“This really is going down as the lamest rescue attempt in the history of rescue attempts,” Zach said.
The guilt that haunted her eyes cleared as she strapped herself in. “But come on, shouldn’t we get an ‘A’ for effort?”
Zach leaned in. Yes, she should get an A, and a whole lot more. The space between them closed. He could smell the kiwi in her hair. She had laugh lines at the corners of her eyes that he had always imagined would be right there, crinkling for him.
Her lips parted. Finally, he would get to taste—
“Hang on!” the pilot yelled as the helicopter tilted precariously forward, throwing them all against their restraints.
* * *
Ronnie’s hand lashed out, grabbing hold of Zach’s. The ground was now like a bull’s-eye for the chopper. The only good thing from their staggering, limping, and erratic flight was they didn’t have much altitude.
How many tons of metal were about to hit—with how many pounds of pressure? She would have done the calculations in her head except for, you know—they were about to find out.
This was it.
She squeezed Zach’s hand. How Ronnie wanted to clench her eyes closed, but the sight before her refused to let them close.
The blades hit first. The metal screeching as they bent askew, which, by some sheer, dumb luck, toppled them over so that the gears and roof took the brunt of the collision. The chopper rolled, and the torque threatened to tear the straps that held them in. But in a burst of shattered glass and twisted steel, it groaned to a halt.
“Get out!” The pilot yelled.
Ronnie fumbled with her latch. Her fingers were numb from gripping Zach so tightly. He helped her with the buckle as the pilot opened the side door.
“Now!”
In a tangle of limbs, they all scrambled out as cut wires sparked and popped. They ran and stumbled as many yards as they could before the chopper blew. The force knocked them all to the ground.
Ronnie lay there for a moment, making sure that she could feel all her limbs. It wasn’t just shock telling her that she had survived the crash. But the aches and shooting pains from every quarter of her body confirmed that she was, in fact, alive. Rolling onto her back, she scanned the area. Everyone else looked tattered all to hell, but alive as well.
Zach helped her to sit up. God, he looked like hell. Probably just a good reflection of how well she had fared.
She patted his arm as another fireball roared from the wreckage into the sky.
“Okay, so maybe not an ‘A’…”
* * *
Grant winced against the sun, the throbbing in his shoulder, and their abject failure. Who could have guessed that the bitch had an EM gun? A gun that actually shot directional EM pulses? He was seriously going to have to have a talk with the guys in R&D at Langley.
Luckily, their work with ionic metal components was pretty damned cutting edge. As his pilot smoldered on the ground next to him, Grant bit down hard on his back molar. He cracked the thin porcelain cap, cutting his cheek. He would have to have a good talking-to with the tech boys about that, too.
As moisture washed over the filament in his tooth, it activated the metal, creating an extremely temporary broadcast signal.
“No joy,” Grant said to the air, thick with acrid smoke. “The package is loose.” Of course, Grant couldn’t hear his superiors back in Washington, not with his earpiece dead, but he could certainly imagine the general mood. Pissed off and scared. “I repeat. The fucking package is on the loose.”
His tongue played with the edge of the cap. Tiny metal fragments floated up amongst the blood. Who knew if they even got that last bit? Grant surveyed the dry, barren Mexican countryside.
While the Federales would send someone for their downed pilots, Grant doubted very much if they would help him give chase. The CIA had already strained relations with the Mexican government over just the concept of kidnapping Zach to get to the Robin Hood hacker.
Now, to know that she’d pulled out an EM gun? They were not going to have the cojones to challenge her. No one did. Except for Grant.
One might think that after losing four jets, a chopper, and a literally half-baked pilot, it would have put a damper on his optimism. But Grant just whistled as he headed north.
Round one seldom went to the ultimate victor.
* * *
Zach ground his teeth, which didn’t really do anything to ward off the pain in his side. However, it certainly made him feel like he was doing something. Especially since Ronnie had put him on a “hunk” time-out. Or was that what Quirk called it? Either way, it galled him to have to sit on the sidelines as the other three pulled anything functional from the burned-out husk of the helicopter.
He watched as Ronnie brushed aside a stray lock as she rummaged through the wreckage. One would think, after being tortured and shot down out of the sky, that he might be a wee bit resentful of Ronnie.
Lord knew that if his mother had anything to say about it, she would say, “Once trouble, always trouble,” or “A lady who puts her elbows on the dinner table is no lady.” And he would be steaming right about now.
Granny, however? God rest her soul, she would be saying something like, “Such a dear to try to rescue you, no?” or “It’s the effort that counts.”
Yeah, he usually did fall on Granny’s side. Because how could he be upset with Ronnie? She’d risked her life, Quirk’s, and, as it turned out, the pilot’s—to save him. How many times did his therapist insist that Zach needed to find out exactly how committed Ronnie was to the relationship? Zach was pretty sure that taking on the CIA was pretty damn committed. He could hardly wait to tell Dr. Webster. Not.
Ronnie lugged a large, charred metallic suitcase over and plopped it down before stretching her back. Under any other circumstances, he would have hopped up to give her a hand.
Unfortunately, these were extremely difficult circumstances, as his right kidney throbbed. Literally, throbbed. Instead of rising, he nodded to the pilot, who was still in long johns and walking away from the wreckage. “Where’s he going?” Zach asked Ronnie.
Ronnie lifted her hand above her eyes to shield them from the afternoon sun. “Probably to get a sawed-off shotgun.”
“Wait!” Quirk shouted unceremoniously dropping his equipment nearly on Zach’s feet as he rushed after the pilot. “Wait!”
To Zach’s surprise, the pilot did stop as Quirk panted the ten whole steps he had to run. “Where are you going?”
“You destroyed a helicopter I’d assembled by hand. Where do you think I’m going?”
“But, but, but,” Quirk protested, “can’t you stay for lunch? I think I salvaged some Brie and crackers.”
Zach didn’t think that the burly pilot looked like a Brie kind of guy. So he wasn’t exactly surprised when the pilot turned and continued walking down the dusty valley floor.
“He’ll be back,” Quirk said as he rejoined them.
Ronnie snorted. “Yeah, with a sawed-off shotgun.”
“Whichever,” Zach said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Zach did not like the fact that Grant’s helicopter had gone down just over the ridge. While he hoped fervently that his ex-partner had died in that fiery crash, they couldn’t be sure. And if Zach had learned something over the past twenty-four hours, it was not to assume anything.
“Already on it,” Quirk said with a wave of his hand. He popped the locks on a briefcase, bringing to bear half a dozen computers running half a dozen programs that Zach didn’t even know existed. “But I gotta say, even if I get our satcom working, we’ve got to wait for us to move into a new satellite’s coverage range. Then, mounting an evacuation could take—”
“Pay double,” Ronnie announced.
Okay, Zach hadn’t known her for long, but paying double? That seemed far outside Ronnie’s comfort zone. The expression on Quirk’s face and his inability to respond immediately confirmed Zach’s suspicions.
“Double?” Quirk s
tammered. “Did I just hear you correctly?”
“Pay whatever you have to,” Ronnie confirmed. “I want out of here by nightfall.”
“Ja, mein Kommandant, ” Quirk replied.
Ronnie frowned, and then turned to Zach. “And now we’ve got some metallic ions to remove.”
Damn it. He’d forgotten about the plant. He still had a tracking device embedded somewhere in his skin. You would think that he could feel a microfilament, but with all of his cuts and bruises? Where didn’t his body hurt?
Ronnie grinned, though, as she sat down cross-legged next to him. Was it the glow of the fire behind her, or was she just that radiant? Not in the high couture, fake eyelashes kind of way. Hell, she had soot streaks in her hair, and it looked like her left eyebrow was half-singed off. But she glowed in the kind of way that he could imagine waking up to each morning.
If they could make it through this, exactly what other challenge could the world throw at them that they couldn’t tackle? Together? She reached out to check his left shoulder, but he caught her hand instead, tenderly pulling it to his cheek.
“Ronnie…”
Instead of easing into him, she stiffened. “Not now.”
“Then when?” he asked.
* * *
Ronnie gulped. There was Zach, looking all doe-eyed at her. His voice was thick with passion. Why couldn’t she just lean in and quench a thirst that had been parching her for months? Except…
“I’ve had a picture of this…” Ronnie looked into Zach’s eyes. One was bloodshot, while the other was nearly swollen shut. He’d never looked so handsome. “A picture of us for so long.”
“Then why?” he asked, so close that she could taste his cologne.
She simply glanced over her shoulder. The chopper was still aflame, along with dozens of pieces of wreckage. And now, a goat, of all things, walked across the valley toward them. Seriously—a goat.
“And this isn’t it,” she sighed. “It just isn’t.”
Zach leaned back, seeming to get it, or he just caught scent of her more-than- aromatic scent. Either way, she went back to checking for the filament. Ronnie fingered her way through his hair. How many times had she dreamed of tugging on these locks?
“Then we need to talk,” Zach said.
“Talk?” Ronnie asked. “Again with the talking! We haven’t even had a first date yet, dude.”
Zach cocked his head. Why did he have to look so damn cute? Ronnie thought. It was even harder to resist him in person. At least over the iPod he couldn’t chide her with those crackling eyes.
“Fine,” she said going back to picking through his hair like a groupie baboon.
“Were you serious about helping to decode the Hidden Hand’s cipher?”
Ronnie shifted up onto her knees. Between all of the cuts and scrapes and burns, there were a thousand places where the tiny wound from the filament insertion could hide.
“I may hate the CIA, but I’m not exactly going to let mankind get thrown back into the Dark Ages out of spite.”
Granted, she wanted her own island to get far, far, far away from other humans, but that didn’t mean she wanted them all gone. Well, at least not the majority of them.
“Then I think—”
“Stop,” she ordered.
“But—”
“No, I mean stop moving,” she said as she parted his hair at the nape of his neck. “I think I found it.”
There it was. The tiny punctate lesion. The only reason she found it, really, was because it was starting to scab over. All the rest of Zach’s wounds were still fresh and bleeding. She grabbed a pair of jeweler’s tweezers from the case next to her and grabbed the tiny end of the filament. Ever so carefully, she snaked the metal out from under Zach’s skin.
She held up the bloody fiber that looked more like a spider’s silk than a tracking device. Zach leaned in, tilting his head.
“That is what gave us away?”
“Yep,” Ronnie replied, putting the thing in a lead-lined tube. Quirk would have a field day with the material once he got it back to his mad-scientist laboratory. She had every confidence that he would not only be able replicate the device, but also find a way to deactivate it without having to go all ape on someone.
Once the cap was screwed on nice and tight, blocking any transmission that might give away their location, Ronnie sat back on her heels.
“Now, you were saying something regarding the salvation of our world from a weaponized strain of the Black Death?”
A smile played at the edge of his lips. Good. He was starting to get her dark humor.
“Yes, we were,” he replied, and then caught her gaze again. How she wanted to get lost in those brilliant blues, but unfortunately, there really was a weaponized strain of the Black Death on the loose. “I recognized something while I was being interrogated.”
By the look of the bruises Zach had before her efficiency-challenged rescue, he hadn’t been interrogated—he had been tortured.
“I realized that I had seen the symbols they needed decoded before,” Zach said.
“Where?”
Zach grabbed a stick from the ground and began drawing. “Back in El Paso, a crazed old man had carved them into his skin.”
Ronnie frowned. “Carved?”
“Yeah. I mean, I just thought he was clinically insane. He’d just tried to torch a painting—”
“The Picasso?” Ronnie interjected.
“Yes,” Zach said, stopping his artistic rendering in the dirt. “How did you know?”
Um, besides tracking everything that happened in the El Paso FBI office? Ronnie felt maybe that was something best held back until the second date. She shrugged, trying to look as casual as she could. “Must have caught it on the news.”
Luckily, Zach went back to his drawing. “Anyway, I am pretty damn sure that at least one of those symbols was in the Hidden Hand documents that Grant showed me.”
Zach leaned back, revealing the symbol.
Crap. Of all the symbols in the world, it had to be that one. The one that had been burned into their monitors back in the cold room.
She turned to Quirk. “Grab my laptop.”
“What? Do I look like your bitch?” Quirk said, hand on hip. “Do I?”
Ronnie cut him some slack. After all, his hair was mussed and he was working in distinctly non-clean room conditions. As he returned to fixing their communications equipment, Ronnie dug through the various cases and found her laptop. She flipped it open, finding the screenshot that she was looking for.
The angelic script glittered gold.
“You mean like this one?” she asked Zach.
“Exactly.”
Ronnie sat down hard. “Guess it wasn’t spam.”
* * *
“How…how did you get this?” Zach asked. He should have known, though, that Ronnie would not be just a step, but a full block ahead of everyone else. Yet, it still seemed shocking to see the same symbol glow on her screen that had been etched in the old man’s flesh, and again in the Hidden Hand’s papers.
“Long story,” Ronnie said with a sigh. “Just know that angelic script has been considered unbreakable for millennia.”
Zach nodded. “Yeah, that’s the impression I got. Grant said that the entire team at Langley couldn’t crack it.”
“Well, why didn’t they just say so?” Ronnie said, chuckling. “We could have avoided several helicopter crashes if they’d just appealed to my competitive nature.”
“So, what are you going to do?” he asked, although he pretty much knew the answer.
Ronnie settled back into a cross-legged stance, stretching her neck from one side to the other. “Um, crack it?”
He was pretty sure that she meant the code and not her neck. But with Ronnie, you couldn’t ever be 100 percent sure.
“Just like that?”
“Well, not exactly,” she responded, lacing her fingers together and then extending them. “Let Quirk know that I will be back in
three hours.”
“Be back?” Zach asked as Ronnie began typing. “Where are you going?”
Ronnie didn’t answer. Instead, her eyes tracked back and forth across the screen as her fingers flew along the keyboard.
“Ronnie?” he asked, but again, he got no answer. He put his hand up, waving it. But still nothing.
“Quirk!” he yelled.
The young man straightened from his task. “Oh, my God. You two are so needy! A match made in heaven.”
“There’s something wrong with Ronnie.”
“Seriously, what?” Quirk asked, although Zach noticed that the man did hurry over. “I am trying to save our lives here. Along with keeping up to date on everything plague.”
Quirk stepped in front of Ronnie. “Okay, what seems to be the problem?”
“She isn’t responding,” Zach pointed out, although that should have been pretty damn clear when she didn’t even look up as Quirk approached. He snapped his fingers in front of Ronnie. Nothing.
“Really? I mean it doesn’t exactly seem to be a great use of time management, but you called me over for this?”
“Yes.” Zach wasn’t sure if he could really fulfill the promise of his “don’t mess with me” stare, but he brought it to bear anyway.
Quirk cocked his head. “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“She’s looping. Cycling? OCD’ing to the max?” Quirk must have sensed Zach’s confusion, because he followed up with actual compassion in his voice. “Ronnie’s got obsessive-compulsive disorder. She didn’t mention this little mental condition? It’s her secret behind the sauce.”
Zach watched as Ronnie’s eyes flickered, watching the data that flowed so quickly across the screen that it was a blur. How could she be reading that, let alone taking it all in? But her fingers raced nearly as fast as the data, moving symbols from one side of the screen to another, turning them over, flipping them vertically. It was like watching a Rubik’s Cube on crack.
Encrypted: An Action-Packed Techno-Thriller Page 18