Flashpoint (3 page)

Her eyes widened, and he knew that she’d spotted the blood on his shoe and the hole in his pants—number three on the roof had fought back—and assumed he’d been hurt. In truth, his physical health was the last thing he’d been thinking about.

But then Crystal put two bottles of beer on the bar, and Tess turned to thank her, and reality snapped back around. And she wasn’t angelic or even beautiful anymore—she was merely Tess Bailey from support, kind of pretty in an interesting way. Her smile was crooked and her nose was rather oddly shaped and her face was too round—she’d probably have jowls before she turned fifty.

Of course, right now the combination of interesting plus half naked made her look sizzling hot. And since right now was all that ever mattered to Jimmy, he pushed away the last lingering residuals of brightness that had momentarily dazzled him.

He
was
going to go home with Tess tonight. She didn’t know it yet, but it was a given. She wasn’t going to save him, though. At least not more than temporarily.

He was too far gone for that.

As for what he did or didn’t deserve . . . Real life was nothing like the movies, where villains were punished for their sins, and the righteous triumphed.

Which was damn lucky for him.

“Do you need me to get Decker?” When Crystal moved off, Tess’s full attention was back on him—her concern something he could have reached out and held in his hands.

“No, I’m fine,” Jimmy said, because she was looking at him as if he’d lost it. Crap, maybe he had for a minute there. “Really. Sorry.” He kissed her, just a quick press of his lips against hers, because he didn’t know how else to erase the worry from her eyes.

It worked to distract her—God knew it did a similar trick on him.

He wanted to kiss her again, longer, deeper—a real touch-the-tonsils, full fireworks-inducing event—but he didn’t. He’d save that for later.

And Decker always said he had no willpower.

“I’m really fine,” Jimmy said again, and forced a smile to prove it. “It’s just a scrape.”

He didn’t know that for sure—he hadn’t bothered to stop and look. Still, he’d managed to run back down the stairs. His injury couldn’t be
that
bad.

He looked out at the crowd, trying to get a read on who was shit-faced drunk—who would best serve as a catalyst for part two of tonight’s fun.

“Did you find a way to get Decker out of here?” Tess asked. He could see that he’d managed to confuse her. She was back to folding her arms across her chest.

“Yeah, I cleared the roof.” He wondered if she had any idea what that meant. He glanced back at the room. There was a man in a green T-shirt who was so tanked his own buddies’ laughter was starting to piss him off.

But Tess obviously didn’t understand any of what he’d said. “The roof? How . . . ?”

“I called for some help with our extraction.” Jimmy explained the easy part. “We’ll be flying Deck out of here—a chopper’s coming to pick us up—but first we need a little diversion. Have you ever been in a bar fight?”

Tess shook her head.

“Well, you’re about to be. If we get separated, if I can’t make it back over here, keep to the edge of the room. Keep your back to the wall, watch for flying objects, and be ready to duck. Work your way around to that exit sign—the one that’s directly across from the front entrance.” He pointed. “Behind that door are stairs. If you get there first, wait for me or Deck. Don’t open that door without one of us—is that clear?”

She nodded.

“Oh, and there’s one more important thing,” he said. “Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”
You may feel a little pressure. . . .

Tess laughed her amazement.

“Don’t answer right away,” Nash said. “Give yourself time to think it over.”

He’d obviously caught her completely off guard. Good.

“Diego, I—”

“Heads up,” he interrupted.

Because here came ol’ Gus, right on cue, searching for Tess, wondering what the fuck was taking so long with their beers, impatient to send Decker to the parking lot where he’d be filled with holes, where he’d gasp out the last breath of his life in the gravel.

And here came Deck, right behind him, the only real gentleman in this den of bottom-feeders, ready to jump on Gus’s back if he so much as looked cross-eyed at cute little Tess Bailey from support.

“When I knock over that guy sitting there with the black T-shirt that says ‘Badass,’ ” Nash instructed her, meeting his partner’s gaze from across the room just as Gus spotted him with Tess. Gus reacted, reaching inside of his baseball jacket for either his cell phone or a weapon—it didn’t really matter which because he was so slo-oh-oh, and Deck was already on top of him, “lean over the bar and shout to your girlfriend Crystal that she should call 911, that someone in the crowd has a gun. On your mark, get set . . .”

Fifteen feet away, Decker brought Gus Mondelay to his knees and then to the floor, which was a damn good thing, because if it had been Nash taking him down, he would have snapped the motherfucker’s neck. “Go!”

Decker knew the drill.

After he relieved Mondelay of both his weapon and his cell phone and brought him, with a minimum amount of fuss, to an unconscious state, he was more than ready to vacate the premises as quickly as possible.

“Green shirt, two o’clock,” Nash shouted, giving Deck a target that was easy to spot, easy to hit.

After working together for seven years, he and Nash had the fine art of starting a bar fight down to a science. Find two angry drunks sitting fairly close together in the crowd. Knock into them both at the same time, taking them down to the floor, if possible. Come up loud, accusations flying, and start swinging.

Nash had an uncommon ability to determine a person’s flashpoint in just one glance. Man or woman, he could see ’em, read ’em, and play ’em to his full advantage.

That was no small skill to have in their line of work.

True to form, it was only a matter of moments before the fight between Green Shirt and Badass escalated into something even the bouncers couldn’t control. Tables were being knocked over, pitchers and mugs were flying, pool cues were being broken, chairs hefted and thrown.

It was a solid eight on a scale from one to ten—five being sufficient diversion for an escape.

Graceful as a dancer, Nash wove his way through the crowd, grabbing Tess Bailey as he headed for what Decker knew to be a fire exit.

Tess was still without a shirt, a fact that couldn’t have escaped Nash’s attention.

Instead of heading down and out, they took the stairs up, which was an interesting alternative.

Nash read his mind and answered the question as they continued to climb. “There’s an army in the parking lot, so I called for a budget buster.”

That was the Agency nickname for a helicopter extraction. Helos were expensive to keep in the air.

Nash had been pushing Tess in front of him, but now he stopped her from going out the door and onto the roof. “Get behind me,” he ordered as he handed her his shirt. About time—Decker had been on the verge of offering her his own T-shirt.

Although Tess didn’t seem to notice that Nash’s chivalrous action had come about ten minutes too late. In fact, she was looking at Nash the way women always looked at Nash, particularly after he gave her a smile and leaned in closer to say, “You were great down there.”

It was so typical. They weren’t even out of danger and Nash was already setting up the getting laid part of his evening.

Decker would have laughed, but this was Tess Bailey that his partner was messing with. Not only that, but there was something off about Nash tonight, something squirrelly, something . . . brittle. It was almost as if he were going through the motions, or maybe even playacting what was expected of him.

Deck could hear the sirens of the local police as they approached, called in to break up the bar fight. They were an additional diversion and added protection. With five cop cars in the parking lot, only the craziest sons of bitches in the Freedom Network would attempt a shot at the Agency helo that was coming to scoop them off the roof.

“We need to keep our eyes open—it’s been a few minutes since I cleared this area,” Nash told them, and just like that, Deck knew.

Something ugly had gone down when Nash cleared the roof of any potential shooters.

Decker would never know what had happened. He and Nash didn’t talk about things like that. Sure, Deck could try to bring it up, but the most he’d hear was “Yeah, I had a little trouble. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”

Except Decker wasn’t buying that anymore. Yes, without a doubt, his partner could handle any form of violence thrown at him and come out on top, or at least alive. But that was significantly different from the psychological
handling
that was required in this business. It was how Nash was handling the aftermath of violence that was worrying him.

“Here we go,” Nash said, firing another smile at Tess. The helo was out there. Deck could hear its thrumming approach. “Stay close.”

Nash met Deck’s eyes, and Deck nodded, his weapon drawn, too. They kicked open the door.

There was no one up there, no resistance. They were inside the helo and heading quickly out of the area in a matter of seconds.

It was impossible to talk over the noise from the blades, but as Decker watched, Nash leaned in to Tess, speaking directly into her ear.

She laughed, then moved even closer to say something back to him.

His turn again, and to whatever he’d said, she had no immediate response. There was a significant amount of eye contact though, particularly when Nash reached out and finished buttoning up that shirt he’d given her.

Maybe Nash would talk to Tess tonight—tell her the things he couldn’t put into words and say to Decker.

Or maybe he’d simply use her for sex until the scent of death wasn’t so strong in his nostrils anymore, until he thought he’d “handled” whatever it was that he’d had to do tonight to save Decker’s life.

Tess was watching Deck from across that helo cabin, and he made himself smile at her, hoping that she was using Nash as completely as Nash was using her, wishing she could read his mind and heed his unspoken warning.

But maybe she could, because she glanced at Nash, looked back at Decker, and made something of a face and a little shrug. Like,
Yeah, I know exactly what I’ve gotten myself into, but really, can you blame me . . . ?”

No, he couldn’t. He just wished . . .

Decker wished Nash would take Tess home and talk to her about what had happened out on the roof tonight, instead of nailing her.

Although he knew damn well that his motives for wishing that weren’t entirely pure.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

T
WO MONTHS LATER
A
GENCY
HQ, W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

Tess hung up the phone.

She couldn’t believe it.

Brian Underwood didn’t even have the balls to call her into his office and tell her the news to her face. He’d left a lousy
message
on her voice mail.

“Yeah, Bailey, it’s Brian. Sorry to make this a phone call, but it’s twenty-two hundred”—military speak for ten at night. Underwood had never been in the Armed Forces, but he liked people to think that he had—“and this memo just crossed my desk. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and I didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle, especially since I know you’ve been waiting on this info for a coupla weeks. Long story short, they turned you down for that field position. But hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t apply again in six months. There’s always next time, right? And in the meantime, your work with support is of vital importance. . . .”

If they hadn’t accepted her this time, when there were still two additional positions that needed filling ASAP, Tess knew she was never going to leave the support office. She would still be here when she was sixty-five, like Mrs. O’Reilly, four cubicles down. And while she could, indeed, appreciate the vital importance of her work, this was not the job she wanted—and it wasn’t the job she’d been promised when she’d signed on.

But Tess was never going to be promoted into the field.

Diego Nash had been right.

Somehow that made it sting even more. She didn’t want Nash to be right—not about this, not about anything. But most of all, she didn’t want to do so much as even
think
about him ever again.

Fool.

Not him—her. She was the fool. Not for letting him in that night. No, she knew exactly what she was getting—a one-night stand—when he’d asked to come up and she’d said yes.

She was a fool for thinking they’d actually connected. Somehow, something had happened to her brain after he’d kissed her in her kitchen. God, what a kiss. But sometime after that kiss and before the next morning, when she’d woken up, alone—and moronically surprised that he’d vanished with no word, no note—she’d fallen prey to Stupid Woman syndrome.

She’d slept with a man who was known as a player. She’d known that about him before she’d unlocked her apartment door. She’d accepted as fact that they were going to have nothing more than a fling.

And yet somehow she’d ended up thinking that this time it had been different. This time it had been meaningful. This time it had been special. This time he’d still be there in the morning—in fact, he’d be there for thirty-five years of mornings to come.

Yeah, right.

Fool.

And she was an even bigger fool for the way her heart still raced when the phone rang. What did she really think? That after two months of dead silence, Nash was suddenly going to call?

Flowers had arrived the very next morning. But they were from Deck. The card had a short message, in Decker’s own neat handwriting: “Thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty.” Tess knew his handwriting well. She’d processed many of his requisition sheets over the past few years. And in case she’d had any doubt, he’d signed it, “Lawrence Decker.”

On Monday, there was an email in her inbox that Decker had sent to the assistant director—a glowing recommendation that Tess be promoted to a field position. He’d written a brief note at the top of the copy he’d forwarded to her. “I’m not sure how much this will help.”

She’d sent a reply, just a short “Thank you,” but the email had bounced back to her—a sign that the system was freaking out again. It bounced a few days later, too, when she’d tried to resend.

At that point, she’d actually become scared, thinking that Nash and Decker might be dead. They hadn’t been into the office since that night. No paperwork had come through with their names on it either.

As the days continued to pass, she’d done some digging and found out to her shock that they’d left the Agency. Resigned. Just like that. They were gone and they weren’t coming back. Like most of their work in the field, their departure had been quiet. Covert.

Tess had dug farther, actually hacking into accounting, to find out that a rather substantial severance payment had been sent to Nash, care of a small hotel in Ensenada, Mexico, on the Pacific coast.

He was not just gone, he was
gone
. As in thousands of miles away.

And he hadn’t bothered to send her so much as a postcard with an insincere “Wish you were here.”

That had been a bad day, too. One of her all-time worst ever. Although today was coming pretty close to matching it.

It wasn’t even nine a.m., but Tess had to get out of here. She grabbed her purse from the bottom drawer of her desk. Most of her colleagues were still arriving, but her workday was over.

No. Correction. Her Agency career was over.

She took the framed snapshot of her nieces and her piece of the Berlin Wall—too small to be effective as a paperweight but heavy with importance and laden with history—her favorite pen, and her Jean-Luc Picard, Psyduck, and Buffy action figures from her desktop. That was all she wanted—the stupid lemon mints that Nash had liked so much could stay for the next naive recruit.

She took forty-five seconds to type up a letter, another ten to print it out.

Brian was already in his office, door closed, hiding from her. His administrative assistant, Carol, tried to intercept, but Tess wasn’t about to be stopped. Unlike Brian, she needed to deliver this message face-to-face.

She knocked and opened the door without waiting for his go-ahead. He was on the phone, and he looked up at her, the surprise on his broad face morphing instantly into recognition and guilt.

Yeah, he should feel guilty—making promises that he had no intention of keeping.

“Hang on, Milt,” he said into the phone, then put his hand over the receiver. “Bailey. You’re upset. Of course. Why don’t you take the day off?” He glanced toward the door, where his assistant was hovering. “Carol, will you check my schedule for this week and see when I have a spare twenty minutes to sit down and talk to Tess?”

Twenty minutes. This was her life, and he was going to give her twenty minutes of “Try again in six months” later in the week—when she knew for damn sure that right now he and Milton Heinrik were discussing nothing more important than a trade in their fantasy baseball league.

“I quit,” she said. She handed it to him in writing, too, and walked out the door.

K
AZABEK
, K
AZBEKISTAN

Kazbekistani warlord Padsha Bashir had a firm grasp of the English language. He’d honed his language skills while attending college in the States. It seemed almost ludicrous that one of the most feared warlords in this country was an alum of Boston University; a member of the class of ’82.

Sophia stood impassively as the other women prepared her for this morning’s encounter, dressing her in a gown of sheerest gauze, brushing out the tangled knot of her just-washed hair. She didn’t bother to resist the dabs of perfume placed between her breasts and along her throat. She was saving her strength for the nightmare that was coming.

The gown was cool against her skin. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

Somehow that and the fact that the sun was up and streaming in through the palace windows made this seem even more surreal, and that much harder to bear.

But terrible things could happen in the sunlight. It had been a sunny morning, too, on that day when—

Sophia opened her eyes to escape the memory of Dimitri’s head rolling across the ornately tiled palace floor—or at least to try to escape the grisly image for a while.

If she survived this coming day, she’d surely see the gruesome sight of Dimitri’s mouth open in a silent scream the moment she fell asleep. It was a nightmare image she would remember forever, even if she lived to be a hundred and ten.

What had the floor, the room, looked like to Dimitri? Had he seen her in those last few seconds of his life as she gasped with horror?

Death by beheading came fast, but did it come fast enough?

Sophia couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And little wonder, since every time she came face-to-face with Bashir, he had that very same deadly sharp sword close at hand.

He placed it on the table near his bed, and, when she was led into the room, he would never fail to demonstrate to her just how sharp it still was.

His message was clear. If she failed to please him—this bastard who’d killed her husband—her head would be next to roll across the floor.

Two of the women moved the mirror closer so Sophia could see herself—as if she cared.

They’d dressed her in white again. With her blond hair and fair skin, in that nearly transparent gown, she looked like some kind of MTV version of a virgin sacrifice.

Virgin, hah. The truth was that Bashir liked women dressed in white because it contrasted with the red of their blood.

Sophia didn’t know if she would still be alive an hour from now. All she knew for sure was that she was going to bleed.

C
ASA
C
ARMELITA
, E
NSENADA
, M
EXICO

Tess Bailey was back in his bed.

Although
back
wasn’t quite correct, since that one night Jimmy had spent with her had been in
her
bed, in her cozy little apartment with that kitchen with the cow wallpaper, out in Silver Springs, Maryland.

“Nash.”

But the difference between Tess’s bed and his didn’t matter now, because she was here and she was naked and she was warm and she was willing and God, God, God, he wanted her.

“I’m here,” she said as she kissed him, as she opened herself to him. “It’s okay, Jimmy, I’m here. . . .”

He pushed inside of her, nearly blind with need, and oh, holy sainted mother of—

“Nash.”

Jimmy opened his eyes to see Lawrence Decker standing over him. He sat up and his head nearly exploded, but he still managed to take in the fact that he was quite definitely alone in his hotel room bed, that the sun was streaming in through the window blinds, that the ceiling fan overhead was on high, that his mouth was impossibly dry . . .

And that if Deck had been an assassin, Jimmy would, without a doubt, be exceedingly dead right now.

It was not his finest hour.

“Hey,” Jimmy greeted him, his voice sounding rusty to his own ears. “You changed your mind about that vacation, huh?”

“Not exactly.” Deck glanced at the two empty bottles of tequila sitting on the bedside table. “You stopped answering your cell phone.”

“Ah,” Jimmy said. “My batteries ran out.”

“A week ago?”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “You know how it is on vacation. You stop wearing a watch, stop charging the phone.”

He looked at Decker standing there in his T-shirt and those army green fatigues with all those pockets, looking almost exactly the same as he’d looked that day they’d first been introduced.
And this is Chief Lawrence Decker, formerly of SEAL Team One.
What was it about former SEALs, former Rangers? They had a look to them, an edge, that they never lost. It had been, what, seven and a half years since Deck left the teams, yet he still walked, talked, moved, stood, even breathed like a Navy SEAL.

“Or maybe you don’t know how it is,” Jimmy added.

When they’d worked together at the Agency, Decker never took vacations.

“Are you all right?” Decker asked. It was the closest he’d get to mentioning those bottles.

With his hair colored hair and his eye colored eyes, his pleasantly featured face, his relatively vertically challenged stature and bantam-weight build, Decker was the poster child for average.

“I’m great.” Jimmy swung his legs out of bed, pushed himself up—Christ, his head—and staggered into the bathroom.

“You don’t look great.” Decker raised his voice slightly to be heard from the other room.

Jimmy flushed the toilet and moved to the sink, splashing his face, drinking from a water bottle he kept nearby, swallowing some painkiller at the same time.

He winced at his reflection in the mirror as he supported himself with both hands on the edge of the sink. He looked—and felt—like walking road-kill.

Decker, always thoughtful, waited until he turned off the water to say, “I got a call from Tom Paoletti.”

And there it was.

The reason Jimmy had stayed here in Mexico for all these weeks.

Lawrence Decker was a man with a future—and he needed to move into that future unencumbered by ghosts from the past.

Jimmy turned away from the mirror, taking his towel with him into the bedroom, drying his dripping face. “I told you he’d call. Congratulations. When do you start?”

And what the hell took Tom Paoletti so long to call? But he didn’t bother to ask that because he already knew.
He
was what took Tom Paoletti so long. Pizza and beer. Thunder and lightning. Decker and Nash.

You couldn’t have one without the other.

Or so people thought.

But pizza went down just fine with tequila, too.

Decker, as always, didn’t miss a note. He caught Jimmy’s intentional
you
.

And gently volleyed back a plural. “He wants us to come to San Diego,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

Us. Jimmy sat on the bed, exhausted and still half drunk. “I don’t know, Deck. I’m a little tied up right now.”

Decker nodded, as if that weren’t the biggest load of bullshit he’d ever encountered. “I could really use you,” he said. “Tom’s looking to send a team of civilians into Kazbekistan.”

Kazbekistan. Yeah, right.

There was no way anyone from the West was crossing over the K-stan border without some seriously expensive equipment. Such as HALO gear—including an extremely high altitude aircraft to jump out of.

Decker was, no doubt, attempting the age-old practice of bait and switch. He knew Jimmy wouldn’t rest easy with the idea of Deck heading into the hotbed of terrorist activity known in the Spec Ops world as “the Pit” without someone to watch his back. But as soon as they got to Tom Paoletti’s office, Jimmy would find out that the job was really in Sandusky. Some dot com geeks with more money than God wanted to feel important and install a high-tech security grid in their corporate headquarters.