Special Forces: The Operator. Cindy Dees

Which was why she happened to glimpse a familiar face in the crowd. A face that made her lurch. A face that emphatically should not be here.

      The face of a terrorist.

      Surely she’d made a mistake. She moved quickly around the pool, trying to keep an eye on the man, who looked shockingly like Mahmoud Akhtar. Mahmoud led a terror cell that kidnapped her teammate, Piper Ford, last year.

      Piper’s fiancé was an undercover CIA officer who’d helped her escape from Mahmoud, and who’d captured photographs of the entire cell of Iranian operatives. Rebel had looked at an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mahmoud posted in the Medusas’ ready room every day for the past eight months. She knew his face.

      And she’d just seen it here in Sydney, Australia.

      Next to Mahmoud, a second man stood up from where he’d been squatting by the edge of the pool. Yousef Kamali. Mahmoud’s second-in-command and also a glossy photo on her team’s personal Most Wanted wall.

      She wove through the throng of people to the spot where Mahmoud and Yousef had been standing and turned in a slow three-sixty.

      No sign of the two men.

      She had to be wrong. No way could known terrorists gain access to the Olympic Village. Not unless the Iranian government had given them credentials that attached them to the Iranian Olympic team...

      Nah. The Iranians wouldn’t be so brazen.

      She spied two males wearing black tracksuits with green-white-red stripes down the arms and legs. Iran team uniforms. She swore under her breath.

      The pair was moving away from the pool area quickly. Purposefully.

      Frowning, she debated whether to leave her post and follow them. It wasn’t like the softball girls were leaving this party anytime soon. But she was responsible for their safety, which technically included apprehending terrorists.

      The Iranians approached a streetlight with its pole-mounted surveillance camera and, as she looked on, both men simultaneously turned their faces to the right.

      Away from the camera.

      Sonofa—That was the deliberate act of someone who didn’t want to be identified. The act of a trained operative. Or a terrorist.

      She took off running, but the two men were well ahead of her, and more athletes were streaming toward the pool. She dodged and weaved, doing the whole fish swimming upstream thing, desperately trying to keep the Iranians in sight. But she was only five foot four, and it was darned near impossible to see over the glamorous amazons that were most Olympic athletes.

      Finally, she broke out of the worst of the crush and glimpsed her quarry passing through one of the checkpoints to leave the Olympic Village. She put on a burst of speed as they scanned their credentials and stepped onto a city street.

      She flew through the checkpoint without bothering to scan herself out. She couldn’t lose the Iranians! Once they hit the giant street party outside the village, following them was going to get immeasurably harder. She had to close as much of the gap as she could before they lost themselves in the crowds. Sydney was in full celebration mode, and this part of the city had been completely shut down to allow foot traffic to fill the streets.

      Rebel raced through crowds of revelers, but the Iranians picked up speed in front of her, and she stretched out into a full sprint. The men turned a corner and disappeared.

      When she approached the intersection, she slowed, turning the corner fast and low. It turned out to be a relatively quiet, dark street lined with closed office buildings. And it was empty. She raced down it, searching side to side for the Iranians. Nothing. She burst out into another crowded thoroughfare.

      Where did they go?

      There. To her left. She gathered herself to take off running again just as the men disappeared into a building ahead.

      Without warning, big, hard hands grabbed her by both arms, dragging her back into the dark street she’d just emerged from. She stumbled backward, fetching up hard against a building. Immediately, she was flattened against it by a living wall of muscle.

      Chagrin roared through her. She’d gotten so focused on chasing her quarry in front of her that she’d forgotten to watch her own tail. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better.

      “Let go of me,” she ground out. The terrorists were getting away!

      “Who are you?” a male voice rasped from over her head.

      “The person who’s going to hurt you if you don’t let me go. Right. Now.”

      “Little thing like you?” Humor laced her battering ram’s voice.

      No help for it. She was about to be conspicuous.

      * * *

      Avi Bronson yelped as the fleeing suspect, a tiny, shockingly quick female, stomped painfully on the top of his left foot. He swore when she grabbed his thumb off her shoulder and gave it a vicious wrench.

      “Damn, woman! You’ve practically dislocated my thumb.”

      A normal man would step back from the tiny virago now throwing painful elbows at him, kneeing him dangerously close to his groin and scratching at his face. But he was a trained Special Forces soldier, and the last thing he dared do was let this woman get an arm’s length between them where she could really wind up with a fist or foot and actually damage him.

      He leaned in against her, using his superior size and weight to mash her even flatter against the wall at her back, silently thanking his wool suit coat for absorbing the worst of her attack.

      She went still abruptly.

      “Are you done?” he asked cautiously.

      “Yes.” Her tone was surly. Not even close to subdued.

      “If I step back from you, will you stop attacking me?” he tried.

      Too long a pause. Then, “Yes.”

      Liar.

      He jumped back all at once, throwing up his fists to defend himself. And just in the nick of time. She flew at him like an angry bird.

      But then she surprised him by spinning away and taking off at a dead run down the street. Genuinely irritated now, he gave chase.

      Crap, she was fast.

      Of course, she had the advantage over him in weaving through the heavy crowd, being as small as she was. He struggled to keep sight of her as she dodged among the civilians ahead of him.

      Then she did a weird thing,

      She came to a dead stop in front of a giant discotheque, staring at it in what could only be utter disgust.

      Avi screeched to a stop beside her. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me—”

      “Oh, save it,” she muttered, yanking out a set of Olympic credentials from inside her jacket. The holographic ID card hanging from a lanyard around her neck and declaring her to be from the American delegation, certainly looked authentic.

      “Nonetheless. I need you to come with me,” he repeated.

      She finally turned her full attention on him, and he was taken aback by her giant blue eyes, glaring at him as indignantly as if he’d kicked her puppy. “Who are you?” she demanded.

      “Olympic security,” he said shortly.

      “I showed you my credentials. Let’s see yours,” she challenged.

      “Not here,” he muttered. A lifetime of being reviled and targeted for being Israeli had taught him to be deeply reticent about announcing his nationality in crowded, public settings. Not to mention, he was not about to air Olympic security business on a street full of half-drunk spectators.

      “Why won’t you show me your credentials?”