by Paula Graves
“There was no revolution left.” Just as Sinclair had concluded he’d imagined the movement in the woods, he saw another flicker of motion. A head peeking out from behind the trunk of a tree. Tangled brown hair, barely visible above a camouflage-painted face.
Ava. His heart contracted painfully with a jolt of terror.
She was out there, watching. And if there was one thing he’d learned about Ava Trent over the past three days, it was that she had the heart of a lion and the soul of a warrior.
She was out there in the woods right now, intent on finding a way to come to his rescue. He knew it as surely as he knew the sound of his own voice.
And her lion’s heart and warrior soul would get her killed if he didn’t find a way to stop her.
He struggled not to let his fear show as he turned his gaze to meet Cabrera’s, scrambling mentally for the dangling thread of their conversation. “The revolution was over before I ever set foot in Sanselmo,” he continued, hoping the trembling in his legs didn’t make it to his voice. To his own ears he sounded impossibly calm.
He hoped he wasn’t fooling himself.
“That is a lie,” Cabrera spat. “The revolution continues, even today.”
“You want power and money. You want carte blanche to punish the world for your shortcomings, to hide your animalistic rage behind a cloak of revolutionary zeal. You killed Grijalva because he reminds you of your own failures. Your own lack of machismo.”
Cabrera swung the butt of the revolver toward Sinclair’s head, his movement impulsive and made jerky by his rage. Sinclair had just enough warning to duck, the hard edge of the gun butt scraping against the side of his head rather than landing a direct blow.
On his hands and knees, he spared a desperate glance toward the woods, hoping Ava would stay put.
Of course, she didn’t. She was already on the move, her pistol gripped in her right hand while she used her free hand to balance as she scrambled in a crouch down the shallow slope.
Don’t do it, Ava!
He ducked belatedly at a flurry of motion in his peripheral vision. The butt of Cabrera’s revolver caught him squarely in the cheek, sending a blinding cascade of sparkling stars across his field of vision as pain exploded through his brain.
The stars twinkled out, but the pain kept pounding a brutal cadence through the side of his face, rolling in syncopated waves of agony.
“I am the revolution,” Cabrera declared. “Soy La Curva de la Muerte.”
Ava was getting close now, Sinclair saw as he let his gaze slide her way. Too close. Soon, Cabrera would see her. He would fire on her, and there would be nothing Sinclair could do to stop him.
There was nothing he wouldn’t risk to stop that nightmare from happening.
Grabbing Cabrera’s arm, he jerked the man around to face him until the terrorist’s back was turned to Ava. “You are nothing, Alberto. You are the garbage real men wipe from their shoes.”
Cabrera responded by pressing the barrel of the revolver against the center of Sinclair’s forehead.
“And you,” Cabrera answered in a rush of cold fury, “are a dead man.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ava froze in place, shuddering as her sudden stop sent pebbles tumbling down the hill in front of her. Once Sinclair grabbed Cabrera, turning him so that his back was to Ava, she knew Sinclair had spotted her.
But all rational thought fled her brain in a heartbeat when she saw Cabrera press the revolver to Sinclair’s head. His voice rose to a crescendo of rage, ringing through the woods.
“And you are a dead man.”
No, no, no. She was still too far away, her skill with the unfamiliar MK2 too unpredictable to make the shot.
“Kill me now and you’ll never know which of your trusted men is a traitor,” Sinclair replied. He sounded unnaturally calm, she thought. As if he didn’t fear anything. Not even his own death.
That idea scared her nearly as much as the sight of Cabrera’s finger trembling on the trigger.
She made her fear-paralyzed limbs move, took a careful step down the hill. If Sinclair could just stall Cabrera until she was close enough to take a decent shot—
“There is no other traitor,” Cabrera declared, harsh laughter tinting his voice. “My men worship me.”
“Your men fear and loathe you,” Sinclair replied with contempt.
Stop it, Ava thought as she pushed her way downhill more quickly, afraid that Cabrera had already neared his snapping point. Stop antagonizing him. Stall him, don’t push him into pulling the trigger!
“You think you’re brave? You think you show courage speaking to me this way?” Cabrera asked. “You are a fool.”
She was close. So close. Just a few more yards...
Her foot slipped on a loose rock, sliding out from under her. She tried to catch herself without falling, but her scramble for footing dislodged more rocks, and there was nothing quiet about their tumbling cascade down the slope. They clacked like castanets against each other as she ended up hitting hard on her backside, the jolt jarring up her spine until her teeth crashed together, making her see stars.
When her sight flooded back a second later, she was staring down the barrel of Alberto Cabrera’s revolver.
* * *
CABRERA WHIRLED AT the sound of rocks falling behind him, his revolver already whipping up toward Ava. She’d dropped her gun hand to stop her fall, leaving her utterly defenseless.
With no time to go for his own weapon, Sinclair threw himself on Cabrera’s back and went for the revolver.
The gun fired with a deafening crack, and Ava cried out.
Sinclair tried raise his head to relocate her position but Cabrera had wrapped his arm around his neck and was pulling him down to the ground with him, grinding his forehead into the dirt. Sinclair tightened his grip on Cabrera’s gun arm and locked his legs around the man’s thighs to hold him immobile while they struggled for control over the weapon. His fingers dug into Cabrera’s chest.
No, he thought. Not his chest—
Cabrera slammed his elbow into Sinclair’s chin, knocking his head back with a jarring crash of bone on bone. Sinclair’s grip on Cabrera’s wrist slipped, and he felt himself falling away, his head spinning from the impact. He grabbed at the man’s legs just as Cabrera brought the pistol up again.
A crack of gunfire split the air. But it hadn’t come from Cabrera’s pistol, Sinclair realized as Cabrera reeled backwards, staggering to keep his footing. Sinclair reached for the Taurus 1911 tucked into his leg holster, his suddenly sluggish brain trying to catch up, to tell him something important.
Something life-or-death.
Cabrera didn’t fall. He threw away the pistol and grabbed the AR-15 rifle that had fallen to the ground during his struggle, swinging the rifle barrel toward Ava just as she fired another shot.
The bullet hit Cabrera in the chest. Sinclair saw him take the body blow and reel backward again.
But he still didn’t fall.
Vest, he thought. He’s wearing a protective vest.
And Ava wasn’t.
He could go for a headshot, but if he missed, it would be too late. There was no time to aim.
Once again, he threw himself at Cabrera. The AR-15 barked three times in rapid succession as they tumbled to the ground. Sinclair prayed Ava hadn’t been in the line of fire.
Then, suddenly, she was there, flinging herself on top of Cabrera’s head and shoulders. She trapped the rifle under one knee and clamped his head between her knees, shoving the barrel of the MK2 against the base of Cabrera’s skull.
“Move again,” she growled, her breath coming in harsh gasps, “and I will fire two bullets into your brain stem. ¿Comprende?”
Cabrera went utterly still.
Sinclair wiped a film of blood from his head wound out of his eyes and met Ava’s wild-eyed gaze across Cabrera’s prone body. “You hit?”
“No,” she breathed. “You?”
“Not with a bullet,” he ans
wered, poking at the swollen lump on his cheekbone. His jaw didn’t feel too great, either.
But he’d live. At least, he would if they could avoid the rest of Cabrera’s men.
“His men are out looking for you and the others,” he warned.
“I know. I almost ran into one of them.” Between her knees, Cabrera hissed something Sinclair couldn’t quite make out. But Ava seemed to understand what he said, if the rough jab of her pistol barrel against his neck was anything to go by. “I told you to stay still,” she rasped.
Sinclair grabbed the butt of the AR-15 and nodded to Ava. “Move your knee.”
She let up pressure on the rifle and he jerked it from Cabrera’s grasp. He considered tossing it aside before he remembered they weren’t out of danger yet. He slipped the strap over his own shoulder instead.
“Can you grab the phone out of my pocket and contact Jesse?” she suggested, both of her hands still occupied with keeping Cabrera in place.
As Sinclair started to reach for the phone, he saw a half-dozen camouflage-clad figures glide into view, coming at them from what seemed like every direction.
He already had the AR-15 in his hands before the nearest man held up his hand and he recognized the sharp blue eyes of Jesse Cooper.
He let loose a flurry of profanities as his whole body turned into a trembling mass of nerves. “You damned near became a casualty, Cooper.”
“That Cabrera?” Jesse asked, nodding at their captive.
“Yes, but his men are still out there.”
“Yeah, well, so are the Feds, finally.” Alexander Quinn stepped forward, stopping to look down at Cabrera. “You’d have saved us all a lot of time and money if you’d just shot him.”
Sinclair glanced at Ava, letting himself drown a little in her mountain-pool eyes. “She did.”
“It didn’t take,” she murmured, her lips curving in the faintest hint of a smile.
“Sin?”
The voice, soft but so familiar it made his chest ache, came from behind him. He closed his eyes against the sudden flourish of pain, almost hoping he’d imagined her voice.
“Oh, my God, Sin.”
He opened his eyes and she was there, almost a decade older and even more beautiful than he remembered, despite her ragged appearance, pale face and shadow-smudged eyes. Tears burned like acid in his eyes and he blinked them away, not wanting anything to mar his first look at his sister in over eight years.
“I’m so sorry, Ali,” he whispered. The words seemed to scrape his throat raw. “I’m so sorry.”
Quinn bent next to him, grabbing Cabrera’s legs. He nodded for Sinclair to move away from the captive. “I’ve got him.”
Sinclair rose on unsteady legs, barely able to hold his sister’s wide-eyed gaze. Love and shame battled inside him, two sides of the same emotion, each vying for supremacy.
“Why didn’t you let us know?” Alicia asked, tears sliding over her cheeks.
Answering despair roped around his chest and squeezed as he searched for an answer that wouldn’t break her heart and his.
“He couldn’t,” Ava said in a flat tone when he didn’t answer. She’d come to stand near him, he saw. J.D. Cooper had taken over restraining Cabrera. “He knew you couldn’t keep that secret from your parents.”
A hard jolt of pain zigzagged through him at her words. Not because of the implied insult to his parents but because she understood, instinctively, what had kept him silent.
He loved his parents, but he didn’t trust them to choose his word over that of people they considered their ideological allies. They’d never seemed to move past their own youth, when radicalism was romantic, exciting and, in some cases, worthwhile.
They’d never apologized for their association with killers, preferring to pretend that the deadly incidents were tangential to the work of the Journeymen for Change and that the widespread destruction of businesses and property their bombs had wrought had been entirely defensible.
Would they choose the side of the son who’d sold his soul to the CIA?
“Of course,” Alicia murmured. “You’d been working for the CIA. Martin and Lorraine Solano’s son.” Her lips curled in a bleak smile. “They’d have been appalled.”
“I knew you hated me anyway. I thought maybe it would be best for us all if we just left it that way,” he admitted, loathing how cowardly the explanation sounded.
“I never hated you. I was angry and hurt by the things I thought you’d done, but I could never hate you.” She took a step away from her brother-in-law, a step toward Sinclair. “For the record, if you’d told me the truth, I would have kept it from our parents. I’m not blind to the way they are.”
“You were so young when I left. I wasn’t sure—”
“I never romanticized what our parents did, like you did.”
He nodded slowly. “So that just leaves cowardice, I guess. I didn’t want you to see what a fool I’d been.”
“You weren’t a fool.” She took another step toward him, moving with care, as if she saw him as a wild animal on the brink of flight. He almost smiled at the thought, because in so many ways, that was exactly who he’d been for the past few years. “You were young and conscientious. Looking for something in this world worth believing in. You just chose the wrong thing. But if anything Quinn’s been telling me is true, you paid for that mistake beyond what anyone could have asked of you.”
“Don’t.” His voice came out rough and hard, even though he hadn’t intended it. “Don’t turn me into a hero.”
“Too late for that, bud.” Ava slapped his shoulder from behind, making his nerves jangle. “You’re already a hero.”
He glanced at her, saw the emotion blazing in her hazel eyes, and felt like a fraud. He wanted to yell at her, at Alicia, at all of the Coopers standing there looking at him with admiration and sympathy.
They didn’t know. They didn’t understand what he’d done.
But he didn’t get the chance to respond. The sound of dozens of feet crashing through the woods around them put everyone on alert. The Coopers whipped around to face the newcomers, weapons raised and ready.
“Put down the weapons!” The command filtered through a bullhorn, ringing through the woods.
Dozens of black-clad men and a couple of women circled the encampment, a variety of pistols and rifles aimed their way.
The Feds had finally arrived.
* * *
AVA HAD NEVER been the most patient of women, but her years in the FBI had taught her that justice had its own timetable, and it was almost always slower than she liked. Always before, she’d managed to tamp down her irritation with the slow grind of bureaucracy and let the situation play out to its natural end.
But Sinclair Solano was a hero, not a terrorist. And so far, not a single FBI agent, not even her SAC, Pete Chang, would listen to her.
“He’s not dead, so the warrant for his arrest stands,” Chang told her in a voice that suggested he suspected her of having lost her mind during her days with Sinclair Solano.
“Stop looking at me as if I have Stockholm syndrome,” she growled. “I wasn’t his captive. He was mine. And if you don’t believe me, go find Alexander Quinn and he’ll tell you.”
“Mr. Quinn seems to be hard to find at the moment,” Chang told her with a grimace. “And from what I’ve heard, he’s hardly what you’d call a reliable witness. The man spent two decades lying for a living.”
“Then talk to the Coopers.”
“Solano’s in-laws, you mean?”
If there had been anything in the interview room to wrap her hand around, she’d have thrown it at Chang, her career be damned. “If you put him in prison, he will be at Cabrera’s mercy. You think El Cambio doesn’t have a prison network?”
“I know they do.” Chang’s placating tone scraped every nerve she had. “I’m sure the courts will make sure Solano’s put in solitary.”
“He doesn’t belong in jail at all!” Ava gripped the edge of the table in
front of her, frustration boiling inside her. “He put his life on the line for this country for five years.”
“He blew up nine people in Tesoro.”
“Nine terrorists who showed up before they were supposed to. The bomb was meant to go off with no one in the warehouse.”
“So your buddy Solano says.”
“So Alexander Quinn said.”
“Quinn again.”
Ava clamped her mouth shut. “I want to see Solano.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“With all due respect, sir, I don’t care what you think about the idea.”
Chang’s eyes narrowed. “You’re treading a very dangerous line, Agent Trent.”
“Then let me stomp all over it,” she said, her patience gone. She pushed to her feet and glared down at the SAC. “I quit.”
Chang’s dark eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”
“I no longer work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective immediately.” She pulled her credentials wallet from her pocket and shoved it across the table to him, then turned to go.
Chang grabbed her arm, jerking her back to face him. “Nobody said you could leave.”
“Are you charging me with anything?”
Chang looked as if he’d like to say yes, but finally he shook his head and let go of her arm. “No.”
Only because the fallout would be a PR nightmare, she thought with an inward grimace.
“It was nice working with you, Pete. Well, up to today.” She spared him a final, regretful look, and walked to the interview room door.
It was locked, but when she hammered on the door, the guard outside opened it and didn’t try to stop her when she walked into the hall.
A half-dozen of her fellow agents and several Poe Creek police officers watched her with curious expressions as she silently walked the short gauntlet of onlookers toward the front exit of the Poe Creek police station. As she stepped outside, a blustery wind blew needles of rain into her face and she remembered with dismay that her car was back in Johnson City. She and Landry had come to Poe Creek in a bureau-issue sedan.
With a groan of exhaustion, she dropped to the top step of the police station’s shallow front stoop and fought the urge to cry.