Personal Target: An Elite Ops Novel (28 page)

Nick took grim pleasure in the look of pain crossing the scumbag’s face and in the very vulnerable state the man was in with his pants around his knees and his boxers sliding off his hips. It would have been funny if they didn’t need to get the hell out of here—
right
now
.

“Hands on your head. Knees on the ground,” Nick ordered.

Juan put one hand behind his head and started to reach for his pants with the other.

“No,” said Nick. “Touch those pants, and I’ll let her kick your nuts into your nasal cavity.”

Nick lowered his rifle slightly, taking deliberate aim on Juan’s crotch. Juan put his other hand behind his neck and scrambled to kneel on the floor of the truck. There was a handgun propped against the tailgate.

The idiot had left his Glock on the floor when he’d scrambled in the truck to attack Jenny. Nick bent down to retrieve the gun and tucked it in his own waistband. A bag of zip ties were busted open beside Juan’s knees. Several of the heavy-duty plastic cable ties were scattered all over the floor.

Jenny still stood in the corner, watching everything unfold. Her ripped T-shirt revealed scratches all across her chest. Her eyes held a horrified vacancy.

“Jenny, honey, come here,” said Nick.

Hearing her name seemed to bring her back from whatever place she’d gone. She hurried to Nick’s side, and he slid an arm around her waist.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded but didn’t speak. She wouldn’t look at him, either. Was she going into shock? He looked at her hands and reached for the knife clipped to his pocket. That bastard had hurt her. Her wrists were raw and bleeding, and a couple of her fingers were already swelling.

“I need to get those cuffs off you.” Nick sawed through the plastic with the serrated blade while keeping an eye on Juan. “I want to shoot you so bad, you son of a bitch. Twitch, just once. That’s all it’ll take.”

Juan was barely breathing and kept his eyes on the space in front of him as Nick bent down to retrieve a pair of loose zip ties.

“Can you hold a gun?” Nick asked Jenny. “I need to secure him.”

She nodded, and he handed over the Heckler & Koch.

Nick pulled Juan to his feet but had him tug his pants up before frisking him. There were no more weapons. Nick pulled Juan’s arms behind his waist and slid the zip ties on his wrists. He slipped a second pair on him as well, in case the man was an escape artist.

“Where are they taking those women?” Nick asked.

Juan shrugged. “What will you give me if I tell you?” His accent was heavy, but his English was perfect.

“I won’t kill you.” Nick pulled the second set of zip ties much tighter than necessary.

Juan winced. “They’re going to Algiers.”

The capital city of Algiers was two hundred miles from Constantine, on the coast of the Mediterranean. “That doesn’t make sense. Why did you stop here in Constantine?”

Nick pushed him forward out of the truck but avoided passing too close to Jenny. He took very little care to be gentle with Juan and basically shoved him out of the back of the truck.

Juan stumbled and fell. “Algiers is a failsafe for the route,” he answered from the ground.

Nick left him on the concrete as he helped Jenny down from the truck. “Where in Algiers?” he asked, pulling Juan up by the shoulders.

“If I tell you where, are you going to let me go?”

They both knew he wasn’t.

Now it was Nick’s turn to shrug. “We’ll see, when we get to Algiers.”

Nick felt a slight breeze as they made their way across the massive warehouse to “his” Mercedes outside by the Dumpster. The day was going to be a scorcher. Still, he felt no remorse for what he was about to do, particularly after Juan had driven those women through the desert in such torturous conditions. He opened the trunk and pointed. “Get in.”

“What?” Juan’s voice cracked.

“Get in. I’m not taking you on a fucking road trip. Get in the trunk, or I’ll drag your ass behind.”

Juan realized arguing was pointless and climbed in the trunk. Nick helped Jenny into the front passenger seat, hurried behind the steering wheel, and peeled out of the car’s hiding place.

“We need to catch up to the truck if we can,” he explained to her. “They’ll be headed through Constantine. Maybe we can catch them there. I don’t know how I’ll find them otherwise.”

Jenny had been staring straight ahead, scaring him a little with her lack of responsiveness. Finally, she spoke up. “I don’t understand. How did you find me?” She turned to him.

“I slipped a tracker in your shorts pocket before we got out of the truck at the dig.”

“When you kissed me?”

He nodded. “I was lucky you didn’t change clothes.”

She was looking at him, but she didn’t say anything. He needed to explain. God, he’d gone about this all wrong. The past week had been a lesson in what not to do when trying to win back the woman you loved.

The woman he loved.

It hadn’t dawned on him until now, of all times. As tangled up as his feelings still were about the miscarriage and the past, he was in love with Jenny. He had been for ten years.

He wanted to protect her. To cherish her. To be part of her life and to spend his with her. Those feelings overwhelmed him.

He struggled to get the words out. “I know it makes me sound like some kind of stalker, but I was scared of losing you again, like I did when you flew out of Dallas to Niamey. That’s why I didn’t tell you about it. I didn’t want to make you mad.”

Despite the dire circumstances or maybe because of them, he laughed at himself. That sounded fairly ridiculous. People had been trying to kill them since they’d landed in Africa, and he’d been worried she’d be mad over a GPS tracker.

“You didn’t want to make me mad?” Her eyes widened, but she smiled. “My God, you saved my life. Why would I be mad?”

He glanced away from asphalt ahead of them and was lost in her gaze a moment before he hit a pothole and jerked his eyes back to the road.

“Should I be concerned about your stalkerish tendencies?” Her tone was light and that reassured him given the vacancy he’d seen in her eyes earlier. “Are there other women you keep these kinds of tabs on?”

“Nope, you’re the only one.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve always been the only one,” he whispered loud enough for her to hear but focused his gaze on the bridge ahead.

I can’t lose you again. I won’t
.

He needed to say that last part out loud before he lost his nerve. If he looked at her right now, he’d stall. He kept his eyes on the potholed road, but he wanted to tell her everything. He reached for her hand and, avoiding her hurt fingers, carefully threaded his fingers through hers, while keeping his other hand on the wheel.

“What are you saying?” she asked, unaware of the revelation he’d just had and the emotional overload he was experiencing.

For the first time, he knew exactly what he wanted and who he wanted to trust with these “new” feelings. He only had to say it out loud to make it real. “I want . . .”

A BMW sedan passed them as he pulled onto the main road.
Damn.
He hoped that wasn’t anyone looking for them, but the odds were not in their favor. He should have stolen another vehicle. There hadn’t been time.

Disheartened, he watched in the rearview mirror as everything he’d been about to say was relegated to a back burner. He gently squeezed her palm before letting go. The BMW slowed, stopped, and turned around to chase after them.

Shit.

There was no way to be sure who it was after the phone calls he’d made to the embassy. He floored the Mercedes anyway and shot down the main thoroughfare, headed for the Sidi M’Cid. If he could make it across the narrow 164-meter suspension bridge, one of several leading into Constantine, they’d escape into the anonymity of the almost half a million people who lived there.

The early morning traffic was minimal. But they were being chased by a BMW, so it wasn’t as if Nick could leave them in the dust. He barreled around the sweeping mountainous curves.

He could see the Sidi M’Cid in the distance. The BMW was two hundred yards behind and gaining. He shot through a short tunnel carved from the mountain, then out into the light again.

Egg-shaped cars from the city’s urban gondola system hung suspended from cables moving steadily over the gorge connecting the mountainous terrain of the city. The suspension bridge grew larger as they swerved around rocky curves.

Once the highest bridge in the world and a true architectural wonder, the Sidi M’Cid was only one lane with sidewalks on either side. Any other time it would have been fascinating to look up at the brick towers, but the BMW was on their tail. When Nick looked ahead to the other side of the bridge leading into the city near the Casbah, the exit was blocked by what appeared to be official police vehicles.

Whoever was doing this had connections that ran deep. He slammed on the brakes, forcing the car behind him to stop about seventy feet from his bumper in the middle of the span.

They were blocked in from both sides with no way off the bridge but over the side.

“What do we do now?” Jenny asked. Her voice was stronger than he would have expected given the circumstances. Unfortunately her thoughts echoed his exactly, and he didn’t have an answer.

W
HAT DO WE
do now?
Jenny watched in her side-view mirror as three men exited the BMW that had been chasing them and started toward the Mercedes with guns drawn.

“I’m not sure what’s going to happen here,” said Nick. We’re outnumbered. Stay low and follow my lead.”

She nodded and scooted farther down in the seat as her heart rate ticked upward.

“I’m sorry, Jenny.”

She felt the sting at the corner of her eyelids. “Don’t say that,” she whispered.

You saved me.

He’d come for her. Multiple times. He’d gotten her away from the horror in Mexico, the kidnapper in Niamey, the sniper at the hotel, the massacre at the dig, away from Juan and what was sure to have been a vicious rape. For the past nine days Nick had been relentless in coming after her.

Even when she’d run away and told him she didn’t want him anymore. When she’d lied. Because she did want him. Despite all the running, she wanted him desperately. She’d been running away from Nick Donovan for ten years, and he just kept coming after her.

Who did that? Why did Nick do it?

She looked at him and saw the answer in his eyes, before he turned back to watch the three men draw closer in the rearview mirror. It was a hell of a place to figure things out, to finally know what she wanted and to have found it.

The men were even with the back of the vehicle when Juan started beating on the trunk lid. His shouts echoed through the busted window. Jenny couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, but she knew enough Spanish to recognize impressive profanity.

One gunman came forward on the passenger side window, another on the driver’s side, while the third remained at the rear of the car. The driver’s side gunman shouted to be heard over Juan. His English was perfect.

“Put your hands on the wheel. Throw all your weapons out of the window. Use one hand only. Screw with me, and I shoot the woman.”

Nick nodded and did as the man asked. The rifle, knife, and pistol made softer sounds than she would have thought when they landed on the steel and concrete. Jenny placed her hands on the dashboard. The heat from the morning sun was already warming the black surface. Her fingers, which had been so achy and cold earlier, now felt clammy.

The driver’s side gunman kicked the weapons under the car, pulled Nick from the vehicle, frisked him, then popped the trunk at the dash before dragging Nick to the rear of the Mercedes. Jenny knew Nick wasn’t fighting back for fear of her being harmed.

She continued watching in the rearview mirror as Juan burst out of the trunk with the snarling grace of a cat who’d fallen in a commode. He was spitting mad and all but crawled into Nick’s face.

She was still studying Juan’s temper tantrum, grateful he didn’t have a weapon yet, when the gunman on her side of the car spoke. “Dr. Grayson.”

She looked up. Her breath caught in her lungs. “Ohmygod,” she whispered. “It’s you.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

N
ICK STRUGGLED TO
keep up with Juan and Jenny at the same time. Head down, Jenny walked in front of a man toward the BMW that had chased them onto the bridge. Juan stood in front of Nick, practically foaming at the mouth he was so angry. The third gunman who’d remained at the rear of the vehicle came forward to help secure Nick’s hands behind his back.

At the same time, Juan sucker punched Nick once more in what felt like a repeat from the oasis—first a shot to the kidney, then another to the face. Warm blood dripped from his nose as he was shoved from the back end of the car toward the edge of the bridge.

He kept watch on Jenny. She was stuffed into the front passenger seat of the BMW with a great deal more restraint than Nick would have suspected. Still, she put up a good fight. He heard the car’s engine rev.

What were they going to do to her?

“I see you’re confused,” said Juan, moving to block Nick’s view of the BMW and taking a Beretta 9mm from one of the two men with him. “It’s complicated.”

He turned to the man who’d cuffed Nick. “Go tell them at the city end of the bridge to keep the barricades up for the next ten minutes. This won’t take long.”

Nick bit his tongue against a smart-ass comment and a quick trip over the side of the bridge.

Juan brandished the gun a bit. “My boss would have liked to have been here, but now, he just wants you dead.”

“Why? What is this about?” Nick kept his tone even, despite the dire outlook. Staying calm was all he had going for him at this point.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Juan shook his head. “I’m almost sorry it’s going to end this way for you. Hell, I would be sorry if you hadn’t crammed me into that damn trunk earlier. It’s ironic though. Shit, it’s practically prophetic.”

“What are you talking about?” Nick’s head swam as more blood ran down his chin and neck, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.