Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control Read online

  Out of Control

  A Troubleshooters, Inc. Novel

  by

  Suzanne Brockmann

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  For the brave men and women who fought for freedom during the Second World War. My most sincere and humble thanks.

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  Prologue

  At about 0530 that very morning, Ken “WildCard” Karmody became a terrorist.

  It wasn’t a career move he would normally have made, especially on such short notice, with no time to prepare properly. But seeing how it was a direct order, he had no choice but to embrace it completely.

  “You believe you’ll be rescued in a matter of a few short hours, don’t you, Mr. Bond?” he asked his hostage—an SAS enlisted named Gordon MacKenzie who was sitting, tied up, on the sagging floor of the hut they’d finally chosen as Tango HQ. “But such an easy escape—no, it is not to be.”

  “Ah, Christ.” Gordie rolled his eyes along with his rs, sounding as if he were doing an excellent imitation of Scotty from Star Trek, except, hot damn, Jim, the Scottish accent was for real. “Here we go, on the move again, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Kenny slipped neatly from Evil Overlord to Yoda. “Try not,” he told Gordie solemnly as he untied the rope that held the Scot’s feet. “Do. Or do not.” He grinned. “And in this case, my friend, what I need you to do for me is strip.”

  Gordon sighed. With his dark hair cut close to his scalp, his dark brown eyes and his lean build, he looked more like George Clooney than the rather portly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise. “Kenneth. Be reasonable, lad. It’s a training op. You’re only supposed to pretend to be the bad guys. Don’t you know if you let my boys catch you and liberate me, you’ll be home in your girlfriend’s bed before 2230?”

  His girlfriend’s bed.

  The rest of the SEALs who were playing the part of Ken’s merry band of nasties got very quiet. Too quiet.

  What, did they honestly think those three words—his and girlfriend’s and bed—would set him off? He could feel their uncertainty bouncing around the rough-hewn walls of the shack.

  Yup. No doubt about it.

  Jenkins and Gilligan and Silverman and even Jay Lopez, whose first name was short for Jesus, were all expecting him to go postal.

  Ken laughed. He supposed it served him right. Once upon a time, he would have lost it at the merest reminder of Adele.

  But, come on. That was then, this was now. Hadn’t they noticed how fricking serene, how absolutely Buddah-like he’d been lately?

  Imperturbable. Oh, yeah. That was him, all the way. In fact, his picture had gone up next to that word in the dictionary.

  He unfastened Gordie’s hands. “Kinda crowded in my girlfriend’s bed these days, considering she got married to some rich dickhead last weekend.”

  Gordie winced. “Shite. We’re in for a night of it then, are we, boys? Up til dawn’s early light?” He glanced at Jenk, at Lopez, at Gilligan, at Silverman, sending them each a silent individual apology for having said the wrong thing. As if Ken were some kind of special-needs child who had to be handled with extra care—instead of the imperturbable son of a bitch he’d worked hard to become.

  He let the flash of annoyance roll off him as he shook his head. “Naw, it won’t take until dawn. We’ll take ’em out long before midnight.”

  The Scot laughed aloud. “You’ll take them out? Is that what I heard ye say?”

  “You bet your pointy ass. Now strip,” Ken ordered.

  “No focking way.” Gordie was still chuckling to himself. “A fully outfitted SAS team—they’re youngsters, true, and fresh out of . . . No, I won’t bet any body parts, but I will wager a crisp hundred-dollar bill that if there’s any taking out to be done, my boys will be the ones doing it.”

  Ken knew what MacKenzie was thinking. The men from SEAL Team Sixteen were playing the part of the tangos—terrorists—as the six-man SAS team from England trained, practicing the rescue of a hostage. That hostage being, of course, the one and only Gordie MacKenzie, so freaking full of himself it was a wonder he wasn’t bobbing against the ceiling like a helium balloon.

  MacKenzie was thinking about the fact that his SAS boys were dressed for a rescue mission. They had the gear and the MRE’s—Meals, Ready-to-Eat—in case they got hungry. They had the firepower.

  So to speak.

  The automatic weapons both teams were using didn’t shoot real bullets. They were part of a kickass computer program that worked liked a state-of-the-art, high-tech paintball game. Except instead of covering the other players with bright-colored paint, a direct hit was registered, via satellite, in the mainframe computer. A hit severe enough to “kill” disabled an individual player’s ability to use any of the weapons—even one stolen from the enemy.

  The weapons Ken and his SEALs had been given—only two to split between the five of them—didn’t work quite as well as the seven pseudo-machine guns and sidearms that the SAS team had in their possession. Nah, unless tangos were bankrolled by a wealthy patron, they often couldn’t afford anything but cheap-as-shit, rusty, or obsolete weapons. And the computer program, in an attempt to make the T’s weapons seem as rusty, obsolete, and cheap-as-shit as possible, would occasionally and randomly cause them to jam.

  That program was a neat little piece of training software. Ken knew it inside and out.

  He ought to, he’d helped design it.

  Its one major flaw was that it could be uncomfortable to train with in hot weather—something they didn’t have to worry about on a freeze-yer-balls-off winter day like today. It required all the players in the training op to wear specially designed, long-sleeved uniforms, the fabric laced with a sensor grid.

  So, in actuality, the computer didn’t register the fact that a player died. It registered the fact that the player’s uniform died.

  “You know, it’s tempting,” Ken told Gordie, “but I’m not a thief. I’m not going steal your money by taking that bet.”

  “Ach, but I have no problem stealing yours. Humor me, lad.”

  “If you insist. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, take off your focking clothes, MacKenzie, or we’ll take ’em off for you.”

  Gordie stared at him. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re going to cheat, aren’t you, you bastard—”

  Ken nodded to Gilligan, Jenk and Silverman, who wrestled the Scotsman to the ground. He hummed happily to himself as he untied his own boots and kicked them off to get his legs free from his pants. This was going to be fun. “Hey, Lopez, you got scissors in your medical kit?”

  “Absolutely, Chief.”

  Jenk tossed him Gordie’s pants and Ken stepped into them. Yeah, the two men had the same height and build. Gordie’s uniform shirt quickly followed, and he slipped that on, too. “You know how to cut hair?” he asked Lopez.

  The SEAL team’s hospital corpsman looked at him, looked at Gordie who was now being dressed in Ken’s uniform like a giant, uncooperative Barbie doll, and smiled. “How hard could it be?”

  “Let’s go with something nice and short today,” Ken sat down on a partially charred log someone had dragged inside, either to sit on or in an attempt to burn the place down. “I’d like the look that all the SAS boys are sporting these days. I think it would look smashing on me.” He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the hut’s only remaining window.

  With the exception of his hair—which grew much too quickly and tended to stand straight up when he ran his hands through it—in a certai
n light, especially when he tipped his head a certain way, Ken looked a little bit like George Clooney, too.

  “Captain,” he murmured to himself in a perfect imitation of Scotty, honed from years of watching way too much Star Trek—a lonely, dorky, smart-ass loser of a kid who longed for a father more like Mr. Spock, ruled by logic instead of the kind of raw emotion that could make a man put his fist through walls. “The warp engines cannae take anymore . . .”

  It was the waiting that was the hardest part.

  Ken had been born without the patience gene. His biggest challenge in becoming a SEAL had been in learning to wait, learning to lie silently in ambush, constantly alert as the seconds became minutes became hours became days.

  Gilligan, Lopez, and Silverman were out there now, dug into the dirt, communing with the bugs that were still alive under the blanket of brown leaves and fallen pine needles.

  Somehow it was easier to wait in an ambush position. But Ken was here, waiting for a signal, sitting on his butt in this stupid hut.

  Ach, laddie, but he was nae Kenneth Karmody any longer. No, he was handsome Gordon MacKenzie now and, aye, he had the short hair and overinflated ego to prove it.

  The sun was low in the sky and the shadows nice and long when Gilligan—Dan Gillman—finally gave forth with one of his freakishly authentic turkey calls. Apparently, Gillman entered turkey-calling contests and county fairs and won first prize all the time. Ken wasn’t sure exactly what he won—a trophy of a turkey or a trophy of a grown man standing on a stage and acting like a turkey.

  But the signal was his heads up. The SAS boys had finally moved into position outside the hut. What the hell had taken them so long to find this place?

  Ken ignored Gordie’s reproachful eyes as he tested the ropes that bound the man and checked the bandanna he’d stuffed in his mouth as a gag. “Won’t be long now.”

  Gordie made a string of muted noises that might’ve been him trying to say, You dumb focker, when I get free, I’m going to kick your bluddy arse.

  “I’m sure you’ll try, me wee laddie,” Ken murmured back to him as he jammed his own favorite winter hat—the one with the ear flaps that completely covered his hair—onto Gordie’s head.

  He glanced at Jenk, who also appeared to be tied and gagged, at least at first glance. In case any of the naughty SAS boys peeped in through the windows.

  “Ready?”

  Jenk nodded. With his cheeks rosy from the chill in the air, and his eyes bright with excitement, he looked more like a kid who’d just put a frog in his teacher’s drawer than a deadly Navy SEAL. But that was part of his particular charm.

  Ken squeezed the trigger of the pseudo-automatic. Two short bursts, aimed at the floor.

  “Get down,” he shouted in Gordie’s accent. “Get on the focking floor! Yer dead—so dunna ye move!”

  He counted out the seconds it would have taken him to bind and gag two men, and then, crawling on his stomach, pulling his weapon behind him, he pushed at the door, propping it so that it would stay open. With great drama, aware that all eyes were on him, he dragged himself down the steps and into the dirt, leaves, and fallen pine needles outside of the hut.

  He was Gordie, he was Gordie, he was Gordie. Keep the accent up, keep his face down in the shadows.

  “If you’re out there, boys, I sure enough now could use some help,” he called in a low voice. Gordie’s voice. Allie, allie in free, boy-Os. “I had a bit of a fall and my ankle’s focked up good. I think it’s broken for real.”

  Ah, shite, that last bit sounded far more like John Lennon than Gordie MacKenzie. Still, maybe Gordie sounded like John Lennon when he was in serious pain, because—jackpot!—here they came.

  Four of ’em, silently slipping out of the brush and shadows like ghosts, coming to his aid. That meant two were hanging back.

  And there it was again. Gilligan’s wild turkey. Which meant his teammates had pinpointed the locations of the other two SAS boys who were cautious enough to stay hidden.

  Once these four got close enough to see his face in the twilight, the game would move to the next phase. The chaos phase. His favorite. Ken clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t smile.

  “I’ve got two kills in the cabin,” Ken reported a la Gordie, “which means there’s only three of ’em out there, with one weapon between ’em. Because I’ve got their other right here.”

  He pulled it up into a firing position, and damn, Gordie was at least half right. His boys were pretty good, considering the fact they never should have left the cover of the brush in the first place.

  Either they had great intuition or twenty-forty vision, because he didn’t get a single shot off.

  They fired, he was hit, and then he couldn’t get a shot off. The sensors in the uniform screwed with the computer in the automatic weapon, rendering it useless.

  To him.

  Although he was dead, his aim was still good, and he neatly tossed the weapon back through the open doorway of the hut.

  Then Jenkins was there, popping out like a nightmare jack-in-the-box, weapon blazing. And just like that, the game was over for those four wee brave SAS laddies.

  It was over for the two in the bush, as well.

  And the sun hadn’t even fully set.

  Ken went into the hut to cut Gordie free. “You lose.”

  “You son of a whore,” Gordie accused as soon as the gag was out of his mouth.

  “Actually, my mother’s quite nice. Kind of conservative. You’d like her. She attends church—”

  “Is everything a focking joke to you?”

  Kenny considered the question carefully. “No. In fact, I took this training op very seriously—enough to completely kick your ass in record time. Six SAS boys and the hostage dead—killed by friendly fire no less. The computer will make a special little note of that.”

  “They didn’t kill me, they killed you.”

  “Details, details. As in your boys missed an important one—such as the fact that I was wearing your uniform. If they really were the elite force that they’re supposed to be, they should have been paying attention. I would have made a point to know everything there was to know about the computer program that was running this show.”

  “Sure,” Gordie grumbled, “and since you’re some kind of focking computer genius, you would’ve gone in and rewritten the program so that your opposition’s weapons wouldn’t fire. That’s called cheating, Karmody.”

  “Not according to my definition, it’s not,” Ken said, still able to sound serene in the face of Gordie’s anger because he was right. “It’s called being prepared.”

  “What about throwing your weapon to Jenkins that way? I saw you, you know. When you’re dead you’re supposed to play dead. That was cheating for sure. I’ll bet you do it because you know you wouldn’t win in a fair fight.”

  Ken’s cool slipped a notch. “Yeah, gee, sorry, MacKenzie, you’re abso-fucking-lutely right. Of course we all know real terrorists never cheat. And we also all know that there’s never been a case of a tango—even one who’s been shot in the head—managing to squeeze off a few more rounds and killing his attackers after he’s as good as dead.”

  A year or so ago, this was where Kenny would’ve followed up on Gordie’s insult by challenging him to a fight right then and there. Bare fists and no rules—let’s see who walks away and who crawls. Come on, dickhead. Hit me. Just hit me . . .

  But a year or so ago, he hadn’t yet made chief. With the higher rank came the responsibility to not be an asshole—particularly not in front of his men.

  “I’m going to see that the results of this op are challenged,” Gordie blustered. “Your CO is going to hear about this from me.”

  “From me, too,” Ken countered, managing to smile because he knew that Gordie was baiting him and he knew that by staying cool he was completely pissing off the other man. “My team did one fine job today. I’m going to make sure Lieutenant Commander Paoletti knows all about it.”

  Gordie made
himself large. “My boys were supposed to learn something here today.”

  Ken nodded. “Yeah,” he said as he stepped around MacKenzie. “Let’s hope they did.”

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  One

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER

  Savannah von Hopf’s life spiraled even further out of control when she opened her cell phone and discovered that the batteries were completely dead.

  She stared at the phone in disbelief, unwilling at first to accept any explanation other than that she’d suddenly and horrifically been plunged into an alternate reality. She’d charged her phone last night in her hotel room—same as she charged her phone every single night of her life. She wouldn’t have forgotten something as important as that, and she hadn’t. She’d plugged it into the outlet in the bathroom and . . .