Blowback (The Black Cipher Files Book 1) (3 page)

“After our...interaction, I knew if I closed my eyes, you’d be gone,” he volunteered.

The uncontrollable need to refute his assessment bubbled up. “You don’t know me.”

His body stayed relaxed and loose, but his gaze skittered from rear view to side mirror checking for tails. “Honey, until a year ago, I
was
you.”

“You couldn’t know--”

He shifted again, curling both hands around the steering wheel, pressing his shoulders against the seat. “Yes. I could.”

He couldn’t know me. No one did. “So you woke up and thought, hmmm, I guess Staci’s headed West. I’ll hop a plane to keep tracking her.”

Right.

He hesitated. “No. I watched you.”

“You were asleep.”

“I’m a light sleeper. The door closed, the sound woke me up.”

Spell it out for me. “And....”

“I watched you walk back to your car from the window. I saw them tranq you.”

“Who?” I still couldn’t be sure Lucas wasn’t involved. Was the whole kidnap/syringe/rescue a set up to get me to trust him? Perhaps his ‘rescue’ designed to make me relax my guard. “And how?”

“They double teamed you. One guy came out of the liquor store and shot the dart, another guy was in the car. They had you inside their car in five seconds. Very practiced. Very smooth.”

Well-rehearsed. Well-explained. Unless he was one of the guys who took me down. I paused a moment, tucked the keys and syringe back in my right pocket as far away from him as I could.

“What did they look like?”

“Pros.”

The single word raised more questions.

The only thing I clearly remembered was getting up, pulling on my clothes and the piercing sense of regret when I left.

The hours in his arms...I’d felt better than I had in a long time. His scent permeated the car, triggering a rush of yearning suspicion should have wiped away.

But being seduced into treason by a warm male body was not in my game plan.

Who was this guy?

“So, being the white knight you are, you immediately rushed over--”

A red flush stained his cheeks. “I found you didn’t I?”

“How exactly?”

“I used a GPS tracker to follow you. At the airport, I finagled the flight plan out of a contact.”

“Commercial airport?” Private jet. Not military. More privacy, less paperwork. “What if they’d filed a false flight plan?”

“I still had the tracker on you.”

“They could have killed me.”

“If they’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” He flattened his lips and I tried to forget the unbelievable things his mouth had done to my body.

I focused back on my problems. “Did you get any identification on the plane?”

“Partial I.D. number, no other identifying marks.”

I needed to assimilate and plan. I had no i.d. for a commercial flight. With one phone call I could get NSA air force transport back to Maryland, but I didn’t want anyone else tracking me.

I needed to be anonymous a little longer. At least until I could get in touch with Carson and get the syringe contents analyzed. If we could identify the chemical composition, we’d be closer to capturing the people responsible for the kidnappings.

First things first. I rolled down the window, then tugged off my shoes. Wedged between the heel and the sole was a tiny tracker. I pinched at the device, mentally wincing as tiny cuts on my fingers cracked, burning like acid. I ripped the tracker out of my shoe and flung it out of the car.

Under the pretense of watching the device fly away, I hung my head out the window. Cool morning air whipped against my cheeks, the wind blew away traces of nausea and the medicinal odor of drug-induced sweat.

“Damn. That set me back some serious cash.” He sighed.

“Too bad.” My mind moved at a million miles a minute. “We’ll have to ditch the car. I’m sure they’ve got a trace on the license plate right now.”

“She wouldn’t have been able to get a clear look. I smudged dirt on the plate.”

Nice.

Who was this guy? Not just a regular private investigator, clearly, since he’d followed me across the country.

“Did you rent it under your own name?”

He ignored me–which I didn’t like.

I checked the mirrors again, scanning for followers but the morning horizon was thankfully bare.

“My turn,” he said.

I don’t think so.

“What’s in the syringe?”

“Nothing you want injected in you.” Snappy, evasive. I liked it.

As remnants of the kidnapper’s drug wore off, adrenaline rushed through me. Blood pumped faster through my veins, spreading euphoria.

“You don’t know,” he said.

It wasn’t enough to make me crash but it brought reality back. What
was
in that syringe? “You tell me.”

He could have been involved in my abduction. I had nothing to prove he wasn’t, except gut instinct. And since I kept remembering the sex, my gut was suspect.

“No idea.” He checked the GPS again. “What did they want?”

I reviewed the kidnapping. Maybe I’d run too soon. They hadn’t asked about the NSA, CIA, or other agents. They’d only mentioned Lucas.

I couldn’t quite cross him off my list, even if this setup seemed too elaborate to be real.

My stomach roiled. The urge to hang my head out the window swelled. I squared my jaw, unwilling to let him see my handicap.

“You okay?”

Dammit. He’d noticed.

“Fine.” Or I would be. As soon as I got this mission back on track. I may have aborted the initial plan but my overall goals remained. To discover who was abducting field agents, why, and then capture the abductors. Copping the syringe was a bonus.

Six CIA and NSA agents had lost hours of their lives and no one knew what had happened in those lost hours. Traces of Rophynol, a date rape drug, and a Sodium Pentothal derivative, nothing cutting edge, which was surprising, had been found in their bloodstream.

There were no known connectors between the abducted agents. They were both men and women, from different agencies, from different divisions within the agencies, and with different skill sets.

Two agents were dead. The real Staci Grant had been killed in a prison uprising in Afghanistan, although only a select few people knew she was dead, and Brad Johnson had been brutally murdered by a suspected double agent.

It was unclear if the abductions had played a role in exposing the two agents, but the odds that the two agents’ deaths were unconnected were zero.

National Security was at stake: agents, secrets worldwide may have been compromised.

The government didn’t know.

It was up to me to find out.

First I needed to know what was in my bloodstream. Was it the same combination used on the other abducted agents? “You have any spare syringes lying around?”

“Fresh out.” He hesitated. “We could buy a disposable storage container and get a urine sample, when we can stop.”

We couldn’t stop. Yet.

I ran through possibilities. A urine sample would have a limited time window to capture analysis of substances. And I had no lab source near here.

“Sweating, upset stomach.” He paused, lifted a hand to my face, and curled his fingers around my chin.

It was the first time he’d touched me since I’d left that hotel room. The rush of pleasure as his callused fingertips brushed the tender curve of my cheek unsettled me.

His gray gaze bored into mine, concern etched in the slight crimp of his brow. I wanted to shift, look away, but somehow it was imperative to stand my ground. I held motionless against the silent query.

He released my chin, returned his gaze to the road. “Pinpoint pupils.”

The matter of fact analysis threw me again.

“Any other symptoms?”

I gripped the keys in my balled fists and experienced a stab of pain as sensation returned. I hadn’t noticed while I’d been climbing.

Higher tolerance for pain. “No comment.”

Based on my symptoms, nausea, sweating, vision, pain tolerance--I’d been given some sort of opioid. But since I’d had resistance training, I shouldn’t be so affected.

“Ever heard of Oxycontin?”

I sorted through my drug knowledge. Slow release pain medication. Frequently used for terminal cancer patients. “Yeah.”

“Abuse is on the rise. Popular street drug, hillbilly heroin,” he said.

Available by prescription or on the street. Difficult to trace. I wouldn’t know without some sort of chemical analysis. “Possible.”

He cleared his throat. “If they ground it up, it could have been fatal.” And I knew I must have imagined the emotion I heard there.

“As you can see, it wasn’t.” And I didn’t have time to worry about it.

I needed to go through the evidence I’d swiped from the warehouse, but not in front of my chauffeur. I deliberately loosened my grip on the keys, and felt a ripple in the metal design of the key fob. Possibly a manufacturing seam but could it be something more? Her keys lay in my pocket like a cement-booted body at the bottom of the river.

I needed my cell phone. I needed a STU-3 secure line and a chat with Carson.

My badge was gone.

Damn. I was going to be red-badged.

Worst case scenario: They had my keys, my car, my badge. The thieves could infiltrate Crypto City, NSA Headquarters, with the registered car. As long as they didn’t try to bring explosives past the canine unit, they’d get through the security gatehouse.

But even with the badge, they couldn’t get far. Visitor turnstiles wouldn’t be a problem. But to access top clearance areas, a retina scan was mandatory. And since I still had both my eyeballs....

“All our secrets safe?”

Even as I sorted through possible security breaches, I couldn’t miss the bite of sarcasm. I declined to answer. Looking around, I noted we’d spent the last twenty minutes driving south on I-5. “Where are we going?”

“Where no one will think to look for you.”

I still wasn’t sure Lucas Goodman was clean, but at the moment, he was my best option. If he was involved, I needed to stay with him, figure out how to identify the people from that warehouse. If he wasn’t part of the conspiracy, I was using him, plain and simple.

“Where’s that?”

“My place.”

I tracked back to our...encounter, yesterday. He’d said he was from San Francisco.

“No, I wasn’t lying.”

“San Francisco?”

“Here we come.”

Perfect. I had an NSA bolt hole stashed with disguise and identification at the Greyhound Station at 1
st
and Mission. If it looked like he really wasn’t involved, I’d lose Lucas Goodman after we crossed the Bay Bridge.

I could pick up my new i.d., get back to D.C., get that liquid analyzed, and figure out what the hell was going on.

FOUR

Ten hours on the road, two rental car switches and no sleep. We’d had no visible sign of pursuit. It should be safe to stop for a few minutes.

I needed caffeine and I needed it now. “Coffee.”

“About Johnny---”

“We’ve been over this.”
Ad nauseum
. I couldn’t help him find John Wishbone. I wouldn’t help him. Each time he brought up the kid, I gave the same response. His consistent requests for information had
almost
convinced me that Lucas Goodman had nothing to do with my kidnapping. “No.”

Lucas rubbed fingers with blunt-tipped nails over his face, his hands rasping against the blond stubble of his beard.

“I need to find him,” he pressed. “And Staci Grant is my only lead.”

I never explain myself. Never. Yet fatigue strummed across my nerves and I felt inexplicably compelled to elaborate. “I can’t.”

His head bobbed once in understanding, but the set of his mouth telegraphed his intent. “I will convince you to help me.”

Not in this reality. “Whatever gets you through the day, pal.”

“What gets you through the day?”

Bella safe.
The answer popped into my mind like a psych word association. That’s the only truth that made life worth living.

I compressed my mouth, not wanting the thought to escape. Staring straight forward, I shifted in the bucket seat of the compact car. We’d traded down about three classes since the SUV.

I scanned the highway again, but nothing looked out of place. But I had a bad feeling.

A low-level buzz, something wasn’t right. I couldn’t relax my guard. And I’d feel a lot better if I were more in control.

“Would you like me to drive?” Pleasant, soothing and probably annoying as hell.

“Nope.” His response was far too cheerful.

“You’re sure?” An edge I didn’t want crept into my voice. I was used to being the one in the driver’s seat. Literally.

“You’re not on the rental car agreement.”

Lame, very lame.

He laughed, a rough wheeze of breath. “Okay. So that was lame.”

He had the disconcerting tendency to voice extremely similar thoughts. It made me wonder....

Honey. A year ago I was you.

Since he seemed to understand my thought process, I knew he’d need more. My assets and informants were afraid of me, of what would happen if they messed with me. I’d blown that by having sex with him.

It’s difficult to scare someone who has seen you naked.

“You can trust me.” I used my ‘I’m a harmless little female’ smile hoping that would work.

“Right.” He flipped the blinker and sped down the exit ramp. “Like you trust me?”

The smile, the tone hadn’t worked. To be honest, I’d have been disappointed if it had. I had to offer something.

I poured sincerity into my words. “I won’t ditch you.” Not until San Francisco. I needed the ride. And, the timing of his appearance bothered me. So I might as well try to figure out why. Pure coincidence? I didn’t think so.

“I don’t trust you. You wouldn’t trust me if our situation was reversed.” He zoomed up to the order box of a fast food restaurant. “Maybe if you explain why you’re sticking with me, I’ll believe you.”

I snorted. This from a man who planted a tracking device in my shoe.

“Large coffee, two creams and three sweeteners, please.”

“Right.” He rolled down the window and spoke into the box.

Four p.m. in Podunk, California. My unease grew.