Edge of the Heat 5 (21 page)

Sara slipped back down the side of the boulder and landed on her feet in front of him. “I know you’re tired. We’ll stop soon, but we have to get just a little closer to that area first, just in case. It looks like there’s a spring there.” She motioned with her finger and Jerry saw it. A line of trees on the other side of the ridge line, set close together. “I’m pretty certain that Thorpe won’t send dogs after us, at least not until it’s too late, but better safe than sorry is the spy’s motto.”

Jerry smiled, despite the weariness that had slammed into him when they stopped moving. “I thought that was the boy scout motto?”

“Oh no,” Sara said. “That’s
always do what you’re told
.”

Jerry barked a laugh in spite of himself. He’d rarely seen this light, playful Sara. Maybe this was what she was always like when she was being chased by madmen across the desert? When she was in her element, in other words.

As the orange light grew across the desert, they walked. And Sara talked.

S
ara snuck a glance at Jerry out of the corner of her eye. The morning light favored him. His strong face looked at peace out in the wild, and the young beard stubble made him look sexy as hell. She’d always wondered why more men didn’t just walk around with a day or two worth of growth on their face. Women loved it. Or at least she did. That was one thing about American guys. They shaved too much.

She was surprised that he hadn’t asked more questions. He seemed to just accept her story, and her. And she was really surprised that he seemed so at peace with her past. She knew how idealistic he was - how much he valued life. And yet he hadn’t batted an eye when she said she had killed 9 men, then more.

A pang of emotion ran through her again and this time she recognized it immediately for what it was. Deep, deep longing. Deep longing to never have been placed in the super-spy program. To not know that spies existed outside of the movies. To be a normal person who lived a normal life: school, work, falling in love, the big wedding, the two kids, the house, the mortgage, the vacations to the beach - all of it.

Sara shut it down. She was one of the people who made all of that possible for everyone else, that was all. Not everyone could live like that.

She took a drink of water and started talking again, not noticing how hard her voice had become.

“My
vacation
created more questions than it answered. I didn’t have a lot of money. The Agency always provided everything for me, so I had never spent much of my salary, but I sent my father money every month, and I sent the foundation money every month, and I gave the girls at the foundation almost everything else I had. So suddenly I was trying to do spy work with no budget. And in America. America is very expensive compared to Mexico. I have always been an American citizen, so that part was easy, but nothing else was. But I made do. I didn’t have one contact outside of Mexico who wasn’t in the agency so I started calling the men and women I had gone to camp with. I wanted to be careful, and not tip off Thorpe that I was suspicious of him suddenly, so I couldn’t ask anything about him. But I got together with a few people. We gossiped. I found out what most everyone was doing. This seemed to be a dead end to me so I followed Thorpe. I watched him. But from a great distance. I discovered that a woman I had gone to camp with was his personal bodyguard. This surprised me. Why would he need a bodyguard in the U.S.? And she was very alert, like she was constantly dealing with trouble. Thorpe had his own jet. He flew off and left me in America, unable to follow him. I soon discovered that what I was doing wasn’t working.

I flew back to Mexico and formulated a new plan. The pictures hadn’t made
my
work any less important to me, but they’d called Thorpe’s work into question. So for the time being I just kept on doing what I was already doing, with a few small changes. I didn’t have the lust for blood anymore. So I stopped killing people if I could help it. I woke the women and told them to run with the children to the foundation. For the first time I contacted a woman who was in charge of the local gang that was doing my work, and I asked her to wait for the fleeing women and children and take care of them. I took what money I could carry, and set the drugs and weapons caches on fire. I would make sure at least one man was able to raise the alarm, and then I left them to whatever fate decided.  I did this twice before Thorpe flew down to see me. 

I knew he would come, but I didn’t know he would be so angry. It was a strange thing. It seemed to me that he cared deeply about the money and the weapons. Usually I left them to be cleaned by one of his teams, but now I was destroying them. I asked him what his teams did with the money and the weapons. I could tell immediately that what he told me was a rehearsed lie. He said the money (it was always mostly American dollars) was examined to be determined if it was from a crime of some sort and returned to the rightful owner if so, or returned to the U.S. Treasury if not. And the guns were destroyed. I asked why did it matter if I destroyed them, then. He spouted off about government accountability and responsibility and basically said nothing at all.

I told him I didn’t care about any of that. My mission was human trafficking - child trafficking - and that was all I cared about. And I needed to do things how I saw fit. He argued with me and said if I cared about the children I would have to do things the way they’d always been done. He said without the backing of the U.S. Government I’d never be able to work in the same scope as I had been. And he was right. I knew that.

So I backed down. I kept doing missions, but I always took as much money as I could carry at each one now. I needed a bankroll. And I kept investigating him. I found an asset who could hack into the U.S. government computers. I’d had some hacking training, but nothing on that scale. My asset taught me how to get in using back doors, how to hack into other people’s security codes, and how to sift through mountains of data. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible.

I started reading Thorpe’s reports of my own missions. I hadn’t kept detailed logs about drugs, money, or weapons because that wasn’t important to me, but looking over my reports and dredging up my memory, I discovered that Thorpe’s reports were vastly under-reported. The amount of drugs reported destroyed seemed unremarkable, but the reports of weapons and money recovered were so low it was laughable.”

Sara stopped and looked at Jerry. He had a sour, tired look on his face. He was a smart man and he knew where this was going. She also knew they were done for the day. This had to be good enough, because to push them any farther would be dangerous for them. She couldn’t take a chance of disabling one of them on their first day out.

“We should stop,” she told him. “I’ll finish this tonight.”

He blinked and looked around. “OK. Where should we stop?”

They were on the top of a small ridge, with a view of the desert for miles and miles in every direction. There were no trees, just a few cacti and boulders, plus scrub brush lining the ground.

Sara stretched backwards, feeling her spine crackle. She let her eyes wander, not looking at anything in particular. Her eyes would know it without her brain’s interference. She turned in a circle and let her eyes do their thing. Her vision zeroed in on a spot to the right. Two boulders stacked against each other, leaning against the ridge. “There,” she pointed.

She knew it wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. They walked to it and dropped their packs. Sara took out one tarp from the pack and fashioned a crude sun shade, just big enough for one person between the bottom of the two rocks where they opened up a bit. She lined this spot with their jackets, making a sort of bed.

“You can sit down if you want. I need to do a few things. Go ahead and drink plenty of water too - we can only carry two days worth and I should be able to collect enough to replace what we drink.”

Jerry grunted and sat. He took his boots off and his feet sighed in relief. If he’d known he was going to be hiking through the desert for a week he would have worn different shoes. He took out a bottle of water and drank it down swiftly. He took out another and drained half of it. He almost poured the rest over his face to wash the dust off and then caught himself. They were in the desert. Was that really a good idea?

He watched Sara. She had walked a dozen yards away and was digging a hole in the ground with the small, foldable e-tool she had found in the shed back at the house. It looked like hard work to Jerry. All of a sudden he felt like a jerk for sitting here and drinking water - almost talking a bath in it - while she was working. He laced his boots back up with a small pang of regret as they confined his feet again, then ran over to her. “Can I help?”

“Sure, dig another one that looks just like this right there.” She handed him the e-tool and walked off. While he dug she filled the old hole with scrub brush and cacti. She went for her pack, dug a few things out of it, and laid them around the hole.

“Jerry, this is going to seem weird to you maybe, but could you turn your back? I am going to pee in this hole.”

“Um. OK.” Jerry stopped digging and turned his back.
In the hole
?

“OK, you can turn around now. When you’re done, you pee in your hole if you can.”

“Um. OK,” Jerry said again, a cocky grin playing around the corners of his mouth.

She went back to her work, grinning also.

When she was done, she stood up and surveyed her work. It looked good. The sun would bake all the plants plus the pee in the hole and the water trapped in the ground and the plants would evaporate and then collect on the piece of plastic she had secured to the top. It would then run down the sheet of plastic to the lowest point, which was directly in the middle, thanks to the rock she had placed on top. It would drip into the coffee can she had placed underneath it. And best of all it would all be safe to drink, since only water can evaporate and any germs would be left in the soil.

She turned to Jerry to see if his hole was ready for a tarp on top yet. Heat flooded her face when she realized he must have just finished doing what she had asked him to, and was still zipping up his pants. She whipped back around, standing stiffly and hoping he hadn’t seen her. His soft laugh told her he had. “Sorry, I should have warned you,” he called out.

She turned back to him, preparing to scold him. Yes he should have warned her! But the words died on her lips. The sun was raising directly behind his back, so all she could see was his silhouette. He looked like a muscular cowboy: all tight jeans, broad shoulders, and work-roughened skin. His cocky grin was still there, but rather than detract from his attractiveness, it added to it. To her, he looked like he belonged out here. Like he should be roping cattle and bedding women in long flowing dresses who wore bonnets and hid their faces when they laughed.

She realized she was staring and heat rose to her cheeks again.
Get ahold of yourself Lissa,
she said, using her mother’s pet name for her. All of this talk about her past had brought the name back to her mind. She hadn’t thought of her mother in years, hadn’t talked about her to anyone ever. She had never had a best friend, and never really had a boyfriend. What made Jerry so special that she felt she could just open up to him like this? Tell him everything, even though she had planned on leaving out the worst parts. It couldn’t just be because she was attracted to him, could it?

Jerry’s grin widened a bit as he watched her face. Then he set to work gathering rocks that would hold the tarp over his hole. She swallowed hard and pulled another tarp and can out of her pack.

When they had the second hole done and ready to collect water, Jerry handed her the last of his water bottle. “I got all I could drink for now. I didn’t think I should wash my face with it so here, it’s yours.”

She held her hand up. “You can wash your face. Look.” She dipped her chin at the first hole and Jerry saw the water collecting on the plastic sheet already. “Those cans will be full by tonight. We’ll have plenty to wash with and drink so we might as well wash now. It will make sleeping easier.”

“Great!” Jerry put his bottle on the ground, lifted his shirt over his head, and tucked the tail of it in the back pocket of his jeans to keep it off of the ground. He retrieved the water bottle and dumped it directly over his head. To Sara, this display looked boyishly enthusiastic. That boyish enthusiasm was one of the things she loved about him. She watched his back muscles ripple as he bent forward and scrubbed his face. Her hands itched to reach out and touch his skin. To see if it felt as sexy and masculine as it looked.

Sara bit her lip and turned on her heel to block the sight of his broad back. She couldn’t turn her brain around though, and the image still flashed in front of her eyes, making her body throb with want.
What in the hell is wrong with you?
she chastised herself. If ever there was a worse time to be turned on by a man, she couldn’t think of it.

S
ara walked quickly to their makeshift bed area, trying to scrub the image of shirtless, sexy man out of her brain. She heard Jerry walking behind her, so she started talking, hoping business would calm her down. “We should eat, and then sleep. We’ll have to sleep in shifts. I’ll take the first shift. I’ll let you sleep for 3 hours, and then I’ll wake you. It will get hot, but not so hot as to be super uncomfortable. When it’s your shift, you’ll want to stay out of the sun as much as possible. Sit in the shade of the larger rocks, but get up and walk around occasionally. You are watching for any people or dogs or vehicles moving in the desert, and you need to be listening for helicopters. If you see or hear anything wake me up right away. Also watch our holes. If the water stops dripping, cut more cactus to put in the hole. If the can fills to the top, pull it out, empty it into these water bottles, and put it back in there.”

Sara rummaged in her pack and brought out 4 cans of beans and weenies and a can opener.