by Paula Graves
It had been that way eight years ago as well. On an island full of exotic beauties, it had been the fresh-faced, no-nonsense Kentucky farm girl who’d managed to turn him inside out.
He realized she was waiting for an answer, and it took a second to remember what she’d asked. He checked his watch. “Just before six.”
“Don’t suppose you have any food stashed away in that bag of yours?”
He had a couple of protein bars, but he’d meant to replenish his supplies days ago. He should have gone into town sooner. But he’d thought he had time. What was the rush? He had nowhere to go.
Until he’d heard the news about his sister and her husband going missing.
He opened his pack and tossed her one of the protein bars. “Make it last. There’s only one more.”
She ripped open the packaging and took a bite, a low moan escaping her throat. He dragged his gaze away, tamping down the arousal throbbing in his veins. He concentrated on the contents of his backpack, noting with alarm that his supplies were rapidly dwindling.
“You ever going to tell me why you stayed with El Cambio so long after you knew what they were up to?”
He looked at her, once more tempted to spill everything. But her jaw was set, her eyes sharp with skepticism, and he just wasn’t in the mood for her to shoot down the truth again. “Not much point, since you won’t believe me.”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but he could tell she wasn’t quite as nonchalant as she wanted to appear. Maybe, sooner or later, she’d be willing to listen.
And maybe he’d be willing to talk. “How soon do you think we can get going?” she asked around another bite of the protein bar.
“As soon as possible,” he answered resolutely, zipping his bag. “We need to get back to civilization.”
She handed him the remaining half of the protein bar and stretched her limbs, wincing as the motion pulled against her healing wound. Muscles bunched and twitched her jaws, but she managed not to groan, even though Sin could tell she was in pain.
“Maybe you should stay here and rest,” he suggested, finishing off the protein bar in a couple of bites. The little bit of food took the edge off his hunger but didn’t banish it. He needed real food. A real bath. A real bed.
But not until he got his sister back.
“You’re my prisoner, remember?” she asked, grimacing as she pushed herself to a crouch. “You go nowhere without me.”
“Right.” He exited through the tent and peered through the Ghillie net, surveying the mist-shrouded woods around them. Everything looked quiet at the moment.
But he knew that situation could change in a heartbeat.
Chapter Seven
The morning was cool, the air misty, as Ava trudged through the woods behind Sinclair. They were still in the middle of sunrise, the sky peeking through the dense trees overhead a rosy pink starting to give way at the edges to a clear, pale blue. The sun remained behind the crest of the mountains to the east, but there was enough light to make them vulnerable if anyone was out there in the woods looking for them, so they moved ahead at a slow, steady pace.
At least, Ava told herself that was why Sinclair was moving so slowly. Because the alternative was admitting that her wounded hip and the previous day’s exertions had left her hobbled like an arthritic woman three times her age. She was not ready to face such an embarrassing notion.
They were moving steadily west toward Poe Creek, though the path they took was anything but straight. They stayed close to the trees, moving with as much stealth as they could manage. So far, they’d spotted no sign of Cabrera’s men in the woods.
But Ava could feel them nearby, like a poisonous miasma hovering just over the horizon, gathering strength and malignance.
“Need to stop and catch your breath?” Sin paused behind the trunk of a large fir tree and pulled a water bottle from his backpack. He took a long drink and handed the open bottle to her.
She took a drink. The water was tepid but felt cool and satisfying going down. She handed the bottle back and peered around for any sign of movement. “Do you think they’ve given up looking for us?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure they’ve ever been looking for us, exactly.”
“Surely one of those men we’ve taken out had time to radio back to camp.”
“I didn’t find any radios on them.”
“Then they used cell phones. Or satellite phones. We didn’t stop and search them carefully.” She grimaced at the flash of pain that shot through her wounded hip. “Maybe we should have.”
“We were running for our lives,” he said bluntly, stashing the water in his pack. “You need a little longer?”
She squared her shoulders. “No, let’s keep moving.”
They couldn’t have been more than a mile or so from the highway that wound past the Mountain View Motor Lodge, but they were still trudging a winding path through the woods, a long way from anything approaching civilization, nearly an hour later.
The sun was over the mountains by then, angling through the trees in lambent beams that reflected off the low-lying mist. The effect was ethereal, like walking through a golden fog, and if Ava hadn’t been so tense and tired, she might have enjoyed the experience.
But all she wanted right now was to reach civilization, where she had options. Last night, she and Sinclair had agreed that setting the FBI on Cabrera’s gang might not be the smartest way to go, but daylight had a sobering effect, reminding her that for all the well-documented weaknesses in the organization she called home, the FBI was still well-equipped to deal with ruthless terrorists.
“So are the Coopers,” Sinclair said flatly a few minutes later when she voiced her change of heart. “And they have a vested interest in getting Alicia out of there alive, unlike the FBI.”
“The FBI isn’t in the habit of sacrificing civilians, you know.”
He shot a hard, skeptical look her way. “Their track record might suggest otherwise.”
“You can’t hold a couple of high-profile failures against them. They have a long record of good work.”
“You have an institutional loyalty to the Bureau that I don’t have.”
She wasn’t going to win this argument, so she changed tacks. “How do you know the Coopers have even arrived yet?”
“Because that’s what the Coopers do.” He pulled up short, forcing Ava to stutter-step to a halt to keep from slamming into his back. His shoulders went tense, his head lifting.
“What?” she whispered as he remained utterly still.
“I thought I heard something in the woods ahead.” He turned to glance back at her. “Could have been an animal.”
Could have been a terrorist, she countered silently. She saw a similar unspoken thought glittering behind his dark eyes.
She pulled the MK2 pistol he’d given her the night before from its hiding place in her waistband. “Charge or retreat?”
He took a second to think about it. “Retreat. We could be outnumbered.”
And would continue to be outnumbered, she thought grimly, until they reached civilization and could call in reinforcements.
“What will your partner do when you don’t show up for breakfast?” Sin asked a moment later, as they started backtracking toward another westward trail out of the woods.
She wasn’t sure he’d even notice. But she supposed protocol would demand that Landry call in her disappearance, even if he thought she might have a good reason for being away from the motel.
“He’ll call it in, I guess.”
“How soon?”
She glanced at his watch. Almost eight. “I figure we have at least an hour. He’s not going to start looking for me before nine.”
“It would be better if we could prevent the FBI from swooping in here and causing havoc,” he said quietly, as if they hadn’t had almost this very argument a few minutes earlier.
“How are we supposed to find the Coopers?” she asked.
“They’ll be at
the motel. They’ve probably already rousted your partner out of bed, as a matter of fact,” Sin said with a grimace. “Which might mean that extra hour is as good as gone.”
“I thought they liked to do things their own way, without official interference,” she said.
Sinclair considered the thought. “Maybe. Maybe they’ll try to go around your partner. Is he the sort who can be played that way?”
She didn’t like to admit it, but Landry’s apathy probably made him the perfect FBI agent for the Coopers to deal with. He wouldn’t ask too many complicated questions, and he wasn’t going to go the extra mile to find out what was really going on behind the scenes of this kidnapping, or even her own disappearance.
She wondered what had happened to Landry to make him such a dead-ender. When he’d first been assigned to the Johnson City office, she’d made a point of looking at his jacket to see what kind of FBI agent he’d been in his last few assignments.
On paper, he’d looked good. Commendations, a good solve rate, plenty of kind words from superiors and peers alike. But at some point between his last big case in the Richmond field office and his reassignment to the Johnson City resident agency, things had changed for Cade Landry.
Maybe, if she and Sinclair got out of this mess alive, she’d make the effort to find out what had happened to Landry. But her case partner’s history was so far down her list of things to worry about at the moment, she shoved all thoughts of him aside.
“They’ll be able to go around him if that’s their intention,” she answered Sinclair’s earlier question. “Which brings up the next question—if the Coopers are here in Tennessee and are caught up on what’s going on, what’s their next move?”
Sinclair seemed to give the question some thought as he pushed ahead through the dense underbrush. He moved with fluid grace, she noted as she struggled to emulate his easy gait. He’d had some experience moving silently and maintaining a low profile, obviously.
He’d managed to stay off everyone’s radar for three years, after all. The official government assessment had been that he’d died in the harbor explosion three years ago, and nothing had come across her desk to suggest the official assessment was wrong.
Yet, here he was, very much not dead.
She was relieved when he stopped for another rest about twenty minutes later, hunkering down beside her on a fallen tree trunk sheltered from the rest of the woods by a dense stand of young Fraser firs. He offered her a drink of water first, and she took a couple of swigs gratefully, wondering why they weren’t any closer to the road after so much trekking through the woods.
“Are we going in circles?” she asked as she handed back the water bottle.
“We did for a bit,” he answered, taking one quick drink of water before returning the half-empty bottle to his backpack. “I thought we should take precautions, in case someone is tracking us.”
The hair on the back of her neck prickled. “You think that’s happening?”
“I think we shouldn’t take a lot of chances,” he answered after a brief pause. “If any of those men in the woods had a chance to tell Cabrera what was going on before we stopped them, then he knows his plan to kidnap Alicia to smoke me out is working.”
“How does he know you’re alive? As far as I know, nobody else has a clue you’re not fish food in the middle of Tesoro Harbor.”
He grimaced at her description. “I don’t know.”
“Does anyone else know you’re alive?”
She could see his thoughts swirling behind his dark eyes. After a moment, he nodded. “At least two people. One I trust completely. One I think I can probably trust, but—”
“But you can’t be sure?”
“It would take only a word to the wrong person. A slip of the tongue.” He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he stopped, pressing his mouth to a thin line.
“Who’s the one you trust?”
She thought for a moment he wasn’t going to answer her question. Then he released a quiet sigh and said, “He’s a former CIA agent.”
She tried not to look skeptical, but the expression in his eyes made it clear she’d failed.
“I know it sounds like a bad movie,” he said with another quiet huff of breath. “But it’s true. When I lost faith in what El Cambio was doing, I turned myself in at the American consulate in Tesoro. The CIA agent was the first person I talked to.”
“And he, what? Offered you a chance to go back inside El Cambio as a double agent?” she said with a soft laugh.
His lips flattened further. “I told you it sounded like a bad movie.”
She stared at him, realizing her outlandish guess was the story he was apparently going with. “Come on.”
“It’s the truth.”
She didn’t know what to say. He seemed earnest enough, but she was in no position to believe everything he had to say.
“Forget it,” he said after a few seconds. “It’s not that important. All you need to know is that this guy I know can help us if I can reach him.”
“How do you know he’s not the one who betrayed you to Cabrera?”
“Because he put his neck on the line to get me out of Sanselmo safely and set me up with a new identity.”
“What new identity?”
“Christopher Peralta. Although I suppose it doesn’t really matter anymore. Chris Peralta’s been compromised, too.” He nodded toward the west. “We need to be on the move.”
Her legs were beginning to ache in concert with her bullet wound in protest of so much trudging around through underbrush, but she gritted her teeth and did her best to keep pace with Sinclair.
Somewhere around midmorning, they reached the section of the woods where Ava had run into the ambush the day before. She didn’t recognize it, and the bodies of the dead terrorists no longer lay where they’d left them, but Sinclair assured her they’d arrived back in the same place. “I’ve spent the past year wandering these woods and mountains,” he told her as he crouched next to a mountain laurel bush that looked as if it had been shorn in half, several branches now lying broken and flat on the ground. “This is where Escalante’s body fell.”
“So their compadres retrieved the bodies?”
“They don’t want to risk announcing their presence here until they’re ready to strike,”
She looked around, trying to picture the place as she remembered it. But everything had happened so fast, including Sinclair’s hauling her off to the safety of his tent. She could barely remember the details of the ambush itself, much less where it had happened.
“They’re out here looking for us. You know that, right?”
She nodded, trying to ignore the gooseflesh that scattered down her arms in response to his warning. “I know that.”
“Then we shouldn’t linger.” He started walking again.
She trudged behind him, the skin on the back of her neck still crawling.
* * *
BY NOON, THE temperature had risen to the mid-eighties, and the lingering moisture from the previous night’s storms made the woods feel like a sauna. If he’d been alone, Sinclair might have skipped lunch and kept going, but Ava was running on sheer, dogged determination and not much else. “We stop here,” he announced, pulling the Ghillie net from his backpack.
She stared at the camouflage net. “We’re not going to set up the tent, are we?”
He wondered if she knew how much longing he could hear in her voice when she asked that question. “No, but I figured we’d take a longer rest and eat the other protein bar. Rehydrate. Might as well camouflage ourselves while we’re doing it.”
While he draped the Ghillie net across several shrubs, giving them a small shelter for their midday rest, she dug in his backpack and pulled out the last protein bar and a bottle of water. “Are there any creeks around here clean enough to risk refilling our water bottles?”
“Yeah, though I’d still rather boil it first. And we’re fresh out of fires.” He sat down next to a patch of
mossy ground and patted the spot beside him. “Sit. Take a nap if you want. It’s too hot out there for hiking right now, but if you wait around, we’re bound to get an afternoon shower or two. Cool things right off.”
“Oh, goody. More rain.” But she settled on the patch of moss beside him and tore the paper off the protein bar.
“You’ll be glad for the drop in temperature.”
“I know.” She straightened the grimace from her face and managed a half smile as she broke the protein bar in half and gave him his portion. She ate her half slowly, though she had to be hungry by now. He pressed the water on her as well, not liking her pallor or the rapid rate of her breathing. It would be very easy to fall victim to dehydration and heat exhaustion, especially for a woman who was already injured.
He managed to get half the bottle of water down her before her eyelids began to droop. Edging closer, he let her lean against him, her head wobbling before it finally dropped against his shoulder.
A fluttery feeling settled in the center of his chest, reminding him of a time that seemed a lifetime distant, a time when he’d been a young man on the cusp of his wide-open future. A time when a hazel-eyed girl from Nowhere, Kentucky, had stolen his breath and shown him a whole world of possibilities he’d never considered before.
What if he’d met her that night in Mariposa rather than tracking down Luis Grijalva? Where would he be right now?
Not here, he thought. Not hiding in the woods from Alberto Cabrera. Not wondering how much longer Ava Trent could keep walking before her weariness and injury overcame her gritty willpower.
But would El Cambio be on the run the way it was now? Would Sanselmo be so close to stability and economic promise if he hadn’t taken up Alexander Quinn’s offer to turn double agent? So much of the information he’d fed to the CIA had helped defang El Cambio. He’d helped put some of the more brutal drug cartels on the run, as well.
Would he really be willing to turn his back on the good things he’d done, no matter how mistaken his choices in the beginning?
God, he needed to talk to Quinn. The man might be as slippery as an eel in slime, but he had a way of getting to the bottom line of any question.