by Jenna Kernan
“You’re welcome,” said Erin.
Carr backed away from the bed and then headed for the hall, pausing to meet Dalton’s troubled stare.
“Call Tillman. Tell him Carr says we need to relocate you today.”
“The CIA relocates people?” asked Erin.
“We are a full-service organization, ma’am. Best of luck to you both.”
He disappeared into the hall. Dalton followed him as far as the seated marshal. Carr had vanished.
“Get your boss in here now.”
* * *
ERIN’S STITCHES TUGGED as she transferred to the wheelchair under heavy guard. It turned out that their visitor, Ryan Carr, was exactly who and what he claimed. The real deal, apparently. An honest-to-goodness spy who had done exactly what he claimed, rescuing the package from repeated attempts at recovery by members of Siming’s Army and then finally reaching the airlift location, only to watch the chopper be shot down.
Erin thought that he must have been only ten or twelve miles from where the helicopter crashed.
But right now, Erin’s main concern was to not throw up as she was wheeled down the hall under the protection of a ridiculous number of men armed with rifles. The hallway to and from the elevator was absolutely devoid of people.
“Did we just go up?” she asked Dalton.
The elevator was making her sour stomach more upset.
“Yes.”
“Why?” She swallowed back the bitter taste in her mouth.
“Evac helicopter is taking us out of here.”
“Like the one that Siming’s Army already shot down?”
Beside her, Agent Kane Tillman leaned close. “Appreciate it if you don’t mention them.”
She nodded her understanding.
The next twenty minutes were a blur. She only threw up once and the attending EMTs seemed used to this sort of disturbance. They gave her something that settled her stomach and something for the pain. But the analgesic made her sleepy. Now she struggled to stay awake.
The sky was a deep blue and the lights below them flicked on. Streets glimmered with lines of red taillights and white headlights, strung in parallel ribbons.
“Where are we heading?” she asked, watching the Adirondacks resume custody of the land now stretching below in darkness. She stared out at a complete absence of lights and land broken occasionally by the soft glow of dusk gleaming on a lake or river. Her stretcher pressed against one window and her incline allowed her to see forward to the pilots and down to the emptiness between them and the wilderness. She searched for familiar landmarks and saw what could only be the Hudson River, larger now and dotted with the occasional river town. She saw the Mohawk merge and the twin bridges that told her they were headed south. What was their destination?
She did not have long to wonder.
“Are we descending?” she asked Dalton.
“Seems so.”
“Dalton?”
He held her hand. “Hmm?”
“I can’t stay awake.”
He kissed her forehead. “I got you, Erin.”
The drug was seeping into her bloodstream like tea in warm water. She blinked and forced her eyes open, but they rolled back in her head and her muscles went slack.
“No,” she whispered, or merely thought she spoke. Had her lips moved? She drifted, torn loose from the mooring of pain, knowing that if danger came it would find her defenseless.
* * *
DALTON HAD A long night and now sat on the front porch as the birds began their morning songs. They had arrived at the temporary safe house on a country road in a little village in a county called Delaware. He’d never been to central New York. Their hostess was a woman who ran an orchard. Peaches were in season and the bees already droned in the honeysuckle bush that bordered the porch.
Erin was in an upstairs room with Roger Toddington, a former army paramedic and an EMT who was also their hostess’s son. Somehow Dalton had dropped into a crazy world of espionage and he felt like Alice slipping through the looking glass. Everything seemed so normal here, but it was not.
The outside of this farmhouse looked typical enough, but the adjoining outbuilding was not the garage it appeared to be; instead, it was a fully equipped operating room with an adjoining recovery suite that rivaled the ICU where Erin had convalesced from her surgery.
Their hostess, Mrs. Arldine Toddington, offered him a cup of black coffee. The woman was fit, thin and muscular with hair that was snow-white on top and red and white beneath. She looked about as much like a spy as Mr. Rogers, God rest him. But according to Tillman she was a former US marine, a nurse practitioner with unique experience with gunshot wounds and was, it seemed, even tougher than she looked. She also made an amazing peach-and-walnut coffee cake.
But if Agent Tillman was to be believed, they were safe here and would remain in Mrs. Toddington’s care until Erin recovered enough to travel without drawing attention to her healing bullet wound.
“Estimate that will be twelve to fifteen days,” said Arldine.
“Do you have a location?” Dalton asked Tillman.
“Two, actually.” Tillman set aside his coffee to accept a fork and a plate with a large piece of coffee cake littered with sticky walnut bits. “Thank you, Arldine.”
“We’ll have a choice?” asked Dalton.
Arldine and Tillman exchanged looks, and Arldine withdrew to lean against the porch rail facing them. Tillman nodded and she took over the conversation.
“We understand your wife has asked you for a legal separation.”
Dalton lowered the plate to his lap and forced himself to swallow. The moist cake had turned chalky in his mouth, and the sticky topping made the food lodge in his throat.
Tillman filled the silence. “Safer for you both if you go separate ways. You are a big guy. Distinctive looking. Erin is more attractive than most women, but with a change of hair color and wardrobe, she can fit in just about anywhere.”
Sweat popped out behind his ears and across his upper lip.
“Now you’re saying that if we stay together, I put her at risk?”
“We are,” said Tillman.
“But a few moments ago you said you could keep us safe.”
“Carr has uncovered more information on this outfit. Seems to be heavily funded from offshore accounts, and we do not have a handle on the number of recruited members or even how many more sleeper cells can be activated. The speed of their response is daunting. They definitely have our attention.”
“Erin and I are no threat.”
“But you are on a kill list.”
Dalton sat back in the rocker, sending it tilting at a dangerous angle. He knew what a kill list was. Crime organizations used them. It was a bounty list of sorts with a price on the heads of people who had betrayed or wronged them in some way.
“How do you know?” asked Dalton.
“We’ve gotten that much from Lawrence Foster. It was why Carr made his appearance. He doesn’t usually get involved with civilians. But you two protected the information he had carried. So he felt a certain debt. He was at the hospital when I arrived, watching over you and your wife.”
The man gave Dalton the creeps, and that was saying something when you considered all the types of criminals and military badasses he had come in contact with over the years.
“Where will you send her?” asked Dalton, getting back to the crux of the situation.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Only the location we plan to send you.”
Dalton would not even be allowed to know where she was.
“We will give you regular updates on her condition and will notify you both immediately when we neutralize the threat.”
Neutralized, he thought. Also known as dead, killed, KIA or otherwise squashed.
“I need to talk th
is over with Erin.”
“Of course,” said Arldine. “You should.”
“But remember that the threat increases if you stay together.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dalton dreaded this conversation. He had come up here to win back his wife and save their marriage. Now he was going to blow it up again. Only this time he had a good reason. He was doing it to save Erin. To protect her, he had to leave her.
Impossible. Necessary.
He rubbed a knuckle back and forth across his wrinkled forehead trying to prepare for the conversation. She was just recovering, only off the morphine for one day, but he did not have time to waste. The longer he waited, the higher the chances that he would back out. Thinking of the look on her face and of never seeing that face again might just be enough to kill him. According to her, he’d been trying to do that—kill himself—ever since he came home from the Sandbox. He realized she had been right all along and so he would see a mental health professional ASAP. Or he could throw himself right back into the action. He could decline relocation and reenlist.
He felt as if his stomach was filled with tiny shards of glass, cutting him apart from the inside. He stood before her door, an upstairs bedroom of Arldine’s farmhouse with southern exposure, lots of light and a fine view of the hayfield across the road.
Dalton rapped on the door. Roger called him in. When Dalton did not enter, the EMT appeared at the door, his face fixed with a gentle smile.
“Come on in, Detective. I’m just finishing.” Roger looped his stethoscope around his neck and held the ends as one might do with a small towel.
Dalton stepped in on wooden legs. Would she believe him? He had to make her believe him.
“Hey there,” Erin said.
She sat up in the hospital-style bed, a bouquet of sunflowers in a blue ceramic pitcher beside her on the bedside table. Beneath them rested a pill bottle, a half-empty water glass and a magazine.
“How are you feeling?”
“Lonely. I asked Roger to let me move back with you. I understand you have a queen mattress and a view of the barn.”
He hadn’t noticed the view, except that there was easy access to a flat roof beneath the window and a short drop to the ground from there.
The thick bandage on her neck was all the incentive he needed to do what he must. Dalton drew up the old wooden chair and placed it backward beside her bed. He sat, straddling the chair back, using the dowels as a sort of barrier between them because he feared that if he touched her, he’d never let her go.
Dalton cleared his throat.
“Honey?” asked Erin. “What’s wrong?”
* * *
ERIN FELT THE worry creeping up her spine like a nest of baby spiders, their tiny legs moving over her back, lifting the hairs on her body and washing her skin cold.
Dalton’s expression was unfamiliar and deadly serious.
She hazarded a guess.
“Are they out there?” She motioned toward the window and winced, forgetting not to use her left hand. Her head was clear thanks to ceasing the narcotics, but the pain pulsed with her heart, and her healing skin and muscle burned with the slightest movement.
“No, they’re not. Erin, we are going to different locations.”
“What?” Confusion mingled with the fear, landing in her stomach and squeezing tight. She sat up, leaving her nest of pillows, ignoring the pain that now bloomed across her chest. “No.”
“It’s what you wanted. A separation.”
“Trial separation and I explained that to you. I don’t want a separation. I want you to stop taking unnecessary risks. To see a counselor as you said.”
“I changed my mind.”
Her mouth dropped open. She could not even formulate a reply.
“I’m not leaving the force.”
“But...wait...no...” She was stammering. “You have to leave the force. We’re relocating. You can’t... Dalton, this makes no sense.”
“You said I have a death wish. I’m agreeing with you.”
“This is suicide.”
He nodded.
“You have to come with me.”
“I’m not.”
“What are you doing, Dalton? Are they using you as some kind of bait again? We got them Foster. They cannot expect you—”
“They don’t. Haven’t. I just thought you deserved to hear it from me. I’m leaving you this time. I’m sorry, Erin. People don’t change. Sooner or later, I’m catching a bullet. I’m ready. Ready to join those guys I promised to protect.”
“Oh no, you don’t.” She reached for him.
He stood, looking down at her with regret. But not love. Somehow that was gone. The coldness in his dark eyes momentarily stopped her breathing, and her hand dropped to the bright pastel quilt.
“Goodbye, Erin.”
The pain solidified like the surface of a frozen lake. She pointed a finger at him.
“Dalton, don’t you dare walk out that door!”
But he was already gone, and the door slammed shut behind him.
* * *
DALTON MADE IT only to the top of the stairs. Tillman stood on the landing a few steps below him. Dalton sank to the top step still gripping the banister.
“She believe you?”
He nodded, thinking he did not have the strength to rise.
“Good. You can leave now. I have your location information.”
“Where?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Erin adjusted the wide-brimmed ranger hat on her head and proceeded toward her truck, the radio clunking against her hip with each stride. She paused to pass out a few stickers to the children in a visiting family who had stopped to read the nature trail board at the start of a gentle two-mile hike.
“Thank you!” piped the middle child. The youngest was already trying unsuccessfully to affix the sticker on her shirt without removing the backing and the eldest squatted in front of her to help.
Erin waved, feeling just the slightest tug in the stiff muscles of her neck. The cold in the mountains seemed to creep into the place where she had been shot.
She crossed the lot to her truck. Her new location was Mount Rainer National Park where she spent more time outside than she had on the East Coast. Unfortunately, she did not teach rock climbing or lead nature hikes for groups visiting from all over the world. That would be too much like her old life. So she did patrols, taught classes to youngsters in the nature center and manned the admission booth. At night she presented educational programs in the outdoor amphitheater for the visitors camping on-site.
Once in her truck, she unzipped her heavy jacket and headed back to the station past the yellow aspen and spectacular views of the ridge of blue mountains. She lived close to the station in the housing provided by the park to the rangers. Lulu and Jet greeted her at the door, as always. She had spent many nights alone back in Yonkers while Dalton worked his cases. And, though she had worried, she’d known he was out there and hoped he would be home eventually. Now that hope was gone. The cabin had a hollow feel and if not for the dogs, she didn’t think she could take the solitude. Even with the other rangers she was alone, sticking to the story they had given her that made her five years younger and an only child.
September in New York was cool and lovely, but here in the Cascades the high altitude changed the seasons early. There was already snow predicted in the Cascades. In downstate New York, the earliest she ever saw snow had been November, and often just flurries, but here it was September 7 and predictions were for an accumulation tomorrow.
She didn’t mind, could not have asked for a more perfect relocation. And the Company, as they self-identified, were optimistic that she would not have to stay here for more than a year. The information she and Dalton had furnished was likely to stop a pandemic.
Agent Carr kept in
touch, appearing erratically to join a hike or as a solo camper applying for a wilderness permit. He said they were in the process of finding the three Deathbringers that were mentioned on the thumb drive.
The three Deathbringers, according to Carr, came from Chinese folklore, though even in myth form they were still considered dangerous by many. These “corpses” were believed by some to enter the body just after birth and determined the life span of each individual. Each corpse attacked a different system, brain, heart and organs. More specifically to the CIA, they would attack US citizens. The virus that she and Dalton had carried attacked the internal organs, causing a massive shutdown of the renal system. That was corpse number one and steps were underway to locate and intercept a shipment of this virus before it reached US soil. The second corpse, which attacked the brain, referred to a cyber attack, already in place, the brain being a metaphor for the infrastructure that kept communication open. Their people were working on that one now, as well. And the heart? Carr said that the Company believed this was an airborne toxin in production somewhere in New York State.
At the cabin she glimpsed a rental car. A man stood on the porch beside Jet, and for just a moment her heart galloped. But then she recognized that the stranger was too small to be Dalton.
She didn’t look over her shoulder or jump every time she heard an unfamiliar sound. She just was not living her life like that. Erin was out of the vehicle and greeting Jet before she recognized the man in the cowboy hat.
“Mr. Carr,” she said. “That hat makes you look like a Texas Ranger.”
He slipped down the stairs to shake her hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”
He smiled. “And you.”
“Staying for supper?” she asked.
“No, unfortunately. Just wanted to tell you that the tech team has located the computer virus their hackers installed. It was set to disrupt two different systems. The rails in NYC, including subways, and the gas and electric grid in Buffalo.”
“Can they stop it?”
