Dark Sky (3 page)

The last Ethan had heard, Ham was off to South America in search of precious and semiprecious gems, exotic birds and adventures. He had a Ph.D. from Stanford in some kind of science but had never held a real job. He'd attended Char's funeral a year ago, his usual gawky, awkward self, lacking confidence, humble to the point of being irritating.

That few people outside his family and close friends had much idea what Ham looked like these days didn't come as a big surprise to Ethan. The Carhills shunned publicity, fearing the exploitations of tabloids and con men more than kidnappers. And Ham was self-conscious about his appearance, always aware that he didn't live up to Faye and Johnson Carhill's expectations of what their only son and heir should look like.

Ethan had spent the past week in Colombia trying to pick up Ham's trail.

The tip came from Washington, a call out of the blue—an American ex-con who had it in for a blond, female marshal was holding Ham somewhere in the Andes.

It wasn't what Ethan had expected. Not even close.

Although there were other blond, female marshals, he bet that this one was Juliet.

He'd flown to New York yesterday, and now he had confirmation—as much as he needed.

Bobby Tatro, Juliet Longstreet.

Coincidences sometimes occurred at random, but Ethan didn't entertain for even half a second that this was one of them. He and Juliet both had had their names in the papers in recent weeks and months, attached not just to thugs, assassins and an international criminal mastermind like Nick Janssen, but to President Poe.

Ethan had a feeling his straightforward rescue mission had turned into something far more complicated and far more dangerous. He just couldn't pin down what. And it didn't matter—Ham still needed rescuing.

When his cab dumped him off, he plodded through security and made his flight to Washington, D.C., with bare minutes to spare. It was an uneventful flight, allowing his questions to crystallize.

When he arrived at Reagan National Airport, he took a cab out to Georgetown. For the past year, he hadn't had a place of his own. The closest he'd come were the weeks he'd spent in the spring playing gardener for the Dunnemores in Tennessee.

Mia O'Farrell lived in a narrow, historic brick town house on a quaint shaded street within a couple of blocks off M Street, Georgetown's main drag. Ethan appreciated the shade, because it was hot and humid in D.C. The recent rains had moved north to New York.

Dr. O'Farrell wasn't home from the White House yet.

Ethan walked down to M Street and got an iced coffee to go at a Starbucks, picturing himself as a Washington type. Some of his West Point classmates were Pentagon desk jockeys. He'd never been interested. Now? Forget it. He was damaged goods. That President Poe had asked him to volunteer for the Ham Carhill rescue mission only muddled Ethan's status even further. It sure as hell didn't help.

Mia O'Farrell had been at the meeting with Poe two weeks ago. She'd done most of the talking, and although it was all somewhat unorthodox at first, everything had gone more or less by the book since then. Ethan had picked two veteran Special Forces sergeants—friends of his—to risk their lives with him. They could have said no, but they hadn't. They were waiting for him in Bogotá. Whoever was supposed to know about the operation within the Colombian government had given their blessings. That wasn't Ethan's department.

Neither was flying to New York to interrogate a deputy U.S. marshal, but he didn't like the feeling that there was a subtext to this operation that he wasn't privy to.

He window-shopped on M Street, pretending he was an ordinary dad waiting for his kids to get home from soccer practice, sipping his coffee as he checked out restaurants and upscale shops—a black leather jacket on a mannequin in a store window display made him think of Juliet standing in the rain in New York.

When he returned to O'Farrell's street, she was on her front stoop, digging her keys out of an enormous, scuffed, soft black leather satchel, her long, straight dark auburn hair hanging over her face. Ethan said hello, startling the hell out of her. She jumped back and all but screamed.

She was very smart, but tightly wound. He put up his palms in front of him and smiled. “Whoa, easy. It's just me.”

“Oh. Major Brooker.” She seemed slightly annoyed, snatching her keys out of her bag, slinging the bag over one small shoulder as she singled out one key. She had on a trim gray suit, but her silky white blouse was scrunched over to one side, and her brooch—a white lily—had turned upside down and was about to fall off.

“You're going to stick yourself,” Ethan said.

“What?”

“With your brooch. The pin's come undone or something.”

She glanced down, quickly pulling the brooch off her jacket. He thought she did stick herself, but she'd never tell him. Mia O'Farrell, Ph.D., was all about control. She fastened her green eyes on him, her brow furrowed as she studied him. “You shouldn't be here. What do you want?”

“Let's go inside—”

“No way, Major Brooker. Absolutely no way.” She was calm but very firm.

“Okay. Let's take a walk—”

She shook her head. “No. Right here, right now. What do you want?”

“You know, since I'm doing you a favor and risking my life and the lives of my friends in the process, you think you'd be nicer.”

She didn't budge. “You're not doing me a favor. You're answering the call of duty.”

Ethan almost burst out laughing, but saw she was deadly serious and kept his amusement to himself. What did she know about duty? She was a special assistant to the president on matters of national security. All of her experience was academic. Poe had plucked her out of a Washington think tank. She wasn't any older than Ethan was, probably younger.

How in hell had Ham gotten himself mixed up with her?

Ethan grimaced. Never mind Ham. How had he gotten
himself
mixed up with Mia O'Farrell? One day he was chasing an assassin, falling into rivers, talking the marshals out of arresting him. The next day—well, a week later—he was shuttled off to listen to Dr. O'Farrell suggest a fresh new way to get himself killed.

“How did you know I could ID Ham Carhill?” he asked her.

She paled, then glanced around as if someone might be listening in the bushes. “Please. Not here.”

“Now you see why I wanted to go inside—”

“Your family and the Carhills are neighbors in Texas.” She spoke briskly, keeping her voice low and obviously thinking that answered his question.

“We're hardly in spitting distance of each other. There are a lot of miles between us. The Carhills are ultraprivate.” Ethan paused, watching her for a reaction, but there was none. “Someone tipped you off. Who?”

“Irrelevant. You have your orders—”

“It's a voluntary mission.”

“It doesn't have to be.” She didn't go on, but he could see she wanted to—she wanted to remind him that President Poe was his commander in chief, and although this whole crazy operation had ended up within the chain of command, she had Poe's ear, the president's trust. That she, in other words, was calling the shots. “Don't you leave for Colombia again tonight?”

She hadn't wanted him to leave Bogotá. She'd passed him the information on the American ex-con with a vendetta against a blond, female marshal. It was all she had. No name, no location. O'Farrell agreed that the marshal in question was probably Juliet Longstreet, but saw no reason to alert her—no reason for Ethan to be the one to question her about the ex-con. Ethan disagreed and flew to New York without O'Farrell's blessing.

“When I was in Colombia last week,” he said, “I heard talk about psycho mercenaries operating there, guys who tout themselves as being on the side of so-called truth and justice but prefer to be unencumbered by the rules themselves. They don't answer to a chain of command.”

She sighed. “Yes. I know the type.”

“I ran across a nasty little vigilante network in Afghanistan a few years ago. They'd set up their own interrogation room and prison on the outskirts of Kabul, claimed they were working for the Pentagon—it was all bullshit. They were a rogue outfit, running the war on terror the way they thought it should be run.”

Mia was trying to pin her brooch back on her jacket, an awkward process with her keys in one hand. Without looking at him, she said, “I don't see what these mercenaries have to do with your mission. Or me.”

“They don't trust the federal government. As far as they're concerned, they're true patriots, but they don't recognize most federal authority.”

“What difference does that make? If they violate the law, they're subject to arrest, just like anyone else. Their beliefs are irrelevant.” She snapped the brooch into place and looked back up at him, her cheeks rosy. “You should take yourself out for a good dinner. Don't you have any friends in Washington?”

His last meal. He almost smiled, but any humor disappeared, and what he saw in front of him was an intelligent, capable woman who was potentially—probably—in over her head. Where was she getting her information? And what would she do when she suddenly realized she was underwater? Who would she drag under with her?

“Dr. O'Farrell,” Ethan said as earnestly as he could, “if you let one of these guys suck you in—”

“I'm in a hurry, Major. I have a meeting at the White House in forty-five minutes, and I need to change my clothes and make a few calls. I didn't expect to see you again before your mission was completed.” Her green eyes softened, allowing a rare, unguarded peek into what wasn't, Ethan thought, such a cold heart. “Please, Major Brooker. Ethan. Take care of yourself.”

But he recognized her words for what they were—a firm good-night. He was dismissed.

She waited, eyes still on him, until he acknowledged defeat and wished her a good evening.

He walked back down to M Street, the infamous D.C. heat and humidity bearing down on him. He smelled dog crap and car exhaust. He noticed a dead geranium in what had earlier struck him as an attractive flowerpot on a restaurant doorstep.

Preteen boys piled out of an SUV, laughing, ragging on one another. Ethan felt like grabbing them by the ear and letting them in on the real world, telling them to be grateful for their lives of safety and privilege.

But what did he know about these kids? Who was he to judge them, or even Mia O'Farrell?

He was all bluster. He knew—O'Farrell knew—he wasn't about to leave Ham in the Andes with whoever had him, whoever was using him…whoever was using Mia O'Farrell.

Ethan paused on the busy street. He had a job to do. He might as well get on with it.

He decided to heed O'Farrell's advice and take himself out for a good dinner before his flight. He'd go alone—the friends he had in D.C. didn't need to see him right now. If some vigilante mercenary was slipping O'Farrell information, playing her for reasons of his own, her ass would get burned. And maybe not just figuratively. The vigilantes Ethan had run into in Afghanistan were violent fanatics with their own agenda.

But whatever Mia O'Farrell had stumbled into wasn't his problem. His job was to get Ham Carhill out of Colombia alive and reasonably unbloodied.

H
am Carhill tried not to cough. When he was busy hacking up a lung, he couldn't hear what was going on around him. And, right now, it seemed to him nothing was going on.

Absolutely nothing.

He couldn't hear any of the voices he'd come to know during his captivity, men's voices, speaking Spanish and English or a mix of the two languages. Ham spoke fluent Spanish—the creeps who'd snatched him in Bogotá knew that from the start. It was like they had a nice little dossier on him.
Hamilton Johnson Carhill, only son of billionaires Faye and Johnson Carhill of Nowhere, Texas, who would pay to keep the indignity of his kidnapping from hitting the public airwaves even faster than they'd pay to free him.

His parents had opposed his trips to South America, but assumed he was hiking in Patagonia or lying on the beach in Rio. They hoped he'd bulk up on his adventures, get a tan and return home ready to join the Carhill empire.

A cockroach crawled up his shin, but Ham didn't move to flick it off.

He was on a bare, flea-infested mattress on a cot in a cinder-block hut somewhere in the Andes. The darkness in the single room was nearly complete. He only knew it was a cockroach on his leg because it wouldn't be anything else. The place was full of them—huge, ugly things that scurried and raided in the dark. He often wondered how such a country, with its startling contrasts of stunning landscapes and stark poverty, of kind and friendly people and incessant violence, could produce the most beautiful emeralds in the world. Precious gems—in particular, emeralds—had become his passion and, in a way, his undoing.

Ham listened, squeezing his eyes shut as if it'd help sharpen his hearing, and for a moment thought he might have gone deaf.

But he was alone in the hut, perhaps alone in the camp.

The handsome, dark-eyed American and the Colombians—they were gone, all of them.

Had they left him here to
die?

Sitting up, Ham fell into a spasm of coughing, holding his ribs, thinking they might start breaking off into pieces and stab his lungs. The creeps had fed him pinto beans and more pinto beans, a little fatback once a day, and once—an immeasurable treat—a can of beanie weenies.

His hair hung down his back, stringy and unwashed. He had a sketchy, nasty beard. He figured he must have lice. His bowels were a mess, but he didn't think he had any parasites or infections.

Maybe his captors thought he was such a coward he'd just sit there, whether they were there to guard him or not. When they grabbed him, stuffing him in a jeep, he'd passed out—he had no idea where they'd taken him, except that it was a remote area in the mountains. The altitude made breathing only that much more difficult.

I'll die here like a cockroach.

He felt a draft, smelled the outside air and realized the door was open. He staggered toward the fresh air. He kept expecting his eyes to adjust to the dark, but they didn't. Christ—was he blind? But the nights were often pitch black, only he'd never been allowed to walk around, even with a guard.

Something moved. He saw a shadow, heard a swish—fabric on fabric?

“Shh.” A gloved hand clamped down on his wrist. “We're United States soldiers, Mr. Carhill. We're here to rescue you.”

“Ethan?”

Ham didn't know if he spoke out loud. His voice was scratchy. He was so damn weak—was he imagining his own rescue?

A flash, a shot.

The camp wasn't entirely abandoned.

All hell broke loose, and Ham scrambled in the darkness for his boots, his pants, refusing to be taken half naked—and desperate, he thought. He didn't want to look so damn desperate.

He tucked a small plastic bag inside his pants. The bag contained fifteen perfect, beautiful cut and polished emeralds that would bring a good price on any market, legitimate or otherwise.

Did Ethan know about the emeralds? Unlikely, Ham thought. He'd found them late that afternoon, when his captors were in a panic about something—bad news, obviously. Colombia was world-renowned for its emeralds. They were popular with smugglers. But Ham didn't believe these were intended for smugglers—they were the ransom payment for him.

He'd switched them for small, worthless stones.

“Let's go,” Ethan said.

Ham nodded, but he was hyperventilating, feeling faint. Ethan hoisted him over one powerful shoulder. Ham felt himself go limp, tranquil in the knowledge that his friend, neighbor and idol—Ethan the Magnificent, he'd called him as a boy—had come to save him.