In retrospect, I can admit it was a good idea. I dozed as Barrett drove, and boy, I needed the rest. I woke to find we’d reached Old Town Alexandria. And I immediately had plenty to think about. Like whether anyone was lying in wait outside my home.
Great minds think alike, and Barrett cruised my block three times to look for trouble without my having to ask him even once. None of us saw anyone odd, or anything out of place. For my part, though, I didn’t breathe easier until we were behind my own two-hundred-year-old walls and surrounded by my state-of-the-art security system.
Had I been alone, I would’ve holed up in my first-floor office and reviewed the surveillance video piped in from each of the cameras mounted around my property. Instead, I settled for a cursory glance while Katie got acquainted with the guest room and Barrett double-checked every door and window throughout the house’s three floors. It didn’t take too long, though, and I reached the second-floor living room the same time Katie did.
“I can’t believe you live here,” she said, spinning in a slow circle in the middle of the Aubusson rug, just to take everything in.
“I do,” I said. “This is where I hang my hat.”
“Well, your house is like something out of a magazine.”
She goggled at the candlesticks on my mantel. My great, great, great grandmother had carried them to America on her lap. On the Mayflower. Katie didn’t touch them, but she could’ve. It wouldn’t have bothered me.
“Growing up here must’ve been amazing,” she said.
I slumped onto the cocktail ottoman shoved against the sofa. “I grew up on a variety of army posts. The last one was in New Jersey.”
“Oh.” She’d moved on to the kitchen now. She couldn’t resist caressing the silky grain in my granite countertops. “I guess I pictured you living the good life here with your senator father.”
“Nope. My father was an army officer. They don’t make a lot of money. Not even the generals.”
“I can relate to that. My parents were teachers. Then, you know, my mom died. My sister worked after school and on Saturdays to earn money for extras, like tuition. She fought hard to get her engineering degree.” Katie’s lip quivered. “She really did all right.”
“Have you heard from her?” I remembered how eager she’d been in London for the phone call that never came.
Katie sat on the edge of a stool. “I expected to hear from her when I got home, tonight. Now, I’m not sure I’ll ever—”
She burst into tears.
I squared my shoulders as best I could against my pain, shoved a box of tissues in front of her.
“Hey,” I said, “it’s late. We’ve all had a scare. You’re tired. And I’m sure your sister will call you when she can.”
“I’m doing things she wouldn’t be proud of. You’ll hate me when I tell you—”
“You can tell me in the morning,” I said firmly. “Now, there should be all kinds of food in the refrigerator, and plenty of towels in the hall bath. Help yourself to anything you like. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
“Really, you’re too good to me considering—”
“Stay away from the windows,” the security specialist in me added. “And don’t open the door for anyone.”
Katie nodded. She dabbed at her wet eyes. I said my final good night and trundled down the hall to my bedroom.
And that was the last thing I remembered until I woke to find someone in my room.
Chapter 28
Sometime after I’d wished Katie a good night, a persistent tapping reached into my dark dreams and pulled me from a deep sleep. I was in my own bed. That much registered.
And so did the fact that someone was coming through my bedroom door.
An automatic sense of self-preservation took over. I swept my nine-millimeter handgun from the comforter beside me and sat bolt upright. I aimed my gun at the intruder.
“Jamie,” Barrett said, “put the weapon down.”
His voice was rock steady.
Even though I had him in the crosshairs.
Meanwhile, my gun hand quaked like the city of San Francisco in 1906. The weapon wobbled back and forth in my grip. This was a clear indicator of muscle fatigue—and that I had no business holding a firearm.
“Sorry.” I dropped the gun to my side, flopped against my pillows. And even that was a mistake. Last night’s pain had settled into soreness, and after sleeping, every joint in my body was stiff and slow.
“I knocked.” Barrett hadn’t moved from the doorway. His hand still curled around the knob. “You were sleeping hard.”
I had been. And I’d been dreaming of my father. Dreaming that he’d built a house of brilliant blue sapphire because he wanted to give it to me.
Left to my own devices, I’d soon be dreaming again.
But I snapped wide awake when Barrett gave me the news he’d come to deliver.
“Roger Lind’s here. He says he needs to talk to you.”
Sure enough, I found Roger in my living room sipping coffee with Katie.
Without the tears, jeans, or flannel, Katie looked more like herself this morning in tailored gray trousers and a silver blouse. Her hair had been smoothed into its usual chignon. And her black pearls lay lustrously around her neck. But her eyes were shadowed, too. With a lack of sleep, perhaps, or, considering her life was probably in danger, maybe the shadows were fear.
Roger stood when I entered the room, cast an appraising eye over me from head to toe. Judging by the way the corners of his mouth turned south, I’d have said he didn’t like what he saw. I’d somehow crawled into pj’s last night—mint-green satin with pink flannel trim—and slept with the sapphire necklace at my throat, too tired to take it off. But as refined as my mismatched ensemble may’ve been, it didn’t jazz up the black-and-blue sling that supported my broken wrist and wrapped around my body to keep my arm still.
He said, “We’re moving the Oujdads today. Senator Sinclair wants you to go with them.”
I sank into one of the armchairs flanking my fireplace. Katie hustled to bring me a cup of coffee. The stuff tasted like ambrosia.
“I’m not in any shape to protect the Oujdads,” I said, though it pained me to admit it. “Tell my father I respectfully decline.”
But Roger aimed an uneasy glance at Barrett. And he frowned as he spoke to me. “The Senator doesn’t want you to protect the Oujdads. He wants you to be protected.”
“Show her the photos,” Barrett said.
“Metro Police found the sedan that ran you down abandoned near the National Gallery. These are the only images of the driver, pulled from a security camera at the entrance to the Archives Metro station. He disembarked at Metro Center. From there, we think he took to the street, but we don’t know for certain.” Roger handed me a stack of photos he’d extracted from a leather portfolio.
In each and every picture, a person of indeterminate sex made step-by-step progress toward the station’s row of turnstiles. With the swipe of a simple fare card, he or she headed for the outbound trains. The plain jeans and denim jacket the suspect wore weren’t distinctive. But the headgear was. Because the suspect wore a visored motorcycle helmet—just like Helmet Head had when he’d accosted Katie, Philip, and me in London four days ago.
“We don’t know if he’s the same suspect who worked with Dalmatovis and wrecked your hotel room in Britain,” Barrett pointed out, “but—”
“—it’s close enough for government work,” I concluded, and the coffee I’d drunk threatened to burn a hole in my stomach.
“The Department of Homeland Security is working to help State get a grip on this,” Roger said. “In the meantime, your father is working from a safe location. Katie and the Oujdads will be moved to another secure location in the desert Southwest this morning. You’re to go with them. Barrett will also be tagging along for the ride.”
I was considerably less than okay with that. Oh, getting Katie and the Oujdads out of DC was a good move, certainly.
But I’d told Barrett I didn’t want him to be at my father’s beck and call. Because to my father, Barrett was a means to an end, just as I had been. And I was beginning to acknowledge Barrett was much more than that to me.
The look I sent Barrett must’ve telegraphed my frustration, even if it didn’t transmit much affection. But his face went stony. It was his professional face. A cop’s face. And even if I studied it all day, I’d never know what he was thinking behind it.
If Roger picked up on all this static, he didn’t let on.
Katie, on the other hand, took my sour expression as proof she needed to convince me to leave Alexandria.
“If we go West,” she said, topping up my coffee cup, “maybe trouble will have a tough time catching up with us.”
I doubted it. But I also doubted Roger would give me a real choice in the matter. So I excused myself and went to pack a bag.
A full-fledged motorcade, complete with chase cars, shepherded Roger and Barrett, and Katie and myself, from my house in Alexandria, Virginia, to Andrews Air Force Base on the Maryland side of the Beltway. There, on a restricted airstrip that served the likes of Air Force One and the planes of visiting foreign dignitaries, we boarded a Lear jet with military markings. Ikaat and her father were already onboard when we arrived.
Ikaat bounded from her seat when she saw us.
“Jamie! And Katie and Mr. Barrett, too! Have you come to say bon voyage?”
“Actually,” Roger told her, “they’ll be making the trip to your new home with you.”
“It is too exciting,” she said. Her dark eyes shone with anticipation. “Papa often told me stories of America’s Wild West. And now we shall live there.”
Well, life in America, whether in the East or the West, obviously agreed with her. Roses had bloomed in her cheeks. Her eyes gleamed like black buttons. And her hair, without its hijab, shone in bouncy ringlets.
Armand Oujdad didn’t look too shabby, either, especially considering the last time I’d seen him he was aboard a Life Flight helicopter. Now, he ambled from a seat near the rear of the plane to give Katie a big smile of welcome and shake Barrett’s hand heartily. Me, he greeted as the French do, with a heartfelt kiss on each cheek.
He said, “We shall all be safe in the West.”
“That’s the idea,” I admitted.
But I could make him no assurances. I knew my government couldn’t, either. And I felt rotten about that.
I still felt rotten about it when we strapped into our seats for takeoff. Roger stood outside on the tarmac, waving as we taxied. And butterflies turned cartwheels in my stomach long after we were in the air.
I couldn’t say Helmet Head had followed us from Britain, but that the driver of the car that had tried to run us down should also wear a motorcycle helmet seemed too much like a coincidence. My father had taught me a soldier doesn’t rely on coincidence in a combat situation. And in my work as a security specialist, I wasn’t keen on coincidence, either.
That meant one way or another, Helmet Head would likely put in an appearance—wherever we were headed. When he did, though, I’d be ready for him. Barrett’s wake-up call had proved to me I was too weak to handle a nine-millimeter handgun. But that hadn’t kept me from slipping my little .22 into the pocket of the leather jacket I wore. Of course, at that caliber, the weapon didn’t have a lot of stopping power. But it would put a pretty painful dent in anyone who tried to mow me or one of my party down again—and that might be the edge I needed when and if that happened.
Some more rest would sharpen my edge as well, but I just couldn’t sleep given what had happened the last time I’d boarded a plane. Especially since, if we went down during this flight, there’d be no Atlantic Ocean to catch us. So I fidgeted next to Barrett and watched from the window as the green fields below us quickly gave way to the tree-covered crags of the Appalachians. Beyond them, wide river valleys were crisscrossed with farmers’ fields. Once we reached the far side of the sweeping Mississippi, the land grew brown and broad—and when the countryside took on every shade of sand, we began our descent.
We dropped from the sky with the roll and the dive that fighter pilots are known for using even after they leave military service to become commercial airline pilots. Once down, we taxied along the runway forever. I grew impatient and I noticed I wasn’t the only one.
We all had our faces pressed to the plane’s oval windows.
Judging by the sights outside, we hadn’t landed at a commercial airport. Given the brown-painted hangars of corrugated steel and the dull blue pickup trucks with yellow numbers stenciled on their doors, that much was clear. This was another air base—and instead of being shunted on one of those accordioned jetways directly into some kind of terminal, we stepped out of the plane like extras in a 1960s James Bond flick and onto a stair-truck that had rolled up to get us down.
“Where are we?” Katie wanted to know as she and I descended behind Barrett.
“I’m not sure.”
The breeze that blasted my cheeks and whipped my hair around my head suggested West Texas or even Nevada. It was hot and dry, with a hint of sand and sage. Past the chain link that lined this portion of the airfield, the landscape was every shade of taupe and tan. Deep, dark browns hid in the hollows. In the distance, a range of purple mountains crumpled against the blazing sky.
But the giveaway wasn’t in our surroundings.
It was in the people who came to meet Ikaat.
A string of black Ford Explorers drove up, expelled a bevy of men in white lab coats. As they squinted in the late morning sun, a colonel and a second lieutenant in the khaki uniforms of the U.S. Army got out of a staff car and stood with them. Soldiers swarmed them all, armed with automatic weapons and eyes trained on every horizon.
I began to feel like I should’ve packed a Geiger counter. Because this little contingent meant we’d just arrived at some top-secret nuclear research facility. On a top-secret military base.
Unless I missed my guess, we weren’t far from the secluded spot where our nation’s Stealth aircraft first got its groove on. The Manhattan Project did more than build sand castles out here, too. They worked up the world’s first atomic bomb. Hell, there might even have been tidbits from the alleged UFO crash near infamous Roswell, New Mexico, stashed in one of the nearby warehouses. And now Ikaat would have to live and work in this hushed-up, locked-down environment.
The idea that I’d helped her out of one intensely structured society and into another made me uneasy.
But while I looked on, Ikaat’s new colleagues welcomed her like an equal. That’s when it dawned on me. Maybe that kind of respect was all she and Armand had ever wanted. Maybe—with respect and a research facility and fifteen hundred premium cable channels—they really would be happy out here, in the middle of America’s nowhere. In my heart, I certainly hoped so.
Chapter 29
The second lieutenant who’d shown up to greet Ikaat was a young guy with a test pilot’s buzz cut, too many teeth in his smile, and aviator sunglasses that reflected my frown as he chitchatted with the rest of us. His last name, according to the plate pinned to his chest, was Wright. And it was his duty, Wright said, to drive Dr. Oujdad’s friends to their accommodations.
Barrett rode shotgun. Not a surprise, since he’d been sent along to spot trouble. Katie and I piled into the back of Wright’s Explorer. We took the opportunity to power up our cell phones. Katie had to be eager for news from her sister, and I was eager for news from Roger—while dreading a message from Philip. Philip, though, had stopped calling sometime in the night. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but the sight of the beautifully worked phone case he’d bought me reminded me I hadn’t treated him too kindly of late.
“That’s a lost cause, ma’am.”
For a guilty second I thought he was talking about salvaging my friendship with Philip.
Wright said, “You won’t get service out this far in the desert.”
“Great,” I grumbled, and shov
ed the thing into a pocket.
“Wait until you get to the Hooch. It’s got all kinds of amenities, including WiFi.”
Katie developed a dent between her eyebrows. “What’s a hooch?”
Being a general’s daughter, I knew exactly what a hooch was. And I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of living in one. For troops in the field, though, the sandbagged tents with cots to sleep on, hooks to hold your helmet, and five other sweaty soldiers to share your home-away-from-home offered a precious peace at the end of duty hours.
I, however, was more of a Four Seasons kind of girl.
Wright chuckled and said, “Don’t let the name fool you. Because of the kind of work the scientists do, we get all kinds of VIPs through here, including the United Nations crowd. They think they’re roughing it anytime there isn’t a Starbucks on every corner, so some bureaucrat built them a world-class hooch. That’s where you’ll be staying. We’ll see if we can’t sneak you off the post, though. There’s a great barbeque joint in town.”
“What’s this town called?” I asked.
Wright wouldn’t say. His only answer was an even broader smile. We were off the grid—and deep into the government’s own special brand of Neverland. The folks who were unfortunate enough to live near this installation probably didn’t even have a zip code. I bet it made sending Mother’s Day cards tricky. On the upside, Helmet Head would never find us way out here. Or so I thought.
Wright prattled on as we rode through the desert. Katie kept him talking. Great clouds of red dust billowed behind us. The terrain grew rocky. The mountains loomed large. Dark smudges appeared before us. I was still trying to make out what they were when our tires hit asphalt.
Now, we were on an honest-to-goodness road, not some dirt track through the sand. After a handful of miles, the road became a street. But it was a weird street, its concrete as fresh and bright as if it had been poured overnight.
The street widened into an expansive boulevard. The smudges I’d seen from afar resolved into buildings. They looked brand-new, too.
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