Tactical Rescue. Maggie Black K.
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just as well spend the night at a campsite in Timmins. Small and portable, with four wheels, it might not be everyone’s idea of home. But for her, it was perfect. A narrow single bunk lay at the front end of the camper. A tiny kitchenette with a fold-down table filled the center of the space. At the back end, the second bunk had been converted into a long, makeshift desk and video-editing space.
Her eyes rose to the computer monitors at the end of the camper. She’d left them running on the generator. One was broadcasting a feed from the tiny camera mounted inside of her truck. Clipped just inside of the sun visor, she used the tiny, temperamental spy camera to film either herself or the road ahead when her project called for her to narrate something while driving. Right now, it showed the mysterious Sergeant Keats. He plugged a memory stick into her laptop computer. Then he opened his bag on the seat beside him. She crossed the camper to turn off the feed. His phone rang again. He answered.
“Hello?” he said. “Yeah. Sorry we got cut off. Yeah, I’m with her. No, I haven’t told her anything. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a clue.”
A shiver ran down her spine. She shouldn’t be eavesdropping. But he was talking about her and keeping something from her. Why should she trust him?
“Yeah, I’ve got it. I’m using her laptop to check the contents now. But it seems to be automatically downloading onto her machine.” He stuck the phone between his ear and his shoulder, picked up her laptop. “I don’t know. Something weird’s going on. I’ll call back when I’ve got something to report. But yeah, I’ve got Rebecca.” He set the laptop back down. “Don’t worry. I know what I need to do here! I’m not about to let anything get in the way of doing it. Fair enough? I’ll find out what she knows, if she knows anything, and I’ll bring her in.”
She froze.
He was talking like she was his target. No, it was worse than that. She was a Canadian citizen standing on home soil. He wasn’t the police. He didn’t have a warrant or any legal right to question her or take her anywhere. But he was talking as if she was his prisoner.
“No, Rebecca doesn’t know anything!” Zack seemed to be searching his bag for something. His voice sounded almost exasperated. “She’s completely clueless. She’s completely in the dark. She doesn’t even know who I am.”
He reached for the sun visor and tilted the rearview mirror to look behind him, bumping the tiny camera. The camera’s view shifted to the side of the passenger seat. The audio feed cut out entirely. She could barely see a thing inside the cab now and couldn’t hear another word he said.
He waved his hand through the camera’s gaze and suddenly she could see what he’d been searching for.
Her hand rose to her lips.
It was a pair of handcuffs.
* * *
Zack tucked the handcuffs into his belt and his SIG semiautomatic into his holster. Next time he ran into Seth, he’d be ready for him. The two Glocks he’d taken off Seth now lay disassembled in the bottom of his bag. He did not want to know what kind of friends Seth had been making that he managed to get ahold of not only two illegal handguns, but also an IED. Hopefully, he was just a really good thief.
Either way, frustration coursed through Zack’s shoulders. Stonewalling Rebecca like that had been almost physically painful. But she hadn’t seemed to recognize him. He’d been trying to figure out what to say when Seth had opened fire again. He’d sorted that, and then his phone had rung with a call from his own CO, Major Jeff Lyons, field commander of Zack’s special ops unit. And Jeff had opened with the line, Please tell me you’re nowhere near Rebecca Miles right now.
Zack blew out a hard breath. Yes, it was no secret that he had an old Remi base newspaper clipping inside his footlocker with a picture of Rebecca at seventeen and a story about how she’d won the martial arts trophy. Or that he sometimes got a bit of good-natured ribbing from the other guys about having a crush on General Arthur Miles’s stepdaughter whenever the General’s face was on TV. Even though he’d never personally met the man, even back when he and Rebecca were teenagers.
But he’d never imagined that as news of Seth Miles’s treason and crimes spread like wildfire through both official and unofficial channels, someone in his unit would suddenly hope that Zack hadn’t gone to try to talk to Seth’s sister. Or that his own CO would then give him a friendly call just to suggest that as Rebecca was now wanted for police questioning, it might be a good idea that Zack stay away from her.
Too late for that.
“Again, I can’t assess what was on the memory stick.” Zack looked at the laptop. “Whatever it was, it appears to have now leaped from the memory stick to the laptop, and scrubbed the memory stick clean of any trace on the way out. Now the laptop’s completely locked down and appears to be asking for a password in Cyrillic script. So one of the Slavic languages. Don’t think it’s Russian. Could be either another Eastern European or a North Asian language.”
He could think of at least four different organized crime groups his task force had tangled with in various parts of the world that used Cyrillic script in their communications. He’d personally gone into Eastern Europe a few months ago to safely extract a brilliant young woman from the clutches of one such group. And I really hope whatever this is, it’s not connected to that. Because the idea that Seth Miles could’ve just hacked around the government database, looking for something to steal, and found something significant to an active special forces operation was unthinkable.
“Bring it in. Bring Rebecca Miles in. Walk away,” Jeff said. “I’ll report up the chain of command how fortunate we are that one of our top recon guys just happened to stumble upon Seth Miles’s current location and might’ve retrieved what he stole. I’ll try to play it as such great news that hopefully it won’t come back and bite you.”
“I’m on leave,” Zack said. “It was a personal errand. I simply saw her face on the news, and decided to pop by and see how she was. I was hardly expecting to run into Seth.”
“Oh, I know. You don’t need to convince me of anything,” the major said. “This isn’t an order and we’re not officially having this conversation. But as your friend, Zack, my advice is to get as far away from this mess as possible. And fast. The last thing we want is for our whole unit to be grounded from deployment because one of our top guys is being questioned in connection to an open treason investigation. The RCMP are heading the investigation, in conjunction with the Canadian Department of National Defence, and we haven’t been called in. But I can tell you that once word got out a member of our unit had a personal relationship with Seth Miles’s sister, it raised some serious flags as to where the break in security could’ve come from. We’re already worried that we can’t seem to stem the leak of Canadian equipment ending up in the hands of Slavic organized crime. If someone from the RCMP sits down to interview Miss Miles and she so much as mentions your name it won’t look good. Not for you. Not for us. As a friend, I would hate to see this unit function without you. But you know we can’t afford to be pulled from deployment because there’s a shadow hanging over one guy.”
Okay, okay. He got all that. Even though he didn’t like it. Maybe coming to check in on Rebecca had been the wrong call. It had been twenty years since Zack’d let his heart have any say in his decision making, and it had probably been a mistake to start now. But still...
“The Rebecca I knew was a reasonable person with a good heart,” he said. “I know you’ve advised me to keep her in the dark, and I understand why. But I’m not convinced it’ll jeopardize the investigation by telling her who I am and why I’m here. Honestly, she’ll go squirrelly if I’m not straight with her.”
Rebecca’s tenacity could be pretty unrelenting. Considering how hard she’d hammered him for information on the road, he could just imagine how the truck ride to Timmins would go.
“When in doubt,” Jeff said, “imagine explaining every single call you make in the next hour, in a long, drawn-out, extremely uncomfortable tribunal on this whole Seth Miles mess, and answering the question why a solider