The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  He lied, big-time, and put a two-ton weight on Sarah’s back. Nolan’s dead. I checked his pulse. Carry that, Sarah. Hold onto that baby and don’t ever tell her you killed her father. Carry it all.

  At the same time, Lawless used this misconception to keep her under the radar. She thought she’d killed Nolan, and that gave her a huge incentive to live quietly and protect Zoe.

  What a crock. He had convinced her to close off options she should have felt confident to take advantage of. Like the cops. Who wants to make a law-abiding woman fear the cops?

  He stared at his coffee. He poured it on the ground.

  Trust me.

  Yeah, he was a big-time liar. That night at her apartment in Cupertino, he’d told her there was no reason she should fear being arrested. As long as she kept quiet.

  “As long as I keep quiet,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Because …” And her face fell, everything came in, all the light and horror of the truth. “Because if I stay here with this baby, the Worthes will come back. They want her.”

  “I wish I could tell you different,” he said.

  She stared through him, and at her apartment—the backpack, the map of the world, the adventure she was supposed to embark on. For a moment she looked ready to fold.

  Then she steadied herself. “I have to take Zoe and go someplace they can’t find us.” She hugged the baby tighter. “I can cash in my round-the-world ticket.”

  He had sent her on the run. He had seen the fear and determination in her eyes, cradling the baby, a young woman with no experience, thrown overboard from her own life, little more than a girl, really. She wasn’t part of the WITSec deal. He had left her to sink or swim.

  The girl she’d been was nothing like the woman he’d met yesterday. This Sarah, five years older, was something fierce. And loving, and clear-eyed. This Sarah was a warrior.

  How could he face her now?

  He looked at the mountains. To face her he had to find her. But everybody was scattered to the wind, with no protection and no relief. Marichal and three deputies were dead. Teresa, at least, was safe, having spent the night in a hospital for observation. But Sarah and Zoe were gone.

  Fear ran like a scalpel along his spine. The clan had found her once. So had Harker. They’d find her again. They might have found her already. He stared out across the desert, the sand, the blue hills in the far distance. This was the Worthe clan’s native territory. If they hadn’t already captured Sarah and Zoe, they would be closing in on them.

  He took out his phone and tried again to call her, without any luck.

  56

  Dappled sunlight flickered through the windshield of the truck. Sarah stirred and squinted at the sunrise. Stiff, bruised, she straightened and looked around.

  The truck was well hidden in brush under a cluster of cottonwoods in an arroyo off the highway. The Glock rested on her lap. In the back seat, head pillowed on her backpack, Zoe was still asleep.

  Outside, Nolan sat under a tree, eating a granola bar, staring at her.

  She didn’t move.

  In the daylight Nolan looked more than five years older, mid-thirties but his hair in a ponytail salted with gray. The lines around his eyes looked deep. From stress, maybe. She hoped. He took another bite, calmly watching her.

  While Beth was still dead.

  The hairs on her arms stood up. She seemed without volition to inch sideways, to block any possible view of Zoe in the back seat.

  How could he do it?

  How could Lawless?

  How could Lawless have kept this from her for five years? How could he have let her think she had shot Nolan to death? Who the hell was he?

  The same deputy U.S. Marshal she’d seen that day in the snow, calm and focused, who never hesitated to tell her: Run. He had taken charge. He knew what to do. She hadn’t objected or even questioned what he told her. He saved her. Freed her. Or so she’d thought.

  And Lawless thought Curtis Harker was the one who was too driven and devious?

  Nolan finished the granola bar. He pocketed the wrapper and brushed his hands together.

  She unlocked the doors of the truck and got out.

  He was waiting for her, distant, almost skittish. Let him worry. She tucked the Glock in her belt.

  She was relieved that he hadn’t made a fire. She was relieved that he hadn’t run away or called the FBI, or his cousins. She realized that she trusted him, at least on some gut level. It wasn’t merely exhaustion. Though she knew she couldn’t have stayed awake without becoming psychotic and useless. She had closed her eyes, and now she was walking toward him, seemingly unscathed.

  He said, “The spare tire’s a doughnut—one of those little temporary tires that’ll only last fifty miles. And it won’t take much abuse.”

  “What happened, Nolan? What happened that day outside the cabin?”

  “Thought you’d figured it out by now.”

  She resisted the urge to slap him in the face.

  He looked away. “You got there too late. Or too early, that’s what happened.”

  “You were going into Witness Protection that day?”

  “No. I was going to tell Beth I was going into WITSec and she needed to come with me. I’d been working on it for months.”

  “She never knew.”

  “She knew about the FBI. Not about the aftermath.”

  “Who approached whom?” she said.

  “The FBI came to me.”

  “Harker. How did he convince you to work with the Bureau?”

  He looked at her like, Come on. “He told me what I already knew. That I’d never be safe as long as my family knew where I was. Witness Security was the only way to save me. And Beth and the baby.”

  Sarah nodded, encouraging him to go on.

  “And the only way he’d arrange for us to enter WITSec was for me to provide evidence against the family—evidence that would lead to criminal convictions.”

  “And he asked you to obtain evidence by letting Zoe undergo the blessing ceremony.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must truly, deeply hate your family,” she said.

  He couldn’t meet her eye. “I’ve been in WITSec for five years. You think I was scared that day? I’ve been scared every day of my life since then. That’s why I never reached out to you, or tried to contact Zoe.”

  “For fear of discovery?”

  “And that it would expose Zoe to the family again. If I ever surfaced, I’d lose my U.S. Marshals protection. The family would come not just for me, but for her.”

  “Then why did you show yourself now?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She crouched down in front of him. The Glock was jammed in the small of her back. “I want to know—why did you try to grab Zoe from me that day? Because you did. You were crazed, and I knew you were going to do something bad.”

  “I didn’t know where Lawless was, I just knew Beth was in trouble and Fell and Reavy and Grissom were coming for me. So I went crazy.”

  “I thought you were planning to turn Zoe over to the clan.”

  “Holy shit, no.” He looked horrified and actually, truly, hurt at the accusation.

  “I think I believe you. You just wanted to take her with you into WITSec. And you wanted the information from the microchip, because you thought that, without it, the FBI might renege on your deal.”

  He straightened. “I loved Beth. I never wanted to hurt her or Zoe.”

  He looked like a whipped dog. At some level, he now felt ashamed. And he was deeply unsettled around Zoe. He didn’t know what to do or what to say, and he sensed, correctly, that if he got too close Sarah would cut his balls off.

  “Don’t lie to me, Nolan. Did you want to get her chipped?”

  “Yeah.” He seemed to sag. “I knew they’d give her a chip with a number in it.”

  “And you could then turn that over to the FBI.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s on the
chip? Bank account information?”

  “At least.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t just want Zoe for the chip. They think she’s special.”

  The cold buzz began at the base of Sarah’s skull. “What kind of special?”

  “Her birthday has spiritual significance, by their reckoning. January third. One-three. It maps onto a New Testament verse about ‘worth.’ Second Peter, chapter 1, verse 3. ‘God’s divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.’ ”

  Sarah could hardly swallow. “They think that verse proves that the Worthe family is special. Divinely appointed.”

  “Absolutely. They think her birth was their sign from heaven.”

  She felt barbed wire tighten around her chest, squeezing, pricking at her heart.

  Nolan said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Tell me the rest.”

  “A few days ago Harker convinced me to come in from the cold.”

  “How did he find you?”

  “How else? He’s FBI. They wangled it out of the Marshals Service.” He rubbed his hands along his thighs. “And I was so tempted. These last five years have been tough. Sarah, you have no idea. It’s been lonely. I’ve been so isolated.”

  She sat on her haunches and stared at him. He was describing everything she’d been living through—but while raising Zoe and keeping her safe, without the protection of the Marshals Service.

  “So when Harker called and told me I’d be able to live openly again, and see my daughter …” He shrugged and his expression curdled. “But I was just another pawn in Harker’s grand plan to place every flavor of bait in front of the clan.”

  And Nolan was an extra shiny pawn—Harker thought that, if captured, Nolan would be well placed to get lots of info from the family.

  “He promised you liberty—in return for what?” she said. “What did he tell you you’d have to do?”

  “Show up. Talk. I thought.”

  “Harker’s taking extreme measures. I don’t know what he was going to ask you to do, but it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “I don’t know.” Though he was sitting down, he looked wobbly.

  She had a bad feeling. She wondered if Harker planned to implant a new chip in Nolan, a listening device. Like a wire, but undetectable. At the very worst, Harker would get a recording of Nolan being murdered by the clan.

  “What’s the plan?” he said.

  “I’m going to figure out what to do.”

  “You mean how to survive?”

  A breeze stirred the cottonwoods. Their leaves shivered like a thousand tiny wings preparing to fly.

  “No,” she said. “How to win.”

  57

  At eight A.M. Harker got the first reports. No sightings of Sarah Keller or Nolan Worthe. No sightings of the clan. He led the Albuquerque agents into a two-bit diner down the road from the burned-out sheriff’s station. No other customers were there but a TV was on, news being broadcast from right outside.

  Harker flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED. He called to the waitress: “Coffee and your biggest breakfasts—three of them.”

  One of the Albuquerque agents ended a call. “Got it. Driver’s license for the protectee. Under his new name.” His phone beeped. He showed the photo to Harker.

  Harker nodded. Scott Alan Williams. “Yeah, it’s Nolan Worthe. Find out the make and model of any vehicles he owns and get the tag numbers. Check rental agencies at the Roswell airport. The clan was driving a silver SUV. I saw it up close—”

  “They flew into Oklahoma City,” he said. “A Barry Briggs rented a Silver Navigator. OKC’s sending us the info. And two female passengers on the same flight used a similar name—Riggs. Could be an alias.”

  Harker nodded. “Good. Get the sheriff to put out a BOLO. State police as well, all counties.”

  “You think they’re still in New Mexico?”

  “They’re after Zoe Keller. If she’s here, they’re here. And Zoe’s nearby.”

  “But probably on the move by now.”

  The remark sounded casual and annoying, and Harker nearly said so. But he paused. The agent was right.

  “We need to make sure that she can’t go any farther,” he said.

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  He gazed out the window of the diner across the plain, at the empty vista, toward a jutting mountain far to the west. It rose from the desert like a hatchet, blue with shadow. Roadblocks? He needed to mobilize a large law enforcement response, in a rapidly expanding search radius.

  “We need to distract them. And we need to clear out civilians,” he said.

  He needed something quick and dirty. He needed a sideshow. An effective sideshow, which would contain both Sarah Keller and the clan. And which would not reek of FBI involvement.

  He recalled the military convoy that had passed him on the road yesterday—trucks and a long flatbed big rig and outriding vehicles with men inside who were clearly not just Feds but former Special Forces, men with earpieces and mirrored shades, treating civilian traffic like targets.

  He pictured the New Mexico map he had studied earlier. Holloman Air Force Base was sixty miles west, and the White Sands Missile Testing Range, and the Trinity Site. The U.S. government owned nearly half the land in this state, and liked to store deadly and secret materials in desert bunkers. He thought of how fast that convoy had been moving, and the fact that even with skilled drivers, highway travel could end in a ditch. Out here, it didn’t even take a crew of God-addled rednecks to send you off the road. You merely crested a rise and came face-to-face with wandering cattle.

  “What’s the agency that handles nuclear transport?” he said.

  “Office of Secure Transportation?” The agent looked at Harker with suspicion. “Headquarters is in Albuquerque. Why?”

  “What happens if there’s an accident? There’s a protocol, right?”

  “The area around the accident is shut down and quarantined.” The man’s suspicion turned to something between shock and excitement. “OST won’t like it.”

  “The OST doesn’t have to be involved.”

  The agents glanced at each other, and back at Harker.

  Harker stared across miles of blinding sand at the morning sun. “It only has to last for a couple of hours. We’re close. They’re here. This is the only way to activate a multiagency response on short notice.”

  “There’s an incident command system in case of emergency.”

  “Extreme emergency can override the command system. And this is one. Any normal roadblock will tip off the Worthes that we’re trying to corral them. This will actually keep the officers enforcing the cordon safer.” He got out his phone. “Look—if the Worthes get stopped by a cop in a cruiser, they’ll open fire. But if they’re directed back with everybody else because they hear a nuke has crashed up the road? We’ll pen them in. And tighten the noose.”

  Harker had to admit: Sarah Keller had far more savvy and survival skills than he had foreseen. But they weren’t playing tag. It was past time for her to surrender. There could only be one winner, and it had to be him.

  Because if he lost, so would she. The Worthes, Grissom Briggs, these sick child-women Reavy and Fell, were sadistic psychopaths. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill Keller. Her only chance was to surrender to him. For her sake, and for the child’s.

  “I’m afraid we’re about to have an accident. And we’re going to have to declare a nuclear transport emergency.”

  58

  This way.”

  Sarah climbed up the slope of the arroyo through chaparral, boots swishing on the soft dirt. She kept the truck in view. She had the keys in her pocket, the Glock in her hand, and Nolan within range. They reached the lip of the arroyo and stopped. The view spread for fifty miles.

  The aircraft graveyard was off the highway ten miles south of Alamogordo. It was the
size of a university campus, covered with a hundred acres of abandoned airplanes. In the stark sunshine they gleamed silver and white and red and green and black, tail livery fading in the heat. The road was adjacent to White Sands National Monument, the Sahara of white dunes that rose a hundred feet high and flowed across the desert floor for twenty miles. It was thirty miles as the crow flies from the site where the first atomic bomb was exploded by the Manhattan Project in 1945. It was at the heart of ancient Apache lands. And it was just down the road from the mountains where Billy the Kid was born, and hid out when he was on the run.

  The perfect place to make a last stand.

  She stood in the morning sun staring at the white desert to the west, an arc of sky behind it so blue it seemed to look straight through to nothingness.

  She couldn’t run anymore. Running would only exhaust her, endlessly, until they brought her down. That was no life for Zoe. Run, and she would destroy the child she had sworn to save.

  She had to turn the situation around. She could no longer let Zoe and herself serve as bait.

  How, she thought—how could she do this?

  She climbed on a boulder and sat, hands hanging from her knees. She stared and thought. The sun heated her back and warmed the dun-colored slope. Below on the desert floor, mirages began to glimmer.

  The sun was higher in the sky, shadows shorter, when she finally climbed down from the boulder. Nolan was still sitting nearby, waiting. She walked past and waved for him to follow her back down the arroyo to the truck.

  “Well? What’s the plan?” he said.

  “Multistage. Like a Saturn rocket.”

  She just hoped it didn’t blow up in flight.

  “What are the stages?” Nolan said.

  “You won’t like them. But you’d better understand them,” she said. “One. Eliminate Grissom, Fell, and Reavy. I don’t care if they end up in prison or in the ground. But take them off the board. Permanently.”

  He nodded. He looked pale, but he wasn’t disagreeing. They trooped down the slope.

  “Two. Convince the family to give up trying to grab Zoe. Make her of no interest to them.”