by Rachel Lee
A sense of betrayal began burning in him, but this wasn’t the time to let it take over. Trace forced it down, trying to clear his head, suddenly wishing he hadn’t taken the pain pill. It wouldn’t help at all, not right now. What good would it do him to ease his hand when his brain would be in low gear?
“We’ve got some time. Bill never told anyone he directed you to me, and I talked to him on a scrambled line this morning.”
“You have one?” Trace hadn’t expected that, given that Ryker had hung up his spurs. That technology was doled out very carefully.
“Better believe it. When I resigned, I still had a lot of useful stuff in my brain. They want to pick it occasionally. Think they’re going to trust the phone company with that? Or that I would? Hell, we don’t even let the NSA eavesdrop on our lines.”
But another thought had occurred to Trace and it made him sick. “I got your address on an unsecure line. I’d better leave now. I don’t want your family at risk.”
“Well...” Ryker’s eyes twinkled unexpectedly. “The conversation I had with Bill this morning wasn’t exactly as straightforward as I reported. We talked sideways on purpose. I gave Bill a helluva lecture about revealing my whereabouts, and I told him I’d sent you on your way this morning. So if anybody was listening, I sounded p.o.’d, Bill sounded apologetic and loosely explanatory, and in theory you’re already on the road. We’re gonna need to get your car out of town along with the phone, though. You okay to drive?”
“Yeah.” Trace started smiling. His head was getting into the game again. He guessed he’d been missing a sense of purpose. And it felt good not to be alone for the first time in a few weeks. “You wouldn’t happen to know of a junkyard a few hundred miles from here?”
“Well, I do happen to know just the right guy to get a car towed a long, long way.”
* * *
An unreasonable curiosity dragged Julie off her usual path to the elementary school and past the motel. Trace’s car was still there, but probably wouldn’t be for long. Then she got a jolt as she saw Ryker exit the room with the guy. What was going on?
Down the street a way, she pulled over to the curb and watched her rearview mirror. For some reason Ryker dashed across the state highway into the truck stop parking lot. A few minutes later he dashed back. She saw him wave toward the center of the town, then jog up the street to where his car was parked.
What the heck? It was like a scene out of some spy movie, she thought, almost laughing at herself. Why in the world would Ryker park up the street instead of in the motel lot? Shaking her head as questions percolated in her mind, she started to put her car in gear. As she looked to the side she found Ryker pulling up beside her. He was lowering his window, so she touched the button to lower hers.
“Julie,” he said.
“Ryker. What...”
He interrupted her. “Whatever you just saw, forget it. Completely. Curiosity and the cat. You read me?”
Astonished, she gaped at him, feeling her head bob agreement. “I never saw a thing,” she said when she could find her voice.
He smiled. “Good. Just keep Marisa in mind.”
Then he pulled away, leaving her with more questions than ever. Eventually she pulled out, remembering that twenty-two children would be piling into her classroom very soon. But she didn’t want to think about those kids.
She wanted to think about what had just happened and what it might mean, and why he was concerned about Marisa.
No matter how many times she told herself to just forget it, as Ryker had warned her, the questions kept percolating in her mind. Somehow she had to find out what was going on.
Determined that she would, she entered her classroom smiling.
* * *
Ryker had told Trace just last night to lie low. Walking into a busy sheriff’s office hardly struck Trace as staying low. It actually seemed quite high-profile. His nerves began to crawl.
No names were exchanged. The wizened woman at the dispatcher’s desk, who squinted at them through a cloud of smoke that issued from the illicit cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, merely jerked her head toward the back.
Trace followed Ryker down a hallway to an open door that had the word Sheriff stenciled on the frosted glass top. Inside a man with a burn-scarred face sat behind the desk, his khaki uniform neatly pressed. He spoke without rising.
“Hey, Ryker. Close the door.” Then his gaze settled on Trace, taking him in. “Sit down,” he said to both of them, “and tell me what all the cloak-and-dagger stuff is about.”
Trace tensed. Some things were not to be revealed under any circumstances, and certainly nothing about the situation he was in. Operational security could be compromised inadvertently. “Maybe I should just go,” he said.
Ryker clapped a hand to his shoulder. “Maybe you should, but we’re going to discuss other options here. Sheriff Dalton worked undercover for years with the DEA. I think he might have some understanding of what we could be dealing with here, and I’m sure he doesn’t expect either of us to reveal anything we’re not allowed to.” Then Ryker returned his attention to the sheriff. “Gage, you know I worked for the State Department. So did my friend here.”
Trace watched in amazement as understanding dawned in the sheriff’s gaze. “Yeah, I know all about that,” the man said, and somehow Trace believed he did. Reading between the lines.
“Well,” Ryker continued, “Trace was badly hurt, and he’s been cut loose. Our main concern is that he may have a tiger on his tail.”
Gage’s sharp gaze flashed back to Trace. “Well, and here I was starting to get bored with domestic disputes and traffic accidents. Winter’s a bad time for accidents.”
Trace said nothing, but his nerves stopped crawling. The sheriff had figured it out and knew not to say too much. Ryker had been right. And was that a possible solution Gage had just mentioned?
Trace decided to take over. After what Ryker had told him, there was no longer any doubt in his mind. “I need to get out of town. I need to be gone. I don’t want to put Ryker and his family at risk. Then there’s this Julie Ardlow. She asked me to sit with her at the diner last night for coffee, after I met her at Ryker’s house.”
“And she knows something is going on,” Ryker said heavily. “I warned her off.”
“You’re new around here, Ryker,” Dalton said. “Let me assure you that Julie takes no as a challenge. She’s not going to leave it alone.”
“Unless I leave,” said Trace, standing. The buzz of the drugs made him a little light-headed. “My phone’s on its way to...where?” he said to Ryker.
“A semi that was going to Denver.”
“Okay. Then I’ll ditch my car somewhere between here and there, get another and take a different direction.”
“You can’t keep running,” Ryker argued.
Trace simply shook his head. “I’ll get what’s coming to me, whatever it is, but it’s not going to land on someone else’s head. I never should have come here.”
“Sit a moment,” Dalton said mildly. “While I do admire your scruples, fact is, you’re in my town and that makes you my headache, at least briefly. So what do you know about this tiger?”
Trace sat slowly, ignoring the pounding in his arm, taking care not to let the meds make him clumsy. “Until this morning, I wasn’t even sure there was one. Vague...gossip, if you will. Ryker made a call and it appears trouble is stalking me, but that’s all either of us knows. Not who, why or anything. Which makes this a nearly unsolvable problem.”
Gage nodded slowly, rocking back in his desk chair. It squealed a protest. The only sound in the room. “Many years ago,” he said slowly, “I had a problem like that and I didn’t know it. A car bomb intended for me killed my entire family. I survived. Only one itch saved me from cutting my own throat. I wanted to find th
e SOB who’d ratted me out.”
Trace nodded. Gage’s experience didn’t shock him, because he’d seen it in his own unsavory world. “I get it. But for me it’s not too late to protect everyone else.”
“Maybe not. No way to know, but I was driving at something else. You need to start thinking real hard. You’d be surprised how different some things can look in light of new information.”
Trace knew he was right. It could. It might. Something might reveal itself. But he wasn’t about to sit here while the guy closed in on him and his friend. He needed to clear out. “I can think on the road.”
“Or maybe we can make it seem you’re on the road.”
Trace shook his head. “I appreciate it, but I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time in situations like this. I can take care of myself now, without endangering anyone else.” That was the most important thing. It always had been.
“You can’t possibly know that,” Ryker said. “You’re assuming a sniper’s bullet at fifteen hundred yards. What if it’s a bomb? What if other people get unavoidably involved?”
“Like what happened to my family,” Gage remarked. “Best you stay around people who know what’s going on. Who might be able to help. Like I said, I admire your scruples, but they don’t necessarily protect anyone. And not everyone has them.”
Trace sat in silence, staring down at his still-gloved, destroyed hand. They were right. He didn’t want to admit it—he wished he’d never set foot in this town—but they were right.
He’d been a damned fool to ever come here, but he hadn’t really believed he was in trouble. Not when he arrived here, simply because a colleague he knew lived here. The threat had been so vague that it seemed improbable that anything would happen. Someone looking for him under his real name? Could have been anyone and probably meaningless. He figured the suggestion of a threat had been used to shunt him aside until his medical retirement came through. He’d become useless, mainly because of the pain and the meds, and frankly no one wanted to see him hanging around like a reminder of what could happen to any of them. He’d known he made his coworkers uneasy.
But this? The burn of betrayal was returning, lighting a fire deep in his belly. The sheriff was right about one thing: he wanted to know who’d put him in this position and who was after him. He wanted those answers more than he wanted to preserve his own messed-up life.
He sighed. “I took my pain meds this morning. I’m not at my best. I need more coffee.”
“Three didn’t do it?” Ryker asked.
“This is strong stuff. That’s why I hate to take it.”
Dalton surprised him by rising and limping over to the door. He opened it and leaned out. “Hal!”
“Yo?”
“Get me six tall and strongs, black, from Maude’s. Double time.”
Then he limped back to his seat, and with every one of his careful movements, Trace felt a twinge of sympathy for the sheriff. Evidently he hadn’t escaped all the effects of the bomb that had killed his family.
“That’ll tick Velma off good,” the sheriff remarked when he’d settled again.
“Velma?” Trace asked.
“The smoking volcano at the front desk. She makes us coffee every morning. We all pretend to drink it so as not to offend her. Might as well swallow thickened battery acid.” Gage waved a hand. “Her coffee is infamous. Enough about that. We’ll pump some more caffeine into you, and when you feel ready, we’ll get into some detail about what, if anything, Conard County can do for you, if you’ll let us.”
Trace shook his head, trying to absorb this. “Why should you help me? You don’t know me from Adam.”
“I have some inkling about the service you’ve been providing to this country,” Gage said quietly. “I get freaking frosted when people like you get cut loose. I don’t like the stench, and I want to clean it up. Besides, you’re Ryker’s friend, and his wife means a whole lot to folks around here.”
That was when Trace realized he’d walked onto a different planet.
* * *
The coffee arrived within ten minutes. Trace drank the first as fast as he could without burning his mouth and throat, then started on another. The two other men took their time chatting about how another storm was about to blow in and how everyone hoped it would be the last of the winter.
Trace listened with only half an ear. Ryker had given him enough information to fly with this morning, and as the coffee drove away the fuzziness the meds caused in his mind, it slipped into high gear. He’d hated the last weeks of running from an invisible threat that might not even exist. Well, now he was pretty certain it was real. Not knowing who or what made it pretty hard to take evasive action, but at least there was a reason for what he needed to do.
As a field operative, he’d seen enough of the underside to know that sometimes assets were more important than operatives, that his employer would protect some of them at any cost. He’d never known personally of a case where an operative had been hung out to dry, but it didn’t exceed his ability to imagine. It became even easier to imagine when the operative, namely him, had become useless. Yeah, they’d do it all right. If an important asset demanded Trace’s blood, nobody would intervene.
He looked up, interrupting the conversation without apology. “My phone’s on the road. The car needs to be, too.”
Ryker checked his watch. “Very soon. The driver of the truck I put your phone on was just walking inside to order breakfast when I spoke to him. He’s probably just finishing up. Or maybe just pulled out of the lot. But you’re right.”
“I’d better get to it, then.”
“Hold it,” said Dalton. “Give it five.”
“Why?”
“Because Ryker told me earlier we might need to get rid of your car. I’ve got a couple of guys who should be here any minute. So you think they’ve got a tracking device on your auto?”
“I don’t know. It’s unlikely, but I never looked for one. Besides, phones are easy to track. But if they’re tracking both, then we don’t want them to get too far apart.”
“Why in the devil would they want to track you when they’ve cut you loose?” Gage nearly growled.
“Because,” Trace said, “I might be a peace offering.” Dead silence answered him.
The burn was growing. He’d spent a long time preoccupied by his recovery and rehab, and hadn’t been paying much attention to a lot of things. When they suggested it might be best for him to hit the road until they figured out if he was at risk, it had made perfect sense in the morphine-induced haze.
He’d gotten off the morphine to milder stuff, meds he could mostly control with coffee, but he hadn’t really thought about the entire setup. He was a field operative, for heaven’s sake. Living at risk didn’t seem strange or unusual to him. Being on the run had sometimes been part of his job. It had never occurred to him that the agency might just want him to be far away when fate overtook him. Plausible deniability was stamped all over this.
He looked up again as a tall man entered the office without knocking. His bearing, his gaze... Trace would have bet the guy had a special ops background. To the casual eye, it wouldn’t show. To the experienced eye, it was unmistakable.
“Hi, Seth,” Gage said. “I’m not going to introduce you.”
Seth half smiled. “I wouldn’t expect it. What do you need?”
“I need you and Wade to wreck a vehicle for me. Make it bad but nonfatal.”
“Easy enough.”
“Well, I’m not done yet,” Gage said. “We need to do this fast. There’s a cell phone on a commercial truck headed for Denver. I need the crash to occur about one hundred and fifty miles from here, close to that phone. Maybe twenty or so miles ahead of the truck.” He looked at Ryker. “Whose truck?”
Ryker rattled off a license number and a de
scription.
Seth nodded. “Got it.”
“Leave the vehicle, leave the plates on it. One of you can drive an official car so neither of you get stopped for speeding on your way out, okay?” He pointed to the wall. “Grab the keys for number sixteen. She’s gassed and ready to go.” Then he turned his attention toward Trace. “Your keys?”
Trace stood, shoving his good hand into his jacket pocket and pulling them out, handing them over. “Might be smart to lose these in the snow, too.”
Seth smiled faintly. “Will do. Which car?”
“Virginia plates, dark blue.”
“See you in a few hours,” Seth said and departed.
Trace began to see a little humor in all this, out of place though it was. “Who was that masked man?”
Gage chuckled. “Hang around here for a while and you’ll find out.” Then he leaned forward, reaching for his coffee. “We’ve got one more immediate problem. Julie Ardlow.”
Julie Ardlow. Trace thought about her, of course, but what really chapped him was that he’d lost control of everything. Oh, he knew he wasn’t at his best with pain pills in his system, and he seriously considered throwing them away. But each time he started to, he was forced to admit that he couldn’t yet. The pain could keep him from thinking clearly even more than the meds. At least those he could fight with coffee.
But he was usually the manager of operations like this. The one who laid out the plan and directed it. Instead, he was along for the ride, and he didn’t like it. He approved of the sheriff’s actions. They were the same thing he would have ordered himself in a similar circumstance. But instead he’d been forced into the position of passenger.
What good would it do in the long run? Maybe he should have gone on his way with a sharp eye out and hoped to run into the tiger. Problem was, from the instant Ryker had reminded him there could be collateral damage, he’d been trapped.
But trapped in what? He couldn’t spend the rest of his life in this small town waiting for the guy to find him. Yeah, he’d been blowing in the wind, and Dalton and Ryker had helped to give him a landing spot, but for how long? How long could he stand it? What if others in this town might now be at risk? Ryker had worried about it, justifiably.