Always Been Mine (27 page)

“Fuck me,” Nate whispered. “This is sounding too damn real.”

“Damn straight,” Gabe muttered. “I already left a message for Porter.”

Travis nodded. “Whatever covert group Porter is working with needs this data.” Though Gabe agreed, he wanted in on that mission, so he could personally gut whoever tortured Beatrice. His anger was under control, but it would spike to a killing degree whenever he let his thoughts drift to the cuts on Beatrice’s arms.

“I’m done,” the sketch artist said, walking up to them. “Johnny agrees it’s not an exact likeness, but it’s the best he could remember.”

Gabe looked at the sketch and balked. He could feel the blood leave his face as a fear like he’d never felt before ratcheted up inside him. Travis cursed while Nate said, “Fuck! Tell me that’s not Zach Jamison.”

*****

Zach Jamison is dirty. He was working with Ryker.

Beatrice read the message twice to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood.

“What’s wrong, Beatrice?” Zach whispered.

Her gaze lifted reluctantly to stare into dark soulless depths. The gears in her brain tried to make sense of who was clearly before her.
 

The person who tortured her.

The more you fight, the more it’s going to hurt.

“You,” Beatrice whispered.
 

Zach’s smile was nothing like his regular megawatt smile. This time, it was laced with malice. “So, the cat’s out of the bag. Pity.” His eyes shifted to a point over her shoulder. Ed Shephard had probably been alerted. Beatrice was frozen; she didn’t dare take her eyes off Zach.

A scuffle erupted behind her. There was screaming and seats scraping as the crowd panicked. She still didn’t dare look away.

“See, I’m not stupid to come here by myself.” Zach’s lips curved derisively.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Beatrice finally found her voice. Her phone kept buzzing. She couldn’t take her eyes off Zach. She just didn’t trust him. She couldn’t be taken again. It would destroy her. The thought of never feeling safe, not knowing who to trust, would destroy her.

“You won’t have to,” Zach sneered. “You’ll be dead.”

He lunged forward, a hand shooting out, but Beatrice, even in her terror, was ready for him. She shoved her chair backward and managed to block a knife swipe aimed for her neck. She stood up and saw Ed engaged in a hand-to-hand with Zach’s goon. She faced off with Zach, who had indecision written all over his face as he stared beyond her again.

“I’ll see you around, pretty girl.” He backed away from her and disappeared into the back exit. It would be foolish to follow him. Beatrice stood unmoving.

Ed suddenly appeared by her side. “Jesus, you’re bleeding.”

She was cut? Before she could reach up to touch the right side of her face, Ed had her chin tilted at an angle.

“It’s a shallow cut,” Ed observed. “But fuck me, Sullivan’s going to go ape-shit.”

She had no doubt. Remembering her phone, she saw additional text messages from Gabe.

Talk to me.

Damn it. Tell me you’re okay.

And then.

Babe, please be okay.

Beatrice called him.

“Beatrice? Christ, babe, are you okay?” Gabe growled into the phone.

“I’m fine. Oh, God. Oh, God, Gabe, I can’t believe it’s Zach.” She half-sobbed into the phone, collapsing into a chair as the adrenalin withdrew from her body. It was as if a ghost had walked over her grave, and she felt chilled all over. Her life had once again flashed in front of her. It was only through her endless sparring exercises and continued training that saved her from having her carotid artery slashed.

 
“Ed’s with you?” Ed was on the phone, probably with Travis or Nate. Zach’s goon also disappeared.

“Yes, he is,” Beatrice said. Protection of your principal was always a priority, not chasing after an assailant. It was a primary rule of executive protection.

“I’m on my way,” Gabe said, his voice now guttural. “God, Beatrice, I love you.”

“I love you, Gabe.” She felt cold, so cold. “I need you,” she added on a whisper.

“I’ll be there soon.”

*****

“Can’t you go any damn faster?”

“I’m going as fast as I can, man,” Travis muttered as he wove his Escalade around DC traffic. “It’s rush hour and they’re in Georgetown.”

A skin peel with muriatic acid was probably less torturous than what Gabe was experiencing right now. He had calmed down a bit after he’d talk to Beatrice, but the sucker punch of discovering that Zach Jamison had been deceiving them all this time caused him to almost lose his shit at BSI.
 

He was ready to charge out the door when Travis and Nate pounced on him to calm him down. He nearly punched Travis, but the other man assured him there was no one more capable than Ed Shephard and he’d been alerted. It did little to assuage Gabe’s panic, especially when Beatrice didn’t reply to his text message warning. But he agreed to let Travis drive while he’d been imagining several ways to deliver a slow painful death to Jamison. Finally, he had someone to direct his rage. A focus.
 

Parking in Georgetown was terrible. Gabe was doubly thankful now that Travis was driving. It wasn’t difficult to find the coffee shop; there was already a police cruiser double-parked in front of it.
 

“I’ll need to drop you off here and find parking,” Travis said as he approached the intersection a block before the establishment.
 

“Thanks, man.” Gabe exited the Escalade and broke into a sprint. There were some curious onlookers at the entrance. He shouldered past them and yanked the door open. He spotted Beatrice talking to a uniform.

Their eyes met across the room, her luminous green ones flooding with relief, probably mirroring his own. His relief quickly turned to outrage when he noticed the cut right under her right jaw.

Beatrice abandoned the police officer and walked briskly toward him. He opened his arms and quickly engulfed her in a crushing embrace. If given a choice, she would never leave his arms.

“Babe, you scared the shit out of me,” Gabe murmured into her hair.
 

“I’m sorry. You’re right again,” she mumbled, pulling away to look up at him. “I shouldn’t have left the office.”

Gabe exhaled deeply. “Yeah. But it’s done. Next time listen to your security, okay?”

“I know. I keep on preaching it, but I had Ed with me, so I felt safe enough.”

“You didn’t know Jamison was dirty.” He hugged her tightly to him again before he asked as calmly as he could muster, “What happened to your neck?”

Beatrice stiffened in his arms.

“Babe?”

“He tried to cut me.”

Gabe closed his eyes at the thought; the close call was killing him.
 

“Ouch, Gabe. Ease up. You’re squeezing the air out of me.”

“How . . . you blocked it?”
 

“Yes.”

“That’s my girl.”
 

“Um, excuse me, Ms. Porter, but I need more information from you.” A police officer was standing beside them, assessing Gabe warily.
 

Gabe forced himself to let Beatrice go. He kissed the crown of her head and nodded to the uniform to proceed. He hovered nearby though, spotting Travis talking to Ed. He wanted to join that huddle, but leaving Beatrice’s side was not an option right now. He didn’t know who to trust in this coffee shop and the crowd outside didn’t exactly give him the warm fuzzies as he scanned the spectators for suspicious elements.

His awareness was heightened; all his senses were engaged as he called upon all his training to protect the woman he loved. Right now, the only way someone was going to hurt a hair on her head was through his cold, lifeless body.

*****

Zach Jamison got into a white-colored van a few blocks away from the coffee shop. He needed to go to ground and fast. That had been too fucking close. He turned to the driver of the van, Domingo Ventura, the leader of the Fuego gang.

“How the fuck did Sullivan find out about Volkov?” Zach demanded.

Ventura had no idea the Russian they had been dealing with was actually former U.S. Special Forces Steve Ryker.

“I have no idea. But one of my
hermanos
saw him drag Johnny from the dry cleaners. We should have whacked that
pendejo
when we had the chance.”

Now that BSI had outed him, it would only be a matter of time before they establish his connection to Philip Crowe. Too bad he had not finished off Beatrice Porter. He relished wreaking psychological agony more than physical damage. Maybe he could still play with her. She was right when she called him a sadistic bastard.

Frank Wilkes would be one unhappy boss, but Zach still had information he needed. Unless someone figured out what information he’d been siphoning from their office, Zach was still indispensable.
 

It was Benjamin Porter he wanted dead. Zach had nothing against Sullivan. That had been all Ryker. However, Sullivan being in the way of his revenge against Porter made him Zach’s enemy as well.

So be it.

*****

It was obvious now that “safe house” was a misnomer, and the place was intended to be a command center for Porter’s agenda. Right now, the house was like a fucking party. Okay, maybe Gabe was exaggerating. With Caitlin around, food was a necessity, especially since she was almost four months pregnant. She had hacked into the Metropolitan Police Department database because they were officially the ones investigating the assault on Beatrice in Georgetown. They had lifted a partial fingerprint of Zach Jamison from the coffee cup.

Caitlin was using those prints to do a search of her own against a larger, more classified database with a couple of modified input parameters to widen the search to individuals other than Zach Jamison in case the name was an alias. Travis’s wife had been shoveling food in her mouth as they waited, much to Porter’s annoyance. Clearly, the admiral was old school and didn’t want anyone eating in the command center.

Gabe stuck his head out of the command room to briefly check on Beatrice. She just received a call from Senator Mendoza who received a visit from the MPD detectives. Judging from Beatrice’s face, she was trying to make the senator feel better for unleashing Zach Jamison on her. Neither the MPD nor the senator knew of her torture at the hands of the motherfucker. The truth would open a whole line of questioning that could compromise what the admiral was working on. Until Porter and his covert team could shut down Redrook, they had to keep their intel under wraps. All the senator and the MPD knew was Zach Jamison had snapped and attacked Beatrice. Tough sell to the senator since Zach had apparently worked for a former friend of his and came highly recommended.
 

Gabe stood beside Porter. “Hundred bucks says that the senator’s former Chief of Staff was murdered and didn’t die from a heart attack.”

“Short of exhuming the body, we couldn’t prove it,” the admiral said. “But I’m going with your hunch. You did say Hybernabis could mimic a heart attack in those with pre-existing conditions.”

“Correct.”

Caitlin gave a whoop that made the admiral and Gabe switch their attentions to her.

“Found anything?” Porter asked.

“I’ve kept an open-match algorithm against Philip Crowe’s records, including both living and deceased people,” Caitlin said. “The fingerprints bear a 91% match against Zacharia Alvarez. Deceased. Car accident.” She shook her head and added derisively. “Sounds like a common cause of faked deaths. Anyway, Alvarez and Crowe were in the same college together until the second year when Alvarez supposedly died. They were both computer science majors. Crowe dropped out to join the Army soon after his death.”

“Let me guess, Alvarez is Colombian?” Gabe asked.

“Irish-Colombian. That’s why it’s hard to tag his ethnicity.”

“So Zacharia Alvarez becomes Zach Jamison.”

“You think Crowe and Alvarez were acquainted with each other? Going to the same college and sharing the same major would assure they’d at least moved in the same circles.”

“Hacking into school records now,” Caitlin announced. It took maybe fifteen minutes for her to find what she was looking for, oblivious that he and Porter were looking over her shoulders. She zoned them out. By this time, Travis had quietly entered the room. “Yep, they belong to the same fraternity and . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand. “Um . . .
 
Yeah, they know each other.” Caitlin’s eyes angled toward the three men in the room. “Does someone get the vibe that they’re more than just friends?”

All three men shifted uncomfortably. There were several pictures of Crowe and Alvarez in rather compromising positions. The images were faded, probably over fifteen years ago.
 

“Aren’t those pics too racy for fraternity websites?” Gabe asked. “You’d have thought with Zach’s new identity, they’d have erased every trace of him.”

“I’m not on a fraternity website,” Caitlin said. “That had been sanitized. I went to one of their former frat brother’s micro-blogging site. That’s where you’ll find interesting pictures. Get Doug in here, let’s get his opinion.”

Gabe was trying not to chuckle as Travis left the room to get Doug. Beatrice returned with her assistant.

“Oh, my,” Beatrice said. “That explains a lot, doesn’t it, Doug?”

“Oh, yeah,” her assistant replied, eyes wide on the screen. Doug looked at everyone in the room. “There’s something between those two all right.”

“If he and Crowe continued to be lovers, that would explain his hatred against you, Admiral,” Caitlin said.

There was silence in the room as everyone absorbed the motive. It made perfect sense, Gabe realized. Although a lover’s revenge seemed to be simply the tip of the iceberg because everything had been set into motion long before Porter had shot and killed Philip Crowe. This meant Zach Jamison had been recruited to be a sleeper agent, meant to infiltrate the political system and keep the CIA apprised of its schemes, totally clandestine and not sanctioned by the U.S. government.

“You think Zach is bi?” Beatrice asked suddenly.