Page 2 of Jacking Jill

Keller’s voice sounded crackly and distant. Jack couldn’t catch the words. He slowed the bike down to a steady 95 mph, tapped the phone to turn up the volume. Keller’s voice was clearer now. He was talking to someone else, probably Paige Anderson, the former CIA hacker whom Benson had recruited after that Ice-and-Indy mission. Hours ago, Paige had picked up a probable facial-recognition match on Diego Vargas after hunting him for two months via traffic cameras and spy-drones and cell towers and anything else she could hack into from Darkwater’s new headquarters being constructed in the woods outside Arlington, Virginia.

Keller was with her at the new headquarters, along with Fay and some of the other Darkwater crew helping set up the new digs. For seven years Darkwater had operated without its own offices, using Ax’s family ranch down in Georgia or Benson’s house in Virginia for meetings. But after Nancy Sullivan agreed to temporarily return to Darkwater while Benson healed from his injuries, the crafty old spook asked her to use the vast Darkwater cash reserves seized during the Bruiser-and-Brenna mission to buy some secluded land in the Virginia woods and get it built out and outfitted with military grade technology and safehouse-level security.

Of course, everyone knew that asking Nancy to set up the new Darkwater headquarters was Benson’s way of making sure Nancy Sullivan’s “temporary” return would last at least a year, if not more. Jack wasn’t sure what the deal was with Benson and Nancy, but he knew better than to ask the old spook about matters of love.

Because Jack knew that Sally Norton, the love of Benson’s life, had been murdered during the first Darkwater mission. Benson still wore a wedding ring even though they’d never been legally married. He never spoke about her, and it was common knowledge that questions about Sally were off-limits for any Darkwater man who didn’t want to piss off the old CIA dog.

Except right now Jack was getting a bit pissed off himself. His body hurt from riding hard for almost three hours. Controlling a bike at this speed subjected your body to vicious G-forces, and you needed to flex dozens of stabilizer-muscles throughout your body to make high-speed turns without killing yourself. Sure, Jack’s body was a finely tuned machine that matched his bike’s precision engineering, but it still required rest now and then to perform at its best.

It also required fuel, and when Jack glanced at the fuel gauge, he was startled to see the needle twitching close to EMPTY. He should have remembered that riding in cold weather uses more gas. Shit. Ice would laugh his ass off at Jack’s stubborn insistence on using the bike instead of just taking one of the shiny new Darkwater custom-outfitted Jeep Liberty trucks that had been tricked out to the max, with battering-ram grills and crash-cages and a massive fuel tank with a heck of a lot of space to carry reserves.

“There’s a gas station coming up,” Jack reported to Keller, who was still discussing something with Paige. “Need to fuel up. Meanwhile, make sure I’m not on a wild goose chase here, Keller. There’s nobody on this damn road. I’m way out in the sticks. Hope the gas station is still operational. Keller, you copy?”

“Roger that.” Keller sounded distracted. “We’ve got a situation here, Jack. Paige lost the burner phone signal that she had locked into after the facial-recognition match. She was using it to track Diego’s progress, but it’s gone dead. He might have ditched it. Taken out the battery and snapped the SIM card. Stay alert. Might just be his normal protocol to change phones to be safe, but maybe he’s figured out we’re closing in on him. If he needs to change vehicles in a hurry, he might have pulled off at the same gas station you’re going to be coming up on shortly.”

“Will do.” Jack saw the gas station sign pop up over the next crest of empty road. He held his breath as the bike coughed like it was down to the dregs of the fuel tank. The exit came up shortly, and when Jack saw that the gas station was open, he exhaled and blazed up the ramp, roared into the station, then rolled to a stop near the solitary pump that appeared to be full-service out here in the boonies, like credit-card readers hadn’t made it this far out into the Maryland sticks.

A scrawny attendant in dirty overalls and a grease-stained yellow sweatshirt stepped out of the small gas station. His eyes were wide and alert, his body wired with more energy than you could get from caffeine. The guy was clearly hopped up on something more. Sad but not surprising. These sorts of chemical drugs were a fucking disease ravaging American lives.

“Nice wheels, man.” The twitchy attendant flashed a rotten-toothed grin as Jack dismounted, straightened to full height, broadened to full width. “You want the high-octane gas, right?”

“Yeah. Fill her up. No overflow.” Jack took off his helmet, cracked a friendly grin at the hopped-up attendant. “Anyone else come through here this afternoon?”

The attendant shook his head, pulled the nozzle off the gas-pump, flipped the old-school dials to show three zeroes, unscrewed the bike’s fuel tank top, started filling it up. “Nope,” he said, his wide-eyed gaze riveted on the gas-pump dials where the numbers spun like a slot-machine. “You’re the first today. And probably the last. They built that new freeway just a couple miles from this county road, pretty much killed all traffic except local.” He grinned to show his rotten teeth that resembled moonrocks. “And there ain’t no locals left round here neither. Government bought up most of this here land. Maybe they’re going to build one of those secret compounds to stash the aliens that crash down to earth during them solar flares. They got an alien stash-house in New Mexico since the 1950s, but everyone knows about that now. So I guess they need to build a new one, right?”

“Right.” Jack stretched his long muscular body until he heard his lower back re-align with a satisfying crack. “Alien stash-houses. Solar flares. Got it. Watch that fuel tank overflow. Hey, you got a restroom, buddy?”

“Around the back.” The attendant was back to staring at the hypnotically spinning gas-pump dials. “Take your time. This pump runs slow.”

Jack grunted, sweeping his gaze around the empty parking lot. The gas station was on a slight bluff, the Maryland woods starting not far from the end of the rectangular asphalt. It was still late afternoon, but the winter sun was already moving low enough to cast the woods in enough shadow to make Jack wary. Army Delta Force candidates had to make it through both Ranger School and Delta Selection, and while the SEALs were tested by the harsh waters of the Pacific Ocean in Coronado, Army Special Forces put their Rangers and Deltas through the harshest land-based environments they could find in the United States. You don’t get to be a Delta without learning how to find water in the desert, navigate your way through a swamp, live through a night in the jungle.

But Diego Vargas had those same skills, Jack reminded himself as he strolled to the edge of the gas station lot and peered into the darkening woods. Diego had started off with the Mexican Marines, was quickly recruited into their world-class Special Forces Unit before moving to the Zetas—a counter-narcotics assassination squad secretly supported by the CIA two decades earlier. Then the CIA pulled their funding, disavowed any connection with the Zetas, leaving them to fight the drug Cartels on their own. And, like so many abandoned and disavowed CIA projects, over the next ten years the Zetas morphed into just another cartel-like organization.

You fight monsters long enough, you turn into one.

Though Diego’s transformation had been unusually sudden, viciously brutal.

And heartbreakingly tragic.

“The Cartels tried to bribe Diego in the early days, when the Zetas were hunting the cartels with CIA support,” Benson had told the group of Darkwater men huddled around his hospital bed in Bethesda a couple of months earlier. “Didn’t work, so they switched tactics. Used Diego as an example to scare the other Zetas into toeing the Cartel line just like the Mexican State and Federal Police.” Benson had taken a breath, his face darkening with something that felt akin to guilt, like maybe in his old age Benson was regretting some of the mistakes the CIA had made. “They brutalized and murdered Diego’s young wife and baby daughter. Wife was pregnant with their second kid. They held Diego down and made him watch for hours. It broke him in a way that can never be fixed.”

Deathly silence had fallen across the group of Darkwater men, eight of whom had wives and babies of their own, the ninth already on his way to starting his own family. Jack had watched streaks of wildly protective anger color the bearded faces of normally coolheaded men like Dogg and Fox. Although Jack himself had no interest in starting a family, didn’t think he had a fatherly bone in his body, he understood what he saw in the dangerously narrowed gazes of the older Darkwater men. They were fathers and husbands, alpha protectors with families to defend. To lose a wife and child to that kind of sickness and to be forced to watch it happen?

Nah, there’d be no limit to the violence that would explode even from men of honor like Ax, Edge, Fox, Cody, and the rest of the Darkwater daddies.

They’d burn down the world to get revenge.

And so maybe they all understood Diego Vargas a little better after that revelation.

Because they all knew how the amorphous energy which fueled their own righteous violence could burn dark if it weren’t balanced out by the power of love.

But not just any kind of love.

The Darkwater kind of love.

The kind of love that simmered with a savage sexual fire.

The kind of love that burned far too hot for normal people to handle.

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