“No.” The finality in Gabe’s voice left no room for argument and Mena laughed.
“No, I didn’t think so. All right.” Finishing his wine, he stood again and motioned them to follow him through the veranda doors into the library. He crossed to a huge, glossy desk and opened a drawer, drew out a file.
“This contains everything I know about Bryson’s abduction, from my own research and from keeping tabs on your team, Commander—and I might add your second-in-command, the invariable Travis Quinn, has been struggling to hold them together in your absence.”
Gabe’s face gave away nothing, no flicker of surprise or another emotion, but Audrey felt him tighten up at her side. Much like he’d done for her earlier, she reached down and grasped his hand in reassurance. He gave hers a small squeeze in return, but then let go and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Get on with it,” Gabe said, ice in his voice. “Stop yanking my dick and tell us what you know.”
“Ah-ha. I do love your frankness,” Mena laughed. “On with it, then. I know your team, such as it is, is searching for a man named Jacinto Rivera. I know they found nothing at his last known address, and have no idea where else to look. I also know where to find him.” He tossed the file on his desk and it skated across the polished wood.
Gabe caught it before it slid off the edge. “Where?”
“Patience. First, you need to know something about Jacinto Rivera. He is the younger, even less cultured brother of Angel Rivera, the EPC general of the Andean region, and their family tree reads like a horror story of depravity. Their father was a drunk that got himself killed in a bar fight ten years ago. Their mother was a whore murdered by a client a year after that, and their sister, also a whore, disappeared six years ago. God only knows what became of her.
“Their uncle was a disgusting rapist interested in small boys, and his son, Rorro, finally took revenge for all of Papa’s late night visits last year. Rorro’s fifteen and he sliced his father up, the likes of which I haven’t seen since La Violencia. He’s a mean little brat, not to be underestimated, and he’s attached to his cousin’s hip. Wherever Jacinto goes, Rorro’s not far behind.”
“So what does this have to do with Bryson?” Audrey asked.
Mena pointedly ignored her, instead addressing Gabe as he motioned toward the Bogotá map still laid out on the table on the veranda. “That house belonged to Rorro’s father. Your team cannot find it because Rorro’s father, in addition to being a pervert, was also a very accomplished racketeer and money launderer. Nothing he owned is in his name. Even for your analyst, Señor Physick, whom I’m told is one of the best available, it’ll take days to wade through all the paperwork, and that is only if your team is looking in Rorro’s direction. We both know Bryson doesn’t have days. As soon as they get the money, they will kill him. That is what I would do in their place.”
Audrey recoiled in disgust. He spoke of murder like you would crush a cockroach, without a second thought or regret. She looked at Gabe to see his reaction, but he was nodding in agreement.
God. Sometimes, when he was in war mode, he truly scared her.
Gabe opened the file in his hand, leafed through, closed it again and, to her surprise, passed it to her. She opened it and found all the pages written in Spanish. Ah, that explains it.
She shook off her horror and translated without waiting for him to ask. “It’s papers pertaining to the house’s ownership and bank statements for both Rorro and Jacinto. Rorro, a.k.a. Rodrigo Salazar Vargas, is very well off. Jacinto, not so much, but there has been a flurry of activity on his card in both Bryson’s and Rorro’s neighborhoods.” She found a picture dated last night of Rorro leaving a disco and showed it to Gabe.
“Huh,” was all he said.
“There’s also a charge for a limo rental on one of Rorro’s cards the day Bryson was abducted,” she told him. “It’s not an unusual charge, but there’s a note here saying he never returned the car to the limo company.”
“I believe you wanted a good reason to approach Rorro’s house,” Mena chimed in. “There you go. One very good reason.”
“Yeah, it is.” But Gabe didn’t sound happy about it. He looked at Mena and ground his molars for a moment of pure frustration before biting the bullet and asking, “Can I use your phone to contact my team?”
That Cheshire Cat grin flashed again. “Oh, that was painful, wasn’t it? Asking me for a favor.”
“You have no idea,” Gabe said. “But, you’re right, Bryson doesn’t have much time, and I won’t waste it by nursing a grudge.”
“You are so noble. Really, I find it sickening.” He sat in the leather chair behind his desk and waved toward the phone. “It’s all yours, but keep in mind they will not be able to trace the number.”
Audrey stayed where she was, looking through the file, but watched Gabe dial out of the corner of her eye. He stood with all his weight on his left foot again and looked so far beyond fatigued that he was freefalling into exhaustionland.
Poor man. He’d had…what? Not counting his bought of unconsciousness, he’d had about four hours of sleep in the past forty-eight. She had squeezed in a little more than that and still felt dead on her feet, so she couldn’t imagine how he was still going.
Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed him so hard to have sex earlier. Even as much as they both wanted it, and she’d
needed
it, she should have let him sleep instead. The short afterglow nap obviously hadn’t been long enough to do him any good.
“Quinn,” he said into the phone, and Quinn’s exclamation of surprise was so loud she heard it from across the room.
Gabe made a gesture of impatience and raised his voice in a drill sergeant’s command: “Listen up. You need to destroy your phone as soon as we disconnect.”
Mena lifted his brows at that, but said nothing, smile still in place.
“Then scramble the team and recon this address.” He gave the address in some sort of military code Audrey didn’t understand. “Our principle may be inside. I’ll be—”
Gabe stiffened and turned toward the library doors a second before they burst open and Liam Miller strode in with a gun and a wild, hyped look in his brown eyes. He grinned and shut the doors soundly behind him.
Several things happened at once, so fast Audrey’s mind raced to catch up. Liam raised his weapon to Mena and said, “I quit,” the same moment Mena started to rise and reached inside his jacket for his own gun. Gabe stood directly between them, caught in the crossfire, and could only drop the phone and twist partially out of the way before Liam’s bullet ripped through his side and struck Mena in the face, taking off the back of his head and spraying brains over the back wall. Mena’s finger tightened reflexively on the trigger as he slumped sideways in the chair and the shot went wild. Audrey felt the burn of it slice through her upper arm.
“Gabe!” Shaking, terrified for him, she lurched over to where he had crumpled in front of the desk, but he was already army crawling under it, scrambling for the gun Mena had dropped.
“Hide!” he shouted. “Take cover!”
She couldn’t. There was no place to go, so she lunged toward the phone several feet away. If she could get it, she could tell Quinn where they were and—
Liam plucked the phone out of her hands and dropped it into its cradle. “No calling for help.”
Dismissing her, he shoved her aside and kicked at Gabe’s bad foot before it disappeared under the desk. “We have a score to settle, Bristow. Stand up!”
To her utter horror, Gabe did just that. He rose from behind the desk, limping as his weight settled on his feet, and raised hands covered with blood in surrender.
“I’m unarmed, Liam.” He caught Audrey’s gaze and tilted his head ever so slightly to the right. She looked over and down and saw Mena’s gun had landed closer to her than him.
No. Oh, God, no. He couldn’t expect her… She met his gaze again and shook her head once. He just stared back, expression composed, gold eyes grim.
When violence is the only language your enemies know, you gotta learn to speak it, too.
He said to Liam, “There’s no honor in shooting an unarmed enemy. Is that really how you want this to end?”
“Yeah, mate.” Liam smiled and leveled his gun on Gabe’s chest. “It is.”
…
Tough love worked. Who’d have thought it?
After Quinn’s beat down of Jesse and the hundred push-ups, the team stopped bickering and treated him with a little more respect. Which was a nice reprieve. He’d been so, so tired of battling them.
Now, an hour later, they stood around the table, throwing about ideas, trying to plot their next step.
“I don’t think that will do us much good,” Harvard said in response to an idea Jesse had tossed out. “We might as well go door to door to Jacinto Rivera’s neighbors and ask if any of them have seen him or Bryson Van Amee.”
“Not in that neighborhood,” Marcus said, and others murmured agreement. “Nobody’s gonna say shit to us.”
“They’re more likely to shoot us,” Ian added. “And what are we doing about that warehouse? I vote we make it go boom before the bad guys move it on us.”
“You always vote to make things go boom,” Jean-Luc said with a friendly elbow nudge in Ian’s side, and Ian didn’t rip his head off for it.
Quinn, still in the chair with his feet on the table and a computer on his lap, was feeling rather proud of them all when his phone rang. All eyes turned toward him and the room went so silent you could hear the proverbial pin drop from a block away. Everyone who would be calling him was present in the room—minus one—and they all knew it.
He slowly lowered his feet to the floor and sat up, checking the phone’s screen.
“Restricted,” he said. “Probably won’t get a trace.”
“We can try. I’m on it. Give me a sec.” Harvard shot over to his computer, fingers flying across the keyboard with the grace of a concert pianist. After another ring, he put on a set of headphones and looked up. “You’re good, boss. Answer it.”
Quinn drew a fortifying breath and raised the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”
“Quinn,” Gabe said.
And his composure soared right out the window, leaving him mired in a mix of relief and worry. He surged to his feet. “Holy shit! Gabe, where are you? What the hell happened? Is Audrey okay? Are
you
okay?”
“Listen up,” Gabe snapped out in his no-nonsense voice, and Quinn realized he was babbling. He ground his teeth and strived for calm again.
“I’m listening.”
“You need to destroy your phone as soon as we disconnect.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. Yeah, this can’t be good. Gabe would only ask him to destroy the phone if he was afraid someone on that end would try to trace the call back to him. “Aye aye.”
“Then scramble the team and recon this address.” He gave the address in code. Another bad sign and Quinn committed it to memory. “Our principle may be inside. I’ll be—”
He broke off.
Disturbed by the sudden silence, Quinn said, “Hello?”
Bang!
One gunshot, followed by the soft
umph
of a body hitting the floor.
Bang!
A second, and Audrey screamed, “Gabe!”
“Hide!” he shouted. “Take cover!”
The call disconnected and Quinn spun toward Harvard, who removed his headphones and shook his head. The kid looked as ill as Quinn felt.
“Signal was too scrambled, boss. I’m sorry, but it was bouncing me all over the globe and I couldn’t lock on.”
“Goddammit!” Quinn threw the cell phone as hard as he could and it crashed against the wall, leaving an indention in the cheap plaster before clattering to the floor in pieces. Then he went so numb he didn’t even feel Jesse’s hands on his shoulders, shoving him into a chair, until the medic knelt in front of him with a penlight.
Gabe was in trouble. And he couldn’t do a damn thing to help.
As soon as the light hit his eyes, he snapped back to himself and pushed Jesse aside. “Get away from me. I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” Jesse said, but packed up his bag and stood. “Still haven’t seen those medical records, Quinn.”
Christ, he was sick to death of doctors. And cowboys who wanted to be doctors. “A little busy here, Jesse.”
The address
, he thought. He may not be able to help Gabe now, but he could damn well follow orders. He shoved to his feet and rifled through the papers on the table, looking for—
“What did Gabe say?” someone asked softly behind him. It sounded like Marcus, but he was so focused on finding a street map of Bogotá under all the papers that he didn’t turn to look.
“He gave us orders.” There it was. Finally. He spread the map out and found the correct coordinates at an intersection a mere mile from Bryson Van Amee’s apartment. He tapped the spot with his index finger. “He said Van Amee might be at this location and we need to check it out.”
“But what about Gabe and Audrey—”
This time he did look up to spear Harvard with a hard stare meant to shut him up. The others didn’t need to know the details of what they’d heard over the phone or he might have a mutiny on his hands, despite the team’s newfound cohesiveness.
“Gabe’s got it handled.” He hoped. “The best thing we can do for him now is follow his orders.”
Chapter Seventeen
The gun went off and Gabe thought,
Oh shit
.
Only he never felt the impact of a second bullet ripping another hole in his body. He felt blood trickling from the one already in his side, but no new damage that he could tell.
In the silence that descended on the room, he looked around, trying to get his bearings. The adrenaline surge burned off, leaving him muddled and shaky, and for a long second, he couldn’t figure out where the gunshot had come from. Or where it had gone.
Across the room, Liam’s eyes widened in shock and pain as blood bloomed on his chest and his gun fell from his hand. With blood bubbling from his mouth, he took two lurching steps toward Audrey—who held Mena’s gun in a perfect stance, ready and willing to fire again.
Gabe circled the desk and caught Liam around the middle, tackling him to the carpet. He went down easily, already half-unconscious, and choked on his own blood as his eyes rolled back into his head.
“Did I kill him?” Audrey whispered.
Yeah, she probably had, but Gabe wasn’t about to tell her that. Hearing the telltale wheeze of a sucking chest wound, he pushed himself upright and stared down at Liam’s graying complexion. Audrey had gotten the bastard square in the lung.
He looked up. Her complexion matched Liam’s, except without the blue cast of approaching death.
“I had to. He gave me no choice. I had to. I had to.” She still held the gun clenched in her shaking hands.
Gabe swore and shoved Liam up onto his injured side to protect his good lung from filling with blood. The guy deserved to rot for the rest of eternity in the innermost layer of Hell, but Audrey wasn’t going to be the one to send him there. The guilt of killing a man would crush her.
Liam moaned in pain.
“Shut up.” Ignoring his own wounds, he stripped out of his jacket and made a compress. “Audrey, honey, snap out of it and search the desk. Find me something plastic or something else I can use to seal the wound. Scissors, tape.”
She blinked and finally lowered the gun. “Wh—what? Why?” She looked at Mena’s corpse in the desk chair, then at Liam, struggling to breathe and spilling blood onto the Aubusson rug. “We need to leave!”
“He’ll die if we do.”
“I don’t care.” Color rushed back into her cheeks. She hurried to his side and tried to tug him to his feet. “Better him than you. You’re bleeding everywhere. You need medical attention. Let’s go!”
Gabe grabbed Liam’s gun and lumbered to his feet. Shit, he was weak as a kitten from blood loss, and getting weaker. Still, he met her stare, wanting her to understand. “If we leave and he dies, you’ll have killed him. Are you prepared to live with that?”
Her chin hitched up. “I wouldn’t have picked up the gun if I wasn’t.”
So strong. He flicked away one of the tears he didn’t think she was even aware were running down her cheeks. “I wish I could have gotten to it first.”
“But you didn’t. I did, and then did what I had to do to keep us both alive.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
She hesitated, gazed down at Liam, then firmed up her trembling lips and nodded once. “You were right. Sometimes, with people like him, violence is the only option. Now, let’s go before someone comes looking for one of them.”
God, he adored her. He gripped that stubborn chin and lifted it, giving her a quick, hard kiss. “All right. We’re outta here.”
Grasping her hand, he pulled her toward the door, but his legs went out from under him after the first step. One minute he was on his feet and the next, his hands and knees. His mouth felt like cotton and tasted like blood, and his visual acuity was way off.
Oh man, he was crashing. Pushed himself too far for too long.
He shoved away Audrey’s helping hands. “Go.”
“Are you insane?”
He let go a huff of laughter. “Only around you, honey.”
“This isn’t a time to joke.” She yanked hard on his shirt and managed only to tear it. “C’mon, Gabriel. Move.”
He tried, but his head suddenly weighed a hundred pounds, each of his limbs at least a couple thousand a piece. He collapsed and, hard as he fought it, consciousness became nothing but a good memory.
That is, until her palm connected smartly with his cheek. He jolted awake to find her in his face, eyes sparking with fear-fueled anger.
“Don’t you dare do this to me, sailor,” she said through her teeth as tears choked every heated word. “I killed a man for you, and you are
not
going to make me leave you behind. You are going to pick your sorry ass off this floor and get us to safety.”
Yeah, forget adoration. He loved this woman.
“Yes, ma’am.” Weakness plaguing his every movement, he struggled to sit and managed to get upright. Sitting there on his butt, panting and shivering, with sweat dripping off his temples, the realization struck that he couldn’t do this under his own steam.
He looked up at Audrey. So tough, so stubborn, and almost as demanding as he was.
He held out a hand. She released a huge breath of relief and clasped his palm. “On the count of three, big guy. One, two, up ya go.”
With her help, Gabe hauled himself to his feet. He staggered a little, and took a moment to draw a deep breath and regain his bearings. He touched his fingers to the seeping wound in his side.
Messy. A lot of torn flesh and a whole lot of blood, but he didn’t think anything vital had been hit and, with adrenaline coursing through his system, he couldn’t feel the pain. Yet. But that would change real damn fast, and they had to be well away from Mena’s estate when his brain caught on to the fact he was probably bleeding to death.
“We need to bandage you,” Audrey said when his fingers came away smeared red.
“Later.” Nausea threatened to choke him, but he swallowed it down and shuffled to the door. “Search the desk, their pockets. We need money, car keys, an AK-47. Anything that will help us get the fuck out of here.”
“Okay,” Audrey said.
As she scrambled through the desk drawers behind him, he cracked the door open enough to peek into the hallway. Two guards stood there with their backs to him. They must have been told to expect gunshots, which played to his advantage, bought him some time to strategize. Too much longer, though, and those guards might start getting antsy.
Gabe quietly shut the door, leaned his forehead against it, and thought back a year to all of SEAL Team Ten’s plans for raiding Mena’s estate. They’d had intel on the servants’ and the guards’ shifts, on the placement of all the cameras and motion sensors. He knew the house, the grounds, and the security system’s strengths and weaknesses like he knew his own name. Escape would have been difficult if he was in prime condition and had his SEAL teammates for back up. Escape while seriously wounded with an untrained woman in tow…
Fuck.
Audrey returned to his side with a roll of Colombian bills. “No keys.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said and shoved the roll into his pants pocket. “We can’t get to the garages from here. Hallway’s guarded.”
“What are we going to do?”
Gabe pushed away from the door and, ignoring his lightheadedness, weaved across the library, out onto the terrace, all the while scanning, searching for an out. Hallway was a no-go unless he took out the guards, but where there were two, there would be more. Could he take them all in his weakened condition? Maybe if he got lucky. Was he willing to risk Audrey’s life like that? No fucking way.
So his only option was the terrace. He leaned over the railing and scanned the ground below. The pool glowed a soft blue-green two stories down, but jumping was out of the question. The terrace overlooked the pool’s shallow end, and any miscalculation on his part would send him slamming into the concrete deck. He was already in enough pain and didn’t need to add the possibility of breaking every bone in his body to the equation.
“What’s that up there?” At his side, Audrey pointed to the roof one story above them. He straightened away from the railing and gazed up.
Well, shit. Why didn’t he think of that? They might just have a shot at escaping yet.
“Mena’s chopper.” He grinned and grasped Audrey’s face in his hands, planting a hard kiss on her open mouth. “You’re brilliant, honey. Can you climb?”
She gave him a look that said
duh
and started unbuckling the straps on her high heels. “Can you fly?”
“It’s been a while.”
“Good enough for me.” She handed him her shoes and stood on the balcony railing to grip the edge of the flowered trellis overhead. In one smooth move, she pulled herself up and flattened herself to the wood, then stretched out her hands to help him. He climbed onto the railing and, reaching up for the trellis, he sucked in a fortifying breath.
This was going to hurt like a bitch.