Locked and Loaded
Authors: Alexis Grant
CONTENTS
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Alexis Grant
PROLOGUE
Miami, Florida, Present Day
Sage stood under the intense, multihead shower spray, scrubbing her body with expensive shower gel until her skin felt raw. She’d definitely crossed the line. Other DEA Special Agents had warned her that it always came down to this when working on a long, involved undercover investigation. They’d told her to “get her head right” and to be ready, because there’d always be a point of no return when you had to decide how much of yourself you were willing to give for your country, willing to do to fit into the dark and decadent underbelly of illegal drugs.
The men who had preceded her on the case had gone in as deal makers, distributors, security forces, all in an attempt to trick Roberto Salazar into giving them access to his inner workings. But Salazar was no fool and each attempt by agents before her had gotten them close, but never close enough … until she’d entered the scene.
Before this assignment, she’d thought she could handle it. She didn’t think she had a line. Her Field Division Supervisor kept asking her if she was prepared, and she’d repeatedly told him yes without blinking or stuttering. She’d wanted this. She’d hounded Hank Wilson until he’d given her the plum assignment. Drug kingpins from the infamous Salazar Brothers Alliance had created the chain of events that had left her mother and younger brother, along with her baby sister, dead—mowed down by ricocheted bullets in a territorial dispute. She had more at stake in this than anyone in the department. It was her trump card that finally got Hank to relent.
Innocents had bled to death in front of a corner grocery store. The Salazars’ careless bullets had left her grandmother wailing in a hospital, on her knees in prayer begging doctors to revive DOA incoming. These same ruthless killers had left her grandmother stranded by grief in church, screaming over caskets … and had left her traumatized and mute when authorities collected her from North Miami High School to tell that, save for her Nana, everyone in her immediate family was dead.
Yeah, she’d lobbied for the assignment.
With her eyes closed, Sage turned off the water with an unsteady grip, wondering how her life had become so completely screwed up by thirty years old. None of this was in her personal plan. She reached for a thick, Turkish bath sheet and pressed her face into the fragrant nap of the towel, remembering how she thought she could change things the second she’d graduated from Miami U with a BS in Criminal Justice, determined to be a part of the war on drugs. That seemed so far away now.
Sage let out a sad sigh and began drying off her body. Back then, women new to law enforcement held up Michele Leonhart as the consummate role model. Even to this day, she still was. Coincidentally, she had just been appointed to the DEA’s Senior Executive Service to spearhead Special Agent Recruitment efforts at DEA Headquarters the same year Sage’s family had been killed, 1996. Leonhart had broken through the glass ceiling and she was a woman who had it all … two kids, a husband, and a successful career in law enforcement. Sage’s idol was a woman who’d worked her way up in the agency from a beat cop in Minnesota to finally be unanimously confirmed as the deputy administrator of the DEA by the US Senate. Leonhart was everything that she had once wanted to be.
But Sage was now pretty sure that her idol didn’t own the dark need for vengeance that she did, and probably hadn’t gone fully undercover to this degree. Although she didn’t know for sure, she was fairly certain that Leonhart had stayed on the cleaner side of investigations.
Not looking in the foggy wall-to-ceiling mirrors, Sage walked over to the large, white marble sink and pumped body lotion into her hand. Nana had warned that unless she released her hatred of those who had killed her momma and siblings, one day it would destroy her soul. She used to scoff at that warning, unable to explain to her grandmother that more than revenge fueled her ambition. Fear ruled it.
It was impossible to just sit idly by and watch what had happened to her happen to other families. Her worst nightmares had come true as she witnessed the rising statistics of drug-related violence. Men like Roberto Salazar were getting stronger, not weaker. More families than ever before were grieving over innocent blood spilled. Being paralyzed by the threat of retaliation was more than her soul could bear … It was an ongoing violation of her spirit until the day she decided that, if she wasn’t a part of the solution, she was part of the problem. Someone had to address the tide of destruction that had become a national tsunami. Given that she had nothing left to lose other than her life, who better to get involved?
When her Nana quoted scripture to dissuade her, Sage would remind her that somewhere it had said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Nana never understood the full extent of her rage. It started off as very focused on her own personal pain and then as time went on and story after sad story in her community accumulated, the rage blossomed. Sage sighed again and applied more lotion.
Anger had been productive. Sage applied mineral-based anti-aging cream to her cheeks in gentle strokes. The powerful emotion had fueled her through college to graduate at the top of her class, and had rocketed her through the grueling requirements of the Police Academy. Rage and determination got her through the insanely competitive process of becoming a Special Agent, got her through sixteen intense weeks of training at Quantico. But maybe her Nana had been right, God rest her soul.
Sage stared in the mirror for a moment, glad that it was still opaque, and then twisted her long mass of freshly shampooed hair up into a mound on her head and clipped it in place.
Every one of her colleagues drew the line at killing an innocent human being to prove one’s allegiance to the criminal they were trailing, but sleeping with the enemy or getting high with a target was par for the course. Blending in was paramount for survival. Her fellow veteran agents had said that until she’d been initiated, truly experienced the gut-wrenching decision of total immersion into that world, she hadn’t really gone undercover.
She’d definitely been initiated these last few months. Right now she was way undercover, bordering on being in too deep. Never had she imagined that she’d have to go this far to exact the kind of justice her soul demanded. But there was no use in dwelling on it. Maybe she didn’t have a soul anymore. She wasn’t sure if it had fled her the day they’d told her that her family had been slain.
The one thing she was certain of, however, was that Roberto Salazar was about to do a megadeal with Anwar Assad. The Miami drug alliance was about to bring in major weight from Afghanistan. A link with Al Qaeda was firmly established due to her expertly placed bugs; getting close to Salazar gave her free access to the ten-thousand-square-foot mansion, Salazar’s marina, as well as the seventy-seven thousand square feet of opulently manicured, waterfront grounds that surrounded his Miami compound.
Now her Field Division knew for sure that drugs flowing through Miami via a newly expected shipment were going to fund a large arms buy—weapons from a Canadian source to be used against US troops. The DEA’s foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Teams had echoed that intel. Her objective now that she’d gotten in close with Salazar was to find where the drop would take place, where the money was going to be wired, and who the Canadian arms contact was so they could catch the bastards.
Sage stared in the mirror full-on now, watching the steam slowly dissipate. Hell, yeah, putting her body on the line was worth it. Others had taken shrapnel or a bullet or a roadside bomb. She looked at her blurry image without blinking. Yes, she could continue this mission through to the bitter end, no matter what it took … not only for her family and for all those grieving families who had been caught in the crosshairs of drug violence, but for every person—military or civilian—who had been slain by terrorism.
“Small price to pay,” she murmured and then turned away from the mirror to gather her sunscreen. Everything about her life now was a lie and the lines between who she’d been and who she was were as blurry as the bathroom mirror.
So what, that in order to get in, she’d had to play the role of Salazar’s lover. It didn’t matter that the moment when she’d been accepted into her target’s inner circle and into his heart, she’d been forced to mentally separate from herself. If she was to be Salazar’s woman, then she had to sleep with him. Period. But it wasn’t her; the new identity took over. It was the only way she could do what she’d had to do. Special Agent Sage Wagner was now completely Camille Rodriguez, a biracial Latina … part African American and Latino, lover and numero uno girlfriend of Roberto Salazar. She’d use whatever it took to get in close to complete her mission.
She looked up calmly as the bathroom door opened, tucking away her innermost thoughts. A cool shaft of air rushed in with Roberto, sunlight framing his six-foot-two, athletic build. He had on a classic business suit; navy blue pinstriped, single-breasted, Armani with a French blue, white-collared shirt, paisley silk tie, and seeming quite the dignified businessman. He was on his way to Miami International Airport to meet with Assad … but where were they headed after that?
“I thought you were going to wash yourself down the drain?” Roberto beamed at her and openly appraised her towel-clad form.
She tilted her head and offered him a pout. “No, just getting ready to go shopping … are you still going to your meeting alone or can you take me this time? I can read a magazine or amuse myself in the cafés or shops wherever you’re going for a couple of hours until you’re finished. Come on, Roberto. I’m bored. After you’re done, we could do something fun.”
“It has been a while since we’ve done something fun,” he murmured, his eyes stripping away the towel. “I admit that I’ve been preoccupied with business lately … but it won’t always be this way.”
“After your meeting, we could go out … or … not.”
She offered him a sexy half-smile and waited. When he hesitated and didn’t immediately respond she moved toward him slowly, studying his handsome smile and intense, dark eyes, allowing his freshly barbered hair to thread through her fingers once she’d reached him. It had been several weeks since he’d touched her; the negotiations were obviously taking a toll on his libido—which was a good thing and a bad thing. Much could be extricated from him if he was still interested in her, a lot could be learned in pillow talk or when he spoke to his colleagues on the phone while in the bedroom. But lately he’d been aloof, and that wasn’t good.
She leaned up and into him to brush his mouth with a kiss. “You took too long to answer me, so I already know the answer.”
He circled her waist with his hands, caressing it through the damp towel. “I took too long to answer you because I was deciding, Corazón. You make it hard for a man to think about business.” He kissed her deeply and then drew away. “But to keep you in fashion and in this mansion, there are certain things I cannot neglect …
sí
?”
Hating that he’d tied her to his illicit deals, even if it was through the temporarily lavish lifestyle he shared with her or whatever other fantasy he’d concocted in his mind, she nodded and released a long, faux-submissive sigh.
“Sí.”