Breaking the Rules

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE



Some kind of serious situation is going down,” Dan said as he spoke via Eden’s cell phone with Jake, who was inside of the very building he and Izzy were watching. Jake, who was holding Jenni and Eden and Ben at gunpoint. Jake, who started this conversation with a threat to kill one of them if Dan didn’t tell him what he wanted to know. Dan had interrupted that shit midsentence. Control the conversation, Izzy had advised him. He was trying. “Right here, in an apartment directly across the courtyard. The police are all over the place—squad cars are everywhere. They’ve got a guy cuffed and three uniformed officers are taking him out of here. Don’t tell me—you left a man behind to follow me. One of the neighbors must’ve spotted him, knew he didn’t belong here, saw his weapon, and called it in.”

On the other end of the phone, Jake swore, but Dan didn’t let him take control of the conversation.

“I know you want the girl,” Dan said as Izzy, who was listening in, nodded his approval, “but the cops have already knocked on my door, no doubt looking for information, and I didn’t open up because I had blood in my hair and I thought it might raise eyebrows. If I come walking out there now …”

“Well, you figure out a way to get it done,” Jake told him.

“No,” Dan said. “You f*cked this up by leaving this idiot here—you’re going to have to wait. And while you’re waiting? I want proof of life and I want it right f*cking now. I want to talk to all three of them, and then I’m going to want to talk to them again, after—”

“Which one do you want me to kill?” Jake asked, throwing Dan’s own words back in his face. “Right f*cking now?”

And Dan couldn’t help himself. He hesitated. Just a second or two, but it was enough. Izzy made keep going motions, but it was too late. He’d dropped the ball.

“You’ll go to the girl,” Jake said, “and you’ll get the girl. And then you’ll call me. Because I want proof that you have her. You have ten minutes, or one of the hostages is dead.”

“Ten minutes isn’t—” Dan said, but the call had been cut. “Jesus!”

“That’s okay,” Izzy told him, tried to reassure him. “You did okay. Well, maybe not okay, but we both knew it was a long shot and … We can do this in ten minutes.”

“Maybe we can set up a conference call,” Dan said. “You know, with Neesha?”

“I’m betting Jake wouldn’t recognize her voice,” Izzy said as he started toward the building.

Dan followed. “But that’s great. That means we can call back in, like seven minutes, and I say that I have her, and you pretend to be a frightened little girl.”

Izzy looked back at him with an odd mix of sympathy and disgust in his eyes. “And if he wants a picture? You gonna put me in a dress with a little pink bow in my hair?”

Dan was grabbing wildly at solutions and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop himself. “We pretend we lose connection and then we get Neesha to send me a picture, which I send to him.”

“What if he wants a picture of her dead body?” Izzy said.

“We fake it.”

“She’s alone in that apartment,” Izzy pointed out. “Even if you could get her to take out the ketchup and squeeze it onto herself, how’s she going take the picture of herself lying there, dead?”

“So … we talk her into letting the FBI in there,” Dan said, but even as the words left his lips, he knew that would never happen. Not in the next ten minutes.

“We’re doing this the simple way, bro,” Izzy told him, not unkindly. “We’re going in there and we’re getting them out.”

Armed only with kitchen knives, except okay, there were four men outside that building who were in possession of a variety of weaponry. It wouldn’t take much to make a transfer of all that firepower into the two SEALs’ hands.

The plan was a relatively simple one that they’d already established. Izzy would take out the security cameras and the guards in the front. Dan would dispatch the other two, and they’d meet up on the roof and play it by ear from there.

Except …

“I’m giving you an order to use deadly force,” Dan said to Izzy as they moved closer to the structure.

Izzy looked at him like he’d gone mad. “Who died and made you admiral?” he asked.

“If one of us is going to burn for this,” Dan said, “I want it to be me.”

Izzy made a raspberry sound. “You’re the career Navy man,” he pointed out. “Dude, look at you—you have master chief written all over you. If you really think there needs to be an order, I’ll give the order. These a*sholes just threatened to kill someone we love. They are dead f*cking serious, and we are, too. If you have a problem eliminating those guards in a permanent fashion, you tell me now—”

“No,” Dan said. “I just didn’t want …” He stopped. Started over. “You’re an asset to the Teams, and I’m planning on getting out anyway.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Dude, you’re suffering from marriage madness. You don’t know what the hell you’re saying, because you’re too busy trying to find words that rhyme with love so you can write Jennilyn a freaking sonnet. Above, okay? It’s moon above, stars above, either work equally well. Problem solved, move on.”

Dan shook his head. “That’s not—”

“Zip it, Chatty Cathy, it’s go time,” Izzy said, shooting Dan the hand signal for ready along with shut the f*ck up.

They were just going to make it before the sun burst, in its full glory, over the mountains to the east.

Except there was something … a light in the sky, coming from the west, shimmering slightly as it moved toward them …

Izzy saw it, too.

A light—and a noise. Getting bigger and louder and …

“What the f*ck?” Izzy said exactly what Dan was thinking. He turned to look at him, shouting over the deafening roar. “Okay, bro, change of plans …”


Eden took a deep breath, about to pound on the door and scream, Help! We need help in here, when a sound started, distant at first, then louder and louder, a high-pitched whine accompanied by a low rumbling.

Ben and Jenni were both looking at her, confusion on their faces. And she knew that she was looking back at them the same way.

It was Jenn who identified it first. “It’s a plane,” she said, and even though Eden couldn’t hear her over the rattle and roar, she could read her lips. “A jet—it’s landing on the airstrip outside.”

And Eden’s first thought was that it was Izzy, even though she knew it couldn’t possibly be. She had to close her eyes for a moment, because she was filled with such a rush of hope and longing at the idea that, in just a few short moments, she’d be safe in his arms.

But then she realized that if it wasn’t Izzy on that plane—and it wasn’t, it couldn’t be—then it was someone, or a lot of someones, who worked for or with Jake. Two against seven was dangerous enough odds. This plane was definitely adding to that number by at least one, and quite possibly doubling or even tripling it. Shoot, big enough planes could carry hundreds of men.

And Eden knew that Izzy and her brother were SEALs, and that they were good at taking care of themselves, good at what they did. But they weren’t invincible.

Still, she also knew no matter how many additional men came in on that plane to provide backup for Jake, that Izzy and Dan weren’t going to let that stop or even slow them. In fact, it was likely that they’d use the incoming plane as a diversion.

And she found herself waiting, heart in her throat, listening for the sounds of gunshots or shouting—sounds that would let her know the battle had begun.


Izzy had done everything but kiss Dan good-bye.

“Okay, bro, change of plans.” After that initial what the f*ck, Izzy’d taken the landing jet in stride. And they needed a change in plan because they both realized that their new priority one was to make sure that Jenn, Eden, and Ben did not get on that aircraft.

“Go around back,” Izzy said, “take out those two guards, ammo up, and get inside through one of the air vents—think you can do that, Gimpy McBaby-Man?”

Dan laughed as he said, “F*ck you!”

“I’ll take that as a Yes, Mommy. Once you’re inside, locate the women and Ben. Stay put if you think it’s safe; if not, get them out of that northeast room, but I want you to avoid the front of the building. Do you hear me? Stay back from the airfield.”

Dan nodded, because he knew what was coming.

Izzy said it anyway. “Because I’m gonna disable the plane, and if I have to, I’ll make it go boom.”

“How the hell are you going to …?” The words were out of Dan’s mouth even though he knew the answer.

“I’ll improvise.” Izzy held out his hand to Dan, and what started as a handshake turned into a tight hug. “F*ck you, a*shole. I hate you and your ass face. Keep Eden safe for me,” he said, and it was the closest the irreverent SEAL would ever come to a should I not return type appeal.

“Make sure you improvise an escape while you’re at it,” Dan said, past an inexplicable lump in his throat.

Izzy pushed Dan away. “Go.”

Dan went.


Whoever was in charge of security here was a total fool.

As Izzy watched, the two guards in the front of the building went to meet the plane with another two men, who came out of the building with a portable set of metal stairs, after pulling up one of the garagelike bay doors and leaving the damn thing wide freaking open.

He wanted to call Dan on Eden’s cell phone and say, Come on back, bro, lookie here, you can sneak right in. Thing is, Dan needed the firepower he was going to borrow from the guards around back—except, oh, sweet! The guard who was built like a linebacker actually set his AK-47 down, leaning it against the side of the building so he could help move the stairs.

Izzy helped himself to the weapon donation and ducked inside—and nearly ran into the guy with the hat he’d seen visiting Greg’s house with skinhead Jake. The guy’s gun went up in a classic gangbanger sideways hold, and Izzy opened both hands in a gesture that said Whoa, Nellie, even though he was still holding tight to the linebacker’s weapon.

“Who the hell are you?” the guy asked.

Jesus, what was Hat Guy’s name?

“Nathan,” Izzy said, pulling it out of his ass. “Damn, you scared the shit out of me, man. I just came in from the plane. I’m looking for Jake …?”

The fact that he used their names worked like a charm, and Nathan lowered his weapon just enough for Izzy to hit him in the face with the butt of that AK-47—no, wait, it was an AK-74 with a slightly smaller-caliber bullet, but the same grand Kalashnikov design.

Nathan went down, his lights out, and Izzy dragged him back behind a conveniently parked A&B Storage truck, relieving him of his various weapons—that very nice Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol that he’d held like a dipshit, and a backup SIG Sauer with the same caliber; okay, so maybe he wasn’t a total dipshit. Maybe he just liked the drama of an unconventional handgrip. Maybe he found that holding his handgun like that got him laid.

Although, truly? What it had gotten him this morning was laid out.

Nathan was carrying magazines for his weapons in his pockets, as well as a set of keys—one of them bearing the symbol for a Ford, and no doubt belonging to the van that was parked outside, near a f*cking Volvo.

Hi, my name is Bob, and I’m a security guard for an organization that sells children as sex slaves, and yeah. I drive a Volvo because I’m into auto safety.

Right.

Nathan also was carrying a set of plastic restraints—no doubt because they had cargo that needed to be restrained, aka Eden, Jennilyn, and Ben, due to be shipped out on that plane. Izzy hummed a few bars of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—Mama, just killed a man—as he opened the back of the truck and used one of the pieces of plastic to restrain Nathan, hands behind his back, to one of the anchors on the floor that was inside of the truck, rather than breaking the motherf*cker’s neck the way he kinda sorta wanted to.

But in the aftermath—at least the aftermath Izzy was envisioning—it was good to have one of the bad guys still be capable of communication. And someone relatively far up the chain of command was particularly likely to start communicating effectively; i.e., confessing to all of his evil boss’s sins, when faced with life in prison or worse.

So Izzy yanked off the guy’s sneaker, stripped off his smelly-ass sock and jammed it into his mouth, then gave him one more tap on the head to make sure he stayed unconscious, before closing and securing the truck door with another of those handy plastic restraints.

Outside on the runway, the sun had risen, and the metal stairs were in place as the plane’s door popped opened. And as the two guards stood there along with two of the men from inside, like neatly lined-up little ducks in a shooting range, Izzy knew he’d never have a better opportunity to take all of them out.

And whether they drove a Volvo or not, they did willingly work for an organization that sold children—internationally—as sex slaves.

So Izzy did what he had to, knowing as he did it that all hell would break loose at the sound of that AK-74, but that the dirty dozen that they’d started with—if Danny’d done his job, and if he knew Danny and he did, Danny had done it quickly and efficiently—would drop down to a far more manageable five.

Not counting, of course, the potential army that awaited him in that plane.


The climb up to the air vent on the north side of the warehouse was a bitch and a half.

But Dan did it, because he had to.

Because he could not fail.

Because he’d trained and trained and trained for this. For getting the job done despite the pain.

So he made it up and he made it inside, and he swung himself onto a series of catwalks that crisscrossed the ceiling, up near a set of big, slow-moving fans.

Jesus, it was hot in here, but there was no time to rest or congratulate himself for making it this far. Gimpy McBaby-Man, he was not.

Infrared images had put the three hostages—his potentially pregnant wife, his brother, and his sister—in a small room in the northeast corner of the building. He found it easily. The entire back of the building was partitioned into a row of rooms, with lower ceilings covered by rolls of insulation, probably because those rooms were air-conditioned and the rest of this place sure as hell wasn’t.

As Dan made his way over in that direction, he could see the tops of the walls that segmented the rooms, and he saw there was a long hallway that connected them all.

It was then that he heard it—the unmistakable sound of gunfire.

And five men burst out of the single door in that long wall that separated the warehouse from the back rooms.

One of them—a man with a shaved head—stopped a second and snapped out an order as the remaining three ran for the airfield. “Go to the prisoners and get one of them.”

The man who’d been given the order hesitated. “Which one?”

“I don’t give a shit! Just do it! Now!”

They were too far away, and outside of the range of the weapons that Dan had acquired from the obviously inexperienced guards—which was a shame, because if he had more than this stupid lightweight room broom or these small-caliber pistols, he could’ve taken them all out when they’d come through the door.

And as the skinhead followed the other men toward the open warehouse bay and the brilliant morning light, and as that last man ran back toward the partition door, Dan ran, too, heading for that northeast corner of the building.

There was no ladder down. He was going to have to jump, counting on the ceiling’s tile-and-metal framework and that insulation to break his fall.

Dan swung himself over the edge of the catwalk and let himself drop.


Eden and Ben were both talking at once.

“It’s Izzy!”

“It’s Danny! It’s got to be!”

They both started yelling. “Hey! We’re in here! We’re back here!”

Jenn, too, had heard what undeniably sounded like gunfire. She’d heard shouting, too, but none of the voices belonged to Dan, and that worried her.

But then she heard the sound of footsteps running down the hall.

“Here comes the guard,” she said. “It sounds like only one …”

Ben and Eden both moved into place.

The door opened with a crash, and the guard—the man Jenn thought of as Nathan’s brother—was standing there, waving a gun at them, shouting, “Get back from the door!”

They couldn’t get close enough to stick him with the glucagon. At least not yet. But maybe if he ordered them out of there …

“Down on your knees, hands on your heads,” he shouted. “You! The big girl! Get over here!”

He was talking to Jenn—she was larger than Eden—and she was going to have a chance to do it.

It was then that the ceiling exploded and Jenn threw herself down on top of Ben, who was still pretending to be unconscious, only to find that Eden had done the very same thing.

But it wasn’t an explosion, it was an entrance. The ceiling tiles had shattered from the force of a man plunging through them, bringing insulation and pieces of the metal framework with him, and God, it was not just any man, it was …

“Danny!”


The jet was one of those personal-sized baby jets that richie-riches or celebrities with pilot licenses used, to flit from L.A. to Palm Springs.

Izzy charged up the stairs and hit the door to the plane with his shoulder before the frightened-looking man standing there could swing it all the way shut.

The guy was a flight attendant, or maybe the copilot—either way he was unarmed—and Izzy pushed his way past him into the cabin, which was wonderfully empty, thank you, baby Jesus, for that lovely surprise.

It had been stripped of seats—all except for the very front row on both sides of the aisle—to make room for the kind of sturdy cages that could be used to transport dangerous animals.

Or human beings.

And shit, he was wrong about the cabin being empty.

There was one little girl locked in the cage in the back. She poked her head up to look at Izzy with brown eyes that were wide with alarm, but then ducked back down, as if trying to hide.

Behind the cages—there had to be a half dozen of them—was what looked like a bar setup.

Just in case the slave traders wanted a gin and tonic midflight.

Izzy tossed the flight attendant into the plush leather of that single row of seats after the guy went unconscious due to his head connecting solidly with Izzy’s elbow. He was definitely a flight attendant, because the copilot was up with the pilot in the cockpit, both of them fumbling for weapons as they gazed at Izzy with alarm through the open cockpit door—which had a pre-9/11 design, seeing as how it swung open into the cabin so they couldn’t kick it shut.

If the cages and that little girl hadn’t been there, Izzy might’ve tried a Freeze! or a Hands where I can see ’em!

But that child made it so clear that these a*sholes knew exactly what they were doing. They’d chosen to dance with the devil.

So Izzy sent them to hell.


Dan hit the ground hard amid the rubble and dust from the ceiling, but he rolled, and as he rolled, he brought up his weapon and he fired, and the man in the doorway fell.

“Is Ben badly hurt?” were the first words out of his mouth as he reached for Jenn’s hand, to pull her up to her feet.

She was shaking, she couldn’t help herself—that man was dead—and she wanted to throw herself into Dan’s arms, but she knew there was no time. She settled for looking hard into his eyes—that fall had hurt him, but he’d never admit it—as Ben answered for himself. “I’m fine. I was just pretending—”

“Good,” Dan cut him off, even as he squeezed Jenn’s hand and released her to help Ben up, because there was no time for even the briefest of kisses.

“Is Izzy here?” Eden asked.

“He’s out there,” Dan said, crouching next to the dead guard as if he were no more than an unpleasant pile of trash, and taking what looked like a rifle and a smaller handgun off the man’s body.

“By himself?” Eden asked, her worry radiating off of her.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Oh God,” Eden breathed.

“We counted seven of them,” Jenn told Dan. “Two outside and five in.”

“We got an infrared head count of twelve from the FBI. Who are on their way, but it’s going to be a while before they get here,” Dan told her as he handed what looked like a small machine gun to Eden and the handgun to Ben. He offered a similar weapon to Jenn. “Baby, I know you don’t like firearms, but—”

She didn’t, it was true, and she’d discovered she liked dead bodies even less, but she took it from him willingly. It was heavy and solid. “I’ve never even held one before.”

“Don’t point it at anyone you aren’t willing to kill,” he told her, told all of them. “And if it comes to it, aim for the biggest body mass—you’ll have a better chance of hitting your target.”

“I’ll show Jenn how to release the safety,” Ben volunteered.

Dan looked at him hard. “I’m not sure I want to know how you know that, but good.”

“Please. You need to go help Izzy,” Eden told Dan. “We’ll be all right here. If the FBI’s coming …”

Jenn wasn’t sure she was in agreement. She herself would certainly be far more all right with Dan safely beside her, but she couldn’t be so selfish as to make him stay. “I love you,” she told him.

And he did take the time—a fraction of a second—to kiss her. And then he was gone.


Izzy couldn’t get the freaking cabin door to close.

Which meant that the three-man assault team that lurked just inside the warehouse bay door could easily get inside and take him out.

Except they weren’t exactly an assault team. They weren’t even close. They were more like three petty criminals who’d graduated to more serious crimes and hooked up with some really evil men with a ton of money and international connections. They obviously had some knowledge and experience when it came to handling firearms. But it was limited to the tune of keep your head down so it doesn’t get shot off, and point the barrel of the weapon toward the target and squeeze the trigger until said target doesn’t move anymore.

Two of them were doing just that, their wildly inaccurate bullets bouncing off the concrete and only occasionally pinging into the fuselage of the jet—which was helping Izzy make the damn thing unsafe to fly, thanks very much, boys.

They were clearly a little freaked by the display of death at the bottom of the portable aircraft stairs—so much so that one of them squirted.

As Izzy watched, the guy squeezed out of the cover of the warehouse and ran not toward the plane in an heroic attempt to end the battle, but rather toward the parked van and that Volvo. He was fleeing the scene as squirters were prone to do, and Izzy saw no need to take him out, since he was removing himself from the equation.

One of his co-workers, though, apparently had a problem with his desertion, because he leaned out of the doorway to shoot the guy square in the back.

Izzy took the opportunity—and the clean shot—to take out the shooter, who fell, too. Which brought his magic number down from five to three.

He had the location of one of ’em pinpointed. It was the other two he was worried about.

He had to get the hell off this plane so he could find them and take them out.


Danny came back—almost right away—into the room that had changed from their prison cell into their fortress for this impending siege.

“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “There’s a cache of weapons in a room down the hall—these guys must be gunrunning, too. It’s a freaking munitions dump and Izzy was talking about blowing up that plane—”

“What?” Eden said, not quite able to believe her ears.

“Possibly blowing up the plane,” her brother corrected himself as he took out a cell phone—it was hers—and hit the speed dial. “I don’t know what he’s doing, not yet, but whatever it is he does, I don’t want you to be trapped back here.” He led the way out into the hall. “Stay close to me. We’re going to head over to where there’s a bunch of crates.” He looked at Eden and shook his head. “He’s not picking up.”

She took the phone from him. “I’ll try him again.”

“Do it when we get there,” Dan said. “Right now I need eyes open and top speed. If someone starts shooting, don’t run in a straight line. Zig and zag. Got it?”

They all nodded.

“Let’s go.”


Izzy used his feet and kicked the stairs away from the plane, which was another step in the right direction in terms of surviving an assault, but several steps back in terms of getting his ass off the plane and taking out the final three.

It wasn’t until he was completely back inside and he’d shut the door—Jesus Harvey Christ on a pogo stick, so that was how it latched, wow, he was an idiot—that he realized his pants had been shaking because his carefully silenced phone was ringing.

Of course, he wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the sounds of the little caged girl in the back of the plane, who was crying rather loudly at this point.

“Hey, I’m the good guy,” Izzy told her as he took out his phone, but of course it had stopped. A missed call from Eden, who was really Dan, since Dan had Eden’s phone. But it could actually be Eden, because Dan should have found her and Jenni and Ben by now. “I don’t suppose you speak any English …?”

If everything was going just right, Izzy’s wife, her two brothers, and his new sister-in-law should be hunkered down in that back northeast corner of the building, waiting for Izzy to take out the remaining bad guys. Which, okay, maybe he could do while safely ensconced in this plane, as if it were a great big Iron Man–type suit.

As he called Eden’s phone back, he moved Dumb and Dumber out of the cockpit, and he could see through the windshield that good old skinhead Jake was one of the surviving baddies. He and another man—skinny with a ponytail—were having an argument right there in the shelter from the open bay door.

It was too much to hope that Jake would eliminate another of the enemy, and sadly enough it didn’t happen—nor did Eden or Dan pick up the phone. Which freaked Izzy out just a bit, and made him redo the math in his head. Twelve tangos, not counting the three on the plane, minus two via Dan, minus the one Izzy’d put in the truck, minus four at the bottom of the stairs, minus two was … three. Which left one unaccounted for and possibly doing damage to Dan, Eden, Jenni, and Ben, which was alarming.

He dialed Eden’s number again.

As Izzy watched, Skinny disappeared back inside, while Jake leaned out of the doorway just a little bit to look up at the plane. As he did, he saw Izzy there in the cockpit, and he raised his weapon and let loose a blast of bullets.

Izzy hit the deck, but the glass was apparently bulletproof, which really wasn’t that big of a surprise on a high-end toy like this, particularly one used for nefarious deeds.

But Jake didn’t seem all that nonplussed. He smiled at Izzy, and even came out a bit farther from his cover, no doubt because he now believed that Izzy couldn’t shoot him, either. So he pointed a finger-gun at Izzy and pretend-shot him, like, bang, still with that big you are so dead smile on his fugly face.

Izzy was just about to prove how so not dead he was when Eden picked up.

“Izzy,” she gasped. “We need help! Danny’s been shot!”

* * *

Dan had zigged instead of zagged, taking up the rear as they’d run toward the shadowy crate that was closest to the back hallway door.

He’d seen the man coming—skinny with a ponytail—heading back toward the very doorway they’d just vacated, and he’d fired his weapon, half hoping he’d hit the son of a bitch, and half hoping he’d draw the man’s fire, so he wouldn’t kill Jenni, Eden, or Ben.

He’d gotten part of his wish.

Right before Dan made it to cover, he felt the bullet slap him, and he went down.

He tried to make it look intentional—like he was sliding into home. And he managed to bring his weapon up and fire back a long burst, so that even if the gunman knew he’d made contact, he didn’t think they were defenseless back here.

Jenn knew, right away, that something was wrong. Particularly when Dan ordered Ben to climb up on top of the crate and unload his weapon at anything that moved.

“I’m hit,” he then told her, as if she couldn’t tell, at this point, from the blood.

Jesus, it was his leg—his left one this time, and it was bleeding like a bitch.

“Tell me what to do,” Jenn said, calm and steady, as Eden got on the phone with Izzy.

“Tourniquet,” Dan said, “something to slow the bleeding,” as Eden asked, “Izzy wants to know how bad is it?” She turned to look and answered the question herself. “It’s bad.”

“It’s not. I’m going to be okay,” Dan told Jenn even as she said to him, “You’re going to be fine.” She was taking off her bra, right out from under her shirt—a feminine talent that had always impressed him.

“Izzy wants to know how many of the twelve you took out,” Eden asked Dan as Jenn pulled it free and wrapped it around the top of his leg.

“Three,” Dan told her, and she forwarded the info to the other SEAL. “Two outside, and one in.”

“He says we’re down to two—the guy named Jake and the one who just shot you,” Eden reported.

“That’s good news,” Dan told Jenn. He could see she didn’t quite believe it, so he told her, “I’m not leaving you.”

“You better not, you bastard,” she said. “If you think you can just attempt to knock me up and then check out …”

Dan laughed, but then, Jesus, it started to hurt. “Ben, you okay up there?” he called.

“I’m good,” Ben reported. “There’s movement, back by the doorway that we came out of. I’m pretty sure I’m too far away …”

“Hold your fire,” Dan said. “Good call. But if they come any closer …”

“Yeah,” Eden was saying into the phone. “There’re all these crates in here. We’re behind the one that’s closest to the back of the building.”

“Closest to the northeast corner,” Dan told her, and she relayed that info, too.

“Izzy says to stay put,” Eden reported. “To hold on. He says he’s on his way.”

“Hey, Danny?” Ben called from atop the crate. “The man who came out of that doorway? He’s carrying—jeez, I don’t know what that is, except … Holy crap, Eed, I think it’s that thing that they used against that demon on Buffy. The one in the mall? Where Zander had memories of being a soldier from that Halloween episode, right after Angel becomes Angelus in season two …?”

“Oh, shit,” Eden said into the phone, to Izzy. “If Ben’s right? I think they’ve got a rocket launcher.”


Driving a plane wasn’t as easy as it looked when sitting in coach and traversing the airport runways.

And Izzy hadn’t been one of those flip-a-coin-to-see-if-you-join-the-Air-Force-or-the-Navy kids who loved the water but also secretly yearned to fly. He’d never particularly wanted to learn how to be a pilot, mostly because his goal had been to jump out of the plane, and you sure as hell couldn’t do that while you were sitting in the captain’s chair.

Still, he’d always been curious about how things worked, and he knew enough to finally figure out how to make this particular vehicle move.

And not a moment too soon.

“Hold on back there, little girl,” he shouted as he backed that sucker up, his phone tucked up under his chin.

“Little what?” Eden said on the other end of the satellite signal, her voice traveling up into outer space and bouncing back down to his phone, even though she was only some mere hundreds of yards away from him, in that gleaming white warehouse.

“There’s a girl,” Izzy reported as he put that puppy back into the equivalent of drive, “maybe nine or ten, in a cage, in the cabin of this plane.”

“Seriously?”

“You think I’d make this shit up?” Izzy asked.

Eden laughed, but then she stopped. “Please, please don’t die,” she said.

“It’s two against five,” he countered.

“But they have a rocket launcher.”

“And I’m about to drive a jet up their ass. Ready or not, here I come.” And Izzy hit the equivalent of the gas.


Only Irving Zanella would crash a jet plane through the side of a building. He actually aimed the nose of the thing through the bay door and just kept going, and the sheet metal shrieked and tore. He hit a truck and then another truck, and a wing was clearly damaged, too, before the plane rolled to a stop.

Dan found himself looking up at the fans that were slowly spinning and the catwalk that he’d used when he first came in, and he was glad that nothing was directly overhead, to fall on them.

They were far enough away to be safe.

Except …

“Uh-oh,” Ben said, from his perch atop the crate. “The bald guy with the rocket launcher? He’s aiming that thing at us!”


Izzy’d missed.

He’d hoped he’d hit Jake when he plowed into the building. He was pretty sure that that one bump he’d felt was the plane hitting the dude’s very last minion.

But Jake had jumped clear.

And Izzy knew he was screwed. He knew he’d failed—he’d taken too long to figure out how to get this thing to move, because now the bastard was going to blow his shit sky-high.

Except …

Holy crap, Jake was aiming that rocket launcher not at Izzy and the plane, but at the crate where Eden, Jenni, Dan, and Ben were hunkered down. The a*shole actually took his time to do it, as he looked back at Izzy, like, You ready to watch while I kill your family before I kill you, trapped the way you are behind that bulletproof glass?

Which gave Izzy enough time to bring that AK-74 right up to that glass, because unlike the a*shole down there, he knew that bulletproof tended not to work so well when the barrel of a gun with a Kalashnikov’s power was pressed against it.

And he squeezed the trigger, and the gun did what he’d expected it to do and blew a hole in that window, which allowed Izzy to send the next round of bullets into Jake, who had turned back to look at him, this time in astonished surprise, before he died.

“Yeah, a*shole. That’ll teach you to f*ck with my family.” Izzy picked up the phone he’d dropped when he’d grabbed for his weapon. The line was still open. “Hey,” he said, still breathing hard as he watched and waited, but there was no other movement. “You still there?”

“I’m still here,” Eden said, her voice warm and steady in his ear.

“Ask Ben if he saw whether I got ’em both.”

She put her hand over the bottom of the phone, and he heard muffled voices, but then she came back and said, “He said yeah. Jenn says we need a medical kit. And she needs me to get off the phone so we can find out how soon the FBI’ll be here.”

“I’m on my way,” Izzy said as he used the last of Nathan’s restraints to lock the still-unconscious flight attendant to the nearest cage before he searched for the plane’s first-aid kit. It was in one of the overhead compartments and it was seriously lacking in anything useful like a plasma expander—that would’ve been too easy—so he punched the bulkhead right over the seats, hard enough to release the oxygen masks.

“I’ll be back,” he told the wide-eyed and now silent little girl as he grabbed the tubing and pulled it free. “We’ll get you out of here, ASAP. But first? I gotta help a friend and go kiss the shit out of my wife.”


“Here he comes,” Ben announced.

And there, indeed, was Izzy, dropping lightly from the open door of the plane onto the concrete floor of the warehouse, his cell phone to his ear.

As Eden watched, peeking around the edge of the crate, he bent down and picked up the rocket launcher, checking it—no doubt making sure it no longer was a danger.

He also swung past one of the trucks that his plane had pushed over, making sure that the back door was securely closed as he ended his phone call.

And then he was jogging toward them, with that smooth and easy gait that Eden had come to know so well.

“FBI’s ETA is approximately seven minutes,” Jenn announced, Eden’s phone to her ear as she sat beside Danny. “They’re sending a medevac chopper.”

“I’m doing okay,” Danny reassured her as Izzy came closer and saw Eden and smiled. “This is nothing like the last time.”

“I’m sitting in a puddle of your blood,” Jenn pointed out as Eden stepped out from behind the crate.

“Yeah, but it’s slowed. Look at me. I’m fine. I’m not in shock, I’m alert—”

“You’re a terrible liar—I can tell you’re in serious pain—”

“Well, yeah,” Dan said. “I’ve been shot. It hurts—”

They kept talking—Danny obviously knew Jenni was reassured by his ability to have a conversation—but Eden didn’t hear any more of it as she threw herself forward and into Izzy’s arms.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I’m so sorry,” she started, but he cut her off.

“Chht!” he said, making that sound that she’d made at him just a few hours earlier, like the Dog Whisperer. “Those aren’t the three words I want to hear.”

“I love you,” she told him.

He did his best Han Solo. “I know.” But then he ruined it by laughing, except it didn’t really ruin it, it made it that much better, because his laughter was pure Izzy, and as he kissed her, Eden knew that he loved her, too.

But he broke the kiss almost before it had started, carrying her with him around the side of the crate so he could take a look at Danny’s leg.

“Gimpy McBaby-Man!” he said. “Got another boo-boo?” He held out a length of plastic tubing that he’d brought from the plane as he knelt down beside Dan. “I know we’ve got some needles, in with that insulin—Ben, you still have that bag?”

“I do.” Ben tossed down the bag that he’d carried with him out of their prison cell and Izzy caught it.

“This, along with a little tape and plenty of this fine gravity that planet Earth provides … I kneel before you,” Izzy told Eden’s other brother as he continued to check his wound, “your walking and talking bag of type O blood.”

“We’ve really got the bleeding under control,” Dan told him.

“It looks like you have,” Izzy said, not to Dan, but to Jenn, who was looking more pale than Danny. “Looks like the bullet missed the artery.”

She nodded, still not completely convinced.

So Izzy looked at her directly, squarely, and said, “We’ll keep an eye on it. If it starts bleeding again, well, we’ve got the tools we need to keep him alive until the helo gets here. Okay? I promise you, he’s going to be fine.”

And this time when she nodded, she actually smiled, too.

“I just spoke to Jenk,” Izzy told Danny. “He and Lindsey and Lopez are heading over to Eden’s apartment—to try to talk to Neesha. She’s still holed up, inside.” He looked at Eden. “She went one-on-one with Todd.”

“She what?”

“We left her Greg’s gun and she kicked his ass,” he told her as he wiped Dan’s blood from his hands on the front of Dan’s shirt.

“Hey!”

“Yeah, what? You’re already a mess. Anyway, it got noisy and now the police and the FBI are out in the courtyard, trying to get her to put down her weapon and come out with her hands up. She wants to wait for us to get home. Which could be a while.” Izzy reached for Eden, pulling her down onto his lap. “Ben, you’re still keeping watch, right?”

“I am,” Ben said.

“Good boy,” Izzy said as he looked into Eden’s eyes. “Because right now? I’ve got to kiss my wife.”

And that he did.