Close To Danger (Westen #4)(64)
Wes’s arm tightened around her, his heartbeat still steady beneath her. His body, strong and solid, just like him.
“Bad things can happen in the daylight, too,” he said after a few minutes.
The last mission. That had to be what he was talking about.
Slowly she slid her arm around his torso until she was hugging him in the loosest of hugs and waited. When he didn’t continue, she took a breath, and just like with a scared or hesitant witness, she gently prodded.
“What happened on that last mission, Wes?”
And there was the question.
Wes had been asked that very thing in the debriefing once he and Bulldog were finally safe on U.S. soil. What had happened? Or as his commander with the Agency had put it, What the fuck happened, Strong?
Straight up and with no flowery description, he’d told the suits in the room with him the facts of the mission. They hadn’t really wanted to know more than him admitting he’d fucked up. Not only had he lost the asset, but out of the six men on his team, only he and Bulldog had made it out of that jungle. It hadn’t taken them long to cut him loose. All of forty-eight hours after he was discharged from the hospital.
What he’d told them wasn’t what happened.
“The mission was compromised before my team even set foot in Venezuela. It was to be a simple extraction. A businessman on holiday was taken hostage. At first it was believed to be a simple express kidnapping.”
“Express kidnapping?” Chloe asked. Her breath whispering across his skin eased some of the anger humming just beneath the surface.
“Tourists are kidnapped by gangs, driven to ATM’s around cities, forced to withdraw money until they max out their cash and use their credit cards to buy high-ticket items. Usually, if they’re in a rental car, their vehicle is stolen, leaving them stranded in a city where they know no one.”
“How frightening.”
“It is, but it’s usually over quickly.”
“Are people hurt?”
“If they resist or try to fight, they’re beaten into submission. Rarely are they killed. Usually they’re only detained for a few hours.” He hesitated.
“What was different this time?” she asked.
Damn, the woman was smart.
“The guy panicked. Still acting the CEO, he flashed his Black Amex card around and figured they wouldn’t hurt him if he told them how much money he had and how valuable he’d be as a hostage. Fucking idiot,” he ground out. Still angry at the guy for putting them all in danger and subsequently getting his men killed. “So instead of a few hours of inconvenience and some embarrassment he bought himself days tramping through the jungle, which is where my team came in.”
“I thought you worked for the government?”
“Technically, I still do.” He hurried on before she could question that statement. “The CEO happened to be a contractor for a technical company—one that developed both physical intelligence equipment and the security programs that ran them.”
“So, you were sent in to retrieve him before they sold him and all his knowledge off to someone who would use the information to attack our country?”
“Give the woman a prize,” he said, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head.
“What went wrong?”
Everything.
The fire in the fireplace sparked and the flames moved, just as they had that night.
“It was a simple mission, should’ve taken us no more than a day or two. Fly into Columbia, meet a CIA agent with contacts in the area. Cross the border with the agent’s tracker. Find the CEO, secure him, and get back to the landing zone for a taxi home.”
“Taxi being a helicopter?”
“Fastest way home.” Should’ve been as easy as crossing the street for his team. They’d done it dozens of times before, in all kinds of terrains, all kinds of scenarios.
Chloe shifted, lifting slightly and adjusting her body so she could rest her arm on his chest, her chin on her arm, those soulful brown eyes studying him. “What went wrong?” she repeated.
He reached over to toy with some of the soft spikes of her hair. “Everything. I should’ve known something was up when we got off the plane. Our agency contact seemed nervous. He was a young guy I found out later was on his first in-country assignment. The guide seemed to be more in charge than he did. But my team’s job was go get the hostage, not train a field agent. So, we followed the pair into the jungle. Timing was right. Took us less than a day to find the camp. We spread out, isolating the small hut on one side where a guard stood. Obvious place for the hostage to be kept.”
“Was he?”
“Yes, only he wasn’t alive. My guess is they killed him within hours of us arriving.”
“Why? He wasn’t any good to them dead.”
“They’d gotten all the money they could from his account before the government put a freeze on his assets. If they were hoping to sell him off to the highest bidder, something must’ve gone wrong with the deal.”
“How did they know you were coming?”
“The guide.”
“He sold you out?”
He clenched his jaw tight for a moment, fighting the anger that shot through him. “The group worked often as security for the drug cartels up in the mountains and in the jungle. Our guide was a go-between for them and the cartels’ leadership. Apparently, they didn’t like our little mission into their territories. So we, along with our CIA contact were to die down there, too.”