The Asset by Anna del Mar

Author:Anna del Mar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Neil barked when we entered the cottage. The small sitting room was crowded. My eyes traveled from one man to the next, trying to make sense of the scene. Manny Rivera sat in his high-tech wheelchair, working on some type of cleverly attached console. Wang Ho paced the foyer’s small perimeter as if guarding the door to the cellar. Will Jackson lounged on my couch, squinting through his thick glasses and playing what looked like a high-tech video game on his laptop.

“‘Good morning, Vietnam!’” Will shouted, startling everybody, including himself. “Well, hello, beautiful,” he shrieked like a parrot.

Eyes bright with interest, the three men leveled their stares on me, a trained, systematic, professional assessment with traces of...what? Curiosity. Compassion? I cringed under their scrutiny. I’m sure I looked quite unhinged, standing at the threshold wearing only a giant flannel shirt and black tennis shoes.

Ash surveyed the room. “Three-sixty?”

“Perimeter secured.” Manny’s fingers punched the screen before him. “No hostile contact on the radar, no prospects for contact for twenty-nine—no—make that thirty clicks.”

Ash turned to Will. “Status?”

“Unchanged,” Will said in a perfectly normal voice. “Target is on the ground, full entourage accounted for, all devices within designated range, visual confirmed.”

Time slowed down to a trickle as one by one, the realizations hit me. All that brainpower in the room. They hadn’t come to Copperhill just to shovel ashes and clear debris. They hadn’t spent all of their time at the ranch either. They’d scouted, secured and monitored the cottage and who knew what else.

“Showtime,” Ash said to Wang. “Bring him up.”

“Bring who up?” I said as Wang disappeared down the stairs.

“Hang on.” Ash leaned over Will’s screen as both men scrutinized the streaming data. “Keep an eye on the monitoring device signal.”

Monitoring device signal? “Could somebody please explain what’s going on?”

Ash gestured with his stubble-darkened chin toward the foyer. Neil growled. Wang came back, leading a man wearing a hood across the sitting room. I stared, speechless. If the hood wasn’t shocking enough, the man’s hands were fastened with zip cuffs.

Wang guided the man to sit on the chair by the fireplace. My knees were already soft as melted butter, but when Wang removed the hood from the man’s head my heart screeched to a complete stop. I took several wobbly steps backward. I sucked in the air, but not a drop of oxygen made it to my lungs. My back bumped against Ash, who propped me up with a hand to the waist.

“Breathe.” Ash squeezed my shoulder. “Come on, take a breath.”

It took all I had to draw in the air. I forced myself to look, to make sure I was seeing right. The man before me would have been invisible in a crowd. He wasn’t short, thin or ugly, but he wasn’t tall, fat or handsome either. His small eyes could have been brown, hazel or olive, depending on the light. His most notable trait was the way in which he wore his hair, short and spiked to cover his thinning crown.

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