Wrong Number

by Rachelle Christensen

  “If we go in closer to Bear Lake, there’s a place with a couple computers they let people pay to use.”

  Aubree pointed at Scarlett. “We’re down to the last of her diapers. I hadn’t planned on staying put for quite so long.”

  “Do you mind if I come along as your tour guide?” Wyatt tapped his hat. “A park ranger can be a handy thing to have around.”

  “I think that sounds like a good idea.” Aubree stepped closer to him. “Can I schedule my guided tour for tomorrow? I need some more time to gather my thoughts today.”

  Wyatt put his arm around her, pulling her into his chest. He leaned in for one more kiss, and Aubree’s heart raced as his lips met hers. Her lips warmed to his touch, and they kissed several times before she leaned her head against his chest.

  Wyatt rubbed her back, and she listened to his heart thrum through the soft cotton of his shirt as she enjoyed the tingling feeling in her lips.

  “Listen, I know you’ve been worried about venturing outside of the campground by yourself, so I want to show you something that’s only a few miles away—a wonderful scenic attraction I’m sure you’ve missed.” He reached one of his bronzed arms out and pointed west of the camping area. “The ice cave.”

  “Ice cave?” Aubree raised her eyebrows. “You’re serious?”

  Wyatt laughed. “Of course I’m serious. It’s pretty neat, and I want to take you and Scarlett to a place where there’s snow year round.”

  “But it’s almost August. How could there be snow down here?”

  “I’ll show you after lunch.” Wyatt released Aubree and took charge of pushing Scarlett’s stroller. She watched him for half a second, taking in his tanned skin and dark, wavy hair. It was nice to have something pleasant to distract her thoughts. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed how good-looking Wyatt was before, but she hadn’t really let herself look because she was too busy holding up her shield of defense. Trust was an amazing thing. It was like someone had wiped the film off her window, and she could finally look at the world and enjoy it—almost without fear. When she was with Wyatt, she wasn’t afraid that someone would find her. Aubree touched her lips, smiled, and then hurried to keep up with Wyatt’s long strides.

  A couple miles from the Paris Springs Campground down a dusty dirt road, they saw the scenic attraction called the Ice Cave. Aubree was less than impressed when she climbed out of Wyatt’s pickup and looked at the face of a rocky hill covered with ugly dying weeds and brown grasses.

  “It’s nothing spectacular if you don’t have the right company,” Wyatt commented after seeing her face. “Let me hold Scarlett. The trail is over here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Aubree replied.

  “It’s the inside of the cave that’s cool—not the outside.” He kicked at a dying bunch of grass and winked at her.

  “Am I that easy to read?” Aubree frowned and followed Wyatt to the entrance of the cave.

  “Nah, I’m just making conversation.” He chuckled.

  They stopped in front of a wooden sign indicating that the elevation at the Ice Cave was 7,815 feet. Wyatt had told Aubree to bring a jacket and he handed it to her.

  “Now’s the time to put this on.” He adjusted a stocking hat on Scarlett’s head. It was one of his, and the blue knit had to be folded nearly in half to keep from going over the baby’s eyes. “It’s forty degrees inside the cave. It’ll feel nice to us, but I think Scarlett will like having her hat and blanket.”

  Aubree followed them around the face of the rocky hill. The dirt path ended at a wide cave entrance. A jagged lining of large rocks made it appear as if some giant had pulled the stone apart to get into the dim cavern. Pulling her arms through the jacket, Aubree shivered as an icy stillness surrounded them. She tucked the blanket around Scarlett, and the baby giggled when Wyatt blew warm air on her cheek.

  Inside the cave, their eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, and they walked down a rough dirt path and across a wooden plank bridge where, according to Wyatt, the temperature dropped thirty degrees within a few yards.

  The dirty water under the bridge had bits of ice floating in it. Huge serrated rocks loomed above them, dripping. A pool of water with a sheen of ice stretched out to their right and lapped against the deep crevices in the rocks.

  Rubbing her arms, Aubree shivered and said, “I can’t believe how cold it is.”

  Wyatt nodded. “It’s this way year-round. No sunlight ever gets through.”

  Aubree looked down into the murky water and watched her breath coming out in clouds. Scarlett snuggled against Wyatt’s shoulder so that only her blue eyes peeked out beneath the stocking hat. They walked about twenty-five yards until Aubree could see strands of sunlight ahead. The dark cavern opened up, and the blue sky looked down on them. It was as if someone had taken the top off the cave. They were still completely surrounded by rock, but the ceiling of the cave was gone. There was a slight temperature change, but it was still cold—cold enough that an eight-foot drift of ice-encrusted snow stretching twenty feet wide was wedged against the wall of rocks.

  “Now, before you get disappointed at the end of our fantastic cave here, I have something to show you.” Wyatt pointed at a pile of rock just inside the darkened portion of the cave. “Here’s something most people don’t know about.”

  Aubree followed Wyatt back into the semi-darkness and watched as he crouched down and appeared to be looking at the wall of rocks before him.

  “Look, Scarlett.” Wyatt pulled out a flashlight and clicked on the beam of light, making it dance along the rocks. Scarlett turned her head and laughed, pointing at the bits of light.

  “Most people haven’t played shadow games with flashlights before?” Aubree placed her cold hand on the back of Wyatt’s neck, and he inhaled sharply at her freezing touch.

  “No, look down here.” He pointed the flashlight at the wall again, but this time it went beyond the rocks. Past the darkness, Aubree stooped down to see a shallow opening only thirty inches high. She peered into the opening, and the beam revealed a path of sharp frozen rocks that opened into a large cavern.

  In the dim beam of the flashlight, Wyatt pointed out piles of more snow and ice. A bit of daylight trickled through a fissure to the right of the cavern. “Have you ever been in there?” Aubree asked.

  “I have, and believe me, spelunking and short go together.” Wyatt stood and put a hand by his head. “Shimmying all six-foot, five-inches of me through that opening took some doing, and it’s pretty cold in there too.”

  “Is there something to see, or do you just like exploring caves?” Aubree nudged a rock with her toe and reached out to take a wriggling Scarlett from his arms.

  “A couple years ago, somebody’s little dog went down there and didn’t want to come back out. It was an older couple, and I happened to be around, so I got to play ‘Hero for the Day’ and rescue Fido.” He grinned, and Aubree couldn’t help laughing as she pictured the tall and brawny park ranger climbing into the cavern to rescue a dog. Then she shivered again.

  “I guess we’d better move back into the sunlight,” she said. “Thanks for being our tour guide.”

  Wyatt wrapped his arms around her and the baby. “Anytime. Maybe later today I can show you some interesting rocks around the area.”

  Aubree raised her eyebrows and tickled his side. “Rocks, huh?”

  He kissed her forehead and murmured, “Or twigs, or anything, if it means I get to see you again today.” Then Wyatt took her hand, and they walked back into the dry heat of late summer.

  Aubree smiled wider than she had in a long time and nudged her worries back a little further from the present. Tomorrow she’d get to work hunting down her hunters, but today she was happy to leave those memories frozen in the ice cave.

  Shadowed by the light above the flimsy trailer table that night, Aubree read through all of her notes. Being with Wyatt had put her at ease, and being rid of the hunted feeling she’d grown accustomed to seemed to have given her cl
arity and a new hope to look for answers in her case. She prayed for help to remember every detail of the conversation from Devin’s cell phone. As she meditated, her mind cleared, and she was back in her car listening to the voice responsible for the murder of her husband and the secretary of defense.

  Aubree pieced together the fragments from her memory and tried to write out the whole conversation yet again, from beginning to end. Then she highlighted words that might be useful to search on the Internet. She also tried replacing some of the words with synonyms to look for double meanings within the context of each sentence. If there was some type of code hidden in this fragment of conversation, she was determined to find it.

  After picking her brain for every detail and trying several different methods, the FBI specialists had never been able to help her remember the entire phone call clearly. Aubree massaged her temples and tried to sort out her thoughts. Maybe it didn’t matter what the man had said, but how he’d said it. She still felt suspicious about Governor Ferrin because his voice sounded so similar to the one from her memory. She planned to check him out on the Internet tomorrow.

  With phrases from the conversation running through her head, sleep was hard to come by, but Aubree kept repeating, Tomorrow, I’ll find out what this all means.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE RIDE OUT OF the Paris Springs campground the next morning had Aubree on edge. She looked out the window and then behind them. It was the closest she’d been to civilization for nearly three weeks.

  “You can relax,” Wyatt said. “I didn’t see any suspicious characters this morning.”

  She knew he was joking, but the nervous jitters threatened the contents of her stomach. “I’m afraid I’ll find something, and then I’m afraid I won’t.”

  “Have you thought about contacting the FBI?”

  “Not yet. I doubt they’ve found anything new since I left, and Jason would just want me back in protective custody.”

  Wyatt chewed on his bottom lip. “If you feel up to it, I’d really like to drive you into Logan next week . . . maybe to meet my parents.”

  “Are you asking me on a date?” Aubree pinched his side and laughed.

  “Hey! Yes, a date. That’s a great idea.” He looked to the back seat where Scarlett’s car seat was buckled. She was sucking on the pink ear of a stuffed rabbit. “Scarlett, how would you like to go on your first date?”

  Aubree smiled. “She’ll need a chaperone.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  At a café in Garden City, not far from the shores of Bear Lake, Wyatt ordered some French fries and played with Scarlett. Aubree settled in a corner where she could see them. The first thing she did when she sat in front of the computer was type in a name: Governor Brent Ferrin.

  Aubree found what she was looking for much faster than anticipated. The information about the governor’s immediate family read typically enough until she scrolled down to his siblings. Aubree gasped when she read about the governor’s family.

  She focused on the seemingly insignificant piece of information—his brother was chief of police in San Diego. She read about how the Ferrin family enjoyed serving their country in many ways. It was much more than coincidence. Aubree knew even without hearing his voice that she had stumbled onto something dangerous.

  Thinking back to the assassination of Robert Walden, Aubree remembered seeing many units from the San Diego police department on hand for crowd control. She tapped the keyboard with her pencil and wrote a few ideas in her notebook. Her pulse quickened with excitement as she wrote her assumptions. The chief of police would definitely be involved in smoothing the way for a visit from the secretary of defense to his city. But Aubree wondered if Chief Ferrin had been preparing in a different way.

  Then she shook her head. What reason would the chief of police have to orchestrate an assassination of the secretary of defense? Aubree surmised that the FBI would have checked out Governor Ferrin’s siblings, and they might even be keeping an eye on the chief of police, but Aubree figured he would be more than helpful and have a pristine record.

  She felt pretty sure the San Diego chief of police would be one of the last people the FBI would seriously investigate for this crime—or maybe not. Either way, everything pointed to someone infiltrating the system. The witness protection program hadn’t stopped him; the police and FBI hadn’t stopped him—maybe because he was working right along with them.

  But why? Why was she such a danger? Not just because of his voice. There had to be another reason. Aubree massaged her forehead in her hands and glanced at the notes scribbled all over her notebook. There was something more. She had already decided that, so she couldn’t get hung up on Chief Ferrin. The pages of her notebook rattled as she flipped through them. She paused on the transcript of the original conversation from Devin’s cell phone.

  “What if there’s something I’m missing in this conversation?” she mumbled to herself. She looked up to see Wyatt grinning at her with raised eyebrows. She shrugged, and he saluted her and turned back to the window to keep watch.

  It was a long shot, but Aubree decided to perform a keyword search on the Internet. The FBI had used several decoding programs to do the same thing, but Aubree wondered if there was something she had missed that would have affected their search. She could enter some of the words from the conversation to see if it helped trigger her memory in case she had missed a meaning somewhere.

  She separated each word and typed it in capital letters into Google’s search engine. It was tedious at first, but she was determined. She scanned through page after page of search results, not really knowing what she was looking for. Nearing the middle of the handwritten conversation, Aubree leaned her head in her hands. Was she just wasting her time? She thought about skipping the next line. It didn’t seem important that the man had said, “By the time they find him, we’ll be in the green.” But then she looked at the sentence again.

  It was odd, but she didn’t remember placing any significance on the word “green,” and now it seemed to be jumping from the page as if it didn’t belong.

  “In the green” meant money, didn’t it? That’s what Aubree reported hearing—something about money—but he hadn’t said the word money. In the green. Could something so simple be the reason for this madness? Her finger rested on the phrase she had written in the battered notebook. Why had she never examined that part of the conversation before?

  Aubree entered the phrase “in the green” and scanned through the hits the search engine brought up. Then she decided to focus on just one word, green, and she combined it with conspiracy theories. She opened another page for a Google search and typed in “green government programs.” Her hands shook as she clicked back and forth between the two searches, scrolling through the first page of results.

  The search for “green conspiracy theories” didn’t bring up anything interesting—instead it concentrated on why people weren’t going green to save the earth. Clicking back over to the search for green government programs, she saw several pages with titles such as: A green government, environmental programs, and legislation. She scrolled through pages of Google searches trying to find something that made sense.

  Deciding to modify the search a bit, she switched the words around and typed “government programs green” in the search bar.

  The search was redirected, and a new page popped up. At the top, underneath the colorful Google logo, Aubree read, “Did you mean: Government programs GREANE?”

  GREANE was hyperlinked, and so she clicked on the strange spelling of the word to see where it would lead. The next page caused her throat to constrict, and the tension made it hard to breathe. She scrolled down the list, and let the mouse hover over the link to a blog. One click displayed www.rachellewrites.blogspot.com with an entry titled, “The New Governor of Nebraska is in the GREANE.”

  Aubree scanned the contents of the blog, reading faster and faster as her mind tried to process the words. She felt the hairs on
the back of her neck stand up. She clicked on a few other areas within the search and read all about the new GREANE deal. There were also several reports bad-mouthing the new governor of Nebraska and his single-minded campaign to be part of the GREANE program.

  Aubree looked at her battered notebook again. Her thumb brushed against a smudge of dirt beside her writing and she concentrated on delving into her worst memory. The day Devin was killed had been a terrible day. The FBI had questioned her over and over during the course of the following months, trying to help her remember every single word in the conversation she had heard. She had pieced together fragments of the memory and tried to tell them word for word the entire chilling conversation—at least she thought she had.

  Looking at her notebook, Aubree realized her mistake. In the transcription process, she hadn’t reported hearing one word because it didn’t add any meaning to the gist of the sentence. In fact, she had actually replaced it with the word that fit the meaning she had understood. When she gave the initial report, she had been traumatized. But now, almost a year later, the conversation had come back to her crystal-clear, and she remembered every single word.

  She realized why the voice had been so easy to recognize when she heard Governor Ferrin speaking on the TV back in Omaha. He’d used the one word she hadn’t remembered, and that word had triggered a memory. Flipping back through her notes, she found what she had written about the day she heard Governor Ferrin speak. He talked about a new program, a green program to bolster the state’s economy. He said, “The state of Nebraska has a green future.” But now Aubree realized that he’d meant a GREANE future.

  She looked around the café, and the room seemed to close in on her. Wyatt waved a French fry at Scarlett. Another couple ate their lunch and talked about boating later. She tried to steady her shaking hands as she jotted down notes. She didn’t dare speak aloud the one word that she now understood was the reason Devin had been killed. An acronym—g, r, e, a, n, e.