Manhunt in the Wild West

by Jessica Andersen

  That’d come back to bite Sara, but Chelsea knew her friend would handle it quietly. There was no need to gossip.

  Noticing that the driver had started to fidget, she said, “Don’t stress. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

  He mumbled something, grabbed the clipboard and turned away, heading back for the van.

  “Hey!” she called, starting after him. “I haven’t signed off yet.”

  Just then, Jerry started pushing the first gurney toward the morgue, and she saw that he’d acquired a smear of red on the front of his scrubs.

  “Jerry, stop,” Chelsea said quickly as a twist of worry locked in her stomach. She crossed to the blue-eyed guard, who was facing away from her, prepping the second bag for transport. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Weren’t these body bags surface-cleaned back at the prison?”

  They certainly should’ve been. Not only was it standard protocol, but it was also doubly important in this case, given that they didn’t yet know why or how the prisoners had died.

  Her guard turned—that was how she found herself thinking of him, as “her guard,” though that was silly—and she got the full-on gut punch of his charisma. His features were lean, his skin drawn and pale, and he didn’t look like he smiled much. And those eyes…up close they were even more magnetic than she’d thought them from afar, ice blue and arresting, and holding a level of intensity that reached inside her and grabbed on, kindling a curl of heat in her belly.

  He looked more like a grown-up than most of the thirty-somethings she knew. He looked like a leader, like someone who would take charge of any situation.

  “We’re just the transporters,” he said, his voice a rough rasp that slid along her nerve endings and left tiny shivers behind. “We’re running late, so it’d be best if you signed off on the delivery so we can be on our way.” Something moved in his expression, there and gone so quickly she almost missed it, but leaving the impression that his words were more an order than a suggestion.

  Nerves fired through her, warning that something wasn’t right.

  Not liking the feeling, or the strange effect the guard had on her, Chelsea backpedaled a step. But she stuck to operating procedures, saying, “I’m not signing anything if there’s blood on the bags. You have no idea what killed these men. For all we know, it could be an infectious agent.” She gestured for Jerry to step away from the gurney, and reached for her cell phone. “Leave everything right where it is. I’m calling my boss.”

  This is so not what Sara needs right now, she thought, but protocol was protocol, and if the medical staff at the ARX Supermax had been so sloppy as to allow the bodies to be shipped without the bags being disinfected first, who knew what other safety precaution they might’ve skipped?

  “Wait,” the blue-eyed guard said, holding up a hand. At that same moment, the guard behind him spun and grabbed for something on his belt. A gun.

  Chelsea’s eyes locked on the weapon, and she froze.

  Jerry’s head jerked up and his mouth went slack, his eyes locking on the other guard. “Hey, aren’t you—”

  The man shot him where he stood.

  Jerry jerked spasmodically as blood bloomed in the center of his forehead. Then he went limp and fell, his eyes glazing as he dropped, his mouth open in an “O” of surprise.

  To Chelsea, the world seemed to slow down, his body collapsing at half-speed. She sucked in a breath to scream, but before she could make a sound, something slammed into her temple, dazing her.

  She staggered, only just beginning to realize that the guards weren’t guards at all. They were convicts wearing the clothing of the guards who were no doubt filling the body bags in the van. Somehow the prisoners had played dead and then pulled a switch en route.

  Heart drumming as her consciousness dimmed, Chelsea fumbled for her phone, and watched it spin out of her grasp and clatter to the ground, which pitched and heaved beneath her. The blue-eyed guard caught her as she fell, supporting her in his strong, steady arms, in a grip that shouldn’t have felt as good as it did.

  The last thing she comprehended before she passed out was a piercing sense of disappointment that somehow existed alongside the terror. Of course he was trouble; she’d never been truly attracted to any other kind of man. Sara had even joked one time that Chelsea’s taste in men was going to be the death of her.

  What if she’d been right?

  Chapter Two

  Jonah Fairfax hadn’t touched a woman in nearly nine months, and this was not how he’d pictured ending the drought.

  When Fax had imagined his reintroduction to feminine companionship from the sterile gloom of his six-by-ten cell, he’d figured on candlelight, good food and soft music, and either a paid escort or a sympathetic friend of a friend. Or, hell, even his handler and sometimes lover, who called herself Jane Doe even in bed.

  The woman’s identity hadn’t been particularly important to his sexual fantasy. What had mattered were the trappings of civilization, the colors and smells, and the textures of real life.

  However, that fantasy most definitely hadn’t involved a prison meat wagon backed up to the morgue where they’d been stood up by Rickey Charles, the contact who was the key to the next stage in their getaway. And it definitely hadn’t starred a pistol-whipped woman hanging limply in his arms…and three seriously nasty terrorists glaring at him like they already regretted involving him in their jailbreak.

  Not that they’d had a choice. He’d made damn sure of that, with help from Jane and some of the other agents working underneath her. She headed up a national security agency so secret it didn’t even have a name, one that was organized along the lines of the very terror networks it hunted, with each agent functioning as a separate cell, not knowing who else might be involved, or how.

  For this particular op, Jane had gotten Fax arrested for murder, constructing such a deep, seamless cover that even his mother and brothers had written him off. That had been the only way to make him useful to al-Jihad, just as orchestrating an escape had been the only way they could come up with to flush out the high-level terrorist’s suspected contacts within Homeland Security itself.

  The deaths of the prison guards and the morgue attendant were regrettable, but Jane had chosen Fax for the op because she knew he could function in the bloodiest situations and deal with an acceptable level of collateral damage—and innocent lives lost—if it meant getting the job done. It was cold, yes, but necessary.

  Jane had honed that level of detachment, perhaps, but he could thank his wife, Abby, for setting him on the path. She’d been dead five years now, and he thought she would’ve hated what he’d become. No way she would’ve accepted the part her betrayal had played—she’d never been big on personal accountability. But even as he thought that, Fax was mildly surprised to realize it’d been some time since he’d last thought of the woman who’d been his high-school sweetheart, and later his wife. In the past, her memory had driven him, haunted him, made him into the bloodless man he’d become, the one Jane had needed and wanted.

  Now, it seemed, even the warmth of anger was fading, leaving him colder still.

  “You gonna kill the bitch or dance with her first?” Lee Mawadi asked, nodding to the woman in Fax’s arms with a sneer.

  Then again, Lee seemed to do pretty much everything with a sneer. Fax was pretty sure it covered some major insecurities.

  Fax didn’t know any of his fellow escapees well, because the 24/7 solitary confinement at the ARX Supermax tended to cut down on social discourse. He’d met the three terrorists in person for the first time just an hour earlier, when they’d awoken from the drugs Jane had smuggled to him, which had mimicked death close enough to pass inspection for twelve hours.

  Almost immediately upon awakening, Fax had pegged the thirtysomething, blond Lee Mawadi as a wannabe, a follower. Lee had grown up a rich, pampered American, but had developed a love of violence along the way, a desire to kill, and be part of a killing squad. He’d hooked up with al-Jihad and h
ad found the leader he’d been seeking. He’d played the part of a businessman, married a photographer and lived the American dream, all while working as a member of al-Jihad’s crew, following orders without question.

  Lee was a lemming, but Fax suspected he was a nasty critter, the sort that would bite you before it ran off the cliff in pursuit of its leader.

  “No need to kill her,” Fax said in answer to Lee’s question. “She’s out cold.” He shifted the woman’s deadweight, figuring on dumping her off to the side, out of harm’s way. The younger, male morgue attendant was beyond help, but if Fax played it right, he could probably leave the woman alive without attracting too much suspicion. Motioning to the van with his chin, he raised his voice and called to the other members of the small group, “Let’s get out of here. Our cover’s blown to hell thanks to Lee’s itchy trigger finger.”

  As planned, they’d come out of the coma-inducing meds mid-transpo. Fax had suffered a moment of atavistic terror at finding himself zipped inside a body bag, but al-Jihad had come through as promised. The bag was taped shut rather than zippered, and one of the four guards had distracted the others long enough for the prisoners to emerge from their bags and get into position. Then they’d killed all four guards—including their accomplice, whom al-Jihad didn’t trust to stay bought—by breaking their necks, so as to keep their uniforms unbloodied. Then they’d switched places, four for four. Fax didn’t know what the death-mimicking meds had contained, but they’d left him with a nasty hangover and occasional double vision. That didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, his cover intact. His job was to keep it that way until he figured out who al-Jihad was working with, and what they planned to do next.

  With fanatical monsters like him it wasn’t a case of if; it was a case of when and where.

  “Hey!” Slow to catch the insult, Lee spun in the midst of dragging the younger man’s body into the van. “The guy recognized me. I had no choice!”

  “Maybe,” Fax retorted, propping the woman up against the cold cement wall, partially hidden behind a Dumpster. “Maybe not.”

  Knowing he was pushing it, he slid a look at the other two men, who as far as he was concerned were far more dangerous than Lee Mawadi.

  Muhammad Feyd’s dossier pegged the dark-eyed, dark-haired man at thirty-eight, a fanatic among fanatics who’d left al Qaeda in search of a more proactive group of anti-Western terrorists. He’d found exactly that in the man seated in the passenger’s seat of the prison transpo van…a man known simply as al-Jihad.

  The terrorist leader’s dossier was thin, devoid of any information predating the new millennium. He’d appeared on the world stage just before the September 11th terror attacks, had slipped out of the country immediately thereafter, and had played tag with Homeland Security for the next several years. Federal law enforcement suspected that he’d been the mastermind behind numerous bombings and other atrocities, but had never managed to concretely tie him to any of the attacks until he’d finally been tried and convicted for the Santa Bombings that had occurred in several major Colorado cities a few years earlier.

  Targeting six shopping malls all owned by the American Mall group, the bombings had been planned to coincide with the ceremonial arrival of the mall Santas to their decorated thrones. All six of the Santas had died…along with the parents and children who’d been lined up, eagerly awaiting the kickoff to the holiday season.

  It had been terrorism at its most horrible, and local and federal law enforcement had worked around the clock to indict and convict al-Jihad and his henchmen. They had succeeded, but the evidence had been more circumstantial than proof-positive. The terrorists’ high-powered defense attorney had lodged appeal after appeal, but the filings had wound up logjammed in the legal system, which Fax figured was no accident. The courts had no love of terrorists.

  The delay had given Jane time to formulate Fax’s cover and arrange to have him locked up in the same prison as the terrorist leader and his two lieutenants. She’d turned Fax’s honorable military discharge into a dishonorable ousting, cast him in the role of anarchist, invoked the USA PATRIOT Act and held him without trial, making him that much more attractive to an anti-American bastard like al-Jihad.

  And thus, an unholy alliance had been born, right on schedule.

  In person, the terrorist leader was tall, thin and angular, and graceful enough in his movements that he almost appeared effete…except for his eyes, which were those of a killer.

  From reading the available reports, Fax had known that al-Jihad would be a smart, driven, dangerous man. Meeting him in the flesh had reinforced that impression and added a new realization: the bastard wasn’t just dangerous; he was completely without a conscience when it came to killing Americans. Worse, he enjoyed the hell out of it.

  That put Fax in an even more tenuous position than he’d anticipated, making it a seriously bad idea to draw attention. Yet that was just what he was risking if he fought too hard to save the pretty medical examiner from becoming part of the collateral damage.

  “Boss?” Lee said plaintively, looking at the passenger’s seat of the van, where al-Jihad sat silent and square-shouldered.

  The terrorist leader sent his follower a dark look that all but said “get a spine,” yet he said nothing.

  Muhammad aimed a kick at Lee and growled, “Get in the damn van.” He jerked his chin at Fax. “You, too. And bring the woman. We’ll need a hostage if things get sticky on the way out.”

  The original plan had been for Rickey Charles—whom al-Jihad had somehow contacted and bribed—to cover the switch for as long as possible, giving them time to get well away. In the absence of that help, their window of opportunity to escape cleanly was closing fast.

  “But—” Fax bit off the protest, knowing he was already on tenuous footing with the terrorists.

  The only reason he was there at all was because he’d developed the contact for the death-mimicking drugs they’d needed to get on the meat wagon. He’d contacted al-Jihad through a Byzantine trail of notes hidden in the few common areas the prisoners were given access to, one at a time. He’d offered the drug in exchange for a place within al-Jihad’s terror cell, and the plan had been born.

  Frankly, he was somewhat surprised they hadn’t tried to kill him yet, now that they were outside the prison walls. That they hadn’t tried to off him indicated that they still had some use for him, but he had a feeling that amnesty wouldn’t last long if he started arguing orders.

  She’s acceptable collateral damage, he told himself, and went back for the woman.

  Damned if she didn’t stir a little and curl into him when he picked her up and held her against his chest. Surprised, he looked down.

  She had dark, chestnut-highlighted hair and faint freckles visible through a fading summer tan. Her cheeks and lips were full, her chin softly rounded, and her nose turned up slightly at the end, giving her an almost childlike, vulnerable air. But there was nothing childlike about the curves that pressed against him, and there was sure as hell nothing juvenile about the unexpected surge of lust that slammed into him when she shifted and turned her face into his neck, so her hair tickled the edge of his ear and feathered across the sensitive skin beneath his jaw.

  “Move your ass,” Lee snapped from inside the van.

  Muhammad finished disabling the vehicle’s state-issued GPS locator and got in the driver’s seat, then gunned the engine to warn Fax that he was running out of time.

  Sometimes it’s necessary to sacrifice a few to save the rest, Fax reminded himself. Still, his stomach twisted in a sick ball as he slung the woman through the side door of the vehicle, so she landed near her dead friend, whose corpse was stacked with two of the guards’ bodies. The other two bodies were still on the gurneys, one of which was jammed in at an angle where Lee had shoved it in after their escape plan had blown up in their faces.

  Even without Rickey Charles, they might’ve bluffed their way through the body transfer and talked the woman into signing
off without confirming the identities of the corpses, but once Lee killed the morgue attendant, even that slim chance had disappeared.

  Their escape could get real messy real quick, Fax knew. Problem was, he needed them to get free so the terrorists would reach out to their contacts and plan their next move.

  Which meant the woman’s life—and his own, for that matter—were expendable in the grand scheme of things.

  Hating the necessity more than he would’ve expected to, he jumped into the van and rolled the side door closed just as Muhammad hit the gas and the van peeled away from the ME’s office.

  The four men braced to hear the alarm raised any second, to see pursuit behind them. But there was no alarm, no pursuit as al-Jihad’s second in command navigated the city streets of Bear Claw.

  Fax noted that they were heading roughly northward, back in the direction of the prison rather than away, but he didn’t ask why, didn’t even let on that he’d noticed or even cared. He simply filed the information, and hoped like hell he’d have a chance to get it to Jane before al-Jihad and the others decided he’d outlived his usefulness.

  Maybe five miles outside the city limits, well down a deserted road that wound through the state forest, Muhammad pulled off into a small parking lot that served a trailhead leading into the wilderness.

  Al-Jihad, who was still riding shotgun, turned to Lee and Fax, and said in his dead, inflectionless voice, “Kill the woman and dump all of the bodies in the canyon. We won’t need them where we’re going.”

  Which is where? Fax wanted to ask but didn’t because he knew the game too well. The more he followed orders without question, the longer he would live, and the more information he’d gain about the structure of al-Jihad’s network inside the U.S.

  So instead of asking the questions he wanted answered, he nodded and rolled open the side door, then waited while Lee climbed out. When the other man turned back, Fax shoved one of the body bags at him.