Authors: Penny McCall
“The parkway winds around a little bit,” he said, taking her meaning, “but it runs pretty much southwest. I figure we keep heading in that direction. We can cut east in the morning and come out on the road where no one could possibly expect us to.”
Aubrey turned that over in her mind a time or two, finally figuring out why she didn’t like that plan—besides the part about spending the rest of the day walking. “Where are we sleeping tonight?”
He gave her a look that wasn’t very encouraging.
“I have a feeling there’s not going to be a bed involved.”
“Read any survival manuals lately?”
“Only the kind that pertain to hoarding canned goods and automatic weapons.”
“That’s not going to help you here.”
Aubrey could have thought of any number of responses to that, but she figured she’d be best off saving her energy for walking. It turned out she was right.
By the time Jack decided to stop for the night, she barely had the energy to breathe, let alone talk, and her longing for a soft, clean bed had morphed into something closer to “any horizontal surface.”
She crawled into the shallow cave Jack found and propped her back against the cool, soft moss-covered wall, in spite of what might be crawling around in the plant life. Her eyes drifted closed, her breathing evened out and the world wafted away on a soft cloud of oblivion. Except for Jack clattering around. And mumbling to himself.
Aubrey opened one eye and saw him crouched over a bundle of sticks, shaking his head and drawing on his vocabulary of four-letter words. She dragged her backpack over, digging through until she found what she wanted by touch. “Here,” she said, holding it up so he could see it when he turned around.
He stared at it, clearly disgusted because she was solving his problems again. So naturally she rubbed it in. “It’s a cigarette lighter. But I think it works on any flammable material.”
He lifted his eyes to hers, layering a no-shit look over the disgruntlement still on his face. “It’s probably wet.”
She flicked it on, and flame shot out. “It’s a little damp in there, but mostly the backpack floated.”
Jack caught the lighter when she flipped it to him, muttering, “Trust you to have a pink lighter.”
Aubrey managed a smile that didn’t even make it to smug before she was dozing off. She woke up a few seconds later to a whoosh of sound and a wave of heat that practically singed off her eyebrows. She sat up, blinking in the bright light, one hand shielding her face. She would have called the look on Jack’s face sheepish if she hadn’t known him better.
“The wood was damp so I gathered a bunch of dry moss to get the fire going. Probably too much.”
“Not if you’re trying to tell the whole countryside we’re here.”
“You mean the rabbits and the squirrels?”
“And the guy with the gun.”
“Trust me, he’s not wandering around in the woods at night looking for us.”
“Yeah,” she said around a yawn. “He’s probably in some nice, warm motel, waiting for us to straggle out of the forest, weak and half starved, so we make easy targets.”
“What nice, warm motel?”
Aubrey shrugged, eyes closed, missing the part where he was still suspicious of her. “I don’t know. He didn’t have any trouble finding us the last time.”
“Must’ve had your work line tapped.”
“Or your boss’s line.” Or Tom’s, Aubrey thought, sitting up again. Who’d’ve known guilt was such a stimulant? She argued with herself for a second; should she tell Jack about her phone call to Tom, or shouldn’t she? Definitely shouldn’t, she decided, at least not until they were in public somewhere and he couldn’t kill her. Besides, she’d stopped seeing Tom regularly months ago, so why would anyone think it worthwhile to tap his phone? And even if he did turn out to be involved in this somehow, what did that have to do with Jack’s problem? “Maybe your boss is the real mole,” she suggested, making the next leap out loud.
“No,” Jack said. Flat, decisive, no room for egghead arguments. “You need to go back through your activities for the weeks before Corona took out the contract on you. Try to remember if anyone you know was acting strange, or if you could have seen something unusual at work or around your neighborhood.”
“My neighborhood?”
“It’s not exactly Georgetown.”
“You’d probably find more illegal substances in Georgetown than you would in my neighborhood,” Aubrey huffed. “Just because the residents don’t have the highest per-capita income doesn’t mean they’re all addicts.”
Jack waited a beat. “Are you done with the social lesson?”
“Funny how you’re more than willing to accuse my friends but you won’t even consider the possibility that someone you know is the mole.” She dug through her backpack, came out with another bottle of water. “Did it ever occur to you that none of my friends would know how to set you up?”
Jack took the bottle from her. “I know it has to be someone at the agency who set me up. And I know it wasn’t Mike.”
Awww, Jack Mitchell had a friend. There was somebody out there who actually liked Jack and he liked that somebody back. He was, in fact, unflinchingly loyal to that friend. One might even say blindly loyal. But Aubrey didn’t have the heart to tease him; it felt like kicking a puppy. A puppy who was more likely to take off a couple of fingers than lick her hand. “If it’s not your boss, then who else could it be?”
“Got any food in there?” He gestured to her backpack, mostly to turn her brain away from trying to solve that side of the problem. But she was like a dog with a bone—a Chihuahua, a pesky, yappy little creature that didn’t know when to back down from a bigger, meaner dog.
“Why would someone want to make you look like a mole, anyway?”
“To get me off Corona’s case before I could bring him down.”
“How exactly?”
Jack mulled that over for a moment.
“You want me to trust you. Give me a reason.”
“Fine,” he said, giving in to the inevitable. “The bureau was contacted by a woman named Doris, who said she knew something that would blow our case against Corona wide open, so I went to meet her. When I got there she was dead. I was barely there long enough to find her body before I heard the sirens. I took off, but whoever tipped off the cops put Doris’s murder on me. By the time I got back to the office Mike had instructions to detain me.”
“But he let you go instead.”
“He tried to talk me into sitting tight and riding it out. Told me there was a contract out on you and maybe—”
“Maybe Doris and I were in cahoots?”
“Not exactly, but there was no telling who else Doris might have blabbed to before she bought it.”
“Well, Jack, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t know anyone named Doris. And even if I ran into her at the library, or the market, and I didn’t know her name, I’d still remember if some random woman had blurted out something about Pablo Corona. Maybe your friend Mike set us both up.”
“Why? If Mike wanted me in custody, I’d be in custody. And you’d probably be dead.”
“Neither one of us would have enjoyed that.”
“But it would have fit right into Corona’s plans. He wants me off his case and he wants you dead. Because you know something you shouldn’t.”
“And if I don’t? If this is a mistake and I know nothing about Corona?”
Then his gut was wrong, and that would be a first for him. “Corona doesn’t get this kind of thing wrong. You need to try to remember—”
“I’ve been trying,” she snapped.
“Try harder. Hell, that photographic memory isn’t such a big deal after all, is it?”
“It was a big enough deal for the CIA and FBI to try to recruit me right out of college. I turned them both down.”
Jack stopped, the bottle halfway to his mouth, staring at her.
“Surprised?”
“What surprises me is that you said no, what with your love of danger.”
“Yeah, well, all they wanted me to do was sort and file information.”
“So you decided to be a librarian instead. And that’s different from sorting and filing how?”
“Would you want to know all that stuff and not be able to do anything about it?”
“It was an entry-level position.” Jack eyeballed the bottle, drank, measured, until it looked like about half the water was gone, then handed it back to Aubrey. “They would have trained you to connect seemingly unconnected facts and identify trouble spots around the world.”
“Oh.” She took a sip of water. “No one told me that.”
“With your brain you’d probably be running Analysis by now.”
“Maybe you’d be working for me,” she said, grinning.
“No. I wouldn’t working be for you.”
No, Aubrey agreed silently. He wouldn’t be working for her, any more than he was working for her now. She wasn’t even sure he worked for the good guys. She couldn’t let herself feel sorry for him, either, although that wasn’t as easy as it should have been.
She’d seen flashes of humor and even the occasional fleeting snatch of warmth in his eyes, but overall he was a cold, hard man, and no wonder.
He claimed to be with the FBI, but he could be a criminal for all she knew, or maybe he worked for one of Uncle Sam’s ends-justify-the-means shadow groups. Either way, Jack Mitchell had the edge of a man who’d lived on the dark side of society for a long time. For all his bluster, there was a world-weariness about him, a cynicism that said he’d seen it all twice and done most of it himself when the situation called for it. She felt kind of sorry for him—and glad for herself. She’d wondered from time to time where her life might have gone if she’d accepted a job with the government. Now she knew. Even if she hadn’t done fieldwork, she had a feeling she still would have seen too much.
“Food?” Jack reminded her, his growling stomach making it more than a subject-changing ploy.
Her backpack was still in her lap, but Aubrey didn’t bother looking inside it. “The granola bars were it.”
“Then why are you still lugging that thing around? What the hell do you have in there that’s so important?”
“Makeup and . . . stuff. Necessities.”
“Did it ever occur to you that food is a necessity?”
So much for feeling sorry for Jack. “I wasn’t expecting to wind up in the middle of nowhere, but at least we have water.”
“Yippee.”
“At least I managed to hang on to my backpack. I don’t see your duffel anywhere around.”
He patted his shoulder holster. “I have everything I need.”
“How about the first-aid kit?”
“With what we’re up against a first-aid kit is just dead weight, and I make it a point not to carry around dead weight. Usually.”
“I never asked you to carry me, Jack. I never asked you for anything, except to be left alone.”
“You won’t last five minutes without me, and since there’s no telling how long we’ll have to walk tomorrow, you better hope to hell I can carry you because there’s not enough fat on you to make a halfway decent rasher of bacon.”
“And your point would be?”
“You weren’t exactly the Bionic Woman today. I can go another twenty-four hours without food but you probably won’t make it through the night. Maybe we should hike back to Larry’s. It’s not like anyone will expect us to do that.”
“I’m not walking anywhere in the dark and getting lost.”
“All we have to do is head downhill until we hit the river, follow it back to your car—there’s no way we can get that car back up to the road, so wipe that line off your forehead.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Jack said. “We cross the river by the car where it’s shallow and walk uphill until we hit the road, then follow it back to Larry’s.”
“Gosh, Jack, you could have had real success as a cartographer—Oh, wait, it’s not 1492 anymore, they’ve pretty much figured out where everything is. And cartographers don’t get to carry guns and blow stuff up.”
“Here I am concerned for your welfare and there you go insulting me again,” he said, all sullen and indignant.
And here she was, feeling bad. “It’s not the best idea you’ve ever had.”
“You just don’t want to admit I’m not as dumb as you think.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb, Jack. You just lack certain problem-solving skills. Like diplomacy.”
“I’m not paid to be a diplomat.”
“It’s a good thing.” Aubrey buttoned herself into her jacket and lay down on her side, pillowing her head on her backpack and wiggling around until she found a relatively comfortable position.
Jack didn’t take the hint.
“What about your family?” he asked.
“You checked my family out before you invaded the Library of Congress.”
Silence, the kind that had an attitude, and in Jack’s case the attitude was pissed off. Aubrey couldn’t have cared less. She’d been trying to sleep ever since they stopped walking, and maybe he was pissed off enough to leave her alone. Or maybe not.
“Tell me anyway.”
Aubrey exhaled heavily. “I’m an only child, my parents and grandparents are all gone. I have a cousin in Idaho, and I’m distantly related to English royalty.”