01 A Cold Dark Place (33 page)
T
he sound of a siren wailed in the distance. The cavalry were finally coming.
“To plug certain holes in FBI security.”
He nodded. “Are you going to accept the position?” Frazer asked him.
“Work for the feebs?”
Alex eyed the gun in Frazer’s hand. His lips twitched. “Sure, if Mallory can stand having me around.”
She
turned the man toward her and took his face in her hands and kissed him. Parker still kept one eye on him though. Smart man. Frazer figured he had their silence.
He looked at the senator.
“You will step down due to ill health. You will hand over to me every piece of information you have on The Gateway Project and you will never interfere with law enforcement policy again or you will be arrested for conspiracy to commit murder.”
Her eyes drifted to the woodpile.
“I’m done. I just want to bury my baby. You don’t need to worry about me any longer.”
Hanrahan stood looking at him like he
’d won the lottery. Frazer pointed his finger at the man. He felt sickened by his betrayal.
“
You just retired. You can go on your book tours and your fucking media circus but if you ever mention this, if you even hint at vigilante justice or corruption in the BAU, I will put a bullet in you myself. Now get your gun, and go with the senator to look for that missing girl. You weren’t here when Chance died. You know nothing about what happened. You went searching for the girl as soon as you heard she was out here. Go.”
They stumbled away.
He faced Mallory Rooney. What did he say to a woman who’d known something was going on from the moment she’d seen her first dead serial killer? A woman who’d been hunted by a madman, betrayed by her family, her lover, her boss? And had survived to prove she was a better person than all of them.
Judging from the way she clung to Parker
’s hand, she’d managed to forgive him. Frazer had just executed a man in front of her in cold blood. Would she forgive him too? Or had he gone too far?
“
Special Agent Rooney.”
“
Yes, sir?” She stood straighter, bracing her shoulders, a defiant expression on her gamine face.
“
Welcome to the team.”
She
smiled at him, a sunburst of hope and thankfulness. He figured he had his answer.
M
allory stuffed her hands deep in the pockets of her new down winter jacket and stood at the top of the hill, looking down the track that led through the woods to her childhood home. The sun was rising to the east and she thought of her twin who’d been nearby for so many years, but oh so far away. One day she might be able to forgive herself for not finding her sooner, but not yet. Not yet.
She started walking
down the hill toward the crime scene tape that surrounded the pit, wanting this to be over, needing this to be over.
Newly promoted
ASAC Frazer had shut her and Alex out of the investigation and she was grateful. She was grateful to Lincoln Frazer for many things.
Deputy Sean Kennedy had been found
alive inside the pit. Weak from dehydration and hypothermia, he’d survived his ordeal and was recovering in the hospital being praised for being the first to solve the case even though it had almost cost him his life. Amanda Collie—the young waitress—had managed to make her way to Eastborne and had called the cops. She was shaken up but Leo Chance hadn’t sexually assaulted her. He probably hadn’t had time. The town was aghast. The sheriff had been to see Mallory three times and every time he looked more distressed.
Hard to
cope with the fact you’d been fooled so completely when you were supposed to be in charge of keeping the town safe. She knew he wouldn’t run for office again. She’d seen it in his eyes. Leo Chance’s crimes had destroyed many lives. Not only his victims and their families, but his remaining family who bore the brunt of the shame.
Bryce Keeble had spent
many hours keeping her company during her vigil. They didn’t talk but they understood one another implicitly.
The buzz of a generator grew louder
, industrial lights spilling over the area where the woodpile had once stood. The feds had relocated the whole thing a few hundred yards west, carefully examining each piece of wood for possible evidence. Yesterday, they’d used ground penetrating radar to target the most likely resting place for Payton’s remains. Today they’d start digging.
The snow had melted
again and Mallory trudged through the dark mud to resume her place on the sidelines. The only reason she went home was to sleep. Finding her lost twin was all she could think about right now. Alex took care of everything else, from procuring clothes suitable for standing in the winter woods all day long, to bringing her food, to making sure no evidence could rebound on them and destroy the bargain Frazer had so cleverly put together. He even dealt with her mother, who now deferred to him about everything from what to tell the press to how much caffeine to drink. Sublime to the ridiculous.
She arrived at the clearing
and noted they’d already begun excavating. The crime scene technicians shot her a glance. Her mouth went dry. They’d told her they wouldn’t begin until noon and it was only dawn. They’d lied. They’d probably started as soon as she’d left around midnight. Part of her was furious but she understood them. She made them uncomfortable but she couldn’t stay away.
She felt Alex’s presence before she saw him. She still hadn’t told him about the baby but they were entering new territory now.
She wanted to navigate it carefully. Her feelings went deeper than she’d believed possible. Knowing someone would kill for you, would give up their life for you, was sobering. It put their passion in a different light. Made it deeper, brighter, bolder, stronger.
She didn’t think he was a monster, just a man who’d gone off course while suffering the terrible
effects of guilt and PTSD. She knew there could still be fallout. Knew they may never be completely safe from the shadowy figures who’d helped her mother set up this terrifying organization. But Alex said he’d arranged certain safeguards for their protection, and whoever ran the thing must know he was not the sort of man to take on unless they were willing to die for the cause. Given they all had so much to lose should the conspiracy come to light, she figured they were safe, for now.
He handed her a cup of steaming coffee in a travel mug.
“Promise you’ll never lie to me again,” she said quietly. By tacit agreement the five of them had agreed not to talk about what happened in the woods that day, but this was about the future not the past. “Not even for my own good.”
“You have my word.”
He kissed her temple, his lips warm and soft.
She caught his hand in hers.
It was time to come clean. “Do you remember, before everything went to hell, that I called you and told you I needed to talk?”
His eyes crinkled infinitesimally at the edges. “I remember.”
Although he’d obviously forgotten in the ensuing chaos.
“I figured out why I felt so nauseous.” She watched his skin pale, his gray eyes widen.
“You’re...?” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He dragged a big hand down his face. “You’re pregnant? That whole time you went after Leo Chance, you were pregnant and you knew it?”
“Are you angry?”
He looked at the sky. “Fuck. Yes! At myself. At you.” He squeezed his eyes shut and gathered her close. “Are you sure?”
“A
s a dime store pregnancy test and one missed period.”
“Pretty sure then,” he mumbled into her hair
as he held her closer.
She gave a soft laugh
, clinging to his shoulders. “Think you can cope?”
He drew back and looked her in the eye.
“You’re my one shot at a normal life, Mal, which doesn’t sound flattering unless you know how fucked up I am. If you can trust someone like me to look after a child—”
“I’m not worried about you hurting our baby, Alex. But I am worried you might do something stupid with some archaic notion of protecting us.
I don’t want any secrets between us. I want a fresh start—”
“You want that first date we never went on?”
She
touched his face. “Yes. But only after we lay Payton to rest.”
He nodded soberly, but there was a
light in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. She wanted to give him hope for the future. She wanted to give him all the joy he’d missed over the years. She turned around in his arms and watched a group of feds return blurry-eyed to the scene. They looked at her and then went down the pit. They were cataloguing evidence. DNA. Trace. Diaries, photographs, and notebooks that probably belonged to Payton. She wanted so badly to look at the documents and see what they said but it wasn’t possible until they’d been processed. She knew that. That was her job too. It didn’t make the wait any easier.
The
technician bent over the excavation site nearest to them, looked up and called over one of the other techs. “I’ve got something.”
She froze. “Do you think i
t’s her?” she whispered.
Alex’s hands squeezed her shoulder
, fingers digging in. “Yes. I think it’s her.”
Moisture gathered in her eyes. The long ago sound of Payton’s laughter flitted at the edge of her mind. She rested her hand
over his. Determined to wait it out, determined to show her sister the love and respect that had never stopped, no matter how many days and years they’d been apart. “I think it’s her too.” She squeezed his hand. “It’s almost over.”
Alex slid both hands
over her stomach and she leaned back against him. Something fluttered inside her. The sun started to rise over the tree tops, filling the dawn with dramatic reds and pinks. She smiled through her tears. It seemed somehow right that Payton would finally see the sunrise again. “Just keep holding me, Alex,” she whispered.
He squeezed her
tight, and his warmth engulfed her. “I’m never letting go, Mallory. I’ll never let you go.”
Read the start of Chapter One of Toni Anderson’s Romantic Spy
Thriller...
©Toni Anderson
I
t looked and felt like the dominion of Gods.
Special Air Service trooper Ty Dempsey had been catapulted from a rural English market town into the heart of a colossal mountain range full of pristine snow-capped peaks which glowed against a glassy blue sky. Many of the summits in the Hindu Kush were over five miles high. The utter peace and tranquility of this region was an illusion that hid death, danger and uncertainty beneath every elegant precipice. No place on earth was more treacherous or more beautiful than the high mountains.
He was an anomaly here.
Life was an anomaly here.
Thin sharp needles pierced his lungs every time he took a breath. But his prey was as hampered by the landscape as they were, and Ty Dempsey wasn’t going to let a former Russian Special Forces operative-turned-terrorist get the better of an elite modern-day military force. Especially a man who’d shockingly betrayed not only his country, but humanity itself.
They needed to find him. They needed to stop the bastard from killing again.
The only noise in this arena was boots punching through the crust of frozen snow, and the harshness of puny human lungs struggling to draw oxygen out of the fragile atmosphere. The shriek of a golden eagle pierced the vastness overhead, warning the world that there were strangers here and to beware. Dempsey raised his sunglasses to peer back over his shoulder at the snaking trail he and his squad had laid down. Any fool could follow that trail, but only a real fool would track them across the Roof of the World to a place so remote not even war lingered.
But the world was full of fools.
As part of the British SAS’s Sabre Squadron A’s Mountain Troop, Dempsey was familiar with the terrain. He knew the perils of mountains and altitude, understood the raw omnipotent power of nature. This was what he trained for. This was his job. This was his life. He’d climbed Everest and K2, though the latter had nearly killed him. He understood that there were places on earth that were blisteringly hostile, that could obliterate you in a split second, but they held no malice, no evil. Unlike people…
He relaxed his grip on his carbine and adjusted the weight of his
bergen. None of the men said a word as they climbed ever higher, one by one disappearing over the crest of the ridge and dropping down into the snowy wilderness beyond. With an icy breath Dempsey followed his men on the next impossible mission. Hunting a ghost.
***
The small plane taxied down the runway at Kurut in the Wakhan Corridor, a tiny panhandle of land in the far northeast of Afghanistan. Thankfully the runway was clear of snow—a miracle in itself.
Dr. Axelle Dehn stared out of the plane window and tried to relax her grip on the seat in front of her. She’d been traveling for thirty hours straight, leveraging every contact she’d ever made to get flights and temporary visas for her and her graduate student. Something was going on with her leopards and she was determined to find out what.
Last fall, they’d attached satellite radio collars to ten highly-endangered snow leopards here in the Wakhan. This past week, in the space of a few days, they’d lost one signal completely, and another signal was now coming from a talus-riddled slope where no shelter existed. This latter signal was from a collar that had been attached to a leopard called Sheba, one of only two female snow leopards they’d caught. Just ten days ago, for the first time ever, they’d captured photos from one of their remote camera traps of the same leopard moving two newborn cubs. If Sheba had been killed, the cubs were out there, hungry and defenseless. Emotion tried to crowd her mind but she thrust it aside.
The cats might be fine.
The collar might have malfunctioned and dropped off before it was programmed to. Or maybe she hadn’t fastened it tight enough when they’d trapped Sheba, and the leopard had somehow slipped it off.
But two collars in two days…?
The plane came to a stop and the pilot turned off the propellers. The glacier-fed river gushed silkily down the wide, flat valley. Goats grazed beside a couple of rough adobe houses where smoke drifted through the holes in the roof. Bactrian camels and small, sturdy horses were corralled nearby. A line of yaks packed with supplies waited patiently in a row. Yaks were the backbone of survival in this remote valley, especially once you headed east beyond the so-called
road
. People used them for everything from milk, food, transportation and even fuel in this frigid treeless moonscape.
It was early spring—the fields were being tilled in preparation to plant barley in the short but vital growing season. A group of children ran toward the plane, the girls dressed in red dresses with pink headscarves, the boys wearing jewel-bright green and blue sweaters over dusty pants. Hospitality was legendary in this savagely poor region, but with the possibility of only a few hundred snow leopards left in Afghanistan’s wilderness, Axelle didn’t have time to squander.
Her assistant, a Dane called Josef Vidler, gathered his things beside her. She adjusted her hat and scarf to cover her hair. The type of Islam practiced here was moderate and respectful.
“Hello, Dr. Dehn,” the children chimed as the pilot opened the door. A mix of different colored irises and features reflected the diverse genetic makeup of this ancient spit of land.
“
As-Salaam Alaikum
.” She gave them a tired smile. The children’s faces were gaunt but wreathed in happiness. Malnourishment was common in the Wakhan, and after a brutal winter most families were only a goat short of starvation.
Despite the worry for her cats, it humbled her. These people, who struggled with survival every single day, were doing their best to live in harmony with the snow leopard. And a large part of this change in attitude toward one of the region’s top predators was due to the work of the Conservation Trust. It was a privilege to work for them, a privilege she didn’t intend to screw up. She dug into her day pack and pulled out two canisters of children’s multi-vitamins she’d found in Frankfurt Airport. She rattled one of the canisters and they all jumped back in surprise. She pointed to Keeta, a teenage girl whose eyes were as blue as Josef’s and
whose English was excellent thanks to some recent schooling. “These are
not
candy so only eat one a day.” She held up a single finger. Then handed them over and the children chorused a thank you before running back to their homes.
Anji Waheed, their local guide and wildlife ranger-in-training, rattled toward them in their sturdy Russian van.
“
As-Salaam Alaikum
, Mr. Josef, Doctor Axelle,” Anji called out as he pulled up beside them. The relief in the Wakhi man’s deep brown eyes reinforced the seriousness of the situation.
“
Wa-Alaikum Salaam
.” They could all do with a little peace. The men patted each other on the back, and they began hauling their belongings out of the plane and into the van.
Axelle took a deep breath. “Did you find any sign of the cubs?”
Anji shook his head. “No, but as soon as I heard you were on your way, I took some men up to base camp to set up the yurts, then came back to get you.” Although only a few miles up the side valley, it was two bone-rattling hours of travel on a barely-there gravel road to their encampment. During winter, they did their tracking online from back home at Montana State University. In summer, they took a more hands-on approach.
“Thanks.” Axelle stowed her frustration and smiled her gratitude. From their tracking data she had a good idea where Sheba might have denned up. Barring accidents or breakdowns they might get there before nightfall.
She was praying for a collar malfunction even though that would put their million-dollar project way behind schedule. The alternative meant the cubs and their mother were probably dead. Her instinct told her losing two cats in a couple of days wasn’t coincidence, nor was it a local herder protecting livestock. A professional poacher was going after her animals for their fur and bones to feed China’s ravenous appetite for traditional medicine. It was imperative to find out exactly what was going on, and with the continuing conflict in Afghanistan it wasn’t going to be easy.
“Do the elders know anything about what might be happening?” she asked. Only twelve miles wide in places, the Wakhan Valley was a tiny finger of flat fertile ground separating some of the tallest mountains in the world—the magnificent and treacherous Hindu Kush to the south and the impenetrable Pamir Range to the north. Harsh winters trapped locals inside for seven months of the year. Wildlife was scarce and the region mercilessly inaccessible, but these people knew the land better than a visitor ever could.
“No.” His eyes shot between her and Josef. “They are scared that if the snow leopards are dead, you will blame them and they will lose their clinic.”
The Trust not only had an anti-poaching scheme, they also vaccinated local livestock once a year against common diseases,
gratis
. The program promoted healthier livestock and reduced the losses herders suffered to sickness, which in turn compensated for the occasional snow leopard kill. So far the scheme was working, except now they had two missing, possibly dead leopards and two tiny cubs unaccounted for.
The weight of responsibility sat like an elephant on her chest.
“Josef, run over and reassure them while Anji and I finish loading.” She held his gaze when he looked like he’d argue. The village elders sometimes struggled to deal with a woman. She didn’t mind because she loathed politics. “Be quick. We don’t have time for tea—you’ll have to make your excuses.”
It wasn’t how things were done here and she didn’t want to offend these people, but the survival of a species trumped social niceties today. Ten more minutes and they were finished packing. Anji tied the spare gasoline canisters onto the roof and made sure both big gas tanks were full. They honked and Josef jogged over and jumped into the van.
“Everything be okay.” Lines creased Anji’s leathery skin. “
Inshallah
.”
God willing, indeed.
She and Josef exchanged a look as Anji gunned the engine over the rough road marked only by a line of pale stones. Dust flew, stirred up by the tires, the land still soft from the thaw. They bounced over rivers, ruts and alluvial fans. Axelle craned her neck to stare at the imposing mountains.
“If the collars
are
working”—Josef spoke from the backseat—“there could be some crackpot in these hills picking off critically endangered animals for money. Anyone that desperate isn’t going to care if a couple of foreigners end up as collateral damage.”
They’d left some weapons with their other belongings last fall. Her father had insisted she have some sort of protection when he’d heard she was conducting her research in Afghanistan. Now she was grateful.
She glanced at Josef sharply. “Do you want to go home?”
“I’m just saying this could be dangerous.” His hands gripped the back of the seat as they bounced over a rickety bridge.
“If you want to go back you should say so now. The pilot can fly you out in the morning.” She kept her voice soft. They were almost the same age but he was her responsibility and she had no right to place him in danger. “I don’t want you thinking you don’t have a choice. I can handle this.” He had a life. He had a future. She only had her passion for saving things that needed saving.
“Ya, I run away and leave you alone in the wilderness.” Josef sat back and crossed his arms, muttering angrily.
She held back an instinctive retort. She didn’t care about being alone in the wilderness, but with this amount of ground to cover, she needed all the help she could get. “I have Anji,” she said instead. “We can get more men from the village.”
The Wakhi man
grinned a gap-toothed smile, his eyes dancing. After generations of war and decades of being ignored by the government in Kabul, a few missing teeth were the least of anyone’s problems. A few dead leopards might not rank high in the concerns of government either, not with the resurgence of the Taliban, not with the constant threat of assassination, insurgents and death.
“If we find sign of a poacher we will gather men from the village and hunt him down,” the smaller man said.
Axelle nodded, but she was worried. This would be Anji’s responsibility when he finished training and was appointed the wildlife officer for this region. He needed to be confident enough to take charge of dangerous situations like this. She bit her lip. He was such a sweet little guy she didn’t know how he’d confront armed poachers. The idea of him hurt didn’t sit well. He had a family. People who cared.
Isolation pressed down on her shoulders. All she had was an estranged father and a grandfather she hadn’t visited in two long years.
Energetic clouds boiled over the top of the mountains. A spring storm was building, but it was nothing to the growing sense of unease that filled her when she thought of someone lining up her cats in the crosshairs of a hunting scope.
