Monkey Business by Tymber Dalton
“Not sure yet,” he said before looking down at her. “We don’t know how long we’ll be there, yet. Might be for a while. Hard to run ops from there, though, without military intervention. Will probably have to relocate somewhere else. We don’t want to split up the team for too long.” She loved how he kept his hair a little longer than the other guys. Enough to dig her fingers into and enough for the breeze from the bow to blow it around.
“Are we going to be safe in Hawaii?”
“For a little while, yes. We’re coming in black on a military ship,” he said. “We have an in with the crew. They’re keeping us unlisted, classified.”
She still had problems processing that. “They can do that?”
“Captain of the boat can do anything he wants.” He smiled. “And he happens to be Papa’s uncle.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “A monkey’s uncle, huh?”
He grinned. “No shit. Mother’s brother.”
“Ah. But how do you know no one will find out what he’s done? I don’t want him to get in trouble for helping us.”
“He’s got high-level security clearance. He and his crew run support on a lot of black ops missions. They scrub their logs and manifests on a regular basis. No one expects to be able to trace what they’ve done. That’s how we know we can trust him and his crew. We literally were never here on this boat as far as anyone is concerned.”
“What about Quong’s family?”
“Alpha’s got a buddy who’s a CIA spook in Hilo. He’s already working on new IDs for them, us, and for you.”
“Can we trust him?”
Doc sighed. “At some point, we have to trust, yes. There are people we wouldn’t trust, some we’d trust in a limited fashion, and then a few key people we trust.”
“Mi—Bubba?” She still had difficulty thinking of him by his code name.
“Definitely.”
She still couldn’t get over the fact that Mike had worried so much about her that he’d passed on the info to Arliss, suspecting it meant she’d end up hooked up with a SOTIF unit. “General Arliss?”
He hesitated. “I want to say we can trust him, but I’m not going to bet my life or yours on that. My gut tells me it’s someone else who’s running things sideways and in the shadows, outside of Arliss’ sphere of influence. Someone lower down the food chain. Especially since we now know Bubba can look at it for us from a different angle. It would explain how someone got the info about you, but didn’t know enough to track it back to Bubba. They didn’t know Arliss was getting his intel from totally OTG sources.”
“Doesn’t that make things more dangerous for us? That it’s someone else and we don’t know who?”
“It could, if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re the most dangerous things on the planet right now.”
“Except for Kite,” she quietly said.
“Well, yeah. There is that. I suspect Arliss and Bubba will have some more direct communications in the near future, if they aren’t already. If anyone can help Arliss root out the mole, it’ll be Bubba.”
Tango walked up. “Mess in ten,” he said. “And Papa says we’re to stay on board when we hit Pearl Harbor.”
“Why?” Celia asked.
“We and Dr. Quong aren’t staying on this island. We’re going to get dropped elsewhere.”
Neither of them asked. If Tango knew, he’d tell them.
“I’m guessing,” Celia quietly asked, “that we won’t be in Hawaii for long?”
“Probably not,” Tango said. “We’re already tracking Dr. Perkins’ whereabouts and staying off the grid to do it. We can’t afford for the wrong people to get their hands on these people.”
“Do you have a secure connection to Bubba yet? I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“We’re working on it,” Tango said. “He might end up moved elsewhere, for all I know. That’s not my call, though, babe.”
“How do we know Dr. Quong won’t jump ship with his family?” she asked. “They’re safe, right? Since they’re vaccinated?”
“Because,” Doc said, “he wants a successful vaccine as badly as the rest of us do.” He frowned. “He’s not positive the vaccine he gave his family will keep them safe. They were racing against time to put one together as it was. Not enough time for thorough testing. And you heard him yourself. Kite’s mutating.”
“Oh.” She stared out at the vast ocean around of them.
Well, I did think about trying to get back to the States on a boat instead of a plane.
Summer was rapidly approaching. With it, a likely spike in Kite infections worldwide in the northern hemisphere.
“Failure isn’t an option,” Doc assured her. “Just keep saying that to yourself.”
She laid her head on Tango’s shoulder. Considering she didn’t want to be anywhere else but with these two men, regardless of where they had to go, she knew she had no other choice.
“Failure isn’t an option,” she said.
* * * *
Reverend Silo stood at the windows overlooking the Sandias when he heard the knock.
“Come.”
He knew it was Jerald without looking. And the tentative sound of his knock did not bode well.
“Sir?”
“Just tell me.”
He heard Jerald step into the room and close the office door behind him. The man cleared his throat before starting. “Unfortunately, the target was lost.”
“Lost?”
He nervously swallowed. “Removed from our friends’ possession.”
Silo finally turned, struggling and finally managing to contain his anger. “Well?”
“Our friends report losses on their side.”
“In other words, their asses literally got kicked by a bunch of Drunk Monkeys?”
Jerald nodded.
Silo carefully considered his next words. He wasn’t a man used to running up against opposition. “Did we hear anything back from our friends? Why this didn’t go according to plan?”
“Our friends don’t know that. They lost contact with part of their group. Further investigation discovered the unsuccessful venture.”
“Figures.” General Arliss was someone he’d long wanted to have under his thumb, but he’d never been able to bribe or blackmail the man. Arliss was a rarity at his level, squeaky clean with no apparent skeletons in his closet.
And Silo knew he couldn’t just order the general kicked out of his post. That would raise too many suspicions, even if he brought all his contacts to bear down on the officer.
That would be getting greedy, and greed is what usually initiated massive downfalls.
“Now what?” he asked Jerald.
“The targets have gone underground,” Jerald said. “Our friends are working on reacquiring their whereabouts.”
“Keep at it. I want to know where they are. What about that reporter?”
“She sent an e-mail yesterday to a coworker of hers in Chicago, stating that she was…close to her goal. But the Australian borders were shut down yesterday, and we’ve been unable to track if she actually left the country or is still there.”
He glared at Jerald. “And she didn’t mention—” He caught himself, cleared his throat, and lowered his voice. “She portrayed everything as normal?”
Jerald nodded.
“It was obviously a fake e-mail. She would have mentioned her little…run-in with our friends. Find her. Have someone keep an eye on her sister and that coworker of hers, on their social media and e-mail accounts, everything. If she’s going to contact someone, it’ll be them. Do we know if she’s with the Drunk Monkeys or not?”
“No, sir. We don’t. But considering our friends failed, I would suspect she might be. It would be an unusual coincidence, indeed, if they didn’t facilitate her liberation.”
That was one of the reasons he liked Jerald. The man could make the most unsavory activities sound like ordinary, above-board business dealings.
Jerald stood awaiting further instru
Silo dropped into his chair behind his desk. “So it’s safe to say that particular doctor will no longer be within our grasp? At least not for the immediate future?”
“It would appear that way.”
“Do we have any other direct connections to Arliss?”
“Not yet, sir. None who are highly placed enough to be effective at this time.”
“Call Senator Davis. Find out if he can secure us an independent contact in the general’s command or elsewhere.”
“I took the liberty of doing that already, sir. He will get back to us.”
“Very good. How is the LA project progressing?”
“On schedule, sir. The volunteers have already started their training.”
“Excellent. Keep me posted on any new developments in…this matter. That’s all.” He waved Jerald out. Once he was alone again, he leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head.
What would I do? Where would I go? Well, obviously I’d get my ass off Oz.
Everyone had known it was only a matter of time before Kite made it to the island. With the infection raging within Asia and Indonesia, desperate refugees would seek safe harbors elsewhere, bringing the infection with them.
As long as Australia had controlled air traffic and the vessels accessing their ports, they could keep the disease off their turf.
Now…
Pity.
He suspected it was likely the group would try to make their way to the US mainland. But now that they were cut off from their secure military communications and support lines, it would make life difficult for them, at the very least.
Unfortunately, he also suspected the men were very resourceful. They weren’t the first SOTIF team created for nothing. Their last standing orders were to get as many of the people from The List to US soil that they could, so they could work on a Kite vaccine.
And if one of the doctors was still alive, that meant others likely were, too.
The trick would be getting to them first, and not implicating himself in their acquisition. It wouldn’t do for a reporter to spill any of his secrets to the public. Not when he was so damn close to his goal.
By God, I will not tolerate being stymied by a bunch of men called the Drunk Monkeys.
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tymber Dalton lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC winner is also the bestselling author of over fifty-five books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, and many more.
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Tymber Dalton, Monkey Business