by Rachel Lee
She pushed to her feet. “What happened, Trace?”
“I stopped taking pain meds and used my brains. We didn’t fool them this long, Julie. I wouldn’t have been fooled for this long. The storm bought a little time, but not as much as I imagined. Damn pills. They likely figured out it was all a ruse. And if they knew I came here, they probably figured out who I was going to see. So you get out of here. I’m going to meet Ryker and take care of some things. Make sure he and his family are safe. But I can’t do any of that if I’m worrying about you. So please, go to your friend’s house.”
She nodded. “Okay. Marisa will know how to reach me after it’s over. But, Trace, please...be careful. I don’t think I could stand it if anything happened to you.”
But he’d withdrawn again, his eyes hard as chips of brown glass. He nodded, acknowledging her, but didn’t answer.
Game time.
* * *
“Meet me,” Trace said into the phone. “Make sure your family...”
Ryker answered. “Sheriff’s. They’re safe.”
“Got it.”
Julie emerged from her bedroom with a tote and began to pull on her outerwear. “Where are you meeting him?”
“Sheriff’s.”
“I can drop you there,” Julie said. “It’s on the way to Ashley’s.”
“Like this place was on the way to the motel?” The essential focus he needed was taking over, and he heard the edge in his own voice but refused to apologize for it. There was too much on the line now.
“No,” she retorted sharply. “For real. I have to drive right past it. Hurry up, and let’s go.”
He pulled on his outerwear as quickly as he could, ignoring the fiery poker in his hand. No time for that, no room for that, and it might not matter much longer. At the door he paused. He hated to step outside, making targets of both himself and Julie.
“Let me go first.”
She looked as if she would balk, but then nodded. “You know where my car is?”
“Right out front.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t pause to lock the place up.”
“I rarely do,” she admitted. “Let’s go.”
“Me first,” he insisted. Pulling his ski mask down took a few seconds, and he didn’t object when she helped. Then he pulled his hood up.
“Don’t follow me until I tell you. Promise.”
She promised, her eyes looking suspiciously bright, with creases of tension around the corner. He could almost smell her fear. Fear for him, he realized. All he had was the brick of the satellite phone in his pocket and a knife he had taken from her drawer and tucked into his boot without letting her see it. He was useless with a gun, and he knew it.
All he could count on was coming up against this guy face-to-face.
Outside, he felt the bite of the cold, but saw that the clouds were lightening. No more snow fell, and the whipping wind had settled down quite a bit. He forced himself to wait, to see if anything moved or happened. Nothing did. He walked out more into the open and waited, every sense straining. The world remained frozen in place.
Good. He could at least get Julie away. He checked her car, then went back and opened the door. “Come on.”
She had her car key ready in her hand. She had good instincts, lots of them. She walked straight to her car, unlocked it, threw her bag in back and climbed in. He wasn’t far behind her with his duffel.
The motor started without any trouble. She had backed in to her parking place, which turned out to be a good thing as the front-wheel drive grabbed the accumulated snow and pulled them through the lot to the recently plowed street.
She drove with the expertise of a long winter behind her, carefully but quickly. “Just let me out at the sheriff’s office,” he said. “Then keep going straight to Ashley’s. I’ll tell everyone where you’ve gone, okay?”
Occasional cars passed them, apparently folks who’d had enough of being locked indoors. None of them caught his attention or seemed out of place.
“Why didn’t you want me to lock my door?” she asked.
“Because I didn’t want you standing in the open any longer than necessary.”
She murmured something under her breath.
“Julie, I’m sorry. I’m sorrier than I can say. I never should have taken those freaking pain pills. I thought I was keeping them under control with coffee, but when they started wearing off early this morning, as I was reaching for the bottle to take just one more, it was like my brain truly kicked into gear again. Probably for the first time since I was wounded. I should have been thinking more clearly.”
“You were thinking clearly enough, it seemed,” she argued firmly. “You weren’t acting stupid.”
“I acted stupidly the instant I decided to look up Ryker.”
“Maybe not. If you hadn’t, you would never have been sure you were being hunted. That wouldn’t have gone well.”
No, it might not have, not when he considered the soothing promise that they were keeping an eye out for him. And why on earth would it ever have occurred to him that they weren’t? It was an unwritten rule. We take care of our operatives.
“How’s the pain?” she asked.
“It’s keeping me wide-awake.”
“Not distracting?”
“Not right now. I can’t let it.”
As they pulled up in front of the sheriff’s office, he reached for the door release and his duffel all at once.
“Listen,” he said before he climbed out, “I’ll find you once this is over. Okay?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t like the look on her face. He was certain there were a million things she wanted to say to him, things he probably deserved, and maybe some things he wasn’t ready to hear. Regardless, she bit them back, and it saddened him that Julie, who always spoke her mind, was refusing to speak it now.
“Straight to Ashley’s, okay?”
“I promised.”
Then he climbed out into the cold day and strode toward the door of the office. He didn’t want to look back, but he did anyway, making sure she was disappearing down the street. If he survived this, he supposed he’d have plenty of time to hate himself later for what he had brought into that woman’s life.
* * *
The general had seen them leave the woman’s apartment. It had been easy enough to stay out of sight. In fact, he favored snow for his operations. It splintered light, messed up shadows and provided a lot of cover each time the wind stirred when the powder was this dry.
So from a block away, his white vehicle almost completely hidden behind a snowbank, dressed all in white, he had watched. Where were they going? As soon as they pulled away, he decided to follow. Besides, he hadn’t liked the look of the building in which the woman lived. The possibility of too many neighbors to hear or see something, no cover in the parking lot except for a handful of vehicles...no, it was not a good place to take Archer down.
Nor did he especially want to take the woman down. She probably had no idea what she harbored. A man like this Archer was perfectly capable of seducing a woman to help him out. The general knew it to be true because he had done so, many times. Women were weak, and they became very stupid when a man smiled and flattered them. They had an urgent need to be liked by the opposite sex.
But he would use that woman if it became necessary. Nor would he shrink from killing her. It was just that he had decided his CIA acquaintance was right: clean would be better. One man dead, no more.
So he followed at a distance. Among the other cars passing, while they were few, he would not stand out at all.
He got a jolt, though, when he saw the car stop at the sheriff’s office. He had thought they might be going for food or something similar. But no, Archer got out there and headed in
side.
The general hesitated. He believed Archer knew someone was coming for him, but to break security by speaking to the local law?
This was something he needed to think over quickly. Matters might have become more complicated than he had thought. Clearly Archer knew someone was coming. Even his CIA friend had admitted that when he dropped off the grid. Nor had it taken them long to locate him. By yesterday morning, they were able to tell the general where to look. By yesterday afternoon they had given him an address.
And while all that was going on, they’d had one of their planes fly him to Denver, despite the storm, to bring him close to his target. Casell, his contact, was doing a fine job of making amends for the slipup that had nearly cost the general everything. When this was done, they would be even.
A new relationship, now that the agency understood the general’s importance. How essential he was to them.
As the woman drove off, he decided to follow her. He needed to know where all the pieces were. Archer was at the sheriff’s and Andrepov was fairly certain he’d be there for a while. Breaking protocol, sharing secrets, perhaps trying to convince someone to protect him.
But he couldn’t afford to count the woman out yet. She might have been sent on a mission for Archer. Andrepov had persuaded many women to do things for him in his time. No reason to think Archer was any less ruthless.
Because the only way a man could survive in this game was through sheer ruthlessness.
* * *
Trace was sent to the sheriff’s private office the instant he entered. He’d barely had time to greet Gage Dalton and take a seat before Ryker arrived carrying two trays full of tall coffees. At once the door was closed and for a few moments silence fell.
“Where do we begin?” Gage asked.
“How about we start with my stupidity?” Trace began. “I was more doped up than I realized until this morning when the last pills cleared totally out of my system.”
“Let’s not run over that,” Ryker said. “Pointless. We’re here now. Tell us what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that a very high-level party in the CIA is behind this. I’m fairly sure a certain General Andrepov is the guy they’ve sent after me, and he’s one dangerous man. And I realized this morning that our little ruse probably didn’t throw them off my trail for more than twenty-four hours.”
“Andrepov?” Ryker repeated, and swore.
Trace looked at him. “You know him?”
“By reputation. I’d rather face Lucifer.”
“Great,” said Gage, drumming his fingers. “I’ve run into the minions of hell before.”
“This guy is more than a minion,” Trace said.
“You worked with him?” Ryker asked.
“Not directly. Some operatives below me did. Several layers down.”
“Layers and more layers,” Ryker remarked. “Safer for everyone.”
“Right,” said Trace. “More layers, more deniability for everyone, including assets. Even Andrepov understood that. But now...”
“What makes you think it’s him?” Gage asked.
“He’s part of a Ukrainian delegation that’s been in town for the last week. And one of the people he was meeting with is listed as an undersecretary of State. But he’s actually an assistant director at the CIA.”
Ryker stiffened. “Who?”
“Casell.”
Another cussword filled the air. “That dirty son of a...”
“That’s not helping right now,” Trace said. “I think time is limited. Look at it. I went off the radar on Friday. By Saturday night they could be fairly certain I wasn’t in a hospital somewhere. I didn’t access my bank or credit, so they could safely assume that I didn’t buy a car, and I didn’t stay in a motel. Which direction would you look, Ryker? Especially if they heard me call for your address? I wasn’t on a secure line. I told you that.”
“But you were on a burner, right?”
“What the hell difference would that make? I thought they were covering me. So when I bought the burner, I pulled out the credit card.”
“Well, double damn,” said Gage. “So you’re thinking he’s on his way here now?”
“I’m thinking he could already be here.”
“But the storm...”
Ryker interjected then. “I had a friendly phone call from someone we know. A certain diplomat hasn’t been seen by anyone since Saturday morning.”
“So your contact knows?”
Ryker nodded. “He wasn’t sure, but he talked to a clerk who got shoved into the middle of this. The guy mentioned a general.”
“Then it’s him,” Trace said. If he’d had time, he might have exploded, but that was a luxury for later. Right now he needed every unclouded, objective brain cell he had. His hand was pounding again, but he drew a breath and used the pain to clear his head.
“Where’s Julie?” Ryker asked. “Not at home?”
“Of course not. I’m assuming it didn’t take them long to put a tap on your line. They know who you’ve been calling. Maybe they even listened in. I told her to go to her friend Ashley’s place and stay put.”
Gage picked up a radio and keyed it. “Twenty-one, this is Dalton.”
“Twenty-one here,” said a woman’s voice.
“Connie, where are you?” The voice gave him a street intersection. “That’s near Ashley’s, right?”
“Less than a minute.”
“Get over there right now and stay with her. Julie should be there soon, if she’s not already. You stay with them, but make it seem like a friendly drop-in. I want you on alert.”
He received an affirmative response and put the radio aside.
“Who’s Connie?” Trace asked.
“One of my deputies. Daughter-in-law of a guy you met, Micah Parish. Anyway, she’s part of that circle of friends. Ashley, Julie, Connie and a couple of others. Connie can show up at Ashley’s without scaring them and keep an eye on them, okay?”
The radio crackled. “I’m at Ashley’s,” Connie’s voice said. “No sign of Julie yet. I’m going inside.”
Trace looked at the sheriff. “Is that a problem that Julie’s not there?”
“Not yet. From here to Ashley’s might take a couple of minutes longer, especially if she ran into an unplowed street, which is possible.”
“Thanks. Julie’s been my biggest concern.” Then he looked at Ryker. “And you and your family, of course.”
“Me and mine are fine. Gage has given us enough protection to hold off a squad, never mind one guy. But what’s the plan?”
“You’re going to stay close to your family. Julie’s going to stay with Ashley. And I’m going back on the grid. Where can I get a phone?”
Ryker tucked his hand in his jacket pocket. “You know, I figured that was coming. Paid cash for a burner when I was out on Saturday. But why do you want to get back on the grid?”
“So he can hunt me and leave everyone else alone. I want everyone else out of sight and out of mind.”
“You’re going to need to be able to get around,” Ryker added, and tossed him a key that he caught with his good hand. “John Hayes’s car. It runs reliably, but not much more than that.”
“Not Marisa’s, though.”
Ryker shook his head. “I wouldn’t risk that. No, it’s John’s car, and we were thinking it was time to let it go. This seems as good a way as any. It’s parked outside.”
Trace looked at the two men, feeling everything inside him deadening, all unnecessary systems shutting down. Right now he needed to be an automaton with a brain. No room for anything else.
“I mean it,” he said again. “Everyone stays away, including the people you told to watch me. Have them watch Julie. Not me. I need to lead this guy away from here.”
He looked at the number on the phone, memorized it, then dialed a number he knew too well.
“Hey, this is Archer. Got any news for me?”
* * *
The general saw a huge wrinkle as he watched Archer’s woman friend pull up at a house. There was a sheriff’s vehicle parked out front. Something was being planned, and he had to interrupt it before matters grew more difficult.
Without another thought, he put his car in Park and climbed out. As the woman eased out of her car, holding a cloth bag, he approached her with his most charming smile. She glanced at him, then froze. “Can I help you?”
“Please,” he said, then took one strong swing with his fist.
* * *
Julie came to with a head that felt as if it were being jackhammered. Without opening her eyes, she assessed what she could. She was in a moving car. She was probably concussed, to judge by the headache. And she felt fairly certain she was with the general.
Moving very cautiously, a millimeter at a time, she realized her wrists were bound. Then terror slammed her. She’d been kidnapped by a man Trace had described in the ugliest terms imaginable. There could be only one reason: to draw Trace to him, away from any possible safety. Oh God, she had to do something.
But she couldn’t imagine what. As her head jolted against the car’s window, she opened her eyes just a bit and saw nothing but empty, snowy countryside. From the way the vehicle was jolting, she suspected they were off-road. Each bounce made her head hurt worse.
Fear was clogging her throat, causing her heart to hammer wildly, creating a desperate need for oxygen.
“I know you are awake,” said a heavily accented, deep voice. “But do not fear. You will be all right.”
Julie turned her head slowly to look at the driver. She supposed most would consider him a handsome man, with gray hair and a deceptively young face. A strong nose that balanced a heavy brow. “Who are you?”
“You know that man who has been visiting you? I am an old friend.”
“I’m supposed to believe that when you knocked me out, kidnapped me and tied me up?”
