Forced Disappearance (7 page)

The smell of frying meat hit them as they stepped inside, the place a single large room, mostly locals around the tables. Her heart twisted as she watched Glenn swallow repeatedly. “Hey, we have time for a bite.” She smiled.

They went to the back and took a table in the corner. She ordered soup for the both of them. He’d better start with something light.

He kept looking at other people eating, then glancing to the door. He’d been abused, badly, she thought, and silently cursed the Guri commander. “I have a lot of questions.”

“Not here.”

She nodded. They’d have time. She had found Glenn. Alive. She grinned. Right now she just wanted him to relax and eat, but before their soup arrived, Roberto strode in, and her euphoria dimmed.

Roberto hurried toward them, a too-wide smile on his face. “Señor Danning?”

Glenn’s entire body stiffened. He cast a quick glance around, half lifting from his chair, ready to run for it, but Roberto was next to them in seconds.

He lifted his hands, palms out, in the common gesture of no-harm-intended. He flashed Miranda an impressed smile before turning to Glenn again. “We’ve been looking for you. I’m glad we’ve found you at last.”

Glenn checked him over. Miranda knew the exact moment he spotted the concealed weapon. His face tightened.

Roberto dropped into the chair on Miranda’s other side, boxing her into the corner, his eyes on Glenn. “Tell us what happened.”

Unease put Miranda on alert. How was it possible that Roberto strolled into the same off-the-beaten-path eatery as they had, several blocks from where she’d left him?

Glenn glared. “Your National Guard kidnapped me. They accused me of being a spy.” He kept his voice low so nobody beyond their table would hear.

Roberto leaned back in his seat, watching him carefully. “Why?”

“Finding that out is second on my to-do list, right below getting out of this damned country.”

“We’ll drive up to Caracas, then fly back to the US,” Miranda put in. Would Roberto let them? She wanted badly for him to be what he seemed, a helpful partner interested in justice.

“I’d rather go to Brazil.” Glenn looked pointedly at Roberto. “I don’t trust anyone in this country.”

Miranda put a hand on his. However this played out, she
was
going to get Glenn back home. “Just trust me.”

But even as she said that, armed guardsmen rushed into the restaurant and headed straight toward them.
Oh shit.

Glenn ran for the back door, cursing, and was gone in two seconds, Roberto darting after him. Miranda was only a few steps behind them. “No! Wait!”

“Alto! Alto!” Half a dozen rifles pointed at her.

She froze, anger steaming through her. “Okay. Don’t shoot.”

She raised her hands into the air and bent forward as if to drop to her knees in surrender. But instead, she grabbed a chair and threw it at the soldiers, then sprinted through the back door as shots flew by her.

She burst outside. Came to a screeching halt.
Oh, hell.
More guardsmen waited out back.

She slammed her back against the door so their buddies couldn’t follow her, reached for her weapon, and pointed it straight at Roberto’s head as he was slapping handcuffs on Glenn, looking pretty satisfied with himself.

“Let him go,” she demanded. “Put your weapons down.”

But instead of telling his men to obey, Roberto smiled at her.

“I will shoot.” She meant it. She had a dozen bullets and only seven men against her. She had a fair chance.

The door banged against her back, but she held steady, bracing herself with her feet. The nearest soldier grabbed for her. She moved her aim from Roberto and shot at her attacker.

Nothing happened.

She squeezed the trigger again. Yet no matter how many times she tried, the weapon didn’t fire. Fear shot through her then.

She threw the gun at the man with a curse. She’d been surprised that Roberto would give her a weapon. Of course, if he’d fixed it so it wouldn’t work . . . But why give her a weapon at all? She cursed again as she understood at last. GPS locator—probably in a hollow bullet. That was how he’d found her.

The soldiers behind her burst through the door at last, propelling her forward, into the hands of men waiting for her. She knocked two down, flipped the third. But the rest rushed her all at once and overpowered her.

One of the soldiers grabbed her and twisted her arm behind her back to hold her in place as she struggled.

“Get your hands off me! I’m here under the full protection of the United States government. I have a badge.”

Her credentials didn’t impress the guy. He didn’t budge an inch.

Roberto handed Glenn over to another batch of soldiers. The men shoved him over to a waiting army truck, the back canvas covered. They boosted him up.

“Roberto!” Miranda struggled. “You can’t do this. This is an illegal arrest.”

He kept his expression shuttered as he walked over. “Sorry, señorita. I wish this could have ended differently, but we don’t tolerate spies in our country, the same way you don’t tolerate them in yours.”

As he patted her down and took her phone, wallet, and badge, she felt nothing but outrage. “I’m not a spy, for heaven’s sake, and neither is Glenn Danning!”

His face remained emotionless as he held out handcuffs for her.

The soldier let her go. There were guardsmen all around, all armed. Glenn was already in the back of the truck.
No way to escape.

She held her hands out for the cuffs as she seethed. She needed to go with Glenn. She wasn’t letting him out of her sight.

“Are you even with the police?” she asked Roberto.

Roberto’s smile held a twinge of regret. He held her hands for a second after he cuffed her. “DISIP.”

Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención
—
the Venezuelan equivalent of the CIA. Because for some idiotic reason they thought Glenn was a spy. She grit her teeth.

“Listen, you’re making a big mistake here,” she called back as one of the men began shoving her toward the back of the truck.

“We call it apprehension and recovery.” Roberto nodded to the soldiers, and they hoisted her into the truck without ceremony.

Four soldiers came up behind her, pushing the prisoners to the back while they sat closer to the tailgate. The green canvas flap dropped down, closing them in. Someone shouted orders outside, then the engine revved and the truck lurched forward.

Shit, shit, shit, dammit!

One dark thought after another flew through her head as she began to fully understand their situation. They were branded as spies. The Venezuelan government was going to deny all knowledge of her disappearance as they’d denied Glenn’s. The only way for Venezuela to come out of this without an international incident was for both of them to disappear without a trace.

They were as good as dead.

Cold sweat rolled down her spine. She caught Glenn’s gaze as he sat on the wooden bench across from her, his entire body rigid, his face flushed with fury.

“We have to escape,” she mouthed.

He didn’t bother to keep his voice down as he responded. “I would have been out of the country by morning if you hadn’t shown up.” His gaze boiled with anger.

Oh
, he was mad at
her
.

As if to underscore that, he said, “Stay the hell away from me.”

All right, so he didn’t want to be friends again.

Chapter 7

SHE’D CHANGED. GLENN
didn’t like it.

She’d cut her hair. Why would she do that? She’d had lovely hair, silky soft waves tumbling down to her butt. For school and the engineering lab she’d always worn it in a thick braid so it wouldn’t get in the way. But at night with him . . . He’d loved the sight of all that dark hair spread out on the pillow. He’d loved
her
. Not that it’d mattered to her.

Why would she show up in his life now to mess him up all over again? His mind had a hard time catching up with the fact that she was here.

Hot fury pumped through Glenn’s veins. After surviving the torture, the fever, the illegal loggers, the trip through the jungle, he’d been less than ten miles from freedom . . . His jaw clenched so tightly, his teeth ground against each other.

Miranda.

She sat in the back of the truck opposite him.
Why now? After all these years . . .

He was mad as hell, yet couldn’t take his eyes off her, comparing every little detail to his memories, trying to reconcile this new Miranda with the old. Her body was different. More compact, with more muscle. She’d moved with a controlled strength that showed her army training. Wearing a simple shirt with khaki cargo pants, she had the whole Lara Croft thing going, her head held high, unbowed in captivity.

He had a flashback to their video-gaming days and he almost,
almost
, softened toward her a little.

“Break. Out.” She carefully mouthed the two words at him.

She was
not
going to tell him what to do. He glared and mouthed back, “You’re not in charge.” He was going to break out because he wanted to break out. He wasn’t going back to Guri for more torture.
Fuck the commander.

But before he had time to come up with a plan, Miranda Pain-in-the-Ass Soto parted her knees and dropped her cuffed, fisted hands between her legs where the soldiers wouldn’t see them, then unfolded three fingers on her right hand while holding his gaze.
Three.
She closed one finger.
Two.
Closed another one.
One.
Only her index finger was extended.

A countdown. He had one second to figure out what they were doing. Then she gave a final nod and attacked with lightning speed.

She slammed her elbow into the face of the soldier next to her, hard enough to break his nose and knock him off his seat, then she threw herself on the second man as he shouted, “Alto! Alto!”

She yelled at Glenn. “Hurry!”

He was fighting, doing his level best to mirror what she did. He didn’t have her skills, but he did have some extra weight to throw into his punches.

By the time he immobilized his first guy, she already had her cuffed hands wrapped around the last man’s throat, choking consciousness out of him as the truck rattled down the road.

The lightning attack lasted less than a minute.

Jesus
. The sudden, violent rush of effort stole the air from Glenn’s lungs. He kneeled in the bottom of the truck, breathing hard, staring at her. All four soldiers were incapacitated, lying partially on top of each other.

He’d gotten one; she’d gotten three, her face flushed from the fight.

His old video-gaming nerd self would have had a boner by now. The more mature Glenn was . . . All right, turned on, dammit, as he watched her, her chest heaving while she tried to catch her breath next to him.

“Let’s grab what we can.” She was moving again already, reaching into the shirt pocket of one of the knocked-out soldiers. She pulled out a small key.

How did she know the guy had it? Apparently, she’d paid more attention than Glenn had.

“Hands,” she ordered. “Hurry up.”

He held out his wrists and was free the next second, then he took the key and unlocked her cuffs in turn, hating the red circles on her pale skin.

She paid no attention to her injury. She grabbed a pistol and shoved it into the waistband of her pants for easy access, then took the water canteens off two of the men and clipped them onto her belt. Glenn did the same with the other two.

She grabbed a knife. So did he. They both grabbed hats. Then as he patted down the last guy, he found a lighter and half a pack of cigarettes. He pocketed those. He had a feeling they were heading back to the forest where fire might come in handy.

The jungle was torturous in its own way, but Glenn preferred it to the commander.

When Miranda picked up a rifle, so did he. Then she moved to the tailgate and made room for him next to her, in front of the closed canvas flaps. “On three again,” she said. “One, two, three.”

She pushed the canvas aside on the last word and opened fire on the military Jeep that followed the truck for extra security. The Jeep swerved, then slowed before the driver straightened it, his passengers returning fire.

At the noise of the gunfight, the driver of the transport truck slammed on the breaks, realizing something had gone terribly wrong in the back. The sudden lurch nearly tossed Miranda and Glenn off the truck. Glenn careened to correct, but Miranda shoved him.

“Jump!” She pushed him straight into the path of the oncoming bullets.

He lost his rifle as he tumbled to the ground, had no time to pick it up. Above him, Miranda kept shooting non-stop, kept the soldiers pinned down in the Jeep long enough for Glenn to make a mad dash toward the forest.

He ran like hell, certain about only two things: they were going to die, and Miranda Soto was raving mad.

He didn’t look back until he was in cover behind a tree, then he pulled his pistol and shot blindly at whoever was still moving. Only Roberto was alive in the Jeep, his head pulled down behind the dashboard as he shot at them.

The two men from the cab of the transport truck were jumping to the ground with their rifles to enter the fray. Glenn fired to hold them back, trying to provide Miranda with some cover. His heart beat hard enough to break through his ribcage. He had zero gun skills. Didn’t she know that?!

She showed plenty of skill as she dropped to the ground at last, shooting backwards as she dashed toward him. “Go! Go! Go!”

He didn’t need any further encouragement. He ran like hell.

She caught up with him pretty fast, tucked her gun away, shouting over the sound of gunfire. “They’re shooting blind. They can’t see us. Keep going.”

He put every ounce of energy he had into moving forward, not that the going was easy. More like an obstacle course: bushes and trees, rocks and exposed roots in their way. One wrong step, and a fall could mean being skewered by a broken bamboo shaft or a branch.

Then an endless patch of thorny bushes slowed them further yet.

“We have to reach the border,” he gasped as he fought his way through the heavy undergrowth. “Boa Vista is just on the other side. We can get transport from there to Rio.”

“The border will be under lockdown before we can reach it.”

“Then we cut through the jungle. Go the long way around.”

“This is the start of the rainy season. It’s rained every day since I’ve been here. Soon the rain will start and won’t stop for weeks. We can’t walk over a hundred miles through heavy jungle without a machete. Not through mudslides and flooding rivers.”

He grunted. She always thought she had a better solution to everything. As company president, he wasn’t used to his decisions being questioned at every turn. Even more annoying was the fact that she was right. Not that he was ready to concede.

He bent a thick, thorny branch out of the way. “We’d be safer in Brazil.” She couldn’t argue with that.

Of course, she did. “We can’t cross the border through the jungle in the rainy season. And if we take the road, we’ll be caught before we get anywhere near freedom. And even if we reach the Brazilian border, they aren’t going to let us in without papers. The border guards will be notified to watch out for criminal fugitives. Instead of asylum, chances are we’d be returned to Roberto.”

Glenn pushed forward, then stopped when he realized he had the knife he’d taken off one of the soldiers. He pulled it from his belt and began hacking away the vines and branches. A machete would have been better, but he was making more progress than when he’d been tearing at the vegetation with his bare hands.

But as soon as Miranda realized what he was doing, she put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t. You’re going to leave a trail a blind man could follow.”

Oh, here we go, Miss Know-It-All Smarty-Pants.
He’d forgotten that his roommate in college used to call her Hermione.

The fact that she was right was just an extra layer of irk frosting on Glenn’s layer cake of pissed-off. He was sick and tired of her being right. It was particularly annoying that part of him was impressed by how fast she could think under pressure.

“Are you suggesting that we sit out the rainy season in the jungle?” He went back to using his bare hands to bend branches out of the way.

“First, let’s get away from the men behind us. When we can do it safely, we’ll sneak back into the city and hitch a ride on a plane.”

He glanced back. “There’s an airport here?” Why hadn’t he thought of that? Probably because they were in the middle of nowhere. “How big is Santa Elena?” He’d pictured it as a small town in the middle of the jungle.

“Almost thirty thousand people.”

Leave it to her to know exactly.

“I pay attention to detail when I work a case,” she said. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have found you.”

“In which case, I wouldn’t have been caught,” he pointed out, then felt like a jerk when the expression on her face changed. She looked as if he’d just kicked her.

He turned away from her and refocused on the undergrowth he needed to fight through, hoping he wasn’t touching anything poisonous. “How do we walk into the city without getting caught?” Everyone would be looking for them now.

She didn’t respond immediately. Good to know she didn’t have an instant response to every question.

But only a minute or two passed before she said, “Through the slums. People who live there are not the type to call the cops, even if they see some raggedy foreigners. And we’re not going to run into a patrolling officer. The cops don’t go into the slums unless there’s a coordinated takedown going on and they have considerable backup.”

“How are you an expert on slums?” He kept pushing forward.

“Roberto told me some things.”

“I bet he did.”

“Listen.”

He turned.

She held up a hand to bid him to silence.

He strained his ears. “What is it?” he whispered after a long moment.

“Nothing. I haven’t heard anyone behind us for a while. I think we lost them.”

He listened again. She was right. Nothing but the birds and the bugs. His shoulders relaxed. “I know where the bad section of the city is. I walked through it this morning. Let’s circle around and find our way into Santa Elena through the slums then.” He paused. “Even if we cut through the slums without trouble, the airport will be guarded.”

“We’ll figure out something.” She scanned him from head to toe before her gaze returned to his. “Are you all right?”

“You?” She had a bloody scratch on her face, probably from a branch. He wanted to wipe the dried drops, but didn’t reach out.

She held his gaze. “We should go.”

“Yeah.” He had the crazy impulse to push her up against the nearest tree and kiss her.

He put his carnal urges down to dehydration. They were definitely not going there. Ever again.

He moved past her, spotted an animal trail that headed in the right general direction. “Let’s try this.”

She fell in step behind him. “Maybe it’ll take us to a road that goes into town.”

But their plan didn’t go as smoothly as that. They circled back to the road, but every time they tried to leave the woods, they saw guardsmen. The few roads that led into town were riddled with checkpoints. The National Guard had the outskirts of the city covered.

“We could spend the night in the woods,” Glenn suggested as they pulled behind a stand of bamboo, well out of sight. To keep walking after dark was simply too dangerous. They wouldn’t see where they were stepping. “Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow.”

“You think you can handle a night in the jungle?”

His manly pride bristled, but he couldn’t fault her for the question. He’d been a total nerd the last time they’d seen each other, barely a step above the pocket-protector geeks. He’d changed. He wasn’t the same clueless kid who’d fallen for the first pretty girl who liked engineering, and then let her rip his heart out and hack it into pieces. “I can handle anything you can handle.”

A couple of seconds ticked by before she nodded. “It’ll be dark in an hour. Let’s find a campsite.”

They began moving again, away from the road and deeper into the forest, scanning their surroundings, struggling for at least half an hour before he spotted a small clearing at last.

“There.” He pointed. “Trees close enough to each other to build a platform to sleep on.”

“And not much undergrowth for snakes to hide in,” she added as she assessed the spot.

“Plenty of bushes all around, so people can’t see the light of our fire unless they are right on top of us,” he finished listing the advantages.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You’ve done this before?”

“How did you think I made it this far from Guri?” He’d survived more than one night alone in the woods, on the run, sick.

“How did you?”

He pulled out his knife. “Stowed away with illegal loggers, then walked through the jungle.” When she looked skeptical, he bit back a smile. Miranda Soto had a lot to learn about him.

To further prove that he could take care of himself without her help, he moved over to the nearest stand of bamboo that would make the bulk of their bedding and began hacking away at the sturdy stalks. She joined to help.

Okay, so maybe she was faster with the knife than he was. She moved with the assurance of a woman who knew how to use a weapon. He couldn’t help thinking, once again, how much she’d changed all around. But the biggest difference was in her eyes.