Killshadow Road

by Paula Graves

  She shook her head. “I know it’s big and it’s going to be deadly. That’s their goal. But I don’t know what they have planned.”

  “Or who in the FBI is working with them.”

  “Right.” She tugged her hands away from his, her composure back in place. She tamed her hair with steady hands and met his gaze with a look of raw determination. “I think we need to start with the second question first. Who is aiding the BRI in their plans? We have our suspicions about Cade Landry, right?”

  He nodded. “But I don’t want to get so focused on him that we drop the ball and fail to look at other suspects.”

  “I’ve known Glen Robertson for several years, even before I was transferred to the Knoxville Field Office.” Her gaze followed him as he rose to his feet in front of her. “I can’t imagine him doing anything that wasn’t completely honorable.”

  “People can deceive you.”

  “I know that. I’m not naive.”

  “I know you’re not.” His voice softened. “Instead of going to talk to Quinn, why don’t we go back to my cabin for now? Anyone who was looking for you in that area has probably moved on by now. And I have internet.”

  “We should probably wait until night.”

  He nodded. “Safer that way.” He crossed to the doorway and grabbed his leather jacket from the garment hook nailed to the cabin’s rough wood walls. “I’ll be back.”

  She rose. “Where are you going?”

  “To check the Land Rover. Make sure nobody has tampered with it. I’ll knock four times fast and twice slow so you’ll know I’m the one at the door and won’t shoot me.” Flashing her a smile, he lifted the collar of his jacket against the brisk April breeze as he stepped out onto the creaking porch, welcoming the dose of cold to help him get his simmering libido back under control.

  The Land Rover was where he’d parked after returning from his roundabout tour of mountain roads in an attempt to shake the vehicles that had been following him. All four tires looked to be intact, and a careful check of the chassis and under the hood convinced him he hadn’t picked up any trackers or other sort of electronic parasites.

  He’d gassed up once he felt certain he’d lost the tail, so they should be good for the trip to his cabin on Killshadow Road.

  When he got back to the cabin, he knocked using the code he’d told her to listen for. No gun pointed his way when he entered again. In fact, McKenna wasn’t in the front room at all.

  “Rigsby?” he called.

  “Back here.”

  He followed the sound of her voice and found her in the bedroom, packing things back into his duffel bag. “I see you’re ready to be gone.”

  She shot him a wry smile. “You had me at internet.”

  They cleaned up the cabin before they left, trying to put everything back the way it had been. Darcy stuffed their used linens and towels in a garbage bag he found under the kitchen cabinet. “I can launder them at my place and bring them back before Bragg and Susannah return,” he told McKenna as she eyed the bag.

  She fluffed the bed pillows and stood back to survey her handiwork. “They’ll know we were here when they find the extra food in the cabinets.”

  “Nobody ever complains about intruders who leave gifts.”

  She sighed, dropping onto the edge of the bed. “I don’t know how I ended up here, in a situation like this. My career was my life.”

  Well aware he was playing with fire, he sat beside her on the bed. “I know the feeling.”

  “What happened to you, Darcy?” She twisted to look at him, a brief frown the only sign that the movement caused her any pain.

  She was getting better, he thought.

  “I stopped playing by the rules,” he answered.

  “That’s cryptic.”

  “After Kaziristan, I saw how Barton Reid twisted everything I believed in to turn Maddox Heller into a scapegoat.” He frowned at the memory of the sick, sinking feeling that had twisted his gut when he’d heard how Reid and his sycophants at Foggy Bottom had destroyed the good name of a brave, honorable Marine. “We were there, Rigsby. We saw how it happened.”

  “He saved our lives. He saved everyone but Teresa.”

  “We didn’t know at the time how deeply indebted to the militants Reid had become.”

  “The bureau was only tangentially involved in the investigation of Reid,” she said. “But I know enough to know he was corrupt to the bone.”

  “I helped bring him down.”

  She arched one ginger eyebrow at him. “That didn’t make the papers.”

  “I guess, to be more accurate, I should say I helped the people who brought him down.”

  “Cooper Security, right?”

  He nodded, remembering that night in Washington, DC, when he’d gotten the call from Alexander Quinn asking for his help. He’d been inclined to ignore the call from Quinn—in his experience, cooperating with Quinn was rarely a good idea.

  “Quinn called me. Told me a man named Jesse Cooper was on his way to Washington with a woman who was in grave danger from elements within the government who wanted to use her as leverage against her father.”

  “Her father?”

  “Baxter Marsh.” He saw the recognition dawn. “Yes, the same Baxter Marsh who headed the Marine Corps’ part of the joint task force in Kaziristan.”

  “Reid was trying to get his hands on some coded journal, right?”

  He nodded. “Jesse Cooper had the journal. They’d managed to decode the journal using the three keys General Marsh and his two fellow generals had created.”

  “Right. I remember that part of the story. Each man had entrusted the key to one other person, in case something happened to one of them, right?”

  “Yes. And something did happen to one of them. General Ross died in a suspicious car crash. But he’d hidden his part of the key in a locket he gave his wife. So, eventually, his key was added to the other two keys to decode the journal and reveal the secrets that brought Barton Reid down.”

  “Along with several people in the previous administration,” she said bluntly. “And you helped Cooper get his hands on that information?”

  “I did. I also used my friendship with the British ambassador to the US to get Cooper and Evie Marsh into a big reception at the embassy.”

  “No wonder you hit a ceiling on the job.”

  He looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Do you think I did the wrong thing?”

  She shook her head quickly. “Bad people got caught and put away. Wasn’t that your job?”

  He couldn’t quell a smile. “Something like that.”

  “Then good for you, Nicholas Darcy. You didn’t let the rules get in the way of doing the right thing.” Her smile in return felt like the warm sun breaking through clouds on a cold day.

  They made sandwiches for dinner and ate them on the winding drive back to Darcy’s cabin. He watched carefully for any sign of a tail, but if there was anyone following them back to Killshadow Road, they were invisible in the darkness.

  After an hour-long trip that took fifty minutes longer than the journey would normally take, he parked the Land Rover on the gravel drive in front of the cabin and cut the engine. “Wait here,” he said. “And stay alert.”

  The cabin was dark and looked undisturbed, but that didn’t mean anything when one was dealing with the FBI. He opened the Land Rover’s back hatch and pulled out the toolbox he had stored there.

  “What are you doing?” McKenna turned to watch him.

  “Looking for this.” He pulled out the small detection device that had come with the job at The Gates. Quinn had warned him that working for an agency that dealt with the sort of cases The Gates handled automatically made them all targets by enemies both domestic and foreign.

  “You need to kn
ow if someone’s listening,” Quinn had warned him as he handed him the device.

  Now he turned on the bug sniffer and headed up the porch steps, watching the little device do its work.

  After covering the entire cabin without receiving any warning blips, he pocketed the sniffer and went back out to the Land Rover. “We’re good.”

  McKenna climbed out of the Land Rover, moving a little more slowly than she had earlier in the day. She’d exerted herself more that day than she had since her injury, and the extra exercise was clearly starting to take a toll.

  “Go straight to bed,” he ordered. “I’ll lock up.”

  She stared at him. “Are you crazy? It’s not even nine o’clock. Just point me to your computer and I promise I’ll sit still while I’m surfing the Net. We’ve already wasted more time than I like.”

  He decided not to argue for once. She was right. They were already behind, and time was running out.

  “It’s in my bedroom.”

  She started down the hall, then stopped, looking back at him. “What’s the username and password?”

  He froze in place. “Username is just my last name.”

  “And the password?”

  Heat bloomed in his neck and cheeks as he realized he’d just stepped into a minefield.

  “Darcy?” she said when he didn’t answer right away.

  He took a deep breath and got it over with. “It’s McKenna, backward with no capital letters.”

  She stared at him a moment, her eyes luminous. “Oh, Darcy.”

  “Tempus fugit, Rigsby,” he said gruffly, tapping his watch. “Time flies.”

  She flashed him a bright smile and disappeared down the hallway.

  He glanced at his watch. Just after seven. There was a chance someone was still in the office, he knew. The normal hours at The Gates were eight to five, but none of the agents kept normal hours.

  He’d worked deep into the evening several times himself. So it was possible Olivia Sharp was still in the office, wasn’t it?

  He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the direct number to the agents’ bull pen. On the third ring, Cain Dennison’s gravelly drawl answered, “The Gates.”

  “You’re there late, Dennison. Sara out on the town with the girls?”

  “If by ‘out on the town with the girls’ you mean on a stakeout over in Bitterwood, then yes. Yes, she is.” The humorous tone of his voice didn’t quite mask his wariness. “I heard you were in the office today.”

  “I was. Needed to pick Ava Trent’s brain about something.”

  “Anything to do with why you’re staying at Bragg’s cabin?”

  “No,” Darcy lied. “Just following up on something. Is Olivia Sharp in the office by any chance?”

  “Just missed her. She left around twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Wait, Darcy.”

  The urgent edge to Dennison’s voice made him do as the other man asked. “What is it?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay? You know if you need anything, all you have to do is call.”

  Darcy felt a niggle of guilt. “I know. I do. I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Dennison sounded unconvinced. “You know where to reach me if that changes.”

  The differences between Dennison and Darcy might outweigh the similarities, but Darcy believed him. If he ended up needing help, Dennison would come through for him.

  It was gratifying to know he wasn’t nearly as alone as he’d felt the past few years. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He hung up the phone and shoved it back in his pocket, wondering if he was going to have to take Dennison up on the offer before this case was over.

  * * *

  SHE WAS HIS PASSWORD.

  As far as McKenna knew, she’d never been anyone’s password before. And Darcy’s, of all the buttoned-up, unromantic souls in the universe...

  “Grow up, Rigsby,” she muttered as she powered up the laptop and waited for the log-in screen. But the corners of her lips still twitched at the thought of Darcy still thinking enough of her, all these years later, to use her name as a password.

  She logged in, pulled up a browser window and typed in the name Cade Landry. Within seconds, she had pages full of Cade Landrys, so she narrowed the search by adding “FBI” to the parameters.

  The entries narrowed down considerably. And most of them were about the explosion near Richmond.

  As she clicked through the link to the first entry, she heard Darcy’s footsteps coming down the hall. A moment later, his voice rumbled from the doorway. “Any luck?”

  “Just got started.” She patted the edge of the bed next to her and began scanning the online article. It was a pretty straightforward report of the incident and the injuries and deaths involved. Landry was one of the FBI agents mentioned. “If I was still able to access anything from the FBI database—but they cut me off.”

  “I’m cut off from most of the resources we have available at The Gates, too.” He sat next to her. “Rather inconvenient, that.”

  She slanted a look at him. “You don’t think that one has anything to do with the other, do you? You said you and your agency have been trying to dismantle the BRI and their affiliates—and the BRI is certainly part of what’s happened to me...”

  “I don’t see how the two cases could be connected, though,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t see how people would have linked you to me, or vice versa. We haven’t spoken in years, and I doubt anyone in the BRI would have been at the American Embassy in Kaziristan nearly a decade ago.”

  She nodded, looking back at the computer screen. “It wouldn’t have mattered if they were. We were always very careful not to let anything between us show. To anyone.”

  “Ourselves included.”

  He was so solid beside her. So strong and warm. The urge to curl up against his side felt like a physical craving.

  She controlled the desire and clicked on another link. “We had our reasons.”

  The story in the second link looked to be longer and more substantial, she noted. It was dated a couple of days after the explosion, when both investigators and journalists would have had time to eliminate most of the misinformation and fill in the blanks of the story.

  The tone of the story was much more critical of the FBI, of course. By that time, word of the botched standoff would have reached the ears of someone in the news business. Too many people in the bureau were happy to throw another agent or two under the bus in order to make themselves look good in comparison.

  Cade Landry’s name came up. Often. But it was a name near the middle of the page that caught her eye. “Well, would you look at that?”

  Darcy leaned closer, the heat of him enveloping her with delicious warmth. “What?”

  She pointed to the screen. “Look what group authorities believed the two bombers belonged to.”

  Darcy uttered a short profanity. “The Blue Ridge Infantry.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Darcy had finally coaxed McKenna to bed around eleven the night before, but he’d stayed up a little longer, hunting down all the references he could find to the connection between the Blue Ridge Infantry and the two bombers involved in the Richmond incident that had cost Cade Landry his fast track up the FBI ladder.

  Ava Solano had told him that Landry seemed to be apathetic about his job these days, but was apathy hiding something else? What if Landry had been involved with the Blue Ridge Infantry all along? What if the botched raid had been an attempt to help his comrades escape? The bomb detonation could have been accidental—all it would have taken was a nervous militia member with a twitchy trigger finger to set off a bomb belt.

  Landry definitely deserved greater scrutiny, he decide
d the next morning when he headed to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. And getting in contact with Olivia Sharp was the first place to start.

  The aroma of freshly brewed coffee hit him halfway to the kitchen. He found McKenna at the table, sipping coffee and reading another article on his laptop computer.

  “Grab some coffee,” she invited with a cheeky grin. “Or maybe you could whip us up an omelet. I’m starving.”

  “You look a lot better.”

  “I feel a lot better.” She stretched her arms over her head, not even wincing. “I slept like a log.”

  He could tell. She looked rested and beautiful. “Good. It seems to have done you a world of good.”

  “So, what’s on our agenda this morning?” she asked as he crossed to the refrigerator for eggs.

  “Breakfast,” he said. “Then you can continue your internet research while I drive into town to track down Olivia Sharp.”

  McKenna turned from the laptop to look at him. “Right. She works at The Gates now, you said.”

  He put a skillet on the stove to heat while he stirred eggs, cheese, milk and spices together for the omelet. “I don’t know her well. She came to work there shortly before I was put on administrative leave. But I’m hoping she’ll be willing to answer a few questions for me about the incident in Richmond.”

  “And about Cade Landry?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, do me a favor, will you? If you talk to her, ask her who the incident commander for her unit was. So far, all the news accounts keep referring to him by his job title. Not one has mentioned him by name.”

  He finished pouring the omelet mixture into the pan before he turned to look at her. “That’s odd, I take it?”

  “Very odd. I don’t know why nobody supplied his name to the news outlets. They had no trouble naming any of the other agents on that team.”

  He dished up their omelets and set the plates on the table, taking his own seat opposite her. “Put away the laptop and eat.”

  With a sigh that reminded him of her workaholic days at the embassy, she slid the laptop to the side and picked up her fork. “Remember when we sneaked into the embassy kitchen in the middle of the night to make scrambled eggs for everybody getting off guard duty for the night?”