Finn’s eyes flashed her way, but before he could reply Bax said, “I’ve got a pay phone in a Grab-and-Go at the next exit. Twenty-four B.”
* * *
“I NEED a safe house.” The Agency kept safe houses ready to go, not just throughout the USA but around the world, and Finn had little doubt that there would be at least one somewhere between where he was and Houston. “And I’m going to need some backup.”
As he spoke into the pay phone, summarizing what had happened for Eagle, Finn scanned his surroundings. The phone was set into the wall of an ancient Grab-and-Go store, located conveniently right next to the restrooms. Riley was in one, Bax in the other. The Acura was directly in front of him. Two other cars waited in the parking lot, one at a gas pump, one parked in front of the store, both harmless. He could see all the way to the expressway exits: nothing concerning headed their way. He had a bad feeling that that was only temporary.
He hadn’t wanted to trust even his own agency with the knowledge of where he was taking Riley, but he was fresh out of options. Too many people would be coming after her now that they thought she knew where the money was.
“So she knows the whereabouts of the money?”
Something in Eagle’s tone gave Finn pause. “I think she was bluffing, trying to draw out her sister’s kidnappers.”
In fact, he was starting to think no such thing. He didn’t know how Riley knew where the money was, but he thought she did know. His gut shouted it, and as he ran his mind back, every fact he turned over confirmed it. But he wasn’t about to tell Eagle that. Eagle was on a mission to find that money. If he thought Riley knew where it was, and somebody besides Finn could get the information out of her faster than Finn could, then he might very well find himself in a pitched battle with his own agency.
Because he wasn’t letting them have Riley. Until now, his ultimate loyalty, after his loyalty to his country, had been to Eagle. When he’d saved Eagle’s life, it had been a split-second decision: they’d been in the basement of a bombed-out tenement in Libya, meeting with the deputy head of Libyan intelligence and a few of his underlings for a top-secret passing-on of information at the highest levels. A traitor in the Libyan ranks had opened fire. Finn had grabbed Eagle, basically turned into a one-man war machine, and gotten his superior out of there, taking a hit himself in the process that had nearly killed him.
He and Eagle had been the only two in that room to get out alive.
Jennifer, his ex-girlfriend by that time but still a fellow agent, had been in that room, too. She hadn’t survived.
Finn was haunted by the knowledge that he could have gotten her out of there, could have saved her instead of Eagle. But Jennifer had been a professional like himself, and when the bullets had started flying he had reacted instantly, instinctively, and as his training had dictated.
He still bore the scars of that night: a puckered wound on his abdomen and a shit-ton of guilt and regret and grief over Jennifer.
He’d retired, and started over.
Now there was Riley. This time, loyalty to his superior and his agency wasn’t going to supersede his loyalty to a woman he cared about (and how was this for a moment to find himself face to face with the fact that he cared like that about Riley?). He was all in, committed to getting her out of this, whatever it took.
The object of his thoughts came out of the ladies’ room and threw him a guarded look. Finn nodded at the car, threw her the keys. It was too hot to sit in a car for even a few minutes without the air conditioner on, and he had no fear she was going to try to drive away. Riley was way too smart for that.
As Riley got into the passenger seat and reached across to insert the keys in the ignition and turn on the engine, Eagle said, “If she doesn’t know where the money is, you’re a wasted resource as long as you’re with her.”
Finn pulled his attention back to his conversation. “I need a little more time to figure this out. If the money’s around to be found, I’ll find it.”
“Time’s running out,” Eagle warned.
“We need to recover the sister-in-law, Emma.”
“People are on it. You think I don’t want to rescue a teenage girl from kidnappers? Let them do their jobs. You find the damned money. Hang on.”
A minute later Eagle was back on the line with the location of a safe house.
— CHAPTER —
THIRTY
Bax was out of the restroom and leaning against the car by the time Finn finished his conversation and hung up. It was hot as hell, the air smelled like gas fumes and restrooms, and Bax, in a suit and tie, too, was turning red from the heat. Grim as he was feeling, Finn experienced a flicker of amusement as he wondered if the other man was avoiding getting in the car because he didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions, or worse, from Riley.
“I got a text from the guys in Stringtown. They’re at the van, and they want to know where I am.” Bax straightened as Finn approached the car.
“Tell them you’re on a field trip.” Finn pulled off his own tie and unbuttoned his collar. He would have shed the jacket, but then his shoulder rig would have been exposed and he didn’t want that.
“Okay. Right.” Bax was texting as he got in the car.
“Checking in with the boss?” Riley asked him with an edge to her voice as he slid behind the wheel, and he knew she was referring to his phone call.
All right, so he was a sucker for a woman with attitude. At least he was facing his faults.
“I got us a safe house,” Finn said. His tone was mild. Blowing up at her was a waste of time and effort—it wouldn’t change a thing, wouldn’t unspill the milk, wouldn’t put her words back in her mouth—so he wasn’t going to do it. It wasn’t how he rolled. It was a measure of how surprised and scared for her he had been that he’d done it at all. Anyway, if he wanted her cooperation, yelling at her probably wasn’t the smartest way to go about getting it. And he didn’t want to goad her into blurting out too much—like the whereabouts of the money—in front of Bax. Not that he didn’t trust the other man, but—yeah, he didn’t. He didn’t trust anybody that much.
“A safe house?” Riley looked taken aback.
“You know, a place where we can hide from all the people who want to kill us.” As soon as he said it, he told himself that sarcasm should probably be given a rest, too.
They were on I-45 South again, and Finn cast a wary look around. Nothing but ordinary-looking traffic. He kept a cautious eye on his mirrors as he moved over into the fast lane and hit it. They had maybe another half hour on the expressway and then fifteen minutes after that to the safe house.
May you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you’re dead: the old Irish prayer popped into his head, and he substituted the words we and the safe house and enemy operatives get on your tail in the appropriate places and sent it skyward, then looked at Riley.
“I need you to take the battery out of your phone,” he said.
She’d been holding her purse on her lap. Now she frowned at him and clutched it tighter. Finn realized her phone was in there.
“I can’t.” The touch of panic in her eyes made his stomach constrict. A sucker for a woman with attitude, my ass, he thought. What you’re a sucker for is her. Damn it. “Emma—the kidnappers said they’d call me on it.”
“I arranged to have your calls routed through my phone. When they call, we’ll get it just fine.” He said it gently and watched her process it. “It’d be easy for somebody to get your number and track you with it.”
She knew it: she’d disabled her phone before for just that reason.
“What about your phone? And his?” She jerked her head at Bax.
“Mine can’t be tracked that way. I’m guessing his is the same.”
A glance in the rearview mirror showed Bax nodding. “Blocked,” he said.
Riley’s lips compressed, but she unzipped her purse—the little thingy that secured the zipper was indeed not snapped—and pulled out her ph
one. She looked down at it.
“I can’t miss that call,” she said.
“You won’t,” he promised.
“I was hoping they would have called by now.”
He said, “Maybe they weren’t watching TV,” and mentally kicked himself for sarcasm again. She looked so worried that he regretted the words, and their tone, as soon as they came out. To soothe her he added, “It was a piss-poor idea to tell the whole damned world you know where the money is, but if it makes you feel any better, any kidnapper worth his salt will have some kind of flag on your name. If they missed the live version of your press conference, they’ll get the word some other way soon enough.”
Finn watched her expression change, from what he basically translated as I’ve put us all in danger for nothing to oh, God, I hope so.
Being able to read her face the way he could was another telltale sign, one that in retrospect he should have picked up on right away.
“All right, fine.” She started to take the battery out of her phone with a quick efficiency that once upon a time would have surprised him. It still impressed him.
“Tech forensics was able to trace those two emails that were sent to Jeff that you earmarked,” Bax reported on a note of excitement. “I just got a text. Dude named Ed Harper, from the Dallas area. Local PD picked him up, and we’ve got an agent questioning him now.”
Finn frowned. The name meant nothing to him. But no operative worth a damn would be sitting around in a place where he was known to reside waiting for police to pick him up.
“I didn’t—” Riley said, but Finn stopped listening. Up ahead, one semi was passing another. No big deal, except that in a couple of minutes he’d be running up close behind them, and they—both of them—were blocking the way. Glancing in his mirrors, he saw that on this hilly stretch of highway, traffic had thinned out considerably. Behind him were maybe three other cars. Correction: vehicles. Two big SUVs, one beige, one black, and a white pickup, a big one, a Ford F-250.
Finn frowned, and cast quick, assessing looks around. To his left was a grassy median bisected by a thick stand of trees that prevented him from being able to see the northbound lanes. To his right was wooded hillside. On neither side was there enough room for a car. No easy route of escape.
He felt his gut clench. At about that same time, the semis, now running side by side, began to slow down.
Yeah. Showtime.
“Don’t anybody look around. Riley, keep your lap belt on, but come out of your shoulder belt and lay forward. Wrap your arms around your knees and hang on. Lie real flat, as flat as you can.” His voice was calm and steady even as adrenaline spiked through his veins. As he spoke he was smoothly changing lanes to position Riley, who looked at him with alarm before she obediently slid out of the shoulder portion of her seat belt, so that any vehicles approaching them from behind would have to come up on his side, not hers. “Bax, this is something I probably should have asked already: how good a shot are you?”
“Good,” Bax said in a tight, slightly strangulated voice that had Finn praying he wasn’t exaggerating.
“Oh, my God, it’s happening, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I have a gun?” Riley was stretched out as directed. Her face was turned toward him. She was pale and her eyes were wide with fear.
Finn shook his head, not bothering to repeat one of his favorite maxims, which was that guns were best left to professionals, especially when he was sitting right beside the nonprofessional who wanted one.
“Your job is to stay down. That’s it, understand?” As she nodded he said to Bax, “When the shooting starts, either aim for the driver or a front tire. Shooting the passenger won’t help us. Got it?”
Bax sounded steadier. “Got it.”
Finn glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Bax had moved the rifle up to lie on the seat with the other weapons, and he had his Glock out. Good.
Finn said, “They want to kidnap Riley, not kill her. Us they’ll gladly kill, but not in a way that could kill her, which means they’re going to try to avoid making us have a terrible accident. That gives us a little bit of an advantage.”
“Holy shit, look out,” Bax said. “The pickup’s coming up on the left.”
The Acura’s front bumper was already measurably closer to the rumbling semis, and it wasn’t because Finn was speeding up. The semis would continue to slow down. The pickup would come up on the driver’s side, and the SUVs would close in from behind, boxing them in. The object of the game, Finn knew, was to stop them so that Riley could be grabbed. He could either allow the Acura to be slowed to a stop, or they’d force him to slow down enough to where if they shot him dead while he was still at the wheel, they could close in tight enough around the Acura to bring it to a stop.
In either scenario, he and Bax were dead. Riley, too, only they’d wait until, one way or another, she told them the whereabouts of the money first.
What he had here was a brief window of opportunity.
“I’m getting ready to hang a hard left,” he told Bax. In his side mirror he could see the pickup, a big white monster with a billet grille, roaring up. Two men on board: professionals. Sunlight pouring through the windshield glinted off a silver gun barrel in the passenger’s hand. “I’m going to be driving, so you’re going to be doing most of the shooting. When we go by the SUVs, you pick: driver or tire. But get one or the other.”
Bax said, “I’ll get both.”
Had to love the guy’s optimism.
“Don’t get killed,” Riley said, staring up at him. He could see how hard she was breathing, hear the tension in her voice. She flicked a glance toward the backseat. “Either of you.”
“Hold tight, Angel.” With that, Finn drew his Beretta and hit the button that rolled down the windows. As always in a situation like this, he felt a fierce calm descend. His heart rate slowed. So did his pulse and respiration. The rush of hot wind whipping outdoor smells through the car’s interior hit his face and sent Riley’s hair flying. He could hear the rattle of the pickup, see that its grille was almost even with the Acura’s passenger door.
Shock and awe, baby.
Keeping one hand on the wheel, Finn leaned out the driver’s side window just far enough to get the job done. With unerring precision he snapped off a quick shot that shattered the pickup’s window and caught the driver square in the middle of the forehead: money shot. The staccato pop was lost in the roar of the wind. Even as Finn withdrew, the driver slumped, the horn blared as his dead body landed on it, and the pickup veered wildly toward the Acura. Finn took advantage of the few seconds before impact to stomp the accelerator and yank the wheel left. The Acura squealed past the skidding pickup with inches to spare.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Riley gasped as she was thrown toward him and her body came up off the seat, then was caught by her seat belt and flung back down again.
“Stay down.”
Brakes screamed as the SUVs tried to avoid the fishtailing pickup and started sliding themselves. Up ahead, the semis were braking, too. The smell of scorching tires filled the air.
“Suck lead, assholes!” Bax screamed. As bullets pinged into the Acura rat-a-tat-tat, making Finn cringe, Bax fired, loud bangs that told Finn he had opted for the rifle.
The front tire of the nearest SUV exploded, sending it zigzagging wildly.
“Way to do it!” Finn yelled.
The rifle banged some more.
The steering wheel shook beneath Finn’s hands as he fought it for control. The margin for error was so slight—the wall of trees was inches from the side of the car and the swerving SUVs took up most of the pavement. Trees flashed by the windshield in a green-brown blur, bullets peppered the sides of the car right along with flying gravel, and as they hit grass they bounced like ping pong balls. Then the Acura was flying back the way it had come, partly on grass and partly on the pavement. A glance in the rearview mirror showed Finn that the pickup had crashed into the wooded slope on the right side of the expressway, both SUV
s were off the pavement, and the semis were angled across the road, one in front of the other. Finn counted three men outside the vehicles, two rushing toward the pickup and one leaning back against the side of the beige SUV holding his arm, and felt a surge of triumph mixed with relief.
“We did it,” Bax exulted.
“Way to get the job done,” Finn congratulated him, and glanced at Riley, who was cautiously sitting up. “You okay?”
“Fine. I can’t believe we’re alive after that.” Pushing her hair back from her face with both hands—Finn rolled up the windows so it wouldn’t blow anymore—Riley looked at him. Something in her face reminded him that she’d just seen him kill a man. Their eyes met. Finn felt naked: This is what I am. He didn’t like the sensation. Mouth compressing, he returned his attention to his driving, and eased the Acura back up on the road.
“You saved my life again. Thank you,” Riley said quietly, and something tight inside him eased just a little bit. He nodded, and she then slewed around to look at Bax. “Neither of you are hurt?”
“No.”
“No.”
Riley looked back at the site of the wreck they were rapidly leaving behind and shivered. “Will they come after us, do you think?”
“I only got the one tire,” Bax confessed. “Other than that, I don’t know what I hit.”
“Whatever you hit, it worked,” Finn said, glancing at him through the mirror. “Good man.” Then, to Riley, “They won’t come after us. Not right now,” and refrained from telling her that there were probably dozens more exactly like them.
“We’re going the wrong way down the expressway,” she pointed out.
Worried as he was, her matter-of-fact tone almost made him smile. “I’ll get right on that.”
— CHAPTER —
THIRTY-ONE
The safe house was an ordinary-looking brick two-story not too far southwest of Dallas. It was in a semirural neighborhood with no near neighbors, set back off the road and ringed by trees.
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