“Maybe,” she said, staring out the window. “But it feels like it must have been a huge game plan, and they went to a lot of effort to get to you.” She turned to look at him and asked, “What have you done, or who have you done something to that could bring all this on?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been involved in dozens of missions all over the world,” he said quietly. “If somebody wanted to hold me personally responsible, they certainly could, but I would be no more personally responsible than all the other men involved in the same operation.”
“So that’s the question then, isn’t it?” she said, staring at him. “Have any of your other black-ops friends gone missing?”
Shane wasn’t even sure where that thought had come from, but he stared at Shelly in surprise, then turned to look at Diesel.
Diesel shrugged. “She’s got a point. But, if somebody had taken out a whole team, we might not even know—because we’ve been out of service for a while.” He turned to look back at her, still frowning.
She shrugged. “It sounds like something you need to consider,” she said. “Like, maybe you’re the last resort. Particularly if you’re not part of an active naval unit anymore. For all you know, there has been a major accident, and a unit was taken out, and you were the last one on the list. Or, hell, maybe they’re even starting with you. But, if you overthrew a government, put somebody behind bars, got somebody kicked out of the navy—who the hell knows what it may have been—but revenge can take a long time to develop, as people make plans to get even.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start to look for something like that,” Shane said quietly.
“With your old superiors,” she said, “I would think. I don’t know how many people you’ve actually dealt with or how it all works, which puts me at a disadvantage on crafting a solution.”
“Not to mention the fact that I’m no longer in the navy anymore,” he said, with half a smile.
“I get that,” she said. “You’ve left the navy but not the government. But that doesn’t mean these killers know that, or perhaps the very act of leaving the navy is what opened it up so they could get to you.”
He shook his head. “Now you’re reaching a bit.”
“And you’re ignoring an obvious question that needs to be asked.”
“She’s right,” Diesel said, and there was such a surprise in his voice that she turned on him, an eyebrow raised.
Shane laughed. “She’s often right,” he said. “She has a very different mind-set.”
“I do not,” she said crossly.
“Do so,” he said, with affection. She just glared at him, and he laughed.
“Like I said,” Diesel said, “you two make a great couple.”
“It would never work,” she said, shaking her head.
“Why is that?” Diesel asked, studying her carefully.
“I’m all about monogamy, and he wants to play the field.”
“That’s not true,” Shane protested.
She looked at him in surprise. “Since when?”
“I haven’t ‘played the field,’ as you call it, for at least four or five years,” he said.
Her eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said, “it was a stage. I was happy to not settle down and to just enjoy life, and so were you, as I recall.”
“Sure, but I am much more interested in relationships that don’t have a start and an end date,” she said.
He burst out laughing at that. “You apparently haven’t updated your information on me lately.”
“Obviously I didn’t realize you’d finally gotten to the point of wanting to settle down. I figured you were still up for traveling the world, being wild and crazy.”
“Traveling the world is never a bad thing,” he said. “Besides, you don’t know what you’ll do now. Maybe you’ll end up doing more traveling.”
“Maybe,” she said, “I was actually thinking about it, but I don’t really know. Right now, it’s hard to know anything. Except one thing. … I don’t really want to go back into tall New York City office buildings.”
“Like the ones with seven floors?”
“Especially not the ones with seven floors,” she said. “Although I’m not too thrilled with the idea of being in buildings that have more than two. Actually I’d like to stay on the ground floor for now.”
“It’s amazing how an incident like that can really affect you. It makes sense though,” he said. “When you think about it, your life has not always been the easiest, and, when you go through something traumatic like that, it’s hard to get past it.”
“I don’t want it to be the thing that I remember about my entire life though,” she said. “That would be terrible. There’s got to be so much more in my world than to survive being held by terrorists—or whatever you want to call that attack.”
“Well, it was definitely a targeted assault,” he said, “but I’m not sure it was for men and country.”
“Well, I don’t know what else it was, but they said that I was a means to an end to get you here,” she said. She glared at him. “Do you know what that felt like? To know that all they were doing was waiting for you to show up, and that I was responsible for getting you there?”
“Hey, I came here of my own free will,” he said in a mild tone, knowing perfectly well that she would take that guilt on no matter what he said. “You are not responsible. These guys were. Besides,” he added, “did you ever get a chance to take a picture of any of the kidnappers?”
She shook her head. “No. Our phones were taken away. Just like our purses, and we even had to empty our pockets. Everything that we had on us was taken away.”
“Would you recognize them again?”
“Of course,” she said. “Why?”
“Could you give a police artist information for a sketch?”
She stopped and stared at him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see the one hardly at all, but the other two were all in black. The only one I really saw close must have been one of the two guys you and Diesel took out.”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“I wonder why he wasn’t wearing a mask, like the others?”
“Because it didn’t matter,” Diesel said. “He wouldn’t survive anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was targeted to not survive,” he said, “as in, once his mask came off, the others couldn’t afford to let him live.”
“But even by association,” she said, “if you find who one is, surely you can track down the others.”
“Unless they were hired out, using locals,” Diesel said. He brought up his laptop and started typing away.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, looking at Shane.
“Contacting our group to see if anybody has any information,” he said.
When Diesel lifted his head, he shook it and said, “The two bad guys left in the building are still unconscious. And the cabbie isn’t talking.”