by Carly Bishop
She turned away and went to the railing. The sun shone brightly now, but warmth hadn’t yet penetrated the morning chill. She had no choice to make other than to cooperate with these men.
To go on surviving despite Winston Broussard. Though David Tafoya had drilled into her months ago that she must always be wary of strangers and unexpected events, he had clearly sent Special Agent Paglia here.
She didn’t understand, but Tafoya would surely explain later what had gone wrong.
“Ms. Hollister?” the sheriff’s deputy prodded.
She turned back to them. “What do you want me to do?”
“Pack a bag and make your farewells.”
Of course. Eden nodded. “How much time?”
“Five minutes. Ten at the most,” Paglia said. “We need to be out of here as soon as possible.”
“What about Judith?” Eden asked. “If...will she be safe staying here?” The two men exchanged glances. Judith’s safety was apparently not an issue they had considered. “I want your personal assurances that she’ll be looked after.”
“I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing happens to Ms. Cornwallis,” the deputy reassured her.
Paglia added, “Once you’re no longer here, though, chances are she won’t be in any danger.”
Chances are. Eden wanted to laugh. Chance also dictated that her identity as Lisa Hollister would never be compromised.
She went back inside and closed the door behind her.
Tension crackled off Judith. “So?” she asked.
“So.” Eden took a deep breath. What could she say? How could she tell this difficult old woman—who needed her whether she admitted it or not—that she must leave? With enough warning, she might have been able to come up with something more believable. “Looks like I’ve just won an all-expenses-paid vacation, courtesy of the U.S. government.”
The old lady’s lips pursed in a thin, taut line. “I don’t wish to be humored, missy. I want to know what’s going on.”
That attempt at levity had felt lame to Eden anyway. “I know, Judith. But I can’t stay and I can’t tell you where I’m going. They don’t even tell me.”
Judith stared for a long moment, then nodded as if recognizing this was the way Lisa Hollister had come, and this was the way she must go.
“It would help me enormously,” Eden said, “if after I’ve gone, you would fax a letter to your agent, to Britta, letting her know you’re all right.”
“How did you know?” Judith demanded imperiously.
“That you are perfectly capable of faxing things yourself?” Eden gave her a fond smile. It wasn’t easy to find her voice. “Call it a lucky guess.”
“My left foot,” Judith cracked.
“Will you do it?”
Though for the briefest moment a crestfallen, helpless expression took hold of her, the old woman nodded. Then she straightened, cast her cane aside, and turning away to hide her watery eyes, she began to put together some fruit and graham crackers and a thermos of tea for Eden to take with her.
In her tiny room, Eden packed what she could in ten minutes and then went back to the great room to collect her needlepoint project and odds and ends.
Judith was sitting in the rocking chair, twining her hair back into its customary single white braid. She patted the ladder-back kitchen chair beside her. The old woman— whose affections Eden hadn’t been the least bit sure of until this moment—was fighting back tears.
Eden didn’t dare allow herself to feel this loss. “I’ll be okay, Judith. So will you.”
Judith said nothing, only examined her braid with a hand mirror that was almost two hundred years old. The back and handle were of one piece and made of silver etched in rose patterns. She held it out to Eden. Her hand trembled because the silver made the mirror so heavy. “I want you to have this.”
Eden swallowed. “Judith, I couldn’t.”
“But you must, simply.” Her British accent had never been so pronounced as it was now. “It’s got quite a long history, you know. My mother before me, hers before her. Eight generations in all. I don’t propose it should stop with me.” She drew a labored breath and rose to tuck the mirror inside Eden’s backpack, then, rather solemnly but with a twinkle in her eye, added, “I’d like to think the dear old bats might approve my rather belated maternal instincts, don’t you?”
WHEN CHRIS APPROACHED Linda Desmond about the alias and location of the protected witness, Eden Kelley, it was already raining like hell south of Boston.
After Linda gave him access to the computer file, including names, dates and graphics precisely locating the remote mountain cabin, Chris made his flight reservation for Billings, Montana. From there, he would rent a cycle and drive the remaining three hundred miles to Jackson Hole. But the hurricane-force winds and torrential rains meant no flights would likely depart Boston for several hours before or after Chris’s reservation.
He wound up on the last flight departing Logan International—or any other airport within several hundred miles—for the next few hours. The 747 was heading to Minneapolis, not Billings or even Denver, but Chris had one chance of getting out in time and he took it.
Minneapolis.
He had a lot of time to think, and after looking at all the angles, he realized Minneapolis would work in his favor. Sooner or later, Linda Desmond would have an attack of conscience, and she would find some backdoor way of telling Paul Maroncek that Chris had “somehow” gotten access to top secret relocation files.
Paul was smart, and Chris’s biggest problem would be how to throw his boss off the scent. He trusted Chris. When it became known that Eden Kelley had disappeared, Paul would track Chris’s movements and discover that he’d gone to Minnesota. Paul might be reassured for a day or two, convinced that Chris hadn’t acted on his knowledge of the alias and whereabouts of Eden Kelley.
Since Paul had urged him to go fishing, Chris suspected the north woods might be as good a diversion as anything he might actually have planned.
He deplaned in Minneapolis in midaftemoon, went to the car rental agency, leased a Jeep in his own name and with his own credit cards and confided he was heading farther north to do some backwoods fishing. He parked the Jeep in an immense lot at the airport.
Then he bought a ticket to Billings and paid cash. In Montana, he got hold of a used but powerful bike the same way. That and a sixteen inch machine pistol. He found an army surplus store still open at eleven-thirty that night and bought a bedroll and knapsack, tins of meat and powdered milk and Oreo cookies.
He didn’t mind the bucks. The money came from Catherine’s life insurance payout. She didn’t have any use for it, buried on Chestnut Hill. Chris did. But the detour through Minneapolis and the time spent tracking down the Harley and pistol had cost him too many precious hours.
With all the lost time, he figured he had one chance in a hundred now of snatching Eden Kelley before Tafoya’s men took her back into protective custody.
He took I-90 west to Livingston. Hauling ass south from there on U.S. 89 he crossed the Montana-Wyoming border at four in the morning.
He made it to Jackson in another hour and a half. His eyes stung. His body ached after almost six grisly hours in the bike saddle over some of the most dark and formidable terrain he’d ever traversed. His hands throbbed from relentless vibrations through the handle bars. The scenery was spectacular now in the predawn light, but he was too tired to care.
He stopped on the north side of Jackson to gas up the bike and get his bearings. In a national park area, maps were as common as houseflies. There was one under the glass on the counter in a convenience store. Aware that he was the lone customer in the store, marginally conscious of the painfully young doe-eyed clerk watching him as if he smiled at her he might make her whole day, he put a couple of packaged frozen burritos into the microwave.
He poured himself a large foam cup of freshly brewed coffee, then spent a few minutes conforming his recall of the computer graphi
cs detailing Eden Kelley’s location to the USGS map.
“Can I help you with that? With anything?”
The clerk’s honeyed voice startled him—but not because she wanted to flirt with him. He encountered that with a tiresome regularity. Women came on to him all the time. Sometimes he thought the raunchier he looked, the stronger the come-ons got. But he was in his own little world and dead tired and hungry and the sound of her voice alone rattled his cage. He needed sleep badly.
He wasn’t going to get it.
“No.” He offered a smile so he wouldn’t feel like such a bastard. It felt mechanical and condescending to him, but the girl smiled brilliantly back. “Thanks, though.”
When the microwave dinged, he pulled out the steaming burritos and slid them into the pocket of his coat.
He finished off the coffee, then grabbed a pint carton of milk and half a dozen packages of little chocolate doughnuts to ease his sweet tooth. Tossing two ten dollar bills from his money clip on the counter to pay for the gas and food, he walked back outside and ripped into a burrito, downed it, then began eating the second one a little less ravenously.
Halfway through the doughnuts, he spotted a nondescript black sedan pulling over to the side of the intersection opposite him. Chris had tracked and captured and delivered hardened, streetwise, deadly fugitives, and he knew how they thought. What they saw. What niggling doubts arose to trigger their shifty little minds. He knew what the lowlifes would know. The man in the sedan was a cop. A Fed.
Undoubtedly, this one was the Feeb sent to collect Eden Kelley.
But why stop at this intersection?
A moment later, Chris knew. A county sheriff’s four-wheel-drive vehicle drove up behind the sedan. The agent got out of the sedan, glanced around as he locked his car, then got into the county vehicle. Chris figured the FBI agent, who had to have come from central Wyoming, didn’t know which of the roads farther up the canyon would take him to the mountain cabin where Eden Kelley, alias Lisa Hollister, now resided.
Chris polished off the two remaining doughnuts, wadded up the wrapper and tossed it into the battered trash barrel between the convenience-store gas pumps. Following them wouldn’t be a problem, but he wasn’t going to get to the woman first.
He threw his weight against the kick starter, thinking it could have been worse. The Feeb might have taken Kelley an hour ago. He might as well count himself lucky as not. But he wasn’t into Pollyanna thinking. He had chosen a deadly course of action for which he needed Eden Kelley. He refused on principle to back off.
He would do what he had to do.
Chapter Three
Revving the engine, Chris shifted into gear, peeled out and accelerated onto the paved two-lane up the canyon. He formulated and discarded half a dozen capture scenarios.
The sheriff’s deputy would have to drive Eden Kelley back down this same canyon road no matter which route out of Jackson the Feeb had in mind. Of all the possibilities, if it had been Chris’s problem to solve, he’d choose flying her out of Jackson. He had to snatch her before then.
He narrowed the choices to two. He could either ambush the sheriff’s vehicle at the old lady’s cabin and take Kelley before she ever climbed into the four wheel drive, or he could set up some kind of roadblock on the way back down the canyon road. Trap them. Run them off the road. Blow out a few tires. Whatever it took to stop them long enough to grab the woman.
Leaning into a hairpin turn, visually scouring the high, shadowed, scrub-covered canyon walls, he knew there was no way trapping them would work. Not without risking Kelley’s life—or a standoff he couldn’t win.
He intended to win.
He accelerated out of the turn, going twice the twentyfive-mile-per-hour speed limit. He knew what he must do now, but not how it would come off. How the land lay. How he could snatch a woman from two presumably armed and able professionals. He had never yet fallen into the seduction of underestimating his lawless prey. He wouldn’t start with men who were his peers.
He shivered hard, another indication of his exhaustion. When he spotted the turnoff at last, a good seven miles out of town and bearing north, he forgot how tired he was, and how cold.
He startled a couple of crows off the road. Avoiding a deep rut, he downshifted and took the rising slope slow and easy in order not to give the two men any advance warning of his approach.
Near the top of the rise, he angled off the dirt road and across a borrow pit to the cover of some scraggly lodgepole pines. He stopped long enough to arm the machine pistol he drew from the deep inside pocket of his leather coat. He had no intention of firing on innocent men but he had to be ready for anything.
He guided the Harley as quietly as possible off road, to the top of the foothill. The machine wasn’t meant for off-road use, wasn’t billed or built to be a dirt bike. He would just have to make do.
He turned off the cycle. Concealed by trees and scrub at the crest of the hill, Chris assessed the surrounding landscape. The old woman’s cabin was nestled in a narrow valley, a couple hundred feet below Chris’s position, and the mountain terrain rose as steeply opposite him.
He saw the deputy and the FBI agent standing on the porch. Neither woman was in sight. The Feeb dragged on a cigarette, pacing anxiously, then flipped the butt over the porch railing. The deputy dropped nervously down the stairs, heading in an impatient stride back to his four-wheel-drive vehicle. He opened the back window, lowered the tailgate and then opened both passenger side doors.
At last, for the first time since Catherine was murdered, Chris saw Eden Kelley emerging from the cabin. She came out the screen door, shading her eyes against the sun. Her long, straight, dark brown hair shone in the sunlight as she slung the strap of a backpack over one shoulder and stepped onto the veranda holding a suitcase in her other hand.
He noted for the record how pretty she was in even the most ordinary clothes, how his chest tightened, how much he resented her, how the bitterness clogged his throat. But now he had to focus on what must happen next despite the sexual awareness she triggered and the surge of anger at himself.
The movements of the trio seemed to play out in some surreal other world Chris knew from long experience. The way captures happened, every detail, every movement, every gesture registered in his consciousness, each one leading inevitably to the next, finally to the precise moment in time when he must make his move or sacrifice the capture or get himself iced.
It happened like that for him now. Still watching from his concealed place atop the hill, he knew where each of the agents were in relation to one another and the woman. He sensed their tension. Prepared to protect her, they were still unsuspecting.
Eden Kelley wasn’t. She hadn’t seen Chris. She hadn’t even looked in his direction, but wariness pervaded her supple posture. Her hand went to her throat. She stopped at the top of the steps, dropped the suitcase from her left hand and looked uncertainly back.
At the same time, the sheriff’s deputy got into the car and Chris dumped the clutch, then toed the Harley into gear, the engine noise coinciding with that of the four-wheel drive. Eden Kelley moved back toward the cabin door and hugged a white-haired old woman clad in a robe.
The FBI agent threw her bag into the back of the vehicle, then closed the tailgate and window, all the while urging her to hurry. Chris anticipated the agent would usher her into the back seat, then get in himself.
She stepped off the last of the creaking wooden porch steps with a fierce sort of determination, more quickly than Chris expected, almost convulsively.
In that split second, a rifle shot rang out from a position on the steep hillside opposite Chris. Eden jerked and spun and fell to the steps.
She’d been hit, high, Chris thought, too high to kill her, but he swore and exploded into action, full throttle, hurtling down the wooded hillside, crashing through sapling aspen and scrub oak toward the cabin. The rear of the bike slipped sideways, and Chris jerked hard to the right to correct the skid without st
opping his downward trajectory.
He heard the old woman scream over the roar of his engine as another shot rang out. The sheriff’s deputy shouted. Both lawmen dropped automatically to assault positions, their sidearms drawn and aimed away from Chris in the direction the shot had come from.
He saw Eden crawling, scrambling to get to the side of the porch stairs and to cover. The open door on the four-wheel drive had to be blocking the shooter’s line of fire or he would already have gotten off a second round to finish her. But every inch she moved toward the side of the porch had to be bringing her back into the assassin’s view.
The FBI agent must have anticipated the same deadly event. He flung himself from behind the car door into the line of fire. Another rifle shot cracked through the air. The agent crumpled silently to the ground and the sheriffs deputy took out on foot after the shooter. He didn’t stand a chance against the shooter’s rifle and high position.
Chris angled sideways to unleash a barrage of bullets way up the hillside, covering the deputy’s wild, scrambling dash up the slope. Eden screamed and rose up and Chris barreled into the melee, the bike sliding within inches of her, spraying dirt.
She cried out again, screaming for the old woman to get to safety and send for help. She tried to run from him but he grabbed her by the forearm. She was strong, but by his size alone he had every advantage over her.
She knew that. He saw it in her desperate gray eyes. Shock would drop her like a rock in another few seconds. She had been incredibly lucky—the bullet had pierced the thick strap of the backpack before penetrating her flesh.
She’d survive, but she was losing blood and the adrenaline rush had already worn too thin.
He planted both feet on the ground and pulled the scarf from around his neck. Wadding the material, he crammed it beneath the strap to staunch the blood, then stuck her other arm through the opposite strap to keep the pack in place.