Captain's Call of Duty
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Cindy Dees
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Chapter 1
“Next one of you boys who makes a comment about any of my girl parts,” Alexandra Mendez declared, “I’m gonna have to hurt you. Bad.” Sheesh. Wear one lousy skirt to the office—and not even a sexy one at that—and the guys went crazy. Pervs.
One of the several dozen soldiers clustered in the ready room passed behind her and flipped her brunette ponytail. “Hell, Mendez. I didn’t even know you had girl parts.”
The old hurt speared into her, sharp and bright. He didn’t know. None of them knew how much she hated being “one of the guys.” Desperate choices…made young…to save her father…
She scowled at no one in particular. “Anyone see Captain Kelley? I need to talk to him.”
A predictable chorus of cat calls and rude remarks erupted. She was so not sleeping with Jim Kelley. But it didn’t help the rumor mill that he hovered over her as though she was some kind of freaking moron every time anyone in the unit gave her a job to do. Which wasn’t to say she wouldn’t seriously consider sleeping with Jim if he offered. She’d had a massive crush on him for pretty much her whole life.
She rolled her eyes and announced to the room at large, “I swear, you’ll never see it coming. A knife between the ribs, nice and quiet.”
Laughter broke out. “You and what army?” someone called.
She shook her head and didn’t rise to the bait. These Special Forces types thought they were such hot stuff. Nothing and nobody could touch them. Problem was, they were right about that most of the time. Just once, she’d like to give them a taste of their own medicine.
“Captain’s in the colonel’s office,” someone finally relented and volunteered. “Secure fax came in a few minutes ago.”
Ahh. A mission was coming down to the unit. No wonder everyone was hanging around trying to look busy. They were all here to wrangle a spot on whatever team was about to get sent out.
She clenched her jaw. She’d give her right arm and her firstborn child to be sent out in the field just once. Other tech-support types went out to back up the teams all the time. But not her. Never her. Maybe this time—
The colonel’s office door opened and the atmosphere in the room went from jovial to supercharged in about a nanosecond. Captain Jim Kelley stepped out. “Delta Company,” he announced, “you’re up.”
Cheers—from Delta’s guys—and groans from everyone else rose loudly. Over the din, Jim yelled, “Intel briefing in the conference room. Ten minutes.”
Alex pushed through the mass of big, muscular bodies toward Jim. Ten minutes? Crud. She didn’t have much time to make her case. “Captain Kelley!” she called. He made eye contact with her over the shoulders of the non-Delta company commanders as they groused at him and tried to get a piece of the action.
“Mendez, you got a report for me?” Jim barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“My office. Now.”
He was clearly using her as an excuse to escape the sleevetuggers, but she was okay with that. He’d be her captive audience until the ready room cleared out.
He paused in his doorway and gestured for her to precede him inside. As always, her heart stuttered when she had any excuse to get this close to Jim Kelley and his rugged good looks. He was a man’s man…heck, he was a woman’s kind of man, too. Those blue-on-blue eyes of his, the thick, dark hair cropped short, the strong features, direct stare—
Without warning, her shoe heel caught on the doorjamb and her right ankle rolled out from under her. She pitched forward and slammed face first into her boss’s rock-solid chest.
“Hey, Mendez,” someone laughed behind her, “you don’t have to be that obvious about throwing yourself at the guy!” More laughter ensued.
Her cheeks flamed. Whoever said fair-skinned women were the only ones cursed with blushing when they were embarrassed had never met her. Her golden complexion turned beet-red with the best of them, thank you very much. Of course, she never really blushed except when she did something humiliating around Jim Kelley. And that happened a great deal more often than she liked to think about.
“Walk much?” he murmured, setting her back on her feet. “Maybe you should stick to flats, kid.”
Face on fire, she glared in the general direction of his chin and mumbled, “Yeah, whatever.” She was such a dork. She couldn’t even walk past the guy without falling all over herself.
“You need help getting to a chair?” he asked dryly.
She hoped that was a rhetorical question because she had no intention of answering him. She sat down on the cursed chair, and then remembered she was wearing a skirt. She should turn a little to angle her skirt away from him enough that she wasn’t inviting him to look up it.
She swiveled in the seat, but, of course, the danged skirt didn’t swivel with her. The stupid thing wrapped around her thighs so tightly she feared a seam would pop any second. She half rose to twist it back into place. But in trying to be subtle about it, she was a little too subtle and lost her balance. She fell back onto the chair, barely catching enough seat to stay in it and the thing rocked ominously to one side. She managed to right both herself and the chair, but not before Jim smirked openly at her from behind his desk.
“I swear, Al, I’ve never met anyone as clumsy as you in my whole life.”
She almost stuck her tongue out at him, but they weren’t kids any more. And besides, she was only a klutz around him.
The grin faded from his face and his stare went all manly again. “What’s up, Mendez?”
It might be common usage to call people by their last names in the army, but coming from him, it made her feel…ugly. Nerves jangled like broken power lines in her stomach. She asked as lightly as she could muster, “Where’s the team mission to this time?”
“Secretary of State’s going to East Africa to discuss the piracy problem with various leaders over there. We’re providing supplemental security.”
That was a particularly dangerous corner of the world. Delta Company stood a more-than-fair chance of seeing combat on the job. She announced, “I want to go with them.”
“So do I. But that doesn’t mean either of us gets to do it.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been attached to this unit for a full year and I haven’t been out on a single field op.”
“You’ve been on tons of ops,” he retorted.
“Sitting in a van a hundred miles from the deployment and babysitting satellite feeds is not a real op. I want to be where the action is.”
Jim’s expression hardened. “Not happening. You’re a rookie. You’re a female. And your dad would kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
She snapped, “Rookie techs go out in the field with the unit all the time. And you’ve sent a woman into a hot combat zone before—”
“Yeah, and look how that turned out.” His gaze strayed to the wall of photographs of fallen heroes under a banner declaring them never to be forgotten.
“—and as for my dad, I’m an adult and this is my job. He can get over it.”
“You’re inexperienced. I can’t risk my men’s lives with you. When you’ve got more field experience, maybe we’ll talk about it.”
He’d set up a neat catch-22 and snagged her squarely in its logic. She demanded, “And how, exactly, am I supposed to get more field experience if you won’t ever put me out there?”
Exasperation poured off the guy, but she, frankly, didn’t care. She was pretty darned exasperated herself.
“Do you have a report from Chandler’s office for me or not?” Jim asked implacably. He obviously thought the discussion about sending her to Africa was over.
“I’ll go over your head,” she threatened. “I can claim discrimination, you know.”
He leaned forward, palms pressed flat on his desk, and glared at her. “As long as you’re attached to this unit, you work for me. My decision. My call. I say you stay right where you are. It took my superiors a year to get someone into Senator Chandler’s office. And I’m not about to pull you out.”
Frustration and hurt warred for supremacy in her gut. She was really, really good at her job. Nobody was better with high-tech gadgetry than she was. She’d earned a chance to do her job for real in combat. He was just being pig-headed and chauvinistic. “If you don’t think I’m good enough at my job to let me do it, then why don’t you let me go back to my own battalion where my work will be appreciated?”
He momentarily looked stricken, but then he snarled, “If you do something intentional to make me fire you, you won’t be getting any jobs in tech ops again any time soon. I’ll see to it.”
She jumped to her feet and miraculously managed to get vertical without mishap. “How dare you threaten me!”
His jaw muscles worked angrily. “You threatened me first, Mendez, and I don’t take kindly to that.” His gaze speared into her coldly. “You have your orders. I expect you to stay put in Chandler’s office and keep watching for anything out of the ordinary. You’re going nowhere until you get the dirt on the guy. Is that understood?”
She was so furious she didn’t trust herself to speak aloud. She nodded stiffly before pivoting and marching to the door. At least she hoped it looked like marching. Disconcertingly, in the narrow skirt and heels, it felt more like mincing than marching. She gave his door a satisfyingly loud slam on the way out, though. Jerk.
He wanted the dirt on Chet Chandler, did he? Oh, she’d give him dirt. In fact, she knew just how to get it. She glanced at her watch. Almost five o’clock. Senator Chandler had a dinner meeting tonight with some caucus group. And whenever he left the office, the rest of the staff usually checked out pretty soon thereafter. She’d give it a couple of hours and then she’d move in for the kill.
Her idea was risky. Arguably stupid. If she got caught she’d be fired from Chandler’s staff for sure, and then Jim would be really mad at her. Tough. She was going to hack into Chet Chandler’s personal computer. And then in a few days, before next week’s no-notice system sweep by the FBI, she’d unhack the senator’s computer.
It had cost her hundreds of dollars’ worth of beers and countless hours of deadly, dull baseball talk with her “buddy” from the FBI cyber-crime unit to find out when the next sweep of the Congressional offices was scheduled. But it would all be worth it if she could show Jim Kelley just how good she really was at her job.
If he wouldn’t send her out on a real mission to get experience, she’d just create one for herself. Passive surveillance on one Senator Chet Chandler had just shifted into active pursuit mode.
Jim Kelley woke from a dead sleep to the sound of someone pounding on the front door of his stylish Georgetown town house. What time was it anyway? He lifted his head to look blearily at the alarm clock. Two in the morning? He swore under his breath as he rolled out of bed and pulled on sweat pants.
“I’m coming!” he yelled irritably at whoever was trying to bust down his door. He looked through the peephole and spied the distorted figure of a woman. A familiar one he emphatically didn’t want to see right now.
He threw the door open. “C’mon, Mendez. Do we have to get into this again? I said I’m not sending you to Africa. Get over it.”
“May I come in?” she ground out between clenched teeth.
“Are you drunk?”
“No!”
“Are you going to throw another tantrum at me?”
“God, that’s a sexist remark. Let me in. I got something on Chandler.”
Surprised, he stepped back. She brushed by him and he sucked in a sharp breath. She was wearing yoga pants and a muscle shirt that hugged her body quite informatively. It turned out that beneath the military uniforms and dull suits she normally wore, the girl had curves. And beneath the curves she was lean and fit. Who’d have guessed?
She glanced up at him sidelong and déjà vu slammed into him. Arturo used to look at him just like that. Same eyes. Same wry humor. It had been ten years since her older brother, his best friend, had died. Sometimes Alex was so much like Arturo it was spooky. And sometimes it was as though the accident had happened yesterday, the pain and guilt and loss as new and raw as ever.
“Nice place,” Alex blurted.
“Thanks.” Those stretchy pants cupped her derriere just right, and her T-shirt left bare a sexy little strip of golden flesh across her belly. Make that a flat, firm belly. And make that an intensely weird sensation to be noticing it.
“Must be nice not to have to live on army pay in this town.”
Couldn’t resist taking a pot shot at him, could she? Must still be pissed about this afternoon. He glanced around the chic living room and shrugged. It wasn’t his fault his mother was an heiress, or that he’d parlayed the trust fund he’d gotten when he turned eighteen into millions more by investing it wisely.
“It’s two in the morning, Mendez,” he said, hinting not so subtly for her to get to the point of this little visit.
She glared. “I’m well aware of that. I’ve been working all night while you caught up on your beauty sleep.”
Vague surprise registered. What work would keep her up so late? She was a junior flunky—little more than an errand girl—in Chandler’s office. Surely the guy didn’t give her work to do that kept her up this late at night. “Congratulations. You win the workaholic award,” he declared. “So what do you want?”
“Get dressed,” she ordered tersely. “There’s something I need to show you.”
His eyebrows shot up. Since when was she the one giving orders? He was the unit operations officer. She was the lowly support tech. Not to mention, why was she so tense? She’d come to his unit with a reputation for being cool as a cucumber under pressure. That and the girl was a wizard with anything that had wires. She would give James Bond’s tech support guy, Q, a run for his British money. Something must be up. Something big.
Frowning, he stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wear something preppy!” she called after him.
Preppy? What the heck? Off-duty his tastes tended to jeans and cowboy boots. But he was curious enough to dig out a pair of tailored khaki slacks and a dark-green polo shirt. He rooted around in the back of his closet and found a pair of deck shoes, too. He occasionally sailed with friends in Annapolis, and the shoes actually were handy on a boat. In keeping with the preppy thing, he skipped socks and slipped his bare feet into the shoes.
When he came back to the living room, she was perched on the edge of his pearl-gray leather sofa warily eyeing his coffee table and the foot-tall crystal sculpture of a seagull in flight on it. The piece was one of a kind, but he restrained an urge to slide it out of her reach. He snorted at himself. Apparently, it was an ingrained habit not to insult a pretty woman at this time of night.
“What’s going on, Mendez?”
Her dark eyes flashed with something unnamed. He might call it fear if it wasn’t Mendez he was looking at. She didn’t have a fearful bone in her entire body.
She answered, “I found something on Senator Chandler’s computer. I could’ve brought you a copy of the file, but you wouldn’t have believed me if I did. I need you to see it for yourself on his computer, as big as life.”
If he hadn’t known her pretty much his whole life, he’d say she’d lost her marbles. But Alex never had been prone to hysteria and didn’t look as though she was about to start now. She looked…scared.
They stepped out into the sleeping Georgetown street. He glanced around for her piece-of-crap Buick and didn’t spot it. “Where’d you park?” he murmured.
“I took the subway.”
“The Beast on the fritz?”
She snorted at the idea that any car of hers wouldn’t be in perfect working order. Good point. Her old man was the finest mechanic on the planet, and she wasn’t far behind the guy in what she knew about cars.
“I’ll drive,” he announced. Not only did he prefer his zippy little BMW on the Washington streets, but he wanted fast access to the Luger 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in the glove compartment.
Traffic was nonexistent at this hour and they were downtown in a matter of minutes. Shocking. It could take Jim an hour or more to make that drive during rush hour. He even found a parking spot less than a block from the Dirksen Building, where Chandler’s office was.
“How are we planning to get in?” he asked.
“We’re walking in the front door. I told the guard when I left to come get you that I’d be back with someone to help me in a little while. He’s expecting you and will sign you in as a visitor,” she answered disdainfully.
“No spooky ops for you, huh?”
“Hey. If you want to break in, I can take you around back and rewire the service entrance. But it’ll take an hour and then we’ll have to dodge the roaming guards who, contrary to what you see on TV, are very good at their jobs.”
He shrugged. “Why make it hard if we can take the path of least resistance?”
“Like I was saying. The front door.”
Touchy, touchy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her this tense. His curiosity grew even more. What had she found to make her this tight?
“Good evening, Miss Mendez,” a night guard at the front desk said. “I see you convinced your colleague to come in and help you.”
She sighed. “Senator Chandler’s freaking out over some testimony his committee’s hearing tomorrow. He made me dig up a Subject Matter Expert and drag the poor man down here to help me develop a list of questions. This is Captain Kelley, by the way.”
The guard was thorough…and slow. But eventually, the badge with a big red V on it was handed over. Jim clipped it to his collar.
Playing his part, Jim said, “All right, Miss Mendez. Let’s get to work. We don’t have long if this hearing starts at nine.”
She nodded and led him through the metal detectors to an elevator bank. They stepped inside and the door closed behind them. She stared fixedly at the doors as if she was uncomfortable being in a confined space with him.
“What’s going on, Al? I can’t remember the last time I saw you so wired.”
The door opened. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
She followed him down a long hallway to a walnut door with a brass panel on it announcing this to be the office of Chester V. Chandler, the junior senator from Nebraska. She swiped her badge and then keyed a number on the pad below the card reader. A green light beeped and she pushed open the door.
They stepped into a darkened room. She reached past him to turn on the lights. With a quick gasp to announce it, she managed to get her feet tangled up and he had to grab her fast to keep her from falling over. Typical Mendez. He bit back a grin at the sight of her cheeks reddening.
“Lock that door behind you,” she mumbled.
He did so and turned around. Alex had already disappeared into the next room. He followed her in time to see her sit down behind a big mahogany desk and open a laptop computer sitting on it. Interested to see what had her so freaked out, he moved around behind her to look over her shoulder.
It booted up and she rapidly typed in a long password comprised of random letters and numbers.
“Impressive,” he commented. “How long did it take you to hack that?”
“Chet gave me the password months ago.”
“Seriously?” That surprised him. If the guy had secrets to keep, why would he hand out his password to some junior aide?
“Whenever he has computer problems, I’m his go-to girl.” She added dryly, “Turns out I have a bit of a knack with electronics.”
“You’re kidding,” he retorted, matching her sarcasm. By the time she’d hit her teens, it had been clear she’d inherited her dad’s gift for gadgets. He’d never seen a mechanical device of any kind that could best either one of them. Of course, the army had spent years further training her natural talent until she was downright frightening.
“Here it is,” she announced as she clicked on a file icon. As it loaded, she stood up. “Sit down and take a look at this.”
He replaced her in the leather desk chair. An email message popped up on the screen.
The package has been taken. ETA final destination 6:00 a.m. local. Will report when contents have been secured and delivery confirmation sent.
“Mendez, have you lost it? Why do I care about some damned package?”
“Look at the date of the message,” she replied.
“The twentieth of August. Big deal.”
“Wasn’t that the day your sister was kidnapped?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Check out this note.” She leaned over his shoulder to click on another email stored in the same file, and he was startled to register that she smelled good. Like fresh-cut hay, sweet and warm.
Another note popped up.
Delivery confirmation received. Recipient has not responded, however. Request further instructions.
And then a third note.
We need you to lean on HK. Make him understand what will happen if he doesn’t play ball.
Disquiet started to rumble in Jim’s gut. His father, Hank Kelley, had initially kept Lana’s kidnapping secret from the rest of the family. Hank had refused to pay a ransom and had told the kidnappers he would never bend to blackmail. Still, these vague notes didn’t come close to constituting proof that Chet Chandler knew about his sister’s kidnapping.
But then Alex opened one last message. This one contained a video clip and took several seconds to load. A room came into view from the perspective of a camera mounted high in the corner looking down on the space. A woman sat in a chair in the middle of the room. Her ankles and wrists bore metal cuffs secured to the chair. And she was blindfolded. But Jim didn’t have to see her entire face to know it was Lana.
He leaped to his feet. “Sonofa—” he exclaimed. Senator Chet Chandler was involved in his sister’s kidnapping? He’d kill the guy. Or worse, expose him. He’d ruin the bastard. Nobody messed with his little sister and got away with it.
“Copy these files for me,” Jim ground out. “I’ll have them in front of a grand jury first thing in the morning.”
“You can’t,” Alex replied. “We don’t have a warrant to search this computer.”
“Then get one!”
“By the time we get a judge to sign off on one, Chandler would hear about it and erase these before we ever get here.”
“Make me a copy of the damned things anyway,” Jim growled. “Illegally obtained or not, I want the evidence on the slime ball. I will find a way to take him down.”
Without comment, Alex reached into her pocket for a flash drive. She plugged it into the side of the senator’s computer and reached over Jim’s shoulder to strike several keys. “Done.”
“What else has Chandler got on this system?” Jim demanded.
“I don’t—” She broke off as the outer office door beeped. “Get over on the couch,” she whispered. “Write something down on this, fast.” She threw him a yellow legal pad, slammed the screen on the laptop shut, and raced for the outer office door.
He heard her say pleasantly from the other room, “Hey, Parker. Mike said you’d stop by. How’s Marly?”
Impressed, Jim listened to her and the guard chat about the guy’s apparently about-to-have-a-baby wife. Man. Alex really was cool under pressure. The guard poked his head into the senator’s office and Jim looked up from his legal pad casually. He nodded at the guard, who nodded back.
In a few moments, the fellow left and Alex came back into the office. She picked up where they’d left off. “Here’s the thing,” she explained. “If I copy the entire contents of the senator’s hard drive, it’ll only give us a snapshot of what’s on the system this very minute. I’d rather have a way to track what he’s doing from day-to-day.”
“Can you do that?” Jim asked.
“I don’t have the gear with me to do it tonight, but I can get the stuff and plant a transmitter on his motherboard. But I’ll need to set up another computer somewhere nearby to act as the shadow system.”
“Shadow system?”
She nodded. “The second computer will act exactly like the first computer. We’ll see every keystroke the senator makes, every email he receives or sends, every file he opens, saves or deletes. Although, on our system, nothing will actually delete.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re scary, Mendez?”
She smiled wolfishly. “All the time.”
It was a quick matter to wipe down the senator’s desk for fingerprints and turn out the lights. But Jim was surprised when she left the outer office lights on and then led him away from the elevator bank they’d used to come upstairs.
“What’s up?” he murmured under his voice.
“We’re supposed to be pulling an all-nighter working on a set of questions. Unless you want to sit in the office the rest of night, I thought we’d use the back door.”
“But you said it would take an hour to get through its security.”
“From the outside. From inside the building it’s a twominute job to disable the thing. Our only problems are Parker and the cleaning crew. I’ll take point.”
And just like that, she strode off down the hall, leaving him to follow behind. Memories of a dark, rocky valley flashed through his head. Another woman taking point. His misgivings about letting her do it, the rolled eyes of the other guys on the op, his determination to let her prove herself to the unit…
He shook his head and scowled at Alex’s attempt to play toy soldier. She didn’t get it at all. She had no idea how dangerous it was in the field and wasn’t the slightest bit equipped to handle it, physically or emotionally.
She surprised him by hand-signaling a retreat, Special Forces style. His many years of training kicked in and he obeyed, not questioning the order. He turned, raced down the hall they currently were in, and ducked into the next available side hall. She joined him a second later. They froze in the shadowed alcove, shoulder to shoulder, as a janitor rolled a cleaning cart past them. The guy never saw them. A door opened and the cart creaked inside.
Alex glided out to the main hallway, peeked around the corner, and signaled him to proceed. Amusement flared in his gut. She had all the moves, he’d grant her that. But nobody was shooting at them or hunting them with the intent to kill. And that made all the difference between a real field op and this little pretend game of hers. But who was he to puncture her balloon? He dutifully followed her to the service exit and stood lookout while she disabled the door alarm.
She hadn’t lied. In under two minutes they slipped out into the cool Washington night. He unclipped his badge and passed it to her to hand in to the security guard in the morning. They walked around the corner to his car. He drove away slowly enough not to draw any attention to himself; they were just another pair of weary staffers going home after burning the midnight oil.
But when they were safely a few blocks away, Jim pulled the car over and asked, “When can you have the senator’s computer bugged?”
“Noon tomorrow.”
“How so soon?” he demanded.
“I’ll send the senator a virus in an email. It’ll freeze up his system. He’ll panic and call me into his office to fix it. I’ll take apart the computer, wire the transmitter to the motherboard, and then erase the virus. No sweat.”
Ballsy, to plant a bug right under her boss’s nose. Jim nodded tersely. “I want to know everything. How involved is this guy in Lana’s kidnapping? Who’s he working with? Who did those emails come from? Particularly the one that told him to lean on my old man. If Chandler’s just a pawn in this thing, I want to know who the king is.”
“I’m going to need somewhere to set up the shadow computer. Somewhere close. Like an office or an apartment.”
“I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning,” he replied tersely.
“What about a search warrant for Chet’s computer?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. You were right. We don’t want to spook Chandler. I’ll run the paperwork for your bug through military channels. The people who had me put you in Chandler’s office can green-light us. And they won’t leak anything.”
She glanced over at him sharply, but then looked away hastily. Why had she gone skittish on him all of a sudden? “What?” he demanded.
“Us?” she mumbled. “Are you coming on board my op, then?”
“This scumbucket can lead me to Lana’s kidnappers—or he might even be one of them. Hell, yes, I’m in.” He added grimly, “Call me when the bug’s in place.”
She nodded.
“You need a ride to your place?” he offered.
“It’s too far out of your way,” she protested.
“I’m wide awake and too pissed off at Chandler to go back to sleep any time soon.”
“Fine. Then head south on I-395 to the Beltway.”
He followed her directions to a nondescript apartment complex in suburban Virginia that looked like every other apartment complex around it. She reached for her door handle to jump out, and he stopped her with a hand on her left forearm.
“Hey, Al. Thanks. You did good tonight.”
She nodded and then all but fell out of his car. He grinned. That girl was a mess. He drove home thoughtfully. Why on earth was Chet Chandler mixed up in something as dangerous and potentially career-ending as kidnapping?
Jim’s gut said that Chet Chandler’s strings were being pulled by the same person or persons the kidnappers had worked for. His father believed the Raven’s Head Society was behind Lana’s kidnapping. According to Hank, the Ravens included some of the richest, most powerful, most influential people on the planet. But then, according to Hank, the Ravens also had a plan to rule the world in secret.
Who was the unseen player pulling Chet Chandler’s strings? All the signs pointed to there being one. Who in this town had the raw power to force United States senators to dance for them? What had Mendez stumbled into the middle of?
