The Shaughnessey Accord (5 page)

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Authors: Alison Kent

BOOK: The Shaughnessey Accord
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He didn't answer. Instead, he backed his way across the concrete floor, his gaze trained on the door until he reached the corner and the built-in, fireproof safety cabinet holding her safe, her files, and her security system's equipment.
She watched, mouth agape, as he twirled the dial on the cabinet's combination lock and opened the door. She was done standing still. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Shit. Your camera's down."

"What?" What the hell was going on here? "Look,
Shaughnessey
. You don't tell me how the hell you know my combination, not to mention where my monitor is . . ." She peered around his shoulder at the small television on top of the VCR recording the store camera's data.

He was wrong. The camera wasn't down. She could see movement in one corner. The rest of the lens had been blacked out by spray paint judging by the speckles peppering the missed spot. "I'm calling the cops."
"No," Tripp barked, but she'd already backed away and lifted the handset from the phone on the wall.

"It's dead." She held it out, away from her ear, wondering if the second line in the shop was still working.

Tripp nodded but kept his attention on the coaxial cable running into the back of the TV.
She hung up the useless phone, told herself she was in good hands, that she could trust him, even while a tiny voice reminded her that she didn't know him well enough to jump to that conclusion.
The things he was doing, the knife he'd pulled from his pocket, the fact that he was cutting into the cable . . .
She crossed the room, grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the knife, the hand he'd used to make her come, and stared him in the eye. "You tell me what's going on and tell me now or so help me—"
"What? So help you what? You'll run out the door into who knows what?" He pulled back the cable's black covering, shredded what looked like a coating of woven fabric around the core copper wire. "Stay put. That's all I'm asking."
She didn't want to do anything he said, not when he'd suddenly clammed up. Not when everything he was doing was as underhanded and sneaky—if not downright illegal—as anything that would bring out cops with bullhorns.

But staying put was what she ended up doing because she had no better idea. She looked on as Tripp twisted a short strip of the shredded fabric and tapped it against the copper. Three short taps, three long, three short.

An obvious SOS.
"Are you trying to signal the security company?"
And why, with the police already outside?
"I don't pay for twenty-four/seven monitoring. No one is going to hear that."
"They're not supposed to hear it."
Glory rubbed a hand to her tense forehead. This was getting worse by the second. "What, then? See it? How can they seek?"
"It's not your security service I'm trying to reach." He glanced sharply from the static on the blacked-out feed to the door, his brows drawn down into a deep V. "Can you take over? Three short, three long—"
"Three short.
My degree might be in business, but I did learn your basic SOS."
"Good girl," he said.
She wanted to snap and growl at his use of "girl" but, quite frankly, she was too damned worried. Flat-out scared, if the truth be known, taking the cable from his hands.
Scared and suddenly longing for one of the safe-and-so-what-if-he's-boring dates of her parents' choosing. She wanted to be anywhere but here with this obviously dangerous man who turned her on, burned her up,
then
betrayed her by breaking into her not-so-secure security system.
She tapped the twisted fabric to the wire, felt a strange metallic tang in her teeth, wondered who the hell it was she was signaling.
And, at the same time, sending out vibes to her mother's First Presbyterian prayer circle that she wasn't shorting out her only route of escape.

Sweat ran between Tripp's shoulder blades and pooled at the base of his spine. He'd been in such a hurry to get to Glory that he'd left his cell on his desk charging. Meaning, having it with him wouldn't have done him a fat lot of good anyway seeing as how it was dead.

He needed to reach the ops center, let Christian or Kelly John know something was going down. One of them ought to get hungry enough soon to realize he hadn't returned. Logic told him they'd check his monitor showing the Brighton feed, see the SOS static, and realize he had a situation here on his hands.
He trusted his partners to get him and Glory out. He trusted the cops out front to bungle whatever it was they were doing.
Nothing particular against New York City's finest.
His beef was with authority figures in general, letting power go to their heads, twisting the law to suit their purpose, lifting themselves above.
Sorta
the way things had gone down in Colombia, leaving him facing the short stick of a court-martial for desertion—a way-the-hell-better scenario than sticking around to face certain death after blowing the whistle on the drug deals his superiors had been making in the name of the law.
With Glory looking on, not looking happy about what he'd asked her to do but at least looking like she wouldn't give up, he twisted the lock on the door as quietly as he could. Next, he turned the handle, cracked the door open and braced the bulk of his body for an inward attack.
Nothing.
His knife at the ready, he moved his head far enough to peer with one eye through the sliver of an opening, seeing nothing but the brown-and-yellow textured wallpaper and the edge of one of the shop's signature black-framed prints.
A centimeter wider, and this time the glimpse of black he caught belonged to what looked like the sleeve of a jacket. He shifted to his other eye, got nothing but the same perspective, and so cracked the door open further.

This time it was enough. He heard snuffling and whimpering and then an indistinctive voice—no accent, no inflection— calmly say, "Our friends outside are not going to deter me, Professor. I plan to be gone before they begin their textbook driven negotiation process to secure the safe release of our hostages."

Hostages! Shit!
"I would be more than happy to oblige"—this from a second, distinctly cultured voice—"if I had
an inkling
as to what you were talking about."
Tripp couldn't identify the players. The voices were unfamiliar. He had no clue as to what was happening. He only knew that he had to stop whatever it was.
The black sleeve shifted enough for him to see a slice of a head in a black ski mask.
Again, no way to identify who or what he was up against without getting closer.
He pushed the door closed without a sound, backed his way across the room to where Glory stood.
She stared at him, eyes wide and liquid though she hadn't shed a tear. She still held the cable he'd handed her, though at some point she'd stopped tapping out the SOS. It was good enough. One of his partners would eventually notice the problem with the Brighton feed.
Once they rewound the tape to find out when what had gone down, they'd devise a rescue plan in a hurry. But he couldn't wait around for any of that to happen. He wanted Glory safely out of here now.
Even if he had to rely solely on himself.
He took the cable from her hands, moved her to the same spot she'd stood in before, before when he'd kissed her, when he'd made her come with his hand. "I want you out of sight in case anyone comes charging through the door."
"You want me to stay put, you mean."
"If something happens to you, I'll never forgive myself for not gorging on dessert when I had the chance."
She blinked hard to keep away the tears. "You are so not funny,
Shaughnessey
."
"No, but you're crazy about me anyway."

"Don't count on it."

"I've been counting on it for weeks already," he said with a wink. And then he sobered. "I need to find out what's happening. I don't want to put you in more danger than you already are, but I have to do this."
"Do what?" she pleaded in a whisper. "Why don't you just let the police handle it? I think we're safe. No one knows we're here."
"It won't take
them
five seconds to find out. I'd like to know who we're dealing with here should that happen."
"We're
not dealing with anyone, Tripp. Please let the police handle it. This is what they're trained to do."
What was he going to tell her? That he didn't trust the police? That he was better trained than the good guys on the bullhorn but he wouldn't know about the bad guys until he took a closer look?
He finally asked her to simply, "Trust me? I'm not going to do anything stupid."

She gave him a look in return that said she wouldn't trust him half as far as Gary Sheffield could throw a baseball. So he held her fingers in his, brought them to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. Then he gave her a grin meant to tell her to leave all the worry to him.

He took his time cracking the door open again. The sleeve and ski mask obviously belonged to a lookout. The shop's back hallway was only accessible by those already in the shop or those using the alley's door. Meaning, whoever was making demands inside wanted new arrivals kept out and everyone else kept in place.
He took a deep breath, not sure if he was tamping down or revving up the adrenaline, nodded at Glory, and that was it. He pulled open the door. One long step into the hallway. A hand clamped over the guard's mouth. Pressure applied to a point just below his carotid.
The man was dead to the world from the choke hold before he even knew what hit him.
And deader than deadweight as Tripp dragged him into the storeroom.
Glory eased the door closed behind them. No more than a few seconds had passed. No real noise made. Tripp planted a knee in the small of the man's back.

He didn't bother with the ski mask yet but emptied all the pockets, finding the two things he'd most wanted to find.
A 9mm Beretta and a cell phone.

He tucked the gun into his waistband, punched a number into the phone that no government agency would ever be able to trace, and once connected said, "
Shaughnessey
."
Several minutes later, a computerized voice replied, "Thank you," signaling that his location had been made.
Five
Once the biometric sensor read the scan of Julian
Samms's
thumbprint, the ops center's door slid open. He stepped out of the safety vestibule and into the cavernous room, the hub of SG-5's activities.
Christian and Kelly John both looked up. One nodded. One lifted a hand in greeting. Tripp wasn't anywhere to be seen. Eli McKenzie, the fifth member of the original team, had recently returned to the field in Mexico, having recovered from a nasty—and suspicious—poisoning.
"Where's
Shaughnessey
?" Julian asked, heading for his own desk to download the files he'd need in Miami where he was headed later today.
Ostensibly to save a woman's life.
What he'd learned about her made him more ambivalent than was wise when prepping for a mission. But this one had tied herself to Spectra IT willingly, and he didn't have a lot of sympathy for anyone that dumb.

K.J. pushed away from his desk, swiveled his chair toward Tripp's corner of the workstation, and frowned. "He went for lunch. Like thirty minutes ago."

Typing his security code into the system, Julian snorted. "He
go
back to Philly for
cheesesteaks
, or what?"
This time it was Christian who pushed out of his chair. "He went to Brighton's. Check the feed. See if he's still over there messing with Glory. He did say something about taking his time."
The three Smithson operatives gathered in front of Tripp's desk, K.J. finally settling into the chair when it became clear that the camera broadcasting from Brighton's was broadcasting nothing but snow.
Julian and Christian watched as Kelly John checked the input and output connections, finding nothing wrong with the equipment, and queued the last thirty minutes of recorded feed to play.

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