Damon's Deal Read online

  “I know that we weren’t privy to all those conversations, but we were certainly privy to their fear.”

  She snorted at that. “Didn’t seem to matter what we said. They were always thinking that you guys would go off the deep end and blow up something.”

  “Which is probably why we ended up getting shut down, but I don’t know where they got that idea from and have to wonder if somebody was feeding it to them.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me. You guys are the strongest individuals I’ve ever met. There was nothing even the slightest bit haywire about you.”

  “Well, thanks for that, but a word of warning. You can bet that Terk isn’t feeling anywhere near as nice or as congenial as you might have thought he was before.”

  “Of course not. He’s being hunted and the team attacked. And, if it is by one of our own, he’ll go underground and find out who did this. If his skills are intact, that would be something. He was the strongest of you all.”

  “Exactly.” Damon smiled in satisfaction. “I’m glad you understand.”

  “Is that the game then, retaliation?” She hoped not.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not retaliation. It’s about survival. If we don’t solve this, we’ll never have a life. It’s one thing for those of us who are alive and able to go underground and to hide for the rest of our lives, but it’s an entirely different thing if you and Mera have to.”

  “Meaning, I’m not as good at it?” She watched as he drove the truck around a corner.

  “You’re not as good at it,” he confirmed. “It’s not what you three are.”

  “And yet it seems like whoever it was considered us enough of a threat that we had to be taken out too. Whoever is doing this—and, as much as I can’t quite accept that it is our own bosses, but because of the timing it’s likely—it could have been instigated by some other party.”

  “But remember this. What was done to the team had to have been done by another team like us.”

  She sucked in her breath. “I didn’t consider that, and that’s scary.”

  “It is, and it also means that something much more powerful and more dangerous than us is out there. That’s what we don’t want.”

  “No, of course not,” she agreed. “Every country wants to know that they have the most powerful weapon.”

  He laughed. “Isn’t that the truth.”

  As they drove toward Wilson’s address, she spoke. “I would really hate for that to be the final answer. I don’t want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. It’s hard enough to sleep now.”

  “It doesn’t look like you’ve slept at all,” he murmured.

  “Oh, so now you’re telling me that I look like shit too, huh?” But a note of laughter was in her voice.

  He tossed her a grin. “I would never say that, but you look like you didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “Well, when you wake up, and seconds later your bed is riddled with bullets, it does tend to make for more sleepless nights.”

  “Of course. Don’t you want to stop that?”

  “I do, of course, but you’re asking for a commitment that’s very dangerous for me.”

  “Yeah, but how is it more dangerous than what you’ve already been through and what you will face in the future when they figure out you got away? … We’re here with you.”

  She struggled to answer that. She was terrified to leave and be alone, and she was terrified to stay.

  “Let’s go check on Wilson.”

  *

  Damon and Tasha pulled up outside what looked like a series of small flats. Checking the apartment number on his phone, Damon hopped out with her, and they walked across the street. He opened up his senses, knowing that again he would only get half the information and would get slammed with pain as soon as he tried to increase it by much. He opened up and checked. And frowned in surprise. “Absolutely nothing is around here.” He paused. “Almost like a deadness is here.”

  “That’s not good.” Her footsteps slowed.

  He grabbed her arm, dragging her closer to walk right beside him. “Not necessarily,” he noted quietly. “It feels more like they’ve been here and gone.”

  “Of course they’ve been here and gone.” And then she sucked in her breath. “But been here and gone where?”

  “Come on. Let’s go find out.”

  They walked up and knocked on the door at Wilson’s flat number. When they got no answer, Damon turned his back on the hallway. “Keep watch.” Then he took out his tools and popped the lock.

  “The fact that it’s locked, shouldn’t that be a good indication?”

  As he went in, he checked the lock inside. “No, you can lock it and then still close the door from the outside.” He lifted his nose and froze. “You don’t want to be in here.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why not?” And then she caught the smell. Her eyes widened, and she bolted from him. “Wilson,” she cried out, and she raced around the flat, heading to the bedroom. As soon as she got to the open doorway, Damon was just a hair behind her.

  And she stopped in the doorway and cried out. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

  He snatched her into his arms and pulled her back, so that she wouldn’t see, while Damon studied the layout and the inside of the room. “Looks like Wilson was first.”

  She started to cry in his arms, as he held her close.

  He carefully analyzed the scene. Same MO as the others. Just random destruction in the living room, but the bed had been shot up, and unfortunately Wilson had been sleeping.

  Damon walked her back to the living room, “Stay here. I need to take a closer look.”

  She nodded and didn’t say anything, then sat down on the arm of the couch, her arms wrapped around her chest, weeping silently.

  He was sorry to leave her alone, but, if ever they needed confirmation on details, it was right now. He headed back to the bedroom, pulled out his phone, and took photos. It looked like Wilson had taken three bullets, all direct hits. He probably hadn’t even known what hit him.

  Damon took more photos around the place, including the living room, which had been trashed to make it look like a robbery—if anybody was stupid enough to assume the bullet holes were a part of that. To Damon, this looked like an execution.

  Shaking his head, Damon stepped back out again, and, dragging her with him, they exited, got into the vehicle, and he immediately started it up and pulled away. As soon as he could, he pulled off the road into a parking lot, surrounded by lots of other vehicles, and he called Terk, who answered on the first ring.

  “What did you find?” Terk asked impatiently.

  “They got him first. Wilson is dead, and it has all the looks of a professional hit. He’s number one of all of us,” he murmured. “He has been terminated.”

  Chapter 4

  Tasha watched carefully as Damon drove through the city, sliding into back roads, taking corners in a roundabout way, as he took them to their new location. She didn’t even know what to think; she was half numb, half full of pain and sorrow, and terrified of what was coming. “I still can’t believe somebody is trying to wipe out the entire team.”

  “It’s hard to think otherwise.” His voice was quiet inside the cab.

  She shuddered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “It just seemed so unbelievable.”

  “Remember the work we do though.” He quickly glanced in her direction.

  She studied his profile. “The thing is, I always saw us as taking out bad guys. Not good guys taking us out.”

  His lips quirked. “We were,” he corrected. “That’s exactly what we were doing. But we would be naive to assume that some of these bad guys wouldn’t try to get back at us for it.”

  “And I would understand that long before I would think that it was our own government,” she murmured.

  “And we can’t know which way this will go yet,” he argued. “We’re waiting for status changes on all the rest of the team. Only Te
rk and I, at the moment, are capable of doing anything.”

  “And that’s how I feel right now. With Wilson gone and Mera hurt, there’s just me. And how is it that I survived?”

  “I think he was either short on time, or—because it was the third one, and he’d done the first two successfully—he just assumed he’d hit his intended target, made a quick dash out of your place, and disappeared. He did three in one evening, so timing was an issue.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  He nodded. “It’s one thing to go in and kill somebody, cross your tracks to make sure you’re safe, and nobody knows it was you. It’s another thing to hit three in one night,” he stated. “That takes a pro.”

  She shuddered at the thought. “Like the pros we were?”

  “Like the pros we are,” he corrected. “And, no, it wasn’t any of our team.”

  She frowned at that. “I never thought that,” she protested.

  He shot her a hard glance. “Good, I’m glad to hear that because our team is down, and I doubt they could have done that to themselves.”

  “We were supposed to get a couple new recruits before they suddenly closed the department. Do we know anything about them?”

  She watched his eyebrows shoot up, as he contemplated her suggestion. “No, I don’t. When they decided abruptly to shut us down,” he murmured, “I don’t even know what happened to those two. I presume they were told not to show up. I’m not sure they were anything other than a red herring to keep us thinking everything was trucking along like normal. They didn’t arrive though.”

  “No, they were due to come in two weeks, I think,” she replied. “But what do I know? It seems like everything was happening around me, and I was completely oblivious.”

  “Not oblivious, just doing your job, focused on the here and now. None of us could have known this attack was coming.”

  “And yet I feel like we should have,” she noted. “Who else does this kind of work without knowing something like this is coming toward them? That inside edge should have warned Terk of that upcoming danger. So why didn’t it?”

  “It was very well planned,” he admitted. “We were all taken out within a twenty-four-hour period, likely within a few hours of each other.”

  “And that’s scary too because it takes a pro team to coordinate something like that,” she murmured. “A team that’s skilled and has resources behind them.”

  “Which is why I was wondering if it was another government. Personally I’m considering Iran.”

  “Because of what happened on the last mission over there?”

  “Well, it certainly is a possibility, isn’t it?”

  “It could be somebody else,” she agreed, “but it would take the right people.”

  “We’ve been targeting the right people for a couple years now.” He slid her a glance. “And you know them yourself.”

  “I do.” Her mind raced, as she thought about all the different cases. “But so often, we’ve gone after kidnap victims or coups that were happening or taking out terrorists on the sly,” she murmured.

  “And all of them have teams,” he muttered.

  “Right, I just didn’t think of it.” She paused. “I never considered a significant attempt at retaliation. Over the years it never happened, so I thought we were safe. Plus we were better than everyone else,” she stated, with a caustic tone.

  He frowned. “It’s not that we were better than anyone,” he argued, “but you’re only as good as your team, or, when we were running individual ops, we knew we only had ourselves to depend on and, therefore, cut all ties to anyone else. When we came back with the job done, nobody knew what we had done, where we’d done it, or how, and that was a good way to operate.”

  “Is that what it’s come down to now? Each of us alone?”

  He shook his head. “No, I need Terk, and he needs us.”

  “And I’m not sure I need either of you.” There, she’d said it. Clear, crisp, and completely based on fear. He didn’t look at her and didn’t even acknowledge her words. “What? You won’t even say anything?”

  “I know where you’re coming from,” he replied. “I’m hoping that you will agree to help us.”

  “And why would I?”

  At that, he gave half a snort. “You weren’t an ostrich at any point in time in the last several years. But, right now, if you think that sticking your head in the sand will help your situation, you’re wrong.”

  Glumly she stared out the window. “Meaning that, as soon as they realize I’m alive, they’ll come back after me?”

  “I would.”

  She sucked in her breath. That statement said so much. Because whoever was out there who attacked them was just as cold and proficient as the team she had worked for. But it was so much easier to work for her team when she thought that they were the guys on the winning side. The good guys. She sank back into her seat, then closed her eyes and tried to let the fear inside calm down. But it was hard, damn hard. “What if they never found out?” she murmured.

  “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. And, when you least expect it, they’ll be there. You won’t feel the bullet in the middle of the night. Just like Wilson didn’t.”

  She stayed quiet for the rest of the trip.

  When he stopped going around in circles and darted into the back alley of what looked like a large storage compound, full of warehouses, her eyebrows shot up. “Is this what you’re calling offices these days?”

  He shot her a look. “It’s temporary.”

  She pinched her lips together. And, when he pulled up in front of one, then hopped out and unlocked a door at the side, she followed him.

  “What about my stuff?” she murmured.

  “Leave it there. We’re not set up for sleeping here.”

  She stepped inside and realized it was literally a huge warehouse, with completely concrete walls. “Do you think the concrete in here is enough?”

  “It’s not steel reinforced, so no,” he replied briskly. “But it was a temporary solution for a time we didn’t really want to consider.”

  “No,” she agreed. “We were disbanding, not trying to set up a new headquarters somewhere else.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  When the door opened at the back of the warehouse, she jumped, startled, and then walked in Terk. He took one look at her, and she saw the fatigue and the worry clearly on his face. She raced toward him, and, just before she reached him, his arms opened up and wrapped around her. He held her close, gently rubbing her back.

  “I’m so glad they missed you,” he murmured.

  She felt the tears in her eyes. Something was so damn strong and so … almost stalwart about Terk. Everybody had had their own particular qualities, but something extra was about Terk as a leader. He was the most compassionate and empathetic man whom she’d ever met. Yet he could be as hard and as cold as ice, when the situation dictated. But he always paid a high price. And unfortunately she’d seen that time and time again. When she finally stepped back, she brushed the tears from her eyes. “Mera is alive, but she’s terrified.”

  He nodded. “Who isn’t?”

  She winced at that. “I was hoping you would tell me that it was all fine and that you already had it all well in hand.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “I would if I could, but it’s not quite so simple.”

  “No,” she murmured, “it isn’t.” She looked around. “I see boxes upon boxes.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “New equipment.”

  “What kind of equipment?” she asked, walking over and studying the contents. She saw new computers with actual hard drives, extra bits and pieces in open boxes, and monitors.

  “Can you set this up?” Terk asked.

  She nodded. “I absolutely can, but that doesn’t mean it has any place to go. Particularly in a place like this. We had special satellite feeds running through the steel and the concrete to get the communications that we neede
d. Otherwise we would never have gotten signals in or out.”

  He nodded. “I know, and this is only temporary here, so it’s a matter of doing what we can.”

  “Got it,” she noted. “Let me get started then.” She started opening up the rest of the boxes. She looked around and saw a couple folding tables off to the side. She walked over, set one of them on its feet, and started unpacking the electronics. This was her field, no doubt, but she did worry about it. “Does anybody know we’re here?” she tossed out. When a sudden silence came from behind her, she pivoted and looked at the two men, both staring at her. “Please tell me that’s a no?”

  Terk shook his head. “Nobody knows, at least not this location.”

  “But do some people know we’re alive?”

  He nodded slowly.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Is that safe?”

  “We have to trust somebody, and I’ve chosen to trust my brother,” he replied coolly.

  She stared at him for a long moment. “I didn’t even know you had one.”

  His lips quirked. “Not only do I have a brother but he’s a twin.”

  “Holy shit.” She stared at him. “How did you ever hide that?”

  “I didn’t even try to. My brother was also working in the US Navy for a long time. Now he works for a private security company.”

  She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. She studied him carefully. “Is it safe? Because, even though he might believe in his company, that doesn’t mean that everybody in his company believes in him.”

  “And that’s a very good observation,” Terk noted, “and I appreciate the concern, but, in this case, I do trust him and the company.”

  She shook her head. “A lot of people are in companies.” She hesitated. “You can’t trust all of them.”

  “I get that,” he noted. “And, if you want to walk, you can at any time.”

  She frowned. “I don’t have any place to go, and you know it.”

  “Then trust me, just like you’ve trusted me all these years.”

  She let out a slow deep breath. “It’s not that easy.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he agreed, “and, right now, I guess trusting me is probably even harder than normal because we somehow ended up in this situation.”