Now it looked like Ozzie munched on babies for breakfast. He attacked his laptop keyboard as if he had a personal vendetta against the poor thing.

“Go on,” Boss growled. “They’ve been monitoring the online activities on one of our computers and what?”

“And they were wondering if there was anything they could do to assist us in our most recent endeavor regarding Theo Fairchild,” Zoelner finished in a rush, still wearing a slightly bewildered expression.

“Yeah, well, that sounds like a prime example of my cow done up and died so I don’t need your bull,” Mac said. “Why would the CIA give one shit, much less two, about helpin’ us? I don’t trust those people.”

“Yeah,” Zoelner snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. Remember I used to be one of those people.”

Mac made a face. “Then what did you tell her?” And Delilah was curious about that as well. Was it possible the CIA could do something more than the Knights in locating Uncle Theo? Were there…she didn’t know…some sort of secret CIA ways and means?

“I told her we were simply looking for Delilah’s missing uncle,” Zoelner said. “And I told her that unless they had some sort of LoJack on Theodore Fairchild or his old Marine Corps buddy, Charles Sander, there wasn’t much they could do.”

Okay. Apparently the CIA didn’t have any sort of secret ways and means. Shit.

“Good.” Boss nodded. “Sooo,” he drew out the word, “barring any more mysterious telephone calls from the CIA, I think we all have our assignments here. Let’s get to it.”

“Permission to stay behind and figure out how those goddamned spooks are monitoring our Internet activities?” Ozzie said, typing frantically.

“Permission denied,” Boss said, causing Ozzie to glance up from his laptop screen. “You’ve got more important things to do besides getting into a dick-measuring contest with the CIA’s tech boys. You go help find Theo. You can whip it out and prove your superiority to the spooks when you get back.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Boss announced, pushing up from the table.

Delilah stood along with the rest of the group, itching to mount up on Big Red, her beloved custom BKI motorcycle, and hit the road. But a loud squawk followed by a quickly indrawn breath drew her attention over to Ali.

“Uh…folks?” the blonde said, wrinkling her nose and staring down at the floor. “My water just broke.”

Chapter Six

Holy shit, I’m such an idiot.

Chelsea reached up to slide her forefinger and thumb beneath her glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose. What were the odds that her supervisor would ask her to call Dagan on this night? And what were the odds that she’d completely forget just what this night meant?

“I didn’t expect to hear from you,” had been Dagan’s initial salvo. “Not tonight of all nights.” To which, idiot that she was, she’d responded with, “Tonight? What’s so special about tonight?”

The words had been out of her mouth a half second before she glanced at the date on the lower right-hand corner of her laptop screen, a half second too late for her to call them back.

“Oh…” was Dagan’s immediate retort, and there’d been no mistaking the hurt in his voice the moment before all emotion whatsoever disappeared. She could picture him getting completely still in that weird way of his, becoming a living, breathing statue. “So, what do you want then, Agent Duvall?”

Agent Duvall…

He never used to call her that. It’d always been Chelsea, or Chels.

To say it’d all been downhill after that would be the understatement of the century. And, yeah, she’d certainly spend a good deal of time obsessing about how she could have handled it better. But for right now, she had a call to make.

Rubbing her hand down her face, she dialed her supervisor’s number.

“What’d you discover?” Morales demanded before the first ring finished sounding.

“Nothing,” she told him. Nothing other than the fact that I’m an insensitive ass, and Dagan was smart to cut all ties with me. “They’re simply looking for this Theodore Fairchild guy because he’s the uncle of one of their friends. That…uh…that bartender who’s in on their secret?” she explained. “You know the one?”

A grunt was Morales’s only reply. She took it to be an affirmative. Back to being succinct, are we?

“Anyway,” she continued, “apparently the bartender’s uncle was supposed to be visiting a former Marine pal named Charles something or other and has since stopped answering his cell phone. The bartender is worried about him—allegedly going MIA isn’t like the man—and she’s enlisted the Knights to help her locate him.” And unless her boss read more into the situation than she figured was warranted, she quickly added, “But it’s been less than twenty-four hours, so I suspect the two old coots just tied one on for old-time’s sake and—”

“Sonofa-fucking-bitch!” Morales thundered, and Chelsea was so taken aback, the phone slipped from her hand to clatter against the keyboard of her laptop.

“Sir?” she asked once she retrieved the device, her heart’s tempo having gone from a steady thump-thump to a racing bahdahboom-bahdahboom!

“Was it Charles Sander?” Morales demanded.

“Uh…yeah.” She swallowed. “That rings a b—”

“Does the code name BA Repatriate mean anything to you?” he cut her off.

“BA…” She hastily pushed her laptop aside and lunged from her bed, running over to her dresser where some of the alphabetized, highly redacted copies of the files the CIA suspected the rogue CIA agent might have had access to sat in a neat pile. Quickly finding the one she sought, she flipped open the cover.

And although most of the page was blacked out—couldn’t worry that a civilian might stumble into her apartment and see highly classified files—the three words scrawled against the top of the page in big, bold letters said it all.

Her stomach immediately took a header, falling to the floor at her bare feet. “Sir? Do we have any idea who Winterfield might have sold this information to?”

“Unfortunately not,” Morales admitted, fury vibrating in every syllable. “But you can be certain, if he sold this piece of Intel, it was to an organization that isn’t on Uncle Sam’s Christmas list.”

Her mind was racing a million miles a minute. The implication of this could be… But, wait… “This file doesn’t list the locations of the missing BAs. It just gives the names of the five men who worked the mission.”

“All of whom are dead of natural causes except for Charles and Theodore. And apparently, according to the Knights, both of those men have now gone AWOL.”

And the hits just keep on coming! But it was part of Chelsea’s job not to get bogged down in the details. She was expected to be the “big picture” girl. She was expected to keep everyone from jumping to conclusions. “It’s still possible this is all a misunderstanding,” she said. “I mean, we’re not positive which files that prick Winterfield,” she winced at the foul language, “accessed and downloaded. This could still be a case of two old Marine Corps buddies getting overly lubricated and—”

“Which is why I’m sending you in alone, Agent Duvall.”

Okay, huh? He was…sending her in? As in, out into the field? But she wasn’t a field agent! She was a desk-jockey analyst with lines of code instead of listening devices and reams of Intel instead of incendiary devices. “Uh, sir? I’m…I’m not sure I copied you correctly on that last bit.”

“If this is just a red herring,” Morales said, “I don’t want to alert the Knights to the true scope of the problem Winterfield has caused for us. So I’m sending you in to—”

“If you’ll pardon my interrupting, sir. The Knights have proved themselves trustworthy time and again. Heck, they’re the personal goon-squad to the president and the JCs. How much more proof do you need of their reliability?”

“Loose lips sink ships, Agent Duvall. You know that as well as I do.”

Loose lips sink ships, she silently mimicked, rolling her eyes. “Spare me the World War II propaganda, sir,” she harrumphed, disliking where this conversation was leading. Disliking the thought of having to lie straight to Dagan’s face. “I know better than most how important it is to keep our cards close to our vest. But the Knights—”

“You’ll go in,” Morales cut her off, “working under the auspices of your new title and you’ll assess the situation.” And she recognized a red line when she was poised to jump right over it. Her supervisor had made up his mind. Any more argument from her would be flying precariously close to insubordination. “If you think there’s more going on in Illinois than a simple misunderstanding, I’ll have a team ready and waiting to swoop in. If not, then BKI, and the world at large, will remain blessedly unaware of just what a clusterfuck Winterfield created for us.”

“The Knights aren’t the world at large,” she muttered, unable to help herself.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, sir,” she said, biting her tongue so hard she marveled she didn’t taste blood.

“Good then,” Morales said, finality in his tone. “I’ll arrange transport for you immediately.”

The line went dead, and Chelsea pulled the phone away from her ear. Her eyes scanned the file in her hand, and she imagined the warm welcome—not—she’d receive when she just showed up on the Knights’ doorstep.

This is bad, she thought. This is going to be very, very bad…