Cherry Adair - T-flac 09 (16 page)

The way he was feeling, they floated Caleb’s boat just fine. All three had had their moral compasses ripped off years ago. The El-Hoorie brothers had made their money with everything from drugs to white slavery. If it was profitable and illegal, they had their hands in it. They liked to blow things up. And they were damn good at it.

“Might be worth letting Al-Adel have Shaw for a couple of minutes,” Farris said with a feral smile.

Al-Adel’s sideline was prolonged torture. He took his hobby
very
seriously.

“Watch your backs, boys,” Lark told them before cutting off.

“That makes the party interesting,” Caleb observed. Tossing the phone aside, he started shuffling through maps, photographs, thermal-imaging, ground-penetrating radar grids, and various papers to find the sat com pictures of the area.

The guys passed through the kitchen to grab drinks and snacks to chow down on while they pored over what they’d already pored over, studied, dissected, and reassembled. And they’d do it as many times as it took to get the job done.

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“Ideas?” Caleb absently rubbed his knee as his men surrounded the table. Christ. He was thirty-four years old and already falling apart.

“Get him to come outside,” Dekker offered, chugging a lemon soda.

“How? By dangling a magic carrot?” Farris asked, brushing a hand over a topographical map of the area and using his skills to convert the one-dimensional paper into a 3-D contoured landscape. He pointed. “Check out how deep he can go into the mountain.” He glanced over at Caleb. “You went in—how far? Mile and a half? More? Can we even teleport that deep into sheer rock?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Caleb asked flatly. “We’re fucked if we materialize into solid rock. We have to figure out exactly how deep is just deep enough, get in, take him—
alive
—and get out. All at precisely the right second.”

“Er—Didn’t we just
try
that?” Rook asked, ripping open a bag of potato chips with his teeth. The chips went flying. “Sorry ’bout that.” He started picking them up, eating them as he went, leaving dots of grease all over their paperwork.

Dekker handed Rook a paper towel before waving the grease marks off their paperwork. “Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?”

“Orphan.” Rook’s country-boy, open face took on a hangdog expression. That face had gotten the twenty-two-year-old more women than Caleb had seen in a lifetime. Go figure that women liked Tony’s blond, surfer-boy good looks, and that dimple that looked like someone had stuck the point of a pencil in his chiseled cheek. One side only. The girls seemed to like that.

Caleb liked that the kid was smart and quick, and thought on his feet. “Bullshit. I had dinner with you and your folks not two months ago.” Rook’s parents had been married for thirty-some years. To each other. And they still acted crazy in love.

Rook grinned. “Perfect, weren’t they?”

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“Yeah.” Maybe that’s when this annoying ache in his chest had started. Seeing a couple so happy, so content?
They
didn’t have some f-ing medieval Curse to deal with. Tony Rook’s plump, pretty mother wasn’t going to die from some mysterious ailment or some improbable accident because she loved her husband.

“Know
why
?”

“No, Anthony,” Caleb asked patiently. “Why?”

“Central Casting. Hired them to impress you.” He grinned that choir-boy smile of his.

Interesting concept, but untrue of course. “Idiot.” Caleb smacked him on the back of his head. “Let’s compare notes, gentlemen. Where there’s T-FLAC/psi, there’s a way.”

He started sketching the chambers each had seen, and what was in them, on his computerized illustration tablet. “Here.” He X-ed groups of Shaw’s men by numbers, location, and function. “Here and here. Dekker?”

Dekker put his feet on the chair beside him. Using the spatula he’d brought in from the kitchen to scratch his back, he pointed out the area he’d covered. “Latrine, dorm, dorm, gym.”

Usually Anton Dekker wore brown contacts to disguise his eyes, which were an almost unreal shade of pale, Caribbean blue, and very distinctive against his dark, swarthy completion. He hadn’t bothered on this op yet.

Caleb preferred him with brown eyes. He looked like a gypsy, he should have brown eyes. When Dekker looked at a guy with that pale, searing gaze it was as if he could read your freaking mind. Very disconcerting. Caleb didn’t want his mind read. Especially by a man he wasn’t sure he trusted.

What would Dekker think if he caught a load of all the erotic images in his head of Hannah?

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Hannah’s eyes were hazel. The color of a freshwater stream as it swirled around rocks and mossy pools—Good Christ. He’d lost what little he had left of his mind. Mossy pools, for God’s sake?! Caleb chugged the rest of his water, then held the bottle against his shoulder as he addressed the others.

Oh, he trusted Dek’s skills, and his dedication to T-FLAC and counterterrorism. But in four years, Dekker had never fully revealed all of his skills. He’d denied that mind reading was one of them. Why lie? No, the jury was still out on Anton Dekker.

“Two hundred and fifty men, plus a herd of wizard-hungry dogs,” he added dryly, rubbing the cool damp bottle on his skin. Hannah’s mouth had—
Shut up!
he told himself.
Just shut the fuck up.
Forget Hannah. He was never going to see her again.

Was it going to be like this until he was old and bent over and sitting out on the front porch of the T-FLAC retirement home? Crap. Was
this
what he had to look forward to?

He shook his head. Maybe he could have hypnosis? Or a brain suck, or…Get his shit together. Yeah.

That. “All in
very
tight quarters,” he told the others. “Stir crazy and ready to rumble.” He glanced at each of them. “One TiVo op left, ladies.”

“Teleport in.” Dekker dropped his feet, pointing with the handle of his spatula. “All four of us, here where it branches. Two hold off the marauding hordes, the other two go find Shaw and teleport him out.”

Caleb tossed the bottle he’d been holding into the trash. He gave Dek a hard look. “Kill two hundred and fifty witnesses we have no beef with? Those guys in there aren’t tangos. They’re soldiers.

Bodyguards. Cooks and ass wipers.”

“You have a point,” Dekker said flatly, scratching his back, making Caleb want to scratch his too. The LockOut suit did a helluva job protecting them, but it was tight, and after it was removed your skin itched for an hour. “Okay, then the best solution is to draw Shaw outside.”

Rook considered it. “Or find another way in.”

“Pizza delivery?” Farris suggested tongue in cheek. “Two hundred and fifty hookers? What?”

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Making the toughest decision in his entire career, Caleb stood. “I know a way I can stroll right through that front door and shake the son of a bitch’s hand.”

“Well, hell!” Dekker looked up. “Why didn’t you say so!”

SANFRANCISCO

FRIDAY, APRIL14

10:45A .M.

The trick, Caleb thought, switching the flowers from his left to right hand, was to convince Hannah—

Heather,
he reminded himself.
Heather Shaw.
Brian Shaw’s daughter.

Got it.

The trick was to convince Heather that he was in love with her.

Harder would be convincing himself that he
wasn’t.

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There was no room for emotion. He needed her. She was his entrée into Shaw’s bolt-hole. Time was ticking away. The longer T-FLAC couldn’t get to Shaw, the more time his clients had to locate him. The more time Shaw had to escape.

Whoever found Shaw first would have control of billions and billions of dollars. Money was power.

Especially in the terrorist world. If
one
group suddenly had access to that vast dollar amount it would be unstoppable. The thought of
that
much power in a tango’s hands was bone-chilling.

T-FLAC
had
to find that money first. Had to.

Caleb left the others in Matera, keeping an eagle eye out for any signs of newcomers. The newcomers being any of the dozen tango clients Shaw had embezzled from. Logic dictated that none of them would be stupid enough to go inside, guns blazing. Without Shaw they wouldn’t know where he’d hidden the money.

No one was going to get in there. Not without blowing the place to smithereens. No. The only way in was with a golden ticket for a front-row seat.

Caleb had that ticket. Hannah. He had to start thinking of her as Hannah so that he didn’t screw up and blow his cover. But by calling her “Heather” he was effectively keeping her as job status.

What a Goddamned cluster.

He didn’t want to see her again. She was too much of a distraction. He felt the familiar pain in what should have been his heart. A heart that had long ago acknowledged that any meaningful relationship was futile and doomed to failure.

He was A-okay, absolutely f-ing A-okay, with never having a permanent woman in his life.

The
un
permanent ones worked out just fine. Better than fine. Perfect in fact. Women like Kris-Alice who knew the score, and welcomed him into her bed with no strings attached.

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Oh, yeah? Then why haven’t I taken full advantage of her generosity lately?

Good question.

To which Caleb had no goddamned answer.

He’d received Hannah’s message twenty minutes ago.

He hadn’t called her back. He’d needed that time to gather his equilibrium, to marshal his thoughts, and to get himself under control to face her with equanimity. He couldn’t afford to be vulnerable, even minutely, in this. He could not allow any trace of real emotion to cloud his reality.

Fucking up now was not an option.

He stood there like some pimple-faced teenager waiting for his first date to open the door.
First and
foremost you are a T-FLAC/psi operative, try to remember that little factoid.

His distraction when it came to Shaw’s daughter could not be allowed to play a part in what he had to do. He was Cursed to choose duty over love. Unfortunately, right now the two were so intertwined he wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began.

Hannah’s call had been relayed through several switchboards. Lark had contacted him in Italy, minutes before he was about to teleport to San Francisco to see Hannah on his own. He had a hollow feeling in his gut about the reason for her call.

What a freaking mess. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. To get close to Shaw he needed the man’s long-lost, estranged daughter. But Caleb knew that seeing her again, being near her again, he’d feel that same inescapable pull.

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That fatal attraction.

He’d put a lot of effort into not thinking about her in the last three months. Fat lot of good that had done him. Everything about her was indelibly imprinted on his synapses. He gave her front door a hard rap.

Praying that his attraction to her had faded in three months. Praying that she wasn’t as pretty, as sexy, or funny as he remembered. Hoping that…

The door opened six inches. “Caleb!”

He took her in like an addict snorted coke. Fast. The sight of her went straight to his brain, then shot directly through his bloodstream right to his groin.

The joy in her face, and the undisguised pleasure in her voice made his breath snag. Her honey-brown hair was half down, half up in a ponytail, and looked as though she’d just gotten out of bed. Her eye, the one he could see over the chain, sparkled, and her lips—Jesus God. Her soft pink lips, slightly parted, curved in a delighted smile.

“Hi.” She didn’t move.

Neither did he.

Caleb could just see half her face, a jean-clad hip, and her lightly tanned shoulder.

His mind went blank. She was
more
than he remembered. More everything. He knew he could go to the end of his life without seeing a more beautiful sight.

Half a Hannah was a feast.

Oh, man.

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He swallowed fear.

Her beauty made the ache in his chest feel as though his heart had been hacked out with a pocketknife.

For the first time in his life he had the overwhelming urge to run. Run like hell.

“Hey, beautiful.” It was hard to push the words out through his dry lips.
I am so screwed,
he thought, like a drowning man going down for the third time.

“Hang on. Let me—” The chain rattled as she struggled to unlatch it. “Just a sec—Oh, damn it.”