He crumpled, rolling and swearing. Linc dropped a knee into his back. “Be still!”
When the groaning man finally complied, Linc cuffed him.
Allie stepped to the door and scanned the outer area for any more immediate danger while her mind churned with what she was going to tell Linc.
“Clear!”
“Clear over here!”
The calls came in. Everyone was in custody. Allie lowered her weapon and turned back to find Linc staring at her—and Daria gone. Henry stood at the back door, his eyes swinging back and forth between her and Linc, pure frustration stamped on his features. “Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag now.”
“Where’s Daria?” Allie asked.
“I got her in the van away from the reporters that are on the scene,” Henry said. “I swear, they show up faster and faster.” He eyed Allie. “Everything okay in here?”
“Yes,” Allie said.
“No, everything’s not okay,” Linc countered. “Mark!”
Mark King stepped in and Allie quickly turned her back, not wanting to be recognized yet.
“Yeah, what you got?”
“Take care of this vermin for me, will you?” Linc said. “I’ve got something to deal with.”
“Got it.”
Once he had his prisoner in capable hands and the three of them were alone, Linc swung back to Allie and Henry, jabbing a finger at his supervisor. “You knew she was alive all this time?”
“Yes.”
He reeled back, the single-word answer as effective as a sucker punch.
Allie winced and stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Let us explain.”
“Explain? You let me think you were dead and you want to explain? There’s no explanation. None!” He backed toward the door.
“There is! I had no choice! At least, I thought I didn’t.”
“There’s always a choice, Allie. Always. I guess you’ve got Daria now. That means you’ve got the evidence, so you don’t need me anymore.” And then he was gone.
Allie resisted the urge to crumble to the floor in a puddle of tears. Instead, she shot Henry a black look, masking her hurt behind the anger. “You go after him while I go see Daria and get that evidence.”
Henry caught her arm. “You can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re dead, remember? You have to stay that way for the moment. Even with this raid, no one’s seen you except Linc, and he’ll keep his mouth shut once I explain things to him. The minute you show your face outside this room, Nevsky will learn about it.”
She slapped her sunglasses on and pulled her baseball cap over her head. “I’m going to make sure Daria is all right.” She waved off his protests. “I’ll make sure no one recognizes me.”
“Fine.” She could see Henry gritting his teeth. Finally, he shook his head. “Just let me get Smythe out of the van and you can talk to her alone. Then I’ll track down Linc and explain everything. I’ll tell him it was my idea and I ordered you to go along with it.”
“Do it. Please.” She tacked the last word on the end. After all, he was still her supervisor.
Henry left and Allie paced the floor of the small office, impatience edging her closer and closer to stepping out the door.
Finally, Henry reappeared, jaw tight. “She’s not there.”
“What? Then where is she?”
“Smythe said she asked to go to the bathroom. He escorted her to the one next door and she . . . left.”
“Left!” Allie stared. “What do you mean she left? How did she just leave?”
“Climbed out of the window.”
“And no one saw her? The media? Anyone?”
“No.”
“Unbelievable.” Allie curled her fingers into a fist and barely managed to keep from slamming it into the wall. “She’s in danger, Henry.”
He winced. “I know. I told Smythe to keep an eye on her, but she slipped away from him. Who’d have thought she’d run from our protection after we rescued her?”
Allie pinched the bridge of her nose as her stomach twisted in a knot. Had Daria been snatched again, or had she run? If she’d run, why? She’d been safe. Had the gunfire scared her into bolting? Maybe, but that didn’t sound like her. She’d risked her life to get evidence against her father. Had lived in the same house with the man who could have killed her at any moment and she had hardly blinked an eye. And she hadn’t hesitated to help Linc take out one of the goons. So, either she’d been taken again or something major had spooked her into running.
“See if you can track her down. Please, Henry. We’ve got to find her before her father does.”
Henry got on his radio. A minute later, he met her gaze. “Okay, agents are combing the area. It doesn’t look like she was snatched. One agent said he saw her walking away from the scene toward the road.”
“That makes no sense,” Allie said. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but we’re looking for her.”
“I’ve also got to go talk to Linc, then I’m going to join in the search for Daria.”
“Now, that’s not a good idea,” Henry said.
“Maybe not, but it’s what I’m going to do. I need a uniform to blend in,” she said. “Can you get me a vest?”
Henry’s jaw tightened, then he gave a shrug of resignation. “Wait on me. We’ve both got to talk to him.”
“No, I want to talk to him alone first. He’s furious, Henry.” And hurt. As well as betrayed. And he was justified in all of it.
“I know. He’ll cool off. Stay here and I’ll get that vest.”
She sighed and hoped he was right about Linc cooling off, but she had a feeling it was going to be a long process.
7
Linc sat behind the wheel of his new SUV and desperately tried to get his seething emotions under control. He honestly couldn’t think of a time he’d been so hurt, so angry, so filled with uncontrollable rage that he was actually tempted to do something violent. Like punch his supervisor in the face.
Not even Regina’s betrayal had stirred such rage.
And Allie . . .
Resting his palms against his eyes, he ignored the organized chaos still going on at the scene. He needed a moment. Several actually.
The moment he’d seen Henry and Allie together, he’d known faking her death had been Henry’s idea. But for Allie to go along with it?
“How could you, Allie?” he whispered.
He needed to be asking her those questions instead of the empty space in his SUV. But while he was overjoyed that she was alive, he wasn’t ready to face her yet. “Let us explain,” she’d said. Us. Meaning her and Henry.
What possible excuse could they have to keep her “dead”?
Well, if you’d let them explain, maybe you’d find out.
Linc wasn’t interested in listening to the part of his brain that was still able to think rationally. He just wanted to be mad.
Right now.
Eventually, he’d want to hear what they had to say.
A knock on the passenger door jerked him from his thoughts, heart pounding, sweat breaking across his forehead. He couldn’t make out the figure on the other side of the tinted window, but saw it was female and wearing the standard FBI baseball cap.
He rolled the window down and Special Agent Donna Sims turned. “I need to check out your vehicle.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. I was asked to do it and told not to question why. I’ve already done four others and you’re the fifth.” She pulled a mirror from one of the pockets on her vest and started going over the underbelly of his dash.
Linc stepped out and took the mirror from her, carefully using it to clear the interior. “Nothing,” he said. “You find anything on the others?”
“No.” She took the mirror back and started on the outside of the SUV.
At the back, she paused, then finished the walk, then returned to show him a small disk about the size of a dime. “Found it under
the license plate. Someone’s tracking you,” she said.
He curled his fingers into a fist. “You’ll take it to the lab? See if they can get any info from it?”
“Of course.” She dropped it into an evidence bag, labeled it, then passed it off to another officer, who signed the tag noting that he’d received it. “Pull around the covered area behind the building, will you?”
“Why?”
“Again, I don’t know. I was just asked—in a very strange way, I might add—to pass the message along.” She handed him a sheet of paper with those instructions ending with the initials HO.
“Henry gave you this?”
“Nope. Another agent, but I didn’t get a good look at her. She passed it and kept walking, so I figured she was trying to get a message to you without anyone else knowing—including me. It was fast and she was slick.”
“She, huh?”
“Yeah. You need any help? Backup?”
“No, but thanks.”
Not convinced, she stared at him and started to protest when Linc climbed back into the driver’s seat, his mind whirling. He twisted the key and the engine roared to life. Anger and curiosity burned a path through his brain as he began the slow trek to the back. Having done a reconnaissance of the building before entry, he knew exactly the spot Donna meant.
Once under cover of the loading area, he glanced around, hand on his weapon. No Henry.
The door that connected the loading area to the office building opened and a woman stepped out. Dressed in her FBI khaki slacks, blue shirt, and vest, she kept her head down. The baseball cap covered her hair and dark sunglasses hid her eyes. She knocked on the passenger window and he lowered it.
“We need to talk,” she said as she opened the door and slid into his passenger seat, keeping the ball cap pulled low.
“Hop in and have a seat,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Save the sarcasm, Linc. I know you’re hurt, or just plain angry. Put whatever emotion you want to on it, I don’t blame you.”
“You have no idea.”
“Yeah, I do, just in reverse.”
He started to bite off a response, then stopped. He faced her. “What does that mean?”
“Can you drive? I can’t let anyone see me with you.” She moved the seat as far back as it would go, then scrunched down onto the floorboard, shoulders against the door. Fortunately, the floorboard of the large Suburban was roomy enough to accommodate her.
For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, he didn’t bother arguing with her. Instead, he shifted into drive and pulled away from the still-busy scene. “What did you mean?”
“I understand because I’ve been there.”
“So you said. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about when someone shot my parents and me and my little sister and left us for dead.”
Linc gave a harsh gasp. “What?” The word came out garbled, strangled, and he stared at her a bit too long. He jerked the wheel to keep them on the road. He’d thought he knew most everything about her. An only child whose parents had died when she was a teenager. “You never said a thing about that. You never said anything about siblings.”
“I don’t like to talk about it. A teenager by the name of Gregori Radchenko shot my parents while they were sleeping, then killed my eight-year-old sister in the hallway when she came out of her bedroom. I saw him shoot her, and when I screamed at him, Radchenko turned the gun on me. He fired once and missed. I turned to run and he shot me in the back. My dad and sister died right there. I remember seeing Gregori run for the stairs and heard the front door slam.”
Speechless, he stared at the road instead of her, his jaw working, but unable to get any words out.
“My mom and I survived because our next-door neighbor was a surgeon and was out walking his dog at three in the morning when it happened,” she said. “He called for help while he worked to save me. I remember him yelling into the phone that I was going to bleed out if someone didn’t get there. And then I blacked out.”
Linc didn’t know what to say. She spoke without emotion, staring somewhere in the vicinity of his legs, her rigid shoulders and white-knuckled fists resting on her knees the only indication that telling the story troubled her.
“Allie—”
“When I woke up in the hospital, I started screaming for my little sister. They told me she was in ICU and I could see her after I’d healed. They told me my dad was fine and he’d be in to see me later.”
“How old were you?” He nearly choked on the question, trying to breathe around the shock.
“Fourteen.”
Linc raked a hand over his head. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“There’s nothing to say. They lied. The doctors, the nurses, everyone. Even my mom.”
“She lived?”
“She was hit by one bullet. A flesh wound, so she recovered fairly quickly. She told me everyone was fine. Of course, as I healed and grew stronger, it was more difficult to continue to put me off. Finally, when I insisted on someone taking me to see them or I was going to find them myself, she had to tell me the truth. I was livid. Hysterical. They had to keep me sedated for two days.” She shook her head. “I thought you were dead until about four hours before I saw you in that raid,” she said.
He blanched. “Henry told you I was dead?”
She gave a short laugh. “No, he told me you were alive. I was high as a kite on painkillers and I was . . . messed up, flashing back and forth between crashing drones, exploding boats, and the moment when I realized my mother had been lying to me for two weeks. When Henry told me you were alive and that I just needed to concentrate on getting better, I didn’t believe him.”
“Because of what happened with your family,” Linc said.
She looked away and nodded and he thought he saw tears in her eyes. But when she turned back, her eyes were clear, hard, with no sign of emotion.
Finally, he exited the highway.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Someplace we can talk without worrying about being followed or overheard.”
Unsure where he thought they could go that would afford them the privacy they needed, Allie clamped her lips shut and let him drive while she grappled with her emotions, wrestling them into submission. “I’m sorry Henry let you believe I was dead,” she finally said past the lump in her throat, “but after he explained some things to me, I . . . understood that it might be for the best. Although, to be honest, if the shoe was on the other foot, I’d be reacting exactly like you are.”
Without answering, Linc made several more turns, the last one leading him down a long cement drive to a ranch-style home set well back and out of sight from the main road. He pulled into the garage and cut the engine. “I’ll listen,” he finally said.
He’d listen. Well, that was better than she’d expected. “Where are we?”
“A safe house.”
“How come I don’t know about this one?”
He shrugged. “Because it belongs to the Columbia PD, not the FBI. I helped Brady out with a case a while back and we used this place.”
“Emily?”
“Yes.”
Emily Chastain, now Emily St. John because she’d married Linc’s brother, Brady, four months ago.
Once they were inside, Linc motioned to the sofa, and she dropped onto it with a wince. The stitches in her back still bothered her, but she figured they were the least of her worries at the moment. Linc took the recliner near the large wall of windows that overlooked the lake.
Allie drew in a deep breath. Might as well get this over with. “Henry said you and your family would be in danger should Nevsky learn I was alive. Because of the pictures in his office, I was inclined to agree.”
“Maybe so, but is there any reason that I couldn’t know you were alive?”
She gave a halfhearted shrug. “If Nevsky even had a whiff that I was alive, I don’t know what he might do. I too
k a huge chance arranging this at the last minute and getting in the car with you. Henry’s going to be livid when he finds out, but I couldn’t let you just leave, thinking that I’d deliberately set out to hurt you.” She looked away. If someone had followed them, she couldn’t tell. She’d had to quickly come up with a plan to get Linc alone, and the best she could do was take advantage of the controlled chaos at the scene to slip into the loading area and into Linc’s vehicle. But a chance was still a chance.
“Wait a minute. What do you mean when he finds out? I got a note from Henry arranging this.”
“No, that was me. I suggested to Henry that someone should check the vehicles for tracking devices so if anyone was watching it wouldn’t be obvious yours was the focus of the search. I wrote the note, signed Henry’s initials, and slipped it to Donna with a whisper to pass it on to you. She and I have rarely talked or worked together, so I didn’t think she’d recognize me.”
He blew out a breath and shook his head. “She didn’t.”
“You need to check everything for tracking and listening devices. Your family does too.”
“I’ve already warned everyone that it’s possible Nevsky was watching them, but no one’s seen anything—or found any devices that I know of.”
“Probably because he thought I was dead and had no reason to go after them now. Or you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why go after me and my family if it’s you he wants dead?”
Allie couldn’t sit still another minute. She rose to pace. “I’ve thought about that, and the only thing I could think of was that with him watching us so closely, he would notice that things were . . . developing . . . between us.”
Linc raised a brow. “Developing?”
She flushed and hated the heat. Linc was the only one who could do that to her. “We haven’t advertised the fact that we were hanging out, maybe behaving like we were a little more than just friends, but we didn’t try to hide it either.”
“Hanging out?”
“What do you call it?”
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