8
“That isn’t part of the plan, Jack.”
“It is now, Benson,” said Jack softly into his phone, glancing at the two bodyguards who were standing against a gold-painted wall adjacent to the lavishly stocked buffet table in the massive indoor hall which looked big enough to host a football game. “My gut tells me Kay Steffen is Diego’s mystery contact. Paige checked her out, and it looks like she’s a lawyer. I bet she works for Romeo Carmine, so therefore our trail leads directly to the big man.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, kid,” came Benson’s warning. “In more ways than one, I might add.” He chuckled dryly, his comment making Jack wonder if Paige really had turned off access to Jack’s microphone and camera like he’d asked or if Benson had been listening in all this while. He sighed into the phone, listened as Benson continued. “Look, Jack. We still don’t know for sure that Kay is Diego’s contact. You seeing her in the hotel lobby answering a call at around the same time Paige picked up the burner phone again might just be a coincidence. Paige hasn’t been able to see any of the messages or listen in on any of the phone calls. And we don’t know for sure whether Kay works for Romeo Carmine either. There’s no record of her representing the Carmine Family in any legal cases. Though Romeo”s been mostly legit for years now, so there aren”t any recent legal cases. Still, take it slow, kid.”
Jack sighed into the phone, scanning the room for Jill on her way back from the bathroom. No sign of her yet, but Bobby Carmine was on the far side of the hall near the open bar, nowhere near where Jill would be, so Jack relaxed and focused on arguing his case with Benson.
“Why the hell is a lawyer at this wedding if she doesn’t work for the Carmine Family?” Jack thought back to Paige’s research on Kay Steffen. “She fits the profile. Ten years as a Federal Prosecutor. Then she switches sides and goes into private practice as a defense attorney, defending the same thugs that she spent ten years putting away. She’s a mercenary. Following the money. No moral compass.”
“Worry about your own damn compass before you change this mission’s direction.” Benson spoke curtly.
Jack bristled. “You questioning my moral compass, Benson?”
“Your morals are fine, kid. It’s your cock that’s pointing in a questionable direction. I know your history with women, Jack. You’re far too compromised in the dick department to trust that it points true north. You get my drift?” Benson spoke straight and cold, no hint of that wisecracking humor in his steady tone. “Clear your mind of all the crap the other Darkwater guys have been feeding you. Just because her name is Jill doesn’t mean she’s yours, kid. Use her and then lose her. You and I both know that you aren’t the forever kind of guy. Don’t try to be something you’re not. I know how it looks with the Darkwater patterns and the names and whatnot, and I know I’m guilty of encouraging all the rumors of mystery and magic. But although I believe certain things about how the universe works, I’m also acutely aware that we live in a world of flesh and bone, sand and stone. A world where death is final as fuck, no matter what I might believe about the afterlife. I know it’s challenging for the new Darkwater guys to ignore the patterns and play the game straight, which is why it’s doubly important that you follow my orders to the letter, Jack. You got sloppy at the gas station, and a civilian got killed.”
“Well, I didn’t fucking kill him, Benson,” Jack snarled, unable to stop the defensiveness from taking over his tone. In his mind he could still see that gas station attendant’s crooked smile, teeth rotted out by whatever addiction had prematurely aged him. Sure, Jack hadn’t pulled the trigger. But he’d left his bike with the keys in the damn ignition while he went to take a piss. Jack had literally been caught with his dick in his hand. That kind of mistake would have been not just uncharacteristic in the Deltas but unacceptable. “All right, look, I’ll cool my jets, Benson.” He thought a moment, glancing towards the empty corridor leading to where Jill had disappeared into the restroom. “Guess you pulled Jill’s name from her car registration or hotel booking.” He took a breath, blinked twice, feeling vaguely guilty for asking the next question even though he couldn’t stop himself. “What did Paige find out about her? Anything in Jill’s background I should know about?”
Benson was silent at first, then Jack heard him speaking in hushed tones to Paige and Keller. “Paige will update you,” he said gruffly to Jack after a bit. “But remember that this is my mission, not yours, soldier. Keep Kay Steffen in sight, but keep your mind open that it could be somebody else at that wedding. The endgame is Diego Vargas—not Kay Steffen, and certainly not Romeo Carmine. Stay with Jill as long as you need her for cover, but be careful about which compass you’re following, kid. It’s dangerous to think that the patterns of the past will continue into the future. Sooner or later all patterns break, all rules have their exceptions, all diamonds have their flaws. Oh, and don’t pressure Paige into overriding your phone again. She works for me, not you. Now get your head straight, and remember that the Jack-and-Jill nursery rhyme did not end well for that fairy-tale couple. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after, right? Sounds cute and funny in cartoon fairy-tale land. But in the real world that means you and Jill both die at the end. Keep that in mind before you let your dick out of your pants, stud. Hold for Paige.”
Jack stared at the phone, not sure what to make of Benson’s comments. Was the warning real or was Benson up to his coyote-crooked tricks? Was the wily old wolf testing Jack like he’d done so often on the previous Darkwater missions or should these serious-sounding warnings be taken at face value?
It was impossible to know for sure. Jack had spent a fair amount of time with Benson during the Ice-and-Indy mission—enough to get some insight into Benson’s strangely mystical view of the world. Jack and Ice’s head-in-the-stars flower-waving parents had shared some of Benson’s woo-woo beliefs, had tried to pass some of those whimsical teachings down to their kids. Ice had firmly rejected all that nonsense, but Jack had listened with a somewhat open mind.
But that still didn’t help Jack guess where Benson’s mind was right now. The older Darkwater guys had echoed some of the same warnings about how Darkwater was a different beast now. It had been eight years since Ax and Amy defeated Prince Rafiq on that first Darkwater mission, and things had certainly changed. The missions were getting more complex, with more players in the game, the stakes way bigger than just the Darkwater men and women involved. With Senator Robinson on the cusp of becoming the next American President, all bets were off when it came to protecting him and his family. Marcus and Delilah Robinson and the future of the White House were the highest priority, which meant Benson would absolutely make the hard decision to sacrifice a Darkwater man—and maybe a Darkwater woman too—for the bigger picture if it ever came down to it.
In fact Benson had been prepared to do precisely that with Jack’s older brother Ice on the last mission. It had pissed Jack off to the point where he’d considered breaking the old CIA man’s jaw. But Jack was no stranger to how shadowy spooks like Benson and Kaiser worked. Men like that often faced impossible choices, where right and wrong wasn’t so clear, where cozy compassion had to be overruled by cold calculation, where you burned good men and women because America was worth the sacrifice.
Jack poked at his phone as he waited for Paige to come back on the line. He opened up the settings and sighed. Sure enough, the settings to manually control the microphone and camera were grayed out again. Jack wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t expected his little secret to evade Benson’s watchful eyes for too long.
Had Benson been listening in during that flash of protective anger with Bobby, that confrontation which almost derailed the entire mission, almost got Jack kicked out of the wedding when he was so close to getting back on Diego’s slippery trail?
Hell, Jack thought as he glanced at the two black-suited thugs assigned to watch over him and Jill, this whole mission might already be blown. Kay Steffen had seen Jack in the lobby, and Romeo Carmine already had Jack on his radar. Diego himself would have seen Jack outside Senator Robinson’s townhome and almost certainly knew Jack was part of Darkwater. Right now Kay Steffen and Romeo Carmine and Diego Vargas hadn’t connected all the dots and blown what little cover Jack still had, but the clock was ticking.
“Hey, Jack,” came Paige’s breathless voice through the phone. “Sorry, it’s a bit crazy here at Darkwater HQ. Construction is creating a racket, and Benson isn’t fully back all the way in his recovery. He won’t admit it, but Nancy thinks the shockwave-induced concussion from the blast is giving him headaches, making him irritable and hot-tempered.”
Jack frowned, wondering if maybe Benson wasn’t completely himself—which made it even harder to figure out whether to take his warnings at face-value or ignore them completely.
Still, Benson was certainly right about one aspect of Jack’s internal guidance system:
Following his cock hadn’t always led Jack to the best outcome.
He was most certainly compromised in the dick department.
Now Benson’s advice to “use her and then lose her” echoed in Jack’s head as he saw Jill emerge from that distant corridor. Immediately his cock perked up like it was locked-in on her curvy presence, awakened by that intimate glimpse he’d gotten of her sexy slit outlined through her tights before she’d self-consciously covered herself.
Damn, she looks hot as fuck in that black dress, Jack thought as he watched Jill step into the main hall, her heavenly hips highlighted by the corridor lights behind her, her sexy shape mesmerizing like music, intoxicating like alcohol, arousing like an aphrodisiac. He wanted to fuck her, no doubt about it. But it was more than just that, even though it had never been more than just that with any woman in his past.
This was new and different. Just like the burst of possessiveness back in the hotel room had been something new and different. Jealousy had never been an issue before, mostly because Jack simply never gave a damn, was never with a woman long enough to even pretend like they were together. Hell, he’d often had the opposite problem—women getting possessive and jealous to the point where he couldn’t bail on them fast enough. Soon he’d gotten into the habit of cutting women loose as fast as possible after taking what he wanted.
But what happens when I want more than just that and I want it forever, Jack wondered as he watched Jill glance towards him from over by the buffet table and smile shyly before quickly looking away when Nina made her way over and the two women began to talk like they were friends again, like they’d never had a falling out that would have been final as fuck if it were two guys but seemed to suddenly be a non-issue with the two girls.
Jack thought back to what Romeo Carmine had somewhat facetiously declared about women communicating and interacting in ways that men simply weren’t wired to understand. He scanned the room for Romeo, who was nowhere to be seen. Kay Steffen wasn’t around either, which made Jack think he should maybe stroll down some of the corridors to see if he could catch a glimpse of the mystery lawyer who’d once worked for the Federal Government on major drug cases and might now be freelancing for the Carmine Family, perhaps brokering a deal between the Carmines and the Zetas via Diego Vargas.
Jack needed to know more about Kay Steffen—especially about her departure from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Did she leave voluntarily or was she forced out because she was dirty, because her moral compass was about as reliable as Jack’s dirty dick?
“No dirt whatsoever,” came Paige’s voice through the phone as Jack watched Nina and Jill stroll arm-in-arm towards the buffet table. Jill cast another secret glance at Jack, a shy smile flashing across her pretty face as she hurriedly looked away from him and nodded earnestly at something Nina was saying about the platter of Italian prosciutto. “Jill is cleaner than a cartoon princess.”
Jack chuckled at Paige’s little quip. “The cleaner on the outside, the dirtier on the inside,” he whispered without thinking as his cock drew all his attention to Jill leaning forward over the buffet table, showing just enough cleavage to make him uncomfortably stiff. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to say that out loud. Go on, Paige. What else did you pull up on Jill Hennessy,” he said hurriedly, making sure to use Jill’s last name in an attempt to pretend like this was all business, just the job, use her and then lose her, moral compasses, blah fucking blah.
“She’s from the DC area, went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, lived in Philly for a couple of years after graduating, working at the University Alumni Relations Office.” Paige ran through the facts with robotic precision. “Then she moved back to the DC suburbs, perhaps to care for her parents, both of whom died over the next couple of years.”
Jack frowned. His own parents had passed away not long ago. Jack and Ice had both taken early retirement from the Army to care for them during those brutal final years when the cancer took them both within months of each other—no thanks to his flower-child parents refusing to accept any modern pharmaceutical interventions like chemotherapy or even painkillers.
“How did Jill’s folks die?” he asked, trying to keep his tone unaffected and businesslike as Benson’s warnings whispered somewhere in the back of his head, messing with the cool certainty he’d felt that Jill was his, that this time his cock was pointing true north, this time it was different, this time it was real, this time it was . . . love?
Stop it, he told himself angrily as Paige’s reply was drowned out by the thunder of blood in his eardrums at the word love, a word Jack had used with cruel carelessness in the past, sometimes taking savage delight in how women reacted when he tossed it out there with a sort of morbid viciousness, like a part of him thought that if you’re naive enough to believe a guy when he says “I love you” after one night, then having your heart torn to shreds by Jack the Ripper was a learning experience that would help toughen you up for when the next shameless piece-of-shit hound-dog came sniffing around for a taste of sweet coochie.
Except now those memories felt like they belonged to a different person, like something really had changed in Jack, like this really was different because he was different, because she was different.
“You sound different, Jack,” came Paige’s voice through his swirling senses as Jack watched Jill glance at him again then touch her hair and say something to Nina before starting to head back towards him with a plate of something. “Everything all right? Listen, don’t let Benson get to you. He’s been quick to anger the past couple of days after coming back to Darkwater HQ full-time. Nancy says it’s the headaches and also because he’s annoyed with the slow recovery, thinks the physical therapy is a waste of time, refuses to take the prescription painkillers. His shin bone was shattered by shrapnel from the blast, you know. The surgeons put in a titanium plate along with a whole bunch of screws and rods. The pain’s got to be killing him.”
“Benson’s a big boy. He can take it.” Jack smiled as Jill approached with a plate of prosciutto and cheese and artisan crackers that looked too fancy to eat. “Listen, send me whatever else you have so I can look at it later.” He didn’t say Jill’s name. “And tell Benson not to worry about me losing my cool again.”
“Again? When did you lose your cool the first time?” Paige asked.
Jack frowned. “Wasn’t Benson listening in during that Bobby Carmine confrontation out in the parking lot? Thought you gave him access to my phone again.”
“I did, but only a few minutes ago, right before this call. Benson couldn’t have been listening in earlier.” There was concern in Paige’s voice. “Why, what happened with Bobby Carmine?”
“Forget it,” Jack said hurriedly as Jill sat down on the white leather sofa beside him, crossed one black-stockinged leg over the other knee, the thin-shaved prosciutto in her plate a dark blood-red that matched her knitted wool shawl that was sadly covering all her lovely cleavage now. “Too long a story for now. Bottom line is I need to be on my best behavior the rest of the evening. No snooping around the mansion. Maybe tomorrow the heat will be off and I’ll be able to do a little more recon. But right now I’m going to stay in the main hall, keep my eyes open for Kay Steffen or any other guests who pull out phones that could be burners. Can’t do much more here at the Carmine Mansion with a couple of goons watching me.” He thought a moment, his mind perusing the day’s reconnaissance and settling on that hotel-desk package with Kay Steffen’s room number scrawled on the brown paper envelope. Jack lowered his voice. “But maybe I can get something useful done at the Winchester Hotel while Kay Steffen is still here at the party. Listen, can you get Keller or one of the guys to drop off a package with some Darkwater surveillance devices? Leave it with the hotel front desk in a tamper-proof bag. Send me a message when it arrives.”
Paige hesitated, then said something to Keller, who snapped out a quick reply in his typically emotionless voice. Paige was back on a second later. “Keller says Hogan will drop it off. He’s on his way to Philly from New Jersey anyway, just in case you need quick backup. Hogan’s got a few miniature listening devices and a couple of other Darkwater goodies he can package up for you. It’ll be at least an hour, though.” She paused, then spoke quietly, like she’d already figured out what Jack was planning. “Be careful bugging Kay Steffen’s hotel room, Jack. If she’s involved, she’s going to be on alert for anyone who might be on Diego’s trail. The Darkwater tech is CIA-level stuff and should evade most bug-detection scanning devices, but you never know. If Kay Steffen finds a military-grade surveillance device in her room, it might blow your cover.”
“My cover is going to be blown sooner or later anyway,” Jack said grimly. “Diego knows my name, knows what I look like, knows I work for Benson and Darkwater. I doubt he’s going to show up at a crowded wedding and see me, but if Kay Steffen works for Romeo Carmine and she is indeed Diego’s contact, then once everyone meets, all the dots might get connected and my improvised last-minute cover story won’t hold up. Then it’s anyone’s guess what will happen, but it probably won’t be good. Best case I’ll be kicked out and won’t be allowed anywhere near the Carmine Estate again. Worst case . . . well, forget that for now. Either way, I don’t have much time. Need to move now, because maybe tomorrow I’ll have lost my advantage.”
“Roger that,” said Paige quietly. “Good luck, Jack.”
Jack hung up and hastily slid the phone into his suit-jacket inner pocket, making sure to kill the screen so Jill wouldn’t see her own photograph pop up in the stream of data-rich text messages that Paige was already sending through.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said with a teasing grin, glancing at the sliced prosciutto on her plate, which was resting on her black-stockinged thigh. Jill’s dress had ridden up when she sat, and Jack’s roving eye followed the smooth black expanse of satin-covered leg as far as he dared. “That’s some nice-looking meat.”
Jill glanced down at the sliced Italian ham on her plate, then glanced at the leg-revealing hem of her black dress, pulling at it before sighing and raising an eyebrow at Jack. “I thought you were going to be on your best behavior.”
Jack leaned his body back, holding his arms wide in indignant protest. “How is that misbehaving?!” He managed to hold the innocent expression long enough to draw a giggle from Jill. Then he sighed and, with his arms still stretched, sank back into the sofa. He lowered his outstretched arms slowly, making sure his left arm came down snugly over Jill’s shoulder in a movie-theater move he’d perfected during middle school. “Now this, on the other hand, could most certainly be construed as bad behavior,” he whispered with a sly grin as he nestled Jill close to him on their little sofa-nest with a panoramic view of the vast hall crowded with guests. “Learned this move in middle school. You know it, I presume?”
Jill shrugged. “Nobody ever tried the stretch-and-put-your-arm-around-her move on me during middle school,” she said, leaning against his body and biting on a cracker the shape of a snowflake. “My first date was high-school prom.”
Jack frowned, glancing at her face to make sure she wasn’t joking. He wondered if that’s what Paige had meant with the “clean as a cartoon princess” comment. At first the idea that Jill didn’t have a lot of experience calmed his uncharacteristically jealous heart. But then a dreadful splinter of guilt stabbed through him when he remembered Benson’s words, knew that he couldn’t let himself get pulled into something that might compromise the bigger mission.
But damn, he was very much in danger of getting pulled in.
And from the way Jill was leaning against his body and laughing at jokes that had perhaps scandalized her earlier, Jack wondered if she was getting pulled in too.
Pulled in by not just his cocky charm but by his protective posturing. Jack sensed it in the way Jill was snuggled into his big body, her ass angled almost sideways so her soft cushion pressed against his hard hip-bone. Jack’s own body was half-turned to support her as they watched the wedding guests float around them like extras in a surreal movie-set, and they were quite literally joined at the hip right now.
Jack said nothing for a long blissful moment, letting the raw electricity rip through him from the way her body felt against his. His arm was still around her shoulders, his fingertips grazing her bare arm beneath that red wool shawl that she’d knitted herself. Jack could feel goosebumps prick up on Jill’s smooth skin even though it was toasty warm in the hall.
She looked at him now, a flash of something hot streaking across her rosy-red cheeks, like she felt the electricity too, sensed that something was happening here.
Don’t hurt her, you piece of shit, Jack warned himself when he remembered that this woman wasn’t some party-girl who’d been around the block a few times and would be just fine with a man like Jack moving along after a mutually pleasurable night or two together. This woman was different, and if he kept pulling her in, kept pulling himself in . . .
“Were you really planning to sleep with that piece-of-shit Bobby Carmine?” Jack managed to keep the jealousy out of his voice well enough, partly because he’d already sensed that Jill wasn’t going to attempt that crap now, perhaps never would have gone through with it even if she’d been here alone. “Don’t take it personally, but you don’t strike me as the type. Not that there’s anything wrong with being the type to fuck someone else’s fiancé for a good cause . . .”
Jill shifted against his body. “Here we go typecasting again.” She sighed, glanced up at him, blinking away something that was most certainly not indignation, not this time. “No,” she said softly with a flash of embarrassment. “I mean, yes, it was part of my plan, but more like a last resort. I was going to show up here and play it by ear, feel out Nina to see if simply talking to her would work.”
“And? Will it work?” Jack glanced across the big hall at Nina, who was now with Bobby. As Jack watched, the two of them stepped away from the bar, then hurried down a back corridor and disappeared into a room, Nina casting a vaguely guilty look over her shoulder before following Bobby inside and closing the door. “Tell me they’re just going to grab a quickie like a good bride and groom.”
“A quickie hit of whatever the flavor of the month is for Bobby,” said Jill glumly from where her head rested against Jack’s shoulder. “He’s so bad for her, Jack. I know she can get clean, but not with Bobby always pushing her to get high with him. I mean, I know Bobby’s a victim of addiction too, that once you get trapped in that place, it becomes really hard to get out without help. But Nina’s my friend, not Bobby. He needs help too, but my priority is Nina.”
“Pretty sure Bobby Carmine was an asshole before he ever got high,” Jack said. “And he’ll still be an asshole if he ever gets clean.” He swept his gaze across the hall again. Romeo Carmine was at the bar now, holding court at the center of an informal circle of older men and women. “Why hasn’t Uncle Romeo stepped in and sent Bobby to rehab? He called Bobby a junkie earlier, so he obviously knows about his nephew’s drug use.”
Jill shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he even hopes Bobby dies of an overdose. You heard what he said about Bobby not being a real Carmine, right?”
Jack nodded, studying Romeo Carmine’s body language from across the hall. The guy projected authority and power in a way that Jack knew was authentic, no faking, no bullshit. The guy was clearly the alpha wolf in his little den, the king of whatever kingdom the Carmine Family still had left after the legalization of online sports gambling all over America pretty much killed off the illegal bookie trade that was the bread-and-butter of the traditional mafia world.
Which was why so many old mafia families were moving into drugs to make up for the lost business. The ones that didn’t make the move got pushed out by the Families willing to take the risk for the big money that came with drugs like weed at first, then cocaine, now heroin, meth, and Fentanyl—which was turning into an epidemic in America, thanks to dirt-cheap Chinese-made Fentanyl smuggled across the southern border.
And perhaps soon to be sailed into American ports from the Zeta Nation’s strategic location on South America’s northeastern coast.
That was almost certainly the play, Jack thought as he watched Romeo Carmine light a cigarette with a solid gold Zippo. This guy was living large, and if he could afford to set up his sister and her bastard kid in a mansion the size of the White House, Romeo Carmine certainly wasn’t hurting for cash.
Which was puzzling, given the relative obscurity of the Carmine Family. Jack had flipped through what Paige had sent him on Romeo Carmine’s operations. Paige and Nancy had looked into Romeo Carmine’s tax returns, and it had all checked out clean enough that the IRS didn’t have grounds for any serious suspicion. Sure, Nancy had found a slew of shell companies and anonymous LLCs, but all of that was legal for the most part—or at least legal enough that it was common practice for pretty much every wealthy family in the United States. Nancy, being a former Treasury Agent, was still digging into the details, but right now it appeared that Romeo Carmine was legally set up to look like just another wealthy American investor.
Romeo Carmine is not the target, Jack reminded himself now as Romeo’s sharp gaze suddenly flicked towards Jack and Jill. The black-haired gray-eyed alpha wolf waved with his cigarette, flashed a big grin, then raised his glass of Italian Prosecco in a silent toast.
Jack sighed, nodded once to acknowledge Romeo, then patted Jill’s arm and leaned forward to get up. “Come on. Let’s dance.”