Secret Identity

by Paula Graves

  She said the words he dreaded. “Al Adar.”

  Chapter Eight

  She saw the horror in his eyes and realized that no matter what nightmares she’d had to face for the four and a half weeks she’d spent in al Adar’s torture dungeon, it could have been worse. It could have been what he was clearly imagining.

  “They didn’t rape me,” she said quickly, because she knew it would be his first thought. It would have been her first thought, as well, had a colleague been taken by the terrorist group, which had built a reputation for utter, soulless ruthlessness over the five-year period when it tried to destroy the remaining shaky hold of democratic ideals in the Central Asian republic.

  She saw the relief in his expression, but it didn’t last long. Like anyone who’d spent time living in Kaziristan, Rick knew that there were plenty of atrocities al Adar was known for besides rape.

  He caught her hand, looking at her short fingernails. He couldn’t miss the differences—when her nails had been torn off during torture sessions, the last thing her captors had cared about was whether or not they’d grow back properly. A couple of the fingernail beds had become infected, and the nails had only recently grown back enough to look halfway normal. Doctors had warned those nails might never be right again.

  Compared with the sorts of deformities some surviving al Adar victims had to live with, misshapen nails and a few scars on her torso seemed small nuisances. She knew her fate could have been much worse.

  Besides, some of the worst scars of her ordeal remained hidden inside.

  She gently pulled her hands out of his grip. “They wanted me to tell them about a man they were looking for. I’m pretty sure they knew I was CIA, so you’d think they’d have asked about state secrets, wouldn’t you?”

  “A man?”

  “I didn’t even know who he was. But they seemed to think I knew where they could find him.”

  She saw Rick’s eyes narrow. “Did they tell you his name?”

  “They called him The Doctor. They seemed to think I would know who they meant.”

  The odd expression on Rick’s face persisted, but she felt too ill and tired to try to figure out what he was thinking. She hadn’t wanted to talk about her ordeal in Kaziristan in the first place, and right now, the call of the bed behind her was growing strong.

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No, I didn’t. I tried to pretend I did—so they wouldn’t just kill me before I figured out how to get away from them.”

  He reached up and brushed away the lock of tangled hair that had fallen in her face. “Smart lady.”

  She smiled a little at his praise, forcing herself to ignore the way even that light touch made her whole body tingle with awareness. “Toward the end, I was beginning to think I was being stupid, instead. Prolonging the ordeal when I could have just gotten it over with.”

  “But you got away.”

  “I did.” She told him about Malid, the guard she’d targeted the day she’d made her escape attempt. “He had a large scar on the left side of his forehead—I figured he’d had a head injury at some point in his life that left him slightly brain damaged. He spoke Kaziri with a strong rural accent and a thick-tongued speech impediment.”

  “Go for the weakest link.”

  She nodded. “I tricked him into loosening my shackles. Once he got close enough, and I had him off guard, I just followed my training.” If Malid hadn’t been a quick-tempered brute, she might have felt a little sorry for what had surely happened to him after his superiors in the organization discovered he’d allowed her to escape.

  “So you saw where they were keeping you.”

  “One more safe house bites the dust.” She grimaced. “Of course, they were long gone by the time I made it to an American checkpoint and could tell them who I was and what I knew.”

  He reached for her hand, twining his fingers with hers. She let him, grateful for the warmth of his touch. She saw in his dark eyes that he’d guessed what had happened next.

  “I was a liability to the CIA at that point,” she said aloud. “Since they couldn’t trust that I hadn’t given up secrets, they reassigned anyone whose cover identity I could have compromised. They changed the location of checkpoints. Alexander Quinn was removed from the Kaziristan station.”

  “They burned you.”

  “Not quite as dramatic as people might think, but yeah. I was officially persona non grata at the agency.” She looked down at her short, slightly misshapen fingernails and almost laughed. They seemed the perfect metaphor for her life—cut off, tamped down and nowhere near what it used to be.

  “Did they give you your new identity?”

  She nodded. “They did what they could for me.” She touched her cheek, where the exposed nub of her broken tooth had started to ache a little. “I guess I should have expected they’d do something like put a tracker chip in my tooth. They’d want to be sure I wasn’t getting into any trouble.”

  “We sure know how to pick employers, huh?” He flashed a rueful smile.

  She found herself smiling in response, even though a moment earlier, her thoughts had been bleak. “Guess we do.”

  “I should have had Eric look at your tooth while he was here.” Rick made a sympathetic face. “Does it hurt?”

  “Just a little. I’ve hurt worse.”

  His brow furrowed. “Why don’t you go back to bed and try to get some rest?”

  She sat up straighter, lifting her chin. “I’m fine. I slept all the way here, and I got some sleep last night—”

  “On a hard cave floor. And you slept about an hour in the car. Rest.” He stood, tugging her hand to pull her to her feet. “At least until dinnertime.”

  She let him lead her back to the bed, and even allowed him to tuck her in without a peep. But as he started to leave the room, she cleared her voice and called his name.

  He turned to look back at her. “Yeah?”

  “I can’t stay here.” The words came out soft and fragile, so she cleared her throat and continued in a stronger voice. “I shouldn’t have gone with you back in Thurlow Gap. I put you in danger, and now your family is in danger.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” he answered quietly. He turned and walked out of the room.

  She leaned back against the pillows, her head starting to ache again. She closed her eyes, not so much to try to sleep as to shut out the homey comfort of Isabel Cooper’s guest room.

  Rick might think he and his family were prepared for what was coming their way, but Amanda knew better. Whether her pursuers were rogue MacLear agents, as evidence would suggest—or al Adar sleeper agents who’d somehow slipped into the country undetected—they’d almost certainly followed the satellite signal from the receiver in her porcelain crown. Which meant they weren’t working alone.

  Someone in the CIA was working with them.

  WHEN RICK WALKED OUT the front door, Isabel was sitting at the top of her front porch steps, a glass of iced tea beside her and her slim, jeans-clad legs tucked up nearly to her chest so her feet could rest on the second step down. She picked up the glass and made room for Rick to join her.

  He sat beside her, his bones creaking a little. “Thanks for doing this.”

  “You know a Cooper never turns down a person in need,” she answered, a wry tone to her voice.

  His little sister had grown a bit cynical over the years. Having their mother walk out of her life when she was still in elementary school hadn’t been an auspicious start. But working nearly seven years with the FBI tracking down domestic terrorists and losing her partner, Ben Scanlon, in a bomb blast about five months ago? Rick suspected most of his sister’s bleak worldview came as a result of that event.

  She hadn’t had the heart to stick with the bureau after Scanlon’s death. Jesse had convinced her to come home and take her place in the security agency he was building, just as he had with Rick. All of his brothers and sisters were working with Jesse now—Izzy had been the final holdout.

>   “She wants to leave. Thinks she’s putting us in too much danger by sticking around.”

  Isabel nudged his shoulder with hers. Fortunately, it was the one without the bullet wound. “Is she?”

  “Probably,” he conceded. He told his sister about the GPS transmitter in Amanda’s crown. “She said a CIA dentist repaired the tooth.”

  “So you think the CIA sent a black-ops unit to hunt her down?” Isabel sounded skeptical.

  “I have no doubt they were tracking her. She and the CIA didn’t really part as friends.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not like the FBI where you can just turn in your notice and go. The CIA is different. You know that.” He didn’t add what Amanda had told him about her captivity. That was her story to tell.

  “Some folks at the FBI weren’t all that happy to get my resignation,” she murmured regretfully. “I left some investigations in the lurch.”

  “Are you sure you made the right decision?” His sister didn’t seem any happier working for Jesse than she had been working for the bureau.

  He knew she was still grieving her partner’s death. But had she made things worse by leaving the FBI?

  “Rick, you look so tired. Maybe you should go home and get a little rest yourself.”

  He looked over his shoulder toward the house. His head told him she was right. He hadn’t had much sleep since the night before last, and he’d also suffered an injury and a stressful twenty-four hours. He could use a nice big meal and a long night’s sleep.

  But he didn’t like the idea of being very far from Amanda. Not until they knew a lot more about what was going on.

  “Okay, how about this?” Isabel said with a grin. “I’ll pack a bag and go live at your place for a few days, and you stay here with your ex-girlfriend. Just don’t do anything in my house that would make me want to hurl.”

  He reached over and mussed her hair, making her squawk. “Brat.” As she finger-combed her dark hair, he added, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Sure—it’ll give me a chance to go through your stuff and learn all your secrets.” She shot him a grin that reminded him of what a sneaky little smart aleck she’d been when they were younger. No wonder she’d joined the FBI.

  “Okay. I’ll take you up on that. You go pack and I’ll do the same.” He pushed off the steps, grimacing as his injured arm protested.

  Before heading back to his house, he stopped at the office to see if Jesse was around. His eldest brother was in his office, going through the day’s case reports.

  He looked up as Rick entered, his brows lifting slightly at the bedraggled sight of him. “I was wondering if you were going to stop by to tell me what’s going on.” He waved toward the chair in front of his desk.

  Rick sat and looked warily at his brother. “I figured Wade would’ve caught you up.”

  “He did, to a degree.”

  “But you want your pound of flesh?” Rick snapped. He immediately regretted it, but there was no taking it back.

  “I’m not trying to bust your chops here. I need to know if there’s anything I can do to help.” Jesse’s expression darkened. “It sounds like your friend has a price on her head, and that could put this company, not to mention our family, in danger.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  Jesse’s lips pressed to a tight line. “Then act like it.”

  Rick took a deep breath. He didn’t know why five minutes with his older brother turned him into an adolescent idiot. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Jesse’s expression softened. “How’s your arm?”

  “Hurts like hell, but I’ll live.”

  “So, is Amanda Caldwell her real name?”

  Rick shook his head.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t tell you.”

  “Okay.” Jesse reached across the desk and pushed a folded newspaper toward Rick. “This afternoon’s paper. Page six.”

  Rick flipped the paper open and scanned the sixth page. His eyebrow notched upward. “Barton Reid’s trial has been postponed?”

  “The case seems to be falling apart. Luke and Abby are a little on edge about it.”

  Rick couldn’t blame them. His cousin Luke had just gotten out from under an ongoing death threat from a South American drug lord who’d been hounding him for years. Now he had to contend with the case against Barton Reid going south, which might put him and his wife back in the crosshairs again. Reid had been behind terrorizing Abby to learn what evidence her late husband had found to incriminate Reid.

  If he was in the mood for revenge, Abby and Luke were pretty tempting targets.

  “I guess the family’s rallying the wagons around Gossamer Ridge?” Rick asked aloud.

  “That’s what Alicia says. Speaking of her—did she catch you when you came in?”

  “I didn’t see her.” Rick’s cousin-in-law Alicia had started working for Cooper Security about a month after she married his cousin Gabe. She was a brilliant little dynamo whose PhD in criminal psychology looked very good on the Cooper Security list of credentials. She also happened to be an insightful, natural investigator. They were lucky she’d decided to join the company.

  “Well, she’ll be looking for you,” Jesse told him.

  “What does she want?”

  “She didn’t tell me—just said to let you know she wanted to see you.” Jesse’s eyes narrowed. “How much sleep have you had in the last day?”

  “A few hours.”

  “How many of those hours were on the floor of that cave Wade told me about?

  “A few,” he answered with a wry smile.

  “Go home. Get some sleep. We can regroup tomorrow.”

  Home, Rick thought as he walked back through the bullpen-style communal office where rows of desks, some occupied, some empty, filled the open area. He supposed he and his brothers and sisters all thought of Chickasaw County as home, no matter how far they’d roamed over the years. After all, here they were, all six of them, back in Chickasaw County, all living within a few miles of the sprawling two-story farmhouse where they’d grown up, where their father, now retired, still lived.

  But at the moment, the only place that called to him, on a gut-deep level, was his sister Isabel’s house.

  Because Amanda was there.

  He’d thought, as time and distance built between him and those few stolen weeks of fire and feeling, he was over what he’d felt for her.

  But clearly, he wasn’t.

  Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe it never had been. But it was more than he’d ever felt for another woman. More than he’d felt, period, for a long while now.

  Now he just had to decide what he was going to do about it.

  AMANDA HAD COME TO THINK of her captor as an incubus, so thoroughly and horribly had he haunted her dreams for the past three years. In real life, he had seemed far less intimidating, at least on sight. Physically, he was only average in size—tall, perhaps, for a Kaziri, but no more than five foot ten in height, trim and fit but not particularly muscular. He would have been considered pleasant-featured in almost any culture, with handsome brown eyes, high cheekbones and a mobile, laughing mouth. His hair was dark but not black, shot through with russet, especially when the light slanting through the single window in the interrogation room hit it.

  His cohort called him Raa Baber—The Tiger.

  But in her dreams, as in life, he lacked the noble beauty of the big, sleek cat. The man she knew as The Tiger was hard. Suffocating. Cruel.

  She forced herself awake, before the games began. She sat up in the soft bed and threw off the blankets, feeling trapped. Only when she’d scrambled over to the window and let the afternoon light bathe her in reflected warmth did the pounding, rapid-fire cadence of her pulse recede into something approaching normal.

  The house was quiet around her, only the faint hum of electricity and her own rapid respirations breaking the silence. She willed herself to relax,
to let go of her past for just a few minutes. She was clean—finally—and on the mend. The broth and toast Rick had given her earlier had managed to stay down with no ill effects. And she was, for the moment, safe.

  Or so she thought.

  Until she heard the front door open.

  She supposed most people would assume that Isabel or Rick had returned. It was a logical assumption—the house belonged to Isabel, and Rick had the most interest in where she was and what she was doing.

  But Amanda had learned long ago to assume nothing.

  She looked around the room for her duffel bag, finding it tucked inside the guest room’s small closet. As the sound of footsteps sounded quietly outside her door, she pulled the first spare weapon she could find from within the bag’s interior—her SIG Sauer P238. She checked the clip to make sure it was loaded and swung the weapon toward the door as footsteps stopped just outside.

  The doorknob rattled. She steadied her weapon.

  The door swung open and the intruder took one step inside. It was a woman in her late twenties, with wavy black hair and coffee-black eyes that widened as she spotted the gun in Amanda’s hand.

  The woman released a soft profanity and lifted her hands, dropping her purse to the floor. “I come in peace,” she said quickly. “I’m Alicia Cooper. Rick’s cousin Gabe is my husband.” She had an accent from somewhere on the West Coast—Oregon, maybe, or northern California.

  Amanda didn’t drop the weapon. “What do you want?”

  “Your help,” Alicia answered.

  Chapter Nine

  Amanda heard more footsteps moving in the house, behind Alicia. The other woman didn’t seem to notice, her focus centered on the snub, square nose of the SIG.

  “My help?” Amanda asked, wondering if the second person approaching was friend or foe.

  “I understand you were attacked yesterday morning by a man who once worked with MacLear.”