Honor’s Revenge: Masters’ Admiralty, book 4 Read online

  HONOR’S REVENGE

  Masters’ Admiralty, book 4

  MARI CARR

  LILA DUBOIS

  For our sisters-in-law, Dr. D and Joey, who appreciate us marrying their brothers so much that they give us advice on weird British slang and how to drug and kidnap someone.

  * * *

  Thanks for putting up with our specific brand of crazy.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Hidden Devotion

  About the Authors

  Prologue

  Jane Dell loved her family, the Masters’ Admiralty, and her country, in that order. And while technically her family came first, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t use her weekly phone calls with her grandson Marek to pump him for information. Her husbands had known better than to be anything but wholly supportive when she’d announced that she would also be reporting any intelligence she got out of Marek. It had taken her nearly forty years of trinity marriage, but she’d finally gotten them trained. And they understood. They understood how hard it had been for her to lose Marek. They understood that she always had plans inside plans, contingencies for everything, and all of it started with information.

  She finished cleaning her gun—not that she’d had much occasion to shoot anything lately, but it was good to keep in practice. It took far too long, due to the arthritis in her fingers, especially the three on the left hand that had been broken during some light torture.

  Getting old was bollocks.

  She’d been an agent in her majesty’s secret service all of her adult life, but hadn’t been one of those useless shoot-people-and-make-a-mess agents. Not that she hadn’t shot and killed a few who needed to be dead. Killing was easy work. The hard work, the real work, was information.

  Her butler William brought her the house phone on a silver tray.

  “Finish it up.” Jane slid the cloth across the table to William and picked up the phone.

  “Please,” her grandson, Marek, prompted. “You forgot to say please.”

  “I was there the day you were born, child. Don’t lecture me about manners.”

  “Of course not, Grandmother.” Marek’s tone was both slightly apologetic and amused.

  She sighed noisily. “Please, William.”

  “Of course, Dame Dell.”

  William set about tidying away her cleaning kit and the illegal firearm. Jane pushed up from the table, hating the way her body creaked and protested, and walked to her favorite chair in the front parlor. From here she could look out over the grounds of the home she’d built with her husbands, the home where her sprawling, complicated family gathered for the holidays. Everyone except Marek.

  She’d lost him to the Trinity Masters.

  “How are you today, Grandmother?”

  “Still an old lady.”

  “You may be chronologically aged, but you will never be an ‘old lady’.”

  That made her smile. Marek was good, truly good, like a fairytale knight who took on righteous quests. It was one of the many reasons it rankled that she’d lost him to those idiot Americans. “You’re too damn right. Now tell me what you’re doing in the colonies.”

  “Language, Grandmother. And I think they prefer not to be called the colonies these days.”

  She thumped her cane on the floor. “And I don’t want you living in squalor.”

  “I assure you, Boston is perfectly civilized.”

  “Doubtful. That entire country is a coal mine fire.”

  Marek’s sigh was just barely audible. “How are Grandfather and Tadcu?”

  “Masoor is off making money. Caradoc is grubbing in the dirt. Meanwhile, I just sit here, a lonely old lady.” More like the spider in the center of a far-reaching web, but playing the put-upon old lady had been working for her for several years now.

  “I’m very sorry if you’re lonely, Grandmother.”

  “If you were, you wouldn’t have run off with the Americans.”

  “By run off, I assume you mean fallen in love, gotten married, and settled down. By the way, Rose and Wes are fine. Thank you for asking.”

  Jane sniffed. She’d taken to calling Marek’s spouses the husband and the wife, refusing to use their actual names.

  “At least you had a proper marriage,” she conceded. Marek’s mother had been a legacy to the Trinity Masters—the redheaded American stepchild organization of the Masters’ Admiralty—but she’d turned down her membership when she’d fallen in love with Marek’s father.

  As such, Marek was one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world who was a legacy to both secret societies.

  And the Americans had snapped him up. The grand master of the Trinity Masters deserved a tip of the hat for that, but it was a single victory.

  Jane intended to win the war.

  Caradoc had asked her what war, and she’d told him to stop butting his Welsh nose in and asking annoying questions.

  “Tell me you’re at least working. I can’t stand a layabout.”

  “I’m working,” Marek assured her.

  “Who are you rescuing now?” Marek was a freelance kidnapping and ransom specialist.

  “I’m actually not taking many jobs where I have to travel right—”

  “I knew it, you’re trapped. Sigh if you need extraction.”

  Marek started to sigh, then stopped himself, which resulted in a coughing fit.

  “I can have you in international waters in two hours,” Jane said.

  Marek cleared his throat. “Grandmother. I don’t need to be rescued. I’m actually doing some work for the Grand Master.”

  Alone in her sunny parlor, retired MI6 officer Jane Dell smiled. This conversation was going exactly as planned.

  “Probably nothing important. Wasting your talents.”

  “Recruitment, actually. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

  “Asset recruitment is the backbone of good intelligence,” she agreed.

  “Not asset recruitment. New member recruitment. With everything that’s been going on within the Trinity Masters, it’s been almost a year since new members were brought in.”

  Now here was the potential for some good information. “Probably a bunch of soldiers and hooligans.”

  “You know I can’t tell you anything,” Marek chided softly.

  “You don’t need to. I know what kind of people the colonists want—cannon fodder.”

  “You do know they recruited me not long ago.”

  “Probably the only smart member they’re going to get.”

  “There are plenty of smart people—”

  “There’s more than one kind of intelligence, Marek,” she scolded. “Your grand master needs foot soldiers, but that bad decision will come home to roost. There will be no science, no art, no discovery…” She expected him to interrupt, b
ut Marek’s manners were too good, so she had to let the words trail off.

  “Actually, Grandmother, I’m looking into several artists and scientists, an award-winning poet and several members of her family, aerospace inventors, and a few musicians.”

  “Space cowboys,” she said dismissively. “But poets and musicians, that shows promise.”

  “Yes, the woman’s poetry is lovely, and she’d bring a unique perspective. I’m working on the correct approach for her and her family.”

  “Bringing multiple assets on at one time is hard,” she warned him. “Tell me more, and I’ll tell you the right way to go about it.”

  “I wish I could.” It wasn’t a platitude, but a regretful statement. Her grandson was smart enough to know that her advice would be worth its weight in gold. “I’m not sure the standard comparison of joining the society being similar to having a patron will work with her. I’m actually thinking the alternative nature of the lifestyle might be appealing.”

  “You mean the arranged trinity marriage.”

  “The trinity marriage. I’m not sure about the arranged part. That can be…difficult…for people who weren’t raised in it.”

  “That’s because in America you have all those wackos with eighty child brides.”

  “Grandmother—”

  “Don’t tell me I’m wrong. I have Netflix.”

  “I would never tell you you’re wrong because I know better and value my life.”

  “Smart boy.”

  The rest of their conversation turned to updates about the family, with Jane sneaking in the more-than-occasional barb that Marek would miss most family gatherings now that he’d settled down in America. In theory, he could come home for a nice visit. In practice, the Trinity Masters and Masters’ Admiralty were in a state of uneasy truce. Marek’s husband, Weston Anderson, had helped solve an old mystery, but in the process betrayed a friendship with Arthur, who was now the admiral of England.

  When the call ended, Jane set aside the phone and picked up her state-of-the-art tablet, which was keyed into military and intelligence search databases.

  Marek may be family, but he was also now one of her assets, embedded deep within an organization where they had no other assets. Everything he told her would be put into a report and filed. That was who she was. What she did. She’d been an MI6 operative longer than she’d been a grandmother.

  Besides, the Trinity Masters needed to be saved from themselves. America was barely a functional country as far as Jane was concerned. Everything would be much better, and her Marek much happier, once the upstart Trinity Masters fell apart, something she was sure was coming. She’d get Marek back and the Masters’ Admiralty could take over in the States.

  It took her nearly an hour to come up with a list of seven young, award-winning female poets who had at least two unmarried relatives. Marek had said the poet had family they were thinking of recruiting, which meant young, unmarried siblings or cousins.

  He’d given her one more piece of information. The poet was the sort of sensible woman who would jump at the chance for a ménage relationship.

  That meant it was time to start reading some poetry.

  As the morning light turned gold with afternoon, Jane finally sat back with a satisfied sigh. She knew who Marek was recruiting—Sylvia Hayden. She was a good recruit, too. Jane wasn’t one for poetry, but what this woman wrote was more than just pretty rhyming words. It showed insight into what it meant to be human, to be a woman, to be alone, and to need to be alone.

  Someone with that level of emotional intelligence and insight would make an amazing asset.

  And that was just Sylvia. Never mind the rest of her family, who were just as promising.

  Jane dictated a quick report, in which she detailed her source—Marek. How the information had been acquired—direct conversation followed by evidenced-based investigation. And finally, the names of the potential Trinity Masters’ recruits. Once she was done, she sent the report to England’s Vice Admiral Lorelei.

  Her report would be filed, the information stored away. More than likely the information would sit in a digital file cabinet, never to be looked at or used, but that didn’t stop Jane from filing the report.

  After all, a good agent never knew what information might come in handy.

  Chapter One

  If his wife Dahlia hadn’t died, she might have called this a game of chess. It would have been one of the few instances in which she was wrong. Eric Ericsson hopped out of the black cab on the outskirts of London. He ducked into the pub that he’d told the driver was his destination. Once inside he ordered a beer, passed it off to an attractive brunette with a wink, then ducked into the toilet, emerging a few minutes later in a Manchester United jersey and knit cap. The disguise, such as it was, wouldn’t hide his height. At six and a half feet tall, he was usually the biggest guy in the room.

  Less than five minutes after he’d entered the pub, he was walking out, tagging along with a crowd of English football fans who’d been watching the match. He jumped into another cab and gave the address of yet another pub.

  King to D3.

  He couldn’t hear Dahlia’s voice anymore. She’d been dead more than fifteen years, but when she’d been alive, she had been a master game player. Her chosen game had been finance, and she’d played it beautifully. He’d been by her side, the dutiful husband, happy to support her and help her keep the secrets that needed to be kept. More than that, he’d loved Dahlia, just as he’d loved Trina, the third member of their trinity marriage.

  They’d married young—an arranged marriage, as was the way of the Masters’ Admiralty, the secret society formed in a desperate attempt to preserve the art, knowledge, and finances of Europe when the continent was being ravaged by the Black Plague. He’d become a knight of Kalmar at a time when he was still young enough to find that notion romantic.

  By the time Eric reached his destination, he’d taken three different forms of transportation and changed his appearance four times. The precautions and circuitous route meant he arrived at the warehouse—his real destination—nearly five hours after he’d touched down at Heathrow. It had taken him far longer to get from the center of London to this former steel manufacturing warehouse than it had to fly from the Isle of Man to London. It had taken him two days to figure out how to get away from the Spartan Guard, his personal guards. More like personal pains in the ass.

  King to D4.

  When he’d first seen his wives, both of them intelligent and lovely, he’d been sure the three of them would lead a charmed existence. Then life happened. In the space of two years, both his wives had died and he’d been made admiral of Kalmar, a position he’d neither wanted nor been able to handle. Mercifully, the Masters’ Admiralty let him step down, and he’d given in to a self-destructive madness that lasted for years. He did things—crazy, dangerous, unforgivable things.

  It hadn’t mattered. There’d been almost no one left who cared if he lived or died, no one except two unruly teenagers he’d befriended on a sheep farm in Galway, of all places. Josephine and her brother, Colum, had constantly found ways to keep him moving, keep him from stepping into the path of the bullets fired in his direction.

  His plan had been to die young. Now, at forty-one, he’d lived too long to die young, but at the rate he’d been going, he certainly wouldn’t have lived to see fifty.

  Then the admirals—those backstabbing fuckers—had done something unforgivable. They’d made him the fleet admiral.

  Now, instead of grimly taking on security missions and ops no sane man would touch, he was in charge of over a thousand of Europe’s smartest, wealthiest, most talented, and most deadly people.

  Yes, Dahlia would have called this a game of chess.

  It was more like herding cats, except half the cats were assassins and spies, the other half were descendants of kings and emperors, and another half had PhDs.

  Dammit, that was too many halves.

  He walked the last mile
, approaching with his hands held slightly away from his body so the camera with which they were no doubt watching him could see he was unarmed.

  Maybe it was like chess, but in the version he was playing, the board wasn’t one smooth expanse of checkered squares, but a fractured landscape of a rainbow of colors. A playing field that had been ravaged by war.

  The Masters’ Admiralty was at war, and he was their wartime general. The enemy was still unknown, but he had a group of particularly smart and unruly cats working on that.

  Every night when he lay down, he closed his eyes and made lists of people and mission objectives. Since becoming fleet admiral, he’d started working every angle, investigating every clue, working to ferret out the weaknesses, to hopefully secure their defenses. Every time he thought he’d gotten ahead, that he was keeping his people safe, something went wrong. Kidnapping, torture, bombings. He’d fallen through a booby trap. That had been a fun Tuesday night.

  If this had been a game, he would be losing. Badly.

  Queen to D4.

  Queen takes King.

  Checkmate.

  He shoved open the door of the warehouse. Despite its appearance, the door opened soundlessly.