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Authors: Kerri M. Patterson

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BOOK: Perfect Stranger
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When he began digging a shallow hole in the
dirt, Chloe slowly went out into the yard, too, the sultry evening
surrounding her as the Brazilian sun set like a ball of fire on the
jungle horizon. She crossed her arms, purse dangling from her hand
by the strap. Jericho thrust the shovel behind him at her. She
frowned, but took it, looking over to view the two-foot hole he'd
dug.

"Hang on to that," he said, and proceeded to
take the bag of trash and dropped the small sack into a hole, then
reached behind him again. "Your purse."

Chloe gaped and looked at the designer bag
hanging from her fingertips. "Oh, no!" she wailed.

"Sorry," he said, and took the purse.

Chloe puckered her lips as the handbag, too,
dropped in the hole. Jericho went to a grill nearby and took up the
lighter fluid to douse the pile he'd created. She cringed when he
struck a match and dropped it. As her belongings burned, her
shoulders dropped.

She didn’t notice that he had turned to
study her, but when she did, their eyes locked.

He was uncertain. She sensed that something
worried this man deeply. She could see it in his dark-green
eyes.

"Will we stay here long?" she asked.

He slowly shook his head as he took a few
steps, closing the gap between them. His fingers brushed hers as he
took the shovel from her.

"No, we need to keep moving. Eventually
we'll be found if we stay put. However, moving will only afford us
a little time." He looked away, into the thickly covered jungle.
"They'll find us."

Despite the heat, a chill raced down her
spine. "And then what?"

Jericho slammed the shovel into the dirt,
turning to the pit and spitting into the fire as the licking flames
popped behind him. "I'm not sure yet. We have to stay off the grid
for now, until I know more. Come on." He gestured into the
house.

Chloe's stomach knotted as she followed him.
She despised the unknowing.

As they entered the house, Chloe shut the
door and continued to follow Jericho down the small hallway, to the
middle, where he opened the closet.

There was an array of weaponry there, on
shelves and in racks on the wall where shelving parted far enough
towards the middle.

As he pulled out a bag, she couldn’t help
noticing the look crossing over his features so plainly.

Pain.

Chloe looked up and quickly counted the
bags. There were four others still on the shelves, all neatly
placed, uniformed black backpacks. No insignia or brand names. No
patches. They'd all been packed in a like manner.

Her eyes fell back to Jericho as he looked
at the packs, too. "Who do they belong to? It can't hurt to tell me
that much." His pained expression told her it did hurt him, but in
a different way.

"My team," he said, and pulled down another
pack to hand her.

Chloe chewed her lip. "Were they supposed to
be here?" she asked.

His jaw ticked, and a muscle under his eye
flinched. "Yes."

Chloe looked around them, feeling very small
all of a sudden. She looked down at the pack. "If they come after
we leave, won't one of them need this?" She lifted the pack a
little.

Jericho exhaled hard. "He won't be needing
it." He brushed past her to toss his bag down on the table and then
pivoted to the kitchen to pull out two boxes and brought them to
the table to sit them by his pack.

Chloe came to the end of the hall, but
stopped there.

"Think you can pack some of these MREs, at
least three days worth in each of our packs?" he asked, looking
over his shoulder at her.

Chloe nodded.

"Rule of thumb is, one per person, per day,"
he told her.

Jericho glanced back to the tabletop and
unzipped a side pocket on the pack, taking out what looked to be
cell phone, then brushed past Chloe, leaving her alone again.

****

The screen door squealed
loudly and crashed into the frame as Jericho left the house. He
sucked in a hard breath and then blew it out in a
whoosh
, running a hand
through his hair. With the other he lifted the satphone,
considering it a moment.

Contact was a risk.

But they needed an ally, and he could only
think of one person in Brazil who could help them. Only one other
person here he trusted.

Jericho lowered the satphone and left the
porch to circle around the side of the house so Chloe wouldn’t
overhear him. He frowned, swatting at mosquitoes before punching in
the number.

He closed his eyes as it rang.

"Hello," the voice on the other end
said.

"Logan?" Jericho asked.

There was a bit of static-silence. "Who's
this?"

"Eden."

"Oh, hell. What's up, man?"

"I need a favor," Jericho said.

The other man snorted. "Don't we all. Are
you on a secure line?"

"Satphone."

"Were ya at?" Logan asked.

"A little village called Pirai outside Rio
de Janeiro."

"And what could you possibly need from me? I
thought all you Special Forces guys stayed pretty well
prepared."

Jericho scoffed. "We couldn’t have been
prepared for this." He briefly told Logan of the night he and his
team had been separated, ending with his incident with Chloe.

"You didn’t take the female with you, did
you?" Logan asked.

"Had to," Jericho said.

Logan gave a low whistle. "Glad I'm not you.
My advice, leave her there, man. Get the hell out of that village
and leave her there. She'll find her way home, and if she's wise
she won't ever think of or mention this whole mess or you
again."

Jericho glanced over his shoulder and walked
a little further down the side of the house. "She saved my life. I
can't leave her."

Logan tsked. There was a pause followed by a
long sigh. "Well, here's what I can do for you. Get to Barbacena.
There's a former CIA operative there by the name of Carvalho. He
can help you get back Stateside. Let me give him a heads-up. You
just worry about getting yourself there. I'll drop a preset DAGR in
Valença. There's a Vale Verde-Texaco posto de gasolina on Rua Do
Barroso when you come into town. You'll find it in a trashcan at
the second pump."

Jericho's spirits lifted a little. The
navigational device would help once they got into Barbacena.
"Thanks, Logan. I own you one."

"Who are you kidding? We're even now. You
saved my life in Iraq." He paused. "Don’t trust sources here. There
has been a leak detected. Haven't heard much more than that. Don't
trust Brazilian or U.S. government here, man. If I didn’t know you
personally, I wouldn’t be talking to you now."

"Understood."

"Stay off the grid. And I still advise you
to ditch the female. She'll only slow you down."

Jericho scowled. "She's dead if I do
that."

"Whatever, man. Don’t say I didn’t warn
you."

"Gotcha."

"Stay safe."

The phone clicked into static-silence, and
Jericho lowered it from his ear, turning the power off as he looked
back toward the front of the house.

A leak in Brazil? Someone had leaked his
mission, but who? Conyers had suggested MacKall, but Jericho didn’t
believe it then, and he sure as hell didn’t believe it now.

It had to be someone much larger. Someone
with something to gain and the close ties needed with the hostiles
to use the extremists for his or her purposes.

How much did he trust Conyers? A CIA handler
for the Southwest Asia Theater in Brazil, opposed to their mission
from the start. Why had the man even been there in the first place?
Brazil wasn’t his territory, though Conyers had told them Weston
sent him. Jericho had first thought perhaps somehow Conyers could
be tied in because the hostiles running the compound were linked to
an operation in the Southwest Asia Theater. Now he wasn’t so
sure.

Who in their right mind trusted anyone in
the government, especially CIA? For all he knew, Conyers was behind
this himself.

And what happened to his team? Where were
Gunner and Butler? Were they even alive?

A sickening dread hit the pit of his stomach
and Jericho kicked at the dirt as he left the side of the house and
laid the satphone on the porch to go back to the shovel. He quickly
filled in the hole of charred items and then went inside.

As the door closed at his back, he caught
sight of Chloe, studying the back of an MRE package. The vision of
her there on the other side of the table caught something inside
him.

She looked soft. She looked everything that
shouldn’t belong in his dark, trustless world. This woman tried to
hide her fear just as much as she tried to hide being too
trusting—but she was. She was a gullible person whom many could
easily take advantage of.

She was lucky he was an honest man, not one
whose conscience wouldn't berate him for leaving her, even if it
would be the easier thing to do.

His gaze flickered away as he reached behind
to lock the door. "You should try one. I suggest the brisket and
potatoes."

Her eyes flicked up from the nutritional
label, as though she hadn’t noticed him before then. "Is that kind
good?" she asked, tossing the one she held into the open box to
choose the other package, taking his suggestion.

"Good enough for what it is," Jericho said,
sliding into a chair and pulling a waterproofed map from the
backpack.

He unfolded it and quickly scanned the area
above Rio to find Barbacena. Judging the distance with his fingers,
the city was roughly two-hundred and fifty-three klicks away from
their current location.

He sighed hard at the rattling package
across the table, glancing to Chloe again as she struggled to tear
open the MRE. He stood and reached to take the package from her,
effectively ripping the seal away. He smiled as he handed it back.
"Spoon is in the package. So is a heater, or you can eat it cold if
you don’t want to bother."

Jericho's chair scrapped back as he stood
and crossed the room for the hall closet. A rattled breath escaped
him there at the door, and he pulled it open, leaning on the
shelves a moment as he looked at the readied assault packs again.
He clenched his fist and pushed off the shelf, taking several
rounds from the closet. He took one of the SCARs from the rack on
the wall inside the closet, too, and turned on his heel, stalking
from the hall.

He returned to the table, setting the SCAR
aside to begin packing some of the boxed rounds in the pack. When
he was done, he broke the weapon down into the upper and lower
receiver and placed it in the pack, out of sight, too.

His gaze flickered to Chloe as she ate, and
he turned back to begin pulling the extra magazines from the
pockets on the front and sides of his pack.

"Blah," Chloe muttered around a
spoonful.

Jericho looked up again to see her grimace
and smirked. "Hey, that's the best one," he said, trying to hide
his warring emotions, too.

A few minutes later he heard her drop the
empty MRE into the trash. Jericho continued to slip rounds into the
magazines.

"If you had your bag packed, why didn’t you
load those, too?" she asked.

"We did load some, not all though. Keeping
them loaded an extended time can ruin the spring in the mag." He
shrugged. "Didn’t know when or if I'd be back to this place."

"If you show me how, I'll help."

Jericho glanced up to catch her innocent
stare and fumbled with the round sending it clanking to the floor.
He scowled and bent to pick the bullet up. "Why not?" he
muttered.

Jericho leaned over the table to hand her a
magazine. "The round points out this way, so just slip the bullet
in like this." He showed her.

Chloe closed her fingers around the end of
the mag, but Jericho didn’t let go. He lifted his gaze to meet
hers.

"You should use the night to adjust yourself
to this new world you've been thrust into, Chloe. In the morning,
we leave for Barbacena." Jericho let go to take up the magazine he
had been filling. "After tonight, I can't assure you of
anything."

Chapter Five

 

0800 hours, Saturday

The village of Pirai, Brazil

 

As they walked side-by-side down one of the
only two roads in downtown Pirai, the early Brazilian day seemed
something almost normal to Chloe. There was a small market opening,
the owner setting out fresh crates of various fruits. Chloe looked
on the mangos and bananas longingly after having had another MRE
before they left.

The clay-brick and tin roofed homes in the
little village were stacked on top of each other. Samba, rap, and
hip-hop filtered out into the street from open windows, and
colorful blankets waved in the breeze but kept the privacy of the
inside of the homes.

Roasting meat wafted
through the morning as the local denizens of Pirai started their
grills early on the weekend. Chloe well knew the Brazilians would
be sitting outdoors, a
cervejas
in one hand, tending the
churrasco
with the other. The quaint
village charmed her, though a little obscure, hidden from the
world, and somewhat overgrown and unrefined.

Jericho grabbed her hand suddenly as they
rounded a corner, startling her, and she looked down at their
fingers as he entwined them. "What are you doing?" she asked
low.

"Just act natural," he told her, nodding
ahead to the two dark-skinned women talking rapidly in their native
tongue as they came down the street in their direction. Jericho
turned and flashed Chloe a grin, and more surprisingly lowered his
head and kissed her on the neck before pulling her into his side to
wrap his arm around her shoulders.

Warmth flashed through her so quickly, Chloe
thought she might expire on the bricked street. His hard body
rocked against her side as they walked. Though they only pretended,
she couldn’t remember feeling this thrilled rush at having a man's
arm around her before.

BOOK: Perfect Stranger
8.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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