J Saint - Collateral Damage

Jack woke, his body covered in sweat, his heart pounding hard, his chest frozen with pain. The urgency to save Neil still gripped his every muscle. He had to fight against the panic rising in his throat, fight to hold on to Lauren and realize the nightmare wasn't happening at that moment even as his mind chased after the details.

Is that how things went down?

0630 hours

Matt? Mitch? Lauren awoke with a start from her dream. She'd been standing in a thick mist, calling to her sons, who were just out of sight. She could hear their laughter, their excited voices as they raced their cars, but somehow couldn't reach them, nor could they hear her. She shoved the unsettling feeling aside. She'd call them shortly, sure they'd soon be up, jumping on Angie's bed, demanding to get to Disney World.

The grayish light of a waffling dawn suffused the room and Jack was already gone. But the spot in the bed next to her was still warm and the mark of his lovemaking still lingered on her lips and inside her core.

She rose as her mind turned to last night's discoveries. The sooner they exposed Bill's crimes and found the roots of his terroristic activities, the sooner she'd get her sons and her mangled wreck of a life back. She'd have to rebuild. Go somewhere. Start new.

After taking care of essentials and putting herself as together as she was going to get, she found Jack in the kitchen, gripping a cup of coffee. His face grim. His computer sat on the table before him and he wasn't alone. The man who stood to greet her had her jaw popping open.

It wasn't because his handsomeness stunned her. It wasn't that he was cut from the same ruggedly dynamic cloth as Jack was, only taller. It was because were the man to salt his temples, she would have sworn that President Paul Anderson was standing in front of her.

Before he or Jack could speak, she stuck out her hand. "You must be Commander Weston."

"Roger to you. And you're Lauren Collins."

"Just Lauren, for now. The things I'm learning make me want to change my last name." She glanced toward the computer. "Have you logged back into the email account?"

Jack nodded. After arriving at Weston's house last night, they'd glanced at the account the attacker had interrupted them from doing. Unfortunately neither she nor Jack had been able to discern anything immediately from the incoming entries and there had been no outgoing mail in the account, so they'd put the puzzle aside until morning.

"We didn't look at the drafted but unsent emails last night. There are a number of them."

"What do they say?"

Jack looked toward Weston. "Commander?"

"Go ahead. I've got a call into my cousin about the information and the future attacks planned, but we've no orders yet about what do to. We've got about twenty more minutes before we have to be on post at 0630." His cell phone vibrated. "Well, speak of the devil." Weston left the room.

Jack met her gaze and the grave seriousness in his eyes gut punched her. She grabbed the back of a dinette chair. "What is it?"

"The email drafts are a diary of sort. An account of activities planned and executed with cold precision." He turned the computer her way and clicked on the message. It began: The first move is the assassination of Imam Hassan Omar Aziz in Iran…

Her mouth went numb, her body shook, and her brain fogged with pain and disbelief. "You mean Bill was an assassin? He went around killing people?"

Jack flinched, his gaze turning darker, his mouth grimmer. "Of sorts. If you read further, you'll find he didn't actually do the dirty work. He was more of an intermediary. He hired the necessary people, made sure the job was done, then paid the men-one way or the other."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that risks to the operations received bullets rather than the promised cash. Both of the men who framed the US and Israeli Military for Aziz's assassination were executed. No evidence of who really committed the crime was left behind, except for your husband's account of the event."

Lauren shook her head, sat down, and buried her face in her hands. "I, oh God, I know this is real, but I just can't believe all of this. A murderer. A killer. What else? What else is there lurking in the shadows that he lied to me about?"

Jack flinched again, as if she'd attacked him personally, but answered her, his voice stark. "The attacks on the oil refineries and reserves worldwide. The kidnapping of Ambassador James's and Prime Minister Shalev's daughters."

Lauren snapped her head up. "In Lebanon? That's where you were hurt. That's where you saw Bill."

"Yes. My Delta team went in to rescue the women." A muscle in his jaw ticked. His expression was haggard. He was clearly struggling with something. Then he met her gaze head on. "Bill was there and…I killed him. Shot him to death with a spray of bullets from my machine gun. He died at my feet."

Lauren reared back at the harsh ugly reality of the situation and Jack's hard voice. She'd understood Jack had a job to do. Bill had been involved in something bad. But…Jesus…couldn't Jack have told her this before now? Her entire world spun in turmoil, one of horror and pain over the reality of what Bill had done and just how he had died.

Jack had come to her asking about Bill. He hadn't necessarily deceived her, but… "You killed Bill. You didn't tell me."

"Guilty. There's no excuse for what I let happen between us. I did try and tell you. I am no better of a man than Bill was. I'm sorry. I suck at relationships anyway." He stood. "We've got to go to the post. The CIA and NCS will be there shortly. They are going to have more questions than you can answer and they are going to turn you and your sons' lives inside out. They will leave nothing unexposed until they've reached the bottom of the cesspool Bill was in. I'm going to do what I can, but it's going be rough."

Pain slashed through Lauren even as her mind spun from the revelations about Bill. Jack's knife went deeper than Bill's betrayals. That was it? That was all Jack was going to say about them together. That he sucked at relationships anyway? Lauren met Jack's gaze disappointed for the first time since he knocked on her door. "You're boiling everything we shared down to, 'I'm sorry and I suck anyway'?" Anger bubbled inside of her. She wanted to yell, but clenched her teeth instead. "What was it, Jack? Pity fucks for a deceived widow?"

He looked as if she'd punched him, which only made her feel worse. "Yeah. It was what it was." He collected the computer and left the room, his back and manner as hard and cold as steel.

Lauren fisted her hand against her aching heart and fought the burn in her eyes and her gut. She didn't need Jack. She didn't need anything but her sons back in her arms to protect them and someplace to disappear. She had a life to rebuild for them and come hell or high water nothing and no one was going to stop her from doing that. It occurred to her as she left the kitchen that she hadn't asked who Bill had worked for. If her husband had been the intermediary then someone had to be calling the shots and that someone just might be the SOB after her.

Jack and Weston were waiting at the door. Lauren grabbed her purse and waited until they were in the car to ask some of the questions starting to perk in her shocked brain. Weston and Jack were in the front, she sat in the back.

"Who exactly did Bill work for?" she asked. "Is BioLogics behind all of this?"

"BioLogics was nothing but a cardboard front for a bigger entity," Jack said.

"What entity?"

"We're still trying to piece that together," Roger Weston said. "In the diary of information, Bill called the man he worked for as The Man with the Yellow Hat."

Lauren frowned. "You're kidding. As in Curious George?"