Excerpt of Deep Blue by Suzanne McMinn

Cade Brock lowered the binoculars he had trained on the house down the street, his grip tightening on the cell phone at his ear as his pulse froze. "What did you say?"

The PAX League chief, Harrison Beck, let a beat draw out. "It's Adal Chaba. I wanted to tell you myself."

"Keep going." Cade continued to watch the target location from the parked car he'd positioned down the block even as his jaw clenched and something dark banded his chest.

"We nailed Kerbasi," Beck told him. "We got the data off his hard drive that links him to Chaba. I'm taking you off the case."

"No." The word burst tightly out of Cade's mouth. His fingers moved of their own accord to the rigid slice of a scar not four weeks old on the side of his throat. A parting gift from Harmon Kerbasi. If he hadn't wanted this case for revenge already, knowing Kerbasi was linked to the terrorist kingpin Chaba clinched it.

"You sound like hell," Beck said. "As much as we need you on this case, it's too soon. This is too personal already, and now —"

"No." He knew he sounded like hell. He felt like hell. But he had people to put in hell. And yeah, it was personal. "You need me."

"You need some R&R."

"I had enough R&R." The last month, in the hospital then recovering at home on enforced leave, had been more R&R than he'd ever wanted or intended to suffer again. He needed a case to work on. Downtime was nothing but an invitation to nightmares of guilt and loss so deep he didn't want to relive them. And yet he did. Every time he closed his eyes. And sometimes when they were open.

"You need to come in for more testing."

He was sick and tired of testing. And he knew the PAX chief didn't just mean the endless scientific probing he'd endured for most of his life. Beck meant psychological testing. He knew what they thought of him. They called him "The Machine" as if he weren't even human. And maybe he gave that impression. Good enough. He didn't have buddies in the League. He worked alone, no other agents at his side. He liked it that way. If they thought that made him an emotionless machine, so be it. He was respected but not befriended. He kept his emotional distance. It was better for everyone that way. Especially him.

Changing any of that wasn't on his agenda. "I'm not coming in for more testing. I'm not going back on R&R. And you can take me off the case, but I'm not taking myself off." He had a slippery relationship with the League. Technically, he was their agent. They'd raised him from age six, and some people would say that made them his family. But they'd never owned him, and the last thing they were going to do when it came to Chaba was control him. "Now tell me about Chaba."

Another moment passed in which he was certain Beck was considering the ten different ways he wanted to throttle him. The PAX chief respected him, though, and he knew what getting Chaba meant to Cade.

"The hard drive didn't have much on it," Beck said finally. "Kerbasi'd been ditching his laptop regularly. Chaba's careful. He would have insisted on that. Unless Kerbasi starts talking, all we've got are a few e-mails that link him up the chain of command. We need the woman. She's the key."

A red compact car slid down the street toward the house and stopped. Tall and leggy, the woman stepped out of the car then turned to scan the quiet, palm-lined Key Mango street. Cade lifted the binoculars again.

"And I've got her," he said.

He punched the phone off, leaving the PAX chief without the time, or the connection, to change one damn thing that was about to happen. Cade watched the target stand, rooted, for a few moments in the driveway of the house.

It was almost too convenient. Not even a challenge. It couldn't have been easier if she'd tied a ribbon around her slim, pretty neck and handed herself to him.

He waited, adrenaline burning, in the nondescript sedan he'd rented, parked several houses down and across the street from the two-story house. There was an apartment on bottom, another on top. Nothing was this easy, and he wasn't taking any chances. He'd tangled with Tabitha Donovan before, and she'd nearly cost him his life when she'd left him to Kerbasi. There would be no repeats of that scenario.

She stood there, as if she were waiting for someone, too, as he'd been waiting for her. Or did she fear someone was after her? For a second, he thought she was going to get back in the car and drive away. If someone was after her — someone besides him — well, he might have a chance to kill two birds with one stone, because the people she was dealing with were even more elusive than Tabitha Donovan — or whatever she was calling herself today. And they were definitely a hell of a lot more dangerous.

Cade knew from personal experience that mass murder was Chaba's stock in trade.

"Run, baby. Run!"

His mother's wild eyes seared him as he wob-bled, panicked, on the fiery beach.

"Take care of your brother. You're a big boy."

"No, Mama." He clung to her arm even as she pushed him away.

"I have to find your father, baby. Take your brother. Run!"

She shook him off, and turned....

Fire, then blackness and screaming, so much screaming —

Cade squeezed his eyes shut for a horrific beat. For the millionth time, he couldn't stop the screaming, couldn't go back and make it different, couldn't change the lives that had been lost, couldn't bury the memories and anger deep enough. Even blowing Chaba to hell wouldn't do that. But it would be a start.

He opened his eyes and focused on the present, the woman, the link to the evil that had haunted him all his life.

Even from a distance in the clouded twilight, she was the most gorgeous terrorist he'd ever seen. She wore hip- hugging pink cropped pants and a white camisole top that clung to curvy breasts and a trim waist. Blond hair fell free to her shoulders, and even in the soggy Florida Keys heat, she looked fresh as the proverbial daisy.

He tipped the binoculars to his eyes — the better to see her deceptively lovely oval face in the scant light, slender with intriguing hollows that made her look delicate...when she was anything but.

She nibbled her lip as she hesitated in front of the building. Did she see him, even from this distance, through the tinted windows and murky shadows of the oncoming night and a brewing storm?

A breeze whipped the lush palm fronds up and down the street and the first plops of the storm front hanging gray in the sky above hit his wind-shield. She turned to retrieve an overnight bag from the rear of the vehicle. She hadn't seen him. She didn't have a clue.

She was about to get one.

He lowered the binoculars, satisfied. She'd be spending the rest of her life in a government lockup if what the PAX League believed about her was true. And considering the evidence he had already, he didn't have any doubts. In the meantime, they needed her.

Alive, not dead, and with the dangerous double-crossing game she was playing, she was on borrowed time already. She didn't know it, but he was about to save her sorry life.

Getting to the truth, and to her secrets, including her real identity, was his job, and unfortunately, that meant keeping her alive. He watched as she swayed her wickedly sexy hips, crossing to the wooden outside steps leading up to the second-story apartment, overnight bag in hand. The small island community of Key Mango that she'd apparently chosen for her home base was hardly exclusive housing. The tiny key was made up primarily of locals, shrimp trawling seamen and dive fanatics, with a sprinkling of Bahamian rental homes and run-down duplex apartments that attracted tourists going for economical over trendy. Not that anything came cheap down here. Even a one-bedroom weather- beaten studio on the least fashionable island in the coral keys would cost a pretty penny this close to the water.

Tabitha Donovan had plenty of pretty pennies tucked in her secret Swiss bank account, no doubt courtesy of Chaba, but she wasn't showing them off, not with the used car she was driving and not with the less than stellar housing she'd used a credit card in her made-up name to lease. It was how PAX had tracked her here. Mistakes. Criminals always made them, even the beautiful ones.

The street lay quiet in the early evening, nothing but the beat of palm fronds in the wind and the rush of gathering rain hitting the steaming street. This late in the summer, the vacation renters were heading out and more than half the homes and apartments were empty, their distant owners putting months at a time on sale to attract off-season travelers who would be arriving in the coming weeks. The cute blonde wasn't planning to leave, though. She'd booked her rental through the fall. The better to search for the ancient secret she was planning to sell out at the cost of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of lives.

But her plans were about to change. Whether he liked it or not — and he didn't — she was going with him, and going alive. She was a pawn on his way to the top, and now that he knew that top was Chaba, he'd do anything to get there. Even put up with the woman who'd set him up to die.