The Ultimate Betrayal Read online

  “That sounds good. When are we leaving?”

  “First thing in the morning. I’ve got a couple of loose ends I need to take care of before we go.”

  “I took a taxi straight here from the airport when I realized those guys were following me. I need to find a hotel to spend the night.”

  Bran felt a trace of amusement. “You won’t be needing a hotel room, Jessie. You’ll be staying at my place tonight. You’re Danny’s sister. From the moment you walked through that door until this is over, you’re under my protection.”

  She blinked. “Wait a minute. I’m not sure what I expected when I came here—your help clearing my father’s name, for sure. But I certainly wasn’t expecting you to act as my bodyguard.”

  “Until today, you didn’t know you needed one. Now you do.”

  She looked as if she might argue, but since he was right, she stayed silent.

  Bran closed the laptop on his desk and shoved it into its black neoprene sleeve. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “What if they’re watching?”

  Bran flicked a glance toward the rear entrance leading to the parking lot. “I hope they are. Better for everyone if they know you’re no longer here.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll lose them long before we get anywhere near my condo. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Jessie stepped back as Bran grabbed the handle of her carry-on and started for the back door, stopping several times to speak to one of his colleagues. They were all good-looking people, and amazingly fit; even the receptionist up front was a pretty brunette with a sunny disposition. Another woman walked toward her, a stunning blonde who looked to be in great physical condition.

  “You don’t have to worry,” the blonde woman said. “Bran won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Jessie, this is Lissa Blayne,” Bran said. “Former police detective, currently a private investigator.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Jessie said. “I’m just hoping Brandon can help me clear my father’s name.”

  Lissa smiled. “If anyone can, it’s Bran.”

  Jessie didn’t mention the theft of the chemical weapons or that they would be trying to find them before something terrible happened. She figured the fewer people who knew, the better.

  Bran nudged her forward and they started moving again, her carry-on rolling along in his wake. He paused at the back door and handed over the bag. “You take it from here. I need to keep my hands free.”

  Remembering the gunfire that had erupted only a short time ago, she felt a rush of nerves. “All right.”

  “Stay here till I check things out.”

  She nodded. Bran pulled the door open enough to scope out the parking lot, then stepped outside. He wasn’t gone long before she heard the rumble of a car engine starting, pulling to a halt outside the door.

  A moment later the door swung open again. “Let’s go.”

  Pulling the carry-on behind her, Jessie followed Bran out to where a black Jeep Wrangler idled in the lot. He helped her into the passenger seat and closed the door, rounded the vehicle, and slid in behind the wheel. He pulled into the street more slowly than she would have expected.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  Bran shook his head. “No sign of them. They might pick us up later, but I’m thinking you were right. They were sending you a warning.”

  “You mean like, this is what’s going to happen to you if you keep asking questions?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it.” He started driving, constantly checking the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, his head swiveling right to left, left to right as he swept the area around them.

  He turned the Jeep at the corner, pulled into the left lane, turned another corner, pulled into the right lane, sped up, slowed down, shot through traffic and drove through parking lots, turned into alleys, and gunned through yellow lights.

  After twenty minutes of zigzagging between cars, she was sure anyone who might be trying to keep track of them was not going to succeed.

  “You okay?” Bran asked as she clung to her seat.

  “How long do we have to keep this up?”

  He cranked the wheel, turning the Jeep into an underground parking garage, and pulled into a space marked Unit 1410, next to what appeared to be a brand-new Chevy Stingray, bright red with matte-black trim.

  “Home sweet home,” Bran said, grinning. Jessie pulled her gaze away from that amazingly handsome face and ignored the little tug of awareness she felt when he smiled, which only made him more attractive. He turned off the engine and cracked open his door at the same time Jessie opened hers.

  “Stay there,” he commanded, back in bodyguard mode, the smile gone from his face. He checked their surroundings, then came around to her side of the Jeep to help her out. He hauled her luggage out of the back, but didn’t offer to tow it up to his condo. Apparently, he didn’t believe in taking chances.

  Jessie glanced around the parking garage, which was cleaner than most houses, not a trace of oil on the concrete floor. The neighborhood was extremely upscale, and from the looks of the mirrored glass building, perfectly landscaped flower beds, and manicured grassy open spaces, so were the condos.

  She’d known the Garretts had money, but she hadn’t thought about it when she’d come to Dallas. She just needed help, and she believed her brother’s friend would agree.

  She towed her carry-on into the elevator and waited as Bran pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. The carriage zipped up as if it had wings, and the doors opened onto a corridor lined on one side with plate glass windows looking out over the city. Opposite the windows, a row of apartments. Bran paused at 1410, swiped his key, and opened the door.

  Jessie waited while he disabled the alarm, then reset it to perimeter only. When he turned, she could feel him close beside her, big and male, vowing to protect her. He was former army Special Forces, a Delta operator, just like her brother, one of the most capable and deadly men on the planet. For the first time in days, she felt safe.

  “The guest rooms are down the hall,” Bran said. “Each has its own bath. Follow me.”

  She took a look around as he led her beneath the modern glass chandelier in the granite-floored entry. Ten-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, stunning views of the city, big sliding glass doors that opened onto a terrace.

  “Your place is lovely.”

  “Thanks.” He flashed another grin. “Long as my brother Reese keeps the family business making money, I can afford it. Besides, I’ve lived everywhere from a tent in the middle of the Afghan desert to a hammock in the Colombian jungle. I figured it was time for a change.”

  She smiled. “I’m betting the Stingray is yours, too.”

  “Recent addition. I’ve barely had time to try it out.”

  Jessie felt a pang of guilt. “And now here I am, dragging you off to Colorado, into what could turn out to be a very dangerous situation.”

  He sobered, walked back and caught her chin, forcing her to look up at him. “I owe your brother my life. In giving it to me, he lost his own. There is nothing his sister or anyone he cared about could ever ask of me that I would not do.”

  Her throat tightened. She thought of how much she missed Danny, knew how much her brother had admired and respected Brandon. “I’m glad I came to you. When I left Colorado, I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but now I am. Thank you for helping me.”

  “The only thing I’ve done so far is sweep a pile of glass off the floor of my office. You can thank me when this is over.”

  Jessie just nodded. Now that they were safely inside his condo, Bran took the handle of her suitcase and tugged it down the hall into one of the guest rooms. The bedroom furniture was modern, dark wood throughout, the bed covered by a pale blue silk comforter, trendy lamps on the bedside tables, a desk, and tw
o pale blue chairs in a small seating area.

  “You have very good taste in interior design,” she said.

  He tossed the carry-on up onto the bed. “Afraid I can’t take the credit. A friend helped me.”

  A friend. The way he looked, there was no doubt what kind of friend. “Female, I imagine.”

  He just shrugged those wide shoulders. “Women have a knack for that kind of thing.”

  In today’s world, it was a sexist thing to say, but she almost smiled. She had lived with her dad and brother. She knew how military men thought. Since they also tended to be caring and protective, it wasn’t a problem for her.

  “Some women, I guess,” she said. “I was never good at that stuff myself.”

  “That why you took up writing?”

  “Investigating and writing. I like the challenge of digging into mysteries and solving them.”

  Bran’s features turned serious. “That’s good because we’re going to need your skills and mine to figure out what the hell is going on in Colorado.”

  Jessie stayed silent. Because Bran Garrett was right.

  THREE

  Bran sat down behind the desk in his home office. He booted up his computer, a top-of-the-line iMac Pro with a twenty-seven-inch, 5K, P-3 widescreen color monitor. The room was filled with state-of-the-art equipment, some of it stuff he rarely used and was still getting a handle on figuring out.

  While Jessie got settled in the guest room, he used the time to Google Colonel James Daniel Kegan.

  Bran had met Danny’s father several times over the years, a good-looking, distinguished man with very straight posture, a slightly ruddy complexion, and a mane of silver-streaked dark red hair. He had always been cordial, if a bit formal due to his superior rank, but he had clearly loved his son.

  Bran had gone to see him several months after Danny’s funeral, which he’d been unable to attend. He’d been in the hospital at the time, recovering from injuries he had suffered in the same Afghan firefight that had killed his friend.

  He glanced down at the pages of links, began clicking through them. The colonel had graduated West Point and gone on to achieve a sterling military career. Several articles talked about his outstanding record, his service in the Gulf War, in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the medals he had won, including a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.

  It was hard to imagine a man like that stealing chemical weapons.

  Bran found no articles on the theft, which he had expected, since the information would have been highly classified. The public would not be happy to learn that military-grade weapons had been stolen and not recovered.

  He looked up information on the US Army Alamo Chemical Depot, responsible for the safe and secure storage of chemical weapons stockpiled in Colorado, one of only two such installations in the country.

  He glanced up as the soft fragrance of flowers drifted toward him, and saw Jessie walking into the study. He told himself the little kick he felt had nothing to do with the way her fiery, red-gold hair fell in soft waves to below her shoulders. Or the way the long-sleeved T-shirt she had changed into hugged the swell of her breasts, just the right size to fit his hands.

  Bran jerked his gaze away and turned back to the computer screen. Unfortunately, Jessie rounded the desk and stood close behind him to peer over his shoulder.

  His groin tightened. Not good. This was Danny’s sister, not a woman he could trifle with and just walk away. She was special to Danny, which made her special to him.

  “I see you’re digging up info on the depot,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know it’s there to destroy the country’s stockpile of chemical weapons, but that’s about it.”

  “In a nutshell, they’ve got fifteen thousand pounds of mustard gas, in seven hundred and eighty thousand recovered munitions. Last I checked, there were approximately fifty thousand 155 millimeter projectiles, three hundred 105 millimeter projectiles, and a hundred four-point-two-inch mortar rounds.”

  Impressed, he turned in the chair to look at her. “Anything else I should know?”

  “The actual destruction of the weapons is contracted to a civilian corporation, Weidner Engineering. They have fourteen hundred employees assigned to the project. Year-to-date they’ve destroyed over 365 tons of munitions at a cost of over a billion and a half dollars. Of course that doesn’t account for the stuff that’s gone missing.”

  “How much?”

  “That, I don’t know. As an outsider, it isn’t that easy to find out.”

  “Maybe not, but you’ve obviously done your homework.”

  “I’m a journalist. I need to be as accurate as possible. Add to that, I want my father’s name cleared. I need as much information as I can get.”

  Bran nodded. “We’ll find out more when we get to Colorado. I do know these are the same type of chemical weapons used in Syria against the Syrian people. If you come in contact with the stuff, it’s bad news.”

  “At the very least, it blisters your skin and mucous membranes on contact. Breathing it can result in permanent blindness, or worst case, it reacts with the water in the air to form hydrochloric acid, which causes swelling and blocking of the lung tissue.”

  “Death by suffocation,” Bran said.

  “I remember the gruesome pictures from Syria, what it did to the children.”

  “Yeah. The stuff is brutal and deadly.”

  “It’s horrible,” Jessie said.

  “I assume you have a file on this, information you’ve collected.”

  “I do.”

  “I need to see it.” He rose from his chair. “In the meantime, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go see what my housekeeper’s got stored in the fridge.”

  The look on Jessie’s face said that after their gruesome conversation, food was the last thing on her mind. Her stomach rumbled as if it disagreed.

  She sighed. “I haven’t eaten since I left Colorado. Too much going on.”

  Bran sobered as he led the way to the kitchen. There was plenty going on, all right. And none of it good. Helping Jessie Kegan was far more than a protection detail. Whatever was going on involved national security.

  If Colonel Kegan had been murdered, the men responsible were as deadly as the chemicals Bran and Jessie were hunting.

  From now on—as spec ops soldiers liked to say—the only easy day was yesterday.

  * * *

  After roast beef sandwiches and a cup of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup, assembled by her ridiculously hot male host, Jessie retrieved the file she had compiled on the case and carried it in to Bran, seated once more behind the desk in his study.

  As he accepted the file, he gave her left hand a pointed glance. “You never married?”

  She shook her head, suddenly uneasy. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Tension filtered through her but she managed to smile. “Turns out my judgment of men is lousy.”

  “Seemed like your folks had a happy marriage.”

  “They did. Dad loved Mom and she was crazy about him, too. It nearly destroyed my father when she died.”

  “I remember Danny telling me she had a stroke. He talked about what a great mom she was.”

  “She really was. She was always there for all of us, kind of the bedrock of the family. I think Dad took her death even harder than Danny’s. Being a soldier, he accepted that his son could be killed. It never occurred to him that Mom would die before he did.”

  Bran leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on her face. “So...no husband. No serious boyfriend, either?”

  “No. Listen, if you’re finished with the third degree, I’m going to bed. It’s been a rough day.”

  His gaze sharpened. “Sorry,” he said, not looking sorry at all and even more curious than before—unfortunately. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

&nbs
p; “What time?” she managed to ask calmly.

  “We leave at six. We can pick up something to eat on the way to the airport.”

  “I’ll be ready. Good night, Bran. And thanks again. I really appreciate your help.”

  Bran casually nodded, but his beautiful blue eyes never strayed as she turned and walked away. She shouldn’t have let his questions get to her. It was a dead giveaway to a guy as smart as he was that there was more to the story than she was willing to tell.

  Far more.

  She thought of the man whose brutality had changed her life. Jordan Duran, Jordy, he’d signed his emails, the man who was currently serving a ten-year prison sentence. She didn’t like to think about him. She refused to let him control any more of her life than he already had. As she had learned to do, she pushed his image from her mind and just thanked God she was still alive.

  Calm once more, she closed the guest-room door and headed over to the desk, where she’d set up her laptop. For the next half hour, she researched the town of Alamo and the surrounding area, saw that the violent crime rate, which included murder, rape, manslaughter, and armed robbery, was the highest in Colorado, one of the highest in the nation.

  As a military brat, she and her family had moved from one end of the country to the other. They had been living at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs when she had graduated high school. Going to the University of Denver, only ninety minutes away, seemed a perfect fit. A little distance, a little room to grow, but still close to her family. During those four years, she had fallen in love with the Mile High City and decided to stay after graduation.

  She knew a lot about Denver and Colorado Springs, but very little about the town of Alamo and the area around the army Depot. Jessie went back over the crime links she had Googled, hoping something would click in regard to the theft, but nothing seemed remotely connected to stealing chemical weapons.

  Yawning, she packed up the computer so she would be ready to travel in the morning. Stripping off the long-sleeved pink T-shirt and soft brown leggings she had changed into, she headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth, then went to bed.