by Paula Graves
She flipped the matchbox over to the blue-and-white imprint on the front. She had the same brand in her kitchen right now. Anyone could have sent it.
Something small and black in one corner caught her eye. It looked like little more than a tiny smudge, as if the ink on the box label had spattered during printing. But Amanda had seen something like it before.
She took the box to the kitchen and found a magnifying glass in the utility drawer. Under the magnifying lens, the smudge became a couple of tiny letters: A. Q.
Alexander Quinn.
Part of her wanted to pack up and leave Thurlow Gap before sunset. But the same part knew there was nowhere she could go that Quinn couldn’t find her. The master spy who’d trained her in covert ops had come by the nickname “Warlock” honestly.
She might as well dial the bloody number. He already knew where she was.
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, basked under an unseasonably warm late-March sun, humidity making Rick Cooper’s shirt stick to his back beneath his suit jacket. He would take the jacket off but he was armed—legally, of course; over the years, he’d learned to strictly adhere to any law that didn’t absolutely have to be broken. Still, no need to draw unwanted attention by sitting in an open-air bistro wearing a Walther P99 in a shoulder holster.
He checked his watch. He’d been waiting for almost an hour, but so far no one had approached his table besides the flop-haired teenage boy who kept refreshing his water glass and asking if he was ready for a menu yet. Derrick Lambert, the prospective client who’d emailed him with directions to the meeting, was apparently a no-show.
As he reached for his wallet to pay the waiter for his time, his cell phone rang. He checked the display—the call was from an unfamiliar number with a local area code. Was it his prospective client, explaining his late arrival?
He answered. “Hello?”
He heard a faint inhalation, then silence.
“Hello?” he repeated, loudly enough to draw a look from patrons at the next table.
The phone clicked dead. Rick took out his frustration on the off button and jammed his phone in his suit pocket.
“It wasn’t a wrong number.” The smooth voice behind Rick sent adrenaline jolting through him. He turned and gazed up into the hard hazel eyes of Alexander Quinn.
“Derrick Lambert, I presume?” Rick turned his back on the CIA spook, anger flooding his chest.
Quinn took a seat across from Rick and waved off the approaching waiter. “Sorry I’m late.”
“No, you’re not.”
Quinn inclined his head. “Was the number blocked?”
“No.”
“Good. Now, remember this. Sigurd.” Quinn rose and started walking away.
Rick tossed a ten on the table and followed, falling into step as they neared the traffic light at the corner. “That’s it? I wait an hour in the sun for ‘Sigurd’?”
Quinn stopped and turned so quickly that Rick almost knocked into him. “Just follow the number, Cooper.” The CIA agent walked away, cool and unhurried in the warm sunshine.
Bitterness rose in Rick’s throat as he reversed course, striding toward the Dodge Charger parked at the curb near the bistro. Screw the phone number. Alexander Quinn had mucked up his life enough already.
He unlocked the door and slid into the hot interior of the car. The jacket went to the passenger seat, followed by his tie. Starting the car, he cranked the air up a notch, struck, not for the first time, by how good people in this country had it. Clean water. Beautiful homes. Big, shiny cars with air conditioning. He’d been in places where those luxuries would have been as out of reach as a trip to the moon.
The Charger’s engine growled to life under him as he pulled out into the moderate midday traffic on Summer Street. Stopping at a red light, he pulled out his phone and punched in his brother’s direct line. Jesse Cooper answered on the first ring.
“Meeting was a bust,” Rick said. “I’m headed back. I’ll be in the office first thing in the morning.”
“Guy was a no-show?”
“He showed. But it’s nothing we want to handle.”
“Are you sure?” Jesse asked.
Rick’s mouth tightened. “You said my experience would be an asset to Cooper Security. Do you trust it or not?”
“I trust it. You know I do. I’ve got to go. Isabel’s back with a prospective client.” Jesse hung up.
Rick looked at the cell-phone display. Pressing the back button, he took a look at the previous caller’s number. It would be easy to hit Redial and see who answered, just to satisfy his curiosity.
“Sigurd,” he muttered.
The traffic light turned green, forcing the issue. He laid the phone atop his jacket and accelerated through the intersection, forcing his focus back on navigating the unfamiliar Knoxville streets.
He’d been back stateside only a year now, after almost a decade in a dozen different trouble spots in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. Kaziristan hadn’t been the first, nor the last, but it had been the one that made him start thinking long and hard about his choice of occupations.
He was what some people would call a mercenary, though he didn’t think of himself that way. He had been a private-security contractor, working for a company called MacLear Enterprises, until MacLear had gone belly up in a scandal last year—a scandal exposed by his own cousin Luke Cooper, who’d been protecting a woman being terrorized by MacLear’s corrupt secret army-for-hire.
Learning the company he’d given a decade of his life to was corrupt to the bone had been a pretty hard hit for Rick’s confidence. Why hadn’t he seen the truth?
Had he turned a blind eye because he was too in love with the adrenaline and adventure of his job?
After the exciting life he’d led, going home to Chickasaw County again had been a daunting proposition. He’d fielded offers from other security agencies, had considered taking a few of them, but in the end, the call of home and family had proved a stronger pull than he’d anticipated.
Not that there weren’t problems. A guy didn’t leave his family behind and turn into a virtual ghost for ten years without creating a little interfamily tension. And he knew his brother Jesse, in particular, resented that Rick had gone with a civilian security unit rather than serving his country the way Jesse had.
Fat bit of irony, that, given that Jesse’s first act upon leaving the Marines was to open his own security agency. And even Jesse couldn’t deny that Rick had skills the security agency needed. He hoped in time they’d work through the old resentments and come out stronger for it.
Plus, he admired the hell out of his brother for the kind of company he was building. Cooper Security was a for-profit company, but profit wasn’t the bottom line with Jesse. He was in this work to do the kinds of jobs the government couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do.
Few who drove past the low-slung stucco office building on Jones Street in Maybridge knew what went on inside, what sort of men and women staffed the agency’s headquarters. Most of the operatives formerly worked for an alphabet soup of U.S. government agencies—CIA, FBI, DSS, ATF, DEA, military special forces.
Most of the Cooper Security agents—even Rick—shared one thing in common: a connection to Kaziristan, a former Soviet satellite located in the midst of some of the world’s hottest hot spots. Some had worked embassy security or run covert operations. Others had tracked Kaziri terrorists worldwide or interdicted their funding. His sister Megan had lost her husband in combat in Kaziristan.
For Rick, the Kaziristan connection had started with a blonde bombshell from the CIA.
IT HADN’T BEEN RICK. The voice was similar—deep and smooth, with a Southern drawl—but it couldn’t belong to Rick Cooper. He was probably half a world away, tracking down suicide bombers in Karachi or running a scam on Russian mobsters—anywhere but Alabama, answering a number Alexander Quinn had put a lot of effort into sending to her. Quinn wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to reunite two people he’d worked so hard to se
parate.
We don’t fraternize with mercs. Ever.
She closed her eyes, tucking her knees to her chin. She’d always known Quinn was a manipulative bastard, but he generally had a good reason. What was his reason this time?
She looked down at the matchbox beside her on the front porch. It lay partly open, the fake nails peeking from inside, a vivid reminder of a past she wanted to bury.
Quinn knew what happened in Tablis. He’d been the first agent to reach her after she’d escaped the rat hole where the al Adar militants had kept her for almost two weeks. He’d seen the full picture of her ordeal, painted in the rainbow hues of bruises, welts and slashes all over her body. In the bloody nubs where her fingernails had been.
She’d been overjoyed to see him that day. She’d thought the nightmare was over.
She’d been so wrong.
Tears burned her eyes like acid. She dashed them away, angry at herself for the show of weakness. Her time would be better spent trying to figure out just what Quinn was trying to tell her with the matchbox and the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone number he’d given her.
To make her earlier call, she’d used the pay phone at the gas station down the road, hoping it would offer her a semblance of anonymity. Maybe she should go back there and call the number again. Say something this time, rather than hanging up like a scared teenager too chicken to finish a prank call.
She tucked the matchbox in her pocket and started the half-mile walk to the gas station down Dewberry Road. Heat rose in shimmery waves off the blacktop, fragrant with the odor of gasoline and melting tar. The afternoon sun stung her bare arms, bringing with it a sense of déjà vu that caught her by surprise. She hadn’t thought of home in a long time, of the lazy Southern summers of her childhood, when the sun couldn’t get too hot or the day too long.
She’d taken a risk by choosing another tiny Southern town to escape to, but after Kaziristan and the aftermath, she’d needed that sense of familiarity. Small Southern towns were all alike in fundamental ways. Ways that made it a little easier to sleep at night.
She reached the gas station within ten minutes and pulled the matchbox from her pocket, although by now she had the number memorized, having stared at it so long before she got up the nerve to call the first time. She crossed to the phone set into the station’s brick facade, sparing a glance at the lanky attendant teetering on the back legs of a metal folding chair and fanning himself with a folded piece of cardboard with a motor-oil logo peeking out of one end.
“Sure is hot for March,” he muttered halfheartedly and closed his eyes, showing no signs of wanting to start a conversation.
She murmured agreement and reached for the pay phone. But before her fingers touched the receiver, it began to ring. She grabbed it on instinct. “Hello?”
There was no answer, just the sound of a car’s engine. The caller must be in a car.
“Hello?” she repeated.
“Who’s speaking?” a familiar voice asked.
The voice that sounded like Rick Cooper’s.
Her hand trembled. “Who’s calling?”
After a pause, the caller said, “Sigurd.”
Amanda slammed the receiver back on the hook, the tremor in her hand spreading like wildfire to the rest of her body.
The gas station attendant looked her way, his expression mildly curious.
“Wrong number,” she managed to rasp out. She wheeled and started walking away, her stride fast and purposeful.
The man’s last word echoed in her head. Sigurd.
The phone behind her started ringing again.
“Hey, it’s ringing again,” the attendant called out.
She ignored him, walking faster. She heard the scrape of the attendant’s chair against the cement, and a moment later, the phone stopped ringing.
She kept going, her mind racing.
If the call was a message from Quinn, it made no sense. The CIA cut her off almost three years ago. She had no operational value to anyone, friend or foe.
Surely she’d misunderstood the caller. He’d said something else. Anything but “Sigurd.”
After all, who would send an assassin after her?
Chapter Two
As Rick passed through Maryville, heading east, he checked his phone to make sure it was still working. He’d left a message earlier to let Jesse know about his change in plans, but so far, his brother hadn’t called back for any details.
Not that Rick had any details to give him.
Thurlow Gap didn’t even show up on the map he’d looked up on his phone, but the drawling local who’d answered the phone the second time gave him directions from Knoxville. He’d also shared what he knew about the woman who’d answered Rick’s earlier call. She was a freelance artist named Amanda Caldwell. At least, that was the name she was going by now. But after hearing her voice on the phone, Rick knew better.
She was the woman he’d known as Tara Brady.
Tara had been a dry-witted, leggy blonde working out of the U.S. embassy in Tablis, Kaziristan. He’d been in the Kaziristan capital supporting a joint force investigating allegations of American citizens of Kaziri descent fighting with anti-government rebels north of Tablis.
Tara had never told him she was CIA, but he knew it, and she knew he knew it. It should have kept their interactions limited and circumspect—mercs and spooks didn’t get involved.
But he and Tara had.
Their affair had been brief but torrid. Lingering glances led to stolen moments of intimacy, then a few nights of frantic, amazing sex in a flea-bitten hotel on the outskirts of the city. He’d never fallen for a woman so fast or so hard in his life.
But of course, it had to come to an end.
He put the memories out of his mind and concentrated on the winding drive east through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian chain. Ahead, the expansive cloud-tipped peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park spread before him in hues of jade, turquoise and sapphire.
Tara loved mountains. She’d hoped one day to cross the Timrhan Mountains, the craggy, unforgiving border between Kaziristan and Russia to the north. He’d laughed at her bravado. She’d told him not to underestimate her.
That had been their last night together.
He reached the Thurlow Gap city limits around four-thirty. Though the sun was still high in the sky, nightfall hours away, the town already looked buttoned up for the evening. The gas station was still open, but the only person around was a buxom woman behind the cashier’s counter near the front window.
Rick refilled the Charger’s tank before approaching the woman—people often responded more openly to nosy questions if you asked them while handing them money. He added a package of cinnamon breath mints to the tab and asked her if she knew Amanda Caldwell.
“Who wants to know?” the woman asked in a whiskeyed rasp, eyeing him with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.
“I’m an old friend. Rick Cooper.”
The woman’s brow creased further. “Can’t say she ever mentioned you.”
“She called me earlier today, but I didn’t ask for her address. I was in the area so I thought I’d drop by to visit.”
“She don’t get many visitors.”
Not surprising, Rick thought. “No significant other?”
The woman gave a loud snort. “Hell, the girl don’t even have a dog keepin’ her company.”
He couldn’t quell a glimmer of satisfaction at the woman’s words, though shame followed fast on its heels. What right did he have to wish her a life of solitude? When his hand was forced, he’d chosen a mission over her. She’d made a similar choice. Things between them ended abruptly, and apparently she’d never looked back. He hadn’t, either.
At least not that he’d ever let anyone see.
His coming here to talk to Tara—Amanda—wasn’t personal, even now. He just wanted to know why a CIA master spy like Alexander Quinn was pulling his strings where she was concerned.
The clerk inclined her head. “Come to think of it, I reckon maybe she’d like seein’ an old friend, at that. Especially a good-lookin’ fella like you.” Her lips quirking, she lifted a sun-leathered arm and pointed down the road. “She lives in a house a few blocks down Dewberry Road. On the left. The house is set back a bit, but you really can’t miss it—she has a big black mailbox with the number 212 on it.” She winked at him. “Tell her she can thank me later.”
Rick smiled and thanked her, heading out to his car. As he slid behind the wheel of the Charger, his cell phone rang. It was Jesse. He considered not answering but finally thumbed the connector. “Hey, Jesse.”
“Why the hell are you heading north?”
“I can’t tell you that yet.”
“You can’t tell me?” Irritation edged his brother’s drawl.
“Not yet. But it’s important or I’d be on my way back to the office.” Rick started the Charger.
The pause on Jesse’s end was thick with annoyance. “You may be family, but that doesn’t mean you can keep pushing the envelope quite so hard, Rick.”
“And you know as well as I do that some things happen we have to deal with on the q.t., Jess. This is one of them. I’ll explain everything later, okay?”
Jesse sighed. “Stay in touch.” He hung up.
Rick checked to see if he was safe to pull out. A black Toyota Land Cruiser turned into the gas station and pulled up at the pump behind him, leaving him in the clear.
As he waited for traffic to open up enough for him to take a left onto Dewberry Road, his gaze drifted back to the pumps, where a sandy-haired man wearing a black T-shirt and black trousers unfolded himself from the Land Cruiser and reached for the pump handle. He met Rick’s glance briefly before his gaze settled on the gas pump’s fuel gauge as it rang up his purchase.
Something about the sandy-haired man dinged Rick’s internal radar. He didn’t recognize him; Rick had a good memory for faces, and he’d never seen the man in the Toyota before. But something about him just didn’t fit here in Thurlow Gap. There was a foreignness to him. As if he didn’t belong.