Red Awakening (Red Zone) Read online

  The words felt like tiny pins pricking at her heart as their meaning penetrated. And then, the world tilted and the air became dangerously thin.

  He knew her kidnappers.

  He was one of them.

  “You don’ get to change the plan, mon ami,” Eyepatch said as Keiko stood frozen in shock.

  Mace grimaced. “I do when I know there’s another way. We don’t need to go through with the…plan. If we tell her the truth, she’ll help us.”

  Plan? What plan? What had they intended to do that was so awful he couldn’t say it in front of her?

  “And you got that from the hour you spent with her?” Eyepatch’s eyebrow arched skeptically.

  “I’m telling you.” Mace ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “She isn’t who we think she is. She’ll listen to us.” He looked around for a minute as though desperately searching for words. “She’s a good person.”

  “Feet pue tan,” Striker cursed. “You slept with her. In the car? It had to be in the car.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with this,” Mace said. “I’m telling you we need to change the plan. We can get her to help us without resorting to…”

  He trailed off, but the word hung in the air above them. Keiko heard it as though it had been broadcast through speakers—blackmail. He was talking about blackmail.

  The shock of his intent jarred her from her frozen state. “You were going to blackmail me?” she shouted at him.

  He winced and held up his hands, as though in supplication. “I was against the plan from the beginning.”

  That didn’t help, and it sure as hell wasn’t a denial. “But you went along with it anyway? Which means you set me up. You played me.” She stalked toward him, clutching the towel around her, wishing she was fully dressed and wearing the killer heels that provided some much-needed height. “Was having sex with me part of your plan?” A horrifying thought occurred to her. “Were you faking it?”

  “What? No! I wasn’t faking anything. My reaction was all you. And sex was never part of the plan.” His hands fisted at his sides, but there were no signs of remorse on his blank face. “Things got out of hand.”

  “Things got out of hand?” Now she was furious. “You accidentally had sex with me? But, really, you didn’t mean to?”

  “No. Damn it. You’re putting words in my mouth. I wanted you. I still do. You know that.” He gestured to his friends. “I tried to stop this from happening.”

  “This? You mean you and your friends blackmailing me.” She scoffed at him. “You didn’t try very hard.”

  His jaw clenched and unclenched. “You were supposed to wait downstairs.”

  “And you weren’t supposed to have sex with the target,” the guy without the eyepatch drawled.

  The woman in the pool coughed, but it sounded suspiciously like she’d said “dumbass.”

  Keiko couldn’t have agreed more. “You’re a bastard.”

  His lips thinned. “Yeah. But I’m a bastard who’s trying to save you from being blackmailed.”

  “I’m overwhelmed with gratitude.” Keiko glared at him.

  “Tell her what we need and why,” Mace told Eyepatch. “Give her a chance to choose to help us first, before you strong-arm her into it.”

  Keiko didn’t care about their arguments or what they wanted. She’d reached her limit for the evening. Instead of spending a hot night with her dream man, she’d flashed her body to a bunch of people with guns, and her Viking had turned out to be a lying weasel.

  “Save it,” she announced and turned for the door. “I don’t care what you want. There’s no way I’d help any of you now. I’m leaving. You can work this out without me.”

  “Damn it, Keiko, help me out here,” Mace barked.

  “I’ll get right on that,” Keiko called to him as she strode toward the door.

  “I can’t let you leave,” Eyepatch said, motioning for the man with the cold eyes to block her path.

  She felt like her head was going to explode. “I thought you said you wouldn’t hurt me?” Was everything a lie?

  “Seriously, Keiko?” Mace said with exasperation. “You believed a guy who’s holding a gun on you?”

  “I believed you, too,” she reminded him. “Seems I’m more gullible than I thought.”

  “Look,” Eyepatch said. “We all need to calm down here. I didn’t lie to you. I won’t hurt you. But I will contain you if need be. We need to resolve this between ourselves. We can’t have you walking straight out of here an’ telling Enforcement all about us.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Keiko said. “I promise.” If they could lie, so could she.

  Mace groaned, telling her she wasn’t fooling anyone. His patronizing expression was the last straw. The tenuous control on her anger snapped, and without thinking it through, she shoved him hard. If she hadn’t surprised him, she wouldn’t have been able to budge him. But he did budge. He slid backward, lost his balance, and slipped into the pool with a loud and satisfying splash.

  “What the hell?” he shouted when he surfaced.

  Turning her back on him, she fought to swallow the fury that made her itch to snatch one of their guns and shoot Mace in the backside. Instead, she confronted Eyepatch, the obvious leader of the group. A man who was clearly easily amused, because he was grinning at Mace. A sight that made her anger boil up all over again.

  “Is this funny to you?” she demanded.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, wiping the smile from his face fast.

  “Just tell me what you want and let’s get this over with. I never want to see any of you again.” She glared down at Mace. “Especially you.”

  Chapter Six

  They were seated in the hotel room’s lounge, facing each other in a tense standoff. Mace hated that Keiko wouldn’t even look at him, but he understood it. She sat on the edge of one of the sofas, wearing her sexy red dress, but all Mace could think about was the moment when she’d been standing naked beside the pool. It didn’t seem right that he’d touched her, been inside of her, but the only glimpse he’d gotten of her gorgeous body was in that second.

  His sister, Sandi, was right—he did let his dick do his thinking.

  And it was going to get him killed.

  “You’ve jammed all signals in and out of the penthouse, haven’t you?” Keiko’s back was straight, her knees firmly together and her expression cold. There was no sign of the passionate woman who’d climbed all over him on their trip to the hotel. And he didn’t blame her. She was in the enemy camp.

  “We couldn’t risk you calling Enforcement,” Striker said evenly, making Mace want to punch out his unpatched eye.

  “I see.” Keiko sounded perfectly calm and in control. Suspiciously so. It didn’t bode well for any of them. “I have calls I need to make to my superiors at work. There are things that have to be arranged for tomorrow’s press conference.”

  Mace noted that she didn’t request access to a comm link, she just stated what she had to do. It was sexy as hell.

  “We’ll let you contact them later,” Striker said. “In a controlled manner.”

  Oh, she didn’t like that. Her eyes blazed before they narrowed at him. “How very thoughtful of you.”

  Striker’s lips twitched, but he managed to not smile. “I’m a thoughtful kind of guy.”

  “A criminal one.”

  He gave her a Gallic shrug. “C’est la vie. Let’s get down to business.”

  “Oh, yes, let’s.”

  “We’re ready,” Striker said through the comm unit to their tech guy, Hunter, who was holed up in one of the many bedrooms in the penthouse.

  Hunter came scurrying out, looking like a college kid who’d woken late and forgotten to brush his hair. It was hard to believe he’d been a newly minted Army Ranger when they’d started their chemical-weapon-induced sleep. He’d been assigned to their team when their old tech guy retired just before the war, and although it didn’t look like he knew his way around a rifle,
let alone how to kill a man with his hands, Mace knew firsthand that Hunter had deadly skills.

  But as usual, his attention was on his tech. Under his arm he held an old-fashioned keyboard, and his eyes were on the datapad in his hands.

  He got halfway into the room before he looked up and screeched to a halt. “Whoa,” he said, his eyes on Keiko. “You are way hotter than your on-screen image.”

  Mace growled loudly at Hunter. The kid had no filter.

  “Stop it,” Keiko snapped, looking at him for the first time since she’d pushed him into the pool.

  “He needs to show some respect,” Mace said.

  “Like you did?”

  “Trust me, I respect the hell out of you, princess.”

  Keiko dismissed them with a haughty look before turning back to Striker. “Can we get on with things? Tell me what you want from me.”

  “What we want is simple,” Eyepatch said. “We need you to add Mace to the list of reporters who have been vetted by security for tomorrow’s press conference.”

  She barked out a laugh. “That’s never going to happen.”

  “You might want to reconsider. Because”—he glanced at Mace, who glared back at him—“if you don’t, we’ll be forced to release proof that your parents are members of a terrorist organization. Of Freedom.”

  “I told you,” Mace said through gritted teeth. “You’re dealing with her the wrong way.”

  “Like you would know the right way,” she snapped at him before turning back to Striker. “My parents aren’t terrorists. They’re academics who’re more interested in studying the past than dealing with the present. And seeing as Freedom wasn’t around hundreds of years ago, I doubt they even registered on my family’s radar. Whatever you think you have on them is false. You’ve wasted your time.”

  Striker held up a data crystal. “Like I said,” he drawled. “I have proof.”

  He tossed the data crystal to Hunter, who did his thing. A few seconds later, the wall of screens filled with recorded video of Keiko’s parents.

  There was footage showing them sneaking into meetings with known Freedom terrorists, followed by messages they’d written that revealed they’d been conspiring against CommTECH. The government of the Northern Territory and the company Keiko represented to the world. Their actions were treasonous. Their sentence would be death.

  Mace didn’t watch the screen—he’d seen it all before, anyway, when he hadn’t known their target intimately. Now, he watched the woman who’d broken through every defense he’d put up against her. Her life was being torn apart before his eyes, forcing her to question everything she believed. And he found himself hating his team for doing this to her.

  “I’ve seen enough,” she said at last, and the screens went blank. Her chin wobbled a little as she looked Striker straight in the eye. “But it doesn’t change anything. I have no intention of helping you to get into CommTECH’s research facility.”

  “Even if it means the lives of your parents?” Striker’s eyebrow went up, and Mace could almost hear him thinking that Keiko was just as cold as the team told him she’d be. He was wrong. Keiko was smarter than any of them had factored into their planning.

  “Do you think I’m completely clueless?” she said as though reading his mind. “Whether I help you get into the building or not, this doesn’t end well for me and my family. Once the press conference is over and CommTECH realizes someone’s had unauthorized access to the building, they’ll launch an investigation. Which, no doubt, will lead to the same evidence you’ve amassed on my parents. They’ll assume I’m the traitor who let you in, and they will be right.”

  She gave an unladylike snort of disgust. “If I don’t do this, you release the information, and CommTECH arrests me on suspicion of being in league with Freedom, just like my parents. If I do as you want me to do, CommTECH arrests me on suspicion of being in league with you and then finds out about my parents. Either way, the end result is the same—my parents and me in prison, waiting on death row. Like I said, I don’t win either way. So I think I’ll take my chances with not helping you.”

  She folded her arms over that sexy little red dress, crossed her legs, and swung her sexy-as-hell stiletto shoe, like she didn’t have a care in the world. They were at an impasse. And to be honest, he was kind of impressed with her for putting them there.

  “What makes you think they’ll find out we were there?” Striker said.

  She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re planning either violence, theft, or sabotage. What else is there? Kind of hard to keep any of those a secret.”

  Man, she was glorious. She had them over a barrel, and she knew it.

  Until he caught Striker’s eye and a cold chill swept through him. Straightening away from the wall, he took a step toward his team leader, his best friend, the man who was like a brother to him and asked the question he dreaded hearing an answer to. “What have you done?”

  Striker ran a hand over his smooth head. “We knew you wouldn’t like it—that’s why we kept you in the dark—but we already guessed where this might lead.” He looked at Keiko. “My wife is very smart, much smarter than the rest of us, and she figured there’d be a point in this negotiation where you realized it was a zero-sum game. She knew we’d have to have something else in reserve to sway your decision.” He let out a sigh. “She just didn’t know what we’d come up with, and I hope she never finds out…”

  The screens flickered, and Keiko’s parents appeared in a live feed, larger than life, in front of them.

  “Keiko?” her English mother called.

  Her Japanese father leaned into the camera. “Are you okay?”

  The elderly couple clung to each other, while behind them, two masked soldiers held guns pointed at their heads.

  “No!” Keiko was on her feet, fury pouring from her. “Release my parents right now.”

  Mace crossed the wide living area to stand at her back. He was furious with his team leader. “This wasn’t part of the plan. If Friday knew about this, she’d have your balls.”

  Striker’s eye was hard. “And I’d explain to her the exact same thing I’m telling you—we do what is necessary to get the job done.”

  Mace couldn’t believe his team had planned for this without telling him. He felt betrayed all over again. Only, instead of his government stabbing him in the back and leaving him for dead, this time the betrayers were the only family he’d ever known—his team.

  “Her parents won’t be harmed if she does what we want,” Striker said. “You know that.”

  Yeah, he got the message. Keiko’s parents were perfectly safe and wouldn’t be hurt—regardless of Keiko’s decision. This was all a bluff. Striker might be pushing the boundaries of their team, but he was telling him that there were still lines he wouldn’t cross. It didn’t ease Mace’s anger any. Keiko didn’t know that her parents were in no real danger. All she saw was the threat.

  “Let them go,” she said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “No,” her father said. “Don’t put yourself in danger because of us. We never wanted our choices to affect you.” He shared a loving look with his wife. “It was one of the reasons we never told you about our allegiance.”

  “Papa, I work for our government, and you’re in an organization that’s trying to tear it down. How could your choices not affect me?”

  “We didn’t think anyone would find out,” her mother said. “We aren’t active. We don’t attack buildings or blow up things to get attention. We write research papers to help the Freedom leadership negotiate for a better future—for everyone.”

  “It’s still a terrorist organization, Mom. You know what the penalty is for being a member of it. How could you put yourselves in danger like that?”

  “You don’t understand,” her father said. “You think CommTECH is wonderful. You love the thrill of working there and being right in the center of history as it’s being made. But you don’t see the damage they cause. You only see the good
things. The things they want you to see. Having a business run a country isn’t good for the people. There’s a conflict of interest, because they will always care more about their interests than anything else. That’s why we need to go back to the old ways, to the time when people voted for their government leaders instead of letting the company with the most power lead them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Keiko said. “I didn’t think you paid any attention to politics. I wasn’t even sure you knew who Freedom are.”

  “My darling,” her mother said. “Just because I’m an archeologist and your father is a history professor doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of what’s going on in the present. In fact, we notice it more than most people, because we have a deeper understanding of how things used to be.”

  “History can teach us many lessons,” her father added. “One of them is that countries shouldn’t be ruled by people who have their own profit in mind.”

  “That’s why we got involved,” her mother said. “We saw the patterns repeating. It’s totalitarianism dressed up as capitalism, and people are getting lost in the system, used as cogs to further the cause of the machine. It’s all about profit. And that isn’t right.”

  “But terrorists?” Keiko wiped away a tear that had escaped to roll down her cheek. Her parents were hurting her. Mace’s team had hurt her. Hell, he had hurt her. How much more disillusionment could one woman take before she broke?

  “Freedom kills people,” she said. “They say it’s justified because they’re bringing about a better world, but they can’t describe what that world would look like. They want us to go back to a way of government that didn’t work. Democracy didn’t work. CommTECH helps people. And before you tell me I’m naive, I know they make a profit, too, but they govern well. I should know.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “How could you have lied to us all these years? Or does Hana know?”

  “No.” Her father shook his head. “Your sister doesn’t know, but…” He looked at his wife.