Edge of the Heat 5

by Lisa Ladew

  Chris lay immobile and seemingly unconscious. Jerry snatched a glimpse at Sara. She was working on her ropes. She didn’t look shot.

  Jerry’s mind tried to register what had just happened here. Part of him, the Paramedic part of him that had vowed to do no harm and always help if he could, fought to go to Brian and see if there were anything he could do for the wounds. Another small part of him replayed the eagerness in Brian’s voice as he discussed breaking Sara’s arms. Jerry stood firm and held the gun on Chris.

  “We have to get out of here,” Sara stumbled to him, taking the gun from his hand. To Jerry, it looked like an extension of her arm.

  “OK,” Jerry said. Wishing he were already gone. Wishing he hadn’t ever been here in the first place. Only the growing ache in his arms and shoulders convinced him it hadn’t all been a horrible dream.

  “Go look for supplies. See if there’s a kitchen. We need backpacks, coats, food, water, rope, plastic bags, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, medicine and first aid packs if they have them, any tarps you can find, lighters or matches, a pot, and both of those cots. I’ll take care of him,” Sara said, motioning to Chris.

  A question had been forming in Jerry’s mind - an important question, but it fled. He looked at her, suspicion written on his face. “Do you mean kill?”

  Sara looked at him and said nothing, her arms rigid, holding the gun on Chris’ inert body.

  “You can’t just kill him. He’s unconscious!”

  “Jerry,” Sara said softly. “What do you think they were going to do to you?”

  “I know, but that’s what makes them the bad guys,” Jerry whispered. His worst thoughts were coming true. Sara was a bad guy too.

  “There’s a very slim line between the good guys and the bad guys, Jerry. Most good guys never have to learn that. But the ones that do keep the world from utter chaos,” Sara said softly, kindly.

  “You owe me some answers,” Jerry said, looking pleadingly into her eyes.

  “I know,” she nodded. “And you’re going to get them, all of them. We just have to get out of here now, before anyone else comes. Quickly.”

  “OK.” Jerry turned uneasily and sprinted through the doorway on the far side of the room, looking for the things she had asked for. The next room was a kitchen. He pulled open a top drawer, looking for aluminum foil. A gunshot crashed behind him.

  A single fat tear slid down Jerry’s face, unnoticed by him.

  Chapter 22

  Jerry gathered what he had found and brought it to Sara, who was going through the pockets of the dead men. The question had popped back into his mind. “We aren’t walking?”

  She wiped her hands on her jeans and stood up. “We have to.”

  “Sara, we’re in the middle of the desert. We can’t.”

  “We can. It’s safest.”

  Jerry spotted the car keys on the floor. He toed them with his boot. “We can drive the car,” he said keeping a grumpy, beseeching note out of his voice with effort.

  “We can’t Jerry. They could have a locater on it for one thing, and do you remember what the road we came in on looked like? It was 5 or 6 miles long, a one way road. If we meet anyone on that road, it will be Frank Thorpe, and we’ll have no chance. He’ll have more guns, more ammo, and more people than us. He’ll run us down and bring us right back here.”

  Frank Thorpe. Jerry tried to remember where he had heard that name before and couldn’t. He put it out of his mind for now.

  “Then we can use their phones,” Jerry said, now toeing the phone Sara had spilled out of Chris’ pocket.

  “They might be bugged. The probably are bugged. Jerry, you don’t understand how this operation works. I do. Believe me when I tell you that we need to get out of this house within the next few minutes, and it has to be on foot.”

  Jerry’s mind flashed over what that meant. Endless days of walking ahead of them. The search for water, for food. His still-healing leg. He didn’t know anything about surviving in the desert. Sara might, but … “My friends! I can call Craig or Hawk and they’d send in a helicopter to get us out of here!”

  Sara took his hand. She leaned towards him. Her eyes burned into him like a great fire. “You’d be signing their death warrants,” she said quietly.

  Jerry’s brain shook inside his skull. Was this all a delusion? Were the people Sara was dealing with really bad enough and crazy enough to kill two FBI agents for trying to help her?

  “Alright,” Jerry said, feeling the heat of her hand in his. “Let’s do this then.”

  She nodded and dropped his hand. She pulled a gun from the waistband of her pants. Chris’ gun? Brian’s gun? Did it matter? “Take this. Stand outside the doorway. I’m going to assemble what we need and check the shed that must be behind the house. We leave in 10 minutes. If you hear a car or see headlights, run as fast as you can to get me. ”

  Jerry took the gun. “Got it.”

  Despite Sara’s best efforts, they still didn’t leave for another 25 minutes. Sara, ordinarily quite calm and relaxed, even in the worst situations, started to show the strain of the situation. Jerry, from his place just outside the door, watched her shove items into the packs she had found in a survival kit in the shed without even trying to organize anything. He saw the blood leak sluggishly out of the ragged gunshot wound on her arm and hoped he’d get a chance to clean it out soon. The last thing she did was drag the two cots out of the rooms and place them with their stuff.

  “OK, we’re ready. Here, put this on.” She carried the slightly larger pack to Jerry. He took it, surprised at the weight. It was probably 80 pounds. He shrugged into it. She went back and got the cot. “You’ll have to carry this for now. When we are far enough away we can drag them - maybe even put our packs on them and drag them.” Jerry took the cot. It was quite light, thank goodness, but awkward because of its size.

  “I can sleep on the ground,” Jerry said.

  “The cots aren’t for sleeping on. They are going to search for us either with dogs or with FLIR helicopters. Dogs are problematic in the desert, especially after about 20 miles, and definitely if we can find a wash of water to walk in. FLIR helicopters will spot us easily though, unless we use these.”

  “Oh.” Jerry said, like he knew what the hell she was talking about. He guessed he was about to find out. He felt a wave of surrealism wash over him. Was he really on the run in the desert from killers? Or government agents - he wasn’t sure. Sara acted like she did this every day. No wonder she was so efficient and unavailable if this was her life.

  Sara shouldered her pack with a wince, picked up her cot, and pushed past him, her face grim and tight. He followed, each step feeling like he was walking through quicksand.

  But it got easier.

  ***

  Before they left, Sara had them walk around the house in a circle twice, then she took off in a direction that looked just like all the others to Jerry. The moon shone almost completely overhead, lighting their way. She set an impossibly quick pace. She said she would feel better when they were at least 5 miles away and she would tell him her story then. For now she was walking too fast for conversation. She changed directions once, heading almost the exact opposite way from how they had started. Jerry followed her without comment. He was glad one of them knew what they were doing.

  The terrain was mostly easy to walk on. For that he was glad. Much of what they walked over was flat, completely flat, without even a plant. Nothing but miles of dust and hard pan. When they got to an area with scrub brush littering the ground, she knelt and examined it. Then she said they could drag their cots. Jerry’s arms rejoiced.

  The night air was surprisingly cold. Surprising to Jerry anyway, he thought deserts were hot. We are at probably 5000 feet elevation, she’d explained when he’d asked. A slight breeze stirred the air sometimes. To Jerry, it smelled like dust and small animals. He watched the moon, listened to his feet moan in his boots, and followed Sara. Sometimes he looked behind them and was gratified to f
ind he could no longer see the house they’d been imprisoned in. He did see a single car traveling on a lonely, invisible road back the way they had come in that glance, and that made him quicken his pace.

  Finally, when his feet were screaming instead of just moaning, and his lungs were making him feel like an out-of-shape couch potato, Sara turned to him. “Want to take a break?” she said.

  “God, yes.” Jerry shrugged off his pack, dropped the cot (which now felt heavier than the pack) and collapsed on the ground. Sara sat lithely beside him and took off her shoes to rub her feet.

  “Do you know how far we’ve gone?” Jerry asked.

  Sara nodded. “My guess is we’ve gone 10 miles.”

  “10! 10 miles! No wonder I’m so sore. How do you even know?”

  Sara looked at him, smiling a secret little smile he had never seen on her face before, almost seeming to ask ‘Do you really want to know?’

  “Two ways. For one, I’ve been counting my paces. I know how long my paces are. Every time we hit a mile I put a pebble in my left pocket. I have 10 pebbles in there now. Plus we’ve been walking for almost 3 hours. At the pace we’ve been setting, 10 miles is just about right.”

  Jerry smiled. He’d seen her gather pebbles when they first started out, but hadn’t even wondered what she’d been doing. He looked at the sky, thinking he might know the answer to the next question. “How do you know how long we’ve been walking? We don’t have a watch or a phone between us, do we?”

  “No, I don’t have a watch or a phone. But look at the sky. The sun is going to come up soon. I would guess it’s 5 in the morning. We left just after 2 a.m.”

  Jerry nodded. “What are you, some sort of desert survivalist?” He grinned in what he hoped was a charming manner.

  She smiled back, almost shyly. “I’ve taken many survival courses. Desert survival was one of them.” She looked down at the ground and took a deep breath. She seemed to be weighing an important decision. Jerry let her weigh it. What else could he do?

  “You wanted answers Jerry, and I want to give them to you. We should only sit here for a short while though. Maybe 5 more minutes. I want to head up to that ridge up there. That way we can scout for water. We only have about 2 days worth on us right now, so it will be important to refill as often as we can. We don’t have to keep up this pace though, so we can walk and talk.”

  “Two days worth of water? How long are we going to be out here?”

  Sara sighed and looked at the sky. “The best I can figure it will take us 6 to 8 days to get back to Vegas.”

  Jerry’s mouth dropped open. “We’re walking back to Vegas? Why? I’m sure there’s small towns out here. We can stop at one of those. Make a phone call.”

  Sara started shaking her head before the words were out of his mouth. “We have to go back to Vegas. Either that, or we have to head north to Boise, Idaho. I’m betting Thorpe thinks I’ll head north, so that’s why we are going south. We can’t stop at a small town for 2 reasons. He’s smart, and he’s determined, and he’s got all the resources of our government at his disposal. As soon as he discovers I’m gone, he’ll send agents out to every single small town in the area. As soon as we walk into one, we’re as good as dead. And he’ll mobilize a state-wide wire tap on the phone, with computerized voice recognition listening for certain words. Plus, he’ll be investigating you already. No matter who we try to call, if he intercepts it, that person is as good as dead. We’re on our own Jerry.”

  Something hit Jerry like a lightning bolt to the forehead. “Frank Thorpe! I thought I knew who he was. He’s the Arms Control Undersecretary right?”

  Sara nodded. “Close enough. He’s also the head of the DCIA. It’s a U.S. intelligence agency that doesn’t officially exist.”

  Jerry shook his head. “Of course he is. And let me guess, he’s really an evil guy and he uses this intelligence agency to do evil things.”

  Sara smiled. A full, genuine smile that crinkled her eyes. “You got it.”

  “So why does he want to kill you?”

  “Actually, he doesn’t want to kill me. I’m sure he would kill me eventually if he could, but what he really wants is to get some information and some files from me.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Sara sighed. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.” She put her head down again, and spoke her next sentence into the dirt, like she didn’t want to look at Jerry’s face when she said it. “I’m a spy, Jerry. Or I was a spy. Now I’m just a rogue exagent.”

  Her words slammed into Jerry. He wasn’t sure what they meant to him yet, but they sure explained a lot of things. They explained just about everything actually. Except they didn’t explain the part that really mattered to him. And that was what he meant to her. But he’d ask her later. Right now he just wanted to hear the rest of it. Every detail.

  Chapter 23

  Jerry interrupted Sara. “I really want to hear your story - all of it - but I want to clean out your gunshot wound while we’re sitting here.”

  Sara looked up sharply in almost comical surprise. Surprise that he wasn’t blown away by her statement? He smiled at her. “I knew you had to be something like that Sara. It’s the only thing that explains all this.”

  She nodded and opened his pack. “Here.” She handed him what looked like a military aid bag. Jerry’s eyes gleamed. He should have everything he needed in here. Hell, if it was a true military aid bag, there’d be drugs and suture kits and everything. He took it, and rolled it out on the ground, examining every item with undisguised glee. Sure enough, this bag was like a mini hospital. No wonder his pack was so heavy. This thing must weigh close to 40 pounds.

  Jerry whistled appreciatively. “I could do surgery on you right here. Our own mini-MASH unit.”

  Sara laughed, a bright tinkling sound that Jerry didn’t hear nearly often enough. “I guess I know what gets you excited,” she said.

  Jerry’s stopped his examination and fixed her with a stare. You get me excited, he thought, feeling the truth of the statement. After everything he was still more excited by and fascinated with this woman than he’d ever been with anyone in his life. God help me.

  Sara saw the essence of his thoughts and blushed. A dusty rose-colored tinting of her cheeks. Jerry had never seen her blush before. He thought it made her look sexy as hell. Jerry felt his body respond - his most intimate parts stiffen - and laughed at himself. No wonder there’s 7 billion of us, he thought. Because men are simple, stupid creatures, ready for sex in even the most unlikely and dangerous circumstances.

  Jerry turned his attention back to the aid bag and Sara’s wound, shifting on the ground and willing himself to calm down.

  He picked out some disinfectant, syringe, and a metal tool. “This wound looks shallow, but because there’s no exit, the bullet is probably still in there. I need to get it out if we’re going to be out here for a week.”

  Sara nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve got benzocaine, but it still might hurt quite a bit.”

  “I’ll be OK,” Sara said. “Should I keep talking?”

  “Yes. I can listen while I work.”

  Sara nodded. She looked around at their surroundings for a moment. Flat, dusty plain on one side, looming mountains on the other. Nothing but cactus and scrub in between. She took a deep breath and started talking as Jerry stuck the needle in her arm several times, attempting to numb the area around the wound.

  Her next sentence chilled Jerry to the bone.

  “I was born to be a spy,” she said, wincing slightly as Jerry hit a sore spot. “Or at least a DCIA agent. Both my parents were agents. They fell in love and married secretly, because it’s against the rules for DCIA agents to marry each other. Once they were found out, they were sent together to the toughest, most thankless duty that DCIA agents face. These days they probably would have been sent to Pakistan or Afghanistan or something, but back then, in 1975, the worst duty that existed was human trafficking in Mexico, plus Ce
ntral and South America. My mother was a half-Egyptian, half-Caucasian refugee granted citizenship at 12 and my father was a half-Mexican, half-Caucasian illegal immigrant granted citizenship at 14.”

  Jerry looked at Sara’s face as she said this. So that explained her impossible-to-pin-down-ethnicity and her exotic looks.

  “Both my parents were fiercely patriotic. More so than any flag-waving, gun-toting redneck. They always said they didn’t take the U.S. for granted, like people who had been born here seemed to do.

  They didn’t complain when they were sent to their new duty. They knew it was important work. And they were together. And they could have been fired. 10 years later my mother got pregnant. They were scared to tell the agency, but when they did, a strange word came back through proper channels. Prepare for a dignitary visit.

  The dignitary ended up being a new, junior senator. He came right to their house in Mexico City and sat at their kitchen table. He laid out a plan that he called new, cutting-edge, and promising. He dangled an offer in front of their face. And they took it. Basically, the agency wanted to put the baby - me - on the payroll as soon as I was born. They didn’t know if I would be a boy or a girl, but they didn’t care. Each gender has its advantages and disadvantages in spy work. They wanted me trained as an agent from day one. Imagine it, he’d said. A baby who grew up hearing 5 or 6 languages instead of 1, who learned weapons as a toddler, who trained in martial arts as an adolescent, who learned to pick locks and detect surveillance as a pre-teen, who drove tanks and flew airplanes and helicopters as a teenager. This would be a kind of super spy. He’d said that most kids spend 12 years of their lives in school, learning things like algebra and sociology. But in his spy school they were going to teach map-reading and arctic survival and lock-picking.