The First Prophet

by Kay Hooper

  She turned her gaze back to the lake and put her hands on the deck railing as if she needed something to hold on to. But her voice remained steady. “Whatever was born in me six months ago is…growing. Bigger. More powerful. Affecting my other senses and even the way I think. I…know things I shouldn’t know. Not because I have a vision, but just because. I feel things I don’t understand and can’t explain.”

  “Sarah—”

  “I’m changing. I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t know what I’ll be when it’s over.”

  Tucker had always assumed it would be a cool thing to see the future, and God knew it would be helpful and less painful to see one’s mistakes ahead of time and have a shot at not making them. At least that was what he had always thought. But he was beginning to realize that the future might not be such a cool thing to see after all. Not when monsters lurked there. Not when all you saw was death, and danger, and frightening things. He had never seen anybody with haunted eyes until he had looked into Sarah’s the night she’d had a vision of men coming to kill her.

  “She never wanted to be found, you know. That’s why you couldn’t.”

  That was when he had started to believe in Sarah Gallagher.

  He drew a breath and kept his own voice quiet. “Maybe that’s natural, Sarah. For you.”

  “You mean for what I’ve become.”

  “I mean for who you’ve become. Who you’re becoming. How could you not change after what’s happened to you?”

  “Words,” she said softly. “Just words. They don’t mean a lot to me these days.”

  “Then tell me what I can do to help you.”

  “I told you the day we met. You can’t help me.”

  “Sarah, I thought we had gotten past that.”

  “Then you were wrong.” She turned her head once more to look at him, and something hard and bright glittered in her eyes. “You think we’re safe here? We’re not. They’re everywhere. All around us. All the time. We’re never going to be safe until it’s over. And it won’t be over until they get me. That’s one of the things I know now. One of the things I can’t explain knowing.”

  “You were wrong about Margo,” he reminded her, still holding on to that evidence of fallibility.

  “Strike one. Do I get three before I’m out?” Her voice was tight and brittle.

  Tucker frowned suddenly as his own instincts and senses stirred and began talking to him. Flatly, he said, “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah.”

  She sent him a quick glance, then returned her gaze to the lake. Her profile was immobile, unrevealing.

  “I’m not going to run away from this,” he went on steadily. “From you. I don’t believe you’re some kind of freak. I’m not afraid of you, or of anything you might see.”

  “You’re lying,” she whispered. “You are afraid of what I might see. If I look inside you.”

  He had never really been faced with a genuine psychic before, not one like Sarah, so Tucker had not realized, in all the years of his search, that he would in fact be wary of one. But he was. And the only thing he knew for certain was that he couldn’t lie to her about it.

  “This is new to me too,” he reminded her quietly. “Give me a little time to get used to it.”

  “Time is something we don’t have a lot of.”

  “Maybe. But you might at least stop trying to scare me off. I don’t scare so easily.”

  Almost inaudibly, she said, “What I know would scare you. What I’ve seen.”

  Tucker reached out and turned her to face him, keeping his hands on her shoulders. She felt very slight to him, and there was a tremor running through her tense body.

  Is she strong enough to make it through this?

  “Sarah, we’re going to survive this. Both of us.”

  “Are we?” She refused to meet his eyes, keeping her gaze fixed on his chest. She sounded very tired all of a sudden, and there was something hollow in her tone that told him she was alone once more.

  He wondered whether she had finished grieving for her David, the dead lover Margo had been so scornful of. Had she? Was he just a memory now, or would she torment herself for the rest of her life because she hadn’t been able to save him?

  Are we both haunted by what we didn’t do?

  That thought almost made him obey the urge to protect himself and pull away from her, but instead, giving in to some compulsion he didn’t question, he pulled her into his arms and held her.

  Sarah was stiff for only a moment before she relaxed and leaned into him. Her head tucked perfectly into the curve of his neck, and her warm breath against his skin sparked a tiny flare of heat deep inside him. She felt good in his arms. Almost terrifyingly delicate, but very good.

  Her arms slid inside the flannel shirt and around his waist, and he knew the moment when she touched the gun.

  She didn’t react at all except to say, “You have a gun.”

  Belatedly, he remembered she was an army brat; guns undoubtedly were familiar to her. “I thought it might come in handy,” he said.

  “You’re probably right.”

  One of his hands lifted to touch her hair, winding the silky strands around his fingers. “Can you handle guns?”

  “Yes. But I never liked them much.”

  “It’s just another precaution, Sarah.”

  “I know.” She drew back just enough to look up at him.

  He hadn’t intended this to go any further than comfort, but the next thing Tucker knew, her warm, soft lips were beneath his.

  It was a careful, tentative kiss, without force and yet tense with a hunger he could feel growing stronger and stronger inside him. A hunger he felt in her as well. It was held rigidly under control in both of them, something he was very aware of, and that restraint made the kiss curiously more erotic.

  He raised his head finally, reluctant but all too aware of both her vulnerability and a bad situation that was only going to get worse. “Sarah…”

  She reached up and touched his mouth lightly, her fingers gently stopping whatever he would have said. “I don’t think either of us is going back to sleep. Why don’t I go get the coffee started?” Her voice was a little husky and nakedly defenseless.

  After a moment, he nodded and let her go. He wanted to say something, to reassure now in a different way, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Left alone on the deck, he stood for a few more minutes gazing out over the lake. It was quiet and calm and peaceful. He wished he could say the same about himself. Finally, he turned and went into the cabin, where Sarah had turned on the lights and was making coffee.

  “You’re so cautious,” Cait said with a sigh.

  “When you’ve been at this a little longer, you will be too,” Brodie told her as he peered through the infrared binoculars.

  “You’re also made of iron,” she grumbled. “What, you only sleep on odd Thursdays? I’m beat.”

  Brodie smiled slightly but kept the glasses trained on the small cabin on the other side of the lake.

  She shifted, trying to find some comfortable position on a hard and chilly ground, and sighed. “Look, we’ve got to approach them sooner or later, or Gallagher’s going to slip right through our fingers again.”

  “Not in the dark,” Brodie said flatly. “Never trust anybody who comes to you in the dark, Cait.”

  She glanced at him curiously, but said only, “Lesson number one thousand and one?”

  “If you like.” He met her gaze, his own a little impatient. “Dammit, I’m trying to keep you alive.”

  “I realize that,” she said with some dignity. “Just stop treating me like a child.”

  He looked at her a moment longer, then shook his head and returned his gaze to the cabin. “It’ll be light soon.”

  “What’re we going to do about Mackenzie?”

  Brodie’s mouth tightened. “Not much we can do.”

  “He won’t let us get at her without a fight.”

  “I know that.”

&nbs
p; “So? If she’s made him part of the package—”

  “Then he’s part of the package. I doubt the world would notice the disappearance of one writer more or less.”

  Cait opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, Brodie spoke again. “Pack up.”

  “Yes, sir,” she muttered with a small salute.

  Brodie didn’t notice.

  Tucker came into the great room after showering and shaving, feeling better physically but still more than a little rattled emotionally. He didn’t really know what to say to Sarah, except to follow her lead and just not mention those unsettling few minutes on the deck.

  They had both retreated, quickly and cautiously, as if from the edge of a precipice.

  She was frying bacon in the kitchen, and as he came to fix a cup of coffee, she said, “Tucker?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What we found on your computer last night…all those dead and missing people…Who could be doing it? I mean, the whole thing is so huge. Do you think…it might be the government?”

  He understood her wary suggestion. “I know it’s a pet theory of the people who believe there’s a conspiracy under every bush.”

  “I know. But…”

  Tucker nodded. “Yeah. But. It’s hard not to wonder. The kind of manpower this has to involve, the cost, the sheer scope of the thing—how many organizations could handle it? Not many, I’d guess.”

  “But the government could.”

  He smiled faintly as she turned her head to look at him. “I’m one of those people who believe our beloved government couldn’t keep a secret for more than ten minutes no matter what it involved. However…I also believe that’s the Our Government entity—the entire unwieldy mass of bureaucrats stabbing each other in the back while they try to run the country. Or not, as the case may be. Within that mess, there could well be considerably smaller groups a bit better organized and a lot better at keeping secrets. The CIA’s supposed to be dandy, and the FBI not half bad. And we can’t discount the various branches of the military.”

  “But why would they?”

  “That’s the question we need to answer. Somehow I doubt we’ll be able to figure out who’s doing this until we understand why it’s being done.”

  She was silent for a moment or two, then said absently, “Your computer beeped a little while ago.”

  “Um. Must be finished with the search.” Before they had gone to bed, he had set up his laptop to search a number of data banks for some of the information they sought, and then had simply closed the lid and allowed the machine to work, hoping the satellite wouldn’t cut the search short; reception up here tended to be spotty at times.

  Now, he carried his coffee with him to the couch and sat down to open the laptop. What he saw surprised him.

  “E-mail? What the hell…”

  Sarah turned off the stove and came to look over his shoulder at the computer. “Is something wrong? You have an e-mail address, don’t you? Everybody seems to, these days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it’s probably one of your friends.”

  Tucker shook his head. “Sarah, this message isn’t coming through a server into an e-mail account. It’s being sent directly into my system via the satellite dish and my wireless connection, even though I set the program to disconnect from the Internet as soon as it had completed its task. A message being sent straight into the laptop’s operating system…that is not supposed to be possible. Not only does it mean my firewall has been breached, it also means whoever did it knows where I am.”

  After a moment, she said steadily, “Then maybe we’d better see what the note says.”

  Tucker opened the note. And it was brief.

  Leave the cabin now.

  They’re coming.

  “It could be a trick,” Sarah whispered.

  “To drive us into a trap?” Tucker knew his voice was grim. “We’re trapped now, with our backs against the lake. God, how stupid can I be? Grab your bag, Sarah.” He was typing rapidly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to find out where the note came from. Grab your bag, we’re leaving.”

  She obeyed, returning to the great room only a couple of minutes later. “I’m ready. I have your bag too.”

  “Thanks. Dammit, they’ve routed the call through so many proxy servers, it’d take me a week to trace it.”

  “We don’t have a week.”

  He hesitated only an instant, then swore and quickly closed his computer, flipped it over, and removed the battery, severing whatever connection there was between his laptop and whoever had contacted it. Sarah was right; they were out of time. It took only a minute more to pack up the computer in its case, grab it and his other bag, and kill the lights.

  They slipped from the darkened cabin as quietly as possible. The car was parked nearby, and it took only seconds to stow the luggage and get moving. Tucker didn’t turn on the car’s lights.

  “I know these roads,” he told Sarah as she sat tensely beside him. “They’re like rabbit trails around here. If I can get far enough back into the woods, we may be able to slip past them.” He was assuming that, as at the apartment, the enemy would come in force, possibly from several different directions at once. He thought it was poor strategy to make any kind of assumption, but knew it would be far safer to overestimate the enemy rather than underestimate them.

  The Mercedes purred quietly through the woods, shocks efficiently absorbing most of the bumps from a narrow and badly rutted road. But they were forced to go slowly without headlights as Tucker picked his way cautiously around curves and between looming trees.

  And they were no more than half a mile from the cabin when suddenly, ahead of them, lights stabbed blindingly through the darkness.

  Tucker didn’t hesitate. He hit his own lights and turned the wheel hard to the right in almost the same movement. “Hang on,” he told Sarah.

  It was in all reality hardly more than a rabbit trail, an old road so narrow that brush scraped along the sides of the Mercedes, and so uneven that the shocks didn’t have a chance—especially since Tucker was driving at a reckless speed. But, somehow, he was able to keep the heavy car on the road around one hairpin curve after another, even at this speed and with the roar of a pursuing car behind them.

  Unlike all the car chases in television and the movies, no shots came from the car behind them. Hardly any sound at all, in fact. There was just that grim, steady pursuit, unceasing and unrelenting. But there was only one car behind them—as far as they could tell.

  “There have to be more,” Sarah said.

  “Bet on it. If I were them, I’d take one or two more cars and circle around, try to get ahead of us. They have to figure these roads all lead to the main one, where we have to end up eventually.”

  “Are they right?” she asked, hanging on for dear life to keep from being tossed around inside the hurtling car.

  “No. This road goes on for miles, all the way to the highway—and it doesn’t cross another road along the way.”

  Sarah looked back over her shoulder. “I think they’re gaining on us.” Her voice was remarkably calm, especially considering that she could hardly breathe for the fear clogging her throat.

  “In just a minute,” Tucker said tensely, “I’ll see what I can do about that. If memory serves—and I hope to God it does—our friends back there are about to get a little surprise.”

  Memory served. It was a very easy turn to miss, because it was sharp and totally unexpected; a deceptively gentle rise kept even a wary driver from realizing that there were only two choices once you reached the top—take a punishingly sharp turn to the right, or do a swan dive into a small pond.

  Tucker made the turn.

  The car behind them didn’t.

  Duran stood behind the cabin looking out over the lake. With the sun up now, it sparkled invitingly. He thought briefly of swimming or fishing or just drifting on a boat, but the thoughts didn’t last. They never did.<
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  “Report,” he said as almost silent footsteps approached behind him.

  “They didn’t leave anything behind but a half-cooked breakfast. No sign of where they’re headed next. No sign of their ultimate goal.”

  Duran glanced over his shoulder briefly. “I imagine the ultimate goal is to escape.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell the others it’s time we were going.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Footsteps retreated.

  Duran returned his attention to the lake, but this time his gaze scanned beyond it. Eventually, he focused on a spot directly across from the cabin. Misty in the early morning. A couple of fallen trees, thick shrubs. A very peaceful scene. A perfect place from which to…observe.

  He smiled slightly as he studied that perfect place. Then, still smiling, he turned and went unhurriedly toward the cabin.

  “Tell me that bastard didn’t know we were here,” Cait pleaded.

  Watching several dark cars leaving the cabin across the lake, Brodie laughed shortly. “He knew.”

  Cait was still visibly upset. “What’s he doing here? Why is he leading the hunt for Sarah Gallagher?”

  “She must have more potential than we realized.”

  “But they tried to kill her.”

  Brodie sat back and began stowing the binoculars, frowning. “Maybe not. That fire could have been an attempt to get her rather than kill her. A house burns down, a female body is conveniently found inside burned beyond recognition—who’s to say it isn’t Gallagher?”

  Cait looked a little sick. “Kill some poor woman just to provide a body for something like that?”

  “It’s been done before,” Brodie replied without emotion.

  After a moment, Cait drew a deep breath. “So you think Duran wants her?”

  “I think he wouldn’t be here on the front lines unless he had something more in mind than Gallagher’s death.”

  Cait nodded slowly. “What now?”

  “Now,” Brodie said grimly, “we find some way of getting our car out of that fucking pond.”