by Paula Graves
Darcy nodded, hoping he was right.
Seth was waiting by the passenger door of the Land Rover, smiling at Darcy across the top of the cab. “You don’t trust me a bit, do you?”
“I barely trust anyone at the moment,” Darcy answered.
“But especially not me.”
Darcy didn’t speak.
Seth shrugged. “I get it. I get it all the time, actually. But I reckon you’ll just have to see for yourself whether or not I’m worthy of your trust.”
“It would behoove you to be so.”
Seth smiled as Darcy used the remote to unlock the doors. “Nice accent. You should hear my Irish one.” He climbed into the passenger seat.
Darcy looked across the yard toward Fitz’s truck. McKenna was standing next to the door, gazing at him across the dark yard. There was just enough moonlight to make out the glitter of her eyes.
Darcy smiled. He saw the slight curve of her lips, the faint glint of her teeth. Then she got into the truck, disappearing from his view.
For a moment, his stomach gave a sickening downward lurch.
He took a deep breath, gathering his wits. He hadn’t seen her for eight years. They’d both survived the separation.
They would both survive a couple of hours apart, right?
At least, he hoped so.
* * *
CADE LANDRY ANSWERED on the second ring, his voice raspy and thick. “Yeah?”
Great, McKenna thought. Had he been drinking? “Landry, it’s Rigsby.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. For a second, she thought the call had been cut off and started digging in her pocket for quarters to feed the pay phone. Then Landry spoke again. “Where are you?”
“I need to meet you. I don’t feel safe.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Not badly,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder at the Land Rover parked behind her. She couldn’t see Darcy’s face behind the glare from the motel sign bouncing off the windshield. But she felt his gaze on her. It warmed her, made her feel strong and weak at the same time.
“Tell me where to find you.” Landry’s voice was stronger now. Didn’t sound nearly as slurred. “Are you alone?”
“I am,” she lied. “Do you know where the Econo-Tel Motor Lodge is on Route 4 south of Poe Creek?”
“No, but I’ll find it. Are you out of sight?”
“Not right now, but I will be as soon as I get off the phone.”
“Good. Stay out of sight. You’re in serious danger.”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling you. I need help coming in.”
“I’ll give it to you. You just get hidden and stay put. I’m in a black Malibu—remember what my car looks like?”
“I remember.”
“I’ll pull in the parking lot at the motel. Is there someplace you can hide where you can still see the parking lot?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Good. I’m on my way. Get out of sight and I’ll see you soon.”
She hung up the pay phone and walked over to the Land Rover. Darcy lowered the window and looked up at her. “Landry’s coming?”
“Yes.” She looked past him at Seth Hammond, whose used-car-salesman grin had disappeared now that the assignment was under way. “How’s the video feed holding up?”
He met her gaze steadily. “Clear as a bell. This feed covers the parking lot perfectly. We should be able to spot the target as soon as he shows up.”
“What’s he driving?” Darcy asked.
“Black Malibu. Later model. It’s not a bucar,” she added, referring to an FBI fleet vehicle. “It’s his personal car.”
“Wouldn’t he drive an FBI fleet car if he was playing this by the book?” Darcy asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Landry’s an odd bird. And he loves that car. Just—keep an eye out for any sort of tricks.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Seth said with a slight smile. He looked like an ordinary guy, she thought, when he wasn’t trying so hard to play the role of the smarmy con man.
“I’ve got to hurry to the diner to make the second call,” she said, patting the window frame as she started to turn to go.
Darcy caught her hand, holding her in place. “Be careful.” His thumb slid over the back of her hand in a caress. “Don’t take chances.”
She turned her hand over until her palm pressed against his. “Everything in life’s a chance. But I’ll be careful.”
“You do that.” He let go of her hand, and she turned away, walking slowly back to join Mark Fitzpatrick in his truck.
Fitz, as he’d told her to call him, started the truck as she buckled herself in. “You ready for this?”
She nodded. “I appreciate this. That you’re putting yourself on the line for me when you don’t even know me.”
“I know Darcy. He and the guys at The Gates helped me out not long ago when someone I know was in trouble. Darcy went to bat for her with Quinn. She needed a job and Darcy made sure Quinn gave her a chance. I don’t think even Darcy knows how much he helped her.”
“Your girl?” she asked, reading between the lines.
Fitz’s lips curved, the boyish smile carving dimples in his cheeks. “Yeah. We’re getting married soon.” His smile faded. “So, let’s get this done right tonight, okay? No surprises. No risks. I kind of promised her I’d come home alive. If I don’t, she’ll kill me.”
“I’m all for coming home alive,” she assured him, remembering Darcy’s long, deep gaze at her as she walked away from the Land Rover.
They reached the Blackberry Café within ten minutes, parking near the edge of the lot where the glow from the street lamp on the corner didn’t quite reach. The pay phone bolted to the wall of the hardware store was barely visible under the shadow of the store awning. It had been in working order when she and Darcy had checked it the night before, but a lot could have changed in a day.
She fed coins into the slot and sent up a silent prayer as she called SSA Darryl Boyle’s cell-phone number.
It rang three times without Boyle answering. As she was about to hang up and start over, he picked up. “Boyle.”
“Agent Boyle, it’s Agent Rigsby. I’m in trouble and I need your help.”
Chapter Seventeen
“They don’t really think you’re clueless about what they’re up to, do they?” Olivia lowered the binoculars and turned to look at Quinn.
He shrugged. “I don’t think they’re actively trying to deceive me, no.”
“The woman doesn’t want you in on it.”
“She doesn’t trust me. Or anyone, I assume. She believes her own people were involved in trying to kill her.” Quinn took the binoculars Olivia had set down and lifted them to his eyes. Through the lenses, he made out Darcy’s Land Rover sitting at one end of the motel’s parking lot. “What are they doing?”
“Hammond seems to be on a laptop computer,” Olivia answered, drumming her fingers on the dashboard as if impatient for him to hand over the binoculars again.
Quinn ignored her jitters, trying to see if he could discern what was on the computer screen by focusing on the reflection in the Land Rover’s passenger-side window. “They seem to be monitoring some kind of video feed.”
“Did they set up hidden cameras somewhere?”
“I’m not sure. But I know how to find out.” He handed her the binoculars and picked up his cell phone, dialing a number.
Seth Hammond answered on the second ring. “Yeah, boss?”
“Why are you parked in the Econo-Tel Motor Lodge parking lot, monitoring a video feed?”
Hammond muttered a profanity.
A moment later, Nick Darcy’s voice was in Quinn’s ear. “This isn’t your business.
Stay out of it.”
“She didn’t want you to come to me for help?”
“No.”
“I’ll keep my distance. But are you sure you’re prepared for any contingency?”
Darcy’s voice tightened, betraying his doubts. “There’s no such thing as being prepared for any contingency.”
“What are you hoping will happen?”
“We need to know who she can or can’t trust at the FBI.”
“And how is sitting in a vehicle looking at a video feed going to clarify that question for you?”
“You don’t know what our plan involves, Quinn. And I’m not going to tell you.” Darcy hung up the phone.
“You have such a way with your employees,” Olivia murmured as he pocketed his phone.
“They’ve set up some sort of trap,” Quinn said, reaching for the binoculars. “But Agent Rigsby is nowhere in sight.”
“I spotted Dennison and his deputy girlfriend parked on the other side of the motel lot,” Olivia commented. “Do we know who else is involved in this mysterious sting?”
“No. Ever since word got around of the GPS trackers in the agents’ cars, they’ve been disabling them.”
“Good for them,” Olivia murmured, slanting a dark look his way. “We were wrong to try to track them like pets with microchips.”
“Knowing where my agents are at the moment might come in very handy.” Quinn considered what he knew about the agents he had in sight. Seth Hammond was with Darcy. And Dennison had brought his girlfriend along for the operation, which meant they weren’t necessarily sticking to agents from The Gates alone.
“Sutton Calhoun and his wife,” he said aloud a moment later. “Calhoun and Hammond are close now. Rigsby must be with them.”
“Just the three of them?”
“Probably one more agent to match the number here. There must be a second stakeout point.”
“But where?”
Quinn picked up his phone and dialed Calhoun’s cell-phone number. It rang three times before going to voice mail.
“Darcy warned them. They’re screening calls from me.”
“So what now?” Olivia asked.
Quinn picked up the binoculars and raised them to his eyes again. “They’re staking out this parking lot for a reason. Right?”
“Right. You said you think they’ve set up some sort of trap. But who are they trying to trap?”
Quinn scanned the parking lot. “Rigsby claims there’s someone inside the FBI gunning for her. Maybe they settled on a suspect.”
“Or two,” Olivia pointed out. “Since there’s a second stakeout point?”
“One of them is Landry,” Quinn said, slanting a look at Olivia.
“I know.”
“Any thoughts on the other one?”
Her eyes narrowed as she peered through the windshield. “Darcy asked me some questions about what happened in Richmond. Specifically, he wanted to know who the incident commander for my SWAT unit was.”
“Who was it?”
“Darryl Boyle.”
“Rigsby’s direct supervisor at the Knoxville office?”
“That’s the one.”
* * *
STAKEOUTS WERE GENERALLY boring affairs. Until they weren’t.
Except for the call from Quinn twenty minutes earlier, Darcy’s stakeout of the Econo-Tel Motor Lodge had been uneventful. If Landry was on his way to meet McKenna, he was taking his own sweet time.
Meanwhile, Darcy felt as if he was about to crawl right out of his skin. His nerves were jittering, his pulse pounding a heightened cadence in his ears, and every twitch of a leaf rustled by the night breeze outside set him on high alert.
He shouldn’t have let McKenna convince him to split up. He should be with her instead of staying here watching a silent parking lot.
“Is that a phone?” Seth Hammond’s drawl broke the silence in the Land Rover.
Darcy jerked at the noise. “What?”
“I’m hearing a phone ringing.”
Darcy listened. Seth was right. A phone was ringing.
“The pay phone,” Seth said.
It rang one more time, then went silent.
Darcy looked at Seth. “Coincidence?”
The other man shook his head. “Not damn likely.”
The phone started to ring again.
As Darcy started to open the driver’s door, Seth put a hand on his arm.
“What if someone’s trying to draw you out in the open?”
“What if it’s Landry trying to contact her again?” Darcy asked.
“You answering the phone isn’t exactly going to make him feel real good about showing up for this shindig.”
“It’s a chance I have to take.” Darcy opened the door and hurried toward the ringing phone, catching it on the fifth trill. “Hello?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, but Darcy could feel someone listening.
“Hello?” he repeated.
“You’re Nick Darcy, right?” The voice on the other end of the line was a deep drawl, broader and gentler than the hard-edged mountain twangs Darcy had grown used to hearing in this part of Tennessee. “This was a setup, wasn’t it?”
Darcy didn’t answer.
“Doesn’t matter,” Landry continued, sounding frustrated. “I need to talk to Rigsby. Now.”
Cold crept up Darcy’s spine and settled in his chest. “I can pass a message along to her.”
Landry muttered a low curse. “She’s not there, is she?”
“If you’ll tell me your message—”
“He knows, Darcy. Darryl Boyle knows it’s a setup. And wherever Rigsby’s luring him, he’s not going there alone.”
The chill spread to Darcy’s limbs. He clutched the phone more tightly. “You mean he’s bringing FBI backup. Right?”
“I don’t think so,” Landry warned, his voice tight with tension. “Something’s not right with him.”
“Something’s not right with you, either. I’ve talked to Ava Trent. I’ve even talked to your old SWAT team partner, Olivia Sharp.”
“You talked to Olivia?” There was a shift in the tone of Landry’s voice that caught Darcy by surprise.
“They both seem to think you’re a dead-ender. On your way back down the ladder before you flame out for good.”
Landry was silent for so long, Darcy feared he’d hung up. When he finally spoke again, his voice was flat and weary. “I guess I deserve that. But I’m tellin’ you right now, you gotta get Rigsby out of there. I called Boyle. Told him about my call from Rigsby. He said he got one, too, and I should sit tight. He’d take care of it. But something about the way he was talking— I don’t know. It didn’t sound right. So I called the Knoxville Field Office, offered the Johnson City RA’s assistance in the extraction. And nobody in Knoxville knew what the hell I was talking about.”
“How do I know you’re not setting us both up?” Darcy asked, trying to keep his head as his heart clamored at him to go get McKenna and take her somewhere so far away nobody could find her again.
“You don’t,” Landry said. Then the line went dead.
Darcy hung up the phone and ran back to the car. “Get Calhoun on the phone,” he ordered, already dialing the number of the burner phone he’d given McKenna. The cell phone rang once and went straight to voice mail. “Damn it!”
“Calhoun’s not answering,” Seth said, looking at Darcy with a worried expression. “What the hell is happening?”
“I’m not sure,” Darcy admitted, dialing another number. “But we need to pull up stakes and get to Brightwater as fast as we can.”
On the second ring, Alexander Quinn answered. “Ready to talk to me now?”
“Yes,” Dar
cy snapped. “So listen very carefully, because we may already be out of time.”
* * *
MCKENNA LOOKED AT her watch. Only four minutes had passed since the last time she’d checked. It felt more like an hour. “Maybe we should check in with Calhoun and his wife,” she suggested, glancing at Fitz in the driver’s seat. “See if they’ve seen anything suspicious.”
“I’m sure they’d have called us if they had,” Fitz said reasonably.
“I’m climbing out of my skin here. Can’t we just call someone? Anyone? Maybe we could call Darcy and see if his crew has seen anything from Landry.”
Fitz looked her way, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes. “You try Darcy. I’ll call Calhoun.”
She tugged the burner phone from her jacket pocket and dialed the number he’d stored for her.
Nothing happened. She looked at the display and saw there were no bars. The phone wasn’t receiving any signal from the cell tower.
“Hmm,” Fitz murmured.
“What?”
“No reception.”
Alarms blared in her head. “We were able to check in with Calhoun just fifteen minutes ago. The signal was great.”
“I know.” Fitz frowned.
McKenna looked down at her laptop, checking the video feed. There was nothing new there. She could see Calhoun’s truck parked at the other end of the small shopping strip in one of the diner’s security cameras. Fitz’s truck was still visible in the feed from the second camera. Nothing had changed.
She narrowed her eyes and reached for the power-window switch on the passenger door.
“What are you doing?”
She reached out the passenger window and waved toward the camera, keeping her eye on the feed.
Nothing in the image on her computer screen changed. No hand, no wave.
“Oh, hell.” She raised the window again and pulled her Glock from the holster behind her back.
“What?”
“Someone’s hacked our feed. They’re out there.” She peered out the window at the quiet street in front of the diner, looking for any sign of movement. “And I don’t think it’s the FBI.”
Fitz muttered a curse and started the truck’s engine. As he put the vehicle in Reverse, a hard thud shook the chassis, and the truck began to shimmy as Fitz tried to steer it backward.
