Red Awakening (Red Zone 2)

“Somebody has to pay for that.” And Keiko was seriously skilled at payback.

“Please, if there’s any justice in the world, let it be Friday,” he muttered.

She couldn’t help but smile. “Was it her idea? The fake blackmail?”

He tensed for a moment, and she could tell he was struggling between the need to tell her the truth and the urge to throw Friday under a bus. At last he sighed. “No, it was the rest of the team. Friday wouldn’t have come up with that or gone along with it if she’d known.”

Keiko made a mental note to ask him about his weird relationship with his team leader’s wife later. Right now, she had another, more burning question. “Who’s the target for the nano virus?”

He didn’t even hesitate to reply. “Rueben Granger.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”

He snorted, and she got the impression he was smiling right along with her, but she didn’t want to lift her head from his chest to check.

There was one more thing she had to know. “Was it fake? Us? Were you just coming on to me because of the mission?”

He gently touched her chin and angled her face up to look at him. What she saw in his eyes stole her breath. “I told you in the car, and I’ll tell you again now. What’s between us has nothing to do with anyone else. That part was real. It was all us.”

For what seemed like forever, they stared into each other’s eyes.

“Okay then,” Keiko whispered before rubbing her face on his shirt. One last snuggle before they got back to reality. “Tell me your plan for getting out of here.”

He kept his hands on her shoulders as he looked down at his shirt with shocked outrage on his face. “Did you just wipe your nose on me?”

And against all odds, Keiko laughed.

Chapter Twenty-One

Private Jet

Somewhere between New York City and Houston, Northern Territory

Daniel Mercer looked up from his handheld datapad, where he was going over the report on the Freedom cell that’d taken over CommTECH’s research facility, to find that his brother was staring at the flight attendant.

“Stop staring at the man.” Daniel kept his voice low.

This was a conversation just between brothers. “You’re making him nervous.”

The emotionless mask that turned toward him had no impact. Daniel had been looking at it since the day they were born. “We need to discuss payment for this job.”

And so it began. The game between twins. The one where Daniel played his part to keep a monster leashed as best he could.

“There will be plenty of people in Houston for you to play with,” Daniel said. “You can have free reign in the building.” The terrorists were going to die anyway. Whether it was from a bullet or at the end of Charles’s knife made no difference.

A small voice whispered in the back of his mind that he was lying to himself. It was a voice he’d been hearing more often over the years, and he suspected it was his long-dead conscience coming back to life. He ignored it and focused on his datapad, telling himself that the agony his brother’s victims would experience was nothing more than they deserved. They were criminals. They caused the death of others.

Usually.

If Daniel managed to keep Charles’s deadly hobby contained by aiming him at the people who needed killing.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t always successful.

“I’ll have the people in the building anyway,” Charles said in the flat, emotionless tone of his. “I choose something else for my payment.”

“No. The Freedom terrorists are enough.”

It was the same argument they went through before every job. Charles thought it amusing to make Daniel feel responsible for every kill he made—by making him approve his choice of victim. It was his payment for Charles allowing him to lead a normal life. As normal as it got, being one half of the Mercer twins.