Manhunt in the Wild West (18 page)

Fax straightened away from her, although he kept an arm looped protectively around her waist as he surveyed the helicopter. She saw him look at the tree line as though considering making a break for it, and she elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t even think of it. These are my friends.”

He looked at her for a long moment unspeaking, then nodded. “Mine, too, if they’ll have me.” He raised a hand to the chopper, gesturing for them to throw down a line, as there was nowhere to land.

And as he hooked them in and they were lifted up into the sky, Chelsea, who’d never been a big fan of heights, clung to his solid bulk and watched the ground fall away, knowing that as long as she was with him, she could do anything. Even fly.

The exultation was short-lived, though, because her friends weren’t the only ones in the chopper—there was also a grim-faced man who immediately grabbed Fax and engaged him in low-voiced conversation, somehow isolating the two of them even in the crowded quarters of the helicopter.

The moment they touched down near the stadium, that same man whisked Fax away into a dark sedan with tinted windows and government plates.

Fax didn’t look back as the vehicle pulled away. And in the days that followed, he didn’t call. There was no word of him, not even a rumor.

It was as if he’d disappeared.

It was three long, agonizing weeks before Fax’s boots hit Colorado soil once again.

The last time he’d arrived in the Bear Claw area, he’d been cuffed and flanked by blank-faced U.S. Marshals, who he suspected would’ve shot to kill and enjoyed it, believing that he’d tortured and murdered two FBI agents.

This time he was alone and dressed in casual civilian clothes. The jeans and button-down shirt still felt a little strange after living so long in prison clothes.

He was carrying a duffel bag filled with new clothes, because when he’d gone back to the storage unit he’d rented right after Abby’s death, the things inside the musty garage-size box had looked tired and irrelevant. So he’d picked out a few boxes of stuff he thought he might want some day and donated the rest to a local shelter.

Then he’d cleaned out his offshore bank account, which had grown fat with the undercover pay Jane had funneled there through a shell company, and used the money to buy some essentials during the few breaks he’d been allowed between debriefings.

Those breaks had been few and far between. The grim-faced agents in charge hadn’t outright refused to let him leave the bunkerlike maze of rooms located beneath an innocuous-looking building in downtown D.C. They’d made it clear, though, that the more he stayed put and answered the same questions over and over again, the higher his likelihood of making it out of there with some hope of a continued career within federal law enforcement.

He’d stayed and he’d given up everything he knew or even suspected about the op that he’d thought had been designed to draw out al-Jihad’s conspirators, but had really been intended solely to help the murderer escape from the ARX Supermax prison. He told them everything, not because he wanted his career back, but because his main motivation for having entered the world in the first place remained unchanged. He wanted to help bring down al-Jihad and others like him, who attacked U.S. politics by killing noncombatants: women and children. Families.

Out of necessity, the info flow hadn’t just been one way. The agents questioning Fax had revealed that al-Jihad and Lee Mawadi remained at large, as did Jane Doe. Worse, she had managed to use her equipment to feed misinformation to the cops on duty along the parade route.

That, combined with the chaos at the stadium and the lack of manpower on the mountain, meant that not only had all of al-Jihad’s men escaped—with the exception of Muhammad, who was staying grimly tight-lipped so far—the conspirators remained undetected.

For a time, the investigation had focused on FBI agent Michael Grayson, the man who had arrested Fax in the stadium the day before the attack. Even more damning than his seemingly not-so-coincidental presence at the stadium, was that he’d also been the point of failure for a carefully worded warning sent by Seth Varitek early on the morning of the parade.

Grayson had received the information, determined it was a prank, and unilaterally decided not to add the manpower Varitek had suggested. In doing so, he had very nearly helped doom thousands of Bear Claw residents.

Despite that sign of complicity, a thorough investigation turned up no evidence that Grayson was linked to al-Jihad or any other terrorist. Instead, it turned out that the agent was suffering through the tail end of a very nasty divorce and had been living on caffeine pills rather than sleep or food.

Not surprisingly, he’d been pulled out of the field and would undergo major reviews and potentially lose his fieldwork status. But while it was a good thing to deal with an agent on the edge, with Grayson cleared of suspicion, they were left with few theories and even fewer clues regarding the structure of al-Jihad’s terror cells or the whereabouts of the terrorist leader, Jane Doe or Lee Mawadi.

One of their few leads was Lee Mawadi’s ex-wife who lived in a remote area roughly between Bear Claw and the ARX Supermax prison. She had divorced him shortly after his arrest for the Santa Bombings, claiming not to have had any idea of his criminal involvement. She’d quit her job as a magazine photographer and changed her name and had all but gone into seclusion in an isolated cabin high in the mountains. All of which was consistent with her claim that she hated her ex…except for the fact that her cabin was less than thirty miles from the prison.

If she had wanted to completely separate herself from her ex-husband…why had she chosen to live a short drive away from where he’d been incarcerated?

When asked, she’d told agents it was atonement, a reminder of the terrible mistake she’d made. Living near the peak of a low mountain, within sight of both the prison and Bear Claw City, she was constantly reminded of the people who’d died in the Santa Bombings.

Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe not. Regardless, the feds were keeping her under very tight surveillance.

The task force dedicated to bringing al-Jihad down was being headed up by a no-nonsense career agent named M. K. O’Reilly. There were still major questions of who could and couldn’t be trusted, but Fax’s gut said O’Reilly was clean. Then again, he’d missed the signs that Jane had turned. In retrospect it was far too easy to pick up on the little hints, the small inconsistencies, and the way she’d progressively cut him off from all his other contacts, until he’d been dealing with her and her alone.

He was furious with himself for being oblivious to the clues. Oddly, though, Jane’s betrayal—not just of him but of the country he’d dedicated his life to protecting—didn’t kick him back into the black hole of distrust he’d occupied in the months after Abby’s death, the pit Jane herself had rescued him from.

Instead, he was able to hate Jane for the betrayal without hating himself, without withdrawing from the people around him.

That was Chelsea’s doing, he knew. Any time the blackness encroached on his soul, he thought of her smile, her gentle sanity, and the way their hands had fit together, the way
they
had fit, even though on paper they never should’ve worked.

At least he’d told himself over and over that they worked, holding it as a lifeline, a mantra when things had looked their worst, when the grim-faced agents had hinted that he should plan for an extended stay, another incarceration, this time without the luxury of knowing deep down inside that he was one of the good guys, that he didn’t belong there.

Then one day the threats had disappeared. In their place had been a job offer and an open door.

He was a free man now. He could dress how he wanted, could go where he wanted.

Which was what had brought him to Bear Claw.

When he got there, though, he pulled his rental over to the side of the road beside the
Welcome to Bear Claw City!
sign at the outskirts of the metro area.

And he sat there, wondering whether he’d blown it by not calling Chelsea in the intervening weeks, not letting her know where everything stood. The thing was, he hadn’t wanted to call until he knew he was going to be able to come back to her.

“Well, you’re back,” he said to himself, staring up at the welcome sign. “Time to do your worst and hope for the best.”

Still, it was a long time before he started driving again, and when he did his pulse was kicking, because for the first time in a long, long time, he was going to lay his heart—rather than his life—on the line.

For the first time in a long, long time, he cared.

More than that, he loved. He’d told her before, in the heat of the moment. Now it was time to see if she’d really meant it…because he sure as hell had.

S
ITTING IN HER
small office in the ME’s complex, Chelsea took another long look at the e-mail that had dropped into her computer’s in-box. The return address was a government system, and there was an official seal at the upper left of the letter itself. The words
congratulations
and
please report
swam before her eyes, which misted at the realization that she was being offered a second chance at her dreams.

One of them, anyway. The other one appeared to be long gone, damn him.

Anger and heartache scratched at the back of her throat and she would’ve cursed herself for thinking of Fax. But if she started doing that, her days were likely to turn into a never-ending string of four-letter words, because she couldn’t get him out of her head or her heart.

He’d swept into her life, turned her safe little universe upside down, told her he loved her and made her love him, and then disappeared without a word.

Jerk,
she thought for the thousandth time and tried to find the anger that had sustained her for the first couple of weeks. It’d faded, though, leaving sadness behind—for herself, because she wanted the life they could’ve made together and for him because he’d been unable to break free of the patterns and beliefs that had bound him for too long. He was stuck in the past.

Well, not me,
she thought, reading through the e-mail for the third time, finally beginning to believe she’d actually been accepted into the FBI’s initial round of candidate screening.

She wasn’t a shoo-in by any means, but she’d taken the first step.

“I have good news and bad news,” she said when she heard someone come through the door, assuming it was Sara because she’d just called over and left a voice mail telling her boss that they needed to talk.

“Me, too,” said a voice that was definitely
not
Sara’s.

Chelsea froze. Then she looked up from her monitor, moving slowly, half convinced that he’d disappear, proving to be the same figment she’d imagined too many times to count.

But he didn’t disappear. He stayed put, with one shoulder propped against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest, his forearms bare where he’d rolled up the sleeves of a crisp blue button-down shirt.

The shirt was jarring in its very normalcy, as were his new-looking jeans and belt, which seemed to be trying to make him look like a regular guy. They failed, though, because there was nothing average about his solid build and angular face or the powerful emotion in his eyes when he looked at her.

Chelsea’s breath went thin in her lungs as she stood and moved around the desk to approach him.

Stopping just outside his reach, she lifted her chin. “What’s your news?”

“You first,” he said, challenging her. Teasing her.

And at that moment she knew it was going to be okay. She didn’t know where he’d been, but in that instant she knew he’d come back for her, and this time he was there to stay. She knew because she could finally see the warmth in his eyes, the love.

Her heart beat double time beneath her skin with a powerful combination of nerves and excitement. “I re-applied to the FBI and they’ve invited me to D.C.”

“Of course they did. They’re not stupid.” The way he said it made her wonder whether he’d had something to do with the quick response. “What’s the bad news?”

Her elation dimmed slightly. “It means leaving Sara in the lurch. With Jerry and Ricky both gone, she’s shorthanded as it is. Worse, Mayor Proudfoot wants to replace her with someone more susceptible to pressure. He’s leaning hard on IAD to investigate the office.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. “But Sara’s tough. She can take care of herself.”

When she said it that way, it seemed obvious. Why had it taken her so long to figure out that she had to let go sometimes?

She tilted her head, taking a long look at the man who’d helped teach her that, by showing her the extreme of what could happen to a person who tried to take the world’s problems on his shoulders and forgot to have his own life in the process.

“What about you?” she said, feeling her whole body shimmer with the warmth of his nearness, with the certainty that he’d come back for her. “What’s your good news?”

“I’m here,” he said simply, “and I’m staying. Not in Bear Claw, necessarily, but wherever you are. That’s where I want to be.”

He took her hand in his, and their fingers fit perfectly.

She stepped into him, leaned into him. “What’s the bad news?”

“Same thing. Whether it’s good news or bad depends on your perspective.” He took her other hand, folded his fingers around hers and raised her knuckles to his lips. “That’s assuming that you’re willing to forgive me for taking a few weeks to get things squared away and make sure I didn’t have to write you from the ARX Supermax, and you’re happy to see me and you still want us to be together. In that case, then it’s good news.”

His eyes said he already knew what her answer would be, as did the touch of his lips against hers, bringing heat and want.

“And if I’m not willing to forgive?” she said against his mouth, letting go of his hands to wrap her arms around his waist, anchoring herself to his strength.

“Then it’s bad news, because I have no intention of giving up what we could have together. I don’t care how long it takes, I’m going to stick it out and make it work.” His eyes were intent on hers. “So, which is it? Good news or bad?”

She smiled as the warmth that’d gathered in her heart moved outward, radiating through her body like need. Like love. “Oh, it’s good news. Very, very good news.”

And as they kissed, twining together in her office doorway, she knew that no matter where she chose to go from here, what she chose to do, she wouldn’t be doing it alone. She had a partner now. A lover.