by Paula Graves
“What happened a year ago?” She pulled off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve to get a better look at the wound. Without the flashlight beam pointed directly at her arm, all she could make out in the shadows was a thin, dark furrow in the flesh above her elbow. At his look of surprise, she added, “I don’t watch a lot of news. I knew MacLear had folded, but I never heard exactly why.”
“Barton Reid sent a group of the SSU to kidnap the two-year-old son of a linguist named Abby Chandler.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “A linguist?”
“They wanted something her late husband had stolen from MacLear.”
When Rick flashed the light on her arm, she winced at the ragged, oozing sight. She should have checked before they settled down for the night—her arm had been aching a little then. She just hadn’t wanted to admit any weakness in front of Rick. “What time is it?”
“A little after 4:00 a.m.”
So the wound had been dirty for several hours now. “Better give it a good scrubbing,” she said grimly. “Infection’s had some time to set in.”
With a look of sympathy, Rick nodded and went to work on the wound with methodical thoroughness. He was trying to be gentle, Amanda could tell, but there was no painless way to scrub dirt and debris out of an open wound, especially one that had been allowed to fester all night.
He spoke while he worked, his voice soft but somehow bracing. “Abby—the linguist—didn’t know what her husband had taken or where to find it, so she went to her husband’s best friend, a fellow Marine named Luke Cooper.”
She looked up at the name. “Cooper?” she asked in a similarly hushed tone.
He nodded. “My cousin.”
“Ah.”
“Abby figured if anyone would know what her husband had taken, it would be Luke.”
“And did he know?”
“Not at first.” To her great relief, Rick stopped cleaning the wound and reached into the first-aid kit for the same tube of ointment she’d used to protect his earlier gunshot wound. His mind seemed to follow a similar path, for he smiled slightly as he started applying the ointment. “Look—matching wounds.”
“I take it, since MacLear went down in a blaze of infamy, that your cousin found what the linguist was looking for?”
“Yeah. And a lot more.” Rick put a piece of gauze bandaging over her bullet graze. “Found out her little boy was actually his son. It’s a long story, but one with a happy ending. He and Abby are married now.”
“And they put Barton Reid behind bars?” She’d had some dealings with Reid during her time in the CIA. Not good dealings—the man had been the worst kind of diplomat, one who thought his position in the State Department gave him a sort of droit du seigneur—not sexually, as far as she knew, but Reid had expected everyone else, fellow American and host-country citizen alike, to march to his tune. He’d been the kind of foreign-service agent who gave the rest of them a bad name, and she wasn’t sorry to hear that he’d been hoist with his own petard. “What did he do?”
“Profited from a drugs-for-arms deal down in Sanselmo.”
“And whatever Abby’s husband stole proved it?”
“Well, we thought so, at the time.” He sounded grim. “There were copies of emails, saved on a flash drive, that showed Reid had direct knowledge of the deals.”
“But?”
“But Reid claims the mails were sent fraudulently by one of his aides. A man who conveniently committed suicide a week before Reid came out with this claim.”
Amanda shook her head. “Surely nobody’s fooled by that.”
He shot her an odd look. “You haven’t heard any of this before? Thurlow Gap didn’t have a newspaper?”
“I didn’t take the paper,” she answered.
“It’s been all over the news for the past few months.”
“I told you, I don’t watch the news,” she replied, her tone louder than she had intended. She lowered her voice back to a whisper. “I was trying to leave all of that behind me.”
She could tell he wanted to ask more questions, but to her relief, he simply finished taping down her bandage and sat back on his heels. “It’ll be getting light out soon,” he said. “Maybe this would be a good time to see if our intruders have finally left.”
Amanda felt sluggish as she grabbed her gun from its position beside her and struggled to her feet behind him, catching up only when he slowed at the cave entrance. Morning light filtering through the trees outside bounced off the pale gray face of the cave entrance, providing just enough illumination for her to see the tension in Rick’s face.
“Stay,” he said, although almost no sound escaped his lips. “I’ll be right back.”
She wanted to protest, but her whole brain seemed cloudy, as if she hadn’t yet shaken off the effects of sleep. She checked the clip of her Smith & Wesson as quietly as she could and pressed her back against the cave wall, waiting for some sort of signal from Rick.
He reappeared in the cave entrance. “It’s clear,” he said aloud, his voice sounding thunderous after such a long period of hushed tones. “At least, right around here.”
“Do you know how to get out of here?”
“I know the general direction. But we can’t go back the way you came—you left a trail. They had plenty of time to follow it back to the motel. They probably have someone waiting there for us if we go back.”
Her stomach turned an unpleasant flip. “What if they’ve found your car?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
They headed out into the gray premorning gloom, although even the little bit of light inching its way into the eastern sky was bright after a night in the rocky bowels of the mountainside. Rick consulted the compass in his survival pack and headed them toward the rising sun. He seemed to know where he was going, and she was feeling too exhausted to argue. Nor did she put up a fight when he picked up her duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder.
They seemed to trudge through the woods forever, although when she asked Rick for the time, she was surprised to learn they’d been walking for less than twenty minutes. Her legs felt weak and achy, and her head was starting to hurt. He offered her a protein bar when they stopped for a second to regain their bearings, but she refused it. Her brain told her she needed the fuel, but her squirming gut warned that it had no intention of accepting food at the moment.
She did take a sip from the water bottle in her own pack. The water felt cold and delicious, and she had to force herself not to drink the whole bottle in one swig.
About ten minutes later, she heard the faint sound of traffic. The road must be somewhere nearby.
“There,” Rick said quietly.
She followed his gaze and saw a clump of bushes about twenty feet from a pale gray ribbon of county highway. “What?”
“See that clump of elderberry bushes?”
She wasn’t sure what an elderberry bush looked like, but she guessed he was talking about the clump ahead. “Yeah?”
“That’s the Charger.”
She peered at the bushes. If the big black Dodge was parked under there, it wasn’t readily obvious. Of course, there was barely any daylight at all. Perhaps it would be more visible once the sun came up.
“Still have that GPS signal detector on you?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He pulled it from the survival pack attached to his belt and turned it on. A bright light came on immediately.
Her gut tightened. “That’s a hit, isn’t it?”
He nodded, his forehead furrowed. “But it’s not coming from the car.”
“What do you mean?”
“This device can detect a signal within a twenty-five-foot radius. We’re at least fifty feet from the car.”
“One of us? When would anyone have had a chance to put a tracker on one of us?”
“Wait here.” He walked toward the car, stepping out his paces. About thirty feet away, he turned, looking back at her. Slowly, he walked back. “It’s not me. The light we
nt off about twenty-five feet out.”
She held out her hand for the device, her heart sinking. Stripping off the survival kit and handing Rick her pistol, so that all she carried with her was her clothing on her back, she slowly paced off. Ten feet. Twenty. Ten more, and she stood about thirty feet away from both Rick and the Charger.
The light was still shining brightly.
She looked at Rick, who was watching her with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. “It’s on me,” she said.
“Did you miss something in your pockets?” he asked.
She checked the pocket of her jeans. Nothing. Her T-shirt didn’t have any pockets. Carefully, she reached down and pulled off her sturdy hiking boots. She threw them underhand to Rick and checked the GPS signal detector. Still shining brightly.
“Could it be in the button of your jeans?” Rick asked.
She shimmied out of her jeans, rolled them into a ball and threw them toward Rick. They landed within the twenty-five-foot zone, but after he’d retrieved them and carried them back to the safe zone, the light was still shining.
“What if it’s not in your clothes?” Rick said, his tone so hushed that she could barely make out what he was saying.
The nausea she’d been battling for the past half hour rose to a crescendo as a horrible new thought flashed in her mind.
What if the tracking chip were inside her?
It would explain how Alexander Quinn had known where to send his cryptic message. How their pursuers had tracked them on the highway and later to where she’d hiked through the woods. “They’ve been tracking me this whole time.”
Rick crossed to her, bringing her discarded items. Shivering from the cold and from reaction setting in, she tugged on her jeans and pulled on her boots.
Rick wrapped her jacket around her and pulled her into the curve of his arm. “If it’s on you, we can’t hang around here much longer. They may already have your signal back.”
“The cave could have blocked the signal last night,” she murmured, trying to work past the acute sense of violation.
“Have you had surgery anytime recently?” he asked.
She shook her head. The injuries from her captivity in Kaziristan had been painful and debilitating, but they hadn’t required surgery. She hadn’t even gone under anesthesia afterward—the closest she’d come was a shot of Novocain at the CIA dentist’s office when they capped the molar her tormenters had broken during a torture session.
“Son of a—” She pressed her fingertips against her jaw.
“What is it?”
She grabbed her duffel bag from the ground by his side and pulled a small tool kit from inside. The set of pliers inside should do what she needed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rick asked as she opened her mouth and clamped the pliers over the crowned molar.
She gave a couple of hard tugs and the crown came free. She dropped it in her palm and studied the underside of the fake porcelain tooth.
There it was, embedded in the underside of the crown. The chip was tiny—about an eighth of an inch square—but incredibly complex-looking.
Rick’s dark eyes met hers, his expression tinged with horror. “Someone put a tracker in your crown?”
She nodded, swallowing another surge of nausea. “Let’s get rid of it and get out of here.” She started to throw the crown into the woods.
“Wait—” Rick caught her hand, stopping her. “How was the signal getting through the porcelain?”
He plucked the crown from her hand and studied the chip inside. “Let me borrow those pliers.” Using the tool, he carefully picked out the small chip. “There it is.”
She bent closer to look where he was pointing with the tip of the pliers. A tiny wire, attached to the chip, stuck out of the porcelain.
Rick turned the crown over and pointed to a small spot at the top of the false tooth. “That’s an antenna—it’s threaded through the porcelain. It would have sent out a signal, possibly through the skin of your cheek, but definitely anytime you opened your mouth.” He handed the tooth back to her, keeping the chip. “When we get to Chickasaw County, we’ll find a dental-repair kit and put that back on for you. Without the chip, it’s harmless.”
When we get to Chickasaw County, she repeated silently. He still expected her to go home with him, after everything they’d just been through. Did he really think people bold and ruthless enough to send a whole crew of assassins after her would stop looking for her just because they lost her signal?
“What are you going to do with that?” She nodded toward the chip, which he was examining with curiosity.
His gaze shifted toward the road, where traffic had begun to pick up a bit. A couple of cars passed by while she waited for his answer.
“Take this. I’m going to flag someone down. If I can get a vehicle to stop, I want you to slip this chip into their back bumper while I talk to the driver.” He touched her face, his hands impossibly warm on her cold cheeks. “You up to it?”
She lifted her chin, fighting a sense of enervation. “Let’s do it.”
She followed him to the road’s edge, her leg muscles aching and trembling as if she’d run a marathon. The first couple of cars passed without stopping, but finally a dusty old pickup truck slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. The window rolled down and a tanned, grizzled farmer wearing a blue plaid shirt and denim overalls stuck his head out the window. “You folks in some kind of trouble?”
“We went hiking yesterday and got lost,” Rick told the man. As he spun a tale of a vacation gone wrong, Amanda edged back to the truck’s bumper and dropped the chip into the truck bed, where it quickly joined the road grit lining the grimy bed.
“Well, the motel is down the road that way—you can’t miss it,” the farmer told them. “Need a ride? Your missus looks a little tuckered out.”
Rick put his arm around Amanda’s shoulder. “No, I can get her there okay. But thanks for the offer.” He waved as the farmer drove away.
“Let’s go—just in case they’ve already tracked us this far,” Rick said, heading for the car.
“What if we’ve just put that man in danger?” Amanda asked as she trudged through the underbrush after him.
He turned to look at her. “I didn’t even think of that.”
“I didn’t until it was too late,” she admitted. But she should have. She’d spent a lot of time over the past three years worrying about collateral damage—had she put her neighbors in Thurlow Gap in danger just by living among them?
“My guess is, he’ll be okay. They didn’t come after me in the motel—they went after you. They know exactly who they’re looking for, and they’re not going to make a big scene and draw attention by ambushing some poor farmer in a pickup truck who’s just going on with his daily business.”
Amanda hoped he was right. But she couldn’t help worrying about the farmer.
Or whoever Rick was talking to on his cell phone when she woke from a light doze almost an hour later in time to overhear him say, “We’re about twenty minutes away from your location. Thanks for the escort in.”
“Twenty minutes from where?” Amanda asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Fort Payne, Alabama,” he answered, ending the call. “That was my sister Isabel. She and my brother Wade are meeting us there to give us a security escort to Chickasaw County.”
She shook her head, wincing as the movement intensified the pain savaging her skull. “Don’t involve anyone else—I should just…” The world outside the car seemed to be moving in a dizzying rush, the blur of colors making her light-headed.
“Amanda?” Rick’s voice, heavy with alarm, seemed to come from miles away.
She closed her eyes against the kaleidoscope of images assaulting her throbbing brain. If she could just shut it out for a little while…
Blackness descended, and for the first time in a long time, she sank gratefully into the abyss.
SHE WAS BURNING UP, so feverish that her flesh almost seeme
d to sting his fingers where he touched her. On a hunch, he tugged up the sleeve of her jacket and saw that the skin outside the bandage over her bullet graze was turning a purplish-red from infection.
She’d gone too long without cleaning the wound. Longer than he had, and he’d been careful to protect his own injury from contamination, keeping it covered by his shirt.
There was a temporal thermometer in the first-aid kit. At the first opportunity, he pulled off to the side of the road and tested her temperature, trying not to wake her. She was asleep, not unconscious—she’d roused and grumbled a little earlier when he’d felt her forehead—and he knew that rest was almost as good a remedy for infection as antibiotics.
He checked the thermometer when it beeped. Her temperature was nearly 104 degrees. Too high.
The small scenic overlook where he’d parked to take her temperature was empty of other cars. Not that having an audience would have stopped him from what he was about to do, but he knew Amanda would probably prefer not to be stripped naked with people watching.
He went around to her side of the car, carrying a couple of ibuprofen, a bottle of water and a clean washcloth he kept in his larger camping kit packed in the trunk of the car. First coaxing her to take the ibuprofen with a few sips of the water, he then turned his attention to bringing her fever down. He planned to strip her to her underwear and bathe her with the wet washcloth. The cool water and the mild March morning temperatures should be the next best thing to an ice bath.
But Amanda’s fierce reaction when he started to remove her T-shirt caught him by surprise. She swung at him weakly as he pulled the hem up to her breastbone. “No!” she cried, slapping at his hands.
But he didn’t drop the hem, his gaze snared by what he saw along the edge of her rib cage. Fending off her struggle, he turned her until her back was bared to him from the shoulder blades down.