Navy SEAL Survival (11 page)

“Kylie. Could I come in?”

“Just a minute. I was about to get into the shower.”

“I'm sorry to disturb you. I just...just...”

“Hold on.” Natalie shoved Duff's clothes at him and pushed him into the bathroom. As soon as she had the door closed, and her blue dress pulled over her body, she opened the door, shoving her hand through her tousled hair.

One glance at the girl's face and she held open her arms. “What's wrong, Kylie?”

“I couldn't sleep. The others don't know I left the room. I can't help it. I can't stop thinking about Melody.”

Neither could Natalie and guilt wrapped around her heart. She'd been making love to a sexy man while her sister was being held in some godforsaken hell. Natalie hugged the girl to her chest, wishing she were Melody. Tears welled in her eyes. She blinked them back and vowed to work harder and smarter to come up with a plan to find and free her sister.

Kylie sniffed and looked up at Natalie. “Do you mind if I stay with you tonight? I don't know why, but I feel closer to Melody with you.”

With a man in her bathroom, Natalie had to think fast. “You bet you can stay with me. But you'll need your own things. I'll walk you back to the others and let you gather what you'll need for the night.” Natalie scooped her key card off the floor beside the door and followed Kylie out into the hallway.

By the time she and Kylie had returned to the room, Duff had cleared out, taking his clothes.

Though disappointed the night had ended the way it had, Natalie knew it was for the best. While Kylie ducked into the shower, Natalie inserted the earbud into her ear.

“About time you tuned in,” Lance said.

“Sorry. I didn't take the communications equipment into the bar earlier. It's hard enough for me to think with all that's going on. I didn't need a man in my head talking to me.”

“Understood,” he said. “What have you got?”

She passed on the information about Rolf Schwimmer and the man she'd followed. “The man I followed might be a dead end, but I have to follow every lead.”

“I'll check him out. You're right to suspect him if he was dancing with one of your sister's friends one minute and making a secret assignation the next. I'll let you know what I find.”

“And you'll look into Rolf Schwimmer?”

“I'll run facial recognition software on the image I've pulled from the security cameras. I'll also run a background check on your secret lovers. Hopefully, I'll have something for you in the morning.”

“Do you ever sleep?”

“Only when I don't have a case to help solve.”

“Thanks, Lance,” Natalie said. “You don't know how much it means to me to have your help on this case.”

“If it were my sister, I'd want all the help I could get.”

The shower shut off in the bathroom.

“Gotta go,” Natalie whispered and turned off the headset, stashing it beneath her pillow.

A moment later Kylie entered the room, fresh-faced, with a towel wrapped around her head.

Not exactly the roommate Natalie would have preferred, but the right one to keep her on track.

* * *

D
UFF
LEFT
THE
hotel in search of his friends. He found them in Sawyer's bungalow, their voices a low murmur from outside the door. He knocked once and entered.

“Thought you were staying in the hotel tonight?” Sawyer slapped a cold beer into his hand and nodded toward an empty seat.

His body still humming from his encounter with Natalie, Duff popped the top off the bottle and downed half of the cool liquid before answering. “I am. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. If the women decide to go on an excursion tomorrow, we need to tag along to make sure they're okay.”

Sawyer frowned. “What excursion?”

“Chichén Itzá. A Mayan ruin an hour away.”

Quentin shook his head. “I thought we were here to enjoy the sun and sand. Not to go traipsing in the jungle. Been there, done that, could write the book.”

“We might not need all of us, if Quentin wants to stay back and ogle bikini-clad women on the beach.” Duff shot a glance at the other two members of his team. “What do you say?”

“I'm in,” Sawyer said. “I wanted to see the ruins anyway.”

“Count me in,” Montana agreed. “This trip is getting more interesting by the second.”

Quentin sighed. “I bet there won't be any bikinis at the ruins.”

“Nope.” Duff grinned. “But you'll go anyway, right?”

He nodded. “I'll go.”

“We'll play it by ear in the morning. Natalie's sister's friends are only here for another day, they might decide to stay and hang out at the resort, given all that's happened.”

Quentin brightened. “We can always hope. They were pretty cute in their bikinis.”

“Rein it in, Romeo,” Sawyer said. “They're on the young side for us.”

“Each one of them is at least twenty-one, or pretty darned close, legal and single. That's only seven or eight years difference in age.”

Sawyer frowned.

Quentin raised his hands, palms upward. “What?”

“They're still in college. Don't charm them into quitting.” Sawyer nodded toward Duff. “We've got your six on this mission, Duff.”

“Thanks. I'll be in the hotel should you need me.”

“Yeah, closer to the women,” Quentin grumbled.

“To sleep.” Duff left the bungalow and glanced both ways along the path. A man stood outside a building near the beach, stretching his arms above his head. Since Duff had been there, he hadn't seen anyone coming or going from that particular bungalow. He turned toward the hotel and strolled along the path, glancing over his shoulder, keeping an eye on the stretching man. When the guy stepped back into the bungalow, Duff circled back. Moving silently, relying on his SEAL training, he worked his way back to the bungalow where the man had stepped inside.

In a resort environment, he found it hard to see the enemy in every person he met. Most of his targets had been pretty obvious. Here, anyone could be stalking young women. Human trafficking was a high-dollar business.

The guy he saw stretching could be the ringleader, or he could be a guy on his honeymoon, stretching after an active romp in bed with his new wife.

Duff eased up to the window of the bungalow. Only a sliver of light made it past the drawn shades. He could see the shadow of a figure moving around inside, but not much else. He circled the building to one of the other windows and found a little more of a sliver of light. Through it he noticed the bright glare of a screen. Not the blinking lights of a television screen playing different scenes. More the light of a computer monitor or a couple of monitors.

After studying the bit of an image he could see through the window, he concluded only one figure moved around. So he wasn't on his honeymoon. Perhaps he was a businessman, working remotely through a high-speed internet connection. That alone didn't make him a candidate for kidnapping.

Duff straightened, feeling a little foolish for suspecting every man he saw at the resort. For all they knew the culprit was a local making a quick buck selling females to a foreign market. Cancun was bigger than the resorts. On the other side of the resorts compound was an uglier reality of living where drug lords ran the government and the citizens answered to them. Hell, even at the resort, they were subject to the underpinnings of a corrupt government.

After leaving the bungalow, Duff stepped back onto the path, passing his bungalow and the one his friends were still inside, drinking beer and talking about women.

Duff passed the bungalow Natalie had been spying on earlier. A light still burned inside and he could hear voices. He walked on, refusing to look in another window. If the security patrol at the resort caught him, they'd throw him in jail. His commander would be livid, wanting to know what the hell he was doing.

With young women's lives on the line, he couldn't blame Natalie for following every lead. It just seemed as though they were taking shots in the dark. They needed some good, solid evidence or clues to lead them to the right party responsible.

Duff returned to the room beside Natalie's, showered and fell into bed. On the other side of the wall lay a woman who'd made him give up a perfectly good vacation to go chasing after clues that could either lead to nothing or to a huge can of worms with international implications.

And he'd come to Cancun for some much-needed rest and relaxation. He snorted in the dark. Why was it trouble found the Navy SEALs whether they were looking for it or not?

Which begged the question, why had he let himself get involved?

Hell, he couldn't picture it any other way. Natalie needed their help to find her sister and to keep her friends safe from whomever it was kidnapping young women. He couldn't ignore them.

Duff closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. That itch he got prior to a mission made him restless. But like any other mission, he knew a well-rested body was his best defense. As he drifted to sleep, he dreamed of Natalie lying naked on the altar of a Mayan ruin. A faceless enemy dressed in ancient Mayan ceremonial garb raised a machete over her, ready to sacrifice her to a pagan god.

Duff woke with a start, shook himself, turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but he couldn't get that image out of his mind. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't sleep.

In his gut he knew something was going to happen today, and it wasn't going to be a tour-guided picnic.

Chapter Ten

Natalie woke early the next morning. She'd been dreaming about Duff, lying naked with him in the sand, waves washing up over their bodies as they made love. The vibration of her cell phone on the nightstand beside her bed pulled her from the most glorious dream.

Natalie reached for the annoying sound and glanced at the screen. It was a text message from Lance:
Got info on R and kissers, come see.

Natalie was awake immediately. She sat up and glanced across to where Kylie slept, her hand tucked beneath her cheek.

Dressing quickly, she plugged her headset into her ear and wrote a note to Kylie, saying she'd gone out for a run on the beach. The sun had yet to make its appearance, but the predawn gray light chasing the night away would make it easy to find her way to Lance's bungalow.

Dressed in shorts, a tank top and sneakers, she looked like any health-conscious runner out for a morning jog before the sun rose and heated the air.

Once outside the hotel, she jogged down the path that meandered through the bungalows until she reached Lance's. She stopped and pretended to tie her shoe, glancing around for signs of anyone watching. When she'd determined she was alone, she stepped up to the door. Lance opened it and waved her inside.

“What did you find?” she asked as soon as the door clicked closed.

“Well, actually, it's what I didn't find that had me wondering.”

“Show me.”

Lance sat at the computer and ran his fingers across the keyboard, then clicked the mouse, bringing up a passport image of the man Natalie followed to the bungalow the previous evening.

“Kissing guy is Frank ‘Sly' Jones, former army ranger, now working in DC as a security consultant.” He flipped to an image of a woman dressed in a skirt suit. “His girlfriend registered under the name Cassandra Teirney, real estate agent, also from DC.”

“Why was Sly dancing with one of our girls when he had a lover back in the bungalow?”

Lance shrugged. “Might be a player.” He clicked the mouse and nodded toward the screen. “I'm more concerned about Rolf.”

“Why?” Natalie leaned over his shoulder and stared at the monitor.

“I searched the hotel database for our friend Rolf and found Rolf Schwimmer. A quick lookup on the national passport database came up empty. None of the images matched the one you sent me via your cell phone nor of the images I was able to pull from security cameras located throughout the resort.”

Natalie's belly tightened. “What
did
you find?”

“I had Royce run a facial recognition program starting with US criminal databases. While he was doing that, I ran one against the US military identification database and got a hit.”

“He's one of our military?”

“Was.”
Lance brought up an image of Rolf dressed in the desert camouflage uniform of the US Army Special Forces. “He left the service four years ago, after ten years and four deployments to the Middle East and two purple hearts. His legal name is Rex Masters. He was a sniper.”

Natalie studied the image, recognizing the same man who called himself Rolf in Cancun. “What's he doing now?”

Lance shook his head. “That's just it. I can't find anything else on him from the past four years that he's been out of the military. No address, no tax records. Nothing.”

Natalie's blood chilled in her veins. “Do you think he's hired on somewhere as a mercenary? Maybe for a foreign country or agency?”

Lance shrugged. “That's all I found. He actually arrived in this country a week ago.”

“About the time the women started disappearing.” Anger warmed her blood and made her want to march right out and confront the bastard. “If he's the one responsible for my sister's disappearance, I'll kill him and take great pleasure in doing so.”

“We can't be certain he's involved with the missing women. However, he just left his room on the fourth floor of the hotel. If you want to get inside, I'll keep an eye on his movements and let you know when he gets close.” Lance glanced at his watch. “People usually don't start stirring for another half hour.”

“Then why is he?” Natalie asked.

“He's wearing running shoes, shorts and no shirt. I assume he's on his way out to run. Something I need to do.”

“You got a way for me to get past his door lock?”

“I can unlock it from here.” He grinned and pulled up a screen. “I'm tapped into the hotel security database. I can unlock any door anytime.”

“Okay. It'll take me a couple minutes to get there. Can you block the security camera from following me to his room?”

“Got it covered. Hurry. I don't know how long the guy can run.”

Natalie waited for Lance to give her the all-clear signal before she left his bungalow and jogged back to the hotel. If Rolf—Rex—got back before she was finished searching his room, she'd have a hard time justifying being in there. Given that he was a highly trained military man, he might take offense to having his privacy violated. And if he was involved in the kidnapping of the women, he'd have reason to want to insure her silence on whatever she might discover.

Her heart beating fast, Natalie entered the hotel and took the stairs to the fourth floor, running all the way up. Thankfully, she stayed in good shape and wasn't that winded by the time she emerged on Rex's floor.

Lance gave her the room number. As she reached it, she noted the Do No Disturb sign hung on the handle. The indicator light blinked green as she approached. Wrapping her hand in the hem of her tank top, she twisted the door handle and pushed it inward.

Inside she found a neatly kept room with clothes hung in the closet, the shirts all facing the same direction, the trousers neatly pressed.

A suitcase sat on the luggage rack zipped closed.

Natalie checked the drawers first, finding rolled socks, T-shirts and shorts. It looked like the inside of an army recruit's footlocker. Everything was placed precisely. A drill sergeant's ace cadet.

Careful not to disturb anything, Natalie checked beneath the clothing, pulled the drawers out and looked behind each. Hating to disturb the neatly made bed, she searched beneath the pillows, mattress and the bed itself. The lock box in the closet was locked.

“I don't suppose you could get me inside the lock box?” She spoke softly.

“Sorry. It's not on the security network.”

Natalie turned to the suitcase. The lightweight, black, hard-plastic case appeared like any other. She unlatched the case and peered inside. It looked empty at first glance. But as she looked closer it appeared to be shallower than the exterior would indicate. Could it have a secret panel?

Running her fingers along the inside edges, Natalie couldn't feel anything out of the ordinary. She examined the exterior and couldn't see anything that looked like a button to be pushed to reveal an inner compartment.

She took the case into the bathroom and laid it on the counter in the bright lighting and opened it. Slowly, carefully, she looked again.

There. At the inside edge, there was a slight discoloration in the plastic rim. She slid her hand over it sideways and nothing happened. Bracing her thumb on it, she pushed it upward. Something clicked and the lining of the case rose on one side. “I found a secret compartment in his suitcase.”

“Yeah, find out what's in it and get the hell out. He's on his way through the side entrance.”

Her heart racing, Natalie tugged at the floor of the case, trying to open it. “Can't you stall his elevator or something? I need a little more time.”

“I would, but he's headed for the stairwell.”

“Damn.” Natalie pulled harder, forcing the bottom of the case open. She gasped.

“What's in it?” Lance's voice echoed in her ear.

“A gun and an envelope.”

“You don't have time. You have to get out.”

“I need to know what's in the envelope.” She pulled open the envelope and photographs fell out, landing on the floor of the bathroom. All of them were of beautiful blonde women. In the middle of the photos was one of Melody—one she'd posted on her profile page of her favorite social media site.

“He's in the stairwell,” Lance said, his voice urgent. “Get out, Nat.”

Natalie gathered the photographs and shoved them back into the envelope, tossed it into the secret compartment and secured it in place. It didn't quite fit right, but she didn't have time to return it to its original state. Slamming the case shut, she carried it back to the room, laid it on the luggage rack and slipped out the door. With no time to spare, she ran for the elevator and punched the button.

“You don't have time to wait for the elevator.” Lance's voice sounded in her ear. “The room directly behind you is vacant. Go!”

Natalie spun, grabbed the door handle and pushed it open as the stairwell door opened at the other end of the hall. She dived inside and let the door close automatically. She could hear Masters's footsteps, but the door clicked shut before he reached her position.

Her heart thundering in her chest, Natalie waited for a few seconds.

“Masters is in his room,” Lance's calm voice said softly. “The elevator is at the fourth floor and is about to open...now.”

Natalie pulled open the room door as the elevator bell dinged. A quick glance toward Masters's closed door and Natalie scampered across the hall into the open elevator.

“Good morning, Natalie.”

* * *

D
UFF
SHOOK
HIS
head at the red flush rising in Natalie's cheeks. “You're out and about early. I take it you found out something new.”

She nodded. “Let's go to your room and I'll tell you all about it.”

The elevator rose to the eighth floor and Natalie stepped out.

Duff could hear the women before he actually saw them. He strode into the hallway to find Melody's friends gathered at the elevator, wearing shorts, matching T-shirts and carrying light backpacks.

“What's going on?” Natalie asked.

“We're going down for breakfast. If you still want to come along, you need to hurry, the bus leaves at eight.”

“We'll be right down,” Natalie said. “Don't let the bus leave without us.”

The girls stepped onto the elevator and Natalie hurried toward her room.

“Are you sure it's a good idea for them to go on that tour?” Duff followed Natalie into her room.

“No. But I'm going with them. Maybe there
is
safety in numbers.”

“Do you mind telling me what you were doing on the fourth floor?”

When the door closed behind Duff, Natalie turned and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I may have found our kidnapper.”

He held her for a brief moment. “Tell me.”

She pushed away from him, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Look, I don't have time to explain everything, but I had reason to suspect our friend Rolf.”

While she spoke, she slipped out of her tank top, pulled a light, short-sleeved blouse over her sports bra and tied it around her waist, leaving a significant amount of her midriff exposed.

Duff's groin tightened, but he resisted taking her back into his arms and kissing her all the way down to that tempting display of flesh.

“Rolf isn't Rolf. He's former army sniper Rex Masters.”

Natalie slipped out of her running shorts and stood in front of her suitcase in a pair of sheer pink thong panties.

Duff dragged in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You realize you're killing me.”

She cast him a weak smile. “If we only had time...”

Duff willed his body to relax. As much as he wanted to make love to Natalie, they had bigger fish to fry. “What did you find in Masters's room?”

She reached for a pair of shorts and paused. “A secret compartment in his suitcase.”

“I take it you got inside.” When she nodded, he asked, “What did you find?”

Natalie glanced up at him. “A gun and an envelope filled with photos of blondes. One of which was my sister.” She bit her lip, her eyes pooling with tears. One slipped down her cheek. She dashed her hand across, capturing it, and straightened her shoulders. Then she pulled on a pair of denim cutoffs, frayed at the hem. In the outfit, she appeared younger, the same age as her sister's friends.

Duff's brow knit. “If he's the one, why don't we confront him?”

“I can't afford to spook him. If he disappears, my sister's location disappears with him.”

“So what now?”

“We go to Chichén Itzá with Melody's friends. I can't let them go alone.”

“Talk them out of it.”

“I can't. There have been what appear to be two attempts to nab blondes from the patrons of this resort. If Masters is the one responsible, he might try again on the trip to Chichén Itzá. I want to be the one he goes for. You can't be around when he makes his move. He has to think I'm alone and unprotected.”

Duff's gut tightened and he grabbed her arms. “The man has a gun. How will you protect yourself against bullets?”

“If he's after me to sell me, he won't want to damage the goods.” Natalie stared up into his face. “And I'm not completely alone here.”

“What do you mean?”

She pulled the miniature earbud from her ear. “I have someone following my movements and helping me.”

Duff frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She pointed to her foot. “I have a microchip embedded between my toes, and a highly trained man on the other end of the tracking device who can locate me anywhere on earth.”

“What good will that do if you're dead?”

Her lips tightened. “It's a chance I have to take to find my sister.”

Duff stared at Natalie. “There seems to be a lot I don't know about you.”