Flee the Night

by Susan May Warren

  Leaning back in his chair, he flicked on the morning edition of CNN. Nothing about the train wreck. Which was good, he supposed. Old news. He thought of Lacey on the run again.

  He’d give her another four hours, then call and check on her progress. He had no doubt she’d have good news for him. If anyone could do the impossible, it was his favorite spy.

  He took a sip of Pepto-Bismol. He hated the stuff, how it coated his gut. But it made the pain subside, at least for an hour or two.

  The little girl stirred, yawned, shifted on her pillow. Nero glanced at her, and the image of his own daughter hit him broadside, nearly knocking the wind out of him. Stacy. Blonde, a sweet smile. Innocent.

  Grief welled in his throat. She would have been in her early twenties by now. He took another swig of the Pepto.

  Lacey would pay. Even if she found Ex-6 and handed it over, she would pay. He owed his wife. He owed himself.

  He owed Stacy.

  Micah finished the last of his coffee slowly, watching Lacey sop up her syrup with her final bite of pancake. The woman had the appetite of a horse, just like he’d remembered. The comparison made him grin. She was as stubborn and wild as any of her family’s Thoroughbreds. “Why don’t you trust the NSA? Aren’t you on their team?” The questions nagged at him like a burr under his skin.

  She looked up at him and made a face. “Let’s just say that I find it particularly suspicious that I’m bushwhacked within weeks of finishing the program. They had a guard on me. Then they offered to take Ex-6 off my hands … in exchange for keeping Emily out of the foster-care system.” Her jaw tightened as she said it, and he saw fury in her eyes. “Like they think I might make off with it and sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Micah thumbed the handle of his cup. “The highest bidder?”

  Lacey wiped her mouth, then took a sip of her coffee. He noticed she still liked it like candy—two sugars and a packet of creamer. “Other countries. Obviously America has a huge advantage with Ex-6. Not only can they encrypt their information and detect interceptions of their transmissions, but also decrypt other messages.”

  “The skeleton key to any regime.”

  “Well, in the right hands.” Lacey sat back. Her blonde wig outlined her high cheekbones. And that lime green shirt did distracting things to her silver eyes. But he’d been wrong about her not having changed much. He saw hardness in her expression. Combined with an etched sorrow, it made him want to reach out and pull her into his arms.

  That thought made him freeze, and little sirens blared in the back of his head. Danger, danger! Then again, he already knew that. Still, all this grown-up toughness pinched him deep in his soul, where he’d buried all his feelings, all his hopes.

  Lacey had changed. And he’d had the power to stop it.

  He harbored no illusions that if she hadn’t been handcuffed to her bed, nursing a dislocated shoulder, she would have been tromping about the woods alone … probably still would be. With a pang, he realized what it had cost her to call on him for help.

  And he’d called her a liar.

  He winced. “I need to call Conner.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his Nokia. The screen was black. “I have to plug it in to recharge. I’ll have to call him from the truck.”

  “Who’s Conner?”

  “One of my search-and-rescue buddies. He and our team are back in Poplar Bluff. Probably waiting for me to return from the hospital.”

  She tweaked a one-sided, rueful smile. “Sorry. You should turn around, Micah. Go back to them.”

  He set the phone on the table. “So the NSA is after you because they want Ex-6?”

  “I don’t know. I’m probably a bit jumpy.” She gave a self-deprecating shrug. “They’re probably after me because they think I killed my bodyguard.” She sighed and looked out the window at the dirt parking lot.

  “Did you?” He didn’t know what he believed, but suddenly he didn’t want to know the truth. He held up his hand. “Don’t answer that.”

  “Of course I didn’t kill him—” she frowned—“at least I don’t think so.” She looked at Micah, and he saw vulnerability wash through her expression. “They said I was holding the knife. The last thing I remember was flying through the air during the train crash, landing hard, and blacking out. I remember screaming Emily’s name. And I remember the guy sitting across from us. Big guy. He bought Emily an ice-cream cone in the Little Rock station. He was supposedly my bodyguard. Maybe … I landed on him. I remember I was holding the knife just before we derailed.” She frowned again as if trying to untangle her memory.

  “Back up. You were holding a knife? Why?”

  She opened her mouth, as if she’d just been caught saying too much, and then made a pained face. “I thought I saw Ishmael Shavik.”

  The name nudged something in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t get a fix on it.

  “The man who killed John.” Lacey didn’t break his gaze as she said it, but a second later she looked down. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  A cold fist gripped his heart. “Who’s Ishamel Shavik?”

  She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’ve already dragged you in far enough. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

  Yeah, well, he’d already been skewered about a thousand times over the past few days. Just sitting here with her felt like an open wound. Yet he seemed to be addicted to this pain because he couldn’t bring himself to snatch her, throw her over his shoulder, lock her in the truck, and call Senator Ramey.

  Why had he prayed for the opportunity to bring her to justice all these years if he wasn’t going to grab his chance with both burly hands? Maybe because she looked too … honest. Desperate. And the way she was gathering her composure and shutting him out before his eyes ignited all the suspicions he’d thought were in cinders. Was she innocent?

  “Who is Ishmael Shavik?” he growled.

  “I have to go to the restroom and brush my teeth.” She produced a new brush and a traveler-size tube of Colgate. “I’ll … talk to you when I get out—” she glanced around the café—“when we’re away from here.”

  He swallowed a protest. Okay, yes, maybe it would be better to chat in the privacy of his truck. He nodded. “I’ll be outside, calling Conner.”

  She slid out of the booth. “Thanks, Micah, for … breakfast.” He watched her and couldn’t help but feel the tug on his heart when her eyes glistened. Then she turned and marched off to the bathroom.

  He paid the bill and strode outside, her words churning in his gut. Ishmael Shavik. Where had he heard that name before? He sat in his pickup, leaving the door open to let the fresh breeze shave off a few more vestiges of fatigue, and plugged his cell phone into the charger. He dialed Conner’s cell.

  The man picked it up on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Get out of bed. I need you to do some sleuthing for me.”

  “Good morning to you too, Tootsie. Where are you?”

  Micah paused. “Kentucky. And I don’t want to elaborate. I just need your help.”

  “Kentucky?” Conner groaned. “Micah, you didn’t … do anything stupid, did you?”

  “Maybe. Like I said, I don’t want to elaborate, but I need you to see what you can find on a guy named Ishmael Shavik.”

  “Okay, stupid would be helping someone under arrest escape and then of course driving her across the country in search of her daughter. That’s what this is about, right? Can you say ‘aiding and abetting’? This will look great on your request for reinstatement.”

  “Ishmael Shavik. Try connecting him with the murder of John Montgomery.”

  “The guy from Kazakhstan? I thought you said his wife did it.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. But something she said—”

  “So you are with her. Micah, you are so in trouble. Turn her in before you blow your career to smithereens.”

  “I’ll call you in an hour. See what you can find.”

  “Micah—”

&nb
sp; He clicked off. Clipped the telephone to his visor. The sun lit pools of water to gold and bedazzled the parking lot. An elderly couple emerged from an ancient Buick and ambled toward the café. The old man cupped his hand on the woman’s elbow, helping her. What would it be like to grow old with Lacey, wake up each morning to her smile, race her on horse-back, or sit on the porch as the sun sank behind the green blue Kentucky hills?

  Being with Lacey had surfaced regrets that he’d long buried. Regrets he’d rewritten as wisdom. Regrets that burned a hole in his heart, regardless of what they were named.

  Ishmael Shavik. Yes, he’d heard the name before. Raising his eyes heavenward, he shot up a prayer for Conner. Truth was always on the side of righteousness, and for the first time, he wondered why he’d let himself so easily be duped into condemning Lacey. Maybe she was innocent, just as his heart wanted to believe. Maybe, in fact, she was the victim here. Maybe they even had a chance of resurrecting their friendship … and more.

  Maybe this time he wouldn’t let his feelings stick to his rib cage or catch in his throat. There was no John Montgomery to stand in his way, not anymore.

  Micah put a hand to his chest. It burned, a strange mixture of hope and fear. Where was she, anyway? He got out of the truck and walked back inside the café. Maybe she’d returned to their booth.

  But, no. The elderly couple had taken their places.

  Micah flagged down Aunt Bee. “You know that blonde I came in here with? Did she leave?”

  “Dunno,” she said and brushed off.

  He felt like an idiot as he shuffled back to the ladies’ bathroom. He knocked on the flimsy door. “Lacey?” He heard water running. Boy, she was going to have clean teeth. “Lacey?”

  Nothing.

  Suddenly, his stomach rolled over, as if realization started in his gut and worked up to his brain. He knocked a final time, then called her name again. His loud voice felled the conversations in the café to silence. He heard only the roar of his foolishness, screaming indictment. Idiot! Ignoring the burn of a hundred eyes on him, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the door.

  If he were a swearing man, he’d have let loose a barrage of frustration. As it were, he stood there, staring at the open window over the toilet and knew that everything he’d let himself believe over the past three hours—hope, forgiveness, redemption—had been ground to a pulp.

  Lacey was still up to her old tricks. Deceit … and quite possibly, murder.

  Definitely the murder of the last tendrils of mercy in his heart.

  Chapter 10

  OH, THE SWEET rewards of living in a small town. Lacey found an unlocked pickup three short steps from the bathroom window and dived in. She could hardly believe her good fortune when the keys dangled in the ignition. She turned it over, popped it into gear, and roared out without a backward glance.

  Sorry, Micah.

  She fought the burn in her throat. This was for his own good. She’d been stupid to let Shavik’s name slip. To Jim Micah, master bloodhound, no less. If she hadn’t called him on his cell phone nearly seven years ago and told him to stay away from her, he would have his own Syrian Doberman on his trail. Shavik took no prisoners.

  Every suspicion she entertained that Shavik had only been the thug, the muscle and front man behind someone more sinister, had burst to life with the text message on her cell phone back in the hospital. Still, the identity of the kidnapper didn’t really matter. Emily’s life was in danger, and Lacey had every intention of sneaking onto the farm to her private office, swiping her most recent version of Ex-6, and bartering it for Em’s life. Micah may know about the safe, but he knew nothing about the communications room she’d built in the cabin on the back half of the property, where she holed up after Emily’s birth. Even then, she’d begun plotting Ex-6, hoping to find a way to make amends for John’s death. If only she’d been smarter sooner. If only she’d listened to the voice of reason.

  If only she’d listened to her heart. Then she would never have let Micah push her away and stride out of her life. She would have flung her arms around him and held on until he admitted all the things she’d seen in his eyes. Things she recognized too late.

  She should have seen through that kiss to the emotions. Why had she waited for the right words?

  Because she was idealistic. John wooed her with poetry and dreams, with the promise of glory and adventure. She should have paid attention, however, to action. Micah’s actions.

  She cut north on Guinn Lane and angled for the back road that ran behind the Galloway farm, which rolled over three hundred acres, spotted here and there with clumps of oak, maple, and cedar. She had no doubt that Micah had alerted the NSA to her destination. By now he was probably standing in the women’s bathroom—she hadn’t bothered to lock the door; he would have kicked it down anyway—full of fury.

  She hadn’t duped him, not really. She never said she’d let him tag along. But she felt his absence like a sucking chest wound. Despite his anger and misgivings, he was the only one on the planet whose opinion of her mattered. He’d been her best friend in her darkest hour. He alone had made her feel safe, and when she’d needed the right answer he’d delivered it.

  For the first time since she’d met him, she couldn’t swallow his faith. She refused to believe that God was in charge of the dark moments, that He could allow them. She’d made the wrong choices. God shouldn’t have to pay for that. And if He’d somehow engineered them …

  She eased up on the gas and turned onto the old rutted tractor path. She spotted Ernie Shold’s house and approached slowly. The place felt abandoned. Broken windows, filthy curtains, a crumbled stone stoop. The taste of decay ringed the old farmhand’s home in the overgrown tangle of fleabane.

  She opened the doors to his garage and drove in. Then she sat in the dark and listened to her heart thunder. The place smelled of oil and dirt. She traced the path to her cabin in her mind—along the creek and up through the grove of maple. The hard part would be the stretch of fence line that ran between Ernie’s pasture and Galloway’s. Up the hill that overlooked the main house and into the secret entrance, Grave’s Cave, then into the old Galloway mine. From there, no one but a practiced foot would find her secreted entrance to the cabin.

  She exited the garage and pulled out the binoculars she’d pilfered from Micah’s survival pack. That, his knife, a flashlight, and his nylon rope. If the NSA hoped to surveil her, they’d have to cover the back roads for miles. She edged down to the creek, parted the blue-eyed grass, and emerged at the split of the fences, under a wide maple. Crouching for what felt like an hour, she saw nothing but two colts playing in the field. Their soft whinnies carried in the air. The mares would be in the other paddock. Recollections of happier times rushed back to her—when she’d speculated with her father on the value of the newest foals and when she stood in this very spot, heart racing, sopping wet from wrestling Micah in the creek.

  As if reading her mind, the sun appeared from behind a cloud and warmed her face. Sweat trickled from under the confounded wig. The breeze had fragranced the day with the smells of fall, the lingering taste of summer. A catbird shrilled its mewing song.

  The memories drew Lacey in. It had been here, under the canopy of this maple, that she’d first recognized her deepest longings. At least the one she’d wanted to grab on to with both hands.

  It had been right after her mother’s funeral the summer after her sophomore year. She’d known Micah nearly nine months, and despite the fact that she was dating John, Micah had become a friend. And, on the day they lowered her mother’s body into the ground he’d become a soul mate.

  Breast cancer had swept through Alicia Galloway’s body and ravaged her in a matter of months. Lacey felt pretty sure that a part of her own heart had been scooped out and buried in that cold earth. She couldn’t bear the reception, the somber tones, the faces of grief. She’d escaped to the creek, sunk down into the shadows of the maple, and let grief crash over her.

  She didn
’t hear Micah approach, just looked up and saw him standing above her, pain in his eyes. Then he’d knelt and pulled her into those huge wide-receiver arms and held her. She hung on and sobbed.

  John had already left for cadet camp at West Point. Micah, however, had ten glorious weeks before boot camp, and it seemed he spent every waking hour of those weeks either trying to divert her from her grief or helping her muscle through it. Watching him leave for camp had gouged out another huge chunk of her heart. She had leaned against his car, feeling herself shredding, and heard the catch in her own voice when she said, “Don’t forget me.”

  He smiled, pure and sweet and dangerous. “How can I forget you? You’re my lucky penny.”

  He must have seen her fears lurch up with the rest of her emotions—love, regret, friendship—for he’d reached out of the window and tugged one of her unruly curls. “I won’t forget you. I promise.”

  Through letters and occasional visits, she’d continued to date John her junior and senior years, and she couldn’t bear to question her motives. John was fun. Exhilarating. He embodied adventure and a bright future. Paralyzingly handsome, with his curly blond hair and scalawag smile, John knew how to tap into her desire to change the world and wrap it around his little finger. But sometimes, between the poetry and laughter, the games and heady dreams, she longed for something … more substantial.

  And in the spring of her senior year, Mr. Substantial had come back to sprawl again under this maple tree, his arms crossed under his head, his eyes on her. Micah had returned to take Lacey to her senior prom in John’s stead. Micah still looked devastatingly handsome in his faded Levi’s and gray army T-shirt. Thick muscles betrayed his PT routine, and his dark hair had been shaved short, into a high and tight crew cut. Micah would be unbearably gorgeous in his dress blues tonight at the prom.

  She could hardly take a full breath in his presence. John might be studying to be an officer, but his best friend, Jim Micah, was soldier to his marrow. Power. Righteousness. Duty. And tonight he was her date.