LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      It started as a hot tub party.

      It quickly devolved into a hot tub orgy.

      Rebel McQueen was supposed to provide security for a dozen members of the US women’s softball delegation in the midst of it, but she’d last seen her charges disappearing into a mass of gorgeous naked bodies that was the Norwegian men’s water polo team.

      Acute regret speared into her.

      Where did she go wrong with her life that she was a lousy security guard while these other young women of her approximate age and physical ability were partying with possibly the hottest guys on the planet?

      The “hot tub” was actually a giant swimming pool in the Olympic Village that had been heated to spa temperatures for the duration of the games. Easily two hundred athletes were in the pool now, engaging in every manner and combination of sexual play.

      She got it. They were young, athletic, far from home, and had precompetition adrenaline galore before the games opened tomorrow night. But she was responsible for those softball players, and she couldn’t spot a single one of them right now. All she could make out in the churning water were writhing limbs and the occasional flash of a pale face. The rest of it could just as easily have been a feeding frenzy of sharks.

      The Medusas—the highly classified, all-female, Special Forces team she was part of—were an ultra-under-the-radar part of the American security contingent at these games.

      Tonight, the American security staff was undermanned, and she’d volunteered to help out. But she’d had no idea she was in for this! The Medusas had been briefed that the Olympic Village would be a wild party scene, but nothing in her Special Forces training had prepared her for a frat party with twenty thousand wild children determined to play. Hard.

      Play. Not a word that had meaning in her world. Duty. Honor. Country. Those words, immortalized by General Douglas MacArthur, were the ones she lived by.

      Oh joy. Word of the orgy must be spreading, for more athletes started arriving at the pool in a steady stream, stripping naked and jumping in.

      It was arguably the best-looking group of naked people Rebel had ever seen, at any rate. Idly, she played a game of “guess the sport based on body type.”

      There went a lean, no-fat marathon runner.

      Disproportionately massive torso and skinny legs? A rower.

      Big gut, wreathed in muscle—weight lifter.

      A crowd began to form around the edges of the pool. Whether they were purely spectators to the debauchery or waiting for an inch of open water to join in, she couldn’t tell. But they elbowed Rebel back from the pool with their muscular, jostling bodies.

      Swearing under her breath, she let herself be propelled back. Her orders were to be inconspicuous. Instead of resisting, she occupied herself with watching the watchers. Which was why she happened to glimpse a familiar face in the crowd. A face that made her lurch. A face that emphatically should not be here.

      The face of a terrorist.

      Surely she’d made a mistake. She moved quickly around the pool, trying to keep an eye on the man, who looked shockingly like Mahmoud Akhtar. Mahmoud led a terror cell that kidnapped her teammate, Piper Ford, last year.

      Piper’s fiancé was an undercover CIA officer who’d helped her escape from Mahmoud, and who’d captured photographs of the entire cell of Iranian operatives. Rebel had looked at an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mahmoud posted in the Medusas’ ready room every day for the past eight months. She knew his face.

      And she’d just seen it here in Sydney, Australia.

      Next to Mahmoud, a second man stood up from where he’d been squatting by the edge of the pool. Yousef Kamali. Mahmoud’s second-in-command and also a glossy photo on her team’s personal Most Wanted wall.

      She wove through the throng of people to the spot where Mahmoud and Yousef had been standing

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