Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover (6 page)

Reid smiled. “Parker is better with Yetis.”

Now wasn’t the time to give the man a list of all
the reasons Yetis didn’t exist. If these two insisted on watching over her and shooting men who wanted to grab her, she could put up with a little nonsense talk. “Even I would take a Yeti right now. So long as it was on our side.”

“I knew you’d come around,” Parker said as he started taking photos.

“I’m a scientist.” For some reason she felt the need to point that out. It likely had to do with the fact nothing made sense or was within her control right now. Falling back on what she knew to be true gave her some comfort.

Parker frowned at her. “So?”

“Not a big believer in things that have no scientific basis.” That summed up her life. Usually she was fine with that way of operating, but thanks to the blank stares she was getting, her confidence faltered.

“Like falling for some random guy and getting engaged in a few days?” Parker asked.

Reid groaned. “Parker, really. Shut the fuck up.”

But the guy had a point. Of all the plans she’d made for her life, someone like Reid—lethal and strong and ready to die for a cause—hadn’t fit in anywhere. She didn’t generally get lured in by a fit body and gravelly voice. At least, not until Reid.

“I did, didn’t I?” Those weeks still stunned her. Falling so fast and so hard had run counter to her practical nature. She’d backed out believing that sort of intense
relationship shouldn’t morph into anything long-term. That it couldn’t survive. And even if it could for her, there was no way it could happen like that for him. She just couldn’t see it.

It all sounded smart in theory. In practice, leaving him left her in pieces. Fast or not, whatever she felt for him refused to go away quietly . . . or quickly.

“As you pointed out, whatever you felt didn’t last for long. You wiggled out of it.” Reid stared at her as if waiting for her to challenge him. When she stayed quiet, he pushed on. “We need a plan for this situation.”

The man was six-feet-whatever of pure stubbornness. She walked over to him and peeled back his shirt. Both because he needed medical attention and because, in that moment, she needed to touch him. “Any ideas?”

She half expected him to shrug her off or insist he was fine. Instead, he stood there and let her fuss over him. Winced and glared but didn’t push her away.

“Easy, I head out. Possibly draw out anyone who might be following, and go back to the last point where the communications system worked.” When the shirt underneath his jacket stuck to the wound, he looked at her. “That doesn’t feel great.”

She assumed his calm comment meant that it really did hurt. She also knew they could be looking at much worse injuries if they went along with his dangerous plan. “So, your plan is to get shot. Take one for the team and all that.”

He frowned. “Hopefully not.”

“Hope? That’s not good enough. Come up with something else. Preferably, a plan that keeps you alive.” She tried to remember where they’d dropped their backpacks before storming the compound, then decided it would be easy to find supplies amidst the wreckage in the sleeping quarters. “And I need to sew that up, so don’t think we’re done with the medical part of this.”

“It’s a flesh wound. The bullet just grazed me.” He lifted the shirt again and studied the area she just touched.

“Did you get a medical degree on one of your days off?” She knew he had limited training for just this sort of out-in-the-field issue, to get team members injured in action out. If possible. But that wasn’t really the point.

“Did you?” he asked. But before she could volley a response at him, he changed the subject. “What if we made use of a labor camp? Off-the-books, Stalin era. Covert.”

She glanced at Parker. When he didn’t protest or say anything, she turned back to Reid. “That sounds awful.”

“Russia insists it was something else. I don’t really care, but from the aerial photos I studied on the way over, it shouldn’t be too far.” He started to shrug, then hissed in reaction to the movement before letting his wounded shoulder fall again. “More importantly, it’s abandoned, or should be.”

Parker made a humming sound. “That’s a lot of ‘shoulds’ in that comment.”

“Do we have another choice?” Reid asked.

“Huh.” Parker shrugged. “Like I said, perfect.”

He had to be kidding. They both did. She could barely control the fear rattling around inside her. “Do you know what that word means?”

“And that’s why scientists aren’t in charge of the Alliance.” Reid squeezed her upper arm then let his hand drop again.

Not that she had any desire to be, but still . . . “Because we’re practical?”

“You play it too safe. Sometimes you’ve got to take a risk to get the big reward.”

The intensity of his stare almost knocked her over. “Are we still talking about this situation or something else?”

The corner of Reid’s mouth kicked up in a smile. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

T
ASHA
G
REGORY
stared out her glass-walled office and into the Warehouse situation room. High-end equipment hummed with life and covered table after table. Oversized monitors showing news from around the world and covert camera feeds from hotspot locations hung from the ceiling and lined the walls.

The space was modern and sleek. Very industrial. The career types who sat in the big building across the fenced-in grounds of Liberty Crossing, the home of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia, liked to testify in their secret congressional hearings about the Alliance being an example of true international cooperation between the U.S. and the UK. That was when they weren’t too busy berating her in private for every little thing the Alliance did and every dime spent.

But the higher-ups liked a big public show, complete with lots of self-congratulations. They also felt qualified to make decisions without ever picking up a weapon or making a life-or-death spot decision in the field.

Both the Americans and their British counterparts micromanaged to an annoying degree. Tried to plan everything out, as if a national crisis came with the ability to call time-out to regroup. They spent a lot of time designing manuals and talking about protocol. Never mind that the setup of the Alliance outside of the CIA and MI6 meant the team was not hamstrung by the rules the intelligence agencies had to follow. And she would not have been able to convince her men to read operation manuals even if she ordered it, not that she ever would.

The Alliance could move from country to country with great freedom. She took the heat and played the game so her team could work with her as the only true oversight. Move in and out without being seen. Get the equipment they needed while standing in the middle of a firefight. Skate the very thin line between right and wrong as they assessed how to contain the damage. No one was better at any of that than her team.

To her, the fancy office space and Marine guards at the entrance gate amounted to pure window dressing. The real beating heart of the Alliance was the team members, and she trusted them to make the hard calls. She directed and ordered, but she listened and made adjustments. Right now most of them were out.

The place usually bustled with activity, but she’d sent the members of both Bravo and Delta out on mandatory leave. They’d lost one of their own and needed to
grieve, even though they fought the idea. Almost every one of them thought that heading straight out on a new assignment and concentrating on doing what they did best was the answer. Part of her agreed. But the higher-ups in the CIA and MI6, the intelligence agencies that trained most of the team members and sometimes supplied backup for missions, argued the point and she conceded.

There were fears about vigilante frustration and the potential for something catastrophic to happen. Having risen through the ranks of MI6 and set up the Alliance, Tasha had a high tolerance for handling catastrophe. Her team was no different.

She planned to call them all back in next week, reassemble and get back to work. It wasn’t as if the gun runners and human traffickers and every other terrorist and piece of human garbage out there looking to cause trouble took the month off because Harlan Ross, lifetime British intelligence officer and Alliance administrator, sacrificed his life in exchange for saving a terminal of people at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Alliance team members standing in the room with him. Including her.

No one outside the Alliance even knew about his sacrifice. And that was the part that ticked her off the most. All those years of service to the Crown, and he wouldn’t receive even a star on a wall like the CIA did for their own. Harlan had been an MI6 officer before
joining the Alliance and there would be no public appreciation for him because he died after leaving MI6. That was a choice he’d made when he joined the Alliance.

Harlan wasn’t the type to seek accolades and the job didn’t allow for it, but the covert end for a hero still sucked. She wanted him to be recognized but knew it would never happen.

“Is it usually this quiet around here?” The deep male voice bounced around her office. Caleb Layne looked from one corner to the other, not trying to hide the fact that he was taking in the position of every paper clip and notebook.

“Actually, never.” She gestured to the guard hovering in her doorway to leave. After a brief hesitation he did, closing the door behind him.

Once alone with her guest, she focused all her attention on him. That was no hardship. She might be engaged to an administrator in the Alliance but her eyesight worked just fine.

The phrase “tall, dark, and handsome” might have been invented to describe Caleb. He was a guy with a bit of a reputation. Outside of these walls, the public saw him as a technology genius who went from creating apps that made life easier, to building a gaming company that supplied the world with an endless stream of postapocalyptic role-playing activities.

Impressive but a bit ruthless, and inside these walls
a valuable asset. He excelled at creating what he called “pathways to further communication” but others would see as hacking or even potentially espionage. He could access systems that no one should be able to break. Closed systems. Top secret, lives-depend-on-no-one-knowing-this systems.

Which is why Tasha hired him to make sure the Alliance’s system remained secure. The last time someone penetrated their internal communication it touched off a manhunt that led to many deaths, including Harlan’s. That would not happen again. Not on her watch.

Caleb smiled as his gaze hesitated on the file open on her desk. “Is the world on fire and the rest of us don’t know about it?”

Thirty, with coal black hair and something in his facial features that hinted at his Asian heritage. She couldn’t quite nail that part down, but he did look just like his sister. Tasha just wished she could fully trust the man to tell her the truth rather than try to play her.

“Probably.” She closed the unimportant file, letting him think he might have seen something when he hadn’t. He was a man drawn to solving problems, so she liked to keep him motivated by giving him some. But she hadn’t called this meeting. “I’m guessing that’s not why you’re here. You’re not one to panic, and I sensed worry in your voice when you called.”

His confident smile slipped a little but regained its full wattage before he leaned back in his chair. It
creaked under his trim runner’s build. “Thanks for seeing me.”

“You’ve done work for us. Tell me how we can repay the favor.”

“This isn’t just for me. It’s for you, too.”

That sounded bad. Like she’d missed something, and she did not miss things. “You’ve lost me.”

“I can’t reach Cara.” Caleb stared down at his hands for a second before meeting Tasha’s gaze again. “To be completely accurate, the science expedition she’s on has gone dark.”

His word choice didn’t make much sense. It was a little too dramatic for Caleb’s usual choices, so Tasha treaded carefully. “Where?”

“Ural Mountains.”

She forced her body to remain still. At times the world felt as if it were on fire, with regional outbreaks of violence, and nations threatening other nations. For the first time in a long time, the Urals made the list of potential problem areas. Sixteen hundred miles stretching up to the Arctic, some of it home to small cities and towns. Much of it desolate and hard to investigate, and that didn’t even take into account the difficulty in dealing with the country’s leadership.

She leaned back, matching her relaxed position to Caleb’s even though she knew they were both playing games here. “What kind of expedition is this?”

“The undercover type.”

She mentally flipped through every briefing file and satellite photo from the last two weeks but could not place any mention of a field operation disguised as a science expedition. “And that’s where I come in? You think this is something the Alliance either knows about or should?”

“Reid is there. I think he took Parker Scott with him.”

Tasha could hear the air rattling around inside her chest. Feel the tension ratchet up as her body and brain prepared for battle. “Excuse me?”

Caleb blew out a long breath. “I lost contact with Cara and I went to Reid.”

“You’re telling me you lost two of my men.” Two men she planned to strangle when she got her hands on them.

“I wouldn’t say it that way, since you know how to use a gun, but yes.”

Good thing she had plenty of fury to go around because right now it extended past the man in front of her to the two on the ground she trusted not to be so reckless. Apparently they were unclear on the concept of vacation. Since neither their real names nor any of their aliases tripped an alarm through passport or visa control, she had to assume they sneaked into Russia. Not exactly a country with the warmest regard for that sort of thing.

“Why?” And she didn’t explain further. She knew Caleb knew what she was really asking.

“Cara has a tracker. I thought maybe Reid could find her faster than I could.”

This conversation just got worse and worse. “You’re saying Cara let him implant a device on her?”

Caleb winced. “‘Let’ is the wrong word.”

“When Reid gets back and starts the mandatory refresher course on international travel restrictions I plan to make him take, I’ll throw in one on consent as well.” Reid’s boundaries had never been great, but this . . .
damn it
.

“She’s in Russia on a grant from the Bastion Foundation.”

Tasha didn’t even try to hide her frustration over that news. She grabbed onto the armrests and dug her fingernails in to keep from yelling. “Of course she is.”

“What?” When Tasha gestured for Caleb to keep explaining, he did. “They are there under the guise of testing theories about some old hiking incident. One of those big unsolved conspiracies. But I did some digging—”

“I don’t want to know how.” Plausible deniability was a big concept in her dealings with Caleb.

“She’s there for something else.”

All the pieces fell together in Tasha’s head. The CIA’s insistence they had agents working to assess what could be a threat in the Urals, and the steadfast refusal to let her bring in the Alliance to help. Those idiots at Langley were using scientists, endangering people without sufficient training.

She exhaled. “Let me guess. You stumbled upon allegations that a faction within the Russian military—or worse, a private former military group—is using former Soviet era compounds throughout the Urals to do something weapons related, possibly nuclear but also could be chemical, it’s not clear except that the complete takeover of the Ukraine seems to be the endgame.”

Caleb’s arm dropped and his hand smacked against the side of the chair. “I see you already got the memo.”

“It’s my job to know these things.” And since she might need Caleb’s backdoor assistance, she filled him in on the basics. “I’d been told there were assets in the region tracking truck movements and poking around to see if the Alliance should investigate. Then satellite access cut off. Signals are being jammed on the ground.”

“Reid, Parker, and Cara are in the middle of all of that.”

“I’m not happy about you using my men for your personal mission.” Now there was an understatement. She’d firmly crossed over from frustrated to pissed, but with her people scattered, the Alliance being watched closer than usual after Harlan’s murder, and the need to keep this off the intelligence community’s radar for now, she needed Caleb.

“I didn’t know about the alternative reason for the expedition until communication got cut off and I started investigating.” He held up a hand in mock surrender. “I
really did ask Reid to go as a personal favor.” Caleb shook his head. “He said something about having vacation time and motorcycles.”

“The fact he still loves Cara probably weighed heavily in his decision to go.” And that was the other unknown factor. Tasha had worked with her fiancé, Ward, in the field in the past and knew just how hard it was to keep the emotional separated from the mission in those circumstances.

“Reid insists that’s over.” Caleb shrugged. “That’s what he
says,
anyway.”

“Sure.” Men really could be clueless. “I’m assuming you covered your digital tracks. The CIA isn’t hunting you down right now, correct?”

Caleb snorted. “Give me some credit.”

“Good, because we need to do an end run. Convincing the people I answer to that we should put a second team on the ground and risk pissing off Russia will take too long.” Her bigger fear was in touching off an intelligence agency battle between the CIA and everyone else, where the CIA rushed to cover its ass and the science expedition became collateral damage. “You wouldn’t believe the layers of bullshit involved in this sort of thing.”

Caleb’s gaze narrowed. “So, what do we do?”

“Go straight to Nikolay Murin.” One of her least favorite people on the planet, and that was saying something.

“The head of the Bastion Foundation,” Caleb said nice and slow, as if weighing each word as he said it.

“Niko and I have a bit of a history.” She found her first smile since the conversation started.

“A good one?”

“I think so.” She unlocked the safe behind her desk and threw a stack of files in it. Then she took out her gun. “I grabbed him and interrogated him about nine months ago. We made an agreement when he ended up accepting my blackmail terms. Things ended up fine.”

“Does he see it that way?”

Tasha smiled for the first time since the conversation started. She stood up, ready to get this done. “Well, he’s not in jail for fraud, and that’s thanks to me. Me and his willingness to tell me everything I needed to know at the time.”

Caleb shook his head. “I don’t want to know about what.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Maybe I should go in alone.” Caleb said it more as a comment than a question.

“Even with your money and power, it’s possible he’ll never see you.” The man was ridiculously paranoid about his protection. Refused public appearances and played the role of mysterious billionaire philanthropist very well. “But Niko will see me.”