Protecting Justice (The Justice Series Book 4) Page 11

  Without stopping to exchange pleasantries, Fallyn slid into the booth, Tony beside her.

  “Hey, Fallyn,” the guy said.

  “Hi, Blake. Thanks for meeting us. This is Tony.”

  Blake nodded but didn’t bother with a handshake. All part of the effort to appear they hadn’t just met, Tony supposed.

  Whatever. As long as they all got out without Fallyn’s shoes getting boosted. Tony glanced around the mostly empty restaurant, made brief eye contact with an older man sitting three tables over reading a newspaper. The guy quickly averted his eyes and went back to his paper.

  Outside of that, the place was quiet for 10:30 on a Friday morning.

  “So, what’s up?” Blake said. “I need to get back.”

  Fallyn clasped her hands together on top of the scarred Formica table. “I need to know what’s up with the Foreign Relations committee’s investigation on the CanAir flight.”

  “Which one?”

  Tony rolled his eyes.

  “Blake,” Fallyn said, “don’t be an asshole. We’re both too busy and my sister is dead. I’m well aware that your boss…” she turned to Tony and nodded toward Blake, “…his boss is Senator Dolan, a member of the Armed Services committee. He and Senator Margaret Oren, the chair of Foreign Relations, have a standing meeting every Wednesday at noon in a room on the fourth floor at the InterContinental.” She looked back at Blake, “I think you should stop screwing with me.”

  Jeez, the woman was hell on wheels.

  A seriously pale Blake held his hands out. “How am I screwing with you?”

  She leaned in. “In the next ten seconds, you’re going to tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Which, we both know, is a lie because your boss, a married man, is having an affair with a colleague, a married woman, and my guess is there’s a lot of pillow talk that goes on between two senators. Pillow talk that most likely starts to leak into each respective senator’s office. And since one of the senators we’re talking about chairs the committee investigating a highly suspicious plane crash involving the most wanted terrorist in the world, I think there’s a high propensity for leakage. So, please, Blake, cut the shit and remember that you owe me your career after I bailed you out of that little DUI problem last year.”

  And…wow. That right there? Smoking hot. Total turn on. No prisoners. Bam. Right to the jugular. Damn, he loved that. Watching her work, watching her plow through the bullcrap to get to what she needed. The only thing missing in the I-want-to-do-her department was an erection.

  And if she kept this up, his body would definitely pony up one of those.

  Blake shifted his gaze to Tony, again sizing him up. If Blake expected a reaction from Tony, he’d be waiting a while. Tony had worked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court long enough to become an expert at the nothing-face. Right now, he was all about the nothing-face.

  After a few seconds, Blake faced Fallyn. “You want to keep your voice down?”

  Ha. Classic stall tactic.

  “Don’t test me,” she said. “My voice is down. Now, what’s up with this investigation? There’s no way Foreign Relations believes this guy blew himself up. His ego was too big.” She nodded toward Tony. “Abdul-Nasser Nazari wouldn’t put himself on a plane he wanted to blow up. He’d want to see the fallout. Watch the carnage. And if your boss doesn’t want the grieving sister of one of his committee members mouthing off about a cover-up, not to mention his little weekly trysts, you’d better come clean.” She dug one finger into the table. “My sister is dead. I want to know why.”

  “I thought she had a heart attack.”

  “She did. A medicinally-induced one. A drug called Perisoladol. And golly gee, we can’t find a prescription for that anywhere. And, double golly gee, my sister has a load of encrypted files about this plane crash on a tablet. And, triple golly gee, someone broke into her house the other night and knocked me on my ass looking for something. You’re a smart guy, Blake. You can figure this out.”

  Blake sat back and stared out the grimy window to the traffic on the street. Fallyn kept her focus and the enormous pressure on him. Eventually, someone would have to give. Chances were, it wouldn’t be Fallyn.

  No wonder she excelled at her job. Grey should hire her to round out his merry band of operatives. She’d break anyone’s balls.

  A solid minute passed before Blake gave up on the window and faced Fallyn. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

  “You know I’ll protect you. And Tony will do the same. All we want is the truth.”

  He nodded. “Word around the office is that Foreign Relations said they were done investigating. That’s bull. They’re all over this. They’re saying Abdul-Nasser Nazari blew up the plane as an act of rebellion, but they don’t believe that.”

  Why?

  Tony wanted to ask the question, but wouldn’t. This was Fallyn’s show and she had a plan. His getting in the middle of it wouldn’t help her.

  “Why?”

  Atta, girl.

  Blake pressed his lips together and broke eye contact. He stared out the window again, his head inching back and forth, the movement so slight it was barely there. Whatever he wrestled with, it had teeth.

  Fallyn sat forward, touched his hand and drew his attention. “Blake, I need this. Please. You can trust me. You know you can. Besides, we both signed a confidentiality agreement last year. Your secrets are my secrets.”

  “I don’t know everything and I sure as hell don’t have a direct line to Foreign Relations. All I know is what I hear from my boss.”

  Here we go…

  Adrenaline ravaged Tony’s veins and he battled to sit still. Stoic. Following Fallyn’s lead because she hadn’t budged a millimeter. For her, meetings like this were a daily occurrence. Before this meeting, he didn’t get it. Why she’d want control of people’s secrets. Now? Feeling the rush of whatever Blake was about to say, he got it. Understood it on a primal level.

  Fallyn was an adrenaline junkie.

  And he wanted her.

  “I don’t care,” Fallyn said. “Tell me what you do know. I’ll figure out the rest.”

  “The day after the crash, I was in a meeting with the senator—”

  “Dolan?”

  “Yes. He got a call from Senator Oren. Dolan asked me to step out of the room. Which I did. I stood outside the office while he took the call.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  He shook his head. “No, but his wife called on another line and one of the staffers told me she was holding.”

  “Well, that’s a pickle,” Fallyn said, totally deadpan.

  Blake snorted. “Yeah. I cracked the door just to let him know his wife was holding and he didn’t put Oren on hold, just looked up at me like WTF? I informed him his wife was on hold and he went back to his conversation.”

  Again, he glanced out the window and Tony felt for the guy. Clearly, he wanted to be loyal to his boss, something Tony respected, but Fallyn, she’d played that dead sister card and nothing would keep her from badgering this guy until he caved—something they all knew.

  “What’d you hear?” Fallyn asked.

  Blake met her eyes. “As I closed the door, I heard Senator Dolan say something about Ryan Nicols.”

  Whoa. Ryan Nicols. The President’s son, who they’d just seen at Heather’s funeral in his Air Force dress uniform with the medals that could cover a city block. Lieutenant Ryan Nicols was one of the best fighter pilots the United States military had ever seen.

  “What about him?”

  Blake held his hands out. “I don’t know. I swear to you I don’t. But, I’ll tell you this, the next day, I was out for drinks and saw one of Oren’s staffers. He was bragging about his boss getting called to the Oval the day before.” He waved his hand. “We’re a competitive bunch. The Oval office? That’s major. And that would have been the same day Oren called Dolan and they talked about Ryan Nicols.”

  Fallyn sat back, looked at Tony with squint
y eyes. “You tracking this?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “My guess? The chair of Foreign Relations calls to tell her lover that she’s been summoned to the White House. And for whatever reason, the president’s son is involved.”

  Chapter Nine

  Ryan Nicols. The president’s son.

  Senator Oren. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  Fallyn paced the suite’s living room, her brain making a lot of connections she didn’t particularly like. Ones that seemed completely logical if also completely immoral and unethical.

  Of course, this was the nation’s capitol. Immoral and unethical went hand in hand.

  “Why is there so little about this kid in the news?” Tony said from the couch.

  Hates desks. Check. They were probably too confining or something for the big guy. If only she could take him to her P&A office and show him the fun things one could do on a desk.

  Focus, Fallyn.

  Currently, Tony was deep couch sitting with his feet on the coffee table and his legs sprawled as he surfed the Net for articles on the First Son.

  “You’d think with his family in the White House, and Ryan an accomplished Air Force pilot, he’d have a little more screen time. Hell, he doesn’t even have a Facebook or Snapchat account.”

  “He was voted one of the military’s most eligible bachelors last year,” Fallyn said. “The president blew a gasket. Ryan’s on a Special Forces team that very few people know about. Very few. It’s called Redwing, and those guys are so elite and perform such secret missions, they can’t afford to have the public know anything about them. Not even within the other U.S. military branches that they live and work in on a daily basis. Their wives, their best friends, their moms and dads…none of them can know that they’re involved in this Redwing team. The secrecy of the team is of vital importance, so I’m told, because of national security, blah, blah, blah. Just knowing about it can put you in serious danger. Lucky me, I had to make that little ‘most eligible bachelor’ notoriety go away and go away fast. I couldn’t even bring my team in on it. Just me as a personal favor to the president.”

  Tony shot her a tilted, mischievous grin that gave his dark eyes a slight edge. “So now that you’ve shared that tidbit of trivia with me, do you have to kill me?”

  Only if he wanted her to kiss him to death. “I was sworn to secrecy, and normally, no, I do not take that kind of thing lightly and blab it to the first good looking bodyguard who comes along, but in this case, I know you deal with top-secret stuff all the time and know, like me, how to keep your trap shut. I need someone to bounce ideas off of, and since my team is back in New York, you’ll have to too.”

  She smiled back at him and, for a second, saw that smoldering look replace the mischievousness. Before he could say anything, or grab her up for one of his power kisses, his phone went off.

  Damn it. She was looking forward to that kiss.

  “It’s Teeg,” he told her as he answered the phone. “Yeah, Geek Boy. What’s up?”

  At the same time, her phone rang. Blocked number. Hmm. She let it go to voicemail and listened to Tony talk to his tech guru.

  Poor Teeg. She felt sorry for him being surrounded by all the government agents who teased and made fun of his skills while totally relying on those same skills to make their jobs easier. She really should fix him and Tabitha, one of her employees, up one of these days. The little tingle she got behind her ears when she saw an opportunity to fix someone was nagging her. She had that when she thought of David Teeg.

  Even more so when she looked at Tony Gerard who was now bent forward, feet on the floor.

  Her phone dinged that the caller had left a message. She punched in her passcode and listened while she stared at Tony.

  When was the last time she’d felt this way over a man? The tingle that said he needed fixing but the fixing he needed was found between her legs and in her arms.

  A man’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Ms. Pasche, this is Special Agent Allan Bronco. I’ve been alerted by the U.S. Capitol Police that there is an investigation into your sister’s death. I need to interview you and would like you to come to my office today at 3 p.m. Please confirm this will work for you. See you then.”

  Great. Now the FBI wanted to interrogate her.

  “You sure?” Tony was saying, bringing Fallyn’s mind back to the moment. “Interesting. We were just discussing him. Yeah…send me a screenshot and I’ll show it to Fallyn and get back to you.”

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  Tony held up a finger. “Hey, Geek Boy?” There was a pause. “Good work.”

  She liked a guy who complimented co-workers on a job well done. Tony disconnected and tapped a couple buttons on his phone. “You’re gonna love this.”

  He turned the screen around and Fallyn leaned forward to look at it, but it seemed too small to read so she hustled over to the couch to sit next to him.

  He made room for her, tucking her close to his body and holding the phone for her. He smelled good and the body heat radiating off of him enveloped her.

  She squinted, still couldn’t make out the words. She needed her readers on for this small shit. “Can you enlarge the page? I’d swear that’s a curriculum vitae of Ryan Nicols.”

  Tony tapped the screen, enlarging the words at the top of the page. “You wouldn’t be wrong.”

  Fallyn snatched the phone from him, scrolling past the name, age, and multiple bulleted paragraphs. Sure enough, the screen shot Teeg had sent was a fairly in-depth and completely classified, top-secret document of Ryan Nicols’ education and military training. “This was on my sister’s tablet?”

  “Yep.”

  Fallyn scrolled some more. There was no mention of Ryan’s Special Forces team, but that was no surprise. She handed Tony the phone. “Okay, so here’s what we know. Senator Oren, the head of the Foreign Relations committee launches an investigation into the plane’s disappearance. Then she gets called to the president’s office and is presumably told to drop it. It’s an act of terrorism, end of story. She’s confused, befuddled, but goes along with it. What else can she do? However, she’s a smart woman and wonders why the president wants her off of it. If the disappearance of CanAir 702 wasn’t an act of terrorism, something else happened to it.” She slowly circled one hand. “So, let’s kick tires here. Throw around some ideas.”

  “Mechanical failure,” Tony said. “Or, if we’re being dramatic, one of the pilots wigged out.”

  “Or a passenger on board went crazy and took it down.”

  Tony shrugged.

  “But why would the prez care about any of that? Mechanical failure, crazy pilot or psycho passengers. If any of those options were viable and he got involved at all, he’d make a statement and move on. Leave it to the NTSB to figure out.”

  “Okay,” Tony said. “So why didn’t he do that?”

  “I don’t know. If we’re going for the drama again I’d say the only reason he wants that investigation canned is because he doesn’t want the public to know what happened to CanAir 702.”

  “So, Senator Oren gets nervous. The president has shut her down and she doesn’t know why. She wants to talk it out with someone. Calls her boyfriend, Senator Dolan.”

  Fallyn nodded. “And somehow Ryan Nicols’ name comes up and that’s when Blake overhears it. He’s an expert pilot. Maybe they do believe the pilots on board had something to do with the plane going down and he offered some insight?”

  “How does your sister play into all of this?”

  “I don’t know, but I bet Senator Oren asked her to secretly look into it while she played along with the president. Let him think the investigation was closed. Meanwhile, Heather was looking into Ryan Nicols and that plane manifest. Did Teeg decode anything else?”

  Tony shook his head. “Caroline and Mitch are working an assignment and needed Teeg’s assistance. That one had to take precedence over this for a few hours. He’s back on it now.”

  On
e tech specialist for a whole group of agents wasn’t ideal, yet Fallyn understood the skeleton crew. She ran her team the same way. It had to be people with certain personalities and those who understood the intangible side of the cases they dealt with. A rare breed.

  Tony’s phone buzzed with an incoming call. He saw the ID, clicked the call over to voicemail without missing a beat.

  “Sister?” Fallyn asked.

  Tony shook his head. “My supervisor at the Court. He probably wants to remind me my vacation time ends soon.”

  “And?”

  “What?”

  “Are you going back?”

  He zipped his lips and sat up, making a lot of work out of putting his phone away. He stood, the couch jostling her as his weight disappeared. “I assume you want to talk to Senator Oren?”

  “Oren won’t talk to me. Not if I so much as mention the CanAir disappearance and my sister’s research. I mean so far, no one but us and the cops even know Heather’s death is suspicious. If I do mention that the CanAir disappearance and Heather’s death might be connected, no way Oren will put her neck out. After all, she could be next.”

  She reached up and touched Tony’s hand. Didn’t grab it, just lightly caressed those long fingers. “Tony, what happened to the chief justice wasn’t your fault. I know everyone tells you that, and you probably disagree, but it’s the truth.”

  A slight shudder went through him at her touch. He cleared his throat, looked away. “I was his protection detail and I screwed up. Now the man is dead. How is that not my fault, Fallyn?”

  Her heart went out to him. “I read the reports, saw the video. Neither you nor the chief had any idea that man on the bridge was staging the road rage fight in order to get at the chief. Justice Turner bailed out of the car before you could do anything. I know from a lot of reports that he was a tough cookie and did whatever he wanted. You couldn’t have stopped him from jumping out of the car to play peacemaker anymore than I could have.”