“There ’s never been a traitor in the Secret Service. Never.”
“So this is something new. Get your mind around it. I’m telling the truth.”
“I’m not saying you’re not. I’m just saying that maybe you’re mistaken. If one of those guys tried to kill you in the hospital, the reason would have to be to perpetuate some kind of cover-up of the First Lady’s death, which means they would have to be involved in that. I don’t buy it. I can’t.”
To Jess’s ears, it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“There ’s something else,” she said. “After the crash, those people I told you about who went rushing down past me with flashlights? The ones who surrounded the car and either set it on fire or watched it burn?”
“Yeah?”
“I think they were Secret Service agents, too.”
Dead silence greeted that. Jess looked at him, trying to read his expression in the shifting darkness. All she could see was his profile, and all of a sudden it looked like it had been carved from stone.
“Why would you think—?”
Jess jumped as the “William Tell Overture” blared out of nowhere, interrupting. It took her a moment—and the sight of him digging his cell phone out of his pants pocket—to realize that it was his ringtone. It seemed to her that after looking at the caller ID he hesitated for a moment before he flipped the thing open and pressed the connect button.
“Yeah?” he said into the phone.
“You got your problem fixed yet?” The voice on the other end belonged to a man. It was faint and crackly and unknown to her, but Jess could hear every word.
“Taken care of.”
“You found her?”
“Yeah.”
“She with you now?”
“Yeah.”
Jess didn’t need the glance Ryan slanted at her to realize that she was the topic of conversation. She stiffened, watching him intently. From the brevity of his responses, Jess gathered that he didn’t realize she could hear both sides of the conversation.
The voice continued. “She’s been talking. To a reporter.”
Jess went cold with horror. How could anyone know that?
“I don’t think so,” Ryan replied. They were nosing into a sharp curve, and Ryan tapped the brakes, slowing the car. Now she could almost see the individual trunks of the tall pines as they whipped past the window. Pale gray moonlight filtered in through the windshield, dappling the interior of the car. The changing light made him look like a stranger.
“It ’s true. He ’s on his way to meet with her now.”
The look Ryan directed at Jess was sharp.
“What?”
“Yep. There’s more going on here than you know. It stinks, but we’ve got to take care of this.”
“I am taking care of it.”
There was a stop sign at the bottom of the curve. She remembered it now: Stop at that sign, cross an intersection, and then they were on the road that led to I-95 and the 7-Eleven.
The voice crackled again. “She can’t talk to any reporters.”
Another glance came her way from Ryan, this one unmistakably grim. “She won’t. You have my word.”
Jess thought she heard a sigh through the phone. “I’m afraid that ’s not good enough anymore. Why don’t you go on and take her back to your house? I’ll meet you there.”
“How do you know I’m not at my house?” Ryan’s voice suddenly had an edge to it.
There was the briefest of pauses. “I think you know the answer to that. You’ve always been a team player, Ryan. We appreciate it, too. Don’t think we don’t. And we ’ll remember this.”
Jess watched Ryan’s hand tighten on the phone.
“You have anything to do with what happened to Davenport and his secretary?” His tone had an ugly undernote now.
Jess couldn’t help it. Her eyes widened on his face. She could feel her heart slamming against her rib cage. Her palms turned clammy and she wiped them on her skirt in response. They were almost at the stop sign, she saw out of the corner of her eye. The RAV4 was slowing down.
“No. Hell, no. Look, just bring the woman back to your house. I’ll meet you there, and we ’ll talk this out.”
Ryan glanced her way once more. His face was in shadow again, and she couldn’t read his expression at all.
Oh, God, please let me be able to trust him.
She was suddenly terrified that she ’d made a mistake, that she couldn’t, that she’d let her attraction to him cloud her judgment. Her mouth went dry at the thought.
“Yeah, okay.” The ugliness was gone. He sounded perfectly normal again. “As long as we ’re both clear that talking is all we ’re going to do.”
Jess took a deep breath. Her stomach plummeted clear down to her toes. She wasn’t letting him take her back to his house. No way in hell. She would be killed. She was as certain of that as she was that the sun would come up in about forty-five minutes.
And Ryan was in on it. That thought was almost more horrifying than anything else.
“Absolutely.” The man sounded relieved. “It’ll take me maybe half an hour to get there.”
“All right.”
“Keep her with you. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
Ryan wasn’t looking at her now, but the new tension she could feel emanating from him in waves spoke volumes. “You got it.”
His answer struck fear into her soul. There was absolutely no emotion in his voice at all. Coupled with the suddenly fraught atmosphere in the car, that told her everything she needed to know. Swallowing, she pulled her gaze away from him to their surroundings with real effort. A four-way stop. A small slope leading to a strip of tall grass like the one she had just hidden in, leading to a strip of woods. The woods couldn’t be very deep because of the road cutting through them that intersected this one in a T. Pass through the intersection, and you were on the road leading to the 7-Eleven. Solomon was waiting there, or would be soon. If she could just get to the 7-Eleven . . .
All that went through her mind in a flash as Ryan disconnected. At the same time, the RAV4 rocked to a halt at the stop sign—and she grabbed the door handle and shoved the door open.
“Jess!” Ryan grabbed at her and missed.
“Leave me alone!”
“Damn it to hell, Jess!”
This time his grab caught the tail end of her jacket. She just managed to yank it free as she catapulted from the car.
Her feet in the cursed high heels struck the gravel shoulder hard. She staggered and almost fell, barely managing to catch herself before she hit her knees. One shoe came loose, and she kicked it off, then kicked off the other to match and went plunging barefoot down the slope. Darkness immediately cloaked her, but she knew that wasn’t going to be enough. Behind her the RAV4’s interior light glowed yellow, lighting her path at the same time as it ruthlessly exposed her. Gravel cut into her soles. The straw-like grass was slippery underfoot and whipped around her legs. Her heart raced and adrenaline surged through her like rocket fuel as she launched herself through the waist-high grass, stumbling frantically toward the woods. Her legs felt as heavy as if she were wearing concrete boots, and she knew escaping from him was going to be all but impossible—but she had to try. The tone of the conversation had made it perfectly clear—Ryan was one of them after all. Maybe reluctantly, maybe halfheartedly, but still a team player just as the other man had said.
The hard truth was, she was a danger to them. A danger that could only be fully eliminated by her death.
Ryan had agreed to bring her back to his house. Even as she reeled at the knowledge that he was involved, that she was just as foolish as she had suspected, Jess shuddered at the thought of what they might be planning to do to her. An accident—would they want to make it look like an accident, like Marian’s death? Or a suicide like Davenport? Or would they . . .
There was the smallest of sounds behind her, a funny little metallic click. It was such an insignificant sound that she didn’t know what made her glance over her shoulder in an attempt to identify it.
But she did, and was just in time to watch as the RAV4 exploded with a hollow-sounding boom accompanied by a fireball the size of a house.
21
J
ess whirled to face the explosion, both hands flying to cover her open mouth. For a moment she just stood there, dumbfounded, as a whoosh of heat blasted past her and a geyser of debris shot skyward. A split second later, car parts rattled down on the road and the area surrounding it, although none reached as far as where she stood frozen in the tall grass perhaps thirty feet away. The blaze completely engulfed the RAV4, lighting up the night like a giant bonfire. Black smoke billowed toward the sky. The smell of burning hit her, bringing back instant hideous memories of another burning car. . . .
“Mark!” she screamed, as the past was wiped out by a rush of brand-new horror. “Mark!”
He had been in that car.
Moving like she had never believed she would be able to move again, she raced toward it, adrenaline giving her dicey legs a strength and purpose that carried her back through the grass toward the car faster than she had run away from it. Heart thundering, pulse pounding, gasping with emotion, she watched the flames devouring the vehicle and knew already that there was nothing she could do, no help she could give.
Too late, too late, too late—
the thought beat through her mind like the desperate pounding of a drum.
Scrambling up the slope, feeling the heat as intense as a furnace on her face and exposed skin, she heard the crackling of the fire, smelled burning rubber and gasoline and she refused to think what else, and saw that the asphalt on which the vehicle sat was already melting and bubbling from the intense heat of the flames.
Then she was on the road, running around the front of the RAV4 to the driver’s side, her eyes stinging, her throat aching, knowing it was useless but . . .
Even as she tried to absorb the reality of the total conflagration that made any attempt at rescue both impossible and pointless, she spotted him. Her heart gave a great leap.
He wasn’t in the car. He lay sprawled on his stomach on the pavement on the opposite side of the road. The leaping flames that lit up the night bathed him in a flickering orange glow so that the dark bulk of him was just visible against the glittering blacktop.
Oh, God, thank God, he’d been thrown clear.
“Mark!” She flew toward him.
Is he hurt? Is he dead?
“Mark!”
Dropping to her knees beside him, she ran her eyes over him, put her hands on his shoulders, and felt the solid, intact strength of them, slid her hand to the center of his back to see if she could detect the rise and fall of his rib cage that would indicate he was still breathing, checking the extent of his injuries as best she could by the uncertain light of the blazing fire behind them.
Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .
He groaned and rolled over, then sat up, blinking at her.
“Mark!”
Throwing her arms around him, she hugged him, pressed her face to his, kissed his warm, bristly cheek a couple of times, so glad he wasn’t dead that she completely forgot everything else. One hard arm came around her, and she felt him clumsily patting her back. That brought her back to reality a little, and she let go of him, sinking back on her haunches to frown at him, her freezing toes curling into the rough pavement. He quit patting her, but his arm still curved loosely around her waist, casually intimate.
He was looking past her at the burning car, his expression as astounded as hers must have been moments earlier.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Are you hurt?” Her voice was sharp.
He frowned, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. A little dazed, maybe. Jesus Christ, if you hadn’t gone jumping out of the car like an idiot and I hadn’t gotten out to go chasing after you, we’d both be toast right now.”
That brought everything rushing back in a reorienting burst of memory.
He was going to take me back to his house to be killed.
Her widening eyes met his narrowing ones for a pregnant instant of shared knowledge, and then she pushed his arm aside and surged to her feet.
Lunging forward, he grabbed her wrist, his long fingers circling it like a manacle.
“Oh, no you don’t.”
She did her best to yank her arm free. “Let me go, you son-of-a . . .”
“What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?” He held on tight. “Are you
trying
to get yourself killed?”
“What, do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m deaf? I
heard
that phone call. I heard that man telling you to take me back to your house, and you agreeing to do it!”
Grimacing, he rolled to his feet without letting go of her wrist. “I was just agreeing with him to buy a little time. Jesus, we don’t have time for this. I’m on your side, okay?”
Your side.
“You need convincing, take a look at my car. That bomb would have gotten me, too.”
Bomb.
That was the first time that exactly what had happened really registered with her. The RAV4 had been blown up with a
bomb.
She stopped struggling to look at the burning husk of what had been his SUV. The fire was consuming the RAV4 at a furious clip. Hot and orange, it popped and crackled and hissed, putting out incinerator-like heat intense enough to shimmer in the air and warm the pavement beneath her feet. If either one of them had been inside, they would have been cremated by now.
“Give me your purse.” Apparently feeling he had convinced her, or else figuring it just didn’t matter because there wasn’t any place she could run to that he couldn’t catch her easily, Mark released her wrist, grabbed her purse off her arm, and opened the small zipper compartment at the side.
“What’re you doing?” His action so completely surprised her that she actually felt indignation, and tried futilely to snatch her purse back without even thinking about attempting to get away.