1
Ian DeRose
“Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy.”
“Did you seriously just quote Cobra Kai to Baxter as life advice?”
Landon crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in the conference room chair with a good-natured grin. “Not so much life advice as dating advice, but yeah. I’m surprised you got the reference, Sarge. Did they even have movies when you were growing up?”
Sarge tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes at Landon. “You know what they did have when I was growing up? Ways for me to kick your scrawny ass, and that’s still true.”
I leaned back in my own chair at the head of the table. I could put an end to the bickering between my two right-hand men, Landon Black and Harrison McEwan—a.k.a. Sarge—but didn’t. It was harmless enough.
Besides, I recognized the actions for what they were: Landon deliberately trying to get a rise out of Sarge. That wasn’t unusual. But this time he was doing it for a reason. It got Sarge focused in this room.
Besides, quoting the spin-off of an eighties karate movie as dating advice for Isaac Baxter, my new employee who looked like a movie star himself, was ridiculous.
We’d just finished our monthly conference call with the other Zodiac Tactical offices around the world. I had branches on nearly every continent—Paris, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, New York, and our home office here in Denver.
Each office specialized in an area of what we were experts in as security contractors—risk consulting, intelligence gathering, private and corporate bodyguarding, hostage rescue.
If the law couldn’t or wouldn’t handle it, my team and I would. So I had some of the best tactical minds in the world working for me. Cobra Kai references notwithstanding.
“I think I’ll try taking her out to dinner,” Isaac muttered. He was new but so far was fitting in well. Landon and Sarge continued bickering like an old married couple, hardly paying Isaac any mind even though he was the one they were supposedly giving advice to.
It was zero six hundred here, not when we were normally in the office, but it was impossible to find a time for our monthly meeting that was within regular business hours for all the different locations. We varied the time of the interoffice call each month, but someone always had to get up in the middle of the night. And this month had been our turn.
I might be the owner and head of Zodiac Tactical, but I tried to make it a practice to never require my people to do things I wasn’t willing to do myself.
The meeting had been relatively uneventful.
I stood up. “Let’s get some breakfast and head home.”
Isaac immediately nodded. “Yes, please. Thank God. I was afraid Landon was about to tell me to wax on, wax off once I got this girl to say yes to a date, and I was afraid to find out what that meant.”
“Oh,” Landon replied with a grin. “I can gladly demonstrate the wax on, wax off if Sarge here would volunteer to bend over—”
“Fuck off.” Sarge flipped him the bird.
Landon stood and patted the older man on the shoulder. “Now Sarge, it won’t hurt a bit if I do it righ—”
“Breakfast,” I interrupted. “If it will shut you guys up, I’m buying.”
Landon kept taunting Sarge with details of the so-called waxing on and off as we walked out of the conference room, but he stopped midsentence as he received a text on his phone.
His eyes narrowed. “We’ve got an incoming email from Linear Tactical, boss. Intel on Mosaic.”
All of us immediately fell into combat readiness, even though there was no battle to fight. Mosaic, or more specifically this new version of Mosaic, was a pretty word for a very ugly group of people.
“Anything concerning Bronwyn Rourke?” Sarge asked.
This was the reason Landon had been using all his annoyance skills to get Sarge focused on him. To distract Sarge from Bronwyn.
Landon shook his head. “Sorry, man. Nothing mentioned about her. Only says Linear has some sort of hard drive, and they hope to crack it soon. It contains intel on Mosaic, but they don’t know what.”
I squeezed Sarge’s shoulder. “We’re going to get her back.”
Sarge nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
I hadn’t been aware Sarge knew Bronwyn Rourke, one of Zodiac’s most unique agents who was based out of the Paris office, but he’d nearly lost his shit when we’d gotten word she was missing. She was supposed to have been on a special and highly dangerous solo mission in Marrakesh.
When she hadn’t reported in, we’d sent multiple contacts to ground looking for her. Nothing. She’d disappeared.
Eventually, we’d assumed the worst. However, the worst wasn’t what we’d thought. She wasn’t dead, but it was arguable that what she was going through now was worse. She was at Mosaic’s mercy. And they’d made sure I knew it.
I kept a tight lid on my own personal weaknesses, which simmered close to the surface when it came to Mosaic. Landon saw it and raised an eyebrow at me. He was the only one who knew the truth.
But fuck that. I wasn’t about to let any emotion get the best of me.
“Can we trust the intel?” Sarge demanded.
I had to hand it to Landon. He didn’t say anything when Sarge snatched Landon’s phone out of his hand to read the email himself.
Landon may have been egging Sarge on before, but that had been for a purpose. He cared about the other man. For whatever reason, Sarge was taking Bronwyn’s disappearance harder than anyone else.
“Can we trust intel from Linear? Hell, yes.” I responded.
Sarge handed Landon back his phone and scrubbed a hand down his face. “Sorry.”
“Help a new guy out. What is Linear Tactical?” Isaac asked. “Is that a sister company or something?”
“No. They work with civilians out in Wyoming, teaching survival and self-defense courses. They don’t do what we do”—face danger on the front lines almost daily—“but they’re good men. I respect the hell out of them. Almost all of them are former Special Forces.”
I’d been a Navy SEAL, not an Army Green Beret like the LT guys, but I’d fight shoulder to shoulder with any of the Linear men. They may no longer be active duty, but they definitely hadn’t given up their warrior instincts.
Landon turned to me. “Kendrick Foster, LT’s computer guru, wants to meet face-to-face. Says there’s too many potential breaches in electronic transference of data to take the chance.”
“Then let’s get the jet ready. Looks like we’re going to Wyoming.”
I’d never spent much time in Oak Creek itself, just knew the town was small enough that my assistant called it a logistical nightmare—few hotels, no car rentals. Only a couple of restaurants, none of which took reservations. She had to line everything up via phone.
“You want me to come?” Sarge asked.
Isaac took a step closer. “I’m available too. Whatever you need.”
Everyone in this office knew that taking down Mosaic, or this new version of Mosaic, was the most important thing. The old version had been bad enough: information and weapons sales, providing the tools any organization needed for its own little terrorist attack. But this new version of Mosaic, if we could believe the videos we’d received that included footage of one of our own, had branched out into human trafficking.