Stolen Vengeance: Slye Temp book 6 (16 page)

Chapter 17

“Get my team out of there now, Barry!” Sabrina ordered her contact  for this government clusterfuck-of-a job. “We had a deal. I send my people in undercover and you guaranteed me access. Fontana got hit and that might not have happened if my people had been on the roof. You assured me I could yank my agents out fast if I had to, well news flash–
I need them
.
Now!”

“Give me a break, Sabrina. I had no control over Tinker’s guards. He’s got political friends in places you can’t imagine and they don’t want him crossed.”

“I don’t care. I’ve got a few friends of my own. Trust me when I say you won’t like which way shit rolls down hill if I’m pushed to call them. Get. My. Team. Released. My next call will be to someone who can do it, but it won’t be pretty.”  She thumbed the end button on her cell phone as hard as she could.

It just didn’t have the same effect as slamming a receiver down on a landline phone.

She strode across the conference room in the basement of their safe house in LA and stood over Josh, who was monitoring the four video feeds from ... wait a minute. “What happened to number two camera at the event?”

“Lost it right before everything went down. I did everything I could to bring it up, so I’m thinking it’s a glitch in the camera itself.”

“Dingo’s cameras don’t have glitches,” she argued, but not with Josh. Just thinking out loud.

Sabrina’s cell phone buzzed. She looked at the caller ID on the display. “Be right back.”

Not waiting on him to reply, she walked across the conference room and entered the private office she used when on site then closed the door before answering. “Did you hear about the hit on Fontana?”

“I more than heard about it. I have something to show you and you’re going to have to make a choice about where you stand after you see it.”

Chapter 18

“You didn’t get the scroll, Perdido?” Rikker had waited for her to be dropped off at home before he inserted into the estate she’d built on her smoking looks, sex and manipulation.

The perfect mix for politics.

Her nostrils flared when she turned a black gaze on him. “I did what I could. Did you miss that I was almost killed tonight? One hair closer and it would have been me instead of Fontana. You tell your boss I am not pleased with any of this.”

Rikker could imagine the eye roll the General would give her in reply. And, just to be clear, the General was not Rikker’s boss, but since the General thought he held sway over Rikker, there was no reason to let him or this bitch think differently.

Not yet.

Making himself at home, he stepped over to her private bar and lifted a bottle of whiskey with his gloved hands, pouring two fingers into a crystal glass.

A bar in her bedroom? Was it too much trouble to walk to another room for a drink?

Guess so.

He turned to her, swishing the drink in his glass. “I’m here for the scroll. You made a deal. You haven’t delivered. That means my boss won’t fulfill his end either.”

“What?” She went into a tirade of cursing fluently in her native South American language. When the noise died down, she said, “What about the assassin?”

Rikker took a last sip of his drink and dropped a piece of paper on her bar. “He’ll come for you and he won’t miss this time. He’s your problem.”

“The General can’t leave me exposed like this.”

“Apparently he can, unless you want a dossier released on you to the press.”

That took the red rage out of her cheeks and washed the crazy from her eyes.

“Calm down. The General had a secondary plan in case you did not deliver. You have four days left to deliver the scroll. If not, the General has a way for you to make amends, but I’ve seen his makeup tests and I don’t think you’ll pass.”

She would do as told with no argument or it would be her last argument. Perdido was a narcissistic bitch who took care of
número uno
first.

He took her silence to mean they had an understanding.

Setting the glass down, he walked out.

Chapter 19

Dingo trudged behind Nick into the meeting room at the safe house where no one was happy. Least of all Dingo.

Sabrina had ordered him to return.

Ordered.

Dingo had texted back to say he might run a little behind, maybe an hour, which should have gotten him a “be careful and stay in touch,” not a curt reply that unless he could explain why he had to be late he was expected to return just like everyone else.

Yes, Sabrina led the teams and everyone needed to debrief after that goat rope security detail, but Dingo had wanted to follow Tinker’s entourage when he left.

And, to be honest, Dingo wanted to make sure Valene was okay. He hadn’t seen her when the shooting went down and just wanted a minute to be sure she got out of the interrogations and went straight home to sit tight until he got there.

Orion Hunters were involved.

So was Satan’s Garden Club.

All right here in LA. Coincidence? Not likely.

Valene had still been inside a private room at the hotel, being questioned when Sabrina sent out her get-the-hell-back-here-ASAP text. It hadn’t been those exact words, but the phone had practically steamed from that message.

Of course, if Sabrina had known Valene was on site, Sabrina would have gone from zero-to-pissed in seconds.

Or maybe
that
was the problem.

Sabrina had seen Valene on the video feeds.

If so, Sabrina would have made the leap that Dingo had wanted to stay to see Valene out of purely personal reasons.

Dingo paused next to Josh, who stood from where he’d been monitoring the video feeds from the event. He handed Josh two fingerprint samples he’d pulled off the killer and did a double take at video two. “Where’s the feed for number two?”

Josh said, “Lost it.”

“Before or after the hit?”

“Right before.”

“Is that what has her jacked up?” Dingo asked, not needing to clarify that he meant Sabrina.

“Maybe. She’s got something crawling up her spine and won’t say.”

If she wouldn’t tell Josh then it probably didn’t have to do specifically with Dingo.

Everything is not all about you, dumbshit.

Dingo dropped onto a seat on the opposite side of the big conference table from the door, glad to sit down for a moment even if he hadn’t wanted to come back. The room smelled of frustrated agents who had been working for hours on end.

Sabrina stepped in from her adjoining suite and moved toward the head of the table.

She liked her privacy no matter where she was.

He understood. They’d been packed into bedrooms like tuna into cans as kids back at the orphanage. He and Josh were the same way. The three of them would hunker down in tight quarters for as long as it took if they were on a mission, but the minute they returned, everybody went to whatever they called home.

For Dingo, that was a company apartment since he kept nothing more than the few changes of clothes he could fit in a small duffel, which allowed him to use any place for home.

Sabrina’s gaze slid over to Ryder as he found a chair on Dingo’s left, then it skipped Dingo completely and jumped to Josh, who took a spot at the end of the table on Dingo’s right. That must have suited her because she glanced over to Tanner sitting across from Dingo, Nick who was standing up, then Blade and White Hawk sitting between Tanner and Sabrina.

But she’d avoided any eye contact with Dingo.

Maybe he’d been right all along about what had her on edge. Either way, he was going to have a talk with her after this.

Just the two of them.

But Sabrina had to let him deal with his own life. She thought she could save him from himself, keep him from making another mistake with Valene, but she had it wrong.

Dingo still believed Valene had done nothing wrong beyond being too enthusiastic when it came to life in general.

If not for the danger it put her in, he loved that about her. But now she might have put herself in trouble by her association with Charlie, and Dingo had to get her out of it. Once he did, he’d have to thank Sabrina for alerting him to Charlie. Then he’d remind her that the end does not always justify the means.

If their friendship meant anything to her, she’d never betray his trust again.

Sabrina’s heart was in the right place, but she needed to butt out of his personal life.

He was also going to tell Josh and Sabrina about seeing Rikker. They could decide whether anyone else knew. He would never hold out information on Rikker from those two.

Eyeing every agent in the room, Sabrina asked in a voice that could ice over hot coals, “Anyone want to tell me how someone got sniped with six of my people on site, and we have no suspect?”

All but Nick had settled around the table.

Nick stood just inside the door, over six feet of tension coiled tight from the look of his stiff shoulders. He let out a rush of breath and began spitting out a report.

“Two Warbucks guards on the roof prevented any Slye coverage there. Evidently one was the assassin. Dingo found him in the west stairwell dead. My guess is that whoever killed him was part of the assassination plan and simply clipping any loose threads immediately.”

Sabrina’s gaze ticked back in Dingo’s direction again, but wouldn’t stay.

What was that look all about?

Tanner leaned back in the office chair, still alert and ready to go. “Killer had scarring that I think is the Orion star configuration we discussed earlier. Ties this to the Bergman killing.”

Connecting a dot with the Bergman killer sent tension rippling around the room.

Sabrina asked, “Have you confirmed that marking as a hunter identification yet?”

“My source says the marking was on the elite agents of the Orion Hunters, but now that I have a photo I’ll get an absolute confirmation.” Tanner didn’t look happy about this connection with the hunters. He’d defied death to keep his resource and future wife, Soo Jin, out of the hands of Orion Hunters. But she was the best intel the team had on the elusive fanatics. Jin had been a captive research specialist in North Korea when she’d shown up unexpectedly on Tanner’s mission to extract two physicists from the country last month.

The physicists had been connected to an Orion Hunter terror plot and Jin had been instrumental in preventing it.

Dingo asked Sabrina, “Did you get a photo on the Bergman killer’s tat?”

Had he not been studying her closely for any change, he’d have missed the slight tensing of her shoulders before she shook her head and said, “The report I had was a visual ID. I’ve avoided asking APD in case there’s an Orion Hunter on the force. Based on everything we’ve learned from past encounters, we have no idea where they might have infiltrated.”

That figured. She just accepted Laughton’s intel as valid, but questioned everything Dingo did right now.

Josh leaned forward with his elbows propped on the conference table. “I fed every face that entered as a guest, security and wait staff at the event through our facial recognition contact and there were no suspicious hits.”

If Josh had seen anyone resembling Rikker he’d have told Dingo while the team was still on site.

That meant Dingo had been wrong.

     But his gut still argued that he’d been right. Nick scratched his back against the wall then paused, arms crossed, deep in thought–or so he’d seemed–staring down at nothing. He said, “That entire scenario was off.”

“Because the assassin missed Perdido?” White Hawk asked from where she sat closest to Sabrina. She said very little unless she required information at that moment or had assimilated something she didn’t understand.

Ryder answered, “Maybe, but that would depend on the assassin being an amateur. A really bad amateur at that. Do we have anything back on the fingerprint?”

Josh cleared his throat. “It’s sent in and they’ll ping me as soon as they have something.”

“It’s one of two things,” Ryder went on. “If it was an amateur who blew the mission, that begs the question of why he stopped shooting, because someone without experience would panic and shoot again.”

“He did,” White Hawk argued. “He shot the guy who was down in the event who had a handgun.”

“That’s another issue. What I meant was that someone sent to make a kill who thinks he’s missed would try to take a second shot right behind the first one. It could be as you said, that Fontana knocked Perdido out of position for a second shot or if the sniper was a pro, then that means–”

“Shooting Fontana wasn’t an accident.”  Dingo stated what they all had to be thinking based on the simple fact that the assassin had infiltrated Tinker’s security, which meant he’d been in place for a while and that his background check for that job had been above reproach. A freakin’ sleeper cell.

White Hawk tapped a finger on the table surface. “Fontana leaned toward Perdido just as he got hit and he fell, knocking her to the ground. That would explain not taking the second shot at Perdido.”

“Maybe,” Ryder conceded, but his tone said he didn’t think so and as the resident sniper on their team Dingo went with Ryder’s gut reaction.

“Then who was the target?” White Hawk said, pursuing the point without being obnoxious. “The initials were F.E.P. Francine Eva Perdido.”

“If it wasn’t Perdido, then the hypothesis we built around the initials is wrong,” Josh offered.

Dingo shook his head. “I have a feeling we were at the right place and the right time, but the intel is skewed in some way. There were players on stage that we weren’t expecting.”

Tanner rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and slapped the table. “I suck at cryptic shit. We need Margaux. She loved damn puzzles.”

Sabrina told Tanner, “True. I tried to reach her but she and Logan are out of pocket for another six days.”

Margaux Duke, aka “The Duke” had been a Slye agent, and still was as far as the team was concerned, but she’d gone rogue to find the person who killed her FBI agent cousin and landed in a South American jungle prison with Logan Baklanov who had been after the same person.

They survived when Dingo wouldn’t have given either of them more than single digit odds, and she was now part of Logan’s Hamr Brotherhood operation.

“What about the other guy with a weapon,” Blade inquired of the room.

Tanner frowned. “That clown on the ground?”

Blade lifted a finger. “That one.”

Dingo gave his opinion. “I’m with Nick. I think this whole thing was shonky.”

“
Shawn-kee
? What the hell is that?” Tanner Bodine’s deep Texas drawl purred around the room.

“Shonky is Aussie for only-an-idiot-would-consider-the-evidence-as-it-appears,” Josh explained. At least he pronounced Aussie correctly as Ozzie, the way Dingo had taught him when Josh was just a punk.

“Back on point,” Sabrina ordered everyone.

Dingo arched an eyebrow at her short fuse when she normally would have ignored the occasional jab or quip to break the tension.

She sent a subtle look back at him that said,
Don’t push me right now.

Yep, they had to talk soon for the benefit of everyone.

Dingo got them back on track. “I’m saying I think the shooter on the ground waving the gun might have been there as a distraction.”

“As part of the hit?” White Hawk asked.

“Right.” Dingo caught a nod of agreement from Ryder and continued. “Plant a handgun long before the event. Buy him a ticket and send him in convinced that he’d be snatched out with the assassin then paid well.”

White Hawk said, “Killing him on site would have been part of the plan from the beginning.”

“Right.”

“Then who killed the assassin?”

Nick snorted. “There’s the sixty-four-thousand dollar question.” 

White Hawk cocked her head, looking totally confused by that old saying.

“What else do we know about the assassin’s death?” Sabrina asked, keeping the debriefing moving along.

“Dingo found him first,” Tanner replied.

Nick added, “Assassin had been popped twice and looked like he knew who killed him, because he had his rifle packed in a case, but he also had a Glock on his hip that never got drawn.”

Blade slouched back, listening in quiet speculation. “Basically someone double crossed someone and double tapped him in the head. Sounds like a professional hit.”

“Not the forehead,” Dingo corrected. “Shot him through each eye.”

Sabrina wasn’t often surprised, but from the way her face lost its sharpness and her eyebrows bounced up for a second, she clearly hadn’t expected to hear that.

Why? Dingo had never had this tough a time reading Sabrina.

“And there was a second tat,” Nick concluded.

“What was that one?”  Sabrina was shifting her attention between Tanner, Nick and Dingo.

“It was a satanic ink design on the shooter’s forearm with three letters. S. G. C.”  Dingo met Sabrina’s stare, daring her to stop him from protecting Valene.