part0088

T he plane jostled hard enough to jerk Savage awake. He shook his head to clear it, looked around, and wiped a touch of drool from his lips. While he had said that having the comforts of traveling first class wasn’t important, he had to admit it did factor in. He’d slept in all kinds of places, some of which weren’t necessarily where people usually slept. When you had spent most of the day lugging about fifty pounds of equipment and weapons up and over dunes, you would be surprised by where you could manage to fall asleep. After a while, you simply adjusted to it. Your body adapted quickly to the kinds of stress it was put through and by now, he’d reached a point where he was able to basically sleep on demand. Most of the time, anyway, unless his brain had engaged high gear and wouldn’t decelerate.

That said, the comfortable plush seats in the private jet were a definite improvement to being strapped into a cramped seat in a Goliath aircraft. Dinner had been served immediately after takeoff, and the stewardess had directed him to the bar should he need anything else and told him to let her know if there was anything he needed from her. That was essentially all he remembered of the overnight flight—or seven-hour flight, anyway, he noted when he checked his watch.

When the lingering traces of sleep slowly faded, he registered that the fasten seatbelt sign was already on. The jolt he had felt was most likely from the plane starting its descent.

Another thing you learned from spending days, weeks, and sometimes up to months out in dangerous territories in the world was to be a light sleeper. It hadn’t paid off in this case, though, he acknowledged wryly. He groaned, rolled his shoulders, and took a second to stretch before he strapped himself into the seat and adjusted it into the upright position.

The stewardess entered the passenger area and paused before she turned back the way she had come. He assumed she had intended to alert him that they were starting their descent. His mind began to turn and he leaned back into his seat and stared through the window while the plane thrust through the low cloud.

It really did pay to be rich these days, Savage thought with a small smirk. Or have rich friends, anyway. He had heard the story of how Monroe and Anderson had become tangled in this mess only once and he honestly didn’t remember much of it. All he needed to know was that they were in the Zoo together and decided they needed to change Pegasus from the inside to make it an organization or company that wasn’t the epitome of evil in the world, or something like that. Things had merely spiraled from that point forward.

He didn’t even want to think about what kind of shit the pair of them and their friends in the Zoo would have been in had he not been brought on. Considering that Anderson’s home had been attacked with his wife and kid inside, there were some things even a man like him didn’t want to have to consider.

The thought was immediately pushed aside, and he focused on his current situation rather than the nightmare that hovered below the surface of his calm. He gripped the arms of his seat as they touched down. As soon as he was cleared to do so, he disembarked and breathed in the icy evening air before he shouldered his duffle bag. The stewardess told him she hoped he enjoyed his flight. He’d left her a generous tip—generous by his standards, anyway. He wasn’t sure how much millionaires tipped after they had a pleasant cross-country flight.

Either way, it was the best he could do at this point. He moved away from the plane and realized when he looked around that he had lost a couple of hours on the trip to Seattle. It had been late before the plane had been prepped for the trip, and yet according to his clock, only three and a half hours had passed, more or less. The airport they had landed at was a private strip outside the city of Seattle and he wondered if he would have to call a taxi or an Uber or something. Then he saw the Audi parked out near where the plane taxied into a hangar.

Signed rental papers had been left on top of it, with a message from Anderson that he should deliver the car to the company when he was finished with it and keep his refueling receipts.

The man had apparently missed the fact that he’d rented an electric car. Savage snatched the keys up from where they had been placed on the roof. The details of the vehicle were included with the rental papers and confirmed that the car was delivered with a full battery. On the top of the vehicle, solar panels were fitted to keep recharging it throughout the day, but a small gas-powered engine was stored in the back, just in case. It was designed to be a fully electric car.

It wasn’t his favorite kind of car, but he wouldn’t turn his nose up at one that was better than the two he still technically owned. They were both in fake names, of course, which was the next best thing to a rental for anonymity. He heaved the duffel bag into the trunk and slid into the driver’s seat. When he reached the exit of the small airport, the GPS activated and directed him into the city, although there weren’t any actual destinations marked on the map.

“Did I wake you?” he asked and turned the car onto a long, winding street that descended from the elevated location the airport was on. The silence of the electric motor was a little unnerving, but he simply needed to get used to it. He gave himself fifteen minutes to adjust to the new lack of noise.

“I needed sleep, and since everyone is either out of reach or resting themselves, I thought it was as good a time as any.” The hacker chuckled. “I managed about five hours, which is more than I get most nights. I’ll find coffee in a while too.”

“Yeah, Jer one, Control five hundred,” Anja replied with a trace of a sting in her voice. “It’s good to see you starting to cut into my lead there. I thought I was playing on my own for a while.”

“Aw, don’t feel bad.” He smirked and guided the car onto a more-heavily populated road. It looked like the city of Seattle had begun to come alive with the morning rush hour. He knew the city well enough that he didn’t need the GPS to order him around. It had been a while—a few years—but you didn’t forget a city like this one.

“About a year and a half.” Savage shook his head. He remembered having to be recalled to this city. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Off time was supposed to be spent with your loved ones, or lacking that, getting yourself wasted in preparation for resuming your tour. He had been pulled back to Seattle almost against his will.

“I grew up around here, but both of my folks are gone,” he said and decided that she was ready to hear the truth about what he was doing there. “We weren’t really close with the rest of my extended family. I think I have a couple of uncles and aunts living somewhere in Texas, but I never really knew them, never really cared to, and the feeling was mutual. By the time I was sixteen, it was only me and Jules. We’d been together since our sophomore year in high school.

“We married a couple of years later when she got pregnant but we separated after Abby was born. Things were…complicated. She was anti-military and had been supportive of my time with the Army despite that, but with a kid, she became a little more insistent, to the point where I decided against my second tour and came back home instead. I found a job and felt a little resentful about it too, I guess.”

She didn’t say anything. He didn’t know if she was actually listening or if she had turned his connection off until he was done sharing, but the floodgates had opened. She’d asked to know about it before and he now obliged. It was up to her whether she wanted to know or not.

“Anyway, things got tense, and she told me if I wanted to go, I should go.” Savage pressed forward and pretended he was merely talking to himself to make the whole process easier. “And I did. I picked up another tour and was out of the country again less than a month later. When I went home for some time off, I asked if she wanted a divorce, and she said no. I think she wanted to maintain the marriage at least until Abby turned eighteen. When I got back again a year later, though, she called and said she’d changed her mind and she did actually want a divorce.”

“Shit,” Anja interjected, which confirmed that he wasn’t merely talking to himself. The conversation helped to distract him from rising irritation when traffic slowed to a crawl through a construction zone.

“Yeah, she met a lawyer, actually,” Savage continued. “Andy…something. I forget his last name now. Anyway, they started dating, he proposed, and she accepted. She was still technically married to me, so they needed me back there to sign papers before they could get the marriage plans underway.”

He fell silent as the memories surfaced, still a little raw around the edges. Rather than dwell on it, he focused his attention to stare at the cars ahead which moved as best they could in the usual stop and go pattern that defined heavy traffic. He removed his hands from the wheel and turned on the auto-drive features that had been developed for traffic jams exactly like this one. It would keep him moving steadily along the road until he needed to take control of the car again once they could increase speed.

“I wanted to hate him so much when I heard about it,” he said softly into the silence. “I needed him to be an asshole—a rebound who Jules would realize wasn’t right for her so she’d come back to me. But he’s awesome, and that’s the truth. He’s a great lawyer and has his own practice and everything. He’s successful, treats Jules like a queen, and Abby adores him. The man was a fucking boy scout. He did the triathlon in college and he still runs a marathon every year.”

“What, do you think I’ll let a man live in the same house as my baby girl without making sure I know every dirty little detail of his life?” Savage asked with a scowl and thumped an open palm on the steering wheel. “My first CO was out and in the FBI at the time, and he agreed to run a couple of background checks on the man when I asked.”

“It was pot possession,” he grumbled in response. “Nothing serious or life-threatening that might rear its head later on and be a problem they need my help with. I think I would have preferred it if he was merely some boring-ass choirboy. But no. Not only is he perfect Mr. Lawyer, but he also has a trace of bad boy—a hint of a dark side, enough to make him exciting.”

“Only if it’s on the way,” he replied. “If I have to choose between saving Jules and Abigail and saving Andy, I’ll leave him behind without a second thought or a hint of regret.”

“I have a feeling you already knew who we were coming here for.” He glanced into the rearview mirror at the seemingly endless stream of cars. “That you might have looked into my personal life anyway despite knowing I wanted to keep my family’s privacy intact.”

“It’s adorable that you think there’s any privacy in this world of ours.” Anja cackled and almost sounded like a Bond villain. “But I like to let people think that basically, everything about them isn’t readily available online these days. It makes them feel a little more comfortable around me.”

“Right.” He knew he should have felt annoyed—or even insulted—that she hadn’t respected his wishes, but he should have known that telling her not to look into something was like telling a kid not to touch the giant chocolate egg on the counter and then leaving kid and egg alone for a couple of hours. While he could hope she would have stopped herself from accessing the information, he really shouldn’t have expected it.

“Anyway,” Savage said when he decided to simply move past it. “We’re—and by we, I mean me, of course—here to make sure Jules and Abby are safe and sound. I don’t really care what happens to Andy. He can die or get kidnapped for all I care.”

He smirked when his mind went back to the last time he’d had a conversation like this—in the steak place, sitting across from Coleman. Her words at the time sprung to his mind at this point too.

“Well, the jury’s still out on that,” he murmured under his breath, knowing she could still hear him. “But that’s the official story and I’ll stick with it.”

“Okay, big guy.” Her voice held an edge of amusement. “How do you want to do this? I have the street address where the ex and the kid are living with the lawyer. I have the addresses where the ex works, where the lawyer works, and the school where the kid is.”

“It looks like she has classes all morning,” Anja said. “But she’s been given a pass from classes later—she’s earned it due to good grades—and will be at soccer practice all afternoon.”

“Okay.” He rolled his neck to ease the tension creeping in. He didn’t know how he would take this. If having a discussion with Coleman had been difficult, he wasn’t sure what to expect from himself in this situation. While there were feelings involved when it came to Coleman, this was his baby girl. The apple of his eye. The single person in the world who would turn him from mildly violent to over-the-top genocidal.

“I should probably do a couple of sweeps during the morning,” Savage said as a plan came together in his head. “I can check the house and make sure there’s nothing there for me to deal with. Look up Jules’ workplace and maybe even Andy’s practice too. With that done, I can circle back to Abby’s school and make sure she’s okay. And once I’ve established that everyone’s alive and well, I can mount a defense for them over the next few days while we decide how to deal with Banks and make him leave them alone. If he’s actually targeted them, of course.”

“It’s nice to hear you all unreasonably optimistic about how well today will go.” The Russian chuckled. “But that sounds like a plan, Daddy-O. I’ll patch your day into your car’s GPS with all the addresses.”