Encrypted (35 page)

“We have a lock,” the man replied in a thick accent.

Grant looked
at
the digital screen that had hastily been mounted onto the rusting dashboard. Zach’s chopper was tracking northwest
,
just as he had guessed. Soon
,
this damned assignment would be over.

Good thing, because Grant had his tailor on standby.

* * *

Ronnie glanced away as Zach finished dressing.
Not that she didn’t want to look.
Um, even bruised
,
those
abs were to
die
for, but they reminded her of the beating he took.
For her.
Had it tainted his feelings?

Since meeting on that dusty road outside the CIA safe
house things had been well, strained. Granted
,
Zach was badly injured
,
and they were fleeing for their lives on a helicopter, but still. The butterflies just wouldn’t go away. Each time she caught a glimpse of that strong jawline or those eyes, Ronnie felt
as though,
somehow
,
she had entered her own surveillance footage.
He really couldn’t be here, with her, could he?

“So the metal blocks the signal?” Zach asked Quirk
,
as her assistant stuffed the FBI agent’s clothes into an aluminum tube.

Quirk’s well
-
manscaped eyebrow shot up. “Hardly
.
W
e want it amplified.”

God
,
her assistant could be such a queen sometimes. She would have stepped in to spare Zach the drama, but she was having a hard time calibrating the ultrasound machine.

“But um,” Zach asked tentatively, “Aren’t we just dumping the clothes over the side?”

“And have them get a quick visual that we outwitted them?” Quirk snorted as he pulled out a model airplane. Okay, Quirk would kill her if she ever used the term “model” for that piece of high
-
tech awesomeness. It was more like a
souped
-
up fighter jet, only scaled down to be two feet long. “I am
way
cooler than that.”

Quirk turned to the pilot. “Speed?”

“377
kph
,” the pilot answered in his usual brusque manner.

Quirk typed the number into the small jet’s onboard keyboard
,
but then paused. “377?” Oh
,
my. That man knows how to handle his stick.”

“Quirk…” Ronnie warned as she came to Zach
’s
side. If she had any hope of not chasing the FBI agent away, Quirk was going to have to keep the not
-
so
-
subtle innuendos to a minimum.

Of course
,
her assistant did not oblige. While checking the tube’s attachment to the plane’s fuselage with one hand, Quirk waved his other hand in the general vicinity of Zach.

* * *

“Oh
,
sure,” Quirk said as he put the finishing touches on his baby. “We can risk our lives to save your squeeze, but I can’t take a moment to
—
”

“Quirk!”

Yes, Ronnie, the truth did hurt
. But there was no point in pursuing her unjust behavior, since their chopper was being pursued.
By men with guns.

“All right. Here we go.” He turned to the pilot
,
who just needed his beard trimmed a bit to really accentuate his jawline. “Ready?”

“Always,” the pilot grunted.

T
hose slightly
yellowed
-
by
-
cigar teeth
and squinting
,
flint eyes
captured
Quirk.

“You
did
say
that
we were ready, right?” Ronnie interjected before Quirk got weak in the knees.

“On my mark,” Quirk announced as the pilot gripped the joystick tightly. “Three…two…one…”

In unison, almost like great sex, Quirk felt the pilot turn the chopper as Quirk opened the side door and released the decoy plane. It flew straight and true, directly on the path they had been heading. The metal of the chopper vibrated,
making
Quirk’s teeth
chatter
as
it
laid over, gaining speed, taking them nearly 90 degrees away from the plane’s trajectory.
The
decoy plane carrying Zach’s tracked clothes should throw those CIA goons off their track by miles.

Once the chopper leveled out and Quirk shut the door, he made a show of dusting off his hands. “I am
that
good.”

“Maybe,” Ronnie admitted, “but now
,
we wait.”

Yes, waiting.
Quirk’s least favorite part.

* * *

“Why don’t we have a visual?” Grant demanded. The damned digital readout showed
that
they should be right on Zach’s ass by now
,
yet
he could see
nothing but blue skies all around.

The pilot just shrugged. Did the man not know that Grant’s career
—
no
,
life
—
depended on the next few minutes? However
,
the mustached pilot seemed to have little regard for career advancement.

“There,” the
Federale
pilot said, pointing ahead.

Grant had to squint to make out the faintest exhaust trail. “That’s no chopper.”

Instead
,
it was a toy plane. A freaking toy plane.

They must have realized
that
Zach’s clothes were traceable. He’d have to yell at the techs back home
who
swore
that
the thin metal fiber couldn’t be found.

“Fire on it.”

The pilot popped the safety off the trigger and locked onto the tiny plane.

A warning flashed
in
bright red on the screen
.
“Better Luck Next Time.”

The Robin Hood hacker’s tagline.

“Fire!” Grant yelled
,
knowing that destroying the plane would in no way get back at Zach and that binary bitch, but he did take a measure of satisfaction as the small plane blew up, scattering Zach’s clothes, and about a hundred thousand dollars in tracking equipment, to the wind.

Oh, they
might
have thought
that
they won the day, but clearly the Robin Hoo
d
hacker didn’t realize that Grant had an unlimited budget for this mission.

Sitting back in the flight seat, Grant gave the order. “Activate the secondary tracking device.”

The pilot nodded, punching in the code.

Zach wasn’t getting away. The sanctimonious prick wasn’t going to live another day.

* * *

“How long until we land?” Ronnie asked the pilot. If they were on schedule
,
they should be able to pick up their getaway car and cross back into Texas within the hour.

Before the pilot could answer, Quirk shouted, “We’ve got two fast
-
moving bogeys approaching from the east!”

Ronnie spun on her heel. That couldn’t be. They’d knocked out all eyes in the air and
had
gotten rid of the tracking device on Zach. But looking down at the radar screen, Quirk was correct. Actually
,
another two blimps popped up on the readout.

“I am telling you, they’ve perfected it,” Quirk insisted.

The FBI agent raised an eyebrow. “Perfected what?”

Ronnie really didn’t want to believe
that
it could be true. “They are at least five years away from field
-
testing it.”

Quirk shrugged. “Guess we are getting a look into the future
,
then.”

Zach leaned forward, guarding his injured ribs. They had shot him full of antibiotics, steroids, and painkillers
—
sometimes Quirk’s hypochondria and encyclopedic knowledge of remedies did come in handy, but
pain
still etched the FBI agent’s face.

All for her
,
and here she couldn’t even save him. Ronnie sat down next to Zach. Gently
,
she ran her hands over his arms.

“How long were you unconscious?” Ronnie asked.

“I wasn’t,” Zach stated
,
but when Ronnie cocked her head, he cast his eyes down. “No more than a few minutes.” He looked back up. “Did they shoot me up with something?”

Quirk snorted. “You could say that.”

Ronnie glared at her assistant.
As if
they didn’t have enough to worry about
.
S
he
resented having
to be sarcasm patrol as well.

“They’ve been experimenting with an ultrathin metal fiber that
—
”

“I know,” Zach interrupted. “The clothes.”

“Yes, well, no,”
Ronnie
said as her hands coursed over his wide shoulders and back. Oh
,
to be in such close physical contact for some other reason than trying to save their lives. “What I am looking for is even more advanced. The metallic ions are inert until they are hit by a burst of microwaves,
and
then they realign, transforming that microwave energy into a narrow burst of radio signal.”

The helicopter jolted, nearly sending Ronnie to the floor. It was only Zach’s strong hands that kept her seated. For a moment he held her there
,
despite the danger of them both falling over. Their body heat mingled.
God
,
how she wanted to taste
those
cracked and bruised
lips. Zach leaned in. Ronnie leaned in.

“Um, yeah,” Quirk interjected. Ronnie snapped back and began her gentle probing of Zach’s skin, trying to find the insertion point. “Once that burst of energy is released
,
the ions revert to their inert, impossible
-
to
-
detect state.”

“
Nearly
impossible,” Ronnie corrected him. They
had
to find the thin
,
metal thread
—
or they were worse than sitting ducks.

“Well, it might not matter now,”
Quirk
said
,
not sounding
like
his usual snarky self. “Looks like four jets and a chase helicopter.”

To punctuate her assistant’s words
,
a missile went off to the left, rocking the helicopter.

“I take it
that
this wasn’t just a family misunderstanding,” the pilot grumbled.

She didn’t blame the guy. They hadn’t been exactly forthcoming
about
why they needed the helicopter when they booked it.

It was Zach’s jaw that worked overtime
,
though. “We’ve got to talk.”

“Sure,” Ronnie said
frantically
searching up his neck for evidence of the fiber. “Let me just pour a glass of wine.”

* * *

Zach grabbed Ronnie’s hand. He loved her sense of humor
,
but not with this weight on his
conscience
. “I’m serious.”

Another explosion nearly shattered the window behind them as they lurched to the left.

“Ha! Just try to lock on
to
us,” Quirk shouted
,
working on five different devices.

Zach tugged Ronnie’s chin
up
to face him. “They don’t want to
down
the chopper. They want to force us to
land
.”

As another explosion rocked them to the right, Ronnie frowned. “Dude, it doesn’t
—
”