Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(77)

It was unusual for someone as senior as Bud to be part of an op, but Bud wasn't a desk jockey. He looked around, noting everything. The three dead guys clustered at the back. Wilson and his team around Nick. The two men on the ground. They were wounded but breathing, Nick was delighted to see. And the bad guys were dead.

"Mancino saved our asses," Wilson said quietly to Bud.

"No, no man." Nick pushed that away with a gesture of his hand. He didn't want the credit, he just wanted the dead guys dead. As a matter of fact, things had gone his way, because he'd have killed them anyway. The fact that he'd done so and wasn't going to be charged with homicide was icing on the cake. "I happened to be outside and could make a lateral entrance. Your team softened them up, I was just on mop-up detail." He looked at Wilson and allowed the grief he felt to show. "Your two guys out back. They're gone. They had explosives ready to blow."

Wilson staggered, almost lost his balanced. His head hung low, then he raised it. He turned to Bud. "Medics on the way? Eisner and McBride are wounded. Eisner's losing a ton of blood."

"Yeah." Bud tapped the comms unit in his ear. "They should be here right-" A loud ambulance siren filled the air, cutting out as the ambulance drew up outside with a screech of brakes. "Now." 

Two guys wearing EMT jackets jumped out of the back of the ambulance while it was still rocking, carrying a gurney. They carried out a stabilized Eisner, already transfusing, then McBride. Both men held thumbs up, Eisner's hand shaky, McBride's firm.

Everyone stood silently as two body bags were carried out.

The ambulance drove away, the PPD crime scene unit showed up and Nick groaned.

Bud's heavy hand landed on his shoulder. "I know," Bud said sympathetically. "But we have to do this by the book and I need to get your testimony, together with that of the SWAT guys still standing. We can get Eisner and McBride's testimony later when they're out of surgery."

Nick quivered. He wanted to get this over with as fast as humanly possible and get back to Kay. He wanted to hold her, reassure himself that she was all right, then get her into bed as fast as he could.

He was pumped with adrenaline, and the handiest way to vent that was fucking. Way out in the desert in Afghanistan, there hadn't been any women available who wouldn't have been stoned to death for talking to him, and he didn't fancy goats. None of the team members did, so they all beat off in the barracks.

So yeah, he wanted Kay, because he was about ready to explode.

He wanted her. Not just any woman with the right plumbing but her, Kay Hudson, beautiful and brilliant and all his.

It was way too soon to propose. He knew that. But he wanted to stake his claim. Nail her and nail her down at the same time. Make sure she'd stay with him in Portland. Nick wasn't one to think much about the future, because usually the present was enough to handle. Or that was the old Nick.

The new Nick wanted to make plans, be absolutely certain that Kay would be part of those plans. He wanted to look into the future and see her in it.

Right now, he'd give anything to be with Kay, holding her, kissing her, being inside her. He didn't want to be here in this abandoned warehouse, walking Bud and his crime scene team through what had happened. But-Nick was a professional. He'd had patience beaten into him when he'd joined the Navy as a hotshot hothead. Patience and control and discipline had been pounded into his head and muscles.

So he answered Bud's questions patiently, walked him through it, basically did an after-action review, like he'd done countless times after a battle.

And it had been a battle, no doubt about that. A hundred bullets fired, five dead, two wounded. Yeah, that was a battle.

They'd discovered the laptop that operated the drone and one of Bud's techs would go through its entire history. About an hour into the debriefing, IDs on the dead guys came in from the facial-recognition databank.

The head guy was a surprise-Oliver Baker, himself.

Nick looked at Bud in shock, and saw his surprise reflected in Bud's face.

"Oliver Baker," Bud said slowly. "Huh."

Huh indeed.

Baker wasn't quite a security contractor, not in the sense that ASI was. He was more a power broker, the "Fixer", as his nickname suggested. So, he was the one who had used the bio-weapon?

The two other men were in his employ. Basically his only employees, so his company, Solutions International, was effectively no more. Nick wasn't too clear on what exactly Baker did, and didn't care. What he cared about was that for whatever reason, Baker and his guys had gone after Kay and now they were dead. Everyone who wanted to hurt her was dead. That was good enough for him.

Nick looked at Bud. "Kay has about a terabyte of data that she's studying. What he was up to will be in the data. Kay will figure it out, if she hasn't already." He met Bud's sober gaze. "What I can tell you is that he was messing around with bio-weapons, with some kind of weaponized super-flu. Something that had Kay scared shitless. She's a virologist and doesn't scare easy."