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Between the man’s name andthe mention of Trident, Frisco now knew who they were dealing with. The world of black ops was a relatively small one in the grand scheme of things, and even if you were meeting someone from it for the first time, you’d probably already heard about them from other members of the community. Ian Sawyer and his brother Devon had retired from SEAL Team Four a few years ago and started Trident Security in Tampa, Florida. The company took on cases from the private sector and government contracts, specifically from the FBI, CIA, and Deimos. That last agency was still a large enigma in that, until just recently, a scant few people had known it even existed and that included members of the black-ops community.
“Yup, you’re in. But you owe him a case of scotch ... the good stuff.”
Frisco grinned for the first time since the other man had snuck up on them, knowing Ghost had said no such thing.
After Hollywood rattled off the frequency the team was currently using, Sawyer repeated the info to someone named “Polo” over his own unit. Within seconds, there were several clicks and then the two groups were suddenly able to communicate with each other. Frisco took over the watch as the twomen to his left compared maps of the surrounding area and alerted their own team members about who was within shooting distance so no one got caught up in friendly fire. It was bad enough they had to worry about the armed guards patrolling the outer edges of the compound spotting them.
“Damn, I wish these two fuckers would just meet up already,” Frisco grumbled about twenty minutes later, after all was quiet over the comms once more, except the chatter from the party inside. “Then we can take them both out and get the hell out of here with the codes and nuke.”
Sawyer yanked the binoculars from his eyes and glared at Hollywood and Frisco. “What do you mean takebothof them out? Damn it, this is what fucking happens when those dingleberries back in Washington don’t talk to each other.” He activated his microphone again. “Hey, Jackass, Sweetheart, and Vixen, there’s a price on your boy’s head. Ghost, under no circumstances do any of your men shoot the guy with the damn codes. He’s friendly.”
Hollywood groaned. “Are you fucking kidding me? He’s a plant?”
“More like a dweeb, but yeah, we need to get him out in one piece.”
For the next thirty seconds or so,there was back and forth conversation between Ghost, Fletch, Carter, and the woman, Jordyn, about some guy who worked for an import/export company. It was all fictional, of course. The end result was they were all on the same page—finally. “Preston Ward” was now off the Deltas’ hit list. Unfortunately, the one person who remained on it was still an unknown entity.
Once he was satisfied their inside man was not going to end up in the morgue, Sawyer gave the Deltas a quick intel report. “The dweeb is from Deimos—one of their support guys using a cover that’s been cultivated for years. His date, Vixen, is an operative. Egghead, get with whomever Delta’s got on the wires and send out the pic of Reardon and Caldwell. They get extracted no matter what; resistance isn’t in the dweeb’s vocabulary. He won’t last sixty seconds.”
Great, just great. That meant the guy wasn’t trained in SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. If he was captured and tortured, he’d be spilling his guts in no time. Not what you wanted to hear about a black-ops agent, even if he was on the support team. He still probably knew enough to cause huge problems for Deimos and the President of the United States.
A few seconds after Beckett “Coach” Ralston andSawyer’s man synchronized their databases, Frisco’s miniature tablet vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out. When a photo of a couple popped up, he studied it. They were dressed in formal wear—a tuxedo on the red-haired guy, while the looker wore a gold evening gown with a thigh-high slit in the skirt. And damn, was she hot. Her chestnut-colored hair was down and full of curls that framed her heart-shaped face. Without knowing how tall the guy was, and with nothing else in the photo to use in comparison, it was difficult to tell how tall she was. But with that mile-long leg that was exposed, Frisco figured she was somewhere between five seven and five nine, which was three to five inches shorter than he was. While she had curves, it was obvious to him she was in excellent physical condition, which was in direct contrast to her “date,” whose arm was around her waist as they grinned for the camera. It was evident they knew each other well, and an odd jolt of jealousy struck Frisco as he assessed the other man. The lucky bastard looked like he spent most of his time indoors behind a computer—he was pale, skinny with almost no muscle tone, and his black-rimmed glasses had “nerd” written all over them—not that there was anything wrong with that. The “nerds” and “geeks” of this worldheld a lot more power than most gave them credit for. Hell, Coach’s wife, Harley, was a computer geek ... and she was pretty damn hot, too.
“Coach, are you fucking with the damn feeds?” the guy named “Egghead” queried in a pissed-off tone.
“Nope—was just going to ask you the same thing. I’ve got garbage on half of them.”
“What’s wrong?” Sawyer and Hollywood spoke into their comms at the same time.
Sawyer’s man was the first to reply, “We’ve got some sort of interference on a few of the feeds—they’re coming in as static, and I don’t think it’s random. Someone else is hacked in besides the two of us.”
“Fuck,” his boss replied. “Who else wants to throw a monkey wrench into this gig? Find out where it’s coming from and make it fast. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Before anyone could respond, that bad feeling Frisco and all the other operatives were now experiencing became reality when an explosion rocked the compound, followed by screams and all hell breaking loose. A ball of flames blew out several windows, spraying everyone standing on the patiowith shattered glass, sending them running for cover.
A chorus of curses came over the comm units. Murphy’s law just went FUBAR again. The mission was officially fucked up beyond all recognition.Shit.
CHAPTER 2
Haven Caldwell squeezed her “date’s”arm. “You’re doing fine, Preston,” she assured him in a low voice, using the name of the reclusive computer developer he was pretending to be. “Just relax.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kenny Reardon responded, while tugging on the collar of his tuxedo and the black tie encircling it. He was only two years her junior, but his pale, baby face, covered in freckles, made him appear far younger than that. “You don’t have a target on your back.”
She cupped his chin and turned his head so he was looking directly at her. To anyone else in the room, it probably seemed like she was seducing the socially-handicapped but rich man. However, in reality, they were just friends. She’d known Kennyfor about eight years, ever since he’d been hired as one of the analysts at Deimos, five years after she’d been trained to be one of their operatives at the age of twenty-one. He’d been assigned as the intelligence and communications contact for her and several other agents and, over the years, had become like a kid brother to her. They spoke almost daily, and when she was in town, they occasionally went out to dinner or to a movie. Some of the few times Haven was able to let down her hair and be herself—unfortunately, she had no idea who that person was anymore.
Some of the support staff and agents at the covert organization’s headquarters in California had become a close-knit family, considering most of them had been employed based on the fact they didn’t have any. Few people in the world even knew Deimos existed—the CIA was a Boy Scout troop compared to it—and those who did, knew to keep their mouths shut. Haven and her fellow operatives did the President’s and US government’s dirty work—not that anyone in power would admit it. They took care of things, which the public could never know about, to keep the US safe from terrorists and other world powers who wanted to see the leader of the free world fall flat on its face.Deimos was the Greek god of terror, so it was the ideal name for the black-ops agency that excelled in torture and assassinations, among other things.
For years, Haven had traveled all over the world, using various aliases. Sometimes, like this evening, she hobnobbed with the elite, while on other missions, she could be in one of the worst hellholes on Earth. It wasn’t hard to figure out which assignments she preferred. But this was Kenny’s first time, and most likely his last, in the field. They’d needed the super geek for his extensive computer knowledge, specifically about the Dark Web, in the event the operative was tested. “Preston Ward” was one of hundreds of profiles the agency had spent years updating for times just like this. There were few photos of the fictional man on the internet, all of which were hazy or taken from the back, and several members of the Deimos support staff could actually pass as “Preston” whenever the time came to use the profile. Reardon had just happened to draw the short straw, and it was Haven’s job to make sure he got out of the mission in one piece.
“Hey, you know I won’t let anything happen to you. Just stick to me like glue, hot stuff.”
“Well, at least that’s not a hardship. I’ve got the hottest looking date here tonight.”
Haven grinned. When she’d first gotten to know Reardon, a simple exchange like that would have had his cheeks and neck turning beet red as he stuttered through a response. Even now, if a woman he barely knew just smiled at him, he would still have the same reaction. But over time, he’d gotten comfortable with the female agents such as Haven and Jordyn Alvarez. Sometimes they liked to tease him, but usually they preferred to build up his self-assurance around women. He was a sweet kid, and she would love for some lucky girl to realize that someday. In fact, not too long ago, while Carter was away on a solo mission, Haven and Jordyn had been at headquarters for some new training and had taken Kenny out to a bar for dinner after his shift had ended one night. Both women were used to being hit on in most social settings, and that night had been no exception. However, they’d given all their attention to their friend, making him feel ten feet tall and bulletproof. She was sure the other women in the bar that night had been wondering what was so special about him that had Haven and Jordyn ignoring every other man in the place. Kenny would probably always be shy around women he didn’t know, but, hopefully, they’d given him the confidence to get past thatso he could talk to one he was interested in without getting tongue tied.
Hooking her arm around his elbow, Haven gestured to the main doors to the ballroom. “Let’s take a walk through the rest of the place. Hopefully, we’ll run into ‘Mr. Smith’ soon.”
Mr. Smith, undoubtedly not his real name, had popped up on the Dark Web a few months ago. The Dark Web was the side of the internet most people didn’t know was a reality and not just something they read about in a spy novel. Smith had been trolling for anyone who might have a specific software protection dongle with launch codes for a suitcase-sized nuclear device. It was one of many that’d gone missing from Russia back in the 1990s. Using the Preston Ward profile, the agents at Deimos headquarters had begun laying an intricate trail about how the developer/hacker had come into possession of the codes. They were then contacted by Smith who wanted to purchase the codes for the tidy sum of $10 million. After providing “proof” Preston had the codes, the agents had then engaged in a game of cat and mouse which was hopefully coming to an end tonight. Once they identified who Smith really was, he’d be quietly taken into custody by Deimosagents, who would then stop at nothing to recover the device.