Swift Strike (SEAL Team 14 Book 2) (17 page)

“I need to come in to check the computer system associated with the gate, ma’am.” He gave her a warm smile, and she relaxed a little.
Sheesh, get a hold of yourself, girl.

“Oh, right. I’m sorry, please, come in.” Opening the door all the way, she stepped to the side so he could enter.

“You have a big home,” he said. “I was surprised to see such a large property so far away from the rest of the town.”

“Thank you. I like the solitude here by the water.”

“Ah yes, I imagine that there is a certain amount of tranquility when your nearest neighbors are the ocean and the bay.”

“What exactly do you have to check in here?” she asked, carefully making sure she kept her voice even and a calm smile in place.

“Just the digital interface for the system to make sure that there has not been some sort of electrical interference that is causing the gate to malfunction. That type of problem has been known to happen in this particular gate model, but luckily there’s an easy fix for it.”

Sheesh. She really needed to get a grip. Her nerves were all over the place just because of an unexpected visit by a repair man. She was being silly. The guy probably thought that she was a little touched in the head.

Mentally chastising herself, she showed the man the small room in the back corner of the house where the security system’s computer mainframe was set up.

“I should be able to have your gate up and working in no time.”

“Great. Just let me know if you need anything, I’ll be in the next room,” she said, walking away.

“There is just one more thing, ma’am.”

“Yes,” Lena said, turning around. The man had closed the gap she’d placed between them and was now only standing a few inches away from her. She took a step away from him. His hand gripped something that looked like an electric shaver. “What do you think you are doing?”

“You were a very hard woman to find, Ms. Westlake,” he said, the corners of his lips turning up into a cruel snarl. “Very hard. We were beginning to think that you’d left the continent. And that would have been a shame indeed. You and I still have some unfinished business to attend to.”

Gone was the friendly, carefree smile from just a few minutes before. His transformation from normal guy to monster was completed when he drew a handgun from behind the waistband of his jeans.

But it wasn’t until he took off his sunglasses that she knew exactly whom she was dealing with. This man had hazel eyes.

Hazel eyes. Hazel Eyes.

She hadn’t recognized him earlier because he’d shaved off his beard and hidden his distinctive facial features under dark shades and a baseball cap. It was the same light-eyed man who’d terrorized her those weeks before.
God help her
.

Lena ran. Fully expecting to feel the painful punch of bullets through her back, she lurched forward in terror. If she could just make it to the doorway she stood a chance. She still had her car keys in the pocket of her jeans. The police station was only a twenty-five minute drive away. If she could just get to the car, she would be safe, she could make it.

Scrambling ahead, Lena raced through the house, clumsily crashing into furniture and bumping into walls. Her heart was thumping almost out of her chest, but she was nearly to the front door. She could make it. She
had
to make it.

Lena summoned every ounce of strength and speed that she possessed as she ran for her life. She could hear his heavy breathing and muttered curses behind her. He wasn’t too far away. Chairs splintered and glass shattered all around her as he barreled through the house after her.

God, why was he here?
Why was he after her again? What did he want from her?

Her hand circled around the knob, freedom nearly in her grasp. But just as she yanked the door partway open, she felt his punishing hands clutching at her neck. Bruising her. Choking her. He was trying to cut off her airway. She had not been quick enough to escape and now he’d caught her.

She didn’t want to die
. With that raw realization, she transformed into a madwoman. Kicking, screaming, and biting, she tried her damnedest to fight him off. Refusing to go down without a fight, she kicked out at his groin as hard as she could. A hard kick to the balls would fell even the most physically imposing of men.

She missed her mark with her first kick, connecting with his shin instead. Next, she attempted to blind him. Clawing at his face, she went straight for his eyes. She was rewarded with the appearance of an uneven scratch on the side of his cheek.

Bam
!

He slammed her up against the door so hard that her brain sloshed painfully against her skull. His fist slammed into the side of her head. Lifting her clean up off the ground, he jammed his arm against her throat. His face contorted in anger, his stormy gray eyes narrowed to the tiniest of slits.

Black spots formed in front of Lena’s eyes. A warm, wet trickle flowed down her lips and she realized that her nose was bleeding, possibly broken.

“Move again, and I will break your fucking neck. I promise you that,” he growled, his face only an inch away from hers. She did not have a choice in the matter. The tight choke hold he had on her was causing Lena to lose sensation in her legs and arms.

The viciousness of the violence that had just been used against her shocked her to her core. In that moment, it dawned on her that her struggle was hopeless. And she knew that this man was intent on doing even more damage to her. She had failed to escape and now this maniac was going to kill her...or worse.

Sensing her defeat, Hazel Eyes smiled at her. “Good night, Lena,” he whispered against her ear. Blackness enveloped her after the first volts of the stun gun penetrated her chest.

One Day Later

82nd Street Naval Base

San Diego, California

“
I
Don’t know
how to
tell you this, Denison. I’m terrible at this type of shit, and there is really no good way to break it to you. So I’m just going to tell you flat out. Lena Westlake is missing
.”

“
What
?” he bolted upright in his chair, panic setting in before he had even processed the magnitude of what his commanding officer was saying.

“She was reported missing from her home by her brother, Philip Westlake.”

“Since when? I just talked to her yesterday morning.” He was shouting, completely unable to control the volume of his voice. Lena was missing.
His
Lena.

“He reported her missing yesterday evening.”

“Damn it to hell. What happened?” Jesse’s heart raced. He did not want to hear what his CO was about to tell him, but he had to. Part of him was hoping that all of this was some sort of a cosmic mistake or a twisted joke of some kind. Hell, he would take an extremely cruel joke over the harsh reality of Lena being missing. But he knew that Commander Dewitt would never joke about something like this.

“The local police department has not yet pieced together exactly what the hell went down. However, it seems that she was attacked and snatched from her house in Walvis Bay the day before her brother’s arrival. She was supposed to pick him up from the airport yesterday afternoon, but she never showed. He and his girlfriend took a cab to her home in Walvis Bay and found the house turned upside down and Lena gone. The front door was left wide open. Broken pieces of furniture were scattered all over the first floor. There were blood smears on the walls, and Ms. Westlake’s purse and cell phone were found inside of the residence.”

“God.” Jesse’s gut clenched. His heart sank deeper and deeper into his chest with every new bleak detail he learned. Glancing up at his commanding officer, he asked the question he was dreading to ask. “How much blood did they find at the scene?”

“Not a lot. Until the DNA testing comes in, we have to assume that the blood is hers—most of it at least—but there wasn’t enough indicating that she bled out there. Of course, that’s not to say that she’s still alive either.”

“Fuck.” Jesse could not believe that this was happening. He could not comprehend that someone had taken Lena away from him. The devastating reality that Lena was now back in the clutches of a murderous sociopath—a sick bastard who would undoubtedly not even break a sweat when he put a bullet through her brain—was unthinkable.

Jesse pictured her beautiful face the last time he had seen her. It had been during a Skype video chat session yesterday. He’d still been spending time with his family in Louisville. Wearing a light blue sundress, a wide grin, and smiling eyes, she’d taken his breath away. After their last conversation before he left Africa, he hadn’t expected to contact her so soon.

In fact, he had told himself that he shouldn’t contact her period. That doing so would just be sending the wrong signal, especially when he wasn’t positive about what he wanted. He had told himself that he needed time to make sure that he could fully commit to Lena in the way that she needed. He sure as hell didn’t want to mess up the unique friendship that they shared because he couldn’t make up his damn mind.

But in the end, he’d missed her too much. The happiness that lit up her face when she realized that it was him on the other end of the line had been priceless. He’d wanted to make it a habit to put that type of elation on her face on a regular basis. They had even planned for her to fly out to San Diego to visit him within the next few months. Now she was gone.

Images of Rose’s dead, broken body flashed through his head and intermingled with an equally horrific visualization of Lena bleeding out from a bullet wound to the head. Shaking his head, he tried to erase the brutal imagery of Lena being murdered from his mind. The unthinkable was now a reality.

“Are there any leads?” Jesse choked out, his voice a mixture of shock, despair, and an unyielding fury.

“Not at the moment. The house she lived in was secluded. Her closest neighbor was located a mile away from her, so obviously no one heard a thing.”

Squinting his eyes, Jesse thought of something. “What about her camera system? She had a security network. One of the cameras should have caught something. Did the police check the tapes?”

“The Walvis Bay police officers attempted to view the tape, but they found that the security gate was broken and the security camera was disabled. There was no usable footage,” Mark replied grimly.

“Damn it,” Jesse muttered under his breath. “I told her to get that gate fixed. I should have had it taken care of it before I left her.” He couldn’t keep his voice from shaking. “I should never have left her, sir.”

Mark coughed, clearing his throat. “Listen, I’m only telling you this now because I’ve been made aware that the two of you have been seeing one another. I know that this has got to be tough on you right now, but you’ve got to keep your head on straight.”

“We’ve got to take this case over, sir. We have to move on this fast. The local police department over there is a complete joke. They just don’t have the resources, sir.”

“Listen, Denison. We don’t yet know what happened to Ms. Westlake. For all that we know, she could have been the victim of a random burglary that turned bad.”

“What was missing?”

“What?”

“You said that it could have just been a random robbery, sir? What was missing from her home?”

“It’s unclear at the moment. Her brother had a difficult time identifying any missing items, but as you know, he doesn’t live at the house. At any rate, this crime just took place, Denison. The police are still investigating the crime scene, so they’ll have more information in a few days.”

A random robbery his ass. What were the odds of someone being snatched and victimized by a terror group for weeks on end and then only a few weeks later a victim of a random robbery? Jesse was not a gambling man, but it did not take an expert gambler to appreciate that the odds of those series of events being unrelated were slim to none.

“You can’t seriously believe Lena was the victim of a chance robbery, sir. That would be one hell of a coincidence given all that has transpired. And what kind of robber do you know removes the homeowner from the scene?”

Seething, Jesse tried his best to rein in his emotions. He would
not
jump up from his chair and slam a fist into his superior officer’s door. He would
not
kick a hole in his superior officer’s wall.

Never before had he experienced such an unruly amalgamation of rage and despair before. He wanted to rip someone apart limb by limb. He wanted to find the bastard who had abducted his woman and beat him into a bloody pulp. And Lena
was
his woman.

Clenching and unclenching his fists, he glowered back at his CO. There was no way in hell Jesse was just going to sit idly by and twiddle his thumbs for a “few days.”

Mark glared at him. “This is a delicate situation, Denison. And so far, there’s no indication AnSawar is involved in this in any way.”

“Well, if you believe that, sir, I have a couple of golden bridges in Arizona I’d like to sell you.”

“Look, the only reason why I haven’t ripped you a new one yet is because I understand where you are coming from on this. But you have to understand something too. I can’t deploy this SEAL Team without a specific directive from on high. And as of right now, there isn’t one.”

“Fine, sir. Take this as your official notice that I am requesting personal leave.”

“You just took your personal leave for the year.”

“I know, sir, but I’m requesting emergency leave to deal with a personal family matter.” The notion of Lena as family should have shocked Jesse, but it didn’t. He
did
think of her as family. And Jesse protected his own.

“Be smart about this, Denison. Do you really think that chasing shadows is going to help anybody right now? Just what do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

Gritting his teeth so hard that he was probably wearing them down to the nubs, he somberly eyed his CO. “I’m going to find Lena, sir. I’m going to bring her home. And I’m going to kill the son of a bitch who took her.”

****

A sharp pain traversed its way through Lena’s brain. Her jaw ached and a dull throbbing radiated throughout her chest. Blinking her eyes open, she found herself lying flat on her back on a metal-frame twin bed, her left wrist handcuffed to the headboard. The only light in the tiny room was the meek illumination provided by a small lamp situated on a small table in the corner.

Lena was not sure how long she had been lying there unconscious, but she could remember everything that’d occurred up until that point. Hazel Eyes had captured her. But where he had taken her was just as much of a mystery as why he’d taken her.

What was he going to do to her?
The seemingly endless list of horrendous possibilities made her blood run cold. It did not make any sense that they would target her again. She had explained to him weeks earlier that she only had a paltry amount of money compared to AnSawar’s demands of millions of dollars. No, there had to have been some other reason that he’d abducted her again.

Worry about the fate of her mother and brother was keeping her up at night. Her family could not have been taking her disappearance well. Philip had to have been beside himself, especially since he had probably seen the condition her home had been left in. She also wondered about Jesse.

By now, he had to have discovered that she was gone. He must be worried sick about her. Even though she had only known him a brief time, Lena had discovered that he had a protective streak about a mile wide. He saw himself as the protector of those he felt he had a personal duty for. She had gleaned that he now thought of her safety as his one of his responsibilities.

But as much as she trusted Jesse, deep down Lena recognized that he couldn’t save her from her fate now. She was sure he would do everything he could to try to do just that. But there’s no way that he could know where she’d be taken.
She
didn’t even know where she’d been taken.

The cold hard truth was that sometimes there just wasn’t a way to pull yourself or someone you loved back from the abyss. Sometimes, no matter how you lived your life, no matter how well you tried to treat other people, no matter how many theoretical gold stars you’d collected throughout the years—it just wasn’t enough. Right now, she was standing at the edge of life and death. And she was going to die.

The sense of loss that enveloped her caused angry tears to slip out from the corners of her eyes. Wiping the tears away with her free hand, she quickly scooted further back onto the bed when she heard the door to the room crash open.

“Ah, you’re awake. Excellent,” Hazel Eyes crooned out as he entered the room. Once he reached her, he pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the handcuffs. “How is your chest feeling? Do you have any pain? I do apologize for having to incapacitate you, but it was quite necessary. As you may recall you were acting extremely hysterical.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked, unable to keep a slight tremble out of her voice.

“I understand that you must think that I’m doing this just to be cruel. But really, that’s the farthest thing from the truth. This is strictly business for me, Ms. Westlake.”

“What do you want?”

“One hundred million dollars,” he answered, a dark smile on his face.

God not this same old crap yet again. “I told you this before, I don’t have that type of money,” she yelled at him, her patience completely worn out.

Hazel Eyes sat down beside her on the bed, only about a foot away from her. Lena moved her body away from him and as close to the wall as she could.

“I want to help you out of this predicament that you are in, Lena. I really do. But you have to help me out also. I have to get something from you in return—
quid pro quo
if you will. To help this process along, you can start by telling me everything you know about Corynx Seven.”

Lena blinked. “What?”

“Corynx Seven,” he repeated in an infuriatingly composed voice.

The name sounded familiar to her, but she was having trouble thinking clearly given her current circumstances. Searching the recesses of her mind, she finally remembered where she’d heard that name from.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” he prodded her again after she didn’t respond to him.

“Yes, I know what you are talking about.”

“What do you know of it?”

“Corynx Seven was one of my father’s weapons manufacturing companies,” Lena replied. “He and his business partners closed the facility down back in the early 2000s—I believe due to financial reasons. Why are you asking me about it?”