Tactical Force

He nodded, flipped the kickstand down on his bike and joined Cole on the stairs.

Charlie led Anne and Grace into the house.

Arnold joined Cole and Jack. “Declan and the others are on their way in. They sustained some gunfire.”

“Are they okay?” Jack asked.

The butler nodded. “There was some damage to their vehicles, but they’re fine.”

Jack shook his head. If they’d been a little slower on the motorcycle, they would have taken those bullets. Anne had been on the back of the bike. She’d have been hit first. His heart raced, and he broke out in a sweat. Anne could have died. Just like Kylie. He’d have to rethink his motorcycle if he was tasked to protect Ms. Bellamy.

With that thought came another. Did he want to protect the woman? His history with women went deeper and more tragic than with Kylie. He’d lost his mother to cancer when he was only twelve. And just when he thought he was getting over Kylie and found someone else to love, Jennifer, the nurse deployed to the same base as he was in Afghanistan, had been killed when her vehicle rolled over an IED.

No. He was bad luck to the women in his life.

Women he loved. He could protect Anne Bellamy as long as he didn’t make the mistake of jinxing her by falling in love with her. The right thing to do would be to let someone else take over the woman’s protection. After saving her from being run down in DC and being shot at on the road to the Halverson estate, he felt he had a vested interest in her well-being.

He couldn’t get ahead of himself. If Anne stayed at the Halverson estate, she wouldn’t need a personal protector. Jack wouldn’t have to worry about her safety or jinxing her.

“What’s wrong?” Cole asked him.

“Why do you ask?”

Cole shrugged. “You were frowning.”

Jack shook his head, clearing his rampant thoughts. “I was thinking about the mess they made of her apartment and the message on the wall,” he lied. Now that he did think about it, he wondered who had put it there and why they thought she was a problem.

“Halverson must have been onto something big with Trinity for them to target him for assassination.”

“If they knew about Ms. Bellamy all along, why did they wait until now to go after her?”

“I assume it has to do with the person who texted her,” Cole said. “Using the phone number Anne gave Snow, Jonah hacked into the phone system and is going through her call and text history as we speak. We should go to the war room and see if he’s found anything.”

Jack followed Cole through the house and into Halverson’s study, where the trapdoor was hidden. It led into a basement painted white and set up with a conference room and a computer room with an array of monitors, CPUs and keyboards lining the walls.

Jonah Spradlin, Charlie Halverson’s young computer guru, sat at a keyboard, looking up at a setup of six monitors. His fingers flew across the keys, then he’d pause and study the screen. He repeated the process several times, shaking his head, his lips pressing together each time.

“Find anything?” Cole asked, taking the seat beside Jonah. Cole pressed several keys on the keyboard in front of him and brought up a screen.

“I traced the call back to a burner phone purchased at a store in Arlington,” Jonah said. “I hacked into their computer system, but the name the phone was registered to was Linda Radcliff, a woman who died five years ago.”

“Did they have video surveillance at the store?”

“Yes, but I haven’t hacked into that system yet. I’m working on it.”

“If the phone was registered to a Linda, the person had to be female,” Cole surmised. “Surely, the clerk or store owner would have denied the sale if the ID didn’t match the person presenting it.”

“So, we’re looking for a female texter.” Jack paced the length of the room and back. “What will that buy us? There are hundreds of thousands of females in this area. We have to narrow it down a little more than that.”

“We’re working on it. We don’t have a lot to go on and now your lady doesn’t have a phone for our mystery texter to send messages to.”

“She figured out Ms. Bellamy was associated with John Halverson,” Jack pointed out. “She’s smart. She’ll come up with a way to communicate with Ms. Bellamy again.”

Cole glanced up. “What’s your girl’s plan from here?”

Jack frowned. “She’s not my girl. And I have no idea. I just got her here.”

“I’m going to work tomorrow, as usual.” A female voice sounded behind them.

Anne descended the steps into the war room, followed by Grace and Charlie.

Jack faced her, his feet spread, his arms crossing over his chest. “The hell you are.”

Anne’s eyebrows rose up her forehead. “I have a big meeting to prepare for on Friday. I need to be in my office every day this week. Besides, the person who texted me wanted me to help stop Trinity from doing something. I can’t help if I’m locked behind the walls of this estate.”

“You’re a walking target,” Jack said. “It would be suicide for you to step past the gates.”

Anne lifted her chin. “I can’t hide away forever.”

“You can until we figure out what’s going on,” Jack insisted.

“We can figure it out a lot faster from inside the government offices. I assume since the person texted me, I’m probably in a position to find out something. Otherwise, why would he ask me for help?”

“She,” Jack corrected.

Anne cocked an eyebrow. “See? You already know more than when we started.”

“Okay, she’s female—” Jack threw his hand in the air “—so is half the population of the Metro area.”

“I’m going to work tomorrow,” Anne said. “I just need a ride in to a Metro station, and I’ll take it from there.”

“You can’t go alone,” Charlie said.

“Charlie’s right,” Jack said. “It’s too dangerous. You’re not equipped to handle armed assassins.”

Again, Anne stared at him with a cocked eyebrow. “And you are?”

“More so than you,” Jack shot back.

Charlie clapped her hands together. “Then it’s settled.”

Jack glared at the woman whose money funded Declan’s Defenders. “What’s settled?”

“The fact that Anne can’t go to work alone.” Charlie smiled as if everything was perfectly obvious. “You’ll go with her.”

Chapter Three (#udbf45780-e7e6-57be-8b3c-afe1e4eaa2b7)

Anne frowned. “Jack can’t go with me. You have to have a badge and a security clearance to get inside the office where I work.”