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This was not your typical hospital.
She shifted her right arm. Two inches later, it jerked to a stop. Bemused, she stared at the gleaming cuffs locking her own wrist to the rails on her bed. The heck with sanitation—this was not your typical hospital restraint. She flinched as another, louder, explosion reverberated through the walls of the room, hammering through her skull. The curtains parted another foot, affording her a partial view of a scarred slab of wood.
A door.
Where did it lead?
Before she could ponder the possibilities, much less gather the strength to find out, she heard the voices again, jangling keys scraping against the lock.
The other patient.
She swung her head to the left as another explosion rocked the room. The man’s eyes were still closed, but he shifted, moaning softly as he twisted his battered body toward the side of the bed. Toward her. Her lips stung as she opened her mouth—but the door flew open, as well. She slammed her eyes shut instinctively. Dizziness swirled in along with the dark. She eased her lids up. Just a crack. It was enough. She watched as two men she didn’t recognize shoved the hospital curtains aside. Two more men followed them through. All four wore camouflage fatigues.
Soldiers?
Perhaps. But not American.
Americans wouldn’t be brandishing Romanian Kalashnikovs rifles. One of the thugs shouted something to his buddies as he raised the barrel of his AK-47. The thug then sighted the automatic rifle in on the battered head of the man in the opposite bed and shouted again. She had no idea what he’d said, but the dialect wasn’t Romanian. The largest of the two thugs dragged the woozy man from his mattress, wrenching his arm behind his back as the smallest thug unlocked the steel cuffs. The man groaned in protest as his shoulder popped. He received a fresh bash to his skull in return. His glasses flew off, landing at the thugs’ boots with a slap. A distinctive crunch followed.
Crude laughter filled the room.
Another thug shouted above the din as they dragged the now moaning man from the room. Yet another responded. As before, she had no idea what the men had said, but a split second before the door slammed shut and silence reigned within, she caught several mangled syllables she did recognize.
A name.
Alexander Morrow.
She stiffened, the implications of that memory alone giving her the strength to bring her free hand to her face. Dizziness and shock gave way to searing confusion as her fingers collided with the thick swaths binding her head.
That pile of expended, bloody gauze was hers?
Was that why she couldn’t remember where she was, much less how she’d gotten here?
She searched the contours of her face, hoping for clues. Desperate for answers. But all she gained was another question. And this question burned more deeply than all the others combined. If the man those camouflaged thugs had just dragged from the room was Alexander Morrow—
Who the hell was she?
“Four minutes to the drop zone!”
Jared adjusted his oxygen mask and flashed a thumbs-up toward the plane’s crew chief. He double-checked his parachute and gear one last time before latching on to the succession of safety straps dangling from the overhead as he worked his way down the belly of the CIA-modified C-130. Wind colder than a penguin’s ass slammed into him as he reached the plane’s yawning tail ramp, ripping through his pressure suit.
He ignored it.
This high up, he could take in ninety percent of the Rebelian countryside through the blanket of intermittent clouds, as well as all four major cities. Cities that were woefully dark despite the midnight hour. Hell, from here light pollution bleeding up from the destitute capital city of Rajalla put out less wattage than the subdued altimeter strapped to his wrist. Jared lowered the night-vision goggles from his helmet and locked them over his jump lenses. Seconds later the crew chief’s voice flooded his earpiece.
“Two minutes!”
Jared flashed another thumbs-up. The second he bailed out of this bucket of bolts, the pilot would swing the plane’s nose due west and hightail it back to Ramstein. By the time the droning C-130 reached German air space where he and Hatch had established a command post, he’d be knocking on DeBruzkya’s door. Or rather, his DeBruzkya. Jared muscled his way into the icy crosswinds, stopping when the tips of his boots were flush with the lip of the plane’s ramp. One predetermined electronic signal from the transmitter in his pocket and a well-timed blitzkrieg from the CIA team on the ground—artfully disguised as a renewed rebel offensive—would provide the necessary cover and concealment for the remainder of his objectives.
He hoped.
“One minute!”
Jared grabbed on to the familiar, heady adrenaline surging through his veins and harnessed it, using it to beat down the unexpected flash of panic. The doubt. Dammit, Hatch trusted him to see this through. Hatch also knew the situation, understood the risks. Mentor or not, surely the man would have tapped someone else—hell, anyone else—for Morrow’s snatch if there was a chance of him screwing up, however unintentionally.
But there was a chance he might slip, wasn’t there? The worst part was he’d never see it coming.
Or was that the best?
“Thirty seconds!”
Pull it together, Soldier.
The decade-old taunt worked. Two years with Army Special Forces, five more in Delta Force, another eight with ARIES. He hadn’t botched a snatch yet. And he’d never lost a package.
He wasn’t about to start now.
“Go!”
Jared pressed his fingers to the gold medallion beneath his pressure suit for luck and tipped his helmet toward the crew chief, vaulting boots first into the icy void before the sergeant could return his nod. Three breaths of canned oxygen later, he popped his chute. The dark-gray canopy billowed out, jerking his spine into perfect alignment as the C-130 roared off into the night. A minute later there was nothing but eerie silence and overly bright stars. Then the chilling frost creeping across his goggles…and ten long minutes to kill. Determined to banish the doubt from his brain, he ran through the coming mission. He embraced the hope.
Unfortunately, all three converged on one man.
Alexander Morrow.
Just let him be alive.
His trusty medic’s bag would do the rest. Hell, ten seconds after he stabbed Morrow with the pre-filled amphetamine injector, he’d have trouble keeping up with the nerdy, myopic geologist, bashed body and broken bones notwithstanding. Jared studied the inky blackness as he continued to float down. The feeble lights of Rajalla had long since passed behind him. Even with night-vision goggles, the remaining flickering pinpricks were few and far between. Though he couldn’t yet make out the closing mountainous terrain, he already knew the only hazards between his silk chute and DeBruzkya’s private compound were the thousand and one massive pines crowding the jagged crags.
Years of whizzing through the clouds warned him he’d passed the halfway point, as did the gradually warming air. A quick glance at his altimeter and his watch confirmed it.
Ten thousand feet, 2410 hours.
Time to lock and load.
He slipped his right hand inside his pressure suit and retrieved his MP-5, automatically flicking the safety off with his thumb as he reintroduced the submachine gun to the night air. He reached inside his suit again, this time punching the kickoff button with his left hand. A high-pitched tone followed.
One covert transmission sent.
His confirmation arrived five seconds later as the terrain below came to deafening—and blinding—life.
Minutes later, as fellow ARIES operative Marty Lyons and his band of masquerading marauders lobbed half the CIA’s local arsenal at the northern facade of DeBruzkya’s compound, Jared’s own boots slammed onto the granite roof of the castle’s southernmost tower. He rolled with the force, ignoring the shards of glass that ripped into his pressure suit. He severed the lines of his chute as he came to his feet. A quick snap of his wrists deflated the billowing silk. He expended precious seconds whipping the fabric into a tight ball, then raced across the roof, stopping to cram the chute into the first ventilation shaft he hit along the way.
Christ, Marty!
Jared hit the deck as the trail from a stray rocket lit up the night sky. The moment the explosion died out, he was up and running again. Marty and his men continued to pound at the northern facade of the castle as he tore into his rucksack and yanked out the waiting coils of rappelling rope. He dropped the bulk of the nylon to the roof and used one end to form his seat, threading the other through a makeshift pulley. Seconds later he scrambled over the granite ledge, his face and chest, as well as his submachine gun, front and center as he bounded down the wall Australian-style, face-first toward the now unguarded basement door at the base of the southern tower.
He left his ropes dangling in the breeze and tore into his ruck again, this time snagging a block of C-4. He molded the plastic explosive to the array of dead bolts, then played out enough time fuse and pre-rigged the caps. He ripped off his night-vision goggles and glanced at his watch as he sought cover in an identical recessed doorway ten feet away.
He jerked the ring on the fuse igniter.
Ten seconds later, the C-4 blew the locks off the door. Jared wrenched the metal slab open and scrambled down the stone steps. He was already halfway down the main corridor by the time the smoke cleared, night-vision goggles firmly in place as he compared the doors and secondary corridors he passed against the floor plan ARIES agent Robert Davidson had managed to obtain before he was forced to evacuate Rebelia. The hair on the back of Jared’s neck snapped to attention as he passed the first door that didn’t belong. And then the second.
He slammed the demons down as he swapped his goggles for the thermal imaging scope stashed in his ruck. A solitary heat source glowed within. It wasn’t moving.
Morrow.
Though the scarred slab separating them was three doors away from the one Davidson’s source had pegged, Jared’s instincts locked in. They wouldn’t budge. Unfortunately neither would the door.
If he blew this door, the resulting internal vibrations would announce his presence within the castle with all the finesse of a fragmentation grenade chewing through a sheet of rice paper. He double-checked his watch. What the hell—five minutes from now it wouldn’t matter. He was almost out of time and definitely out of options. He grabbed another block of C-4 from his ruck, this time rigging half of it. Seconds later, the locks on the wooden door followed the explosive fate of the outer metal one. With them went his sole chance at culling enough time to execute a quick search for DeBruzkya’s cache of purloined jewels before the exfiltration chopper arrived.
Jared vaulted into the room and shoved a set of portable hospital curtains aside. Bypassing the empty bed, he leaned over the occupied one and peered through the darkness and still swirling smoke. The man’s eyes were closed, but Jared recognized him instantly, despite the bandages and missing glasses. He leaned closer and checked the man’s breathing. Prayed.
Razor-sharp steel kissed Jared’s throat.
His estimation of Morrow shot up a notch. The man wasn’t unconscious, after all. Not with those eyes wide open.
“Name’s Jared Sullivan, ARIES. We met three months ago in a guest room in Director Hatch’s house.”
Recognition flooded brown eyes as the scalpel clattered to the floor. Morrow’s relief was palpable. Humbling. Unlike many Jared had served with over the years, it wasn’t the adrenaline or the toys that had kept him coming back for more.
It was that look. It made it all worthwhile.
It made this particular job worthwhile.
He saw Morrow’s mouth open, heard the air rip past his lips. “Where?”
“Later. Can you stand?”
He caught the man’s answering nod—and tore into his medic bag, anyway. Given the wobble punctuating the motion, Morrow needed the boost the amphetamines would provide. Jared scanned the makeshift hospital room as he snagged the syringe from his bag, biting back a curse as he recognized the array of machines and monitors. There was no way he could risk shooting Morrow up with speed now. He pitched the syringe, still capped, to the floor and leaned down to heft Morrow over his shoulder, clearing the still-smoldering doorway before the man could argue.
“W-wait! There may be someone else. A—”
“No time. Sorry.”
He truly was. But he had his orders—and his package. He carried the former engraved in his brain, the latter locked over his shoulder as he headed for the basement’s main corridor. DeBruzkya’s goons would be arriving soon. Even the stash of gems estimated to rival the contents of the main vault at Fort Knox would have to wait for another day. Another opportunity.
Yesterday morning Morrow had clearly been Hatch’s priority. Today the man was his.
Unfortunately Morrow opted to struggle. “Dammit, you’ve got to—”
Jared deliberately clipped the geologist’s head into his shoulder to muffle the rest, relieved when the sudden motion also caused the man to pass out. Right now he didn’t need the distraction. Especially when he rounded the basement corner and spied the two camouflaged goons examining the remains of the outer door he’d blown on his way in. He was about to receive distraction enough as it was. The first goon raised the barrel of his rifle.
That was as far as he got.
Two quick bursts from his own submachine gun knocked the men down and swept their AK-47s across the stone floor. Jared shouldered Morrow up the moldy basement steps and into the shadowy night, then dumped the geologist at the base of the ropes he’d left dangling down the wall. Thirty seconds later, he’d attached the risers and hefted Morrow again. The moment he locked his boots into the risers, the man’s body jerked to life.
“Goddammit, you just can’t leave the—”
A massive explosion rocked the castle walls.
Jared blessed Marty and his team once more as he used the rappelling ropes and risers to quickly scale the remaining thirty feet of granite separating him and his living package from the roof. That chopper had damned well better be waiting by the time they arrived. Halfway up, gunfire riddled the night air, along with the length of the castle wall.
Christ.
Someone must have discovered the bodies and sounded the alarm. Jared instinctively tightened his hold on Morrow with one hand as he jerked his other to his face, ripping his night-vision goggles off in the nick of time. Seconds later a hundred floodlights exploded around them, illuminating the castle, the grounds, the rooftops and the walls…illuminating them.
He and Morrow cursed and flinched together. Fortunately the thugs were in the same boat.
The soldiers recovered quickly, however, because a second spat of gunfire, this one more vicious and closer than the last, riddled the wall. Jared bit back another curse as fire ripped across his left hamstring. Fortunately it felt like a flesh wound, not a direct hit. He twisted his body, instinctively shielding Morrow’s as another spray rent the air.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Another hit. This time, his right biceps. He glanced down to confirm it, spotting the dark stain rapidly spreading across the black fabric of his sleeve. Flesh wound or not, that one stung. He sucked in his breath and forced himself to move past the ache.
Hand over hand, Soldier.
Suddenly they were there. Six beautiful inches from the ledge of the roof. His already surging adrenaline must have kicked up another notch, because he no longer felt the pain in his arm or his leg. He could, however, hear the blessed pulsing of a chopper’s blades in the distance. Their chopper.
Morrow protested as he braced his good arm against the wall to boost the geologist up first. Jared silenced the man with a terse glare as he locked his fingers to the man’s suit belt, not bothering to question why Morrow hadn’t been stripped and placed in a hospital gown. He was too busy blessing the leather strap and the anchor points it afforded. But as he shoved Morrow up, the buckle slipped, then parted altogether. Before Morrow’s body followed, he shifted his grip and gave one last, all-out heave, barely noticing as his right hand slid squarely up between the man’s legs, right smack into his groin.
Oddly enough, Morrow wasn’t the one who stiffened.
He did.
Unless he was severely mistaken, half the world’s diamonds, emeralds and rubies weren’t the only gems that were acutely, inexplicably missing. The good doctor also lacked jewels. Those of the family variety. Either that or Alex Morrow wasn’t a man.
But a woman.
Chapter 2
Of all the ways she’d imagined her cover being blown, this was not one of them. Alex dragged her gaze down to the man whose oversize paw was still locked to the most intimate part of her body, praying with every fiber of her being.
She needn’t have bothered.
He knew.
The irony of Jared Sullivan discovering one of her most fiercely guarded secrets this way scorched the remaining fog from her brain. Ice-cold terror replaced it. Terror that now that he knew the truth, he’d be able to see straight through her and divine the rest. If Sam hadn’t already told him.
No, Sam wouldn’t have.
Would he?
A spray of gunfire ripped her thoughts back to the terror at hand. Bullets tore into the ledge beside her head. Either the thugs that had been chasing them had improved their aim, or they’d managed to close the distance. A swift glance down past Jared’s boots confirmed the worst. One of the men had reached the base of the tower. If his AK-47 hadn’t jammed, her brain would have been seeping through the sieve of her skull by now. The thug cursed his malfunctioning rifle and pitched it, opting to grab the end of the nylon rope and scurry up the wall before his buddies caught up enough to cover him.
It was a mistake.
Jared’s hand—MP-5 submachine gun attached—snapped downward as he popped off the remainder of a thirty-round banana clip. She didn’t need to understand the local language, much less catch the thug’s shocked grunt to know Jared had scored a direct hit. She shot a round of thanks heavenward—until she spotted six more thugs bringing up the rear, all armed.
Jared heaved her frame over the ledge as the squad opened fire. Thankfully the spray was haphazard at best. She reached back over the wall, but from the terse shake of his head, it was clear that Jared didn’t trust her strength. He hooked his right boot up on the ledge as the bullets continued to fly, the men rapidly closing the distance and, unfortunately, improving their accuracy. To her horror, the heel of Jared’s boot hit a crevice in the rock and slipped. She reached over the ledge again, this time ignoring the man’s fierce frown as she grabbed his forearm, pulling with all her might as his boot swung up again. His body cleared the ledge a split second before the next spray of bullets trimmed the granite down by inches.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” She jerked her chin toward the thundering chopper drawing closer and closer to the roof. With no less than three floodlights shining directly into her eyes, she had no idea what model the chopper was, much less which country it hailed from. All she knew was that each pulse of those blades drove a thousand daggers into her ear and straight through her brain. She’d forgive the pilot—as long as he was one of theirs. “Just tell me that bird is ours.”
“It is.”
Moments later a sentry on a parapet sixty yards away turned and spotted them. He opened fire as she and Jared hit the roof. Before Alex could draw her next breath, Jared had dumped the expended clip from his submachine gun, locked in a fresh magazine and rose slightly to spray the parapet with bullets.
The sentry pitched headfirst over the wall.
Its flight path clear, the chopper ate up the remaining distance. But the moment the bird moved in over the roof, the roar shot off the scale, damned near shattering her eardrum. The pain was so intense she didn’t even notice Jared kneeling again until his kneecap slammed onto her hand.
“Christ. Sorry, I didn’t—”
“Please. Just…get me…on that…” She couldn’t finish, much less move.
It must have shown.
With no time to cut the rappelling ropes still dangling over the ledge, Jared hooked his arm around her waist and hauled her to her feet. He dragged her toward the chopper, probably chalking up her stumbles to her coma—at least, she hoped so. Five steps later she no longer cared. Just as long as he didn’t let her go. If he did, she knew in her soul that she’d dive straight back down to that roof and this time she’d crawl beneath it.
Anything to get away from that goddamn noise.
She’d been ruthlessly pummeled by sound before, ambushed by the relentless depravity of a malfunctioning hearing aid—but never like this. Just when she thought she couldn’t take another step—with or without support—a steel cable, complete with twin harnesses attached, spilled out from the chopper. Jared shoved her in front of him, sheltering her six-foot frame with his taller, more massive body as a vicious onslaught of lead chewed up the roof directly behind them.
The thugs had reached the ledge.
She felt Jared twist to return the spray. Seconds later several screams punctuated the rotor wash. Jared dragged her to the waiting cable as they died out, but it was too late. The sound waves were ricocheting directly off the flat roof now, their intensity magnified beyond endurance as they slammed back up into her ears. She couldn’t help it; she cowered into Jared’s shoulder, unable to control her body long enough to grab one of the suspended harnesses, much less hook her arms through.
“Dammit! I can’t—”
He jerked the cable close and hooked both her arms inside a harness before she could finish, supporting her with one sinewy arm, then the other as he donned his own harness. He clipped the submachine gun with its expended magazine to his web gear and shoved his medical pouch aside as he hauled her against him, this time anchoring her entire body to his as the chopper swept them up into the air and off into the night. There was no escaping him.
Or the noise.
But at least that began to ebb as the chopper gained altitude. Desperate to ignore the thunder still hammering in her ear, Alex dragged her thoughts together and forced herself to concentrate on her other senses—on any other sense—finally latching on to the only one strong enough to sear through the pain. Touch. She focused on the iron arms banded about her chest, on the cords of taut muscle welded to her belly and her thighs. On the fiery heat smelting every embarrassing inch in between. Jared Sullivan’s touch.
Jared Sullivan’s heat.
Alex gathered her strength and her nerve and lifted her chin, pushing through the noise to stare into those dark amber eyes. Though she’d seen them in person but once before and not nearly this close, that unusual, simmering glow had already managed to work its way beneath her defenses. Since that fateful day, those eyes had managed to gain the power of night, slipping into the intimacy of her bedroom, stoking her illicit desires, setting fire to her resolve. Setting fire to her.
If only in her dreams.
So much so that when she’d risked opening her eyes in that damned makeshift hospital cell and found herself staring into this gaze, she was certain she was hallucinating—until he spoke.
Even now, with the icy wind slicing into the back of her tattered jacket and trousers, with that god-awful racket still reverberating through her skull, that steady amber gaze worked its magic, unnerving her to her very core. But this time, she welcomed it. It seared through the thunder and the cold until, gradually, she was able to notice the rest. This close, despite the camouflaged greasepaint he’d smeared into his face, she could make out the majority of Jared’s striking features.