Lord, he’s gorgeous. And smart. And brave. And funny. And sexy. Ugh!
“That name Venom gave you?” He offered her a hand to help her stand. She hesitated to take it. After a beat, she placed her fingers in his warm, wide palm and allowed him to pull her out of bed. Just as she’d feared, his touch, the feel of his calluses, affected her in distinctly naughty ways.
“Raheem?” She quickly extracted her hand from Ozzie’s grip, hoping he couldn’t feel her fingers shaking.
“That’s the one.” He nodded. “I’ve been doing some digging. A lot of digging, actually.”
Of course he had. She’d been upstairs feeling sorry for herself and napping. And he’d been digging. Working. Hacking. Doing his best to find all the pieces of this crazy puzzle and put them together. For her.
Double ugh! Why does he have to be so wonderful? And why can’t he be mine?
*
“Something Samantha told Washington and Carver struck a chord with me,” Ozzie said, and Christian watched him type madly on the laptop sitting in front of him. The clickety-clack of his fingers across the keyboard echoed around the second floor and into the shop below.
Since the meeting Ozzie and Delilah had called was impromptu, only Christian, Emily, and Samantha were present around the conference table. Becky was on the phone with a client who wanted twenty custom bikes built in the next two months. And the other ladies, having once again received the call that those in the field were right as rain, were back at their respective homes taking care of their children or simply avoiding the shop while Samantha was present. Christian understood. The wives and girlfriends of the Black Knights already had enough to worry about without having to watch every word that came out of their mouths.
“That name, Raheem… I’d seen it before,” Ozzie continued, grabbing a slice of cold pizza from the box on the table. “Good thing Venom was so chatty there at the end.”
“He thought it was going to be my end,” Samantha said. “So he wasn’t too worried about divulging secrets.”
“Don’t remind me,” Ozzie muttered around a mouthful of pizza.
Samantha bit her lip and glanced away.
Oh no, Christian thought, recognizing the change in the atmosphere between the two. He looked over at Ozzie, hoping for a clue to what that was all about. But Ozzie seemed as confused as Christian. Ozzie cocked his head at Samantha, halting mid-chew.
“What’s with them?” Emily leaned close to whisper in Christian’s ear, proving he wasn’t the only one to detect trouble in paradise. Also proving Emily had sweet-smelling breath, like bubble gum and fresh coffee, and that her hair was cool and soft where it brushed against his neck.
Frowning, he leaned away from her. Odd, because what he really wanted to do was lean toward her. “Why does everyone assume I have a ruddy crystal ball capable of seeing people’s motivations?”
“Why do you have to be such a ruddy curmudgeon?” she came back immediately, mimicking his accent.
“Please go on,” Samantha insisted after turning back to Ozzie, interrupting any answer Christian might have given Emily. “I’m all ears.”
Ozzie’s eyes remained narrowed, his expression baffled. But he haltingly continued. “A man named Raheem al-Atrash was the translator with the squad of army infantrymen at Albu Bali.”
“Now that seems like too much of a coincidence,” Emily said, shooting Christian a withering glance. Cad that he was, he felt that look deep in his…crotch.
“I thought so too,” Ozzie said. “So I did a little digging. And guess what I found?”
“He found quite a bit actually,” Delilah piped up. She turned Ozzie’s laptop around so everyone could see the screen where a tall, dark bloke in an Iraqi military uniform proudly posed for a picture. “Meet Colonel Raheem al-Atrash.”
“Colonel,” Samantha sputtered. “So after the greedy sonofabitch willfully took part in a massacre of his own people, he went from being an interpreter to a colonel?”
“Actually,” Delilah said, “turns out that after Albu Bali, he was promoted to major. In the years since, he’s risen to the rank of colonel.”
“Seems one of the ways the CIA managed to keep the massacre at Albu Bali a secret was to pull some strings and get Raheem a cushy position inside the Iraqi army,” Ozzie explained. “A cherry job in exchange for his silence.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Samantha’s face was the epitome of disgust.
“Welcome to the wide world of international intrigue, luv,” Christian told her. Having lived there most of his adult life, he was no longer surprised by the perfidy of the players.
“Yeah?” Her brow was knitted. “Well, from what little I’ve seen of it, I’m not surprised you all got out as quickly as you could.”
A heartbeat of strained silence followed that little pronouncement. Emily was quick to fill it. “So let me guess. Colonel al-Atrash is being supplied with weapons by the U.S. government.”
“According to our military records, he is,” Ozzie said.
“Meaning?” Samantha asked, and Christian noticed that she couldn’t quite meet Ozzie’s eyes.
“Meaning I could find no corresponding record of those weapons when I hacked into the Iraqi accounts,” Ozzie said. “It would appear that Raheem is accepting the shipments himself and then diverting the guns to the Basilisks instead of sending them on to the Iraqi army.”
“Can you prove this?” Now Samantha was directing her gaze straight at Ozzie. The reporter in her overruled whatever else was going on.
“Not me.” Ozzie shook his head. “Delilah.” He pointed to the redheaded bartender who petted Fido’s big, blocky head. “By digging into Raheem’s accounts, she was able to follow a money trail leading back to a Panamanian bank. The same Panamanian bank used by one of the shell companies the Basilisks have.”
“After a marathon bit of hacking,” Delilah added, “Ozzie was able to get past the bank’s firewalls.”
“Which themselves had firewalls,” Ozzie muttered.
“And he located some internal transfers of cash between the account of the Basilisks’ shell company and the account Raheem owns,” Delilah finished. “Done and done. Point A has finally been connected to Point B.”
“Holy shit!” Samantha blinked rapidly. “That’s…incredible.”
“Yep.” Ozzie ran a hand through his hair, wincing when he inadvertently hit the wound near his temple. “Seems our wild-goose chase paid off.”
“So what happens now?” Samantha asked.
Ozzie blew out a breath. “It’s already happening. I handed everything over to Washington, and he’s handed it to the government. There are a lot of players interested in this case. The ATF, the FBI. Fuck, even the CIA.”