by Vicki Hinze
Amanda twisted in the seat, took aim and blinked hard, trying to clear the spots from her eyes. She put one bullet through the Lexus’s windshield, then another one in its front right tire. The driver hit the brakes hard. The car screeched, skidded, its tires churning smoke. The driver lost control. The car careened off the road, over the shoulder, and onto the grass, where it fishtailed to a stop.
A cloud of dust enveloped the car and Amanda collapsed back on the seat, her head spinning, the spots blinding her. She fought against passing out, but there was no way she could avoid it. Her body was too worn down from captivity and the tomb, too vulnerable. The darkness was coming at her from all sides and sucking hard. “Cross. I think I’m going to...”
“Well, what do you know?” Mark Cross mumbled. “The woman is human, after all.”
Chapter Three
Amanda awakened on a 26-footer with dual 150 Yamahas mounted on the stern. She lay sprawled on a bench seat and twisted her neck to check out her surroundings.
Mark Cross sat at the wheel. They were surrounded by water—the Gulf of Mexico—and a finger of land with tall bumps of buildings to the north looked small and distant. Her arm throbbed and she looked down at it. It was bandaged.
As if sensing she was up, Cross glanced back over his shoulder, then slowed the boat and let it idle and drift. “You okay now?”
She nodded, embarrassed. “Yeah.”
He reached into a cooler under the seat, pulled out two bottles of water and then passed one to her. “We have privacy out here. When you’re ready to talk about your experience, let me know.”
She took the bottle. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Excuse me?”
He was serious. “Why should I be willing to put my life and career in your hands by telling you anything?” Unscrewing the cap, she took a long drink. The cold water felt good sliding down her parched throat. “I’m here to get information not to give it.”
He sat down opposite her, stared for a long moment. With a breathy sigh, he reached under his left slacks leg, removed a gun strapped to his ankle, then set it on the seat beside her. He paused, measured her nonplussed response, then removed a second gun from his right ankle and set it beside the first one.
She showed no reaction.
His challenging gaze locked on to hers, he stood up, shoved a hand down the front of his slacks, withdrew a third gun and then set it on the seat beside her. It brushed her thigh and the metal was warm from his body.
Finally, he spoke. “Allowing underestimation is an effective weapon. There’s value in knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your allies, as well as your enemies.”
So he’d been testing her abilities. Respect for him welled in her, as did amusement. Her handshake test had been on target after all. “Sound policy.”
He chewed at his inner lip. “Look, we share the same unique problem, Amanda, whether or not you want to admit it. I know you were missing for three months.”
“Kate wouldn’t dare reveal that.”
“She would and she did. To me, where revealing it was safe,” he said. “Kate was terrified for you, and I supported her like any decent brother—surrogate or otherwise—would.”
“Just like she supported you?” Amanda asked, gaining insight. He and Kate were really close. Family. Inside, she felt a little ache. She didn’t have that.
“Yes,” he admitted, then stared down for a moment before looking back into her eyes. “We were both missing for three months and we don’t know why, Amanda. We both need the truth. The only reason I haven’t been dumped on my backside is because I have an advantage.”
She looked at him, questioning.
“Secretary Reynolds,” Cross continued. “He knew me well and he trusted me. That’s the only reason my career isn’t in the jeopardy yours is in. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about those three months, or worry about what happened during them. Will what I said or did be the reason people are killed?” He lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. I need to know, Amanda. Just as much as you do.”
Empathy streamed through her. She knew this misery, this doubt and fear, and saw all her deepest feelings reflected in his eyes.
“So, do we work together to find the truth, or not?”
Their gazes locked and the truth settled over Amanda like a shroud. Whether or not either of them wanted it, they shared a bond birthed in fear and doubt, and it created an intimacy between them she’d never felt before in her life. An intimate bond that she never would have allowed herself to feel, much less admit existed. But this refused to be denied. This...connection.
“We do.” Amanda nodded, totally intrigued by Mark Cross. “Absolutely.”
“Good.” He swallowed a drink of water. “You look hungry. Are you?”
“Yes.” She’d been eating practically nonstop since her return, but still couldn’t seem to stay full for more than an hour.
“Let’s go to the galley and fix some lunch.” He moved toward the metal stairs, his long body casting a shadow on the white deck.
Amanda followed him, glad to be out of the relentless sun. The glare was strong; inviting a wall-banger of a headache she wanted to avoid. When they sat down, she said, “So tell me about your experience.”
He opened a picnic basket and pulled out chicken, potato salad and baked beans. Then a bowl of fresh fruit: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and kiwi. “I’d just finished a high-risk rescue mission and was starting my leave. I had three months, including use-or-lose days, and things were relatively quiet at the office, so I decided to binge and use all the time off at once. I planned a whale of a vacation. I’d take the boat down to the Bahamas and cruise the Caribbean, being totally decadent.”
Decadent she could believe. The man oozed testosterone. But a man who lived by a self-imposed, six-date limit didn’t get decadent with the same woman for three months. “Alone?”
“Yeah.” He seemed uneasy about the question. “I like my privacy.”
“Me, too.” She gave him the lie. They didn’t get close to people outside of work because it took too much effort. It was easier to avoid relationships than to live lies and make excuses for unexplained, extended absences and some of the “dark side” mission requirements that came with the job. She popped a tangy raspberry into her mouth, and immediately wanted another. “So what happened?’
“Day three, I went to sleep on the boat in the Bahamas.” He scooped potato salad from a carton onto his plate. “I woke up on my boat, thinking it was the next morning, only it wasn’t. Three months had passed, and I wasn’t in the Bahamas or anywhere in the Caribbean. I was docked at my home port in Destin.” He shook his head, obviously reliving the disbelief he’d felt then. “I have no idea how I got there, or what happened during the three missing months. No memory of any of my vacation after the first three days whatsoever.”
Unlike her own experience and yet similar, too. Kunz could be responsible. Mark’s incident had GRID’S pseudo-signature. He had chosen not to conceal the truth about his three-month absence, to tell Secretary Reynolds the truth, admitting he had no recall of that time and the security breach his blackout created. That put his life and career squarely in the secretary’s hands.
Amanda rubbed her temple, considering all the angles. In the end, Kunz letting Mark go didn’t make sense...unless he wanted Mark to be honest with the secretary. Or unless Kunz deliberately took the risk because those risks were unavoidable.
Mark remembering nothing of that three months, her remembering nothing of it... It was certainly possible he, too, was a Kunz victim. The odds of them experiencing the same thing for any other reason were astronomical.
“What about you?” Mark asked. “What do you remember?”
She dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin. “I was inserted undercover on a mission and exposed—I don’t know how—and then I was taken hostage and tortured.”
Mark stopped eating, leaned forward, giving her his full attention. “You rem
ember what happened to you?”
“No, not really. I remember bits and pieces of being tortured and drugged and someone told me I’d be sealed in a tomb. I’m not sure who. I heard one voice in my head, but I see two different men.” She shrugged. “The next thing I remember is waking up in the tomb. The brick mortar was still wet but it took a while to dig my way out—maybe a few days. When I did escape, I found out I was in a different country and three months had passed since my last call-in. I thought it had only been a few days. Now, I’m not real sure when the things I remember took place.”
“No other memory of that time at all?”
“None. Blank slate.” She stabbed a chunk of potato. “The only thing I’m certain of is that I wasn’t in that tomb for three months. No rations. Beyond that, I don’t have a clue.”
He sighed. “Who held you hostage?”
She munched on a strawberry before answering. “What is your security clearance now?”
“Above yours.”
She gave him a level gaze. “Unless you’ve been elected president, that’s not possible.” Her job required open Intel access.
He held her gaze, and then decided to trust her. “My clearance being lowered was for public consumption, Amanda. To protect my unit and me. Whoever did whatever was done to me had to be put on notice that I was out of commission, that all my access codes and the intelligence I had access to was obsolete.”
She believed him. “Okay,” she said. “So where are you now?”
“I answer directly to Secretary Reynolds.”
The secretary of defense. Major clout. That worked for her. “GRID held me,” she said. “Thomas Kunz.” She imaged a photo of him in her mind: black hair, brown eyes, and a sharp face full of angry angles. Something niggled at her, as if Kunz’s image wasn’t quite right, but it persisted so she didn’t fight it. “You?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said. “I haven’t been able to find any connections.”
“What about similarities between you and the other two men in your unit?” Sitting across the table from him, she bit into a piece of chicken that was tender and juicy.
“We’re all attached to Intel and assigned to Providence Air Force Base. But that’s it. Totally different backgrounds, missions, training. We don’t even share common hobbies.”
“Are you familiar with GRID’S organization, Mark?”
“Not really, no. I’ve seen it named on the Watch list, but I don’t know anything about it. The records are sealed. Access is on a need-to-know basis. Officially, I have no need to know.”
“The designation is necessary,” she assured him. GRID was kept out of the news, out of the typical information-sharing channels, because discussing it only increased its ability to market its services to unfriendly forces. “It’s the largest group of black market intelligence brokers in the world. They’re experts on U.S. personnel, resources and classified intelligence,” she told Mark. “The organization has only one known criterion for selling intelligence to anyone—payment must be in U.S. dollars.” Talk about adding insult to injury.
“So the obvious link—intelligence—is the link between our incidents?”
“That’s my guess.”
He quietly absorbed that information. “And you think GRID is also responsible for the absences of the two men in my unit?”
“Anything is possible, Mark.” She wished it wasn’t, but facts were facts. “I think it’s worth investigating and then making a final determination.”
His eyes glazed, unfocused on some distant memory far outside the boat’s cabin. “I interviewed the two men extensively—Sloan and Harding. No one knew much about Sloan. He’d just reported for duty here and hadn’t had much time to interact, but people from his old unit and all his records claim he’s an exemplary soldier. No incidents of him losing his temper enough to hack a woman to death. And no evidence of post-traumatic stress, which is what the prosecutor’s medical officer is claiming as the reason for his memory blackout.”
There it was again. That dreaded word, blackout. A shiver shot up her backbone and set the roof of her mouth to tingling.
Mark went on. “Reactions were different with M.C.—Major Harding.”
“How so?” She took a long drink of water to wash down a bite of potato salad. Sweet relish would have been better in it than dill.
“Several people I interviewed said they had noticed small inconsistencies in his behavior before and his behavior after his absence. Nothing they could finger exactly, just little things. Apparently, those differences carried over at home, because his wife, Sharon, made an appointment with the OSI office to discuss something troubling her about him.”
An alarm went off in Amanda’s mind. Spouses didn’t make appointments to discuss matters troubling them. Those kinds of discussions negatively impacted careers. They talked to friends, other spouses—ones who couldn’t wreck their marriages, their spouses’ careers, and their livelihoods. “Interesting.”
“It certainly might have been, if she had kept the appointment. She died the night before in a car accident. Her brake line had been cut. Within twenty-four hours, her husband was arrested for her murder.”
Even more interesting. “What was Major Harding’s security clearance at the time of the murder?” A chilling thought simmered in Amanda’s mind.
“Top secret.”
Just as she feared. “We need to talk to him,” she said, crushing her napkin and clearing the remnants of their picnic. “Sooner rather than later, if possible.” Amanda was seeing a pattern. A very disturbing pattern that could rock the entire world of military intelligence. “Can you get me in to see him?”
“No problem.” He reached over and dabbed at her chin with a napkin. She started and he stilled, suddenly uncomfortable. “A seed,” he said. “From the strawberries.”
“Oh.” She swiped at her mouth. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” He rinsed their plates at the sink. “Do you want to stow your gear at the VOQ first, or go straight to the jail? I made you a reservation and arranged for a rental car.”
“Thanks.” Registering for her room at the Visiting Officers’ Quarters could wait. “To the jail, please.”
“Okay. I’ll have the car delivered there.” He dried the dishes and stowed them in a cabinet over the sink. “We’ll bypass the harbor, in case your shadows are hanging around, waiting for us to get back.”
The Air Force standard-issue sedan was parked at the harbor dock. “What do we use for transportation?”
“We leave the boat at my house, pick up my Hummer, and go from there.”
He had a Hummer, a house on the water, a huge boat. “Your pay grade must be a lot higher than an S.A.S.S. operative’s.”
“It’s the same.” He didn’t look at her, but the corners of his mouth drew down and he shifted, clearly uncomfortable.
“Really?” She hiked an eyebrow but restrained herself from asking the question.
“Don’t get diabolical on me, Amanda. I’m not on the take and I didn’t inherit a fortune.”
“Fair enough.” She shrugged. “What did you do?”
“I designed a few mystery games called Dirty Side Down.”
“The computer game?” It was all the rage with the college set and she and Kate had played often. Neither had won, but they’d played. “Kate never mentioned you had created them.”
“You didn’t know me, and I don’t advertise it. Notoriety gets in the way of the job, so I avoid it.”
He’d be worthless in his job if he had to deal with fame. “So Dirty Side Down is subsidizing your income.”
“All four versions of it.” He nodded. “Games pay well.”
Interesting. Not a word about any of this was mentioned in the dossier Kate had given her. “How well?” Amanda pushed, not quite ready to completely trust him.
“Very.” He smiled and there was just enough playfulness in it to set her mind at ease. “If you’re through being suspicious, we can get going.”
Amanda nodded, hoping that beyond visiting other prisoners, Mark’s words didn’t prove prophetic.
Major M. C. Harding sat waiting in an interview room typically reserved for attorney/client visits. Unlike words spoken, his appearance couldn’t be faked, and it was consistent with that of an innocent man falsely accused who was grieving the death of his wife. He looked gaunt, his eyes sunken, as if his being in jail had sucked all the life out of him and left only a brittle, bitter shell.
He stared at her across a scarred table, his voice deadpan flat and hopeless. “I don’t have anything to tell you, Captain West, that I haven’t already told Mark several times. I don’t know what happened to Sharon. I only know I didn’t kill her. No one wants to hear that. They want me to talk about evidence, but I don’t know anything about evidence, and I don’t give a flip what it supposedly says. If it proves I killed Sharon, it’s wrong.”
He certainly came across as earnest and sincere, if hostile. Understandable, if in fact he was innocent. Ordinarily, she’d strive for more compassion and tiptoe, but considering the potential consequences, she didn’t have the luxury of spare time. She’d have to be blunt and to the point. “In the interval between your initial absence and your arrest, is there any segment of time for which you can’t account? I’m not looking for alibis from others. I’m talking about intervals of time where you don’t know where you were or what you did.”
He glared at her. The red flush of anger swept up his neck and flooded his face, and he shot a daggered look at Mark. “What are you doing, bringing her here to ask me questions like this?”
“Calm down,” Mark said. “You don’t understand—”
“Excuse me? I understand plenty.” He shoved back from the table. “I’m already convicted, man. I didn’t do a thing, but that means nothing to anyone but me. I trusted you, and you bring some hotshot in here to ask me questions like that. What? You expect me to spill my guts and help her shove the freaking needle into my arm?”