Promises in the Dark (18 page)

It was better that she hadn’t known the men had been tracking them. Tension made people freeze and move clumsily. Imminent danger tended to scare the shit out of them. Adrenaline could give you wings, but not stealth.

When she finally became aware of the threat, her body went stiff against his.

Soldiers or DMH?
He knew she wanted to ask, but would also know it didn’t matter. Both were men with guns and out for blood.

An ambush was the only way to end this. It would be loud and ugly, but better than him going up against a group of heavily armed men. Again. Because two times in as many nights would be pushing his luck and he didn’t do that any more than necessary.

But it meant leaving Liv behind.

He slid a gun into her hands. “Don’t think, just shoot. And wait for me. No matter how damned long it takes, don’t you move, Liv. Promise me.”

She nodded as she whispered a “yes” and he kissed her softly, leaving behind a promise of his own. And then he turned and took off, before he changed his mind.

Immediately, he pushed Liv from his mind—ruthlessly bringing himself back to his training, his focus only on the men.

Looking behind him could get him killed.

But that didn’t mean he could avoid going backward completely. No, he needed to double back, then circle around the route the men were taking—not nearly as silently as they should have been. He could hear their rustle, but he supposed since they had the big guns and more power, they didn’t need to be quiet.

Or so they thought.

Working quickly, he emptied his pockets, because there was always shit in there that could be useful in any situation—duct tape, a staple, a wire … a detonator.

A trip wire wound around the detonator and attached to two bushes across a footpath would make for a nicely improvised IED. He stretched it taut, moved away quietly, and then he started to make some noise, because he needed the men to mark him as
it
and play follow the leader.

He shot at them—a shot in the dark, as it was, although he hit at least one. Took off into the brush and shoved through a smaller passageway, so as not to disturb the trip wire. The AK fire behind him had him moving fast, and these men knew this land better than he did. It was all he could do to stay twenty feet ahead of them, until they reached the trap.

The explosion hit sooner that he thought, slamming him to the ground, face-first. His forehead hit the dirt as the blasting continued. And then there was nothing.

His hands were capable of anything—and everything. And she wanted them all over her.

She heard him whisper, “
Vivi
,” his voice tight, a note of pure want in the sound.

Feeling bold, she moved to press her lips to his, closed her eyes with the flutter of anticipation in her chest … and heard the click of his gun.

For a brief moment she wondered why he simply didn’t walk away from her instead of pulling out a weapon … and then she realized with horror that Caleb sensed a threat, and it wasn’t her.

Which pretty much derailed the whole safe house concept in her mind.

Slowly, she pulled back, barely daring to breathe. His eyes were trained over her shoulder and she felt him guiding her behind him and she gladly obeyed.

“We need to go. Grab what you can—get to the garage.” His lips barely moved, the words hardly registering as sound, and yet she understood.

As quietly as possibly, she collected the computers and the cords and headed out to the garage.

Cael had already opened the door and declared it clear, which made her feel marginally better as she got inside the dark car and closed the door as softly as possible.

She secured the computers in a bag she found on the backseat, put them on the floor behind the driver’s seat, and then she crawled behind the passenger’s seat and braced herself.

She watched the clock in order to keep herself calm. Five minutes and thirty-two seconds passed before Caleb was in the driver’s seat, throwing gear over her head into the back, pulling his weapon.

It was only then she noted the cut above his eye and the bruise on his cheek.

“Caleb, my God … are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fine.” The words were ground out in a decidedly
not fine
manner, but he was talking. Breathing. Angry.

Considering the situation, all good signs. But it meant that there had been men already inside the house, which was not.

“Do you know how to shoot?” he asked her. “Be honest.”

“My father believed strongly in the right to bear arms.”

He handed her a Sig Sauer, the metal cool against her sweaty palm. “I don’t think you’ll need it now, but just be ready.”

She nodded, throat too dry to trust.

“We’re out of here.” He gunned the engine, jerking the wheel, and she felt the truck skim along the side of another vehicle, which must’ve been attempting to block them in.

She didn’t want to think about what a close call it was—because they weren’t out of the mess yet.

The squeal of tires, the long scraping sound of metal crunching against metal again, and suddenly the resistance she’d felt was gone—the back of the truck fishtailed and they were free … moving fast enough to make her stomach lurch.

“You okay?” he asked, and she nodded before he turned his attention back to the road. “Stay down for a little while, let me make sure we’re in the clear.”

“They had to find us through the IP,” she said, more to herself than to Caleb.

“It’s protected.”

“Who knows where we were?”

“My CO. My team.” He was dialing Gray as he spoke. “Gray, we were found. What the hell happened?” He listened for a while—a long while—and her stomach twisted as she watched him grip the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white.

He muttered a few choice words from time to time, asked, “What else?” several times, but she didn’t get any other information from his side of the conversation.

When he finally hung up, he remained silent for ten long minutes—she knew because she watched the clock on the dash with a growing sense of dread.

“Gray thinks our post security was hacked. They got in and looked into safe-house security. Got the address. Saw the lights go on, so to speak.”

“You think it’s part of this whole DMH thing?” she asked, and he nodded.

“If they’ve got someone on the inside watching safe houses, they know when one’s in use. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.” He glanced in the rearview mirror and realized that blood was dripping down his forehead to his cheek. “Shit.”

“Here, let me.” She climbed into the passenger’s seat, ignoring his earlier order to stay down. She wet a paper towel with bottled water and then pressed it gently to his forehead, making sure not to block his vision. She held it there for a few minutes until the bleeding seemed to stop and then she dug into the first-aid kit he’d told her was in the glove compartment and found a butterfly bandage.

“Thanks,” he said as she returned to the backseat. “Listen, my guys ran the names you gave me. The first two guys checked out fine. But Dale—one of my teammates checked on him, and he hasn’t been seen for a couple of weeks. Not by his landlord or anyone at the college. He’s not answering his cell and his apartment’s pretty bare.”

Her heart sank. Could she be responsible for something happening to him? “So he disappeared, like the lawyers?”

“Can’t be sure of a connection. Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Does he have another house? What about his parents?”

She tried to think back on what she knew of Dale—to see if she could use twenty-twenty hindsight to discover any clues he might’ve unwittingly left her. “I don’t know anything about him, really. He said his parents had been killed in an accident on a dig. His father was also an archeologist—his mom just followed him to help with the recording and the paperwork associated with his finds. He said he was an only child. And he loved poker—he played twice a month, some really big game with friends of his from childhood. I never met them, though. But these were serious games—high stakes. He loved playing, said he was really good. I know he hated to lose.”

Cael glanced at her and then back at the road. “Who doesn’t?”

But now, the newest empty seat mocked them, highlighted their failures.

First Jones, a man who’d been with DMH from the start, who was killed by a member of the elite Delta Force, a man named Kell Roberts, last year. And then Kieran, who’d been too young and green to be invited to the table, but who’d had a damned promising future and a brass set of balls.

Either they were getting sloppy or the military operations were getting better. Technology was DMH’s best friend and worst enemy as it grew bigger.

It could easily be their downfall if Ace couldn’t get Vivienne under control … or terminated.

“Are you in?” Elijah snapped his fingers and Ace fought the urge to reach across and break his wrist.

“Always.”

Cards were dealt and now was the time for concentration.

The blind risk. It was Ace’s favorite move because it tended to throw the others off their game, but these men knew him too well to try it too often. Elijah was hesitating, his dyslexia getting the better of him, the way it did when stress was high.

Ace tried to temper his impatience with Elijah and his well-hidden disability, but the chink in the man’s armor had always been obvious—and a source of great worry—to Ace.

He’d put everything on the line for this organization, lived life undercover in the States for six months setting up his new life, and another six dating Vivienne Clare after her father died. He left himself open to the possibility of being spotted and seized by various organizations, including Homeland Security, while she attempted to finish the program he needed.

When it became apparent she wouldn’t be able to, he’d had no choice but to steal it out from under her. That was a month ago, and he still hadn’t been able to get rid of the safeguard.

“You’ve never gotten over the fact that Vivienne was smarter than you,” Elijah said.

Ace didn’t let his expression change, but Elijah would still know he was seething. It was the benefit—and the problem—of having grown up with the man.

They could take each other down in the space of mere hours. The only thing stopping them was the fact that DMH and its success hinged on both of them functioning together. Each man sitting at this table held a card the others didn’t know about—it would take all of them putting in their codes into the computer at the same exact time to unlock things like bank accounts and other private information.

A safeguard of their own set in place so neither Elijah nor Ace nor the others would get too big for their britches—and to make sure they couldn’t unseat one another without exposing DMH.

Keeping it true to the cause, they’d said when they’d decided to take DMH overseas, away from the constraints of the U.S. government.

Already, the buzzards circled. Smaller terrorist groups who wanted more than their share of the pie.

Getting bigger meant attracting more attention from everyone—FBI, CIA, Interpol, the military.

“How is the security program?” Elijah asked finally, in the middle of a hand, in order to throw Ace.

“We’re still working through the safeguard.”

“You should’ve taken her at the same time you took the software,” Elijah said flatly.

Of course Elijah was right, but Ace did not want to involve yet another female—another female prisoner in DMH. After what happened with Olivia, they realized that women were far too big a risk, far more resourceful than either man had given them credit for. Besides, there was no guarantee Vivienne would’ve agreed to help him fix the program, if she even could.

She would be an asset to DMH if she weren’t so damned honest. He’d assumed, wrongly, that she had more than a little of her late father’s conspiracy theorist inside of her, that she would be interested in helping DMH eventually. That he could turn her.

He’d barely been able to get her from frigid to warm in bed, and he’d given up on everything else. The fact that he couldn’t figure out how to finish her father’s program and fix the safeguard situation made him even angrier. “I’ll get her back.”

“How?” Elijah’s eyes were heavy-lidded—the man always looked like he was resting, but Ace knew that would be severely underestimating the man he’d once called friend.

“I’ve got men on it.”

“We’ve both screwed up …” Elijah started, and Ace could only nod and fold his hand. “We need more money,” he continued, with a finality that indicated the topic would soon be closed. “With the loss of the Morocco clinic, we’ve been compromised. Going forward, I refuse to let DMH depend on the damned winds of fortune and on every terrorist intent on jihad. We want them to come to us, not the other way around. I didn’t bring DMH this far to have it dependent on others. Now is the time to make the move toward total independence, to show the other organizations that we’re the ones to come to if they need help.”

“It’s already blown up in our face, so to speak,” Ace reminded him. “I’ve taken partial responsibility—I will get Vivienne. I’ve also hacked into the medical databases we need, but it’s not going to be as easy as you think.”

“It never is,” Elijah agreed, put down his spread of cards to expose a winning hand. “It never is.”