“Doesn’t matter,” she continued, waving a dismissive hand through the air. “They were in New Orleans waiting for Morales to give them an approximate heading when the signals on the tracking devices suddenly stopped moving. Ten minutes later, the pressure gauges indicated the capsules were sitting in nearly two hundred feet of water. So either the terrorists chucked the CWs overboard for some reason, which isn’t likely. Or the boat sank, which is what we suspect.”
“Isn’t it possible the tangos simply tossed the tracking devices overboard?” Wolf asked, falling back into old habits and using military slang to refer to the terrorists. “The simplest answer usually being the right one?”
“Nope.” Olivia shook her head emphatically. “If they’d screwed with the devices or removed them from the capsules, we’d have known.”
“How’s that?” Leo asked, trying really hard not to notice how the sunlight cutting through the kitchen windows bathed her in a warm, golden glow, picking up the subtle auburn highlights in her otherwise black-as-midnight hair.
“Those tracking devices are the latest to come out of the science and technology department back at Langley. Not only do they have heat sensors, pressure gauges, and the ability to connect to all satellites everywhere—foreign and domestic, civilian and military—but they’re also about the size of one grain of rice.”
Uncle John whistled, and Leo looked over to find the old man’s hands now resting ever so casually on the big duffel bag. “You reallyareJames Bond, aren’t you?” his uncle said. “Or Jamie Bond. You know, since you’re a girl and all,” he added unnecessarily.
“But that’s not the real kicker,” Olivia continued, wiggling her eyebrows at his uncle, “because all of that technology is pretty standard in today’s spy market. Whatisn’tstandard is the adhesive on these tracking devices. It’s embedded with nanotechnology that transmits a warning signal if the apparatus is tampered with.
“So far, we haven’t received any such signal. So the weapons were tossed or the whole damn boat sank. Either scenario sucks, and have I mentioned how much I hate that guy Murphy?” She blew out a breath and shook her head. “But regardless of what happened, we have to get those CWs back. We can’t leave three capsules of chemicals lying around on the ocean floor that, if combined and aerosolized, could take out the population of a small city.”
“Sonofabitch,” Wolf cursed. “Just what kind of stuff are we talking here?”
“Methylphosphonyl difluoride, cyclohexylamine, and cyclohexanol.” She rattled off the list of tongue-twisting agents like a bona fide chemical engineer.
Leo wondered if it were possible for a person to shit their own heart. “Cyclosarin?” he demanded. “You let these sonsofbitches escape with the mixture for cyclosarin?” It was one of the most deadly nerve agents ever to come out of a German laboratory. He thought he’d beenjokingwhen he named her one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “Jesus H. Christ, Olivia!”
“Why am I picturing you with your pinky held to your lip while you stroke a hairless cat in an ominous fashion?” Bran asked her, eyes hard as stone.
“Huh?” She frowned at him.
“You know, Austin Powers?” When her face remained blank, Bran added, “Dr. Evil? How long has it been since you watched a movie?”
“Look,” she said, her tone defiant, “if we could’ve planted fake capsules, we would have. But these types of weapons have elaborate QR codes etched into their casings. Those QR codes can’t be duplicated with any sort of precision. The OPCW made sure of that.”
“The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Wolf clarified for Leo’s uncle’s sake.
“If the mole or moles wanted to,” Olivia continued, “they could have had the tangos snap a picture of the code for verification, and it would have been easy to check that code against the OPCW’s online manifest.” When no one said anything to that, she continued to plead her case. “Was it a risk using the real chemicals as bait? Yes. Undoubtedly. But catching the traitor or traitors, plugging the leak in the Intelligence Community, and potentially saving the necks of agents and civilians alike made the reward worth the risk. We just…”—she sighed and threw her hands in the air—“we just didn’t bargain for all ofthis.”
Bran glanced around the kitchen as if he was expecting to see someone other than the six of them and Meat who, after finishing his kibble, had immediately retired to the doggy pillow shoved beneath the freestanding, farmhouse-style sink. The big, furry dope was sprawled on his back, legs spread wide, cock and balls all on display, and snoring loud enough to rattle the windowpanes.
“Okay, I get it,” Bran said. “So you and Morales saw an opportunity and you took it. But then where the hell are these contractors you were talking about? Why aren’t you with thosespostatas”—the New Jersey Italian in him came out when he got worked up or tipsy, and it was like being in the middle of aSopranosepisode—“instead of here with us?”
She squinted at the clock on the wall. Like everything else, patience was finite, and Leo could tell she had just about reached the limit of hers. He couldn’t blame her, of course. I mean, she’d allowed frickin’chemicalweaponsto be stolen and then sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Her and Morales’s asses were definitely in a bind here.
“None of the contractors are dive specialists,” she admitted, slicing her hand through the air like a karate chop. She used the gesture as punctuation. A physical exclamation point. “But don’t you worry, Morales has already had them transfer to Key West and rent a boat. They’ll meet us out at the, uh, the code name we’re using during transmissions is ‘the package.’”
“Clever.” Bran snorted, and Leo watched Olivia’s lips curve into a frown as her eyes glinted with… What was that emotion he saw on her face? Derision? Determination? Or desperation, perhaps?
Well, whatever it was, it made his heart clench and the deep breath he dragged into his lungs burn. Then again, maybe that last part was due more to the fact that the air inside the kitchen smelled strongly of chicory coffee mixed with the rather pungent aroma of the tuna casserole his uncle seemed to live on.
“Anyway,” she continued, “if we pull anchornow, we should arrive at the capsules about the same time the contractors will. Which is good since we have no idea what we’ll be dealing with out there. I’m hoping that if the boat sank, it pulled the terrorists down right along with it. But since Morales can’t take the chance of accessing our satellites to search the area without potentially alerting the moles to our little operation…” She let the sentence dangle, shrugging.
Leo sensed Bran and Mason’s gazes landing on his face. Carefully, feeling as if everything he’d worked so hard for during the last two months was on the line, and that Fate, in the form of one curvaceous female, was slicing at the rope, he said, “So you’re tellin’ me that not only do you want us to dive down and recover your lost capsules, but you also think it’s possible we’ll only be able to do that after a firefight with eight card-carryin’ al-Qaeda militants?”
“It’s not out of the question.” She met his gaze head-on.
Any other time he would have appreciated her no-bullshit approach. Not today. Because today she was attempting to involve him in a mission that would put an indefinite hold on his search for theSantaCristina. Bad enough. Worse still was the fact that said mission might just be enough to get him and his men…hisfriends…killed. Andthatwould pretty much obliterate any chance they had of keeping their promise.
Right.The thought sucked so hard he figured there was a hickey on his brain.
Looking around at his crew, Leo made a decision that went against everything he’d stood for since the day he attached his Budweiser, the pin of the Navy SEAL brotherhood, to his dress whites. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted a trip, Olivia,” he said, the words threatening to slip backward from his lips to lodge in his throat. “We weren’t jokin’ when we bugged out. We’re done. Finished. Kaput. Which means this is now a case of not my circus, not my monkeys. I suspect you and Morales can find a team of contractors with divin’ credentials that’ll allow you both to continue to keep this whole thing on the down-low while keepin’ us out of it.”
Olivia’s eyes rounded. Yessir. She hadn’t been expectingthat. Leo was even a bit shocked himself. But before she could open her mouth to utter a word of protest, the sound of Wolf pushing back from the table, the legs of his chair scraping against the linoleum floor, interrupted her.
