by Paula Graves
“What are we up against?” he asked.
She didn’t pretend not to understand what he was asking. “I swear, I’ll tell you everything. But right now we have to get moving.”
He held on to her arm a moment longer before he dropped his hand away. “Tell me what to do.”
“Just pack. Fast as you can. I’ll make sure it’s clear outside, then I’ll meet you at the truck.” She pushed past him, her heart pounding with dread.
* * *
THE NIGHT WAS clear and cool, a whispery breeze sending a chill up Jack’s spine as he hurried down the porch steps and across the gravel drive to where Mallory waited by the truck. She was in motion, moving from foot to foot, her head swiveling as she scanned the woods around them as if she expected an ambush any second.
Hell, maybe she did. Maybe he should be doing so, too.
When he clicked the remote keyless entry device on his key chain to unlock the door, the resulting beep made Mallory jump.
“Sorry,” he said quietly, opening the driver’s door while she entered the passenger side and stashed her bags on the bench seat. “We have to leave the key to the cabin at the main office—”
“Don’t stop,” she said sharply, already belting herself in.
“Why not?” he asked as he started the engine.
“Just don’t. We’ll get the key back to the property managers if we have to mail it, but just trust me. Don’t—”
Something hit the side of the truck with a hard thunk. Simultaneously a bark of gunfire rang in the woods.
“Go!” Mallory growled, folding herself forward and dropping her head beneath the window.
He jerked the truck into Drive and hit the gas, spraying gravel behind them as they barreled down the narrow access road. A second crack of gunfire sounded, but he didn’t feel any impact on the truck.
“Faster!” Mallory’s voice rang with fear, the frantic sound so different from her normal, controlled tone that Jack felt an answering flood of panic rise in his throat. He was going as fast as he dared on the dark, twisting mountain road, but he didn’t let up, the trees a blur as they whipped past them on the way to the main highway. “Take a right at the highway!”
When they reached the four-lane, he turned right and slowed to just above the speed limit, earning a growl of protest from Mallory. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to avoid the notice of the Tennessee Highway Patrol,” he answered, slanting a quick glance her way. In the glow of the dashboard lights, her blue eyes glittered with fear as she darted quick looks in every direction.
“We’re going to have to stop soon,” she warned, “so we really need to get as far as we can as fast as we can.”
“Didn’t you just say no stops?”
She shot him an impatient glare. “Someone was outside the cabin earlier. They could have planted a tracker on your truck. There’s a rest stop about ten miles south of here. We can pull over there.” She slumped back in her seat and seemed to make a conscious effort to relax, but one knee jiggled restlessly and he had a feeling that if he reached across to touch her, she’d shoot through the roof of the truck.
“Who was that back there in the woods?” He kept his tone even and calm, though his own nerves were so tightly strung he had to consciously will his fingers not to clutch the steering wheel in a death grip.
“I’m not sure,” she said after a beat of silence.
“You said you’d tell me everything.”
“I will.” She turned her head to look at him. “I will. But it’s long, it’s complicated and I honestly don’t know who that was shooting at us back there. Or, for that matter, who went after me yesterday at my cabin.”
“Surely you have some idea.”
“I have a few.”
“A few?”
“I’ve made enemies.”
“Enemies who murdered your sister thinking she was you?”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was raspy and faint. “Yes.”
“And you blame yourself.”
“Yes.” No hesitation, he noted.
A short while later, the rest stop appeared ahead in the truck’s headlights. “You sure we’ve gotten far enough to risk stopping?”
“If there’s a tracker on the truck, they’ll find us anyway.”
“And if there’s not?”
“It’s worth the risk.” She nodded toward the turnoff. “Let’s do this, as fast as we can.”
Jack pulled the truck into the rest area parking lot and drove around to the back, where the rest area welcome center would hide them from the road.
The surge of pride that swelled in his chest at Mallory’s nod of approval was downright embarrassing. But he followed her lead and exited the truck.
She was already searching the truck chassis, running her hand along the bottom of the side panels. “They didn’t open any doors, or your alarm system would have detected the motion, right?”
“Right. Or if they’d put any undue pressure on the car, or broken a window or—”
“Doesn’t take undue pressure to put a tracker on the underside of the chassis,” she noted. “Wouldn’t have been that easy to get all the way under the truck on that gravel drive, I suppose. They’d have stirred up the gravel, and I didn’t notice any gravel out of place when I looked around while I was waiting for you.” She stood up straight and dusted her hands, looking at him over the hood of the truck. “No tracker that I can find.”
“You checked to see if the gravel was out of place?” He stared back at her, once again surprised. Though by now, nothing the woman said or did should have come as a shock.
“I thought a tracker might be a possibility. But I didn’t get a chance to check before you came outside and then the shooting started.” She opened the passenger door and climbed inside.
Back in the truck, he paused with his hand on the ignition key, still thinking about what her last words had inadvertently revealed. Dropping his hand to his side, he turned to look at her, his heart thudding a slow, deep cadence of dread.
Her gaze swept up to meet his, and in her blue eyes, he saw an answering look of apprehension.
“Just how long have you been running, Mallory?” he asked.
She released a quiet sigh. “As long as I can remember.”
* * *
THE RAIN WAS BACK, peppering the truck’s windshield with fat splats of precipitation and blurring the limited view of the world illuminated in the headlights as they neared the Maryville city limits.
“I told you about my mother’s death,” she said, filling the tense silence that had fallen between them after her last answer. To Jack’s credit, he had remained quiet, letting her gather her thoughts, and her courage, before she spoke.
“You did,” he agreed.
“We went to live with my aunt and uncle in Amarillo.” The house where Mara had lived had belonged first to their uncle, their mother’s older brother. He and his wife had been childless, and when he passed away of a heart attack only a month after his wife had succumbed to cancer, he’d left the house to Mallory and her sister.
Mara had lived out the rest of her life there. Mallory, however, had already moved on long before.
“They were very kind to us. They didn’t have any children, so they treated us as if we were there own.” She tucked her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Mara thrived.”
“You didn’t?”
“I witnessed my mother’s death. Mara didn’t.” She rubbed her chin against her forearm, trying to shove the image of that night away, tuck it into that dark little cubbyhole in the deepest recesses of her memory where she tried to keep it hidden. “I guess I never really felt like a child after that. I acted out, and my poor aunt and uncle didn’t have a clue how to deal with a kid like me. Brain-smart, maybe, but so life-stupid.”
“You never got any kind of therapy?”
She managed a bleak approximation of a smile. “A few visits. I proc
laimed myself cured and I guess my aunt and uncle wanted to believe it. So they did.”
Jack made a little huffing sound but said nothing else.
“I was sixteen when I finished my high school courses. I was a natural student, I guess. Ate up every subject put in front of me and went back for extras. I don’t know, I guess maybe I figured if I learned all the secrets of the universe, my life might start to make sense.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No. It didn’t,” she agreed. “Next, I went to college at MIT.”
He released a low whistle. “Impressive.”
She slanted a look at him, wondering if he was making fun of her. He looked sincere enough. “Double-majored in computer science and philosophy.”
He grinned at that revelation. “Philosophy?”
“I thought it was cool and radical.”
“Was it?”
“Not so much,” she admitted. “Most of the guys who took philosophy classes did it to score with the girls.”
“That’s pretty much the reason guys take any college classes,” he murmured drily.
“I graduated from college by the age of nineteen. The world was my oyster, or so the astronaut who spoke at graduation told us.” She sounded terribly cynical for a woman not yet thirty, she thought, tightening her grip on her knees. “By then, I had fallen in with a group of hackers I’d met over the course of my studies. Some were fellow students. Some were dropouts. Some were trust-fund babies with money and time on their hands.”
“Black hats or white hats?”
“Mostly gray.” They’d played pretty fast and loose with cybersecurity laws those days, too young and stupid to think that anything could ever really touch them. “Nothing that would have landed anybody in jail long-term.”
“But short-term?”
“A night in the clink now and then.” She shrugged. “I managed to skirt the line. Never got picked up myself.” Not by the local cops, at least.
Jack seemed to sense the hesitation in her voice. “Never?”
“Not here,” she amended. “In the United States, I mean.”
One dark eyebrow notched upward as he shot another quick glance her way. “Then where?”
“Medellín, Colombia.”
His voice deepened. “Drugs?”
She shook her head, her gut tightening to a knot. “Guns.”
He shot her a hard look. “You were running guns?”
“Not me. Well, I guess I was, but—anyway, the guy I was with at the time was an arms dealer.”
He directed his gaze forward again, but she saw in the hard set of his jaw that her confession had disturbed him.
“I didn’t know,” she added quickly, not sure why she felt compelled to defend herself to Jack Drummond when she’d never felt inclined to explain her choices to anyone besides Mara.
Not even Alexander Quinn had heard a single excuse pass her lips. Nor had he asked for one. All he’d cared about was the information she had been willing to provide about Carlos Herrera and his merry band of arms dealers.
“How’d you end up in jail?”
“Carlos had used me to carry guns. I swear, Jack, I didn’t know what he was doing.”
He frowned in her direction, as if he found her sudden show of earnestness as unexpected as she did herself. “I believe you.”
Relief washed over her like a chill, followed by a flutter of guilt at the part she’d left out of the story. “I wasn’t entirely innocent, though.”
“Did you think you were running drugs instead?”
“God, no.” She recoiled at the thought. “I thought they were smuggling bootleg software. Stuff that should be available open source. Or so I thought at the time.”
“Not anymore?”
“Not everything has to be free. People put a lot of time and sweat into their work. I think they deserve compensation for it.”
“Of course.”
“But life can look very different when you’re twenty-two, foolish and living life in the fast lane.” She leaned her cheek against her forearm, ignoring the twinge of pain in her back at her cramped position, another reminder that she hadn’t been twenty-two and naive in a long, long time.
“How long were you in jail in Medellín?”
“Four days.”
He winced. “How bad was it?”
“Could have been a lot worse,” she admitted, thinking of some of the horror stories she’d heard from embassy staff in Bogotá about Americans in Colombian prisons. “One of my friends who escaped the raid called the US embassy in Bogotá. Quinn was there.”
“And saw a chance to bring down a gunrunning operation?” Jack guessed.
“Something like that.”
“Why do I get the feeling that wasn’t the last thing you ever did for Alexander Quinn?”
“Because it wasn’t.”
“Is that when you went from gray hat to white hat?”
She smiled at the hint of amusement in his voice. She’d known he’d appreciate the hat analogy. “More or less. Quinn saved me from what could have been years in prison. And we took down at least one small band of gunrunners supplying FARC—Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. Leftist guerrilla group. Very violent.”
“Lovely.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to know.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “I should have asked more questions.”
“You shouldn’t have been in Colombia running bootleg software, either,” he pointed out in a flat voice.
“And you shouldn’t have been messing with Mara’s head the way you did,” she shot back.
He slanted a hard look her way before the tension in his jaw relaxed and he gave a short nod. “Fair enough.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Guilt tugged at her chest. “You didn’t really break her heart, Jack. She never let you that far in.”
They had reached the outskirts of Maryville while she was spilling the sordid tale of her misbegotten youth. Ahead, the first traffic light in miles shimmered red in the rainy night, and Jack pulled the truck to a stop and turned to look at her.
“What do you mean, she never let me that far in?”
Mallory made herself meet his curious gaze, even though she felt a ripple of guilt for what she was about to say. “Mara had her own demons, Jack. She was sweet, yes. And kind. But she told me, after you’d left, that she’d never really let herself love you. She knew you’d leave, so she didn’t bother. At first, I don’t think I believed her. God knows, I hated you for her, because you shouldn’t have played with her affections. You certainly didn’t care whether or not you left her heartbroken in your wake.”
Jack blinked slowly. “I did care. Just too late.”
“Well, you can stop feeling guilty now. Okay? Mara never loved you.” She waved her hand in front of him. “I absolve you officially.”
“I thought you weren’t in the absolution business.”
“I’m not,” she admitted, dragging her gaze away from his warm eyes. She nodded at the traffic light, which had turned green.
With a soft exhalation, Jack drove on, into Maryville proper. Mallory hadn’t held out much hope for finding an all-night diner, but just off the main drag, she spotted what looked like a small storefront eatery still open despite the late hour. She touched Jack’s arm and pointed.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“I can set up a hot spot there. Get back online.”
“And look for what?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Not what. Who.” She reached behind her for her backpack and the laptop inside. “It’s time to see if Endrex wants to come back out to play.”
Chapter Thirteen
Watching Mallory on the computer reminded Jack, unexpectedly, of watching a master bull rider at work. Over the course of his years on the rodeo circuit, he’d seen some rides that defied physics. Observing Mallory’s virtuoso turn at the keyboard was almost as exhilarating, though on a more cereb
ral level. With a few rapid keystrokes, she navigated the internet with both skill and intuition that left him in her virtual dust.
They’d gravitated to a corner booth in the all-night diner, sharing the place with a couple of big rig truckers who were trading highway war stories from their perches on stools at the front counter and a pair of middle-aged lovers more interested in each other than the half-eaten plate of cheese fries in front of them.
He and Mallory had ordered two large coffees and a couple of sandwiches—steak and cheese for him, turkey with Swiss for her—before settling down on the same side of the booth like the lovers across the diner from them. But unlike the middle-aged woman, Mallory only had eyes for her laptop screen.
“I wrote a program that logs all my internet interactions. It recorded the brief conversation I had with our mystery contact last night,” she told him as her fingers danced gracefully over the keys. “I can run those logs through another program I wrote to see if it can sniff out where the message originated, but it could take a while.” She made one final keystroke and sat back, reaching for her neglected sandwich.
“Will that help?” he asked. “Knowing where it originated? I mean, is it going to tell you his physical location, so we could actually hunt him down for a face-to-face meeting?”
“Potentially, yes. But even if his geographic location is masked, we might get some clues about how to make contact with him instead of waiting for him to make the next move.”
He could definitely see the benefit in being the ones in control. “How long have you been looking for him?”
“Off and on since the last time he disappeared, which was almost two years ago. But in earnest? The past four months.”
“What changed four months ago?” he asked, curious.
“A group called the Blue Ridge Infantry tried to poison the attendees of a law enforcement conference near Barrowville, just down the road from Purgatory.”
“I’m not following.”
She glanced at him. “I told you about Wayne Cortland and his criminal organization, didn’t I?”
“Right, and you said Endrex worked for him, but what do they have to do with this Blue Ridge outfit?”