When Crystal’s body simply had no more tears left to give, she slowly rolled onto her back, her head on Jenna’s legs. “I didn’t want you to know,” she said, her voice a raw scrape. “I didn’t want you to . . . think . . . less of me.”
“Less of you? How could I?” Jenna asked, shaking her head. “My God, I would never have thought this was your fault. Because it’s not. How could it be?”
“I know,” Crystal said, her throat tight again. “I was just so ashamed.” She covered her mouth with her hand, and Jenna stroked her palm over Crystal’s sweaty forehead.
“Will you tell me now?”
The thing she’d never wanted to do. Crystal was supposed to have shielded Jenna from all this. Let her live her life free from the knowledge of this reality. It was part of what she’d promised their father, at least that’s what she’d always told herself. Too late now. The failure sat like a ten-pound weight on her heart. Crystal’s head moved down in a nod without her telling it to, but it was the right thing to do. “I’ll tell you,” she whispered. “I’ll hate it, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Chapter 16
The sun had set, and the team had been in position for almost two hours when the first vehicles pulled into Pier 13, a long stretch of concrete slab that ran from the road along a mammoth and abandoned industrial granary to the pier that stretched into the dark waters of Baltimore Harbor beyond. A gray van, two black Suburbans with tinted windows, and a box truck circled into the lot behind the granary.
“Hold your position everyone. Engage only if hostiles engage first. We are fact-finding only,” came Nick’s voice through Shane’s earpiece. From his sniper roost on an old barge moored to one side of the pier, Shane watched as men climbed out of the trucks and fanned out in a defensive circle. Ten in all. Heavily armed.
Against their six.
Near the middle of the group loomed the man Shane had seen kissing Crystal at Confessions. Bruno Ashe. He stood at the right hand of a tall, thin black man in a sharp-looking suit. Shane’s gut said that had to be Jimmy Church. Who else but a self-appointed Messiah, the name he called himself inside his organization, would radiate that kind of self-assurance or warrant the kind of deference the rest of the men paid to him?
Eyeballing the white box truck, Shane wondered if Church was giving or receiving tonight. Maybe both. And, really, it didn’t matter. Shane just hoped the nature of the delivery and those with whom Church was making the trade would help them figure out what the hell Merritt had been up to and how they could use that intel to regain their good names, their reputations, and their honor.
Shane scanned a one-eighty circuit from left to right. Though he couldn’t see any of the team, he knew Nick and Marz provided the team’s eyes from the sky from their positions inside broken windows on opposite ends of the granary’s second floor. Beckett hid at ground level behind a trailer that might once have served as some sort of office. Easy crouched in a nook where a lower concrete gangway ran along the far side of the pier, shielded by the shadows of the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered passenger ship, apparently, that had long been docked there. And Nick’s PI friend, Miguel, had the water approach covered from his position out in the harbor on his fishing boat. Jeremy had Beckett’s SUV hidden about a quarter mile away, giving them access to both a water and a land evacuation of the site in case they needed the options.
Nick had been reluctant as hell to bring Jeremy out in the field, and of all people, Shane totally got his wanting to keep his brother safe. But the reality was they were seriously understaffed for the mission they’d created for themselves. And to his credit, Jer was only too happy to help however he could.
“Note that all eyes are on the water,” Marz said. “Keep alert for a marine landing.”
“Roger that,” Miguel said.
Given that the Savannah took up most of the far side of the pier, that probably meant their unknown hostiles would dock on the same side as Shane’s barge, making his position the closest to deal with them should the need arise.
Damn good thing they’d had the day to prepare for this operation.
After Marz had nailed down the meeting’s location via the audio surveillance of Confessions, the whole group had gotten a few hours shut-eye, then spent the day learning everything they could about the pier. Miguel, Nick, and Easy had taken the older man’s boat out along the whole stretch of waterfront comprised of several piers. Once they’d seen that the dock appeared no longer in use, they’d dropped Easy off to wire up a few booby traps in case things went south and they required a little explosive assistance to cover their asses.
Meanwhile, Beckett and Shane had familiarized themselves with the land approach, learning there was only one road in and out of that part of the terminal. Both groups had loaded up on photographs of the geography, allowing Marz to merge those with the aerial images he’d pulled off the Web to compile a whiteboard-sized graphic from which they could strategize and prepare for every possible contingency.
All of that meant Shane hadn’t had five minutes to try to see Crystal, and the radio silence was eating at his innards. Last thing he wanted was for her to think those scars had chased him off when his reaction was exactly the opposite—he wanted her by his side where he could protect her from ever being hurt again.
“Look lively, gentlemen,” came Miguel’s voice over the coms. “Two powerboats coming in from the southeast and heading your direction.” Shane looked to his right out over the expanse of the barge to the black waters beyond. He scanned the horizon and finally found the green, red, and white navigation lights demarcating the vessels in question.
“Are you close enough for a head count?” Nick asked.
“Negative,” Miguel said.
Soon, the hum of the boats’ motors traveled across the water, the sound getting louder by degrees as they neared. Shane’s muscles tensed in readiness, and every one of his senses sharpened with awareness, the reactions instinctive after years of being in similar situations out in the field. Breathing and heart rate steady, he tamped down the excitement that threatened to bubble up at the anticipation of getting some answers. Everything needed to be by the book to ensure that the team’s presence remained covert, they got the photographic information Marz needed to research identities, and everyone got home safe.
Two motorboats entered the golden light cast by the lamp at the end of the pier. Cabin cruisers, the kind with galleys and sleeping berths belowdecks, easily thirty-six or forty feet long. Shane took a quick inventory of both boats. “At least three hostiles on each vessel,” he said in a low voice. “Lots of firepower.”
“Copy,” Nick replied.
That made it sixteen against six. The nearly three-to-one ratio was way the hell less than ideal, but hopefully everything would go as planned, and it would never come into play.
The boats passed alongside Shane’s position, and some of Church’s men moved toward the waterside as the new arrivals docked and disembarked in an orderly, methodical fashion that said they’d done this before.
“Make that four per boat,” Shane said as a single man emerged from down below on both boats and held a sentry position on deck. Two other men stayed near the boats, while the rest moved closer to Church.
The round of greetings between Church and his men and the newcomers, generally friendly in nature, revealed a fair degree of trust. Question was, who the hell were these guys? Was one of these the man named Azziz that Charlie had heard about while kidnapped? And did they have anything to do with Merritt?