Sam bent down and kissed his wife, moving one hand up to cup the back of her head. He was lost, just like that, at the touch of his lips to hers. He took a deep, shaky breath, every hormone in his body pinging to painful life, and held her more closely, right hand moving over her back.
The satiny material felt real good but her naked flesh, he knew from experience, would feel even better.
He knew this nightgown. There was a zipper…oh, yeah. And when the two back panels separated, he slid his hand over her satiny skin, pulling her even more tightly against him.
Making love to a pregnant Nicole was mind-blowingly erotic. He was heavy, so missionary would soon be out. Still, there were plenty of other positions, and Sam knew every one.
Sam picked her up and lay her on the bed gently and stood there for just a moment, looking at her. He had an almost painful hard-on, but just looking at her, knowing she was his, was his wife, carried his baby…shit, that was the best.
“Sam,” she said softly. “Is she?”
Oh man. He could smell her excitement, a smell that was imprinted on the most primitive part of his brain. Granted, Nicole would probably say that all of his brain was primitive, but in the most basic, reptilian part of his brain, that smell, her smell, would remain with him till the end of time. Nicole’s arousal.
How excited was she?
“Sam?”
Only one way to find out. Eyes fixed on the dark cloud of soft hair between her thighs, Sam cupped her, right there where he wanted to be. Waggling his hand made her open her thighs to him and his hand slid in to cover her completely. The lips of her sex felt puffy, slick…
“Sam!”
He inserted a long finger and yes—thank you God—she was wet. Excited. Not as excited as he was, but then that was impossible.
He shifted forward, inserting his thigh between hers, opening her up.
“Oh, for—” Nicole slapped his hand away and clamped her thighs shut. “Will you listen to me?”
Startled, Sam’s head lifted and he saw with consternation that she was looking exasperated. At him. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that look on her gorgeous face. What had he done now?
“Yeah, honey?” He smiled down at his wife. “What is it?”
“For the third time, are we safe here? Is Eve safe?”
Sex was instantly booted out of Sam’s mind. He smoothed back a lock of blue-black hair, tucking it behind her ear. He looked his wife straight in the eyes and spoke soberly.
“Oh, yeah. Mike cleared her room. He said that he left absolutely nothing of hers behind that could in any way identify her. You trust Mike, right?”
“Yes,” Nicole said softly. “Absolutely.”
His heart gave one of those hard little pumps it sometimes did when he realized all over again how lucky he was. He’d have married Nicole even if she didn’t get on with his brothers, but the fact was, they loved her almost as much as he did. Lucky, lucky man.
“We’ve gone over this, Harry and Mike and I, and we can’t find a way that Montez can connect her to us. So she can recover here and we can set her up in a new life when she’s ready.”
Nicole gave one of her mysterious smiles.
Sam frowned. “What?”
She shook her head, the scent of her shampoo whooshing out from her and messing with his head.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So—it’s okay, then?”
“Absolutely.” Sam picked up her hand and brought it to his mouth, utterly sober and serious. “I would never—and trust me when I say never—let you be near any possible danger to you and our child. You have to believe me.”
“Oh!” Nicole looked startled. “I believe you, of course I do.”
“Good.” Blood was rushing out of his head, down, down…Sam bent and ran his mouth along her neck, and gave her a little nip. She loved that. It turned her on. He knew that through long practice. Nicole shivered and at that moment he lifted her leg and gently slid his cock into her. “Now.” He pulled slowly out, then pressed back in. “Where were we?”
Prineville, Georgia
Bearclaw Headquarters
“I’m sorry, sir,” the snooty political aide said on the phone. “But Senator Manson is unavailable at the moment.”
Montez gritted his teeth, pulled the handset away so the bitch wouldn’t hear him blowing his breath out in one controlled flow. Control. He needed to keep control.
“All right,” he said, when his voice was steady. “When will the senator be available for an appointment?”
Never, you moron.
The unsaid words hung there, quivering.
Montez remembered this assistant to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a tall, bony creature with two PhDs, one in political science and one in physics. Ferociously ambitious, biding her time on a senator’s staff before she joined some hotshot think tank for ten times the salary.
She’d disliked Montez on sight, and it had been mutual.
“I think I can safely speak for the senator here,” she said finally. “There has been some…adverse publicity lately with regard to your personnel. This is not a good time for the senator to be linking his name to yours. At least until all the ambiguities have been cleared up. Good day.”
A click.
She’d hung up on him. Montez stared at the dead handset. The bitch had hung up on him.
He knew exactly what she was referring to. The media storm surrounding the shooting deaths of three of his employees in San Diego had shaken the company to its foundations.
He had sent three of his best operatives to pick up one woman. One small woman. It hadn’t even occurred to him that they should go in without ID because it hadn’t occurred to him that they could fail.
But they had. Spectacularly. Three men shot dead on the streets of San Diego. Three men with Bearclaw ID on them. There had been nothing Montez could do about it because the police got there before he could wipe the identities clean.
Three good men, former soldiers, crack shots all of them—and a lone woman had defeated them. Which was insane, of course. Especially when that woman was Ellen.
Montez had offered countless times to teach her to shoot. Lots of women got off on guns and, even better, got off on men who were good with guns. Not Ellen. She’d rejected his offer to give her lessons with barely masked horror, as if he were offering to teach her to kiss cobras. And she wasn’t turned on by gunmen, either. Otherwise she’d have been in his bed long ago and this whole fucking mess would never have happened.
So it sure wasn’t Ellen who’d gotten the drop on his men. Men who’d been mission-ready, primed to grab her. No one could ever get the drop on his men, Montez would swear to that.
But the fact was, someone had. One person. Though the San Diego PD had been incredibly tight-lipped with him—you’d have thought he was the suspect, they doled out so little intel—Montez had hacked into their system and discovered that the bullets that had killed his men had come from one untraceable gun and one gun registered to Bearclaw.
One gun. One man.
One man had taken down three of his men, men who’d been ready for trouble. And he’d done it so fast and neat he hadn’t left any trace behind. It was almost unthinkable.
Bearclaw had had a lot of really bad publicity from that. It was dying down only because the police had zip—no leads, no gun, no shooter. The bodies had been autopsied—and yes, big surprise, cause of death was massive trauma from bullet wounds in all three cases—and handed back to Montez.
None of the men had families, so Montez had made a very big deal of giving them a hero’s funeral on company grounds, and had given all his employees the day off to attend. And all the while inside he’d been seething, furious that they’d botched a job that should have been easy, a fucking cakewalk, and had instead become a huge albatross around Bearclaw’s neck.
It might, in fact, cost him the company, if he wasn’t careful, because he needed that Pentagon contract, real bad, and right now
.
Ellen Palmer was now in the hands of a very slick operator who could take three of his men out in minutes and get away laughing.
She was now ten times more dangerous than before.
Montez needed outside help. He hated to admit it, but it was true. He needed someone outside his company, someone who was better than the men in his company. Someone who would never be connected back to the company.
He knew one man who would fit the bill.
He dialed a number he’d committed to memory.
Piet van der Boeke. Originally South African, now a stateless person. The last sighting of Piet had been way up the Congo River tracking down a rebel warlord.
He’d done it, too. Piet was legendary. He didn’t have a company or a stable team of men. He recruited men for each job based on the job specs. He was plugged into the world and he found the best man or men for the job each time. But he worked best alone.
Montez didn’t want an army. He wanted one man, Piet. He’d done Piet a favor in ’02, a big enough one that Piet had given him his private number and told him to call if he needed help.
Piet was a fine soldier, one of the best. But there were fine soldiers everywhere. Montez employed more than three hundred of them himself. Men who knew how to handle themselves in a firefight, how to shoot, how to survive an op. They weren’t a dime a dozen, but there were plenty of good soldiers around.
What Piet did, better than anyone in the world, was track.
His mother had died giving him birth. Piet’s father ran a hardscrabble farm three hundred miles from Johannesburg and, more important, at least two hundred miles from another white woman. Piet had been wet-nursed by the wife of the chief of the local Nguni tribe. The chief had basically brought him up with his own son, who had been like a brother to Piet. While year after year Piet’s father sat morosely over his unpaid bills, drinking bottle after bottle of whiskey, Piet was out in the wild, learning to follow sign. He enrolled in the South African Army the day he turned seventeen and proved to be a natural soldier.
But what was extraordinary was that Piet could track in all kinds of wilds. The savannah, the uplands of the Hindu Kush, Grozny, Peshawar, Belgrade…you name the place, country or city where a man had gone to ground and Piet would find him.
When he went private, he had clients coming out of his ears.
He’d been a natural at following sign for big game and he was a natural at modern technology. It was said that the U.S. military didn’t want Bin Laden to be found, otherwise they’d have contracted Piet van der Boeke—then Bin Laden would be either in the dock or six feet underground.
The cell rang. He had strong encryption and knew Piet did, too.
“Yeah?” A bass tone in a strong Afrikaans accent, so strong even the voice distortion program couldn’t quite mask it. The yeah sounded like yiah. But the voiceprint would be completely altered. Even if NSA could pluck this conversation out of the air—and the odds of that were a billion to one—there would be no voiceprint match.
It occurred to Montez that since he had no idea where Piet was, he could be waking him up. If he was in West Africa, where he heard Piet had set up headquarters, it’d be midnight where he was. But the voice sounded strong and completely alert.
“No names. We met during Moondust. I headed the team. Do you remember me?”
Moondust had been a private black op just over the Pakistani border, technically illegal. Piet and four of his men had been guarding and leading a New York Times journalist on the hunt for al Qaeda’s bioweapons expert. The journalist had gone on to win a Pulitzer. What the article didn’t mention was that their GPS had died on them and they had gone four miles into no-no land, over the border into Pakistan, and had been shot up by a cove of Taliban.
Piet had wasted every single tango but he was left with two dead and two wounded, including the journo. If the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, had caught them, the journalist would have been thrown into jail till the end of time and Piet and his men would have been hanged, not without some pain first.
Montez had been following a lead that one of Bin Laden’s comms guys had his headquarters in a mud hut. But the mud hut was just that—full of goat herders with their goats—and Montez was ready to pull back with his men when he got an SOS from Van der Boeker.
Technically, it wasn’t Montez’s business at all. In fact, technically, helping mercenaries was illegal. But hell, it was only a couple of miles out of his way, he had manpower up the wazoo and it was a chance to get an IOU out of Piet van der Boeke. Better than money in the bank.
His team cut communication with their FOB for a couple of hours and went out to rescue Piet, his wounded and the journalist. The journalist was sworn to silence about the rescue, wrote an article that was turned into a book that became a bestseller and didn’t once mention Piet or Montez.
“Yiah. I remember you, mate. You need something?”
“Bad. I’ll send a company jet for you. Are you near Lungi?” The Freetown airport was the staging area for most of western and central Africa. Busy and corrupt, a place where one more corporate jet wasn’t going to be noticed.
“Yiah.”
“Can you be there by fourteen hundred hours local time tomorrow?”
“Yiah.”
“Good. The corporate jet will be in the name of—”
“I know the name.” And he hung up.
Montez stared at his screen for a moment, then powered down the laptop, knowing that he’d just done the only thing possible to correct a really bad situation.
Yiah.
Chapter 7
Prineville, Georgia
Piet van der Boeke hadn’t aged in the past eight years, Montez thought. His face had been deeply tanned and weatherbeaten eight years ago and still was. He was still wiry and lithe, moving swiftly down the steps that had been rolled up to the Gulfstream at the private airfield as if he hadn’t just spent the past ten hours sitting down in a pressurized compartment.
“Thanks for coming.” Montez clasped his hand at the bottom of the stairs. Piet’s grip was strong and dry.
“No problem.”
A car and a driver were waiting. Two minutes after Piet stepped onto the tarmac, they were driving away. The flight had been registered as a cargo flight. No one knew Piet was in America.
They both understood that the chauffeured limo was no place for a briefing, so they didn’t talk. Montez opened a small fridge and silently handed Piet a bottle of spring water. Unlike most mercs, Piet was a teetotaller.
Montez had the driver go straight into the detached six-car garage that was connected to the main house via an underground passageway. Piet made no comments, just observed everything with his sharp gaze.
For the first time, Montez wondered what someone would think of his home. It was more than thirty thousand square feet and as luxuriously appointed as the crazy fag decorator from Atlanta could make it. Piet was an observer. He carefully studied his prey, both in and out of their natural habitats. Montez wondered uncomfortably just what Piet made of his own habitat, what he thought it said about him.
He shook that thought off irritably. He was going to offer Piet over half a million bucks for this job—who cared what the fuck he thought?
Finally, they were in Montez’s study. Montez had his study swept for bugs twice a day. The windows were specially treated to break up laser beams; there was a thirty-foot perimeter around the entire house with motion sensors. No one was going to thread in a snake camera and mike.
They were secure.
Montez indicated a big, comfortable leather armchair and watched as Piet sank into it. After pouring himself a generous portion of a twenty-year-old Talisker he sank down into another one.
Piet might be a teetotaller, but that was no reason for Montez to deprive himself.
He studied the South African for a moment. Piet sat quietly, accepting the scrutiny. “I’m offering half a million,” Montez began, and Piet held up a big, callused hand.
Montez didn’t even let an eyelash flicker, but inside he was groaning with dismay. Had Piet’s prices gone way up? Half a million was a real stretch for him at this particular moment, with no government contracts in sight. Fuck, what would happen if Piet’s price had gone up to a million? He didn’t even know if he had that kind of spare cash.
“I don’t want any money,” Piet said, and Montez’s mouth fell open before he was able to school his face back to blankness. “You saved my life and I owe you. I always pay my debts. But I do this one job for you and that’s it. You never call me again. Is that agreed?”
The bank account in Montez’s head went ping! He shifted the half mil back onto the assets side and tried not to nod too enthusiastically his agreement. “Fine by me. And thanks.”
Piet waved that away. “So…who am I after?”
“A woman.” Montez watched him carefully. For some reason, some mercs had problems with women and kids, which made no sense to him. A gig was a gig.
But Piet merely nodded. “Who is she?”
“Ellen Palmer.” Just saying the name made Montez’s blood speed up. “Used to be head accountant here.”
Piet’s eyes were the lightest blue Montez had ever seen. In direct sunlight they looked so pale they were almost white. “Tell me about her.”
Montez gulped down the rest of his whiskey to calm himself down. Just thinking of the bitch…“What do you want to know?”
His voice was calm, thoughtful. “What kind of woman is she? Flashy, loud? Quiet, bookish? Any hobbies? Is she the friendly kind? What does she look like?”
Well, that was something Montez could answer easily. He slid across two photos, both taken at a company picnic a year and a half ago.
Piet studied them carefully, spending about five minutes on each photo. Montez fidgeted in his chair. Damn, he wanted to get going. Finally, Piet spoke. “So tell me, tell me everything.”
Montez did, leaving out only the dollar amount of the missing pallets in the Green Zone in Baghdad and what happened to Arlen Miller.
“And then?” Piet’s voice was so fucking calm.
“And then the bitch just…disappeared. Been gone for a whole fucking year. I had men fan out, I had her phone tapped, I got her mail, I checked her credit cards. Nothing. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the fucking earth.”