Blue Ridge Ricochet

by Paula Graves

  He suddenly felt trapped, a prisoner to his own choices.

  “I should turn myself in,” he said aloud.

  Behind him, Nicki remained silent. But he felt her tension.

  “I’m putting you in danger by being here,” he added, turning to look at her. “I’m certainly not making your assignment any easier.”

  “If you turn yourself in, you’ll be a sitting duck,” she warned. “A man like Philip Crandall can make things happen, even in the jailhouse.”

  “At least he wouldn’t be trying to get to me through other people.”

  “So you let him win? You fall on your own sword and make it easier for him to keep doing whatever it is he’s doing?” She shook her head. “That’s cowardice. And I don’t think you’re a coward.”

  Anger welled inside him. Anger and a gnawing, grating pain that seemed to be shredding his insides, inch by inch. “I don’t understand why he went after Michelle. Why her? She was so decent. Funny and good-natured and so very, very decent.” Tears burned his eyes, but he fought them. Fought the weakness they represented.

  He could mourn later. Right now, Michelle needed his vengeance, not his grief.

  Nicki pulled the chair up next to him and took his hands in hers. “Tell me about her.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t need to talk it out.”

  “Tell me about her, anyway. I want her to be real to me.”

  He looked up and found her eyes blazing at him again. “Why?”

  Her grip on his hands tightened. “Because I want her in my head when I help take those sons of bitches down.”

  He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “You’d have liked her.”

  “So tell me about her,” she said again. “Was she married?”

  “Divorced. Married young, right out of college. She never talked badly of him, but I got the feeling he wasn’t exactly the faithful sort.”

  “Any children?”

  “No. She had two cats she treated like they were her children.” He frowned. “I wonder what’ll happen to them.”

  “I’m sure someone will take them. Did she have family around?”

  “No. They lived in San Francisco. All the way across the country.” It was stupid, he thought, that of all the things he should be worrying about, all he could think about was those two silly cats of hers. “You don’t think they’ll take those cats to a shelter, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I could get a message to Quinn, see what he could do. He probably knows people who could make sure they get a good home.”

  He squeezed her hands. “You think I’m being foolish.”

  “No, I don’t. I think you’re grieving a friend. And however you need to do that is okay.”

  “I wish—” He broke off, not sure what he wished. That Michelle was still alive? Of course he wished that. He wished he’d never gotten that second call from Cade Landry. He’d be at his office in DC right now, putting together a brochure or creating new graphics for the next recruiting pamphlet.

  He wouldn’t be sitting in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, holding hands with an undercover operative and missing the hell out of a woman who hadn’t deserved to die so young.

  “Did she have any reason to suspect Philip Crandall was behind your disappearance?” Nicki asked a few minutes later.

  “I don’t know. She was smart. But she didn’t know I went to Crandall about Cade Landry. I didn’t suspect anything about Crandall myself until I spoke to him directly.”

  “Did he say something to make you suspicious?”

  “Just that he wanted me to keep silent about it. Not tell anyone else that Cade Landry had called me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t sound unreasonable.”

  “It wasn’t, I suppose.”

  “But it made you suspicious, anyway.”

  “You ever had that little voice in the back of your head that says ‘something’s not right here’?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s what I heard. Something wasn’t right.” He brushed his thumb over the back of her hand, knowing he should let go. Put more distance between them rather than cling to her as if she was his only lifeline.

  But he couldn’t seem to do it. It felt as if there was a part of him that would shatter if he let go. And as much as that notion should scare him, it didn’t. It made him feel steadier somehow. Needing another person—needing her—wasn’t a sign of weakness.

  It was a show of strength.

  “You’re sure it was Crandall who sicced those guys on you? The ones who ran you off the road?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone else my suspicions about Crandall. Nobody but Cade Landry and Olivia Sharp. You know Olivia, right? I mean, since she also works for The Gates.”

  “I know her.”

  “Anyway, by that time, I was already being followed.”

  “Could someone have intercepted the call from Landry?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not exactly someone they’d have thought to put under surveillance, especially after the last time.”

  “The last time?”

  He looked down at their entwined hands. “You know Cade Landry disappeared almost a year ago, don’t you? Long before he resurfaced again earlier this year.”

  “Right. The FBI suspected him of being involved in a plot to kill one of their undercover operatives.”

  “He knew he was a suspect, and he had some information to share with Assistant Director Crandall, but he didn’t want to go through normal channels. So he called me.”

  “Why you? You’re not an agent.”

  “I think that’s probably why,” he answered with a smile. “I’m nobody. Who’d suspect that I’d get a call from a rogue agent?”

  “How did Landry even know you?”

  “He went through a cybersecurity course the same time I did a little over a year ago. He was being moved to an RA—Resident Agency—down in Tennessee and they wanted him to be their point man on cybersecurity. I guess he remembered me when he needed help.”

  “You didn’t suspect Crandall the first time you went to him?”

  “I didn’t go to him,” Dallas answered quietly, letting go of her hands and sitting back.

  “But you said Landry asked you to bypass channels.”

  “I didn’t listen to him. I thought he was being paranoid. The rules were there for a reason. The chain of command isn’t just some arbitrary set of standards.”

  “And that’s when things went wrong for Landry.”

  “From what I’ve heard, he disappeared overnight. All his stuff was gone from his apartment and a lot of people thought he’d just run off.”

  “But he hadn’t.”

  “No. I never thought he had. I knew from the scuttlebutt at the Bureau that the brass thought Landry had been corrupted by the Blue Ridge Infantry and their criminal cohort. Do you remember hearing about those two bombers who blew up a warehouse in Virginia a few years ago?”

  She nodded. “I was doing some work for the Nashville police then. Everybody was on edge, wondering if we were about to see a bunch of those small-scale terror attacks from the likes of the Blue Ridge Infantry or maybe some low-level copycats. Everyone was on high alert.”

  “Landry was on the FBI SWAT team that went after those guys. He and his team went in early, against orders, although he swears he got an order to go in. Two of the men on his team were killed. It basically ruined his career.”

  “The FBI thought he botched the raid on purpose?”

  “They weren’t sure. They couldn’t prove anything obviously, or they’d have charged him.”

  “So when he suddenly went missing in the middle of an investigation of the Blue Ridge Infantry—”

  “A lot people figured
he’d gone over to the dark side for good,” he finished for her.

  “What about you? What did you think?”

  “I thought he was dead.” He stood up. “But clearly he wasn’t. And when I heard from him again, I decided to do things his way.”

  “Which still didn’t work the way he hoped?” She stood, as well.

  “You tell me. I thought he was dead until you told me he’s not.” He nodded toward the hallway. “Sitting here wallowing in regret isn’t going to stop Crandall. I need to figure out more about what’s going on with the BRI. Especially if you’re about to come face-to-face with their top man.”

  She followed him to the spare room and stood in the door, watching while he pulled up a chair to the worktable holding his computer. “Do you really think you can get that kind of information on the internet? I’m pretty sure there are loads of people, civilians and lawmen alike, trying to get that kind of information. And nobody’s had any luck so far.”

  “That’s because they’re looking in the wrong places,” he said.

  “And you think you know the right places to look?” She sounded skeptical.

  He shot her a cocky look, taking masculine satisfaction in the rush of color that stained her cheeks in response. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  * * *

  “SIR, YOU ASKED me to inform you of anything that might be an attempted intrusion.”

  Assistant Director Philip Crandall looked up from his paperwork and found Hopkins from the cybersecurity section. He waved the woman in. “You’ve found something?”

  “I believe so,” she answered, a frown etching thin lines in her pale forehead. Jessica Hopkins was a tall, slim woman in her late twenties who looked a decade younger, thanks to good skin and her apparent disdain for makeup. She dressed professionally enough, but her trim suit made her look like a teenager playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. And being a tall girl, she wore a utilitarian pair of flats that seemed to symbolize her obvious discomfort with her own gangly body.

  But the bright green eyes staring back at him through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses were as sharp as diamonds.

  “Do tell me what you’ve discovered, Hopkins,” he prodded when she didn’t continue right away.

  “Well, there was a query of sorts. In the system. It’s complicated.” She waved her hand as if the hows and whys weren’t important. Crandall supposed they weren’t, as long as she could tell him what those complicated things meant.

  “Was it an intrusion or not?”

  “I think it was.”

  “Can you tell where it came from?”

  “That’s the strange thing. It was pretty well masked, as if whoever was poking around in the system knew how to cover her tracks.”

  “Her tracks?”

  “Or his. It’s just—before the intruder could duck back into his or her shell, I discovered how they entered the system.” She leaned toward him, lowering her voice. Her eyes were wide and troubled. “I think—I’m sure the intruder got in using the log-on and password of Michelle Matsumara.”

  Crandall went very still for a moment, trying not to react. Then he realized that he should be reacting. It was surely what the woman would expect of him upon hearing that a dead FBI employee’s computer log-on had been utilized two days after her murder.

  “Is there any way to track the intrusion back to the intruder?” he asked, wishing he’d been less cavalier about upgrading his rudimentary computer skills. He’d figured he’d reached a level at the FBI where understanding advanced technology could be safely left to underlings. It was his job to put the connections together, not root out the connections in the first place.

  He made a note to talk to some of his associates about remedying the gaps in his technological education. Computers were clearly here to stay, and, as he had no intentions of retiring to his Virginia farm anytime soon, it would behoove him to update his skills.

  Especially if he wanted to maintain absolute secrecy.

  He looked across the desk at Jessica Hopkins and realized a time might come, not too distant from this moment, when he would have to have her dispatched. He hoped that time would never come. He hoped she didn’t ask the wrong questions—or, he supposed, the right ones.

  He wasn’t one of those people who lusted for power for its own sake. He took no pleasure in some of the things he had to do in order to achieve his goals.

  But he’d come to the conclusion long ago that the nation he’d pledged his life to protect was incapable of freely governing itself. Sooner or later, without the intervention of practical men such as himself, the nation would collapse beneath the weight of its own excesses.

  Sadly, a country’s salvation made for some very strange bedfellows indeed.

  He dismissed Hopkins, asked her to keep him apprised of anything else she discovered and walked with her as far as the elevators. But once she entered and the doors swished shut behind her, he continued on to the stairs.

  The walk from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building to the Federal Triangle Metro station took him past grand alabaster buildings that never let a person forget he was in the grandest city in the grandest nation in the world.

  At least, that was the story told by the grandeur of those facades. The reality, as always in this mercurial universe, was far more debatable.

  The Metro Silver Line took him to a small café in Arlington, where he sat at the counter and ordered black coffee and an apple crisp. His order arrived promptly, delivered by a quiet, clean-shaven young man who poured coffee with a smile. His dark eyes settled on Crandall’s face for a moment. “Haven’t seen you in here in a while.”

  “Haven’t had occasion to be in this part of town,” Crandall answered with a brief smile. He pulled his wallet from his jacket pocket and handed the server a twenty, folded around a note he’d composed on the train. “I hope to be back soon.”

  “I’ll have your coffee and apple crisp waiting, sir.” The young man took the money with a smile and carried it to the cash register. He opened the register drawer, unfolded the bill and laid it in the tray with one hand, while he pocketed the note with his other.

  He nodded at Crandall and disappeared into the back of the diner.

  Crandall relaxed against the stool back, enjoying a sip of the hot, strong coffee. He might lack the knowledge to make sense of what Jessica Hopkins had told him earlier in his office, but he knew plenty of people who could.

  All he had to do was wait.

  * * *

  WHEN NICKI WAS a little girl and her world had been as changeable as the Tennessee weather, she’d found solace in cooking. It wasn’t the food itself that gave her a sense of normalcy, although she’d enjoyed the results of her culinary efforts as much as anyone. It was the act of cooking, the alchemical magic of food meeting flame, that had given her a sense of calm purpose when the world around her went insane.

  Her mother’s emotional ups and downs had made life unpredictable, but as long as she had a stove and a pan, Nicki could control at least one part of her world. She’d taught herself to cook using an old, tattered cookbook that had belonged to her grandmother, sometimes with wretched results. But kitchen disasters had become fewer and farther between by the time she reached her teens, and her first real job in high school had been tending the grill at Maisey Ledbetter’s diner. That’s where she’d learned that cooking wasn’t a skill but an art.

  Funny how her life always seemed to cycle back to cooking, sooner or later.

  Tonight, her pans were providing her a much needed distraction from Dallas’s focus on his keyboard and the mysteries of the internet. She hadn’t tried whipping up anything ambitious since taking up residence in this tiny little mountain town, but she’d found some nice fillets of trout at the grocery store in Abington a couple of weeks ago and had been waiting for an occasion to take
them out of the freezer and do something interesting with them.

  She whipped up a lemon butter sauce for the trout and tossed some fresh mixed greens and spinach into a side salad, humming tunelessly as she worked. The day’s tension seemed to melt away as quickly as the butter she used in the sauce, and by the time Dallas wandered into the kitchen, sniffing the air, she was feeling relaxed and nearly optimistic again, despite the stressful news that had marred their day.

  “What on earth is that amazing smell?” he murmured, bending close to look over her shoulder at the trout fillets browning on the stove.

  “Trout with lemon butter sauce and a side of mixed greens in a honey vinaigrette.” She struggled against the urge to lean back into his body, to wrap herself in the heat of him, though she found it harder and harder to come up with a good reason why she shouldn’t.

  She’d been alone for a while now. By choice.

  So what if she chose something else now? Whatever was happening with Dallas Cole didn’t feel rushed or reckless, despite their short time together. In some ways, she felt as if she knew him better than anyone she’d ever known.

  And perhaps more to the point, she felt as if she’d shared more of herself—her true self—with him than she’d ever shared with anyone else.

  She’d let him see who she was and he hadn’t run away as fast as he could.

  Of course, he wasn’t exactly in any position to run away, was he?

  “I think you’re about to burn the trout,” he murmured in her ear.

  She removed the pan from the heat. “Sorry. I’m not used to distractions in the kitchen.”

  He brushed his hand down her cheek, making her shiver. “Am I a distraction?”

  She turned to face him, pressing her hand flat against his chest. “By now, you have to know you are.”

  He gazed at her for a breathless moment. Then he bent to kiss her.