Hell on Wheels (11 page)

Wonderful. Just…wonderful.

And maybe they were right. Maybe Grigg hadn’t trusted that she could handle the truth.

The urge to cry returned in earnest, but someone offered her a distraction when they handed her a bandana. Choking back her disgrace and horror, she wiped her lips before lowering the trash can.

Hesitantly, she returned her attention to the group and was simultaneously gratified and humbled to note there was no censure, no disappointment or disillusionment on any of their faces. In fact, most of them looked as torn-to-pieces as she felt and that just made the tears gather faster. She blinked rapidly and fervently wished for a moment of privacy. Unfortunately, privacy wouldn’t help her figure out what was going on. Sticking it out, hearing the rest of the story—no matter how awful—was the only thing that would help with that.

Dragging in a trembling breath, she folded the bandana into a neat square and asked the only question there was, “Why?”

“Why were they captured and tortured?” Frank replied calmly, as if he hadn’t spent the last couple of minutes watching her completely lose it.

She nodded, though part of her wanted to plug her fingers in her ears, shake her head, and sing
la-la-la
. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss, but she’d come too far to back out now. She wanted to know it all. She
needed
to know it all.

Frank dropped his reluctant gaze to his big hands, carefully folding them around his cup of coffee as he shook his head. “We don’t know. Wrong place at the wrong time, as far as we can tell. The terrorists who took them weren’t supposed to be operating in that region, considering Syria and Lebanon aren’t exactly cozy neighbors. All our sources indicate it was happenstance. Piss poor luck. Grigg and Nate were in transit to their target when their vehicle was ambushed by Hezbollah militants.”

She shivered and swung her teary gaze back to Nate. His square jaw was working hard enough to crush granite. Then she remembered. “Oh, my God, I
hit
you that day. You’d been tortured and I
hit
you. I…I’m so sorry, Nate. P-please forgive me.”

She hiccupped and one mutinous tear escaped. Her chest was so tight she wondered how her heart continued to beat through the constriction. She’d hit a man, a patriot who’d sacrificed so much, who’d been recently tortured.

“Nothin’ to forgive,” he managed to grind out. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

Huh?

She dashed away that single tear with shaking fingers. “For what? What have you possibly got to be sorry about? It wasn’t your fault you made it out and Grigg didn’t.”

Becky made a strange strangled sound, and Ali’s eyes darted over to the young woman. She was using the frayed hem of her grease-and-paint-stained T-shirt to wipe at the fat tears running down her reddened cheeks.

What in the world was going on?

The horror on the men’s faces, the anguish on the women’s was about more than Grigg’s death and her ill-timed venture into physical violence.

“So,” Dan said softly as he put an arm around his wife, who was also fighting a flood of tears. “If it wasn’t Brazil and it wasn’t the capture by the Lebanese, what else could it be? Grigg hadn’t been tapped for anything previous to those assignments in about two months.”

He was changing the subject. Ali knew a blatant evasion when she heard it. She opened her mouth to ask just exactly what it was they weren’t telling her, but Becky beat her to the punch.

“No,” the young woman announced firmly, every eye in the room settling on her tear soaked face. “He did have one other mission in there. A brief, personal security job he did for some senator.”

“Say what?” Ozzie turned away from the computers. “I don’t remember getting any authorization for that.”

“It didn’t come through the usual channel. It was on his personal computer. He was only gone for one evening. Came home early in the morning. I just figured he was doing some off-the-books work.”

“The hell you say,” Nate barked and Ali jumped. She totally forgot about trying to ascertain what dark secrets they were still keeping from her, what chilling knowledge had caused them all such immediate anguish, when she turned to see Nate’s livid expression. “He never told me anything about that.”

“You were away doing that Colombian job with Mac and Christian,” Becky supplied, wiping the last of her tears away with the back of her hands.

“How do you just happen to know what’s in Grigg’s personal correspondence, Rebecca?” Frank growled.

“Uh,” Becky nervously glanced toward Ozzie. The young man’s face was totally covered in oh-you’ve-done-it-this-time.

Frank glanced back and forth between the two. “What? What have you two been up to?”

“Okay,” Becky said, chewing on the soggy stick of her last sucker. “See, the thing is, me and Ozzie have an equitable little exchange going. I teach him how to disassemble, clean, and reinstall a carburetor, and he teaches me how to code. I teach him how to fabricate an oil tank, and he teaches me how to hack.”

“And that hacking includes personal email accounts?” Frank asked, his expression like a thundercloud. “Rebecca! Damnit!”

“Hey,” she yelled back in defense, “I thought he might’ve been in trouble! We were supposed to order pizza and watch a movie that night. But after he checked his email, he suddenly said he had to bail on me. He grabbed up his go-bag and a fistful of extra magazines and made tracks like the hounds of hell were baying at his heels. I got worried, so I,” she shrugged, protectively wrapping her arms around herself, “I peeked.”

“You
peeked?
At
personal
files? That’s
not
okay, Rebecca. Sticking your nose in the wrong place could very well get you killed one of these days. Do you understand me? Say you understand me,” Frank pressed and Becky dutifully nodded her head, but then she opened her mouth. Before she got a chance to say whatever it was she was about to say, Frank angrily waved her off. “No. Absolutely not. That’s the end of the discussion.”

Becky snapped her mouth closed and settled back in her chair, her face a mixture of defiance and misery, and Ali couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy. She understood the need to keep close tabs on those she loved and knew from first-hand experience how frustrating it could be when she couldn’t do that. She also knew that, like Becky, if she’d had a way to inconspicuously dig around in Grigg’s business, she’d have used it and not thought twice.

Maybe it had something to do with that extra X chromosome. Something about having a uterus and set of ovaries just made a person intrinsically more curious and infinitely more nosy. Whatever it was, she did her sisterly duty and flashed Becky a brief look of alliance. Becky smiled shakily in response.

“He never mentioned the job to you?” Frank asked Nate.

“Never.”

“Huh.” The big man rubbed his stubbled chin, shooting one last disgusted look at Becky, before turning toward the wall of computers. “Ozzie? You mind accessing Nate’s account to see just what Rebecca’s talking about?”

“Already on it, Boss.” Ozzie said.

Something was obviously…off about this entire scenario.

Ali’s stomach—never a reliable organ—turned over again. She grabbed her Coke and took a hasty sip.

“Is it unusual for one of you to take an off-the-books assignment?” she asked, some sixth sense telling her she wasn’t going to like the answer.

“
Yeah
,” Frank emphasized. She gulped more soda. “Unusual in that it’s just not done. Ever. And even if we
did
agree to take on independent work, we’d never accept a job without letting at least one member of the team know about it. You know, in case backup’s needed.”

Crapola.

“See,” Becky grumbled. “Now you know why I was so worried and why I…”

Frank flung her a look so ferocious the young woman’s shoulders hitched up around her ears as she trailed off, dutifully fixing her eyes on the table in front of her.

“Huh,” Ozzie interrupted, and Ali decided she was beginning to hate that word. “Simple and concise. Someone from the FBI, a Special Agent Jordan Delaney, asked Grigg to perform a private security detail for a party Senator Aldus threw for the Pakistani Ambassador to the Vatican. Dude,” Ozzie groused, “there’s a goddamned official for everything.” Shaking his shaggy blond head, he continued. “Anyway, according to this, more specific information was supposed to be forthcoming upon Grigg’s arrival in DC.”

“Get Special Agent Delaney on the phone,” Frank commanded. “Let’s figure out just what the hell is going on here.”

Ali couldn’t help but wholeheartedly agree.

“Uh-oh,” Ozzie murmured, and she decided that was another phrase she could do without. “No go on talking to Delaney. The man’s dead.”

“
Dead
?” Frank bellowed. “How? When?”

“Car crash. According to this,” Ozzie indicated his glowing computer screen, “police assume he fell asleep at the wheel. His car ran off an overpass on Highway 1 and ended up in the Potomac on the…” He leaned in closer to his monitor. “Shit. The crash happened the very night—or early morning more precisely—of Grigg’s supposed security detail for the senator.”

Oh boy, this was
so
not good. Even Ali, naturally cock-eyed optimist that she was, didn’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude.

Apparently neither did Frank.

“So Grigg takes a job for the FBI without telling any of us,” he said, “and that very night his FBI contact is dead and Grigg is less than twenty-four hours away from being snatched out of the middle of the Syrian desert and tortured by a group of terrorists who were never supposed to be in that region? Something stinks.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “And this time it isn’t your socks, Dan Man.”

No one was in the mood to appreciate Ozzie’s attempt at levity.

“Okay,” Frank slapped his wide palm on the table, taking charge. “I’m going to get on the horn to General Fuller. Let him contact those fucks…uh, ’scuse my language, ladies, at the FBI. Hopefully, he can convince their director to look into whatever this Agent Delaney was investing. “

“Dude,” Dan snorted, “good luck with that. Those folks are tighter than a virgin’s pu…er,” he glanced sheepishly at Ali then winced when Patti slapped him on the back of the head. “Sorry,” he mumbled, kissing his wife’s hand and looking genuinely apologetic before returning his attention to Frank. “Let’s just say they’re never happy to share their secrets.”

“Well, they better
get
happy or we’re going to have to start rattling their fucking cages.” Frank winced. “Uh, ’scuse the language again, ladies—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Frank,” Becky grumped, “we’re not gonna pass out because you’ve got a goddamned, shitty, little sonofabitchin’ potty mouth.”

Ali couldn’t help it, one corner of her mouth twitched.

Patti giggled behind her hand and Dan snorted.

Everyone in the room felt the release of pent-up tension, like a stretched rubber band had suddenly been turned loose. Nothing better than laughter through tears. Thank you,
Steel Magnolias
.

Frank, it seemed, was the only one who didn’t find Becky’s little speech entertaining. He glowered so fiercely, Ali wondered how Becky’s hair didn’t spontaneously combust. She had to give the young woman definite props for being able to flash the Black Knights’ boss a very convincing so-whatcha-gonna-do-about-it grin.

Ozzie piped up. “Oh, and FYI, that license plate Ali snapped a photo of belongs to a midnight blue Lincoln Navigator owned by a Mr. John Robert Godfrey. He’s a sixty-five-year old middle school principal who’s been working for the Wilmington School District for over twenty-two years.”

“No.” She was already shaking her head before he could finish. “I know the difference between black and blue. This vehicle was black, jet black. And the guy behind the wheel was closer to thirty-five than sixty-five.”

“Yeah,” Dan intoned. “It couldn’t be that easy.”

“What?” she asked.

“The first thing any professional operator would do while on a stake-out or doing reconnaissance is switch out license plates.”

“Oh,” her shoulders hunched. She’d been so proud of getting that picture. And it was all for nothing. “So that’s that then.”

“Not necessarily,” Frank assured her. “We’ve got a couple of strings we can pull and see what unravels. Now, I know you’re tired, but I need you to concentrate.”

She dragged herself upright and nodded, using every bit of self-discipline she possessed to keep functioning even though her stomach ached, her sleep-deprived brain operated through a sticky film of tar, and she really, really needed a little privacy to indulge in a good cry. Not to mention the fact that all the Coke made her need to pee like a Russian racehorse.

“Did Grigg send you anything out of the ordinary? A file, a letter? Perhaps even a package?”

She chewed on her bottom lip, wracking her sluggish brain. “No,” she finally shook her head. “Nothing.”