Acceptable Risks

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “Pretty tenuous,” Jason observed.

  Ella gave an elegant shrug. “It’s the best I can do. I can keep looking while you go check it out.”

  “Why don’t you go down and plug it into the navigation system,” Jason told Lark. “It should accept the coordinates. I’ll have Ella print off a map and be down in a minute.” He waited until Lark had left the room and gave her time to get to the elevator. Ella watched him the whole time.

  “I don’t have a printer,” she said.

  “I know.” He didn’t need a map. He just didn’t want Lark to have to hear painful truths, and maybe Ella would admit them more easily without her niece in the room. “Is the will the reason you hooked up with Isaac to do this?”

  Any pleasantness in Ella’s expression disappeared, replaced by the ruthlessness and lack of sentimentality that had driven her success. Jason knew she’d answer him. She had no more loyalty to Kemmerling than she had to Matt. She’d always pick her own best interests over anything else, and talking to him now meant he’d leave her alone.

  “I didn’t ‘hook up’ with Isaac. He came to me.”

  “With what?”

  “He found out about my connection to Matthew and suspected our relationship wasn’t a positive one. He told me his plan and I wasn’t unhappy at the idea that Matthew would suffer.” She stood, her eyes glittering, and pointed a sharp nail at his chest. “My brother-in-law treated me like crap the entire time he was married to my sister. He poisoned her against me and made sure I got nothing.”

  “If Lark’s right, and he never touched that money, it’s still there. Why didn’t you just approach him and ask for it when your company was in trouble?”

  Her face turned dark red. “We are not in trouble.”

  “Sure. I bet you didn’t want him to know, because your success is all you’ve ever cared about, right? You wouldn’t want him to think he was right about you.”

  “What do you know about it?” she spat.

  “Nothing. But it doesn’t take much to understand someone like you.”

  She snarled, and any beauty or dignity she possessed was gone. “You’re just like him. A chauvinistic, self-righteous bastard. I hope Isaac manages to take you both down. In fact, he can kill you for all I care.” She reared back and slammed the heels of her hands toward his chest. On a spike of adrenaline, he caught her wrists before she connected with his sternum, but felt a twinge at the movement. Mental, or real?

  Two breaths, and the adrenaline ebbed. Everything was fine.

  “What are Isaac’s plans, Ella?”

  She struggled, but he easily held her away from him, blocking her knee when she tried to get him in the only place she thought he was vulnerable. Eventually, she yelled in frustration and went limp in his grip.

  “I hope he gets you both arrested for treason,” she panted. “And that’s all I’ll say.”

  Jason knew he’d get no more out of her and let her go. She lunged at him again. He turned his back, a less vulnerable part of his body. She screamed in rage, but he left the room and headed for the elevator.

  It always came down to the same things. Greed and revenge. More than half the threats he’d faced while working for Hummingbird had stemmed from one or the other. This situation was more complex than most, but at its core, it was no different—people failing to take responsibility for whatever results they obtained, blaming others and covering their own inadequacies by seeking to punish, to gain something they had no right to.

  He paused in the lobby, amused for a moment at his philosophizing. He sobered when he saw Lark standing next to the Range Rover. Her dark hair blew back in the breeze, and the angle of the sun made her complexion glow. She was beautiful. But at the same time agitated, rocking back and forth next to the passenger door, alternately staring at the hotel’s main door and out onto the street.

  He hurried over, realizing his keys were in his pocket and she hadn’t been able to get into the truck. “I’m sorry, Lark, I didn’t think—”

  She whirled on him. “Do you know who just drove by?”

  “Nnoooo.” He hit the button to check the surveillance system, and when it flashed green unlocked the doors. “Who?”

  “Nils.”

  He froze half in, half out of the car. “What?”

  “I know!” She yanked open the door and jumped in, immediately leaning toward the navigation system, which wasn’t on because Jason hadn’t started the truck yet. He slid into his seat and shoved the key into the ignition.

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I held him at pitchfork-point.” She hit keys on the GPS, then checked the slip of paper. “How did he get out of the stall?”

  Jason waited for the system to prep the route. “He’s not completely stupid. He probably found a way to reach the bolt, maybe got his hands on a stick or pulled a bar out of rotted wood. The farm is just up the road from town. He didn’t have far to hike.”

  “And what was he doing here? He didn’t pull in, so he wasn’t coming for Ella.” She shook her head and answered before Jason could. “Never mind—it’s a main road, blah blah blah. Coincidences do happen, even if no one believes in them.”

  “Well said.” Jason watched her jab at his GPS unit and considered taking over. She probably wouldn’t respond well. He reined in his impatience.

  “So now Isaac is going to know what we’re doing.” She hit a wrong button and the unit beeped at her. She made a move to hit the thing, stopped herself, and slammed her hand on the dash instead, letting out a string of curses. Jason let her vent, then gathered her against his chest and held her. He expected her to fall into tears, apologize, and be okay. But even though she let him hold her, even though she wrapped her fingers so tightly around his arm he started to get hard, she didn’t lose it. Didn’t let go. He didn’t know if he should admire her control or worry about how much pain she was harboring.

  After less than a minute, she pulled away, took a deep breath, and finished keying the info into the system. It flashed and beeped, then told him to go north on the road in front of them.

  “We can’t worry about Nils now,” Jason said. “Let’s just work on finding Matt and Gabby. This is the closest we’ve been since he disappeared.”

  “I know.” She pulled her seatbelt on and sat back hard against the seat. “You’re right. Let’s get moving.”

  Jason hoped he was right, that it was a legitimate lead, and that Ella wasn’t sending them on a wild goose chase, or worse.

  And he hoped the thought didn’t occur to Lark, either.

  * * *

  The road didn’t peter out, or narrow in underbrush and forest. It just ended, with piles of dirt forming an uneven semicircle around the sharp line of the macadam. Behind the dirt, construction debris lay tumbled among fallen trees and broken brush, and beyond that, thicker forest than what had bordered the road so far.

  Gabby had had enough. She was tired of the obstacles, the heat, the pointlessness of everything that had happened the last two days. Adrenaline rushed through her, and she marched up one of the dirt hills. Matthew called her name, but she ignored him. She needed height. Needed to see what was ahead, what was behind, and what they’d missed.

  The hill wasn’t high enough. It just gave her a better view of the crap on the ground surrounding them. She marched down the other side just as Matthew reached her.

  “Gabby, stop.” He tried to get in front of her, to catch her arms, but she shrugged him off and kept going. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m climbing a tree.” She skirted a piece of concrete cylinder and kept going. “We need to see where the hell we’re going. Should have done it right away,” she muttered. “Haze, my ass.”

  She got to the edge of the woods and stepped in a hole. Her right ankle snapped sideways and she fell with a cry, rolling with the motion and praying she hadn’t done too much damage.

  “Gabby!”

  “I’m okay.” She gasped in air and rolled t
o her back, waiting for the initial wave of nausea to pass before she could assess the damage. “It wasn’t bad, just sudden.”

  “Lie still.” Matthew crouched next to her and lifted her right ankle onto his bent knee. “Did you hurt anything when you fell?”

  Gabby brushed dirt off her palms and checked the heels of her hands. “Just a couple of scrapes. I’m okay,” she said again, drawing a deep breath and trying to sit. She got as far as her elbows, but Matthew wouldn’t let her go any higher. “Let me up. We need to climb a tree and see where we are.”

  “I’ll do it.” He gently probed, then rotated, her ankle. She could tell it was already swelling a little, but the pain was minimal, mostly bruiselike when he pressed down. She could walk on it. “Height wouldn’t have done any good back near the cabin,” he told her. “We were in a valley. But we’ve been mostly climbing all day.” Setting her foot down, he stood and looked for a suitable tree.

  Gabby watched him select one and haul himself into the lower branches, then looked back toward the stupid road while she waited. How could the road just end? That truck had come from here, and the motorcycle that passed them went somewhere. Unless they missed a turnoff somehow, and that was hard to believe, even in their depleted conditions, considering how slowly they’d been moving. Still, that was the only explanation, wasn’t it?

  She tilted her head back to see where Matthew was. She forgot which tree he’d climbed into, and searched until a flash of his blue shirt near the top of the tallest evergreen caught her eye. The treetop swayed, then bent, and she held her breath until it eased back upright. The sliver of blue moved higher, then halted for several minutes before it started moving back downward. By the time Matthew hit the ground, Gabby had dragged herself to her feet and tested her ankle.

  “Well?” she called before he was halfway back to her.

  He shook his head.

  “What’s that mean? No luck? Too far? What?”

  He stayed silent as he made his way through the debris field. When he got to her side, put his hand on her elbow, looked at her ankle, and opened his mouth, she said, “Don’t you dare ask how my ankle is before you tell me what you saw.”

  He looked grim. “We have a choice.”

  “I take it it’s not a good choice,” she sighed.

  “The haze was smog. Probably DC, though it’s too far away to tell. There’s a good two miles of thick forest before we get to the next town in that direction.”

  “And the other way?”

  “If we go back the way we came, probably about five miles, to a turnoff we missed, that will take us to a group of buildings that may be the crossroads you were hoping for.”

  Gabby scowled. “Why the hell isn’t there some kind of bar every three miles around here? Don’t hunters drink a lot?” She sighed and tried to buck up. “My ankle is fine if I keep it straight. The uneven ground in the woods will be impossible. But I can handle a few miles of flat road. Let’s get moving.” She glanced at Matthew, noticing the tears in his dress pants and sweat stains on what was probably an expensive shirt. His “weekend” shoes were sturdy enough to climb trees, apparently, but probably wearing as well as her flats were. As they headed back toward the road, she imagined a giant maze someone had placed them in. One with no exit.

  * * *

  The region of Virginia to which Ella’s information had sent them made navigating difficult. Several times they found themselves on roads the GPS didn’t recognize, and they kept having to backtrack and find another way. Jason could almost hear Lark’s heart pounding harder with every mile closer to the coordinates. Six dirt roads, two gravel lanes, and a wagon track later, they pulled into a clearing holding a rough-looking cabin and no vehicles. There hadn’t been any visual warning that they were close to their destination, and the GPS said they had half a mile to go. But this was the end of the road, and they’d seen no other structures for hours.

  “They’ll have heard us coming.” Lark grabbed the dash as they bounced over a pothole. “We should go in fast.”

  “No.” Jason turned off the engine and removed his seat belt, shifting into mission mode. “You stay here, in the driver’s seat. I’ll scout the place and go in when I know what I’m getting into. No arguments.”

  Lark didn’t give him any.

  The feeling of being close to his target jacked up his senses. When he got out of the truck, he smelled the woods, both fresh and rotting vegetation, and a faint hint of smoke, as if there had been a fire burning, extinguished some time ago. The air was still, thick, and he’d already started to sweat. A drop trickling between his shoulder blades burned, and he rubbed at it before drawing his pistol and easing toward the cabin.

  Everything was silent. Birds and animals awaited his next move, and the cabin seemed deserted. He crept up to the nearest side of the building and looked through the window, staying to the left so he could see most of the room without exposing too much of himself. It was a small, sparse bedroom, empty. The room behind it was the same, only it contained a rumpled bed and a chair. On the back of the cabin was a built-on room, completely empty. Jason circled around the back, and found a fresh hole dug from underneath the building. Hope leaped, but he ignored it and continued carefully around the corner.

  On the other side he peered into the kitchen and living area, which also looked empty, but he couldn’t see everything. Still, it was enough to take a cautious risk and go into the building. The front door opened noiselessly, unexpected in a wooden cabin in this condition.

  Jason had no sooner cleared the threshold than a figure bucked where it lay on the plaid couch. Jason whipped his weapon toward him, but the big man faced the back of the couch, his hands fastened with cuffs behind him, feet tied with some kind of fabric—old curtains?—and mouth taped closed with duct tape. Jason swept the room one more time, but there was no one else there. He holstered the pistol and stepped carefully closer.

  The guy twisted to look over his shoulder, displaying a blackening eye and dried blood around a swollen nose. Still, Jason recognized him.

  “John?” He slowly peeled the tape away from the guy’s mouth. “What are you doing here?”

  John grunted.

  “You work for Isaac?” Jason guessed.

  “Did.”

  “He do this?”

  John had to clear his throat before talking, and it came out dry and rough. “Madrassa. Got the jump on me. Before he bolted with the doctor.”

  “Where is Isaac?”

  “What time is it?” When Jason told him, he made a face. “Probably on his way back here.”

  “How long ago did Matthew leave?”

  “Last night, near dark.”

  Jason stood, thinking. They probably hadn’t gotten far when they first took off, and had found someplace to hole up overnight. Still, it had been hours since dawn. They could be anywhere on those roads. They had to get moving, but he hesitated over John, undecided what to do with him.

  John knew, though. “Tape me back up,” he croaked. “Kemmerling needs to see me like this. He’ll fire me. Then I’ll be out.”