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  Teardrops leaked from the corners of Ozzie’s eyes, streaking the soot on his temples and darkening his blond hair as he thrashed his head from side to side. Steady experienced the prick of sympathetic waterworks behind his eyes. But he couldn’t give in to tears. Not only would it do no one any good, but it would also interfere with his ability to do his job. And right now, his job was—

  Abby…

  Her name whispered through his mind and caused his racing heart to trip over itself.

  Abby…

  “Agent DePaul!” he bellowed over his shoulder, remembering the code name the Secret Service had assigned to Abby after she graduated from college and took the job at the DC Botanic Garden. “Check on Beekeeper!” But the agent just stood there, staring at Julia’s mutilated body. He raised his voice to a booming roar. “DePaul! Secure the Beekeeper!”

  She jumped, blinking owlishly before she got a hold of herself. He saw her throat work over a hard swallow. Then she nodded and dug her bare toes into the carpet, sprinting in his direction. He ducked his head, displaced air fluttering his hair as she made like an Olympian and vaulted over him.

  He didn’t watch her race down the hall, although there was a part of him that wanted to, a part of him that desperately needed to see that Abby was safe and sound. For right now though, he had to concentrate everything he had on the task at hand, because his best friend’s life could quite easily—and literally—slip through his fingers if he didn’t.

  “What do I do?” Dan asked breathlessly, dropping Steady’s camouflage medical bag to the floor and kneeling beside him in the doorway.

  “The belt.” Steady fought a cough. The thin smoke made his chest feel full of hot coals. “Wrap it around his leg.” He pushed up the bottom edge of Ozzie’s blood-soaked boxers so he could point at the lump beneath Ozzie’s flesh, high on his thigh, where his fingers were clamping the artery. “And cinch it tight above here.”

  Dan jerked his chin in a nod, then carefully threaded the end of the belt under Ozzie’s wrecked leg, snaking it close to his groin. “Tight,” Steady emphasized again. “Tight as you can.” Dan gritted his teeth and yanked the belt as Ozzie let loose with a shriek guaran-frackin’-teed to haunt Steady for the rest of his life. “Hold him, Dan!” he yelled when Ozzie thrashed. “You have to keep him still!”

  Dan threw himself over Ozzie’s chest, using his weight to hold Ozzie down. With his free hand, Steady unzipped his medical bag. Almost there. Almost there. Madre de Dios, almost there. He just needed to find a clamp to put on the end of that artery and then he could start Ozzie on Hemopure, an oxygen-carrying blood substitute produced in South Africa. Even though it had yet to be approved by the FDA, he’d taken to acquiring the stuff from his Recces friend—Recces was the nickname for South Africa’s Special Forces Brigade—and packing it in his med kit. It stayed good for up to thirty-six months at room temperature, was compatible with all blood types, and was a wonderful Johnny-on-the-Spot when a transfusion wasn’t possible. Like right now…

  Unfortunately, before he could find the small plastic case he kept his clamps in, the overhead lights flickered and dimmed…then went out altogether. Instantly the space was plunged into darkness. Deep, dark, impenetrable darkness. Blinding darkness…

  Shit! Fuck! Sonofabitch!

  “Ozzie!” he shouted his friend’s name, reaching unseeingly for Ozzie’s shoulder. When he found it, he gave it a squeeze. “Ozzie!” he yelled again because the guy continued to struggle against Dan’s restraining weight. “You have to be still, hermano! I know it hurts! I know it does! But you have to be still so Dan can let go of you. I need him to get a flashlight!”

  “Sonofabitch!” Ozzie howled. “I need morphine!”

  “Can’t give you morphine.” He infused his voice with calm, hoping it would help Ozzie do the same. “With the amount of blood you’ve lost, it could kill you.”

  “Sonofabitch! Sonofabiiiiiiitch!” Ozzie bellowed again.

  “It’s mind over matter!” he yelled right back. Okay, so fuck calm. How about candor? “Just open up that big brain tank of yours”—besides being the Black Knights’ resident lady-killer, Ozzie was also a whiz-kid computer hacker with an IQ big enough to make Einstein envious—“and fill it with some high-octane grin-and-bear it! You hear me? You find a way to be still! Your life depends on it!” And then, just in case candor didn’t work, he figured he’d appeal to Ozzie’s machismo. “Besides, you keep up this prissy shit, and I’m going to have to revoke your membership to Club Dude.”

  Ozzie moaned, and Steady could hear his gut-wrenching struggle for composure beneath Agent DePaul’s repeated pounding on Abby’s door and her screams for Abby to “open up!” Why isn’t she opening her door? Is she too frightened? He’d never figured her for the shrinking violet sort, but—

  “He’s still,” Dan said. Steady’s eyes had adjusted to the stygian darkness and could just make out Dan’s shape in the dim red light cast by the glowing KELUAR/EXIT sign tacked to the wall above the door to the emergency stairwell. Ozzie was quaking from head to toe, but he was no longer fighting them. Steady had always suspected Ethan “Ozzie” Sykes, despite his constant joking and bad taste in eighties music, was one tough motherfucker. Now he knew it for sure.

  “Okay.” He nodded. “Now feel around in my bag. There should be a MagLite attached with Velcro to one side.”

  He could hear his medical gear clanking and clacking as Dan rustled through his duffel, and he tried not to think about the fact that there was no such thing as a sterile field in this particular situation. Then the glaring beam of the flashlight hit him in the face, and he screwed his lids shut to save his eyesight. “Bueno, good.” He nodded again. “Shine that into the bag so I can find my clamps.”

  Dan did as instructed, stuffing the MagLite between his teeth so that he could use both hands to hold Steady’s duffel wide. Steady located his clamps in an instant and blew out a deep breath. “Cover him again,” he told Dan. “This will bark like a bitch in heat.”

  “Do it, Steady.” Ozzie’s voice was reedy, thin. “Just do it.”

  One. Tough. Motherfucker.

  “Here goes,” he said. Dan threw himself over Ozzie at the same time he shined the light into that awful wound. Steady pushed Ozzie’s torn flesh and muscle up with one hand while pulling the artery down with the other. It was a slippery little bastard, but he managed to block out the thought of what would happen if he didn’t manage to hang on to it. But there was no way he could block out Ozzie’s bloodcurdling wail of sheer, unimaginable agony. It was enough to burst his eardrums, enough to scar his soul.

  Finally, finally, he had the artery where he needed it to apply the clamp. Then it was back into his duffel bag for the Hemopure and QuikClot. And, miracle of miracles, the lights chose that moment to come back on.

  “Go help Agent DePaul,” he told Dan, blinking against the sudden glare. “I’ve got this now.”

  Dan nodded and pushed to his feet. Steady watched him sprint down the hall, then immediately turned back to his patient.

  Patient…

  Jesús Cristo, Ozzie was so much more than that. A trusted teammate. A best friend. A brother really, in every way that mattered. And if he allowed himself to dwell on what he was doing and who he was doing it to, he’d probably lose his shit. So, sí, his patient…

  “Almost finished,” he assured Ozzie. “We’ll get you to the nearest hospital, and after a little blood transfusion, it’ll be all the morphine you can stand. How does that sound, eh, bro?”

  “Julia?” Ozzie managed to rasp as he tried to lift his head to peer into the smoky room.

  “She’s dead.” Steady wasn’t Willy Wonka. Sugarcoating things wasn’t his style.

  “Fuuuuuck.” Ozzie allowed his head to drop back to the floor, a sob shuddering through him. Steady gave his friend two seconds to mourn before he went back to work on that thigh.

  Seven years of higher education and numerous bouts of battlefield triage helped him deter
mine exactly where to shake the QuikClot—a powdery clotting agent—to combat the worst of the remaining bleeding. Ozzie moaned and clenched his bloody fists, but compared to what he’d just been through, the burn of the QuikClot was child’s play. Steady was in the process of hooking up an IV of Hemopure when a loud bang! thundered around the space. Instinct had him throwing himself over Ozzie until a double bang! bang! made him glance up.

  Penni DePaul, weapon in hand, was firing into the locking mechanisms on the doors of her fellow Secret Service agents’ rooms. Dan followed behind her, kicking them open. And each time he did, smoke billowed out in a thin but corrosive cloud that wasn’t quite enough to trigger the hotel’s fire suppressant system. That is, if the hotel even had a fire suppressant system. In this part of the world, you could never be sure if those sprinkler nozzles attached to the ceiling were functional or just for show.

  Regardless, Steady didn’t need to look into those rooms to know what was there. The growing smell of charred flesh said it all. It wasn’t one explosion that’d rocked him in his bed. It was several small, simultaneous ones. Abby Thompson’s security detail was dead or dying. And something inside Steady, something deep and profound, something he wasn’t aware existed, shattered with the realization. Was this the abduction scheme they’d been hearing about? Or something far more sinister?

  Abby!

  He didn’t realize he screamed her name aloud until he saw Dan turn in his direction, the man’s face a sooty mask of dread. Oh, Abby, no!

  “I’m firing at your lock, Abby!” Agent DePaul yelled. “If you’re in there, move away from the door!”

  Steady’s skin tried to crawl off his body. He couldn’t draw a full breath. And his heart thundered so loudly he could hear it echoing down the hall. Then he realized it wasn’t his heart. It was footsteps. A lot of them…

  The door to the emergency stairwell burst open, spewing forth a glut of hotel staff and security at the same time that Penni pulled her trigger. Bang! The crowd of new arrivals—hard to believe, but he’d hazard a guess barely two minutes had passed since the explosions rocked the building—dropped to the floor, proned out like a group of sardines, lying side by side as they covered their heads with their hands.

  Steady only gave them a cursory glance before turning to watch Dan kick in Abby’s door. Dan rushed into the room and Steady’s heart proceeded to climb into his throat. Which was strange, because if his heart was in his throat, then what the hell was hurting in his chest, making it feel like he’d had his sternum cracked open by a surgical retractor?

  Dan finally reemerged—ten hours later? Twenty? It seemed like an eternity but could have been only a couple of seconds—and his face was ashen, his eyes wild. Steady braced himself for the words he didn’t want to hear. The words he’d never be ready to hear. Oh, sweet heaven! Abby! No!

  But what Dan said was, “She’s gone.”

  Chapter Five

  They were dead…

  All her colleagues were dead. And much to Penni DePaul’s eternal sorrow, she now understood what it meant to be the last man…woman…standing. She’d always assumed the phrase had a positive connotation, that it would feel good to be the last woman standing. Boy-oh-boy, had she been wrong.

  It felt awful.

  “Those who weren’t on duty were killed in their beds. Whoever set the bombs timed them perfectly. They went off thirty minutes after the agents were required to be back in their rooms. Which was just enough time for them to wash their faces, brush their teeth, and snuggle beneath the covers,” Dan grumbled into his phone. “And let me be the first to say, those incendiary devices were very effective.” Mad effective, as people speaking Brooklynese would say, right along with God help those poor souls.

  Dan and Steady had stood on the roof of the hotel while Ozzie Sykes was loaded into a medevac helicopter. Afterward, a lengthy back-and-forth with hotel security and the local authorities had ended in a somewhat threatening call from the U.S. State Department to the head of the Kuala Lumpur police. Once the locals were officially…dismissed, Dan and Steady had grabbed her and secluded themselves here, in Steady’s room.

  Not for nuttin’, as her dearly departed father would say, but I guess diplomatic immunity has it perks.

  Since then, Dan and Steady had made a series of telephone calls while she used Dan’s iPad—hers was blown to Kingdom Come thanks to the fact that she’d left it on her now-destroyed hotel bed. And she totally wasn’t going to think about what might have happened had she not broken protocol, which she’d never done before—to locate the signals emitted by the tracking devices sewn into Abby’s clothes. Abby…Abby… She had to focus on sweet, charming, hilariously funny when it came to colorful curses Abby. Beekeeper. Her charge. Because it was either that or succumb to the mixture of hysteria, remorse, and flat-out disbelief bubbling inside her in an evil witch’s brew. Unfortunately, the iPad’s screen, covered by a digital map of Kuala Lumpur, was lit up like the mother-flippin’ Fourth of July sky above the Statue of Liberty.

  What the hell does that mean? she wondered. Then answered her own question a second later when tiny alarm bells started ringing in her head. Most definitely nothing good.

  Dan’s next words had her forgetting the task at hand. “The others, the three who were on duty, had their throats slit.”

  Christ on the cross, as if the shock of seeing her colleagues blown away wasn’t bad enough, she’d made the additional, and additionally horrific, discovery that Tony, Marcy, and LaVaughn had been summarily executed. Quick and dirty, they’d been left to bleed out at their observation points…

  And where was she while all this bed-bombing, throat-slitting was happening, you ask? Forget about it. Because she was across the hall getting her twerk on with the muscle-for-hire hottie who’d reeled her in with his hoohah-igniting eyes and lonely smile.

  A sob that was one part shame, two parts regret, and three parts guilt threatened at the back of her throat. But she managed to contain it just like she’d managed to contain the fifty others before it. She couldn’t afford to break down now.

  “HQ says there’s a carrier group operating in the South China Sea near Manila,” Steady informed Dan after he signed off on his call, “which will save our asses in two very important ways. The first is that—”

  “HQ?” she interrupted. “Where is that? And what…or…who are you guys really?”

  And, okay, perhaps that’s a question she should have asked before attempting to do the horizontal mambo with one of them. Because the only information she and the rest of her colleagues—her dead colleagues, her colleagues who were at this very moment being loaded into body bags…but, no, that was another thing she couldn’t think about now—had been given about the three beefy guys accompanying them to Malaysia was that they were all former military men whom the president insisted come along to augment security. She’d assumed they, like so many ex–armed forces types, were simply a glorified private bodyguard service. But the swiftness with which that medevac was summoned and the bizarre and timely call from the State Department—not to mention their “HQ” happened to know the highly classified location of the nearest U.S. Navy carrier group—had her internal gyroscope not only wiggling, but swinging from side to side like a stinkin’ pendulum.

  “Why do you want to know?” Steady asked, a muscle in his jaw twitching a warning.

  She didn’t heed it. “Call me intrigued,” she told him.

  “Sí? Well, call us classified.”

  Uh-huh. Okay. So if she wasn’t mistaken—and she very much doubted she was—these guys were other. And judging by the shuttered looks they were giving her, she figured she knew just what that other was.

  Black Ops…

  Black as in not even the Pentagon controlled them. Black as in the kind of men who operated outside, beneath, and beyond the auspices of international law and order. Black as in folks for whom the phrase deny all knowledge of your existence was coined, and then there was its twin, I could tell you,
but then I’d have to kill you.

  She swallowed. “Never mind.” Because if there was one thing she knew about shadow operators, it was that the less she knew, the better.

  Dan sent her a smile she assumed was supposed to be comforting, but a fat lot of good it did her. There was nothing, absolutely nothing anyone could do to comfort her right now…Buck up and keep chicky! She could almost hear her father’s voice in her ear, and she immediately squared her shoulders.

  “Once Ozzie is stable”—Steady continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. He was stuffing gear into a black backpack with quick, efficient movements—“he’ll be transferred from the local emergency facility to the hospital ship accompanying the carrier group. He’ll undergo surgery there…which is the first point in our favor because I don’t trust these Malaysian sawbones to do what it’ll take to save his leg.”

  “Good,” Dan grunted, watching Steady load his pack. Why was he equipping himself? Was the guy planning on a flippin’ hike or something? “And I’m sorry you can’t be there with him. I know you wanna keep an eye on the medical side of things.”

  Steady shook his head, the muscles in his broad shoulders flexing. “It is what it is. Besides, right now we have other things to take care of.”

  “Like finding Abby.”

  “Exactly,” Steady confirmed. “Which brings me to the second point in our favor. That SEAL team tasked with securing the last of the…um…uh”—he snapped a veiled glance in her direction—“you know whats from the ocean floor is traveling with the carrier group.”

  Something was on the ocean floor? Despite the gravity of her current situation, Penni’s imagination took flight with the possibilities. A wrecked nuclear submarine, perhaps? Or sunken biological weapons from Syria? Some of the material taken from the al-Assad regime had gone missing from a shipment and—

  “They just finished their mission, which means they’re gearing up to head our way as we speak,” Steady continued. “With flight time and transfer time, I’d say their ETA is approximately”—he glanced at the big black watch on his wrist—“oh-seven-hundred. HQ says you worked beside these men back in the day? That you were pretty good friends with their lieutenant, some guy nicknamed ‘The Lion’?”