by Kathi Daley
Ben grabbed his jacket and followed Michael out the door. “Her best friend and teammate was shot and killed during a mission. They had been sent behind enemy lines to retrieve an asset who had been captured. The enemy was waiting for them, and her team met with heavy fire. Her friend died, as did several other members of the team. It was tough on her. I think she felt like maybe their deaths were her fault. That maybe if she had done something sooner or better, they would have lived.”
“Wow. That’s awful.”
Ben nodded. “It was. Her tour ended shortly after the incident and she spent the final months of her contract in San Diego, where she met Eric. She told me that after the death and destruction of war, his lighthearted approach to life was refreshing. He seemed to have the money to spend traveling the world, following one dive after another. She told me that she felt like she needed a change, so instead of reupping for another four years, she went with him. I guess she told you that he died while diving on a wreck.”
Michael nodded. “She did tell me that. She didn’t say why she decided to leave the Army, though. It seems like she’s had a tough time all around.”
“She has, but she is a survivor. I know that she is feeling somewhat lost since Eric’s death, but I have no doubt she’ll eventually land on her feet.”
Michael turned back toward the room after Bosley had finished his business.
“I think the two of you will make a good team,” Ben added. “You both have good instincts and you bring to the partnership slightly different skill sets. If anyone can find the ledger, I have no doubt it would be the two of you.”
“I’ll take good care of her,” Michael promised.
“You do that, and let her take care of you as well.”
After Michael entered the room he’d taken as his own, he went to look in on the woman who was still asleep in the next one. If he was honest with himself, after only a few days he already found himself falling halfway in love with her, but after learning the rest of what she’d been through and knowing the courage it must have taken to find a way to survive, he suspected he’d want to find a way to be with her even after this crazy mission of theirs was over.
Chapter 11
Harper turned around and looked out the rear window of the brand-new SUV that Ben had given them. “I actually thought I was going to cry when Ben drove away with Princess and Bosley.”
Michael sighed. “Yeah, me too. I’m going to miss them.”
“It is crazy how you can meet someone and be totally in love with them after only a few days.”
Michael looked at Harper with a raised brow.
“The baby,” Harper clarified. “I was talking about being in love with the baby. And the puppy. I mean, who wouldn’t fall in love with that adorable little face?”
“Bosley is a cute pup and Princess is most definitely the cutest baby I have ever seen.”
“Right! I used to think Holly was crazy for having all those kids; now I’m jealous that she gets to spend time with Princess while we track down the man who is most likely responsible for her mother’s death.” Harper’s face reddened. “If I happen to get my hands on that guy, he is going to be a dead man.”
“The plan is to find and retrieve the ledger and turn it over to the authorities,” Michael reminded her. “Ben didn’t mention murder as part of it.”
“We’ll see how it goes.” Harper turned slightly so she was looking at Michael. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep last night, and I certainly didn’t plan to sleep clear through until morning. What did you and Ben manage to find out from the thumb drive?”
“There is a lot I still need to work out, but it appears that Salvador Garcia has a compound in the mountains of Southern New Mexico. Based on the information on the thumb drive, it appears as if it was from there that Isabella escaped.”
“I wonder how she got all the way to California.”
“I don’t know. The timeline is sketchy, so I’m not sure how long she was on her own before she got hooked up with the DEA. I do suspect that she may have hidden the ledger near the compound rather than travel with it, yet not so close to it that it would be easily discovered. Keep in mind that she was pregnant at the time of her escape. Because I don’t have a good handle on that timeline yet, I’m not sure how far along she was, but I am fairly certain she would have wanted to travel light. My suggestion is that we head toward New Mexico. We can work on the map in the evenings after we stop. I’m hoping to have more of the clues associated with the map translated by the time we get there.”
“And how long do you think that will take?”
“Two or three days, depending on the weather. I looked at the forecast this morning before we started out, and unfortunately, there are storms all across the country for most of the upcoming week. I think we are going to need to deal with snow in the north and rain in the south.”
Harper supposed that a road trip lasting two or three days wouldn’t be all that bad. It would give her time to get to know Michael better and to try to decode the map. Without the baby and the puppy as buffers, she did worry that the situation might take on an intimacy she wasn’t sure she was ready for. Of course, she had just met Michael. Still she couldn’t quite get his soft brown eyes and crooked smile out of her mind. When she’d woken in the middle of the night to find him pacing the floor with a fussy Princess, singing softly to her all the while, her icy heart had melted just enough to create a hole in her defenses.
“Pull up the weather app on my phone and see if the storm that was supposed to roll into southern Montana has arrived yet.”
Harper picked up the phone and accessed the app. “It looks like it is currently snowing in Billings, with heavy snow predicted by late morning. It does look like the snow is supposed to taper off by midafternoon.” Harper glanced at her driving companion. “I guess we can stop for lunch and wait out the worst of it and then continue south if the storm dissipates as predicted.”
“Sounds like a good plan. Ben and I were up pretty late last night, so I was thinking we’d stop early today anyway.”
“I got plenty of sleep and am happy to drive if you would like to take a nap.”
Michael looked like he was going to argue but instead agreed that they’d trade off in an hour or so, and she could drive until they stopped for lunch.
“I’ve been thinking about the DEA vehicle we saw in Idaho. Do you think whoever was driving it wanted to do us harm, or do you think they were simply some agent hoping to track down Isabella’s testimony to use against Garcia?” Harper asked.
“I don’t know. At this point, I don’t think we can trust anyone. Ben has a friend in the FBI who he assured me we can trust. He is going to talk with him as soon as he has a chance to see if he might be able to get an insider’s look at the players, who might be on Garcia’s payroll, and who we might be safe trusting.”
“I just hope Ben’s connection actually is one of the good guys.”
“Ben knows what is at stake. He’ll be careful.”
As agreed, Michael pulled over after an hour and Harper climbed into the driver’s seat. Once she was underway, Michael promptly fell asleep. The drive was somewhat boring without him to talk to, and given some of the lusty thoughts she’d had after realizing that they were going to be alone for several days at least, she realized that allowing her mind to wander was not a good thing, so she turned the radio on low and hoped it wouldn’t wake him. He must have been really out of it, she decided, because he didn’t stir at all until she pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall.
Michael sat up and looked around. “Why are we stopping?”
“It’s just past noon and we’d decided to stop for lunch.”
Michael frowned. “I don’t see a restaurant.”
“Next door. I thought it might be better to park here.”
Michael rubbed his eyes. “Why?”
She shrugged. “It was a tactical choice. Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Then let’s go. The storm seems to have stalled. Maybe we can make more progress today than we thought.”
The coffee shop was crowded, but they managed to find a booth near a window. Michael ordered a roast beef sandwich with a cup of vegetable beef soup, and she chose a grilled cheese with a cup of tomato soup. They were halfway through their meal when she noticed the car.
“Black sedan with California plates.”
Michael frowned. “There is no way that guy followed us.”
She watched as a man got out of his car and looked around the parking lot. There were at least two dozen cars in the lot, but he paused and looked in the window of every single one.
“Come on,” Michael said, grabbing his jacket, tossing a couple of twenties on the table, and heading toward the bathrooms and the back door.
“It can’t be the same guy,” she said, following Michael out into the cold.
“Maybe not, but it looks like the same car.”
She followed Michael as he crept around toward the front of the lot, being careful to stay low so the hedge growing against the building would hide them. Her view of the man dressed in casual clothes was filtered, but it was good enough to see that he was not the man who had killed Agent Beaverton. Still, she found herself wishing she hadn’t left the gun Ben had given her locked in the glove box.
“They aren’t here,” the man was saying into his phone. “Yes, I’m sure. There are a couple of dozen cars in the lot but not a single Range Rover.”
Her heart pounded as the man paused to listen to the person on the other end of the line. She prayed he wouldn’t hear her breathing; it sounded loud to her ears.
The man continued to listen for a while longer, then spoke. “I looked inside every car in the lot and there wasn’t a car seat in any of them. I can’t explain why the GPS signal said they would be here, but they aren’t.”
She held her breath as he glanced in their direction. Again, she wished she had brought the gun. Of course, even if she’d had, she wasn’t sure what she’d have done with it. There were a whole lot of innocent bystanders here.
“Yeah, I’ll take a look inside. I need to use the head anyway. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” He hung up and headed for the front door of the coffee shop.
Michael grabbed her hand and led her toward the other parking lot. Once they were loaded into the vehicle, he pulled out and headed back the way they had come so they didn’t have to pass the restaurant.
“What GPS signal?” she asked.
“I don’t know. This is a new car, Ben gave us new burner cells, and we have a computer that has never been connected to the internet. The old computer and phones were destroyed. It makes no sense.”
She looked around frantically. There had to be something they were missing. “Your personal cell. We haven’t used it to make calls, but we have used the apps.”
“Of course.” Michael pulled over. He got out of the car, put his cell phone under the tire of the car, got back in, and ran over it.
“Well, I guess that takes care of that,” she said. “But now we don’t have a map.”
“The car has a navigation system. It isn’t registered to either of us, so it shouldn’t alert anyone if we use it. Look for a road we can take that will get us off this road and take us south.”
She turned on the navigation system and pulled up the map. “If you take the next left and then the second left after that, you should run into Highway 89 South. If you follow that route, we will end up in Yellowstone National Park. The road through the park will be closed, but it wouldn’t be a bad place to spend the night. There is a town there and it is definitely off the beaten path.”
“Okay, we’ll head there and regroup.” Michael turned to her and smiled. “It seems your tactical move to park in the lot next to the restaurant paid off. I doubt this car will even be on the radar of the man in the DEA vehicle.”
She shrugged. “It is what I was trained for.” She looked at the navigation system. “I do think we should disable the GPS, though, just in case. We can buy paper maps to use, the way they did in the olden days.”
Michael nodded. “I need to fuel up. I’ll disable the system when we stop. Maybe we can find a travel plaza that sells old-fashioned maps. I wouldn’t mind grabbing a snack considering we only managed to eat half our lunch.”
“I saw a stand with maps in the last gas station we stopped at. I don’t think everyone has navigation systems in their vehicles, and there are a lot of dead spaces out here, with no cell service.”
“That’s a good point. If we are going to stop early, we can work on decrypting the thumb drive some more. My gut tells me that the only way we can end this is if we can find what we need to locate the man behind it.”
Chapter 12
The motel was located on the bank of a rushing river that provided a steady hum even with the windows closed. The lodging property didn’t offer suites, so Michael got two rooms with a connecting door, much like other rooms they had shared before. The units were clean but somewhat shabby, although Harper supposed it really didn’t matter; they were there to work, not to lounge around as if they were on an actual vacation.
“So, what did you and Ben figure out after I fell asleep last night?” she wondered.
Michael pulled out the laptop Ben had brought for him to use, set it on the small table by the window, and plugged it in. Once it booted up, he inserted the thumb drive, then accessed the file with the map. In addition to a topographical map that contained changes in elevation but no other defining attributes, there was a series of instructions that appeared to be written more as clues to a puzzle.
“As you can see, the topographical map alone doesn’t tell us anything without other landscape markers. Ben called his friend, Special Agent Roy Griswold at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and asked for his help in identifying the landscape.”
“Did Ben explain everything that was happening?” she asked.
“No. As a start, Ben simply told his friend that he was working on a case, that the map was a clue, and that he needed help matching the map with the topography it showed. I have to say that I was pretty surprised when the agent didn’t even question Ben’s need to obtain the information. He just asked us to email him a copy of the map, which he ran through a software program that matches up topography indicated on a map with physical topography. Griswold came up with a location in the southern part of New Mexico. The problem is that the area shown on the map covers more than a hundred square miles. We are going to need to narrow it down if we have any hope at all of finding the ledger, assuming the map even leads to it.”
“Which is where the clues provided in the puzzle must come in,” she speculated. “I assume your plan is to travel to the general area and then look for the clues provided.”
Michael nodded. “That’s the plan. We’ll need at least two days to get to our destination; maybe three days, depending on the weather. There are a couple of different routes we can take, so I thought we’d look at the weather report in the morning and select the one that is least likely to give us issues.”
She sat back and looked at the map. “And once we get there, if we are successful in locating the ledger, then what?”
“Then we have a decision to make. I know Agent Beaverton told you to trust no one, but I think there is going to come a time when we’ll need to bring in the big guns. Ben seems to think we can trust Griswold. He is leaving the decision to involve him to a greater extent up to us, but I trust Ben, so at this point I am inclined to give him the go ahead to talk to him again.”
Harper paused to consider. “I get that we are going to need more help at some point. I’d like to wait until Ben gets home and Princess is safe with Holly. I guess he should be there tomorrow evening. Right now, I am inclined to tell Ben to wait to bring his friend in on more things until after we have the chance to look for the ledger. We both know that once any more of the feds get involved, they are going to want us to be uninvolved. We ha
ve come this far without them; personally, I’d like to see this mission through to completion.”
Michael nodded. “That sounds fine to me. We’ll call Ben tomorrow evening to check in with him.” He logged out of the file that contained the map and logged in to the one with the information on bank accounts and contact names. “It seems like this file covers a lot of damaging information. I wonder what the ledger has that isn’t already provided here.”
She frowned. “Maybe the ledger is more of a calendar. I would think the number one thing that would be needed to actually track this man down is the knowledge of where he is going to be at some point in the future.”
He sat back in his chair. “That makes sense. Perhaps the ledger has information relating to meetings that have been set up but have not yet taken place.”
She tilted her head slightly. “Don’t you think Garcia would change things up if that was the purpose of the ledger and he knew it was missing?”
“Perhaps. But there is an equally likely possibility that he wouldn’t want to act in a manner that creates a sense of doubt in his own people, especially if he isn’t sure the ledger has been compromised.”
Harper leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “You could be correct about that. I’m sure Garcia wouldn’t want his contacts to know that anything involving him has been compromised. It would demonstrate weakness on his part. I suppose it is likely that he is hoping to track down the ledger before he is forced to change the plans he has already made.”
Michael logged off the computer and pushed it aside. “Let’s grab something to eat. There were only a couple of restaurants open when we drove through earlier and I’m not sure what time they close.”
“I noticed a restaurant with an attached bar when we came into town. Chances are it will be open later than some of the other eateries in the area.” Harper sat down on the side of the bed and began pulling on her boots. “I really do need to find a place to buy something else to wear. I’m pretty sure these sweats are getting ripe.”