Escape to Morning (23 page)

What if Nazar was betraying them? He'd always been the weak one. Philosophical. A purist, he'd voiced dissent on occasion—such as their liaison with North Korea and the bombing in Macedonia.

Then again, he was probably trying to spare his wife from the justice of Hayata. Thankfully, they found the traitorous woman and her daughter. And Bakym had been among the privileged who made Nazar's wife suffer for her betrayals. Nazar should remember that.

“We have to find Fadima. Find out what she knows. Draw her father out of hiding.” Then Nazar would be reminded what it meant to turn on his Hayata brothers.

Bakym turned, zeroed in on Daniel, stepping an inch away from his face. “Get back out there. Find her. Or I'll do to you what I plan to do to her.”

Daniel nodded, a cold glint in his eye, probably meant for Bakym but useful for the task. “We'll find her. I promise.”

“So, she's still out there.” Will tucked his night-vision goggles into his rucksack and readjusted the cell phone in his ear. “I can't wait for your guy, Jeff. I gotta go. Tell—”

“Phil Branden.”

“Right—Phil—that I'll contact him when I get back, and to check the progress of the ME's investigation on Simon.”

“You going back out with the dog team?” Jeff asked.

Will had already dismissed the idea of bringing Dani and Sarah along. They'd been good company and had even led him to his current lead. But this time he was going alone. Just in case the terrorists still scoured the woods.

“Nope. I studied the map, and I think I have a pretty good idea of where she might be hiding out. We tracked her to an inland lake, semiprivate with rustic cabins on the southern end. I'm going to hike in just before first light tomorrow and start a systematic search. My gut is telling me that she's hiding out in one of the cabins.”

“What about those Hayata operatives you saw?”

“I don't know. They were in the same stretch of forest I was, and the storm nearly sliced and diced me. I wonder if they're even alive.”

“You better hope not.”

Will sighed, grabbed another ammunition clip, and shoved it into one of his vest pockets. “Any news on General Nazar?”

“Yeah, and it's not good. He's disappeared, along with his son. We think he went into hiding.”

“Or Hayata figured him out.”

“Maybe. But you gotta find that girl. Our hunch is that only she knows where he is. And if we don't find her soon, Hayata is going to find them both—and accomplish their mission.”

“Right,” Will said, smelling the smoke, hearing the screams of his own Hayata nightmares in Kazakhstan. He checked his watch and grimaced. The new agent, Phil, had sacrificed hours tracking down a phantom caller while he'd spent the day with Dani.

Well, he wouldn't really call
that
a sacrifice.

“Will, when you find her, don't stop. Get on a plane and bring her back here.”

“Roger that.” Will clicked off the phone, tucked it into his pocket, and surveyed the mess he'd made of his room. He'd packed little for this undercover mission, and it had taken him less than an hour to assemble most of it into two duffel bags. The rest he'd stuff into the rucksack he planned to carry on his back as he hiked into Tom Lake.

It hadn't escaped him that he wouldn't be able to say goodbye to Dani. Or Sarah for that matter, although somehow that didn't feel quite so painful.

“Thanks, Will, for being my friend,”
Dani had said today as she got out of the truck. Those words felt like fingerprints on his heart, marking him as a different man. He'd smiled, and something akin to peace filled his heart. It felt really heart-sweepingly good to be called a friend. So good that he'd even managed to keep in check all the desires to run his hand into her short, silky hair, pull her close, and kiss her.

Friends didn't do that.

Right?

Will picked up a pile of books off his nightstand. Bonnie's wedding invitation lay on top. He'd retrieved it from the floor of his truck, and now he smoothed it against his leg, opened it again.

It was dated for this weekend. He was going to be a real slouch and not show up. Even if he wanted to go, he couldn't. But it wasn't too late to do the right thing. To check in and be the friend he should have been to her … to Lew. Especially since he seemed to be batting one thousand in the friends department.

He sank to the floor, his head back, eyes closed as Lew strolled into his mind.

“Hey, pal, great hit!” Lew, hanging out of the dugout, baseball cap shadowing his lazy brown eyes, a shank of blond hair peeking out the back. He slapped Will on the back as he jogged in after clinching the game with a homer. “Let's get out of here.”

Will threw his hard hat into the bag and joined the team for the endgame congrats. The Cotter Bulls raking in another victory. The sun blazed, still powerful despite the late hour, even in its downward slide. The smell of barbeque simmered in the warm air.

Baseball fans dispersed as Lew gathered his stuff. “Mom's got lasagna waiting. Wanna join us?”

Will's mind tracked to his own house. His mother had left a couple of weeks ago, and things in the Masterson household had deteriorated like Jell-O on a hot day. Currently, food wasn't high on his father's list of priorities. Will had breakfasted on a bag of microwavable burritos and washed them down with a cold beer, hoping his dad wouldn't notice his dwindling supply. Dinner at the Strongs' would fill the nooks and crannies of latent hunger.

However, hanging out with the Strongs felt like salt in open wounds lately. Probably because Will's mother had stayed longest this time. Nearly a year. Long enough for it to really rip his heart from his chest when she left. Long enough for Will to see his father cry.

Still, the Strongs offered an escape from his dark house. And if he was especially unlucky, his dad would be there, already drinking hooch, and he'd have to duck a few good swings. In the end, he'd wind up sleeping on the Strongs' front-porch swing anyway.

When Lew came out of the showers an hour later and repeated the dinner invitation, Will gave a slight nod. They exited the locker room of the high school, and Lew waved to Bonnie and a friend, sitting like ornaments on her father's Mustang. Will tried to ignore the stab of envy. Bonnie so adored Lew it felt like they were already married. Even so, Will knew that Lew and Bonnie had some sort of religious agreement—one that said they were only close friends until Lew put a ring on her finger in a church.

Will had earned a shiner once, challenging that agreement, calling Lew a fool.

“Hey ya, Will,” Bonnie said. “I want you to meet my cousin Katie.”

He could like Katie, with her long brown hair, slightly mischievous eyes, the look of danger in her smile. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her Levi's 501 jeans, drawing them low, revealing skin. “Hi, ya,” she said softly.

But he heard the invitation in her voice loud and clear. She was Bonnie's cousin?

“She's in for the weekend,” Bonnie said, not seeing or perhaps ignoring the sudden shift in temperature. “She's a freshman at Brookings College.”

An older woman
. “Glad to meet you,” Will said and ignored the warning on Lew's face.

Katie turned out to be just the girl he'd expected. In town for the weekend meant in town for fun. And he'd lived up to her expectations.

He never did get that lasagna, though, and years later, as he watched Lew toss his daughters in the air and share a kiss with Bonnie, he knew that there was only one wise man between them.

Until, of course, a bomb had destroyed the perfect life.

And now, Bonnie was starting over. With some other guy who wasn't Lew. Well, at least she'd kept going with her life despite her grief.

Will sat down on the bed, fished out his cell phone, and scrolled down to her number. His chest tightened as he pressed Send.

The phone rang once. Will glanced at the clock. It was still early, and he could imagine Bonnie outside with her girls, pushing them on the backyard swings, her dusty blonde hair caught in a sweeping wind.

The phone rang again. The black-eyed Susans would be blooming in her backyard, and the smell of prairie grass coming alive after winter would lace Cotter with a nice, husky scent. Neighbors would be banging their front doors as they wandered out to the street to call in their children. He could nearly taste nostalgia, bittersweet in his mouth.

Maybe Cotter wasn't such a bad place to grow up.

Three rings.

“Hello?”

Will opened his mouth, but nothing came out as panic gripped him by the throat. What was he supposed to say? That he was sorry he'd never so much as called to check on them in three years? That he didn't know how to be a friend to the wife of his best buddy?

“Hello?”

He hung up. Shaking, he dropped the phone. So much for that euphoric feeling he'd had all day, the one in his pretend world where Dani and he lived happily ever after in Moose Bend. No, reality was Cotter, South Dakota, his past, and his new responsibilities. Dani may think he was a good friend, but she knew practically nothing about him. Well, okay, she knew a few things—things that he'd never told other women. Things about his father and his childhood. But it didn't mean she knew him. She didn't know the places he'd been, the things he'd done.

Not like Bonnie did.

Dani had no idea that darkness had once lurked in his soul. How for years he'd felt half dead or numb, like one of those lepers in the Bible. In his brain, he knew that God had made him new. He wanted so much to believe God when He said, “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person,” to truly be a new person, someone who could be everything he saw reflected in Dani's beautiful eyes.

Trustworthy.

Honest.

Honorable.

It reminded him of the way Bonnie had looked at Lew.

That thought spasmed his chest, and he put a hand to it as if to loosen it. He had seen himself as honorable in Dani's eyes today. He had thought he'd never, ever feel that way. And it nearly made him weak with longing. Like she was looking past his layers, his duplicity, to the real Will.

Or at least the Will he wanted to be.

He took a deep breath and reached for the nearest book to shove the invitation into. His hand closed on Lew's Bible. Bonnie had sent it to him shortly after the funeral. He carried it with him like a … good-luck charm, he supposed. It felt as if Lew might be there, whispering wisdom into his ears.

He heard Sarah's words from yesterday morning—Lamentations 3—and he flipped it open to the verses: “The L
ORD
is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the L
ORD
. And it is good for people to submit at an early age to the yoke of his discipline.”

Maybe if he'd submitted to God's discipline, done things God's way, he'd have a lady like Bonnie—or Dani—waiting for him to come home to.

God's way. He tracked to an earlier verse, to where Sarah had begun quoting. “I say to myself, ‘The L
ORD
is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!' ”

His inheritance.

Will stared out his window to the twilight. The urge to start over had never felt so strong, so real. Since Lew's death three years ago he'd thought long and hard about eternity, wondering why God had chosen to take Lew instead of him. Will knew that he'd been given a second chance, a reprieve, so to speak. That if he'd been killed beside Lew there would have been a different eternity for him. And he'd felt guilty over his relief.

He missed Lew's smile, his honesty, his wisdom. There were long nights when he'd wanted to surrender to the lonely ache in his heart, find a short-term friend, or turn to his father's method of pain control. But Lew's life had made an impression on him, and somehow surrendering felt like dishonoring his memory. As if Lew might look down from heaven and frown.

Will related to Dani's childhood coping mechanisms more than she realized. He'd even found himself on his knees in a church on the day of Lew's funeral, weeping, asking God for another chance.

Only he wasn't quite sure what that meant. How to go from there. He read the words again. “The L
ORD
is my inheritance.”
“Portion,”
Sarah had said. He remembered the other words:
reward, influence, abundance, sustenance, reputation
. Dani had said,
“All
.
”

Will closed the Bible, held its cool cover to his forehead.
Help me, Lord. Help me know what secret Lew had. What did he mean when he said You were his deliverer? his sustainer? his reward? Help me to understand, because most of the time I'm confused and getting it wrong
.

His prayer sounded painfully desperate. Well, he'd been feeling desperate for about three years now.
I really want to be Your man, Lord. Please teach me what that means
. He rubbed the cover of the Bible.
Thank You for letting me meet Dani. For letting her show me what it feels like to just … be the right kind of guy
.