Wildcard

by Rachel Lee

  Boise National Park, Idaho

  Renate wasted no time gathering up Tom—or Law, as she now insisted on calling him—repeating the name with a frequency that left no doubt she was trying to drum it into his head.

  “They’re headed toward the Canadian border,” she told him. “We’ve got to get going.”

  The hammer working on his head was hitting with less frequency now, and the throb in his leg was nothing but a miserable nuisance. “That’s clever,” he said, helping her to collect the guns she had left with him.

  “Yes. I expected them to go south.”

  “Are you sure they didn’t see you following them?”

  She looked at him, freezing as she did so. “They didn’t see me. But they probably know someone saw them departing.”

  Her eyes looked hollow, he realized. Impulsively, he reached out and clasped her arm. “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “I had to kill a sentry.”

  But her face and, even more so, her eyes belied that shrug. It was tearing her up inside, and she didn’t have time to deal with it right now. He knew the feelings so well that his next act was one of pure impulse.

  He pulled her to him, heedless of the weapons she held, ignoring the way they pressed into his gut. He hugged her tightly and pressed her face to his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  For a couple of seconds she leaned against him, then she pulled away and resumed packing.

  “We need to hurry,” she said quietly. “We must catch up before they slip too far away.”

  Need had clashed with need, and her emotional needs had lost. Such things always had to be dealt with later. Tom wasn’t sure that was healthy at all.

  He gathered the rest of their gear and followed her out to the truck. Once everything was stowed in the bed under a tarp, they climbed in and headed for the highway.

  “They’re on a tour bus,” she told him as they covered the five miles of dirt road toward the highway. “Headed north. They packed weapons as well as other supplies.”

  “They won’t be able to cross the border with that stuff. Hell, the Guatemalans might not be allowed across the border no matter what, even if they have passports.”

  “I don’t think they’re planning to go through a border crossing station.”

  Tom turned to look at her. “You think they’re crossing through the mountains?”

  “Probably, if they cross at all. They may just be going into hiding.”

  “Jeez. It’s still winter up north in the mountains. Deep snow, closed roads…”

  “I know.”

  “We aren’t outfitted to follow them on foot.”

  “We will be if we need to be.”

  Her chin had set; her eyes were locked to the darkening road. Clouds and the mountains dimmed the world early.

  “Jesus,” he said, thinking of it. He hoped those men didn’t try a run through the mountains. He doubted any of them, Guatemalans, Renate or himself, were truly prepared for that.

  They came to an abrupt stop at the highway; then, after checking that all was clear, Renate hit the pavement and the accelerator. Much to his surprise, the rattletrap old truck seemed to have a Ferrari engine under the hood. Renate drove as if she were on the autobahn.

  Tom decided it might be a good time to have a conversation. He started, of course, by annoying her. At least she wouldn’t be thinking about the sentry she’d had to kill.

  “Where the hell do you get off giving me a name?”

  “You needed to be someone different.”

  “And where do you get off killing me?”

  She barely spared him a glance. Her attention was riveted to the road. “You needed to be dead.”

  “You don’t think it’s remotely possible that I could have drawn on my own resources? That I could have called my boss and told him that someone was trying to kill me?”

  “You were unconscious, and I had to get you out of that hospital before someone came to finish the job on you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I also don’t want your FBI involved. It has too many leaks.”

  Now this he really did take exception to. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “No? Then how did I know your boss was about to put you back on suspension?”

  He had no answer for that, and he shifted grumpily in his seat. “Do you realize what I’m doing?”

  “Riding in a truck.”

  “I’m doing a hell of a lot more than riding in a truck. I’m riding in a truck with an admitted killer who has arranged my fake death and turned me into some person I don’t know and never wanted to be. I should have you arrested next time we stop.”

  “Just give it a rest and let your head stop aching.”

  “My head wouldn’t be aching at all if I hadn’t fallen in with you. I think you owe me some explanations, or I’m going to blow the lid off whatever it is you’re doing. Faking the death of an FBI agent is no joke, either. I could probably see you locked up in a federal prison for a very long time.”

  “You could. Perhaps.”

  “Then start talking.” Because now, as he thought over this entire thing, he was getting very angry. Mad enough to spit, come to that. Although the facts were different, he was beginning to feel that he was being used in the same way he had been used in L.A. And his aching head and throbbing leg weren’t making him any less irritable, especially when she drove as if they were in the Grand Prix and was jolting him around on the truck’s tight suspension. “You’ve got until the next town to convince me I should continue being an accessory after the fact.”

  She sighed, and her foot pressed down even harder on the accelerator as they raced through a curve. He leaned and nearly groaned out loud as his leg shrieked at him.

  “All right,” she said finally. “You want to know? I’ll tell you, but if you try to tell anyone else, you’ll wind up as dead as that sentry. If I don’t do it, someone else will.”

  “How scary,” he said sarcastically. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m already dead.”

  “So am I.”

  Those simple words caused him to stare at her. “Why?”

  She was silent for a few moments, as if considering where to begin. “I wasn’t always Renate Bächle,” she said. “I was born Gretchen Ziegtenbach, in Mannheim. I majored in computer science and accounting at the University of Heidelberg, then became an agent with the Bundeskriminalamt, the BKA. The German equivalent of your FBI.”

  “I know who they are.” His voice had grown quiet, as had his anger. With that one statement from her, things had grown immeasurably clearer.

  “Yes. Well.” She steered them expertly through another curve. “I was in a task force working on some suspected illegalities in the German banking community. The more I looked, the deeper I got. I stumbled across a group that called itself the Frankfurt Brotherhood.”

  “Ya gotta worry when they give themselves a name.”

  She glanced at him. “Yes. You do.”

  Twilight was beginning to settle, but she left her headlights off. He almost mentioned it, then realized he didn’t want to interrupt her story.

  “By then we’d wrapped up the initial elements of the investigation. A couple of minor indictments. The task force was disbanded, and I was sent to Köln to begin another assignment. But I was stubborn. I didn’t want to let it go. So I continued to look around on my own time. I got into their computer files. I kept digging. The Frankfurt Brotherhood was more than a group of German bankers. Their scope and influence was worldwide. I had gone beyond my official mandate, and my superiors wanted no part of what I had found. After all, these were close associates of the Six Wise Men.”

  “Who?” Tom asked.

  She laughed. “The committee of economic advisors to the German government. We call them the Six Wise Men.”

  “Important guys,” Tom said.

  “Very. Their associates are not the sort of people the BKA wants to go aft
er. Especially not on the basis of illegal computer searches. I was told to leave it alone.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said, a brief smile flickering over her features. “I started to leak information about them to the media. Things they would not wish to have known. I was hoping I could force them out into the open, or at least clip their wings. Instead, they killed me.”

  Her eyes grew distant for a moment. “The Schwarzwald is such a lovely place, Law. The Black Forest. The Alps. The headwaters of the Rhine. My family moved there when I was ten, and I went there often on weekends to visit them and play poker. My father was a dealer, and later a floor manager, at a casino. My media contact liked baccarat. We exchanged information in the bar.”

  “And these Frankfurt Brotherhood guys found out?”

  She nodded. “They ran my car off the road as I was driving back to Köln. It was a twisting mountain road, with a steep gorge off to the side. I jumped free as my car began to tumble, and landed in a thicket of trees. My car tumbled on into the gorge and exploded.”

  “Cars don’t do that except in movies,” Tom said.

  “You’re right,” she replied. “Unless someone has rigged the gas tank. Which they had.”

  Tom put up a hand. “But there was no body in the car. The killers would have known.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes misted for a moment. “If there had been no body in the car, they would have known.”

  Suddenly it became clear. “Your contact.”

  She nodded. “She had been my best friend all through high school. She was afraid, so she’d left her car in Stuttgart. She didn’t…we didn’t think they would kill a BKA agent. So she hid in the back seat. I was going to drop her off on my way back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  She drove on in silence for a few minutes. He tried to think of something to say, and realized any comfort he attempted would be rejected. He settled on prompting her to continue the story.

  “So you became someone else?”

  “Yes. As it turned out, I had gained the attention of another organization, as well. They gave me a new identity. And a new life.” She hesitated and looked at him. “We are called Office 119.”

  “And who’s this ‘we’?” he asked.

  “After the September 11 attack,” she said, “the world was focused on terrorism. Many countries had far more experience in dealing with it than the U.S. Some of them didn’t think the U.S. would handle it well, so words were whispered in the United Nations. Arrangements were made. Money was found. Office 119 was established. All of this was very quiet. Invisible. We don’t officially exist.

  “The founders had contacts in the world’s major law enforcement agencies. They began to identify and track people who seemed capable. People who had operated on their own initiative in researching or investigating these kinds of criminal conspiracies. They had found me. They heard about the accident, and found an anonymous woman in a German hospital. Me. They recruited me.”

  “Like you’ve recruited me,” Tom said, realization hitting him like a punch to the stomach. “None of this was accidental. If Wes Dixon hadn’t accommodated you by trying to kill me, you’d have found another way.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I would have. Every Office 119 agent is officially dead. We don’t exist. We have no families. No home country. No politically motivated superiors. No nationalist agendas. Our sole allegiance is to the United Nations. To the people of the world.”

  Suddenly she jammed on the brakes, bringing them down to a more reasonable speed. “There they are.”

  Tom looked ahead and saw the bus ahead of them, traveling briskly toward the edge of what appeared to be a small town.

  “There’s a map in the glove compartment,” Renate said. “Get it out. We can’t lose them. And we can’t get lost.”

  Tom found the road atlas and opened it to the map of Idaho. “I saw a sign for Grangeville a few miles back. This must be it ahead.”

  “So,” Renate said, slowing as they neared a roadside diner, “do I let you out here? Do you want to return to your old life and try to dance in the straitjacket of the FBI? Or do we keep driving?”

  Tom had no doubt that everything she had said was true. Including the part about dancing in a straitjacket if he returned to Washington. He’d pressed on with a case he’d been told to drop, and he could give no explanation that would not compromise Renate. At best he would be sent to some backwater field office. More likely, he would be out of a job, and if Wes Dixon and Ed Morgan found out he was alive, he would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, waiting for them to clean up a very loose end.

  He looked into her eyes and for the first time saw beneath the predatory glint to the pain she had endured, the sacrifices she had made. A lifelong friend had died in her place. She had left behind a family she could never again visit. Now he understood why she had buried her emotions. Thinking about her past would do nothing except lead to a mistake, and in her profession, mistakes could be fatal. So she lived in the moment, focused on her mission, ignoring the self-desiccated desert of her heart.

  Was that how he wanted to live?

  But there was something else in her face, he saw. A sense of purpose. A clarity. A freedom. An anger that he recognized all too well, mated with a mission and the means to achieve it.

  He remembered his mother wasting away with cancer, his father’s death in jail. He remembered the screams of a twelve-year-old girl, betrayed on a beach in California. He remembered the shock he’d felt when Grant Lawrence was shot, and the pain he’d seen etched on Miriam’s face as she listened to the description of his wounds in the briefing.

  Suddenly, irrationally, Tom assigned the blame for all those memories to Wes Dixon and his financial backers. Too many good people had suffered because of their machinations and secret cabals. Too many lives had been ruined.

  He looked at Renate again.

  “Keep driving.”

  20

  Guatemalan Highlands

  Miriam felt more than heard the young man’s return. He moved with the silence of a jungle cat, and once again she had to admit a grudging admiration for his training.

  “Twelve men,” he said almost soundlessly. “They have split into two columns. They know these mountains and this stream. I think they expected that we might stop, and have split up to surround us.”

  “They’re good,” she said.

  “Sí, gringa. They are very good. If they were coming in one column, we might ambush them. But like this…”

  He didn’t have to finish the thought. Any plan of an ambush was now gone. They had to get the villagers out of the trap before the rebels closed in.

  “Tell the others,” she said. “Get them across the stream and farther into the jungle. Just a couple hundred meters will do. Let the rebel jaws close on empty space. Then we have a chance.”

  His smile sent chills down her spine. “Sí. Está correcto. Voy ahora.”

  Even Miriam’s rudimentary Spanish, gleaned over the past weeks, allowed her to understand clearly. Yes. That is correct. I go now. He had been testing her, seeing if she was fit for the task the priest had assigned her. She had passed.

  He melted into the jungle, and she heard quiet rustling as the others moved away behind her. Blinking her eyes against the rivulets of sweat, she waited until their rustling had died and she judged that they were safely across the stream and out of the trap. Then she belly crawled backward, listening for sounds of the rebels’ approach, until she felt a hand on her back.

  “They are close,” the young man whispered. “Come. This way.”

  She followed him, silently cursing her relative clumsiness. He was accustomed to this terrain and could slip through it as easily as a mountain breeze. She seemed to catch every thorn, get tangled in every patch of brush.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she leaned back against cool, damp stone at the site he had selected. It was a good
spot, on a knoll overlooking the clearing where the path intersected the stream. They had both concealment and surprise in their favor. The rebels had numbers. She wondered how the competing advantages would weigh against each other, but only for a moment.

  The young man touched her arm and nodded toward the far side of the clearing. A branch stirred, and then another. Slowly, patiently, she scanned the thick undergrowth for signs of movement. Three. Four. Five. And, yes, there was the sixth.

  She glanced over for a moment and saw that he was tracking the approach of the other group. Identifying his targets. Waiting for the right moment.

  “I have them all,” she whispered.

  “I do, too,” he said. “Let them reach the clearing. They will stop to discuss what to do next.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You know what to do then,” he said. “Don’t hesitate. They are paper targets, moving in the breeze.”

  She had heard the same words at Quantico, during her training. Dehumanizing words. She had hoped she would never have to act on those words. And while she’d shot a man once before, that man had been firing at Grant Lawrence, whose kidnapped children she had just rescued. This was different. These men weren’t shooting at anyone. She forced herself to remember the woman clutching the baby to her chest as bullets shredded them.

  Paper targets, moving in the breeze.

  The rebels had reached the clearing, querulous looks on their faces. One spoke. Another answered. They moved closer. Closer.

  Now.

  She squeezed the trigger and felt the kick of the stock against her shoulder as she focused on paper targets moving in the breeze. Watched, as if from high above, as they spun and tumbled, mouths flying open, arms flailing. The scent of cordite biting her nostrils. The clatter of the young man’s rifle mixing with her own, ringing in her ears. The ping of brass shells ejected onto rock. The brief cries as the paper targets fluttered to the ground and lay still.

  “Está terminado,” he said, placing his hand atop her rifle.

  Her hand still clenched the grip, her finger tensed on the trigger. Paper targets littered the ground. She pulled her eyes away and met his.