Betrayal on the Border

by Jill Elizabeth Nelson

  He turned and took the stairs two at a time. If he missed his footing it would be a broken leg or a broken neck. Neither much mattered if a bullet found a vital organ. He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned to find the door at the top bursting open and Maddie only halfway down. He shouted a warning that she probably couldn’t hear, but whether she heard him or was hyperaware of what was happening around her, she suddenly vaulted over the stair rail, hit the concrete floor and rolled.

  Another zing near his ear sent Chris dashing behind the nearest piece of equipment. A bullet spanged off metal behind him, and he began a crouching zigzag pattern from the cover of one machine to another. The fingers of the hand that had held the recorder tingled as if they’d been asleep, but there was no time to stop and check the damage. His pulse roared in his ears louder than the shriek of the alarm.

  Was Maddie all right? He deserved the Idiot Prize for hunting her down and getting her involved in this investigation. He should have pursued the leads on his own and caught the culprits. Then she’d be safe, not dodging bullets. Yeah, right! Without her, he’d be worm food already.

  God, this is Chris with a major SOS!

  Light showered down from above and the clangor ceased. Chris froze, clapping a hand over his eyes. Had he been hit by a bullet and sent to his reward? He hadn’t felt any pain. Silent seconds ticked past. Slowly, he peeled his hand away from his face and blinked. Nope, he was not dead. He stood beside a mammoth piece of equipment resembling a giant giraffe. He checked the hand that tingled. No blood. The bullet hadn’t ravaged flesh, only electronics.

  Where was everyone? A shuffling sound came from his right rear flank, and another small noise wafted from his left. The skin on his entire body prickled. He was being stalked. Maddie had told him to find a door. He gazed around. No exit in sight. He was deep in the maze of machinery. On the far side of the plant, one of the pieces of equipment sputtered to life.

  Maddie?

  Smart girl. By the time the hunters reached that spot, she’d be long gone. Chris grinned. Two could play that game. He flipped the on switch of the giant giraffe and darted away as it clanged and clattered into motion. A man-shaped shadow on his right sent him crouching into cover behind a box-laden conveyor belt. He peered through the sliver of space between a pair of boxes and barely stopped himself from sucking in an audible breath.

  Agent Ramsey stood, armed and dangerous, hard gaze flitting this way and that. I’m not dirty, the guy had claimed from the sanctity of his home. Hah! No slimier than a pig in a wallow. Someone needed to take this guy down. Hard. And he meant to do it, but not with a bullet. The right words reported to the right people would send this traitor to the penitentiary forever and a day.

  But first he had to get out of here alive with Maddie by his side.

  The agent shuffled off in a direction away from Chris’s hiding place. Warm weakness threatened to collapse his legs beneath him, but he firmed his knees and moved on. His heart battered his ribs, and his mouth was dry as a baked stone. Did soldiers feel this way in the combat zone, or was he hopelessly civilian? The question was moot if he didn’t find an exit...soon!

  Ssst!

  The faint hiss halted him. He gazed around and spotted a feminine hand poking from behind a piece of machinery. The forefinger beckoned him. Searching right and left for any sign of their deadly stalkers, he soft-footed toward her. He rounded the corner of the machine, and their gazes locked.

  A sensation swept through him as if he were standing beneath the cascade of a sun-warmed fountain. Relief? Thanksgiving? Love? He batted that last absurd thought away. Maddie was alive and unharmed, and for the moment, nothing else mattered. Was he fooling himself to think he saw a reflection of his sudden irrational burst of joy in her eyes? What did they feel for each other? Would they ever be able to talk about it? Not now, that was for sure.

  She placed a finger to her lips and pointed toward the inside wall. Why would they move away from the exits? He lifted his eyebrows. She mouthed Trust me, and he did. More than he’d trusted another living soul—other than his family—since a traitorous woman fired a bullet that shattered his world. Ironic, since Maddie was the one who harbored trust issues toward him.

  Chris followed Maddie’s lead to the edge of a line of equipment. About six yards of open space separated them from a doorway that led deeper into the building, probably into a cargo bay. Could they escape from there? She must think so.

  Head swiveling right to left, Maddie peered around their meager cover. She lifted a hand and waved him on. Chris charged across the open space, yanked the door open and held it for her. A scowl was his reward for chivalry as she darted from cover toward him.

  From near at hand, the night guard’s voice shouted an obscenity. The guy sure had a limited vocabulary. A sharp report sounded, and Maddie staggered as she all but fell through the open door. Chris scrambled into the darkness after her. The rasp of Maddie’s breathing led him to her. Blackness was nearly absolute in this area smelling of oil and gasoline. He reached out to wrap her in his arms, but instead her hand grabbed his shirt and dragged him up against the wall beside her.

  “Are you hit?” he rasped.

  “Negative,” she whispered back. “The bullet ripped through my backpack though, and it’s in tough shape. Good thing my flashlight didn’t fall out.”

  “Who cares about a backpack or a flashlight when—”

  “Shh.”

  Chris clamped his jaw shut. Aggravating, bossy woman, but silence was the better part of wisdom at the moment.

  The door began to open, and a hand bearing a gun poked inside. Maddie’s arm swept down and something long and metallic connected with the gun, yanking it from its owner’s grip and earning a howl as the injured gun hand was jerked back. She slammed the door and leaned against it. A bright beam shot from the flashlight she’d used to disarm the guard.

  “There!” She pointed toward a straight-backed chair farther up the wall.

  Chris scrambled to retrieve it for her, and she jammed the back of the chair under the doorknob.

  “He’ll have reinforcements soon,” she said, “and they’ll come at us from another direction, so we’d better scram quick, fast and in a hurry.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She scooped up the guard’s gun while sweeping the beam of her flashlight through a mechanic shop that would be the envy of a lot of guys Chris knew. Neat and complete, except for a partially disassembled riding lawn mower sitting in the middle of the cement floor.

  “There!” He pointed toward a door across the room.

  Angry voices began to carry to them from the mammoth plant they’d escaped.

  “Come on,” Maddie said and headed toward their new escape route.

  Chris trotted after her. She flung open the door, and they found themselves not outside, but entering a cavernous garage, populated by a couple of trucks and a van, in various stages of repair.

  “This place is way too self-sufficient,” he muttered.

  “Yeah,” Maddie agreed. “Makes you wonder why they don’t want an outside shop working on their vehicles.”

  “Not if they’re using them to transport drugs. This setup would be ideal, not only to maintain their own transportation fleet but to provide privacy to tuck contraband into secret compartments.”

  Brilliant light flashed through a bank of windows high in one wall, followed almost instantly by a boom of thunder.

  “Let’s go!” she cried. “The storm will give us cover.”

  Maddie took off toward a door at the rear of the garage, and Chris stayed on her heels. They plunged outside into wind-lashed gloom that swallowed the beam of the flashlight within a few feet of its source. The scent of ozone hung in the air like doom’s signature. The hairs on the nape of Chris’s neck prickled, but the possibility of being struck by lightning was less d
aunting than waiting for the certainty of being struck by a bullet.

  Together, they left the meager protection of the building’s overhang and raced toward a brief line of trees that clawed the night with writhing branches. Lightning slashed the sky once more, and a drumroll of thunder brought down a curtain of rain. One moment Chris was dry; the next he was soaked to the skin. Keeping Maddie in sight became almost impossible, even with the paltry beam of her flashlight to guide him.

  Past the line of trees, they left the manicured lawn of the factory and entered a wilderness of rocks and cholla that set him stumbling and fighting for balance with every other step. They went on and on through the driving wet. He had no clue what direction they were headed in, or even if they weren’t traipsing in circles. At least there was no chance of their hunters spotting them in this murk.

  Water cascaded off his head and invaded his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Forging onward became like trying not to drown while walking on land. Then the land ceased.

  Chris plunged downward as if he’d stepped off the end of the earth. Abruptly, his fall ended, and his feet struck terra firma—or more like terra mucka. Bright pain spiked up his left leg, and his limbs buckled beneath him. He sprawled facedown and tasted bitter silt.

  Lucky him. He’d found one of the ravines surrounding the paper plant. The chilly water pooling around him was attempting to drown him for real. Numbness invaded his body. He had no idea if he could move a muscle to escape the rising tide.

  SEVEN

  Maddie sensed Chris’s sudden absence from her six, where he’d been practically breathing down her neck. She halted and scanned the few feet the flashlight’s beam managed to illuminate in this wild weather. The wind drove rain straight into her face, and continuous flashes of lightning blinded rather than helped her to see. She’d been drier and seen more clearly during a night scuba-dive insertion in the Middle East. She squinted to make out the area a foot or two ahead.

  There! Was that the lip of a ravine?

  She crept forward and the beam of her light traveled down the side of a sheer drop, but didn’t have the power to reach the bottom of the narrow cut in the earth. Chris had to be down there, but good luck hearing calls for help over the whoosh of falling rain and all-but-constant booms of thunder. She shrugged out of her pack and rummaged inside it through the gaping hole the bullet had torn in the canvas. Where was that nylon rope? If it had fallen out somewhere along their route, they were toast.

  Her fingers closed on her quarry. Finally! Maddie pulled the cord from her pack, and her heart hit her toes. The bullet had taken a bite out of the rope along one of the folds and effectively left her with two parts. Would she have enough length to reach Chris? No matter. She had to try.

  A tree stood nearby, old, gnarled and half dead, but it would serve to anchor one end of the rope so she could shimmy down and see if Chris was all right. He could have broken his neck. Or he could be lying down there unconscious, drowning in the water pooling at the bottom of the draw. Her heart seized like an engine that had exhausted its oil. No! She couldn’t think like that and had no time to examine why the idea of him being hurt—or worse—filled her with panic.

  Blanking her mind of all but the task at hand, she fastened one end of her abbreviated rope around the tree trunk then quickly tied knots for handholds down the remaining length. Even with the knots it was going to be a trick to hang on to the cord in this deluge.

  She went to the edge of the ravine and began to let herself down. I’m coming, Chris. Hang on! God, please help him. The prayer wafted from her thoughts as naturally as prayer used to be for her. Nothing like a crisis to jump-start faith. Or was it love for the man at the bottom? Why did her thoughts keep straying in that ridiculous direction? Stay on task, woman!

  Her body slipped and slithered down the mud and rocks. No telling how many bruises she’d have to show for this stunt. Rats! She hung by the last knot in her rope, fibers digging into her palms, and her feet couldn’t yet touch bottom. Climbing back up would mean leaving Chris to his fate, but letting go meant potential injury, or at the least, joining him in a trap with no known means of escape.

  There was no decision to make.

  She released her hold on the rope and tumbled downward. The drop was short. Slimy earth grabbed her feet, and she flexed her knees to absorb the impact.

  “Chris!” Her voice sounded hollow in her ears, as if the wall of rain bounced the word back at her.

  Maddie swiveled her head from side to side, straining into the murk for any sign of her companion. Was the raining letting up? Her visibility was becoming marginally clearer, the sting of raindrops less punishing, and lightning less frequent. She rummaged in her pack and retrieved the flashlight. The gun she’d taken from the security guard was gone—lost during her climb down the sheer wall. Small loss at the moment. She clicked the light on. Yes, the deluge was tapering off. The light beam reached farther than it had less than five minutes ago.

  Where was Chris? Was she mistaken about what had happened? Had he disappeared into the night in some other direction and not fallen into the ravine at all? She couldn’t have descended into this pit for nothing. Her stomach knotted. Why did she keep denying how much that pesky, persistent, lethally adorable reporter meant to her? A hand grabbed her elbow from behind. Maddie shrieked and whirled, bumping up against a slimy but solid chest.

  “Chris?” The amazed gasp of his name escaped her as she gazed up into his storm-shadowed features.

  His arms swallowed her, and she went into them, heart leaping like a joy-struck hare. Lips met lips, rain-chilled at first, then warm and firm and gentle and demanding all at once. For all she cared, this moment could last forever. But he pulled his face away, though he didn’t unwrap his arms from around her.

  “Let’s get out of this rain,” he said.

  “Get out—”

  She didn’t finish the question as he took her by the hand and pulled her with a lurching stride toward a hollow in the side of the ravine that sat a good foot above the sodden bottom. Under the revealing beam of her flashlight, the area proved to be a tiny cave. They had to squat to sit under the cover of the low roof, but the niche provided a haven from the downpour on their heads. The floor of the cave was damp, though nothing like the inches of sucking mud at the bottom of the ravine.

  “You’re limping,” she said.

  “Not sure if my ankle is broken or just sprained.”

  “At least it wasn’t your neck.” She looked toward him.

  His face hovered close...then closer...closer. Warm breath fanned her face. Her lips tingled, and her eyelids drooped. Another stolen kiss would taste so sweet. She shouldn’t allow the caress, but she couldn’t make herself stop him. Why live in reality when the fantasy of love spread balm across her stricken heart? She leaned forward a fraction of an inch and tasted...air.

  He had turned his head and eased his body marginally away from hers. A sensation like shattering glass struck the pit of her stomach. She hissed in a breath and studied the toes of her sodden sneakers.

  “I need to confess,” he said.

  Her insides curdled. Here it came, his admission of guilt. A minute ago, she’d kissed a traitor in relief at finding him alive and now almost kissed him again. What a pitiful specimen she was. Maddie stared at the curtain of water streaming past the cave opening.

  “When I landed at the bottom of this draw and figured I was a goner,” he continued, “my biggest regret was you. I never got the chance to hold you close like I’ve wanted to do since our days in that Arizona training camp.”

  “Well, now you’ve gotten that itch out of your system. You should be happy.” Her words came out taut and bitter, not flippant as she’d intended.

  Chris’s finger on her lips laid a barrier against further sniping remarks.

  “I’m anything but happy...and
that should make you happy,” he said. “I can’t fall for you, but I don’t know how to stop myself, any more than I could halt my tumble into this ravine.”

  Maddie snorted. “I know why I won’t let myself give in to foolish attraction for a handsome face and charming personality. What’s your excuse?”

  “Ouch! That was harsh.”

  Heat scalded through her veins. Shame? Why should she be ashamed of insulting a traitor? But what if he isn’t? The still, small voice sent a tiny shiver through her that had nothing to do with the wet weather. What was that sensation? Hope? The feeling was foreign and familiar all at once—like unexpectedly encountering an old friend she’d lost touch with aeons ago. She didn’t dare renew the friendship. Not yet.

  Maddie cleared her throat. “Don’t take it too badly. At least I called you handsome and charming.”

  A low chuckle answered her. “I meant your statement was harsh toward yourself.”

  “Huh?”

  “Madeleine Jameson, you are a beauty, inside and out, and don’t even know it. You’re the whole package—courage, character and intelligence wrapped up in attractive femininity.”

  “I’m feminine? I mean, attractive? You think so?”

  Her heart started performing funky dance moves inside her rib cage. Growing up in an army household hadn’t provided fertile soil for producing anybody’s version of a homecoming queen. But something inside her had hungered to hear such words. Why did this man have to be the one to speak them?

  “No thinking necessary.” He shook his head. “And that’s why you’re a lethal threat to my vow never again to fall for someone during the heat of an investigation. Feelings impair good judgment, and that mistake cost me too much in the past for me to repeat it.”

  “What happened to sour you on romance on the job?” Her voice cracked, botching her attempt at a casual tone.

  Chris released a long breath. “Do you remember when I saw that woman in a wheelchair? For a few seconds I thought I was seeing my sister.”