Hidden Threat (26 page)

For a moment she could not find any words that would move from her brain to her mouth and make sense. To transition from the beautiful memory of her first lovemaking moment with Zach to the outstretched hand of his daughter was discomfiting, to make an understatement.

“
Amanda, what are you doing here?” Not great, but the best she could do.

After a pregnant pause, Amanda looked up at Riley.

“
I’m sorry about what I said to you.”

An apology? This would be a classic breakthrough if it was sincere.

“
How did you find my house? How did you get here?”

“
Can I come in?” Amanda’s voice was solemn. “I’d rather talk to you in the house.”

Though she had never had a client in her home, she figured it would be harmless.

“
Sure, come on in. Where are my manners?” Riley was still trying to find her footing here. She led Amanda through the foyer, past her study, and into the family room with its vaulted ceiling and stone fireplace. “Please, sit down. Can I get you something to drink?”

“
I’m fine. I need to ask you a few questions,” Amanda said emphatically. Riley thought she could hear the whisper of the words, “. . . while I still have the courage.”

“
Okay, sport, it’s your dime,” Riley said, more to herself now. Riley’s radar had reengaged. Something seemed out of place.

“
I went to Sanford Friday. I went to see my dad’s house. You know, how this will thing tells me to, just like I have to see you. That was one of the requirements.”

“
Go on.”

“
Jake drove me, and he used the key you gave him. We were in there for about an hour, maybe, and then I guess my mom called the NCBI or something because some people showed up and arrested Jake for kidnapping.”

“
What!” Riley’s hand came to her mouth. “Where is he now?”

“
They released him, but made me fly back here because he’s eighteen and I’m seventeen. They couldn’t let him drive me back. I kind of freaked, so I’ve been hanging at Brianna’s house all weekend. My best friend. Mom, everybody’s kind of freaked out, you know?”

Riley shifted in her chair and leaned forward. “So where is Jake now?”

“
I haven’t seen him since he got back. I even texted him that I was coming over here and it would be cool if he met us so we could, you know, talk. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about though.”

“
Let me ask you, what made the NCBI release him so quickly?”

“
That’s
part of what I need to talk to you about. I’m afraid I’m seeing how screwed up in the head I am. I need to talk to you.”

“
We’re talking, Amanda. It’s going to be okay. And you’re not screwed up.”

“
I . . . I don’t remember things . . . about my dad. Well, sometimes I do, like today.” Her words were coming out fast now. “When we were driving up the hill to his house I thought I was traveling back in time. I saw myself wrecking my bike, and I had absolutely no memory of that. Then . . . then we got into the house, and all these memories came rushing back like someone was playing a DVD in my head, you know?”

Riley watched Amanda speak, tears sneaking their way down her face.

“
The images were so real. I was reading on the chair. I was listening to a bedtime story. I was asking him not to go to work. What’s wrong with me?” she demanded, reaching out with her hands in frustration.

Riley grabbed Amanda’s hands and held them. “Let me show you something, Amanda.”

Riley guided her up the stairs and into what was obviously a guest bedroom. On the bed were several scrapbooks.

“
Just for the record, Amanda, it’s important for you to know that your father met me at the courthouse as he was leaving the hearing for the divorce. The marriage was over by the time we began our relationship.”

Amanda didn’t respond initially. Then she said, “No one wants to think of their parents apart, you know. But I’ve never thought of my parents even together. I just couldn’t figure out why he was never there.”

“
But you have to know, he was there. Look here. Your dad and I put these photo albums together. Several are of him and me, but you’re probably not interested in that,” she said, opening one of the albums. There were several pictures of Amanda swimming, as if taken from the corner of the gymnasium. She flipped a few pages, and Amanda saw photos of the senior class production of
Gone With the Wind
, in which she’d played Scarlett O’Hara. “Your dad was with you, but the conflict was so damaging to you that he pulled away. He couldn’t let you go. He had no intention of ever doing that. He just wanted you to have your space, to let you figure things out on your own. If that was possible.”

“
Why wouldn’t it be possible?” Amanda asked, flipping through the photos.

“
I mentioned to you the last time we were together a thing called parental alienation syndrome, do you remember?”

“
I dunno, maybe, I guess.”

“
It’s where one parent, usually the parent the child lives with most of the time, uses a child to hurt the other parent. It’s also called malicious mother syndrome.”

Riley eyed Amanda closely, watching for a defensive reaction regarding her mother. To her surprise, Amanda continued flipping through the book and looked up at her. “I’m listening.”

“
The incident, for example, that you describe about being locked in the back of a car while your mother demanded money from your father is classic manipulation of the child and the noncustodial parent, who was your father, in this case. It could be argued,” she continued gingerly, “that your mother used you as a prop to compel your father to pay money to see you.”

“
What if he really owed her that money?”

“
Doesn’t make it right, honey,” Riley quickly said. “Putting a child in that kind of situation is, in my mind, criminal.”

“
That’s pretty strong, don’t you think?”

“
No, I don’t, actually.”

Amanda put down the photo album, walked over to the window, and stared into the darkness. Riley saw her look down and notice a book on the end table.

“
What’s this? This is you?” Amanda asked, distracted.

“
Yes, that’s me. My book, rather. The courts have a lot to learn about this sort of thing.”

Riley walked over and took it from her.

“
It’s great that you’re published.”

“
I think I’m one million five hundred thousand on the Amazon bestsellers list. Awesome.” She smiled. Riley was being exceptionally modest. Her book had done well and had been chosen as a text at several universities. She wished to move past the book quickly, though. This was about Amanda, not her.

Riley did smile inwardly as she remembered Zach poring over the pages, saying,
“You have to attack this thing like a military problem. You have an enemy who has outer defenses, and they are holding someone hostage. What is your shaping operation? What are your interim objectives? How do you create the conditions for a successful attack while not harming the hostage? What is your defeat mechanism, that one thing that will assure you victory?”

After a while, it had all became perfectly logical to her, though it was never in her nature to ponder the complexities of warfare. Psychology according to Sun Tzu. Wonderful.

“
Can’t you see this is exactly what they’re doing? They are fighting a war, and Amanda is their point man. She makes first contact on their behalf. Then they develop the situation. She is trained as spy and infantryman rolled into one.”
Zach’s words, now more than ever, seemed terribly poignant as she had begun to dismantle the first surface layer of Amanda Garrett’s psyche.
Amanda is their point man. She makes first contact. . . .

“
Well, I’d like to be published one day.”

“
Really?”

“
I know, it’s not cool, but I like to write. Mom tells me it’s for losers.”

Riley stared at her a moment, noticing how much of Zachary she saw in her face. Strong cheekbones and the eyes, she felt as though Zachary were staring directly at her. Flint green specks burned brilliantly in what could only be called jade irises.

“
What?”

“
First of all, it’s totally cool. Just look at me. Secondly, you look so much like your father. He was such a beautiful man. And I know, Amanda, that you have his heart, too. Your father was a writer. He helped with this book.” She patted the hard cover of her opus. “And he wrote some other things, too.”

Amanda looked down at the carpet. “I’m just so confused, you know. I need to go back to the house, I guess, and spend some more time there maybe. It was, I don’t know, so good to be . . . home. I felt at peace.”

Riley felt the sting of tears forming but managed to hold them back. “He always wanted you there, and I think you could see how much he carried you in his heart.”

Amanda wiped her eyes and then dried her hands on her jeans. “Does this make me a worse person than I already am? That I abandoned my father?”

“
Honey, you never abandoned your dad. You never had a chance. But what you can do, now that you understand more, is honor him the way that he honored you.”

“
How can I do that? He’s dead. Gone.”

“
You’d be surprised at how much more in your life he could be, even now, Amanda. I’d say, if you have even one half the character of your father, which you do, then you’ll find a way to keep him with you. Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship with him.”

“
Like he did with me? I was gone, really, but from what it looks like, he tried to keep the memories close.”

“
Something like that.” Riley smiled tightly. She was straining under the pressure. She wasn’t sure she could convince herself of the truth of her own words, much less carry the burden of helping Amanda to restore her relationship with her dead father. Riley knew that she needed to grieve but was sacrificing her own healing for Amanda’s.

Just as she had promised.

CHAPTER 33

Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan

Early Monday Morning

Mullah Rahman knew two things for certain.

The messengers had left Dubai a few days ago and should have returned by now. And the second layer of information contained on the flash drive, if true, was explosive. On it were the plans for a complete withdrawal of all of the border combat outposts that the Americans had built.

Operations Searing Gorge and Final Salute were the code names on the encrypted files. Rahman’s information operations technician, Hasad Mohammed, had worked the flash drive and its contents for two days when he finally announced, “In Shallah.”

As Hasad showed him the files, the more mundane sets of information included a variety of special operations policies and standard operating procedures that anyone could find on the Internet.

The gold mine had been hidden beneath a second encrypted layer of information, which at first blush appeared to be a special operations rifle range manual. However, Hasad had found maps and plans in Annex C of the Glossary.

Rahman asked himself two fundamental questions.

Are these plans accurate and why would a combatant be carrying them into battle?

He pieced together the information in the plan and matched it against the map hanging on his wall in a different home than where they had initially stopped. A few miles further east, they had moved at night and blended into an alternate command post.

The room in which Rahman stood was sparsely furnished with two chairs, a wooden table, a Dell laptop, a pewter water pitcher, and his sleeping roll on the floor next to his prayer mat. A generator hummed quietly outside, providing power to the weak lights and the computer. On the wall was a detailed map of the Northwest Frontier Province and Kunar and Nuristan Provinces of Afghanistan. His mission for the last two years had been to strike the Americans where he could, inflict maximum casualties as frequently as possible, and survive.

Now, with Habib’s team already in the Naray area of Afghanistan digging for the Thorium, he apparently had captured an intelligence trove, because he saw phase one of the American operation was for two MH-47s to raid the mountain saddle which Rahman and his team had successfully defended. The plan called for an immediate follow on operation of the 101
^st
Airborne to withdraw from the dozens of firebases up and down the border. This tracked closely with what the cowardly army colonel had mentioned after they beat him and with what the Americans had done previously in the Korengal Valley where Rahman’s men had fought the Americans daily. After the Americans had suffered too many casualties, they had decided to abandon the post. It was that simple. So Rahman could see how his plan was working. Fight them hard. Cause casualties. Drive the wedge in the American public. And get them to leave

The documents contained detailed timelines beginning in the next 48 hours. All of this led Rahman to believe the information on the flash drive was authentic. The double encryption and the fact that the special operations soldiers were conducting a spoiling attack to allow for the withdrawal meant that they would have needed the sequential plan on hand, but secure, such as on a double encrypted flash drive.