Page 88 of Her Ruthless Protector

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Unlike the talent, A.J.’s trailer had been one of the first trailers that had been returned to the RV center the day before the event. That meant when she needed to have her nervous break-down she ended up in Python’s trailer with his cats. That just made her cry harder when she knew that he was in surgery. But now she had her game face on.

She filed into the conference room that Max had commandeered for some kind of wrap-up session. She’d suggested the room for them—it was well away from prying eyes here at the stadium. The two SEAL teams and Lieutenant Commander McAllister asked her to participate as well, which had stunned her.

“Is that cat hair?” Kane asked as he sat down beside her.

She looked over at him to give him shit in return, and saw blood. It made her cringe. She looked around. A lot of men had blood on them. She was pretty sure it was other people’s blood where they had administered to the wounded, but maybe not.

“Let’s get down to business,” Liam started. “Kane, you stated that the kid in the computer room called you Uncle, is that right? Asher, why do you think it was the guy you took out?”

“The guy was running up the staircase that Kane and A.J. had gone down. I was just bringing down a wounded acrobat from the catwalk. The guy was pushing past everybody. When he pushed down a man carrying a wounded woman, I yelled at him to stop. He didn’t. I started to run after him, that was when he pulled a gun. I took him out with a headshot. There were just too many civilians around, I wasn’t going to risk trying to take him alive.”

“It was the right decision,” Max said.

“That’s two terrorists accounted for,” Liam said. “Rashid and his men have tracked down the electric company that normally does the work on the lights. They went to their place of business. They found the five men in the back room, all dead and two of their cranes are unaccounted for.”

“Well, we can account for the trucks’ whereabouts two days ago,” Kane said bitterly. “We can’t possibly think that just the kid and his uncle did that, can you? Taking out the five guys I mean.”

“Highly doubtful,” Liam agreed.

“Everything outside of the stadium was Rashid’s responsibility,” Max said.

Fifteen pairs of eyes swung to him.

Max raised his hands, palms out. “I’m just telling you the agreed upon parameters, as far as I’m concerned, we are the ones that screwed the pooch on this one, gentlemen.”

A.J. let out a small sigh of relief. She was going to think worse of Max if he was going to pass the blame.

“They’re getting better at this,” Liam said. “They’re keeping information to smaller and smaller groups of people and then carrying out missions that require far less manpower so that it is less likely someone will get caught or talk before the mission. This one was smooth. Gray questioned Chet at the hospital. According to him, there were two guys doing the lamping of the lights. They were there for hours. One of Rashid’s men did a cursory check of their equipment, but obviously not thorough enough.”

“For God’s sake, they even connected cable in order to get the connection they needed.” Kane was outraged. “What about at two-o’clock in the morning when they did the systems test? Was the kid there?”

“Chet says no.”

“Good to see he didn’t overlook that.”

“Kane, lay off Chet,” A.J. murmured.

“You’re right, this is on our head. We all take the blame for this, it went down on our watch,” Kane shook his head tiredly.

“Kane, you can take a lot of credit for the success of this op. You shut this shit down fast, if you hadn’t it could have been much worse,” Liam said. He turned to Max and Gray. “Your teams went above and beyond.”

“It could have been so much better if the Sultan had taken it seriously and given us more manpower to begin with,” Asher said.

“We’ll talk about that in a moment,” Max said. “Let’s move to A.J.’s portion of the meeting,” he gave her a smile.

A.J. realized that something deeper was going on that she couldn’t be privy to. That was fine by her. She felt privileged to be part of what they had allowed her to listen in on as is.

“A.J., I know you’ve been working with the hospitals. What’s the numbers?” Max asked.

A.J. pulled up her little notebook.

“Four dead contestants. Seven in the audience dead, which included two reporters. And we’ve got twenty-two hospitalized, four aren’t expected to make it. I really need a story to tell the press. What everybody’s clamoring for is whether the next two nights will be safe. Will they?”

“A.J., there was one arm of this particular cell that was working on this project. This attack ended with what went down today. Is it possible someone else, another terrorist, has their eye on your show? Anything’s possible,” Max said.

“Can I say that? Is that okay to release to the press?”