Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three (43 page)

“Hey, now,” Uncle Grand protested with a grin. “You may be all slicked up and citified, honey girl, but you’re still as country as dirt, and don’t you go forgetting it. Besides, possum’s good eating. Softer than armadillo anyhow.”

And that little gem sent her into another conniption of laughter, her shoulders shaking at her uncle’s plainspoken humor. He chuckled right along with her, wiping his eyes with mirth as they both enjoyed the simple pleasure of sharing a joke and shooting the shit in the soft heat of the afternoon sun.

“What’s so funny?” Alejandro asked as he strode up to them, holding his phone.

“My uncle’s taste in men,” Sam replied with a laugh.

“And possums,” Grant added with a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t think I want to understand,” Alejandro replied with a look, before holding up his phone. “Sandro Roman just called. He’s been trying to get ahold of Jack, but he hasn’t been answering.”

“Hey, Jack—” Grant called out across the corral. “You got your phone on you?”

Jack’s dark head raised in question. He patted the pockets of his dark jeans, then his shirt pocket. “Guess I left it in the guest house,” he called back. “Why?”

“Sandro’s flying in as we speak,” Alejandro told Sam, his voice low so it wouldn’t carry. “He’ll be at the airfield in less than an hour.”

Grant cocked his head. “Why?” he looked down at her. “You invite him?”

A shiver of dread and anticipation ran up her spine. Sandro either had news about her father or he was going to find some good reason to drag Jack away. The thought of him leaving left her feeling instantly bereft, the lightheartedness she’d just felt retreating under the shadow of her misgivings.

Jack strode across the corral toward them, wiping the sweat off his brow with a bandanna. “What’s up? Everything all right?” he asked as he kicked up dust behind him.

“Your dad’s on his way here,” Alejandro told him without preamble.

Jack’s brows shot up, then lowered, silver eyes glinting with a kind of cocksure impudence, like he’d won a bet. “He call you?”

“Yeah,” Alejo nodded. “He’s been trying to get ahold of you the past few hours, with no luck.”

Jack got a boot up on the grate and vaulted himself neatly over the wooden fence. He met her eyes as he came to a stop in front of her, knowing she’d understand what it meant that his father was coming here.

“He your ride home?” Grant asked, surprised.

“Not unless she wants him to be,” Jack replied softly, still looking at her.

“Sandro says he’s got a friend with him,” Alejandro added. “Someone Sam knows.”

Sam cocked her head. “Who?”

“Admiral Roland Morrissey.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Of all the names she hadn’t expected to hear…

“Roland?” her uncle crowed, surprising her. “Holy hell, that’s a name I haven’t heard in years!”

Shock reverberated through her. “You know Admiral Morrissey?” she asked her uncle.

“That sailor wasn’t no admiral when I knew him, missy.” Grant grinned wide, a look of nostalgia crossing his face. “We came up together—me, Roland, and your dad all served together on the USS Midway back in the day. He was a little younger than us, but he was stationed in Okinawa too.”

“How do you know Morrissey?” Jack asked Samantha, curious.

She nodded slowly, still standing there in some kind of suspended disbelief at the unlikely coincidence. “He was my commanding officer in the Navy. Morrissey also got me the intel on Nazar, as well as the air support and SEAL Team Six for the op against Nazar in Afghanistan.”

“No shit?” her uncle asked, tipping his hat back and rubbing his brow. “Small world.”

Yeah. Too fucking small. Her skin felt hot. If he was showing up with Sandro, it couldn’t be for a good reason.

“So he’s an Admiral now, huh?” Grant asked.

“He’s a
jefe
at the five-sided puzzle palace,” Alejo replied, using army slang for the Pentagon. “Joint Chiefs of Staff now.”

“
Shee
-it,” Grant whistled, impressed. “I’d better go let Hannah know we’ll have a couple honored guests tonight for supper.”

“Thank you, Grant. Sorry for the last minute notice,” Jack told him, his impeccable good manners saving her the awkwardness of having to try to explain her stunned silence.

Grant left them, striding across the pasture up to the house.

“What the fuck?” she whispered to herself, trying to make sense of it all. Morrissey had recruited her into the Kennedy Irregular Warfare Center when she’d still been in the ROTC. She’d known him since she was twenty-years-old. Never once had he mentioned knowing her father or Uncle Grant. Even when he’d seen her just a few months ago to give her intel on Nazar, he hadn’t said anything. And now he was flying out with Senator Sandro Roman?

“Morrissey must know something if he’s with my father,” Jack told her as soon as Grant was out of earshot. “That was the terms of our agreement.”

“What terms?” Sam demanded, finding her voice again.

Alejo’s gaze darted back and forth between them, brows up to his hairline.

“I told my father I knew were Lightner was,” Jack confessed. “I’d only tell him if he brought me solid information about your father’s involvement with the CIA.”

Her eyes narrowed. She looked at Alejo, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly with a silent
I didn’t tell him shit
confirmation.

“How do you know where Lightner is, Jack?” she asked slowly, carefully, like she was stepping in a minefield.

“I overheard your conversation on the phone with the woman who saved my life in London,” he admitted candidly, his gaze unwavering and unrepentant. “And I used that information to get Dad to come to the table with something meaningful for you.”

“Dammit, Jack!” She pushed her hands through her hair. “Lightner’s
mine!
Now your father is going to bring in the CIA, Interpol, and the fucking British Intelligence right into the middle of
my
goddamn op! I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation here! It’s taken us months to get this far—
months!
Any fuck-ups now and we could lose him forever.”

“Not if we misdirect the Senator and the Admiral long enough to give the team time to pin him down,” Alejandro interjected. “The meet goes down tonight. Plenty of time to get in and get out, unscathed. No one will be the wiser for it.” He looked at Jack. “Unless you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

Jack crossed his arms, his answering gaze defiant. “I never told my father that intel came from you. I can just as easily tell him it came from one of the mercs who are after the bounty on Lightner’s head, and I can lead him anywhere. All you need to do is act hurt, emotional, and upset, and he’ll assume you’re too weak to attack right now.”

“I
am
hurt, emotional, and upset, Jack.” Sam glared at him. “I have to go back up to that house right now and have the hardest conversation of my life with Grant.”

Alejandro looked at her. “He doesn’t know?”

“No. I didn’t want to tell him anything until I had solid leads. I didn’t want him to feel like this.”

“Like what?” Alejo asked her.

“Like an open wound,” she answered grimly. Sam had been lying to Grant for months. A lie of omission was still a lie. Even if she’d done it to protect him. Now she’d have to go up there and confess the whole ugly, sordid story before warning him that his old friend and fellow midshipman coming to dinner very likely had something to do with his best friend and a boy he considered a son dying that long ago night.

Jack touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry,
tesoro
. I thought I was giving you what you wanted,” he told her sincerely. “Lightner was the only immediate leverage I could think of to give him. I never planned on telling him anything else without your knowledge.”

The rational part of her mind knew that Jack had delivered exactly what she’d asked for. There was no way he could have known Morrissey was involved somehow. And even if he had, he couldn’t have foreseen the significance.

“I know.” She nodded shortly. “Just keep your father and Morrissey away from my team,” she told him before turning toward the house. “I need to go speak with my uncle before they get here.”

*

April—Late Afternoon

Houston, Texas

W E S L E Y

“We got a
fuckin’ problem,” Wes said as soon as Carey answered his phone.

“Well, you can’t ever have too many of those,” Carey drawled sarcastically.

“Travis Brandt fingered Mack McDevitt for motive,” Wes told him as he paced across his hotel suite. “He brought up some seriously legitimate points. I just don’t know how we look into it without raising eyebrows or getting his tail up.”

“For the last time—it ain’t Mack,” Carey sighed. “I’m still tracking Sakurai. The guy’s a ghost.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a record of him entering the U.S. about a few days before the funeral, but we can’t find anything after that. He was flagged for overstaying his visa. It’s like he just vanished.”

Wes frowned as he swung open the door to his Jeep. “When did he arrive?”

“Couple days before Rob and Ry were killed.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” Carey confirmed.

“Any access to financial records?”

“No. Not from back then. You gotta remember, we were all on dial-ups and telnetting back then. Besides, he was based somewhere in Japan. Any records would be there. It’s like looking for a needle in a hundred-and-twenty-eight-million person haystack, and in another language, just to make it extra irritating.”

“We need to look at Mack,” Wes pressed.

“I’m telling you, that’s almost as offensive as you accusing my daddy of doing it,” Carey huffed.

“Then what’s your better idea?”

“We stay on Sakurai. It doesn’t make any sense that he could disappear like that.”

“I have contacts in Japan. I’ll get them looking,” Wes told him, thinking of a couple good journalist friends he knew who owed him some favors.

“And Wes?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay away from Mack. He knows Sammy’s mulling this over. If he sniffs any of this shit coming, even from a mile away, he’ll go to her so fast, we’ll both be in a world of hurt.”

*

April—Late Afternoon

Wyatt Ranch, Texas

S A M A N T H A

Grant stood stone-faced
in front of the glass case holding three generations worth of Navy medals: her granddaddy’s, his, Rob Wyatt’s, hers and Carey’s.

“You should have told me, Sammy,” he rumbled, his voice heavy with disappointment.

“I know it, Uncle Grant. I just…” she looked up at the exposed beams lining the library’s ceiling, looking for the right words. “I thought if I came to you with something solid, that would somehow make it easier.”

“Easier?” he scoffed. “I loved your daddy like a brother. Losing him and Ry was the single worst day of my life,” Grant told her, his voice flat as he stared at an old Polaroid of the two of them in their uniforms aboard the USS Midway, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, cocky young sailors grinning like foxes in a hen house.

“I know it was; I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark.” She took a quick breath. “Truly.”

“What else have you been keeping from me?” he asked, turning toward her. It hurt her to see him hurt and angry like this, when less than an hour ago they’d been laughing like they hadn’t in years.

“This is it,” she promised. “I swear it on Ry’s grave.”

“Does Carey know?”

Sam nodded once.

Grant made a sound of irritated disgust. “He went along with this cock-eyed plan?”

“Don’t you know, Uncle Grant? Bear goes along with all my cock-eyed plans.” She attempted a smile but he just shook his head, disgusted.

Grant went to the bar and poured himself a healthy glass of bourbon. “I’m gonna have words with that boy.”

“He didn’t want to do it, for what it’s worth,” she told her uncle. “He only went along with it because I asked him to.”

Alejandro knocked once before opening the double doors into the library, escorting Jack, Sandro, and Admiral Morrissey in before excusing himself and shutting the doors behind him. Unlike when Sam had seen him at the Pentagon a few months back, Morrissey wasn’t dressed in his Navy uniform this time. He wore slacks, a dress shirt, and a tweed blazer. He looked more like a college professor than a military adviser to the President.