White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (9 page)

Over the three days of questions, the
people actually doing the questioning and the listening had
changed. Nick had been there for one day. Duardo for two days.
There were others, usually three at a time. She had at first
resented the revolving roster of questioners, because she had to
repeatedly explain herself and describe moments that had become
almost painful to talk about. But Duardo had pointed out that the
repetitions and the different listeners were a way to unearth
details that she had forgotten, or that no one else had thought to
ask.

She never wanted to go through that
process again.

It was possible that Rubén Rey had been
one of the questioners for other people. Even Duardo had been
debriefed because he was her brother and Lucas’ unit had reported
to him. Everyone in the big house seemed to trust Rubén, after
all.

But Rubén shook his head. “I was
questioned,” he told her.

“
You
? What for?”

Rubén glanced at the door again and
suddenly, Téra hoped Minnie would choose this moment to step back
into the room. Rubén would shut up if she did.

But he spoke, his voice low. “Before
Lucas De la Cruz set his sights on you, he tried another
target.”

“You?” Minnie breathed, shocked.
“But…why didn’t you report him?”

Rubén’s gaze didn’t shift away from
hers. “If someone tries to seduce you, you don’t automatically
think they’re doing it because they want access to the computer
networks you control. I didn’t make the connection until
after…afterward,” he finished awkwardly. “Then I reported to
Colonel Peña and volunteered to be debriefed.”

So many questions! Téra sat still,
trying to sort it out in her mind. “He was trying to use you?” she
whispered.

“He
tried
,” Rubén said flatly.
“But I don’t think you were just a target for him, Téra. I think in
his twisted way, he was trying to protect you.”

“From him,” she finished.

“From the damage that he would cause, if
he didn’t.” Rubén gave a small shrug and a wry smile. “I don’t know
if it helps at all, but in a very small way, I know what you’re
going through.”

“It does help,” Téra said truthfully.
“Thank you for telling me.”

“Telling you what?” Minnie asked,
pushing open the door and walking in.

“Why she can’t order from the Sears
catalogue,” Rubén said casually.

Minnie snorted. “The catalogue is just a
way to see what’s available. We can buy it cheaper and get it
sooner if we go to local vendors. What is it you want, anyway?”

“Oh, nothing important,” Téra said. “It
doesn’t matter.”

“No, really,” Minnie insisted. “What do
you want? It’s my treat.”

Téra glanced at Rubén helplessly and his
gaze dropped to the book in her lap and back up.

“Just a book that I would like to read,”
she told Minnie and mentally thanked Rubén.

“Hell, we can get that on Amazon,”
Minnie said, with a grin. “What’s the title?”

Téra grasped mentally for a book title
that she knew wasn’t in the big house and Minnie pulled up the
bookstore and found it, then set about happily ordering it for her.
When Minnie’s attention was fully focused on her laptop screen,
Téra caught Rubén’s gaze again and gave him a small smile.

He touched his fingers to his chest and
his head bent forward a little.

Téra opened her book once more and tried
to remember not to smile.

Efraín found Carmen just after eight in
the morning, barely an hour after she had left Garrett in his
office. She had walked and taken a cold shower and walked around
the monastery again, but still found herself shaking with rage
whenever she thought of the exchange in his office.

Efraín held out a sack. “Orders. We go
in like locals. No visible weapons. Nice and innocent,
instead.”

“Garrett left innocence behind in his
crib,” she said shortly and took the bag and looked inside. Then
she sighed and pulled out the multi-hued silk garment. “Fiesta
clothes? I’ll stand out like a neon sign.”

Efraín shrugged. “It’s market day in
Valle Leñosa. Probably why they set the meeting there.”

It probably was, Carmen agreed mentally.
She took the sack from him. “There’d better be shoes. I can’t wear
army boots with this.”

Efraín grinned. “Barefoot works.” He
winked and walked away, hitching his rifle over his shoulder.

All the older towns in Vistaria had a
weekly market day. It was a long-standing tradition where local
producers bought their wares and produce into town, for others to
barter for and buy. It was one of the very last traditional
economic structures to survive the twenty-first century and because
of the war, it was one of the few remaining ways for anyone to
acquire fresh food, so the market would be well attended.
Traditional clothing wasn’t out of place there. There would be many
others dressed up in their Vistarian finery.

So she put on the silky skirt and the
white peasant blouse that slid off one shoulder every time she
moved. There
were
shoes in the sack. They weren’t
traditional dancing shoes but flat black slip-ons that would let
her move across terrain easily. They were a tight fit, but they
would do. She also dug around her backpack and found her brush,
then unpinned her hair and brushed it out, working the brush
through tangles and knots, until it was falling about her shoulders
freely.

No visible weapons
, Efraín had
said. She tried sliding her Glock down the front of her shirt, but
the weight of the gun pulled the shirt down until it threatened to
slide right down her arm and expose her breast. She fished the gun
out again and hefted it.

Llora, one of the elderly women who
tended the cooking pots and was a
de facto
mother to many in
the camp, shuffled over to where Carmen was weighing her gun in her
hand. Llora’s feet were swollen and painful to walk on, but she
smiled at Carmen and held out a thick piece of elastic.

Carmen frowned at her. “Elastic?”

“For around your leg. It will hold your
weapon under your skirt.”

Carmen stared at her, startled that such
a passive, gentle woman as Llora would come up with a way to hide
weapons. “The skirt is silk. The gun is bulky. It will show under
the silk.”

Llora shrugged. “A knife is flat. Take a
knife.”

So Carmen threaded the flat holster for
her knife onto the elastic and tied it around her thigh. A knife
was useless in a gun fight, but the whole point of this expedition
was to slide into town, have their meeting and slide out again, all
without being spotted by the Insurrectos. With luck, the knife
would stay strapped to her thigh, unused, until she came back to
the camp.

When she was ready, she made her way
through the monastery to the big courtyard where the three working
vehicles were kept. They had creatively acquired all of them, but
let the monks use them when they needed horsepower. Most of the
time, roaring around in a vehicle drew attention upon them they
didn’t want. But they were useful for hauling heavy loads and when
they needed to move camp. Carmen hoped they wouldn’t have to move
for a while. They had shifted camp four times in the first three
weeks she had been with the unit. Moving was uncomfortable, hard
work and unsettling. It always took her a few days to get any sort
of decent sleep after a move. There were too many strange noises
and objects around to relax enough to sleep properly.

If they were trying to look like locals,
then arriving in a Jeep would be logical. Jeeps were everywhere on
Vistaria, useful for their four wheel drive capabilities and
because they could handle the steep mountain roads, too. They were
cheap, reliable and as common as ants.

Efraín and Ledo were already there,
leaning back against the open-topped Jeep. Neither looked armed and
both of them had washed and shaved and wore button-through shirts
and the tight black trousers that made Vistarian men all look
long-legged and slim hipped, especially if they were wearing
traditional shirts over the top.

They both grinned when they saw her and
Efraín gave a low wolf whistle.

“You want to keep your balls intact?”
Carmen growled at him.

He grinned. “For you, Carmencita, I
would risk my balls.”

“Luckily, you don’t have to. You’re not
my type, Efraín. And I have a knife strapped to my thigh to back
that up.”

Efraín threw his hands into the air. “My
heart is broken!”

“This isn’t a party outing,” Garrett
growled from behind them. “Efraín, get in the Jeep.”

Ledo was already clambering into the
back of the Jeep, where two small jump seats unfolded.

Efraín shrugged and climbed in with him
and took the other seat.

Great
, Carmen thought. That left
the passenger seat for her, right next to Garrett. She didn’t for a
moment think Garrett would let her drive.

Garrett strode past her and dumped his
heavy medical bag at Efraín’s feet. He looked very different from
the scruffy, bearded man she had walked out on a few hours ago. He
had shaved and washed and it looked like he may even have trimmed
his hair. It had been brushed and was lying neatly against his
head, but nothing would remove the thick waves, or the pale color
that would draw attention to him in this nation of black-haired men
and women.

So Garrett hadn’t bothered trying to
look local. He had brought his medical bag and he was wearing
clean, fairly new jeans and a jacket over his V-necked tee shirt.
He looked very westernized. Even civilized.

“Get in,” he told her curtly.

Carmen closed up her mouth and climbed
in, glad that the traditional skirts of Vistaria weren’t pencil
skirts. She wouldn’t have been able to bend her knee enough to get
up into the seat.

Garrett started the jeep without looking
at her. That was fine by her. If he was going to ignore her the
whole way, she could relax…well, relax as much as one could when
driving into Insurrecto territory.

Once they were on the sealed road that
led to Valle Leñosa, Garrett picked up speed, until he was just
under the posted speed limit. That was when the movement of the air
around the open Jeep picked up Carmen’s skirt and blew it
backward.

She fought with the silk, pushing it
back down over her knees, but she didn’t have enough hands to
contain the voluminous yards of silk.

Garrett laughed. “Wrap it around your
knees and sit on the rest,” he told her. “I’m not going to slow
down just to preserve your modesty.” He had to speak loudly to be
heard over the wind.

Carmen fought to gather the yardage
together and do what he suggested. Finally, she tucked the excess
under her knees and lifted her thighs to push it beneath and
relaxed when it didn’t billow up into her face once more.

“The knife is a nice touch,” Garrett
said.

She glanced at him and was startled all
over again by his clean face. On this side, the scars were minimal.
“I couldn’t find a way to hide a gun, not wearing this.”

“I don’t want to be in a position where
we need guns,” he said flatly. “This is in and out, as soft-shoe as
we can manage it. It’s market day in Leñosa. There will be
Insurrectos everywhere.”

Carmen looked away, out at the trees
passing by. It was going to be a long ride.

It was hard to find parking when they
arrived in Leñosa. Most of the locals arrived on foot, but there
were enough people living farther than walking distance from the
town that cars choked the crossroads at the center of the valley.
Garrett drove around slowly, as they all watched for a parking
space. He had picked up a black Vistarian flat-brimmed hat from the
back of the Jeep and put it on as they had entered the town limits.
It shaded his face and eyes like his straw cowboy hat did, but it
didn’t look so incongruous among all the other Vistarian hats.

“I don’t like driving around like this,
exposed,” Garrett muttered.

Carmen tapped his arm. “There,” she
said, as another Jeep backed out of a narrow stall.

“That will do.” He wheeled into the
opening, cutting off another car, then shut down the engine.
“Efraín, you’re with me. Ledo, Carmen, watch our backs.” He hauled
the medical bag out of the back of the Jeep, then looked down at it
to check that the red caduceus was visible and turned the bag
around so it was. Even in Vistaria, the US medical symbol was well
recognized.

The market itself was at the other end
of the block where they had parked and even from here, the noise
from it was loud. It was a friendly sound. A beckoning sound.

As Carmen and Ledo trailed after
Garrett, watching to see if anyone took any interest in him, she
turned her face up to the sun for a step or two, appreciating the
mild, cloudless day and enjoying the feminine swish of skirt hem
around her knees. She had been wearing jeans for weeks and weeks.
The raw silk sheath dress she had worn to Calli’s wedding felt like
a very long time ago.

When they reached the market itself,
Angelo wandered over to greet them. He had been waiting at the
entrance to the town square. Garrett acknowledged him with a nod
and everyone split up. The strategy had been decided back at the
camp. They would wander the stalls by themselves, checking each
other’s backs to see if anyone was following or taking interest in
them. At the appointed hour, Carmen and Garrett would head for the
café where the meeting was set to take place.

There was a big clock on a tower at the
end of the square where the market was located. There was just over
twenty minutes before the meeting. Carmen made herself stroll,
moving at the same speed as all the other shoppers. She lingered at
stalls whose produce caught her eye, held up shawls for inspection
and prodded tomatoes and peppers of all sorts. The fruit on display
made her mouth water, but she had no cash with which to buy it. It
had been weeks since she’d had any fruit.