Wanted (Hostage Rescue Team Series Book 8) (22 page)

A surge of blood rushed to his groin. He’d never looked forward to a drive more. “Is it legal?”

She gave him a saucy smile that made him even harder, the damn tight tux pants strangling his growing erection. “As I’m pretty sure it would qualify as distracted driving on your part, I feel fairly safe in saying…
nope
.”

Mentally he was already in his truck and backing out of the parking spot. “Time to go,” he blurted.

Laughing, she caught his hand, the edge of his engagement ring pressing into his palm. “Yes.”

She was going to be his forever soon, and he couldn’t wait.

Together they ran hand in hand, down the hill to where his truck waited.

Clay stopped his third set of bicep curls when DeLuca walked into the gym and headed straight for him. When the boss came to single you out, it usually wasn’t good news.

“Briar just called. Rycroft wants us to drive up and meet the contact he’s been using for the Whitaker case.”

Clay hid his surprise and lowered the hand weight to the floor. He’d wanted to get back to Zoe after the upcoming team meeting but if there was an ongoing threat to them or Zoe, he wanted to know about it. “Sure, okay.”

He threw on a fresh shirt and they took DeLuca’s truck up to Fort Meade. In a little over an hour, they arrived at the NSA headquarters there.

Inside the main building, Briar met them in the lobby. She kissed DeLuca, smiled at Clay. “Hey, Bauer.”

“Hey,” he answered.

“Heard your girl said yes. Congrats.”

“Thanks.” That had been one hell of a memorable night, for both of them. And tux porn might even be better than suit porn, he thought with a secret smile. Zoe was dealing pretty well with everything that had happened, but he wished he’d been able to be home with her more over the past few days. He didn’t want her on her feet too much until the doc declared her totally out of danger for miscarriage.

Briar looked up at DeLuca. “I just found out about this a few hours ago, and though I could tell you, you’d never believe me. I think it’s best you guys see this for yourselves.”

With that cryptic statement, she turned and walked away.

Clay exchanged a look with DeLuca and followed after her.

They took an elevator down four floors. Deep underground now, Briar used several biometric scanners to get them through the secured doorways and led them to a sealed room at the far end. Rycroft was waiting outside it, arms folded across his chest.

He nodded at him and DeLuca. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.” Then to Clay, “I figured you’d want to see my contact in person. He ID’d Whitaker, and he’s the reason we found Grande so fast. Far as I can tell, there’s no other threat to Zoe’s safety, or your team. At least not from the Fuentes cartel,” he added with a smile. “But you can question him about that yourself in a minute.”

Clay was insanely curious about who this mystery source was.

“We’re gonna try and recruit him.” Rycroft spared a smile for Briar. “Got a pretty irresistible carrot to dangle in front of him.”

“Who is it?” DeLuca asked, glancing at the wide window before them. It was frosted over, so they couldn’t see anything, but there was no doubt they were facing some kind of an interrogation room.

“I’ll show you.”

Clay was aware of Briar moving to stand next to DeLuca, sliding her hand into his. Obviously she thought this was going to be some kind of shock for him.

“You’ll be able to see him, but he won’t see us,” Rycroft said, then hit a button on the wall beside the door and the frosting disappeared.

A lone, sunken figure appeared before them, seated in a chair behind a long, rectangular desk. Short-cropped dark hair, dark eyes.

Recognition flared instantly and his stomach muscles grabbed.

Beside him, DeLuca sucked in a shocked breath. “No fucking way.”

Clay stared through the glass, hardly able to believe it himself. He tore his gaze from the prisoner to stare at Rycroft, wondering what the hell was going on. Because this couldn’t be real. Clay had to have seen a ghost just now, because he’d watched the man die in front of him three months ago in Miami.

Rycroft’s lips curled into a rueful smile. “Looks pretty good for a dead man, huh?”

Clay’s gaze snapped back to the prisoner behind the glass. “What the
hell
?” Cruzie had shot the former Fuentes enforcer, then beaten the hell out of him on the deck of that speedboat for taking Marisol. Clay had seen it happen.

Impossible as it seemed, he couldn’t deny what he was seeing right now with his own eyes.

Against all odds, Miguel “
el Santo
” Bautista was somehow back from the dead.

****

After waiting alone in the room for a long time, sitting in the hard plastic chair pulled up to the long rectangular table, the door finally opened.

Bautista locked stares with the fit young woman in the business suit who entered the interrogation room and shut the door behind her. Young, maybe mid-to-late twenties, long dark hair, bronze-toned skin. Middle Eastern descent maybe, but mixed with something else. Her eyes were so dark they were nearly black, and they met his unflinchingly. She carried a folder in one hand.

He kept his manacled hands in his lap, was careful to keep his expression neutral as she approached the table and pulled out the chair opposite him. He’d lost count of the number of times someone had questioned him over the past three months. If they thought they could break him by talking him to death, they were wrong.

The Army had taught him how to withstand interrogations far worse than the ones he’d been subjected to by the NSA and other intelligence organizations. Besides, nothing they could do to him would ever be as bad as what he’d already been through, while recovering from his wounds.

The woman across from him regarded him coolly for a few moments. “My name is Briar Jones. I work with Alex Rycroft.”

Bautista didn’t answer. He was exhausted. The effort of staying upright and alert after such a long, arduous recovery made him tire quickly. But he would never let them know just how tired he was. How badly he wished they’d just let him die instead of forcing him to live.

He was already dead. Inside, anyway. His body was the only thing that refused to accept that.

“Thanks to your cooperation and the intel you gave us, the FBI was able to apprehend Dominic Grande last night.”

He stared back at her without reply. Did she expect him to say
you’re welcome
? Why had they sent in someone as young as her to do this?

“You’ve been very helpful. And with your skillset, you have a lot to offer.”

Still he didn’t react. He didn’t know who this woman was or what she wanted, but if she’d read his file, then she knew he had nothing to offer…except being good at killing.

At that, he was an expert.

Those steady black eyes studied him, not giving anything away. And right then Bautista knew she was an operator, or at least a former operator. Like him. “I have an offer for you.” She slid the manila folder across the table toward him, left it closed. “We want to recruit you.”

He couldn’t have heard her right. “The NSA wants to recruit me,” he repeated dully, not believing a word of it. He’d killed many people. None of them innocent, but in the eyes of the law that wouldn’t matter because he’d acted as judge, jury and executioner all in one.

And sometimes he’d even enjoyed his work.

The rush. The power that came from meting out the kind of justice the men he’d hunted down deserved. Watching evil men suffer under his blade or his hands had been almost cathartic for him.

He knew he wasn’t a good man. He’d killed his victims in cold blood and slept soundly afterward, without any attacks of conscience. But the U.S. government was every bit as ruthless as he’d been. And something told him this woman understood that as well as he did.

Briar nodded in confirmation. “That’s right.”

Bautista glanced past her to the large mirror behind her. A two-way mirror where an untold number of intelligence officials would be watching every second of this so-called “interview”. “Why isn’t Rycroft making the offer himself?”

The corner of her mouth quirked up. “Because you and I have…something in common. A shared interest. And I have something Rycroft can’t offer you.”

He looked back at her, held her gaze for a moment, trying to figure her out. What was her angle? Everyone had one. What were they after? “What’s the offer?”

“A job,” she said simply. “We want you to do contract work for us, in exchange for an expunged record.”

That surprised him. Mostly it put him on edge. They would offer to wipe his slate clean, after all the murders he’d committed? To put that on the table meant they wanted something big from him. And they wanted it bad.

“Expunged how?” Not completely, for sure. There had to be loopholes. Traps they’d prepared with their legal manipulation.

“That depends on you.”

Of course it did. He barely withheld his sardonic smirk. She was being purposely evasive. He’d play. “So, what kind of contract work?”

“To start, we need you to help us find someone.”

He was getting tired of the run-around. Just tell him already. “Who?”

Rather than answer, Briar reached out and flipped open the folder.

For a moment Bautista felt his heart seize when he saw the photo of the woman displayed there, disbelief exploding inside him. He jerked his gaze up to Briar’s, fighting the simultaneous rush of rage and hope that surged through his body. They were fucking with him. Had to be.

“You remember her,” she murmured, her expression giving nothing away.

Of course he remembered her. She was blond in this picture instead of brunette, but the ice blue eyes and facial features were unmistakable.

Julia
.

“I know you realize that’s not her real name,” Briar said softly.

He hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud. Shit, he really had lost his edge.

Schooling his features, he kept his expression carefully blank in spite of how hard his heart was pounding. He had to play this cool, not let the people listening in know how interested he was in what Briar had to say. All this time later, he still didn’t know who the woman in the photograph truly was.

She’d lied to him. About a lot of things. Not easy, to fool him, but she’d managed it. He’d fully believed the cover story she’d constructed. His research and background check he’d done on her had confirmed what she’d told him.

He’d been wrong.

And yet, his gut insisted that she’d cared about him on some level. That was the hardest part, knowing she hadn’t lied about
everything
.

Why? Why had she done it?

“What
is
her name?” he asked, his voice sounding like gravel.

“Georgia.”

He tested the name in his mind. Tried to reconcile it with the woman he’d thought he’d known. His heart beat faster.
Georgia
. “Why do you want to find her?”

“Because she’s a friend of mine. A…sister of sorts.”

Bautista waited, struggling to hide the tumult of emotions warring inside him.

When he didn’t respond or jump at the bait they’d dangled, Briar continued. “She’s like me.” She paused. “A government-trained assassin.”

Shock reverberated through him at the announcement. But so many things about that made sense. How she’d been able to conceal her true identity from him. How she’d been able to act the part she’d chosen for so many months without him finding out the truth, only revealing her true objective and skills at the very end.

He never let people in. Ever.

But you let her in
. Though he hadn’t been conscious of it at the time, some part of him must have known that they were alike.

More than the bullet wounds that had nearly killed him, wondering if she might have betrayed him, set him up, had hurt the most as he lay dying on that boat.

That look on her face though, when the HRT had captured him…

She’d been kneeling at his side, begging him to hold on, her expression grief stricken, her eyes full of fear and desperation. Throughout the long weeks of agonizing recovery, he’d never been able to get that image out of his head. Some part of him stubbornly clung to the thread of hope that she
had
cared.

“Where did she go?” he rasped out.

“We don’t know. She disappeared while the paramedics were working on you and no one’s heard from her since. I’ve used every last one of my resources and still can’t locate her. But we think you could draw her out.”

His heart rate picked up. Was she in danger? He still felt the need to protect her, no matter what had happened. It was crazy. “Why do you want her?”

“To recruit her, same as you. And…she’s at risk.”

Someone was threatening her? All his protective instincts, dormant these past few months, suddenly flared back to life. He’d given his life for her that day. Or thought he had. And he’d done it willingly, never expecting that they’d be able to revive him.

But his heart was stubborn. Even though he’d flat-lined twice on the way to the hospital and gone through seven surgeries afterward to repair the damage to his internal organs, he’d somehow hung on.

Then he’d woken up from his medically-induced coma in a maximum-security medical facility, chained to his bed, drugged to just below unconsciousness. Helpless. Wishing he’d died.

But maybe there was a reason why he hadn’t. Maybe
she
was why.

“At risk from what?” he demanded.

“We have reason to believe she’s been targeted by dangerous enemies, some of whom you know.”

Denial shot through him, swift and powerful. Fuentes’s people. The idea of anyone hunting the vibrant, kind woman he’d known was unthinkable. “Explain.”

“Recent evidence suggests she’s being hunted. But in addition to that, she’s also a risk to herself at the moment.” Briar paused. “Georgia is on a mission to eliminate whoever’s left on her kill list. We’re trying to find her before she’s successful.”