by Dees, Cindy
Katie frowned. “At first, the Marines were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”
He leaned back to stare at her. “Follow that train of thought. See where it takes you.”
“After they let you go, they called André. He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you and drug you. And that something made them hold me and not let me join you.”
“Go on.”
“André likes you. He must have called his boss and was relaying the boss’s orders. So, why did the boss want the cops to go after you? You had information the CIA desperately wanted. Why not bring you in with all possible speed?”
Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.
She continued. “The boss had to have told them I was not a threat, but that you were. And the two of us were to be separated. I presumably knew as much as you did about what we found in Cuba, so I was as big a threat as you to whatever’s going on. Since they didn’t formally detain me, I have to rule out the information about the chemical weapons as the cause of your arrest.”
Alex looked startled at that. Shock. She’d actually outthought the genius for once?
She continued more enthusiastically. “Why separate us specifically? What’s the big deal about the two of us being together?”
Alex frowned. “The CIA thinks you’re keeping me in line. That I won’t go off the reservation if you’re around.”
“Then why would they take me away from you?” A nasty connection dropped into place. She spoke slowly, feeling her way through the logic. “Alex. Not only did they take me away from you, but they gave you drugs to make you paranoid. What if they made you suspicious of me intentionally?”
He tilted his head, considering. “It’s a bit of a stretch, but it is plausible.”
“What do I bring to you that you can’t do for yourself?” she asked.
“That’s easy. Stability. Predictability. And control over my more dangerous impulses.”
“How’s that?”
“I am known to have feelings for you and Dawn. Threaten the two of you, and I’m forced to stay in line and behave myself.”
She was dismayed that he thought she was such a big vulnerability. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “It was my choice to get involved with you. My fault.”
Fault? She was a fault in his life? She’d been a mistake for him right from the beginning. He’d tried to warn her, but she’d ignored him and thrust a relationship and even a daughter on him whether he liked it or not.
The two of them could never make it as a couple if all he saw when he looked at her was a potentially lethal error in judgment. The last thing she wanted to be to him was a fatal vulnerability. He was right to leave her. A sob escaped her throat, and she bit back its sibling as it bubbled up in her chest.
“As soon as this is over, Alex, I’ll let you go. I get it now. If my being with you puts you at so much risk, then we can’t ever be together. I’ll walk away and never look back. I love you too much to be the cause of your injury or death.”
For just an instant, his gaze raged with some turbulent, unnamed emotion. And then, as usual, all expression drained from his eyes. His face went smooth and still, completely unreadable. Lord, she wished she knew how to do that, too.
Her vision swam in tears and she looked away from him hastily. The computer screen was the only nearby target for her unseeing stare. “Let’s finish this,” she said fiercely. “The sooner, the better. Every day we’re together puts you at risk.”
He made a tiny sound that might be a laugh half-formed, or maybe something else...like pain. Either way, he placed his hands on the keyboard and started to type. He played the machine like a virtuoso, and she couldn’t begin to understand the lines of code that flashed across the screen almost too fast to read. But she did recognize the Central Intelligence Agency seal when it briefly flashed up on the monitor.
“When I tell you to, start counting the time,” he muttered as he plugged a flash drive into a port in the side of the monitor.
“Okay.” She pulled out her cell phone and set up a stopwatch app.
“Go,” he murmured. She started the counter.
A list of files came up on the screen quickly enough. He didn’t mess with them, though. Instead, he pulled up another window and appeared to commence running another program. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to break the write protection on those files so I can download them.”
He typed frantically for another few seconds and then stopped. “Okay. That’s it. Now we have to let the program run and see if the algorithm can break through the copy protection protocols on those files before we’re kicked out of the mainframe.”
“That’s two minutes elapsed,” she murmured.
He nodded tersely. They stared at the monitor in silence as his decryption program did its work.
“Three minutes.”
His jaw muscles rippled like he was clenching his teeth, but he didn’t acknowledge her minute-by-minute count in any other way.
“Are you going to give up?” she asked.
He shrugged. “As long as their security guys don’t kick me out, I may as well sit tight and see if I can capture those files. I’ve got nothing to lose by trying, and I won’t get another shot at this. It’s now or never.”
“Eight minutes.” Every second crawled past, taking an eternity. The code in his second window continued to scroll past too fast to read. She counted all the way to fifteen minutes without anything appearing to happen. And then, all of a sudden, a download progress bar started to turn from white to blue across the bottom of the monitor.
“You did it,” she breathed.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he warned. The bar had almost turned most of the way white when all hell broke loose on the screen. A new window opened of its own volition and code started scrolling down the monitor. Alex jumped and started typing, his nimble fingers flying across the keyboard. He muttered unintelligibly to himself, and Katie sat frozen beside him, not wanting to distract him.
“Pull out the flash drive,” he ordered suddenly. “Now!”
She reached up and yanked the drive out of the port. The screen went black. “Did we get the files?”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said by way of an answer. He stood up fast and strode toward the exit with her half running beside him.
“Well?” she demanded as they burst out into the street.
“I won’t know until I open that drive and see what made its way onto it before the agency’s countermeasures kicked in. But first, we have to get away from this location.”
Her shoulder gave a warning shout but she ignored the flash of pain. She asked nervously, “It’ll take them a while to track down that computer terminal, right? We’ve got plenty of time to get away.”
“Not how it works,” he bit out. “These are the big boys we’re messing with. They have resources you can’t even begin to imagine.”
They’d walked briskly several blocks back toward their motel when Alex swore under his breath.
“Let me guess,” she muttered in dismay. “We’ve got company.”
“That would be correct. Don’t look back.”
But how? They’d been in the library a grand total of maybe twenty minutes. Unless the agency had figured out the two of them were on that train, and the CIA had sent agents into this general area already to search for them.
“There’s a cab over there,” she suggested. “Across the street just beyond the next intersection.” It was the only cab she’d seen in this dilapidated and mostly residential part of town. Finally. A piece of luck had broken their way.
“Stay with me,” Alex ordered absently as his eyes roved in all directions. “We’ll cross over to it in the middle of the intersection.”
She didn’t reply. He was obviously busy formulating plans and evaluating various contingencies.
<
br /> She did sneak a peek behind them as they approached a stoplight. Darned if she could spot anyone following them. Was the tail real? Or was this all part of Alex’s elaborate paranoid delusion about how dangerous the world was and how people in it were out to get him?
They reached the stoplight and he didn’t pause. He plunged into the oncoming traffic, and she squeaked in alarm as cars swerved and honked their horns angrily. Scared to death, she dodged along with him, practically climbing on his heels.
They somehow reached the safety of the far curb, and Alex broke into a run. She kept up with him, but barely, gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder as she jarred it pounding on the concrete sidewalk. He hailed the cab and opened the door for her to slide into the backseat. He jumped in after her and gave the cabbie the name of their motel.
She started to turn around to look behind them for pursuit, but Alex bit out, “Don’t look. Assume they’re following us.”
Too late. She’d caught a glimpse of a man in a beige raincoat leaping into the passenger’s side of a big, dark SUV way too frantically to be a regular civilian just going about his business.
God almighty. Alex wasn’t entirely wrong about his world colliding with hers at a moment’s notice. It was as if the curtain separating the two in her mind had suddenly become tissue thin. In times like this, she almost could believe Alex wasn’t crazy. Almost.
The taxi rolled for about five minutes, and then suddenly, Alex leaned forward and said sharply, “This isn’t the way to the motel.”
“There’s construction,” the cabbie replied. “I’m going around it. I’ll knock a chunk off the fare if you want.”
Alex subsided, frowning slightly. When he worried, she worried. He not only had a great deal of training she didn’t have, but he also had an incredible instinct for sensing trouble. It was no doubt part of what made him a great spy.
Abruptly, the taxi left the surface street and swerved onto a highway entrance ramp, accelerating quickly.
“Hey!” she exclaimed. This was definitely not the way back to the motel. She reached for her cell phone to call 9-1-1.
But Alex reached out to grip her forearm and forestall her. He shook his head infinitesimally in the negative. Crap. He was right. They couldn’t call the police. If they did, they’d be found by the CIA. Alex would be hauled in and drugged again if he was lucky, and killed as a rogue operative if he was not lucky. As for her, she would just get dead. The two of them were on their own with this lunatic and his cab.
She looked forward toward the driver and froze in horror. The small black bore of a pistol was pointed back at her.
She looked over at Alex in panic. What was happening? Were they being kidnapped?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KATIE STARTED TO open her mouth to ask that very question, but Alex shook his head the tiniest bit at her again. That look had entered his eyes. The one they’d had the first night he’d gotten home. The look of a killer. Absolutely chilling calm rolled off him. Oddly enough, it comforted her. Spy Alex was in the house. And she trusted that version of him with her life.
Why didn’t Alex shoot the driver? Although there was the whole business of the taxi traveling at seventy miles per hour. If Alex shot the guy, the vehicle would crash spectacularly. Still. They might have a better shot of surviving a crash than whatever their kidnapper had in store for them.
She sat back and tried to memorize the roads, to keep her sense of direction and to stay oriented as to where they were. And above all, she tried not to panic. But it was hard not to. A man had a freaking gun pointed at her. On cue, her shoulder throbbed fiercely, a pointed reminder of how real a threat that weapon posed.
Worse, a sick realization that Alex was not crazy at all twisted and turned in her gut. The darkness did lurk just below the surface of what she knew as the normal world. Just like he’d said it did. And she’d just been too naive and stupid to see it. Or maybe too stubborn.
It wasn’t as if she’d never heard her brothers and dad talking about it. She had willfully chosen to ignore the warning signs of its existence with them, and she’d done the exact same thing with Alex. No wonder he was fed up with her and counting the seconds until he could ditch her forever.
God, she’d been a fool. Only now, when it was far too late, did she finally let go of her delusions long enough to realize Alex had had it right all along. And they were both going to die because of her stubbornness and stupidity.
“I’m so sorry, Alex,” she mumbled.
His gaze flickered toward her long enough for her to be sure he’d heard her, but he didn’t acknowledge her apology in any other way. He looked too busy observing the driver and thinking about something. Hopefully, he was devising a brilliant escape plan.
But she bloody well didn’t see a way out of this mess. She had a sinking feeling that this time they would not miraculously elude disaster.
Her entire body started to shake at the idea of dying. It was one thing to consider being in danger in the abstract, from a distance. It was an entirely different animal altogether to be staring death in the face.
Something really, really bad was going to happen to them, and it was all her fault.
The cab drove south for maybe fifteen minutes on the highway and then exited onto a country road headed west, inland and away from the Atlantic coast. The vehicle slowed barely enough to squeal around the corner at the top of the exit ramp, and then it accelerated immediately down a deserted, two-lane road. The driver must be worried about them making a jump for it out the back doors. Not that she would try it at these speeds. She was no trained stuntwoman.
Outside was a mixture of farmland and forest, and human dwellings were becoming sparse. The driver was taking them out in the middle of freaking nowhere. This could not be good.
Who was this guy? And how had he known where to be conveniently available for her and Alex to jump in his cab? He must have been working with whoever had tailed them after they left the library. Which spoke of coordination and communication on a scale that only a bunch like the CIA could pull off on short notice.
The sophistication of this kidnapping was daunting, to say the least. But which one of them was the target, her or Alex? The people who’d been shooting at her obviously wanted her dead, not kidnapped. Did that mean this elaborate assault was directed at Alex?
The obvious culprit was the CIA. They had shown deep distrust of Alex from the beginning and it had only intensified recently. But she supposed this could just as easily be his father attempting to snatch him from the clutches of the CIA. Man, Alex’s life was complicated. She didn’t envy him the pushes and pulls coming at him from all directions. And now his mother was somehow part of the tug-of-war over him. That had to be messing with his head big-time.
The cab slowed abruptly and careered onto a narrow gravel road. The tires skidded and the car fishtailed, taking the slippery surface far too fast for safety. She braced herself and did her best not to become motion sick at the violent ride.
The car turned off the dirt road and onto a barely passable driveway, hardly even a path through the weeds. Crap. Nobody would ever find them out here in the boonies.
The cab stopped in a sunny, weed-clogged clearing in the bottom of a swale. On the rising slopes around them, thin trees cast dappled shade over the undergrowth. No sooner had the vehicle stopped than the barrel of the pistol aimed straight at Katie from the driver’s seat.
“Get out,” the man ordered them. “Slowly. The girl first.”
If she wasn’t mistaken a hint of triumph flashed in Alex’s eyes for an instant, as if to say the driver had just made a fatal error. She didn’t see it, though. She couldn’t seem to peel her gaze away from that tiny, deadly black hole gaping at her face.
“Out!” the driver barked.
She looked over at Alex, and he nodded in encouragement. She fumbled at the door handle and pushed the door open.
“Go out, and move forward,” Alex murmured in Zaghastani. I
t was a rare dialect spoken only in one tiny region of central Asia. When they’d gone on a mission to Zaghastan last year, Alex had picked up a little of the language, in which she was fluent.
She did as he instructed and stepped out of the cab. She circled wide of the door and moved toward the front of the vehicle. The cabbie tracked her with his pistol, aiming it at her through the driver’s side window, which he’d opened.
“Now you,” the driver snapped at Alex. “No funny business, or I kill the girl.”
What was she supposed to do? Dive for the front of the cab and use the engine for cover? Stand here like the guy’d told her to? Run? Poised on her toes and ready to bolt, she waited and watched for a signal, any signal, from Alex.
He stepped out of the car slowly. But then he moved so fast she barely saw the blur of motion. Alex lunged forward, grabbed the pistol by the barrel and twisted it violently free of the man’s hand all in one lightning-fast attack.
“Get down, Katie!” Alex bit out. The driver’s door started to open, and in the next millisecond, the pistol fired deafeningly, a single shot. A spray of blood coated the inside of the windshield.
“Get in the backseat,” he ordered, already pulling the driver’s door open. He dragged the driver’s body out of the vehicle by the feet as she darted past, leaving a wide smear of blood in the grass. Alex slid behind the wheel and started the engine as she dived into the backseat.
He’d barely thrown the car into gear when a fusillade of gunshots erupted around them. Screaming a little, she threw her arms over her head and plastered herself flat against the vinyl upholstery. Alex swore from the front seat and returned fire.
“These guys are pros, Katie. They’ll kill the car. We’re sitting ducks in here. When I say go, kick open the door you just crawled in and run like hell for the woods. Zigzag. It makes you harder to hit. I’ll cover you.”
“Pass me the driver’s pistol,” she responded in a trembling voice. “Then I can cover you while you join me.”
A hand came over the back of the front seat and she took the weapon from it. All those years of shooting tin cans with her dad and brothers were finally going to come in handy apparently. She couldn’t actually believe she was about to run out into a firefight. But she and Alex were in life-threatening danger. He was outnumbered, which meant he was also outgunned. If she didn’t help him, he would die. They would both die. Determination temporarily overrode her panic. She reached back, staying low to unlatch the door.