Rekindled (Titanium Security Series) (23 page)

His dark eyes bored into hers, so cold it felt like a burst of arctic air had brushed against her skin. Goosebumps sprang up, denial pounding in her brain.

“Call him,” he ordered softly, and Grace didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He wanted her to call Alex, let him hear her die while he was helpless to stop it. Her throat moved convulsively and she opened her mouth to tell him to go to hell. Hassani must have seen the spark of defiance in her eyes, because before she could speak he reached behind him and withdrew a lethal-looking black pistol from his waistband.

Without looking away from her eyes he pulled the slide back with his injured hand. The metallic sound was terrible, chilling in the deathly quiet. He raised the weapon and pointed it at David. “Call him or he dies.”

David’s sharp intake of breath was overly loud in the brittle silence.

Staring into those cold, hard eyes, Grace knew he would do it. She knew both she and David were never leaving this building alive, whether by Hassani’s hand or whatever was in that crate. Once she made this call, Alex would come for her. She had to at least warn him about the chemical weapon and pray it was enough to save him.

Quivering inside, she gripped the phone tighter, entered the password and dialed Alex.

“Play that back again,” Alex ordered Gage. He and Hunter were gathered around the laptop with Ellis and Jordyn, who had just arrived at the makeshift command center in Karachi a few minutes ago. Various others were running around trying to organize the enormous number of police and military known not to support Hassani. Evers was en route on another flight and should be landing within the hour.

Nothing was happening fast enough for Alex’s liking.

Gage moved the cursor and hit the play button on the footage that showed one of the suspect planes landing at a small airfield to the northeast of the city twenty minutes ago. On the screen, four small SUVs approached the aircraft as it taxied off the runway and came to a stop in the middle of a field.

The vehicles began circling it, driving faster and faster over the dry ground until they kicked up a huge cloud of dust thick enough to obscure the view of the drone filming overhead. A few minutes later, one by one the trucks peeled away, each driving off in a different direction. When the dust cleared enough to see the plane, it was empty, and there was no way to tell who the passengers had been or which vehicle Grace had been unloaded into. Alex swore. At this point they had to assume that every other plane carrying the remaining UN team members had been treated similarly. Every single one of those SUVs had gone to different airfields.

Maybe one of the others had caught something he’d missed. “Well?” he asked his team, the desperation eating at him.

“Not a fucking thing,” Gage muttered as the others shook their heads.

Alex huffed out a breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. Two hours. Two fucking hours since he’d been on the ground here and all he’d managed to do so far was send the Paks off on a series of wild goose chases after all the vehicles shown in the drone footage. Five other flights had been flagged as potentially holding hostages from the UN chemical weapons team. There was no telling if Grace had been in any of them, or even if she was still alive. But she had to be. Hassani would never have gone to the trouble of orchestrating this elaborate plan if all he’d wanted to do was kill her. So where the hell was she?

One solid lead. That’s all they needed to break this case open.

Tamping down the frustration inside him, he gave each of the Titanium team members a list of people to contact, some military, others police. They immediately started calling to arrange coverage, logistics. In the middle of scanning through the dozens of new e-mails that had arrived in his inbox over the past few minutes, his phone rang. When he saw Grace’s name pop up on the screen, his muscles went rigid.

He sucked in a breath, snapped his fingers to get the others’ attention as he put the phone on speaker and answered. “Grace?” His heart was in his throat as he awaited a reply. His entire team was staring at him, bodies tense, riveted to every word.

“
Alex
.” The ragged note of fear in her voice sliced through him like a razor blade.

He blocked the emotions raging inside him, focused on what he needed to know to find her. “Are you hurt?” he demanded. He had to get the critical info out of her and keep her on the line long enough for them to get a lock on her signal.

“N-no, but—”

“Where are you?” He had to get her to calm down, help him find her. But Christ it had never been so hard to contain his emotions before.

“David and I are in an abandoned warehouse, and there are chemical weapons—” She broke off and let out a fearful cry that made the hair on the back of Alex’s neck stand up.

“
Grace
,” he shouted.

“She’s done talking,” a familiar male voice answered a moment later, “but I’m not.”

Alex’s hand tightened around the phone, gripping it so hard his fingers ached. There was no way he could play this cool. He was too wound up, too terrified for Grace. And Hassani knew it. Bastard wanted vengeance for exposing him in the first place, and then for his subsequent capture and interrogation. “What do you want?” he ground out. “Me?”
You can fucking have me, asshole.
He barely choked the words back. He couldn’t tip his hand, not yet.

“Eventually. But I’m not going to make it that easy for you. You’ve got thirty minutes to trace this call and find her. Then you can die together, if she’s not already dead by the time you get here. Much as I’d love to stay and watch, I’ve got more important things to take care of.”

The line went dead before Alex could respond. He jerked his gaze from the phone to look at Gage. “Call Claire,” he rasped out, aware that he was shaking, coming apart at the seams and didn’t know how the fuck to stop it. Every second that passed bled precious time away from his chance of saving Grace. “Get her to trace the signal.” Normally he’d do it but he knew he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to risk Grace’s life on the chance that he wouldn’t make a technical mistake right now. And outside of Zahra, he didn’t trust anyone else to take care of this but Claire.

“On it,” Gage responded, his phone already to his ear. She must have answered a second later because he started rattling off details.

Keeping one eye on Gage for a signal, Alex called the head of Pakistani security and the officer in charge in Karachi to update them as Gage spoke to Claire. “I need a HAZMAT team on standby,” he told the man, “and I need them ready to move with one phone call. Get me whatever emergency response teams you can, get them mobilized and make sure they’re ready with enough auto injectors to treat chem weapons casualties.” Grace had said Hassani had chemical weapons. What sort, how many and where they were located were anyone’s guess. The thought of him unleashing that kind of toxin turned Alex’s blood to ice.

As he spoke, in his peripheral vision he saw Jordyn get up and come over to him. He tensed. She hesitated as she watched him, then started to raise her hand as though she was going to touch him in a gesture of consolation. He shook his head sharply and twisted away as he listened to what the man on the other end of the line was saying. Thankfully Jordyn dropped her hand and stepped back, her eyes holding a sympathy he couldn’t stand. He knew she was only trying to help but he couldn’t take anyone touching him right now. He was so on edge he was about to lose it in front of everyone.

Gage stood up suddenly, his eyes locked on Alex, and gave him a decisive nod.

“Gotta go,” Alex blurted to the official. “Call me when everyone’s up and in place.” He spoke to Gage as he ended the call. “She’s got it?”

“Yeah. Hunt’s pulling up a map with the signal now.”

Thank you, Claire.
He rushed over to the laptop, stared at the screen with burning eyes as Hunter enlarged the map. The red dot appeared in the lower right of the screen and Alex’s pulse doubled. “That’s only a few miles from us.” Hope surged again, swelling in a painful bubble against his ribs. His chest felt too tight, his lungs couldn’t get enough air.

He reached past Hunter and pulled up a close-up of the area. They all studied the terrain, the layout of the building and the position of the airstrip. Alex grabbed his phone and called the Pak official again to give him the location as the others all jumped up and gathered their gear. But he’d already decided he couldn’t ask this of them.

“You’re not going in there with me,” he said firmly to them when he hung up and met them by the door.

They all stopped and looked at him like he was nuts, even Ellis, who was normally the hardest to read. “You’re not fucking going in there by yourself,” Hunter growled.

“It’s a trap,” Gage said, stating the obvious in case Alex didn’t get it, frowning at him like he’d lost his damn mind.

But he’d never been so clear about anything, except Grace. Whatever happened, he was getting her out of there alive. “Yeah, and that’s why all of you are going to hold back on the perimeter. HAZMAT team’s on its way, so make sure you suit up and follow MOPP level four protocol the second they get there. And the prisoner comes with us.” He indicated the hooded man flanked by the two guards walking toward them from the rear of the room.

“And what about you?” Jordyn blurted.

“There’s no time and I can handle myself,” he argued. At this point Hassani was too paranoid to trust anyone, except Bashir, and the man couldn’t help him now. Hassani would be acting on his own now, biding his time until he could get up to Islamabad. Alex was more convinced than ever that’s what the bastard wanted, more than the chance of escape.

He had less than fifteen minutes to come up with a plan and get to Grace; he wasn’t going to waste time arguing. “Let’s move. Hunter and Gage with me and the prisoner, and you two following with the guards. Gage’ll drop me and the prisoner off and pull back to provide cover while you two stake out an observation position and keep eyes on the building. I’ll handle Hassani.”

Hunter and Gage exchanged a long look, then the team leader turned his attention to Ellis and Jordyn and gave a tight nod. “Stay close and keep your channels clear.”

Alex glanced at the clock on his phone before stuffing it into his pocket. Twenty-one minutes until the deadline. Already heading for the door, he checked to make sure he had a round chambered in his SIG and took the M4 Gage handed him before racing outside with the others to the waiting vehicles.

****

Malik paused at the doors to check the sensors surrounding the old hangar. When his phone showed they were all still intact, he eased out into the long shadows cast by the corrugated metal roofline and cast a cautious look around.

Nothing moved and there was no sound except the distant drone of a small aircraft’s engine. He picked up the length of chain he’d left next to the door and wound it through the handles, locking the two doors together with a heavy duty padlock. Then he eased around the back of the hangar to survey the open space he had to cross. He’d hidden his vehicle in an old shed on the far side of the sun-baked field.

Aside from the pilot coming for him shortly and the generals and their men waiting for him back in Islamabad, he was working alone from here on out because he didn’t trust anyone. His paranoia about being double crossed was well-earned, having already been turned on once by a trusted ally. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. From here on out, he controlled everything. Including Alex Rycroft’s demise.

He’d planned the route to the shed carefully, making sure he would have enough shadows cast by the trees scattered across the terrain to cover his retreat. All he had to do was get into the waiting vehicle and drive the few miles to the LZ where the helo his ISI contact was sending for him would touch down. Then it was only a matter of a few hours before he reached Islamabad and his personal loyal military guard awaiting him there.

Just as he stepped from the safety of the shadows next to the building, the sound of approaching vehicles reached his ears. He froze, flattened himself against the side of the hangar. Peering around the edge of the wall, he saw two dark SUVs roaring up.

No. It couldn’t be Rycroft. Not yet. It was too soon.

His pulse hammered in his ears. There was nowhere for him to go now except for the getaway vehicle he’d stashed, and he’d be exposed to whoever was in those vehicles if he moved now. He waited until the SUVs slowed across from the hangar before taking a sliding step toward the shed. The rear passenger door of one popped open. He stopped, watching. He was less than seventy-five yards from the vehicles.

A man emerged. Caucasian. Broad shouldered. Dark hair, gray at the temples.

Rycroft
.

Every muscle in his body went rigid.

Rycroft reached into the vehicle, hauled someone else out the door, a man with a hood over his face. Something familiar about the prisoner’s stance made Malik hesitate.

Rycroft frog marched the man out past the SUV and toward the hangar, and the vehicle took off with a spin of its tires. Malik’s heart thudded in his ears. Had they spotted him?

Rycroft pushed the hooded man ahead of him, one hand holding the prisoner’s bound hands behind the man’s back, the other gripping a pistol at his side. He walked forward a few more yards and came to a halt. “Malik!”

Malik sucked in a breath and grabbed for his own pistol as he shot a glance at the SUV Rycroft had climbed out of. It was still driving away, abandoning the two men. It had to be a trap. There had to be others positioned around the perimeter that he couldn’t see. How the hell had they gotten here so quickly?

He jerked his gaze back to Rycroft, standing out in the open. The ballistic vest Malik wore suddenly seemed inadequate. He felt practically naked as he stood there gauging the distance between him and Rycroft. They stood far enough apart to make an accurate pistol shot unlikely, despite their mutual expertise. He could still make a run for it, still get to the truck.