Committed (8 page)

The agent in charge of the case, Giovanna “Gio” Veronesi, stood next to Damien’s seat, flipping through a few pages of her notes. Their director, Howard Cooper, stood not far off, his beady gaze narrowed and aimed at Gio’s back. The man had tried everything to pull the case from Gio, but he didn’t have the years or experience working in Chicago to do it. He would be on hand to stand in front of the camera and take the glory, though. That was fine. Damien had worked with Gio for years on Emilio’s crimes, with no more acknowledgment than a nod of thanks for proper paperwork. It pissed Damien off, but not Gio. The woman had always had a calm, levelheaded approach. As much as Damien wanted to be lead on this one, it was probably best that she was the lead agent.

Hell, his mind was still partially back at House Surrender, with a tattooed, golden-haired siren. His balls were so blue he didn’t know if he’d survive how much he wanted the woman.

Damien resisted the urge to check his personal cell phone for a call from her. A text. Morse code. A doodle. If he were lucky an erotic picture or a video. He hadn’t heard from either Rapunzel or Yamamoto all day, and he hadn’t had time to worry about it.

“Gio?” he muttered.

“One sec.” She flipped a few more pages.

He held his tongue. This was Gio’s show, after all, but they were working with a small window of opportunity.

“Okay. Let’s roll,” she said, for his ears alone. Gio straightened up, adjusting her suit jacket and flipping her wild curls over her shoulder. She might be only a few inches over five feet, but Gio was one spitfire of an Italian, and one hell of an agent.

Gio stepped into the space at the end of the room. There was a whiteboard behind her. They’d sketched the layout of the area, and how the men would be positioned in a best-case scenario. The audience slowly hushed, and she waited until she had their full attention.

“I want to thank everyone for being here. I know this is seven days earlier than expected. We’re missing manpower, but the team we have is the most skilled set of officers I’ve had the honor of working with.” She turned slightly toward the board and glanced at her notes.

“Chicago DEA welcomes you all,” Cooper said, stepping forward to hover at Gio’s side. The man dwarfed her in stature, but Gio shone in the spotlight. If she didn’t like the trenches so much, she could have done a nice job as a suit.

“Thank you, sir. Let me get everyone up to speed. At roughly eighteen hundred hours on Friday, José ‘The Money Man’ Morales”—she pulled a photograph from her file and stuck it under a clip above the whiteboard—“phoned our Chicago area kingpin, Emilio Molina.” She pulled out another photograph and stuck it next to the accountant’s. “He said that the quarterly accounting meeting was going to be moved up. At the time, that was all we knew. At oh one hundred hours this morning, we heard from our undercover agent, Matías Govea. He’s been embedded with the new Valdez cartel, and he got a message out from California, where he’s positioned with the Columbian leaders. Not only are The Money Man and Emilio meeting with enough drugs and cash to put them away for a very long time, Aarón Valdez himself will be meeting with Emilio.”

“We want Aarón Valdez alive.” Cooper pointed at the photograph.

Gio pinned a third photograph to the board and took a moment to stare at the faces that had haunted them, ignoring the director’s comment. Damien glared at the picture of Aarón Valdez. The man had killed at least two DEA agents stationed in Mexico, simply because he could. Damien couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Matías to be embedded with the man for months. Damien had only worked briefly with the undercover officer, but he was a damn good man, and a fantastic undercover agent.

“All right. Our main objective is to snatch Aarón Valdez, José Morales, and Emilio Molina, in that order. We know there will be others with them, but at this time our undercover personnel can’t communicate who that will be, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of Douglas Marlowe’s death.”

The room grew still as officers gritted their teeth or clenched their fists, each wanting a piece of the man who had committed such atrocities. They’d never recovered all of Douglas’s body.

Aarón Valdez was a man who combined the early violence of the Columbian cartels with the smooth efficiency of more modern operations. It was Damien’s assumption that the man was a sociopath, but they’d know more once they had him in custody. His subordinates, like Emilio, weren’t much better. In Emilio’s case, they were worse. He was a magnet for every serial killer and gangbanging thug who liked to deal out pain and death. Emilio’s name had become synonymous with the bogeyman in the lower-income areas of Chicago, used to scare misbehaving children, or as a curse upon your enemies.

For Damien, though, getting Emilio was a personal matter.

Three years prior, Damien had been responsible for field training a handful of recruits. They’d gone on a normal buy bust operation. An agent posed as a customer, and once they had confirmation that a sale of drugs had taken place, the team would swoop in and arrest whoever was there.

It had gone horribly wrong in a hail of gunfire, and Damien had lost a fresh-faced new recruit named Kimberly Wendell in the parking lot of a laundromat. He’d only known her for a few days while they put the mission together, but she’d been one of those people whose smile sparked something inside of everyone she met. Damien had looked at her and seen someone who would rise far in the DEA and change things.

Kimberly Wendell was an agent Damien would never forget.

Getting rid of this scum would do the world a hell of a lot of good.

“José Morales, the accountant, never meets with their people in the same place. He always chooses a remote area away from the city, preferably early in the morning, and someplace where the terrain is flat. This location is all of that.”

Gio turned to the board and began explaining how they would use two ditches and a large culvert to hide the heavily armored SWAT officers. They would coordinate the attack so that six vehicles packed with the rest of the joint task force would drive in and they would exit from moving vehicles. It wasn’t ideal, but they couldn’t be certain about the exit route any of the suspects would be taking, so they had to catch them together.

Damien knew this part by heart. Gio and he had rehashed it many times in the weeks leading up to this operation, back when it was going to be a simple sting to grab Emilio and the accountant.

Now it was much more. They could potentially cut the head off the snake, eliminating a large portion of the drug trade in the Chicago area.

Gio fielded questions from the other agents, officers, and suits who weren’t from the
Chicago DEA office. Their team already knew the whole mission inside out.

It was a crap deal that the mission wouldn’t happen as planned. While Damien was more than happy with the team they had, the rushed timetable made errors more likely.

And it had cost him the weekend with Rapunzel.

He couldn’t resist.

Damien pulled out his personal cell phone and stared at the notification bar. No new messages.

Rapunzel should have been cared for and looked after on Friday. It made him grind his teeth to think about her finding comfort in someone else’s arms, but there was nothing else he could do about it. He had expected some word from her yesterday, but now it was Sunday and still there was nothing, from her or Yamamoto.

Damien bit the bullet and resorted to text messaging. He hated it, preferring to just call a person when he needed to talk to them, but it wasn’t the time or place.

    
To Yamamoto: How’s my switch?

“If there aren’t any more questions, we want to be in place in fifteen minutes.” Gio paused and the room fell silent. “Okay. Stay safe, stay alive. Getting these bad guys isn’t worth losing anyone here. Let’s roll.”

The room erupted in movement, officers calling to each other, organizing their individual teams.

“Damien.” Gio beckoned him to where she was in conversation with two suits, easily recognized because of their clothing, completely inappropriate for the field. A suit was always properly dressed for the camera, rarely for the job at hand.

“Damien, I’m afraid Archer isn’t going to make it in time. He’s on his way in from a wedding and is still about ten minutes away. Can I swap you out with him?” Gio turned to the map. “That’s going to put you in the east ditch.”

Right in the middle of the action, where he wanted to be.

“Sure thing, boss.” Damien grinned.

Gio suppressed a sigh, and actually didn’t roll her eyes this time. He liked to ruffle her feathers a little every now and then. “Okay, they should load up to drop you soon. See you in an hour.” She gave him a fleeting smile and turned her attention back to the suits.

Damien heard them mention a press release and a news conference, and barely resisted the urge to shudder. A suit he was not. Damien might live out his days fighting in the inner-city
trenches, and he’d be perfectly happy to do so. It got his blood going, the adrenaline pumping, and each suspect he got to stare in the eye while reading him his rights was one more who wouldn’t plague innocent people for a while.

He grabbed his flak jacket from where he’d stowed it under his chair and strapped it on. The trailer was almost empty, so he headed out to one of the vehicles that would drop them off. Despite the large contingent of manpower, the area was quiet. People moved like shadows in the near darkness, doing their best to remain silent and undetectable. They couldn’t know if Valdez had scouts coming to the location early to check it out before the meet.

Damien wasn’t bothered at all by the last-minute change. As a senior agent, Gio had wanted him with the teams swooping in, which would have meant that the first wave got all the immediate action. With Agent Archer delayed, Damien would be taking charge of his team, which consisted of a half-dozen DEA agents and a complete complement of Chicago SWAT officers in full gear.

An unmarked van, outfitted for SWAT purposes, was idling with the last group loaded and ready. Unlike the suits, these were Damien’s kind of people. He’d worked with many of them before, and knew them on a first-name basis. Benches lined the sides of the van, and officers were sitting and standing, packed in as tightly as they could be.

“I’m trading places with Archer. I’m Special Agent Damien Moana. We’re going to get real close for the next little while. Let’s roll,” Damien called out, and slapped the top of the van.

“Glad to see ya finally decided to arrive, Moana,” one of the officers drawled.

Damien chuckled. “Thought it about time I put in an appearance. How are the kids?”

“Good, good. Youngest has her birthday party later today.” The man sighed. “Christ, ten eight-year-olds is all I need.”

The van rolled forward and all conversation ceased. The aroma of coffee and sweat mixed together in the humid evening air. It was the scent of a bust.

The silence was tense as they made their way in the blackness of night, without the guidance of headlights, to the spot where the meeting would go down. He only hoped the location wasn’t shifted twenty feet in either direction. They were running a risk, but the culvert was the only cover.

The van eased to a stop and Damien stepped out. Behind him, the rest of the men were just as careful.

The fresh breeze wafted toward him, carrying with it the scent of flowers and growing green things. He paused and inhaled, catching the faint smell of fresh-cut grass.

Once Damien’s eyes had adjusted to the moonlight as much as they were going to, he moved toward the other team. Their vans headed back to the staging area, nearly two miles away.

“Moana?” one of the DEA officers called, peering at him.

“Yup. Archer and I are trading places.” The two of them couldn’t be more different. Where Damien was tall and wide, Archer was average height and built like a swimmer.

Damien took a few moments to familiarize himself with the area. He walked back and forth on the dirt-and-gravel road, trying to figure out why The Money Man would pick this spot. Their meets were typically remote, but this one took the cake.

The land rolled away from them, the fields gone fallow. Trees formed a line bordering the plots. Their spot was in the middle of a floodplain, so no crops grew here, just grass.

Not a cloud dotted the sky, just an expanse of stars Damien rarely glimpsed in the city, and the moon. The full, glowing sphere was a bad omen in his experience. Weird things happened during a full moon that he could never explain. Guns backfiring. A stun gun going dead. New equipment breaking.

Damien wasn’t a superstitious type, but he’d stayed alive by being careful.

Tonight, he’d be ready for anything.

Damien stood hunched over in a culvert barely five feet in depth. Which was pretty deep, unless you were six foot four. The SWAT team stood by, in helmets, night-vision devices, and flak jackets, equipped with shields, guns, and ammo strapped to their bodies. He was working with the best team possible.

“One pair of headlights approaching the location,” said a voice coming from his receiver.

That one sentence amped up the tension. A few officers, who’d taken a knee, now rose into a crouching position. Two other vehicles were still to arrive, but with even one nearing their location, it was a little more real.

Sweet tendrils of anticipation amped on adrenaline curled through his body.

He could picture the scene in his mind’s eye.

The location was remote, but from either direction, you had to approach it on a one-lane road that ran under a canopy of trees. If Damien were a crook, he’d pause to survey the landscape before driving out into the open, the way their bad guys were doing.

All of the officers had been very careful to not leave any trace of their passing, right down to carrying a broom to wipe away tracks and footprints. By now, the staging area would be
on lights-out, and the officers silent. The unmistakable sound of an engine neared their position and went right by. He tracked the vehicle’s progress with his eyes, estimating that it must have stopped on the south end of the little bridge. The idling engine serenaded them.