Page 332 of Wild Mustang Security Firm

Reid stood in the open garage doorway, regretting every life choice he’d ever made, but none quite as keenly as this one. He watched her drive away, wondering if her unsteadiness behind the wheel was indicative of how sick she was or because she had no idea how to drive.

It didn’t matter. The phone he’d given her was operating under one of his own special programs. He’d dialed to call for his emergency exit with NATO. They’d be none too pleased when they realized it wasn’t him but Aliya. The phone would repeatedly ping her identity and location to them. She was Fariq’s sister, after all, still had information that would be valuable to them… and damn it, they owed her.

They might not realize it while it was happening, but they would save her.

His job now was to make sure she stayed saved.

With his own words, Fariq had sealed his fate.

She is mine. She has always been mine…

I will never stop hunting you…

For as long as he drew breath, Fariq would do everything he could to reclaim his innocent younger sister.

Yeah, well, Reid wasn’t about to let Fariq have her. No matter what else she did with her life, the one thing Aliya would never need fear again was that her brother would hurt her.

In fact—ejecting the almost empty clip from his Glock, replacing it with a full one—he intended to guarantee it.

Closing the garage door, he went to the mercenary he’d shot, deftly rifling his pockets for all the ammunition clips he could use. The man’s name was Royce, and he’d liked him. He’d seemed a decent man as far as any man in Fariq’s employ could be. The problem was, he was Fariq’s man, and Christian could not afford to leave anyone alive behind him, with a gun or the ability to use one.

One look at the courtyard, then back to the fortress, he knew deadly little Avery and her military chopper were gone. She’d come for Thom and had retrieved him… at least he’d done that much right.

What he’d gotten wrong was not killing Fariq when he’d had the chance. The men on the perimeter walls were gone. Having spent years co-leading the mercenaries, he knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. The fortress was done. It was bug-out time—grab anything of importance and onto the next hideout—with one major difference from every other time Reid had issued the order in their militarized past.

This time, although Avery and Thom were gone, there was still an enemy in the compound—him. Fariq would be scrambling to get away now, but he would be laying traps all along the way.

Reid had known for years he wasn’t going to get out of this alive, but as he headed back into the fortress, for the first time in a long time, he found himself hoping he lived just long enough to bury Fariq first. If he didn’t, Aliya would never be safe, nor would anyone else he cared about.

The courtyard was eerily empty as he crossed it, heading into the fortress pretty much along the same path as he’d left it. Moving cautiously along the walls, his gun cupped in his hands, he searched the upper floors for hints of movement but found none.

Fariq wouldn’t be escaping this place via any of the vehicles in the garage. His preferences were usually the helicopter or one of his many boats. If Avery was even halfway competent, she’d have taken out the helicopter. That left the yachts safely ensconced in the protective caves built into the cliffside below the fortress. Those cliffs were the biggest reason this fortress had been chosen. It was big enough to hide not only Fariq’s secondary yacht but a small army’s worth of speedboats and at least two power cruisers.

That’s when it hit him—Fariq, the body double, and the boats.

Fariq was going to make his getaway, but he wasn’t going to take the yacht. Already stirred up, the Wild Mustangs wouldn’t be satisfied with simply reclaiming their computer geek. Now that they knew this location, they would be back, and they would be crawling every inch of the ocean in search of any boat, plane, or chopper matching Fariq’s grandiose style.

Reid already knew Fariq wouldn’t be on the yacht, his body double would. Fariq would be on one of the fleets of smaller boats, all launched at the same time to better his chances of escape.

Unless Reid got to him before that happened, Fariq would disappear, and God only knew when he’d ever get close enough to stop him again.

He had to get down into the caves, where he encountered his first trap.

There were three access points to the caves. One by water was completely inaccessible unless one was already in a boat.The other two laid inside the fortress at different ends of the structure. Knowing both were likely to be peppered with enough distractions for Fariq to escape, Reid headed for the closest of the two.

The minute he set foot on the stairs, he was shot at. There were at least a half-mile of stairs leading down to the underground cave system. It would take him hours and a limitless supply of percussion grenades before he reached the bottom. By then, Fariq would be gone.

He didn’t have so much as one flashbang anywhere on him. Pulling back, he slammed and barricaded the door and went to Plan B. He had no idea what Plan B was, but he had to get down into those caves, and the only other way to do that—without a boat and without going down either of the two secret staircases—was to scale down the sheer rock cliffside the fortress was built on.

He needed rope. He was going to have to raid the armory… or the linen closet.

The second trap was in the alcove doorways of the long hall that led past the merc sleeping quarters to the armory. Four men outfitted as only soldiers with orders to kill him and who’d happily raided the armory had stationed themselves, one man to a door, opened fired the second he rounded the corner.

He nearly got his head blown off.

They had percussion grenades because, of course, they did.

Back flat to the wall, his gun clasped in both hands, he glared at the ceiling, slowly blowing out his breath as he steadied himself to kill or be killed.

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