Pursuit (7 page)

Charlotte grabbed a sweater and hurried down the stone stairs to the beach, scanning the sea desperately. Hurrying across the damp sand, she searched the long, curving beach. Maybe he had swum back, realizing it was insane to stay out in the ocean in this weather. Both ends of the beach were shrouded in fog. What she could see of the beach was bare and empty. As was the heaving ocean in front of her.

It was absolutely unthinkable that Matt should die. He had come through too much, been far too courageous in putting himself back together, to die now.

She wouldn’t stand for it. Matt needed to live.

The waves were increasing in intensity, whitecapped and curling. There was no way she could watch for him on the beach. She needed to be higher up to be able to scan the horizon for that sleek dark head.

Charlotte made for the quay at a run. A few short steps up, then she was sprinting along it, feet pounding. She reached the edge and stood on tiptoe, searching anxiously for any sign of Matt. She wiped her eyes clear of tears. Tears wouldn’t help anyone. Certainly not Matt. She needed to be dry-eyed and clearheaded.

He was nowhere to be seen. A bright bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky a few yards away, followed immediately by a clap of thunder so loud it deafened her. Oh, God, there was no way anyone could survive in the sea in this weather.

“Matt!
Matt!
” she screamed, but the rising wind bore her voice away. “
Matt!
”

Charlotte leaned against the weathered wooden railing, searching desperately through the fog and wind-driven ocean spray. She scanned the horizon, again and again, and saw only whitecaps and oily sea.

When she leaned more heavily against the railing, there was a piercing crack of thunder. Only it wasn’t thunder. She fell against the dark hard ocean surface with a sharp slap, which took her breath away. In an instant, she was sinking.

She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. However desperately she clawed, she couldn’t seem to rise up, toward the surface and air. Her right leg couldn’t move. Her pants were caught on a heavy plank that had broken off the quay and was sinking, taking her with it. However hard she writhed and grasped, she couldn’t free herself.

Charlotte fought and fought, but the gelid water froze her fingers, slowed her muscles. She was sinking fast. Her movements stilled when she realized she was going to die in the cold dark waters of the ocean.

It had all been in vain. She would never avenge her father’s murder or clear her name. All the pain and effort to escape and make a life for herself until she could return—all useless. It was over. She was going to die at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Robert Haine had won, after all.

Her muscles relaxed, and she drifted farther toward the bottom.

Something big, moving fast in the water, caught her eye. Bubbles rose and something hard caught her waist, propelling her upward. She was rising quickly, but it wasn’t quickly enough. Her lungs were starved of oxygen. She took in a deep breath in the exact instant she crested the surface.

She choked desperately for air as something moved her quickly through the roiling sea toward shore. Her throat could barely let air in. Her lungs heaved uselessly, trying to pull in air and meeting only the swollen tissues of her throat.

Cold water was replaced by cold air against her skin. It took her a moment to realize that they’d left the water. She was placed facedown on the cold wet sand, a strong force pressing rhythmically on her rib cage.

Charlotte coughed, feeling the harsh tang of seawater coming up as she vomited. She shivered and breathed shallowly. A hard hand thumped her back, and she retched seawater again.

At the first harsh indrawn breath without choking, she was suddenly airborne, carried away in strong arms. She clung, shaking, tears stinging her eyes. She’d never felt his touch, but she knew instinctively who it was.

“You came,” she whispered.

She heard his deep voice for the first time. “Of course, sweetheart.”

Lieutenant Matt Sanders’s heart nearly stopped for what would have been the second time in his life when he saw his Guardian Angel fall into the freezing wind-whipped ocean. She wasn’t a good swimmer, he knew that. He’d watched her from up on the hill as she waded gingerly into the water. She always stayed close to the shore, paddling around a little where she could touch before getting out. When he’d seen her fall in to the roiling, steel gray frigid water with a heavy plank caught on her pants, he thought his heart would stop once again, just as it had in the Hindu Kush.

He held his Angel high in his arms as he rushed up the wooden plank path leading from the beach to the town. She tightened her arms around his neck, shivering and sodden.

“You came,” she whispered shakily into his neck.

“Of course, sweetheart.” Matt shifted her in his arms, frowning. She felt nearly weightless. He knew she was slender, but in his arms she felt so delicate, so fragile. She was shaking so much he was afraid she’d break a bone and held her more closely to him. He was sodden, too, but he had a lot more body mass and could radiate some heat to her. His Guardian Angel lifted a slender arm and pointed toward a flight of stairs. “Over there,”

she murmured, “and to the right.” The words came out slurred as she tried to keep her teeth from chattering.

Matt nodded. He didn’t need to be told where she lived. He knew. Just as soon as he could climb stairs in the dark without risking falling flat on his ass, he’d walked over to her little house in the dead of night. He had stood outside her door more nights than he cared to think about. Oh, yeah, he knew where she lived, his sad-eyed beauty. Charlotte Fitzgerald. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. She’d been watching over him these past two months, willing him to make it. He’d come back to life thanks to her. He’d always been a hard man, and he’d been determined to come back even harder after dying, but he almost gave up, that first day in San Luis. He’d always been so strong, and his weakness had scared the shit out of him.

Then he’d seen this beautiful, sad woman on a terrace, looking down, and he’d felt waves of support coming from her. As if she knew what he was doing because she’d done it herself. As if she was willing him with everything in her to succeed. Dying fucked with a man’s mind. Matt knew in his head he’d been handed a second chance at life in the hospital, but he hadn’t known it deep inside until the woman he’d come to call his Angel watched over him as he put himself back together again, broken piece by broken piece.

“Here,” she whispered, as they reached her terrace. Matt made it to her door, bending slightly to open it with her in his arms. Inside, it was as if he’d spent all his life there. Somehow, he knew exactly which couch to put her on—the one with the brightly colored blanket covering the back. He somehow knew where the bathroom was and in a second he was out with a big thick towel.

Matt knelt in front of the couch and started toweling his Angel dry. The wild shivering continued, and he looked her over carefully, worried, as he rubbed her arms. He was a SEAL, a Navy diver. He’d seen hypothermia before—one of the deadliest dangers a soldier could face—and knew it could be fatal fast.

Frowning, Matt held her wrist for a moment, judging pulse rate and temperature. Pulse weak and slow. Core temperature about 92°. In a hea vy man, the chances of total recovery were good, but she was slender. Thin people lost body heat faster. She needed to get out of her wet clothes, right now. Cold wet clothes are a wick for body heat. He had to get her warm and dry. Then he needed to get some hot liquid and sugar into her.

“Charlotte,” he said, keeping his voice low. It took her half a minute to respond.

“Yes,” she whispered after a moment, as she looked up at him. She didn’t question that he knew her name.

She was focused on him. Good. She seemed alert, though slow to react. She was shaking wildly.

“I need to get you out of your clothes. They’re wet, and they’re keeping your temperature down. It’s dangerous for you to stay in them. Let me help you. I’ll put the blanket around you and go get some dry clothes for you to put on.”

She nodded—more a jerk of the head than an assent—and he bent to grab the bottom of her cotton sweater, tugging upward. She obediently lifted her shaking arms, the wet sleeves falling away from her delicate wrists. Matt pulled her sweater off, turned her slightly to undo her bra. And froze.

He couldn’t move; he could barely breathe as he stared at her shoulder. Hypothermia dulls the senses, slows the mind. Charlotte was only now realizing what had happened, what she’d shown him. He could see her registering his shock. Her face went white, bone white, even her lips. She shuddered once, hard, and cringed away from him.

They stared at each other, her light gray eyes meeting his dark ones. Her pupils were so dilated with shock only a silver-blue rim remained. A shaking hand covered her mouth. She looked utterly terrified, as if he were the symbol of death itself. And he was. Humans are essentially animals and like any animal in the wild, she was picking up on the waves of deadly rage coming off him. Death was in the room. Death for whoever had done this to her.

He was a soldier, he knew what that scar was. He’d seen hundreds of them. He had several himself.

Some fucker had shot his Angel, and recently.

Warrenton

April 25

His name was a whisper on the wind, mentioned only at midnight, when the lights were low and the whiskey flowed, when ties and tongues were loosened. Haine had heard the stories, different versions of them, in Atlanta, in San Francisco, in Miami. Depending on who you talked to, the man was a former CIA agent, a former SEAL, an exRanger or that deadliest of Special Forces soldiers, a Delta operator. Depending on who you talked to, he was six-foot-six and blond, five-foot-eight and dark-haired. He was black, he was Hispanic, he was Irish.

He had gravitated to the one place on Earth where he could hide in plain sight what he was—a predator. Uncle Sam spent twelve years training him in the fine art of murder. Uncle Sam was good at that. The US government had actually given him the money, the training, and the weaponry to turn himself into what he’d been born to be—a killing machine.

The thing was, though, that the US government expected its soldiers to have an off button, and he hadn’t been born with one. After a couple of episodes which had to be hushed up, he’d been given a dishonorable discharge because a court-martial would have been too messy.

Haine knew of him only by his nickname—Barrett. Not because it was his name—no one knew the name he was born under—but because of the big .50-caliber sniper rifle he was so good with.

It didn’t matter what his name was, only what he could do.

Barrett solved problems. If someone was standing between you and what you wanted, Barrett took care of it for you, for a price.

One night two years ago, in an exclusive club in Dallas, Haine had listened, bored, while a prospective client named Jerry Dunne ranted about his castrating bitch of a wife who was hell-bent on wiping him out financially during a particularly bitter divorce. According to Jerry, Mrs. Jerry had lawyered up with the Devil Incarnate, and Jerry was staring ruin in the face. Then Jerry’s voice had lowered dramatically and he’d leaned forward, with the sly stupid expression of the very drunk, to confess that he was calling in Barrett to get rid of his problem.

Haine’s heart raced as he casually asked how Barrett could be contacted. Five minutes later, Jerry was snoring in a drunken stupor on the leather banquette of the club, and Haine was tucking a slip of paper with instructions in his pocket. He pulled that slip out now and moved to his laptop.

Barrett was clever. His clients contacted him by e-mail, over a Web-based e-mail site. The clients and Barrett all had the same user name and password, and they had access to the same e-mail account.

Haine logged on and wrote his message but didn’t send it.

An hour later, Barrett logged on, read Haine’s message, deleted it, and answered. Haine read it and deleted it. Since the drafts were never sent, no server kept a copy. It was perfect, it never went anywhere, and was utterly untraceable.

How much?
Haine had asked at the end.

Four hundred thousand,
Barrett wrote.
Two immediately and two upon delivery. Plus
expenses.

Haine lingered over the keyboard, hands trembling. He had stock options, slated to vest in September. Court Industries stock would probably go up to $70 a share after the Proteus Project was approved. He’d make $24 million.
Spend money to make money.
The oldest economic law there was.

Deal,
he keyed.

I’ll be there by midnight tomorrow,
Barrett wrote.

San Luis

Shock shuts down the human nervous system. It drains blood away from the periphery to the vital organs in a last-ditch attempt to protect the center of the human body, the heart and lungs. While in a state of shock, a person is struck blind, deaf, and dumb. Totally helpless and vulnerable, unable to react in any way.

Matt had learned in hard places never to react to surprises. Nothing could shock him, nothing could slow his reaction time.

Matt made sure his men trained for real-life shocks. They trained with thousands of rounds of live ammo whizzing right over their heads. They were subjected to flashbangs—2 million lumens of light and 180 decibels—designed to stun normal people. Matt worked himself and his men until they could recover in a few seconds from shock.