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Chapter Two

Mission Recovery Specialist Jason Grant had successfully shadowed Agent DeRossi to Denver, Colorado. On her tail for several days, he knew the hotel she’d been staying in wasn’t within government per diem limits and, thanks to the GPS tag he’d put on her rental, he’d learned she liked to shop in ritzy boutiques.

For as long as he’d been tracking her, he hadn’t recognized any of her contacts. If Deputy Director Holt hadn’t sent him out here personally, he might think this was a wild goose chase. As it was, he was starting to question the rumor claiming she was here on a Mission Recovery witch hunt. Didn’t look that way to him.

Her return to the airport in a flight attendant uniform piqued his curiosity. He hoped whoever she was here to meet appreciated her effort. She looked pretty damned hot.

He’d followed her through the terminal, but if she’d made contact with anyone, it had been too subtle for him to catch. As a well-trained and experienced member of Mission Recovery, getting something by him was highly unlikely and the thought that she’d managed it made him nervous. And definitely ticked him off.

Beyond the windows of the airport, the storm rolled down from the mountains like an avalanche, blanketing the city with snow and ice. He didn’t care for the idea of being stuck in an airport with thousands of stranded travelers, so it was a relief when DeRossi finally started to move.

Until he lost her.

Her curly blond wig was gone. The bright red blazer of the airline she’d falsely represented was absent from the crowd of travelers milling about. He cursed his arrogance. His boss had warned him she was top of the game, but Jason hadn’t been concerned. The woman had been riding a desk for more than three years. However sharp she had once been, she couldn’t be on the top of her game these days.

His gaze continued to roam the crowd. She hadn’t been that far ahead of him. He tucked himself into a place at the end of the escalators where he could keep an eye on the restrooms as well as the main path to baggage claim.

He gave it three long minutes before he admitted the truth. She’d gotten away. Because she’d spotted him or because she’d completed whatever she’d been sent to do here?

He dialed Deputy Director Holt but the call went straight to voice mail. Probably for the best. Reporting a screw-up like losing the target was way, way low on the list of his favorite activities.

Other than telling him to watch her and report her activities, no one had really briefed him on the real reason why DeRossi was in Colorado at the same time as Director Casey. Having her in the airport at the time of his arrival had to be more than coincidence, but so far as he’d been able to observe she hadn’t made contact.

He’d never met a field agent who liked oversight divisions—whether it was the Internal Affairs divisions of police departments or the covert equivalent of the Initiative committee.

An airport security cart whizzed by and Jason decided it was time to get creative. If he could get into the security office, maybe he’d get lucky and spot her on one of the many video feeds they monitored.

He considered fabricating an elaborate story and settled on a lower-risk version of the truth. Following the cart to the nearest security team office, he walked in, credentials ready.

“Can I help you?”

Jason flipped open the wallet with a badge and ID card as he surveyed the entire space. The security office setup was familiar. One uniformed person at the desk, a couple of others in offices that overlooked the small reception area. He glanced at the one closed door and assumed that was where all the real information was hidden.

“Good afternoon.” He smiled, throwing in a little charm since the uniform was female. “I’m Agent Grant. I was tailing a suspect and she managed to ditch me at baggage claim,” he said with just the right blend of irritation and embarrassment. It was a skill he’d picked up during his time in law enforcement.

“I need a look at your cameras, see if I can spot her. Consider it a professional courtesy,” he added. “I really don’t want to have to hear about this mistake for the rest of my life, if I can avoid it.”

She smiled just a little and made a call to her immediate superior. Feeling the eyes on him, he let his shoulders slump as he tucked his badge away, playing the part of the guy who was having a bad day.

It worked. She hung up the phone and walked him over to the closed door.

Two men in airport security uniforms watched the cycling views of the area from the escalators to the exit doors on the wide bank of monitors. Reading the labels under each, he soon had a feel for each area covered by the closed-circuit cameras.

Public areas, employee-only access and the walkways and streets just outside the terminal. Where was she? She wasn’t loitering in baggage claim. Not in the rental car line either.

“Who are you looking for?”

“Flight attendant. Female. Blonde. In a red blazer.” And with less than a minute a good operative could have changed any one of those distinguishing features. He’d given her three minutes plus the time it had taken him to get in here.

DeRossi was an oversight agent. Hadn’t pushed anything more dangerous than paper in a couple of years. He wanted to bang his head against the wall for underestimating her. No one working any aspect of covert ops got hired or moved up the food chain by accident.

Still. She’d shown no sign of spotting him tailing her and it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to believe her field skills would be rusty.

“Hot?” one of the guards asked.

“Aren’t they all?” Grant mused.

“Sure,” the guard admitted with a smirk. “But a few stand out. Let me cue this for you.”

Jason waited the few seconds, let the guard zoom in. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said, stopping just shy of a fist pump. DeRossi strolled down an employee access hall with a businessman at her side. There was a brief conversation, then they moved again, out of the camera’s view. “Where did she go?”

“Got her,” the other guard said. “She went into a cab with the dude.”

Jason nearly choked when he recognized the man in the picture. Director Casey was no one’s “dude.” It wasn’t his job to know what DeRossi wanted with the head of his division, but of all the possibilities that popped into his head, none of them were good. The director was here for a family event and with no ties to the bride or groom, DeRossi wasn’t on the guest list.

Hell. Had he just allowed the director to be kidnapped?

Feeling more than a little grim, Jason watched the cab pull away from the curb. Without being asked, the pair of guards brought up visuals from the other cameras stationed around the airport until the cab went completely out of their range.

“The cab is in the lane for the long-term parking lots.”

That didn’t make sense to him. The car DeRossi drove to the airport was parked in the short-term garage. He’d parked on the other end of the same level.

“Don’t airline employees have their own lot?”

“Sure,” the first guard said. “If they’re based here, most of the crews take a shuttle in from home. But if she’s with him...” The guard let that thought trail off, but they all knew what he was implying. A sexual rendezvous wasn’t something Jason wanted to think about either.

“Can you cue up a view of those lots?”

The second guard shook his head. “Closed circuit on a different system through another security contract. Sorry.”

“No problem.” He had a general direction at any rate and the storm would slow her down. He hoped. A situation like this was all about the legwork and though she had a head start, he wasn’t out of the game.

His phone rang and the screen showed Deputy Director Holt’s somber face. Jason answered, braced to admit his momentary setback.

“I just received a new alert of a potential problem child in your area. I’m sending you the picture.”

Problem child in this context could mean anything from an informant to an assassin. “Am I being reassigned?” He wanted to ask more questions, but wouldn’t risk it in front of the guards.

“No. Watch for the paths to cross.”

“If they do?”

“Document, but do not intervene.”

Whoa. That set off all of his internal alarms. “Yes, sir.”

“Any news for me?”

He thought of DeRossi and Casey in the cab and out of his reach. “Not at this time.”

“You lost her,” Holt said with an irritable sigh.

“Not exactly.” It wasn’t a lie. He still had a general direction. “This freak storm is slowing everything down.”

“I need to know what she’s after. ASAP.”

“Yes, sir,” Jason replied. “I’m on it.”

Ending the call, he turned the phone back and forth in his hands, waiting for the picture to come through. When it did he gave a low whistle. A woman with fiery red hair and a grin as satisfied as a cat with a mouthful of canary filled his screen. He vaguely wondered what she’d been doing when the photographer had captured the candid shot. He had the disquieting sense that he’d seen her before. Though he couldn’t place her immediately, he knew it would come to him.

Shaking off the errant thought, he considered how to fulfill his orders. Regrettably, he didn’t have much choice but to go back to square one: DeRossi’s hotel room. He’d searched yesterday and turned up nothing useful. Not even that uniform.

Damn. He’d been played by an expert whose day job of riding a desk was apparently no indication of what she was capable of. The fact that she and his boss were headed by cab to long-term parking when Jason had followed her to the short-term garage initially meant she had a backup vehicle. The logical conclusion was she had a secondary hotel room, too.

Damn.

“Can you access the cameras from the gate areas?” Jason provided the terminal number where he’d found DeRossi this morning. He hoped going back to where she’d been would give him a clue about where she was headed with the director.

Reviewing the video footage from the cameras near the gates did nothing but affirm he hadn’t missed a drop or exchange. She might have done a little shopping in recent days, but everything now pointed to her coming here solely to grab Director Casey.

Thanking the security team, he exited the office and headed for the parking garage. Holt expected a new player to intersect with either DeRossi, Casey or both of them. He had to pick up the trail.

Casey had hired Jason into Mission Recovery. Jason wasn’t sure he could sit back and do nothing but document any danger aimed at the director. As a Specialist, his job was to salvage missions that had gone beyond the hope of regular recovery. Holt knew that, knew the philosophy of the Specialists. Did the deputy director really expect Jason to go against the order to stay out of whatever was going on here? Was he relying on the Specialist philosophy of running toward danger rather than away from it?

Jason struggled to make sense of the limited data he had, to organize that data into the context of the orders Holt had handed down.

The Initiative jumped on internal investigations like kids jumped on candy after the piñata breaks. DeRossi had carte blanche to do anything in the name of her official inquiry. And apparently not even Holt knew precisely what she was after. Did that include giving someone a chance to take out the director? Jason’s gut clinched.

None of it lined up.

What could be so bad that execution was the best answer?

The better question was did anyone, including the deputy director, really believe Jason would stand back and let that happen?

Frustrated, he turned up the collar on his suit coat, not nearly enough protection against the blizzard. Staring out into the storm, he guessed there were two inches of snow on the ground already and about ten more on the way. He had to pick a direction and get moving.

Jason remembered Director Casey’s answer when he asked why he’d been selected to join the Specialists. “You have the best instincts I’ve seen in a long time.”

His instincts were on high alert but he just had to figure out where to aim them.

Casey was here for a wedding. Jason turned in the general direction of the mountain resort hosting the event. Somewhere behind the blizzard was a chalet with a fatherless bride counting on her uncle to walk her down the aisle in just over forty-eight hours. Jason felt his temper rising at the idea that he was supposed to observe and document if the director was threatened.

But anger would only blur the instincts.

Evidence to the contrary, in this weather, he couldn’t see DeRossi going anywhere other than her hotel room to wait out the storm, no matter what her primary plans had been. If DeRossi was out to make a statement, the wedding party was full of covert operatives from Specialists to Colby Agency investigators with plenty of history and exemplary service records. There could be any number of reasons for her to intercept Casey here and now.

A cold wind blew through the parking garage and he took it in, clearing his head. His decision made, he turned back to his car, just as a flash of orange caught his peripheral vision. He spun around, watching an oily black cloud beat back the storm in one small spot among the endless fields of parked cars.

Car bomb.

Something entirely too much like fear detonated in his gut.

Busy airport or not, he just couldn’t believe the explosion was a coincidence. Jason raced to see if losing DeRossi had meant the death of his director.