Hot on the Hunt

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.

John climbed onto the corner of the ledge and jumped, rifle in one hand and his HK45 in the other. His boots slammed hard onto the hood of the van, but all the fury and adrenaline pounding through him kept pain the furthest from his mind. He kicked the windshield. This time, the glass did shatter, raining down over the airbags.

He fired shots into the bags, deflating them in seconds, then kicked the female driver and the man in the front passenger seat both in the faces as he took a seat in the empty windshield frame and had a look inside at the handful of operatives aiming guns at him, looking ready to act should he give them the slightest opening.

He didn’t recognize anyone except Logan and Alicia, but the other three had the physiques and postures of highly trained special agents. Their firearms were top rate and high-powered. Too bad for them because John had an automatic military-grade M4 rifle and an HK45 semiautomatic aimed right back at them—and every person there knew that in the time it would take to get one good shot in him, he could level them all to the ground.

Boots still on the driver’s and passenger’s necks, he locked his knees, pinning them to their seats. Then he plucked their guns from their hands and threw them over his shoulder. Call it a product of growing up in the South, but he hated using physical force against women—seriously hated it—but it’d been Logan who’d retrained John after the army that in black ops, nothing mattered except getting the job done, including an opponent’s gender.

Alicia had confirmed Logan’s words for him more than once that it was insulting to women in the field to be treated differently. So he did what he had to without flinching, when he had to, but he didn’t have to like using force against the female driver right now.

There were two guns still aimed at him—Logan’s and the one held by the man in the very back of the van. John focused one gun on each man, even though there was no way he’d take a chance of hitting Alicia by firing at Logan.

Alicia’s expression was cold, blank. He let his gaze flicker over her before it landed on Logan. He swallowed, caging the impulse to beat that shadow of a smile off his former friend’s face.

“Alicia and Logan, you make quite a pair.” He swallowed, correcting the emotion in his tone, replacing it with steel. “I want answers. And I want them now.”

“Thriller, that was quite an entrance. I wish I could say it’s a shock to see you here,” Logan said, using John’s old code name and a slick tone that made John want to bare his teeth. “Because I was in the room when your superiors gave you explicit instructions to stay out of ICE business and off U.S. soil. Here you are violating both directives.”

“And yet, you knew exactly what would happen when you contacted me this morning.” And he was downright pissed at himself for being so gullible. Guess he had further to go than he thought toward rebuilding himself as a warrior.

“Predictability always was a weakness of yours.”

“No, not predictability. Loyalty. That’s why I’m here.” The woman in the driver’s seat looked as if she might be making plans to counterattack. He unlocked his knee and kicked the underside of her chin hard enough to serve as a warning. “And I’ll tell you, Logan, Alicia, it’s the damnedest thing because two years ago, I never would have classified my loyalty to my fellow soldiers and teammates—the people in the world I should trust most—as a weakness.”

He met the gaze of the man in the way back of the van, the one with the flat Polynesian nose and the Kimber 9mm trained on him. “That’s ironic, right? Because when I was a soldier, they drilled it into our heads over and over again that loyalty was everything.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. John winked at him, just to be contrary, before returning his focus to Logan. “This is a good-looking crew you’ve compiled. I guess your superiors have you working in the field now?”

“Wait...you two know each other?” Alicia said.

The question gave John pause. If she’d really teamed up with Logan, she would have known that. Unless she was playing dumb.

He didn’t take his eyes off Logan when he answered her. “Logan recruited me for ICE from the army.”

“I trained you, too. Don’t forget that part of the story.”

John shifted the aim of his rifle to Logan’s face. “Then how is it that there are five of you and only one of me, and yet we find ourselves in this position? This must be one of those times where the student surpasses the teacher.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.” At the first movement of Logan’s gun, John engaged the muscles of his trigger finger, but didn’t take the motion any farther. Instead, he schooled his features against the bolt of panic that hit him as the butt of Logan’s gun found Alicia’s throat. “Where are my manners? I owe you my thanks for leading us to Alicia. She was our target all along and I knew you’d be the one to help us neutralize her.”

Steady, man. Loyalty is your weakness, remember?

Odds were that this was just another ploy to manipulate him. Keeping his focus on Logan’s trigger finger, he noted in his periphery that Alicia’s hands were behind her back. A bruise was forming on her cheek and he saw abrasions on her neck. Her shirt was dotted with debris, as if she’d been flung on the ground. In fact, the more he studied her, the more beat up he realized she was.

So much for his theory about her and Logan teaming up against him. Alicia wasn’t here of her own free will and clearly someone, probably Logan, had roughed her up pretty good. And that made John want to do some killing in a bad, bad way.

Steady...

“What about Rory?” he asked. “How does he factor into this grand plan of yours?”

“Don’t you worry about him. There are only two ways off this island—by boat or air. The airports are on lockdown and the island is surrounded by navy, ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI—you name it, they’re here and all trying to be the ones to take Rory down first. He won’t be leaving this place alive. Bringing Alicia into custody was my crew’s one and only mission.”

“I’ll help you find Rory,” Alicia said. “Think of how it’ll boost your careers if you find him first. I can track him better than anyone.”

“Why would you help us capture him? You’re the one who broke him out of prison.”

“You have no proof.”

“Don’t I?”

Alicia swallowed, which looked as if it took effort given how hard Logan had his gun jammed against her neck. Bastard.

While Logan and Alicia kept up a back-and-forth about proof and being set up, John assessed his options. The van was shot to hell, its tires and windshield destroyed. At some point they were all going to have to get out of the vehicle because this stalemate they were in couldn’t go on indefinitely. John knew they’d try to get out of sight before the authorities showed up. Sure, Logan and his crew were law enforcement officials, but there wasn’t a black ops agent alive who wanted a bunch of uniforms slowing them down or mucking up their operation.

The question John needed to answer in the next thirty seconds or so was how did he get Logan and his crew out of the van, their threat neutralized without killing them, and all while maintaining his position of power? Problems, problems...

“What about me?” he asked, interrupting Logan’s snide response to something Alicia had said.

Logan huffed. “What about you? You’re free to walk away. And I suggest you do so before I change my mind.”

In other words, Logan thought he was harmless. How insulting. Did he not notice John had disabled their van and was holding them all at gunpoint?

“You haven’t left yet.”

“Keen observation.”

“Don’t get ideas about saving your lady love here. Consider this a lesson in who not to give your loyalty to...because it sure isn’t this one. If your positions were reversed, would she save you?”

Not in a million years. She’d already deserted him in the middle of the ocean. He probably could’ve forgiven her for that, except for the minor detail that she still clung to the belief that John was a traitor to his country and helped plot her murder.

The hard truth was that John’s most strategic move would be to walk away, leaving Alicia in Logan’s custody. Since Logan and the rest of the Feds didn’t perceive John as a threat, and with Alicia out of commission, John could hunt down his quarry unencumbered. He had no doubt he could find Rory faster than any of them. The truth was, Alicia being captured and ICE’s underestimation of John’s abilities worked in his favor in every possible way...except for John’s conscience.

Alicia’s life was on the line here. The thought of her languishing in a prison cell for the rest of her life made John’s heart race with panic. No matter what disgraces she thought him guilty of, her opinions didn’t change who John was, with his weakness for loyalty and all.

Rory’s accusations had stripped him of his reputation, his career and the woman he loved, but no one could take away John’s integrity. All he was now was the soldier and man he and his Maker knew him to be. And a soldier didn’t walk away from a teammate in trouble, just like a man didn’t walk away when his woman needed him—even though he wasn’t her man anymore and his days as a soldier were nothing but a fading memory.

Besides, John had never been a big fan of taking the easy way out.

He took his finger off the triggers of his guns and held them up, aimed in the air, like he was surrendering. Really, though, it was a great ruse to get the guns over the top of the van’s roof and out of sight. “All right. Here I go. One question—are you going to shoot me in the back while I walk away?”

“You’re not worth the bullet.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Alicia hadn’t reacted to the news that John was walking away. Not that he’d expected her to—she was too much of a professional. Keeping his expression passive and his eyes on Logan, he squeezed the trigger of his rifle, spraying the teetering balcony post with shots until it gave way and collapsed onto the passenger side of the van with a loud crack.

John dived off the van, out of the way, just before impact.

The force of the falling balcony tipped the van onto its side in a clatter of metal parts and broken glass. It hit the ground hard, dust billowing all around.

John scrambled to his feet and leaped onto the side of the van, to the broken window.

Alicia was grappling with Logan and the woman from the front seat. He’d get to them in a sec, but his first order of business was taking out the man in the back of van. He was partially covered by a fallen beam but still had command of his gun and was shooting wildly. John smashed the butt of his gun into the man’s face.