Shaking off the errant thought, he considered how to fulfill his orders. Regrettably, he didn’t have much choice but to go back to square one: DeRossi’s hotel room. He’d searched yesterday and turned up nothing useful. Not even that uniform.
Damn. He’d been played by an expert whose day job of riding a desk was apparently no indication of what she was capable of. The fact that she and his boss were headed by cab to long-term parking when Jason had followed her to the short-term garage initially meant she had a backup vehicle. The logical conclusion was she had a secondary hotel room, too.
Damn.
“Can you access the cameras from the gate areas?” Jason provided the terminal number where he’d found DeRossi this morning. He hoped going back to where she’d been would give him a clue about where she was headed with the director.
Reviewing the video footage from the cameras near the gates did nothing but affirm he hadn’t missed a drop or exchange. She might have done a little shopping in recent days, but everything now pointed to her coming here solely to grab Director Casey.
Thanking the security team, he exited the office and headed for the parking garage. Holt expected a new player to intersect with either DeRossi, Casey or both of them. He had to pick up the trail.
Casey had hired Jason into Mission Recovery. Jason wasn’t sure he could sit back and do nothing but document any danger aimed at the director. As a Specialist, his job was to salvage missions that had gone beyond the hope of regular recovery. Holt knew that, knew the philosophy of the Specialists. Did the deputy director really expect Jason to go against the order to stay out of whatever was going on here? Was he relying on the Specialist philosophy of running toward danger rather than away from it?
Jason struggled to make sense of the limited data he had, to organize that data into the context of the orders Holt had handed down.
The Initiative jumped on internal investigations like kids jumped on candy after the piñata breaks. DeRossi had carte blanche to do anything in the name of her official inquiry. And apparently not even Holt knew precisely what she was after. Did that include giving someone a chance to take out the director? Jason’s gut clinched.
None of it lined up.
What could be so bad that execution was the best answer?
The better question was did anyone, including the deputy director, really believe Jason would stand back and let that happen?
Frustrated, he turned up the collar on his suit coat, not nearly enough protection against the blizzard. Staring out into the storm, he guessed there were two inches of snow on the ground already and about ten more on the way. He had to pick a direction and get moving.
Jason remembered Director Casey’s answer when he asked why he’d been selected to join the Specialists. “You have the best instincts I’ve seen in a long time.”
His instincts were on high alert but he just had to figure out where to aim them.
Casey was here for a wedding. Jason turned in the general direction of the mountain resort hosting the event. Somewhere behind the blizzard was a chalet with a fatherless bride counting on her uncle to walk her down the aisle in just over forty-eight hours. Jason felt his temper rising at the idea that he was supposed to observe and document if the director was threatened.
But anger would only blur the instincts.
Evidence to the contrary, in this weather, he couldn’t see DeRossi going anywhere other than her hotel room to wait out the storm, no matter what her primary plans had been. If DeRossi was out to make a statement, the wedding party was full of covert operatives from Specialists to Colby Agency investigators with plenty of history and exemplary service records. There could be any number of reasons for her to intercept Casey here and now.
A cold wind blew through the parking garage and he took it in, clearing his head. His decision made, he turned back to his car, just as a flash of orange caught his peripheral vision. He spun around, watching an oily black cloud beat back the storm in one small spot among the endless fields of parked cars.
Car bomb.
Something entirely too much like fear detonated in his gut.
Busy airport or not, he just couldn’t believe the explosion was a coincidence. Jason raced to see if losing DeRossi had meant the death of his director.
Chapter Three
Thomas hadn’t stayed alive as the head of Mission Recovery by relying on luck or anyone’s mercy. He tried to tell himself he was following this woman out of professional courtesy, but it didn’t work. DeRossi was a weakness. One he’d purposely culled from his life years ago. He’d never had any real objectivity where this woman was concerned.
They’d parted as friends—or so he’d thought—until she’d landed on the Initiative committee.
Knowing she could look over his shoulder, question any or all of his decisions had only affirmed his choice to avoid a personal relationship—with her or anyone else. In this line of work you could have the job or the life, but not both.
A tiny voice in his head suggested his niece and her soon-to-be husband disproved his theory. What might work for her, however, would never work for him. He was too set in his ways and there was an inherent distance he didn’t think he could bridge.
He scowled, thinking back to those days working with Jo. They’d been good as partners and he’d assumed their chemistry had been more about the rush of fieldwork than any real connection. Except he’d never quite gotten her out of his system.
“Tonight is all you get. I have to be at the Glenstone Lodge by tomorrow.”
She nodded once.
“For Casey’s wedding.”
She nodded again.
“She asked me to give her away.”
Jo slanted him a look with those midnight eyes, then, without comment, pushed open the exit door.
Cold air, swirling with heavy, wet snowflakes, battered them. Visibility was bad even though they were protected by the terminal building. He glanced up. The mountain peaks weren’t even a shadow on the horizon. The roads to Glenstone were probably already closed. “Lord, what a storm.”
More silence from Jo as she stepped into the miserable weather.
He reached to button his coat, belatedly realizing she didn’t have anything warmer than the flight attendant’s uniform blazer.
“Take this.” He draped his overcoat across her shoulders. She graced him with a small, tight smile and rushed toward a waiting taxi. He didn’t know how she managed it on those needles she called heels.
“I was about to give up on you, lady,” the driver said as they slid into the welcome warmth of his cab.
“What does he mean by that?” Warnings clanged in Thomas’s head even as he closed the door. He could overpower her, but he was too curious about what she was really after.
She shot him a look that confirmed he already knew the answer. He gave
