Instead, I saw Knuckles standing in my room.

He said, “Retro’s finally cracked into the backbone server for the hotel. We’ve got Panda’s computer, and he’s making plans.”

I scowled and said, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know how to knock? How’d you get in here?”

He held up a keycard and said, “I just told you Retro got into the server. We can make a key for any room in the hotel.”

“So you figured you needed one for my room?”

He smiled and said, “I figured you’d be asleep and didn’t want to bang on the door.”

“I was asleep. Asshole.”

“You want to dress and come up? Or stay in bed?”

I was already out and throwing on my clothes. He turned back to the hallway leading to the door, disappearing from view. I heard the door open, then, “Oh, Jennifer, you can come too. We won’t say anything about you wearing the same clothes as last night.”

Shit. The door closed and she poked her head out. “Well, that’s pretty embarrassing.”

I said, “Tell me about it. Getting caught skulking around like kids is more embarrassing than getting snagged red-handed.”

She kicked over the pillow, grabbed her clothes, and went into the bathroom, saying, “I’m using your toothbrush.”

I started shoving things into my pockets and unplugging my phone from the charger, saying, “I guess that makes it official.”

I was putting on my shoes when she came back out fully clothed, brushing her hair. She said, “It wasn’t before?”

The words caught me off guard, because I was just making a joke. Jennifer and I had definitely become partners in more ways than just our business, but we’d never verbalized it. I’d made one statement in the heat of the moment on our last mission, then we’d just sort of dropped it. I was a shit show when it came to such things, and she knew it. She was patient, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last.

I said, “Well . . . yeah . . . I mean . . . I was just . . .”

She hit me in the chest with a towel and said, “Oh, please. Spare me. Should I go up?”

Relieved, I stood and held out my arm to the door. “Yeah. Get it over with. You show any weakness with these guys, and they’ll start ribbing us forever.”

We got in the elevator and I noticed her clothes, stained from our mission last night and wrinkled from lying on the floor of my room. She looked like she’d slept in them. I said, “You’re really going to wear what you had on last night?”

She snapped her head to me and said, “I was. . . . Should I go change?”

The car stopped and I said, “Too late. Welcome to the lion’s den.”

I stepped out and she said, “I’m not going in if you think they’re going to laugh at me.”

“Come on. They know better than to laugh at the managing partner of Grolier Recovery Services. You can fire them.”

Jennifer and I were the owners of GRS, ostensibly a firm that specialized in archeological research. We worked for private entities, universities, and others to help facilitate excavations around the world. Since most archeological digs were in areas that were borderline Wild West—like Nairobi, Kenya, where we were now—I handled the security side of things, something that fit my military background. Jennifer, with her anthropology degree and insatiable appetite for annoying anyone within earshot about ancient history, had the hard part of acting like we really were a legitimate archeological firm.

In truth, the whole thing was a shell company that cloaked a top secret counterterrorism unit called the Taskforce. Back in the day, when I was on active duty, I had been a team leader in the unit. Now, I was a civilian co-owner of a cover organization and a team leader yet again. It had been a rocky road, starting with recruiting Jennifer—a pure civilian and a female to boot—getting her read on, trained up, and admitted to the unit, and had ended with me convincing the commander, Colonel Kurt Hale, to let my company start operating not as a support asset, but as an actual team.

On the surface, for anyone looking at the pure black and white, the demands were insane. Let a female Operator into the Taskforce? Let a civilian company start running missions? No way. But there’s much more to special operations than what can be tallied on a sheet.

Jennifer had passed selection with flying colors, and had put away a few bad guys with her innate skill alone before even attempting that trial, and I . . . well, I was fucking Pike Logan.

Enough said.

That might be a little bigheaded, especially given some of the mistakes I’d made in my past, when I’d slipped into the abyss and lost my way. But that was history now, and at the end of the day, even with the stains, I was the most successful team leader the Taskforce had ever used. Just ask all the people walking around today because I had been there to prevent their death. You couldn’t, of course, because they didn’t know I existed.

The Taskforce command and I had been going back and forth, with me running things off the books and the Oversight Council wetting their pants because of my actions, but finally Kurt had said I was officially in charge. Which gave some members of the Council fits, but since I’d personally saved the lives of Oversight Council family members on my last mission, those idiots were shut down.

Kurt had told me not to screw it up, then sent me to Africa to chase a fat Saudi with bags under his eyes that made him look like a panda bear.

5

I knocked on the door of our makeshift tactical operations center, a suite at the InterContinental Hotel in Nairobi, feeling foolish that Knuckles had waltzed right into my room while I had forgotten to get a key to my own TOC.

I waited for the door to open, knowing someone was eyeing me through the peephole. It took forever, making me wonder if they were screwing with us. Brett finally turned the knob, saying, “Retro’s in back, working the computer. Someone’s on it right now, but it ain’t Panda.”

A short African American built like a fireplug of solid muscle, he moved aside and I said, “Did you need to get a box to see out the door?”

I walked in and waited on a reaction to Jennifer. All he said was, “Hey, Jenn. Good work last night.”

That was it.

Whew.

She gave off her brilliant megawatt smile and said, “Thanks.”

I started back to the bedroom and heard Brett say, “Yeah, it was a long night, huh?”

Good work? Long night? I slid my eyes his way, but he was innocently standing by the door. No grin or anything else to indicate a double entendre.

I went to the back bedroom, where Retro had set up all of our computer network stuff, and saw him staring at a screen, Knuckles standing over his shoulder.

I said, “What’s up?”

“Retro’s accessed Panda’s computer through the hotel Wi-Fi. He’s covertly turned on the laptop camera and we can see who’s typing, and it’s not him. It’s the security chief.”

“And? Why do we care?”

“He’s setting up a visit from an escort. You know, because Panda’s forty-two wives aren’t enough. Real pious.”

A thought hit me. I said, “Hey Retro, if you can see what he’s typing, can’t you just rip through the computer? Image the hard drive and end this mission right now?”

“Already did. This laptop isn’t the one we want. I’m willing to bet that one is air-gapped from the Internet. We still need to locate it and physically access it.”

Ali Salim al-Naggar—aka Panda—was a wealthy Saudi businessman with strong indicators he was providing money to Salafist jihadist groups. One of many around the world defying their government—or, in some instances, operating with its tacit approval—to fund extremists. In this case, we believed he was using his business connections as a clearinghouse to funnel money to the Islamic State—otherwise known as ISIS, ISIL, or Da’esh in the shifting sands of Arabic naming conventions—the rampaging lunatics running amok and beheading everything in their path in Syria and Iraq.


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