Hot on the Hunt
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“You know how you can guarantee I won’t kill you?”
The pilot’s eyes were wide with terror and bugging out of his beet-red face as he gave a spastic shake of his head.
The real answer was Because I would never kill a civilian—ever. But honesty like that wasn’t exactly an A-1 coercion technique. Alicia burrowed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his neck. Her finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger, but it didn’t need to be. The metal on his skin was convincing enough that she meant business.
“Because you’re going to hover over that field, no funny business, and I’m going to jump out. And then you don’t ever have to see me again. Sound like a plan?”
He nodded, right on cue. Holding the helicopter pilot by gunpoint hadn’t been her first choice, but money hadn’t worked as a bribe and she couldn’t take the chance of Rory making it to St. Croix—or, worse, disappearing—before she got a read on him.
She hadn’t wanted to abandon John in the water, either, but what choice did she have? She’d unleashed a vicious criminal and now it was her duty to stop him at the sacrifice of everything else. Not only her duty to herself, but to the planet. Wasn’t that a disquieting thought? In the twenty months since she’d been shot, she’d barely thought of anyone but herself. That’s the way rehab and physical therapy worked. If you weren’t thinking about yourself 24/7, thinking about healing and regaining your strength until it was almost an obsession, then you weren’t doing it right.
She jiggled her gun against the pilot’s skin. “But if you try to be a hero or do something stupid, the deal’s off and I shoot. Got it?”
Another nod.
“Take it down as far as you can without landing.” She didn’t need marks left from the chopper’s landing skids. Her footprints would be evidence enough of her presence on the island. With any luck, the pilot would return to St. Thomas and shake off his flight under duress. Maybe he wouldn’t even call the police. Yeah, right.
Jumping out of a helicopter into a soggy field in the middle of St. Croix’s wilderness wasn’t ideal, but the airport was on the west side of the island—miles from any one of the harbors Rory was almost certain to have chosen as a landing point on the east side and way too central a location for her to disembark at. After a sweep of the coastline, she’d spotted Rory’s speedboat drifting in the calm waters near a secluded high-end resort, with Rory nowhere to be seen.
If she’d been in his position, she would’ve done the very same thing because the resort’s remote location tucked into the lush green tropics of the northeast shore meant fewer witnesses had noticed him drive up and jump out. Plus, the resort sported a whole parking lot full of cars ripe for the stealing.
Contrary to St. Thomas’s Let’s-help-the-tourists-spend-their-money-fast! vibe, this was a sleepy island of wealthy, older vacationers who liked their tennis games at the club in the morning and their naps in their beach hammocks in the afternoon, thank you very much. An escaped convict couldn’t hide here long—at least, that’s what Alicia was counting on.
Unfortunately, that meant she couldn’t hide out here long, either, so it was a good thing that she didn’t plan to. The idea was to locate Rory, execute him and vanish before the vacationers had woken from their naps. The closest, best place to make a clean break with the helicopter and its frightened pilot was a field two kilometers from the resort.
She poked the pilot in the neck with her gun once more for good measure. “Hold it steady now.” She yanked his radio wire from its socket and tossed it out the door opening, then his earphones. No sense giving him a chance to call the police the moment she jumped, even if she’d never said directly why she needed him to get her to St. Croix or what she planned to do while there.
She tucked two one-hundred-dollar bills in his shirt pocket to cover replacing the equipment she’d destroyed, secured the computer bag she’d retrieved from her rental car across her shoulders, then walked to the edge of the doorway. He’d done a great job getting low. She had maybe a two-meter jump. No problem.
On the ground, she ran out from under the helicopter’s shadow and sought cover beneath the tree canopy. She watched the helicopter rise and head off, not back toward St. Thomas, but in the direction of the St. Croix airport. Just terrific. With the navy on its way to the island, she had ten, maybe fifteen minutes to vanish before the U.S. authorities he was most likely on his way to notify descended on the resort.
Cursing at the messiness of it all and how screwed up her vengeance plan had gotten, she made a break for the hotel. What she really needed was a quiet place to log on to her computer. Maybe that was less glamorous than stealing a car and scouring every inch of the island, but Alicia could cover a lot more ground that way, so to speak.
She could tap into the local police phone line and radio and let the police and civilians do the grunt work. If what she’d seen on St. Thomas as the helicopter lifted off was any indication, St. Croix’s main town of Christiansted would be crawling with police and soldiers, too, so the less visible she was, the better.
In the resort’s parking lot, she scanned for a sign of Rory or any indication that he’d been through. She didn’t expect a top-rate operative like him to leave a trail, and he didn’t surprise her with one. She jimmied open the door of a rusty, early 1990s model American-made sedan—the kind that only took the touch of a screwdriver to the engine’s solenoid starter to jumpstart and so were, statistically, the favorite choice of auto thieves the world over—that probably belonged to one of the resort’s employees.
With another look around, she pulled the driver’s door closed, but it caught on something and bounced back open. Her gaze shot sideways to see a man’s black boot propped on the bottom of the door frame.
Squelching a gasp, she pulled her gun and twisted to aim at him, but the man was faster. Cold metal of a gun muzzle jabbed at her neck. Didn’t karma have an ironic sense of humor?
“Not the best idea, Phoenix.”
There were only a handful of men in the world who called her that, and none of them owned that smug, smooth voice. She followed the boot in the doorway up past a pair of black cargo pants, black leather belt and gray T-shirt concealing a lean, fit build to the smirking face of a man who looked a few years older than her thirty-two. It was going to take some effort and strategy to best him and escape, but she had no doubt that she would.
Her first strategic move was to bide her time and wait for an opening. Blanking her expression, she released her gun into her lap and raised her hands in a show of surrender. “What do you want?”
He cocked his head and looked sideways with mocking amusement. “You and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet. Do you know who I am?”
A navy SEAL, she’d bet, given his clothes and high and tight haircut—and, if the gleam in his eye was any indication, one with a mean streak. “Should I care?”
His lips twitched into a smile. “I think you’re going to want to remember my name. ICE Special Agent Logan McCaffrey.”
ICE. That was not the agency she expected to catch up with her first. How did they get to the islands so fast? And why target her? She would’ve thought that if she had any remaining allies in the government, they would be the men and women she’d worked with for twelve years. She guessed loyalty and an exemplary service record didn’t count for much after she’d broken their most notorious corrupt agent out of prison.
The name Logan McCaffrey didn’t ring a bell, but then again, she’d been out of the loop for a year and a half. As if she’d ever paid much attention to the loop the first place. Their black ops crew had operated largely as a solitary unit, their identities classified, which had kept them isolated from the politics and flow of employees within the government bureaucracy that paid their salaries.
McCaffrey tightened a hand around her upper arm. “That was quite a show you put on with Rory Alderman.”
To test his strength, she tried to jerk her arm out of his grip, but he clamped his hand harder around her. Okay, then, he was as strong as he looked and with reflexes to match. The faster she separated his gun from his possession, the better her odds of success. She lowered her gaze to her lap, where her gun lay. So close, yet she’d never be able to wield it before he reacted.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a show.” It was supposed to be quiet and fast, elegant even. Not the spectacle it’d turned into, thanks to John.
“Nevertheless, I’ve been waiting for you to make that move for a long time. Alicia Troy, it’s my pleasure to place you under arrest.”
Chapter 4
John didn’t have time to worry about Alicia, especially with his fate hanging in such limbo. He had enough to think about with hunting down Rory and dodging the military and coast guard vessels that swarmed the water surrounding St. Croix as he considered where and how to sneak ashore.
He’d hitched a ride back to his boat from the yacht owner who’d heard his gunshot, and though his clothes were almost dry and his bag of guns and money had been right where he’d left it on the floor of the boat, it had been a pride-swallowing, tough slog of an hour.
With military and federal forces descending on the island and the dark, threatening clouds of Hurricane Hannah forming in the distant horizon, John doubted Rory would linger there long. There were only a few ways one could get on and off St. Croix, and John had no doubt the airport and main port in Christiansted Harbor were already on lockdown.
The next closest island was over a hundred nautical miles away. Since there was no way Rory would chance returning to St. Thomas, he would have to hire a private charter or steal a private helicopter, plane or a boat large enough to handle the choppy open waters. Even then, the coast guard and military would have satellites and radars to keep tabs on the water and airspace surrounding the island.
As far as John was concerned, he was in the best position to find Rory, not only because of his intimate knowledge of both St. Croix and the man who was his former best friend, but because he was in the ironic position of being the forgotten one, the ghost operative. There wasn’t anyone in the world who cared enough about John’s movement to pay attention to where he was or what he was doing.
The only person who even knew John was an interested party in what happened to Rory and Alicia was his ICE buddy Logan, and even if Logan thought he might go after Rory, he had no idea how close John had been living to the unfolding events or how quickly he was capable of responding. With any luck, he would slip onto the island undetected, nab Rory, extract a confession from him, then turn him over to ICE before Hannah’s wind speed hit fifty knots.
John’s plan not to think about Alicia was easier said than done, though. Because the moment the luxury estates and resorts dotting the green hills of St. Croix’s coast got near enough that he could make out balconies and artfully arranged palm trees in courtyards, all he could think was that she was out there, too. The same 134 miles that trapped Rory with scores of federal agents and U.S. troops also trapped her.
Had she already found and killed Rory? He hadn’t forgotten her hesitation back on St. Thomas to do just that, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. On their black ops team, there was no getting around necessary violence when their duty to defend their country demanded it, which occasionally meant making a kill. Alicia’s conviction to do what was right for her country and her lethal grace were two of the things he loved about her. Perhaps, now that duty to country had been stripped from her job description, her moral compass had changed. Unless...
Unless what if she’d lost her touch? Post-traumatic stress disorder was common in victims of violence. Either that or there was some reason, deep down inside her, why she wanted Rory alive. Regardless of why Alicia had done what she did, it was time to set his musings aside and admit the very real danger that she wouldn’t have the chance to try to kill Rory again because she’d be apprehended by authorities here on St. Croix, if she hadn’t already.
The idea made his chest tight, which pissed him off. She’d abandoned him in middle of the Caribbean Sea, of all the damn things. She hadn’t even seen fit to throw down a floatation device. So what if the authorities got her? He had no business caring what her fate was anymore. If she got caught, then his path to Rory would be clearer. Try as he might, he just couldn’t sell himself on that argument, though. Despite everything, she was the woman he’d once loved. Despite everything, there as a part of him that cared about her still.
He wove a path along the north side of the island, away from busy Christiansted Harbor. With the binoculars he kept in the boat’s console, he scanned the coast, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts from returning to Alicia.
It had always been that way between them—he cared too much and she acted as if she barely afforded him a thought. She’d made him fight for a spot in her bed. Made him demand it. At the time, in the middle of it all, he’d liked being the one calling the shots in their relationship. Fighting for what he wanted was his comfort zone. As with everything else in his life—his career, his family—with her he’d let his stubborn streak act as a battering ram, breaking through her self-protective walls. He’d not only loved Alicia, body and soul, but he’d loved the challenge of her, too.
He saw no sign of Rory’s boat at Salt River Bay, which had been his first hunch. Intimately familiar with almost all the docks, piers, bars and hotels on St. Croix because St. Croix had been the first haven he landed on after his life fell apart, he pressed north, where the shoreline evolved into looming green cliffs untouched by civilization and edged with shallow, yellow sand beaches. It was unlikely that Rory had ditched the boat and swam ashore—which would’ve been hell on his gunshot wound—so he’d either tied off at one of the few docks on this end of the island or he’d gone to the island’s south side.
Sure enough, bobbing in the water alongside kayaks and dinghies tied to the small private dock jutting from the Grand Ammaly Bay Resort, he spotted the boat Rory had stolen.
That cleared up where Rory’s touchdown point had been, but John knew better than to take the bait. Even if the boat hadn’t been left in plain sight as a decoy and was a bona fide signal of Rory’s trail, Rory wouldn’t have lingered at the Grand Ammaly for long. Most likely, he’d gone shopping for unattended purses and wallets at the resort’s restaurants and lounges, then stolen a car. John’s best bet was that Rory’s next move involved treating his gunshot wound.
He also bet that Alicia had started her hunt for Rory at the resort. She didn’t have many weaknesses as an operative, but she was a computer genius, first and foremost, and had the accompanying literal, statistical logic to go along with that gift. John had witnessed it enough back when they were teammates. It was the same mind-set that made her an expert at computer technology, but it would only hurt her in the Caribbean, where scarcely anything followed the rules of American-bred literal logic.
The question now was, after Rory ditched the speedboat and gathered funds, where would he go to tend his wound? Compounding the issue was that Rory didn’t need someone else to administer first aid. Green Berets were trained to take care of themselves and each other. It was a critical skill to have when operating behind enemy lines, as they often had on their missions. Once, in Afghanistan, John had sustained a nasty slice to his side while training Afghan soldiers in hand-to-hand combat techniques and Rory had administered ten stitches in the kitchen of an abandoned, bombed-out house.
All Rory would need was first-aid supplies and a secluded, clean place to patch himself up. On the sleepy, vacation paradise of St. Croix, there was definitely no shortage of secluded hideaways. Good thing John knew Eugene Flyer, bar owner and island informant extraordinaire.
He cranked the wheel of his boat in the opposite direction of the resort, toward Eugene’s bar, but something stopped him from taking the throttle out of neutral. Alicia.
What if she’d caught up with Rory before he’d had time to flee the resort? What if she was on the verge of killing him? John was so near, he had to check. The idea of seeing Alicia again made his heart pound. He wished he knew how to sever the grip she had on his heart, but the best he could do for now was try to ignore it.
But as he spun the wheel back toward the resort and pushed the throttle, he couldn’t stop the rush of memories of the woman he’d loved and lost. It was a bitter pill to swallow to realize that even with everything on the line and his future hanging in the balance, Alicia’s face, her voice, remained stubbornly in the forefront of his mind—forever there, yet forever out of reach.
* * *
Alicia followed McCaffrey’s hand as he snatched her gun and tucked it in his pants pocket. Arrest, huh? So he didn’t have the green light to kill her. Good to know. Part of her was spitting nails that her mission had gone so royally FUBAR, but another part of her had to give thanks for that small favor. At least she was alive. She sat still, forcing him to make the next play.
He took hold of her left arm again and repositioned his gun against her neck.
“Right hand on top of your head, right now.”
She complied, biding her time. Next, he’d probably order her out of the car. One could hope he’d do something so stupid, anyway.
“Real slowly now, you’re going to get out of the car. One wrong move and I shoot. Don’t think for a second that I don’t understand how dangerous you are.”
If he’d truly understood how dangerous she was, he would’ve cuffed her hands to the steering wheel, then climbed in the backseat and ordered her to play hostage taxi driver.
She unfolded one booted leg to the ground, then the other. Predictably, he tugged her arm to force her to stand. Harnessing the momentum in his tug, she pushed off the ground with her left leg, kicking out with her right.
Her boot slammed into his gut as she grabbed the wrist of his gun hand. She banged his wrist against the door frame as she kicked his legs out from under him. With an oof, he fell forward into her lap like she’d hoped he would, his grip on her arm loosening. She jerked her arm free of him, and before he had time to gather his wits, she kneed him in the head, then grabbed the wrist of his gun hand.
They grappled for command of the gun. She nearly lost the battle when he grabbed her hair and yanked. The pain of it made her stomach ache, and the lack of air made her light-headed, but she fought through it, banging his gun hand against the door frame over and over until it fell from his hand, either onto the ground or the car floor, she couldn’t tell. Time for part two of her plan.
Her hands shot out, groping the steering column until her fingers closed around what she’d been after. The gear shifter. She wrenched it down but didn’t have enough force behind the movement to snap it off.
She threw herself backward, arching her hips and creating a slight window to get her knees up. Her boots hit his legs, though she couldn’t guess how high up. Gasping and grunting, she kicked against him, but his hold on her was too firm. Before she could stop him, he pulled her from the car. She put all her effort into one last tug on the gear shifter as they moved. She was about to give up and come up with a new plan when it snapped off.
There was no time to waste. As soon as she was out of the car, she got her legs under her and swung the jagged-edged shiv toward his neck. She felt it snag on skin. He hissed through his teeth and grabbed for her arm. No way was she going to let that happen. Instead, she used his power against him and as his arm whooshed past her, she countered with a block, just as she’d learned as a student of Krav Maga, the discipline of Israeli martial arts her father practiced and had taught her, his only daughter, from the time she could walk.
The memory and discipline of her training settled into her bones, eclipsing the need for conscious planning. They merged, becoming one fluid series of spins, kicks, jabs and blocks. McCaffrey gave as good as he defended himself, employing a dangerous combination of lightness and power that spoke of a background in mixed martial arts. For every lock and strike she issued, he countered with a punch or kick, but she was able to finally create a pocket of space to swing the shiv out. She brought it down hard and stabbed him square in the thigh.
Grunting in pain, he stumbled back, gripping his bleeding leg.
She turned her attention to finding her fallen gun. She didn’t see it on the ground, so it had to be somewhere near the driver’s seat. She’d nearly reached the car when Logan grabbed hold of her waist. She was no match for his strength. He twisted her elbow behind her, then body slammed her face-first into the side of the car near the rear wheel. Painfully.
He pulled her back, then slammed her into the car a second time. His gun found her neck again. “Give me a reason to squeeze the trigger.”
Her mouth went dry. There was more than patriotic duty or irritation that she’d temporarily bested him behind those words, which had dripped with hate, anger. But why? She’d never seen him before, so what could he have against her on a personal level?
Besides the shiv she still held in the hand he’d twisted behind her, she had a hell of an arsenal strapped to her body under her clothes, none of which she could use at the moment. So she waited and tried to ignore the piercing pain in her twisted arm. Patience, patience...
“Got her,” he said low, as though speaking into a phone or earpiece. He rattled off their coordinates.
She gazed down the side of her leg, checking out his stance, calculating how much room she’d need to create so she could slip sideways enough to take control of his gun arm. His right knee had her leg pinned against the car. The shiv had been removed from his leg and, though the pants were torn and bloody, the blood wasn’t spreading or dripping. She must not have caught him all that deep.
She was contemplating her options to get him to loosen his hold when she spied an edge of black peeking out from beneath the cuff of her pants.
Her ankle holster.
“Roger that,” Logan said, his tone indicating he was still on the phone. She glanced over her shoulder as he pocketed the phone.
He narrowed his eyes at her, so she made a show of glancing at her ankle, as if she was considering making a play for the gun. He took the bait, following her line of sight.
“Loaded down with firepower, hmm? I’d expect nothing less. I bet you want me to squat down and get it, make it nice and easy for you to kick me in the face from that position, right?”
“A girl can dream.”
His gun scraped over her shoulder, then her back as he repositioned it between her ribs, aimed at her heart. “How about you get it, nice and slow, then drop it on the ground. I’ll stay here with my finger on the trigger.”
This guy was good. Too good. For the first time, a flutter of nerves started inside her. This was going to be harder than she thought, especially with no crew backing her up. John’s image flickered in her mind. Guess it was too much to ask for him to surprise her with a well-timed ambush.
No.
This was what she wanted—to work alone. She didn’t want to be rescued, especially by the man she’d once dreamed of spending the rest of her life with. Even now, the thought of him made her chest ache. It was stupid, pining for a man who’d conspired to kill her. But even as she thought the words, they felt hollow. Did she really believe him capable of that? The same nagging doubt she’d fought for twenty months to ignore came creeping back into her consciousness.