Honeymoon To Die For (14 page)

She had parents who loved her. They would be devastated by losing her.

Ryder couldn’t hold that against her even if he did feel a deep envy he’d never experienced before.

But would he have a chance to negotiate her freedom with the kidnappers?

If this group had been sent to make a hit, Ryder and Bianca would have already drawn their last breaths. This was a professional team, which hopefully didn’t include bottom feeders who would take advantage of a female hostage. If one of them laid a hand on her, Ryder would make sure the pig regretted it in the most excruciating way.

Whoever sent this team wanted something. Ryder was ready to trade even if it meant Bianca was the only one who walked away alive. Boyd had died just because the Beast had wanted to get back at Ryder.

Ryder did not want another death on his conscience.

Bianca sniffled and the sound cut him worse than the knife he’d taken to the chest back when he’d marched toward danger by choice.

Mind in the game, Van Dyke.

He forced his mind off of Bianca so he could focus on using the skills that had saved his ass more than once in the military.

This bunch hadn’t handled him as roughly as they could have. The boot he’d taken in his side had been just sharp enough to shut him up. He’d gotten the message.

The chip embedded near his spine would bring in the FBI and Slye Temp.

If
this bunch didn’t know about the chip.

If they did, they’d carve up Ryder’s back just to get rid of it.

Noises and movement changed. The van slowed, turned sharply and moved along a...driveway? No, they were entering a building. Ryder heard the squeal of an overhead door being lowered.

He wanted to reassure Bianca, but speaking right now might end with a boot to his head. Getting knocked out, even for a short time, had to be avoided. He had to stay cognizant of time and surroundings for any hope of getting back to Bianca if they were separated and he managed to escape.

They were hustled out of the van and up stairs that had to be metal by the hollow echo of heavy footsteps rocking through the building. A set of hands on each side of Ryder guided him down a walkway then sideways, probably through a doorway. The door clicked shut behind him.

The air smelled old and dank.

His heart had picked up speed with every change, more so now because he didn’t know where Bianca was. He didn’t hear her. In fact, he’d already become accustomed to her scent, because he didn’t smell her anywhere nearby.

Someone cut the flexi-cuffs on his hands then ordered, “Sit.”

Feeling a chair shoved against the back of his legs, Ryder sat. The black bag came off next.

Sabrina and Slye Temp team members Josh Carrington and Margaux Duke stood with their arms crossed, staring down at him. Dingo Paddock’s wiry frame sat in the corner with his head dropped forward, as always, over a laptop open on his knees. Chopped blonde hair stuck out in all directions. He typed furiously.

Behind him, rectangular shadows from missing pictures covered the faded blue walls. The only other furniture Ryder could see was a wooden desk that looked too heavy and beat up to have been worth dragging away from the abandoned office.

He shook his head. “Are you out of your fucking minds?”

“No more than usual,” Josh answered in his cultured voice, but Ryder knew that Josh, Sabrina and Dingo had grown up on the streets of New York as miniature hoodlums. Then Josh had hit the adoption jackpot with a technology family.

“Where’s Bianca?” Ryder wanted to know before he’d listen to anything they had to say.

Sabrina answered, “Safe.”

“Terrified,” Ryder snapped, reaching up to unbutton his collar and jerk his necktie off. He stuffed it in the pocket of his suit, which needed serious cleaning since he’d drawn blood with at least one punch. But no one in here was bleeding. He passed a hard look at everyone in the room. “Is she hurt?”

He’d asked that in a quiet voice that promised pain if she had so much as a scratch on her, and he didn’t have time to figure out why the hell he cared so damn much. Bottom line was that he did. He wasn’t sure what this was all about, but Bianca didn’t belong in the middle of it.

Your fault, asshole.

True.

“She’s fine.”  Sabrina looked at her watch as she spoke. “Nick’s watching her so she doesn’t hurt herself trying to escape. Tanner is with the limo driver at another location until I give him the all-clear to vanish. We don’t have a lot of time.” She shifted her steel gaze back to Ryder. “The FBI will be swarming the area where we snatched you.”  

Dingo looked up at Ryder. “Now you feel better about my midnight surgery?”

“Not really.”  Ryder shuddered at the memory of Dingo showing up in Ryder’s bedroom at the strategic planning site two hours after the chip had been surgically inserted in his back his first day out of prison. Dingo had explained what he was doing and there was no time for any anesthetic. He’d cut the fucking wound open again—and deeper—to attach a tiny piggyback electronic on top of the FBI’s tracking chip.

Dingo had told Ryder if it came down to a choice between getting the information Murdock wanted and keeping Ryder alive, Sabrina wanted to insure Ryder’s survival.

“Just remember,” Dingo said, typing as he paused. “Try not to get slammed back against something hard. With the chips so close together, you might damage one or both of them. Disarming theirs will bring the feds down on your head and this mission will be over. Plus, they inserted it close to your spine for a reason.”

Ryder had no desire to cripple himself or cut this mission short. “Got it.”

Sabrina had the patience of a gnat and wasted no time moving ahead. “Dingo has overridden the transmitter in the chip in your back and is forwarding the signal around the area as if you’re moving, but he can’t do it for long without someone figuring out what’s going on.”

Ryder rubbed his wrists. “When they do, they can tell
me
what’s going on.”

“I don’t know who set you up, and after the CIA screwed my team two years back, I’m not willing to trust the life of one of my people to
any
alphabet agency. Murdock doesn’t care whether you live or die, and he would never allow you to be privy to everything on this mission, but I do and I will.”

Talk about a resounding vote of trust.

Ryder had wondered why Sabrina had supported him for the last five months, even arranging expert legal aid in spite of every piece of evidence stacked against him. He’d appreciated that, expecting to have her support pulled at some point, but Sabrina’s determination to help him and the show of the team’s backing left him without words when he should have said something.  

Sabrina said, “Everything still points to you having killed Kearn, which is
way
too easy and damned insulting. As if I’d hire anyone who killed for money and was too stupid to make that hit and get away clean.”

In a screwed up way, that was flattering, as opposed to Hubrecht’s similar comment that had sounded more like condemnation. But that still didn’t explain why Ryder was sitting here. “I know you didn’t grab me just to rant. What’s going on?”

Sabrina asked Dingo how he was doing. He nodded, so she turned back to Ryder. “Do you know that Nanci Tyler is the FBI agent Murdock assigned as Bianca’s contact?”

“Bianca hasn’t said a word, but then I’m not exactly on her FBI team. Is Nanci a friend of hers?”

Pacing in front of him, Sabrina continued. “No. Bianca has never met Nanci. Murdock wanted to use someone from Bianca’s unit as her contact until I convinced him he’d be taking a risk. That someone in her unit might talk to another FBI agent, because Bianca’s research team was very close. If this mission slipped out, you’d both get burned.”

“I’m still surprised Murdock didn’t balk.”

“He did until I told him our people were the ones who found the mole in the DEA task force in Miami last year. That got his attention. He finally agreed that it would be safer to find someone not connected to Bianca’s original team.” Sabrina nodded at the only other woman in the room as she spoke. “Margaux pulled a personal marker to get Nanci in place.”

Ryder had worked with Margaux Duke, aka “The Duke” on a couple of ops. Tall at five-foot-ten, and with legs a mile long under those black knit pants, she had dark auburn hair styled in a careless cut that slashed down against her black turtleneck and fell around an olive-skinned face with high cheeks. Blistering green eyes dared anyone to test her. She was tough and hot in a camo-Amazon kind of way. Ryder didn’t know her background, but then he didn’t know much about anyone else’s since he’d still been the FNG—the Fucking New Guy—when he was arrested.

He asked Margaux, “Were you with the FBI before coming to Slye?”

Leaning a hip on the desk, Margaux said, “No, but Nanci is my cousin. We grew up like sisters. I told her what was going on and that I needed someone to watch my back in this. She put in a request to change departments just before Murdock and Sabrina had their conversation. She was in the perfect place when he looked inside the agency for someone with no connection to any of Bianca’s team.”

“Nice move.”

Margaux accepted the compliment with a nod. “Nanci is loyal to the FBI and intends to do whatever Bianca or the agency needs, but when I told her what had happened to you and that you’re innocent, she agreed to help us as long as she believes we’re acting in the best interest of the FBI and this country.”

Sitting back with his arms crossed, Ryder asked, “She just accepts that I’m innocent?”  

“If I say so, yes. We’re that close.”

Considered innocent until proven guilty. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Ryder nodded. “I’m guessing Murdock doesn’t know you’re related?”

Margaux shook her head. “But then Murdock doesn’t know I exist.”

Sabrina cut in, telling Ryder, “So you need to make sure Bianca gives you any information passed from Nanci.”

“I’ll try my best, but we still have a few bumps to work out,” Ryder muttered.

“Then unbump them,” Sabrina ordered.

Josh shifted his stance, dropping his arms to hook his thumbs in the pockets of his black cargo pants. “We grabbed you for a couple of reasons. One was so we could tell you about Nanci and to bring you up to speed on new information we have. But you’ll have the added benefit of what this will do to Bianca.”

Ryder scowled. “Give her nightmares?”

“You’ll be there to soothe her, because the minute we’re done here, you get to play hero and escape with her. If you can avoid the FBI picking you both up.”

Josh had a point, because people bonded when thrown together in a stressful situation, but Ryder still didn’t like Bianca having to suffer through this. And the FBI probably hunted him as they spoke, but Ryder grunted his understanding rather than share his concerns about Bianca and bring all conversation to a screeching halt. The team would look at him as if he’d grown a third eye and he wouldn’t blame them.

In their shoes, he’d be wondering what kind of fool he was not to take advantage of Bianca when she was vulnerable.

“Talk faster, people,” Dingo ordered without looking up from his computer.

Sabrina moved them back on topic. “Like Josh said, there are other reasons for this meeting. Josh, tell him what we’ve learned about Czarion that we couldn’t discuss during the strategic planning.”  

Ryder asked, “Wasn’t Czarion the name Leanne Witherspoon gave Trish before Leanne died? Something to do with an artifact Trish was appraising for that reality TV show?” Talk about a nasty mess. That was the last mission Ryder worked with Josh and the team.

Leanne had been a mole in a Miami DEA task force. Everything went to shit for her when Josh and Ryder stopped a plan to take down an airliner with a laser device activated near Miami International Airport. Trish Jackson, Josh’s future wife, had been on that flight with a senator Leanne wanted dead. Pissed off, Leanne kidnapped Trish, who managed to wreck the car into one of the deep canals along Alligator Alley. Ryder and Josh showed up in time to shoot the gator that had Leanne in its jaws, but she’d died anyhow.

“Yep,” Josh confirmed. “We’d searched in every direction for intel on Czarion and found nothing. Trish was actually the one to put us on the right track.”

Ryder gave Josh a long look. “Speaking of Trish, you owe me for telling you what a fool you were for even thinking about not keeping her.”  Ryder paused. “Did you
ever
marry her?”

Josh sighed. “No.”

“You really are a dumbass.”

Josh flicked a look of impatience over at Sabrina. “He has to look roughed up before he leaves here. I call dibs.”

“Dream on,” Ryder countered.

Sabrina snarled, “Would you two
try
to get along—just long enough for us to do this? Josh and Trish haven’t married yet for a reason.”

Ryder frowned. “Why’s that?”

Sabrina arched an eyebrow at Josh that would be the equivalent of an executive order if she were president.

 “Fuck.” Josh looked over Ryder’s head when he answered. “Trish won’t get married until you’re free so you can be there.”

Dingo spoke up while still typing. “Trish was not the only one who wanted to wait, mate. True?”

Well, hell, if Ryder walked away from this with his freedom, he was going to find Trish and give her a big kiss. Right in front of Josh just to piss him off.

Arms crossed again, Josh demanded, “Can we get back to the mission?

Ryder conceded. “What did Trish find out about Czarion?”

Sabrina took over again, clearly in no mood for any more jawing. “Trish said she kept trying to figure out something from the night she was kidnapped. Leanne brought up the rare Amber Room panel Leanne had made available to the television show. Leanne told Trish that the panel was authentic, but not the one the Czarion were searching for. When Trish put feelers out for an Amber Room panel as if she had a buyer, she mentioned it to her brother Zane and he got testy.”

“Testy?” Josh asked, eyebrows shooting up. “Testy is mouthing off. Zane threatened to make Trish a widow before she said I do.”