Omega Force 01- Storm Force (3 page)

Kell felt as if he’d received a gentle scolding from his elementary school teacher. He’d approached this all wrong. The assignment had come up so fast he hadn’t been able to do the kind of prep work he needed, so he’d fallen back on the easiest way inside the organization: volunteer. Stupid. He knew the rules: include enough of the truth to make it believable.

“OK, look. Confession time. I’m not an environmentalist, and I’m sorry I lied about that. I’m willing to learn, but I don’t know much.”

Mori had straightened in her seat and now wore a full-on frown. “So what are you doing here? Are you a cop?”

“Christ. No, nothing like that.”
Not technically
. “I really did just get off active duty, and I need something to keep me from sitting around and getting inside my own head. I’ve driven past the Co-Op before and thought I’d see if you guys needed help.”

She was still frowning, so he added the trump card. “I got injured last time out. I don’t know anything besides being a Ranger. I need to stay busy.”

He’d said it to engender sympathy, which, sure enough, showed on her face. It had come out a lot more truthful than he’d intended, though.

“Rangers are, what, like Marines?”

Kell stared at her, aghast, and had to slam on the brakes to keep from planting the Terminator in the back of a flatbed truck right before the turn into the Co-Op lot.

He was distracted from telling her all the ways Rangers were superior in the Special Ops hierarchy by the news van parked horizontally across two spaces.

“Oh God, I hadn’t thought about the press.” Mori’s fingers tightened on the Terminator’s door handle.

Kell eased the car past them, unnoticed. Guess
Eyewitness News
hadn’t expected to witness their target’s arrival in a senior sedan. “Leave everything to me.”

Mori’s birthday had been far from cheerful, but remembering how Jack Kelly had handled the media made her laugh out loud.

“Leave everything to me,” Kell had said, and then he’d ordered Mori to crouch on the floorboard while he calmly drove the big, ugly Olds into a tree. Barely hard enough to jostle them, but it got the news crew’s attention.

“Get out fast and slip behind the bushes while I keep them busy,” he had whispered, and then he’d proceeded to act like a belligerent crazy man, yelling obscenities and charging at the camera crew, claiming they’d distracted him and caused the accident.

And that was only the finale to the zoo of the last twenty-four hours.
Happy birthday to me.

Mori stood under the hot spray of the shower, her smile fading as she recalled what came next: the piles of messages and e-mails. It wasn’t simply Co-Op contributors expressing concern or canceling their pledges. There were calls from complete strangers. Threatening her. Calling her a terrorist. Accusing her of treason, of murder. Telling her to watch her back if she wanted to continue drawing breath.

Kell had insisted on walking her to her car and following her home after the media had finally drifted away.

She turned off the water and wrapped herself in a towel, then wound a second one around her wet hair. A glass of wine and a nice, fat fantasy novel might distract her for a while.

The humidity was ridiculous, and a cold, air-conditioned sweat coated her skin in the time it took her to walk the ten steps to the bedroom. She rooted in her dresser for something cool to wear. Even with the AC cranked down to icebox levels, the heat was oppressive. A line of tropical waves off the coast of Africa was marching across the Atlantic and would be one more thing for those along the coast to worry about in another week or so. At least tropical storms offshore would pull some of this awful humidity out of the air.

She chose a pair of loose jogging shorts and a T-shirt, a glass of moscato, and a copy of
Game of Thrones
, which she’d been meaning to read for years. Surely swords and imaginary kingdoms and feast-laden banquet halls would take her mind off her problems.

Only, they didn’t. The questions the agents had asked her swirled around in her mind like dancers on a ballroom floor: Where had she been when the bombing took place? Whom had she talked to in the last month? Would she turn over her phone records without a warrant?

She’d called her father on the way to the station and left a message, at least hoping he’d recommend an attorney or tell her if she needed one. It wasn’t like she was guilty of anything. Despite their problems, she had thought her dad would come through for her. Instead, the only one who’d cared enough to see that she got home after a night in hell was Jack Kelly. Her parents hadn’t even called to wish her a happy birthday.

Jack Kelly, who came across as a tightly wound ex-soldier and was probably no more an environmentalist than the governor — well, maybe a little more, but not much. Was he really the wounded vet he claimed to be?

He definitely was in pain, and Mori’s guess would be that he’d had a back injury. He moved a little too carefully. And he did have the military look. His dark hair was starting to grow out, showing the least hint of curl, and he had a coiled energy that reminded her of the rattlesnakes she’d come across while growing up on the ranch. Alert, wary, paying attention to everything around him.

The way his muscles moved under that tanned skin had certainly caught
her
attention.

Mori shook her head. There was no point in even going there.

She’d started the same chapter of her book for the fourth time, reading aloud to force herself to concentrate, when a knock at her door startled her enough to overturn her wine glass.
So damned jumpy.
She grabbed a napkin off the kitchen table and dabbed at the wine beaded on the carpet. At least it was white and not a red, or she could kiss that security deposit good-bye.

A second knock and a muffled voice: “Floral delivery.”

She peered through the peephole, and sure enough, there was a young guy holding a bunch of flowers. It was the bored look on his face that convinced her he was a flower delivery guy and not a cop or a reporter who’d managed to track her down. Not that she didn’t fully expect that the cops, or federal agents, were parked somewhere nearby and watching her every move. Talk about a creepy feeling.

Maybe the flowers were from her parents, at least acknowledging her birthday. The day Mori Chastaine turned twenty-five, her world was supposed to change in ways she didn’t want. She had expected the day to be traumatic. She hadn’t expected to spend it sitting in a small windowless room on a hard chair after too many cups of coffee, being questioned about a horrific crime.

Maybe they were from Dad, trying to make up for abandoning her today. God forbid Paul Chastaine should apologize for anything. Their recent issues had made her realize her father was not a brave man. He was a decent man, in his own way, but he was weak and would always take the easy route. It was a distressing revelation for her at a time when she needed him so badly.

The delivery boy had started walking away by the time she opened the door. He turned with a smile. “Thank God. You were my last delivery today, and I sure didn’t want to have to haul these back to the shop.”

She signed for the flowers and dug in her wallet on the counter for a tip, waiting until he was out of sight in the parking lot before turning to look at them.

No way they came from her parents. A dozen perfect red roses in a cut-glass vase was not their style.

Michael Benedict was another matter. It was
exactly
his style — over the top, expensive, and with lots of invisible strings attached.

Taking a deep breath, Mori pulled the small florist’s envelope from the plastic holder and opened it. Michael had stayed away from her the past couple of months while her parents tried to wear her down about marrying him. But damn it, this was the twenty-first century in the fourth-largest city in America, not the dark ages in a feudal village.

Whatever unholy promises her parents had made with this man when she was born shouldn’t bind her to him now. She should have a choice where she spent her life, and with whom.

Did you get my birthday message, Emory? Love, M.

“What the heck?” She took the note back to the sofa and sat down, staring at the card, trying to figure out its meaning.

She’d checked all her office messages — besides, he never tried to contact her there. She dug her cell phone from her purse and scrolled through the call log. Nothing from Michael Benedict or Tex-La Shipping.

What message had she gotten today, except that she never again wanted to start a day sitting in an interrogation room surrounded by grim-faced men and women? Or maybe that
was
the message.

“Oh God. It was him.” Her whisper seemed to echo around the small living room. Surely she was wrong. Surely he wouldn’t try to set her up for the bombing of the Zemurray Building.

Who was she kidding? It was exactly the kind of thing Michael Benedict would do, to force her hand in marrying him. Knowing her father wouldn’t help her and figuring out what might make her desperate enough to turn to him for help.

Fingers trembling, she picked up the phone to call him, then set it down again. She couldn’t do it, not yet.

But she could force her parents to talk to her. And pray to God she was wrong.

The Chastaine Quad-D Ranch was a forty-five-minute drive west of Houston when there was no traffic on the Katy Freeway. Which was exactly never.

By the time she had finally broken loose from the automotive gridlock, Mori had an aching jaw from grinding her teeth and hands sore from gripping the steering wheel of her little hybrid car until it was slick with sweat.

The farther she got from the city, the more she was convinced she was not only blowing the whole idea of Michael framing her out of proportion, but her sanity also might be in question. She could swear that as she stopped and started and stopped and started with the traffic, she’d seen the same golden eagle sitting on fences, perched on power poles, or flying overhead. Eagles were a rare sight in the concrete habitat, and the idea one might be following her was preposterous.

Finally free of the worst traffic, Mori floored it — just in case the eagle
was
tailing her. Who knew what Homeland Security had at its disposal? Mechanical spying eagles might not be outside the realm of possibility.

She rolled down the window and turned off the AC. Now that night had fallen, the temperature had dropped below ninety degrees. Might be a downright nippy eighty-five by midnight.

The turnoff to the Quad-D was hard to find in daylight, near impossible after dark, but Mori had driven this stretch of two-lane blacktop so often her muscles had memorized the turns. She slowed and eased the car onto the gravel road that stretched through a grove of live oaks that met in a dense overhead canopy. During daylight hours, it looked like a grand entrance to an estate, so the simple two-story wooden farmhouse that lay at the end of it always seemed out of place, lifted from another vista.

The upstairs lights were off and her father’s SUV was missing, but a light shone in the front living room and she saw a shadow move behind it, followed by a rustling of curtains. Someone was home and knew she was here.

Her mom opened the door before she cleared the front stairs. Celia Chastaine was tall and athletic like her daughter, her blond hair streaked with gray now, but Mori recognized none of her own softness and humor. Celia had named her only child after the school where she’d studied in her one failed attempt at escaping family bonds and striking out on her own. Naming her daughter “Emory” hinted at a sense of irony, if not exactly a sense of humor that Mori had never seen.

“Paul said you’d be here as soon as you got out, to honor your commitment. I thought you’d run away from it. I’m glad you proved me wrong.” Celia moved aside so Mori could enter. The ambiance of the house wrapped a warmth around Mori that even Celia couldn’t completely chill. Her grandfather, Gus Chastaine, had been dead several years, but his sweet, calming influence remained carved into the very walls of the home he’d built. If he’d still been alive, he’d support her. Or at least she thought so.

Regardless, Mori had no intention of marrying Michael Benedict, even if she had officially crossed her deadline of turning twenty-five.

“Why didn’t Dad come to pick me up from the FBI offices, or at least send a lawyer?” Mori followed her mother into the living room, where the TV was blaring what looked like some kind of barrel-racing competition. Celia turned it off, and the silence in the room lay heavy.

Her mother sat straight-backed in the overstuffed armchair at the end of the sofa, looking out of place in the homey, Texas warmth of the Chastaine family ranch. She’d lived here thirty years and still looked like an interloper. “Paul wanted you to think about the consequences of being so selfish. To think about everything that would be lost if you continue to shirk your duty.”

Mori gritted her teeth but only counted to three before she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m not here to
fulfill my responsibility
, as you say. I know it looks selfish on the surface, but think about it, Mom. All I’m doing if I marry Michael Benedict is delaying the inevitable, so why not live my life? Find a man to spend my life with who — oh, here’s a radical thought — I might actually
love
?”

A vision of Jack Kelly’s startling blue-green eyes came to her. She didn’t love him, of course. He was just the first man she’d met in a long time she was attracted to, and for no rational reason she could come up with, she somehow trusted him. Plus, he was outside this world her parents lived in, which made him automatically—

“You’ve met someone. I figured as much.” Her mother’s voice dripped with disgust. “You’re sleeping with him, I guess. At least tell me you aren’t pregnant. Do I need to remind you the child won’t be allowed to live?”

Mori stared at the woman who’d given birth to her and wondered who the hell she was. Wondered if at some time in her youth she’d been just like Mori but had let herself be warped into a soulless monster by circumstances. “I’m not seeing anyone, and I’m certainly not pregnant. If I were, this is the last place I would come.”

Her anger brought the details of the room into sharp relief as she got to her feet. The worn, braided rug. Heavy, masculine furniture. Dark, scarred wooden beams on the ceiling. The fireplace it rarely got cold enough to need for warmth. A man’s room for the man’s world they lived in.

Celia might be willing to live her life on the fringes, but Mori wasn’t.

“I’d hoped to talk to Dad, to make sure Michael had nothing to do with whoever told the police the Co-Op was involved in the bombing.” She started toward the door. “Because we do good work. Important work. And we do it without hurting anyone. It shouldn’t be jeopardized because of a personal vendetta.”

She’d pulled open the door, the heat hitting her face like a blast from a steam room. Her mom’s voice came from so close behind her it made her jump. She hadn’t heard Celia get up, much less cross the room that fast.

“Oh, Michael made that call to the police. We all talked about it weeks ago, Michael and your father and me. It was a warning.” Celia’s voice was low and heated with its own anger. “If you don’t want to see the same thing happen again, you’ll change your tune, Little Miss Independent. Michael’s been a patient and forgiving man, but he’s tired of waiting.”

Mori turned and locked gazes with her mother. She knew the shock was visible on her own face, because Celia gave her a cold, satisfied smile before closing the door and shutting her outside.

Michael hadn’t just implicated Mori in the bombing. Celia had implied that he had
caused
the bombing and her parents had known.

The little car bounced along the road beneath the canopy of oaks, but at the end of the drive, instead of turning left toward the freeway to take her back to town, Mori steered the car right, driving in a daze. After a couple of miles, surrounded by open land and occasional clusters of trees, she pulled far enough off the road that she could camouflage her car behind a stand of trees grown scrawny by the hot summer and the ongoing drought.