Capturing the Commando. Colleen Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ size of the Queen Mary. The gas-sucking seventies engine rumbled, and she saw a sweaty-looking pale man with dark, reflective glasses slouched low behind the wheel.

      Though shaded by a floppy beach hat, the driver’s weak chin gave him away as one Garrett Smith, she realized, her heart constricting with the knowledge that that meant the man behind her, the fake dad with the weapon, was well prepared to use it—that he was the very fugitive she’d been so certain she had fooled into walking into their trap.

      She blanched, wondering how long it had taken him to figure out she was FBI. And whether he meant to retaliate for her online masquerade and efforts to entrap him.

      She sucked in a lungful of humid air, thinking of the slim-frame Glock in her inside waistband holster. But thinking, too, of the half-dozen civilians gathered at the nearby bus stop, the men and women on the sidewalk with their greasy sacks of sugary doughnuts and newspapers, or their lunches packed for a new workday.

      For a split second her mind lost its purchase, allowing the memory of another nightmare to crash its way through to reality. The concussive blast, exactly where she’d ordered the tactical team to place its charges. The hot crimson slick spreading from beneath the collapsed wall.

      The cigar store hostages in Iowa, whose lives she had been charged with saving. The hostages whose lives she’d blown away just two months ago…

      The faint drawl of a West Texas accent yanked her ruthlessly back to the present.

      “Make a move for that gun and this goes real bad in a hurry, Special Agent. I promise you, we’re only talking. I swear it as an officer of the U.S. Army Rangers.”

      “An AWOL officer,” she corrected, “on a mission your superiors never authorized and—”

      “Let’s go catch up with your mother, honey,” Captain Rafe Lyons interrupted, his deep voice turning cheerful. “The little guy probably needs changing by now.”

      Adrenaline detonating in hot waves all through her, she couldn’t wrap her brain around the shock of this game changer. Around the fact that rather than playing a crucial role in capturing the commando, she was the one being taken to his waiting car instead. Taken captive, possibly—or maybe to be killed before her thirtieth birthday, regardless of what he had just promised.

      She could already hear the voices, the old guard bureau veterans at her funeral scoffing, If that girl was half the agent her old man was, she’d have fought her way free and dragged Lyons back in handcuffs. Could picture her older brother, Steve, a special agent working out of Oklahoma, wondering aloud why she couldn’t quit competing with him and find herself a nice safe job teaching preschool.

      Like hell, Steve. Fury ramping past her fear, Shannon pivoted, one hand reaching for her waistband, while the other rose to shove aside her assailant’s weapon and allow her enough space to go on the attack.

      But though she’d practiced such defense tactics in scores of training sessions, Lyons was no ordinary sparring partner. Dropping his arm beneath her grasp, he closed in and brought his hand—the hand holding what she took to be a pistol—up against her neck. Before she could cry “Rape!” or free her own gun, she felt herself tumbling, glittering blue bursts crackling through her brain and muscles. Independent of her will, her head and limbs flailed wildly with the voltage surging through her.

      Not a gun—a stun gun, her mind registered as her body crumpled, her forehead smacking the sidewalk and heat streaking past her eyes. As the jolt ended, she heard the Ranger, with his maddening Texas accent, telling the gathering bystanders, “Stand clear. Police business.” She could picture him flashing a wallet with a badge and an official-looking ID.

      Though there were a few murmurs, the onlookers scurried away, eager to look elsewhere as he deftly removed her Glock.

      A minute later, as Lyons flipped the front seat forward and shoved her into the white leather backseat cavern, Shannon struggled to fight, but her abused muscles would only twitch uselessly in response. He climbed in beside her, and his big hands frisked her briskly and efficiently, plucking the cell phone from the pocket of her khaki skirt and dropping that lifeline—with its built-in GPS—beside the curb.

      He reached to close the door and urged the driver, “Let’s go.”

      The man Shannon had ID’d as Lyons’s brother-in-law pulled out into traffic. Sped up to take her somewhere that her team, only a block distant, couldn’t follow.

      She fought to sit up, but her body was having none of it. She struggled to protest, but her words spilled out in an incoherent jumble. Instead, she coughed, choking on the acrid taste of her own terror. Or maybe there was blood, too. Judging from the pain, she’d bitten her tongue, and something was dripping down her forehead, which felt as if she’d cracked it open like an egg.

      “Don’t try to talk.” Bent over her, Lyons briefly came into focus, with his chiseled features, short hair black and shiny as a panther’s, and intense green eyes set in a worried face.

      He started to cuff Shannon’s hands behind her, then appeared to change his mind, binding them in front instead and pressing a towel he pulled out of the diaper bag into them. “Hold this against your forehead.” As he spoke, he winced, regret flashing across his handsome features.

      She reached up, wiping at the bloody mess and struggling to reorder her scrambled thoughts. When she touched the rising lump with the towel, she groaned and struggled not to be sick, pain slicing like a cleaver through her skull.

      “Wish that hadn’t had to happen,” he said, perspiration rolling down the side of his face. “It shouldn’t have been necessary. I told you, I just wanted to talk.”

      “W-would you have bought that and…and gone quietly?” The words sounded thick and clumsy in her ringing ears. “Well, no,” he allowed. “But that’s me, and—anyway, I’m not the one sitting here bleeding.”

      “And I’m not the one heading to Leavenworth for assaulting and abducting a federal officer,” she told the man she had already pegged as just another macho cowboy. Having been raised, alongside her chauvinistic brother, in Wyoming by a testosterone-breathing uncle, she was well-acquainted with the breed—and couldn’t wait to slap cuffs on this Texas-born example.

      As the vintage Cadillac picked up speed and cornered sharply, Shannon would have fallen to the floorboards if Lyons’s strong hands hadn’t grabbed her.

      “Damn it. Careful, Garrett,” he barked. “We don’t need to draw any more attention.”

      “You’re calling me by name?” the driver complained, sounding as nervous as he had every right to be.

      Lyons laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The agent here knows exactly who we are. As much as she knows anything, in the shape she’s in right now.”

      “You promised me nobody’d get hurt. Nobody but those murderers…” Grief choked Garrett’s voice to a whimper. “God. Lissa…”

      With the heel of his hand, Rafe popped the corner of the driver’s seat. “Don’t say her name. All right? Not now. Not until we find them. Then we can ram it down their throats.”

      Lissa Lyons Smith, they meant. Garrett’s wife of two years and Rafe Lyons’s little sister. The sister he had raised after their parents’ deaths in a head-on collision, when Lissa had been fourteen to her brother’s twenty-two.

      The СКАЧАТЬ