After two hours of useless effort, no one was any closer to knowing the bastard’s whereabouts or plans, nor could they find any further trace of him via cell phone towers or credit card info. So far he’d been smart enough to use cash and stay below the radar. For now the investigation was at a standstill and both Alex and Hunter were just as frustrated about that as Gage was.
Alex finally dismissed them all with a brusque command to be back at oh-six-hundred the next morning to get a jumpstart on things. Everyone got up and filed out of the room. In the hallway, Gage waited for Claire and set an arm around her shoulders when she came out. She leaned into him for a second then turned and wrapped her arms around his neck, resting her forehead against his chest with a weary sigh.
He gathered her close and rubbed her back gently, needing to comfort her. “You hanging in there, darlin’?”
“Trying to. Feel like I could sleep for a week though.”
“You can crash as soon as we get you back to the house,” he promised. Though part of him wanted to grab a hotel room where they could have the privacy they needed to hash out their remaining differences and seal their new bond without anyone overhearing her breathless cries. Arousal swirled at the thought of what he wanted to do to her. The next time he had her naked and willing beneath him, he’d made it very clear exactly what she meant to him, in a way she’d never be able to forget. But that would have to wait. For now, she was safest under the same roof as the rest of the team.
As though she sensed the turn his thoughts had taken, she tipped her head back to meet his eyes. The skin beneath hers was so dark it looked bruised. “I’d rather stay up and talk with you.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere, sweetness. We’ll have plenty of time for that talk after you’ve had a decent night’s sleep.”
“I’d sleep better with you beside me.”
He’d known she trusted him, but hearing those words from her after all their time apart filled him with a gratitude he couldn’t express. He lowered his head until his mouth was right against her ear. “I wasn’t planning on sleeping anywhere else,” he murmured, pausing to kiss the sensitive skin beneath her earlobe and flick his tongue over it. Her breath caught and her fingers sank into his shoulders.
“Hey, get a room, you two,” Dunphy remarked on his way past to the elevator down the hall.
“Yeah, let’s,” Claire whispered to him as she drew back, her eyes flaring with unmistakable heat.
Gage chuckled and bent to kiss her mouth once, not letting her sway him. “You need sleep.”
“So take me to bed and make me come first, then I’ll sleep like a baby all night.”
Her seductive words made his jeans turn uncomfortably tight all of a sudden. “If you’re a good girl and do what I say, I might.” Her eyes smoldered up at him and he couldn’t hold back a grin at her reaction to his intimate tone. She might be headstrong and independent but she loved it when he took charge in the bedroom, adored the rough edge he showed her there. Gage swallowed a groan at the thought of everything he wanted to do to her. “Come on, let’s get outta here and find something to eat on the way back.” He turned her around and gave her a little push toward the elevator. She shot him a naughty look over her shoulder then caught up with Ellis.
Hunter came out of the boardroom and fell in step with him in the hallway. “Well, that sucked.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get outta here and regroup.” They rode down the elevator together. Hunter called out to the others as they reached the edge of the parking lot. “Ellis, you go with Gage. Claire, you’re with me.”
Neither of them gave any indication that the order surprised them, and Gage didn’t argue with him. Three minutes later he was in the passenger seat with Ellis behind the wheel of one vehicle, trailing Claire and Hunter’s SUV. Though he’d rather be the one with Claire, he trusted Hunter’s skill and judgement and felt comfortable that she was in good hands.
“So, what’s the plan?” Ellis asked him in his calm, straight forward way. That easy going but alert demeanor was one of the things Gage liked best about the sniper.
“We’ll head back to the safe house. Zahra and Dunphy are staying behind to work on some more chatter from recent phone transmissions and the TTP’s favorite online forum.”
Ellis glanced over at him, speculation in his hazel eyes—more gold than green. “What’s your gut say about the shortened timeline?”
“That somebody’s in a hurry all of a sudden.” And he didn’t like it. A desperate attacker was bound to be even more unpredictable, which made them harder to catch and increased the likelihood of collateral damage. When they found this asshole and took him down, Gage wanted that damage kept to a minimum.
The more he thought about it, the higher his level of unease became. This whole situation didn’t feel right, although he couldn’t pinpoint what exactly was bothering him so much. The looming deadline, the missing link about who was feeding the TTP inside info, their team currently split up with Dunphy back at NSA headquarters.
When they finally arrived at the outlying suburban neighborhood and turned onto the safe house’s street he noticed the empty driveway right away. The yard waste bags were missing, and as far as he could tell no one else’s had been picked up on the entire street.
The warning bells in his head were now jangling like a fire alarm. Last time they’d been this loud he’d been with a patrol entering a mountain village high up in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Listening to his gut and pulling back to wait for aerial recon had saved his life and the lives of his soldiers that day.
“Hold up,” he said to Ellis. The former sniper cast him a sideways glance at the urgency in his tone but didn’t say anything as he pulled over to the curb and kept the engine idling. Gage contacted Hunter via the radio. “Something’s off. Hang back for a bit. Ellis and I’ll check it out.”
“What’s up?”
“Someone’s been here since we left. Not sure if it means anything yet, but I’ll let you know. Stand by.”
“Roger that.”
At his hand signal Ellis steered into the driveway, parked, and they both climbed out. The family in the house beside them were just exiting their garage, the parents each carrying a young child to the waiting car in their driveway. Gage nodded at them and the woman smiled back.
“Your yard looks good,” she called out. “That landscaper did a great job.”
Gage stilled. “What landscaper?” Ellis remained silent next to him, his attention focused on the neighbor.
The woman blinked at him, shifted her baby on her hip. “The man who cleaned up the yard. He came by a couple days ago when the landlord called him in for a quote.”
Tom hadn’t said anything about it, and he would’ve mentioned it to Hunter at least so they wouldn’t have accidentally taken down some poor unsuspecting bastard looking around the yard. “You saw him?”
At the sharp edge in his tone she frowned, her eyes growing worried. “Yes, and he was just here a couple hours ago to take away the bags. Is there a problem?” She glanced up at her husband in confusion. “I thought…”
Ignoring whatever she said to her husband, Gage contacted Hunter over the radio. He could just barely see the second SUV parked at the far end of the street. “Did you hire a landscaper?”
“Negative,” Hunter replied in a hard, suspicious tone.
Shit, that’s what he’d thought, and it meant their cover and location had been burned. “Copy. Stand by.” Ellis was on alert beside him, already scanning the safe house for anything unusual. “What was he driving?” Gage asked the woman.
“Um, a silver minivan. I can’t remember what kind. He loaded the bags into the back before he left.”
“What did he look like?”
“White. Mid twenties maybe? Not as tall as you. Slender. Dark hair.” She chewed her bottom lip, her eyes bouncing between Gage and her husband, who was listening closely.
“Any facial hair?”
“No and he was wearing a ball cap. The team with the capital n and y on it. Yankees?” She glanced up at the husband for verification.
Sounded a lot like this mysterious Mostaffa they were trying to nail, and Gage’s insides tightened. He wished he had a picture of the bastard on his phone to show the woman. Part of him wanted Hunter to get Claire the hell away from here but the other part suspected the slippery asshole was long gone by now. “How long was he here, do you know?”
“I’m not sure. Not long though, maybe fifteen minutes or so because I noticed the minivan parked at the curb on my way upstairs to the laundry room and he was just leaving as I came out to take Eric to swimming lessons.” She nodded toward the toddler in the father’s arms.
Gage relayed the info to Hunter and asked, “You going to check it out with Tom?”
“Damn straight, but I can tell you right now he didn’t call anyone in.”
“Yeah, got it.” They had to get the team’s equipment and sanitize the location, then relocate to a new and undisclosed safe house. “What do you want me to do?” Though he was pretty sure what Hunter was going to say.
“Check it out, find out if the house is still secure.”
“We’re gonna have to go dark after this,” Gage said, knowing they’d have to move even if nothing inside the house had been tampered with. Staying put was too much of a risk now, for Claire, for the team, and the entire taskforce.
“That’s affirm. I’ll talk to Tom and let you know.”
“Roger. I’m out.” Gage focused back on the couple who were looking at him with identical expressions of alarm. His pulse slowed as it always did when he was in combat mode, every sense on full alert. “Look, I need you to go back into the house and stay there until I give you the all clear,” he told them.
They both froze, staring at him with wide eyes. “Why, what the hell’s going on?” the father demanded, putting a protective hand against the back of his son’s head and pulling him in close. He backed up a step as if he was thinking about bolting for the car and peeling away. Which, in Gage’s opinion, wasn’t a bad idea at all. “Should I call the cops?”
He was eyeing Gage’s tats now, looking nervous and probably thinking he and Ellis were drug dealers or gang members. “Not yet. It’s probably nothing, but I’m going to err on the side of caution. We’re with a private security firm working for the government,” he explained, gesturing to Ellis. It wasn’t much, but he had to say something to reassure these people they weren’t thugs about to start a war in this quiet neighborhood. “Go on inside now, and I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”
The couple hurried back into the house and closed the garage door. The moment it shut Gage withdrew his weapon and started up the safe house’s driveway, on high alert. “Take the other side and meet me around back,” he told Ellis and they split up.
Together they swept the backyard, visually checking the windows and doors. There were no footprints in the wet grass, no damage to anything that he could see, and no evidence that anyone had tried to climb through a window or gain access to the roof. Ellis confirmed the same.
“Stay here and cover the back,” Gage told him. “I’ll check out the front door.” If someone had been skulking around the place for fifteen minutes unobserved, there was no telling what—if any—surprises he’d left behind. Before they went in, Gage had to make sure nothing had been tampered with. If anyone was hiding in there he didn’t want them bolting past him or Ellis and escape, and he didn’t want to ask Hunter to come back him up because it would leave Claire undefended if anything went down.
With Ellis holding position in the backyard Gage made his way around the right side of the house, hugging the wall, weapon at the ready. On the front step, he saw the faint outline of a damp footprint on the painted wood surface. His gaze darted up to the door, looking for other signs of a break in or maybe a tripwire. He found nothing, and through the side panel window next to the door he saw that the green light on the alarm keypad was still on but Gage wasn’t taking any chances.
“I don’t see anything, but I don’t like the feel of this so I’m not gonna breach yet,” he said to Ellis via the earpiece. “Gonna take a closer look. Stand by.” Only when he’d determined whether the place was booby trapped would he make the decision about whether to call in backup before they swept the house.
“Copy that. No movement back here.”
Maintaining his vigilance, Gage set a hand against the wall and leaned in toward the side panel window to get a better look inside.
Something was up and it was making her damned nervous. They should’ve all been inside by now, relaxing. Instead Hunter had her well back from the safe house and Gage and Ellis hadn’t given the all clear yet. And despite his calm exterior, Claire knew Hunter was on full alert. His posture was tense, his eyes watchful. Her nape tingled in warning.