Chapter Twelve

Tess readjusted the shopping bags in her hand. “What did you and Eric talk about?”

They’d driven into town again to grab a few more essentials. Not Flemington this time, but Clinton, another charming town twenty minutes away. Again, just to be cautious.

“Guy stuff.” When she stopped walking and grabbed his arm, he rolled his eyes. “What? Will you stop treatin’ me like I’m still eight years old?”

“I’m sorry.” She released his arm and took a calming breath. “Just because you’re eighteen now doesn’t mean I automatically stop worrying about you. You’ll have to learn to accept that. What’s going on with you, Eric, the ATF, and—” She didn’t even want to say his name. “I know you like Eric, but you can’t take him into our confidence. You might inadvertently let something slip.”

“I didn’t. I swear it.” He crossed his heart, the same way he did when he was a little boy. “But I think we should tell him the truth. About everything.”

“I want to,” she began. She really, really did, but keeping things in perspective was paramount. Eric was a sworn federal law enforcement officer and as such had reporting obligations that would override her and Jesse’s fears. “We can’t risk it. If the ATF knew where we came from, let alone the details, they’d get their federal hooks into us and never let go.”

“You’re wrong.” Jesse shook his head. “He’s an okay guy, and he wouldn’t do that to us.”

“I’m sure he is an okay guy.” He was more than okay. Eric was exactly the kind of moral, upstanding influence Jesse needed. Given that her brother had been living with her stepfather most of his life, it was a wonder he hadn’t turned into a carbon copy of the bastard. “But it doesn’t matter. We still need to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

“You sure about that?” Jesse grinned. “If you wanna know the truth, mostly we talked about you.”

“What about me?”

“He likes you.” Jesse puffed up his chest. “As your brother, I’m obligated to look out for you. I told him it was okay to kiss you again, but that if he was only usin’ you to get into your pants, I’d have to kick his ass.”

“Very funny.” She playfully punched his arm. “I’ll try to forget you said that.” If only she could forget the way Eric had kissed her.

The man was more than just an okay kisser. On a scale of one to ten, he rated a solid hundred. The second their lips touched, her libido had gone ballistic, setting her body on fire and making her want to throw caution to the wind, get completely naked with him, and damn the consequences.

“Seriously, Tessie. It’d be okay with me if you guys kissed again. Just do it in private, would ya?”

The look of feigned agony on his face was so real, she laughed. Then he wrapped his arms around his belly. He uttered a tight cry as his legs buckled. She reached for him, but he’d fallen to the sidewalk on his knees, doubled over in pain.

“What’s wrong?” she shouted.

Her brother’s eyes were shut tightly, his face turning bright red. “My stomach…it’s killin’ me.” He began falling onto his side, and she held his shoulders, easing him down so he didn’t crack his head on the sidewalk.

“Jesse, please!” she cried. “What is it?”

Sweat poured down his temples. He didn’t respond, and it scared her to death.

Grabbing her purse, she dug for her phone. Unable to find it, she dumped the contents on the ground.

“Do you need help?” A woman knelt beside them.

“Ambulance,” she mumbled. “I need to call an ambulance!” Finding the phone, she struggled to punch in 9-1-1, but her hands were trembling so much she couldn’t manage it.

“I can do that for you.” The woman held out her hand, and Tess gratefully handed her the phone.

“Jesse, hang in there.” She adjusted her brother’s head so it lay in her lap. Tears leaked from her eyes, and she felt completely helpless. Seeing her baby brother in such agony was unbearable.

This can’t be happening. It was, but it was so surreal.

Vaguely, she heard the woman talking to someone on the phone. Other people gathered around, offering some kind of assistance, but she barely comprehended a word they were saying. Watching Jesse hug himself into a tight ball, his body shuddering, only one thought penetrated her brain.

As quickly as she’d rediscovered her baby brother, she might lose him.

…

Eric sat at his desk, pounding out the rest of his ops plan. Since the FBI was up to their eyeballs in this case as much as the ATF, he wanted Dayne to review it before he emailed it to his RAC—resident agent in charge—for a signature.

Tiger snored away on the dog bed Eric had purchased for the office, but even in sleep, his dog registered the tapping of Eric’s fingers on the laptop by flicking his ears back and forth. Except for him and Tiger, the office was empty. Tomorrow morning, it would be bustling with preparations for the op.

Through the window, he watched Dayne’s SUV pull into the space next to his. A minute later, the door opened and Dayne came into the office, folding his big frame at the empty desk used by visiting agents.

“Where’s Remy?” he asked, referring to Dayne’s big German shepherd.

“Home.” Dayne pulled a laptop from his gear bag and set it on the desk. “She busted her furry butt yesterday searching for a missing toddler. She’s probably in deep doggy REM right about now.”

“Good deal.” There was no better feeling than when your K-9 found a missing child. Not that he’d expect anything less from Remy. Dayne’s K-9 was one of the best trackers in the state. The only dog he’d seen capable of rivaling Remy’s skills was Matt Connors’s CIA K-9, Sheba. “Here’s the draft.” He stapled the freshly printed document, then handed it to Dayne.

While Dayne thumbed through the pages, Eric gave a quick summary.

“I’ve got five teams of two agents each surveilling Jesse to the meet location, plus the two of us. Depending on what goes down, we can either get a search warrant or continue surveillance if we need more probable cause.”

“Sounds good.” Dayne sat back and began reading the plan more thoroughly.

Eric was sure they’d get that probable cause, just as he was certain that sovereign citizens were behind it. Not knowing exactly which sovereign citizens they were dealing with, he could accept. For now. That answer would come soon enough, but considering they were about to engage over a dozen federal agents for a controlled delivery of bomb-making material, followed by a 24/7 surveillance, he didn’t like having any unanswered questions.

Since losing his friends to sovereigns in Alabama, he’d always taken extra steps to protect every other agent he’d worked with. Sometimes, to the point of excess, because he couldn’t go through that again.

Refocusing on his computer, he entered Tess’s name into Accurint. A moment later, the screen flashed with the words “no records found.” He leaned back in his chair. This wasn’t the first time he hadn’t got a hit on a person’s database search, but it was rare.

“Got something?” Dayne asked from across the desk.

“Don’t know.” He didn’t, not really. Next, he ran her name through NLETS for a Massachusetts driver license. Two seconds later, the screen filled with information. A DL had been issued to her two years ago. He recognized the address, but it wasn’t a residence. It’s the Dog Park Café. There could very well be a legitimate reason she’d reported the café as her home address. Maybe she didn’t have a permanent address at the time she applied for the license but was working at the DPC at the time.

Next, he ran the tag on her Toyota Camry, and shit. The address associated with the Camry was also the café, but the registration was issued six months after the driver license, which meant she’d lied to the DMV. He knew this for a fact because no one actually lived at the DPC, not even Andi and Nick. And, after closing up the restaurant at night, he’d seen Tess drive off.

It could mean absolutely nothing. Or it could mean she was trying to hide where she lived. But why, and from whom?

Aside from these two documents, there was nothing on file for her. Anywhere. Including an actual address or credit history. He shoved his fingers through his hair. It was as if he were missing a critical piece of the McTavish puzzle.

“How are things with your temporary tenants?” Dayne raised his dark brows, as if he knew precisely what Eric had been doing on the computer. They worked together so much that the man probably did know him so freaking well. Dayne wasn’t much for baring his own soul, but when it came to others, he didn’t miss a goddamn thing.

“Fine.” He tried keeping his tone bland.

“Uh-huh.” The look on his friend’s face was one of skepticism, telling him Dayne wasn’t buying his shit.

He logged out of the system, thinking his queries hadn’t told him squat. At least, any squat that was conclusive. “It’s not so bad.”

Dayne snorted.

“What?” he shot back.

“I’m just surprised.”

“At?”

Dayne grinned like an idiot. “Buddy, I love you like my own brother, but you’re so rigid. You shocked the shit out of me when you offered to put Tess and her brother up at your house. I thought you were possessed.”

Yeah, that’s what he’d thought, too. He opened his mouth to shoot back an f-you or two, biting it back at the last second. When it came to his home privacy, let alone the peace and quiet he craved, there was no denying he was as rigid as a lead pipe. But in the two days since Tess and Jesse had been living with him, she’d already pushed him way outside his comfort zone, and he’d survived just fine.

There were flowers in his kitchen for the first time ever, and he’d done yoga for Christ’s sake. Or, at least, he’d tried doing yoga. Once Tess had fallen on top of him, he’d forgotten all about it. The only thing he’d wanted had been to kiss her, and he would have kept right on kissing her if Jesse hadn’t interrupted.

The entire drive to the office, his mind had been filled with how incredible her soft lips were and how perfectly they’d fit to his. When their tongues tangled, the heat exploding between them was hotter than a bonfire. Halfway through the drive, honking from the car behind him was the only thing telling him he’d been holding up traffic at a green light.

“Eric?” Man, he needed to get his head out of his ass. “Miller?” Dayne began laughing, something his stoic friend rarely did. “When you were talking with Tess at the Marshal’s office, I couldn’t tell if it was an interrogation or a first date.”

“Fuck you.”

“Love you, too, man.”

Eric swore again, inwardly this time. Dayne knew him as well as he knew himself. He tossed a stapled draft of his ops plan in Dayne’s direction. “Let’s go over this.”

Dayne sobered, clearing his throat. “How do you want to play it?”

“Jesse McTavish’s pickup is at the lab, along with the drums. We’ll have the tech guys rig the truck with audiovisual monitors and transmitters so we can record and see and hear everything in real time. Since we don’t know whether the drums will be transferred to another truck and moved again, or remain at the meet location, we’ll have to remain fluid.”

Dayne nodded. “If we see other drums at the meet location—enough to bust the reporting limit for transfers—we could take this thing down on the spot.”

“Agreed,” Eric said. “But if we don’t see any other drums, we’ll have to maintain surveillance on them 24/7. If they move, we follow. Whoever we get on video we can run through facial recognition.”

“I’ll run the tags on any vehicles.”

A message popped up on his screen indicating he had a new email. It was the one he’d been waiting for from the ATF laboratory. He opened the report attached to the email, then scrolled quickly to the end game—the analysis of the drum contents. Even though he’d fully expected it, seeing the words made his heart beat faster.

Ammonium nitrate.

He printed out two copies of the report, handing one to Dayne. “It’s official. All four drums contain ammonium nitrate.”

Eric set his copy on his desk, tapping his fingers on the figures on the last page—the weight of each drum. The lab had also photographed the labels on the outside of the drums, and as he looked at all four images, he began tapping faster. This was bad. Shitastrophy bad.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dayne looked up.

“Probably.” Eric’s fingers stilled. “None of the drums are full. That’s why they were bouncing around in the back of Jesse’s pickup. The contents of each drum weigh in at less than twenty-five pounds, for a total combined weight of about eighty-five pounds.”

“A bomb that size would be big enough to make a loud noise.” Dayne’s frown deepened. “Why bother trucking such a small amount all the way from Alabama to New Jersey?”

“Exactly.” He nodded. “Alabama’s a thousand miles away. They could easily buy that much here, or in Pennsylvania, New York, or even Delaware, without going to all that trouble.”

His friend massaged his jaw for a few seconds. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Again, he looked at the photos in the report. “The labels indicate the drums were obtained from four different companies. I think they’re piecemealing. Stockpiling small quantities of ammonium nitrate from different locations to fly under the radar.”

He was well versed on the Department of Homeland Security’s Ammonium Nitrate Security Program regs.

“All transactions involving the sale or transfer of ammonium nitrate greater than twenty-five pounds require a DHS registration number,” he continued, “and a record of the transaction produced at the point of sale. But as long as each purchase was less than twenty-five pounds, they could buy separate and unlimited amounts of AN from anywhere in the country and without a single report being filed. We have no way of knowing how much they’ve already accumulated.”

“And,” Dayne added, “it also means we have no idea how big this bomb will be when they’re done making it.”

A chilled moment of silence passed between them. The Oklahoma City bomber had used 4800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and blown up an entire federal building. This was only eighty-five pounds. What if it was only the beginning?

Damn. He could only imagine the devastation.

He opened up a new email window to send another message up the ATF chain of command. “Since they’re collecting the AN here, the target is probably somewhere in New Jersey or a neighboring state. To be on the safe side, we need to go out with a nationwide alert to all agencies, federal, state, and local.” Given the sovereign citizen propensity to attack government employees, he’d also add a warning specific to all government-occupied buildings.

“I’ll send a message to my SAC. He’ll notify the JTTF.” Dayne pulled a laptop from his gear bag.

Now that the substance in the drums had been officially identified, the Joint Terrorist Task Force would issue warnings around the country, including those for large sales of AN. But ammonium nitrate was only one ingredient of a bomb.

He logged into NCIC. “I’ll do an offline search for reports of stolen explosives.”

“What about booster fuel?” Dayne asked, referring to another component of a typical ammonium nitrate bomb.

“Diesel fuel they could buy anywhere, but they’d probably want to supplement that with nitro-methane for more power. That won’t be so easy to obtain.” He stopped typing, staring at the screen as yet another thought occurred to him.

Pieces of a scary-as-shit puzzle were rapidly falling into place—like a damned good reason why sovereigns would choose rural Hunterdon County as their location to create a bomb. “Anyone can purchase very small amounts of nitro-methane at a hobby shop. It’s used as fuel for model airplanes. Getting your hands on anything greater than sixteen ounces would definitely attract attention from the police or fire department.”

Dayne leaned forward. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking the best place to get the volume they’d want is from a racetrack fuel supplier, and there’s a reason this is all happening in the vicinity of Hunterdon County.”

“Still not seeing the connection,” Dayne said. “We don’t have a racetrack in this area.”

“No, but we used to. It closed about a year ago. They’re still breaking down the grandstand.” He should have picked up on it sooner. Dayne wasn’t from the Flemington area, but Eric lived fifteen minutes away. “The Flemington Speedway. It was a small track, and they didn’t race funny cars that use nitro-methane, but everyone there would have connections in the racing industry.”

Dayne’s eyes widened in understanding. “All it would take is one connection at the track to get them what they need. We could start poking around the racetrack, see if anyone’s been approached.”

“We could do that.” He pulled up a screen of offline theft reports. “But then we run the risk of tipping them off, and they might not show for the delivery tomorrow.”

“Tough call.”

He nodded. It went against his proactive nature not to grill every single employee at the track then run their history for connections to the local sovereign citizen movement. Once word got out that the feds were snooping around, they’d only find another supplier. “I’m inclined to wait until after tomorrow and see how things shake out. I can have the duty agent keep checking for offline reports of stolen fuel.”

“Copy that.”

Refocusing on his search, Eric printed out one of the offline reports. About two weeks ago, a mining company in Montana had reported a small amount of missing Domox, a water-gel explosive, and Trimadet, a non-electric delay detonator. From experience, he knew that occasionally, even highly regulated items such as explosives were miscounted and the mistake usually discovered and corrected shortly thereafter. But the timing was too coincidental, and he couldn’t discount the possibility that it was connected to what was going on in New Jersey. He reached for his desk phone, about to call the local PD for details.

His cell rang and he tugged it from the clip on his belt. It was Tess. She’d texted him earlier with her number, and he’d entered her contact info in his phone. Seeing her name pop up sent a jolt of electricity through him, and he smiled. If she was calling to convince him to try another tofu dish, he’d have to put an end to her culinary delusions. He answered the call, but before he could even say hello, he heard sounds that spiked a warning in his blood—a doctor being paged to the ER and Tess’s soft sobs.

He stiffened, his instincts on high alert. “What’s wrong?”

“Eric.” His name came out on a sob.

Dayne caught his gaze, giving him a questioning look.

“It’s Jesse,” she cried. “He’s in the hospital. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He just collapsed on the sidewalk.”

Her panic screamed through the phone, but so did her emotional pain. He felt it just as surely as if her pain were his, too.

“Are you at Hunterdon County Medical Center?” That was the closest hospital to his house.

“Y-yes.” She sniffled, a sound that ripped straight through his heart. “In the emergency room. Oh god.”

“Honey, stay calm.” He snapped his laptop shut and stuffed it in his gear bag, only vaguely registering that he’d just called her an endearment—honey—that he’d never used on any woman in his entire life. “I’m on my way.”

He ended the call then gathered up his draft ops plan and the lab report, hastily cramming those into his bag next to the laptop.

“What’s going on?” Dayne’s green eyes narrowed.

“Jesse McTavish collapsed. He’s in the ER at Hunterdon.” He zipped up his bag and handed the Montana theft report to Dayne. “Can you follow up on this?”

“Ten-four.” Dayne took the report. “Keep me posted.”

“Will do.” He headed for the door. “Tiger, hier.”

Tiger bolted upright with a snort, his legs scrambling as he got to his feet. A second later, he was trotting out the door ahead of Eric.

Jesse hadn’t been feeling well that morning, but he’d given no indication something was really wrong. As if the kid didn’t have enough to deal with, now this.

After loading Tiger into the Interceptor, he sped out of the parking lot, tires screeching on the pavement. As soon as he merged onto I-80, he cued up his RAC’s number to convey the bad news.

Not only did he truly care what happened to Jesse, but the op for tomorrow might very well have just gone to total shit.