Page 51

J ordan lay spent in the darkness after another energetic bout with Trooper Mires. As good as the sex was physically, it left him feeling dead inside. Even when he’d told himself this wasn’t what he wanted, he found himself opening the damned door when she knocked.

It was loneliness and grief crying out for a distraction. Weakness that pissed him off.

He didn’t even know where this woman lived or if she had a middle name or how she took her coffee. What was worse, he didn’t care. He hated himself for that. He was in no state to be with anyone until he could get his head straight.

It wasn’t as if he expected anyone to crack the ice encasing his heart, but he did try to remember his humanity during his few-and-far-between relationships.

This wasn’t a relationship. This was emotionless and physical, like a ten-mile run with an orgasm at the end.

But he didn’t need a woman for an orgasm, and he should finish this thing before he started to resent her as much as he hated himself. It wasn’t her fault. She just wanted sex. A hookup. Any other time, it would have been the perfect scenario, but not right now. Not when he was raw with emotion .

He could hear her quiet breathing as her finger idly doodled on his chest.

She didn’t usually hang around afterwards. It was pretty much come and go. Waiting for her to leave, made him feel like the world’s biggest prick.

“You didn’t call me to escort you home this week.” She pouted. The moon shone so bright he could clearly see her expression.

He captured her hand to stop those wandering fingers. “I was away. I didn’t call anyone.”

Her finely plucked eyebrow rose. “Somewhere nice?”

He couldn’t answer questions. Didn’t want to talk. “Just work.”

She sat up in bed, unabashed about being naked as the silver light outlined her perfect body. Christ if his demonic prick didn’t respond.

“What were you doing?”

He found his shirt on the floor beside the bed. Pulled it on. “FBI stuff.”

She laughed breathily. “I know that, dummy. I mean what kind of work do you do?”

“It’s classified.”

“I’m not about to tell anyone.”

Why was she suddenly asking questions?

“It’s still classified.” He tried to soften his tone, which was verging on a growl. “Look, Ellen, I don’t think we should do this again.”

Her back snapped straight. “Because I asked a couple of questions?”

“No.” Yes . “I can’t talk about my job.”

“Because it’s classified .”

He saw the sneer as clearly as he’d seen the smile. “Look, we’re not in a relationship. You knock on the door to get laid, and I open it for the same reason.”

She smiled slyly in the darkness and licked her lips. “You don’t think that is worth a little conversation?”

He turned on the bedside lamp. Sat up on the side of the bed. He wanted to cradle his head in his hands as a headache worked around the edges of his vision.

“It’s not worth my job,” he said honestly.

She got off the bed, snatched up her clothes, and stormed into the bathroom. A minute later, she came out looking slick and polished. And pissed. “If you’re not interested, don’t answer the door.”

“If you want anything except to fuck, don’t bother knocking.”

“Oh, well excuse me. I didn’t know the only time I could open my mouth was when I was deep throating you.”

Ouch .

“Ellen—”

“Am I wrong?” Those hard blue eyes bored into his.

“Not really.” He wanted to drive her away for both their sakes because if she knocked again, he’d probably let her in. Because he was fucking weak and male and struggling to find anything that mattered in his life right now.

She adjusted her hat on the tight bun of her hair, headed to the door. She slammed it behind her with enough force to rattle the glass in the windows.

Fuck.

He went outside and watched her cruiser taillights disappear along his driveway.

He glanced up at the security camera and hoped Jon Regan wasn’t watching while making acerbic comments that could blister paint to his colleagues.

Jordan was doing what the guy suggested, but that wasn’t why he’d done it.

Having sex was the only time he wasn’t thinking about the fact it should have been him on that plane, terrified as it nosedived thousands of feet to bury itself in the earth below.

It should have been him in his family home when it burned to the ground taking his grandparents, mother, and sister with it.

He went back inside. Shut the door. Locked it .

Next time, he wouldn’t answer the door. The sex was good, but it wasn’t worth this self-recrimination.

How was that healthy?

But maybe that was the point.

Feeding the misery, stoking an addiction…punishing himself with mindless sex that made him hate himself even more afterward.

He didn’t need a damned escort anyway. He was armed and ready. Let the fuckers come. At least that way, he might figure out who’d tried to kill him and bug him, and why. The FBI would have a lead to follow. Action to take. Rather than nothing but unanswered questions.

After the fire at Rowena Smith’s house, Reid Armstrong had been concerned enough that someone was listening into Jordan’s calls that the task force had switched over to the same system they ran presidential communications through out of Langley.

Jordan had persuaded Ackers to switch HRT communications over too.

Until they could figure out what the hell was going on, he wanted to be appropriately paranoid.

He went into the kitchen and dug through one of the cabinets.

Pulled out a bottle of single malt. Poured a healthy measure in a cheap glass and then went back to his desk that was set up in the corner of the living room.

His body clock hadn’t yet adjusted back to Eastern Standard Time after his quick trip across the pond.

He’d visited the beautiful historic town of Ironbridge and what little remained of Rowena’s burnt-out home, and then he’d driven back to London and gotten the first available flight home, which was early Thursday morning.

While he’d been away, Grady Steel had almost died of a gunshot wound, and some of his teammates had gone head-to-head with some of the deadliest threats on the planet.

The divide between him and his teammates exacerbated the strain he was under.

Every mission they did without him drove the wedge between them deeper, pushing them further apart.

Ackers had forbidden him to even mention Rowena Smith, let alone Darmawan Hurek, but the guys wanted answers.

They weren’t stupid. They knew something was off.

Now a new nightmare loomed. Despite the lack of a body, Montana’s family had decided to hold a memorial service in a couple of weeks, and Jordan still didn’t know how he’d be able to face them.

Survivor’s guilt was crippling.

He needed answers. He pulled out his laptop and put on some music. Billie Holiday’s emotionally raw vocals resonated with his mood.

He realized he’d missed a call from Reid Armstrong that had come in while he’d been distracted by Ellen. It was early evening, so he called Armstrong back. “Did you get the DNA back off Rowena Smith’s gym kit?”

“Good evening to you too.”

“Sorry.” Jordan rubbed the stiff muscles in his neck. “Fatigue tends to dull my manners, and the triple dose of jet lag doesn’t help.”

“The lab has the clothes and gym shoes and are confident they’ll get her DNA. Analysts managed to figure out that the family tree site she used hasn’t mailed her results yet, and that’s not surprising as she sent it the day before she left for Africa, and they say about six weeks on the website.”

“Can we hurry that along?”

“By the time we do, the results should have come through anyway. My analyst assures me we’ll know as soon as the results go live.”

“As will anyone who gets pinged as a potential relative.”

“If her biological father is involved with her disappearance, it seems unlikely he’s the sort to enter his DNA into one of these websites.”

“True, but he might have relatives who did. Did you get into her cloud service?”

“We did.” There was a long pause. “It was wiped. We have someone seeing if they can reconstruct anything, but they say it’s doubtful.”

Jordan swore. “It’s as if someone is trying to wipe her existence off the map.”

“The most obvious answer is she’s doing it herself and is determined to disappear.”

“That’s what I thought before I spoke to her relatives and co-workers. By all accounts, she was genuinely close to them, and it doesn’t explain her house burning down.”

“Unless she plans to reappear in a couple of weeks and claim the insurance money.”

Jordan grunted. It didn’t feel right. “She was financially solvent after the inheritances from her family, and she could have just sold the house. Way easier than getting insurance policies to pay out. Anything on those ghost signals?”

“Our analysts aren’t sure. The data looks like it’s been corrupted.”

Who had the power to do that or was it the byproduct of shitty equipment and an unstable electrical grid?

“Did we get anything from the plane itself?”

“That’s why I called. You’re sure your place is bug free?”

Jordans’ suspicion had spread to his colleagues. “TacOps tells me it is.” He hadn’t done a sweep since he’d gotten home this evening though. Too busy doing the State Trooper. “Give me five minutes to do a sweep. I’ll call you back.”

“Feeling paranoid?”

“This whole situation makes me batshit.”

“Me too.”

Jordan hung up and took out the wand Regan had instructed him on. Started in the bathroom and the bedroom then the living room and kitchen.

Jordan called Armstrong again as Billie Holiday finished singing Trav’lin’ Light . “All clear.”

“Okay. Well, the bomb tech who snuck in the hangar with NTSB said that despite the preliminary findings of the Zimbabwean investigation, she believes it was definitely a bomb that brought that plane down.”

What the fuck ?

Jordan dropped to his seat as his knees gave out. He took a slug of the fiery whiskey to steady himself.

“She managed to take a couple of photos of pieces of fuselage and swab some of the fragments while her colleagues distracted the officials. She looks like a harmless kid, so they largely ignored her.”

“What does our side plan to do about it?”

“First thing is to analyze the swabs and confirm the presence of explosives. She only got back today, and the samples are now at the TEDAC lab in Alabama.”

“Any of Kurt or his belongings identified yet?”

“No. If he was targeted, maybe they put it under his seat to make damned sure he didn’t survive.”

“I think death from an air disaster when you’re at ten thousand feet is pretty much a given.” At least his friend wouldn’t have suffered for long. “Any ideas why the authorities there are lying to us?”

“No. But they’re starting to make noises about the West trying to make them look incompetent and as if they are incapable of investigating themselves.”

“When in actual fact someone is trying to hide the truth. Why?”

“That’s a good question, and I don’t have any good answers.

Ambassador swears Zim officials are a hundred percent committed to working with us, but that wasn’t what the FBI agent said when she was there.

They kept them corralled in their hotel and then escorted them to and from the hangar and crash site under armed guard—for their own protection.

They were not allowed to talk to anyone. ”

“Could someone powerful in the Zimbabwean government be responsible for bringing that flight down?” It was a dangerous idea to voice .

“Why?”

“Find the motive, find the ‘who,’” Jordan pondered. “How long until the bomb squad finish their tests?”

“Middle of next week. State Department wants this information locked down.”

Jordan exhaled tiredly. “I want to know how and why my friend and colleague died.” And who ordered it .

“You, me, and several hundred other people’s family members who are growing more vocal in their discontent. I get the impression the US is going to let the families lead the demands for answers until we have proof one way or another.”

“In the meantime, any trail to potential terrorists goes cold. The same way Hurek’s trail has gone cold.” Hurek was the obvious suspect for this bomb, although he had never used explosives before. Didn’t mean he couldn’t start.

“I’m trying to get warrants that allow us to start digging into the security footage from Harare.”

“I can help with reviewing that.”

“I’ll let you know when we confirm explosives and the warrant comes through.”

“What can I do right now?”

“Take the weekend off.”

Jordan took another sip of whiskey and frowned into the glass. “I’ve got a teammate in the hospital and a memorial coming up and still no answers. It’s not exactly conducive to relaxing.”

“Task force is taking the weekend. We’re in limbo without test results. I’m flying to Seattle for a family wedding on the red eye. I’m at the airport right now.”

Jordan had forgotten people had real lives outside work. “Did you discover anything new about the Anders’ murder?”

“The case has been closed for lack of evidence.”

“Already?”

“Yeah. Anders’ company has been sold for a tidy sum, and his wife and kids moved to Cape Town. ”

“Something tells me Bjorn knew something about either Hurek or the bomb or both.”

“Yeah, but how do we prove what a dead man knew?”

“Can we access his phone records or email?”

“Not without a warrant, which I’ll request tonight.

This is all too big to start cowboying around,” Armstrong warned.

“It was one thing to follow-up on the Smith girl, but illegally accessing a dead man’s phone records during a time when the Zimbabwean authorities are screaming US interference… Can’t risk it.”

Fuck. This was why people like Hurek escaped without a trace. They didn’t have to play by the damned rules.

“I’ll just get drunk at home then. Enjoy your wedding.”

“I will. My niece. I can’t believe she’s old enough to get married.”

“Must be nice to have a big family.”

There was a long awkward pause that said it all. “It is. It really is. I’ll call if anything breaks over the weekend, but try to get some rest.”