Jack could tell by the way her eyes flicked over everything, looking for any sign of trouble, any target, that she was still wired and in kill mode. Her carotid artery was pulsing a mile a minute. Things were about to get a different kind of dangerous. He didn’t want any accidents.
“Angela, listen to me. It’s over. Take a deep breath. Keep your mouth closed, and let me take it from here. Don’t freak out about anything I tell them. It will be what I need to say to keep you safe.”
Angela let out a deep breath. “Okay. I understand.”
Jack was relieved she was listening to him, but then, she was smart and he would have expected nothing less.
Dozens of men in black tactical gear poured up the stairwell and fanned out into the room like a black flood oozing up from below. It was a fearsome sight, and meant to be. Under their helmets, everything but their eyes was covered. They all moved quickly, weapons up and ready for anything. Many of those weapons were quickly pointed toward Angela and Jack.
“Hands! Hands!” several of them yelled at the same time, as if they’d just cornered the Devil himself.
Jack was relieved to see Angela lift her hands with him.
They were both quickly surrounded by guns pointed at them from every direction.
“Hands behind your heads! Now! Do it now! Lace your fingers together!” one of them yelled as others pulled out handcuffs.
Angela and Jack both did as instructed.
“Where’s Angus?” Jack asked as a man pulled one of his arms down around behind his back.
“Here,” a familiar voice called out from beyond the wall of men in tactical gear. He was huffing as he hurried up the steps.
As he got closer, he urged the men to let him through. They had already handcuffed Angela and Jack.
“Take it easy,” Angus told them. “These two are friendlies. They’re the ones who called us in. Take off the cuffs, please.”
One of the men took the cuffs back off. He gave Jack a nod and moved back. Some of the big men kept an eye on them while others moved away to help check all the bodies as they went about clearing the room.
Angus was a big man himself, standing six-six. He weighed at least 250 and very little of it was muscle. His tailored suit did a fair job of disguising his prominent pear shape. He had several fat chins but a nice head of brownish-blond hair combed straight back. Surprisingly, it wasn’t going gray. Angus gave others gray hair.
“My god, Jack, I could hardly believe your call.”
“I’m glad you made it here before we were handcuffed, hog-tied, and carted off.”
“Me too,” the big man said as he took in Angela.
“Angus, I’d like you to meet Angela Constantine. Angela, this is Angus, the man who got you released before from those overly enthusiastic intel agents.”
Angela reached out and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for helping me, sir.”
Jack almost did a double take at how polite she was. He realized, then, that she was doing her part to help him with a tense situation. He knew that what she really wanted to do was give him an earful about the injustice of those men taking her prisoner when she had been the one who had discovered the bomb for them—done their job for them.
Jack silently let out a sigh of relief that she didn’t.
The sight of this woman in cutoff shorts, boots, platinum-blond hair tipped in red, piercings down her ears, a big DARK ANGEL tattoo across her throat, there in the room with Angus and all his men in tactical black, was quite the contrast.
Angus quickly returned to business. “I can’t believe this place is only minutes from my office.” He looked a little sick as he gazed at the bomb. “I simply can’t believe it. Had that thing gone off …”
“You would have been vaporized, along with most of the government and a large part of DC,” Jack said.
Angus nodded, still looking queasy as he stared at the bomb. “I still can’t catch my breath over how close this was to being a catastrophe for our country.”
“Is the NEST team on its way?” Jack asked. “That bomb is still live.”
“Yes,” Angus said, returning his attention to Jack. “They should be here any minute. The sooner that thing is made safe, the sooner I’ll be able to breathe.” He looked at Angela again, then back to Jack as he cleared his throat. “What’s she doing here? Was it really necessary to bring her along?”
“I didn’t bring her,” Jack said. “She brought me.”
Angus frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You owe her for stopping that other nuke from going to New York City.”
Angus smiled politely. “Yes, we do. That’s why we released her after things were cleared up. And we gave her that special weapons permit as a token of our deep appreciation.”
“You should be thanking your lucky stars that you did.”
Angus clasped his hands behind his back. “Why’s that?”
“Because after you had her released, she found out about this second bomb.” Jack pointed a thumb back at the device. “Had you not released her—had those rogue agents had their way with her—Washington would be under a mushroom cloud at four p.m. today.”
“Well I don’t know that I can entirely believe—”
“Angus, you need to listen carefully to me so that you can comprehend the seriousness of this situation. None of your people knew there was a second bomb, did they? Any evidence about the second bomb was destroyed in the explosion when you went in after the first one. Even if they would have gotten any intel, you would still never have found this one, but even if you had, it would have been disastrous.”
“Why do you say that?”
Jack gestured off behind the electrical equipment to the dead man in the chair, his legs straight out in front of him, his arms hanging, his face a bloody mess. “That guy there is sitting on a dead man’s switch. If by some miracle you would have found out about this bomb in time, your men would have blown him off that chair and that would have detonated the device.”
Angus wiped his forehead. He was looking a little green.
“Goddamn, Jack. You’re scaring the crap out of me.”
“Angela found out about this device, not unlike she found the other one. She was able to track it to this place. Angela, no one else, was able to find it in time and deal with it without letting that guy on the dead man’s switch move a muscle.”
Angus looked at the man in the chair, then around at all the bodies. “So then you shot all of them when you got here?”
“No, she did. I was just her backup.”
The men in the tactical gear, their eyes the only thing visible in their black masks, exchanged looks. They were probably all just as good shots, but they found it hard to believe.
Angus frowned. “Are you serious?”
“I am,” Jack said. “She a better shot with that twenty-two than anyone I’ve ever seen. No shots to center mass. Every one a head shot. Every bullet she fired today killed a terrorist. One bullet, one man.”
“Well, it took two for that guy down on the second-floor stairs,” Angela corrected. “I screwed up and waited a fraction of a second too long, so it took two bullets.”
“Yeah,” Jack argued to her in defense, “but you put that second round through his ear—from across the room—after you put the first one through his throat so he couldn’t call out an alarm.”
The men in black exchanged looks again. They had probably found the guy below with the bullet hole in through his ear.
Angus gaped at her a moment and then shook his head. “Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of national security, and stopping this threat came down to you two—down to her with a twenty-two.” He turned back to Jack. “We’re going to need to debrief her about all of this, of course.”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that, Angus. Angela is my asset. Not yours.”
He looked shocked. “But this concerns national security.”
“That’s not my job, and it’s not hers.”
Angus’s eyes narrowed. “Is this about the program that was canceled?”
“My contract that was canceled, yes. I’m happy that we were able to stop these two bombs from destroying New York City and Washington, DC, but I don’t work for you anymore. I don’t provide intel for you any longer—by your choice.”