Jacking Jill

1

SOMEWHERE IN MARYLAND, USA.

Jack Wagner gunned the motorcycle’s throttle all the way after taking a hard turn and almost spinning off the county road to avoid an ugly pothole. The black-and-gold Kawasaki Ninja 1000cc crotch-rocket he’d bought with his most recent Darkwater paycheck was a sleek creature of pure masculine energy between his legs, and Jack grinned beneath his tinted helmet-visor as the bike sped way past 140 mph, eating up the deserted county road like a ravenous wolf on the prowl.

Keller’s voice came through on Jack’s earpiece now. “Any sign of him yet?”

“Negative.” Jack shouted into the screaming wind even though the combination earpiece-microphone was state-of-the-art CIA technology that transmitted sound vibrations via the delicate bones of the ear-canal, filtering out all extraneous noise and sending a crisp signal to his Darkwater phone. “How far out is the target?”

The target, of course, was Diego Vargas. He’d popped back up on the radar suddenly just a few hours ago, and Jack was the closest Darkwater guy, had gotten on Diego’s trail immediately. The slippery Zeta leader had somehow managed to evade a manhunt the size of a space invasion for almost two months since the explosion that almost killed Benson, Kaiser, Indy O’Donnell, and Jack himself.

Thankfully Jack’s older brother Ice’s instincts had saved all their asses when Benson’s car exploded outside Senator Marcus Robinson’s townhome in Georgetown, and now Ice and Indy were married and Indy was two months pregnant and they were all—Jack the third wheel included—living in the Wagner family’s big drafty old house in Upstate New York, just down the Hudson River from the historic Army college of West Point.

Jack had offered to move out, to give the married couple some privacy. Darkwater was paying them all far more than what Jack would have considered reasonable, and he already had a rental in the DC area because that’s where all the activity was these days with everyone focused on keeping the Senator and his family safe from Diego’s designs.

Though the risk to the Senator had most certainly lessened since the failed assassination attempt on Kaiser and Benson, that car-bomb Diego had planted beneath Benson’s Ford Crown Victoria. Secret Service protection had finally come through for Robinson, now that it was obvious the Senator was in danger. And with the Secret Service on the job, the Georgetown home was about as safe as the damn White House. Nobody was getting through the Secret Service, which sure as hell took some pressure off Darkwater’s security detail—which Jack had been heading up along with Keller.

That being said, the FBI and CIA had cooled off on the Diego manhunt after two months with zero sightings. The official view was that Diego wasn’t dumb enough to stick around in the United States, would have hightailed it back across the southern border into Mexico, then made his way back to the patch of South American land near Colombia which the Zeta Nation had claimed as their own little fiefdom.

Still, although the FBI and CIA had backed off, the pressure was still very much on Darkwater to find Diego Vargas. There were two cover stories after that bomb—one for the public, another for the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service. The public was told it was a gas leak. The government was informed that the car-bomb wasn’t actually a car-bomb but instead explosives planted beneath a manhole cover outside the Senator’s home, intended for the Senator and his family. FBI, CIA, DHS, and Secret Service were told it went off early by mistake when the Senator was out of town. Only CIA Director Martin Kaiser and Darkwater knew the truth:

That Diego had been gunning for Benson and Kaiser with that bomb.

This whole thing had turned personal.

Just like everything with Darkwater seemed to turn personal. Hell, Diego himself was getting wrapped up in some personal drama. It looked like Diego might have been blackmailed by the now-dead Rhett Rodgers into going after Kaiser and Benson. The ruthless Zeta leader seemed to have risked his own life and mission to save a woman and child that he’d only just met, should mean nothing to him but somehow seemed to mean everything!

Benson had questioned the woman Rhett Rodgers had kidnapped to blackmail Diego into planting the explosives under Benson’s car. The woman—whose name was Mercy—had made it clear that Diego seemed quite happy to get rid of John Benson, blackmail or not.

So perhaps this manhunt for Diego was now personal for Benson and Kaiser too?

But hell, everything had been personal from the very beginning when it came to Darkwater and Benson, the CIA and Martin Kaiser. Everyone was connected in ways that went far beyond just the job. Benson and Kaiser saw themselves as stewards of America’s destiny or some crap like that. Though after seeing the way Ice and Indy had been drawn together by circumstances that defied belief, nobody in Darkwater was calling fate and destiny “crap” anymore.

Not even Jack”s older brother Ice, who was by far the most practical, level-headed, no-nonsense human being on the face of this planet. The Darkwater family was now nine-for-nine with Benson’s “matchmaking”—as CIA Director Martin Kaiser sarcastically called it.

Though even Kaiser’s sarcasm was losing its edge. After all, Martin and Alice Kaiser were the proud adoptive parents of two atrociously cute twins who’d been orphaned during that Fox-and-Fay mission up in Iceland. Kaiser and his wife—who’d been separated for a decade before agreeing to get back together to care for their new twins—named Fay’s orphaned niece and nephew Adam and Eve.

Pretty damn woo-woo, Jack thought with a windblown grin as he weaved the speeding bike around a fallen branch. It was mid-December, but other than some flurries on Thanksgiving, there’d been no serious snow in the DC-Maryland area. The winter wind was crisp and cold, but Jack barely felt it beneath his thick leather jacket and heavy denim jeans and military boots. His helmet had a tinted visor that Benson promised was bulletproof, though Jack would rather not find out. Weapons technology was advancing at the speed of light, and it was always a race between offense and defense. It was a sick joke that the same weapons manufacturers that made bulletproof vests also designed the best armor-piercing bullets.

But military technology had saved Jack’s life on multiple missions back when he’d been with the Army’s elite Delta Force along with Ice, and he had a healthy respect for the advantages afforded to the modern warrior. Sure, Jack and Ice had taken early retirement almost three years ago to care for their dying parents, but joining Darkwater was like being back in Special Forces. The early Darkwater guys were all SEALs, but the Deltas were represented well with Ice and Jack and now Keller.

Keller was still somewhat of a mystery, though. Didn’t talk about his past other than to say he’d started off as a Delta and then done “some other stuff.” Ice and Jack hadn’t crossed paths with Keller in the Army’s famous Company D. Rumor was that Keller had been kicked out of the Deltas early on for “accidentally” killing another Delta guy during a training exercise. But that was just an unconfirmed rumor. Keller’s military file was clean as a whistle, “sanitized” enough for him to get discharged without the “dishonorable” label—which to a Special Forces veteran like Jack was a dead giveaway that Keller the Killer had been quietly recruited by the CIA, probably as a covert overseas assassin, perhaps by John Benson himself—who’d spent forty years as a spook, rising up through the Agency alongside Martin Kaiser, the two of them close like brothers.

Brothers who sometimes want to kill each other, Jack thought with an icy smirk as he thought back to some of his own brotherly fights with Ice. Of course, Jack and Ice were both hard-hitting Delta men, so their fights got physical real quick. Benson and Kaiser, however, worked out their differences on the mental battlefield, lying and manipulating each other if it suited their own purposes, hiding schemes within plots and wrapping everything in conspiracy because that was how these old spooks played the game.

A game that Jack was learning to play himself.

Well, the spy game, at least.

Not that other sort of game which Benson seemed to be playing with this Darkwater thing.

The cosmic matchmaking game.

“You’re next, Jack,” Indy O’Donnell had teased two months ago from where she’d been cuddled in her man Ice’s arms, the two of them grinning at Jack from that big bed at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, when Ice was healing from taking a bullet to save his woman. “Ax and Amy. Bruiser and Brenna. Cody and Cate. Dogg and Diana. Edge and Emma. Fox and Fay. Gavin and Gale. Hogan and Hannah. Ice and Indy. Jack and . . .” Indy had flashed a wickedly teasing smile when Jack swiped the air and shook his head, reminding her that he didn’t play the forever game, used the words “I love you” as a pick-up line, and considered marriage to be a tradition that belonged in history’s dumpster.

Which is probably why all your relationships have been dumpster fires, Jack thought as he roared his motorcycle down the deserted county road. The speedometer was past 150 mph now, and Jack eased up on the throttle as he took the next turn. Wiping out at this speed would leave him with more than just rug-burn. And although Jack knew how to handle his body, had survived multiple crashes in a dozen different vehicles in his recklessly violent life, wiping out on this empty county road in December would probably mean a long cold walk at best. He hadn’t passed a single vehicle in almost an hour.

“Yo, Keller, talk to me.” Jack glanced down at his phone which was secured firmly in the military-grade device-holder on the crest of the gas-tank, just beneath the speedometer dial. “My phone and GPS signal are going in and out. You sure Diego’s still on this road? Why haven’t I caught up with his vehicle? I’m almost breaking the damn sound barrier here.”

Keller’s voice sounded crackly and distant. Jack couldn’t catch the words. He slowed the bike down to a steady 95 mph, tapped the phone to turn up the volume. Keller’s voice was clearer now. He was talking to someone else, probably Paige Anderson, the former CIA hacker whom Benson had recruited after that Ice-and-Indy mission. Hours ago, Paige had picked up a probable facial-recognition match on Diego Vargas after hunting him for two months via traffic cameras and spy-drones and cell towers and anything else she could hack into from Darkwater’s new headquarters being constructed in the woods outside Arlington, Virginia.

Keller was with her at the new headquarters, along with Fay and some of the other Darkwater crew helping set up the new digs. For seven years Darkwater had operated without its own offices, using Ax’s family ranch down in Georgia or Benson’s house in Virginia for meetings. But after Nancy Sullivan agreed to temporarily return to Darkwater while Benson healed from his injuries, the crafty old spook asked her to use the vast Darkwater cash reserves seized during the Bruiser-and-Brenna mission to buy some secluded land in the Virginia woods and get it built out and outfitted with military grade technology and safehouse-level security.

Of course, everyone knew that asking Nancy to set up the new Darkwater headquarters was Benson’s way of making sure Nancy Sullivan’s “temporary” return would last at least a year, if not more. Jack wasn’t sure what the deal was with Benson and Nancy, but he knew better than to ask the old spook about matters of love.

Because Jack knew that Sally Norton, the love of Benson’s life, had been murdered during the first Darkwater mission. Benson still wore a wedding ring even though they’d never been legally married. He never spoke about her, and it was common knowledge that questions about Sally were off-limits for any Darkwater man who didn’t want to piss off the old CIA dog.

Except right now Jack was getting a bit pissed off himself. His body hurt from riding hard for almost three hours. Controlling a bike at this speed subjected your body to vicious G-forces, and you needed to flex dozens of stabilizer-muscles throughout your body to make high-speed turns without killing yourself. Sure, Jack’s body was a finely tuned machine that matched his bike’s precision engineering, but it still required rest now and then to perform at its best.

It also required fuel, and when Jack glanced at the fuel gauge, he was startled to see the needle twitching close to EMPTY. He should have remembered that riding in cold weather uses more gas. Shit. Ice would laugh his ass off at Jack’s stubborn insistence on using the bike instead of just taking one of the shiny new Darkwater custom-outfitted Jeep Liberty trucks that had been tricked out to the max, with battering-ram grills and crash-cages and a massive fuel tank with a heck of a lot of space to carry reserves.

“There’s a gas station coming up,” Jack reported to Keller, who was still discussing something with Paige. “Need to fuel up. Meanwhile, make sure I’m not on a wild goose chase here, Keller. There’s nobody on this damn road. I’m way out in the sticks. Hope the gas station is still operational. Keller, you copy?”

“Roger that.” Keller sounded distracted. “We’ve got a situation here, Jack. Paige lost the burner phone signal that she had locked into after the facial-recognition match. She was using it to track Diego’s progress, but it’s gone dead. He might have ditched it. Taken out the battery and snapped the SIM card. Stay alert. Might just be his normal protocol to change phones to be safe, but maybe he’s figured out we’re closing in on him. If he needs to change vehicles in a hurry, he might have pulled off at the same gas station you’re going to be coming up on shortly.”

“Will do.” Jack saw the gas station sign pop up over the next crest of empty road. He held his breath as the bike coughed like it was down to the dregs of the fuel tank. The exit came up shortly, and when Jack saw that the gas station was open, he exhaled and blazed up the ramp, roared into the station, then rolled to a stop near the solitary pump that appeared to be full-service out here in the boonies, like credit-card readers hadn’t made it this far out into the Maryland sticks.

A scrawny attendant in dirty overalls and a grease-stained yellow sweatshirt stepped out of the small gas station. His eyes were wide and alert, his body wired with more energy than you could get from caffeine. The guy was clearly hopped up on something more. Sad but not surprising. These sorts of chemical drugs were a fucking disease ravaging American lives.

“Nice wheels, man.” The twitchy attendant flashed a rotten-toothed grin as Jack dismounted, straightened to full height, broadened to full width. “You want the high-octane gas, right?”

“Yeah. Fill her up. No overflow.” Jack took off his helmet, cracked a friendly grin at the hopped-up attendant. “Anyone else come through here this afternoon?”

The attendant shook his head, pulled the nozzle off the gas-pump, flipped the old-school dials to show three zeroes, unscrewed the bike’s fuel tank top, started filling it up. “Nope,” he said, his wide-eyed gaze riveted on the gas-pump dials where the numbers spun like a slot-machine. “You’re the first today. And probably the last. They built that new freeway just a couple miles from this county road, pretty much killed all traffic except local.” He grinned to show his rotten teeth that resembled moonrocks. “And there ain’t no locals left round here neither. Government bought up most of this here land. Maybe they’re going to build one of those secret compounds to stash the aliens that crash down to earth during them solar flares. They got an alien stash-house in New Mexico since the 1950s, but everyone knows about that now. So I guess they need to build a new one, right?”

“Right.” Jack stretched his long muscular body until he heard his lower back re-align with a satisfying crack. “Alien stash-houses. Solar flares. Got it. Watch that fuel tank overflow. Hey, you got a restroom, buddy?”

“Around the back.” The attendant was back to staring at the hypnotically spinning gas-pump dials. “Take your time. This pump runs slow.”

Jack grunted, sweeping his gaze around the empty parking lot. The gas station was on a slight bluff, the Maryland woods starting not far from the end of the rectangular asphalt. It was still late afternoon, but the winter sun was already moving low enough to cast the woods in enough shadow to make Jack wary. Army Delta Force candidates had to make it through both Ranger School and Delta Selection, and while the SEALs were tested by the harsh waters of the Pacific Ocean in Coronado, Army Special Forces put their Rangers and Deltas through the harshest land-based environments they could find in the United States. You don’t get to be a Delta without learning how to find water in the desert, navigate your way through a swamp, live through a night in the jungle.

But Diego Vargas had those same skills, Jack reminded himself as he strolled to the edge of the gas station lot and peered into the darkening woods. Diego had started off with the Mexican Marines, was quickly recruited into their world-class Special Forces Unit before moving to the Zetas—a counter-narcotics assassination squad secretly supported by the CIA two decades earlier. Then the CIA pulled their funding, disavowed any connection with the Zetas, leaving them to fight the drug Cartels on their own. And, like so many abandoned and disavowed CIA projects, over the next ten years the Zetas morphed into just another cartel-like organization.

You fight monsters long enough, you turn into one.

Though Diego’s transformation had been unusually sudden, viciously brutal.

And heartbreakingly tragic.

“The Cartels tried to bribe Diego in the early days, when the Zetas were hunting the cartels with CIA support,” Benson had told the group of Darkwater men huddled around his hospital bed in Bethesda a couple of months earlier. “Didn’t work, so they switched tactics. Used Diego as an example to scare the other Zetas into toeing the Cartel line just like the Mexican State and Federal Police.” Benson had taken a breath, his face darkening with something that felt akin to guilt, like maybe in his old age Benson was regretting some of the mistakes the CIA had made. “They brutalized and murdered Diego’s young wife and baby daughter. Wife was pregnant with their second kid. They held Diego down and made him watch for hours. It broke him in a way that can never be fixed.”

Deathly silence had fallen across the group of Darkwater men, eight of whom had wives and babies of their own, the ninth already on his way to starting his own family. Jack had watched streaks of wildly protective anger color the bearded faces of normally coolheaded men like Dogg and Fox. Although Jack himself had no interest in starting a family, didn’t think he had a fatherly bone in his body, he understood what he saw in the dangerously narrowed gazes of the older Darkwater men. They were fathers and husbands, alpha protectors with families to defend. To lose a wife and child to that kind of sickness and to be forced to watch it happen?

Nah, there’d be no limit to the violence that would explode even from men of honor like Ax, Edge, Fox, Cody, and the rest of the Darkwater daddies.

They’d burn down the world to get revenge.

And so maybe they all understood Diego Vargas a little better after that revelation.

Because they all knew how the amorphous energy which fueled their own righteous violence could burn dark if it weren’t balanced out by the power of love.

But not just any kind of love.

The Darkwater kind of love.

The kind of love that simmered with a savage sexual fire.

The kind of love that burned far too hot for normal people to handle.

The kind of love that’s coming for you, Jack.

The thought came at Jack like an arrow, and he blinked rapidly and shook his head as he tried to shake off the annoyingly sticky memory of how Ice and Indy had busted Jack’s balls about how he was next in line.

“Oh, get a grip, for fuck’s sake,” Jack muttered as he swept his gaze across the edge of the woods once more, then turned on his boot-heel and stomped towards the restroom behind the gas station. He’d told himself not to get drawn into this Darkwater stuff with the names all lining up, but it resonated too much with what Jack and Ice’s tie-dye-wearing hippie-hugging parents had tried to explain for so many years.

That there was no such thing as coincidence.

They’d even come up with some silly poem that Jack had always liked—mostly because it drove his straight-laced big brother Ice up the fucking wall.

No such thing as a lucky break.

No such thing as a meaningless mistake.

No such thing as misfortune or luck.

So just follow your heart and you’ll never be stuck.

“No such thing as misfortune or luck,” Jack sang as the restroom door swung closed and he unzipped and pointed his fire-hose of a cock at the urinal. “So just follow your heart and you’ll never be—”

But the last word stuck in his throat when he heard something chillingly familiar outside the door, from back near the gas pumps.

Two sharp pop-pop sounds.

One heavily ominous thud.

Jack would know those sounds anywhere.

Two silenced gunshots, classic military-style double-tap.

The attendant’s body dropping dead to the asphalt.

And suddenly the throaty roar of Jack’s motorcycle being kicked to life!

“Fuck!” Jack whipped out his 9mm Sig Sauer handgun, rammed his way through the door, stumbling out of the restroom with his dick still hanging out. His boots pounded the cold asphalt as he tore around the corner, but it was too late.

Diego Vargas was already racing down the county road on Jack’s stolen bike which now had a full gas-tank.

“Fuck!” Jack shouted again, shoving his cock back into his pants, dropping to his knees, placing his handgun on the asphalt and checking the attendant’s pulse even though Jack had seen enough dead bodies to know it was pointless. Two clean shots to the guy’s chest, one to each chamber of his heart. His yellow sweatshirt was already soaked with blood. At least Diego left the guy’s face intact so the family could do an open-casket funeral. “Shit. Shit. Shit!”

Jack was on his feet again in a flash, whipping out his phone to call Keller while scanning the gas station lot even though he already knew there was no other vehicle available to give pursuit. The dead attendant either lived here or must have been dropped off by a buddy or something. And Diego must have ditched his own vehicle somewhere off the county road in the woods. Either Diego knew he was being followed or his vehicle had broken down. Either way, no point looking for it, because if it wasn’t a breakdown, Diego would have disabled the vehicle to make sure Jack couldn’t chase him.

Assuming Diego even knew he was being actively chased before Jack showed up here on his noisy bike. Hell, Diego might have tossed his burner phone as a routine precaution, moving from one burner phone to another like any good fugitive would do in the modern world of GPS and cell-tower triangulation. Maybe his car did just happen to break down. Either way, Diego must have hiked to this gas station, realized the attendant didn’t have a vehicle, then decided to hide in the woods and wait to car-jack the first customer to show up.

Who just happened to be a grinning dumb-ass named Jack Wagner.

“Damn it. So if Diego didn’t know Darkwater was getting close before, he sure as fuck knows now,” Jack barked into the phone to Keller. “Diego would have seen me guarding the Senator’s townhouse a couple of months ago. I was there that night when he planted the car bomb. He knows I’m a Darkwater man, knows we’re right on his heels now. We waited two months for him to surface, and now he’ll go underground again. I fucked up, man.”

“Yeah, you did,” Keller said in his cold matter-of-fact voice, making Jack’s bristles rise with a mix of anger and embarrassment for having his dick in his hand while his target was twenty feet away. “Shit happens. You all right, Jack?”

“Yeah.” Jack tossed his helmet onto the asphalt like a pissed-off quarterback. “He didn’t take a shot at me. Must have decided not to risk getting into a firefight. Wish he had. I’d have taken his ass down if he’d stayed to fight.”

“That’s why he didn’t. He’s being cautious. Or maybe he’s in a hurry to get somewhere.” Keller grunted, then started talking to someone else—Paige or Nancy or maybe even Benson. “Paige is tapped into traffic-cams at the exits to the nearest towns. We’re going to put a call out to any cops or troopers in the area, but that’ll take a while because you’re so far out in the boonies. Still, Diego will need to get off the road to ditch the bike and switch vehicles pretty soon. We’ll get a bead on him again. Hang tight at the gas station We’ll send someone to pick you up.”

“Damn it!” Jack rubbed his clean-shaved jaw that hurt from how hard he was clenching it. “You know what? I can still catch up with him if I find a vehicle within the next few minutes. Diego won’t risk speeding and getting pulled over. And the limit is 55 on this road. I could catch up easy in pretty much any car.”

“Gas station attendant doesn’t have a vehicle?” Keller asked. “What about Diego’s car? He might have ditched it within a couple miles of the gas station. Won’t be easy to find, and it”s probably disabled anyway. But maybe you get lucky.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if today’s my lucky day,” Jack snarled, glancing up and down the empty county road, the wind whistling around his upturned jacket collar, the moving air whispering that old rhyme again.

No such thing as misfortune or luck.

“Wait, hold on.” Jack whipped his body around at the sound of a car’s engine approaching from behind. A red Honda hatchback had just taken the exit to the gas station, was heading right for him like a gift from the gods. “Shit, I’ll call you back, Keller. Looks like my luck just turned.”