Chapter Twenty
One gunshot. A second on its heels. Or was that an echo of the first? The crack of Walker’s phone hitting the floor. Shouting, a struggle, another gunshot, followed by a jumble of muffled grunts and indistinguishable voices.
Fuck!
Aidan burst around the side of their mobile command center, fear and adrenaline coursing through him. Feet pounding the cement parking lot, he paid no mind to the curious eyes watching him pace or the sirens wailing around their staging area.
“Jamie!” he yelled into the phone. Sweat poured down his face and under his dress shirt and flak jacket. “Goddammit, Whiskey, answer me! Jamie!”
His stomach roiled, his heart hammered, his mind revolted as he waited the longest two minutes of his life. Two minutes in which he cursed himself for leaving his partner behind, thinking it would keep him safe when it might have gotten him killed. Two minutes in which he replayed every smile, touch and kiss from Jameson Walker during the past three weeks, remembering what it had felt like to be alive again. Two minutes in which he bargained with God and any other deity that would listen to let Walker live.
“Agent Talley?” said an unfamiliar voice.
“Where the fuck is my partner?”
“Subduing SAC Clark.”
“Tell me he’s all right.”
The line went muffled, and Aidan shouted “Jamie!” into the phone, fearing the worst, sure the firefight had erupted again. But then that deep, Southern drawl he’d grown so fond of came over the line. “I’m here, Irish.”
Knees going weak, Aidan steadied himself with a hand to the side of the van. “Oh, thank God. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Aidan turned his face into his outstretched arm, hiding the emotion there. “Jamie, I thought...”
“I know, baby, but we don’t have time right now.” A soft endearment followed by a firm reminder that today was bigger than the two of them.
Proving his point, Walker’s voice faded as he spoke away from the phone. “Get on the horn and tell any EMS crews en route to GNL to reverse and head back to the Port.”
When he came back, Walker was all business. “Aidan, everything is in motion, including the docking cruise ships and ticking bomb. Gary doesn’t know where the latter is. You need to move on the five locations Oscar provided. I’ll be running point from here.”
Jamie hung up, leaving Aidan bereft, the brief conversation hardly enough to quell the panic that had consumed him, but then a flare went up over the Port, red and thunderous, and the haze of fear cleared. He’d given Mel that flare gun and told her to fire it in the air if she and Danny found the bomb.
“Barnes!” he barked, climbing back into the van. “We’ve got a location. Let’s move.”
Leading the charge on the Port, they pulled their vehicles to the main entrance and unloaded, not waiting for their foreman escort. Law enforcement teams fanned out, jogging down the rows of containers and moving into position. Aidan, on point, hustled his team toward the flare’s location.
A commotion could be heard several container rows ahead—a crash of metal, the thud of bodies hitting aluminum, grunts and curses, gunfire.
Sprinting the final ten feet, Aidan flattened himself on the other side of the corner of the aisle where the noise had come from and motioned for his team to hold. Once Barnes radioed that his team was in position at the other end of the row, Aidan gave the go-ahead signal and they rounded the corner, guns drawn.
“FBI!” rang the chorus of shouts.
The aisle was littered with downed bodies, including a writhing Terry, and Mel stood in the middle of them, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Hamilton. She landed a roundhouse kick to the merc’s head that sent him reeling, and Aidan lowered his weapon, thinking the fight was over. Until Hamilton suddenly righted himself with a blade in hand. He swiped it in a sharp, upward motion, slicing through Mel’s jacket sleeve before she could jerk out of his reach.
“Hold!” Aidan bellowed, not wanting anyone to take a shot that might hit Mel.
She and Hamilton parried back and forth, jabs and hooks, the knife glinting in the sun, and Aidan struggled to get a lock on Hamilton. Finally, she got a hold of Hamilton’s arm at the elbow, out of the knife’s reach, and swung him so his back was to Aidan. “Fire!” she shouted.
Aidan took the shot, nailing the merc in the middle of his back. The bigger man stumbled forward, knife still slashing, and Mel spun behind him, wrapping both arms around his neck.
“Did you get my picture?” Hamilton raised the knife again and took deadly aim behind him. Mel wrenched his neck to the side, the crack audible, and his lifeless body crumpled to the ground at her feet.
Mel leaned over and pressed two fingers to Hamilton’s neck, checking his pulse.
Danny’s low whistle drew Aidan’s attention to his brother, who had popped out from behind a stack of crates, the flare gun in his hand. “Damn, woman.”
Ignoring him, Mel turned her attention to the officers behind Aidan. “Get these men out of here.” She gestured to the confirmed-dead Hamilton and the rest of his injured crew.
“Where’s the bomb?” Aidan asked.
Mel pointed at the container behind him. “Hamilton swallowed the key.”
“Someone get a set of bolt cutters,” Barnes hollered.
“That’s my cue.” Hopping into action, Danny handed the flare gun to Aidan, shuffled past him, and took a lock-pick set out of his jacket pocket. Thirty seconds later, the heavy door swung open to reveal barrels of explosives, intricately wired with C-4 and multiple trigger devices. A laptop sat atop the bomb, attached to a countdown clock displaying three minutes.
Three minutes—180 seconds—the length of an average television commercial break. He always fast-forwarded commercials; he couldn’t get through the interruptions fast enough. Right now, he desperately needed a pause button. Three minutes wasn’t nearly enough time. He’d never fast-forward again if they lived through this.
Aidan had thought the two minutes on the phone earlier, listening to Walker fight for his life, was the worst his day could get. Now his own mortality, and that of his best friend and brother, and anyone else in the blast radius, was three very short minutes away.
Mel stepped inside the container, using the flashlight on her phone to inspect the deadly contraption. “There’re too many redundancies for me to cut in the time we’ve got.”
Aidan’s stomach hit the floor and his hand clutched his phone like a lifeline.
A lifeline.
A half-court Hail Mary.
Could one of the best shooters he knew beat the buzzer?
Aidan whipped out his phone.
“Walker,” his partner answered.
“I’m looking at a very big bomb that Mel can’t defuse in the two minutes forty-five seconds the counter says we have left until we’re blown to bits.”
“There’s an electronic device controlling it?”
“Laptop.” He struggled to hear Walker’s reply, as Mel shouted behind him for everyone to clear out. “What was that?”
“Put me on speaker,” Walker said, after which, his voice came across loud and clear. “Reach into the front right pocket of your flak jacket.”
Aidan yanked up the Velcro flap and pulled out a cable he hadn’t put there. Walker, with those better-than-average field instincts, thinking ahead.
“Plug the one end of that cable into your phone and the other into the computer.”
Following orders, Aidan gasped, almost dropping the phone, when it took on a life of its own. Or rather, not its own. Someone else had taken it over. Just like with his email.
“Did you hack my phone?”
“Hush, Irish.”
Walker’s answer was given distractedly—Aidan could hear his fingers flying across a keyboard—but those words, the same ones he’d used last night when Aidan had been on desperation’s edge, calmed him now as they had then.
Setting the phone and its dizzying matrix of screens next to the computer, he turned to survey the scene. Everyone had followed Mel’s orders and cleared out, except the one person who didn’t take orders from her. The one person Aidan wanted gone the most.
Danny.
Aidan’s tenuous calm snapped.
He grabbed his brother by the lapels of his suit jacket and shoved him against the aluminum side of the container. “Why the fuck are you still here?”
“Because you’re here.” Danny shrugged, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. And it was. Aidan would have done the same thing, were their roles reversed. “Not leaving you, bro.”
Walker’s voice called from the phone, and Aidan didn’t have time to be angry anymore. Releasing his brother with a kiss to the forehead, he turned back to the computer and phone.
“I’m here. I’m here,” he said, with a glance at the countdown clock. “It’s still counting down. Forty-five seconds left.”
Their lives ticking away by the second...
“I’m going to give you a code to manually enter and you need to press enter at the same time Cruz cuts the redundancy wire that would be last in the sequence. Can she locate that one?”
Mel circled the device, crouching at its right side. “Got it. Danny, you have something in the pick set to cut with?”
Danny tossed her the tool she needed and came to stand next to Aidan.
“All right, Whiskey, go.”
He punched in each number and letter as Walker rattled them off, and at the end, with five seconds left, his brother by his side, his boss and sister-in-law waiting for the go-ahead, he gave her a nod and pressed enter as she sliced through the wire.
They held their breaths.
Four seconds.
Three seconds.
Two—
The clock stopped and the device powered down completely.
Danny collapsed against his side, Mel sank to her knees, and Aidan ran a hand down his face in relief.
“Aidan! Aidan! What’s happening?” Walker called frantically from the phone. “Baby, say something!”
He picked up the life line, switched it off speaker, and held it to his ear. “Nice shot.”
* * *
Sometime between the takedown at the Port and their return to the field office, Mel had changed into a different wrinkle-free suit and wrangled her curls into a bun at her neck. Despite her outward composure, Aidan knew her well enough to realize she’d been shaken.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked, low enough that anyone on the other side of the observation glass wouldn’t hear them. They sat next to each other in the interrogation room, waiting for Torres to bring in Gary. Aidan didn’t expect they had an audience yet—Walker and Barnes were interrogating Terry, and Torres had texted that the doctor was finishing up with Gary—but Mel showed weakness to only a select few and he wouldn’t risk that trust.
“Talk about what?”
“Oh, let’s see—” Aidan ticked off their day from hell on his fingers “—our near death by bomb, your near death by mercenary, Walker’s near death by SAC, said SAC’s betrayal.”
Leaving her phone screen-down on the table, Mel slid back in her seat and crossed one leg over the other. “Not our best day ever.” She tapped a manicured nail on her knee, that tell of hers sneaking past her defenses.
“Far from it.” Aidan shifted in his chair toward her. “What picture was Hamilton talking about? And why’d you kill him?”
She flinched. So tiny a motion an average person wouldn’t notice it. But as accustomed as Aidan was to her grace and deliberate movements, the tiny jerk amounted to an earthquake.
“Mel—”
She held up a hand to silence him. “I killed him because he was cornered. He wouldn’t stop until someone took him down.”
“Death by cop.”
“I chose to minimize any further loss of life. As for the picture...” She grabbed her phone off the table, tapped it a few times, then handed it over. Displayed on the screen was a black-and-white photo still of him and Walker on the condo balcony, lips locked and bodies tangled.
Handing the phone back, Aidan kept his posture casual and his voice level. “There’s nothing here you hadn’t guessed at already.” From the clothes scattered around the condo that morning, to the bite mark on Walker’s chest, to the shouted “Jamie” and “baby” on the phone that afternoon, this picture could not have been news to her.
She turned the display off and set the phone back down on the table. “I still don’t want the confirmation.”
“I know it’s against Bureau policy.”
Dark eyes pinned him and silenced his further explanation. “This isn’t about Bureau policy.” Her voice hadn’t risen and her dismissal hadn’t been delivered in condemnation or anger. Rather, her gaze and words were concerned and sympathetic.
“Is it about Gabe?”
She turned her face away, taking a long, deep breath, and Aidan was sure that was it. Familiar guilt slammed into him, at Mel having to see that picture and at himself for betraying her brother’s memory, but before he could go under completely, she put a hand on his arm, keeping him above water.
“It’s not about Gabe. It’s about you, Aidan.” Her fingers tightened around his arm. “My brother’s death was unexpected. Neither of us could have predicted that accident, knowing what we knew then. Tom’s death hurt too, but he was an FBI agent. It was always a possibility. And Jamie is an FBI agent, too. A damn good one who, after this week, I have no reservations promoting to full field agent status.”
Aidan sucked in a choked breath. “Which means his life will be in danger every time we go out there.” He braced his elbows on his knees and hung his head, running his hands over his face and into his hair. He knew all this, had been including it in his litany of reasons why not to start something with Walker, but hearing it spoken aloud by his best friend, by his boss who understood the daily dangers they faced better than anyone, brought it into startling focus.
Mel rubbed his shoulder. “I couldn’t pick a better man for you. Jamie’s smart, loyal, decent, but he’s got a target on his back, same as you.”
Aidan tilted his head to the side, looking up at her. “But you partnered us.”
“For those very same reasons. He’ll make a terrific partner, and he gives us an advantage in our other investigation. But before this thing with you and him becomes anything more than that—” she nodded at the phone on the table “—you need to think long and hard about how much you’re willing to risk, and possibly lose, again.”
Before he could respond, two firm knocks sounded against the door. Aidan straightened and with a sharp shake of his head, focused on the man Torres led into the room. The former SAC appeared pale and deflated, a larger-than-life figure reduced to a tired old man with his casted arm in a sling.
“Leave us,” Mel ordered Torres, as Gary took the seat across from them.
“Agent Cruz—”
“SAC Cruz,” she corrected. “And I said leave us.”
Torres had the good sense to listen to her the second time and left the room without further protest. Gary fidgeted in his chair, bouncing his bad arm in its cradle against his chest and swiping the other across his forehead. Mel waited for him to settle then asked, “Why?”
Gary’s bloodshot eyes darted from Mel to Aidan, then back to Mel. “I only want to talk to you.”
Aidan had expected this. Walker had told them about Gary’s demand when they’d debriefed after returning from the Port. Walker had managed to get some additional information out of Gary right after their skirmish, but since being put in custody, the SAC hadn’t said a word to anyone.
Mel, however, was not in the mood to do him any favors. “Aidan’s my number two and lead on this investigation. You’ll talk to both of us.”
He hesitated, eyes locked with Mel’s, then his gaze dropped and he seemed to shrink in on himself, looking utterly defeated. “Addy’s dying,” he said hoarsely.
“Addy?” Aidan asked.
“Addison, his wife.” Mel uncrossed her legs and tilted forward. She didn’t reach for Gary’s hands, but the instinct was there. They’d been friends, and she must have also met and liked Addy. “Since when, Gary?”
He swallowed hard and looked up, tears pooling in his eyes. “She was diagnosed four months ago. Cancer, the aggressive kind. They gave her nine months, a year at most.”
“And Hamilton knew about your wife’s condition?” Aidan asked.
He nodded.
“It can’t have been the hospital bills.” Mel shot down the leverage Aidan’s mind had instantly conjured. “Between the salary and pension here and your share of the profits from your family’s ranch, you make plenty.”
“Not enough for the experimental treatment we found. We’re mortgaged to the hilt and still came up short.”
“Until Hamilton offered you a few million,” Aidan said, and Gary nodded again. “Did you ever have contact with Renaud?”
Mel opened the file folder she’d brought in with them, removed the picture of Renaud, and pushed it in front of Gary. He’d already seen it, when Barnes briefed them, but he picked it up again and examined it at length. “I’ve never seen him. Hamilton was my only point of contact.”
“And the full extent of your orders?” Aidan asked.
“As I told Walker, to keep Jo Ann in line and provide backup on the breaches, to make sure the cruise ships docked and the EMS crews were diverted, and to keep the Port crews silent, though Hamilton took care of most of the Port stuff himself. I just showed up and rattled cages from time to time.”
Mel took the photo back and tucked it in the file. “All those lives almost lost, for one.”
Gary shrugged, resigned and beaten. “She’s my wife. Forty years. I’d do anything to save her.”
Aidan knew that feeling, all too well. If there’d been a way he could have prevented Gabe’s death—his murder—he would have given it serious consideration. Before his mind went down the rabbit hole of what-ifs, two taps sounded on the one-way mirror behind him. He and Mel excused themselves and entered the observation room where Walker waited.
“When’d you get here?” Aidan asked, momentarily panicked that Walker might have overheard his and Mel’s conversation before Gary entered.
“I stepped in after Oscar stepped out. I take it you didn’t know about his wife being sick?”
Mel stared through the two-way glass at her friend and colleague who’d conspired with terrorists and nearly succeeded in killing thousands of people. “Last time I saw Addison was six months ago at a conference. She seemed fine.” Turning, she rested against the window ledge. “When he called to request you, he didn’t mention it.”
“Explains the erratic bank account.” Walker handed them both copies of a bank account ledger, then claimed one of the chairs.
Removing his coat, Aidan took the seat next to him and read over the ledger, seeing the large sums going in and out. “You ask him about this before?”
“I only found this account an hour ago. Don’t forget, Gary was on Dave’s list of top crypto students. He’d hid this slush account pretty deep.”
Something else on the ledger caught Aidan’s attention. “This dates back before Gary’s involvement with Hamilton.”
Walker hesitated, and Aidan looked up to see his blue eyes on their boss.
“Go ahead and say it,” she replied to his silent question.
“Gary’s been on the take for years, turning a blind eye to illegal activities at the Port. He kept his hush money in this account. It was just shy of a million when Hamilton’s first deposit hit. He transferred out most of it the next day.”
“Expensive treatment.” Mel glanced over her shoulder and Aidan’s gaze followed, seeing Torres lead Gary away by his good arm. “But he loved her more than anything.”
A chill raced up Aidan’s spine. “Can you tie the deposits from Hamilton back to Renaud?” he asked, ignoring the disquieting unease.
Walker rested his elbows on his knees. “Eventually, but it’s going to take time and some not-so-nice conversations with bankers to follow it all back to the source, assuming I keep it on the up-and-up.”
“Priority one when you get back to San Francisco,” Mel ordered. “And don’t tell me how you get the answers. Just get them.”
“So I guess I’m not getting reassigned here?”
Aidan tried and failed to hide his grin.
“I have no plans of letting you go, Agent Walker.”
“Why did Gary request us on this case?”
“He knew about you. Most of the FBI higher-ups do. He had Jo Ann under his thumb, but if he expected her to crack, he needed another door into GNL’s security network.”
Walker hung his head. “And I gave it to him.”
“No.” Mel pushed off the wall and took the seat on the other side of Walker. “You gave it to Torres, who didn’t think twice when his boss asked for the security protocols to make sure you weren’t the inside man.”
Aidan leaned back with a groan, letting his head fall back and staring up at the ceiling. “So Torres suspected Walker, while we suspected him.”
“Gary played everyone, including me, and I’m sorry for involving you two.” After a moment, Mel asked Walker, “How was Terry involved?”
“He was in it for the money. And to get back at his father. Hamilton had convinced him they would pin it on his old man. Of course, there were never any specifics given and Terry didn’t ask. He seemed as surprised as we were about the bomb already on-site. He thought they were going to take one of the toxins out of GNL for a dirty bomb.”
“Hamilton covered his bases. Everyone had a different story, he had leverage on them all, and he took the truth with him to his grave.”
“We’re back to square one, then,” Walker said.
Aidan laid a hand on his arm. “You stopped a bomb from blowing up two ships full of people. I’d say that’s better than square one.”
The smile on his partner’s face did not reach his tired blue eyes.
“We’re done here,” Mel said, and the three of them stood. “Go home, take the rest of the week off, and we’ll reconvene on Monday.”
“Should we book a ticket for you?” Aidan asked.
“No, I’m going to be a few days. I need to finish processing Gary. I don’t trust anyone else here with it. And I’ve got a lift already.”
“Oh, that’s my cue again.” Danny appeared in the doorway with a lascivious smile.
“How come you get to ride on the private jet?” Aidan huffed at her.
She winked as Danny slung an arm over his shoulders. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, big bro.”
Everyone laughed, including Aidan. While he didn’t want to think about what his brother and Mel would get up to on the plane, he couldn’t help but be thankful for a night off before traveling.
Handshakes between Danny and Walker were exchanged, and his partner mentioned finishing paperwork to process Terry before following Mel out, leaving Aidan and Danny in the observation room alone.
Aidan crossed his arms and leaned against one side of the glass frame. “You want to tell me what’s going on with you and my sister-in-law?”
Danny mirrored his position on the other side. “It’s just a wee bit o’ fun.”
“That didn’t look like ‘just a wee bit o’ fun’ to me.”
“You and I have different definitions of fun, bro. Maybe you should try mine out again, baby,” he added with a smirk.
Of course Danny hadn’t missed that agonized shout from Walker over the phone. Gary, Torres and half of Galveston’s EMS responders had also heard him screaming Walker’s name in terror. He didn’t think anything could have been worse than that gut drop in the car accident yesterday morning, but waiting helplessly on the other end of the line, knowing he might have sent Walker to his death, beat it, hands down. And then his own brush with death... Mel was right to caution him.
He ran a hand over the back of his neck, eyes slipping shut. “When I listened over the line to my partner almost get killed, it felt like losing Gabe all over again. That terror, being helpless to stop it... We were lucky today, Danny. We might not be so lucky in the future, and I can’t go through that again.”
“Fun.” Danny dropped the keys to the Benz in his palm. “Just think about it.”
Aidan couldn’t deny the past eight months had been miserable, and he was no good at being lonely. He had a liquor cabinet full of half-empties and a memory full of fairy tales to prove it. Could he have a bit of fun and avoid the fear of loss that came with attachment?
“Don’t think too hard.” Laughing, Danny kissed the side of his head and headed out.
Grabbing his coat from the chair, Aidan was on his way to do the same when Barnes and Torres crowded the doorway.
Barnes stepped forward, hand extended. “Agent Talley, it was a pleasure working with you.”
Aidan took the offered hand, smiling. Agent Hipster was all right. “Same, Todd.” Barnes’s perpetually worried look gave way to a bright smile. “Sorry I was so hard on you.”
“I was happy for the opportunity to learn from the best.”
From anyone else, Aidan would have written off the brown-nosed comment, but from Barnes, it was genuine. “You find yourself in San Francisco, be sure to stop by and visit us.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I think Walker wanted to run a few follow-up matters by you,” Aidan said, and Barnes nodded, scurrying out the door after another round of handshakes.
Torres remained, leaned back against the wall.
“Agent Torres,” Aidan said. “I’m sorry we were unwittingly on the other side of this thing the past week. I hope you understand why the ruse was necessary on our end.”
Torres looked contemplative, not angry, as he considered him with assessing, hazel eyes. “I understand, but just so you know, I didn’t buy it for a second.”
“That Walker was somehow involved?”
“That you and Walker were fighting and that he had any real interest in me.”
“Well then, you played your part much better than us.”
“My interest wasn’t a ruse. I genuinely wanted to sleep with your partner. Still do. But it’s obvious he has no interest in me.”
Had it really been obvious? It sure as hell hadn’t felt that way at times, the jealousy sinister and choking on more than one occasion.
“He’s all yours, Agent Talley.” No handshakes, no back pats, only a nod of acknowledgement before he left the room.
And left Aidan’s head spinning.