Live Wire (40 page)

She nodded again.

It was bad enough her nerves were back enough that she had begun throwing up again. She hadn’t done that since the night before the operation to reveal the identity of Sorrel. The night before she had killed him.

“Come on, baby.” Catching her fingers, he moved for the door. “Let’s get this done.”

*   *   *

Letting her go was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. Jordan watched as the team surrounded Tehya and rushed her from the back entrance of the hotel to the limo the senator had sent to collect her.

He couldn’t forget the look in her eyes. The fear had been so deep, so dark, he’d wanted nothing but to give her exactly what she wanted. To find a way to bring her with him.

Bringing her with him would have compromised the entire plan. They needed her safe, but they also needed her escape witnessed by the man Jordan was currently watching as well.

He’d figured the men that had come inside weren’t alone.

“Lilly called as they were hitting the doors,” Noah said as they watched the black Suburban from the cargo van they’d driven to the surveillance position. “She said Tehya was crying.”

“Enough.” The order was short, but not as icy as it could have been, because the thought of her crying affected him in ways he didn’t want to look too deeply into.

“She’s a friend,” Micah spoke from behind him. “Having her safe and secure is all well and good, but leaving her without a future because her heart was ripped out wasn’t in the plan when you told us what was going on.”

Jordan could feel his teeth gritting as he turned to Nik where he sat in the driver’s seat. “Where’s your two cents?”

Nik’s expression didn’t change as he continued to watch the other vehicle and the driver in it. “Inflation sucks,” he drawled. “The price is a buck fifty now.”

Trust Nik to be the smart-ass in the group.

Propping his arm on the side of the door, Jordan rubbed the skin above his upper lip thoughtfully.

“Have you managed to ID him yet?” he finally asked the others. It was better to change the subject rather than continuing the course of the subject of Tehya.

“I have him,” Noah said. “Another of those damned Sorrel soldiers turned mercenaries after his death. Wayne Trevits, former MI-6 agent discharged for theft and attempted sale of military weapons. He was sentenced to life in prison, but escaped after a year. He was with Sorrel for ten years before the op that took Sorrel out. It looks like Sorrel’s boys have decided to go after a little vengeance.”

That was definitely what it looked like, Jordan admitted.

It had all the signs of a group of Sorrel’s former employees banding together to make Tehya pay for his death. Everything they had found led them in that direction.

“Maid’s in the room,” Micah announced, obviously watching the laptop displaying the room. “Ahh, there she is. Little old lady with gray hair and big brown eyes,” he grunted. “And she’s not moving to let them go.”

Jordan waited.

“Ah, there she goes. She just pulled the radio from her pocket. She’s calling security.”

Jordan was prepared for that. He’d checked the staff out while they were there and reread the files once the plan was in place, to see who would be walking in on the little party Jordan had arranged.

He hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt, but he’d been certain this maid would choose the option of calling security versus releasing them on their own.

“And we now have two little weak-kneed security guards entering. They’ll make mincemeat out of them.”

It took only minutes.

“Yep, they’re both down,” Micah sighed. “They’re alive, though.”

“They’re aware of the cameras in the hall outside the room,” Jordan stated. “There’s too great a chance of being identified.”

“They’re headed downstairs.”

Jordan and his men moved.

Exiting the back of the van, covert mode intact, Jordan, Nik, Micah, and Noah moved to the appropriate, nondescript vehicles waiting in the parking lot.

Sliding into the Ford sedan, Jordan watched from above the rim of his dark sunglasses as the two men slipped from the same exit Tehya had used and moved quickly to the waiting SUV.

The assassins looked a little worse for wear, but satisfied. They thought they had achieved their objective. His would-be killers believed he was dead, and Tehya defended only by his men.

Evidently they weren’t convinced of the danger posed by the men they would be facing. To this point, Jordan and his men had been playing, sitting back and letting Tehya’s enemies hang themselves. Now, he thought he might help them just a bit with the rope.

The bastards had terrified her, and they had been aware of it. They had known what it would do to her. The plan would have been to take her while she was shell-shocked, while the realization of Jordan’s death was still fresh in her mind.

She would have been more controllable and much easier to intimidate.

That would have been the plan. Unfortunately for them, it wouldn’t have worked so easily for them. He knew Tehya; and even more, he knew Tehya under pressure. His death would have destroyed her, but later. That shock they wanted so desperately would have been what had saved her life, and would have ended theirs.

As the SUV pulled from the parking lot, Jordan turned the receiver on in the sedan and smiled at the movement of the little dot indicating the tracker they had activated. The other assassin’s bug hadn’t yet been activated. He was the backup. The safeguard. Just in case.

There was a reason he had plans A, B, C, and D, with E, F, and G just in case. Sometimes, there were just too many bases to cover. And Jordan liked having all the angles worked out.

Work out the angles and you don’t just protect yourself and your men, but you also protect the woman you had never been able to get out of your head and your heart.

He’d met Tehya eight years before, the night she had killed her father. From the moment he’d looked into those shattered, emerald green eyes, he’d wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and protect her from the world.

Unfortunately, it was too late to protect her by then. The world had already scarred her. Sorrel had already taught her to react first and grieve later.

And she would have grieved for him, he knew.

His men would have surrounded her long enough to attempt to convince her to hide, because it was what he wanted. She wouldn’t have hid.

As he and Micah traded positions and the other men moved in behind the SUV in another vehicle, Jordan concentrated on the area around them. He made certain no one was following them as they followed their attempted assassins.

They traded places several more times before Jordan pulled into a parking lot across from a storage rental facility housed in an old factory. The units, Jordan knew, were temperature controlled, roomy, and free of those pesky surveillance cameras that turned most criminals off.

Slipping from the car, he joined Micah and Nik, and Noah gave them a quick nod toward the warehouse. Using the available delivery vans, trucks, and occasional stacks of varied covered prepared shipments for cover, they moved into the warehouse following the beacon the tracker was giving off.

Minutes later, they eased in as close as possible, coming in together, weapons drawn as they moved in to watch the meeting.

The three men were waiting outside one of the rental rooms, heads down, leaning against the wall as shadows moved in the well-lit unit they were guarding.

They were talking, their voices too low to hear, and the satisfied demeanors of earlier had been dropped. They looked nervous and if he wasn’t mistaken, quite possibly scared as well.

He’d read the dossiers on these men, and he wouldn’t have believed anything could make them nervous, let alone have them looking like three teenagers preparing to face a disciplinarian.

As they waited silently, the shadows in the rental unit began to slow, and long minutes later another man stepped into view.

Gregor Ascarti.

Dressed in his trademark silk suit, his blond hair perfectly combed back, but with a limp Jordan didn’t remember from that last operation against Sorrel that had reportedly taken Ascarti out as well.

Gregor Ascarti had been Sorrel’s right-hand man after his son. He had been the logistical expert who had been damned near impossible to defeat.

And now he was back.

Somehow, the bastard had managed to not just survive, but apparently to live and thrive for the past eight years completely under the radar.

He moved slowly, the limp obviously hindering his movements, as Mark Tenneyson and Ira Arthurs, the mercenaries who had been watching the Taites, exited the rental unit behind him. Ascarti stopped directly in front of John Frackle.

Before anyone could guess what he would do, his hand came back and a strong, heavy blow was delivered against the other man’s face. Frackle was flung back against the wall, but surprisingly, considering his reputation, he didn’t attempt to strike back.

Jordan saw the struggle in Frackle’s face though, the tightening of his fingers as he made an effort not to make a fist.

Jordan strained to hear the conversation, but all he heard were angry murmurs. The combination of their automatic habit of keeping their voices low and the distance from the other men made the conversation impossible to decipher.

One thing was certain, though: Ascarti wasn’t pleased. The fact that the men hadn’t arrived with Tehya was likely the reason for Ascarti’s displeasure.

Hell, he wished he could get fucking closer. If he could just hear what they were planning.

He wasn’t aware how tense he was, how closely he was checking out the surrounding cover, until he felt Noah’s hand on his shoulder in warning.

A tight grimace pulled at his face as he gave a quick nod, an affirmation that he understood the grip.

As Jordan continued to watch, Ascarti moved closer to Frackle, almost nose to nose, his finger poking in the other man’s chest, though his voice never rose.

That was a conversation Jordan would give damned near anything to hear at this point. Though he was fairly certain he knew the gist of it.

They had returned without Tehya, and Ascarti wanted Tehya.

As Jordan had thought earlier, it had all the earmarks of a revenge strike.

But as he watched, eyes narrowed, events sifting through his mind, he couldn’t help but suspect there was something more going on than simple revenge.

These men weren’t having a love affair with Sorrel’s memory. If Tehya happened to have dropped in their paths, then they would have struck out at her. But to still be searching for her after her disappearance?

It didn’t make sense.

Suddenly, Ascarti moved again, the hand holding his weapon moving, the metal smacking into Frackle’s face and knocking him to the ground. In the next breath Ascarti had his gun beneath Fillipini’s chin, pushing it high and tight.

“Fucking stupid…” His accent was thick and dark with fury, the violence in his tone causing Jordan’s brows to lift.

The voice lowered just enough now that only the tone could be heard.

Ascarti stepped back, watching as Frackle came slowly back to his feet, stumbling slightly as he braced himself against the wall.

“Imbecile. The next time, you … will…” The threat was clear as the muzzle of the weapon went beneath Frackle’s jaw, lifting it as Ascarti leaned closer to finish the sentence.

With a final slap against the side of the other man’s face, Ascarti stepped back, straightened his silk jacket, then turned around to face the mercenaries behind him.

The dim fluorescent lights above hit his face at just the right angle, giving Jordan a first, clear look at the other man’s face.

His brows lifted.

The left side of Gregor Ascarti’s face was horrendously disfigured. Scars marred the entire side of his face, twisting around his eye, giving his profile a grotesque appearance.

Jordan slipped farther back into the shadows as the Italian former smuggler moved with far less grace than he had in Aruba.

There was a limp to his right leg, an odd angle in the shape of his left hand as he walked away. Frackle and Fillipini followed him as Tenneyson and Arthur locked up and reset the alarm to the unit before moving quickly to catch up with the others.

The explosion that had targeted Ascarti had apparently not done enough damage. He was clearly as organized and just as dangerous as he had been while Sorrel was still alive.

Giving Micah a careful hand signal, he sent the other man, along with Noah, to make certain Ascarti and his mercenaries were out of the unit.

It took long minutes for the rental storage facility to become deserted except for Jordan and Nik, allowing them a chance to slip from the shadowed area where the team had hidden.

Slipping a small leather case from the pack he carried on his back, Jordan quickly picked the heavy lock one of the Ascarti’s mercenaries had secured before leaving, while Nik worked to disable the security inside.

It was apparent that Ascarti had no reason to suspect that Frackle and his partner had led Jordan and his team straight to them. Of course, why should he; they believed Jordan was dead.

As the heavy lock released, Jordan slid it free before slowly easing the door open, sliding the penlight from his pocket and stepping inside.

“Well, well, well,” he muttered as he surveyed the contents of the unit before turning back to Nik, who had positioned himself protectively at the entrance.

The other man’s pale, icy blue eyes narrowed as his expression tightened in lines of savage fury.

“What does the bastard have planned?” Nik muttered as they each surveyed the array of hidden weapons, ammunition, and surprise, surprise, several dozen handheld rocket launchers.

“I’d have sworn Sorrel was dead,” Nik continued. “But this…” He shook his head slowly as he allowed his gaze to catalog each item there. “God, Jordan, this fucking makes me wonder.”

“DEA would have a field day over this,” Jordan murmured as he moved to several covered boxes, lifted a crowbar from one, and quietly eased open the lid.

The Russian-made automatic weapons weren’t nearly as interesting as the weapons packed away, though.