Her Last Chance

by Toni Anderson

  One eye stared back, frosted iced-blue, the other looked eerily exposed, its pale green depths shining with fear. With shaky fingers she put in the second lens and made up her face. Heavy foundation hid the dark circles under her eyes and translucent powder covered her rampant freckles. Blood-red lipstick and thick black eyeliner dominated her face, making her look harder, bolder.

  “Hello, Juliette.” She knew the old fraud better than she knew herself.

  Blush emphasized cheekbones sharp enough to cut, and mascara elongated her thick lashes. She pinned her hair back into a neat bun, tight to the nape of her neck. Pulled on a wig that was similar to her own dyed, red hair, but cut shorter into a bob that swung just beneath her chin.

  She was ready to die now.

  Her lips curved upward. Her cheeks moved, her eyes crinkled, but there was not an ounce of happy to buoy it up. The façade held, despite the escalating internal pressure.

  FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Ward had sat quietly when the Assistant DA had informed her that mobster Andrew DeLattio was being allowed to turn state’s evidence. Then she’d excused herself and thrown up in the restroom.

  Lines of strain etched her eyes and mouth. Her pulse fluttered.

  Truth was she didn’t mind dying, but she wasn’t going to stand on the sidewalk with a bulls-eye tattooed to her ass. Juliette Morgan was a target for every organized-crime family in the US and Elizabeth intended to make her disappear.

  Permanently.

  She walked through to the main bedroom, pulled out a scarlet Versace pantsuit and a tangerine silk blouse and walked back into the bedroom.

  Can I really do this?

  Yes! The answer screamed inside her head. How else could she reclaim her life? And if she died trying? So be it.

  She dressed. The red and orange clashing violently in an eye-catching display of high fashion—exactly the effect she was going for.

  Satisfied, Elizabeth walked through to the lounge and took one last look at the stylish Manhattan apartment. She was done with it, burned out, wasted, with no future to speak of and a past full of regrets. Time hadn’t diminished her fury; if anything it burned brighter and stronger every day. DeLattio owed her and Witness Protection or not, she was going to get her revenge.

  Forcing herself to move she stopped before she’d gone two paces. Her eyes caught and held an old sepia photograph staring at her from the hall table. A young couple grinned at her from their perch, affectionately hugging two tiny figures between them.

  It knocked her sideways, the lifetime of grief locked up in that treasured photograph. She swallowed three times before she could catch her breath.

  Ah, God.

  Elizabeth blinked to kill the tears and slid the photograph into her purse, next to her Glock. Hiding behind dark sunglasses, she picked up her keys and left without a backward glance.

  ***

  Triple H Ranch, Montana, April 3rd

  In the open doorway of the ranch house with his old dog pressed against his side, Nat Sullivan gazed up into the inky depths of the night sky. No moon shone tonight, though stars glittered like tiny diamonds against the blackest coal.

  It was two a.m. and his eyes hurt.

  A thin layer of fresh snow covered the ground, gleaming like exposed bone. The storm had been a quick blast of fury, totally unpredicted, but not unexpected, not this high in the mountains. Trees popped like firecrackers deep in the heart of the forest.

  A dull throbbing poked at his skull like a hangover. Not that he’d had the time or luxury to get drunk. The headache was the lingering aftereffect of a difference of opinion he’d had with a couple of repo men that afternoon. They thought they had the right to come to the ranch and steal his property. He figured they’d be better off dead.

  Stroking the silky fur that covered the old dog’s skull, tension seeped from his stiff neck as his muscles gradually relaxed. He let out a breath and his stance tempered, shoulders lowered as the tightness slowly eased.

  Peace, finally, after a day of almighty hell.

  The Sullivans had been granted a temporary reprieve when his mother suffered a heart attack. A life-and-death version of the silver-lined cloud.

  Nat tried to force a smile, found the effort too great, his jaw too damn sore to do it justice. Last time he’d seen his mother she’d been pasty gray, her hair standing on end, lying flat on her back in a hospital bed.

  Still giving out orders.

  Old. Weak. Cantankerous. His mother would go to her grave fighting for this land. He could do no less.

  Absently, he played with the silky fur of Blue’s ears. The Triple H was nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a lush valley butted up close to the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Settled by his great, great grandparents, it was as much a part of his heritage as his DNA. A few hundred acres of prime grazing land, carved over millennia by the friction of ice over rock.

  Nat had had his adventures, traveled the world, seen more than his fair share of beautiful country, but now he was back to stay. Montana was in his bones, the backdrop to every thought and the oxygen of every breath. He leaned against the doorframe, looked out at the mountains and welcomed the fresh clean air pressed close against his cheeks.

  It was sacrilege to think the ranch could be taken from them.

  A shooting star plunged across the night sky, falling to its death in a brilliant display. Nat drew in a sharp breath at the flash of beauty. The dog stiffened beneath his palm, a low growl vibrating from its belly all the way to its teeth. Nat cocked his head, ears tuned in, attention focused. A low humming sound grew louder, like the buzz of a honeybee getting closer.

  A car.

  Heading this way.

  “Quiet, Blue. Go lie down.” He didn’t want the dog making a racket and waking his niece. Pulling the baby monitor from his pocket, he checked it against his ear to make sure it was still working, and turned back to the open door.

  Could be nothing.

  Could be Ryan driving home drunk even though he knew better. But Ryan didn’t always show good judgment after a bad day. Didn’t sound like Ryan’s truck though. Nat flicked off the baby monitor.

  Hidden Hollow Hideaway was remote and secluded, with mountains surrounding and enclosing the ranch on all four sides. Miles off the beaten track it was hard to find even in daylight. At night it was damn near impossible. People did not just pass by and they weren’t expecting any paying guests for at least another week. Troy Strange was their only neighbor for miles and he was more likely to visit smallpox victims.

  Trouble was coming—Nat smelled it, almost tasted it at the back of his throat.

  Cursing, he grabbed his rifle and ammo off the gun-rack above the kitchen door and loaded it, chambering a round. He moved quickly outside to stand in the deep shadows besides the big Dutch barn. Cattle lowed behind him and a wolf’s howl echoed through the hills to the east.

  Prickles crept up Nat’s spine. Were the repo men coming back for another shot at his horses? Despite all his attorney’s fine words?

  The car was cresting the rise a hundred yards from the main house. It sure as hell wasn’t Ryan’s truck. Nat’s heart thumped hard against his ribcage and adrenaline banished tiredness. He hugged the side of the barn as headlights cut deep into shadow. The rig, a Jeep Cherokee, pulled into the yard in front of the main house, cut the lights, cut the engine.

  Silence resonated around the granite peaks like a boom in his ears. Nat breathed in and out. He smelled the exhaust fumes tainting the pure mountain air, listened as silence combed the darkness, as if nothing existed except the colorless wasteland of night. Just time and universe, cold and rock.

  Anticipation sharpened every sense as he waited, balanced on the balls of his feet. Nobody moved. Nobody crept out of the Jeep. Nobody sneaked into his stable to steal his prize-winning Arabian horses.

  Nat’s breathing leveled off, his heart rate slowed. He relaxed his stance and adjusted his grip. Waited.

  The repo men had brought a truck
this morning.

  Nat waited another minute, then another. His eyes grew gritty with fatigue and he fought back a yawn. This wasn’t the repo men. He didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t them. Cold seeped into his hands from the frigid metal of the gun; his trigger finger was freezing up.

  “Damn it all to hell.”

  He wasn’t about to leave some stranger hanging around his property in the middle of the night.

  Though it was pitch-black, Nat’s eyesight was sharp and well-adjusted. He knew every inch of ground, every stone, fence, and broken-down piece of machinery on his land. Picking out shades of gray, he moved toward the car. Flicked off the rifle’s safety and peered in through the frosted-up glass. It was like trying to see to the bottom of a riverbed in the middle of winter. He couldn’t make out a damned thing.

  With one finger, he lifted the handle of the driver’s side door. It clicked open, but no interior light came on. Nat took a step back and peered inside, made out a bundled up figure in the back seat, curled up, unmoving.

  Gripping his rifle he felt the tension crackle like static on a dry day. The fine hairs at his nape sprang up, tensile and erect.

  “Drop the rifle, mister.” The voice was softly feminine.

  “Now why would I want to do that?” he asked.

  She was silent. He could feel her apprehension; almost see her weighing her choices in the concealment of the Jeep.

  His teeth locked together. “I don’t think so, ma’am.” He might have been raised to be polite to women, but he wasn’t dumb. “Not ‘til you tell me why you’re sneaking onto my property in the middle of the night.”

  She shifted slightly. He heard the rustle as she pushed aside the blankets.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. There was a lilt, some sort of accent in her voice that sounded both warm and aggressive at the same time. It undid some of his irritation and sparked a glimmer of curiosity.

  “Well, ma’am.” Pitched low, Nat’s voice was steely with courteousness. “A better question would be what the hell’s yours?”

  Read the start of Chapter One of Toni Anderson’s Romantic Spy Thriller...

  THE KILLING GAME

  ©Toni Anderson

  It looked and felt like the dominion of Gods.

  Special Air Service trooper Ty Dempsey had been catapulted from a rural English market town into the heart of a colossal mountain range full of pristine snow-capped peaks which glowed against a glassy blue sky. Many of the summits in the Hindu Kush were over five miles high. The utter peace and tranquility of this region was an illusion that hid death, danger and uncertainty beneath every elegant precipice. No place on earth was more treacherous or more beautiful than the high mountains.

  He was an anomaly here.

  Life was an anomaly here.

  Thin sharp needles pierced his lungs every time he took a breath. But his prey was as hampered by the landscape as they were, and Ty Dempsey wasn’t going to let a former Russian Special Forces operative-turned-terrorist get the better of an elite modern-day military force. Especially a man who’d shockingly betrayed not only his country, but humanity itself.

  They needed to find him. They needed to stop the bastard from killing again.

  The only noise in this arena was boots punching through the crust of frozen snow, and the harshness of puny human lungs struggling to draw oxygen out of the fragile atmosphere. The shriek of a golden eagle pierced the vastness overhead, warning the world that there were strangers here and to beware. Dempsey raised his sunglasses to peer back over his shoulder at the snaking trail he and his squad had laid down. Any fool could follow that trail, but only a real fool would track them across the Roof of the World to a place so remote not even war lingered.

  But the world was full of fools.

  As part of the British SAS’s Sabre Squadron A’s Mountain Troop, Dempsey was familiar with the terrain. He knew the perils of mountains and altitude, understood the raw omnipotent power of nature. This was what he trained for. This was his job. This was his life. He’d climbed Everest and K2, though the latter had nearly killed him. He understood that there were places on earth that were blisteringly hostile, that could obliterate you in a split second, but they held no malice, no evil. Unlike people…

  He relaxed his grip on his carbine and adjusted the weight of his bergen. None of the men said a word as they climbed ever higher, one by one disappearing over the crest of the ridge and dropping down into the snowy wilderness beyond. With an icy breath Dempsey followed his men on the next impossible mission. Hunting a ghost.

  ***

  The small plane taxied down the runway at Kurut in the Wakhan Corridor, a tiny panhandle of land in the far northeast of Afghanistan. Thankfully the runway was clear of snow—a miracle in itself.

  Dr. Axelle Dehn stared out of the plane window and tried to relax her grip on the seat in front of her. She’d been traveling for thirty hours straight, leveraging every contact she’d ever made to get flights and temporary visas for her and her graduate student. Something was going on with her leopards and she was determined to find out what.

  Last fall, they’d attached satellite radio collars to ten highly-endangered snow leopards here in the Wakhan. This past week, in the space of a few days, they’d lost one signal completely, and another signal was now coming from a talus-riddled slope where no shelter existed. This latter signal was from a collar that had been attached to a leopard called Sheba, one of only two female snow leopards they’d caught. Just ten days ago, for the first time ever, they’d captured photos from one of their remote camera traps of the same leopard moving two newborn cubs. If Sheba had been killed, the cubs were out there, hungry and defenseless. Emotion tried to crowd her mind but she thrust it aside.

  The cats might be fine.

  The collar might have malfunctioned and dropped off before it was programmed to. Or maybe she hadn’t fastened it tight enough when they’d trapped Sheba, and the leopard had somehow slipped it off.

  But two collars in two days…?

  The plane came to a stop and the pilot turned off the propellers. The glacier-fed river gushed silkily down the wide, flat valley. Goats grazed beside a couple of rough adobe houses where smoke drifted through the holes in the roof. Bactrian camels and small, sturdy horses were corralled nearby. A line of yaks packed with supplies waited patiently in a row. Yaks were the backbone of survival in this remote valley, especially once you headed east beyond the so-called road. People used them for everything from milk, food, transportation and even fuel in this frigid treeless moonscape.

  It was early spring—the fields were being tilled in preparation to plant barley in the short but vital growing season. A group of children ran toward the plane, the girls dressed in red dresses with pink headscarves, the boys wearing jewel-bright green and blue sweaters over dusty pants. Hospitality was legendary in this savagely poor region, but with the possibility of only a few hundred snow leopards left in Afghanistan’s wilderness, Axelle didn’t have time to squander.

  Her assistant, a Dane called Josef Vidler, gathered his things beside her. She adjusted her hat and scarf to cover her hair. The type of Islam practiced here was moderate and respectful.

  “Hello, Dr. Dehn,” the children chimed as the pilot opened the door. A mix of different colored irises and features reflected the diverse genetic makeup of this ancient spit of land.

  “As-Salaam Alaikum.” She gave them a tired smile. The children’s faces were gaunt but wreathed in happiness. Malnourishment was common in the Wakhan, and after a brutal winter most families were only a goat short of starvation.

  Despite the worry for her cats, it humbled her. These people, who struggled with survival every single day, were doing their best to live in harmony with the snow leopard. And a large part of this change in attitude toward one of the region’s top predators was due to the work of the Conservation Trust. It was a privilege to work for them, a privilege she didn’t intend to screw up. She dug into her day pack and pulled
out two canisters of children’s multi-vitamins she’d found in Frankfurt Airport. She rattled one of the canisters and they all jumped back in surprise. She pointed to Keeta, a teenage girl whose eyes were as blue as Josef’s and whose English was excellent thanks to some recent schooling. “These are not candy so only eat one a day.” She held up a single finger. Then handed them over and the children chorused a thank you before running back to their homes.

  Anji Waheed, their local guide and wildlife ranger-in-training, rattled toward them in their sturdy Russian van.

  “As-Salaam Alaikum, Mr. Josef, Doctor Axelle,” Anji called out as he pulled up beside them. The relief in the Wakhi man’s deep brown eyes reinforced the seriousness of the situation.

  “Wa-Alaikum Salaam.” They could all do with a little peace. The men patted each other on the back, and they began hauling their belongings out of the plane and into the van.

  Axelle took a deep breath. “Did you find any sign of the cubs?”

  Anji shook his head. “No, but as soon as I heard you were on your way, I took some men up to base camp to set up the yurts, then came back to get you.” Although only a few miles up the side valley, it was two bone-rattling hours of travel on a barely-there gravel road to their encampment. During winter, they did their tracking online from back home at Montana State University. In summer, they took a more hands-on approach.

  “Thanks.” Axelle stowed her frustration and smiled her gratitude. From their tracking data she had a good idea where Sheba might have denned up. Barring accidents or breakdowns they might get there before nightfall.

  She was praying for a collar malfunction even though that would put their million-dollar project way behind schedule. The alternative meant the cubs and their mother were probably dead. Her instinct told her losing two cats in a couple of days wasn’t coincidence, nor was it a local herder protecting livestock. A professional poacher was going after her animals for their fur and bones to feed China’s ravenous appetite for traditional medicine. It was imperative to find out exactly what was going on, and with the continuing conflict in Afghanistan it wasn’t going to be easy.