Hide and Seek (7 page)

Shit. No way the puny little two-wheel-drive, four-cylinder was going to have the horsepower to plow out of the deep rut. Gonna have to dig it out.

Using a sturdy stick from the surrounding forest, he went to work freeing the vehicle. It took a lot of elbow grease, and he had to hunker down to chip away at mud encasing the tires. As he dug out the last rut, his gaze strayed to something odd clinging to the underside of the rear bumper.

A small black magnetic GPS tracker.

Holy hell.

He wrenched it off on a harsh curse, his blood running cold.

Someone had been watching Lisa. Thanks to her brother’s careless text, Duarte didn’t have to guess at who might have put the damn thing on her vehicle. Phoenix’s enemies, tracking her.

For how long?

Long enough to know her activities and movements.

Long enough to know where she was now, and whoever it was could easily follow her to the mountain. If they hadn’t already.

And Duarte had just left her all alone, unprotected, at the cabin.

As the dread seized him, a sudden chilling image flashed into his mind’s eye: Lisa in the hands of a killer, a gun jammed against her temple.

It was there and gone in an instant, like glimpsing a single frame from a rolling film. Nothing to tell him where or when it would happen, only the stark vision of Lisa’s pretty face contorted in terror as the nose of a SIG nine-millimeter pressed tight at her head.

Fuck. For all he knew, it could be happening right now.

Icy panic froze his veins at the mere possibility.

Duarte drew his pistol and bolted back to the shortcut, adrenaline pouring through him like acid. His boots chewed up the uneven terrain. Branches slapped at him as he cut a frantic path through the bramble and over the rocky, root-tangled forest floor.

All the while he ran, he tried to reassure himself that she was okay. He’d only been gone a few minutes, and the chances that any of Phoenix’s enemies had trailed her to this remote stretch of North Carolina wilderness were slim at best.

But even slim odds were too much for his liking. Especially when his warrior’s instincts were clanging in high alarm.

Something felt off about the mountainside as he tore up the incline, racing to reach Lisa. Someone was in these woods with him now. He’d bet his life on it.

He knew it the same way his instincts had served him well on combat patrols.

A bogey was somewhere on his land right now with his sights set on Lisa. Closing in on the cabin... armed and ready to kill.

Son of a bitch.

Duarte’s chest squeezed as if caught in a vise. If anything happened to Lisa because he’d let his fucking guard down, he didn’t know how he would live with himself.

And then he heard it.

A single gunshot. Up ahead of him through the woods. Where the cabin was.

No. It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

He couldn’t already be too late to save her.

He ran faster, his heart about to explode in his chest.

Goddamn it, no!

~ ~ ~

Yanked from a pleasant drowse, Lisa bolted upright.

Was that a gunshot?

Holding the sheet to her naked chest, she shook off her sleep and blinked to clear her eyes. She was in the middle of John’s bed. His empty bed.

And that sharp, echoing crack outside had definitely been a gunshot.

“John?” No answer. No sound at all from anywhere in the cabin. “Oh God, where are you? John!”

She flew off the mattress. Got dressed as fast as she could, forgoing her bra, which had evidently gotten lost somewhere on the bedroom floor a few hours earlier. No time for shoes, she tore out of the cabin and into the dewy, early morning forest outside.

She spotted him a couple of yards ahead of her, near the ditch she’d stumbled into the night before.

“John!”

He wasn’t alone. Another man stood in front of him, his back to Lisa. A mane of shaggy, sun-streaked dark blond hair fell to his shoulders in beach bum waves, but there was nothing else soft about him. He was dressed in a camo shirt and olive cargo pants that made him blend in with the foliage around him. A big man, he was tall and muscular and intimidating, nearly the size and bulk of John.

And, like John, he also held a pistol down at his side.

They both looked her way as Lisa hurried toward them. John’s dark eyes were grave, but he didn’t warn her away as she ran toward him with her heart in her throat.

The other man’s face was equally sober, and... vaguely familiar.

Confused, Lisa tried to process the tanned, angular cheeks and sharp blue eyes that stared back at her from this stranger with a gun in his hand. Then realization settled in.

She knew him. The third member of her brother’s trifecta.

“Alec?”

Instead of greeting her as she reached them, he did a quick visual scan of her, from bed-mussed head to barefoot toes. Then he turned a questioning look on John. “I’m not gonna ask.”

John grunted. “Good. Because I’m not about to explain.”

“I heard a gunshot,” Lisa said. “Someone want to tell me what’s going—” Her breath caught in her throat. She pointed to the large, unmoving lump in the bottom of the ditch. “That’s a dead body.”

“It is,” John said, his low voice guarded.

“Did you shoot him?”

“I did,” Alec answered, his baritone drawl equally cagey.

Lisa glanced between the two men caught in their unspoken standoff. Then she glanced down at the body and the nasty looking pistol beside him. The man wore plain clothes, but his trimmed hair and athletic physique screamed military to her. “One of you two please tell me what just happened. What’s going on here? Who the hell is that guy?”

“An enemy of the Phoenix program,” John replied. “Or someone working for the program’s enemies.”

Alec cursed low under his breath. “You told her about Phoenix? Jesus fucking Christ, Ranger.”

Lisa frowned. “Who’s Ranger?”

“I am.” John didn’t take his eyes off Alec. “It was my codename in the program.”

Alec blew out a sharp exhalation. “She shouldn’t be out here, man. She’s in danger.”

“No shit,” John ground out. “The question is, what are you doing here?”

“You mean, besides saving both your asses just now?” Alec gave a slow shake of his head. “Maybe I need to be more concerned about you now. What are you doing up here with Talon’s little sister? Other than the obvious, that is.”

“That’s between me and her. How did you know where to find me?” John drew a small black object out of his jeans pocket and held it in his palm. “This belong to you or the dead guy, Stingray?”

Ranger. Talon. Stingray. Codenames and dead guys, and...

A chill swept over her when she realized what John was holding. “Is that some kind of tracking device?”

“I found it on your car. Then I had a vision of some asshole holding a gun against your head.”

Oh, yeah. Let’s not forget the whole ESP thing either.

She swallowed hard, eyeing the dead man in the ditch. “You’re saying this guy followed me here to kill me?”

“I had the same vision,” Alec said, still looking grimly at John. “A week ago. I’ve been having a lot of visions lately.”

“You’re clairvoyant, too?”

Amazing how calmly she was able to ask that, given that before last night, she’d attributed claims of psychic abilities to people with overactive imaginations or a desperate need for attention. Neither John nor Alec fit those molds. For that matter, neither did her brother, if everything John told her last night about Kyle and the Phoenix program was true.

Which it certainly seemed to be, considering there was a corpse armed with a pistol lying three feet away and Kyle’s two best friends discussing the whole thing as if there was nothing strange about any of it.

“The tracker isn’t mine,” Alec said. “I followed Lisa here last night from Cinci. Been staked out in the woods all night, waiting to see what she was doing up here. And with whom. Now I know.”

“What about him?” John asked, ignoring the jab and cocking his head toward the ditch.

“He showed up a few minutes before you came crashing through the woods like an elephant on the charge. Lucky for you, I already had the son of a bitch in my sights.”

“More like convenient.” John’s tone and expression were filled with suspicion.

Alec scoffed. “This fucker would’ve killed you both if I hadn’t been here.”

“I wouldn’t have given him the chance,” John growled back. “How do I know you’re not part of the problem, too, Stingray? You working for the dark side since Phoenix went down?”

Alec gave a slight shrug. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Lisa couldn’t take the sudden overdose of testosterone rolling off the two men. And she also had about a thousand questions swarming in her head.

They started pouring out of her in a rapid stream. “Why would this guy want to kill me? Is it because of Kyle? Do you think he might’ve known where my brother is? Oh, God... do you think he might’ve killed Kyle, too?” She looked at Alec then. “And what do you mean you followed me here? Why would you do that? I haven’t seen or heard from you in years, so how do you even know where I live? You two need to tell me what the hell is going on, right fucking now.”

John’s narrow glare stayed rooted on his former comrade. “Yeah, Alec. You start. What the fuck are you doing creeping after Lisa?”

“I told you. Last week I had a vision that she was in danger. Didn’t think I could live with myself if I just sat back and let it happen, so I decided to check things out. She wasn’t hard to find through public records, the DMV.” Alec glanced to Lisa. “Once I had the info, I went to your place just to make sure you were okay. I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since.”

“Spying on me?”

“I prefer to think of it as stealth body-guarding,” he said, some of the wry humor she knew him for edging his deep voice. “I didn’t want to scare you, and it was crucial that you continued to act naturally in case anyone else was watching, too.”

She thought back to the past couple of weeks, and to one instance in particular, when she’d come home from work and couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been there. No evidence at all to support it. Not a single thing out of place, but she just...
knew
. “Someone broke into my house last week. They must’ve spent some time nosing around in stealth mode, too. I suppose that was you?”

“No, ma’am,” Alec replied. He and John exchanged a look. “But if it was someone else...”

John blew out a curse. “Kyle texted her yesterday. Told her she needed to hide.”

Alec seemed surprised, and not pleased. “You’ve been in touch with your brother recently? Where is he? What else has he told you?”

She started to answer, but John did it for her. “We don’t know any of that yet. The communication cut off right after she got the text.”

Alec cursed, frowning as he considered. “I need to see her phone. It could be tapped. Or traced.”

“Already disabled it,” John said. His fist swallowed up the GPS tracker and he put it back in his pocket. “Obviously, she’s on the radar now. So is this mountain. Which means so am I.”

“It’s my fault,” Lisa murmured, hating that she was at the center of John’s problems. She was terrified for her brother’s wellbeing—her own as well, especially after realizing an armed assassin had come after her today—but that didn’t mean she had to put anyone else’s life in danger. “I shouldn’t have come here, John. I’m sorry. It’s not your problem to fix for me. I should go before anything worse happens.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said, stepping closer and pulling her under his arm. “Not without me. Got it?”

The intimate gesture and softly worded order sent Alec’s brows up a degree, but he didn’t comment. “You both need to get out of here,” he advised soberly. “The sooner, the better.”

“Agreed,” John said. His muscled arm flexed around Lisa as he met her upturned gaze. “Alec and I need to dispose of the body and take care of some other business out here. Be ready to leave when I get back, all right?”

“Okay,” she murmured.

“Take this.” He put his pistol in her hand, his voice quiet and deadly serious. “Don’t be afraid to use it if anyone shows up at the cabin before I come back.”

She took the gun, catching his meaning as he curled her fingers around its grip. If she needed to use the weapon in the next few minutes, then very likely the only person who would be on the business end of it was Alec Colton.

8

Twenty minutes later, Duarte stood next to Alec on a narrow curve of mountain pass where they had driven Lisa’s car and parked it. The dead guy was in the trunk, his nine-millimeter pistol in Duarte’s safekeeping.

“You still don’t trust me, do you?” Alec said as they walked around to the back of the Camry to pull the body out.

Alec took the corpse’s feet, while Duarte grabbed the arms. “Sheppard warned us to cut all ties with our pasts, not to trust anyone—not even another Phoenix operative—if the program ever got compromised. That advice has kept me alive these past three years.”

“Same with me,” Alec said as they hoisted the dead weight out of the trunk and carried it around to the open driver’s side door. “Yet here I am, not killing you. Helping you. Trusting you, in fact.”

“Yeah.” Duarte grunted, watching the former Marine sniper with more than a little caution. “The question is, what for?”

“
Semper fi
and all that shit, I guess.”

After they positioned the dead man behind the wheel, Duarte stood back. “Go get the gas.”

Alec gave him a cautious look, but the cocky bastard had balls enough to grin at the same time. “You’re not gonna throw a match on me now, are you?”

“Not today.” Duarte smirked in spite of himself. “
Semper fi
and all that shit.”

Chuckling, Alec swaggered back to the trunk for the container of gasoline they’d brought along from the cabin. He opened the cap on the red plastic can and gave the Camry a good dousing, shaking some of the gas out inside the vehicle and onto the body as well. Once the can was empty, he tossed it in the backseat and came over to stand beside Duarte.