Hidden Threat (30 page)

Zachary grabbed at a large boulder, pulling himself up onto the trail. His robe and headdress all might have bought him a minute or two, but the sandals he took from the rifleman, while uncomfortable, were helping him scale the slippery incline.

Just get moving on the trail, he kept reminding himself.

He was about one hundred yards into the steep draw, the village opening to his back, the trail narrowing to his front. Away from the sounds of the rushing water, he could again hear the pitch of voices, more excited. Then one voice above all others seemed to focus the group.

Zachary had not looked back. Never look back, the famous motto. Now was a time to live by that credo. Focused, he pulled again at rocks and scraggly trees sticking out from the massif. The only thing that gave him mild comfort was the AK-47 strapped across his back beneath his flowing robe.

The focused voice began screaming. Shots rang out, but not near him. Darkness began to encompass him.

He was two hundred yards up the valley now and moving more quickly. Three hundred yards up, the climbing got tougher. Hand over hand in some areas.

A quarter mile, he guessed. Still the gunfire, but nothing close. Were they executing the other tribal members responsible for watching him? His breathing was labored, but only because he lacked food, energy. His adrenaline kicked in, though, and supplied the glycogen to his muscles to keep him moving.

An hour later he was cresting the ridge of the mountain. He had to be ten thousand feet high, he figured. He paused, resting, breathing hard, and looked back at the trail he had just climbed.

Unbelievable. From his vantage, it appeared that he had scaled a cliff. Perhaps he had.

Looking west, with the sun now creeping over the mountains, he could see for miles. What he saw was jagged mountain ridgelines, capped with white snow, lined up as far as he could see, like a set of waves coming in off the north shore of Hawaii, massive, white tipped, forbidding.

He pulled the robe around him, glad that he had it for the extra bit of warmth it would provide tonight. He watched his breath crystallize in a fine mist. For the first time he allowed his mind to unlock from the task at hand.

Amanda. His men. His family. Riley. What else in life was there? For a few minutes he savored his relationships with his warriors. The bond they had formed over so many years, so many missions. Living a life in pursuit of nobility, the cause, the righteousness of what they did for a living. It was a good way to live . . . and to die. Hell, it was the only way he could live. His life had to have meaning beyond the paycheck. He had to feel like he was saving the world. That’s how he’d operated ever since coming back into the service.

Then there was Amanda. His heart ached for her, not because of his loss, but because of hers. He had tucked away the injustice of it all so many years ago. The burden was too difficult to carry exposed, too heavy. Watching his relationship with Amanda morph from doting father and daughter to manipulative and destructive player and pawn caught him so off guard that for a couple of years he couldn’t fathom it.

But now, his heart reached out to Amanda, as it always had. It opened full blossom. He would make a stand, again. And in the interim, he knew in his heart that Matt and Riley would do all they could.

Zachary scanned the incredibly beautiful mountains that surrounded him. He closed his eyes, clasped his hands together.

Lord, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for everything that you have given me. Please watch over my men, wherever they may be, and please, please, watch over Amanda for me until I can return to her.

Right now, right here, he decided, again, he would reclaim his child, and his life.

When he looked over his shoulder, he noticed the flashlights moving up the trail.

CHAPTER 38

Charlotte, North Carolina

Sunday Evening (EASTERN TIME)

Jake Devereaux had made the return trip from Sanford to Spartanburg after the brush up with the NC Bureau of Investigation. For a full day he dawdled around his house thinking about all that had transpired.

He was reluctant to call or text Amanda, fearing what her mother and grandmother might do or allege, not to mention that he felt someone had been keeping tabs on him since he left North Carolina. Neither did he want to discuss the situation with his father, an attorney, or his mother, who would worry.

It was Sunday evening and normally he would be taking Amanda to a movie or hanging with some of the other football players. He sat in his room wondering what he should do next and whom he might be able to talk to about
everything
.

His Droid phone suddenly moaned that he had a message. He had seen two others from Amanda telling him she was going to Dwyer’s house. The sending phone was listed as private. His instructions were:

Pick me up at Dwyers house. 112 Tryon St. Luv u.

He figured Amanda’s battery must have gone dead and she had texted him from Miss Dwyer’s phone. This would be a decent opportunity to talk to Amanda away from her mother and grandmother, but with a neutral third party present.

He bounced down the steps of his house, fired up his truck, and sped away. He followed his GPS, turned off I-77 and missed Tryon on the first pass, as it was on a cul-de-sac off the main road. Doubling back, he found the home, a nice two-story narrow brick house. It looked like a row home, only it wasn’t attached to another structure. It was free standing.

He parked in front of the house. Traffic whipped by on the main street just fifty yards behind him. There were ten homes he could see elegantly crammed into the semicircle. He didn’t know much about real estate, but he did figure that these homes, as small as they seemed, probably sold for close to a half million dollars. She must be doing okay, he thought.

The house seemed quiet. A dim light shone through the window that appeared to come from well into the back of the home. He walked along the sidewalk, which was lit by a single wrought-iron gas lamp.

Approaching the door, Jake sensed that the house was empty. There were no indications of movement that typically provided clues that the occupants were indeed present. No television flickering, no radio, no computer monitor.

He rang the doorbell, which sounded characteristically suburban, a double chime in reverse octaves. After a few moments, he pressed the dimly lit button again with his thumb. Lastly, he knocked on the heavy oak door, which surprisingly gave way and drifted open.

Jake looked down at the floor and then up as the door continued to open as if welcoming him on its own. A leafy plant was just inside the foyer to his right as he stepped through the threshold and into the wide foyer.

“
Miss Dwyer? Anybody home?”

His voice sounded alien to him inside someone else’s home.

Jake looked at his watch. The time was just past 10 p.m. He had received the text message no more than forty-five minutes ago. Amanda should still be here.

“
Amanda?” He spoke louder this time. “Amanda!”

The quiet house was eerie. The narrow rooms that funneled toward the rear were all dark and foreboding. He dared not venture any farther.

Turning, he placed his hand on the doorknob and immediately recoiled, as if bitten by a snake. The brass handle was slick with a dark substance that looked like paint, maybe.

Stepping back onto the porch, he pulled the door shut, trying to avoid the grease or paint he had touched. He realized that if Miss Dwyer had gone out jogging or something, he might have just locked her out. He nearly tripped over the gas lamp as he sniffed his hand.

He opened his truck door, turning on the dome light, and in the weak glow he saw red smeared across his palm and fingers. A sickening thought occurred to him as he was reaching into the glove box for the Purell hand sanitizer that Amanda always kept in there. That was when he saw the flashing lights behind his truck.

CHAPTER 39

Spartanburg, South Carolina

Sunday Evening

Amanda slowly pulled into her mother’s driveway. It was nearly midnight on a Sunday. She had ignored what seemed like a thousand calls from her mother and grandmother over the weekend, staving them off with a text and a voicemail to the home phone. Now she worried about the wrath she might incur for having hidden out at Brianna’s for the weekend.

She saw her mom’s twin Mercedes in the driveway as she shut the lights and quietly slipped from the car.

Spending the night with Brianna had been weird. Her best friend had seemed distant, but they were all getting ready to graduate, so she chalked the oddness up to nervousness about the upcoming life change.

Amanda slipped quietly into the house, snuck up the steps, entered her room and locked the door. She leaned back against the door and shut her eyes, sighing heavily.

Shower. She needed a good, hot shower. She stripped off her clothes and turned on the shower, letting the steam build up. As the forceful flow beat against her skin, she replayed the sessions with Riley Dwyer in her mind over and over again, confused about what she was thinking. More troubling, though, was what she was feeling. Her emotions had ranged widely since receiving notification of her father’s death. Initially she was as emotionally responsive as a flatlined heart monitor on a victim of cardiac arrest.

As she was exposed to the terrain and physical surroundings where positive actions had actually occurred with her father, memories came rushing back to her. The recurrences were like a silent train emerging from a dark tunnel at breakneck speed.
The tracks followed
the wild zenith and nadir of an unpredictable sinusoidal wave. Amanda’s emotions chattered along as if on a roller coaster, at first plunging toward the depths of her anger and hatred for a man she was convinced was a deadbeat, only to be rocketed upward toward the peaks of what could only be described as complete and unmitigated love for a father she adored.

The memories only came to her, though, when prompted, as a stopped heart may only begin beating again when the electric paddles are applied. She still did not know what to make of Riley Dwyer. It was unsettling to follow her through the labyrinth of her father’s life. Yet, the memories of her father were but snapshots in time. The movie of her life, it seemed, was here in Spartanburg, devoid of her father and any connections to him. She had always believed that was intentional on his part.

She brushed her hair a hundred times, or close to it anyway, before dimming the light and sliding into bed. She pulled the Hammacher down comforter up to her chin as she nestled into her one-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. She was worn by the swinging emotions and the back and forth travel. This was what happened, she thought to herself. The travel, the emotions, it was all too much. It was a rare moment of insight, perhaps ignited by a receding consciousness and prevailing set of facts.

***

Her mind swirled
as if a small twister were forming on the Kansas plains. Suddenly she
was
in Kansas, but without Toto. Instead, she had a Beagle named Floppy for the hue of his nearly bare belly as a young pup out of his mother’s womb. She had been four or five, she remembered, and there were three baby Beagles lying in straw at the bottom of a box. “That one, the floppy one,” she had said, pointing. So Floppy was jumping at the door in this vision, and Captain Zach Garrett was standing up from the breakfast table.

Amanda was playing with her spoon, dipping it into and out of her Fruit Loops and milk with a devilish grin on her face.

“
What?” her father asked, smiling.

Her big green eyes batted at him. “Nuffin’, Daddy.”

Floppy was jumping at the door, which meant one thing. Zach’s car pool ride was in the driveway.

“
Gotta head on out of here, baby girl. Kite flying at 3 p.m.? Can you work me into your schedule?”

Amanda giggled. “I’ve got a ’pointment at free p.m.”

“
Yeah, what’s that?” Zach was standing now, smiling.

“
Kite flying with Daddy, silly.”

He bent down to give her a kiss

She took his face in her hands. “Later, alligator.” Then she kissed him on the cheek. “Love you, Daddy.”

“
Love you, too, BG.”

Suddenly she was walking through the forest following the giant paw prints of an unknown animal.

“
That way,” she said, pointing and looking at her father. She was maybe ten years old now. It was a cool day in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and Amanda was dressed accordingly in her blue Gore-Tex Northface jacket and faded light blue dungarees. Supple brown hiking boots left cloverleaf imprints as she walked through the sandy soil along the creek bed.

Zachary was following behind, letting her lead. He was close though, as the paw print might
really
be a bear or a mountain lion. He was quite certain it was the large Saint Bernard that the Shiffletts owned.