Hard to Trust

by Wendy Byrne

  They'd finally reached the trees, and the shots hadn't been heard for at least a couple of minutes. He was beginning to get downright hopeful. Until the bullet whistled past his ear.

  "I can't see a damn thing. They've got to have infrared to keep tracking us like this." She picked up the pace as they headed down a steep hill.

  "Must have." He sent the distress text to Jennings, who'd be able to pick up their coordinates.

  "Can I hate you forever if I get shot?"

  "Besides the fact this is absolutely not my fault, you can still curse my grave with your ghost self."

  "You had to have a tracking device on your car that you and your Alliance hotshots didn't figure on."

  "If they did, which I doubt, the blocking device should have taken care of it. Besides, we're not in a car now and they still seem to be tracking us."

  She stopped for a second and turned to look at him. He could see the indignation splattered across her face for a few seconds before she screamed and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tessa screamed like a little girl, not like a seasoned CIA agent, but she couldn't help herself. One minute she was standing next to Jake, the next she was sliding down an incline of indeterminate size. She dug in her heels and placed her forearms along the ground to gain purchase on the slippery landscape. No dice. Every bump and rock felt like boulders, jarring and bruising her body on the way down.

  She spotted something below. Oh hell, that was a highway. If the fall didn't kill her, a truck would no doubt roll over her.

  Jake shined the phone flashlight then she heard him swear, which only added to her worries. That couldn't be good. His footsteps tumbled down the incline, his heavy boots grabbing the rough terrain with ease.

  Somehow he managed to make it to the bottom and grabbed her arm seconds before a car whizzed past. Her heart and stomach were still in free fall, her insides as shaky as a leaf on a tree in a tornado.

  "Are you all right?"

  "If you mean did I break anything? I don't think so. If you mean does everything hurt like hell? That would be a yes."

  "We're sitting ducks in the open like this."

  "I'm not sure—"

  He put a finger to her lips to shush her. Her already erratic pulse did a shift into overdrive. She wasn't sure how much more adrenaline overload her heart could take.

  She needed to stop being a wimp, but every time she breathed her body hurt like she was being prodded with a red-hot poker along every square inch.

  The sound of voices carried through the night. She couldn't be sure how far away they were, but if she could hear them she figured they were close enough to worry about.

  He yanked her beneath an overhang as the conversation filtered from above. Her teeth started to chatter. He slipped an arm over her shoulder, pulling her tight.

  "She's got to be here somewhere. I wish we had the night-vision scope about now."

  Tessa held her breath and thought about death. They didn't have night vision but had somehow managed to track them through the field. Somebody wanted her dead—but first they wanted information from her that she didn't know she had.

  "Somehow we lost the signal." Another guy spoke. Neither voice sounded even remotely familiar. And neither had Russian accents.

  "It was like they disappeared."

  "Tell that to the boss. I'm sure he won't be real happy about their disappearing act once again."

  "He might change his mind about wanting her alive even if she has secrets stashed away somewhere."

  "They did not come this way. I'm telling you. I lost the signal in the field somewhere."

  "What kind of dumbass tracking thing do you have that it keeps shorting out?"

  "It had to be microscopic to avoid detection. And we're still working out some of the bugs."

  Their voices faded into the distance as the men got farther away. Finally, she felt like she could breathe again. Jake's hold on her lessened.

  "That settles it. The signal's not in the car," he said.

  "Then where is it?"

  "It's got to be in your computer or in your backpack." He hesitated and forced her to look at him. "Something else. These guys were different from the ones the other day."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They weren't Russian."

  He was right. That meant there was more than one group of people after her. She swallowed down the fear. "How long before the cavalry comes to get us?" Whoever was after her wasn't going to rest. Getting as far away from them and figuring out how they were tracked had to be the number one priority.

  "Here they are now." The car lights blinked twice as he yanked her back.

  "I'm a muddy mess." Her teeth chattered between her words.

  "Don't worry. You can sit on my lap." He opened the car door, got inside, and pulled her on top of him.

  * * *

  Shit.

  Jennings was waiting for Jake at the warehouse, where they'd left a new car for them. He couldn't help but get the feeling he was on the road to being pulled from the case. Jennings never interfered in an assignment.

  He held out his hand. "You must be Tessa."

  "Careful. I'm pretty much encased in mud. I need to clean up and change. These pants are trashed. For a few minutes, I felt like Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone. Sliding down the mud hill looked much cooler and sexier in the movie. I gotta say, my butt is killing me."

  Jennings chuckled. "The shower is in the back. There're some fresh clothes, shampoo, everything you'll need. I also had some food brought in."

  "All in a day's work." Jake chucked her under the chin and watched her walk away. If not for Jennings's presence, he might have kissed her.

  What the hell was wrong with him? Something happened back there. She'd left her guard down, and so had he.

  "What happened?" Jennings asked, bringing Jake away from his thoughts.

  "We spent the night in Connecticut without an issue, but as soon as we headed toward the city they picked up our trail again."

  "Do you think she alerted them somehow?"

  Jake shook his head even while doubts percolated his thoughts. "I don't think so. She was running as hard as I was to avoid them. And these were different guys than the ones from the other night. No Russian accents."

  "Use the scanners I've set up in back and see what you can find. There's got to be something in her computer or her backpack to explain why they keep finding you." Jennings hesitated. "What about her? Have you found anything more about the circumstances?"

  "She seems on the up and up. She's guarded, but I would be too if somebody was trying to kill me."

  Jennings held out his hand. "Keep me posted. The car's waiting outside with the keys in the glove. There's some food on the tables in back. Be careful."

  With those words of warning, Jake jumped into the shower and put on some fresh clothes. Out before her, he rummaged through her backpack while he waited.

  "Did you find anything?" Tessa had scoured the mud splashes on her face so much that her skin was bright pink when she walked up.

  For a minute or two he forgot he shouldn't trust her, because she looked so damn good. Don't fall into that trap. Not now, especially.

  She glanced around the vacant warehouse. "You're sure it's safe, right?"

  "State-of-the-art holding spot. If there's a bug in your stuff, it will be found with our scanners here."

  He did a superficial look-see of her computer. On the surface it looked clean. Then again, they wouldn't be obvious with their design. Anything embedded wouldn't be found at a superficial level. More than likely it was hidden inside the inner workings and would need a scan to pick it up.

  "Nothing so far. It's gotta be harder to find than that, or you would have seen it already."

  "Where else could it be?"

  He plopped both their bags on the table between them. "I haven't bothered to search mine yet as it's more likely in yours. They didn't have an opportunity to plant anythin
g in my stuff."

  She glanced at the contents spread across the table. After doing a cursory inspection of her underwear, she moved that to the side. "Other than what Sabrina brought for me and the heat pads you provided, there's not much in here. I didn't have time to take a whole lot of stuff from home. Besides, I pack light, and they already stole my C-4." She examined her phone for a few minutes before prying it open. "It's a pay-as-you-go phone, so not much of a chance they got to that. I always do that as a precaution. CIA teaches you to be paranoid and suspect everybody." She shook her head. "But still I called Nick on my home phone. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid."

  "You what?"

  "Before everything came apart, I called Nick and told him about this note I found with an obscure mention of 'Backgammon.' It seemed innocent at the time, but clearly somebody was listening in, because after that all hell broke loose in my life."

  "Why didn't you tell me this before?" What kind of crazy game were they playing? He didn't trust her. She didn't trust him. But still they were supposed to work together. It didn't make sense.

  She shrugged as if that conveyed her sentiments. When she finally raised her gaze to meet his, a smile twittered at the corners of her mouth. "Would you believe I forgot about it?"

  "Ah, no." He crooked his fingers at her. "Let's see the note."

  She started to protest but must have thought better of it, and pulled it up on her phone. "The original is gone. The guys from the other night took it."

  He traced the image on the screen. "Found? It looks like you pieced together a shredded document."

  "Guilty as charged."

  "What does it mean?" He blew out a breath. Was this about her wishing and hoping her friend wasn't dead? But if that were true, it didn't explain the people after her.

  "I'm not trying to say anything." She shook her head. "The whole thing is a fluke. A shot in the dark that I ran across this at all. Either someone was careless, I'm going crazy, or it means absolutely nothing. And now I'm suddenly on somebody's most wanted list. What's up with that?"

  "You sure there's a correlation between the two? Have you thought any more about Istanbul?"

  "There's only two points of intersection between the three of us. But in Istanbul we were ships passing in the night. We weren't there at the same time. Besides, us all being in Afghanistan together is the only that thing that seemed to trigger this firestorm on my head." She busied her hand patting through the bag and avoided eye contact. Her fingertips stilled, and she pulled out the tracking device he'd planted there.

  "I found it. They must have put it in my bag somehow."

  He winced. This was not going to go well. Should he admit what he'd done? Even though he could easily blame somebody else, he might as well 'fess up.

  "About that…"

  She looked up, her eyes getting wider by the second. "Oh no you didn't." When the validity of her suspicions hit, her expression changed to a cold, hard glare. "When? I need to know when you put it there."

  "When you conked out at my apartment that first night. While I had a foolproof alarm system—or so I thought—I figured on the off chance you somehow got away, I needed to have a way of tracking you." He held up his hand when she started to protest. "And in case you forgot, it was because of my forethought that I was able to save your ass at the warehouse."

  "I would have figured a way out of it. Eventually…I'm…" She glanced in his direction. "Okay, maybe not, but it still sucks that you put a tracker on me. Let's bring my bag over to your scanner and see if they can find anything else."

  As they walked together toward the small machine in back, Jake said, "You're mad because I out-spied you."

  "Pfft, as if that could ever happen." A teasing kind of smile broke the edges of her lips. "I'm Mata Hari on steroids."

  "I've got to admit, you've got some mad shooting skills."

  "As the saying goes, if you want to play with the big boys, you've gotta learn how to use their toys. Do you think they somehow homed in on your signal?"

  "Impossible. The Alliance does all its own technology."

  "But that doesn't mean somebody else isn't privy to it at some point down the road."

  "The Alliance isn't a large organization. The handful of people who work there are like family. The idea that one would profit from selling out is pretty much impossible to comprehend."

  "That's what I thought too."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Allegedly the CIA hired you to stop somebody from hurting me, but since you've been guarding me I have had so many close encounters with death that I've lost count."

  "Don't throw me under the bus. There's no reason for me to lie about the assignment I was given."

  "How much are they paying you?"

  He hadn't expected that to be her next question. If he had, he might have better prepared himself. "I don't see how that—"

  "It's a simple question that requires a simple answer."

  Against his better judgment, he opted for the truth. "A hundred thousand dollars."

  "Plus expenses?" When he nodded, she whistled low. "Wow, your services don't come cheap."

  "That's all relative, isn't it?"

  "It's almost as much as I make in a year. I know that for damn sure. I'm curious, are you allowed to turn down assignments?"

  "It hasn't been an issue."

  "Why are you having such a hard time answering the question?" Her tone had turned cynical, and he struggled to figure out the reason.

  "Theoretically, yes. I can turn down an assignment." To give himself some breathing space, he glanced at the readout of the scanner. "Nothing there."

  She huffed. "Don't change the subject. Give me an example—when would you turn down an assignment?"

  He shrugged. "I guess if I thought I couldn't be successful, or it wasn't a right fit for my skill set, but that kind of thing is already built into the system at The Alliance."

  "So why did they choose you for this assignment?"

  Not that he hadn't thought about the same thing over the last few days himself, especially after the Istanbul connection, but he still didn't have an answer. "No clue."

  "What if you were handpicked for some reason? What would you think?"

  "I'd think that was crazy. Nobody would do that." Although in the back of his mind he remembered Jennings making mention of the fact that they had a shortlist of operatives they wanted to use for her, and that Jake's name topped the list. Why was he on that list to begin with?

  "But if they knew you'd be assigned, then they could set you up. They could play you like a fiddle, and you would barely know it." She sucked in a breath. "They could have bugged your house, your car, and you wouldn't be suspicious."

  He held up his hand. "Hold on there. I do this for a living. That couldn't have happened."

  "I do this for a living, and it happened to me." She steeled her jaw and looked him in the eye.

  It was clear she didn't want to be alone in the "I screwed up" department and needed to see he had his own set of foibles. "You're right. Would it make you feel better if we scanned my bag?"

  "Infinitely." Her tone of voice softened, and a hint of tears rose to the surface of her eyes. "It's just that"—she drew in a breath as she fought through the bout of emotion—"they've been on us like we have a GPS chip hanging around our necks or something. What are we missing?"

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "How do you know this is Alex's house?" Tessa asked as they rolled past the sprawling two-story set back from the street. "I don't see him living in this kind of place. He was never into the trappings of the middle class. He always said he could pitch a tent in the middle of the Rockies, and he'd be happy."

  Had she ever really known Alex? Little by little she was discovering he was nothing like he'd portrayed himself to be. She'd been accustomed to not trusting people from the earliest of ages, but this whole idea had been taken to a level that seemed incomprehensible.

  Was anyone who she thought they were? What w
as Jake's agenda? He said he'd been contracted for this assignment randomly, but something seemed off in the way he went about it.

  "The investigator uncovered Alex's ownership of the house only through an exhaustive property search. Based on that, I'm guessing he didn't want anyone to know he lived here." He turned in the seat. To her surprise, he didn't have a gotcha look on his face. "I didn't know him, but it seems like Alex had many different sides. Did you really know as much about him as you thought?"

  "I'm still unconvinced about your intel. Fancy house is one thing, but everything else…" She still couldn't make sense of what Jake had told her. Alex always said he was a rolling stone. In her mind she could picture him smiling and laughing when he said that, and then he would break into the old Temptations song "Papa Was a Rolling Stone."

  Jake raised his eyebrows as if questioning her commitment. Not that she blamed him. The whole mystery kept getting crazier and crazier.

  "If it's Alex's house then I'm sure he has a security system. I have tools in my go bag. I should be able to pick the lock easily unless you know of any additional stuff he might have set up, like flamethrowers or an invisible moat or something."

  She smiled and shook her head. In another life, if things weren't so crazy, she'd find Jake charming. It was clear he was trying to lessen her anxiety even if it wasn't working.

  "The CIA doesn't have that kind of technology. If you tell me The Alliance does I'm jumping ship tomorrow."

  He laughed. "We have some talented people, but that's way beyond our pay grade right now."

  "I've heard about that pay grade of yours, and that's saying a lot." She enjoyed his ability to get her off focus. Walking into what could be Alex's house would force her to confirm that everything he'd told her had been a lie told to her for a specific purpose. If all that could be verified, then she'd have to go to the next logical step and figure out why.

  "Let's park a block over in case our friends from New York make a reappearance. I'm not saying The Alliance scanners aren't good but better safe than sorry."

  She nodded through her sudden bout of nerves and slid out of the car. He held her hand as they walked together. Over the last forty-eight hours she'd become accustomed to his touchy-feely tendencies. Initially she thought it was about his need to be in control but now had come to suspect it was also part of his nature.