Hunter (Decorah Security Series, Book #20): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel

by Rebecca York

  The runner shifted his stance. Although he kept his face carefully neutral, there was something about the angle of his firm jaw that sent a shiver up her spine. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled. “Training exercise,” he answered in measured syllables, using only the precise number of words he needed to convey his meaning. “Six-mile run. Fifty-pound pack.” His voice was rough, rusty, with a kind of unused quality.

  Kathryn goggled as she tried to imagine the stamina it would take to run ten miles carrying that much weight.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” McCourt growled.

  The man drew himself up taller. “The trails are wet,” he said in his gritty voice, then took a step toward McCourt who backed up the same amount of space.

  “Stay away from me,” he warned, a quaver in his voice as his hand inched toward the gun at his waist.

  Kathryn could see he was badly rattled by the chance encounter. My God, was he capable of shooting the man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? What kind of place was this, anyway?

  She looked around. The grounds were as deserted as before. She was the only witness.

  Her heart started to pound. Before she quite realized what she was doing, she stepped out of the car and moved to join the two men.

  McCourt heard the car door open, glanced back at her and swore under his breath. “Stay out of his reach,” he flung over his shoulder. “He’ll beat the crap out of you as soon as look at you.”

  The runner shook his head in strong denial, then switched his attention from McCourt to her, apparently dismissing the other man as if he had ceased to exist. Yet she had the feeling that if McCourt made a sudden move for his gun, it would be knocked out of his hand before he could raise it into firing position.

  “I will not hurt you,” the runner said to her with an absolute finality that she felt as well as heard.

  “I believe you,” Kathryn replied, lifting her eyes to meet his.

  His gaze locked with hers, held. “Thank you.” He spoke the simple phrase with deep sincerity, giving the impression that he rarely had the opportunity to thank anyone.

  “I never lie,” he added.

  It wasn’t a boast, she decided. It was a simple statement of fact. Like the correct date and time.

  “Who are you?” she asked in as steady a voice as she could manage.

  It was a straightforward request for information, yet he appeared to give it deep consideration, and she had the strange feeling that perhaps nobody had ever bothered to ask the question before.

  “Nobody,” he finally answered with a half shrug of his shoulders.

  “You must have a name,” she came back.

  His hand rose, and he tugged for a moment at his left earlobe as if the gesture helped him think. “I am called John Doe,” he recited, the syllables running together into one word. From someone else, it might have been a joke or a sarcastic attempt to cut off the conversation, but the serious look on his face belied any attempt at humor or irony.

  He didn’t ask her name, yet she offered it anyway. “Kathryn Kelley. Kelley with an extra E before the Y,” the way she always said it, even as she pondered the combination of a first and last name that had very little chance of being real.

  “Kathryn Kelley,” he repeated in a thoughtful voice. “You are different.”

  “How?”

  He considered the question. “Many ways. Your hair.” He reached out a hand toward her red curls, his fingers making the barest contact, like a man afraid to harm something of great value. The touch was gentle, yet it sent a vibration traveling along her nerve endings.

  “I—remember—” He stopped, looked perplexed.

  Her breath stilled as she gazed into his eyes. He was waiting for something, and she didn’t know what. Slowly, as if controlled by some outside force, she raised her hand so that her fingers were pressed to his. She could feel the blood pounding in her fingers and wondered if he felt it, too.

  For several heartbeats, neither of them moved, and she saw a look of wonder fill his dark eyes. It was replaced almost instantly by an utter bleakness that brought an answering tightness in her chest. “You are not afraid of me like the others,” he said in that same gritty voice as he pulled his hand back.

  “What did you do to make them afraid?” she asked.

  He shrugged, his face going as blank as a window when the shades are abruptly drawn.

  Kathryn had utterly dismissed McCourt from her mind during the exchange. Now he made his presence felt with a muttered expletive. “That’s enough,” he snapped. “How many miles are left in your run?” he asked John Doe

  The answer came back without hesitation. “Two.”

  “Then finish up. And do an extra two miles to make up for the interruption.”

  “Yes, sir.” He acknowledged the order crisply, though there was an undertone of insolence that she was sure McCourt couldn’t miss.

  Before she could ask any more questions, the man who called himself John Doe crossed the road and started across the scraggly lawn, his long, muscular legs pumping. He picked up speed as he went, until he was moving in a blur of motion that seemed beyond the capacity of anybody but an Olympic sprinter. Yet he was settling into the fast pace for what was still a long run. In a few more seconds, he was out of sight.

  Kathryn stared after him, but her attention snapped back to McCourt as he swore under his breath.

  “Is he being punished?” Kathryn asked.

  “Like he said, he’s being trained,” her escort snapped. Pulling a phone out of his pocket, he began to punch in a series of numbers. Then he turned his back to Kathryn, stepped to the far side of the car, and began to speak in a strained, rapid voice.

  “Give me Beckton,” he demanded, then glanced in her direction and lowered his voice. Yet she still caught the tone of annoyance.

  Unfortunately, the rest of his conversation was muffled. When she realized she was standing in the middle of the road, straining her ears to hear what he was saying, she grimaced and moved to the side of the car, resting her hips against the fender. The wind rustled her hair, and she smiled slightly as she remembered the caress of John Doe’s fingers. He was strong, yet his touch had been gentle, like a man stroking a wild bird. Something she didn’t understand had transpired during the few minutes they’d spent together. All she could say for sure was that she’d met a man who was so out of her realm of experience that he seemed to have dropped to earth from another planet. At the very least, she thought as she recalled his alternately clipped and formal sentence patterns, he sounded like someone who was still learning English.

  Yet the two of them hadn’t needed brilliant conversation to make contact on a very human level. On the other hand, he hadn’t smiled the whole time they had talked, and she was hard put to imagine the harsh lines of his face softening into a smile.

  Feeling suddenly sad, she swiped her hand through her hair, brushing it back from her face.

  Who was he? What was he doing in this strangely controlled environment? She wanted some answers before she agreed to remain on this base.

  McCourt terminated the conversation and dialed a second number. This time he spoke in a more deferential tone. As she watched him, she had ample time to start wondering if she was building fantasies around the encounter on the road. She’d hardly spent five minutes with the man who called himself John Doe. She shouldn’t be jumping to so many conclusions.

  McCourt shoved the phone back into his pocket and returned to the car. Silently, they both climbed inside and closed the doors.

  “John Doe isn’t really his name, is it?” she asked as she sat with her hands wrapped around the wheel, making no move to start the engine. “Who is he?”

  “I’m not authorized to give you that information. You’ll have to address your questions to Mr. Emerson,” he said in a clipped, formal voice.

  “But—”

  “God help you; you’ll find out soon enough. And God help me if I don’t have you in the
office of the Chief of Operations in the next five minutes.”

  ###

  His powerful legs pumped, and his feet pounded the ground, eating up the miles between himself and the woman with the red hair and the gentle expression in her blue eyes. She had looked at him with a kind of interest that was different from Swinton and Beckton and the rest.

  Kathryn Kelley. Kelley with an extra “e” before the “y”, she had told him. She was of no importance to his mission. He should wipe her from his mind.

  But his pace faltered as details bombarded him. Hair of flame. Blue eyes like still water. The rounded curve of breasts and hips. The hem of her skirt where it brushed the tops of her knees. The images licked at his nerve endings like the fire of her hair.

  Somewhere . . . somewhere he had seen her before. In a dream. It couldn’t be in real life.

  His hands clenched into fists as he forced the distracting visual images from his mind. Immediately they were replaced by words. His words to her. Her words to him. Every detail of the brief conversation was branded into his mind. She had talked with a soft voice, but she could hurt him—worse than the others.

  She had made him feel a strange lightheadedness. It came again, and he almost stumbled. With renewed concentration, he got the rhythm back and managed not to dwell on her for a full thirty seconds. When she tiptoed back into his mind, he reminded himself sternly that she was not part of his world. He would never see her again. So he could stop thinking about her, he told himself.

  But she stayed with him. She had stirred up something inside him, something that had been buried deep. Like the memory of a scent that would sometimes tickle the back of his throat, then drift out of reach. Or the music that rose to the surface of his mind the way mist drifted from a pond in the woods and swirled in thick currents. He had never heard that music in real life. It was nothing like the classic rock Beckton played on the radio. Or the country western songs some of the men liked. Yet it must come from somewhere.

  His feet assaulted the blacktop as he picked up the pace in time to the music in his head. The familiar rhythm helped soothe him, and he forced his mind to more important matters. Logic. His work, Project Sandstorm.

  He ran toward that goal. It was burned into him. Everything he did was focused on completing the assignment he had been given. Sandstorm was important. Essential. The reason for his existence. He must carry out the job for which he had been preparing all these months—or he would die trying.

  Then it would be over. The drills on hand-to-hand combat. The survival classes. And all the other details that spelled the difference between success and failure.

  His instructors, Beckton and Winslow and the rest of them, would not be there. None of the scientists or the lab technicians would travel with him to a country halfway around the world called Gravan. He would be on his own. He would have to make all the decisions on weapons, logistics, and deployment. And he would have to calculate the odds of success, weigh each individual detail—like the number of guards at each entrance to General Kassan’s palace.

  It seemed as if he had been training for this assignment all his life. It was his destiny. And going over the details brought him a feeling that bordered on serenity. Yet complete peace eluded him.

  On a deep, instinctive level he sensed that something important inside his brain had been changed. He didn’t understand what had happened, exactly. And he wasn’t ready to cope with it. Yet he had learned above all else to accept the world as he found it. And he knew that his feeling of inner harmony had been shaken in those few minutes when he had encountered Kathryn Kelley—when he had looked at her, talked with her.

  But there was a balance to the equation. If he had lost something, he had gained something as well—an important component, he realized now, that he had lacked. It was still too unfamiliar for him to name. And he didn’t know exactly what had changed or how it would affect his behavior. Yet as he put more distance between himself and the woman, he sensed that nothing would be the same again.

  Chapter Two

  There was nothing besides a modest white sign with black letters to set the administrative offices apart from the rest of the buildings, Kathryn thought as McCourt directed her to a visitor parking space near one of the drab red-brick structures. Like the gatehouse, the entrance was equipped with a metal detector—in case she’d acquired a gun on the drive from the entrance.

  “William Emerson’s office is the third one on the right,” McCourt told her.

  She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

  “Just doing my job,” he returned crisply.

  She immediately regretted the sarcasm. It was a bad idea to start a new job by sniping at other staff members. But the man had been rubbing her wrong at every opportunity.

  He stayed in the small lobby, keeping his eye on her as she headed down the dull gray corridor. Not until she opened the door marked Chief of Operations, did he abandon the guard duty.

  A petite brunette secretary, who looked like she could chew nails in an emergency, asked her to take a seat. Kathryn sank onto one of the worn leather couches in the anteroom. As the minutes ticked by, she thought about the way she’d been approached for this job. Emerson had called her out of the blue and offered her a lot of money to accept a short-term assignment at Stratford Creek. When she’d initially turned him down, he’d upped the pay to a figure that had made her blink. At the same time, his insistence had stirred a responsive wariness, and she knew she wouldn’t be here at all if James Harrison hadn’t scared the spit out of her.

  Emerson had been so anxious to get her to Western Maryland that she’d expected to be ushered into his office the moment she set foot in the anteroom. In fact, he kept her cooling her heels for a good twenty minutes.

  She was paging through a battered copy of Time magazine when he finally appeared.

  “Dr. Kelley. Bill Emerson,” he said, holding out his hand.

  She rose, working to hide her annoyance as they shook hands. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he apologized.

  “Not at all.” Her first thought was that Emerson and McCourt must have the same barber, since their crew cuts looked identical—although Emerson’s was gray instead of sandy blond. While he was dressed in a blue blazer, gray slacks, and highly polished black shoes, he looked like he’d be more at home in a military uniform.

  He was probably in his late fifties and was only a few inches taller than Kathryn’s own five foot seven, she judged. But he appeared taller because he stood with his shoulders thrown back as if expecting a surprise visit from the Secretary of Defense.

  When he ushered her into his office, the plaques and photographs on his wall confirmed the hypothesis that he’d been in the military.

  “You’ve recently left the army?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Yes. I’m a retired colonel. But I couldn’t stand playing golf and trading war stories at the Army and Navy Club. When they asked me to head up this project, I jumped at the chance.”

  As she scanned the framed citations and plaques, she gathered that he was proud of his achievements. If she were given a chance to study the memorabilia, she could probably reconstruct a good part of his service record, she thought.

  Had he been given the Stratford Creek assignment as a reward or because the project needed a strong hand at the helm, she wondered.

  “I’m glad you were able to join us,” he said with a satisfied smile. “I’ve been perusing your record again, and it’s very impressive.”

  “Thank you,” she answered, as she sat down in a visitor’s chair.

  “We’re a little off the beaten track. Did you have any trouble finding us?” Emerson asked, reclaiming his seat behind the desk.

  “No, but the security measures here are a bit intimidating.”

  “They have to be. We’re doing highly classified work. Once you get used to us, I’m sure you’ll appreciate being a member of the
team.”

  “Actually, I’ve reserved judgment on taking the assignment until we could meet in person, and you could tell me what I’d be doing,” she said in an even voice.

  His face registered a flash of anger that he quickly masked. “We’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to expedite your hiring.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “And I thought your personal situation was an urgent consideration,” he added.

  “It is,” she conceded. “But coming here has raised some questions.”

  “About?”

  “I’d like to know more about the man McCourt and I met on the road.”

  “John Doe?” he asked in a tone that turned the question into a statement.

  “News travels fast around here.”

  “I had a report from McCourt.”

  “Of course,” she said. So that had been the deferential phone call. She should have known.

  “What did you think of him?”

  “McCourt?”

  “John Doe.”

  The question took her by surprise, and she came out with the first impression she’d formed. “He was very fit.”

  Emerson laughed as if enjoying a private joke. “Hmm. Yes. What else did you observe?”

  “Well, he appears to speak English as if he’s just learned it,” she answered, embarrassed to voice some of the more personal observations she’d made.

  “You have well-developed powers of observation.”

  Another compliment. She should be pleased. Instead, the man’s intense scrutiny made her feel suffocated.

  “He’s a convict who has volunteered for a special assignment.”

  Kathryn blinked, completely thrown. “That’s hard to believe,” she murmured.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve worked with criminals. He doesn’t behave like one.” If she’d been asked to justify the statement, it would have been difficult to come up with supporting details based on her brief encounter with the man. It was more a feeling than a professional observation.

  Luckily, Emerson didn’t challenge her, but his tone was emphatic as he continued, “We’ve changed him a lot since he arrived. He was serving a life sentence for murder.”