“And we now have two little weak-kneed security guards entering. They’ll make mincemeat out of them.”
It took only minutes.
“Yep, they’re both down,” Micah sighed. “They’re alive, though.”
“They’re aware of the cameras in the hall outside the room,” Jordan stated. “There’s too great a chance of being identified.”
“They’re headed downstairs.”
Jordan and his men moved.
Exiting the back of the van, covert mode intact, Jordan, Nik, Micah, and Noah moved to the appropriate, nondescript vehicles waiting in the parking lot.
Sliding into the Ford sedan, Jordan watched from above the rim of his dark sunglasses as the two men slipped from the same exit Tehya had used and moved quickly to the waiting SUV.
The assassins looked a little worse for wear, but satisfied. They thought they had achieved their objective. His would-be killers believed he was dead, and Tehya defended only by his men.
Evidently they weren’t convinced of the danger posed by the men they would be facing. To this point, Jordan and his men had been playing, sitting back and letting Tehya’s enemies hang themselves. Now, he thought he might help them just a bit with the rope.
The bastards had terrified her, and they had been aware of it. They had known what it would do to her. The plan would have been to take her while she was shell-shocked, while the realization of Jordan’s death was still fresh in her mind.
She would have been more controllable and much easier to intimidate.
That would have been the plan. Unfortunately for them, it wouldn’t have worked so easily for them. He knew Tehya; and even more, he knew Tehya under pressure. His death would have destroyed her, but later. That shock they wanted so desperately would have been what had saved her life, and would have ended theirs.
As the SUV pulled from the parking lot, Jordan turned the receiver on in the sedan and smiled at the movement of the little dot indicating the tracker they had activated. The other assassin’s bug hadn’t yet been activated. He was the backup. The safeguard. Just in case.
There was a reason he had plans A, B, C, and D, with E, F, and G just in case. Sometimes, there were just too many bases to cover. And Jordan liked having all the angles worked out.
Work out the angles and you don’t just protect yourself
and your men, but you also protect the woman you had never been able to get out of your head and your heart.
He’d met Tehya eight years before, the night she had killed her father. From the moment he’d looked into those shattered, emerald green eyes, he’d wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and protect her from the world.
Unfortunately, it was too late to protect her by then. The world had already scarred her. Sorrel had already taught her to react first and grieve later.
And she would have grieved for him, he knew.
His men would have surrounded her long enough to attempt to convince her to hide, because it was what he wanted. She wouldn’t have hid.
As he and Micah traded positions and the other men moved in behind the SUV in another vehicle, Jordan concentrated on the area around them. He made certain no one was following them as they followed their attempted assassins.
They traded places several more times before Jordan pulled into a parking lot across from a storage rental facility housed in an old factory. The units, Jordan knew, were temperature controlled, roomy, and free of those pesky surveillance cameras that turned most criminals off.
Slipping from the car, he joined Micah and Nik, and Noah gave them a quick nod toward the warehouse. Using the available delivery vans, trucks, and occasional stacks of varied covered prepared shipments for cover, they moved into the warehouse following the beacon the tracker was giving off.
Minutes later, they eased in as close as possible, coming in together, weapons drawn as they moved in to watch the meeting.
The three men were waiting outside one of the rental rooms, heads down, leaning against the wall as shadows moved in the well-lit unit they were guarding.
They were talking, their voices too low to hear, and the satisfied demeanors of earlier had been dropped. They looked nervous and if he wasn’t mistaken, quite possibly scared as well.
He’d read the dossiers on these men, and he wouldn’t have believed anything could make them nervous, let alone have them looking like three teenagers preparing to face a disciplinarian.
As they waited silently, the shadows in the rental unit began to slow, and long minutes later another man stepped into view.
Gregor Ascarti.