Jack heard the lock tumble open and moved fast. He snuffed the lights and palmed his P226 as he pocketed Bill's letter. Grabbing Lauren's hand, he led her to the master bedroom before the men entering could have possibly seen or heard them. But then one of the men was speaking so loudly, he and Lauren could have been elephants. Making his way through the condo was easy. The upscale decor was very Zen in style, almost sterile, and left very little clutter to bump into in the dark, letting him focus on the intruders' conversation.
"I've never had to open a tenant's door for the police before. Are you sure you have the right man, Officer? Bill Collins is an affluent business man and his wife does a lot of charity work for children."
"As I said, we suspect his involvement in a crime we are investigating. But right now we are just worried about locating him. We think something may have happened to him. When did you last see him?"
"I'm not sure. A week, maybe two. He travels a lot for his job so that isn't unusual. Have you checked with his wife? I know they're estranged but she might know something. Might have even spoken to him."
"We've tried, but haven't been able to our hands on her, yet."
Jack not only saw red at the man's choice of words, but he itched to smash the guy's face.
"I'll be a few minutes looking around. Do you want me to stop by your unit when I'm done?"
"I'll just wait on you. Without Collins here, it seems the right thing to do. What are you looking for? I watch CSI. Maybe I can help."
"No. Just have a seat."
Footsteps then the sound of cabinets and drawers opening followed.
Lauren tensed and Jack pulled her body tight to his as he unlatched the balcony door. His heart hammered and it had nothing to do with the men down the hallway or the danger of their situation and everything to do with the woman against him. Her lavender scent, her softness, and whatever the pheromone else they called it these days, his attraction to her was visceral.
Jack slid the balcony door open and eased them out into the night. He inched the door shut behind him as he scanned the area. They were three stories up on a twenty story building. The fire escape flanking the right side of the balcony was a welcomed sight. Before being injured in Lebanon, he could have scaled the three stories to the ground in a heartbeat, but now it would take him longer, and guiding Lauren along would have been rough.
The slight chill to the night gave the air a biting edge and the urban noise teeming from the surrounding city pulsed with excitement. Cities had energy and Atlanta's came with a bit of a southern flare to it. They had exited to the side of the building and were hidden from the street as well as from observers by a larger condo on the side.
"Stay close and make as little noise as possible." He led the way down to the second floor where the stairs ended. To go farther would mean unlatching and lowering an old iron ladder, which would likely wake the dead with its screeching.
"Jump when I ask." Jack went over the side of the rail and a thud echoed as his feet hit the pavement. The slim alley way was empty. Their escape had been pretty anticlimactic when compared to the day and a welcomed relief for Jack. All he had to do was keep away from the front of the building by leading her to the car via the back alley.
"Okay jump." He held out his arms.
She looked down at him, her expression horrified. She hesitated. Geez, it wasn't all that much higher than climbing a tree. "Come on."
She shook her head, but then the sound of men's voices overhead had her climbing over the railing and letting go. He caught her easily then took his time setting her on her feet. She clung to him, her heart racing hard. "Are you afraid of heights?"
"Afraid would be an understatement." She shivered hard and he had to fight the urge to kiss her before he let her go. The voices had come from an upper floor and not Bill's condo, but they still needed to get off the street. Taking her hand, he headed back to the car they'd left in a public parking lot a block away. The contact with her soft skin only amplified his want of her. All he kept seeing was the look in her eyes when he'd told her what he would do to wipe Bill from her mind. That look had him wondering what would have happened if they hadn't been interrupted.
Oh man. He sucked in air at the thought of letting go with her-a visual of him and her naked, enjoying a full sexual feast flashed before his eyes. Not that she wasn't attractive to him on every level, but hell, something about her stroked his primal side but good. Which had him wondering what in the hell was wrong with him? Not that he shouldn't find her attractive. Not that he shouldn't want her with some urgency. He'd been without for a long while. It was the strength and depth of that want that were out of proportion and weren't held back in the least by all the reasons he should avoid her like the plague. She was the widow of a terrorist he was investigating. He should be focused on protecting her ass and not holding it. And most of all, he'd killed her husband and had yet to tell her that. He needed to get his mind back on his mission. Period. He bolstered his strength and control and quickened his pace.
"I need the fake cop's license plate." He led her to the car, determined to ignore the burn inside him. "And he might not have come alone. Our shooter could be in a car nearby or on the street. I want you to drive to the Varsity down the street and wait for me, okay? I won't be long."
Letting her go off into the night would bite, but would be safer than with him. She'd be okay for ten minutes in the restaurant's parking lot. There had been a number of cars parked both in the parking lot and at the old-fashioned drive-in stations. Besides, he needed a breather to clear his head. Alone with Lauren was not a good situation and he thanked God her friend and sons were waiting back at the hotel.
"I don't like the idea of separating. What are you going to do?" Matching the hurried pace he'd set, she still managed to gaze at him, clearly worried. He bit back a smile. Considering the depth of danger he operated in on a regular basis, he literally was just going to walk down the street. Her reaction was amusing and touching.
"Depends on what I find. Mainly just get close enough to read his license plates. There's a real good chance I won't be recognized, but they'll make you in a heartbeat."
"Just be careful. Okay?"
"Always." That was one rule he lived by and drilled every day into the men under him. It took a certain breed of man to be in special ops, a man willing to go that extra hundred miles without question, a man willing to lay everything on the line at all times, but that didn't mean to kiss off caution. If anything it meant the opposite. A dead soldier did nobody any good. And a half-cocked one endangered everyone.
They reached the car and Jack waited until she had taken off before he left on foot. He found the cop's car parked on the street and as he suspected, he spied another man in the unloading zone up ahead, leaning on a black sedan. It was the same make and model as the one that had chased them from Angie's. The guy, same size and build as their shooter, smoked a cigarette and kept looking at the entrance to Bill's condo.
Jack thought about sneaking up behind the SOB and putting him in the hospital for a good long while and would have if Lauren and her kids were tucked safely away and he had a back up to take care of them if things went wrong. As it was, he couldn't take the chance. He was smart enough to know that no matter how confident and proficient he was at hand-to-hand combat, anything could go wrong. He'd get the guy. Soon. Just not yet.
He jotted the numbers to both license plates down on the back of Bill's letter and met Lauren at the Varsity. Once they were back on the Interstate, he handed her Bill's letter. "Take another look at this. I think he may have sent you a coded message."
Turning on the map light, she re-read the letter. "I honestly don't have a clue as to what he's trying to tell me. The only thing that I can make a remote guess at is what he wrote about Vegas. About me going with him and his buddies. Maybe I'm supposed to contact them, or meet them."
"That would be my guess. Maybe Bill sent them letters too. The woman on the phone said she'd sent what Bill had asked. Sent it to his family and friends."
"That's right. She said that. I missed that detail."
"Tell me about them."
"I don't know a lot. I've only met them and some of the wives a couple of times. Bill kept me and the kids out of that loop. Maybe we embarrassed him or something. I don't know why."
Jack bit down on his temper as Lauren gave him a few sketchy facts about Thomas Ettinger, Edward Weiss, Conrad Gardner, Bob Cantrell and Ray Branson.
"We'll pay Thomas and Edward a surprise visit tomorrow and hopefully make more progress," he told Lauren. "There wasn't much information in the condo. I've rarely met someone who possessed practically no personal belongings. For that place to be his principle residence, the condo was like a museum. I imagine the fake cop won't find much either."
"You think he's impersonating a law officer?"
"Either that or corrupt. No legit cop would enter a residence alone and without a search warrant."
"I know I didn't like his tone of voice when he told the old landlord he'd been unable to get his hands on me. It freaked me out."
It had made Jack see red too. Lauren spoke before he could tell her.
"Bill didn't keep much. He hated clutter. Said he was born for the electronic world. Did everything online. All financial transactions were done online and all of his records from personal to work were stored in databases and on his laptop that, I now realize, he never let out of his sight."
Jack changed lanes, wondering what life with someone like that would be. Not fun. "The place made me feel as if I were in a sterile bubble."
"Good assessment." Lauren directed her gaze out the window.
Jack sensed there was so much she wasn't saying about her life with Collins. "From my experience, kids and dogs don't fit in bubbles, they pop them."
She nodded. "Guess that was part of why he flipped. Maybe the chaos was more than he could handle and something he always blamed me for. To him normal was being perfectly ordered at all times. He didn't see the boys often after we separated."
Jack bit back his anger and disgust for Bill and directed it toward himself as he saw his divorce from Jill in a new light. He understood parenting wasn't for everyone, but once a kid was born, both parents had to step up to the plate. Instead of doing just that where his daughter was concerned, he'd let Jill cut him out of the game. What the hell? Why was he just seeing that now? They were back at the hotel before he knew it.
When they opened the door, the boys, still awake and going strong, raced up to him and Lauren, excitement shining in their eyes. They spoke to him at the same time, in a wild rush that he couldn't decipher.
Angie looked done in. "I made the mistake of letting them up to have one pretermed race before going to sleep."
Lauren frowned. "What's that?"
"Don't know."
"We need a pretermed track, Mr. Jack." Matt's brow was creased with a serious frown.
"Please, sir," Mitch added, eyes pleading as if his world hung on the answer.
Realization dawned. "They're talking about a predetermined race track. So everyone has the same advantage." Jack looked at Lauren. "I don't mind. It's up to you."
"Just one race," Lauren told the boys. "Then it's bedtime."
"Okay." Jack rubbed his hands together with enthusiasm. "You two go sit in the chairs over there until I get my racing gear ready. I won't be more than two minutes." The boys nodded and dashed to the chairs, scrambling to sit down.
Angie laughed. "I've been trying to make that happen all night."
"Watch NASCAR," Jack said as he went through the adjoining door, to store his gun safely out of the reach of little hands. "The guys racing aren't much different than the twins, and there're all kinds of rules racers have to obey or get penalized for."
Lauren laughed. "Smart man."
Jack returned with some hastily gathered supplies. He told the twins about his Pinewood Derby racing days in Boy Scouts as he set about constructing an agreed upon route that employed just about every surface in the hotel room from a luggage rack to the bed pillows, excepting the table and chairs in which Lauren and Angie now huddled. He made a quick checkered flag, a red flag and a yellow flag out of paper and borrowed clothing, and set himself up as judge. The race was on. He had no doubt the twins could have run the Daytona 500 by foot and beat the drivers with the amount of energy they had. He and Livy used to have fun times like these and he realized he ached deep inside that they'd disappeared with the divorce.
The race was over too soon and there were no fights when he declared Mitch the winner. But he'd made a grave mistake. The boys were begging to join the Boy Scouts in the morning so they could make Pinewood Derby cars and race.
"When you start school in a few weeks," Lauren told them. "Meanwhile you had better get a good night's sleep or you'll be too tired to win the races."
"Pomise," Mitch asked.
"Your solid oak," Matt added.
"My solid oak." Lauren smiled. "Now brush your teeth and hit the sack."
The boys rushed to the bathroom and Jack laughed. "What's solid oak mean?"
The warmth of love in Lauren's eyes as she explained made her unbelievably beautiful and knocked him for a loop. "At first the boys mistook the words solid oak for solemn oath, but once they learned what it was supposed to be, they chose to stick with their own method of promise. Solemn oath doesn't have any substance to it, whereas the big solid oak tree in the backyard means something really important."
Jack nodded. He could remember just how huge promises were to him at six years old and it also made him remember who the most important man in his life was at the time. His father.
Matt and Mitch's father would never walk through the door and speak to them again because Jack had killed him. An iron fist closed around Jack's heart and squeezed hard. He hurt for them and for the part he'd played in Bill's death.
Maybe he didn't have the right to be here. Maybe it was wrong, and maybe it would only intensify the collateral damage of reveling the truth to Lauren later, but he was incapable of walking away from their emotional needs any more than he could have left them under gunfire in a battlefield-an apt description of life at times.
"I'll say good night now." Jack quickly left the room, shutting the adjoining door. All reasons aside, he shouldn't be playing with Bill's sons. Protect them yes, but build their hopes into thinking Jack was something more than the glorified killer he was? No. Nor should he be lusting after Bill's widow.
With his insides all twisted in knots, he showered and mulled over his conversation with Lauren, getting his ducks in a row. He had to call Commander Weston before he hit the sack and he was not looking forward to the event.
Turning on his phone, he was surprised to see he had only one text from Weston.
Jack opened the message and stared at it a moment, stunned, simply because he expected to read an ass-chewing. Call me. Mari is in trouble. He hit the speed dial.
"About time you surfaced," Weston said, his voice almost a whisper.
"What's wrong with Mari?"
"Hold on. Let me step outside so I don't wake her. She's finally resting."
"Outside where?" Jack demanded. "Damn it. What's happened?"
Jack heard Weston's description of the attack on Mari, about Neil's car being stolen and his house shot to hell. "Please tell me they've nailed the bastard to a tree by his yellow balls."
"Not yet."
"Is she going to be all right? The baby?"
Weston's tension-filled exhale grabbed Jack by the throat.
"Damn it, Roger. What are you not saying?"
"Physically, once she starts eating and gets into a prenatal care program, she should be fine. They're going to keep her for a day or two in the hospital then she can go home. What happened today has traumatized her, but I think more than that has her jumping out of her skin every time the breeze moves. I know something traumatic happened to her in Afghanistan. Did Neil ever mention what to you?"
"I was there when he brought her in" Jack said. "It was the night our team had gone into find Ackbajeen?"
"Yeah."
"Neil found her imprisoned in a windowless cell in the bowels of a fairly well-to-do compound-like house. Someone had left her to starve to death and she was literally at death's door. I don't know much more than that. Why?"
"I think she's been-"
"What?"
"Never mind. What we do need to talk about is you getting your ass back here before I can't cover it any more. What the hell do you think you are doing, DT?"
"The right thing. Do you know Bill Collins left Atlanta suddenly the very same day that the daughters of Ambassador James and Israel's Prime Minister Shalev were kidnapped? Do you know that his body has gone missing from the Brazilian authorities today? Do you know that Lauren Collins and her six-year-old twin sons have a trained assassin after them? AWOL me if you have to, but I'm not abandoning her and her kids until this is over."
Weston exhaled hard. "There's no doubt then? Bill Collins is the man who hid in the armoire?"
"Facts are stacking up in my favor."
"What does his wife know?"
"Make that his almost ex. Not much, but she can help me get into his life and piece together what in the hell Bill was up to and who's was behind it. Bill worked for a tree-hugging company called BioLogics. Started two years ago and immediately went shady on his whereabouts and doings. So that company is a great starting point. I have to tell you that I just don't buy it that that tiny radical group we took out in Lebanon pulled off the high profile kidnappings. Not without major connections and funding."
"I'll check on things from this end. Keep me posted then and would you keep in mind that Posse Comitatus is not dead. The lines have been a bit blurred lately but it's still considered law, which means no military action on American soil is sanctioned. In other words this isn't your egg to fry."
"Too late," Jack said. "But I'll be careful. That reminds me. Whoever we are up against has resources out the whazoo and they've either stolen a cop car or have a cop moonlighting on the wrong side of the law." He gave Weston the license plate numbers to check out as well as the names of Bill's friends. "There has to be a connection to Lebanon somewhere."
"Let's hope. I've got an inside at the Agency I'll try and tap before I bother my cousin Paul with this. Though if there is a connection everyone will be PO'd that I sat on it. Watch your back, DT."
"Will do. Keep an eye on Mari and let me know when they nail the bastard who hurt her. I want to be there when he goes down for his crimes."
"If he makes it that far. I'm hoping the cops shoot to kill," Weston said. "I'm not letting Mari out of my sight."
Jack disconnected. Over the years he'd heard Weston under pressure, in battle and going balls to the wall under gunfire, and never had he heard such deadly intent in his voice before. Jack set up the computer and hit the internet, putting BioLogics and Bill Collins under a microscope. From all articles and links, BioLogics was exactly what Lauren had said, a company dedicated to promoting green technology. Its ownership was obscured in a conglomeration of companies that he could find no head honcho on. Also, it was completely funded by charitable donations and listed as a non-profit. That sent his blood pressure steaming. How in the hell did crap like that go on and on?
After a frustrating hour, he went to bed, but took forever to fall asleep, visions of Lauren danced through his head. With her as a wife, a man had to be a total imbecile to have gone after anything else. The look of her, the feel of her, the total package from her vulnerable bottom lip to the fierce fire in her eyes when it came to protecting Matt and Mitch was more than amazing. He closed his eyes and saw her back in the shower with the water sluicing down her creamy neck and the way her shirt clung to the contours of her almost visible breasts. He hated to admit it, but more than his hand had itched to take a wet ride then, and the feeling had only grown. He so would have backed her to the wall in her almost-ex's condo and wiped the SOB from her mind. There was something not quite sane about his need for her and it scared the hell out of him. She was in the other room and had never been in his room, yet he could smell her scent, a combination of lavender and warm honey. This time the gripping knot in his gut sent pulsing sensations southward, tightening his already aching groin. It was going to be a long, hard night.
He tried to knock himself back into line. Tried to put what she stirred in him on ice. His purpose here was to keep them safe and that package didn't include his dick. Besides, any avenue he could take with Lauren once this was over was a dead end street that had Bill Collins's gravestone carved all over it.