her camo BDUs in all the right spots. Her Nordic good looks blessed her with flawless pale skin, full sensual lips, and blue eyes the color of glacier ice. A well-trained, intelligent woman he could trust with his life.
But the life of Sister Kate was another story. He’d learned long ago. Never be the middleman to trust.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you were there.” He pulled out his earplugs and stowed his iPod in a side pocket of his bag. “You need something?”
“Didn’t know you were so into your tunes. You’ve…changed.”
He stared at her a moment, trying to figure out how to respond. He decided this mission was too important to get sidetracked.
“So I’ve been told.” He gave her no explanation. Nor did he make excuses for the man he’d become. “What’s up?”
“Garrett sent an updated weather report. Lady Luck is not with us.” She narrowed her eyes and looked around the cabin before her gaze settled back on him. “Come up top. See for yourself.”
She shut the door behind her and gave him privacy to wash down more antibiotics and check his bandages one more time. He was dodging a fever and knew it. He felt the heat under his skin.
On deck, he spotted Alexa alone at the bow of the boat and went to join her. The breeze buffeted her blond hair as she stared dead ahead. Her team was in the stern. Each man prepared for the mission in his own way. Some men needed to talk out the adrenaline rush and others only wanted solitude. She’d brought five men. All experienced hands.
Joe was at the helm in the wheelhouse and gave him an anxious nod as he walked by. He’d seen that look before. The salty air was thick with humidity. Not even diesel fumes off the back of the boat masked the impending storm. The wind had picked up. And a dark bank of clouds menaced the horizon to the northeast.
His friend had a right to be concerned.
Once they got by the breaker wall, and the boat hit cruising speed, the swells pounded the hull and sprayed a mist onto their faces and clothes. It cooled his skin. Kinkaid stood next to Alexa, widened his stance for balance, and held on. For a long moment, they both watched the darkening horizon in silence, each rapt in thought.
“That tropical storm has been upgraded to a hurricane, category one.” She turned toward him, her blond hair edged in fiery red from the sun. A surge of dark clouds welled up behind her, a somber warning. “Garrett tells me the experts are predicting it’ll get worse. We may have another Katrina on our hands, a category four with winds up to 150 miles an hour.”
“You gonna pull the plug?” he asked, staring toward Cuba.
“What if I did?” She crooked a corner of her mouth. “You’d dump me off on Gilligan’s Island and still head to Cuba, wouldn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“And you wouldn’t respect me in the morning.”
“Nope.”
“Then it looks like we’ll have a ringside seat to the first hurricane of the season,” she told him. “You think they’ll name it after me?”
“If they knew you, they would.”
That made her smile. And inside, he did, too.
New York City
Afternoon
“There’s something you’ll want to see on Al Jazeera.” Tanya Spencer leaned over Garrett’s desk and worked the controls to pull up an enlarged Internet screen for the Arab news network and project it onto one of his TV monitors on the far wall.
He took off his suit jacket, pulled down his tie, and grabbed another cup of coffee while she worked behind his desk.
“Can I get you a cup?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I won’t be here that long. And you’ll be busy after you see this.”
He watched her work, a somber expression on her face and efficiency to her hand movements. Tanya had worked with him for over ten years. An elegant black woman with a keen intellect, a quick wit, and timeless fashion sense. Her Southern drawl could ooze sex appeal or demand your attention with its commanding tone.
And Tanya knew how to wield both.
She brought up a column marked TODAY’S SCHEDULE on Aljazeera.net and scrolled down to what she wanted him to see. A dark screen filled the monitor with an arrow in the center. Once she clicked on it, the show would start.
In the wake of al-Qaeda evacuating Afghanistan, the movement and its various splinter groups had gone underground and launched greater efforts online. The Internet gave them a new lease on life. And they utilized a growing range of multimedia content, including video training clips, photo stills of victims about to be murdered, podcasts that featured testimonials from suicide bombers, and even movie shorts with dramatic music that romanticized life in the jihad and aided recruiting.
“I’ll warn you now. This is disturbing,” she said. Tanya gave him a look that got his attention.
“That’s something, coming from you.” He took a seat near the screen.
“No, really, Garrett. I mean it,” she warned.
Without another word, Tanya dimmed the lights in his office and started the video. Shaky camera work and poor lighting made it hard to tell what was happening at first. Yet the recorded screams gripped him from the start. English-speaking men and women were yelling. Their voices were mixed with the angry demands of armed men in masks, speaking a dialect of Arabic. He didn’t know enough about the language to understand it, but the AK-47s made their hostile intentions clear.
The video camera zoomed in tight on two women. Both looked terrified and were begging for their lives. The drama held him spellbound. And what happened next made him jump. A machete came from off screen. He would never forget the sound of the blade hacking into the woman’s neck and hitting bone.
“Oh, my God.” He’d never seen a beheading that close before. Blood sprayed the lens, and the video continued, but he’d seen enough. “That’s it. Turn it off.”
He’d spilled coffee on his dark slacks. The accident gave him an excuse to turn the lights on and compose himself as he wiped the stain with a napkin. In his lifetime, he’d seen enough death to lose sleep when certain memories surfaced. And he had certainly killed when it had become necessary, yet the level of brutality some men inflicted on others never ceased to amaze him.
“I tried to tell you,” she said.
“I forgot. You’re the queen of understatement.” He set down his coffee and tossed the napkin onto his desk. “I’m assuming there’s a reason you wanted to share this with me.”
“My team analyzed the background and some of the faces. We did a facial recognition on a couple of them.” She stepped behind his desk and removed the video from his monitor, replacing it with a news channel on mute.
“And?” he prompted.
“It’s footage from Haiti,” she replied. “A couple of faces matched the hostage list, including a nun who ran the missionary school. Sister Mary Katherine organized the fund-raiser that the terrorists attacked.”
“She wasn’t one of those women, was she?”
“No. And her body wasn’t found at the medical-clinic siege either. We can only assume they still have her.”
“Have you been able to trace the video upload?” He clenched his teeth and waited for her answer.
“Not yet. There’s no guaranty we can trace it to a source, and they may be working through someone else. Chasing down all these angles will take time.”
“Time we don’t have. There’s a hurricane bearing down on Alexa and her team.” He slumped into his desk chair and swiveled as he thought. “I’ve been following the media on their Haiti coverage. The attack doesn’t have
