WAR: Intrusion (31 page)

“Careful, doctor. You don’t want to damage those valuable hands.”

Annoyed by the edge to his voice, Helen pulled out a plate, slid the cut fruit onto it, then shoved the plate at Lachlan. “Put this on the table, please.”

Not that there was room at the two-person kitchen table for all of these men. “I assume you’re not really here for breakfast,” she told the group. With so many strangers present, she decided that she’d press Lachlan later for any update on the situation. Right now, she just wanted some privacy. “Go ahead and start your meeting. Once I’m done eating I’ll shower, then catch a taxi to the hospital.” Taking the banana she’d set aside and a couple of
bofrot
, she turned around, intending to return to the bedroom.

The men had fallen silent and the air hummed with sudden tension. Those men who weren’t staring at the floor or ceiling were looking at Lachlan. “What?” she demanded. Their expressions were so somber, that her pulse spiked. “Has there been another attack?”

The plate in her hands wobbled. The man nearest to her reached out and steadied it as Lachlan hurriedly reassured, “No. Nothing like that. But there was a large article in today’s newspaper about yesterday’s attack. It highlighted Layla’s Foundation success in improving the accessibility and standard of medical care in this country. They even interviewed some of the survivors from the festival day attack. Natchaba’s reputation has taken a hit because he’s failed to eliminate you and the villagers. You’re in even more danger now than before.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, until Natchaba is caught, it’s even more important that you have bodyguards at all times,” Lachlan continued.

Relieved that he wasn’t trying to stop her from going out, she tightened her grip on her plate. “I’m due at the hospital at ten. I don’t want to take you or your teammates away if you have important matters to discuss.”

“I’ll take first shift,” Levine offered. “You can update me as needed.”

“I’ll assist Dr. Kirk, if the hospital will allow it.” Helen recognized the speaker as the medic who’d worked on Jacobs on the helicopter. “That way we’ll have someone on the inside as well as in the hall.”

“I think the hospital administrator will be okay with that,” Helen said. “They’re pretty understaffed. Any word on whether they’ve reopened the other hospital?”

“Not yet,” Lachlan said. “So. We have the bodyguard assignments set for first watch.”

Helen noticed that Lachlan hadn’t volunteered for a shift. Good. She needed distance from him.

“Transport?” Lachlan asked.

“I’ll drive them over,” said a man with the accent, dark skin, and narrow features of one of the northern tribes. “I have contacts I should meet with.” He glanced at a newspaper sitting on the table.

“Take Dev with you,” Lachlan ordered. “None of us are to go out alone until further notice.”

With her part finished, Helen left the men to figure out their next steps and took her food into the bedroom. Shoving thoughts of her nighttime activities out of her mind, she focused on centering herself. It didn’t work. Her mind bounced from yesterday’s attacks to that amazing sex to Lachlan’s scars and back again.

So it was with relief that she answered Lachlan’s soft knock at her door.

“Doctor, before you leave, we need you to confirm that the photos we’ve identified are the same man you know as Natchaba.”

His cool, professional tone was precisely what she needed to help her keep her emotional distance. “Oh. Okay.” After dropping her empty plate off in the kitchen sink, she joined the group gathered around a man with Nordic blond hair working on a laptop.

“The facial recognition system finally completed its search for faces matching the police sketch,” the man at the computer said. Helen wasn’t good at distinguishing the nuances of non-African accents, but she thought his sounded Scandinavian. “Based on those results, and confirmed where possible by the few positive IDs we’ve received via our informants, these are the suspected aliases of our guy.”

He glanced over at Helen. “I’m Lars Eriksson, by the way. Swede extraordinaire.”

“He’s our communications and computer guru,” Lachlan explained.

“Pleased to meet you,” Helen murmured. Then she chuckled. “Okay, what’s the deal here with the letter L? Lachlan, Levine, Lars. And your name starts with an L as well, right?” she asked, turning to the medic.

“Correct. I’m Lance Fitzgerald.”

She raised her brows. “Is this some sort of secret military recruiting trick? To confuse your enemies by referring to each other as L?”

The men laughed.

“No,” JC said. “Just coincidence. But that’s a great idea.”

“They couldn’t come up with snappy nicknames like mine, so they decided to just limit themselves to one segment of the alphabet,” Hoss said, shaking his head mournfully. “It’s a poor reflection on their creativity, I know.”

“We all know that you got the name Hoss because you couldn’t say your full last name, Hoffsteader,” Levine countered.

“No, no,” JC said. “He got the nickname because he’s a horse’s—”

Lance slapped his hand over JC’s mouth. “Don’t say it.”

“You are all just jealous that you don’t have such a beautiful name as mine.” The quiet, somber African man held out his hand to shake. “I am Obidawah Dapaah, at your service, Dr. Kirk.”

She greeted him in the predominant language of the northern region and was rewarded by what she suspected was a rare smile.

“All, right, lads. Play time’s over,” Lachlan said. “Let the doctor see the photos so she’s not late for her shift.”

“Here you go.” Lars pulled up a grid of seven different photos and turned the laptop so she could see the screen fully. Each photo was taken in a different location, with the man wearing different clothes and with a different name written underneath each photo.

JC whistled. “He’s been busy.”

Helen studied each photo. Some appeared to have been taken by security cameras in various public places. Two were close-ups that she suspected had been taken using a high powered camera lens.

But the face was recognizable even in the poorer quality images. “Yes, that’s the man I knew as Mr. Natchaba.”

“Excellent,” Lars said. “Now tell me if you’ve seen this man.” The next photo was of an older man with medium brown skin.

Lachlan swore in Gaelic under his breath. “That’s why Natchaba seemed familiar.”

“I’ve never seen him,” Helen said. “But he resembles Mr. Natchaba, doesn’t he?”

“Does the name Jonathan Morenga mean anything to you?” Dev asked.

“No. Sorry. Should it?”

Lachlan and Dev exchanged a glance. “He’s an arms dealer working for the rebels,” Dev began.

Lachlan put a hand on her shoulder. “Based on our intelligence, we suspected Morenga was the one running weapons through your airfield. If Morenga is Natchaba’s father, it means our intelligence wasn’t wrong, just incomplete.”

Helen checked the time. “Great. Glad to have cleared that up for you guys, but I’ve got to leave now or I’m going to be late.”

To her relief, her bodyguards wasted no time in separating themselves from the group. Helen allowed them to hustle her into the backseat of a bulky white SUV and they were on the road in minutes. From the level of alertness in all four men, she knew they feared an attack en route to the hospital. So she kept quiet and tried to shake the feeling that she had a huge target on her back.

When Helen stepped from the prep area into the operating room with Lance the medic by her side, her working calm settled over her. Only then did she lose the anxiety that had been looming over her all morning.

Because this was where she was meant to be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LACHLAN
WATCHED THE SUV drive away and fought the urge to insist on accompanying them. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his teammates. He did. He just didn’t like having Helen out of his sight.

“You’re a protector,” Father MacGuinessy said, patting Lachlan’s hand after he’d explained that he was joining the military. “It’s your nature to fight for those you care about and for strangers who are weaker than you.”

Lachlan would never call Helen weak, but he definitely felt protective of her. Unfortunately, she messed with his head. Around Helen, he became too prone to knee-jerk, violent reactions at the slightest threat to her. Became too close to the impulsive, violent man his father had been.

He needed distance from Helen so that he could refocus on his mission. Find the weapons and stop Natchaba before more innocents were harmed.

Not that he’d been much good in that regard so far. Violence kept finding Helen and the other survivors despite his best efforts.

And he knew exactly what Father MacGuinessy would say to that thought, too.
“Stop trying to play God, son. You must accept that you cannot control the world. You can only control yourself.”

He’d heard those words often enough after the Father had taken him in. Every time Lachlan had railed about some injustice at school or drowned in guilt because he hadn’t been able to save some unfortunate student from a bully’s fists.

He turned away from the window. With half the men gone, the room finally had enough air to breathe.

“Azumah is going to be angry that you’re letting more team members be seen in public,” JC commented. “Hoss and I would have been happy to stand guard again.”

“No. You can spell the lads this afternoon if Helen continues working.” Guard duty required intense focus and was also boring as hell. Lachlan wouldn’t subject any of his men to prolonged shifts unless absolutely necessary. “There are still enough foreigners, including security workers, here in the capital to allow us to be anonymous. It’s not as if Lance and Levine are wearing uniforms that say WAR on them.”

“And if someone they’ve worked with in the past recognizes them?” JC asked, the twinkle in his eye indicating that he was enjoying playing devil’s advocate.

Lachlan raised his brows. “On the off chance that a former colleague wanders into the hospital, what are the odds that he’ll immediately assume our lads are working with WAR?” Azumah was very sensitive to the fact that while WAR had a vast network of local informants, politicians, and financiers, the military wing consisted primarily of foreign fighters. Most local soldiers were content to fight the rebels from within their home country’s military. And Lachlan couldn’t blame them. WAR’s limited resources made it difficult to compete with a government-backed military, no matter what level of corruption might be interfering with the military actually achieving its objectives.

Given the rebels’ anti-foreigner rhetoric, Azumah preferred to keep the nationality of WAR’s fighters a mystery. For the most part, WAR’s military teams completed their missions without being spotted, or wore masks to hide those with lighter skin color. The local population had started calling them ghosts because they would see the results of WAR’s actions—such as rebel forces being attacked and pushed away from villages they were targeting—without actually spotting WAR’s fighters.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Lars admitted. “If any of my old teammates saw me, they’d assume I was a mercenary looking to pick up some fast cash. Not a ghost.”

“Wait. You’re not?” Hoss asked with an exaggerated expression of dismay.

Lachlan reached out and lightly boxed Hoss’s ear. “Enough. Having Lance and Levine at the hospital is a risk we have to take, Azumah’s mandate on secrecy be damned. I won’t risk Helen being killed because we were too afraid to expose ourselves.”

JC gave him a nod of respect. “We’re with you, Commander. Had to check, though. You were no fan of Dr. Kirk when you started this mission.”

“Aye. Well, a man can admit when he’s wrong now, can’t he?”

“You won’t get any argument from me,” JC said. “She worked her butt off at that hospital yesterday. You’d never know that she’d survived an attack earlier in the day. I’ve got no problem bending the rules to keep her safe.”

“Yeah,” Hoss said. “She’s all right.”

Warmth and relief spread through Lachlan.

“In fact, based on what Dev saw in the kitchen yesterday morning, I’d say that the Commander is thinking she’s a lot more than all right,” Lars teased without looking up from his computer screen.

Both Hoss and JC started singing “Lachlan and Helen up in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

As Lachlan scowled at them, it hit him. He’d been so worried about proving himself a calm, capable commander who always maintained control and would go the extra mile for his men that he hadn’t realized that the bonds he’d been searching for had already formed. Their casual acceptance of Helen, their willingness to follow his lead even knowing Azumah would be angry, and most of all their brotherly teasing indicated that they’d already accepted him.

He remembered Tony’s disappointment back at the clinic when Lachlan hadn’t opened up about his scars. As he looked around at the faces of these men, he knew that he had to confess his past to them before he told Helen. Not now, not with half the team missing. But soon. It was the one way he could show them how much their acceptance and support meant to him.

JC and Hoss had stopped singing and were looking at him with puzzled frowns.

“Ah, sorry lads. Lost in thought.” He turned to Lars. “Bring us up-to-date on what the government has learned from interrogating the various attackers they’ve arrested.” Several men from the follow-up attack against the regional governor, yesterday’s hospital attack, and the lone survivor from the assault at Layla’s Foundation headquarters had been taken into police custody.

“Natchaba is smart,” Lars said. “He communicates only with the leader of each group. All phone numbers belong either to dummy corporations or are untraceable.”

“Figures,” Hoss muttered.

Lars nodded agreement. “What is particularly interesting is that of the three groups of attackers, none of them are related to one another. Each group claimed to be, shall we say, auditioning for Natchaba. He gave them each a mission. Whether or not they were successful would determine if he allowed them to join his new organization.”