Deep Cover

by Alana Matthews

  And guilty. There was a pretty fair amount of that thrown in, as well.

  My wife and daughter are dead.

  What do you say when someone tells you something like that?

  Tara had bid farewell to a number of friends in her time—a girlfriend with breast cancer, a coworker hit by a car—and her father’s death had not been a picnic by any means. But anything she said to Matt in response to those words would be woefully inadequate.

  She tried anyway.

  “I’m so sorry,” she managed, peering at him through the darkness in an attempt to gauge the level of his anger, the depth of his pain.

  But she couldn’t see him well enough. Could only sense that he wasn’t happy with her at the moment.

  And who could blame him?

  She felt ashamed. “Look,” she said, “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Forget it. You didn’t know. There’s no way you could have.”

  “That doesn’t make me any less of a jerk.”

  “You’re not a jerk,” he said, his tone softening. “Far from it.”

  Tara should have left it at that and said nothing more. Maybe she could blame her background in news gathering for what came next out of her mouth, but she knew that it was really just simple curiosity and impulse that made her ask him.

  “What happened to them? How did they…”

  She couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, and Matt was silent long enough to make her wonder if she should have kept her mouth shut. Then she felt him shift around and move in closer to her, leaning his back against the wall.

  He sighed, and the tension in the air seemed to evaporate.

  “I’m not sure the details matter,” he said. “I spent half of the last seven years trying to forget them, then the other half trying to remember. The experts always tell you that once you’ve grieved you have to find a way to move on. But everything I’ve done with my life since then has been dedicated to their memory, so I guess the details are important and always will be.”

  “Listen,” Tara said, “if you’d rather not talk about this…”

  “Normally I wouldn’t. But after ten months undercover, it’s kind of nice to be able to let loose without filtering everything you say.”

  He shifted again, readjusting his position against the wall as if he were somehow bracing himself for the story he was about to tell.

  Tara felt the sudden need to brace herself, too.

  Then he said, “I’d known Becky since high school. Austin, Texas. We flirted back then, but it wasn’t until a summer home from college that we got to know each other. We’d both been through breakups, and just naturally drifted together. And before we knew it, we were out of school and married and Jennifer was born.”

  He was silent, as if lost in the memory, and Tara had the urge to reach over, take his hand in hers and squeeze it the way he’d squeezed hers in the car. A gesture of comfort. Reassurance.

  But then she thought better of it. Thought the move might be too forward at this particular moment. Too much of an intrusion.

  “My world changed after Jennifer was born. I was young and pretty irresponsible, but there’s something about holding a baby in your arms—a baby you helped create—that turns you on your head and sobers you up pretty fast. As soon as I saw that beautiful little face, I knew I had to do something with my life. Make a decent home for her.

  “A little over three years later, I graduated from law school and accepted a position with a firm in New Mexico. We hadn’t been there two months when Becky and Jen were coming home from swim class and stopped at the corner grocery store for some milk.”

  He paused again, and in that brief silence, Tara felt her heart breaking. She knew what was coming and wasn’t sure now that she wanted to hear it.

  “They were at the checkout counter when a couple of hopped-up street punks came in and started waving guns around. Cleaned out all the cash registers. Nobody really knows why they started shooting, but by the time they were done…” He paused. “I was at the office working late when my cell phone rang. I’ll never forget that call.”

  He again lapsed into silence and Tara could imagine him running that phone call through his head. Could even imagine her own father making it.

  Mr. Hathaway?

  Yes?

  This is Sergeant Ed Richmond. Are you the husband of Rebecca Hathaway?

  Tara felt tears coming on and closed her eyes, shutting the thought out of her mind.

  Then Matt said, “You want to know the irony of it all?”

  “What?”

  “After everything was said and done, I went home that night, didn’t really know what to do with myself. Kept feeling as if Becky and Jen would walk in the door at any moment, even though I’d identified their bodies only two hours before. I don’t know why I went to the refrigerator, I wasn’t hungry. But right there on the top shelf was a carton of milk, still half-full. Enough to last at least another day. Turned out they didn’t really need to stop at the store at all….”

  Tara felt heartsick. Could imagine Matt standing at that open refrigerator, staring at that carton of milk, the if-onlys running through his head.

  She’d had a lifetime of if-onlys and knew that fate could sometimes be very cruel.

  But she’d never experienced this kind of cruelty.

  “It took me a while to get myself together,” Matt said. “I quit the law firm, thought about moving to Europe or South America, anywhere that put some distance between me and that terrible night. I wasn’t very pleasant to be around, but a friend of mine in the bureau convinced me to channel my pain into putting scum like those two street punks in jail. Next thing I knew I was training at Quantico. And now, for better or worse, here we are.”

  She could feel him looking at her now. Could feel those piercing green-gray eyes studying her in the darkness, seeing nothing but shadows and the sliver of moonlight that played along the edges of her face. Her own eyes were filled with tears and she wondered if he saw them, too.

  “That’s why I had to tell you who I was,” he said. “Back at the cabin. I couldn’t stand there and watch you go through what Becky and Jen…”

  He didn’t finish again, and she thought he might be choking back a few tears of his own.

  Tara didn’t hesitate this time.

  Reaching out, she found his hand and squeezed it, and at that moment, her attraction to him was a living, palpable thing.

  It was beyond her control now. That incessant naysayer who always seemed to be perched on her shoulder could take a long vacation as far as she was concerned.

  She could stop and reevaluate later, couldn’t she? Save the rational decisions for a more rational time. Wait until they were both a little less vulnerable, a little less scared. Until the light of day sobered them, brought them to their senses.

  But right now the darkness was calling and all she wanted to do was touch him.

  Matt didn’t seem to mind.

  He brought his free hand up, once again stroking her face. “I wasn’t dreaming, was I? The angel I saw. That was you.”

  Then his hand moved to the back of her neck, gently urging her forward. She felt the heat from his body as he leaned toward her in the darkness, and it took everything she had to contain herself, the anticipation of his kiss almost too much to bear.

  And just as their lips were about to brush—

  The door of the shack burst open, and the beam of a flashlight shone directly in their faces.

  Tara heard the ratchet of a shotgun as a woman’s voice said, “Who in hades are you, and what’re you doing in my house?”

  Ten

  “Come on, get up. On your feet. Both of you.”

  The slight quaver to the woman’s voice gave away her age. Even with the flashlight beam blinding them, Tara guessed that she was getting up there in years.

  “I’ve got triple-ought buck in this scattergun, so I’ll only tell you one more time. On. Your. Feet.”

  Tara could feel
Matt tensing beside her as they did as they were told, rising slowly, their hands in the air. He stepped forward slightly and shielded Tara with his body.

  “There’s no need for the weapon,” he said, squinting against the light. “We’re not a threat to you.”

  “You’re just tourists, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You break into my home and you think I should just smile and say, ‘Have a nice day’?”

  Tara gestured with her hands, trying to calm the woman down. “I don’t blame you for being upset, but we’re in trouble and—”

  “Oh, I can see that. You both look like you been rode hard and put away wet. But that don’t mean you got a right to trespass.”

  “Look,” Matt said. “We’re sorry. We thought the place was abandoned.”

  “I guess you thought wrong then, didn’t you?”

  “Ma’am, let’s not make this any worse than it has to be. I’m Special Agent Matt Hathaway. I’m with the FBI. And right now you’re impeding an investigation.”

  “FBI? You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  The flashlight beam swept over Matt’s body, then returned to his eyes. He squinted again.

  “You gotta be the sorriest federal agent I’ve ever laid eyes on,” the woman said. “Unless running around without a shirt is part of the uniform these days. And it seems to me the only investigation going on here is the two of you getting ready to investigate each other’s body parts.”

  Tara felt herself redden.

  “I know this looks bad,” Matt said, “but I can explain. So why don’t you put the weapon down and let’s talk this over.”

  “Mister, if you think I give two hoots about what some lying son of a…” She didn’t finish the sentence and stayed silent for a moment. “Why do you look familiar to me? Have we met before?”

  “I can’t see your face, but don’t think so, no.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I saw you on the TV this afternoon. You’re one of them boys who escaped from—”

  Without thinking, Tara launched herself forward and grabbed for the shotgun. It was a crazy, impulsive move—not her first of the day—and she heard Matt shout a warning behind her, but it was too late. Then the old woman was shouting, too, as Tara’s hands wrapped around the barrel and shoved it upward.

  The flashlight tumbled to the floor, and the two started struggling, playing tug-of-war over the weapon.

  Then Matt was there, wrenching it away from them. “All right, that’s it! Everybody calm down.”

  It was only then that Tara realized that both she and the old woman had sunk to their knees. The woman stopped struggling and Tara released her.

  Matt ratcheted the action on the shotgun, over and over, unloading it, letting the shells drop to the floor. Then he picked up the flashlight and shone it in Tara’s face.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said, sounding like a cop for the first time since she’d met him. It was a sound so familiar to her that she could almost see her father glaring at her from behind that light. “You could’ve gotten us both killed.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blurting it out like a chastened child. She felt as if she’d been transported through some kind of time warp to a previous decade. “I… I just reacted.”

  The old woman stirred next to her, her voice quavering worse than ever. “What are you gonna do to me?”

  Matt put the light on her, exposing her face for the first time, which was deeply tanned and noticeably weathered. She was edging toward her late seventies, and despite the weathering, she looked frail and wide-eyed and was obviously scared out of her wits.

  Which, of course, made Tara feel even worse.

  She had just beaten up on a grandmother.

  “Relax, ma’am,” Matt said. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Still stung by his scolding, Tara reached out and helped the old woman to her feet.

  “I have an idea,” Tara said. “Why don’t we all start over?”

  Her name was Imogene, and she’d been exaggerating slightly when she said she lived here.

  The truth was, her family had owned the place for several decades, and Imogene came up here once in a while to get away from her good-for-nothing son.

  They had hoped she was carrying a cell phone, but she told them she wouldn’t own one if her life depended on it.

  “The world managed to function just fine before everybody and his brother had a phone plastered to his ear. That’s all you see anymore. That and a bunch of teenagers sending silly messages to each other. It’s enough to drive you crazy.”

  As Imogene spoke, Tara fired up the lamp again so they could all see. She had been worried that the light might attract unwanted eyes, but Imogene assured her that it wouldn’t be anything unusual, and the chances of being noticed were pretty slim.

  “Nobody comes around here,” she said. “Hell, hardly anyone even knows this place exists. And that’s just the way I like it.”

  “The question is,” Matt said, “how did you get here? Do you live nearby?”

  He had put his battered shirt back on, but left it unbuttoned.

  “How you think I got here? I drove.”

  Tara was surprised. “We didn’t hear a car pull in.”

  Imogene smiled. “The way you two looked, I probably could’ve pulled a bulldozer into that yard and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Tara felt herself redden again as Matt went to the window, looking outside. “So where is it?”

  “Look, son, you may have me over a barrel, but if you think I’m gonna aid and abet a fugitive from justice…”

  “I told you, I’m with the FBI.”

  She snorted. “You got a badge or something to back that up?”

  “You’ll just have to trust me. If you don’t, a lot of people could die tomorrow.”

  Imogene frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of threat?”

  Tara could see that Matt was getting agitated. This old woman was their only hope of reaching civilization before The Brotherhood put their plan into action, and he was obviously more concerned with saving lives right now than wasting time explaining himself or sparing anyone’s delicate sensibilities.

  Tara thought the appearance of Imogene had probably reminded him of who he was and what he did for a living, and he was suddenly all business.

  “I’m not threatening anyone,” Matt said, clearly struggling to keep his voice level. “But there are some men not too far from here who are. They’re planning to do some very nasty things tomorrow morning, and unless I can get to the city, a lot of innocent lives will be lost. So give me the keys to your car and point me to it.”

  “Son,” Imogene said, “you wanna tell me why I should believe a word you just said, when everyone on the TV is saying you’re a fugitive from justice?”

  “Because I’ve been working undercover. The two men who escaped with me are Carl Maddox and Rusty Zane. Part of a group called The Brotherhood.”

  Imogene’s face screwed up in surprise. “Zane? One of them boys is a Zane?”

  “You know them?” Tara asked.

  “Family’s been living in these parts for half a century. Never did like ’em much. And if you’re messed up with that bunch of boneheads you’re either crazy as an outhouse rat, or you’re telling me the truth.”

  “Then you’ll help us?”

  “Don’t see as how I have much of a choice,” Imogene said. “But tell me. This nasty thing they’re about to do. What exactly is it?”

  “They’re planning to blow up the Whitestone federal courthouse.”

  Imogene frowned. “You sure about that?”

  “Stood right in the room while they were planning it.”

  Imogene shifted her gaze to Tara, and Tara nodded. “I heard it, too.”

  “Well, then, what the heck are we waiting for?” She dug into her pocket and tossed a set of car keys to Matt. “Hope
you can drive a stick.”

  Matt smiled at her. “I’ll manage.”

  But before they could move, they heard the sudden thunder of horses’ hooves, and Matt quickly gestured them away from the window.

  Carl and his crew rode into the yard and came to a sudden stop, their horses huffing and braying.

  They were silent for a moment, and Tara chanced a peek outside, saw Carl and the others carrying shotguns with flashlight mounts, their faces set with cold, hard determination. A look that said they’d get what they wanted no matter what it took.

  Carl sniffed the air, his pockmarked face spreading into that now familiar grin as he swept his flashlight across the yard and settled its beam on the shack window.

  “If I ain’t mistaken, boys, I believe we’ve just found ourselves a couple of grade-A, government-franchised rodents.”

  Eleven

  Matt grabbed Tara’s arm and pulled her away from the window.

  His first instinct was to douse the lamp, but then he realized there wasn’t much point. He should never have let Tara turn it back on, and Carl already knew someone was inside the shack.

  Outside, Maddox was in his usual form. “Hey, hey, Nicky boy, let’s make this easy. You come out without a fuss, and you have my word we won’t hurt the reporter lady.”

  His word?

  Matt almost laughed.

  Maybe they’d apologize for the inconvenience and give Tara a ride into the city, too.

  How gullible did Carl think he was?

  “What is this?” Imogene whispered. “Some kind of posse?”

  “More like a lynch mob,” Matt told her, then quickly surveyed the shack. “I don’t suppose there’s a back way out of here?”

  “Sure,” she said, gesturing toward a dark corner. “Just head down that hallway, out past the kitchen, and on through the family room.”

  Matt frowned at her. “A simple ‘no’ would’ve worked.”

  “You got eyes, don’t you? Don’t waste my time with stupid questions. I take it these are Zane’s men? The ones you claim are planning to blow up the courthouse?”

  “It’s not a claim,” Tara said. “We told you that.”