Chapter 2
Jake West’s small office was standing room only when McCloud took Omar and Marielle as far as the open door and left them there.
Omar craned his neck into the crowded space as McCloud sped away.
The guest chairs were occupied by Olivia Santos and Ryan Hayes.
Olivia’s husband and Jake’s right hand, Trent Mann, lounged against the large window behind Jake’s desk.
Omar rapped on the doorframe. “You wanted to see us?”
Jake waved a hand. “Come on in and join the party.”
Ryan popped to his feet and gestured at the chair he’d just vacated. “Here take my seat, Marielle.”
She rewarded him with a brilliant smile as she claimed the chair next to Olivia. She leaned over and offered her best friend a piece of her pain au chocolat, and Ryan joined Omar in the back of the room. They leaned against the wall behind the chairs.
“How’d the croissant thing go over?” Ryan asked in a low voice while Marielle got settled.
“It’s pain. It’s like a croissant, but it’s not a croissant,” Omar corrected him.
“Whatever. Did you finally win her heart?”
Omar exhaled audibly through his nostrils at the whispered question.
Apparently, because all their friends had paired off into couples, he and Marielle were expected to do the same.
It didn’t matter how many times Omar explained to Ryan, Jake, and Trent that it was never going to happen. They maintained their delusion.
Before he could respond to Ryan, Jake threw them an unamused look. Omar settled for jabbing Ryan in the ribs with an elbow.
Jake leaned forward in his chair vibrating with intensity as he braced his hands against the top of the wide desk and made his announcement. “We have a new high-priority job.”
Olivia brushed crumbs off her fingers and said, “It must be a big deal if you dragged all of us down here. Who’s the client?”
Jake gave a brisk nod and lowered his voice. “This mission is need to know. The only people who need to know are in this room.” He eyed Marielle and Olivia. “Let me remind you that this confidentially extends to Chelsea and Leilah.”
Unsurprisingly, both women bristled. Olivia opened her mouth to protest, and Marielle placed a hand on her arm as if to say, oh, allow me.
“Is there some reason you’re directing this little reminder to us?” Marielle demanded, gesturing with her coffee mug toward herself and then Olivia. A splash of milky coffee landed on Jake’s otherwise spotless floor in the process.
“Yeah, Moreau, there is. The four of you are like a pack of high schoolers with all your texting and girls only get togethers.”
Omar grimaced at Jake’s retort. Beside him, Ryan exhaled a soft curse. Even Trent dragged a finger across his throat in a cutting motion. But the damage was already done.
“I beg your pardon?” Marielle gestured even more broadly. “Chelsea is your wife. Leilah is his fiancée and his sister.” She twisted in her chair to jab a finger first at Ryan and then at Omar. “You talk to them more than we do.”
Jake raised both hands, palms out, in a placating gesture. “Look, the warning is for everyone. It’s just that I know how Chelsea’s phone blows up with your group chats. You’re tight, and that’s fine. But they don’t need to know about this.”
Unappeased, Olivia huffed, “And I’m a highly trained operative. I have at least as much experience maintaining a secret as anyone in this room—if not more.”
Despite Jake’s ham-fisted delivery, Omar empathized with the guy.
The six people in the room and the two women who didn’t work with them were a mess of tangled connections—they were relatives, friends, lovers, and partners.
Jake was right to worry that the lines might sometimes blur.
Omar shared his concern. It was, in part, why he’d never acted on his feelings for Marielle.
Somebody in this place needed to maintain the illusion of professionalism.
Trent jumped in. “Liv, Jake knows that. I think he’s just trying to impress upon us how critical this mission is.” He gave Jake a meaningful look. “Maybe we should move along. You were about to tell us who the client is?”
Jake shook his head for a beat. Then he said, “It’s one of the alphabet agencies.”
The alphabet agencies encompassed dozens of federal agencies that contracted with Potomac for training, security, and other services. Jake’s non-answer could mean anything from the U.S. Postal Service to the Secret Service and everything in between.
“Could you be a little more specific?” Omar asked.
“It’s an intelligence agency,” Ryan told him, loudly enough so the others could hear.
Olivia craned her neck to look at the attorney. “Domestic?”
Ryan glanced over her head at Jake.
Jake answered, “No.”
She turned to face him. “CIA, got it.”
Jake neither confirmed nor denied her statement. Instead he said, “We’ve been tasked with retrieving sensitive data for them.”
“Why aren’t they doing it themselves?” she pressed him.
He gestured toward the lawyer. “Wanna field this one?”
“There’s been a change in the administration’s stance toward certain foreign actors since the agency first undertook the operation. Now, they need distance.”
“You mean plausible deniability.”
Ryan shrugged. “Tomato, tomahto.”
“Where is this information?” Omar asked.
Jake took over again. “On a yacht.”
“A yacht?” Omar was sure he’d misheard.
“A yacht.” Jake confirmed. “A one-hundred-forty-seven-foot yacht named The Fakhar, which is currently sailing the Mediterranean.”
“That’s Arabic for glory. Or pride.”
Jake gave him a nod. “That tracks. The owner is believed to be a Tunisian national.”
“What do you mean, believed to be?” Marielle asked.
“The vessel is Malta-flagged, registered to a Maltese holding company with possible ties to the Salim Ben Mahmoud, a Tunisian oligarch. The Fakhar departed Tunis yesterday evening, bound for Mallorca.”
“And you want me to confirm ownership?” she guessed.
“No. It only matters because Idris, Mahmoud’s youngest son, is definitely aboard, which means his six armed bodyguards are also aboard.”
“So, why I am here?”
Jake eyed her closely. “You’re going undercover with Khan. You two need to infiltrate the yacht and get the data.”
“What!” Olivia, Marielle, and Omar exclaimed in unison.
Jake turned toward Trent. “Time for everyone except Marielle and Omar to scram. The rest of you are the support team. Trent’s in charge.”
A consummate professional, Olivia clamped her jaw shut. But she threw Jake a murderous look as she followed her husband and Ryan out of the office.
The moment the door closed behind them, Omar locked eyes with his boss. “No way.”
“Excuse you?”
“You aren’t sending me onto a heavily guarded yacht with Moreau. She’s not a field agent. Putting a desk jockey in that situation is a suicide mission.” He kept his tone even despite the wash of sheer adrenaline coursing through him.
Before Jake could respond, Marielle banged her mug down on his desk, pointedly ignoring the coaster to set it directly on the burnished wood. Then she unleashed a rapid torrent of what Omar could only assume was French profanity.
Marielle’s heart thudded. She wasn’t an operative. Omar was right about that. But his reaction served as a flame, heating her icy fear to a hot anger. How dare he dismiss her as incompetent?
She shook from a combination of fright and fury.
Part of her wanted to tell Jake he was out of his mind, that there was no way she was going to infiltrate anything, let alone a yacht protected by a half-dozen armed goons.
The other part of her wanted to make Omar eat his words.
When she and Olivia had gone through their agent training at The Farm, Liv had told her she had two wolves inside her: one wolf that wanted to kick someone’s butt, and another wolf who didn’t want to ruin her manicure.
Jake watched her impassively as the two wolves inside her battled it out. She glanced down at her nails. She was due for a polish change anyway.
She lifted her chin and focused on Jake, ignoring Omar. “I can do it.”
“Of course you can do it. I wouldn’t have assigned you to the mission if you couldn’t do it.” He was talking to her but looking at Omar.
“Why not Olivia?” Omar asked.
Marielle twitched her lips to the side. Honestly? She was wondering the same thing.
Jake leaned back in his chair and ticked off the reasons on his fingers.
“One, a blue-eyed blonde is going to stand out on a boat full of Tunisians. Marielle will at least blend in—she’s passed for Leilah before.
Two, there’s reason to believe the information we’re looking for is in Arabic or possibly French.
Olivia’s fluent in Chinese and Spanish. Marielle’s fluent in French, and your Arabic is passable. ”
She allowed herself a smirk at Jake’s faint praise. Omar was bilingual. His Arabic was beyond impeccable and they all knew it. But that’s what you get for challenging the boss.
Omar gave a defeated sigh. “What’s our cover? How are we getting on the boat?”
“You’re a wealthy couple on a romantic getaway to Mallorca.
Arrange to run into Idris and his party when they dock in Palma.
Ingratiate yourself and wrangle an invitation to join them on their Palma-to-Marseille leg.
Get the data and when you disembark in Marseille, we’ll have an exfil team waiting. ”
Jake kept talking. Or, at least, Marielle assumed he did. She was no longer listening. Pretend to be romantically involved with Omar? No. Not happening.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Omar said.
She snapped her attention to him. His eyes were wide, and his eyebrows were knitted together. He looked as unhappy and worried about this idea as she felt.
“Why not?” Jake wanted to know.
“Well, for one thing—we’re not a couple. And while I know Elle went through agent training, that was a long time ago and she’s never had to adopt and maintain a cover. It’s not that easy, West.”
She found herself bobbing her head in agreement.
Their boss either tried and failed to hide his smirk or didn’t even bother trying. “But you’re clearly attracted to each other. Just lean into it.”
Marielle blinked.
Beside her, Omar stammered, “We’re not … that’s … we’re friends, Jake. That’s it.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “Didn’t the two of you kiss?”
She felt the blood rush to her face. Omar turned toward her. “You told your friends?”
She had. But she knew they would never breathe a word about it. And she couldn’t admit it now, not when Jake had just accused them of being a gaggle of gossips.
So she lied. “No, of course not. Why would I tell them you rejected me?”
He gaped at her, incredulous. “I didn’t reject you. I respected you.”
“What?”
“It was a moment of heightened emotion. We’d been through hell. I thought—”
But she wouldn’t find out what he thought because Jake interjected, “Trent told me.”
“You told Trent?” She cocked her head.
“No!” After a beat, he mumbled, “I told Ryan.”
“And Ryan told Trent, who told me.” Jake brushed his hands together as if that settled the matter.
“Mon dieu! And we’re the pack of high schoolers? Ha,” she huffed.
Jake grinned sheepishly. “Point taken. But there’s unmistakable chemistry between you, even if you are just friends.
So act like a couple in public then hole up in one of the staterooms and play video games or eat macarons or whatever you two do.
You don’t have to get hot and heavy behind closed doors. ”
Omar shook his head. “You really should tap Olivia and Trent for this. They’re married, for Pete’s sake—they won’t have to fake being in love.”
She knew Omar didn’t love her. Of course he didn’t. Still, hearing him say it was a wasp sting to her heart. Ridiculous, she told herself. Shake it off.
“Right,” she said. “And they both have covert operations experience. Surely the tech team can hook up a feed for me to translate any French documents they find.”
“On the open seas? That’s asking for the tech to fail. And aside from that it’s a hard no. They can’t take this mission.”
Omar crossed his arms. “You have to at least tell us why, Jake. Because, no disrespect, this looks like a poor management decision.”
She sucked in a breath while Jake considered the demand for a long moment.
Instead of dressing Omar down, he said, “I can’t do that to Trent. You know he lost his partner when he was on the black squadron, right?”
They both nodded. They’d heard the broad strokes over the years, but no details. Trent and his partner were one of Seal Team Six’s elite male-female operator pairs in Nigeria. His partner went out to meet a source and never came back.
“Trent would strangle me if he knew I told you this, but Carla wasn’t just his partner, she was his lover. Boko Haram sent him her severed hands in a box. Weeks later, he found her body in a cave. It nearly killed him. If something happened to Olivia, he wouldn’t recover.”
Marielle’s stomach churned. Beside her, Omar blanched.
After a moment, she found her voice and protested, “That’s horrifying. But, Jake, it’s not fair to make that decision for him—or her.”
“Maybe not. But I also know that if it came down to achieving the mission goal or keeping his wife safe, Trent will choose her every time. It’s not fair to put him, her, or me in that position.”
The small room fell silent. She shifted her gaze to Omar, and they locked eyes. Wordlessly, they agreed that they could—would—do this for the team. They turned back to Jake.
“When do we leave?” she asked.
He checked the rugged, matte black watch on his left wrist. “Now.”