by Paula Graves
“Not only that, but Solano is working for Quinn now. And recently married Ava Trent.”
“Wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
“They both joined The Gates around the same time, and though they tried to be circumspect about it, it’s difficult to hide when one is madly in love.” Darcy’s smile was close to a grimace. “Confirmed singles are dropping like flies around that office these days. I’m beginning to wonder if Quinn has slipped something into the water.”
“You’re such a romantic, Darcy.”
His smile faded. “Romance is folly. Better to join oneself to another, if that’s what you choose, with your eyes open and your heart intact.”
“Is that what your parents did?”
He made a face. “God, no. Well, my father did, I suppose. He weighed my mother’s qualities and assets and found her an appropriate mate for a man in his position.”
“But your mother fell in love?”
“She did. Just not with my father.”
“Oh.”
“Nothing came of it. Nothing ever could have. He was married and a peer. She was married to an American diplomat.” Darcy pushed his half-empty soup bowl away. “Love is a mercurial bitch.”
“So that’s why—” She stopped, not sure she cared to hear the answer to her unspoken question. “Never mind. So you think Ava Trent could help us find out more about Cade Landry?”
“Maybe. Probably could give us a pretty good bead on whether Pete Chang is the sort of man who’d leak information to the BRI, as well.”
A flicker of excitement burbled in her chest at the thought she might be one step closer to finding out who had put a target on her back. “Do you think you could risk giving her a call and picking her brain?”
“I’d prefer to meet face-to-face,” Darcy answered. “She may suspect more about one or the other of them than she’s willing to share on the phone. I can press her for more information if I see she’s holding something back.”
“Can I go with you?”
He slanted a quelling look at her. “No.”
“She doesn’t have to know who I am.”
“I’m fairly sure Quinn will have passed along the FBI all-points bulletin. It’s standard procedure at the agency when such information comes our way. If he didn’t, and someone discovered the omission, it would raise questions about why he failed to do so.”
“Questions Quinn wouldn’t want to answer.”
“Exactly.” He nodded at her mostly empty bowl as he picked up his own and rose to his feet. “Are you done?”
She pushed the bowl toward him. “Yes, thanks.”
When he returned from the kitchen, he picked up the leather jacket he’d left draped over his chair. “I’ll drop by the office and see if I can track down Ava. You should lie down and get some rest.”
“I’m not tired,” she protested.
“Doesn’t matter. Your body needs rest if you’re serious about speeding up your recuperation time.” He arched a dark eyebrow at her. “You are serious about getting better soon, aren’t you?”
She controlled the urge to hurl one of the throw pillows from the sofa at him. “Of course I am.”
“Find a book to read.” He waved his hand at the built-in bookshelves that flanked the hearth. “Or find a radio and listen to some music, if you can find a station around here that plays anything other than hillbilly anthems. Oh, wait, you are a hillbilly—”
“Not a hillbilly, Jeeves.”
Shrugging on the jacket, he shot her a grin. “Not a Brit, Elly May.”
She managed to hold back her smile until he was safely out the door.
* * *
THE VISITOR’S BADGE clipped to the waistband of his jeans flapped as he walked down the corridor to the agents’ bull pen, a nagging reminder that he was no longer one of them. Not in any meaningful way.
There were only a handful of agents in the office at this time of day. Fortunately for Darcy, Ava Trent—Solano, he amended mentally—was one of them.
She looked up at him, her hazel eyes brightening. “Darcy!”
“Hey, Ava.” He pulled a nearby metal-and-vinyl chair up to her desk and sat. “Where’s Sin?”
“Out on a case.” She lowered her voice. “Quinn still won’t let us share a case. I think we’ll probably be celebrating our twentieth anniversary before he trusts us not to get distracted by each other.”
“I’ve seen the two of you,” Darcy said with a smile. “Quinn’s probably right, you know.”
She laughed. “Probably. What brings you here? Quinn’s reinstating you, I hope?”
“Not yet,” he said with a sigh. “Actually, I’m looking into something that’s sort of fallen into my lap. A personal issue, I guess you could say, regarding someone I worked with several years ago.”
Ava twisted her wavy brown hair into a knot and stuck a pencil through the twist to hold the makeshift chignon in place before she bent closer. “A personal issue? Do tell.”
“Could we take a walk?”
She shot him a puzzled look but stood and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. “If Quinn asks, tell him I’m taking my break,” she told the nearest agent, a tall blonde who had come on board a couple of days before Quinn had put him on administrative leave. Olivia Sharp—he finally placed her as she turned to give Ava a quizzical look.
“We get breaks?” she drawled.
Ava just grinned and looked at Darcy. “So, you have a personal problem? You need a woman’s viewpoint? Advice?”
What was it with people in love? They couldn’t seem to bear it if the rest of the world didn’t find a way to pair up, two by two.
“It’s not that sort of personal issue,” he said, quickly shoving the memory of kissing McKenna Rigsby to the back of his mind. “It’s a former colleague who’s run into some trouble with the FBI.”
Ava looked faintly puzzled. “And because I used to work for the FBI you thought—”
“Actually, you used to work with the Johnson City resident agency, and that’s why I’m here. What can you tell me about a special agent named Cade Landry?”
A loud thud behind him made him jump. He turned in time to see Olivia Sharp crouching to gather up a stack of files she’d dropped.
“I didn’t work with Landry for long,” Ava said, drawing his gaze back to her. “Really only a month or two before I left the bureau to come work here. Why do you want to know something about Landry?”
He took the jacket from her hands and helped her into it. “Let’s walk,” he said.
Ava led Darcy out of the bull pen and down the hall, where he relinquished his visitor’s badge to the receptionist.
Outside, the sun was dipping toward the west, taking with it most of the day’s heat. Ava kept pace with Darcy’s longer legs as they headed east on Magnolia Drive.
“What do you want to know about Landry?”
“Have you seen the APB from the FBI regarding a rogue agent?”
Ava’s eyes narrowed. “I have. You think Landry might be involved with this missing agent?”
“Something like that.”
Her lips tightened to a tight line. “I don’t like to speak ill of people when they’re not here to defend themselves.”
“But you know something?”
She lowered her voice. “If you’re asking me if I have any proof that Cade Landry is a crooked agent, no. I don’t.”
“So what do you know?”
“I know that he has an impressive job jacket. Great scores at the Academy, commendations out the wazoo from his first weeks and months on the job. He was going somewhere. Fast. And then—”
“And then?” he prodded when she fell silent.
She released a deep sigh. “About a year ago, he started going d
ownhill quickly. Went from a blue-flamer heading up the ladder in the Richmond Field Office to a glorified grunt in the Johnson City RA. He was actually junior to me, even though he had more years of experience. That doesn’t happen unless something has gone very, very wrong.”
“But you have no idea what?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t stick around that long, and it wasn’t like I was looking to become his confessor.”
“What was he like to work with?”
Ava’s brow creased. “Apathetic. He went through the motions, did the work adequately enough, but I could tell he really didn’t have any heart for the job. I know there are some agents who try to maintain a certain distance from the work—it’s probably smart, since I’ve seen a lot of agents get too close to their cases and end up in long-term therapy before it was all over—but with Landry, it wasn’t even about keeping his professional distance. He really didn’t seem to care about anything at all.”
“Any theories as to why?”
“Like I said, I didn’t ask any questions and he didn’t offer any answers. I’m pretty sure that whatever went wrong went wrong when he was in Richmond, though. Because before Richmond, he was fast-tracking it to the top. And then his forward progress just seemed to stop.”
“Do you know if it could have been related to his personal life? A broken marriage? Death of a loved one?”
“He was never married. That much I got out of him on a stakeout once.” Ava shook her head. “As for a family member dying? I don’t know. He didn’t mention any family at all while we worked together in Johnson City. I wish I could tell you more.”
“That’s helpful, truly.” He could do some digging into Landry’s public records, see if he could find something about the man’s family. An emotional upheaval could lead an otherwise stable man off the deep end, and deep ends were exactly where a crew of parasites like the BRI and their criminal comrades could do a lot of damage.
“Is that all you needed?”
“Just one more question. What can you tell me about Pete Chang?”
Ava’s expression darkened. “He’s a jerk. A total brownnoser trying to move his way up to a better assignment. He’s an FBI man through and through.”
“Could he be compromised? Could he be corrupted?”
“Chang? Not by anyone outside the FBI, no.” Her lips flattened. “Now, if someone in the FBI gave him a shady order, and he thought it could give him a boost up the bureau ladder? He’d be tempted. But I don’t know that I think he’d even do something corrupt then. He’d probably think it was a test or a trap and report the overture up the chain of command.”
“Ah, one of those.”
Her lips quirked. “I imagine you had dealings with that type of bureaucrat working at State.”
“I did indeed.” He managed a smile, hoping it didn’t appear too much like a grimace. “Thank you for the information.”
“Anytime.” She started to turn toward the old Victorian mansion Quinn had turned into The Gates, then stopped and looked back at Darcy. “This is about that FBI agent on the run, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. He could see in her eyes he didn’t have to.
“Do you trust her?”
He didn’t answer that question, either, but whatever Ava saw in his expression seemed to satisfy her.
“Be careful.” Her smile held considerable concern.
“Always am.” He watched her walk back down the sidewalk to The Gates, wishing he could go with her, not as a visitor but back at his desk, working the job he hadn’t realized he’d come to enjoy so much until he’d been barred from doing it.
He tried not to speed on his way back to the cabin, but he didn’t like leaving McKenna alone so long. She was making a good show of being stronger, but he’d seen the circles of fatigue under her eyes, the pale tone of her skin. She was still weak, still vulnerable.
And he felt a driving need to protect her.
About three miles from the turnoff, a glance in the rearview mirror made him sit up straighter. That black SUV about three cars back had been with him since he’d left The Gates, hadn’t it?
He took the next turnoff and drove at a steady pace down one of the small feeder roads that led toward Warrior Creek Falls. Only one vehicle behind him followed, keeping a steady distance from him. The black SUV.
He was being tailed.
Chapter Nine
She’d tried to nap, but the cabin was entirely too quiet. At her place in Knoxville, there was a constant flow of background noise that never let her feel alone—traffic on the street outside her window, the hum of electrical appliances not only in her place but in those nearby, the whisper of heated air coming through the vents to warm the drafty old four-room apartment.
Here in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but trees and nervous little woodland creatures, the silence was nearly complete. The hiss of the space heater set into the hearth was the only noise, and though it was quiet, in the dearth of ambient noise, it seemed to ring through her head like whispered conversations just out of earshot. The effect was creepy and not at all conducive to sleep.
So when the phone rang just as she started to finally doze off, it set off dozens of little explosions along her nervous system, jerking her wide awake in a second.
The digital readout on the phone’s display showed a number but no name. What was Darcy’s number? She tried to calm her shattered nerves enough to remember.
Taking a chance, she picked up the phone but didn’t speak.
“Rigsby?” Darcy’s clipped accent rang over the line.
She slumped against the sofa cushions. “Yes.”
“Listen carefully. I’ve picked up a tail. I’m trying to shake it, but you need to be prepared in case someone already suspects where we’re staying. I’m fairly sure Bragg has extra firearms stashed somewhere in the cabin. You know he’s worried about those hillbilly hotheads from over in Boneyard Ridge coming after Susannah.”
McKenna knew well the potential threat to her cousin’s life. She and her mother had taken Susie in when she was just sixteen, hiding her from a family of meth-dealing criminals determined to make her pay for killing one of their own when he tried to rape her. The Bradburys hadn’t stopped looking for a chance to serve a little mountain justice to McKenna’s cousin, finally catching up to her a few months ago.
If it weren’t for Hunter Bragg and his colleagues at The Gates, Susie would probably be dead now. The agents from The Gates had issued a stern warning to the Bradburys that Susie was under their protection now. So far, the truce had held, but McKenna knew Hunter and Susie would always feel the need to keep their guard up.
“I’ll look around,” she said. “I’m armed, as well.” Her Glock’s magazine could hold thirteen rounds, but she’d used some rounds in getting away from the people who’d shot her. She had only nine rounds left. She needed to go ammo shopping soon.
“Listen closely. If you get surrounded, there’s a way out of the cabin you need to know about.” Darcy’s voice was low and tight over the phone. “Downstairs in the basement, there’s a big armoire near the back. Open the door and step inside. There’s a pressure plate in the floor of the armoire that opens a trapdoor.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Quinn told me.”
“How does Quinn know?” As soon as she asked the question, she felt like an idiot. “Never mind. How does Quinn know anything? He’s magic.”
Darcy’s soft chuckle bolstered her spirits. “If I can shake the tail, I’ll be back. If I can’t—if you don’t hear something from me within an hour—I want you to take that basement escape tunnel. It comes out several yards into the woods. You’ll need to start hiking due north. Within half a mile, you’ll see a big mountain over the top of the trees. That’s Laurel Rise. Keep hiking. Y
ou’ll come upon a gravel road eventually. Follow that road up the mountain until you reach a big cabin at the top. That cabin belongs to Quinn. I’ve already called to tell him he might be getting a visitor.”
Her gut tightened painfully. She wasn’t sure what scared her more—the thought of hiking up a mountain in her weakened condition or coming face-to-face with Alexander Quinn again after all these years.
“Can you do that, Rigsby?” Darcy asked when she didn’t respond.
She squared her shoulders. “Yes.”
“I will do my best to get back to you.” His voice held a hint of steel.
“I know.”
He hung up without saying goodbye.
For a moment, she sat very still, still gripping the phone in one hand as her mind reeled beneath an onslaught of mental orders—find another weapon, find ammo, pack tools and necessities, pack water and food.
She shook off the paralysis and pushed to her feet, ignoring the punch of pain in her side. She didn’t have time to indulge her weakness.
Her life was in danger, and once again, she had to figure out a way to save herself.
* * *
DARCY WAS RUNNING out of time, but he had to be sure he’d lost the tail—and any possible backup tail—before he risked going back to McKenna. She was depending on him to keep her safe, and the last thing he wanted to do was fail her the way—
He stopped himself short. He had to stop beating himself up over the past. The embassy siege had been eight years ago. He’d been concussed and outnumbered, along with those DSS and Marine Security Guard troops who’d survived the initial onslaught. Despite the wishful thinking of State Department bureaucrats sitting in their fancy offices in Washington, DC, there had been no way to get through that sort of relentless, vicious terrorist attack without sustaining casualties.
The real surprise had been just how many people had survived the siege, thanks to the efforts of people like Maddox Heller, McKenna Rigsby and, yes, even him.
