Hard Landing (21 page)

He joined her in it, pulling her to him and growling his repletion. Her pleasure peaked and ebbed, and she spilled across his chest, utterly fulfilled and deeply content.

All this time, she'd had no idea what making love really meant. Until now.

A peaceful quiet fell over them, interrupted only by the sound of their breaths coming in tandem, slowing to a peaceful ebb and flow. Bronco stroked her hair with a tenderness that curled her toes. At last, she lifted her head and looked at him in the light coming from her bathroom.

"Is it always like that for you?" she heard herself ask, only to regret the question. She didn't want his mind going to other women he'd had sex with, not while holding her.

For an inordinately long time, he gazed back at her. "Actually, it's never been like that," he admitted on a gruff, uncertain note.

Her heart glowed at the confession, but did he have to sound so wary about it? It was obvious he had his doubts about being involved with his commander's estranged wife. Who wouldn't?

Kissing the corner of his mouth, she separated their bodies thinking he might want to get up as he had the last time. But, instead, he pulled her snugly against him. Wriggling closer, she settled her head comfortably on his shoulder and sighed. A huge yawn seized her. With a sense of completion unlike anything she'd ever experienced, she closed her eyes and promptly fell asleep.

* * *

Brant lurched awake, his heart hammering, a clammy sweat on his skin.

Just a dream,
he realized, lowering his head back down on the pillow and reorienting himself. Rebecca lay with an arm and a leg thrown over him. Her steady exhalations calmed his racing pulse.

Closing his eyes again, he pondered the realism of his dream. He and his teammates had been drilling close-quarters hostage rescue techniques in the sturdy outdoor structure they called The Pen. Brant had volunteered to play the hostage, while Tristan Halliday acted as one of the terrorists. Brant had been tied to a chair, a bandana secured over his eyes keeping him from seeing anything but shadows. Listening to Halliday pace before him, issuing mock threats, he awaited rescue.

Something metal rolled across the floor. A flashbang exploded, lighting the room with enough brilliance to penetrate his blindfold. Booted feet scurried toward him. Rubber bullets peppered the wall, and Halliday hit the floor with an oath. One of the rescuers bumped into Brant and whipped the blindfold off his face.

Even in the dark, he recognized Max's blunt features. What was the CO doing participating in the training? Before he even could answer his own question, the snout of a pistol gouged his temple. The soft
click-click
of a round being advanced into the chamber provided his only warning before the gun discharged and sprayed his brains across the wall next to him.

He'd startled awake at the unexpected violence. And now the gritty realism of the hallucination kept his heart beating unevenly. Max had fucking shot him in the head!

He peeked at the digital clock on the other side of Rebecca. Not yet zero five hundred hours. Common sense dictated that he forget the dream and try to fall back to sleep, but the condom he was still wearing was leaking. More than that, the dream seemed to be warning him to get up.

Brant had seen the chilling calculation in his CO's gray eyes several times already. Now that he was cognizant of what the man was up to in his spare time—killing for a price—he had to consider the possibility that he might become Max's next target.

Rebecca stirred. Smoothing a hand down her naked back, Brant memorized the texture of her skin. He kissed her temple, inhaling the scent of peppermint sticks and woman's musk one last time.

This is good-bye
, he realized, and his throat closed up with unexpected loss.

It wasn't as if he hadn't anticipated this moment. One way or another, he'd known he was going to have to bow out of her life. He just hadn't realized it would be this soon or this hard, but things had escalated between them at a record pace.

He eased out of the bed, taking pains not to wake her. Crossing to the bathroom, he shut the door and washed up with the lights off. Then he passed through her room on his way to her door, fighting not to glance in her direction. In the living area, he dressed in his cast-off clothing, jammed his feet into his tennis shoes, and retrieved her sketch of Tony.

Autumn-crisp air brought him more sharply awake as he peeked outside, half-expecting to see Max's Tahoe idling where it had been last night. A mockingbird twittered at the first suggestion of light to pearl the sky. Patting his pocket for his car keys, he took one last look back at Rebecca's apartment.

Regret held his heart in a painful vise. If he didn't like her so much, this wouldn't be so damn hard, but he did. He liked her more than he wanted to admit. And he needed to get to the bottom of this mystery before something awful happened to either one of them.

"Take care, Becca."

Locking the knob, he pulled the door firmly shut behind him. Then he headed for his truck, searching the shadows for any sign of Max.

Once inside of his Bronco, he fished his cell phone and his pistol out from under the seat. A portion of his confidence returned. He had Hack, Bullfrog, and Master Chief to help take on Max. It was good to know his teammates had his back, even if his own commander didn't.

Chapter 12

Bullfrog slipped into Brant's passenger seat, bearing a gym bag and a bagel slathered in cream cheese. He handed the bagel to Brant, shutting the truck door behind him.

"Oh, you read my mind." Brant accepted the offering and took a huge bite out of it. "Anyone follow you?" he asked around a mouthful. The area around the dojo had begun to attract its most dedicated patrons, even this early on a Saturday.

"No one." Bullfrog ran an assessing gaze over his rumpled attire. "You stayed with Rebecca all night?"

"Yep," Brant admitted, ignoring his friend's unspoken disapproval. Starting up his truck, he drove cautiously around the building, on the lookout for Max's Tahoe. Maybe it was his conscience dogging him, but he already felt as though he was wearing a big, fat bull's-eye on his back.

"Sure hope she was worth it," Bullfrog said, looking away.

Memories of the night before stirred in Brant like a bed of leaves under a soft wind. "Best night of my life," he admitted, hearing his own amazement.

His friend flicked a frown at him. "Hack says he'll meet us at Kuzinsky's at seven."

Grateful for Bullfrog's lack of commentary, Brant nodded and pointed his Bronco south. Leery of running into Max, who might have been staked out at his apartment, he had waited at the dojo for Bullfrog to join him. Now they had only ten minutes to get to Kuzinsky's new place, a fixer-upper situated in rural Pungo, ten minutes down the road.

They drove in silence, passing fewer and fewer buildings until nothing but flat farmland surrounded them. Brant found himself reconsidering his future. If he followed through with exposing Max's actions, he could probably kiss his career as a SEAL good-bye. Did he really want to go through with this?

Rebecca's sweet smile came to mind, and the answer was unquestionable:
For her? Yes.

Ten minutes later, they arrived at Kuzinsky's mailbox, situated at the start of a long dirt driveway. Brant swung down it, and a dilapidated farmhouse came into view. Granted, it was backdropped by a picturesque creek framed in marsh grass and cattails. Not a single building other than a newer detached garage stood within sight, just water snaking through the marsh, a lot of trees, and blue sky. But the old house was covered in clapboard that had weathered to a dull gray. Yellow caution tape ran the perimeter of the sagging front porch, and several of the windows were boarded up.

"What the hell?" Brant marveled.

Spying Hack's motorcycle parked at the rear of the house, he drew alongside it. As they stepped out of his truck, Kuzinsky poked his auburn head out of the back door and waved them both in.

The smells of bacon and coffee beckoned them into a warm kitchen. In spite of the home's rough exterior, the kitchen had undergone a full remodel, with handsome white cabinetry that complemented the shiny hardwood floors. Hack looked up from a long table where he sat in front of Max's laptop.

"Morning," he said, booting it up.

"Coffee?" Kuzinsky asked.

Brant and Bullfrog both said yes and pulled out seats. Kuzinsky brought them two steaming mugs as they all sat down.

He nodded at the equipment in front of Hack. "That's the CO's laptop?"

"Rebecca gave it to us," Brant explained. He drew a measured breath and let it out slowly, the way he did whenever he settled behind his Stoner SR-225. "She thinks Commander McDougal is up to something he shouldn't be."

As usual, Kuzinsky's expression gave nothing away. "What makes her think that?" he asked, taking a sip from his mug.

"She saw something she wasn't supposed to see," Brant continued, "a foreign account in Max's name with fifty thousand dollars in it. He told her it was the task unit's money. Prior to that, according to her, they had maxed out their home equity line and were in danger of foreclosure. Next thing she knew, the loan was paid in full. She asked Max where the money had come from, and he said some great uncle had died, leaving him an inheritance."

Kuzinsky's freckled face could have been set in stone. He took another slow sip of his coffee. "Go on," he said.

Brant gestured to Hack. "I figured Hack could find out more if he had the CO's laptop, which was in the shop because it caught a virus."

"A boot-sector virus, actually," Hack inserted, "which kept it from turning on. But I was able to boot to a CD in a pre-executable environment, which gained me access to the hard drive. Using specialized tools, I removed the virus and took a look into his user profile."

A tense silence fell over the table as Hack prepared to share what he'd found.

"For a period of three months last spring, the CO visited a black market website called Silk Road. He also logged in to a Swiss financial firm called Emile Victor DuPonte. On the surface, it looks like a regular institution, but the Swiss government doesn't recognize it, which means it has some shady investors."

"Did you get his login information?" Kuzinsky asked.

"As a matter of fact, I did. But the account is gone. He must have closed it after he realized that his wife saw it. Maybe he opened a new one with the same company. Who knows?"

"There's more," Brant warned, reclaiming the master chief's attention. "A couple weeks back, Rebecca came home from work and Max was tossing some guy out of the house. Speaking with a New York City accent, he introduced himself as Tony." He turned over the sketch he had laid face-side down on the table and slid it toward the master chief. "This is what he looks like."

Kuzinsky's russet eyebrows came together. "Who drew this?"

"She did. It's good, right? Around that same time, she found out Max was using her old post office box. She got into it herself and found this." He handed Kuzinsky his copy of the newspaper article mentioning the mob-related assassinations. "I re-sent the original in an identical envelope in the hopes that Max would never know the difference. Go ahead." He nodded at Kuzinsky. "Read it."

The coffee machine dripped quietly in the background as Kuzinsky waded through the article. At last, he looked up, his dark eyes as inscrutable as ever. "What are you getting at?" he demanded.

"We think the CO's working for the mob," Brant stated. Even to his own ears, it sounded ludicrous.

"Oh, come on," the master chief scoffed.

Brant looked over at Hack. "Show him what you found on Silk Road," he invited.

Hack turned the screen toward their leader. "This is what the website looks like. Trust me, it's not easy to find. Only way in is through a pseudo domain." He displayed a handsome website with a black background and blood-red font. "On April 1, the CO responded to an anonymous advertisement posted by—and I quote—'a powerful family seeking a security expert for all their security needs.' He even submitted his resume, which he deleted but I found in his recycle bin." He expanded a minimized document and let Kuzinsky take a look.

A crease bisected Kuzinsky's freckled forehead. "He listed his sniper qualifications. Why would he do that?"

"Think about it," Brant answered for Hack. "What kinds of security issues do mobsters have?" He waited a beat and answered his own question. "They wanted someone who could eliminate their problems—an assassin, basically." He stretched out a hand and tapped the copy of the news article. "I think he's the sniper working for the Scarpa family. The timeline matches up perfectly. He applied for the position in April. The two murders described here took place in May and July. Both men were shot in the head at a distance of half a mile from the vantage of a boat. We all know Max owns a boat."