Dead Man's Curve

by Paula Graves

  Was he ashamed? She hadn’t thought him capable.

  “I don’t think I can imagine what it’s like to have famous parents.” Her own parents were farmers, hardworking people who scrabbled for every extra nickel or dime to give their kids a better life. They toiled in anonymity, unknown beyond their small circle of family and friends.

  But it had been a good life, even if a hard one. As far as she knew, they had no complaints, even now.

  “My parents were celebrities in some political circles.” Sinclair’s fingers twisted around each other as they spoke. “They had expectations of the kind of lives their children would lead. I was never going to be a brilliant scholar the way Alicia was. I wasn’t cut out for academia. But I wanted my life to mean something, the way theirs had.”

  “You thought joining a South American terrorist group would give your life meaning?” She tried not to sound so harsh, but she had trouble understanding how he could have been so shortsighted. Even at twenty, she’d been able to figure out that a group of heavily-armed rebels wanting to thwart a reform movement already underway couldn’t be up to any good.

  Why hadn’t he seen it?

  “I thought El Cambio wanted a democratic revolution.”

  “So did a lot of people. But the Mendoza government was making changes already—”

  He shot her a sharp look. “El Cambio believed Mendoza was just a puppet for the old Cardoso regime.”

  “Guess we’ll never know, since El Cambio killed Mendoza before he could institute all his proposed reforms.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, then looked back at his hands again. “Wouldn’t have mattered. El Cambio wanted the power for themselves. And they were willing to break any rule, all rules, to get it.”

  “Took you eight months to figure that out?”

  “I saw what I wanted to believe and ignored the rest. Chalked it up to the brutality of the regime, goading people into acting in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.”

  “The regime had already changed by the time you went to Sanselmo,” she pointed out gently. “Mendoza was cleaning up the government, purging the brutes out of the military. Civil society was forming on its own, without the help of the rebels.”

  “We wanted everything immediately.”

  “Because that ever happens.”

  He shot her an angry look. “People are always promised change when it’s time to mark the ballot. But it so rarely happens when the counting is over. The people of Sanselmo had lived with their necks under the boot for too many years.”

  “I know.”

  “How?” he asked, sounding curious. “You seem to know a hell of a lot about a South American country most Americans probably couldn’t point out on a map.”

  “I made it my business to find out all about what was going on in Sanselmo,” she admitted. “Once I figured out that was where you were headed.”

  “How did you know that was where I was headed?”

  “I was already thinking about becoming an investigator by the time we met. I had...instincts for it.” And, if she could admit it to herself, at least, she wanted to know just what her holiday fling was about to get himself into.

  “Did you follow me?”

  “Not exactly.” She stretched her legs out in front of her before realizing there wasn’t really much room for stretching inside the small tent. She tugged her knees back up to her body. “I followed your trail. Learned you’d talked to a man the locals called El Pavón. The peacock.”

  “El Pavón? Hmm.” He seemed to give the name some thought. “I suppose, in retrospect, it fit.”

  From what little she’d been able to see of Luis Grijalva, she concurred. She’d glimpsed him, briefly, in one of the open-market cafés in the Mariposa capital. A trim, compact man with a well-groomed mane of graying hair and a neat mustache and goatee, he’d been a striking figure in his bright island colors and regal bearing.

  Even with her inbred skepticism of people who claimed to be revolutionaries, she’d found him charismatic and appealing.

  How much more would Sinclair, fed the mother’s milk of revolutionary idealism at his parents’ feet, have been susceptible to Grijalva’s sway? He’d already admitted he’d been looking for meaning in his life.

  Grijalva must have seen an easy mark in Sinclair Solano.

  “What did you do when you found out I’d talked to Luis Grijalva?” he asked.

  Her lips quirked again. “Threw up my hands, called you a fool and hopped the next plane back to the States.”

  No need to tell him that she’d cried the whole plane trip home.

  He shifted restlessly. “You haven’t asked the obvious question yet.”

  She released a long, slow breath. “What question is that?”

  He lifted his gaze to meet hers. “Why, if I had figured out what El Cambio was all about eight months into my association with them, did I stick around the group for another four years?”

  It was an excellent question, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. Life had been much neater when she’d been able to tuck her memories of Sinclair Solano in a little box she could shove into the back of her mental closet, never to be reexamined. Easier to say, “He was some guy I met on vacation. I hardly even remember him.”

  Much harder to sit in front of him, his body close enough to send undulating waves of heat washing over her. Close enough to notice, once again, how ridiculously long and dark his eyelashes were, or how his lean features made him almost as beautiful as he was handsome.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, “I’ll bite. Why did you stay with El Cambio after you knew what they were?”

  His dark eyes held hers, full of secrets and mysteries. But as he opened his mouth, drew in a long slow breath in preparation to speak, something snapped outside the tent.

  He whirled to face the entrance, the muscles of his back bunched in anticipation of whatever happened next. He was lean but strong, his body thicker and more toned than it had been when she’d known him before. Life since their interlude in Mariposa had hardened him. Given what he’d been doing for many of those years, she supposed it was no surprise.

  He’d trained with terrorists. Hiked through unforgiving jungles and climbed volcanic peaks in the rainforest lair of El Cambio. And there was no telling what he’d been doing in the past few years, when the world had thought him dead and gone.

  “Stay here,” he whispered.

  “No,” she whispered back, crawling behind him to the tent door.

  The Ghillie net extended about five feet past the front of the tent. Sinclair paused under the Ghillie net, peering out into the darkness of the woods beyond. Rain had started falling again, but lightly now, barely seeping through the netting to drip down the back of Ava’s neck as she hunched closer to Sinclair. He edged over, making room for her, and peered through the netting, trying to see what may have made the loud cracking noise outside the tent.

  Mist rose around them, turning the woods into an ethereal realm of dark shadows and ghostly tendrils of moisture. Staying very still, she peered into the gloom, trying to soften the focus of her gaze so that she’d be better able to spot any sign of movement outside.

  But there was nothing. No movement. No sounds.

  Sin’s hand closed around her elbow, nudging her back toward the tent. She slipped inside, watching as he crawled through behind her.

  “Could have been an animal,” he said quietly.

  She nodded, clenching her jaws against a sudden tremor that rolled through her like an ocean wave.

  “We’re probably not going to get many better chances to get some sleep,” he whispered.

  “I don’t think I can sleep.”

  “I don’t think you can afford not to.”

  She knew he was right, but the thought of closing her eyes and relaxing her guard went against all her instincts. Especially when she’d be trusting her life to a man whom, twenty-four hours ago, she’d have called a traitor without a second thought.
>
  “Why did you stay with El Cambio?” she asked after a few moments of tense silence.

  He didn’t answer. She peered through the dark, trying to see his face, but he had settled with his back to her. If he’d heard her question, he clearly didn’t intend to answer.

  She curled up in a tight knot, wishing she were back at the Mountain View Motor Lodge, tucked into a warm, dry bed. She wished she’d never looked across the parking lot and seen the face of a ghost. She wished someone else had been in the office when the missing-persons call came in from the Poe Creek locals.

  In short, she wished she were anywhere but stuck here in a damp tent with Sinclair Solano, the only man she’d never been able to forget—or forgive.

  * * *

  SIN WASN’T SURE why he hadn’t answered her whispered question. Only a few minutes before, he’d been on the verge of telling her everything, after all. If they hadn’t heard the twig snap, he might have already spilled all the details. So why hadn’t he answered when she asked him again?

  “Nobody will ever believe your story,” Alexander Quinn had warned him when he’d finally come in from the cold. “They’ll think you’re making excuses for your actions. And the CIA won’t be able to back you up. We don’t discuss undercover missions that way, especially when we still have ongoing operations in the arena.”

  Sinclair had accepted the fact that he’d still be living a lie. He’d thought, at the time, it was worth it. It wasn’t like he could go back home to his family. His parents had been as blind about El Cambio as he had been, and they’d hardly be proud of knowing how he’d worked for the CIA to bring the terrorist group to its knees.

  His sister hated him. She’d wished him dead shortly before he’d faked his own demise, and he didn’t suppose she’d changed her mind since. Even now, putting his life on the line to rescue her, he doubted she’d be happy to see him. But he’d figured separation from his family was part of the price he’d paid for his mistakes.

  Besides, the truth was such a cliché. Disillusioned radical agrees to turn double agent for the CIA.

  Who would buy a story like that?

  * * *

  ALEXANDER QUINN TIGHTENED the straps of his backpack and plodded, head down, toward the motel parking lot a quarter mile down the road. He’d dressed for the weather—heavy rain slicker over sturdy jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt—and his hiking boots were weatherproof by design. To anyone who bothered to notice him, he looked like any of the thousands of hikers who followed the Appalachian Trail during the hiking season, though he was miles west of the trail itself.

  A large blue SUV moved past him, headlights slicing through the rainy gloom, and turned into the parking lot of the Mountain View Motor Lodge. The plates, he noted, were local, but a large sticker from a rental car agency covered part of the bumper.

  He slowed his pace as he neared the parking lot, keeping an eye on the SUV. He’d been expecting Coopers to converge on the motel ever since he’d seen the first report of the missing tourists. He had a feeling they’d finally arrived.

  Six people emerged from the SUV, dark silhouettes in the pools of golden light spilling from the tall lamps illuminating the motel’s parking lot. Four men, two women. As he edged closer, another SUV passed him and pulled into the parking lot, lining up next to the other vehicle. Four more people emerged from the second SUV, three men, one woman.

  Quinn paused on the shallow shoulder across the road, watching as the ten new arrivals huddled together in muddy yellow light from the parking lot lamps. He recognized all of them, though he’d had only minimal dealings with most. The occupants of the first SUV were mostly Gabe Cooper’s siblings—brothers, J.D., Jake and Luke; sister, Hannah; Hannah’s husband, Riley; and J.D.’s wife, Natalie. The second vehicle’s occupants were Gabe’s cousins, Jesse, Rick and Isabel, plus Isabel’s husband, Ben Scanlon.

  All experienced trackers, Quinn thought. Good. They’d need all the skills they could muster.

  One of the Coopers turned his head suddenly, his gaze locking with Quinn’s before he could look away. Jesse Cooper. The other man’s eyebrows lifted slightly, but he looked away deliberately, as if ignoring Quinn’s presence.

  He waited as the Coopers and their various spouses moved around the crime-scene tape and headed for the small motel office located at the far end of the parking lot.

  One of them peeled away from the others and started walking toward the edge of the parking lot across from where Quinn stood watching. Not Jesse Cooper, as he might have expected, but Jake Cooper. Gabe’s twin.

  Jake stood at the edge of the road, staring across the narrow two-lane, as if daring Quinn to make the next move.

  He was tempted to turn and walk away. Let the Coopers fend for themselves. They were big boys and girls. They’d handled tough situations in the past, and Quinn knew they could cope without his help if necessary.

  But he had his own reasons for sticking his nose in this missing-persons investigation. He had his own missing person to find.

  He crossed the road at a leisurely pace, not making direct eye contact with Jake. He stopped when he reached the parking lot, standing several feet away from the other man. The rain that had been a deluge earlier in the evening had reemerged as a drizzle, generating a ghostly mist that settled across the valley like a gossamer shroud. Though Jake Cooper stood only a few feet away, he looked almost spectral in the swirling fog.

  “Do you know who has them?” Jake asked in a conversational tone.

  “I have a theory,” Quinn answered in a similar tone.

  “Care to share it?”

  “I don’t think it’s about your brother. I think it’s about Alicia.”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Is it Cooper Security related, then?”

  Quinn shook his head no. “It goes back further than that.”

  “Is it related to Hamilton Gray?”

  Quinn hadn’t even thought about Gray, the serial killer Alicia had helped capture and convict. “As far as I know, he’s still in prison, exhausting all his appeals.”

  “Then what?” Jake’s voice tightened with impatience. “Do you even remember how to hold a straightforward conversation?”

  “Alicia had a brother.”

  Jake stared across the misty void between them. “Her brother’s dead.”

  “Is he?” Quinn started walking away.

  “You’re a cryptic son of a bitch!” Jake called after him.

  Quinn kept walking, unable to argue.

  * * *

  THE BOMB WAS unsophisticated but powerful. ANFO—Ammonium nitrite and fuel oil—easy to procure, easy to use. Some of the El Cambio crew had wanted to emulate their counterparts on the other side of the world and use more technologically sophisticated improvised explosive devices, but for sheer destructive force, ANFO worked nicely.

  Despite his reputation with the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies, Sinclair wasn’t a bomb maker. There were really only a handful of El Cambio operatives who dealt with explosives on a regular basis, but Cabrera and his lieutenants found value in cultivating the idea that all members of El Cambio were equally skilled and lethal.

  He also liked to make sure that everyone in the group had blood on their hands. Sinclair had been fortunate, to that point, that his skills as an artist and propagandist had kept him out of the real dirty work.

  But that day, his time of reckoning had come.

  “It’s a simple timer,” Cabrera had explained as he’d handed Sin the keys to the panel van. “All you have to do is park the truck in front of the warehouse, set the timer for twenty minutes and walk away.”

  An easy task. And an impossible one.

  He hadn’t contacted Alexander Quinn in two months. The spy had seemed surprised to hear from him.

  “You’re blowing up what?” Quinn had asked.

  “I’m not blowing up anything,” Sin had answered bluntly. “How do I get out of this?”

  “You don’t,” Quinn said. Then he’d ra
ttled off directions that had made Sinclair’s head spin.

  But he’d followed them to the letter. And at the end of the day, he’d had blood on his hands. Including his own.

  But no innocents had died that day.

  In the pale gray light seeping through the narrow tent opening, Sinclair looked at the tight white burn scar on the inside of his forearm. It disappeared under the sleeve of his T-shirt, but the puckered flesh extended all the way up his arm. He’d cut things too close that day in Tesoro. Waffled over his choices a little too long.

  Nine men had died in the explosion, all El Cambio rebels.

  Sinclair Solano should have been victim ten, as far as the rest of the world had known. The explosion had blown several of the bodies out into the harbor, including the borrowed body from the morgue. Most of the bodies had been recovered, or at least parts of them had. Enough for a body count. Sinclair himself had gone into the harbor, his shrapnel wounds shrieking with agony as he swam through the burning debris to the rendezvous point he and Quinn had agreed upon.

  Quinn had almost given up on him by the time he dragged himself onto the rocks and into his spy handler’s strong grasp. The next few hours had been a blur, alternating waves of agony and painkillers. Quinn, meanwhile, had made sure the Sanselmo authorities had a copy of his DNA to make the identification on the unidentified body they pulled from the harbor. Nobody had to know that the DNA actually belonged to the homeless dead man Quinn had procured from the local morgue.

  As far as the world was concerned, Sinclair Solano had died that day in Tesoro Harbor. And he’d stayed dead for three and a half long, lonely years.

  So how had Cabrera figured out he was still alive?

  “What time is it?” Ava Trent’s sleepy voice seeped through his skin into his bones, setting them humming. He looked up to find her propped on her elbows, watching him through a mass of brown, humidity-frizzed hair. She looked tired and a little pale, but he found her tempting anyway. And as much as he’d like to pretend it was situational—three years without sex could make any man crazy—deep down he knew there was something fundamentally different about the way Ava Trent made him feel.