Night Shadow by Cherry Adair Page B

previously toasty interior of the car. “What’s up?” he asked the
    other man, all humor gone.
    Daklin opened the back door and climbed in, slamming the door behind
    him. “We have trouble in River City.”
    Alex turned to look at him blankly.
    “A 1957 musical, then a movie,” Lexi enlightened him. “ The Music Man ?
    Never mind. What’s the problem?” she addressed Dak-lin, whose face was
    flushed with the cold.
    “Apparently your wild woo-woo guess was right on the money,” Daklin
    told Alex. He rested his folded arms between the two seat backs.
    “What woo—” Lexi cut herself off. Perhaps better not to know Alex’s every
    ability.
    “The building, as you suspected, is locked down tighter than a—” he
    glanced at Lexi. “Tight,” he finished. “Lu went ahead of us. Knocked him
    on his ass. Unconscious. Pulse thready. Serious burns to his face and
    chest. Ginsberg teleported him back to medical.”
    “Shit. Kiersted and Ginsberg?”
    “In unit one eight six. Stil puking their guts out while sitting on some little
    old lady’s circa 1970 Naugahyde sofa. In the dark. With no heat.”
    “Poor delicate little flowers,” Alex said unsympathetically. “You sick, too?”
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    “Hel n—Yeah,” Daklin admitted. “Big time. Had me on my knees wishing
    for death for about ten minutes.”
    “Fuck.”
    Lexi’s shiver had little to do with the cold. She shot a glance down the row
    of identical blue-doored storage units to what she could see of a cement
    building some three hundred yards away, at the end of the driveway/alley.
    The narrow slice of the warehouse she could see was blank. No door, no
    windows.
    “Same as the warehouse in Rio?”
    “Yeah,” Alex said, clearly thinking. “There was only the one door. Probably
    same goes here.”
    “Didn’t see even that,” Daklin said shuddering. “How the hel did you even
    know the place was here?”
    “The guy Lexi tangled with in the surf last night had a tattoo on his left
    wrist. Lexi drew it out for me. Photographic memory, ya know? Didn’t
    make sense until I slept on it.”
    “We got that it was a bar code,” she told the other man. “But I don’t get
    what that—God. The numbers ! I only remembered part of them—35 53 28
    106 17 5—Ah.” The lightbulb went off.“That’s the longitude and latitude of
    Los Alamos, isn’t it?”
    “Enough of it to make an educated guess. Yeah.”
    She fel against the back of her seat. “Wow. You are good.”
    His grin was sexy as hel . “Intel is looking at the footage of all the
    bombings in the last six-month period. Checking to see if all the tangos
    are about the same age, left-handed, and have tattoos on their wrists.”
    Lexi’s heartbeat sped up with excitement. “Bet they do.”
    “I’l take that bet and raise you a thousand bucks,” Asher Daklin said
    grimly. “But what does that give us?”
    “A mystery wrapped inside an enigma.” Alex opened his door. Iced wind
    howled straight through Lexi’s clothing, but that wasn’t what made her
    shudder. There was no T-FLAC training, no simulations, for what they
    were up against.
    “Come on, children, let’s go find ourselves a powerful wizard and whip his
    ass.” Glock in hand, Alex waited for Lexi and Daklin to join him.
    “This is total y insane, you know,” Lexi told him, shrugging into a jacket
    made from LockOut and keeping up with his long strides in the crisp snow.
    Her lungs burned and her eyes smarted, but her blood pumped hard and
    fast in an excited race. “I do not want to be down on my knees puking up
    wizard doodoo.”
    “Suck it up, Stone,” Alex told her, picking up his pace. “This is what us
    macho operatives do.”
    “Give me a number to call when it flattens you on your ass and stops your
    heart.” She said it half joking, but Lexi didn’t find this situation at all
    amusing. Exciting. Scary. Not funny.
    “Call Mason Knight. His number’s on speed dial on my sat phone. He can
    call my