by Paula Graves
If she kept sitting here, waiting for someone to rescue her, she might end up on the wrong end of an AR-15 with no way to protect herself but a handgun she could barely shoot straight.
She peered up at the overcast sky, trying to discern a lighter spot, an area that might reveal the position of the sun.
After a couple of moments, the clouds thinned out, revealing a faint hint of blue sky and the unmistakable glare of sunlight somewhere to her left. She checked her watch. Ten after noon. At this time of year, the sun would already be dipping toward the west.
Which meant that south was dead ahead.
All she had to do was keep going straight, and sooner or later, she’d find her way back to the Coopers.
* * *
WITHIN THIRTY MINUTES, Sinclair was descending the sloping southern approach to the cove where Cabrera had hidden his camp. He moved slowly, kept close to trees and bushes providing cover, well aware he wasn’t as camouflaged as the extraction team had been.
The camp was still. According to the plan, J.D., Isabel and the others were supposed to subdue the camp guards and leave them tied up in the camp for the mop-up. Sinclair supposed it was possible that Cabrera had already found his men incapacitated and freed them, but if he had, there was no sign of them there in the cove.
The tents were still there, however, and for a moment, Sinclair wondered if Ava could be tied up inside one of them, a new captive Cabrera could hold over Sinclair’s head.
It wasn’t possible that Cabrera knew how much Ava had come to mean to him. But if nothing else, Cabrera probably had a pretty good idea just how strong Sinclair’s sense of responsibility could be. After all, he’d put his life on the line for five years to make up for a year’s worth of youthful stupidity and destruction, hadn’t he?
Cabrera might be willing to gamble that Sinclair would trade himself for almost anyone he could take captive.
The central tent had been the one where Cabrera had been keeping Alicia. If he had Ava, that’s where he’d be keeping her, as well.
There was only one way to find out, he realized, his pulse quickening with a combination of fear and determination.
He had to go into the camp and look.
Chapter Fifteen
She was definitely not going south anymore, Ava decided as she took one more faltering step and realized, with alarm, that she was fewer than thirty yards from the sheltered cove where Cabrera had set up camp. The tops of the tents were visible from where she stood frozen in place.
And there was someone moving around down there.
Easing behind the closest tree trunk, she bent down, trying to figure out at what point she could no longer see the camp. If she moved in a crouch, she decided, she could get to the next tree down the slope without being spotted from the cove.
Before she moved, she checked her phone. Bars! She punched in a quick answer to J.D. Cooper’s earlier status request, then rose just far enough to see what was going on below in the camp.
She’d been right. Someone was definitely moving around down there, gliding from tent to tent. She caught a glimpse of dark hair, a patch of camouflage, the sharp angle of a cheekbone.
Her heart skipped a beat.
It was Sinclair. What on earth was he doing in Cabrera’s camp?
She started forward, then went utterly still, her gaze snagged by movement across the camp. A broad-shouldered man of medium height swept his way toward the encampment, showing no sign of stealth or concern, only a singular, relentless intent evident in his dark face. Though she’d seen only a blurry photo once several years earlier, she knew gut-deep that she was watching Alberto Cabrera heading straight for the raided camp.
And Sinclair Solano.
If she called out to warn him, she might alert Cabrera to his presence as well as hers. But if she remained silent, Cabrera might catch Solano by surprise.
The cell phone she’d almost forgotten vibrated in her left hand, giving her a start. Swallowing a gasp, she tucked herself more firmly behind the tree trunk offering her cover and looked at the display.
The text was from Jesse Cooper.
Your GPS display shows you’re at Cabrera’s camp. Get to cover and do not move. Cabrera and his men are as yet unaccounted for.
Tell me about it, she thought, her gaze moving back to the camp. Cabrera had reached the floor of the shallow cove and was moving without hurry to the area where the tents were clustered.
A crackling noise to her left drew her gaze away from Cabrera. A second man stepped into view in the woods west of her, his gaze on the encampment a few dozen yards down the gentle slope. He had a rifle in one hand, ready if needed, and he spoke something low and unintelligible into the radio in his other hand.
Ava heard the crackle of a radio drift up to her position and realized it must have been Cabrera’s handset. She could no longer see the terrorist leader, but if she’d heard the sound, then Sinclair surely had. He’d know he was no longer alone in the camp.
But how on earth could he get out of there without being caught?
The henchman had now moved close enough that Ava could hear Cabrera’s reply through the radio he held. Enough of her rusty Spanish lingered in her memory to decipher what he was saying. “The camp guards are missing as well as Solano’s sister. I’ve sent the others out to find them. Join Esperanza in the south. Go.”
Though in most cases it was hard to make out nuances through the distortion of the radio, there was no way to miss the anger in Cabrera’s terse reply. The man in the woods wheeled around and started back from where he came.
One down, Ava thought, eyeing the camp again. One left. Between them, she and Sinclair might be able to overpower Cabrera.
But only if Cabrera didn’t shoot first and ask questions later.
* * *
“WHAT AREN’T YOU telling me?”
The rising tone of Alicia Cooper’s voice drew Quinn’s attention away from the woods for a moment. Gabe Cooper’s pretty young wife, though pale-faced and grimy from her ordeal, seemed otherwise uninjured. But she could tell Jesse and the others weren’t telling her everything they knew.
“Just tell her,” he said bluntly, returning his gaze to the tree line in search of intruders.
“Is Gabe badly hurt? Is that what you’re keeping from me?” Her voice rose with alarm, to Quinn’s dismay. Despite evading Cabrera and his men thus far, they weren’t entirely out of danger, not as long as the terrorist and his crew of bandits still roamed the woods.
The Feds were taking their own sweet time getting there for the mop-up. Not that Quinn was surprised; one reason he’d left a job he’d otherwise loved for so many years was how increasingly hidebound the federal bureaucracy had become, making it nearly impossible to carry out the only mission that really counted—protecting American freedom.
But really—how long could it take to get a crew of FBI agents from Knoxville or Johnson City? An hour? They should already be here. But they’d have to set up a staging area and swing their badges around until they got their pecking order straight, and by then, Cabrera and his gang of not-so-merry men could have taken half the county hostage.
“Gabe has bruises and abrasions. Maybe a cracked rib. But he’s already starting to heal up,” Jake assured her in a quiet tone. “You know how tough he is.”
“I wish he didn’t have to prove it quite so often.” Her voice lowered back to a soft murmur, almost too low for Quinn to catch. A moment later, however, he heard her voice again from just a couple of feet away. “What do you want them to tell me?” she asked.
He glanced down at her, struck by how much she looked like her brother, despite the differences in them. Solano was tall and slim, like his elegant mother, while Alicia had inherited her father’s short stature and heavier build. On her, the extra pounds looked good, located in all the right places and kept in check by her boundless energy and self-discipline. But she and Solano shared the same soulful dark eyes, the same olive skin and raven-wing hair. And in tho
se brown eyes, he saw the same sharp intellect that had convinced him to give her brother a second chance all those years ago.
“Quinn,” Jesse Cooper warned.
Quinn ignored him. She was tough and she had a right to know the truth. “They’re not telling you that your brother, Sinclair, is alive and he’s here in Tennessee.”
Behind her, Jake Cooper’s expression darkened with anger, and somewhere nearby, one of the other men muttered a curse. But Quinn ignored them, his gaze locked on Alicia’s face, trying to gauge her reaction.
At first, there was confusion. “What?”
“He didn’t die in the explosion in Sanselmo,” Quinn explained, trying to soften his normal blunt tone as he watched her emotions flicker across her face in a constant, changing stream. Confusion became disbelief, then anger, then consideration, and finally, shining like jewels in her dark, dark eyes, the first radiant gleam of hope.
“They identified his body. We supplied DNA samples—”
“I arranged for the DNA to match the body of the cadaver we planted in the warehouse,” Quinn said.
She shook her head. “That was three years ago. If he’s still alive—”
“He’s still technically a fugitive from the law,” Quinn told her quietly. “We weren’t ready to bring the truth out into the open.”
Confusion returned to her expression, and her voice hardened. “What truth? Why would the CIA help him after all he did?”
“Most of what he did was spy on El Cambio for us.”
Next came the shock, tempered only slightly by a hint of guilt and dismay. “He was working for the CIA the whole time?”
“Not the whole time. But after the first eight months? Yes. He was.”
One grimy hand fluttered up to cover her trembling lips.
“The bomb in the harbor warehouse was meant to be his way out. Nobody was supposed to die except him, you see. The other casualties weren’t planned. Cabrera sent some of his men to the warehouse early to make sure your brother wasn’t pulling a fast one. Seems he’d begun to suspect Sinclair of not being a loyal soldier for the cause.”
“My God,” she murmured, dropping her hand away from her mouth. Her dark eyes widened as all the implications of what Quinn was saying apparently began to sink in. “That’s why Cabrera took me? To get to Sin?”
“Cabrera never said?” Jake stepped up, putting a comforting arm around Alicia’s shoulders.
She looked up at her husband’s twin. “He never said. I thought it had something to do with the Coopers’ problems with the Cordero drug cartel or something. You know El Cambio and the cartels are all knotted up with each other.” She looked back at Quinn. “Where’s Sin? Why isn’t he here?”
It was Jesse Cooper who answered. “He’s gone after the woman you barreled over in Cabrera’s camp.”
She looked at her boss, frowning. “The FBI agent?”
“At the time he left, she hadn’t checked in yet.”
“But if he’s still a fugitive—”
“Seems they knew each other before,” Quinn said.
Alicia’s gaze wasn’t the only one that swung his way at his statement.
“Before when?” Luke asked.
“Before now,” he answered. “Actually, from what I’m told, they met shortly before he joined El Cambio.”
“And nobody thought to mention that before we let him run off in search of her?” Jesse asked.
“Would it have made a difference?” Quinn asked reasonably.
Jesse frowned but didn’t reply.
“He’s out there in the woods now?” Alicia asked, her voice edged with a combination of fear and anger. “With Cabrera still on the loose and thinking he’s a traitor to El Cambio?”
“Technically, he was a traitor,” Quinn said.
She nearly growled at him. “Why the hell aren’t we out there helping him instead of standing around waiting for the damned feds? Or don’t in-laws count as Coopers around here anymore?”
The Coopers looked at each other uncomfortably, as if they hadn’t yet realized that Alicia’s connection to the Cooper family made Solano something close to family as well.
Jake was the first one to speak. “Ah, hell. Which way did he go?”
* * *
THERE WAS NO way out. And maybe that was for the best, Sinclair thought, since the showdown between him and Alberto Cabrera was long overdue. They could end the blood feud here. Now. Just the two of them. Nobody else caught in the crossfire.
Too much blood had already been shed because of the two of them.
The FN9 he’d taken off one of Cabrera’s men still held seventeen rounds. It might not be a match for the AR-15 strapped over Cabrera’s shoulder the last time Sinclair had seen him, but it could do some damage before Cabrera’s bullets could take him down.
It would be a fitting final act to his own sorry life, he thought, to make sure Cabrera never got the chance to kill another innocent.
He crouched low in his hiding place between two of the tents, keeping his ears open for sounds of Cabrera’s movement. So far, the terrorist leader seemed to have no fear, no sense that he might not be alone in the encampment. But Sinclair didn’t let himself believe there was a chance to take Cabrera out without risk to his own life. Whatever else he might have been, might still be, Sinclair knew he wasn’t the sort of man who could fire on someone who didn’t fire on him first. Not without another life at stake.
He’d already searched the whole camp. No sign of Ava. Alicia was safely in the protection of the Coopers. And Cabrera had sent all his men into the woods to look for their missing comrades and their escaped captive.
He and Cabrera were alone.
Time to end it.
But as he settled himself to wait, he realized he no longer heard Cabrera moving around. Frowning, he tamped down the urge to move from his hunkered position to see where Cabrera had gone and listened harder for any sound of movement outside the tents.
When it came, it was loud and impossibly close. The harsh, metallic click of a revolver cocking inches from his ear.
“Oh, this is delicious.” Instead of Spanish, Cabrera spoke in perfect, lightly accented English. He’d gone to college in the U.S., Sinclair knew, though by the time they’d met in the jungles of Sanselmo, Cabrera had eschewed English almost completely in favor of his native language. But he’d been quick to tell Sinclair about his time at UC Berkeley, where both of Sinclair’s parents were professors. Cabrera had taken classes from both of his parents. Sinclair had never figured out whether Cabrera considered Sinclair’s connection to Martin and Lorraine Solano to be a plus or a minus.
“Took you long enough,” Sinclair answered in English as well. “I’ve been waiting for you here a long time.”
“You have your sister,” Cabrera murmured, his voice laced with suspicion. “So why would you come back here?”
Sinclair wasn’t about to tell him about Ava. If she wasn’t here, that meant she was still somewhere out there in the woods, possibly attempting to avoid the El Cambio search party. He wasn’t about to put Cabrera and his men on her scent.
“No answer?” Cabrera prodded.
“Just wanted to catch up with old acquaintances,” Sinclair answered, starting to turn toward Cabrera.
The hard edges of Cabrera’s gun barrel pressed firmly into the flesh at the side of Sinclair’s head. “Put down your weapon. Or,” he added after a beat, “perhaps I should say Carlito Escalante’s weapon?”
Sinclair lowered the FN9 to the ground. Cabrera kicked it, letting the steel toe of his boot thud solidly into Sinclair’s thigh.
Sinclair gritted his teeth against a sharp explosion of pain in his leg.
“Any other weapons?”
He wasn’t about to let Cabrera strip him of his Taurus. He’d go down fighting first. The revolver gleaming in his peripheral vision would be easier to deal with than the AR-15 that was no doubt still strapped over Cabrera’s shoulder, but it would be lethal enough if he lost his las
t weapon.
Cabrera jabbed the barrel of the revolver against his head hard enough to send pain skating through his scalp and down the back of his neck. He felt a trickle of wetness sliding down his temple and realized the edge of the gun barrel had drawn blood that time.
“Weapons?”
“You’re just going to kill me anyway,” Sinclair growled, wondering how quickly he could get the Taurus out of the holster attached to his ankle. Quickly enough that Cabrera couldn’t blow a hole in his head as he moved?
Not likely.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked when Cabrera didn’t respond. “Why don’t you just go ahead and shoot me?”
“You tempt me beyond words,” Cabrera said sharply.
“If you really wanted me dead, you’d have shot me. But you don’t, do you?” Sinclair moved his head slowly to the side to look up at Cabrera. As he did so, his gaze snagged on a flicker of movement in the wooded slope rising behind the camp. Whatever moved went still before he could identify what he’d seen, but he let his gaze linger a moment longer.
“Oh, I want you dead,” Cabrera assured him. “I will kill you today. But first, I must know why.”
“Why what?” Sinclair asked, softening his focus on the woods in an attempt to spot any further movement among the trees.
“Why you betrayed me.”
Betrayed me, Sinclair silently echoed Cabrera’s words. Not El Cambio. Not the cause. But Cabrera himself.
He’d known Cabrera’s vendetta must be personal. But he hadn’t realized just how personal.
“We were comrades. Compadres.” Resentment suffused the terrorist’s soft words. “I entrusted my plans to you, and you betrayed me.”
“You murdered Luis Grijalva. You stood on the most sacred site of Sanselmo history and took him down like a rabid dog.”
Cabrera spat out an obscenity in Spanish before he regained his composure. “He was no rabid dog,” he resumed in English. “He was a mouse. A gutless, scared little mouse who lacked the machismo to do what the revolution required.”
