Boneyard Ridge (18 page)

She released him almost as suddenly as she’d grabbed him, leaving him feeling off balance.

“Thanks,” she whispered. “I needed that.”

His eyes had adjusted just enough to the ambient light leaking through the door crack to see the flash of her white teeth as she grinned.

Forget amazing, he thought. The woman was bloody magnificent.

Gathering what wits he had left, he edged out of the closet and into the bathroom, leading with the Glock, while Susannah trailed behind him, one hand on his back, tethering them together. They eased out of the bathroom and into the main office, Hunter sweeping his penlight and weapon together across the room, looking for a trap.

There was no one else there.

He clicked off the penlight. “I don’t suppose there’s an alternate exit from this office. Besides the main door, I mean.”

“Not that I know of.”

He sighed, considering their options. If Marcus Lemonde had any suspicion at all that someone had broken into the office, he might be waiting outside to ambush them as they left.

“I’m going to risk it,” he said, already moving toward the door.

Her hand closed over his arm, her grip strong, stopping him in his tracks. “You, as in, you alone?”

He turned toward her, saw the anger in her eyes and braced himself. “Yes. Me. Alone.”

“And I just stay here and wait for the big, brave man to play hero and then come back and rescue me when it’s all over?”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way. But, yeah.”

“I realize we only met a day or two ago, so that might explain why you would think that ordering me to stay here like a good little girl is a smart idea. But it’s really, really not.” She let go of his wrist.

“Two of us will be more conspicuous.”

“It’s a hotel corridor. Unless you’re the size of a spider, there’s nowhere to hide.” She shook her head. “Look, I know you’re a man of action and all that—”

“And all that?”

“But I think we need to stop, take a breath, let the adrenaline settle down and try to figure out what the BRI has planned for tomorrow before we go running around like a couple of headless chickens.”

There was a part of him, a barely leashed part of him, that wanted to tell her she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. He might not be wearing the uniform anymore, but he was still a soldier at his core. A man who took action. Who saw the fight and dived right in.

But Susannah was right. This hotel wasn’t his home turf, not really. Marcus Lemonde had been working here a lot longer than he had, and if he was a vital part of whatever the BRI had planned for the conference tomorrow, he had all the advantages.

To win this particular battle, he needed to hunker down and figure out where the planned strike would happen and how to stake out high ground so he’d have the advantage once the battle was underway.

He forced himself to relax, to let the spike of adrenaline ease back to a manageable level. “Okay. You’re right.”

“I’m right?” Her look of surprise was so comical, he couldn’t stop a laugh.

“Yeah. There must be a reason Marcus is working late, and I don’t think it’s last-minute preparations for a great conference this weekend.”

“It may be last-minute preparations, all right.” She looked around the office. “You know what? We shouldn’t stay here to discuss it. He might come back.”

“What do you have in mind?” he asked as she crossed to the file cabinets again.

“We’re pretty sure it’s the conference that’s the target, right?” She opened the top file cabinet and used a penlight to see inside, coming back a moment later with a large file folder she’d pulled from the drawer. “This is my backup file on the conference. I print out two copies of every file I deal with so that we’re never without backups. I’m pretty sure Marcus has the master file but I don’t think he even knows about this one.”

“And what are we going to find in that file?” he asked as she tucked the folder under one arm and started for the office door.

“Hopefully, answers.”

* * *

T
HE MINUTE HAND
on her watch clicked past twelve. Two in the morning. They’d been holed up in one of the basement-level maintenance rooms for over an hour, poring over every file, every scrap of paper, every hastily jotted note that Susannah had filed away over the past few months in preparation for the Tri-State Law Enforcement Society’s annual conference.

“I keep going back to Marcus’s experience with explosives,” she said, stifling a yawn as she looked up from yet another voucher. “If the BRI wanted to make a big splash, blowing up that conference would be one way to do it.”

“It wouldn’t be easy to get their hands on the amount of explosives necessary to make a really big splash,” Hunter disagreed. “Anything really high-grade is very hard to procure. That’s why people go for things like ANFO—ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”

“I know what ANFO is.”

He slanted a look at her. “I’m trying very hard not to ask why you do.”

She flashed him a grin. “I’m from the hills, remember? We know how to explode all sorts of things around here.”

“Well, it takes a pretty big stash of ANFO or something like it to blow up a big building the size of this hotel. Or even a big section of it. At the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, they had barrels of the stuff to do the kind of damage that bomb did.”

“Maybe they’re not going for anything quite that big.”

“Billy Dawson seemed pretty sure what he had planned would rival Oklahoma City in scope.” He looked down at the file folder on the worktable in front of him, one hand flexing over his left knee. “I was really, really hoping it wasn’t going to be explosives, though.”

Of course,
she thought. The last thing he’d want to deal with would be another explosion.

“Hunter—”

His gaze snapped up to meet hers. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t pity me.”

She
had
pitied him, once. Before she’d seen his scars and realized just how close he must have been to death after the explosion—and how far he’d come in such a short time.

Pity was the last thing she felt for him.

“I wouldn’t dare.” She touched his arm. “I just wondered if you think we should call in reinforcements now, while there’s still time.”

“You mean call Quinn.”

“We have nothing to offer the police in the way of evidence, but maybe Quinn has some ideas.”

“If he did, he’d have given them to us.”

Susannah wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t spent much time with Alexander Quinn before he’d left them alone in his cabin, but what interaction they’d shared convinced her he was the sort of man who always had an agenda. Did he want them to find out what was going on here at the Highland Hotel and Resort? Absolutely. Did he want them to put a stop to it? She thought so.

But there was a reason he’d assigned Hunter Bragg to this particular job, and Susannah was beginning to suspect Quinn’s motives were more about getting something from Bragg than stopping the threat to the conference. Or, at the very least, the two goals were of equal importance to Quinn.

But what was it that he wanted from Hunter?

“Why did Quinn assign this job to you?” she asked as he bent his head back over the hotel floor plans once again, his brow furrowed as he looked for something, anything, they hadn’t yet discovered.

“I was a disgruntled vet with a chip on my shoulder,” he said with a grimace, his gaze not moving from the floor plans. “Prime militia bait.”

“Disgruntled?”

He sighed and turned to look at her. “Not about combat. I mean, yeah, I supposed I’m as frustrated as the next grunt about how wars are all about politics these days, but I’m not out to blow up the Pentagon.”

“You just wanted the BRI to think so.”

He nodded. “I’ve been pretty angry since I got back stateside. About this.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his bad leg. “About what happened to my sister because of me. At myself for letting it happen.”

“You didn’t let it happen.”

“You don’t know that. You weren’t there.”

“So tell me. What happened?”

He lowered his head. “Let’s just concentrate on the job at hand.”

“We’ve been staring at these files for an hour as if we could magically conjure up the answer if we just looked hard enough. My eyes are starting to cross. Let’s take a break for a minute.” She touched his arm, felt his skin ripple beneath her touch. “I won’t ask any more questions if you don’t want me to.”

His lips flattened to a thin line. “Good.”

Silence fell between them, marred only by the soft sounds of their breathing and the hum of the hotel’s power plant close by. The small maintenance break room where they’d holed up to do their research was almost as small as her office bathroom, or felt that way, at least, with the large square table in the middle of the cramped space and the long countertop nearby, holding a coffeemaker and a couple of big cans of ground coffee. A tiny refrigerator stood in the corner, its soft hum of electricity swallowed by the noise from the hotel’s heating system.

Hardly a place conducive to figuring out how to save the world. Or, for that matter, to save the Tri-State Law Enforcement Society’s annual conference from going up in smoke.

Frustration boiling in her gut, she pushed her chair back with a scrape and started to rise, but Hunter grabbed her arm, holding her in place.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t move. At first, I thought it was a nightmare. I’d been having my share of those.” He passed his hand over his jaw, his palm making a whispery sound as it rasped against the beginning of beard stubble. “Then I realized there were hands holding me down. On my legs and my arms. On my head. However they’d gotten into my sister’s place, they’d done it without waking me up.”

“Where was your sister?”

“She’d gone to a concert in Knoxville with a couple of women from the prosecutor’s office. That’s where she worked at the time. They made a night of it, booked a room in a hotel near the concert venue.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how they knew she’d be gone. Or maybe they didn’t know. Maybe the plan had been to take me and terrorize her at the same time.”

“I know you must have fought back.”

His eyes narrowed, his gaze unfocused, as if watching the past play out in his mind. “I think I did. I think I must have. They put something on my face—a cloth drenched in something. Maybe chloroform, maybe something else. All I know is, my mind went to a complete fog and the next time I could think clearly, I was cuffed to a water pipe in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And there I stayed until the cops showed up to rescue me. Way too late to be any help to Janet.”

“You think that constitutes letting it happen to you?”

He grimaced as if in pain. “I should have figured out something. Gotten loose somehow. Or, hell, if I hadn’t gotten myself blown up in Afghanistan—”

“I suppose that was your fault, too?” She couldn’t quite keep the dry sarcasm out of her voice.

He snapped his gaze up to hers, his eyes blazing with anger. “Getting blown up might not have been my fault, but—”

When he didn’t continue, she looked down at his leg, watching his fingers as they massaged his thigh. “But something was?”

His lips parted and a shaky breath escaped his lips. His fingers clenched around his leg, so tightly that she knew it must hurt.

She released a gusty little sigh. “Forget it. I shouldn’t push—”

His gaze locked with hers, raw-eyed and fierce. “It was an early morning patrol, about two years ago. Helmand Province. Predawn.”

She eased back into her chair, her heart pounding. She’d wanted details, but now that he was talking, her chest tightened with dread.

“We weren’t really fighting anymore by then. Just trying to keep a lid on the tension. Taliban, warlords battling it out for turf in the opium trade—wild, wild West kind of stuff. If we weren’t there, they’d have been happy enough to slaughter each other. But we gave them a target they could all agree on.” His hand slid away from her arm, but she caught it in hers, needing the connection.

His gaze tangled with hers for a moment before he looked away. But he held on to her hand, his grip tightening.

“It was October, and the summer heat had finally passed. The whole place seemed like a dust bowl to us most of the time, so I can’t really call it beautiful, but the milder weather had us all feeling like we could breathe again.” A smile flirted with his lips but didn’t linger. It never touched his haunted eyes. “Maybe we dropped our guard. I don’t know. I’ve been over and over that morning, trying to figure out how we let ourselves get surrounded.”

She frowned. “Surrounded?”

He bumped gazes with her again before looking away, his eyes angled forward, toward the blank wall across from them, as if he were watching something playing out on the flat surface, something she couldn’t picture. Didn’t want to picture.

“Sometimes that was the point of the IEDs,” he said softly. “To make the troops vulnerable to attack. Blow up the vehicle and prey on the survivors.”

Susannah’s gut roiled. “Did they—”

“Prey on me?” His mouth twisted in a grotesque parody of a smile. “No, not me. I was lucky. The blast sent me flying into a small ravine. They didn’t know I was there, so they didn’t—”

Her fingers flexed, tightening on his.

He turned to look at her again, his gaze holding this time. “This isn’t something anyone needs to hear.”

“But maybe it’s something you need to say.”

His gaze held hers a moment longer, then he closed his eyes and leaned toward her until his forehead rested against hers. “I could hear them attacking—” He swallowed hard, his breath releasing in a soft, guttural growl as he pulled away from her. “I could hear them brutalizing the handful of survivors. I could hear it, but I couldn’t drag myself up that ravine to lay down any cover fire for them. I’ve gone over it and over it a million times since that day—if I’d tried a little harder, could I have made it up that rock wall? My leg was a mess, yes, but only one leg. Not the rest of me. Why couldn’t I make it up that wall?”

“Stop,” she said, fighting a surge of anger as she reached up and cradled his face between her palms, making him look at her. “You nearly lost your leg. You were probably losing blood by the buckets, right? You think you could have saved anyone even if you’d gotten up that wall?”