Aegis Security 03 - Extreme Measures (4 page)

He used to love peaches—peach ice cream, peach cobbler, peach preserves. Hell, he was from Georgia. Peaches were practically a food group where he was from, and before his mother had died from breast cancer, her specialty had been peach pie. But ever since Beirut, he couldn’t stomach peaches. And he hated that now, even after all this time, just the scent of that peach lotion she still obviously slathered all over her body fresh from a shower brought a host of memories he’d rather forget.

He clenched his jaw until it hurt and hefted her into his arms. As he carried her to the chair he’d set up earlier, he ignored the toned muscles in her arms and legs and the tightness of her ass where her body pressed against his. Reminded himself—again—that she wasn’t the sweet and innocent California girl she’d pretended to be.

She was a traitor, one who’d let a known arms dealer walk when they’d been in Beirut, a man who’d gone on to kill innocent women and children. A traitor who’d set his team up to be killed in Guatemala. Who even now was plotting with terrorists—for what he didn’t know, but he’d soon find out.

How many other guys had she fucked to get what she wanted? How many others had died trusting her? How many more lives would be lost—civilians, soldiers, children—before she was done?

He set her in the plastic folding chair and made sure she was propped up. Her head fell forward as he hooked her arms around the back of the chair and cuffed them together. Using zip ties, he strapped each foot to the chair’s legs, then pushed to his feet and stared down at all that curly blonde hair hiding her face.

A sliver of guilt crept into his chest. If there was a hell, he was surely headed there. But he didn’t care. Someone needed to put a stop to her. And it looked like that someone was now him.

“Stupid fucking son of a bitch!” Jake Ryder slammed the phone down on his desk. “Marley! Get in here!”

The door to his office at Aegis headquarters pushed open just as he was tugging off his tie, and Marley Addison, his assistant, stuck her head into the room.

“That doesn’t sound like happiness to me,” she muttered.

Jake threw the tie onto the corner of his desk, scrubbed his hand through his hair, and then leaned both palms on the aged mahogany, ignoring her sarcasm. Seven years with SEAL Team Six had taught him plenty about patience, but all that training was currently flying through the window as his mind raced over what to do about Zane Archer.

He had a soft spot for America’s best. Though Archer had left the CIA for his own personal reasons, his track record there had been stellar. Jake had enough contacts within the organization to know who was worth recruiting and who wasn’t, but had he known then that Zane was going to be a major thorn in his side, he’d never have hired the son of a bitch. He hadn’t spent years building Aegis into the best black ops security company in the world for nothing, and he’d be damned if he was going to let Archer fuck it up for him now.

In the corner of the room near a grouping of leather couches, CNN flickered with images of the Seattle bombing and updates on the number of injured, but he ignored those too. “Who do we have in the Pacific Northwest?”

Marley moved fully into the room. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a neat tail, and the wire-rimmed glasses Jake was used to seeing on her face were pushed up to the top of her head. The door snapped shut behind her as she paged through screens on her smartphone, knowing better than to comment on his mood. “Landon Miller just finished an assignment near Bellingham. He’s scheduled to be off the next two weeks.”

“Get him on the line. ASAP. His vacation’s been canceled until further notice.”

“That’s not going to go over well,” Marley said as he turned to look out at the rolling Kentucky hills lined with neat white fences. “What do I tell him is the reason for this callback?”

Jake watched a stallion race across the field. He’d set up Aegis’s headquarters here, in one wing of the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion he’d inherited from his louse of a father when the bastard had finally keeled over. Partly because the scenery always relaxed him. Partly because it reminded him of where he’d come from and where he was going next. But mostly because he got a sick sense of satisfaction knowing he was dancing on his good-for-nothing father’s grave.

The view today, though, didn’t help. It only pissed him off, because being
here
meant he was too far away to wrap his hands around Zane’s fucking neck. “I want Archer brought in before the Feds get a hold of him.”

“You think Zane’s involved in the bombing in Seattle?”

Jake turned toward Marley. The black slacks were standard for her. The red blouse was new. He’d thought about mentioning it earlier but had decided not to. Their relationship was structured and professional and had been for going on four years now. She was the best damn assistant he’d ever had. The woman monitored his team of operatives better than Central Command,
and
she put up with his ass on a daily basis, which, he knew, wasn’t easy to do. If he started tossing out compliments now, it’d all turn to shit. And he’d had enough shit relationships with women to span a lifetime. He wasn’t going there with Marley no matter how pretty she might look today.

“I think Archer’s thinking with his dick and not his brain. And even if he didn’t set that bomb—which I hope to God he didn’t, because it’s going to fuck Aegis if he had anything to do with it—I have a feeling he’s knee-deep in the shit. Send Miller Archer’s last GPS location and have him pick the son of a bitch up before he causes any more trouble.”

Marley was already dialing as she stepped toward the door. “You got it, boss man.”

She left the door open in her wake, and in the silence, Jake’s headache kicked up to the beat of a marching band. He reached into the pocket of his slacks for the bottle of Motrin he kept there, flipped the lid, and shook the contents over his palm. When nothing spilled out, his frustration shot to a whole new level.

“And get me some more grunt candy before my fucking head explodes!”

A small white bottle flew through the open door and nearly nailed him in the head.

“Come on, beautiful, naptime’s over. Wake up.”

The tapping on Eve’s cheek brought her around. She jolted.

“That’s it. Open those pretty amber eyes for me.”

Lifting her head, she tried to see through the haze. Confusion mixed with the grogginess. “Saw-Sawyer?”

“There’s my girl. Can’t have you sleeping on the job, now can we?”

What was Sawyer doing here? And where was here anyway? She looked around, narrowed her eyes, couldn’t see anything more than fuzzy shapes that seemed to bounce back and forth as if the world had been set on spin cycle.

“Over here, baby.” She followed the sound of his voice. “That’s it. Yeah, I think things are working well enough for us to get started now.”

Get started? Eve had no idea what he meant. Or what was going on. But a niggling thought in the back of her mind warned,
Be careful
.

Metal scraped the floor. Eve focused long enough to see Sawyer’s fuzzy shape pull a chair in front of her and sit. “We’ll start with something easy. Tell me your name.”

Her name? He knew her name. “What is this? What’s going—?”

“Your name, beautiful. And where you live.”

“J-Juliet.”

“No, not your CIA cover, sweetheart. Your real name.”

Eve’s mind spun, and before she thought better of it, she said, “Ev-Evelyn Wolfe. I live in . . .” Crap, where did she live? “Monterey. I live in Monterey.” That was right. On the beach. She had this great bungalow that overlooked the Pacific. It was small and had cost a fortune, but it was so worth it. “In California.”

“Good,” Sawyer said. “Very good. Now, how about who you work for?”

Why was he asking her these questions? Eve couldn’t seem to think straight. “I work for . . . the CIA. You know that.”

“Wrong.” Sawyer leaned forward. A snap echoed in the room, followed by a whisper of air across Eve’s skin and the soft clink of something hitting the floor. “Try again, Evie.”

Eve blinked twice, tried to clear her watery vision. Sawyer was sitting in front of her, and in his hand he held something silver. A knife? Eve tried to see through the fuzziness.

No, not a knife, a pair of scissors.

Scissors? What the hell would he need scissors for? He—

She looked down, and even though everything still seemed to be moving as if underwater, she noticed the top button of her blouse was missing. Her breasts all but spilling out of her once-white top.

Her gaze shot back to his face, and inch by inch, it came into view. Dark hair in need of a trim, several days’ worth of beard on his sculpted jaw, a thin scab across his forehead, and piercing, unfriendly, more-brown-than-green familiar hazel eyes. “Try again, Evie.”

She swallowed. Hard. Tried to make sense of what was happening. Couldn’t. Couldn’t seem to stop herself from talking either. “I . . . I work for the CIA. Counterintelligence. I’m—”

“Wrong.” Sawyer leaned forward again. Another snip. Another whisper of air across her stomach. Another clink as the button hit the cement floor. “I’m not interested in your lies.”

Eve’s stomach tightened. The venom in Sawyer’s words was new. And bone-chilling. She tried to move, to get away, but her hands were locked behind her. She tried to stand but couldn’t because her legs weren’t working. Too late she realized he’d tied her to a chair.

Panic pushed in, mixed with the drug still wreaking havoc on her brain to make things seem surreal. “Sawyer—”

Sawyer leaned back and rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay,” he said more calmly. “Let’s try something else.”

Metal scraped the floor again. Eve held her breath as he stood and moved around behind her, where she couldn’t see him. “What were you doing in Beirut?”

Beirut . . . The word mixed with fuzzy memories. Fuzzy, heated memories of the two of them locked tight together. In their apartment. In the shower. In that crappy car when she’d been sure no one could see them. “I . . . my job.”

“Yeah, I know that, beautiful.” He leaned close to her ear, his warm breath rushing over bare skin to send tingles down her spine. This close she could smell him. Musk and mint and man. She’d always loved the smell of him. “But you weren’t working for the CIA then.”

She had been, though. Synapses slowly started to fire, like links in a chain firming up when pulled tight. And oh man, he wasn’t going to believe her. But the truth . . . the truth was the only thing that seemed to be condensing in her mind. Where were the carefully orchestrated covers? Where were the lies she so often rattled off without a second thought? “I . . . I was working undercover.”

“Spying.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“For whom?”

“The CIA.”

“Oh, Evie.”
Snip. Whoosh. Clank.
“I didn’t realize how eager you were to get naked.”

Eve gasped as her blouse fell open all the way to her belly button. Frustration, fear, and panic all coalesced in the bottom of her stomach. “I’m telling you the truth!”

Blinding pain lit off behind her eyes. Before he could ask her another question, she slammed her lids closed and groaned. “Oh God, my head.”

“You took a nasty hit on the noggin, beautiful. Breathe through it.”

She did. But not because he told her to. Because it was the only thing she could do.

“That’s better,” he said when her face relaxed. “Now, back to what we were discussing. You said you were spying. Are you implying you were spying on the CIA
for
the CIA?”

“Yes,” she managed, gritting her teeth through the pain that was, thankfully, now easing. “I mean . . . the Pentagon—”

“I’m not buying it, honey.” He snipped another button from her shirt. Only one remained.

A red haze lowered over Eve’s vision. He was trying to intimidate her. But this was Sawyer, not some terrorist. He wouldn’t really hurt her. Would he?

She struggled against the chair. “This is bullshit.”

“Ah, but you like bullshit. You spin it so well.”