Hunt Them Down(38)

For some reason, Hunt believed him.

“But you don’t think she’ll hold her end of the bargain.”

“Do you?”

Hunt shook his head. There was a chance she would, but it would be stupid to bet his daughter’s life on it.

“There’s more,” added Anna, looking at her brother.

The bulging vein in Tony’s neck was now throbbing at a frantic rate. “If someone doesn’t deliver my severed head to her within the next forty-five hours, our daughters will be burned alive.”

Our. Daughters. Will. Be. Burned. Alive.

Tony’s words were like a sledgehammer, beating him down with every syllable. Hunt’s mind whirled. Images flicked at him with tantalizing clarity. He could see Leila, savagely beaten, with a tire full of gasoline around her neck. Only once before had he felt anything like the intensity of the fury now erupting deep inside his gut.

Gaza, 2007. The kidnapping of Cole Egan.

Hunt remembered vividly the events that followed his friend’s abduction. McMaster had been right: to find his friend, he had left carnage in his wake. In fact, he had committed some truly atrocious acts in order to reach Cole before the Hamas terrorists could kill him. In order to make peace with his past, with the things he had done, he’d sworn to himself he would never kill or torture another person in cold blood again.

The promise.

This was why he had left the military and joined a federal law enforcement agency. With the DEA, the rules of engagement were better defined. It was also his hope that conducting antidrug operations in the United States would be less chaotic than hunting down terrorists overseas. On the contrary, the moral and ethical dilemmas he faced almost every day as a DEA special agent were often tougher than the challenges he had faced fighting terrorists abroad.

The delicate touch of Anna’s hand on his knee brought him back to the present.

“We need your help, Pierce, and I think you need ours.”

He slowly lifted his head to look at her. She must have seen something in his expression because her eyes widened, and she froze. A frown appeared, drawing her eyebrows together. She removed her hand from his knee and sat straighter.

“What?” he asked her.

He saw her shiver. “There’s darkness in you that scares me.”

Hunt felt it too, and he embraced it. Whatever the cost, he would find Leila and Sophia.

“Sometimes you need darkness to see the light,” he said, knowing the next forty hours would be pitch-black.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Stafford, Virginia

Pierce Hunt. Text message.

Simon Carter recognized the ringtone; he would have ignored it otherwise. He opened his eyes and blinked at the naked woman sleeping beside him. With the exception of the few smile lines around her eyes, his wife hadn’t changed at all since he had first fallen in love with her fifteen years ago. A glimmer of moonlight streamed in through a couple of broken blinds, highlighting the side of her face and the top of her shoulder. He kissed her lightly on her forehead and got out of bed without disturbing her. He picked up his phone from the charging station and went down to the kitchen. He foraged through the fridge and found a pot of leftover chicken à la king. He prepared himself a plate and put it in the microwave. While it heated, he poured a tall glass of ice water and gulped half of it down.

The last time Hunt had contacted him was to let him know he had been transferred to the Miami field division in Weston. Carter was happy for him. Hunt was a good man, well respected by his peers. True, his decisions in the field were highly intuitive, often very rash, and his complete lack of political correctness offended the higher-ups, but no one could argue about the results. Hunt always led from the front, and Carter had learned many important lessons from him. If Carter had become a good team leader, it was mainly due to Hunt’s mentoring.

Carter opened Hunt’s text message and saw it contained a multitude of attachments, all of them fingerprints. Hunt’s message was short, direct, and to the point.

Carter read the text message twice. The ambush in Miami had made national news. The US marshals had lost good men in the attack, but there had been no mention of Hunt’s involvement. His friend was in deep shit and needed his help. Hunt had left instructions on how to contact him.

The microwave beeped, but Carter ignored it. He wasn’t hungry anymore.

“It’s getting close to midnight, baby,” his wife said from behind him. “Are you coming up?”

She was three-quarters of the way down the stairs. There was nothing he wanted more than to cuddle up with her under a pile of blankets, but Hunt’s message meant he needed to head back to the office.

“I’m sorry, Emma; I need to go,” he said, brandishing his phone.

Her worry was apparent. “Be careful, okay?” She had been a close friend of Scott Miller’s wife, and Scott’s death during the Chicago drug raid had shaken her, made her aware of just how dangerous Carter’s job was.

“Always,” he said, scooping her up in his arms.

Emma wrapped her arms around his neck and let him cradle her against his chest. His lips trailed across her hair and down to her neck.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll be back in no time.”



Though Carter drove with his habitual care, his mind was preoccupied. Rumors that Tom Hauer—the current acting administrator of the DEA—wanted to shut down the RRT program and replace it with regional special response teams—SRTs—bothered him. If that were to happen, each major domestic office would be required to maintain its own operational SRT, and chances were he’d be asked to relocate. He and Emma were happy in Stafford. She had found a job at one of the local schools, and they were less than an hour’s drive from her parents. Carter loved his in-laws—both former CIA case officers—and he knew how much his wife cherished her time with them. If his team were disbanded, where would the DEA send him? Since he was the main breadwinner, he and his family wouldn’t have any choice but to go where the DEA wanted him to go.