Authors: Vicki Hinze
“I’m fine, Major.” His jaw snapped shut. “You are our current concern.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that your coloring—”
“Have a seat.” He cut her off, motioning to the sofa.
He was aware, after all. Sara sat down and allowed herself to be interviewed. The warm glow of the room and homey, comfortable atmosphere had been cleverly designed to put trainees at ease. They made Sara more wary.
Jarrod had warned her that the profile would be extensive and intensive. And it was. Omitting anything about him, she was as truthful as possible—until Dr. Owlsley questioned her about claustrophobia.
“Any symptoms of it?” he asked, his pen poised above her file folder.
The question surprised her. Her claustrophobia had never been documented. Anywhere. But remembering the coffins, she supposed she should have anticipated him asking. If trainees were claustrophobic, and they were going to be detained in the boxes she had seen, then Dr. Owlsley and his staff needed to be prepared for possible claustrophobic reactions. He didn’t know she actually suffered from it, thank God. Yet she had to give him some weakness, or he’d keep digging. So she would give him one—but not an existing, real one he could use against her. She looked him straight in the eye and lied. “No, no claustrophobia, though I did once have a phobia of snakes.” She let out a small laugh to create doubt she was truly over that fear. “A former patient cured me.”
Owlsley smiled and rocked back in his chair. “In our work, that’s often the way of it, isn’t it?”
“On occasion, yes.”
“How did this cure come about?”
“During a PTSD flashback, he locked me in a closet with his pet boa constrictor.”
“Amazing response.”
“Not really.” Sara shrugged, crossed her legs, and let the upper one move in a relaxed swing. “If you spend three hours with a huge, hungry snake, and it doesn’t harm you, you realize your fear is misplaced.”
“And no claustrophobia while locked in the closet?”
“None whatsoever,” she said lightly, praying to God the man believed her.
Owlsley didn’t push, but went on with his questioning, focusing largely, she realized, on subtly getting her to reveal her fears, her deepest secrets and desires—anything and everything that could be used to stimulate intense emotions in her.
Oh, yes. He was digging deeply and, though it wasn’t mentioned in the outline she’d been given of what to expect here, he had every intention of putting her through the noninvasive microwave laser technology segment of this training.
That opened the door to a lot of questions in her mind. She stared past Owlsley’s shoulder, through the window. A blue jay perched on the white-lattice partition. Fontaine and Owlsley had decided to damage her. Judging from the probing nature of the questions, extensively. Foster had gotten her here. Had he been included in making that decision? If so, from what perspective? As Fontaine and Owlsley’s ally, or as the bent-on-bringing-them-down commander of the Shadow Watchers?
Dr. Owlsley concluded his questioning and closed her file. “While this training is an across-the-board military-member requirement, in your occupation it’s highly unlikely you would ever be positioned where what we provide would be necessary to your survival.” He nodded to a single sheet of paper. “For that reason, you’ve been given an outline of what you can expect. Your personal training will naturally deviate in small ways.”
“Why?” Every instinct in her body warned Sara to brace. She forcefully continued to swing her leg, to appear relaxed and at ease.
“To dovetail with your personal profile.” Dr. Owlsley wrinkled his nose, inching his glasses up on its bridge. “Our goal is to maximize the effectiveness of our training to your personal benefit. Obviously, we can’t formulate the best means of doing so until after your personal profile is factored into the equation.”
“I see.” Boy, did she. Maximize terror. Maximize fear. Maximize doubt. Study the habits of the prey, and then exploit them.
The comfortable, cozy room suddenly seemed too small with too little air. “Will that be all, Doctor?”
“Yes, Major.” He spared her a glance. “You may return to your quarters until you’re summoned.”
Sara forced herself to smile at Owlsley, stood up, and then left his office. Deviations? She could bet on them. But how bad would they be? And was she strong enough to withstand them? Those were the questions worrying her.
As she stepped outside, the sun disappeared behind roiling black clouds, dark and swirling, mirroring her inner turmoil, and the air felt sultry, thick and humid and oxygen-free. She rushed down the sidewalk, hurrying to get back to her quarters before the rain started.
Two armed guards approached her on the sidewalk. An eerie feeling slithered up Sara’s spine. Her intuition warned her to hide. She looked for a place, but there was nowhere to go, nothing to duck behind. No cars were parked on the street. No buildings or trees stood nearby. And no one else was on the sidewalk in front of her.
A man approached her from behind. “Major West?”
Startled, she stopped and turned. “Yes?”
“Lieutenant Gordon Kane.” He passed her a blue armband. “You’ve been assigned to the blue team. Wear this around your left upper arm.”
The lieutenant didn’t look her in the eye. He looked past her shoulder at the two men approaching. “Are you finding everything all right?”
“Yes.” She took the band, tied it over her sleeve, instinctively picking up on the danger the two men posed. “Is there anything else, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He offered her a smile tempered in steel. “Stay put.”
The men walked by, so close Sara could smell their skin. Both wore red bands, and both made a point of pretending not to notice her while watching her intently. The senior of the two, a beefy lieutenant, glanced back at her. A dispassionate distance burned in his eyes.
Sara focused on Lieutenant Kane. He blinked hard and fast. “You already know you’re in danger here. Do
not
go back to your quarters. Your portion of this mission has been canceled, Doctor. Colonel Foster deemed the risks too high. He’s ordered you out.”
“Out where?
How?”
Sara whispered urgently. “They’ve got my personal belongings, including my car keys. I can’t just walk out of here.”
“No, ma’am, you can’t. You’d be detained and brought back.” Kane nodded that they should walk. “Backup plans are being initiated, but there are
. . .
complications.” Worry flickered through Kane’s eyes. “You’ve got to hide, Major.”
“Where?”
Kane nodded toward the woods, beyond the large metal building. “Out there.” He glanced back at Sara. “A Shadow Watcher will find and extricate you as soon as possible. Until then, stay out of sight.”
Shadow Watcher.
Kane had to be one of Foster’s men, or he wouldn’t know about Shadow Watchers. “Won’t people from IWPT be looking for me?”
“Yes.” Kane’s expression turned grim. “Don’t let them find you. We can’t protect you.”
Sara’s heart beat hard and fast, and the sultry air suddenly seemed as thick as mud. “How can I tell the difference between IWPT’s men and Foster’s?”
“Foster’s will wear blue bands.”
“Okay.” Sara swept a hand through her hair, looked down at her skirted uniform and black military pumps. “Can I at least go change clothes?”
“Only if you want to be caught and tortured.”
Sara broke into a cold sweat. “I’ll, um, manage as I am.”
“Wise decision.” Kane led her down the sidewalk. “I’ll walk with you as far as I can. Once you enter the woods, you’re on your own. Trust no one unless you hear them use the code word.”
Her heels grated against the concrete sidewalk. “What is the code word?”
Lieutenant Kane slid her a level look. “Red Haze.”
Rain spit down on Sara.
It tapped loudly against the leaves on the trees, splattered in the wet dirt and dead leaves littering the ground, and stung her exposed skin. The heels of her pumps sank into the soft mud for the thousandth time in the past hour. Cold and soaked to the bone, she swiped at the water dripping down her face and trudged deeper and deeper into the woods.
Wandering aimlessly was crazy. She needed a plan. She had no idea whom to trust. No way to identify the good guys from the bad ones, except for a blue band anyone could get and a code word anyone could know. To get out of this, she needed to forget thinking like a woman or a doctor and to think like a Shadow Watcher. Like Jarrod.
Exactly. Exactly.
Spotting an oak with a huge trunk, she paused, leaned against its rough bark, and removed her shoes. She slammed the pumps against the tree trunk until the heels cracked off, then put the flats back on her feet. A good distance away, she buried the heels and then walked on, leaving false trails, backtracking, and taking off in different directions to confuse anyone pursuing her.
What else would Jarrod do?
He’d have a clue which direction was south. The main highway, leading to IWPT, lay south. But Sara was navigationally challenged. The downpour blocked the sun, and without it she was screwed. Even at home she had to hang a painting of fish on the south wall so she could keep her directions straight.
Wait. Wait.
She studied the trees. There’d been a hurricane in northwest Florida—actually two of them—a few years ago. The winds had come from
the south, from the gulf. She studied the bent trees, the direction those that had snapped and cracked had fallen on the ground. South became evident.
She headed in that direction. Leaves crackled behind her. Someone had found her.
Sara stumbled into a gully, half-running, half-sliding, rolling and then crawling on her belly through the mud, deep into a clump of palmettos.
I’d be getting rid of those palmettos, Dr. West. The durn things ain’t good for nothing but rat nests.
Hearing her yard man’s voice in her head, Sara shuddered, and recalled that Jarrod had been placed in an actual rat trap and had suffered multiple bites. If he could stand that, then, by God, she could stand this.
The footsteps came closer. More than one person. Two. At least two. Smearing more mud on her forearms and her face, she peeked out from between the thick leaves. The beefy lieutenant and sergeant she had seen on the sidewalk were tracking her. She hadn’t had time to cover the evidence of her descent down the wall of the gully. From their angle above it, could they see her tracks?
Scarcely daring to draw breath, Sara watched them, not daring to so much as blink.
The beefy lieutenant looked down at an instrument attached to his watch. “She can’t be far. Head north.”
The men walked on.
Had the gully given them a false reading? Something must have. But how had they found her so quickly? How were they tracking her? From watching Jarrod, she had learned to camouflage her movements.
Her gaze slid down to the blue band Lieutenant Kane had given her. She took it off, examined its deep folds, and found a device the size of a button. Lieutenant Kane, the son of a bitch, was a red team member. An enemy.
But how had he known about Shadow Watchers and Operation Red Haze?
Only one answer seemed possible. Foster.
Sara crawled on her belly through the mud and out from under the bushes, grateful that the rats had taken refuge from the storm elsewhere. Thunder rumbled through the trees, and a deep sense of betrayal rumbled through Sara. She’d been crossed. And double-crossed.
The door to Jarrod’s
Isolation room buzzed.
Knowing the news couldn’t be good, Jarrod watched Shank barrel into his room. She didn’t look merely worried. The imperturbable woman looked frantic.
“Something’s gone wrong,” she said. “I can’t get Foster. I called Donald O’Shea, and he has no idea where Foster is.”
If Foster’s assistant didn’t know where to find him, no one did. That worried Jarrod. “When was his last official sighting?”
“On his way to recruit Sara. Captain Grant and Lieutenant Kane met his flight when he arrived at Eglin from the Pentagon. That’s been verified. O’Shea says Foster called in once after that and said he would be concluding Operation Red Haze shortly.”
“What did Operations say about that?”