Better Off Dead

by Meryl Sawyer

  She didn’t add how lucky she’d been to lure him away from the gallery where he’d been featured when it changed hands.

  The woman studied the unusual piece for a moment. “Too trendy for me.”

  “You might try Zazobra Gallery on Canyon Road. They have a nice selection of jewelry.” She didn’t add that it was conservative, unimaginative and overpriced.

  “Thanks. Great dog,” the woman said as she headed to the door.

  Lindsey sat at her desk to do some work on her computer, and Zach settled at her feet. She finished in less than ten minutes. What she was doing wasn’t much of a challenge for someone who had a CPA license.

  In WITSEC you weren’t allowed to work in your own profession. That would make it too easy for enemies to find you. They insisted you take a job in a new, unrelated field.

  Boy had she ever. If only her friends could see her now. And Tyler. What would he say, if he knew she owned a jewelry shop?

  Don’t go there.

  Dwelling on the past only meant depression. And anger. She was entitled to a normal life.

  The life that rightfully belonged to Samantha Robbins.

  She shouldn’t have to reinvent herself. They’d broken the law—not her. But in one of life’s baffling ironies, they were free—pending trial—and she was in hiding.

  A cell without walls.

  That’s what she’d been told in the safe house where they’d debriefed her and prepared her for a new life in WITSEC. They had been more right than she ever could have imagined.

  Provo, Turks and Caicos Islands

  SITTING IN A CABANA-style beach lounge, Chad Langston stared out at the expanse of blue water beyond Grace Bay’s twelve-mile crescent of sugar-white sand. He’d just finished reviewing the coroner’s report. Cause of death: drowning.

  “Yeah, right,” Chad said out loud, half-listening to the melodic sound of the surf gently breaking on the shore.

  Robert Townsend IV had been an experienced master diver who’d come to this swank resort in the Caribbean specifically to dive “the wall” on Long Cay. The steep wall plunged seven thousand feet and was rated expert. How could he successfully complete that challenging deep water dive, then the following day go on a newbie’s dive and drown?

  Not only didn’t it make sense, the coroner’s report sucked. No tissue samples had been taken. No toxicology report. Nada.

  Okay, okay. What in hell did he expect?

  The coroner was the local mortician in the capital of Grand Turk, which wasn’t surprising. Turks and Caicos Islands were a British colony half an hour southeast of the Bahamas. Once a hideaway for notorious Caribbean pirates, the eight islands were now a haven for divers and fishermen.

  Serious crime was rare. They weren’t geared up to investigate the way cities in the States were. The coroner had taken one look at the body and decided drowning was the cause of death.

  Townsend had been found floating, facedown, in his scuba equipment on Iguana Key. Air was still in his tank and he was close enough to shore to have waded in.

  “Go figure.”

  The place to start would be with Townsend’s diving gear. The coroner should have spotted an obvious problem, but experience had taught Chad that even the most competent professionals overlooked things. The local mortician didn’t rank high on anyone’s competency list.

  Townsend had been a sixty-two-year-old man with a wife thirty years younger and a considerable fortune. Fidelity Insurance had hired Chad to see if his death could be suicide. If it were, they wouldn’t have to pay the five mil life insurance policy. If Townsend had killed himself, he’d used a unique method.

  “Yo, Langston.”

  Who in hell knew him here? He peered out from under the lounge’s blue canvas shade and saw Archer Danson strolling across the sand in front of Ocean Club West—all white skin that hadn’t seen the sun in years and skinny legs with knock knees.

  “Son of a bitch! What are you doing here?”

  “Tracking you down.”

  Chad moved his legs to one side, and Danson sat on the end of Chad’s lounge and pushed his shades to the top of his head. He always tried to be cool but ended up looking even nerdier—if that was possible. Danson’s slathered-on sunscreen made him smell like a French whorehouse, overwhelming the pleasant scent of frangipani drifting through the tropical air.

  Who could look down at a sweet little baby in a crib and call it Archer? They must have had a nickname for him. As Archer grew up, the kids would have teased him, Chad decided.

  Chad had been lucky—if you called growing up in a small house with three sisters lucky. Being tall with dark hair and having a gift for sports meant he’d been popular. And happy. He sensed Danson had never been happy. The man lived for his work.

  “Danson, how in hell did you find me?”

  With a shrug, Danson grinned. “Your secretary said you were out of town on business. I—”

  “Gimme a break.” He knew Danson must have hacked into the airlines’ databases and seen he’d flown out of Honolulu to Turks and Caicos through Miami and the Bahamas. “What’s so important?”

  “We need some testing done.”

  Chad didn’t bother to ask what Danson had developed for DARPA now. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA—operated out of the Defense Department and had been credited with some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions.

  Global positioning, stealth technology, drones, and the mouse all had been some of their brilliant, innovative ideas. Their motto was “no idea is too wild.” Well, hell some of their ideas were screwed-up. FutureMap, an online futures market to predict terrorist attacks, had left the Congress and the public reeling with disbelief.

  “My testing days are over,” Chad told him with just a touch of regret. “In case you haven’t heard, I’ve been a civilian for over eight years now.”

  Chad managed to say this and keep a straight face. Danson headed special projects for DARPA. He had access to everyone’s records. He knew exactly what Chad had been doing.

  Not that his career was any secret. He was still in touch with most of the Delta Force guys who’d served with him in Desert Storm. Some were still in the military, while others, like him, had opted for a so-called normal life.

  “I know you’re an underwater forensic expert.” Danson’s tone was clipped, a sure sign he was pissed. Like lots of military types, Danson was big on respect. He didn’t appreciate a former subordinate giving him a ration of grief. Of course, Chad didn’t give a rat’s ass what Danson thought.

  “Underwater forensics means—”

  “I know. You’re Sherlock Holmes with a scuba tank. You contract out to police departments that don’t have an underwater expert, but most of your work is for insurance companies who balk at paying certain claims. Like Townsend.”

  Chad gazed at Danson, not surprised to learn the man knew exactly what he was doing down here.

  “Look, we’re prepared to pay you a bundle to test for us.”

  “Why not use one of your own boys?” Chad would be damned before he’d act curious, but he was. DARPA usually tested its own inventions. Why didn’t they want to test this?

  “Good question.” Danson fiddled with the shades perched on top of his balding head. “We don’t want word to leak out on this one. Too sensitive. You still have your SAP/SAR.”

  Why hadn’t the military terminated his top secret clearance? Special Access Program/Special Access Required—SAP/SAR—was damn tough to get. The light dawned. DARPA had kept his SAP/SAR active in case they needed him.

  “You could do this, Chad, make some easy dough, and still snoop around under water all you want.”

  “What is it that you want me to test?”

  “I can’t tell you until you agree to test and sign the mandatory confidentiality document.”

  “Then count me out until I know what it is. How else can I decide if I’ll have the time or interest?”

  “Christ, Langston, you’re pressing
your luck.”

  “Damn straight. You need me more than I need you or you wouldn’t have flown all the way down here.”

  Danson stared at a knockout blonde in a hot-pink butt floss bikini who wandered past. Chad knew Danson wouldn’t tell him a thing until the woman was too far away to hear them.

  The first time Chad met Danson was when Chad joined Delta Force. They were being trained to be dropped behind enemy lines. Danson outfitted each member of the team with a portable multiband scanner that was supposed to scan for any available uplink to the Department of Defense satellite.

  Damn things never worked reliably, but they didn’t find that out until they were behind enemy lines in Desert Storm and couldn’t contact the DOD satellite. Chad had taken his apart and tinkered with the mechanism and finally got it going. After the war, Danson used Chad’s modifications to make a smaller—and totally reliable—scanner.

  Chad had spent his last year in the service testing military devices for DARPA. He’d loved the work, but when his father died unexpectedly, Chad returned to Honolulu.

  “Okay, off the record,” Danson said with a huff of disgust. “We’ve developed a handheld infrared device that can distinguish between thermal signatures.”

  Chad knew all living creatures, plants and machinery gave off heat. Sophisticated infrared sensors could detect the heat and know where something was located. But what was the object?

  Chad let out a low whistle. “You mean it can tell the difference between a car and a man?”

  “You bet. It’ll tell the difference between a gorilla and a person.”

  Chad was more than impressed. Satellite surveillance relied on telescopic photography during the day, and it was damn good. You could hit the magnify button and look at a drop of dew on a leaf, but at night surveillance went to infrared. Every living thing had a thermal signature that showed up as red on the screen.

  Objects such as cars in use gave off enough heat to be confused with people when viewed on the screen. In populated areas, all that could be seen at night was a big red blob. Essentially satellite surveillance after dark sucked.

  “Sounds promising.” Chad deliberately kept his tone noncommittal. “So why isn’t the military testing it?”

  “It’s top secret. I mean double classified. Most of the world thinks we can’t track them if they move at night. We’d like to keep it that way.”

  Chad would bet his life there was more to it, but he was smart enough to accept what Danson told him without comment.

  “You in?” Danson asked.

  Chad hesitated, thinking of everything he had going on in his life. The insurance investigations, his dive boats—most of all, his family. Five years ago, his father had died and soon after, his mother. Being the only son with three sisters and a slew of nieces and nephews meant he became head of the family. He liked it, but their activities took up a lot of his time.

  “I’ll test it for you, if I can do it in Honolulu.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “You know I’m going to look for every flaw and report it.”

  “Just what we want. When you report, call me at this number.” He pulled a card out of the pocket of his swimming trunks. “Use a pay phone, not a cell phone. No IMing. No e-mails.”

  Chad nodded. Now he knew the problem. Somewhere, the brass had a leak.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT HAD BEEN SUCH A BUSY morning that Lindsey hadn’t taken time to phone in her usual order for a turkey sandwich from The Basket Lady who delivered lunch to businesses. It was hard to believe she was hawking jewelry to tourists instead of working in finance. She loved numbers and always had. She had an MBA in statistics. When would she be able to work in her field again?

  Until last year, what she’d known about crime, she’d learned watching DeNiro and Pacino. Hul-lo! Welcome to the real world. White collar criminals were just as deadly as the Mafia.

  Looking up, she saw a couple from the Midwest pass her shop. They were slurping soda from huge plastic cups. They didn’t even glance at the jewelry in the window.

  She’d selected this shop not only for its historic beauty, but because it gave her a good view up the street and there was a back way out. Two, actually, if you counted the back door to Romero’s gallery.

  Ever-vigilant, she’d learned to memorize people’s faces. If someone was following her, she would know it. At least that’s what she told herself. With so many tourists swarming through the city now that summer had arrived, it was impossible to truly memorize every face.

  Still, she continued to try.

  She squinted against the early-afternoon sunlight at the dark-haired man striding toward the gallery. He was a head taller than most men, but even if he hadn’t been, Lindsey would have been able to pick out Derek Albright, her WITSEC field contact.

  The deputy marshal had square-jawed good looks and carried himself with an erect, military bearing. He’d been a Marine before joining the Federal Marshal’s group that ran the witness protection program. His training showed not only in his posture but in the way he talked and acted.

  What was he doing here now?

  Not that he ever announced his visits. In the beginning, he’d popped in to see her several times a week. As she became acclimated, he visited her each week. Lately she was lucky to see him once a month.

  Derek had appeared at her condo one night last week. It was much too soon for him to be here again. Wasn’t it? Maybe something had happened to her sister, Tina or her niece, Ariel. Her stomach cramping with apprehension, she braced herself for bad news as Derek opened Dreamcatcher’s door, but he greeted her with a smile.

  “Hey, Lindsey.”

  A thought suddenly hit her. Maybe a date had been set for the trial. Perhaps an end to this nightmare was in sight. Something in her chest felt lighter—almost hopeful.

  Derek’s eyes were on the open door leading into Romero’s gallery. “Close it.”

  Lindsey slipped over to the connecting door and saw Romero animatedly talking to a couple about a Kevin Red Star lithograph. Without a sound she shut the door.

  “I need to talk to you,” Derek said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Close the gallery. Let’s go to lunch.”

  “Okay, but let me tell Romero. He’ll watch the shop and take care of Zach.”

  It took her a minute to explain an old friend had dropped by and needed to talk to her. Since Romero couldn’t see Derek from where he was standing, she thought he would assume it was a woman. From his wink, she decided he believed she had a boyfriend.

  What a sweetie, she sighed inwardly. He genuinely cared about her. Too bad she couldn’t tell him how much his friendship meant to her.

  She left Zach in the gallery and walked outside with Derek. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it.” He sounded happy. “I made lunch reservations at La Casa Sena.”

  “Really? Since when does WITSEC bankroll lunches at pricey restaurants? This must be good news.”

  “Good news and bad news.” Suddenly the air was fraught with tension and an undercurrent of expectation. “Which do you want first?”

  She’d been so battered down with bad news that she almost opted for the good first. No. This experience had taught her to face her fears and deal with them.

  “The bad.”

  His eyes shifted, a subtle movement most people would have missed, but she knew he was checking out the people around them because that’s what he’d taught her. Tourists, she decided, covertly skimming the clusters of people strolling through the area.

  “Headquarters intercepted an expert hacker who was attempting to access your file.”

  His words beat against her temples. Fear she’d been trying too long to ignore spread through her with a mind-numbing punch.

  “Don’t worry. We stopped them.”

  THE FRAGRANT YEASTY SCENT of warm sapodillas filled the air in La Casa Sena. Ordinarily Lindsey would have been ready to fill one of the hollow centered buns with ho
ney and gobble it down, but her mind wasn’t on food. Derek had insisted on putting off telling her the good news until they had ordered lunch and wine had been served.

  “Okay, now for the good news.” Derek raised his glass of Pinot Noir to hers.

  Lindsey clinked her goblet against his, concealing her frustration with a manufactured smile. She still held out the hope that the good news was a date had been set for the trial.

  Derek grinned and took a swig of wine before, saying in a voice charged with excitement, “I’ve been promoted. I’m going back to headquarters in D.C.”

  He kept talking, but all she heard was a blur of words. This was the good news? Anger mushroomed inside her. What had begun as frustration morphed into something larger, darker.

  Derek was her lifeline, her contact with the people who had taken control of her destiny. They weren’t close—exactly—but there was an immeasurable, unseen bond between them. They’d talked for hours, particularly in those early days just after her arrival. He’d taught her how to start over, how to construct a new past, and how to protect herself.

  Since she’d come to Santa Fe, Derek had been the only person she dared trust. Now, he was leaving and to him this was an occasion to be celebrated. For her it was…she couldn’t quite put in words how she felt, what he’d become to her.

  With everyone and everything she’d known and loved taken from her—even a field contact whose job it was to guide her—was a special person. Allowing Derek Albright to gain such importance illustrated just how screwed-up her life had become.

  “Hey, Lindsey, what’s the matter?”

  “You jerk! This is the good news?”

  He shrugged and tried for a smile.

  “Am I supposed to be happy for you?”

  “No, not really.” A note of apology crept into his voice. “I thought I owed you an explanation.”

  “Really? I can’t imagine why.” Like a balloon inflating, anger was quickly becoming rage.

  “I know you expected me to stay with you until after the trial.” He furtively glanced around him to see if anyone was listening. No one was, but he lowered his voice and leaned even closer. “With all the pressure to increase Homeland Security, the Marshal’s pool of agents has been sucked dry. They need me in D.C. It’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. Hell, under normal circumstances, it would take me another five…ten years to get to that level.”