by Misty Evans
“Let him decide the safest route.”
She fell back and gave Tephra a nod. “You lead. We’re heading to Lot A across that divider.”
The fire trucks surrounded the building, silencing their sirens. Bianca couldn’t see any smoke or fire, so it was probably a false alarm. Tephra slowed, once again focusing on the path ahead of them. “Watch our six,” he said to her.
“You got it.” She lowered her voice as he walked away and whispered to Cal. “What’s a six and how do I watch it?”
“Your backside. Keep an eye out for anyone coming up behind you.”
Was it necessary to speak like they were in an old western movie? She checked behind her. The path they’d run was clear. No sign of Katy or anyone else. “Got it.”
When she turned back around, Tephra was eyeing her. She saw police cars pulling up behind the fire engines. “We’re both dressed as hospital staff, although your black slacks and heels are out of character for the nurses here. We should be able to pass normal people without question, but if there’s an assassin in the area, you’ll stand out.” He pointed to the edge of the lot. “Hug that tree line and don’t draw attention.”
Bianca assented, then told Cal as she followed Tephra, “We’re taking a circuitous route along the back of the lot.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Good.”
Good? Cal never thought anything was good. “Are you okay?”
He was still running from the sounds of his hard exhales as he spoke. “Just never thought I’d be happy about you depending on him to keep you safe.”
She stepped over a curb, following Tephra around a flowerbed. The shadowy tree line was only a few feet away. She checked the crowd on their right. Everyone in the lot was either in their cars or standing in groups, looking at the hospital and the fire trucks. Police officers had cordoned off the entrances and were starting to take statements. “You and me both.”
Another curb hop and they made it. Bianca’s heels sunk in the soft grass. Keeping her eyes pinned on Tephra’s back, she stepped behind an oak tree, and kicked off her shoes. “We’re almost there.”
She ran to catch up with Tephra, which required her to hop over tangles of brambles and work her way through some tight bushes. They were passing by tall, skinny evergreens now, each tree nestled smack dab up against the other creating a wall. The branches prickled her skin but she had to keep grabbing them in order to keep her balance. The hospital needed a new landscaper. Of course, who saw any of this muck in the middle of the divider unless it was from the condo windows on the other side? “Twenty feet or so,” she said to Cal, “and I should be able to pop out from behind the hedge and see the truck.”
Tephra stopped suddenly, Bianca nearly plowing into his back. Her glasses slid to the end of her nose. “Hey.” She pushed them back up. “The truck is in the next lot over.”
“You won’t be needing it,” a man’s voice said.
The voice was familiar. Bianca stood on her tiptoes and peered over Tephra’s shoulder.
Justin Lugmeyer emerged from a second set of evergreens across from them and stared back at her. He held a cold-looking black gun in his hands and pointed it at Tephra’s chest. The barrel had an extension on it…a silencer.
“So you took up with the enemy, huh, Rory? What kind of soldier are you?” Lugmeyer was dressed in plain clothes. His eyes were hard and his jaw looked swollen on the left side. Or maybe that was only a shadow created by the trees. “Things will not go well for you or your mentor now. I suggest if you want him to live out the night, you move away.”
Bianca dropped down, shielding herself behind Tephra’s back. What the hell was Lugmeyer doing here?
Keeping tabs on Halston. Was he the one who poisoned him?
“Don’t do anything stupid.” Tephra raised his hands high in the air. As he did so, the scrub shirt rose and Bianca saw the gun handle peeking out of his waistband.
“Change of plans,” she whispered into the phone. “You’re going to have to come get me, Cal.”
She dropped the phone and reached for the gun.
Chapter Twenty-eight
You’re going to have to come get me, Cal.
Cal was closing in on the area behind Lot B when he heard the thud of Bianca’s phone. Had she dropped it? A second later, he jumped a low-cut evergreen hedge and heard the unmistakable sound of a gun going off.
“Bianca!” he screamed into the phone, still running for the trees that formed a straight line behind the lot.
The only answer was a soft pfft, pfft sound. Almost too soft for the phone to pick up.
Cal knew that sound. Silencer.
His head felt like it would explode right along with his heart. Someone was shooting at Bianca. Again.
Defend. Sliding over the hood of a Beamer, he grabbed his gun from its hiding place while keeping the phone at his ear with his other hand. Someone in the parking lot—probably the owner of the car—yelled at him, but he kept going.
In his ear, he heard Bianca’s voice, far away but still understandable. “Tephra was bringing me here to meet up with you, Lugmeyer. He was going to kill me, but I wanted to talk to you first. I wanted to tell you you’re an ass. You should have let me see my husband in Germany.”
The relief at hearing her voice was instantaneous. His knees, in fact, nearly buckled.
Another voice, this one more muted, answered. “You’re lying. Tephra didn’t even know I was here.”
Lugmeyer. Firing on Tephra and Bianca? It didn’t make sense.
His senior chief had been acting off since the Grimes mission, stress probably, but what was he doing going after Bianca?
“You don’t have to kill Cal. He doesn’t remember what you did in Afghanistan.”
What was she talking about?
He hit the first tree and slowed, slipping behind a sizable oak and scanning the area. Two rows of evergreens formed a screen between the parking lot and the building next door. While they were well maintained from the parking lot side, here they were a tangled mess.
The phone was still pressed to his ear, a distinct silence raising the hair on the back of his neck.
Tephra and Bianca should have entered from the other end. How far down were they? He tried to align his internal compass with where he’d heard the echo of the gunshot. Come on, Bianca. Tell me where you are.
“But he might remember,” Lugmeyer said. “And I can’t have that.”
“You killed Cal’s men, didn’t you?”
Like a flash grenade going off in his head, a new memory rose to the surface. The base of Tank’s head, right where it connected to his spinal cord, exploding from a well-placed sniper shot.
But the shot hadn’t come from the enemy they’d been approaching. The shot had come from behind their lookout point.
In rapid succession, Avery and Butcher had also gone down. Hit in the same spot.
Cal knocked the palm of his hand into his forehead. The PTSD had to be playing games with him. There was no way…
Lugmeyer’s voice broke through the fog sending a chill down Cal’s already rigid spine. “Warfighters sometimes have to die for the greater good.”
Cal’s insides turned to stone. The truth bit deep. The man he had trusted above all others had turned on him. On Tank and Avery and Butcher.
I’ll kill him. Rage seethed in Cal’s bones. He locked his teeth.
A coldness buried deep in his gut spread through his system. Lugmeyer was shooting at his wife. Lugmeyer…
His fingers went numb. He dropped the phone, his hand with the gun trembling with the effort it took to hold onto it.
Fuck! He scrubbed his eyes, ground his teeth. This was not the time for an episode.
Control your focus. Slow down the adrenaline.
Every mission required the same discipline. He zeroed in on a tiny lizard pretending to be part of the tree. The animal’s tiny eyeballs swung in circles, his body a mass of nerves in total flight node.
Not dissimilar to
Cal’s. Except he would never flee.
Oh, no. He was and always had been tuned for fight rather than flight. One of the reasons it had been better for him to go on mission after successive mission. The rage inside that he’d felt all these years had to be buried around Bianca. He would never let it get the best of him and hit her—never that—but he felt like he couldn’t even raise his voice around her. Her mother’s ghost always stood between them.
Closing his eyes, he fisted his open hand into a ball, drew a quiet breath, and thought of Bianca’s smiling face.
His own lips drew up at the corners in response.
Protect.
I will not lose her.
His breathing slowed, circulation returned to his fingers. He opened his eyes and ever so slowly began stalking the assassin after his wife.
Cooper ran with Thomas and Emit across the crowded parking lot. “Where’d the fucker go?”
They’d found the truck Reese had stolen from the vineyard, had been on their way inside the hospital when the fire alarm had gone off. Emit Petit, smart man, had figured out quickly that all Cooper cared about was Bianca’s safety.
He’d told Cooper and Thomas a hell of a story about Rory Tephra, Senator Halston, and Bianca’s plans to prove Reese’s op was compromised from an internal leak. Petit had even helped them locate the stolen truck. Thing was, Cooper didn’t think even Petit knew the whole story behind whatever Bianca was trying to do.
“There!” Petit pointed to the other end of the lot where a double line of oak trees separated the hospital’s parking lots from a high-rise condominium. “That’s where the gunshot came from. That’s where Cal was headed.”
Cooper renewed his speed, diving around people and vehicles. He was a big man, so he tended to knock into people more than he avoided them. “Sorry,” he said as he nearly took out a nurse. He whirled to his left and had to repeat the apology to bystander who swore at him. “Sorry.”
What had happened inside the hospital? The firefighters and cops were clustered on the other side of building around the main entrance, but no hoses were lying on the ground, no water spraying anywhere. No smoke or flames came out of the building.
False alarm.
Which meant someone wanted to create chaos, either to escape or do something illegal inside. He needed to see the hospital’s security tapes.
But not yet. He was this close to finding his agent. Her safety and well-being came first.
And then, once she was safe, she had a lot of ʼsplaining to do.
Somehow Thomas had gotten ahead of him. Cooper poured on more speed, hopping a curb at the edge of the natural divider and cutting the younger agent off as they entered the tree line.
They stopped, breathing hard, and stared into the shadowy hallway the trees created. Petit brought up the rear. “Oh, man, that’s a frickin’ mess.”
Yes, it was. Twin oaks anchored the ends of the tree line but in between the two rows of evergreen shrubs planted only a few feet apart, the landscape was in disarray. “You sure he entered here?”
Petit nodded. Thomas drew out his phone, tapped the screen twice, and had an instant flashlight. He shone it around the area where they stood and Cooper saw the light hit metal on the ground. He bent down and retrieved a cheap cell phone. He held it up and wondered if Reese or Bianca had been using it. A noise came from the speaker and he realized it was an open line.
Cooper made a quiet motion with his free hand and held up the phone so all three of them could listen.
“According to the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—fourth edition, by the way—” Bianca’s voice was slightly muffled, but Cooper recognized the tone and clip of her words. “The ‘lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another’ is a prime indicator of antisocial personality disorder. In present day culture, we often refer to that behavior as psychopathic, although that is not a medically recognized term.”
Thomas frowned and looked perplexed. Who is she talking to? he mouthed.
Cooper shrugged. Petit was grinning and nodding his head. “Sounds like our girl,” he whispered.
Another voice, this one farther away from the phone said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
A male voice. Cooper glanced at Petit. Reese? he mouthed.
Petit shook his head and responded with a silent, Tephra?
Thomas waved his hand so Cooper would look at him. He exaggerated his lip movements. Lughead!
Cooper frowned. Lugmeyer must have followed Halston to the hospital, but what was he doing out here talking to Bianca? Had Lugmeyer fired that shot they’d heard?
And where was Reese?
“I happen to know a lot about personality disorders,” Bianca continued. “My mother suffered from several, and those were exacerbated by her drug and alcohol problems. You don’t fit the classic psychopath criteria, but your case may be mild. Rory told me about your unhealthy need to kill people, how you went into the Navy in order to satisfy that need rather than turning to a less socially acceptable form of murder. I wonder why that is…perhaps you also suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? You should really be tested. You perceive your importance in the overall greater good, as you put it, as more than it actually is.”
“You’re crazy,” Lugmeyer said. “I don’t know how Reese puts up with you.”
Bianca seemed unfazed. “I hate the word crazy, and for your information, Cal loves me.” She cleared her throat. “It’s possible you’ve suffered from a psychologically stressful event—I’ve had a few of those too—and you have PTSD like Cal. You probably refused to accept it so becoming a sniper was your form of stress inoculation training. In fact, your ultimate goal, your dream, has always been to assassinate the president, hasn’t it? To show everyone how good you really are, what kind of warfighter you are. You took out your own SEAL team to prove something to the vice president, but it wasn’t about taking over Rory’s career with the CIA. You knew all along she’d come to you when she was ready to kill the president.”
Cooper frowned hard at the phone, lifted an eyebrow at Petit. The man shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. This was new information to him too.
Silence fell. A silence that made Cooper want to rush into the dense undergrowth and see what the hell he could find.
Seconds stretched into a minute and his skin itched. He couldn’t stand it any longer but as he was about to move, he heard Bianca’s voice again. Not from the phone this time. From somewhere north of them. “Hello? Anyone out there?”
“He’s gone,” a muffled voice said. “You can come out now, B.”
“That’s Reese,” Petit said.
Cooper held the phone to his mouth. “Agent Marx, can you hear me?”
A shuffling noise came through the phone, then Bianca’s voice. “This is Agent Marx. Who is this?”
The air left his lungs in a whoosh. “Bianca, it’s Cooper.”
“Cooper? How did you get Cal’s phone?”
Like that was the most important thing at the moment. “Where are you?”
“At the hospital. Behind Parking Lot B on the south side. Where are you?”
“The other end, behind Lot A. Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.”
In the background, he heard Reese say something, but he couldn’t make out the words. Bianca covered the mouthpiece and said something back to him, then spoke to Cooper. “We need to get out of here, quickly. There are police officers approaching and it would be ill advised for them to take me into custody. Plus, there’s an assassin after me. I can explain everything once we’re someplace safe.”
“Like I said, Agent Marx.” Cooper started tramping through the brush, Thomas and Petit following. “Stay where you are. If you don’t, I’ll put a bullet in your ass. Comprende?”
A slight pause. Then, “Yes, sir.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Gifted or cursed? With her photographic me
mory and high IQ, Cal often wondered which Bianca was.
It was ten minutes after midnight. They’d returned to the winery and now sat in the room downstairs with the long table they’d eaten breakfast at the previous day. Everyone, except Bianca.
She was in a manic stage, pacing and writing on a rolling white board Emit had brought in for her. In one hand she brandished a black marker, writing furiously on the board as she talked to herself. In the other, she held several colored markers, using them for different people’s names. Her system looked a lot like Emit’s TrackMap, only messier.
“And then…” She stopped and wrote something Cal couldn’t read. Maggie, lying next to his feet, lifted her head and whined softly as if Bianca’s craziness worried her as much as it did him.
“But first…no that’s not right.” She used her other hand to erase what she’d just written. “Except he…”
Cal sat at one end of the table, Emit, Cooper Harris, and Thomas Mann lined up on his left. The three of them took notes on paper and computers. Coffee had been brought in while Bianca had recounted everything Tephra had told her at the hospital. Like Lugmeyer, Rory Tephra had disappeared.
And now Bianca was intent on connecting all the dots they had and filling in the ones still missing.
“If this hypothesis is true…” Bianca drew an arrow to a bubble of words. “No, that timeline doesn’t work.” She slashed a line through the arrow.
Emit shot Cal a concerned look. Cal felt his already tense nerves tighten more. He’d seen this type of obsession in her before. When she was overly stressed or when she’d discovered something her logical brain couldn’t figure out, she went into a mental meltdown.
Cursed or gifted?
Suddenly, she stopped, stepped back, and stared at the board, unmoving. Her hands fell to her sides. Her body became immobile, as if someone had flipped a switch, turning her manic side off.