Chapter 14
If he’d let the pain searing between his shoulder blades dictate his decisions, Dane wouldn’t have called the feds.
He would have taken his precious passenger in her ridiculous chestnut-brown wig and driven straight for the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, abandoned the Jeep, and taken the first flight to Tahiti.
Technically he would have been kidnapping her, because he was certain she wouldn’t agree to abandon the real world, but that was far less worrisome to Dane than watching her play bait for Max the Ax and damn Salvatore Cannelloni.
“Are you going to make the call or shall I?” Shana looked at him from her familiar spot in the passenger seat of his old beat-up Jeep. Her window was rolled down and the mellow evening air blew the ends of her pretend hair.
Instead of answering, he slipped his phone from his shirt pocket and dialed up their designated contact with all feds on this mission. Damn Special Agent Derek Smith. They were halfway back to the shack.
“Where are they?”
“That’s abrupt—even for you,” Derek answered.
“Let me put it politely for you—where the hell are Max and Sal and their hired help?”
“Xavier and Cannelloni are entering their respective hotel rooms in Edgartown now. They’re staying at the Hot Nob Luxury Boutique Hotel & Spa.”
“And their minions?”
“No word. They’re on the fly. I haven’t gotten word where they’re staying.”
“Have you identified any of them? Do you even know how many they have?”
“No.” Smith paused, took a breath, and then spoke in a strained voice. “It’s possible there are no minions on the island—yet. They might not be arriving until tomorrow.”
Dane processed this in a blink and said, “Makes sense. Max is no fool. He’ll want to tread carefully and keep his distance from the muscle.”
“We’ll catch sight of them. We have everything covered. All the marinas and the airport.”
“Now you know why I live on an island.”
Smith snorted a sympathetic laugh. “Check in with me when you get home,” he paused and added, “And don’t tell me I sound like your mother.”
“You look a lot like her too,” Dane said. He shut his phone down as Smith went on a profanity rant.
Shana grinned at him. “That was mean.”
“I know. It’s who I am.”
She laughed. The sound settled him so that when they arrived at the beach shack he was ready for sleep.
The fact that neither the feds nor any of his men had spotted anyone that could be attributed to Max or Sal at the restaurant bothered Dane. There had to be someone there. That worried Dane as his head hit the pillow.
He was alone in his bed if he didn’t count his Glock and his phone. The phone buzzed next to his ear and he snatched it up.
“Shit.” Apparently Special Agent Derek Smitten Smith was worried too.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what the hell do you want?”
“You didn’t call. I told you to check in. I’m on my way over.”
“Like hell. I’m on my way to sleep.”
“We need to talk strategy. And I want to listen to audio surveillance.”
“Acer has that covered.”
“I’m sure he could use help.”
“I’ve been listening too. We all need sleep more than anything right now. That includes you.” Dane knew why he wanted to come over and it had nothing to do with audio surveillance.
“I’m almost there.”
“You’re not coming inside. I’ll turn on the electric fence—”
“What the hell, Blaise?”
“I’m not an idiot, Special Agent Smith. The only reason you want to come here at this hour is to see Shana.” Dane’s steely message was met with silence. He waited a couple of beats. He would wait however long he needed to wait for Smith to get his act together.
“You’re way out of line.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t worry about me. If Shana were that interested in you, you wouldn’t need to worry.”
“I’ll forget you said that, Smith, because I have sympathy for you—I really do. You’re not the first guy I’ve seen to come along and fall for Shana. But you’re right. She’s not interested in either of us. She’s a professional. Leave her alone.”
Dane felt the deflation of tension in the next silence. He heard the FBI man take a deep breath.
Then he let the man off the hook because he truly did sympathize.
“Look, they have people. They’ll be sending their people in for the snatch at the wedding tomorrow. That’s our best read of the audio. Your analysts say the same thing. It’s playing out as we thought it would. Get a good night’s sleep.”
They ended the call with their personal tension diffused.
But Dane hoped to hell he was right about tomorrow’s scene playing out as they’d planned. It had to. There was no way Max and Sal were going to pull this off personally. And there was no way in hell they were going to stand by and let Toly get away with betraying them or nixing their deal.
In fact, they needed Toly desperately to save their skins.
Dane stood. The call had him wide awake now. He pulled his bedroom door open almost before Acer had a chance to knock on it.
“What are you grinning at?” Dane said.
“I enjoy having Sal on the ropes—or the fact that his client has him sweating.”
“Spill it.”
“The terrorist cell client they’re dealing with made some nasty threats, according to my latest intercept. Sal was nervous enough to forget about code for half his conversation.”
“You get a line on the client?”
“No—it’s a cutout using a burner phone. A dead end. Our only way to get to this cell is to own Max and Sal.”
“That’s the plan.”
“This is a serious one, Dane,” Acer said. He nodded.
“I got that from the amount of resources the feds have been throwing at this operation. They’re up to over three dozen personnel that we can see on the ground.
All fresh faces. And no counting how many they have behind the scenes.
” The pain stabbed and twisted through his shoulders right into his chest this time.
He hoped to hell he wasn’t having a heart attack.
But he knew anxiety when he felt it. Before every damn life-or-death, end-of-the-world mission. He should have been used to it by now. The good news was that he wasn’t soulless enough to be immune.
The bad news was he was well on his way to becoming soulless. Or losing his life altogether.
“I’ll keep you company,” Dane said. He followed Acer down the hall, glanced briefly at the closed door to Shana’s bedroom, but kept going. When he got to the kitchen, Dane pulled open the freezer door and plucked the almost full bottle of tequila from its icy throne.