Deadly Force (28 page)

She really was gullible because she knew that was exactly what she needed to do.
If
any of this was true. “I need something from you in return.”

“Besides me letting you live?”

“Who exactly wants me dead and why?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t figure it out.”

“It’s my boss, Jonathan, isn’t it?”

“Jonathan? Hell, no, but you’re not going to like the answer.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Just as Tephra opened his mouth to answer, all hell broke loose.

Chapter Twenty-six

Cal was jogging down the corridor when a loud blaring started above his head and people began to scatter.

Fire alarm.

Threat
.

Real or imagined? That was the question. If it was a drill, they couldn’t have picked a worse time. From the way the hospital staff were acting, this was no drill.

But was there really a fire?

No. In his gut, he knew there was no fire. This was a ploy to get someone inside the hospital to come outside. Bianca? The senator?

You’re paranoid
. Well, he’d spent too many years in the field not to be. What better way to find a target than to set up on a nearby building and scan the crowds below? Easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Evacuating the hospital wasn’t the most brilliant idea, however, unless the assailant could cover all the exits. Hard to do with a place this size. Hard, but not impossible.

This part of the building was old, built before the laws requiring sprinkler systems. Cal skirted around fleeing people. Fire or no fire, he had to find Bianca. Keep her from running outside.

I can’t lose her. Not again
.

Bianca flinched and covered her ears as the alarm shrieked above her. “We have to get out of here!”

Tephra shook his head. “Could be a trap.”

They locked eyes, the same thought suddenly dawning on both of them. “Senator Halston,” Bianca said.

At the same time Tephra said, “Patrick!”

Tephra went for the door, Bianca followed him. “That way,” she yelled, pointing to Radiology once they were in the hallway.

People were scrambling in all directions, the main stream heading across their path and to the left. An exit. Tephra grabbed Bianca’s arm and pulled her behind him, forming a human shield as he plowed through the masses.

Someone knocked into her and she lost her balance. She didn’t fall, thanks to the steadying hand Tephra had on her.
Protective. Just like Cal
.

Cal. She had to get to him, get a message to him. As she was jostled to and fro, she drew out her cell. Still no service. Of course not, she was in the basement.

They came to a T in the halls. “Which way?” Tephra asked.

Bianca looked down one and then down the other. Double wide swinging doors were at the ends of each. The shiny tile floors and overhead lights made everything look the same.

The alarm continued to shriek. Her brain was being bombarded with information.
Focus, Bianca
. She closed her eyes for a second, remembering the things she’d seen earlier, hoping she would remember some kind of landmark.

Her eyes snapped open, her attention turning upward. There. The colored stripes. The blue one ran to the double doors at the Radiology Department.

“Right,” she told Tephra. “Beyond those doors.”

They ran down the corridor, checking the gurneys and the nurses pushing them, looking for Halston. When they didn’t spot him, they pushed on through the swinging doors and entered the x-ray department’s waiting room.

Bianca pointed. “They took him behind that door.”

Tephra again led the way as they ignored the warning signs and burst into the ultrasound area.

The room was empty.

Tephra double-checked behind several doors, but there was no one and nothing. He swore and motioned for her to follow him back out.

“What do we do now?” she asked as they left radiology.

He picked up a scrub hat someone had lost in the chaos and shoved it on her head, securing her ponytail under it. Then he brought the mask back up over her mouth. “The only thing we can do. We disappear.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

From the moment he’d watched the elevator doors close with Bianca inside, Cal had felt a gnawing panic. He’d watched the light above the elevator as it illuminated each floor, stopping on 1. Problem was, once he’d gotten to the first floor, he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t find Senator Halston or Halston’s bodyguard either. They’d all vanished.

And then, miracle of miracles, the CNA who’d been helping Bianca had hurried by. Cal had stopped her and turned on the charm.

Asking her where they’d taken Halston would have put the gal on alert and bring trouble on his head, so Cal took another route. He asked her about the cute nurse she’d ridden down in the elevator with. Where could he find her?

The CNA must have seen the honest truth in Cal’s eyes—that he was smitten. “Lower level,” she’d told him. “She’s hanging around radiology waiting for the senator.”

“Thank you.”

He’d kissed her cheek with relief and she’d hollered after him as he sprinted back to the elevators. “Good luck!”

Luck. He’d needed luck, because when he’d gotten to radiology, Bianca wasn’t there.

He’d lost her.
In more ways than one
, the voice in his head told him.

For some idiotic reason, memories of his lost friends flashed through his mind and stole his breath. Tank, the big lug, intercepting a football Cal had thrown and running it in for a touchdown during one of their breaks while waiting for orders in Afghanistan. Avery singing
Can’t Touch This
and doing his MC Hammer routine after a successful mission saving a group of missionaries in a Colombian jungle. Butcher discussing quantum physics one night under the stars with an American professor they’d rescued from a Somalian prison.

All three men’s bodies limp and lifeless.

Cal struggled to breathe, feeling like he’d been hit in the nuts with a baseball bat.
My fault
. Losing his friends, losing Bianca…
my fault
.

People swarmed out of various rooms, knocking into him. He plowed against the tide with one shoulder, his uninjured one, and kept looking for Bianca in her Mickey Mouse shirt. She might still be wearing a mask—smart girl—to help hide her identity, but there was no way he’d miss that white-blonde hair of hers and her purple glasses.

Radiology. Where the fuck was it?

Cal grabbed a passing nurse. “Where’s X-ray?”

She jerked her arm out of his grip. “Sir, you need to leave. This is not a drill.”

The fire alarm continued to blare and Cal had to yell over it. “My wife’s in radiology. I’m not leaving without her.”

“Radiology’s been evacuated. The nurses will take care of her.” Now she grabbed his arm. “You come with me.”

He removed her fingers, not in a brusque way, but with force.
“No, ma’am. Just point me toward the radiology department.”

She must have seen the determination in his eyes. “See that blue line up there?” She pointed to the wall and a blue stripe of paint near the ceiling. A yellow stripe ran above it and a red one below. “Follow that. It’ll lead you right to her. But I’m telling you, she’s not there.”

He nodded and took off, once more fighting against the stream of evacuating people, patients, and staff. The blue stripe turned a corner and so did Cal. This hallway was clearer and he raced down it, continuing to follow that damned stripe.

Another turn and he caught sight of the senator’s bodyguard jogging around a patient in a wheelchair, headed for an exit sign.

“Hey!” Cal yelled, but the man didn’t stop. Probably didn’t hear him over the alarm and the noise. So he gave chase, even though that was the opposite direction from the blue stripe.

When he burst through the exit door, he found himself at a back dock, an ambulance backed up to the concrete and the senator being loaded into it by a nurse and two EMTs.

The bodyguard’s hand went immediately to his weapon. The nurse glanced up.

But it wasn’t Bianca’s blue eyes looking back at him from behind her purple frames, or her blond ponytail swinging around the nurse’s shoulders.

Cal pulled up short and raised his hands to let the guard know he meant no harm. “I’m looking for the nurse who rode down in the elevator with the senator. Have you seen her?”

The man shook his head and Cal turned on his heel and went back inside, yanking out his cell phone to see if he’d received any messages.
No service
. He nearly threw the thing against the nursing station as he passed by.

If Bianca had evacuated like everyone else, she’d be outside. Maybe she was at the truck, waiting for him with Maggie. He prayed she’d at least thought about the fact her assassin could be out there and had taken precautions.

But she wasn’t a trained SEAL or even a field agent. His gut cramped so hard, he nearly doubled over. Fighting the emotion, Cal headed for the exit.

“Reese!”

Hearing his name called with such authority brought Cal up short. He spun around and nearly dropped his phone. Instead he snapped into a salute. “Senior Chief?”

Justin Lugmeyer strode toward him, seeming unfazed by the fire alarm or the last few people running by. He gave a quick return salute. “What are doing here, SEAL?”

There was too much going on, too much to explain, and no goddamn time. “Trying to find my wife. What are you doing here?”

As the man drew closer, it dawned on Cal that Lugmeyer wasn’t in uniform. “You missed your hearing this morning.”

Not an answer. “How did you find me?”

Anger snapped in Lugmeyer’s eyes. He wasn’t used to being questioned. “I met up with Senator Halston to support him on his stops today. He became ill and I accompanied him here. I never expected to find you roaming the halls.”

Cal’s gut gave a funny twinge. “Huh, I didn’t see you upstairs.” At the narrowing of Lugmeyer’s eyes, Cal added, “Sir.”

The senior chief locked his pale eyes on Cal. “I stepped outside the hospital to make some calls earlier. The senator appears to have been poisoned. That may affect national security.” He stepped closer, getting in Cal’s face. “Imagine my surprise to find you here.”

“I can explain everything, but right now I have to find Bianca.”

Lugmeyer held his position, the sour look still on his face. “Where is she, your wife?”

“I don’t know. She was with the senator, then disappeared before the alarm went off.”

“Where’s the senator?”

“They took him out back to an ambulance. I don’t know where they are transporting him.”

A muscle jumped in Lugmeyer’s stony face. “Are you sure your wife is still in the building?”

“No, sir,” he answered honestly. “But I have to find her.”

“I’m sorry, son, but since you didn’t show up for your hearing this morning, you’ve been declared AWOL. It’s my duty to take you into custody and back to San Diego, regardless of what’s going on with your wife.”

Cal’s pulse sped like a racecar. He wished someone would turn off that damned alarm so he could think. “With all due respect, sir, that’s not going to happen.”

He started to walk away, felt a strong hand grab his shoulder. “A good SEAL follows orders, Reese.”

A good SEAL
…

The words rang in his head. He’d heard those before. Heard them come out of Lugmeyer’s mouth, but something clicked in his brain.

Warfighter.

Cal grabbed his head. A thousand images splintered in his brain, the jagged edges rising and falling but not coming together. Until they did.

“Something doesn’t feel right
.”
The words had rolled off his tongue that night as Cal and his men watched the camp.

“It’s too quiet,” Tank had said.

“Where are the guards?” Avery had asked over his comm unit.

Cal had listened to the stillness. Too quiet was right, not even the barking of a dog from the village three clicks away or the scratching of a scorpion in the sand.

But he’d felt the presence of men. Many more men than in his team.

Trap.

He had no proof, only his finely tuned instincts. That and the fact he knew Lugmeyer was keeping something from them. Something crucial to this mission. Cal had overheard him giving a promise to someone over the sat phone that this time the mission would be accomplished and the desired outcome achieved. “The warfighters will be eliminated,” Lugmeyer had said. “No matter what.”

At the time, Cal hadn’t thought much of it. “Command, this is Eagle. Over.”

Lugmeyer had responded. “This is Command, Eagle. Sit rep?”

Cal rattled off the bare facts, conveying his hesitation to enter the cave as best as he could.

“Eagle, this is a go,” Lugmeyer said in his ear. “I repeat, Operation Warfighter is a go.”

Warfighter. The reference was usually associated with soldiers. Cal had assumed in this case it referred to taking out Grimes and
his
soldiers, but suddenly Cal wasn’t so sure.