by Paula Graves
“Think your new bosses at the police department will concur?”
“I have almost a week before I start there. I can give Brand at least that much, can’t I?”
“I can’t ask it.”
Seth and Delilah both turned at the sound of Brand’s deep voice. He sat up in the bed, his hand pressed against his injured side.
“We should change your bandage,” Delilah said, crossing to him.
Brand shrugged off his jacket and lifted the hem of the sweater beneath. The bandage was a little rumpled around the edges, but there didn’t seem to be much bloody ooze seeping through it.
“How’s it look?”
“Better, actually. Maybe we dodged that infection bullet after all.” She changed the bandage quickly, having become skilled at the task over the past couple of days. With Seth as an audience, she managed to keep her head, but even her brother’s presence wasn’t quite enough to render her immune to Brand’s physical attractions.
It had been a mistake to kiss him last night in the car, even though the circumstances had demanded it. Kissing him had brought back a flood of memories she’d spent the past eight years trying to exorcise.
They fit. Their bodies, their mouths, their minds. She’d never fit so well with anyone in her life, and if she was any good at reading people, she knew he felt the same way. But it hadn’t kept him from cutting her off and, ultimately, sending her away.
He’d wanted her, without a doubt. But not enough to make the changes in his life that would make it possible for the two of them to be together.
“I don’t want you to put your life on the line for me,” he murmured as she taped down the last strip of adhesive.
“It’s not your call.”
“It is my call.”
She leveled a look at him that made him blink. “You have no control over what I do or don’t do. Not anymore.”
His eyes narrowed. “So you’re just going to throw yourself in front of the diesel engine barreling down the tracks at me?”
“I’m going to find the truth. Wherever it takes me.”
He touched her face, a brief brush of fingertips along her jaw, then dropped his hand to his lap. “I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?”
“No.”
He took a deep breath and looked over at Seth, who was watching them with his eyebrows slightly elevated. “You and Rachel agree we call Cooper Security to get you out of here?”
Seth’s gaze slid over to take in his sleeping girlfriend, then met Brand’s gaze again. “Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Delilah said, drawing Brand’s attention back to her. “You said someone spoofed your emails so well that even the FBI is having trouble identifying them as fake, right?”
“Yes.” Brand looked grim. “I told you Cortland’s been making connections with anarchists. Some of them are hacktivists.”
“Hacktivists?” Seth asked.
“Hackers with a political agenda. In this case, toward anarchistic ends.”
“Those guys in the truck got my license number, surely,” Delilah said. “They’ve probably already hacked into the Alabama DMV to find out who I am and where I worked.”
“And they might already have a watch on Cooper Security,” Brand said with a grimace, following her thoughts.
“There may be a way around it, though.”
“Yeah?” Seth asked.
“There are a whole lot of Coopers in Alabama. One branch of the family runs a fishing campground and marina. I can get in touch with one of them, using your burner phone. They can relay the message to Jesse Cooper and arrange for an evac without going through official Cooper Security channels. I can even relay the message in Cooper Security code for an extra layer of security.”
Brand held out his phone. “Do it.”
“First, a question. Has anyone checked the latest on the weather? Any idea how soon we might get enough melt-off to drive out of here?”
Brand took the phone back and used it to check the weather. “Temperature’s already hovering around the freezing mark. Should be in the forties by midmorning, and full sun. Could have a decent amount of melt-off by lunchtime. Enough to make for good driving. And once we get out of the snow zone, it should be clear all the way.” He handed her the phone.
She thought for a moment, pondering which Cooper would be the least likely to draw scrutiny. Then she dialed a number she’d memorized years ago, when she’d had to relay a message to Jesse Cooper without going through channels on a surveillance job that had gone spectacularly wrong.
A woman’s voice answered on the third ring. “Whoever you are, it’s four a.m. and I’m seven months pregnant. This had better be spectacularly good.”
“Abby, it’s Delilah Hammond.”
“Oh.” There was a rustle on the other end of the line as Abby Cooper apparently sat up in bed. “Hi. Is something wrong? I thought you left town.”
“I did. But I need a favor.” As briefly as she could, she explained the situation without mentioning Brand. “I need Jesse to send an evacuation team as soon as possible to get my brother and his girlfriend out of harm’s way and put them in a safe house until I can track down who’s targeting them.”
“Of course. But why didn’t you call Jesse directly?”
“I have reason to suspect someone may be monitoring Cooper Security communications. Jesse needs to know that, too, and put Shannon on closing any possible loopholes.”
“Okay. Listen, Luke wants to talk to you.” Abby passed the phone to her husband.
Luke Cooper’s voice was alert and serious. “Tell me what you need and we’ll get it to you.”
Spoken like a marine, Delilah thought with a smile. The long-lost Cooper brother had returned to the family fold a few years earlier after realizing his go-it-alone policy against the ruthless drug lord gunning for him was putting people he loved in danger. While his current career was running a riding stable that provided horses for tourists vacationing in the Cooper Cabins on Gossamer Ridge, he was one man the people of Chickasaw County could depend on in a righteous fight.
If anyone could make sure Seth and Rachel got to safety, it was Luke.
She gave him the code to deliver to Jesse, which included coordinates for a rendezvous point near Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, a town about four hours east of Cherokee. Luke and some of his brothers had made friends with a farmer who’d let them land the Cooper Security helicopter on his property during a manhunt a couple of years ago. He’d probably let them land there again.
“When can you be there?”
Delilah calculated the drive. Four hours to Pilot Mountain, and based on the latest weather information, they should be able to leave the motel by noon at the latest. “I think we can be there at seventeen hundred,” she said, using military time by habit, since that was Jesse Cooper’s habit as well. Five hours would allow for travel difficulties on the first leg of the trip and still give them time to make it to Pilot Mountain to meet the chopper.
“How many passengers?”
She looked at Brand. “Two.”
“We’ll be there.” Luke hung up.
Delilah gave Brand the phone. “I think that phone’s just about lost its usefulness for us.”
“I have another burner. Clean as a whistle and untraceable to me.”
She shook her head. “How long have you suspected you’d have to bug out like this?”
“Long enough.” He looked at Seth. “We won’t be able to keep in touch once you’re out of here.”
Seth met his sister’s gaze. “I know.”
“I wish we had time to let Mama know what’s going on,” Delilah said with regret.
“Bad time for everyone to abandon her.” Seth frowned. “Do you think this Cortland person will go after
her to get to us?”
Delilah’s gut turned a flip. She hadn’t even considered that possibility. “We need to get her to safety, too. If we can get to Sutton, he could do it. He still has contacts at Cooper Security.”
“I know who could give him a message,” Seth said.
“Who?”
“Cleve.”
Delilah met her brother’s gaze with apprehension. “Can he communicate now?”
“Well enough. All I have to do is tell him my mother may be in danger and Sutton needs to take care of her. Cleve will tell him. And Sutton will do it. He’ll do it for you, if not for me.”
“What then?” Delilah asked. “He’s going to stash her with him and Ivy at Ivy’s place for God knows how long?”
“Only a few days,” Brand said quietly, making both Delilah and Seth look at him.
“A few days?” Delilah felt a shiver of anger at his cool calm. This was her mother they were talking about, and maybe Reesa Hammond hadn’t been a candidate for parent of the year, but she deserved protection. “How can you know it’ll only be a few days?”
“Because as soon as we drop off Seth and Rachel, we’re heading to Virginia.”
“To Cortland’s neck of the woods?” Seth asked, puzzled.
“Exactly,” Brand answered with a jut of his jaw. “I can’t run the rest of my life. If we’re going to prove my innocence, it won’t be by running away.”
“What are you saying?” Delilah asked, half scared, half excited to hear his answer.
Brand’s gaze locked with hers, his blue eyes hard with determination. “I’m saying, we take the fight to him. One way or another, we’re going to end this thing.”
Chapter Eight
“I hope Cleve got the message to Sutton about my mother.”
Brand opened his eyes, jarred from a light doze by Delilah’s first words in several miles. “Seth seems to think Cleve can be trusted.”
“Cleve is a con man.”
“Used to be. Now he’s an old man trying to recover from a stroke.” He shifted in the passenger seat, wincing as the healing wound in his side pulled with the movement. “And whatever his reasons, he has a soft spot for Seth.”
She glanced his way, eyes narrowed. “How do you know so much about Cleve and Seth? I never talked about Cleve Calhoun back in the day.”
“I’ve been in touch with Seth since then, remember.”
She looked back at the highway unfolding in front of them. They were heading north on I-74, toward the Virginia state line. They’d waited with Seth and Rachel until the Bell LongRanger helicopter had shown up with a small army of Coopers to escort Delilah’s brother and his girlfriend to a Cooper Security safe house. Brand had stayed in the Camaro, crouched out of sight, until the chopper had lifted off, heading southwest into the waning sunlight.
“Why did you contact Seth, really?” Delilah asked quietly a few minutes later. “Were you spying on me through him?”
Brand felt a flutter of guilt, because that had been exactly why he’d made contact with Seth five years ago. He’d been able to keep track of Delilah, at a distance, when she’d worked as an investigator for the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Norfolk, Virginia. But Delilah had left that job after three years to work for Cooper Security, and Brand’s connection to Jesse Cooper’s outfit had been limited to Cooper’s sister, Isabel, who’d been on his team at the FBI.
Isabel was the soul of discretion, not prone to gossip or sharing her brother’s business—or that of his employees—with anyone else, save perhaps with Ben Scanlon, her partner and now her husband.
So he’d been forced to make contact with Seth instead.
He’d planned, quite ruthlessly, to make a few threats in order to get the con man’s cooperation in keeping an eye on Delilah. But as it turned out, Seth Hammond had been ready to make a change in his life, and instead of strong-arming Seth into cooperating, he’d ended up helping the man get out of the con game and into honest, if sometimes dangerous, work.
“Not going to answer?” Delilah prodded.
“I was spying on you through him,” Brand admitted.
He couldn’t tell by her expression whether she found his answer satisfying or annoying. Maybe a little of both, he realized as the conflicting emotions played out a skirmish in her dark eyes.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he added.
Annoyance won the battle. “Feeling guilty, were you?”
He felt a touch of annoyance himself. “I’m not the one who told you to leave the FBI.”
“You made it impossible for me to stay.”
“What did you want from me?”
“I just wanted—” She stopped short, a pained expression on her face as she flattened her lips into a thin line. “I guess I wanted something impossible. And I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.”
He didn’t have to ask, Before what? He knew the night everything had changed as well as she did. He’d just been hoping they could compartmentalize that night, hide it away like a keepsake, remembered only in passing but not part of their daily existence.
She’d been the one who had said, in unequivocal terms, that she couldn’t pretend what had happened between them hadn’t happened. She couldn’t shove those feelings inside her every day and go about the job as if they were nothing more than colleagues.
He’d thought he could, but in hindsight, he wondered if he would have been successful.
He wanted her, even now. More than he had anticipated.
He changed the topic, looking for more common ground. “Have you thought any more about our plan?”
“What plan? Best I can tell, our plan is to drive up to Travisville, holler ‘Yoo-hoo, we’re over here’ and start ducking when the bullets start flying.”
“Technically, we don’t duck until we figure out where the bullets are coming from.”
She rolled her eyes so hard, they nearly turned a 360-degree flip.
“It’s significant, I think, that he’s still going after Rachel Davenport.”
“He might be going after Seth instead,” she pointed out.
“It doesn’t make much sense that he’s going after either of them,” Brand conceded. “Unless Cortland has made the connection between Seth and me.”
“So he’s what? Trying to isolate you? Make sure you don’t have anywhere you can go to ground?”
“It’s not a secret at the FBI that I’ve been using your brother as a confidential informant.”
“Which would mean someone at the bureau is on Cortland’s payroll.”
“Wouldn’t have to be anyone high up the chain,” Brand pointed out. “Like I said, my work relationship with Seth isn’t classified information there. Anyone in payroll or even the clerical workers in the office would know about Seth.”
“It won’t be hard for Cortland’s men in the truck to run my license plate and connect me to you, either. Since we worked together at the FBI for a few years.” Delilah grimaced. “Maybe we should both do something about changing our appearances.”
He slanted his head to one side, considering her appearance. Since her days in the FBI, she’d let her hair grow long and stopped adding honey-gold highlights, allowing her hair to go back to its natural dusky color. “When was the last time you had a photograph taken?”
She shrugged, frowning. “I have an internal photo with my file at Cooper Security, but that’s considered eyes only, since I did a lot of undercover work. Jesse assured me when I resigned that my files will remain sealed. I guess the last time I had a photo taken was when I was working at the Commonwealth Attorney’s office in Norfolk.” She grimaced. “God, I hope they got rid of that photo.”
“Why?”
“Well, I was trying to put the FBI behind me, that whole corporate bureaucracy
thing, and I was doing some undercover investigations, so I chopped my hair off short and dyed it bright red. That’s the picture that was on my official department ID.”
When this mess was over, he thought with a hidden smile, he was going to have to hunt down someone in the Commonwealth Attorney’s office and get his hands on that photo. “What about your driver’s-license photo?”
“Oh, God, nobody would recognize me from that monstrosity.” She made a face. “I had to rush to get the license renewed in the middle of an undercover assignment about three years ago. I was dolled up like a two-buck prostitute on an eight-day crack binge.”
“So, basically, if someone went looking for a photo of you from the last eight years, it would look nothing like you look now?”
“Pretty much. The photo at Cooper would come the closest, but I don’t see Jesse giving out that kind of information to anyone.”
Brand didn’t like the idea floating through his head at the moment, even though it made a great deal of sense. If Cortland didn’t know what she looked like, she might be able to go within spitting distance of his lair and never be noticed. With her familiarity with the hills, her local accent and her chameleonlike ability to blend into the background, she was the perfect person to send into Travisville to do a little reconnaissance.
“You have an idea but you don’t want to tell me about it.” She gave him an exasperated look that transported him back eight years.
“Cortland doesn’t leave Travisville if he can help it.” Brand looked at the road ahead of them. Outside metropolitan areas, the traffic on the interstate highways was light enough for easy navigation, but he still felt naked, as if every vehicle they passed might contain an occupant who knew what he looked like and what he was wanted for. “The people he hires come to him. So if we want to figure out what he’s up to—”
“We have to go to Cortland,” she finished for him.
