LITMIR.BIZ

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southern Louisiana, nowhere near an active military base, he had no idea. Call it a small act of God that had gone his way.

      Not that he was a whole lot happier about throwing a soldier to the lions than he would be about doing it to some random civilian woman.

      But he’d been forced to make the best of an impossible situation.

      Of the four women cowering on the floor in the school’s front office, she’d looked to be by far the youngest and fittest of the bunch. Naming her as the target had been the least awful choice under the circumstances. Which wasn’t saying much.

      Honestly, he’d feared that if he told the others he didn’t see their target in the office, where she normally worked as an assistant principal, they would start shooting kids to get the woman to reveal herself.

      Mahmoud was a cagey bastard and had barely shared any information with any of his men about this fiasco. He’d briefed the cell members only about an anonymous woman they were supposed to find and kidnap.

      Zane hadn’t thought it was enough detail to pass on to his superiors. He’d assumed Mahmoud and his boys would spend days or weeks finding the target, doing surveillance on her, picking the perfect spot to abduct her and then launching an operation to kidnap the woman.

      Zane thought he had plenty of time to find out who the woman was, slip away from the other men and send a message to his superiors about this little operation. It galled him to have been outmaneuvered by a freaking terrorist like this.

      Mahmoud also hadn’t given the team any indication whatsoever that today would be the actual snatch.

      Zane had been nearly as shocked as the teachers and kids of Southdown Elementary School when they’d piled out of the van for real, armed with actual weapons and ammunition.

      Mahmoud had passed around a picture and name of the target, Persephone Black—whoever the hell she was—in the van as they turned into the school parking lot. Zane hadn’t even had time to send an emergency text to his handlers to let them know who the target was and that an attack was imminent before Mahmoud had ordered them out of the van and barged into a flipping elementary school, armed to kill.

      The picture itself had been informative. It was fuzzy and taken from a distance. The woman had been with a man on a crowded street that looked like some place in Europe. She was looking over her shoulder at something, and the shot of her face had been snapped in that moment. For all the world, it looked like a surveillance photo taken by someone following the couple.

      Did that mean Mahmoud and his men were in the US on behalf of some foreign government with an intelligence service of its own? Iran was the obvious candidate, given that they sounded like native Farsi speakers.

      Regardless, they were some sort of black-ops team, and they’d proved this morning that they were not averse to using violence.

      As soon as he’d heard that the real target was out sick, he’d known he had a big problem. Mahmoud and his boys wouldn’t hesitate to shoot up a school full of little kids in retaliation for their victim being absent.

      He felt really bad for this woman he’d inaccurately fingered as the target. He glanced down at her, crumpled on the floor of the van at his feet, and silently vowed to make it up to her somehow.

      One thing Zane hated worse than just about anything else was being forced into a no-win choice. And God knew he’d faced one of those already today. He could either go along with assaulting a school, snatching a woman and scaring the hell out of a bunch of kids...or he could blow his cover, and throw away months’ worth of work gaining Mahmoud’s trust and worming his way inside what Zane’s superiors believed to be a dangerous and violent sleeper cell.

      He’d very nearly gone ahead and turned his weapon on his coconspirators to take them out this morning. The one thing that had stopped him was being in an elementary school. The possibility of an innocent child being hit in the cross fire was the only reason any of these bastards were still alive.

      If he just knew who they were, he would end this farce right now.

      He did know one thing about them. They would never say anything under interrogation. They were all fanatic enough to die before giving up even their names.

      He’d lived and worked with Mahmoud and his fellow psychopaths for months, and he still didn’t have any idea who they worked for or what their ultimate goal was. That was how closemouthed these men were.

      Normally, Zane would pull the plug on an undercover op like this immediately and get the civilian victim out. Hell, he was on the verge of doing that very thing right now.

      The only thing stopping him was that ring in his pocket. If the kidnapped woman was a West Pointer, maybe he could let this thing play out just a bit more—a few minutes or a few hours—and get his answers before he called in the big guns to take these jerks down.

      Thing was, if Mahmoud and company did work for Iran, they would only be replaced by another sleeper cell of trained killers when US authorities took these guys out.

      Hence the urgent need to know who they worked for and what their end goal was. He didn’t for a minute believe that kidnapping some woman from an elementary school was the primary reason this cell had infiltrated the United States.

      They posed some much-greater national security threat. But what?

      Nope, he’d had no choice today. He had to throw this woman he’d never seen before under the bus and maintain his cover a little longer. He hated it, and he would do whatever he had to do to protect her.

      Just a little while, he mentally promised her.

      The unconscious woman beside him moved faintly and then subsided again. Yousef had hit her way too damned hard if she was still out cold. Zane knew from long experience in the field that if she was unconscious more than a few minutes, she would likely be out for the next couple hours.

      Patience, Zane. Now was not the time to make his move to rescue her. He was probably her only chance of survival. But he would get one shot—and no more than one shot—at rescuing her. He had to wait until she was conscious, able to move fast and willing to cooperate with him.

      He hoped to God she understood his choice and one day forgave him for it.

      Did it make him a dreadful human being that he’d forced her into helping him figure out what these terrorists were up to? That he’d potentially sacrificed this woman’s emotional well-being, and maybe her life, to save many more lives down the road?

      Hell, he was already a dreadful human being. As an undercover agent, he deceived people and lied for a living. He’d even done criminal acts in the name of keeping his covers. He drew the line at hurting or killing innocent victims, although he was skirting dangerously close to that line today. Hell, sometimes he wondered if he was even one of the good guys anymore.

      He owed this woman huge. When the time was right, he silently promised her he would find a way to save her from these men.

      But how...and when...he had no idea.

      Scowling, he leaned back beside her slumped body. He propped an elbow casually on his upraised knee. “Anyone following us?” he asked Bijan, the youngest of the crew, who crouched at the dirty rear window of the van.

      “No. We’re clear,” the kid answered.

      Zane had to give these guys credit. They’d run the grab-and-go to perfection, managing their time on scene to the second and getting away moments before the first police car arrived. His certainty that they were military trained—more specifically, Special Forces trained—intensified.

      His concern for the woman intensified, as well. Men like this wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if and when they figured out they had grabbed the wrong person.

      He studied her face. She was pretty. Her hair was dark blond and her skin was smooth and slightly olive complexioned. The combination was unusual and striking. Her legs were lean in her blue jeans, and her shirt was currently

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