would just be inviting another disaster like this.

“What’s going on?” Kate asked, her chin trembling as she spoke.

I moved back to her side and took her hands in mine. “We’re going for a little trip.”

“What kind of trip?”

“Ash has a house in Austin, Texas.”

She started shaking her hands, panic rising to a boiling point in her eyes. “What happened? Is my dad okay?”

“Of course!” I ran my hand over her face and made her look at me with my fingers hooked under her chin. “If there was something wrong with your dad, I would have told you.”

Tears started to spill from the corner of her eyes. “Then what’s going on?”

“Someone hacked into the cameras at the safe house. And then…” I hesitated because I could see she was on the verge of hysterics and I really needed her to stay calm until we were on the plane and thirty thousand feet over the city.

“And then?”

“There was an explosion.”

“What kind of explosion?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, baby. All I know is what David’s telling me.”

She nodded, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”

“We’re going to a small, private airport outside the city. We should be there in a few minutes.”

“What happens then? How long do we stay in Texas?”

“Until Detective Warren can figure out who’s behind all this and decides it’s safe for you to come back.”

“That could be months.”

I shrugged, dragging my thumb over her bottom lip. “It could be months…all alone. Just you and me and the woods of central Texas.”

She smiled despite the tears. “No cameras?”

“No cameras.”

She curled up against my chest, sniffed a few times, then pulled back to look at me again, the tears gone.

“Okay. I’m okay now.”

“I’m going to protect you, babe. I promise, nothing will happen to you.”

She leaned into me and kissed me gently. “I know.”

I cradled her against my chest and settled back against the seat.

We arrived at the airport a few minutes later. Joss pulled the car right up to the boarding ramp to the plane. She turned and reached her hand through the partition. I squeezed it.

“See you.”

She nodded.

I opened the door and stepped out, reaching back for Kate. We boarded the plane and the steward pulled the ramp up immediately. The plane began to roll toward the runway as Kate and I took seats inside.

“Who does this belong to?”

I reached over and pulled her belt a little tighter. “It’s Ash’s.”

“Ash’s? Where does he get all the money?”

“His father came from a wealthy family.”

“Oh.”

She glanced out the window and grabbed hold of the armrests, her knuckles going white. I slipped out of my seat and moved into the captain’s chair beside her. After I was buckled, I took her hand and pulled it onto my thigh.

“Try to relax. We’ll be in the air before you know it.”

And we’d be hurtling toward the unknown.

What the hell was going on here?