spread the map on the narrow table. “The summer residence is five acres, corners a river that flows to the Amazon. The street side is a park and it’s all heavily guarded.”
“Ramos hasn’t been seen in a couple of days, his condition reported as stable,” Max said. “He’s under wraps for a reason.” He leaned over the map, pulling aside digital views and studying them. Square with a large courtyard in the center, it was the hacienda of a king. “This doesn’t depict a man of the people, huh? I think Ramos was found out and Mrs. G is covering up for him.”
Or using him. “If his cover was blown, we wouldn’t see him at all, or they’d have taken the attack as an opportunity to just erase a problem. Max is right. Ramos is skilled and smart,” Logan said, stepping away from the table and turning back to the gear. He hated to admit that Ramos was probably the best choice. “I know him. He studied Garcia before he went in. A portion of his throat and the underside of his left arm were burned in an operation eleven years ago, but not that much.” He nodded to the man’s picture taped inside the jet. “That looks good.”
“I don’t get you, Logan, how can you do this, risk all this? To kill him?”
“That would be the easy part,” he said. Saving him wouldn’t. He had good reason to walk away. He owed Ramos and America nothing. But as he clipped a carabiner, then tested the strap’s strength, he thought he didn’t want it to be personal.
Coming from careers of following orders, Dragon One ran itself on the individual side of everything. Opinion mattered, emotion counted. They didn’t often take jobs to pay the bills but for a damn good reason. This time, it wasn’t all that clear.
Paul Ramos was a dangerous stain lingering over national security, and Logan’s life. Yeah, he thought. It was personal.
In the grass hut, Tessa felt the buzz of the satellite phone in her dreams. Go away, she thought. It had to be NGS headquarters. Interns never got the time difference right. Blindly, she reached for it and brought it close. She stirred enough to hit SEND.
“If this isn’t Vin Diesel in tight biker pants, I’m hanging up.”
“Tessa.”
Her muscles froze, a lock on her joints that kept her on her side on the mat. Her breathing slowly increased. Humid air skipped between the gaps of the hut. The dark sky shadowed her surroundings as she pushed up on her elbow.
“I know you can hear me.”
She recognized the voice, but the accent was all wrong. “I can,” she said, her mouth drying up with each breath. Maybe she was mistaken? “Who is this?” She pushed back her hair and held it off her face.
“You said, if I ever needed help…to call you.”
Oh please, no. She swallowed hard, fear gripping her throat. “I can’t, you know I can’t. Don’t ask me.”
The voice deepened an octave. “You owe me.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“If it comes to that,” he said. “But I don’t have to, do I?”
No. And he knew it. The shock of hearing his voice fading, she’d known this moment would invade her perfect world and blow the hell out of it.
“You’re a mean-ass son of a bitch,” she snarled with a hatred she didn’t recognize. “If I find you, I just might take you out of your own misery.”
“Now that’s the woman I remember.”
Tessa cringed, pushing the feelings away, far away. God, make this a dream.
Across the hut, Andrew rolled over, frowning sleepily. “Tessa? Everything okay?”
She covered the phone. “Yes, bad timing, sorry. Go back to sleep.”
She stood, shaking off the blanket before she left the shelter, stepping around snoring villagers and moving toward the shore. But he started talking fast, whispered, and that drove up her suspicions. She stopped to listen, detesting the sound of his voice and what it meant to her life.
Total ruin. Like worms after a storm, her ugly past crawled out from the darkness. Then the bastard set a deadline.
Three
Secure facility
Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen
Puerto Rico
The dark blue sedan sped across the airstrip toward the hangar. It was another ten minutes before it came to a halt. The driver remained inside as Nolan Deets left the vehicle. The rain spilled straight down, soft enough to soak everything as he walked across the concrete to the hangar doors. A few civilian workers milled at picnic tables beneath a steel overhang, the water running off and splashing on the ground so hard they were backed up against the walls, smoking and talking.
They each cast him a suspicious glance as he went to the door. A man in a black jumpsuit, cap and sunglasses blocked his path, and demanded ID.
Deets complied, then inclined his head to the workers. “If they don’t have clearance, get them out of here.”
The guard nodded, then stepped aside quickly and opened the door. The scrape of metal on metal rang in the yawning hangar and he stepped over the high threshold. Inside it was cold and damp, the smell of burned wood and scorched metal hanging heavily on the air.
Several people looked up, one man walking toward him, then stopped, nodding when he recognized him. The scientist returned to the long stretch of tables piled with evidence, scanners and computers for collection. At the far end, a lab was established, forensic technicians already working and, not to throw caution out the door, they wore hazmat gear.
In the center of the massive hangar, no fewer than a dozen men in black jumpsuits crawled over the yacht like leeches on infected skin. The forensic experts would pull anything that could be found, but Nolan wanted to see the damage for himself. He approached, removed his coat and tossed it on a chair beside a crate designated for collected evidence before he mounted the ladder running up the side of the ship. Once a beautiful luxury vessel, it was now nothing more than scrap, torn and twisted, yet no less imposing in dry dock and braced with massive timbers and steel scaffolding.
Nolan wasn’t impressed. He could think of a dozen other ways to spend that kind of money than putting a house on the open sea. Yet when the Cuban Navy flexed its muscles on a civilian vessel carrying Americans, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and the Coast Guard got involved. The National Security Agency was watching them all. When Americans turned up dead, everyone wanted justice.
Three other vessels like this had been seized in international waters by Interpol. What had led Nolan to this particular ship was not only the Americans who were brutally murdered, but that prior to being delivered to Miami for the bride and groom, the ship had docked to be serviced in China and boarded by officials. The Chinese weren’t willing to share their dirty laundry with the U.S.—the murder being after the fact and having no consequence to the Chinese—but Nolan was still working on what had led them there. The other seized boats had made port on China’s coast as well.
To him, it felt staged. The other boats were boarded and confiscated, so
