Hot on the Hunt

“What’s your plan with that move? Are you going to kick it up and grab it from midair?”

“Something like that.”

“It’d almost be worth letting you try that, but how about instead you shuffle it behind you.”

“I would, but I can’t move.”

He lifted his knee away from where he had her leg pinned, so she slid the gun back just as he’d asked, biding her time. She gave a start as she felt his hands on the bare skin of her waist where her shirt had pulled up from her pants. He must have spotted the belt she’d strapped to her ribs under her shirt. She remained doubled over and let him look.

“I wasn’t going to strip-search you, but you’re not giving me a lot of choice.” He used his gun to push her shirt higher, revealing her concealed carry-gear belt. “You’re like a one-woman army, here. Grenades, ammo, flash bangs, multi-tool. And I’m sure there’s more in here somewhere.”

He felt along her bra, then gave a humph as he reached the hilt of the knife she’d sewn into it. His touch was clinical, free of any sexual undertones, but she still had to ignore the sensation of being violated. “Ingenious. Makes me wish I was more creative with my concealed carry.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t look as good as you do in cargo pants.” She pushed off her left leg and stood, twisting into the hand that still held her wrist to pin it behind her and bringing his face into strike range. She elbowed him in the nose, then ducked under his gun-holding arm and twisted again, locking out and twisting the arm of the hand that held her wrist until he had no choice except to release her.

Before he could spin to face her, she kicked him with all her might, then reached under her shirt and ripped her knife from its sheath in her bra as she dropped to her knees near his head. She held the knife to his throat.

Wearing an expression of respect, he touched the clotting blood on his thigh from where she’d stabbed him. His eyes were watering, his nose bloody. He reached with unsteady hands into his pocket for her gun and she let him get it clear of the fabric before she elbowed him in the gut, then plucked it from his hand and aimed it at him with her left hand.

“Should I shoot you or slice your neck open?”

“Nicely played. There’s just one little problem.”

She registered the sound of a vehicle at the same time he raised his head and looked past her. A van done up like a resort’s airport shuttle, but with darkly tinted windows, screeched to a stop not two meters away. She supposed the shuttle look was as much camouflage on a tropical island as the type of run-down A-Team knockoff van she and her black ops crew had driven in the Third World countries they often found themselves in.

The side door of the van swung open to reveal two ripped, fit men holding automatic rifles, both aimed at her. Driving the van, and with a handgun aimed at Alicia, was an equally fit young woman.

“Alicia Troy, meet your replacements.” The glee in McCaffrey’s voice made her want to punch him in the face all over again.

Damn it all.

“Drop the gun and get your hands in the air,” Logan said, the smug smoothness returning to his voice. “We’re done dancing.”

Out of ideas, she complied, setting the knife and gun on the ground.

While she processed the turn of events, Logan scooted from beneath her, gathered her discarded weapons and stood. He returned to the car she’d planned to steal and retrieved her computer bag from the passenger seat. “We’ll need this as evidence.”

And, boy, would they find it on that computer. Her gut twisted.

“I see you weighing your options, but the only one that’ll keep you alive is to get your hands in the air. We’re the best of the best and I wouldn’t underestimate us if I were you.”

“If you’re the best, it’s only because my team’s out of the picture.”

Logan and his crew all chuckled. Logan shook his head. “Nearly two years ago, you and your merry band of misfits nearly destroyed a billion-dollar, international operation, and Rory Alderman sold national secrets to the highest bidder. If you ask me, it’s a miracle ICE decided to give their black ops experiment another try.”

Given all the guns pointed at her and that she was outnumbered four to one, her best option—her only option, really—was to do as he said, at least for the time being. For the first time in her life, she raised her arms in a show of surrender.

Chapter 5

Through the painted iron bars of the Ammaly Bay Resort’s pool enclosure, John watched resort security take statements from a couple who had apparently been robbed of all their belongings during the water volleyball tournament less than an hour earlier. So John’s hunch had been right. Rory had used the resort as an ATM to fund his disappearance.

The question still was, had Alicia caught up to him before he was able to slip away?

Cutting a wide berth around the pool, he walked the winding path through the hotel grounds, then through the lobby. After Rory gathered funds, the next logical step would be to steal a car. With that in mind, John headed into the parking lot, but what he saw had him cursing and ducking for cover behind the nearest parked car.

Alicia. But she wasn’t alone.

He watched as she climbed into a white hotel shuttle van along with at least four others.

He raised up slightly as the van cruised past him. He didn’t recognize either the woman behind the wheel or the man in the passenger seat, but they both looked calm, yet vigilant. Something was definitely not right about the situation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Then his eyes widened and his stomach dropped. Something akin to a boiling sensation started in his chest. Sitting right beside Alicia in the middle row of the van was Logan effing McCaffrey—the man John had thought was his only friend left in ICE. Guess they weren’t such great friends, after all.

No wonder Alicia had been so cavalier about breaking the law by hijacking that helicopter. No wonder she hadn’t shot to kill Rory. It wasn’t that she’d lost her touch; it was that she had something going on with ICE that John didn’t understand.

No, check that, he did. There was no two ways about it. He knew exactly what had happened. “Mother of God, Logan and Alicia set me up.”

He watched the van roll out of the parking lot headed north, toward Frederiksted, then jimmied the door of an old hatchback. The once-silver paint had turned gray, and the engine strained before it caught, but it blended in with most of the other vehicles on the island, which was John’s only requirement.

His palms sweating against the steering wheel and his throat tight and sore as though from screaming, John waited until the van was a good distance away before pulling onto the road behind it. It was a slow crawl along the two-lane coastal road to Frederiksted. He hung back as far as he could while still maintaining a visual on the van, biding his time to strike as his anger gathered force.

They’d played him a fool—Logan, Alicia, ICE. Everyone. In his mind, he could see the email from Logan that morning. Alicia is missing.

Oh, they played him good. He huffed out an exhale, fighting to get a grip. The van drove slow and steady over the straight stretch of the highway toward the heart of Frederiksted, with John following at a distance.

John had spent a lot of time in Frederiksted, the second largest town on the island, yet far and away more charming, with its rustic buildings, Dutch history and killer beaches. He used to love the place, but this was the spot where he’d realized, a year or so ago, that his complacency had finally consumed him and he’d lost his taste for life.

It’d happened on a moonlit rooftop deck across the street from the pier, with a beautiful woman in his arms and four shots of rum in his veins. She’d trailed kisses over his chest, her hands exploring lower, and he remembered looking up at the moon and thinking, I feel nothing. Not drunk, not desire, not even anger at Alicia or Rory. Nothing.

It’d been enough to scare rationality back into him. That was the night he left St. Croix and sequestered himself with his weapons and computer on a barely inhabited island east of St. Thomas. That was the night he’d started training again—when he’d started preparing for this, his first and most critical mission back in the game.

And all the while, through his pain and rebirth, Alicia and Logan had been plotting something, preparing to use him.

Instead of stewing on why it seemed to be his lot in life to be a patsy, he should be asking himself what Logan and Alicia were trying to accomplish with Rory’s escape and John’s pursuit of him. It didn’t make sense. Logan was the ICE recruiter who’d brought John and Rory over from Army Special Forces and had facilitated their training. He didn’t work cases, so what was he doing in the field?

Come to think of it, maybe an even better question than that was why would Alicia help ICE in the first place? She’d quit the agency more than a year ago, and as far as John could glean at the time, not on the best of terms after they’d put her on disability.

All John knew was that he was sick and tired of being jerked around and played for a fool. That was going to end right the hell now. Seething inside, he gunned the engine and swerved right, ripping around one corner, then another, onto a side street that ran parallel to the coastal highway on which the van continued to travel. With a whining protest, the hatchback complied. Keeping one eye on the road and his foot pushing the gas pedal to the floor, he reached into his bag and brought out his rifle.

At a corner where the van was set to pass by as it headed in the direction of the airport, he screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, threw the car into Park and ran up an exterior set of stairs to a rooftop deck, rifle in hand. This plan might ruin his getaway car, but John couldn’t worry about that now. There were plenty of other cars on the island to steal.

No more than a minute after he flattened to a shooting position, the van came into view.

His index finger slipped to the trigger. Compared to hitting a buoy, this was going to be a piece of cake. Taking aim, he squeezed the trigger and held it down until the two front tires were shredded.

The van’s brakes smoked as it jerked into a spinout. John then took aim at the windshield and squeezed off a single round that hit right in the corner as the van turned. The windshield beaded into thousands of white balls of glass, but the plastic safety film covering the glass kept the windshield erect, though no one could possibly see through it.

Someone in the van fired a shot out of an open window, then another, but John ignored the danger. It was a little hard to squeeze off an accurate shot from a vehicle spinning out of control. He stood, ready to spring. The van slammed into the side of the building adjacent to the one John stood on, nearly taking out the beams holding the second-story balcony up. The airbags exploded as it shuddered to a stop.