Men Made in America Mega-Bundle

by Gayle Wilson, Marie Ferrarella, Jennifer Greene, Annette Broadrick, Judith Arnold, Rita Herron, Anne Stuart, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Bevarly, Patricia Rosemoor, Emilie Richards

  Soon, baby, she found herself thinking, promising him. We’ll be there very soon.

  Chapter Eleven

  She wasn’t really aware of the scenery they passed, thinking instead about the route Deke had laid out verbally for her. They would not be able to cover as many miles as she had hoped to before nightfall. She hadn’t realized how long they’d slept. They would stop after eight and place the call to Mary. And then it would simply be a matter of using the information her sister provided, to get in touch with Mike and explain some of what was going on, at least enough to warn him and then get to Josh.

  She had been repeating that phrase like a mantra since she’d realized Deke was worried. Underlying his surface imperturbability, something was bothering him, and she didn’t like it. Deke was uncomfortable with what was happening. Maybe only because, as he’d suggested from the first, he didn’t trust Mike. Or maybe because he was afraid they’d be too late.

  Resolutely, she denied those thoughts. Nothing was going to go wrong. Deke didn’t trust anyone but himself. She knew that. He was simply in a hurry to get to Josh, just as she was. She checked her watch again, realizing with frustration that it was only a little after six.

  Deke glanced at her, but he didn’t say anything. They had not really talked after they’d left the motel, only the most commonplace exchanges. Not about Josh or the phone calls. Certainly not about what had happened between them. It was as if he intended to ignore the fact they had made love.

  She knew that he had never wanted that to happen. She had forced the issue, and she supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t want to deal with it. It hurt—his failure to acknowledge that the situation between them had changed. They couldn’t erase what had happened, but it appeared that Deke was going to do the next best thing by ignoring it.

  “Stop worrying,” he said finally, the third time she looked at her watch.

  “Why shouldn’t I worry?” she asked. “You are.”

  He glanced at her again, meeting her eyes and holding them a moment before he turned his attention back to the highway.

  “What makes you think I’m worried?”

  “Experience, maybe? Maybe I’m getting better at reading through the mask.”

  She waited for his explanation, but when the silence continued, she knew he didn’t intend to offer one.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?” she suggested.

  She thought he wouldn’t answer, especially when his eyes remained focused on the road that stretched before them, straight and flat, the colors of the landscape around it the monotonous neutrality of the desert, shimmering with heat and light.

  “I don’t like the idea that someone knew more than we did,” he said.

  “Someone?”

  “Someone who may have had an eighteen-hour head start on us.”

  “And that’s my fault.”

  “It’s no one’s fault. It’s just a reality. I don’t like the idea that someone might have known where Josh was hours before we did.”

  “How would they know?” she asked, but she understood what he was suggesting. He had suggested it from the beginning.

  “I don’t know. I just think…” he hesitated, and angrily she filled in the gap.

  “You think someone in my family is giving information to the people who are following you. Following us,” she amended.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’ve suggested it. You suspected Mike and Bill, that their trip was somehow connected to all this. That they took Josh. And now? You think they’re luring us to meet them? A trap? Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “It’s a possibility,” he admitted. It was a possibility.

  “That’s a bunch of crap,” she said.

  “I know you think that your brothers—”

  “Do you trust me, Deke?” she interrupted. She realized that she was holding her breath, waiting for his answer.

  “Yeah,” he finally said, eyes still on the narrow ribbon ahead.

  “Then believe me when I tell you that Mike and Bill are not involved with your enemies.”

  “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but all along they’ve found us too quickly. They have to have some source of information. I’m just afraid that…they might somehow have gotten your brothers’ location last night.”

  “And they might already have found Josh,” she said.

  “Another possibility.”

  “Then Mike won’t call. We won’t know where to go.”

  “If I’m right, he’ll call. They’ll want to set up an exchange.”

  She knew that was, of course, what they’d been attempting when they’d entered her home. A hostage. Someone who would force Deke Summers to finally give himself up, to surrender at last.

  Well, she thought bitterly, I had to ask. Tell me what you’re worried about. And he had.

  She closed her eyes, fighting the possibilities he’d suggested. Deke’s life in exchange for Josh. That might be what it all boiled down to—what he had told her from the beginning, from the time he’d convinced her to go with him. Only she had never really accepted that might truly be the only option. Deke’s life in exchange for Josh.

  SHE KNEW BY MARY’S voice that something was wrong, knew it before the first bewildered sentence.

  “Did you hear from Mike and the boys?” Becki had asked, trying to keep her voice normal. “Do you have their number?”

  “Not a number,” Mary said, her anxiety clearly revealed despite the distance. “A message. Mike asked me to give you a message. He said it was important.”

  Becki leaned against the side of the fast-food restaurant where she was using the phone. Deke had given her a handful of change, dumping the quarters into her outstretched palm, rejecting her idea of calling collect.

  “A message?” she repeated carefully. This was what Deke had expected, but the sudden fear the words engendered weakened her knees and churned sickly in her stomach.

  “Mike made me write it down so I’d get it right. He said that was important. Do you have something to write on?”

  “I’ve got a pencil. Go ahead.” She had dug the pencil out of the bottom of the glove compartment and had torn out the record page of the service manual, prepared to write down Mike’s number, which would finally take them to Josh.

  “You’re to go to a place called Cloud Run. That’s a town in New Mexico,” Mary said, speaking very carefully. “Monday morning at eight o’clock you have to be at the pay phone on the corner of Everett and Main. The phone’s in front of a drugstore. Somebody will call you on that phone with instructions.”

  “That’s it? That’s all he told you?”

  “Mike said to make sure you understood—nobody but you and Mr. Summers. Don’t contact the authorities. No police. No outside agencies. He said that several times. Just you and Summers. Do you understand any of this, Bec?”

  “Have you told anybody else about Mike’s call?”

  “He told me not to talk to anyone. That was important, too, he said. Only you. And not to breathe a word to anyone else.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  “I just hung up, maybe five minutes before you called. I didn’t know what to do until I talked to you. He sounded…He didn’t sound like Mike. He sounded scared.”

  “It’s okay.” Becki reassured her sister’s fear. She was beginning to sound like Deke. Okay. Everything’s okay. What a lie. Dear God, what a lie. “You know Mike.”

  “You sound like he did,” Mary said, cutting through her assurance. “Pretending to be calm when you’re really not. What the hell is happening, Becki? What the hell is going on?”

  “The less you know about all this…” she began and then hesitated, recognizing the echo. Deke again. Keep everybody in the dark. Trust no one. “Just don’t talk to anyone. The boys are all right. I promise you. I’ll call you as soon as we make connection with them.”

  “Who’s Summers?” Mary asked.


  “A friend of Mike’s,” Becki lied. Why tell her anything else to drive her crazy? After all, Mary’s son was involved in this insanity, too.

  “And he’s in trouble?” Mary asked.

  Becki hesitated, knowing her sister was grasping for some explanation that would make sense of all this.

  “Yes,” she agreed finally. “He’s in trouble.”

  “And you’re not at the beach.”

  “No.”

  She heard the depth of the breath her sister took. “You promise me they’re all right?”

  “As long as you don’t tell anyone what you’ve told me. No one, Mary. Promise me.”

  “All right,” her sister said softly.

  “I have to go. I’ll call you as soon as I can. Monday night.”

  “All right,” Mary said again. The fear was still there, but overlaid by resignation, by trust perhaps.

  She put the receiver back on the metal hook and turned around to find Deke, cold eyes meeting hers, already aware from her face or posture or from some overheard fragment of the conversation that it had all gone wrong.

  “Mike called. We’re to go to some place in New Mexico. Cloud Run. We have to be there by Monday morning at eight o’clock. We’re supposed to wait at a pay phone for instructions.”

  Deke’s expression didn’t change, the information probably only what he’d expected. And then suddenly he smiled at her.

  “Right,” he said, allowing her to read the sarcasm.

  “We’re not going to wait for further instructions?” she asked, hope fluttering upward from the sickness that had grown since Mary had confirmed Deke’s fears.

  “Not damn likely,” he said. He switched the sack of burgers he held in his left hand to his right and then used his good left arm to pull her against his side. He held her a moment, his mouth against her top of her head. “I’m not going to let anything happen to Josh or to the others. Trust me one last time, Bec. I promise you nothing is going to happen to Josh.”

  “I NEED TO MAKE A phone call,” Deke said.

  They had been driving west for the past five hours, since she’d talked to Mary. They both understood the implications of the instructions they’d been given. She realized that Deke had been working his way to a plan, silently considering their options in his head.

  “A phone call?” she repeated. It was the middle of the night. And given Deke’s admitted lack of ties…They had been told not to call the authorities, but she had already come to the decision that if it came down to a demand for Deke’s life in exchange for the others, they would have to get help. Maybe he had come to the same conclusion.

  “The best time,” he said.

  He turned to smile at her, her features barely visible in the darkness. He knew she had been worrying, but he had given her a promise, and in the hours that he’d been driving, always nearer to their destination, he had been trying to work out the best way to make sure it was a promise he could keep. All he needed now was a little assistance.

  ALTHOUGH HE HADN’T USED the number in four years, it was intact in his memory. It was a number he had dialed often, several lifetimes ago. He listened to the distant ringing, waiting, anticipating the once-familiar voice.

  “Hello.”

  The response was sleep fogged, a tired man pulled from a well-deserved rest. Deke Summers’s lips tilted upward a fraction, knowing that despite the pleasantness of the response, he was being cursed, mentally at least.

  “Too much sleep’ll slow you down. You know that,” he said. “It’s almost as bad as old age.”

  There was silence on the other end for a long time. Deke knew the man he had called would have placed his voice. Too well known to have been forgotten, even after four years.

  “Deke?” Luke Ballard whispered. “My God, Deke, is that you?”

  “I need some information,” Deke said, feeling his throat close against the emotions that lay beneath that whispered question. So many years of friendship. Working together. Trusting his life in this man’s hands. And holding Luke’s within his own. “No questions asked.”

  “What kind of information?”

  There was a caution in the response, which Deke could hear, but he didn’t blame his partner for that. It had been a long time, a lot of water under the dam. A lot of rumors and innuendos.

  “A location. A camp. Some kind of training facility. Anything they’ve got near Cloud Run, New Mexico. There’s got to be something nearby, and I need to know exactly what and where it is.”

  “Something that belongs to the Movement.”

  “Or something that they would have unlimited and unquestioned access to.”

  “I’ll have to put it through the computers.”

  “I need it tomorrow. Today,” Deke amended.

  “Sunday?”

  “Don’t you have enough pull?” Deke asked, allowing amusement to color the question.

  “Yeah,” the other admitted, and Deke could hear the answering, slightly embarrassed humor in his voice.

  “I heard you’d moved up in the world, once you got rid of that inconvenient partner.”

  “You in trouble, Deke?”

  “I’m always in trouble. Don’t you remember?”

  “You can still come in. We’ve tried to contact you. I’m so sorry about…”

  “No,” Deke said. Nothing else.

  “You can’t run forever.”

  “Long enough.”

  Another silence. There was too much they needed to say to each other, and no way to express it.

  “Give me a number where I can reach you,” Luke said finally, back to business because his friend had given him no choice.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “It’ll take a while.”

  “Not for a man with pull,” Deke said, his lips lifting again. “And not if you start early. I’ll call you.”

  He broke the connection, holding the receiver a long time, listening to the dial tone, his fingers still on the metal hook he’d pulled down to destroy the connection before there was time for a trace. Old habits.

  DEKE HAD PUSHED HARD, determined to reach a vantage point at the top of the ridge overlooking the encampment before sundown so that he could assess the vulnerabilities of the site or of the operation, to formulate some plan of attack.

  Luke had provided this location, and its nearness to the town where they’d been told to wait had been verification enough of Deke’s suspicions. It was a training facility that, according to the official records, belonged to some survivalist group. The terrain that surrounded it was certainly rugged enough to discourage those who didn’t have business here. Too rugged for the merely curious. But Deke had had no doubt that he would find Becki’s brothers and the children being held at the camp. Its location was too convenient to be coincidental.

  As he had climbed, he had always been aware of Becki determinedly struggling behind him. The slope wasn’t that difficult, but the heat and altitude made any activity challenging. He needed to be high enough to see exactly what the setup was, to find the point of attack that would allow him to get Josh and the others safely out of the hands of his enemies.

  When Becki reached the summit of the ridge, Deke was already stretched out on his stomach, the binoculars that had been among the supplies he’d bought after he’d made the second phone call trained on the relatively flat ground below.

  “Stay low,” he cautioned, his attention focused on the scene spread out before him, the sweep of the glasses slow and careful over whatever was down there. Whatever they had come to see. “You’ll be visible against the light.”

  She obeyed without question, easing nearer to the edge of the escarpment. The position he’d chosen was perfect. It was near enough that she could make out a great deal of detail, even without the advantage of the binoculars he was using, and yet high enough to give them a view of the entire encampment.

  “That’s Bill’s van,” Becki whispered, recognizing the familiar vehicle parked near the perimeter of the
clearing, which seemed to be the center of activity. The van was flanked by several all-terrain vehicles, a couple of which had even been painted over with desert camouflage, and a large panel truck.

  Playing soldier, Deke thought when he saw the camouflage. Half of the people involved probably weren’t aware of the real purpose of this pseudomilitary operation, maybe not even aware that there were lives on the line, the lives of innocent people caught up in their deadly games. As there had been before, he found himself thinking. Just as there had been before.

  A command tent had been set up in the center of the relatively open area and scattered at its periphery were smaller two-man tents. There was no movement visible around the largest, but it was heavily guarded, and the men standing at the four corners were armed with AK-47s, alert and focused on what they were doing. Since the central tent was the only thing that was guarded, it was an easy conclusion that it must be where the hostages were being held.

  He studied the layout and was forced to acknowledge that whoever had designed the security had known exactly what he was doing. This was no amateur operation. Someone with a great deal of experience was in charge of the arrangements, and he had been left with very little to work with. The fall of darkness would offer his best chance at getting to the people who were being held inside, but even that would be a long shot, he was forced to acknowledge. A damn long shot.

  “They’re inside the big tent, aren’t they?” Becki asked.

  “Probably,” he said. He didn’t look at her. He knew that she was trusting him to make this all right. To get Josh and her brothers out without anyone being hurt.

  No more broken and bloodied bodies. It was the same promise he had made long ago. No more failures. No more mistakes.

  He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind as he carefully refocused the glasses, tracking the man who emerged from the central tent to address one of the guards. There was something about him that struck a chord of recognition. Not of the individual himself, but an unconscious acknowledgment that he was the leader. The man in charge. He moved with the surety of the man in charge.