Hard Target: Elite Ops - Book One (19 page)

The explosion was instantaneous. The tank rocketed into the air, forming a mushroom cloud of flame. Fire spewed out from the cloud like water from a broken main.

He shielded Anna and the girl from the heat and pressure wave of the blast with his body, his back taking the brunt of the compression. They were on the ragged edge of being far enough away to be safe.

With the rain coming down in earnest, the fire couldn’t catch hold of the dry underbrush, but acrid smoke formed a solid curtain. The north end of the parking lot was obscured. Shouts drifted down the hallway behind them. Some of the shooters were coming for them.

“It’s time to go,” he said.

Anna’s face was chalk white as he grabbed her hand and the girl’s. Together they headed for the trees. His boot slowed him down. He tripped on the uneven ground of the makeshift parking lot, almost taking everyone out. Still, they were shielded from any shots coming from the north by the flames and corrosive smoke.

To protect his lungs, Leland tried to hold his breath as he ran. The rain caused more smoke, and when they passed the flaming tank, the jungle in front of them and the motel behind them disappeared in the hazy gloom. He heard a couple more shots, but over the sounds of the hissing flames, he couldn’t tell which side they were coming from.

They ran through a gray, caustic fog. Headed for the jungle, he wasn’t entirely sure they were running in a straight line anymore. With every step, pain radiated up his ankle to his leg and back.

When was the last time he’d had a Vicodin? Putting any weight on the boot was agony. He must have done something to it in the dash from the motel.

They burst into the underbrush and vines of the jungle. Branches ripped at their clothes and a large limb with hand-sized leaves slapped him in the face. Twenty yards into the morass, the noise of the fire and chaos dissolved.

The grass was tall and the foliage thickened. Rain fell in a steady drizzle through primeval-sized leaves. Leland heard a couple of muffled shouts but beyond that, nothing. The girl abruptly dropped his hand, sinking down to a tree stump.

He pulled Anna closer. Her hair was on its way to being soaked. Her shirt was torn and her cheek scratched. Without a word she sank to the ground also, seemingly uncaring about the rain and mud. At least her face was no longer marble white.

Smoke drifted into the vines, but there was no worry that flames would spread to the jungle. The hard rain would see to that. Anna pulled on Leland’s hand, and he sat beside her, relieved to be off his feet.

“Okay,” Anna wheezed. “We’re out of the motel, and we still have the money. What do we do now?”

A
NNA SAT BESIDE
Leland in the mud as rain beat down around her. She didn’t care that she was dirty, wet and getting wetter by the minute. She was just grateful for the time being to be seated in the relative safety of a tropical palm and not worrying about someone putting a bullet in her back.

If she stopped to think about everything that had happened to her in the past two days, she might run screaming into the wet, gloomy night. Max had attacked her, she’d gone by ambulance to the ER, Zach had been kidnapped, men had shot at her, she’d flown to Mexico to deliver a ransom, almost had sex with a relative stranger, been fire-bombed in a motel room, then had more gunmen shoot at her. If she’d read all this in a book, she wouldn’t have believed it.

The young girl was staring at her from a perch beside the tree trunk. Anna could feel her dark-eyed scrutiny across the rain-soaked space. “Any ideas?” Anna asked, no longer caring if Leland or the girl answered.

“We need to get out of here. They’ll find us if we don’t move,” he said, leaning against the tree with his booted leg out in front of him.

He’d propped it on a fallen log at their feet. Anna wondered if he had hurt it when they ran just now. She certainly couldn’t tell from his stoic expression.

“Are you sure we won’t be safer waiting it out here?” she asked.

The girl didn’t speak.

“We left a clear path,” Leland replied, pointing toward their footprints in the muddy sand. “Once they figure out we aren’t in the motel, they’re sure to start looking outside.”

Anna glanced at the broken foliage behind her. Yep, she’d left a trail through the underbrush a blind elephant could follow. “Who were those shooters?” she asked.

Leland shrugged. “Could have been people who heard about the ransom and wanted the money for themselves, or someone in this area who has it in for me and found out I’m here. Or it could be the folks who have Zach.”

The thing that had been niggling at the back of her head all along coalesced into a coherent question. At last, what she should have asked eighteen hours earlier was occurring to her. “Would someone who wants to hurt you come after Zach to get at you?”

She didn’t think he was going to answer at first. He stared at the toe of his boot cast, finally lifting his face to study hers.

“Would someone with a vendetta against you take it to that extreme?” repeated Anna. It was vitally important she have an answer to this question.

“I’m a DEA agent. I’ve made some enemies in the cartels.”

He wasn’t answering her question, but she didn’t want to believe what that could mean. Had he been lying to her since Zach was taken? Her breath felt heavy in her chest, like she couldn’t take in enough air.

“Do you think drug dealers could have Zach? Did you think that last night when he was first taken and not tell me?” Her stomach hurt from the implications of the question.

His green eyes never wavered as he answered. “I’d hoped it wasn’t true, but yes, I considered the possibility that the cartel could have taken him last night. I was staying at the hotel because of threats I received due to a trial I was testifying in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Zach’s disappearance could be connected? You lied. Why did you deliberately keep that from me?”

“Because you had enough to deal with, and I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. Telling you then would have run you off, and you needed help. Even if this whole mess doesn’t have anything to do with me—and I’m still not convinced it does—you need my help to get Zach.”

“But last night you said the shooting at the hotel was because of you,” she argued, heedless of keeping her voice down.

“That’s right, and I still believe it. The shooting incident at the hotel in Dallas
was
because of me. I don’t think those were the same people who took Zach. I think we’re dealing with two separate issues. You said it yourself. Why would the kidnappers come after you before you had time to pay the ransom? They had nothing to gain and everything to lose.”

She shook her head in disgust. That last statement might be true, but it wasn’t the real reason he hadn’t told her. Exhaustion and fear were overridden by the fury washing through her. There was something else going on in his answer, but she didn’t know what it was.

The girl was watching their argument with unabashed interest. Anna ignored her.

Why had Leland not said anything last night about his work possibly being the cause of Zach’s kidnapping? She felt betrayed, just as she’d felt betrayed yesterday when she’d overheard Max in that hotel suite. She never would have let Leland help her if she’d suspected he was in any way responsible for Zach’s disappearance.

As angry as she was, a part of her knew he was right to have kept the information from her. But she wasn’t sure which was worse. That he’d lied to her to protect her, or that he was treating her like a child who couldn’t handle the truth.

She abhorred lies. Lying had destroyed her marriage, long before she’d heard Max’s phone conversation in Cancun. But there was certainly nothing to be done about it now.

Arguing was useless. It would be insanity to try and sort out the implications of Leland’s lying to her while they were trying to keep ahead of the gunmen. They had to find something more than the temporary cover of the jungle.

She couldn’t afford to let her anger overrun her common sense. Like it or not, he was right. She needed him at the moment. And that meant she was stuck with him.

It didn’t mean she had to like it. But she could put those feelings aside until the appropriate time. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she’d think about that tomorrow.

“So, I repeat. What do we do now?” she asked.

The shocked look on his face told Anna that he was more than mildly surprised she’d dropped the subject.

“I know a place we’ll be safe,” the girl offered.

Leland glanced back and forth between Anna and the young motel clerk. “How far away is this ‘safe place’?” he asked.

“It’s at the edge of town. No one lives there but me and my grandmother.”

“Can we stay hidden in the undergrowth getting there?” he asked.

The girl nodded.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Anna.

“Let’s do it.” He stood slowly, giving deference to his booted foot in a way he hadn’t since she first met him.

Anna suspected it had something to do with their mad race across the uneven graveled lot. The three of them headed through the vines and otherworldly-sized leaves. Anna slogged through the untamed vegetation behind the girl with Leland bringing up the rear.

The going was difficult. Mud sucked at their shoes and the brush was thick, particularly without a machete to hack a path. Anna was grateful for the flats Marissa had loaned her at the AEGIS office to wear, instead of her beach flip-flops, but they weren’t holding up well. Everyone was soaked when they reached their destination.

The cottage was built of cement blocks painted the same green as the foliage around it. Almost like a hunting blind of sorts, the building blended perfectly into the inhospitable terrain. The shutters were tightly closed against the rainy night, but tiny strips of light leaked out around the edges of the windows.

The girl rapped insistently at the front door. That seemed strange to Anna. Leland tensed behind her.

Why would you knock at your own home?

A lock clicked and the door swung open. Light poured into the steamy darkness. Standing in the threshold was a shirtless man holding a massive handgun. Even without the weapon in his hand, he’d never be mistaken for a harmless individual.

A black tribal tattoo spilled across his chest, over a shoulder to his arm and down his side, disappearing under the loose waistband of his jeans. Leland cursed under his breath, and Anna knew they were in trouble.

“Agent Hollis,” the man spoke with a heavy accent. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Hello, Cesar. It’s been a while.”

Chapter Twenty-One

L
ELAND KNEW THIS
man?

Anna studied Cesar’s face as the girl wound herself around him like a cat. He had the body of a thirty-five-year-old, but was at least ten years older. Yet the girl didn’t seem the least deterred. She kissed his neck and ran her hands across his chest, her fingers dipping dangerously low across his crotch.

“Get in,” Cesar ordered, waving them all inside with his gun. “Drop your packs on the floor.”

Anna glanced at Leland. His face was unreadable, but she could see the tension in his stance and clenching jaw. She moved forward with him. It wasn’t like there was a choice. Together they stepped over the threshold and the door closed behind them.

They took their packs off. Anna was careful to let hers slide to the floor.

“What took so long?” Cesar demanded in Spanish.

His voice wasn’t as gruff as it had been earlier. And no wonder, given that the girl had now slipped her hand beneath his waistband and was murmuring in his ear as she stroked him.

Shocked, Anna looked away, focusing on the man’s face instead as the whispered conversation continued. There was a cruel look around his eyes and mouth that made her uncomfortable, not to mention that ugly-looking gun he was holding.

Despite her roving hands, Cesar interrupted the girl impatiently. “How many were there?” he demanded in Spanish.

The teenager shook her head and shrugged. “I heard all the shooting and ran to the back of the motel.”

Cesar cursed and muttered something under his breath. “Search them,” he said.

The girl went to Leland first, running her hands across his body much as she had Cesar’s. Anna got the distinct impression the girl would have been much more thorough if her boyfriend wasn’t watching.

She removed Leland’s revolver, the gun from his boot, the extra ammunition in his pocket, his sat phone, and what looked like a prescription bottle, handing them all over to Cesar, who wasted no time in smashing the phone and putting the two guns in his own waistband.

Cesar examined the pill bottle and stared at the boot cast with a smug smile before handing the medication to the girl to give back to Leland. “I see no reason for you to be in pain while you’re with me, but we can’t have someone tracking us with your sat phone, now can we, Agent Hollis?”

Still Leland said nothing.

Where was the GPS locater Marissa had given him?

The girl searched Anna and found only the Children’s Transplant Center pager. She started to remove it from her skirt pocket and Anna went wild.

“No!” Anna cried. “Please. It’s not a phone, there’s no GPS. It’s my son’s transplant pager from the hospital. They’ll use it to notify us when a donor is found. Please, I don’t—”

Leland put his hand on her shoulder in an attempt to calm her and she turned toward him, babbling now. “I didn’t tell you about it. I . . . God, I don’t even take a shower without leaving it on the bathroom counter.”

She felt herself tearing up as the girl dispassionately handed the pager to Cesar. The drug dealer examined it thoroughly before studying Anna.

“There’s no GPS,” she repeated. “Please. Don’t destroy it. You can hang on to it yourself. Just let me know if it . . . if it goes off.”

Even in her messy emotional state, she realized how pathetic that sounded. Cesar scrutinized the device once more and shook his head before handing it back to the young girl who in turn gave it to Anna.

The pager was warm from everyone holding it. An inordinate sense of relief swept over her as Anna squeezed the black plastic between her own palms. This was crazy. She knew that. The thing was most likely out of range, here in the middle of absolute nowhere, but the device had become a talisman for her over the past twelve months.