Hunted

by Beverly Long

  “You’re not going to need it,” Ted said, his voice high.

  Ethan didn’t know if it was tension or excitement making the man’s voice change. All he knew was that the men didn’t intend for him and Chandler to be around for long. They were going to take them somewhere, probably remote, kill them and dump the bodies.

  It wasn’t the best plan for killing someone. Transporting them meant that there would be evidence left behind in their vehicles. Lots of DNA. But Ethan was pretty confident that it was the best plan the two men could come up with on short notice. This was a crime of opportunity. Ted had stumbled upon them in the store and he’d been making up the plan as he went along.

  Ethan wasn’t getting into the car with them and he sure as hell wasn’t letting them take Chandler.

  Ted handed his father the gun. “Don’t take it off her.” Then the younger man put on his coat and patted his pockets, looking for gloves.

  Dad was focused on Chandler. When he went to hand the gun back to his son, Ethan made his move.

  From his standing position, he crouched at the knees, then stood up fast, catching the exposed sharp edge of the old sink just right. He felt the duct tape give way.

  His first punch caught Ted, his second Dad. Adrenaline whipped through his body as if he were seventeen again, fighting a man who was bigger and meaner.

  Dad never got up. He stayed down, almost as if he were looking for an excuse for the whole mess to be over with. Ted scrambled up and Ethan executed another punch to take him down to his knees. Ethan kicked him in the stomach, hard enough to knock the man’s breath out of him, but not hard enough to do damage.

  It took him only seconds to subdue them both. He picked up the gun that had fallen on the floor. He held it on them with one hand while he used the scissors to cut the duct tape off Chandler’s wrists. She pulled the duct tape off her mouth, then she pulled the tape off his mouth.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. Thank you.” She looked at Ted. “How’s that luck going for you now?”

  It was enough to make Ethan, who felt miserable about the situation she’d been dragged into, want to smile. The woman had spunk.

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  “It’s not,” she replied simply. “We can talk about it later. What are we going to do with them?”

  He had no idea. All he knew was that these were probably not bad men. They’d lost someone very dear to them, and grief and anger and family loyalty had made them do a crazy thing.

  They needed to contact the police. But he knew that Chandler wanted to see what was on the flash drive first before confronting her stepmother.

  “Do you have a computer?” Ethan asked Ted.

  Ted nodded. It clearly wasn’t the question he’d been expecting.

  “Where?”

  “In my bedroom.”

  Ethan looked at Chandler. “I’m going to tie these two up.” He handed the gun to her. “If they move, shoot them.”

  Ethan used the same duct tape and the same chairs to tie up Dad and Ted. He had learned how to effectively restrain a man in the military and there was no way those two were getting free. When he was finished, he reached for the flash drive and held it out to Chandler, exchanging it for the gun.

  “Use his computer. See if you can read the file.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ted’s computer was a couple years old but he’d updated the software. She had no trouble opening the file. No trouble seeing the data. No trouble identifying which user had made screen print after screen print.

  Claudia Linder McCann.

  She felt sick. Even though she’d expected that it was her stepmother, she’d held out hope that she was wrong, that she wasn’t going to have to tell her father that the woman he loved was likely a traitor to the country he loved.

  When she’d seen enough, she shut down the system and put the flash drive back in her coat pocket.

  When she got back to the kitchen, Ethan was there. No one was talking.

  Ethan raised his head. “Claudia?”

  She nodded. “I’d like to tell my father before going to the authorities. What about them?”

  “We leave them for now. They aren’t going anywhere.” Ethan opened a cupboard door, reached in and pulled out two glasses. He filled each with water. Then he reached into one of the drawers under the open counter where a package of straws was clearly visible.

  He put a straw in each glass and sat one in front of each man. “I’m not going to put tape over your mouths. That way, if you get thirsty and you’re real careful, you should be able to lean forward and get yourself a drink. Pace yourself because it will likely be a few hours before someone comes back for you.”

  Dad was looking down. Ted still had his chin up. “Maybe we won’t be here when you come back,” he said, his tone belligerent.

  “You’ll be here,” Ethan said confidently. “Now, you can yell and scream and maybe get the attention of your neighbors. But then you’re going to have a whole lot of explaining to do. I don’t think your dad thinks that’s a good idea and right now, I think you better listen to him. This ends now.”

  Dad raised his head and gave Ethan a brief nod.

  “For what it’s worth,” Ethan said, his voice soft, “I had nothing to do with Trevor’s death. I am more sorry than you could ever imagine that it happened. And if information was truly leaked, I promise you that I would kill the man who was responsible if I knew who it was. But I can assure you, it wasn’t me.”

  Neither man said anything in response but Chandler could see tears well up in Ted’s eyes. War had taken his brother and in the middle of the night, he’d seen a way to make some small amend. No matter how unhinged it might be.

  “We should go,” she said.

  The only transportation they had available to them was Ted’s Buick. They got in, Ethan driving, Chandler in the passenger seat.

  “I guess I owe you some explanation,” he said.

  She studied him. “I think I’ve got it mostly figured out.”

  “I want you to know it all. You deserve that. I did retire from the military. But something happened before I left, something bad, and there are people who think it was my fault.”

  “What happened?”

  “Eight soldiers were killed. Four on the ground and we lost two helicopters, with two men each. Our pilots had been doing surveillance for weeks. We were confident that we’d identified a stronghold for a terrorist cell that had successfully eluded us since the beginning of the war. Everything was planned perfectly.”

  “But something went wrong?” she asked.

  “They were waiting for us. With more firepower than we could ever have anticipated. At first I thought they just got lucky. But as the weeks went by and more intelligence filtered in, it became apparent that they’d known we were coming. Somebody had sold us out.”

  “Not you.”

  “No. But there was some damning evidence. They believed I had made radio transmissions to the enemy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t either. But they produced a tape of my voice giving details of the mission. There were enemy combatants on the other end.”

  “I can’t believe... How is that even possible?”

  “It was a fake. I told them that. But you can imagine that they found it difficult to believe.”

  “How did you prove your innocence?”

  “There had only been a few times that I had discussed the mission and that was with those who had a need to know. It was with a handful of trusted pilots. I was always very careful when relaying highly classified information. I remembered exactly what I’d said and when I’d said it. I told the investigators and they ultimately got independent verification that supported the wild id
ea that somehow snippets of those different conversations got recorded and used to made me look like the bad guy.”

  “Once you told them what had happened, did they identify who might have done it?”

  “No.”

  “So you still don’t know?”

  “I don’t. I couldn’t imagine any of the men I told doing such a horrible thing. These were men I’d flown with for years. I think it was someone else entirely. Maybe something as simple as someone bugged the area where the conversations occurred. Then they had the skill and ability to weave two different conversations into one and feed in appropriate responses on the part of the enemy.”

  “It sounds very complicated.”

  “You’re telling me. Complicated. Insane. That’s the only explanation I came up with. It could be one of a thousand-plus soldiers who were assigned under that command.”

  She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “That must have been so frustrating for you.”

  “Frustrating. Maddening. Scary.”

  “Well, it’s a crazy story and a crazy situation but I can’t imagine anyone ever thinking that you could do something like that. It just wouldn’t happen.”

  Warmth flooded back into his cold body. He’d been so afraid that he’d see speculation in her pretty eyes, that he’d be able to sense the change in her posture. That her trust in him was broken.

  But there was none of that. “I wish everybody accepted the explanation as easily as that,” he said.

  “They don’t know you as well as I do.”

  “We haven’t seen each other for more than fifteen years,” he reminded her. “People change.”

  “They do. And people hide things well. I know that better than most. But what I also know is that you’ve been a good person since you were a boy. I remember how you used to look out for your mom. Even as a kid, you knew that she shouldn’t be walking home from work in the dark alone and you made sure she never did. And remember the summer that Brody broke his leg? You made sure that he didn’t get left out of anything. You figured out a way that he could participate in whatever you and Mack were doing even when it would have been much easier to leave him sitting on the couch. You were a kid but you knew the right thing to do.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  It didn’t matter because she wasn’t done. “You want to know the reason that Christivo’s deception really hurt me? Because my dad had drummed it into my head that the most important quality a person can have is personal integrity. He said that many times people do the right thing because they don’t want to be caught doing the wrong thing. But he said there are people who do the right thing because it’s the only possibility that they see for themselves. They’re honorable. And whenever he would talk about this, he’d always use you as the example. ‘Ethan Moore,’ he used to say. ‘Now that’s a kid who’s got a personal code that he lives by.’ That’s why I could never tell anybody about Christivo. I couldn’t let them know that I’d chosen somebody who had no personal code of honor. What did that make me? Someone with no judgment? Even worse, someone who didn’t value integrity? Or, God forbid, maybe even someone who had no integrity of her own because she was willing to settle for a lack of it in others.”

  “No, Chandler. You’re none of those things.” It made him crazy that she would even think that way. “You have integrity. Otherwise, you’d have reported this whole mess to the authorities and let them sort it out. But you knew that it was possible that your stepmother could be innocent and you didn’t want to damage her reputation or your relationship with her. Most of all, you didn’t want to hurt your father. That’s integrity. And honor. And courage. And sacrifice. And—”

  “Enough,” she said, smiling. “I get your point.”

  He reached for her and his mouth settled on hers. All the pent-up emotion of the past hour seemed to surge through him and he kissed her with a fierceness that bordered out of control.

  When he finally came up for air, she giggled. “We’re still in Ted’s garage.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I couldn’t go one more minute without tasting you.” There was so much more that he wanted to tell her. But not sitting in Ted Matchmore’s car in his garage with things still unsettled with Claudia Linder McCann.

  “Let’s finish this,” he said. He pushed the button to raise the garage door. “We need to get my truck and then go to your Dad’s house.”

  “I just hope I don’t run into Claudia there.”

  “If she thinks the gig is up, maybe she’ll be lawyering up, getting ready to defend herself against an investigation.”

  “Not yet. Once security would have contacted her, I think she’d have wanted to be on-site. The one thing I’ve learned about her is that she’s a control freak. She doesn’t have the technical skill to do this but she’d have called one of the other computer specialists in to run a report on who had accessed the system at approximately three-thirty and what they looked at.”

  “Why? She has to know it was you.”

  “She probably suspects but I don’t think she could be a hundred percent confident. First of all, there’s probably still some doubt that I escaped the crash and the fire. With all the snow, I doubt they’ve had time to say that the search has been exhausted. Even if they have, she’d have to believe that I somehow managed to cross the mountains and get to Denver in one of the worst blizzards in the past ten years. She’ll ask for a description from the guard and he’s not going to be able to tell her much. He barely saw me and I had my hair up underneath Lauren’s hat and I had on her jacket. I used my user test sign-on and quite frankly, I don’t think there’s any record of who that sign-on belongs to.”

  “You’re pretty smart,” he said. “A good thinker. I like that.”

  She smiled at him. “Why, thank you.”

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I hate driving this car. And Molly is probably in desperate need of a fire hydrant.”

  * * *

  MOLLY, THE GOOD and practical dog she was, was sleeping. She raised her head when they got in, looked at both Ethan and Chandler and smiled. At least Chandler thought it looked like a smile. “You’re such a good girl,” she told the dog, framing Molly’s pretty face in her hands. “I was worried about you.”

  “Doesn’t appear as if she was terribly concerned about us,” Ethan said drily. “I’ll remember that the next time she wants to go out at two in the morning.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Chandler cooed. “I’ll take you out any time of night you need me to.”

  The minute she said it, she regretted it. It was a bit presumptuous. “I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “I’m not sure why that came out that way.”

  He stared at her. The tips of his ears were a soft pink. “When this is over, we need to talk. I’m not going to have this conversation on a busy street, in a pickup truck that quite frankly smells a little bit like a dog who has a gas problem.”

  It was a small reprieve, but he was right. They had to confront a traitor.

  * * *

  BAKER AND CLAUDIA LINDER MCCANN had bought themselves a big house. The house the McCanns had had on Walnut Street had been nice. All the houses in that affluent neighborhood had been. His mother used to complain about all the bathrooms that rich people had to have. By the looks of this house, one might need all their fingers and toes to do an accurate bathroom count. While it wasn’t any of his business, Ethan couldn’t help but think that this house, even located in a subdivision of really showy houses, looked a bit over-the-top.

  “Pillars?” he asked.

  “Claudia’s favorite movie is Gone With the Wind. Welcome to Denver’s Tara.”

  It just didn’t look like Baker McCann.

  “What if your dad isn’t here?” Ethan asked. “He may have gone west, to join the search-and-rescue efforts.”

/>   “He would have wanted to. It’s possible that he found a way to get there just as we found a way to get back. If he’s not here, I’m going to have to call him. I’d rather tell him in person but there’s no time.”

  “So we ring the doorbell?”

  She shook her head. “Claudia may be here. I want us to enter the house very carefully. If we go through the garage, we can enter through the back hallway. My dad spends most of his time in his study, which is toward the back of the house.”

  “But how are we going to get into the garage?”

  She picked up her dirty jeans, which were still on the floor of the truck. Molly had been using them off and on as a bed. She reached into the pocket and pulled out her key ring with the two keys. “One was for the cabin and the other for this house. Dad gave it to me when I had to water their plants when they were on a trip. It unlocks any door. If the security alarm goes off, I know the code.”

  It sounded simple enough. Enter through the garage, either find Baker McCann or call him, tell him what was going on and together, identify next steps. “Okay. If the way to this garage door is via the backyard, I’m going to park my truck on the street behind the house. No need to advertise our presence by pulling in the driveway.”

  He made a turn at the next corner, judged the distance and pulled his truck off to the side of the road. These residential streets had not been plowed as well as the city business district but he got as close to the curb as he could. “Even with your boots, your feet are going to get wet,” he said. “The snow in the backyard is probably a foot deep.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All I can think about is how devastated my dad is going to be.”

  “He’s going to be elated that you’re alive,” Ethan reminded her.

  “I hope that’s enough,” Chandler said, getting out of the truck.

  They stuck to the tree line as they approached the house. Chandler used her key to enter the garage. It was mostly dark inside the empty garage, although windows on the far side provided enough light that Ethan could tell that there would have been room for three cars if Baker didn’t have his lawn mower and snowblower taking up one spot.