Cut and Run 09 Crash & Burn (32 page)

Ty laid the papers out, and he and Zane bowed their heads together to study them.

“This is bank routing information,” Zane said almost immediately.

“Send this shit to Clancy, tell them to get their hands on that money!”

But Zane was shaking his head, deep furrows in his brow. “We’re missing information.”

“What information?”

“This is what’s called a numbered account at a Swiss bank,” Zane told him, tapping the information. “Basically, the name of the account holder is shielded from all but the highest bank officials. You have to give them a code word to get into the account. Without that word, this information won’t even tell us what bank it’s at.”

Ty rested his head in his hands, watching Zane through his fingers.

“And look at the file names of Burns’s photos,” Zane continued. “They’re in numerical order. Three of the numbers aren’t here. I think he erased those three photos, and whatever was in them, that’s what we need to get into that numbered account.”

“God damn it. So, he used this to keep his name off the radar.”

Zane nodded, sighing as he crossed his arms on the table. “We’re doing this ass-backwards. Usually, we’re trying to find the name on the account. We already know it was his.”

“What if it’s yours?” Ty asked before he could stop himself.

Zane met his eyes as he ran a hand through his hair. “Then I’d go down for everything.”

Ty lowered his head, closing his eyes.

“But if it is my name . . . all we’d have to do is figure out the code word, and I’d have access to the money. We get to it first, get it to the CIA, then this all goes away. We’re in the clear.”

Ty nodded, leaning closer until their shoulders brushed, until Zane’s warmth was seeping into him. “We could take this to the CIA now. Let them handle it with what we’ve gleaned.”

“And if they don’t?” Zane posed. “They have no reason to go to bat for us, they could throw us under the bus just as easily as Burns did. Hell,
more
easily. And if it’s my name on there, they wouldn’t even have to work to put me away.”

Ty nodded, fighting the constriction of encroaching panic in his chest. Over the last few years, basically every person in power Ty had ever trusted had turned out to be a horrible person who’d been trying to kill him. He wasn’t about to take what they had to anyone until they were damn sure he and Zane would both come out the other end unscathed. He was beginning to realize that he’d never been out there on the wire without a backup. He’d always trusted Burns to do whatever was in his power to save him, and now, without that safety net, the world felt a lot bigger.

“The only way we’re truly going to be safe is if we have that money in hand,” Zane whispered. “We have to give the CIA what they asked for.”

“Okay. So what do we need?”

“We need the code word.”

“Word!” Digger said as he walked through the kitchen, heading toward the hallway where the bedrooms were.

Ty and Zane watched him, nonplussed. Owen came into the kitchen a moment later, smiling at their confused faces. “Cross and his CIA buddy left.”

“What?” Ty blurted.

“He said they’d be back. Cross said he had a couple hides he could clear out, bring back some major ammunition and cash so we can stay off grid.”

“Good,” Zane grunted as he rubbed his eyes.

Owen sat across the table from them, backward in one of the cheap folding chairs, and leaned his elbows on the back of it. “Have you been watching Nick?” he asked Ty.

Ty scowled. “What do you mean?”

Owen shrugged, pressing his lips tightly together. “He’s bent.”

Ty blinked at Owen, his mind whirring, trying to deal with far too many problems at once.

“Bent?” Zane asked.

Ty took a deep breath. “It was something we used to say, back in service. It’s . . . kind of hard to explain, but it’s not good.”

“Try.”

Ty huffed. “See . . . there’s a bond that can’t be broken when you’ve fought together, and bled together, and cried together.”

Zane slid his hand into Ty’s lap, grasping his fingers and squeezing. He nodded.

“That bond is the only thing that keeps people like us from going insane,” Owen added. “But when that wasn’t enough, when one of us started losing it? We called it bending.”

“You’d push and you’d push,” Ty practically gasped. “And you’d fight and kill, and you’d see things no man should ever have to see. Do things no person should ever be forced to have on their conscience, and your mind would start to bend. You’d get to thinking that was just how life was.”

“Did you ever bend?” Zane asked quietly.

“Hell yeah. It happened to each of us. Sometimes it was slow, we could see it coming, do something to head it off.”

Owen rested his chin on the back of the chair, looking melancholy and distant. “A few nights of leave would help us realize there was a world out there beyond . . . sand and bullets and blood. But sometimes it’d just hit with no warning, one of us would go off the deep end. Hurt people we didn’t need to.”

Zane didn’t speak, and Ty was kind of glad for it. His grip on Zane’s hand tightened.

“Being cruel for no reason other than to see fear in someone’s eyes,” Ty whispered as he met Zane’s eyes with a sad smile. “The thing was, your mind would bend and bend and bend, but it had to break to go back to normal. If it didn’t break, you just bent until you got all twisted inside.”

“We saw that happen too; evil, twisted bastards on both sides of the fighting.”

Zane was frowning so hard it was almost painful to look at him. He rapped his knuckles on the table. “And Nick? Is he . . . bent? Twisted?”

Ty shrugged, his chin still resting in his hand. He moved his water glass around on the table.

“He was usually the one pulling us back from it. He always knew what we could and couldn’t do if we ever wanted cosmic forgiveness,” Owen explained.

“He was . . . like our moral center. I think it weighed heavy on him, but it was his way of anchoring himself. I saw him break once.” Ty fell silent, staring at the water in his glass, lost in the memory somewhere.

“Ty?” Zane whispered.

“He was a scary motherfucker on his way down,” Ty whispered, as if he’d never paused. “You remember how he was in Scotland?”

Zane swallowed hard, nodding. “Are we in danger? Will he hurt one of us if he snaps?”

Owen winced, meeting Ty’s eyes. But Ty shook his head, jarring himself out of the funk. “I don’t think so, no.”

Someone cleared his throat from the doorway, and Ty tensed in expectation of it being Nick eavesdropping. He was almost relieved when it was just Liam. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, mate.”

“I’m going to bed,” Owen told them, and he stood with a quiet good-night, glaring at Liam in passing.

Liam slid into the chair that Owen had vacated.

Ty straightened, his eyes going hard. “What?”

“I know you think it was me switched those bullets out in New Orleans,” Liam said solemnly. “But I’ve never tried to hurt you, mate, not before, not then. Not now. Someone switched those casings on me, someone who wanted you to die ugly.”

“Are you really accusing Nick of that?
Again
?” Zane snapped.

“What?” Ty blurted.

Liam held up a hand. “I’m saying, how many people had access between the time you made up that fragmenting round, and when I loaded it into my gun? You two. Me. Sidewinder. And for the briefest of moments, my handler.”

“Who was your handler?” Ty demanded.

“Her name was Anna. And the cartel killed her shortly after she left New Orleans. They framed me for her murder, and that’s why the NIA is tracking my arse down like a dog. If she’d been working for anyone who wanted you dead, she’d still be kicking.”

“Nick didn’t switch those bullets,” Ty declared.

“If you say so, mate.” Liam sounded almost sad. He certainly looked it. “I’m just trying to tell you . . . watch your back. Take it from someone who knows. Friends and enemies? They sometimes wear the same clothes.”

Zane was sitting in the middle of the sparsely furnished living room, helping to assemble their supplies. Cross had checked in a couple times during the night and the following morning, and he sounded certain that he and Preston would be bringing enough firepower to take over a Caribbean island by nightfall.

Until then, they were sorting the supplies they did have, and each of them had been studying Burns’s cipher code, trying to figure out what the missing pieces might be.

So far they’d all come up empty.

Zane watched absently as they divided up and repacked their supplies. He found his eyes following Ty’s hands as his nimble fingers folded, loaded, stacked, and packed. He’d always loved watching the way Ty’s long fingers moved when he worked, and it didn’t matter what Ty was doing for it to get Zane’s attention.

“Need help?” Ty asked Nick, pulling Zane from his wandering thoughts.

Ty frowned as Nick muttered a reply, and Zane switched his focus to Nick’s hands. They were trembling. He was so unsteady, in fact, that he had to try twice to insert an extra magazine into the elastic catchall on the side of one of the duffel bags.

Ty’s words had drawn Kelly’s attention as well. He craned his neck like a curious prairie dog, scowling at Ty and Nick from where he was sitting between two chairs. “Why do you need help?”

“I don’t need help,” Nick insisted, and he continued his packing, rolling up a piece of clothing so he could stuff it into the bag to cushion whatever explosive goody he’d just packed in there.

“Why are you shaking,” Ty asked him. “I thought that medicine you had took care of the tremor.”

It was obvious Nick had been hoping they’d all just drop it, and he glared at Ty before glancing at Liam, who was sitting on the arm of the couch, loading and checking their few weapons.

Liam looked up when the silence became oppressive, and he narrowed his eyes at each of them. “What?”

“What’d you do?” Kelly asked him. Zane could tell Kelly was getting angry and trying to keep a lid on his temper. He’d been angry ever since he’d arrived in Baltimore, though. He was angry at everything and everyone, including Nick.

Liam scowled, and he seemed confused when he glanced around the room again. He obviously hadn’t been listening to them.

“Why’s Nick shaking?” Kelly asked Liam. “What’d you do?”

“Hey!” Nick shouted. “I didn’t fucking answer the question, means I don’t want it answered!”

Kelly hopped to his feet, but it wasn’t to confront Nick or yell at him. His brow creased in concern.

“Drop it,” Nick grunted, and he went back to his packing, stuffing several bottles of Gatorade into his bag.

Zane realized he was holding his breath, and he met Ty’s eyes across the room. Zane shook his head minutely, then tipped it toward the door. Ty pretended he didn’t understand the gesture, though, and he stood and stepped toward Nick instead. He grabbed Nick’s hand as Nick was reaching for the next Gatorade he intended to try to stuff into that duffel.

Nick’s eyes were wide. Zane could see the tremor in Nick’s palm, the unsteadiness in his fingers, and looking closer at him, Zane could see his jaw tensing, see the exhaustion and fear in his eyes.

Nick had been a Scout Sniper, the best in his class and, according to Ty, the best in their platoon. Snipers didn’t get far with a tremor like the one rambling its way down Nick’s arm into his fingers.

“How long’s it been this bad?” Ty asked.

Nick yanked his hand out of Ty’s grasp. “Don’t worry about it. I can still shoot fine.”

“Where’s your propranolol?” Kelly asked him. His voice had lost that angry edge for once; he’d spoken in low, soothing tones designed to put injured men at ease and convince stubborn patients to trust him.

Nick’s eyes darted back toward Liam, and he said, “It got misplaced.”

They all shifted their attention from Nick to Liam.

“I tossed it overboard,” Liam admitted. “First night on the
Fiddler
with him.”

“You what?” Kelly and Ty blurted almost in unison.

“Nicholas isn’t exactly a mewling kitten in the rain, gentlemen,” Liam insisted. “Once I was on the boat with him and he knew I couldn’t reach the Doc as a threat, I needed to find a weakness so I’d be able to handle him.”

“A
weakness
?” Kelly tilted his head toward Liam as if he hadn’t heard him correctly, and turned his body to the side like a man about to strike, offering less of a target by showing his profile. “Did you have any idea what it’d do to him to go off those meds like that?”

“I knew enough,” Liam admitted. “I certainly regret the action now that we need him and his aim, but it’s none of your concern either way. Irish and I have made our peace with it.”

Zane looked back down at Nick, who had his hands resting on his knees, his tongue pushing against his upper teeth. Even with something under his fingers, they were trembling to the point that he looked like he was shivering with cold or nerves.

“What happens if you can’t get more of the stuff?” Zane asked him.

“Nothing,” Nick answered quietly. He held up his hand to show them, palm facing the floor. There was so much movement it seemed like Nick was doing it on purpose, exaggerating it until it looked fake. “I’ve been off it for almost three weeks; this is what happens. It’s just a tremor.”