Hell for Leather: Black Knights Inc. (7 page)

Uh, everything
, she admitted woefully. It was absolutely
everything
about him.
Damn
it
all
to
hell!

“Yeah,” Boss chuckled, slapping a huge, baseball-mitt-of-a-hand on the table. “You Lone-Star staters do have a way with words. Anyway, since Ali has been storked,” he snorted, “it’s a foregone conclusion Ghost will stay behind and—” Boss stopped in mid-sentence, scowling at Ali. “What the hell is the matter with that cat?”

The tom was now rubbing his entire length over Ali’s belly.

“He’s a frickin’ traitor, that’s what’s the matter with him.” Becky crunched down on her sucker, chewing angrily. “I’m the one who feeds him. I’m the one who bathes him. I’m the one who buys him catnip toys and cleans out his litter box. But do you see him over here rubbing all over me? No. No, you do not.”

“It’s not
me
he’s rubbing on,” Ali insisted, shooting Becky a placating look. “It’s the baby.”

“People,” Mac interrupted, “let’s get back to the point, shall we? Who besides me is goin’ down to Cairo?”

And either Delilah was exhausted or crazy or both, but the way he said that, like it was a foregone conclusion he’d be going with her, gave her a little thrill. Before that idiotic voice could pipe up with something scathing, she preempted it.
Put
a
cork
it, you aggravating little prick! I’ve had it with you!

“Ooh, ooh!” Ozzie raised his hand like an overly exuberant kindergartener. “Me, me! A road trip to southern Illinois sounds like fun.” He winced, peeking at Delilah. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it was fun that your uncle—”

She waved him off. “No worries. I know what you meant.” Because she was a born-and-bred biker, and she knew the thrill of the open road better than anyone. Cruising down the highway on the back of a half-ton of hand-tooled leather and high-polished steel was the closest a person could come to flying without ever leaving the ground.

“Yeah,” Ozzie shook his head woefully, “but that doesn’t—”

He was stopped when Zoelner’s phone suddenly came to life, buzzing angrily and vibrating across the table. The former CIA agent flipped over the device and peered at the screen. A look of confusion and surprise came over his face.

“I’m in for Cairo, too,” he said. Then, “Excuse me for a second.” Standing, he jogged into one of the darkened offices. A light blazed inside the room before the door slammed shut with a
bang
that echoed around the large space, causing the tomcat to pause in his adoration of Ali’s belly.

“Becky and I will stay here to monitor the progress of the guys we’ve still got out in the field,” Boss said. It was then that Delilah did a quick head count and realized seven of the Black Knights were absent from the conference table.
Okay, and way to be
completely
self-absorbed, Delilah. For heaven’s sake.

“So that leaves Steady,” Mac said, tipping his dimpled chin toward the dark-eyed man, “to join those of us headed south. The more boots on the ground we have down there, the more area we can cover.”

“Agreed,” Boss concurred. “It’s all settled then. Pack up your saddlebags, boys. You’re going on a road trip.”

“Wahoo!” Ozzie shot a fist in the air, then kept his hand raised, looking around for someone to slap him a high-five. When no one took him up on his offer, he realized what he’d done and winced at Delilah again. “Jesus. Sorry. Is it too late to take back that
wahoo
?”

“It’s okay, Ozzie,” she assured him, eager herself to be back out on the road now that they had a plan. “I know you didn’t—”

She was cut-off mid-sentence when Zoelner’s office door flew open. The former spy—or current spy? Did the Black Knights qualify as that? In all honesty, she wasn’t sure—stood on the threshold, a strange look wallpapering his face.

“What’s up?” Boss asked. “Who was on the phone?”

“Uh.” Zoelner reached up to scratch his ear. “That was Chelsea Duvall.”

“Should I know who that is?”

“She’s an old…uh…
acquaintance
in The Company. She said she’s been promoted to the position of our official liaison to the CIA.”

“Our official
what
?” Boss demanded, his tone that of a man who occasionally munched on a baby for breakfast.

“She also said…” Zoelner stopped, scrunching up his face. “How did she put it? She said that in an effort to assist us in our exemplary work for the president and his Joint Chiefs, they’ve been monitoring the online activities on one of our computers and—”

“The hell you say!” Ozzie exploded. “Which one? I have anti-spy programs running on all of them!”

“Well, they’re obviously getting around that somehow,
hermano
,” Steady observed.

Now it looked like
Ozzie
munched on babies for breakfast. He attacked his laptop keyboard as if he had a personal vendetta against the poor thing.

“Go on,” Boss growled. “They’ve been monitoring the online activities on one of our computers and
what
?”

“And they were wondering if there was anything they could do to assist us in our most recent endeavor regarding Theo Fairchild,” Zoelner finished in a rush, still wearing a slightly bewildered expression.

“Yeah, well, that sounds like a prime example of my cow done up and died so I don’t need your bull,” Mac said. “Why would the CIA give one shit, much less two, about helpin’ us? I don’t trust those people.”

“Yeah,” Zoelner snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. Remember I used to
be
one of those people.”

Mac made a face. “Then what
did
you tell her?” And Delilah was curious about that as well. Was it possible the CIA could do something more than the Knights in locating Uncle Theo? Were there…she didn’t know…some sort of secret CIA ways and means?

“I told her we were simply looking for Delilah’s missing uncle,” Zoelner said. “And I told her that unless they had some sort of LoJack on Theodore Fairchild or his old Marine Corps buddy, Charles Sander, there wasn’t much they could do.”

Okay. Apparently the CIA
didn’t
have any sort of secret ways and means.
Shit.

“Good.” Boss nodded. “Sooo,” he drew out the word, “barring any more mysterious telephone calls from the CIA, I think we all have our assignments here. Let’s get to it.”

“Permission to stay behind and figure out how those goddamned spooks are monitoring our Internet activities?” Ozzie said, typing frantically.

“Permission denied,” Boss said, causing Ozzie to glance up from his laptop screen. “You’ve got more important things to do besides getting into a dick-measuring contest with the CIA’s tech boys. You go help find Theo. You can whip it out and prove your superiority to the spooks when you get back.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Boss announced, pushing up from the table.

Delilah stood along with the rest of the group, itching to mount up on Big Red, her beloved custom BKI motorcycle, and hit the road. But a loud squawk followed by a quickly indrawn breath drew her attention over to Ali.

“Uh…folks?” the blonde said, wrinkling her nose and staring down at the floor. “My water just broke.”

Holy shit, I’m such an idiot.

Chelsea reached up to slide her forefinger and thumb beneath her glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose. What were the odds that her supervisor would ask her to call Dagan on
this
night? And what were the odds that she’d completely forget just what
this
night meant?

“I didn’t expect to hear from you,” had been Dagan’s initial salvo. “Not tonight of all nights.” To which,
idiot
that she was, she’d responded with, “Tonight? What’s so special about tonight?”

The words had been out of her mouth a half second before she glanced at the date on the lower right-hand corner of her laptop screen, a half second too late for her to call them back.

“Oh…” was Dagan’s immediate retort, and there’d been no mistaking the hurt in his voice the moment before all emotion whatsoever disappeared. She could picture him getting completely still in that weird way of his, becoming a living, breathing statue. “So, what do you want then, Agent Duvall?”

Agent Duvall…

He never used to call her that. It’d always been Chelsea, or Chels.

To say it’d all been downhill after that would be the understatement of the century. And, yeah, she’d certainly spend a good deal of time obsessing about how she could have handled it better. But for right now, she had a call to make.

Rubbing her hand down her face, she dialed her supervisor’s number.

“What’d you discover?” Morales demanded before the first ring finished sounding.

“Nothing,” she told him.
Nothing
other
than
the
fact
that
I’m an insensitive
ass,
and
Dagan
was
smart
to
cut
all
ties
with
me.
“They’re simply looking for this Theodore Fairchild guy because he’s the uncle of one of their friends. That…uh…that bartender who’s in on their secret?” she explained. “You know the one?”

A grunt was Morales’s only reply. She took it to be an affirmative.
Back
to
being
succinct, are we?

“Anyway,” she continued, “apparently the bartender’s uncle was supposed to be visiting a former Marine pal named Charles something or other and has since stopped answering his cell phone. The bartender is worried about him—allegedly going MIA isn’t like the man—and she’s enlisted the Knights to help her locate him.” And unless her boss read more into the situation than she figured was warranted, she quickly added, “But it’s been less than twenty-four hours, so I suspect the two old coots just tied one on for old-time’s sake and—”

“Sonofa-fucking-bitch!” Morales thundered, and Chelsea was so taken aback, the phone slipped from her hand to clatter against the keyboard of her laptop.

“Sir?” she asked once she retrieved the device, her heart’s tempo having gone from a steady
thump-thump
to a racing
bahdahboom-bahdahboom
!

“Was it Charles Sander?” Morales demanded.

“Uh…yeah.” She swallowed. “That rings a b—”

“Does the code name BA Repatriate mean anything to you?” he cut her off.

“BA…” She hastily pushed her laptop aside and lunged from her bed, running over to her dresser where some of the alphabetized, highly redacted copies of the files the CIA suspected the rogue CIA agent might have had access to sat in a neat pile. Quickly finding the one she sought, she flipped open the cover.

And although most of the page was blacked out—couldn’t worry that a civilian might stumble into her apartment and see highly classified files—the three words scrawled against the top of the page in big, bold letters said it all.

Her stomach immediately took a header, falling to the floor at her bare feet. “Sir? Do we have any idea who Winterfield might have sold this information to?”

“Unfortunately not,” Morales admitted, fury vibrating in every syllable. “But you can be certain,
if
he sold this piece of Intel, it was to an organization that
isn’t
on Uncle Sam’s Christmas list.”

Her mind was racing a million miles a minute. The implication of this could be… But, wait… “This file doesn’t list the locations of the missing BAs. It just gives the names of the five men who worked the mission.”

“All of whom are dead of natural causes except for Charles and Theodore. And apparently, according to the Knights, both of those men have now gone AWOL.”

And
the
hits
just
keep
on
coming!
But it was part of Chelsea’s job not to get bogged down in the details. She was expected to be the “big picture” girl. She was expected to keep everyone from jumping to conclusions. “It’s still possible this is all a misunderstanding,” she said. “I mean, we’re not
positive
which files that prick Winterfield,” she winced at the foul language, “accessed and downloaded. This could
still
be a case of two old Marine Corps buddies getting overly lubricated and—”

“Which is why I’m sending you in alone, Agent Duvall.”

Okay, huh?
He was…sending her in? As in, out into the field? But she wasn’t a
field
agent! She was a desk-jockey analyst with lines of code instead of listening devices and reams of Intel instead of incendiary devices. “Uh, sir? I’m…I’m not sure I copied you correctly on that last bit.”

“If this
is
just a red herring,” Morales said, “I don’t want to alert the Knights to the true scope of the problem Winterfield has caused for us. So I’m sending you in to—”

“If you’ll pardon my interrupting, sir. The Knights have proved themselves trustworthy time and again. Heck, they’re the personal goon-squad to the president and the JCs. How much more proof do you need of their reliability?”

“Loose lips sink ships, Agent Duvall. You know that as well as I do.”

Loose
lips
sink
ships
, she silently mimicked, rolling her eyes. “Spare me the World War II propaganda, sir,” she harrumphed, disliking where this conversation was leading. Disliking the thought of having to lie straight to Dagan’s face. “I know better than most how important it is to keep our cards close to our vest. But the Knights—”

“You’ll go in,” Morales cut her off, “working under the auspices of your new title and you’ll assess the situation.” And she recognized a red line when she was poised to jump right over it. Her supervisor had made up his mind. Any more argument from her would be flying precariously close to insubordination. “If you think there’s more going on in Illinois than a simple misunderstanding, I’ll have a team ready and waiting to swoop in. If not, then BKI, and the world at large, will remain blessedly unaware of just what a clusterfuck Winterfield created for us.”

“The Knights aren’t the world at large,” she muttered, unable to help herself.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, sir,” she said, biting her tongue so hard she marveled she didn’t taste blood.

“Good then,” Morales said, finality in his tone. “I’ll arrange transport for you immediately.”

The line went dead, and Chelsea pulled the phone away from her ear. Her eyes scanned the file in her hand, and she imagined the warm welcome—
not
—she’d receive when she just
showed
up
on the Knights’ doorstep.

This
is
bad
, she thought.
This
is
going
to
be
very, very bad…

***

“Blow,” Becky demanded, holding Delilah’s shiny silver Breathalyzer—a handy device used for checking blood/alcohol level—up to Mac’s mouth.

Delilah had taken to carrying the thing around in her saddlebags because anytime she joined one of the local MCs—motorcycle clubs—on a ride, it was inevitable the group would stop at a bar or roadhouse somewhere. Equally inevitable was the fact that some sorry sucker would have one too many, forcing Delilah and the rest of the gang to wait around while the guy—it was
usually
a guy, though once, it had been a gal—sobered up enough to blow below .08%.

“You heard me. Blow,” Becky repeated, wiggling the device.

Mac’s dark eyebrows winged down in a fierce V, his five-o’clock…no, more like
ten
-o’clock-shadowed jaw clenching. “I’m not drunk,” he ground out, crossing his arms over his chest, causing his leather biker jacket to pull tight across the wide expanse of his back.

They were standing in the lower level of the shop, readying their bikes for the ride south following what had been about five minutes of sheer pandemonium after Ali’s water broke. Ghost had immediately scooped his wife up in his arms, ran toward the stairs, then turned and ran back to the conference table to snag Ali’s purse. It was then that he nearly slipped in the puddle of clear amniotic fluid. Delilah had never seen a group of men move as fast as the Black Knights when, in unison, they’d leapt forward to steady the couple.

“H-E-double-hockey-sticks, Nate!” Ali’d bellowed, whacking Ghost on the arm. “I can walk! It’s not like this kid is going to slide out of me or something! And you’re liable to get us both killed this way!”

Ghost had ignored her, refusing to put her down. And after slinging her purse over his big shoulder—now
that
had been a sight, seeing a big, tough-looking guy like Ghost shouldering a pink, sparkly Guess tote bag—he’d bolted down the metal steps two at a time, his booted heels thundering and echoing around the cavernous space. Seconds later, the engine of BKI’s monster Hummer roared to life. A moment after that, the big garage door at the end of the shop rolled up, and Ghost left rubber on the concrete floor, fishtailing his way out of the building.

It was at that point that Becky yelled, “Ew! No! Bad kitty!”

As a group they’d all turned to find Peanut down on his fat, furry haunches, lapping at the puddle of fluid while purring contentedly. Ozzie made a retching sound. Boss muttered, “I think I might be sick.” Becky raced over to the supply closet and pulled out a mop and a bucket, while Steady grabbed the tomcat, holding the beast out in front of him and grimacing like he was about to lose the coffee he’d been swigging.

Some mopping, one quick, disgruntled cat bath, and a couple of packed saddlebags later, and the group heading south was finally ready to go. Well, almost. If Mac would only stop scowling like he’d been sucking on a lemon and blow into the damn Breathalyzer…

“You’re not drunk?” Becky impatiently shoved a green sucker into her mouth. The gesture looked like the physical equivalent of
men…why the hell do they have to make everything so freakin’ difficult?

And even if Delilah had not felt obliged to agree with that sentiment based solely on the unspoken pledge between the sisterhood—you know the one,
we
gals
stick
together
—she’d have agreed because, after all, it was
Mac
they were dealing with here. Mac…
numero
uno
on her very short list of things that put a kink in her otherwise fairly straightforward life.

“No, ma’am. I’m not drunk,” he insisted. “I’ve had so much coffee that we’ll have to pull over every ten minutes so I can pee like a Russian racehorse.”

“I’ve always wondered about the origins of that phrase,” Ozzie observed. He’d already mounted up on his custom chopper. Steady was behind him in the process of doing the same. “I mean what’s so special about a ruski equine, I ask you?”

Becky ignored him, still frowning up at Mac. “So if you’re not drunk, prove it, Gigantor. Puff, puff.”

“Fine,” he grumbled before sticking the short, plastic tube between his lips and blowing. “There.” He showed Becky the digital number on the device’s screen, wiggling it in front of her face victoriously. “I told you. So, go cork your pistol.”

Becky rolled her eyes before moving on to Zoelner with the Breathalyzer.

After Zoelner blew and proved that he, too, was fit to make the journey, Mac swung astride his monster bike. Delilah watched as his big thighs pulled the fabric of his faded jeans tight. For a second, just a
split
second, the searing image of what it would be like to have those muscled thighs pushing her legs wide burned through her mind. And in that fleeting moment, she imagined she could feel his crinkly man-hair brushing the tender skin at the apex of her legs as he pumped and strained into her. For that one all-too-brief instant, she fancied she could actually feel him there, so big and rough, so hot and hard, and…okay,
crap.
Her mind suddenly shook itself out of La-La-Land, and she realized she was staring at Mac’s jean-clad thighs like she was honing her knife and fork, ready to cut a big bite out of each.

You
really
are
pathetic.
And as much as she hated to admit it, that annoying voice was proving to be right far more often than it was proving to be wrong.

When she felt the top of her head buzzing like her scalp was threatening to lift away from her skull, she looked up to find Mac’s eyes narrowed on her and…was that slight reddening of his tan cheeks an actual blush?

Oh, great. Busted.
Had her salacious thoughts been written all over her face?

She hoped not. And in the event that they
hadn’t
been, she licked her lips before blurting the first thing to come to mind. “Uh…just admiring your bike.”

Mac blinked, his expression turning contemplative before it once more slid into that inscrutable mask.

Delilah mentally slapped herself a high five. That
was
some pretty quick thinking on her part. And a believable excuse to boot. Because Mac’s custom Harley
was
one badass bike. Its name, Siren, said it all. With its intricate black-and-gold paint job offsetting and highlighting the glinting chrome of the handlebars, engine, battery box, and wheels—not to mention the mean stretch and the eye-catching blue LED running lights—the motorcycle was, to put it simply, flat-out mesmerizing. Enough to distract and draw in even the most disinterested of passersby just like the fabled Sirens of Greek mythology.