LITMIR.BIZ

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palms sweating against the steering wheel and his throat tight and sore as though from screaming, John waited until the van was a good distance away before pulling onto the road behind it. It was a slow crawl along the two-lane coastal road to Frederiksted. He hung back as far as he could while still maintaining a visual on the van, biding his time to strike as his anger gathered force.

      They’d played him a fool—Logan, Alicia, ICE. Everyone. In his mind, he could see the email from Logan that morning. Alicia is missing.

      Oh, they played him good. He huffed out an exhale, fighting to get a grip. The van drove slow and steady over the straight stretch of the highway toward the heart of Frederiksted, with John following at a distance.

      John had spent a lot of time in Frederiksted, the second largest town on the island, yet far and away more charming, with its rustic buildings, Dutch history and killer beaches. He used to love the place, but this was the spot where he’d realized, a year or so ago, that his complacency had finally consumed him and he’d lost his taste for life.

      It’d happened on a moonlit rooftop deck across the street from the pier, with a beautiful woman in his arms and four shots of rum in his veins. She’d trailed kisses over his chest, her hands exploring lower, and he remembered looking up at the moon and thinking, I feel nothing. Not drunk, not desire, not even anger at Alicia or Rory. Nothing.

      It’d been enough to scare rationality back into him. That was the night he left St. Croix and sequestered himself with his weapons and computer on a barely inhabited island east of St. Thomas. That was the night he’d started training again—when he’d started preparing for this, his first and most critical mission back in the game.

      And all the while, through his pain and rebirth, Alicia and Logan had been plotting something, preparing to use him.

      Instead of stewing on why it seemed to be his lot in life to be a patsy, he should be asking himself what Logan and Alicia were trying to accomplish with Rory’s escape and John’s pursuit of him. It didn’t make sense. Logan was the ICE recruiter who’d brought John and Rory over from Army Special Forces and had facilitated their training. He didn’t work cases, so what was he doing in the field?

      Come to think of it, maybe an even better question than that was why would Alicia help ICE in the first place? She’d quit the agency more than a year ago, and as far as John could glean at the time, not on the best of terms after they’d put her on disability.

      All John knew was that he was sick and tired of being jerked around and played for a fool. That was going to end right the hell now. Seething inside, he gunned the engine and swerved right, ripping around one corner, then another, onto a side street that ran parallel to the coastal highway on which the van continued to travel. With a whining protest, the hatchback complied. Keeping one eye on the road and his foot pushing the gas pedal to the floor, he reached into his bag and brought out his rifle.

      At a corner where the van was set to pass by as it headed in the direction of the airport, he screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, threw the car into Park and ran up an exterior set of stairs to a rooftop deck, rifle in hand. This plan might ruin his getaway car, but John couldn’t worry about that now. There were plenty of other cars on the island to steal.

      No more than a minute after he flattened to a shooting position, the van came into view.

      His index finger slipped to the trigger. Compared to hitting a buoy, this was going to be a piece of cake. Taking aim, he squeezed the trigger and held it down until the two front tires were shredded.

      The van’s brakes smoked as it jerked into a spinout. John then took aim at the windshield and squeezed off a single round that hit right in the corner as the van turned. The windshield beaded into thousands of white balls of glass, but the plastic safety film covering the glass kept the windshield erect, though no one could possibly see through it.

      Someone in the van fired a shot out of an open window, then another, but John ignored the danger. It was a little hard to squeeze off an accurate shot from a vehicle spinning out of control. He stood, ready to spring. The van slammed into the side of the building adjacent to the one John stood on, nearly taking out the beams holding the second-story balcony up. The airbags exploded as it shuddered to a stop.

      John climbed onto the corner of the ledge and jumped, rifle in one hand and his HK45 in the other. His boots slammed hard onto the hood of the van, but all the fury and adrenaline pounding through him kept pain the furthest from his mind. He kicked the windshield. This time, the glass did shatter, raining down over the airbags.

      He fired shots into the bags, deflating them in seconds, then kicked the female driver and the man in the front passenger seat both in the faces as he took a seat in the empty windshield frame and had a look inside at the handful of operatives aiming guns at him, looking ready to act should he give them the slightest opening.

      He didn’t recognize anyone except Logan and Alicia, but the other three had the physiques and postures of highly trained special agents. Their firearms were top rate and high-powered. Too bad for them because John had an automatic military-grade M4 rifle and an HK45 semiautomatic aimed right back at them—and every person there knew that in the time it would take to get one good shot in him, he could level them all to the ground.

      Boots still on the driver’s and passenger’s necks, he locked his knees, pinning them to their seats. Then he plucked their guns from their hands and threw them over his shoulder. Call it a product of growing up in the South, but he hated using physical force against women—seriously hated it—but it’d been Logan who’d retrained John after the army that in black ops, nothing mattered except getting the job done, including an opponent’s gender.

      Alicia had confirmed Logan’s words for him more than once that it was insulting to women in the field to be treated differently. So he did what he had to without flinching, when he had to, but he didn’t have to like using force against the female driver right now.

      There were two guns still aimed at him—Logan’s and the one held by the man in the very back of the van. John focused one gun on each man, even though there was no way he’d take a chance of hitting Alicia by firing at Logan.

      Alicia’s expression was cold, blank. He let his gaze flicker over her before it landed on Logan. He swallowed, caging the impulse to beat that shadow of a smile off his former friend’s face.

      “Alicia and Logan, you make quite a pair.” He swallowed, correcting the emotion in his tone, replacing it with steel. “I want answers. And I want them now.”

      “Thriller, that was quite an entrance. I wish I could say it’s a shock to see you here,” Logan said, using John’s old code name and a slick tone that made John want to bare his teeth. “Because I was in the room when your superiors gave you explicit instructions to stay out of ICE business and off U.S. soil. Here you are violating both directives.”

      “And yet, you knew exactly what would happen when you contacted me this morning.” And he was downright pissed at himself for being so gullible. Guess he had further to go than he thought toward rebuilding himself as a warrior.

      “Predictability always was a weakness of yours.”

      “No, not predictability. Loyalty. That’s why I’m here.” The woman in the driver’s seat looked as if she might be making plans to counterattack. He unlocked his knee and kicked the underside of her chin hard enough to serve as a warning. “And I’ll tell you, Logan, Alicia, it’s the damnedest thing because two years ago, I never would have classified my loyalty to my fellow soldiers and teammates—the people in the world I should trust most—as a weakness.”

      He met the gaze of the man in the way back of the van, the one with the flat Polynesian nose and the Kimber 9mm trained on him. “That’s ironic, right? Because when I was a soldier, they drilled it into our heads over and over again that loyalty was everything.”

      The man’s eyes narrowed. John winked at him, just to be contrary, before returning his focus to Logan. “This is a good-looking crew you’ve compiled. I guess your superiors have you working in the field now?”

      “Wait...you

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