Free Takedown (An Alexandra Poe Thriller) by Brett Battles, Robert Gregory Browne Page A

went to the window overlooking the hotel’s front parking lot.
    He waited through three rings before the line came to life and a voice said, “Yeah?”
    “She’s leaving the hotel.”
    “Why so early?” A hesitant pause. “You think we’re blown?”
    Outside, Alex Poe emerged from the hotel entrance and crossed toward her car, her hair a clear victim of the night’s acrobatics.  
    “Judging by the way she climbed all over me, I highly doubt it.”
    “Just be careful,” the voice said. “She’s a fierce little bitch.”
    “In more ways than you’ll ever know, but she’s a lot more vulnerable than she lets on. And she isn’t the one who cut me.”
    “Hey, you wanted it realistic, remember? A little blood goes a long way.”
    Gérard touched the bandages on his rib cage and pushed out a dry, humorless laugh. “That’s easy to say when it isn’t your blood.”

CHAPTER 8

    A LEX HAD TURNED off her cell phone in Gérard’s hotel room, and now discovered she had five new messages waiting for her—two texts and three voice mails.  
    All from Jason McElroy.
    Given that it was the middle of the night, she was tempted to call him right then and hang up once she knew she’d awakened him, but the prudent course was to continue ignoring him. Whatever the asshole was hot to talk about could wait until she was back in civilization.
    She wasn’t being obstinate. Well, maybe she was, but when it came down to it, she got no joy from working for the guy. It was a relationship of convenience and little else, and after the mix-up in Istanbul, she wasn’t anxious to hear what he had to say.
    Stonewell International was a large, highly respected, multinational security firm that, among other things, specialized in black ops fugitive retrieval. If you wanted someone found and wanted it done off the grid, Stonewell was first on your list. As long as you could afford the fee, of course.
    Last year, McElroy had gone to great lengths to bring Alex into the fold. He had only succeeded because he’d had information she wanted: the identity and location of someone who’d had recent personal contact with her father. Someone who might know his whereabouts.
    Nearly a dozen years ago, her dear old dad, Colonel Francis Edward Poe, had been branded a traitor by the US government for reasons that had never been clear. Most of his file was classified, and Alex’s attempts over the years to dig up the truth had resulted in a big fat zero. But she knew one thing for sure: her father was nota traitor. She didn’t argue that he had changed after her mother’s death, but he had always been a good soldier, and betraying his country was simply not in his DNA.
    Alex had all but given up trying to find him when McElroy approached her. His scheme was simple. He wanted Alex to bag a known terrorist who was temporarily being held under an assumed name at a woman’s prison in Crimea. All Alex had to do was pose as an inmate, gain the woman’s confidence, and break her out of the place—a task that had proven difficult but not impossible.
    Unfortunately, the end result had not been a rendezvous with her father, as Alex had hoped, and the only thing that kept her working for Stonewell was McElroy’s promise that she had full use of the firm’s data network to aid her in correcting that result.
    But Alex was no longer the naive eighteen-year-old who had joined the army in hopes of finding the old man. She knew Frank Poe was a considerable prize that someone like McElroy could use to help feather his cap, so she had no illusions about her and her boss’s relationship. He was exploiting it as much as she was, and would use whatever information she managed to uncover to find Frank Poe for himself.
    All she had to do was beat him to it.

    Shortly after three a.m., Alex pulled her rental car into the carport under the Shimmy Shack, still feeling the sting of her impulsiveness. She couldn’t deny the sex had been good, but her ability to fall