Page 53 of Jacking Jill

You’re being paranoid, Jack thought when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the bathroom door. He looked like a massive guardian protecting a sleeping princess in some dark fairy-tale realm. She’s not in any danger here, Jack reminded himself. And soon she won’t be in any danger anywhere. After all, Benson had confirmed that Romeo Carmine was a dead man walking for ordering a hit on a Darkwater man, right?

But in the crackling clarity of post-coital alertness, Jack wondered if Benson had been serious about taking out Romeo Carmine in cold blood. Sure, a battle-hardened CIA guy like Benson had probably ordered more hits over his forty years with the Agency than anybody would ever know. But murdering an American citizen on U.S. soil was a different matter. Even CIA Director Martin Kaiser wouldn’t stand behind that. And if Darkwater did manage to take out Romeo quietly? What happens after a mob boss suddenly gets eliminated?

Hard to say, considering what Kay Steffen had told them about Romeo’s anarchic succession plan to set up a trust fund for his sister but leave the rest of his wealth and territory up for grabs, sparking street-battles and court-cases and every dirty trick—legal and illegal—in the book.

Would it spark Mafia war up and down the East Coast? Would Darkwater get pulled into that war? What about Diego Vargas and the Zetas? So many open questions. So many moving parts. Shit, it would be so simple if Jack could just go out there with a small team, Delta-Force style, and make Romeo Carmine disappear without a trace.

But Darkwater was way beyond that now, Jack knew. Benson was right about how the Darkwater missions weren’t so simple now. Jack had been part of the Ice-and-Indy mission’s explosive finale, and he’d seen the mind-bending complexity first-hand. In comparison to Ice’s mission, the early Darkwater guys had it easy. Now, with Marcus Robinson just a few months away from the White House, the stakes were higher. Robinson and his wife Delilah’s wedding had been arranged by Gale Cantwell, who was now Gavin McBane’s wife and very much a Darkwater woman. Having the Robinsons in the White House would mean having Darkwater in the White Hous too.

So many connections. So many loose ends from the previous missions. Way more players—some of whom, like the person or people running IMG—still hidden in the shadows.

Jack stared at his own shadow looming on the wall behind the bed. As he watched, the shadows on the wall seemed to move like they existed independently, had some primitive consciousness of their own.

Shaking his head to clear it before he started hallucinating, Jack rubbed his temples, then groaned softly and twisted his torso to open up some of the knots in his coiled muscles.

A satisfying crack between his shoulder blades eased some of the tight pressure around his pectorals, and Jack sighed as his shoulders relaxed. He sat back in his chair, his mind drifting to the end of Benson’s conversation with Kay, that open-ended comment about how Kay might be more useful in drawing out Diego than she realized.

Sure, it might just be a bluff to mess with Kay’s head. But Jack suspected there was more to it. The crafty old CIA coyote had something up his sleeve, something that Paige and Nancy had discovered about Kay Steffen’s past.

Jack glanced at the closed and locked door leading to the empty underground hallways of the still-unfinished Darkwater facility. He considered going back to the war-room to get briefed on what was cooking with Kay and Diego and Romeo. But he didn’t want to wake Jill, and no way Jack was leaving her alone for even one second. He was never leaving her side again, if he could help it. Certainly not when some mafia thug wanted to take her out—along with Jack himself—to avenge the death of a nephew he didn’t give a fuck about. It was almost comical the way humans cared about reputation and status, would risk everything to save face. But Jack understood damn well that the need to gain status and preserve reputation was deeply rooted in evolutionary history, dating back millions of years, to when humanity existed in small tribes, your position in which dictated everything from the food you ate to the mate you took.

Jack gazed lovingly at his own mate on the bed before him, naked and vulnerable beneath the flimsy bedclothes. Those shifting shadows moving on the dark walls seemed to be playing tricks with the light, and for a moment Jack got a strange sense that time itself was a trick of light, that he and Jill were not so different from some primitive tribal couple in their little hut, the man standing guard while his woman rested, no doubt in his primal mind that protection was his responsibility, that once a man takes a mate his duty shifts from his tribe to his family.

You protect your woman and child first.

Only after that do you worry about the rest of the fucking world.

In today’s world it sounded hokey at best, offensive at worst. But in the shifty shadows of this darkened room, Jack felt those ancient truths burn fiercely in his heart, reminding him that under the sophisticated veneer of civilization they were all just animals, beasts of the jungle driven by the same instincts that drove them two million years ago.

And there was something deeply fulfilling about accepting that ancient truth, Jack thought as he watched Jill stir in her sleep without waking, like her body understood it was protected by the most powerful instinct in a man.

The instinct keep his woman safe.

Now a ripple of that protective energy moved up his spine. Jack straightened in the chair, that restlessly watchful instinct snapping him to full attention again, like something was coming and he better be ready for it.

Jack hadn’t spent a lot of time at Darkwater HQ since construction had started a couple of months ago, but he’d studied the blueprints and committed the layout to memory, just like any Delta man worth his salt.

And that sixth-sense of danger only got stronger as Jack’s battlefield instincts assessed the layout of the unfinished building.

Yeah, Darkwater HQ was designed to be an impenetrable fortress nestled in the Virginia forests. But it wasn’t anywhere near complete. There were gaping holes where the sworn-to-secrecy government contractors were still hard at work on construction. The section with Benson and the team’s offices was mostly secure, but certainly not impenetrable yet. Yes, most of the windows were double-paned with a layer of military-grade bulletproof glass, but there were still sections with regular plate-glass. And the blast-proof steel reinforcements on the outer walls weren’t in place yet because there’d been a hold up with getting supplies. Benson wanted top-quality military-grade materials for everything, which slowed down construction to a crawl. Not only were some materials in short supply, but many items were on FBI and DOD watchlists, meaning that any large orders would get flagged for inspection and approval.

Sure, Benson still had serious influence in the dark halls of governmental power, and Kaiser, as sitting Director of the CIA, could green-light almost anything at the Federal level, no questions asked. But Benson wanted Darkwater HQ to remain as secret as possible, and that meant keeping the construction low-profile, without raising too many flags with nosy Federal agencies like Homeland Security or the FBI.

Sure, Darkwater HQ could never stay totally off-the-grid in an age of insect-sized drones and spy-satellites which could read your license plate from the stratosphere, but Benson operated on the principle of plausible deniability, not absolute certainty. He’d instructed Nancy to use different construction crews for different sections, making it so that no single contractor had the full blueprints. There was no hiding from both civilian drones flying overhead and military satellites, of course, but an aerial image of the completed building would reveal nothing more than just another unmarked government-type facility, one amongst hundreds that dotted the DC-Maryland-Virginia area.

What if Kay Steffen double-crossed Benson, Jack thought now as he glanced at his Darkwater phone. What if she or Romeo had some way of tracing the call from Jill’s phone to Jack’s Darkwater device?

Nah, Jack told himself as he slid the phone back into his trouser pocket. Paige had said that it was damn near impossible to trace the GPS signal of a Darkwater phone using even the most advanced tech available to civilians. Sure, the NSA or CIA or DOD could do it, since Darkwater piggy-backed on highly secure satellites controlled by the U.S. Military and Intelligence agencies. But no way in hell Kay or Romeo had that kind of access. Those background-check services that Romeo used to figure out that Jack was former Army Delta Force was just AI programs crawling publicly available Internet data and making educated guesses. They weren’t breaking into military satellite feeds, which meant Jack was just being paranoid. If Paige and Benson weren’t worried that somebody could track Jack’s Darkwater phone, it meant Jill was pretty damn safe tonight.

Jill turned on the bed now, murmuring something from dreamland, her pretty face shining in the darkness of their underground safe-room. Jack smiled to himself as he watched his Sleeping Beauty, then grinned and winked at his gargoyle-like reflection in the mirror. His bullet-grazed cheekbone was clotted and crusty, his weapon still drawn, the black steel glinting in the sliver of light creeping in from beneath the door. His shoulders and chest were tightening again, but Jack caught it in time, using his breathing to relax his muscles. He exhaled slowly and told himself to stand down. Staying on full alert burned precious energy, and although he’d been trained to go for days without rest, it wasn’t optimal.

Jack glanced down at the ready handgun, thought for a moment, then sighed and slid it back into its holster. He settled down in his chair, his shoulders relaxing a bit more, the tension easing enough to signal his body that he could relax for the next few hours, that they were safe until the morning, that nobody was going to get to them here.

19

MEANWHILE, AT THE CARMINE MANSION.

“Get her in here.” Romeo Carmine barked out the order to one of his security grunts, then strolled to his office window and looked down at the illuminated parking lot.

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