Cindy Gerard - Killing Time

They were walking down the wide, well-appointed hallway, peripherally aware of a zillion security cameras monitoring them, when the door at the end of the corridor opened up.

A big man with an imposing build and eyes that could drill holes through steel limped into the hallway to meet them. “Nice to know you can still follow simple directions.”

Mike broke into a broad grin. “Hello, Angel Boy. Long time no see.”

“Call me that again, smart-ass, and you won’t be seeing anything but stars.”

Mike laughed and shook his old friend’s hand. “Missed you too, buddy. Eva—meet Gabe Jones. Word to the wise: Don’t try to drug him. He’s not as forgiving or good-natured as I am.”

• • •

Mike leaned against the terrace wall, nursing a soda while Gabe stretched out on a chaise longue amid potted plants and a playpen.

Except for their quick sponge baths at the airport and her brief run to the drugstore, it was the first time Mike and Eva hadn’t been connected at the hip since she’d seduced him. They’d arrived at Gabe Jones’s apartment only a few minutes ago and she’d excused herself to use the restroom. They needed to get to work on the OSD file, but at the moment he couldn’t muster the energy. He’d practically been mainlining caffeine in the form of soda since they’d landed and for the moment he simply needed to chill.

This terrace was the spot to do it. His gaze landed on the playpen again. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed it. Mike grinned at Gabe. He had to hand it to Gabe’s gorgeous redheaded wife, Jenna. She’d tamed the beast.

Gabe “The Archangel” Jones was one of the toughest, meanest, most reclusive operators he’d ever worked with. Dedicated, driven, focused. A warrior to the end.

He’d either led or been part of teams that had pushed through everything from triple-canopy jungles, urban ghettos, mountains, and swamps for months on end, hunting the bad guys. One time when Mike had picked them up, their clothes were ragged to the point of falling off their bodies, everyone had lost at least twenty pounds, and they hadn’t had a square meal or decent rest in months. But Gabe’s force of personality and leadership had made them go way the hell over and beyond to complete the mission.

He’d even lost a leg a few years ago on an op but it had barely slowed him down.

Yet, here he was, all cozied up in a high-security D.C. apartment complex with designer deck furniture, flowering plants, and toddler toys, reeking of domestic tranquility.

“What?” Gabe narrowed his eyes in response to Mike’s grin.

“Never saw you as a baby daddy.”

“Yeah, well, it’s called maturity. You ought to try it sometime.”

Mike laughed and glanced down at the street ten stories below where rush-hour traffic zipped along. “Sorry I missed Jenna.”

He turned back to his friend, propped his elbows on the terrace wall behind him. Gabe’s wife, who his friend had just informed him was five months pregnant with their second child, was having a girls weekend in West Palm Beach. Jenna had taken their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ali, to visit their friends, Amy and Dallas Garrett, who along with Dallas’s brothers and sister ran E.D.E.N., Inc., a high-risk securities firm. Amy and Dallas had a daughter close to Ali’s age. Jenna and Amy had been close friends ever since they’d bonded during an investigation that had ultimately brought down a secret third-generation neo-Nazi camp in Argentina that practiced mind-control experimentation on unwilling victims. The two women tried to get together whenever time and schedules allowed.

“Might be a good thing Jenna and Ali aren’t here,” Mike added soberly. “And seriously, man, this is a safe house?”

He’d never been in one but had assumed it would be sterile—no personal possessions of any sort, not even art on the wall. Reason: If it was compromised, there’d be no clues for the bad guys as to who was there and possibly why.

“It’s my home. But no one makes it past the front entry that I don’t want inside.”

Judging from all the surveillance cameras and combo locks, Mike didn’t doubt it.

“Anytime you want to tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into,” Gabe added, “I’m all ears. But that’s your call.”

“Appreciate it.” Mike glanced toward the terrace doors, wondering what Eva was up to inside. “In the meantime, I’m still sorting things out.”

Gabe followed his gaze, then tipped up his beer. “So, what are the chances she’s tossing the place?”

Mike grinned and said cheerfully, “I’d say they’re pretty good.”

He’d seen the indecision in Eva’s eyes. She might think she knew everything about him, but she didn’t know Gabe Jones from Adam and that made her nervous. With good reason. Gabe Jones was someone to be wary of even though he was one of the good guys.

“She have anything to do with that?” Gabe lifted his beer, indicating the swelling on Mike’s cheek.

“Yup,” he admitted and carefully pressed the cold soda can against the ripening bruise.

He was going to have to tell him everything—including what he did and didn’t know about Eva Salinas. Which meant telling him about Afghanistan.

So he did. Drew a deep breath and purged. It felt like a bloodletting, and he didn’t stop until he’d spilled every last drop.

When he finished, along with the relief of unloading, he also felt a landslide of shame.

“About time you got that off your chest.”

He blinked at Gabe. “You knew? Jesus. The guys? Do they all know?”

Gabe lifted a shoulder. “We knew something had gone sideways for you. You were career Navy all the way, back in the Task Force Mercy days. And then after Afghanistan, suddenly you weren’t. The next thing we heard, you were hiding out in South America, playing fast and loose with your little cargo business and supporting the local pisco trade.”

Mike stared at the top of his soda can. That pretty much summed up his first couple of years post-Afghanistan. “Couple of years of that hard drinking was all I could take. So I sobered up.” Except for one day each year. And except for wanting a drink every single other day of every year.

“We knew that, too, or we’d never have tagged you for the Sierra Leone mission. You should have come to us,” Gabe added. “We could have helped.”

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. I was too…” He thought of all the things he was, none of them good.

“Stupid?” Gabe suggested.

In spite of himself, Mike grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”

Gabe lifted a dismissive shoulder. “We all have ghosts. Nut up and get over it.”

This prompted a laugh. “How touchy-feely of you. I’m tingling all over.” He held out an arm. “See? Goose bumps.”

Gabe gave him a rare smile. “What can I say? I’m a giver.”

Mike looked up at his friend, who clearly didn’t think less of him, who absolutely had ghosts of his own.

Gabe hitched his chin toward the apartment again. “Want me to run a check on the mystery woman?”

Mike’s phone pinged. He held up a finger and fished it out of his pocket. It was a text from Joe with a document attached. “Funny you should mention her,” he said, “because it looks like Joe came through on that front.”

“Good to know you’re thinking ahead. I’ll go check and see if she needs me to move any furniture so she can look behind it.”

Mike was barely aware that Gabe walked back inside the apartment. He was already engrossed in the background on his mystery woman.

“And we have a winner,” he said under his breath and quickly read the file on Eva Salinas. Good to know she was actually capable of some truth.

Holy crap. Her sheet read like the overachievers handbook. A little reading between the lines and it became clear that little Eva Montoya had been born on a mission. Her parents had set the bar high. From the time she could crawl up on her attorney mother’s lap or charm her JAG attorney father, whose service in the Navy had apparently prompted her to pursue her own career in service to her country, she’d been setting wrongs right.

Girl Scout, student council president, captain of the debating team at University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude, top of her class at U of V law school. Impressive.

And while she did not follow her father’s hellishly big footsteps into the military, she’d had instructor-level credentials in Muay Thai—no wonder she’d made such quick work of him in the alley—and was an expert marksman rank in both long gun and pistol. In short—she was kick-ass.

Right out of law school, she’d joined the CIA as an attorney in support services out of Langley, where she’d met Ramon Salinas, fallen in love, and after a whirlwind courtship, married him.

Should have been a happily ever after, Mike thought. A woman like her sure as hell deserved one. Ramon would have ripped her heart out and stomped all over it, but Mike wasn’t about to tell her that she wouldn’t have gotten that Cinderella ending. He would not talk trash about a dead man to anyone. Sure as hell not to his widow.

He only looked up when he heard the terrace door slide open again and Gabe stepped back outside.

“Everything okay in there?”

Gabe nodded. “I offered her a shower and she jumped at the chance. You look like you could use one, too.”

“For a fact. Might wake me up. We’ve been on the move for longer than I care to remember.”

“That would explain the need for the ugly shirt. Sucker’s so loud it would keep a narcoleptic awake.”

“Listen to you. Another joke from the Archangel. Jenna really has mellowed your ass out.”

“I suspect she’d say that she straightened my ass out. Come on. You can use the shower in our bedroom. Give you a chance to change into something that doesn’t shout South Pacific.”

“I’ll let that pass.”

“As if you could do anything about it.”

Gabe headed back inside, his limp reminding Mike what he’d given up in service to his country and for Jenna. He had saved her from a bomb blast, taking shrapnel in his leg that eventually resulted in amputation below the knee.

“That way.” Gabe pointed down the hall.

Mike hesitated and for a second considered hunting up Eva’s purse and digging around for the flash drive. He’d been itching to plug it into Gabe’s computer and read the information that had driven her to Lima to find him.

But that might break this fragile trust they’d developed and frankly, right now, he wanted a shower more. And he wanted to think about the information Joe had turned up on Eva Salinas, who was not Pamela Diaz or Emily Bradshaw.

The woman was nothing if not inventive.

“Here.” He handed Gabe his phone. “For your reading pleasure. It’s the lowdown on your other houseguest—aka CIA legal eagle.”

It wasn’t often Eva was given license to snoop. While she wasn’t a pro, she’d searched as much of the apartment as she could manage under the ruse of using the restroom before Gabe had stepped back inside and offered her the use of the guest shower.

Not that she’d found anything. Not that she’d expected to, she conceded as she stepped out of the shower and into the bedroom. A good operative—and despite the evidence of a toddler in residence, Jones had operative written all over him—would never leave anything in plain sight. What she needed was access to her CIA database so she could find out who, exactly, he was.

What she got, however, was Jones, alone on the terrace, loading salmon steaks on a grill.