Deadly Force (18 page)

Her throat grew tight. The bliss evaporated, the roller coaster of emotions taking a dive like the crash after too many energy drinks. “He almost
didn’t
miss. If it wasn’t for Maggie—”

“I know. He also said you weren’t the only target on this mission. That my neighbor at the marina? Gus? He was an assassin after
me
.”

She sat up, pushing off his chest. Her heart hammered as she stared down into his eyes. “What?”

“Bianca, what did you steal from the NSA?”

“I didn’t steal anything.”

“Your phone had top secret information on it.”

Turning away, she sat on the edge of the couch, putting her head in her hands. Time to admit the truth. God, he would hate her. “My phone had nothing on it but a few of my personally designed apps and some pictures of us. That’s why I wanted it back, not because I stole top secret info from the government. I wanted to see if I could salvage those pictures.”

Silence fell like a heavy blanket. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t want to see the anger she knew she’d find on his face.

The couch’s cushion depressed as Cal sat up, an unexpected sound rising from behind her. He was chuckling. More than chuckling…he was laughing. “I don’t believe it.”

Facing him, she saw he was shaking his head in exasperation.

“It’s true. I had photos of us from the whale sighting expedition—the last pictures of us together—and I didn’t want to lose them. Even though Tephra smashed the phone, I could probably get them off the SIM card. I never back up my phone or download the pictures—it’s stupid, but that’s me. My backup for important things is up here.” She tapped her head. “But I didn’t want to lose those pictures, Cal.”

“You lied.” He didn’t sound shocked or surprised. Just…disappointed.

What’s new
? “Would you have made an effort to retrieve the phone if I hadn’t told you it was crucial to national security?”

“If the only things on it were pictures and apps, why did Tephra take it?”

“If he’s any good at tracking people, which he apparently is, he already knows all of my contacts.” She froze as a new thought hit. “Except…”

“Except what?”

Her boss. Not Cooper Harris, but Jonathan Brockmann, her boss at Command and Control.

He wasn’t in her contacts book and his private number was stored only in her memory, but he’d called four days ago. To check on her, he’d said. More likely, he was checking to see if she was still alive.

What had he asked her that day?
How’s California treating you? How are things with your…family?

She’d thought it weird he’d asked about Cal. No one in C&C talked about their personal lives. No one said it out loud—it was sort of an unspoken rule—if you worked for Command and Control, you had no personal life. No ties that could compromise your job. Bianca had been the exception.

Cal. Her only tie. “Do you believe Tephra was telling the truth about Gus? That he was an assassin after you?”

“I think Rory Tephra has lost touch with reality.”

Cal’s face, though, said he was worried. That he didn’t believe Tephra wasn’t a mental case at all.

Rare was the time Jonathan Brockmann called her or any of his agents. It just wasn’t done. And although they used encrypted technology, per protocol, any communication with C&C was to be erased from the phone’s call log.

Bianca hadn’t erased it. Being paranoid, she had, in fact, taped the conversation.

Once more, Tephra’s words surfaced in her memory.
There are people watching both of us, monitoring our every phone call, our every move
.

“Bianca.” Cal’s voice was low with warning. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Tracing that call back to Jonathan and Command and Control would be difficult but not impossible. What would it gain Tephra? Jonathan might be the man who’d hired him in the first place.

“Who hired an assassin to come after
you
?” Bianca searched Cal’s face, his eyes. “What aren’t you telling
me
?”

Chapter Seventeen

“You think this is about me?” Cal shook his head in disgust, hauled himself off of the couch, and poked at the fire. “If anyone wanted me dead, I would have gone down with my men.”

“Maybe you were supposed to. Maybe you were all supposed to die. You didn’t. You got out alive.” She drummed her fingers against her chin. “But
why
were you all supposed to die? Did Otto Grimes put out a hit on you?” She stopped, took a deep breath, her naked breasts rising and falling. “Who could take out an entire SEAL platoon?”

Conspiracy theories. She loved them, the puzzle they presented. “Gus was not an assassin, B, and even if he was, he wasn’t there for me.”

“How do you know?”

“He lived in the marina long before I showed up, and he could have taken me out at any point over the past two weeks since I moved in.”

“Did he tell you he’d lived there all this time or did someone else tell you that?”

Come to think of it…Cal stopped poking at the logs in the fireplace. Gus had been a loner. No one at the marina, not even Chewy, the marina owner, had said much about the guy.

He set down the poker. “If Gus was an assassin, he didn’t take me out because he wasn’t after me. He was waiting for you.”

She visibly swallowed and gathered up her shirt. She couldn’t find her bra and gave up, slipping his T-shirt over her head. Pacing, she snatched up her pants but didn’t put them on. “Two assassins? There are
two
assassins after me?”

Her nipples were still hard, jutting out the soft cotton. The hem brushed her thighs as she paced, her slim legs beckoning to him. “Gus, or whoever he was, is dead, so technically, only one. That we know of anyway,” he added.

“Great. Just…peachy.”

He tried to concentrate on more than her luscious body. The past few hours weighed heavily on him but the coming ones offered hope. “There’s an extraction team on their way to help us out. Should be here by 0230 hours.”

“Extraction team?”

He moved away from the fire and kept his eyes diverted from her creamy skin. “Emit is more than a risk management expert. He runs a high-risk security group. That’s the real reason I took you to his beach house. I needed a secure line to contact him and see what he could do for us, and the part about him telling me to use the house whenever I wanted was true. He couldn’t get his sister out of the jungle when she was kidnapped and my team did. He owed me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

“The extraction team was on their way to the house when Tephra showed up. At first I thought Emit was in on whatever this is and sold us out. Now I know Tephra found us with that tracking bullet, so I called Emit and told him where we are. His team will take you to a secure hiding place until this over.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to Sacramento to find Senator Halston.”

Her hands went to her hips. “Not without me.”

“It’s too dangerous for you, and now I have the option of keeping you safe while I go after Halston and whoever else is behind this.” He hated to admit it, but the next sentence was entirely true. “You’re a distraction I can’t afford, B. Emit will keep you safe, and your safety will give me peace of mind while I get to the bottom of this.”

“Not again!” She threw the pants on the couch, fisted her hands. “Don’t do this to me!”

“Do what? I’m trying to take care of you.”

“You’re leaving me. It’s your MO. You’re always leaving me behind. We can’t fix our relationship or our marriage if we don’t do it together. You don’t have a team of SEALs anymore, but you still have me.” She waggled a finger back and forth between them. “You and me. We’re a team.”

It was an old argument. One he was tired of fighting.

He knew what it was to be part of a team. Bianca didn’t. She’d always been more lone wolf than a pack member.

As if she sensed he was about to shut down her logic, she came around the end of the couch and got in his face. “You need me to talk to Senator Halston. He knows who I am and what I do, and I carry a lot more weight than you do in this situation.”

Irritation roared through his veins. What the fuck did she want from him? “This is not about our relationship or your connections in Washington. This is about saving your goddamn life!”

Her face fell, all the life draining out of her. She walked a few feet away and quietly slipped on her pants. “If I can get the senator to admit he leaked the information, I can save your career.”

Damn
. He didn’t want to fight with her. If anything, he wanted to spend a few more minutes keeping the world at bay. “My career is over. I’m due at a hearing at 0800 hours. I won’t be there, and even if I was, I know it would end badly for me.”

She came forward, determination hardening her eyes once more. “You have to let me try. I’m the one who overheard the conversation about him leaking information, and I happen to know the woman he was with the night he got the call is a foreign operative. I started digging around on her right after I intercepted that message, but my clearance access to the Scout database had been revoked. If I could hack back into that, I’m sure I could find a link between her and Grimes.”

“The Scout database?”

“A cross-referencing tool I developed for Command, uhm, I mean…oh hell.” She rubbed her forehead with a hand. “I might as well tell you everything, but you may want to get a drink before I do.”

Cal stiffened. “Spit it out, Bianca.”

She stood behind the couch purposely keeping it between them. “I work for Command and Control, a top secret branch of the NSA. I designed the latest threat matrix software that gives the president a daily…um, well, there’s no other way to put it…a hit list. In C&C, we call it a disposition matrix. It’s a grid that contains biographies of people who pose a threat to US interests and their known or suspected locations. I use it to develop a range of options for their disposal.”

“Everyone knows about the threat matrix.”

“The disposition matrix goes a step beyond a terrorist most wanted list. We don’t make it public and the missions and subsequent kills are kept secret as well. Some of them have to be because they involve public figures whose deaths must be made to look like accidents or inside jobs by their own people.”

Cal processed the meaning behind her words, didn’t like what she was saying. “Like who?”

Her fingers fidgeted with the nonexistent lint ball. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this.”

Cal stayed silent. She glanced up, looked away, rubbed her hand over the couch fabric.

Finally, she cleared her throat, his use of silence seeming to wear her down. “Last month, China’s assistant foreign minister turned up dead in his hotel room from an apparent suicide on a trip to Quebec where he was secretly meeting with a few top officials about a possible oil deal.” She met his gaze. “It wasn’t suicide.”

“You had him killed over oil?”

“The oil deal was a cover for him purchasing a shoulder-fired grenade launcher and giving it to a Chinese-American family, sleeper agents, who planned to assassinate President Norman while he was in New York City at a campaign stop. I had the evidence and believed the official should be arrested and charged, not killed, but it wasn’t my decision to make.”

“What about the family?”

She shook her head, letting him know they were dead too.

“Ah, shit.”

Keeping the president safe, and in turn, the entire country, was a monumental task. While he didn’t like what she was saying, he saw the need for it, and by the slump of Bianca’s shoulders, the sadness in her eyes, he could tell it was also an overwhelming task. Regardless of the accomplishments she’d made in her job, she’d always been a human rights supporter and this type of situation had to go against all of her natural instincts.

He couldn’t stop his feet moving across the floor to get to her, or his arms going around her shoulders as he pulled her into a hug. He’d been forced to make decisions in the line of duty that wrecked him afterward, but rarely did he have any reason to question his orders or his superiors.

She sighed against his chest. “For months now I’ve been wondering how far the power of a single man should be allowed to reach.”

He set his chin against her head. He hadn’t been there for her, to support her and allow her to hash this type of situation over with someone. Unlike other women, she wasn’t a talker, didn’t vent about her problems. Which had always made him slightly uncomfortable since he always wanted to fix whatever problem she had, but most of the time he had no idea what was going on in her head.

It was folly to think she might have shared this level of classified information with him—after all, pillow talk about her job was not allowed any more than it was about his—but maybe if he’d at least been around, he would have picked up on her internal struggle and could have given her encouragement. A hug, a knowing caress, the offer to talk even if she didn’t want to or couldn’t. Yeah, he sucked at communicating verbally, but he
was
a good listener.

He stroked her back and felt her relax into him. “If you didn’t like the job, why didn’t you ask for a transfer?”