by Paula Graves
“For dinner.” She slanted a look at him and smiled. “And for getting down on the floor with me, even though you knew you might have trouble getting back up.”
“Not one of my finer moments.” He focused his attention on unwrapping his hamburger.
“On the contrary.”
He glanced up at her. “You like your men gimpy and stupid?”
She sighed. “Is that really how you see yourself?”
He shook his head. “I still think of myself as unimpaired. Maybe that’s my problem. I’m not being realistic.”
She had a feeling his problem was actually the opposite. She’d seen him move when they were in a hurry. He’d been limping along at first, while pushing her chair, but he’d had no trouble running through the tunnel once they realized there were people coming up fast behind them. And while they’d been rushing around preparing to leave Gossamer Ridge, he’d shown little sign of his injury at all, his limp almost imperceptible.
She supposed it was a realization he was going to have to come to on his own, however. As long as he felt crippled, he was.
In the meantime, she’d come to a realization of her own, one she was pretty sure Wade wasn’t going to want to hear. She wasn’t especially happy about the decision she’d made herself, given how easily she slipped into her weird flashback states.
But every second that passed put her parents in graver danger. She didn’t have time to recover before she put her neck on the line for them.
“There’s something I’ve decided,” she said aloud.
Wade’s wary expression made her stomach knot. “What is it?”
“Well, for one thing, I think we stick around here another night.”
His eyes narrowed. “Not a good idea.”
“Maybe not, but it’s my best chance to remember what happened the night my parents and I were taken.” She folded the wrapper over her half-eaten hamburger, her gut rolling too much to consider eating anything more. “I’ve already remembered more since we’ve been here than I did back in Gossamer Ridge. I think I can remember more.”
“The triggers are too dangerous. We know there’s at least one S.S.U. thug out there looking for you.”
“It can’t be helped.”
Wade’s lips pressed to a thin line before he spoke. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
She swallowed her reluctance and blurted out her plan. “Tomorrow night, we’re going inside my family’s vacation cabin.”
Chapter Nine
“This is the craziest damned idea you’ve come up with yet,” Wade breathed, keeping his gaze pinned to the moonlit cabin thirty yards ahead.
“Duly noted, for the hundredth time,” Annie murmured back, shooting him a weary look. She hadn’t wanted to hear his objections, batting them all away with the stubborn determination of a single-minded soldier on a dangerous but necessary mission.
She needed to do this. And as much as he hated it, he had to let her. Her family was in danger, and he knew if the situation were reversed, he’d crawl through a swamp full of hungry alligators to help his own family.
“There’s no movement anywhere around the cabin,” she whispered as the silence of the woods stretched around them. Even the animals and birds were quiet, as if aware of intruders in their peaceful midst.
“There could be people stationed inside.”
She shook her head. “The authorities released the cabin as a crime scene over a week ago. I read it in the articles online.”
With little else to do but hole up in the motel room and wait for nightfall, Annie had spent a large portion of the day on Wade’s laptop, combing the internet for news articles about her family’s disappearance. She’d hoped it might spark more memories, but all it had seemed to do was make her angrier and more determined than ever to get to the bottom of what had happened to them here in this secluded mountain cabin nearly four weeks ago.
“I wasn’t talking about the cops,” Wade said flatly.
She glanced at him, her eyes gleaming in the pale moonlight seeping through the thinning trees overhead. The warmer weather of early September was starting to give way to cooler temperatures as the month progressed, especially here in the north Georgia mountains, dropping the temperatures into the low sixties at night. Fall was coming, and winter not far behind.
Wade prayed it wouldn’t take that long to find Annie’s family. Based on what she’d shared of her time in captivity, the conditions had been primitive at best. If the temperature dropped below freezing—
“Let’s just do it,” Annie said, tugging on the sleeve of his denim jacket. “There’s nobody in there, but if we wait around much longer—”
“Okay.” She was right. Every minute they waited could be a minute wasted. Wade didn’t see any obvious signs that there were people hiding inside the cabin. But just because they weren’t there at the moment didn’t mean they wouldn’t show up sooner or later. If they were looking for Annie, the cabin would be an obvious place to look.
“I don’t know if you know much about moving with stealth,” Wade murmured, “but if you do, use it.” He struck out ahead of her, painfully conscious of his bad knee. It wasn’t hurting at the moment, despite the trek up the mountain from where he’d hidden the truck. But it still didn’t feel right. It felt unreliable, as if it might turn on him in an instant.
He tried to drive that thought from his mind as he edged forward through the trees, coming ever closer to the narrow clearing around the cabin. When the trees thinned out to nothing, he paused and turned to look at Annie. “Still not too late to turn back.”
The glare she sent his way would have knocked over a less sturdy man. He took a deep breath and started to step out into the clearing when an obvious question, one he should have asked before he stepped foot out of the motel room, occurred to him. “Do you have a key?”
Annie shook her head. “But I know where to find one.”
* * *
ANNIE AND HER PARENTS had all kept keys to the cabin on their key rings. It wasn’t a rental place, like so many cabins in the area, but property her father had bought by saving money over the years so that the family would have a place of refuge from the pressures of his demanding job. He’d wanted any of them to be able to escape there at any time, without worrying about whether the property was otherwise occupied. They used it enough that it was worth the upkeep, whether it was a weekend trip for her and her mother or, when Annie had been a little younger, a fun getaway for her and her college friends.
Even though they all had keys, her father had hidden a spare near the cabin, not in any of the obvious places, like under a window sill or in a flowerpot, but tucked into the knothole of a tree stump about ten yards east of the house. A tornado had taken the top of the tree down years ago, but the trunk was solid and had withstood hundreds of storms since.
Praying no creepy, crawly creature had made its home in the knothole since the last time she’d had to use the hidden key, Annie stuck her finger inside and felt the cool metal of the small key box that protected the key from the elements.
Time and moisture had made the little box rust, but it creaked open and revealed the key.
“Clever,” Wade murmured over her shoulder.
“You realize now that I’ve shown you the secret hiding place, I have to kill you.”
He grinned at her, though his cheek twitched a bit. He didn’t like being out in the open so long.
Neither did she.
They hurried up the front porch of the cabin and used the key on the lock. The door made a low creaking noise that sent her heart racing double time. She closed the door behind them, and they paused in the middle of the entranceway, listening with hushed anxiety for any noise that might reveal they were not alone.
After a moment, Wade broke the silence with a soft snick of his flashlight. What Annie saw in the narrow beam of light playing across the cabin’s front room made her gasp.
The place had been turned upside down. Cabinet drawers opene
d, furniture cushions upended. A film of fingerprint powder lay across every available surface. It hadn’t been like this when the men had taken her and her parents out of here.
She gave a small start at the unexpected memory.
“What?” Wade whispered.
“I remember looking back at this room as they were dragging me out of here, and it looked so normal at the time. They’d come in fast, overpowered us. We didn’t even have time to fight, so we didn’t cause much of a mess.”
She felt Wade’s hand close over her shoulder. “You remember it?” he asked. “Not a flashback?”
Despite the creeping sensation of danger closing in on all sides, she couldn’t hold back a smile. “I remember it. Just that one moment, looking back at the cabin and wondering if anyone would ever know what happened to us.”
The hand on her shoulder squeezed lightly. “I guess the mess came from the police.”
Clearly.
“Be careful not to disturb anything,” Wade added.
Annie wasn’t sure how they were supposed to navigate this mess without moving anything, but she couldn’t argue with him.
“What do you hope to find here?” Wade asked quietly as they moved deeper into the cabin, navigating by the beam of his flashlight.
“Answers,” she replied, knowing she was being frustratingly vague.
Where had she been when the intruders struck? She thought back to all the times she and her parents had come to stay here. When it had been just her and her mom, they’d spent a lot of time outside on the porch, rocking in the twin pine rockers and catching up on their lives apart. When her dad was around, they often gathered in the kitchen to prepare meals together, since her father was a frustrated chef at heart. Or if her mother was napping or doing something elsewhere, sometimes Annie and her father retired into his small study, where he kept his vacation books, as he called them.
She gravitated there, drawn by happy memories of her father’s favorite place in the cabin. His job had taken up so much of his time that the simple freedom to sit in the big leather armchair in the corner and read a good novel or one of the biographies he loved to devour was a rare luxury.
She could picture him there, one leg crossed over the other, his black horn-rimmed reading glasses perched low on his nose as he read. The chair was now dusty with fingerprint powder. The chair opposite, a smaller armchair with rust-colored canvas upholstery, had been left undusted, probably since the nubby fabric wasn’t likely to take prints.
“You want to stick around here a little while?” Wade asked, his quiet voice making her whole body jerk.
“Yeah. Is that okay?”
“Sure. But I think I’ll go look around the rest of the cabin.” He held out his flashlight to her.
“Won’t you need it?”
“I have a spare.” He pulled another flashlight from his pocket, a smaller penlight, and flicked it on. The beam was less powerful, but she supposed it would serve his purposes.
She took the flashlight he offered, realizing only after he left that he probably understood her reluctance to stay in a dark place alone. He could have left her the smaller light, given that she was about to sit still in a room while he was wandering about, but he knew she’d feel better with the stronger source of light to drive away the shadows around her.
A good man, Wade Cooper.
She double-checked the rust armchair to be sure that it was powder-free and sat, staring at the leather chair that sat opposite. She pictured her father there, saw his dark eyes flicker up to meet hers.
Finished with the hen party? he had teased her the last time she’d sat across from him in this chair. His voice was a low, drawling rumble in her mind, clear and fresh in her memory.
It had happened the day she’d arrived at the Chattanooga airport, she realized. He and her mother had picked her up and conveyed her back here in her father’s big, silver Ford Expedition, her mother chatting happily for the entire hour’s drive.
It had been a long time since they’d had time to chat, she remembered, because she’d been working hard on that lead about the Barton Reid case. There were rumors, bordering on educated guesses, that despite how high Barton Reid had ranked at the State Department, people even higher ranked than he were probably involved in the conspiracy to manipulate global events to suit their purposes.
The deeper she’d investigated, the more she’d hit walls. Her parents’ invitation to join them for a week’s vacation in the mountains had come at the perfect time. She’d been happy to put D.C. and her investigation on the back burner for a little while, hoping the time and distance might give her a new perspective on the case.
Instead, it had turned her world upside down.
She remembered, she realized. She remembered spotting her parents at the airport and waving them over. Her father had insisted on carrying her suitcase, while her mother had hooked her arm through Annie’s and started her usual gentle interrogation about Annie’s love life.
Which had been, for most of the last year, pretty arid.
After a while, she and her mother had exhausted the usual topics of conversation, and while Cathy had gone to take a shower before bedtime, she’d come here to the study to spend a little time with her father.
He hadn’t been reading a book this time, she remembered. Instead, he’d been sitting here, staring out the window, his hands steepled under his chin.
She’d smiled at his joke about the hen party, knowing that he adored her mother precisely because of her gentle, social spirit, a fine foil for his own quiet, reserved personality. But his return smile had faded quickly, and she remembered a twisting sensation in her gut, as if she knew he had something deadly serious to tell her.
She’d been afraid he was going to tell her that he or her mother was ill. Cancer, maybe. Or, given their advancing ages, perhaps the early onset of Alzheimer’s. She’d sat across from him, bracing herself for whatever had put that grim expression on his usually placid face.
“I have to go to Nightshade Island later this week, to see Lydia.”
Nightshade Island didn’t ring any bells for her, but the name Lydia did. Lydia Ross was the widow of one of her father’s oldest, closest friends. General Edward Ross had been, along with her father and Marine Corps General Baxter Marsh, the three generals heading up the peacekeeping mission in Kaziristan. Following the al Adar uprising in that country that had begun with a siege on the U.S. and British embassies in the capital city of Tablis, the three generals had mapped out a strategy to support the Kaziri government in reestablishing and maintaining order in the volatile country.
The mission was still ongoing, especially as Kaziristan prepared for their first democratic election since the siege, but all three of the generals had been relieved of duty a year earlier with the changing of the guard at the Department of Defense.
At the age of sixty-seven, her father had decided to take retirement, a choice that had surprised her at the time, given how much he’d loved his Air Force career. But as he continued telling her about his plans for the next week, his decision made a horrible sort of sense.
“I believe Edward was murdered to keep him from sharing the evidence we were gathering against Barton Reid and our suspicions about a higher-reaching conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy to do what?” she’d asked, her gut twisting as she realized that the death of one of them made the death of all three of them the obvious goal of whoever had killed General Ross.
Was her father in danger as well? Was General Marsh?
“We’re not sure,” her father admitted. “We only know who we think may be involved and some of the activities they’ve been involved in. Edward wrote all of it down in a journal, including the evidence that the three of us found independently. I need to protect that journal.”
“What if the people who killed him took it?”
“I’ve spoken to his wife. There’ve been no breaches on the island, so it should be safe for now. Besides, I’m fairly sure the peopl
e who arranged his car crash don’t know about the journal, or they’d never have killed him.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” she’d admitted.
“The information was written in a complex code Edward created while we were still in Kaziristan. We didn’t want to risk the kind of internal leaks that compromised so many other missions. “ Her father had shot her an apologetic look. “No offense, darling, but the press can be vultures, and there are too many young soldiers holding grudges or radical ideas about war and freedom to be entrusted with high-level communications in a war zone. You remember what happened with those data leaks—”
She remembered. “You know I didn’t agree with that.”
“Of course I know that. You’re my daughter.” He smiled with pride. “You understand the importance of operational secrecy. You know people die if the wrong people learn the wrong information.”
It had always been a difficult balance, choosing between the natural desire for absolute transparency and the necessary secrecy involved in combat, a fine line she’d walked her entire career. “So General Ross created a code?”
“A tri-layered code. Each of us possess a piece. The journal can’t be decoded without all three parts.”
“And now General Ross has died, and with him part of the code?”
“No. Each of us agreed to entrust the code to someone else, in case anything happened to us.”
She’d felt a flutter of fear, realizing just how much danger he must be in to tell her even this much of his secret. “You’re afraid something’s going to happen to you, just like it happened to General Ross.”
He’d reached across the space between them and caught her hand. “I’m going to do all I can to avoid that possibility. But the problem is, I haven’t yet entrusted the code to anyone else.”
She looked at him, seeing in his eyes why he’d really asked her to join them here at the cabin. “Dad—”
He’d squeezed her hand. “I trust you. I know you will protect it with your life.”
She’d listened in fearful silence as he’d explained the parameters of his layer of the code. It was deceptively simple, and with a few repetitions, she was able to commit the code to memory.
