by Paula Graves
“How about I tell you a bedtime story?” she suggested, giving Stevie a little nudge. “You love the Silly Squirrel story, don’t you?”
Stevie glared at her, his eyes looking a little glassy in the dim light of the highway lamps. Alarmed, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. He felt hotter than usual.
“Luke, can you turn on the dome light a second?”
“What’s wrong?” Luke asked, doing as she asked.
Abby met his gaze in the rearview mirror. “He feels a little warm. He may be coming down with something.”
“Is it serious?”
She checked Stevie over, looking for signs of a rash or anything else that could clue her in to what was wrong with her son. She nudged Stevie’s mouth open, but he clamped it shut and started to cry. “Come on, baby, Mama needs to look at your teeth. Pretty please?”
He relented, still sniveling, and she saw some redness in the back of his right gum. “He could be cutting one of his second molars. I need to get some stuff from the bag stored in the back hatch.” She looked outside, peering past the glare left by the dome light, and saw that they had just hit the outskirts of a town. Ahead, she saw the darkened facade of a strip shopping center, already closed down at this time of night. “Can we pull over at that shopping center for a minute?”
Luke took a right at the light and pulled into the parking lot, nosing the car into a slot as far from the road as possible. He turned to look at Abby. “Are you sure he’s okay?”
He looked worried, Abby thought, feeling a little sorry for him. She’d had two years to get used to figuring out which of Stevie’s occasional illnesses required quick medical attention and which required patience and a little motherly coddling. She was pretty sure it was teething that was causing him to run a low fever. A teaspoon of liquid baby analgesic and some numbing ointment on his gums should do the trick.
“Just teething,” she reassured him. “I have everything he needs in the smaller bag in the back. Can you get it for me?”
Luke retrieved the bag from the back hatch, bringing it around to the side door where Abby sat. He hovered as she dug through the bag and found the medicines she needed. As she’d hoped, Stevie settled down quickly after she applied the numbing ointment to his tender gums, cuddling close as she soothed him with a soft, slightly off-key lullaby. He was back to sleep in a few minutes.
“How’d you do this by yourself?” Luke’s expression still betrayed anxiety. “I’d have freaked the first time he sneezed.”
“Oh, I did all that. Drove him to the emergency room the first time he scratched himself and drew blood.” Her first year as a mother had been an exercise in fear and paranoia. For a while, every cough had been pneumonia, every rash the measles, every bump and bruise a life-or-death crisis. Thank God for a patient, understanding pediatrician, who’d helped her through the panic attacks and the bouts of self-doubt. She and Stevie had made it through just fine, and he was a healthy, well-adjusted boy of two despite her doubts and inexperience.
“You would have been fine,” she told Luke, catching his hand and squeezing it. “You’d have panicked the first few times you were left alone with him, maybe, but you’d have finally figured out, like I did, that babies are pretty hardy little creatures. They have to be, to survive life.”
“I wish I could have been there.”
She wondered if he was angry with her for keeping Stevie’s existence a secret, now that he’d had more time to think about it. She couldn’t blame him if he was. “I should have told you, Luke. It was all just so crazy at the time. Letting people believe Matt was his father was easier. I was a coward.”
“You were a survivor.” He ran his thumb over the back of her hand. “Probably saved his life by keeping his relationship to me secret.”
She sighed, frustrated all over again. She’d spent the past few hours going over and over in her mind all that Luke had told her about Eladio Cordero’s vendetta against him. Was there really no way to thwart the man’s vengeance? Witness protection, maybe? Some other way to stay under Cordero’s radar permanently?
The thought of walking away from Luke again was so disheartening she felt like crying.
But she didn’t have time to cry. They had an even more pressing problem to cope with than Eladio Cordero. Somehow, they were going to have to figure out what Matt had stolen and where he’d hidden it, before their black-clad pursuers finally tracked them down, as daunting a task to Abby as figuring a way out from under Cordero’s threats.
With Stevie fast asleep again, Abby climbed into the front passenger seat. She looked over at Luke, who was still looking back at Stevie, his brow furrowed with anxiety. “He’s okay, Luke. I promise.”
Luke looked over at her, flashing a sheepish smile. “He’s a great kid, isn’t he? You’ve done such a good job with him.”
She smiled, though her heart ached at the eagerness in his voice. Luke kept swearing he didn’t blame her for keeping Stevie’s paternity a secret, but she didn’t see how it could be true. If someone had kept her son from her for two years, she’d have been out for blood. “He reminds me of you all the time.”
Luke’s smile widened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “He loves horses and hates carrots.”
Luke chuckled. “Yeah? Well, what’s his position on heavy metal, fishing with live bait and the designated hitter?”
“Get back to me in a few years and I’ll let you know.” As soon as the words slipped past her lips, she knew she’d said the wrong thing. Luke’s smile faded quickly and his grip on the steering wheel tightened.
Way to go, Abby. Remind him again that he’s not going to be part of his son’s life.
Several minutes passed in silence, broken only by the occasional rumble of a passing car on the highway. Finally, Abby couldn’t stand the quiet any longer. “I wonder when your sister-in-law is going to call.”
“Soon, I think.” Luke’s gaze dropped to the dashboard clock, which read 10:43 in glowing blue numbers. They’d been on the road for over three hours.
“Then what?” she asked.
After a brief pause, Luke answered, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. Going back over the time between our last stint in Sanselmo and the day of Matt’s death. If he got his hands on any sort of damning evidence against Voices for Villages, it would have had to have been during that tour of duty. Before that, we didn’t have a notion that the organization might have been doing anything illegal.”
“Could Matt’s relationship with that woman have been an assignment? Would you have known?”
“I led that investigation, so yeah. I’d have known.” He sounded apologetic. “Although it’s possible he chose not to end it with Janis Meeks when I told him to because he was trying to do a little undercover work of his own, I suppose.”
That sounded like Matt, she had to concede. The job was his real mistress, and a lover was no more likely than a wife to sway his true devotion to it. “Okay, maybe we should look at this problem another way. What kind of evidence could he have gotten his hands on by playing this Meeks woman? What would drive these people to take so many risks and make so many threats to find it?” She turned in the seat to look at him, feeling the chaos of unanswered questions begin to coalesce in her mind and shape itself into patterns. “These people are putting a lot on the line to get to us, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Luke agreed. “So they must have serious money to burn.”
“And a good reason to burn it,” Abby said. “So whatever Matt took, it must be huge. The guy from Boston said it was files, right?”
“I think he was guessing,” Luke cautioned.
“But it makes sense. Files are about the only thing that would be incriminating enough to merit the kind of full-court press we’re getting from these people.” Abby’s mind was clicking on all cylinders finally, filling her with a fresh sense of purpose she’d come damned near to losing just a few hours earlier. “Physical files?
”
Luke shook his head. “Too bulky, too hard to hide—” He stopped short, his eyes widening suddenly with realization. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?” she asked eagerly.
“I’m not a hundred-percent sure what Matt took,” Luke answered, a smile spreading across his face, “but I have a damned good idea where he hid it.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Gulfstream V had landed at Birmingham-Shuttleworth International Airport at around 11:00 p.m. A tall, thin man dressed in a golf shirt and a crisply ironed pair of khaki chinos greeted them on the tarmac with a stack of file folders, which he gave to Beckett to pass out to the rest of the team while the man in the chinos introduced himself as Davenport from the Atlanta office and began barking out a quick summary of what they’d find inside.
“Tris, Damon, Malcolm—you’re headed straight to Chickasaw County to stake out the Cooper Cove Marina. You have rooms booked at the Sycamore Inn, and someone has already checked in for you.” He handed out room keys. “Go straight to your rooms and get a good night’s sleep. Damon, you’re booked for a fishing trip with Hannah Patterson at 6:00 a.m.” He waved toward the hangar where the Gulfstream was being parked as he spoke. “The red Camry is yours. Key’s in the ignition.”
Relieved to be going solo for this leg of the assignment, Damon followed directions to where the Camry was waiting inside the hangar. When he cranked the Camry’s engine, a man in gray coveralls waved him forward, and he drove out of the hangar and onto the service road that led out of the airport. He found the on-ramp to I-59 and headed onto the interstate highway, a flood of familiarity washing over him as he briefly spotted the sprawling Birmingham skyline to the southwest before he headed in the opposite direction, away from town.
Within an hour, he was well out of town, heading north into the Appalachian foothills dotting the northeastern corner of the state. No worry about directions; the map to his destination had already been stored in the Camry’s built-in GPS.
MacLear thought of everything.
Knowing just how thorough MacLear could be, Damon had come prepared. He pulled a small electronic device from his pocket and pushed the center button. A few small lights flashed in the dark interior of the Camry.
No bugs. He released his pent-up breath and pocketed the device again, sliding it back into the hidden pouch inside his windbreaker pocket. Dropping his hand to his hip, he pulled out another device he’d secreted inside a second hidden pocket. Unlike his official MacLear satellite phone, this little piece of comm gear would not be monitored.
There was only one number programmed into the mini-phone, and Damon knew he had to press the button five times before the call would go through. Even then, when a careful male voice answered, Damon had to recite a sixteen-character password, consisting of both numbers and letters—a code that changed weekly based on a predetermined set of parameters that only two people in the world knew. Damon was one of them. The man who finally took his call was the other.
“Where are you?” Alexander Quinn asked tersely.
“Home,” Damon answered. “Or just northeast of there.”
“So you were assigned to the mop-up.” Quinn sounded unsurprised. He’d predicted the assignment when Damon had talked to him before boarding the Gulfstream in San Diego.
“Smug it up, will you?”
Quinn laughed softly. “I’ve done a little more looking into Cooper’s background. Resourceful fellow, Major Cooper. Won’t be as easy to bring in as your MacLear friends believe. He’ll make it to Gossamer Ridge if that’s where he wants to be.”
“If that’s where he wants to be,” Damon echoed, checking his rearview mirror to make sure no other vehicles were sticking close to him. Tris and Malcolm had been well behind him, so he didn’t have to worry about their sticking close, but he knew the people who ran MacLear weren’t exactly the trusting sort. Every day he had to worry about his hidden agenda being exposed.
If the people at MacLear ever figured out his secret, Damon wasn’t sure even Quinn would be able to help him.
“You’re close, Damon. I can feel it.” The excitement in Quinn’s normally calm voice sent a little rush of adrenaline pouring into Damon’s system. He knew finding the information Matt Chandler had apparently squirreled away could bring down MacLear and Reid. It was the Holy Grail, and Quinn had given Damon the honor of being the man best positioned to find it.
He’d do his damnedest to live up to Quinn’s faith in him.
He rang off and concentrated on the darkened highway ahead, going over his plan for the next day as he drove. Their background on the sister, Hannah Patterson, suggested she was smart and outgoing. Liked to talk.
He might be able to use her extroversion to his advantage.
“I DIDN’T MAKE the connection before, but I should have. The office scanner spent long enough ‘in the shop’ to draw the attention of the company master.” In front of Luke, the highway stretched out, flat and expansive. Crossett, Arkansas, was a faint glow in the rearview mirror, and Hamburg lay about twenty minutes to the northeast. They would stay on Highway 82 all the way to Starkville, Mississippi—unless Kristen called between now and then with different instructions.
“You think Matt somehow faked the scanner malfunction?” Abby sounded thoughtful, not skeptical. After a moment, she nodded. “Yeah, I could see that. He spent a lot of time in his garage workshop in the days before the crash.” Her voice darkened. “By then, I’d stopped trying to figure out what he was up to. I knew I probably didn’t really want to know.”
“If he was scanning the files, the point was to digitize them, right?” Luke continued.
“So we’re looking for—what? A DVD? A flash drive?”
“A USB flash drive,” Luke said, almost certain he was right. “A few weeks before we deployed to Sanselmo, several of us in the unit pooled our money and bought a bunch of large-capacity flash drives in bulk. We split the drives among us to store photos to send home to our families.” He smiled, but it felt a little bittersweet. “Some guys didn’t make it back, so we were tasked with making sure their families got the last photos they took.”
“And you think Matt stored the scans of the files he stole on one of those flash drives?”
“Yes.”
“So where is it now?”
Luke glanced at her. “I think—I hope—it’s somewhere at my parents’ house in Gossamer Ridge.”
Abby looked puzzled. “How would it have gotten there?”
“The day I mailed the disks home, I was called into an emergency meeting. Matt offered to post the package for me.”
“And you think he put an extra disk into the package?”
“I called my mom to make sure she got the disks. She did, but one of the disks seemed to have some sort of strange encryption. They couldn’t open that one.”
“And you didn’t think that was odd?”
“My parents aren’t exactly computer whizzes. They handed it off to Hannah, I think. She’s like a bulldog—she’s probably still trying to get the damned thing to open.” He chuckled.
Abby went quiet. He slanted another quick look her way and found her staring at the darkened highway, her brow furrowed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I knew so little about Matt, didn’t I?” She sighed. “I wonder if he even loved me.”
“He loved you as much as he knew how,” Luke said gently. “He just wasn’t cut out for marriage. He shouldn’t have tried.”
“I was so alone when I met him. I wanted my family back, and he was funny and sweet and swept me off my feet.” Tenderness, tinged with regret, resonated in her voice. “I should have waited. Been more sure.”
“I think everything happens for a reason.”
She chuckled softly. “Even bad marriages?”
A trilling sound set his nerves jangling. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the disposable phone. “Yeah?”
A woman answered. “Luke, it’s Kristen. Sa
m’s wife.”
He smiled bleakly at her self-introduction. She and Sam had been together for nearly a year now, and this was maybe the third or fourth time they’d even spoken. “Long time, no talk.”
“How are y’all doing?”
“Hanging in there. Sam said you’d have instructions.”
“I’m somewhere around Starkville. Where are y’all?”
“Nearing Hamburg, Arkansas, on Highway 82.”
“Okay, good. Stay on 82 all the way into Greenwood, Mississippi. I should get there first, so I’ll book a room at a motel and call with directions.” Kristen’s no-nonsense tone reminded Luke of a gunnery sergeant he’d known. The whole world around them could be going to hell and Gunny’d had a way of keeping them focused on the mission, one step at a time.
His sister-in-law would have made a good Marine.
“All right, we’ll keep heading east and wait for your call.” Luke rang off and told Abby what Kristen had said.
“A real bed?” Abby asked softly. “With a real bathroom?”
He smiled in sympathy. He’d grown to loathe the bathrooms in fast-food restaurants himself during their road trip. “That’s the plan.”
Abby leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. “Three more hours,” she whispered, almost like a prayer.
Three more hours, Luke echoed silently.
Then the hard part would begin.
THE BUDGET ARMS in Yuma had sported a certain kitschy desert charm compared to the Motel 82 in Greenwood, a converted two-story brick apartment complex left to fend for itself in the hot Mississippi sun. The motel-room doors had once been painted a happy sky blue, but the paint had long since faded to a sad muddy aqua, underlining the dilapidated state of the grimy masonry and dented aluminum awnings.
The neon sign over the motel office was mostly dim, the 2 in 82 feebly flickering a sickly yellow every few seconds before subsiding into darkness again. As Luke parked the Dodge in front of one of the rooms, Abby stared out the window at the hapless sign and sighed, wondering what the Cooper family had against a halfway-decent budget motel.