Page 1 of Jacking Jill

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SOMEWHERE IN MARYLAND, USA.

Jack Wagner gunned the motorcycle’s throttle all the way after taking a hard turn and almost spinning off the county road to avoid an ugly pothole. The black-and-gold Kawasaki Ninja 1000cc crotch-rocket he’d bought with his most recent Darkwater paycheck was a sleek creature of pure masculine energy between his legs, and Jack grinned beneath his tinted helmet-visor as the bike sped way past 140 mph, eating up the deserted county road like a ravenous wolf on the prowl.

Keller’s voice came through on Jack’s earpiece now. “Any sign of him yet?”

“Negative.” Jack shouted into the screaming wind even though the combination earpiece-microphone was state-of-the-art CIA technology that transmitted sound vibrations via the delicate bones of the ear-canal, filtering out all extraneous noise and sending a crisp signal to his Darkwater phone. “How far out is the target?”

The target, of course, was Diego Vargas. He’d popped back up on the radar suddenly just a few hours ago, and Jack was the closest Darkwater guy, had gotten on Diego’s trail immediately. The slippery Zeta leader had somehow managed to evade a manhunt the size of a space invasion for almost two months since the explosion that almost killed Benson, Kaiser, Indy O’Donnell, and Jack himself.

Thankfully Jack’s older brother Ice’s instincts had saved all their asses when Benson’s car exploded outside Senator Marcus Robinson’s townhome in Georgetown, and now Ice and Indy were married and Indy was two months pregnant and they were all—Jack the third wheel included—living in the Wagner family’s big drafty old house in Upstate New York, just down the Hudson River from the historic Army college of West Point.

Jack had offered to move out, to give the married couple some privacy. Darkwater was paying them all far more than what Jack would have considered reasonable, and he already had a rental in the DC area because that’s where all the activity was these days with everyone focused on keeping the Senator and his family safe from Diego’s designs.

Though the risk to the Senator had most certainly lessened since the failed assassination attempt on Kaiser and Benson, that car-bomb Diego had planted beneath Benson’s Ford Crown Victoria. Secret Service protection had finally come through for Robinson, now that it was obvious the Senator was in danger. And with the Secret Service on the job, the Georgetown home was about as safe as the damn White House. Nobody was getting through the Secret Service, which sure as hell took some pressure off Darkwater’s security detail—which Jack had been heading up along with Keller.

That being said, the FBI and CIA had cooled off on the Diego manhunt after two months with zero sightings. The official view was that Diego wasn’t dumb enough to stick around in the United States, would have hightailed it back across the southern border into Mexico, then made his way back to the patch of South American land near Colombia which the Zeta Nation had claimed as their own little fiefdom.

Still, although the FBI and CIA had backed off, the pressure was still very much on Darkwater to find Diego Vargas. There were two cover stories after that bomb—one for the public, another for the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service. The public was told it was a gas leak. The government was informed that the car-bomb wasn’t actually a car-bomb but instead explosives planted beneath a manhole cover outside the Senator’s home, intended for the Senator and his family. FBI, CIA, DHS, and Secret Service were told it went off early by mistake when the Senator was out of town. Only CIA Director Martin Kaiser and Darkwater knew the truth:

That Diego had been gunning for Benson and Kaiser with that bomb.

This whole thing had turned personal.

Just like everything with Darkwater seemed to turn personal. Hell, Diego himself was getting wrapped up in some personal drama. It looked like Diego might have been blackmailed by the now-dead Rhett Rodgers into going after Kaiser and Benson. The ruthless Zeta leader seemed to have risked his own life and mission to save a woman and child that he’d only just met, should mean nothing to him but somehow seemed to mean everything!

Benson had questioned the woman Rhett Rodgers had kidnapped to blackmail Diego into planting the explosives under Benson’s car. The woman—whose name was Mercy—had made it clear that Diego seemed quite happy to get rid of John Benson, blackmail or not.

So perhaps this manhunt for Diego was now personal for Benson and Kaiser too?

But hell, everything had been personal from the very beginning when it came to Darkwater and Benson, the CIA and Martin Kaiser. Everyone was connected in ways that went far beyond just the job. Benson and Kaiser saw themselves as stewards of America’s destiny or some crap like that. Though after seeing the way Ice and Indy had been drawn together by circumstances that defied belief, nobody in Darkwater was calling fate and destiny “crap” anymore.

Not even Jack's older brother Ice, who was by far the most practical, level-headed, no-nonsense human being on the face of this planet. The Darkwater family was now nine-for-nine with Benson’s “matchmaking”—as CIA Director Martin Kaiser sarcastically called it.

Though even Kaiser’s sarcasm was losing its edge. After all, Martin and Alice Kaiser were the proud adoptive parents of two atrociously cute twins who’d been orphaned during that Fox-and-Fay mission up in Iceland. Kaiser and his wife—who’d been separated for a decade before agreeing to get back together to care for their new twins—named Fay’s orphaned niece and nephew Adam and Eve.

Pretty damn woo-woo, Jack thought with a windblown grin as he weaved the speeding bike around a fallen branch. It was mid-December, but other than some flurries on Thanksgiving, there’d been no serious snow in the DC-Maryland area. The winter wind was crisp and cold, but Jack barely felt it beneath his thick leather jacket and heavy denim jeans and military boots. His helmet had a tinted visor that Benson promised was bulletproof, though Jack would rather not find out. Weapons technology was advancing at the speed of light, and it was always a race between offense and defense. It was a sick joke that the same weapons manufacturers that made bulletproof vests also designed the best armor-piercing bullets.

But military technology had saved Jack’s life on multiple missions back when he’d been with the Army’s elite Delta Force along with Ice, and he had a healthy respect for the advantages afforded to the modern warrior. Sure, Jack and Ice had taken early retirement almost three years ago to care for their dying parents, but joining Darkwater was like being back in Special Forces. The early Darkwater guys were all SEALs, but the Deltas were represented well with Ice and Jack and now Keller.

Keller was still somewhat of a mystery, though. Didn’t talk about his past other than to say he’d started off as a Delta and then done “some other stuff.” Ice and Jack hadn’t crossed paths with Keller in the Army’s famous Company D. Rumor was that Keller had been kicked out of the Deltas early on for “accidentally” killing another Delta guy during a training exercise. But that was just an unconfirmed rumor. Keller’s military file was clean as a whistle, “sanitized” enough for him to get discharged without the “dishonorable” label—which to a Special Forces veteran like Jack was a dead giveaway that Keller the Killer had been quietly recruited by the CIA, probably as a covert overseas assassin, perhaps by John Benson himself—who’d spent forty years as a spook, rising up through the Agency alongside Martin Kaiser, the two of them close like brothers.

Brothers who sometimes want to kill each other, Jack thought with an icy smirk as he thought back to some of his own brotherly fights with Ice. Of course, Jack and Ice were both hard-hitting Delta men, so their fights got physical real quick. Benson and Kaiser, however, worked out their differences on the mental battlefield, lying and manipulating each other if it suited their own purposes, hiding schemes within plots and wrapping everything in conspiracy because that was how these old spooks played the game.

A game that Jack was learning to play himself.

Well, the spy game, at least.

Not that other sort of game which Benson seemed to be playing with this Darkwater thing.

The cosmic matchmaking game.

“You’re next, Jack,” Indy O’Donnell had teased two months ago from where she’d been cuddled in her man Ice’s arms, the two of them grinning at Jack from that big bed at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, when Ice was healing from taking a bullet to save his woman. “Ax and Amy. Bruiser and Brenna. Cody and Cate. Dogg and Diana. Edge and Emma. Fox and Fay. Gavin and Gale. Hogan and Hannah. Ice and Indy. Jack and . . .” Indy had flashed a wickedly teasing smile when Jack swiped the air and shook his head, reminding her that he didn’t play the forever game, used the words “I love you” as a pick-up line, and considered marriage to be a tradition that belonged in history’s dumpster.

Which is probably why all your relationships have been dumpster fires, Jack thought as he roared his motorcycle down the deserted county road. The speedometer was past 150 mph now, and Jack eased up on the throttle as he took the next turn. Wiping out at this speed would leave him with more than just rug-burn. And although Jack knew how to handle his body, had survived multiple crashes in a dozen different vehicles in his recklessly violent life, wiping out on this empty county road in December would probably mean a long cold walk at best. He hadn’t passed a single vehicle in almost an hour.

“Yo, Keller, talk to me.” Jack glanced down at his phone which was secured firmly in the military-grade device-holder on the crest of the gas-tank, just beneath the speedometer dial. “My phone and GPS signal are going in and out. You sure Diego’s still on this road? Why haven’t I caught up with his vehicle? I’m almost breaking the damn sound barrier here.”

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