Tied to the Stern Read online

  “Excuse me?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady and my face unaffected. The only chance I had was to convince Nate that he’d made a mistake. It was a longshot. I knew that. I had to imagine that, to have my real name, Nate and his people must have gotten their hands on some intel the FBI thought was secret. We were in dicey waters here. I just had to hope my dog paddle was strong enough.

  “Are we really going to play this game?” Nate asked, shaking his head and sighing. “I was hoping we could be more mature than that.”

  “You’re the one playing a game, bud,” I answered sternly. “You pull me into this box and start calling me by somebody else’s name. Not to mention the fact that I was almost killed twice in a breakout I was promised would be routine, and then knocked out before I was even flown out here. If anyone needs to do some maturing, it’s you guys.”

  Nate began pacing back and forth in what little room the space offered him. He looked at the floor, and for an instant, I entertained the idea that I might actually be getting through to him.

  That was, until he started laughing again.

  “You know something? I really get a kick out of you, Dillon,” he said, wiping a mock tear from his eye. “You really are committed, aren’t you?”

  “Committed to this job?” I asked, continuing the ruse, even though I was starting to realize he wasn’t going to fall for it. “I thought I was. Now I’m just starting to think I work for a bunch of lunatics.”

  “Al Davidson is currently incarcerated in Florida. At this moment, he’s probably looking out at the Gulf Coast through bars covering his very secured windows. His girlfriend Margo is similarly detained. We got into Tex’s computer before you even got here. It showed me who Al Davidson really is. Once I knew that, finding out who you really were wasn’t an issue,” Nate said. “Don’t worry, though. This isn’t as bad as you think.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I muttered, cursing silently at the idea that we were too late to stop Tex’s files from getting out.. “Al Davidson is standing right in front of you. You just left Margo at the bungalow.”

  “The man standing in front of me is Detective Dillon Storm, though why you’d even take your father’s last name after the way he treated you growing up is a mystery to me. You have a wife named Rebecca, your grandfather is somehow still dying of what has to be the slowest moving terminal cancer in the history of mankind, and your brother is distant, though you might like to know that he’s actually beginning to make something of an effort with his son Isaac.” Nate shook his head. “He’s a handsome kid.”

  My stomach started to do sour somersaults. I knew Natasha and I might be in trouble out of this, but I never dreamed all of this would begin to put my family at home in danger. An anger, as pure and raging as the Gulf during a summer storm, ran through me. I tried my best to tamp it down, and I was pretty successful seeing as how I didn’t break the bastard’s neck right where he stood. Still, my breaths came quicker and more furiously.

  “I’ve told you, I’m not-”

  “Stop!” Nate yelled. “Would you like me to tell you who your 2nd grade teacher was? Would you like me to tell you who you lost your virginity to or how many times you’ve called Boomer Anderson in the last month? Maybe I should start telling you some truths about Natasha Rayne. If my intel is right, she always did serve as something of a mystery to you.” He shook his head. “I know who you are, Dillon, and I know why you’re here. I could make a phone call right here and have any one of the people I just spoke about killed before you could even consider buying a plane ticket home. So, unless you want to return to FLorida a widower, assuming you even return at all, I’d suggest you stop lying to me. It’s really starting to piss me off.”

  My hands, balled into fists, began to quiver with anger and even fear. I had no doubt Nate could do what he threatened to do. The only thing that I didn’t understand was what was stopping him.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. “If you want to kill me, then just do it. I’ll fight you. I’ll fight you like hell, but there’s no need to bring my family into this.”

  “If I wanted you dead, I’d have killed you while you were unconscious,” Nate answered. “This isn’t about that. In fact, it isn’t about you at all.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Sure, I know about your little FBI sting,” Nate said. “I’ve known about it for quite some time now. The thing is, I don’t care.”

  I started circling the man, matching his moments. In seconds, we were boxers in a ring, sizing each other up as we moved.

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” I answered. “You just got finished telling me that you were the Archer’s right hand man, and now you expect me to believe that you don’t care about an operation that could theoretically take him and his entire enterprise down? How stupid do you think I am?”

  “That’s beside the point,” Nate replied. “And things are much more complicated here than you understand. I did have loyalty to the Archer. That loyalty has been spent up now. It’s gone. I didn’t show him Tex’s files. Like I said, my loyalty to him is gone. In it’s place is a need for something else.”

  “You want power?” I asked, wrinkling my nose suspiciously. “That’s not how this works. If the Archer goes down and you try to take advantage of the power vacuum it creates, they’ll come after you, too. It won’t make any difference.”

  “What I want is so much more valuable than power or money,” Nate said. “What I want can’t be replicated or reproduced. And you’re going to help me.”

  “And why would I do that?” I asked. “My cover is already blown. This is over. What good could you possibly do me now?”

  Nate chuckled again. “You make too many assumptions. Do you know why I brought you here, Dillon?”

  “Because you wanted me to suffocate off bleach fumes?” I murmured.

  “I brought you here because, like the bungalow where you and your fellow agent are situated, there’s no surveillance here,” Nate said. “I brought you here so we could talk privately, to do what I said I was going to do, so we could get to know each other.”

  “Seems like you already know a lot about me though,” I answered.

  “That’s true, and you’re about to learn one more thing about me,” Nate replied. “You’re about to learn what it is I want, but first, let me tell you why you should give it to me.” Nate shook his head. “The Archer has no idea that you’re working with the FBI. In fact, he thinks you’re Al Davidson and that your girlfriend is simply your girlfriend. I won’t tell him any differently. I’ll let you do what you need to and bring him to light, whoever the hell he is, and I won’t say a word about it.”

  “You don’t know who the Archer is?” I balked. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Fine it however you’d like,” Nate said. “I might be his right hand man, but apparently even that isn’t enough to get me facetime with the man. We’ve only ever communicated through go-betweens. As far as I can tell that’s all anyone has ever done. The fact that he’s willing to show himself now speaks to the idea that he knows something is off.”

  “Off?” I asked, noting that Nate didn’t seem to know that Terry knew who the Archer was.

  “The man who tried to kill you,” Nate said. “He’s a symptom of a greater problem. The truth is that it’s hard to build loyalty for someone who won’t allow you to actually look at them.”

  “He’s losing his grasp on things,” I concluded.

  “And he’s wanting to take a hands on approach,” Nate said. “Al Davidson has done a good job for me, and he’s been extremely loyal. Do you really think the Archer would go to that lengths to break someone out of jail if he wasn’t important? Even if he had sensitive intel, the Archer would simply have him killed. It’s just easier.”

  “The Archer wants to rebuild off the back of Al Davidson?” I asked, piecing it all together.

  “He wants to use him as an example,” Nate sai
d. “He wants to replace me and people like me-people whose trust and faith in him are waning- with people like Al Davidson. And he’ll rebuild things with a more open forum, facing forward, as they say.” Nate took a beat before speaking again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people didn’t make it out of this party. It’s going to be a massacre.”

  My heart jumped. “My God. He’s going to kill all the people he doesn’t think are loyal to him.”

  “That surprises you?” Nate asked. “He’s a madman. Or, at least, he seems to be.”

  “I have to put a stop to this,” I said. I mean,they might have been drug dealers and overall horrible people, but I wasn’t about to let them die. Not on my watch.

  “And you will,” Nate said. “Assuming you do a little favor for me first. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll be the one to kick off this little parade of death.” He pulled a photo from his pocket and handed it to me. It was of a woman, mid thirties, wearing a sun hat and smiling. “This is Eve Jensen. Two weeks ago, she came here for a vacation to celebrate her birthday. Two days into that vacation, she went missing without a trace. I want you and your fellow agent to find her. If you can do that for me, then I’ll keep your secret. I’ll let you take down the Archer and his entire organization. I won’t even ask for immunity.”

  “Immunity?” I balked. “You’re blackmailing me.”

  “In any event, that’s what it is,” Nate said. “Find her, and I won’t stand in your way.”

  I looked at the picture again, wondering why a man like Nate would be willing to watch everything he helped build,and even his own freedom, burn down for a woman in a picture.

  “Who is she to you?” I asked, looking back up at him.

  “That’s not important,” he snapped. “You’ve heard my demands. I’m not alone in this. So, please don’t think that silencing me will be enough to keep your secret. The second something happens to me, my people go to the Archer.”

  “I wouldn’t kill you,” I said, horrified.

  “Then that makes you a rarity on this island,” he answered. “Find her, Dillon. You have two days.”

  Chapter 18

  “This is ridiculous,” Natasha said, her eyes wide and her nostrils flared as she looked at me from across the living room in the bungalow we were to share. I told her everything Nate told me, all the demands he made and all the information he had, not that there was much of it. To say she wasn’t taking it well was an understatement if I’d ever seen one. “I’d love to know who that bastard thinks he is.”

  “Someone who has us over a barrel,” I answered flatly. Turning, I looked over the window, my eyes focusing on the beach and the people frollicking out in it. The waters were calm today. I envied them that. “How did this happen?” I asked. “I was told all of this was under control. Merriman assured me his intel was right.”

  “It was right. It just seems to be missing a piece,” Natasha muttered. “They didn’t know they’d get into Tex’s files so quickly.”

  “A piece?” I balked, turning to her and shaking my head. “We’ve been made, Nat. This guy knows who we are, he knows what we’re doing, and he’s got everything he needs to make sure we never see home again.” I stepped toward her, my pulse racing and my head spinning as I considered the more terrifying piece of what Nate told me. “He knows where my family is. He probably knows where your family is, assuming you even have one.”

  Natasha blinked hard, and I saw a flash of something like hurt move through her eyes. It was just for a second, and with the next blink, it was gone. Still, it got me to wonder about Natasha’s past in a way I hadn’t before.

  “Whether or not I’ve got a family really doesn’t matter, Stormy,” she said matter-of-factly. “And neither does the fact that this guy knows where yours is. You’re not working with some back alley gang here. This is the FBI. We can keep your family safe.”

  “Really?” I asked. Now my eyes were widening and my nostrils were flaring. “That’s what you’re coming at me with, Nat? You want to tell me about how effective the FBI is at doing anything? If that was true, then we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, would we?” I shook my head, my jaw tightening as the truth of just what kind of mess we’d found ourselves in really solidified in my head.

  “This is a setback, Stormy. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat that for you,” Natasha said. “But it’s not something we can’t maneuver around.” She shook her head, her blonde curls moving in tandem. “We just have to be very careful about how we do it.”

  Stepping back, I took a deep breath and tried to center myself. Though I still didn’t necessarily agree with Natasha’s thinking, I did know that mine wasn’t going to help this situation. I needed to calm down and to think clearly. Nate was probably counting on me panicking. He very likely wanted me to freak out and blindly do what he asked without really looking at the bigger picture. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. While I would do anything in the entire world to keep my family safe, I couldn’t bend to every criminal who came along twirling their mustache and threatening me. I had to be stronger than that. I had to be better.

  “Let’s assume everything Nate told me is the truth,” I said, keeping my voice calm and even. “He knows my name and he seems to know a lot of extremely personal information about me. So, I have no reason to believe the rest of what’s he saying isn’t true.”

  “Except he didn't say too much, did he?” Natasha asked. Her voice was calm too, and in it rested in something like a deductive quality. I had heard it shade her words back in Vero Beach, when we met for the first time after she left me in Chicago. Other than that instance though, I had never heard the woman sound as cerebral and intense as this...until now.

  She shook her head as she continued. “He basically told you there’s trouble inside Archer’s little organization and this event is meant to purge a lot of that trouble from it. Other than that, he refused to tell you what sort of relationship he has with this missing woman or even who the Archer is.”

  “He didn’t refuse to tell me who the Archer is,” I answered. “He claimed he didn’t know.”

  “Which very well might be a pile of dog crap,” Natasha muttered.

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But I don’t think it is. Why would a man who obviously has no interest in assuring the Archer’s business stays afloat keep the secret of who he is?”

  “Maybe he knows that, if we knew, we wouldn’t help him,” Natasha answered. “Maybe he knows that, with the Archer’s identity, we’d be able to finish this mission.”

  “But it isn’t just about the Archer,” I answered. “Most of the big wigs in his criminal organization will be at this event. Even if we knew, without a shadow of a doubt, who the man was, we’d still have to wait until all these scumbags were piled up in the same place. If he knows our identities and mission, he knows that.”

  “Then maybe he thinks he can use it as leverage,” Natasha mused. “Hold the identity in front of us like a carrot on a stick.”

  “Except he didn’t,” I answered. “He didn’t even attempt that, which leads me to believe that-not only is he telling the truth about not knowing who the Archer is- but he assumed we’d know enough about the organization to know that he wouldn’t know.”

  “Lord,” Natasha muttered, slumping against the bed and crossing her arms over her chest. “How careful is this man?”

  “Careful is what keeps the cogs turning,” I replied. “That and blanket threats, it seems.”

  “We’ll keep your family safe,” Natasha repeated. A hint of compassion traced her words as she looked back up at me. “I know how much they mean to you.”

  “We can do this,” I said, swallowing hard and bridging the gap between us. “I’ve just been thinking about it all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” Natasha asked.

  “We were sent here to keep our covers and complete our mission,” I reminded the woman. “Well, it’s safe to say that’s blown, but it doesn’t mean we can’
t get new covers and complete a new mission.”

  “We can’t pretend to be other people, Stormy. They’ve already seen us,” Natasha answered.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I replied. “I’m talking about working both sides of this. I’m a detective. I figure things out. It’s what I do, and you’ve worked for some of the nastiest people in the country.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Natasha groaned.

  “It’s not a criticism. At least, not this time, it isn’t,” I answered. “It’s a skillset, and one we can use. You know how these places work. You know how to get around them, and I know how to solve a mystery. Now, I don’t trust Nate as far as I can throw him. Even if he is telling us the truth, there’s no reason to believe he won’t just throw us under the bus once we give him what he wants. We have to find a way around him.” I shook my head. “And we have to find that girl.”

  “That girl?” Natasha balked. “That’s a matter for the St Thomas police department, if she even exists at all.”

  “She exists,” I said. “I looked her up while I was waiting for you to come back. I didn’t have time to do a deep dive into who she is or what happened to her exactly, but the things Nate told me are correct.”

  “Fine,” Natasha said. “It’s still not our business.”

  “She’s a missing woman, and she looks to be innocent in all of this,” I replied. “That’s my business regardless of where I happen to be.”

  “Laws of jurisdiction would tell you differently, but I guess you’ve always been the roguish sort.” She looked me up and down, scrunching her nose at me. “In a buttoned up way, I suppose. I guess that’s why I always liked you so much.”