Cut and Run 09 Crash & Burn (16 page)

“No. It’s where Ty was brought in.”

Ty scowled at him. “It’s a hit he ordered me to carry out?”

“No,” Nick answered, sorrow engulfing his voice. “It’s a hit he ordered on a Special Agent James Hathaway.”

Ty’s mouth went dry. “What?”

“Hathaway,” Zane murmured as he scanned the documents. He turned to Ty. “Was that . . . wasn’t that your old partner?”

“Jimmy,” Ty croaked. “His name was Jimmy.”

A lot of the file was redacted, but Ty could make out the high points. Or rather, the low points. He realized his fingers were grazing over the old scar on his hip where he’d taken the bullet that had gone through him and lodged in Jimmy Hathaway.

“You almost died trying to save him,” Nick said to Ty, as if Ty might not remember it.

“You came down and stayed with me while I recovered.” Ty’s voice shook. “Spent two weeks trying to convince me to quit.”

“What else is there?” Zane asked, hard and professional. He had apparently realized Ty’s resolve was nonexistent.

“No,” Ty said, shaking his head. “No, Jimmy’s death wasn’t a hit. That was a suspect we were after for . . .” He trailed off, clutching the file.

“For drug-trafficking?” Nick finished. “For the Vega cartel?”

“Yeah,” Ty breathed.

“On the next page, you’ll see that man’s accounts received a hefty bonus the day before Hathaway was killed in the line of duty,” Liam told Ty. He sounded almost apologetic. “Your drug trafficker was paid off by Burns. He used stolen cartel money.”

“Burns made it look like a cartel hit if anyone examined it too closely,” Nick added. They had either practiced this, or they’d spent enough time together that they could finish each other’s sentences now. Ty sort of hated both of them for it.

Liam was nodding, working to free his hands from the zip tie as if no one would notice.

“No one did, though,” Nick continued. “Because you killed the guy before he could talk. Case closed.”

“Why?” Ty asked.

“Burns had to free you up, bud,” Nick answered. “He needed you to be solo. He promised you you’d never have to have another partner, remember?”

Ty swallowed hard, glancing at Zane and back to the file. “This still doesn’t connect directly to Burns, though.”

“You’re right,” Nick said. He picked up another file and waved it.

Ty was rooted to the spot, so Zane moved to take the file. He opened it even as dread settled in Ty’s belly. If they really did have even shreds of evidence, Ty had no idea how he was going to handle the fallout.

“Those are wire transfers made in your name, Garrett,” Liam offered. “With the information you were gleaning in Miami. Burns was skimming money from cartel accounts, pushing it through an account he’d set up in your name in the Cayman Islands, and then transferring it to his own offshore accounts. I traced them to Switzerland, but lost the endgame to a Swiss stone wall. We’re working on it, but neither of us have the know-how to follow Burns’s trail. We’re missing information we need.”

“What information?” Zane asked.

“Access codes,” Liam answered.

“Zane’s name is in the trail?” Ty asked, voice going harsh.

“It’s the start of the trail. We think
that’s
why the cartel is after him,” Nick told them. “Not because of Antonio de la Vega’s assassination. Or, not completely because of it.”

“His name on those accounts makes him complicit, Ty,” Owen said. “If we can’t prove Burns acted alone, you’ll go down for multiple counts of murder, and Zane will go down for the money.”

“If the cartel don’t kill him first,” Digger added.

“So Burns made it look like I not only stole millions of their dollars, but also killed their boss?” Zane asked, almost shrill.

“Hundreds of millions,” Liam corrected.

“
Cabrón hijo de la gran puta
!”

“Zane,” Ty grunted as the rest of Sidewinder gaped at Zane, wide-eyed.

Zane eyes blazed. “You remember when I said I’d hold him down so you could hit him?” he asked Nick. Nick nodded warily. “Let’s dig him up.”

“That’s . . .” Nick shook his head.

Ty patted Zane’s shoulder to calm him, nodding for Nick to continue.

“When it got too hot, he went in and pulled Zane out,” Nick said. He was still shaky, but he seemed to be gaining confidence in relating the facts of the case to them, as opposed to when he was trying to justify his own actions.

“Why not just let Zane rot down there? Take the heat for him?” Kelly asked. “Why pull him?”

“Covering his own ass,” Nick answered. “Cartel gets a hold of Zane, finds out he’s FBI, they know where the money went. Cartel gets a hold of Zane, turns him, he has the information to maybe come after the money himself. Burns couldn’t risk either scenario; he had to keep Zane on the straight and narrow.” He glanced to Zane almost apologetically and dropped his voice. “Probably why he put you in rehab. That, and he needed you sober and predictable.”

Zane laughed bitterly. “I never could figure out why he cared so much. Why he’d bother getting me clean. This is the first explanation that’s ever made sense. He sent me back to Miami to die. He had so little faith in me that when I didn’t fuck up and get myself killed, he thought I had to be on the cartel’s payroll.”

Ty squeezed his husband’s shoulder. He knew how much of Zane’s initial self-worth Zane had tied into Burns’s belief in him, how much he’d looked to that as a reason he belonged in the Bureau. But Zane didn’t need that now. He’d proven himself a thousand times over. Ty would make sure he remembered.

“Why’d he bring me in?” Ty asked after several moments of heavy silence.

“My guess?” Nick said. “He had to clean house. He used your loyalty, to him and your dad. He knew you wouldn’t ask questions, knew you’d . . . you’d want to prove yourself worthy. Knew what you were capable of.”

Ty nearly staggered as pain washed through him. He’d so blindly followed what he’d thought was right. He’d hurt so many people doing it, including himself. “This is why he recruited us in the first place,” he said to Nick. “You, me, Eli. He only wanted us so we could clean up his messes.”

“Makes you wonder if Sidewinder got pulled from active duty so we’d be free to use in civilian operations,” Owen said. “NIA, FBI, the Corps. How high does this go?”

“We don’t know,” Nick answered.

Liam cleared his throat, looking grim. “I’d say high enough.”

“You ever wonder why Sidewinder got sent off right before our time was up?” Kelly asked. “Right after we all survived a brush with the NIA in New Orleans?”

“You think the NIA sent us back to war?” Ty growled.

Kelly nodded, his eyes as gray and hard as steel.

“Why?”

“So they’d have unhindered access to one of us. They pulled Nick for this hit and then sent us home,” Owen answered. “We were sent back over there just so Burns could be taken out of the game.”

“It’s free labor,” Digger said with a shrug. “NIA tugs a string, Corps calls us back. They tug another string, Nick is sent to their door. Tug that last string, Burns is dead. They only lift a tiny finger and don’t put out a cent for the trouble. Not a bad setup, if you’re an evil bastard.”

“Okay. Okay,” Zane said, eyes wide. “But how was Burns such a threat to the NIA that they’d orchestrate all this?”

“We don’t know,” Liam said grimly. “I know
I’m
scared, though. Because whatever they wanted from him, they didn’t get it. You and Garrett, and all of us, are next in line for their particular brand of borrowing.”

“What about Eli?” Kelly asked. “Did Burns kill him?”

Nick shook his head. “Not that we’ve found. Eli was . . . he was just in the wrong fucking place.”

Zane cursed quietly and raised one of the other pieces of the file he’d been reading over.

Ty almost didn’t want to know what Zane had found. There was dread in his voice when he asked, “What?”

“Deuce,” Zane croaked. “These are wiretaps from Burns’s office. He was having Deuce report to him about us. Whether we were working well together, if we could be partnered.”

“No,” Ty gasped, and he snatched the transcript from Zane’s hand.

“There’s no evidence in there whatsoever to tie your brother to anything,” Nick said quickly. “Burns was using him, just like everyone else.”

“My God.” Ty scanned the transcripts of Burns’s conversations, his voice losing strength like a balloon gasping out its last bit of air. “He was like a fucking father to us.”

“Ty.” Nick stood quickly enough that Zane’s hand went to his gun. Nick froze. He turned to Ty, hands still raised. “I wish he was the person you thought he was. I wish I’d been wrong.”

Tears pricked at Ty’s eyes again. Burns may have been like a father to him, but only because he’d been there when Ty was growing up. Nick . . . Nick was his brother, and he’d earned that with his blood being spilled across the sand.

Nick took a tiny step toward Ty before he seemed to realize he might not be welcome to do it and halted. He was so flustered that he probably didn’t even know he was fidgeting. “I know what he was to you. I know what . . . a father . . . I would have given anything if it could have saved you from what this feels like. I would have been the bad guy.”

“Nick,” Ty choked out. He shook his head, gasping for breath. “I can’t do this right now.”

Nick didn’t say anything further. His eyes were still on Ty’s, though. He never looked away. That was the first thing Ty had ever loved about him.

“There’s more,” Nick told him, and Ty rubbed his eyes dejectedly.

Zane pulled out the next file, holding it up. He frowned, confused. “I don’t get it, who is this guy? It says he was an undercover federal agent.”

“Burns’s last hit,” Kelly answered. “Couple months before the boys were sent off.”

“Who is he? How does he connect to us?” Zane asked as Ty took the file and read over it.

Ty’s heart sank when he saw the picture attached. “I killed him,” he said, feeling the heat drain from his face. “This man was a Fed?”

“ATF. Working undercover in the cartel,” Liam told him.

“Was this one of the men Burns sent you to Miami to take out?” Zane asked.

“Yes.” Ty felt ill as he looked at the file. He’d executed this man without question, thinking his death was vital to keeping Zane safe. Burns had lied to him at every turn, made him into a cold-blooded killer.

Liam continued talking even as Ty grew more distraught. “His death was the one that got the NIA involved, got me into this mess. He’s the reason I was in New Orleans. Both the cartel and the NIA sent me looking for the man who ordered his hit, which is when I figured out there was a third party involved here. When I saw you, Tyler, I knew it had to be Richard Burns. You’d do anything for the man.”

Nick slowly reached to the small of his back and pulled out a combat knife. He stretched toward the end of the bed, taking Liam’s hands in his and slicing through the zip tie Liam had been struggling with.

“Thanks, mate,” Liam said, rubbing at the red marks on his wrist.

“Tell them what you told me,” Nick said, low enough that Ty could barely hear it.

Liam glared at Nick for a moment, then turned mutinous eyes on Ty and Zane. “When you two headed to New Orleans, it wasn’t this mole you think you have that alerted the cartel.”

“Who was it?” Zane demanded.

“I don’t know. But I was embedded in the cartel for a year. You weren’t on their radar until New Orleans. Someone put you there on purpose, and since Nicholas has convinced me it wasn’t him, I now suspect it was Burns.”

“Burns is the one who told us my phone was being monitored,” Zane argued.

“Easy misdirect when he realized you weren’t dead in New Orleans like you were supposed to be,” Nick guessed. “When Ty called him, said he was still alive, Burns knew he had to cover his ass.”

“But he came,” Ty reminded them. “He came to help us.”

“Yeah,” Nick said bitterly. “Landed right after the action went down.”

“You’re saying he was done with us, and so he sent the cartel to go after us,” Zane said slowly.

Liam and Nick were both nodding. Liam took a deep breath before speaking one last time. “Tyler took out every undercover agent placed in the cartel except me. Once he did that, Burns didn’t need him or you anymore.”

Ty’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Zane rested his hand against Ty’s back, squeezing him gently. But Zane had no way to combat the betrayal and pain seeping into Ty’s soul.

Ty sought out answers in his eyes that just weren’t there. “He told me we were protecting your egress from Miami.”

After a few tense seconds, Nick broke the silence. “He lied.”

Zane sat at his desk, staring at the paperwork in front of him but not seeing it. His mind was elsewhere, off with Sidewinder and his husband, who were either still in the hotel trying to decide how to gain access to Richard Burns’s home and office, or off gallivanting around Washington, DC.

Every time his phone rang, he thought it was Ty calling to tell him they’d killed Liam and tossed him into the ocean, or they’d been arrested breaking into Burns’s home or office in DC. Every knock at his door, he hoped it was Perrimore coming to him with something he’d dug up on those accounts, and not word of his brand-new husband involved in a high-speed car chase on the news.