Exception to the Rule (21 page)

More like someone who saluted the flag just so everyone could see him do it, but nonetheless, it might work. And did, for Leo didn’t even think before his response popped out. “Damn right!”

“I’m after some people who took someone important.” She glanced at Rio, found him trying to pretend he wasn’t leaning on the Taurus. She didn’t even want to think about what that lightning-quick maneuver at her side had cost him. His worry for Carolyne had settled into his eyes, drawing expressive eyebrows closer together. “Something crucial to our country. I know where they’re going, and I’m headed to stop them. I need backup…from someone who can handle it.”

Rio made a noise in his throat, a surprised protest. At what, she wasn’t certain. She kept her attention on the men, satisfied to see she’d caught Leo’s attention.
The bubbaboys were less certain, even as she slowly released the man in her grip, stepped back and lowered her gun. “Not backup so much as someone to carry an important message if these guys get past me. We’re talking about a couple of hours, and you get to come back and tell your buddies all about it.”

Jonesy had staggered to his feet, rubbing his arm; it didn’t seem to work quite right. “Leo, she’s crazy. You’re crazy if you’re listening to her!”

Kimmer smiled.
Thank you, Jonesy.
If anything would push Leo over the hump of decision, that would do it. And then he’d quit thinking about his revenge, and start looking at this new opportunity to make himself feel big, and she and Rio could leave, dammit.

Right on cue, Leo pushed himself away from the truck to stand straighter. “And you might just be walking home, because for all the puny things Kimmer Reed ever was, a liar wasn’t none of them.” His expression grew more sour. “She always told me to go right to hell.”

Bob still had a pained hunch to his walk as he moved up beside Leo. “So you want us to stake out a spot and make sure these guys don’t get past?”

“Stake out, yes. And I’ve got a license-plate number for you. But what I need is for you to call a number I can give you, and let them know if the car goes by.” She looked back to Leo, locking gazes with his washed-out blue eyes. “But that’s it. These men are ruthless. They’re international mercenaries. If you step in, you’ll threaten them and they’ll kill the woman who has the information we need.” She pointed to her head. “In here. So if she dies, we fail. That means I need to go in alone.” Total bull, as she’d love to have a dozen Hunter associ
ates in on Carolyne’s rescue. But this particular conversation was about saving face for Leo. She gave him a shrug. “It’s one way to put one over on me, Leo. I can’t leave you behind in the past if I owe you my life—and Carolyne’s.”

He grinned at her. It wasn’t pleasant. “No, you damn well can’t.”

Bob squinted suspiciously. “If you’re setting us up—”

“As if,” Kimmer said, and gestured at Rio. “Or do you really think
I
did this? Or that it’s a coincidence I hit town about the same time as Rio and his cousin? She’s the one in trouble. The country’s security depends on getting her back.” Laying it on thick, she was. But then, these guys probably watched
Walker, Texas Ranger
and were used to it.

Rio made the slightest of noises—a catch of breath, a suppressed grunt of pain—and Kimmer let her impatience show. “Look—help us, or don’t. But at the least, move that truck so we can get on with it!”

“Be nice.” Leo scowled back at her. “Do you want our help or not?”

Pride. Swallow. Hard. “Yes,” she said. “I really do.”

Bob and Leo exchanged glances. Leo said, “We’re in. These other two can come along or walk home—up to them.” He gave the two in question a smirk. “You’ll be damn sorry when the whole town hears you walked away.”

Jonesy gave a little grunt. “We’re coming. Anyway, we can pick up a six-pack if things get boring.”

Kimmer sighed with relief. She didn’t know if they’d follow through or not, but as long as they moved the truck out of the way, she wasn’t going to worry about it. Because when it came right down to it, she didn’t in
tend to fail. She didn’t intend to need their backup. “Got a pen? Paper?”

While Leo rummaged in his glove box; the others took the opportunity to climb back into the truck. Kimmer moved closer to Rio, offering him a wordless expression of concern; he shook his head slightly and she closed her mouth on further questions as Leo backed out of the truck with a pen and a crumpled, unopened envelope labeled Final Bill, holding them out to her in triumph.

“This,” she said, scribbling, “is the plate number. It’s a dark green Grand Am. And this is the number to call if it goes past you. I need you to stake out the exit of that rest stop just south of Erie. If they leave it, call.”

Leo said promptly, “I’ll call right now,” and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, looking as if he thought he’d pulled one over on her. “Just to check your story.”

“A phone!” Kimmer said in delight. “Call, call,
call!
”

Not the reaction he’d expected. He punched the number in and Kimmer waited impatiently for Owen to pick up the phone. Leo swaggered a little in voice and body when he said, “I’m calling about Kimmer Reed. I want to know if she’s working undercover—if it’s a terrorist type thing.”

Owen would certainly say no such thing. Kimmer raised her voice. “Go, Owen! It’s Disneyland!” And dammit, now they’d have to assign a new code word.

Moments later, Leo’s eyes widened with surprise. Kimmer took it to mean Owen was laying it on thick. She held her hand out, impatient and couldn’t help but bounce up and down a couple of times, raising an eyebrow at Rio when he smiled. Slowly, Leo handed the phone over, eyeing her somewhat warily.

“Owen?” Kimmer demanded.

Owen said, “I gather our hopes for your cover were optimistic, and this is an old friend of yours?”

Not stupid, her Owen.

“Essentially. Look, how fast can you get backup just south of Erie?”

“Not a secure line,” he reminded her.

“Not a secure situation,” she shot back.

He sighed; it was his only acknowledgment of just how difficult this assignment had become. No need to tell him that, either—she wouldn’t be calling under these conditions given any other choice. “Summarize.”

“Goonboys have Carolyne. We plan to intercept just south of Erie. The rest station. Rio’s…compromised. I need backup—these particular goonboys are big-time.” She cleared her throat. “I also need a little cleanup. And I’ve got some hard copy—it’s something you’ll want if things go bad.”

Owen hesitated; she heard the faint clack of his keyboard. He muttered something under his breath, a startling breach of his impassive facade. “Four and a half hours. I can get you three bodies, but it’ll be four and half hours.”

“Neither chopper is available?” Kimmer asked in disbelief. “We could
be
three bodies by then.” Leo started, straightening, and she looked over at him to mouth “No” with the firmest scowl possible. He’d gotten into the idea of being the patriotic hero, all right. Maybe a little too much.

“One’s out, one’s out of commission—just happened. If the situation’s that bad, Chimera, don’t forget your primary objective.”

He’d called her by her code name for a reason. The “suck it up and do what’s right even if it’s hard” reason. Kimmer spun on her heel, stalking over to the edge of the woods to turn her back on them all. Leo didn’t even try to stop her. “Listen, Owen, you’re the one who sent me down here. You’re the one who wanted me to get all touchy-feely, to ‘come out of hiding.’ Well, it worked. And this isn’t someone I can just write off. Not like that.”

“Good,” Owen said brusquely, surprising her. “Then don’t let it happen.”

“You should have sent the Terminator,” Kimmer snapped.

“I know you hear me,” Owen said, his voice softening. “Now go make this warning unnecessary. I’ve already put out the call for your backup.”

Who couldn’t possibly get there in time. “Tell them to speed,” Kimmer said shortly, and snapped Leo’s phone shut with more force than was good for it. She stood there a moment, head bowed, thinking furiously.
Rio will die before he lets this happen
.

Therefore, she couldn’t let it happen.

It meant raising the stakes. She couldn’t go into this conservatively; she’d have to risk all of them to save any of them, because there were no second chances.

She took a deep breath, composed her face into the mask she’d worn so automatically until these past few days—until
this
day—and pivoted to walk smartly back to the truck and return Leo’s phone. “They’re on the way,” she told the men. “And I’ve changed my mind about what I need you to do.”

“I heard what you said to him, all right. Looks like you’ll need us for more than just watching the road.”

She shook her head. “Not the way you think.” And then, after some hesitation, she said, “If the car goes by, tell them to check the Taurus when they get there.” Because if the car went by, it would mean she hadn’t made it—that none of them had made it. It would be the goonboy survivors, running from their failure.

“You’re going to hide something for them,” Leo said, giving her a squint of thought.

She didn’t bother to deny it; she gave the slightest of nods, her thoughts distracted and fractured every which way. Even covering this contingency was an admission that she might fail. The thought of it sent her into deep denial—she wouldn’t because she couldn’t because for the first time it meant more than her pride or her safety or abstract notions such as right losing to wrong. It meant failing Rio…and that would mean losing him. It would mean losing the small spark of humanity that he’d reawakened.

Of course, she probably wouldn’t be around to know it, but it would certainly turn those last few moments into the worst kind of hell.
Not the way I want to go
. On the other hand, to find that spark of herself and then lose it again? The thought twisted something inside her and it felt like barbed wire.

She had to look away from Leo, take a deep breath…then another. Still couldn’t speak, not quite yet.

And even so, she’d cover her butt. She’d hide Carolyne’s notes, jam them down into the door along the window. That message would be enough—in truth, her comment to Owen that she had information for him
would have been enough eventually. But she didn’t want time wasted in the searching, and she couldn’t tell him about the Taurus over the open line. She managed to loosen her throat enough to look back at Leo and muster up some semblance of authority as she confirmed, “You’ll do it?”

Leo still had that narrow-eyed look, and for a moment she thought he’d offer up trouble just because the opportunity seemed available. But in the end he only said, “Yeah. I’ll do it.”

She tried to hide her sigh of relief and couldn’t; the surprise it put on his face was worth it. It had, she realized, gotten through to him on a personal level unlike anything else she’d done. He blinked and said, “We’ll be there,” then crossed around the front of the truck and climbed in to immediately start the engine.

Kimmer turned back to the Taurus and found Rio there, no longer pretending to stand upright, but managing a fairly convincing casual lean against the car. She guessed, “Your back is a mess.”

He gave a short laugh, then winced. “It was a mess before today, but yeah, that sums it up.”

Kimmer winced, too—just watching him harnessed by the pain hurt something inside her, far beyond what she expected to feel. “Get inside,” she said. “We’re on our way.”

Rio straightened away from the car and held out his hand; somehow she found her own slipping into it as though by longstanding habit. As she absorbed the surprise of it, the warmth of it, he gave a little squeeze and released her to do as suggested, moving around the car without the matter-of-fact strength she’d come to asso
ciate with him. In three hours they’d be at the rest stop—he’d either be loosened up by the drugs by then, or they’d prove totally inadequate and he’d be lucky to move.

And still, she looked down at her hand and flexed it, feeling a little smile steal across her face.

T
he station wagon muttered across the last of the washboarding and turned onto the asphalt road, immediately picking up speed. The truck appeared behind them a moment later. Rio relaxed into the seat, releasing tension he hadn’t known he’d been holding. Finally. On the way. Heading after Caro, who had no idea if he was even still alive.

She must be out of her mind with terror. She was a sit-by-the-fireplace soul, and if the soft clacking of her keyboard and the wooden snick of Scrabble letter tiles against the game board didn’t give quite the same ambience as the smell of baking cookies and other homey touches, it suited her fine. The high-end think tank suited her, because the management buffered its geniuses from the demanding intensity of its clients, offering more of a home-away-from-home than a
workplace environment. He’d seen Caro’s office once—full of plants and comfortable furniture and even a small television that she sometimes kept on in the background. And she had had Scott in her life these past several years, playing the shark for her when she needed someone with teeth.

None of it had prepared her for this.

Rio shivered slightly, caught by surprise as the frisson rippled through bruises and set off sparks of pain throughout his body.

Kimmer didn’t take her eyes off the winding road, curves she took at a speed high enough to shift them around within the car. “The heater on this thing…it works, but not as well as it probably used to.”

Rio reached for the sleeping bag puddled at his feet. Nylon hissed against itself as he settled it in place, immediately warmer. “Everything’s arranged with your Hunter Agency?”

“More or less. Our backup’s delayed.” She said the words evenly, as though they made no difference at all. The tense line of her jaw said otherwise.

Rio tried to keep his response just as even. “Delayed by how much?”

This time she glanced at him. Cheeks flushed, eyes lit to deepest, luminous blue as the car curved westward into sunlight, lips free of the sardonic quirk often lurking in the corners. “Probably too much,” she said. “Either way, it’ll be dark by the time anything goes down. We’ll do it. I’ve still got the night scope, and we’ve got the element of surprise. They don’t know about me and they think you’re dead. We just have to handle things before—”

Before Carolyne talks.
It was what she’d been about to say, but she wisely clamped down on it. Rio tried to pretend he hadn’t heard it anyway. He knew well enough she was under orders to keep the big fat secret a big fat secret. He even knew that in the bigger picture, Carolyne had to be expendable. But personally, he couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t. Instead, he watched her, saw beyond her confidence to the anxiety beneath. And didn’t, in this short but intense time they’d spent together, remember seeing that anxiety at all. “You’re worried.”

She stiffened, but didn’t say anything. She negotiated a tight curve, glancing in the rearview mirror. Rio checked his side view; the truck was no longer in sight. No big surprise—there was no way the double cab could take the curves at this speed. When he looked back at Kimmer she was biting her lip; she clearly had no intention of answering him. She probably wished she’d given him three of the pain pills so he’d be asleep. He’d never seen that in her, either—that reticence to respond, and the lack of instant comeback. No doubt she was the one used to perceiving things of others, and not being on the receiving end of such perception.

On the other hand, while he wasn’t exactly a slouch at reading people—no one who got through CIA training at The Farm was—he found himself surprised at how much he could see in her.

He found he liked it.

He waited another moment and said, “Tell me about your knack of reading body language.”

Here came the usual instant response, making him smile inside. She said, “You know what there is to know.
I picked it up young—I think you can guess it was my way of staying safe. And I had my mother’s help, before she died. Her…rules of survival. They work. Or they have, until now.” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “I don’t know why the hell I can’t read you. Dammit, I need to be able to
know
what you’re thinking. I’m
used
to working that way.”

Whoa. He’d meant to push her a little, not truly upset her. “Kimmer,” he said gently, a tone that drew her eyes away from the road for an instant, “I think you know me better than you believe. It might not be what you’re used to, but I’m thinking it has its own rewards.”

A renewed flush crept up over those faint, sweet freckles. After a moment she admitted, “That could be. But frankly, the timing sucks.”

Rio laughed, short and somewhat pained. “Ow,” he complained, and shifted to ease his back, pulling the slippery sleeping bag back into place. “You know, we all struggle with trust. Not all of us have had a secret superpower to get along all this time.”

She relaxed a little—not surprising; his words had taken the focus away from her. The road ended at a T-intersection ahead of them, and she brought the Taurus to a hard stop, the brakes shuddering. A sign pointed them toward Erie, and she turned them in that direction. “And you?” she said. “What happened to you? Why did you leave the agency? It’s a trust thing, I’ll bet.”

That, and more than that. He closed his eyes as the past caught up with him, visceral flashes of astonishment as Greg Taylor—SUDSBERG—took the first bullet, gore splattering the dusty aluminum hangar of a private airport to make dark splotches against the only
thing reflecting moonlight; everything else on that field seemed only to suck it in, leaving darkness. Greg, cursing into his throat mike, going down. Hard tarmac, coming up to slam against Rio, the stink of oil from the empty barrels that served as his scant cover, the burn of a bullet he hadn’t felt hit, the sudden flood of warmth from his own blood. The way the world around him faded to nothing but that agony within and the warmth of his blood against the growing chill of his body.

Only PEPPLER had been back far enough to escape unscathed; he’d covered as he could. Hanging back from the action as was necessary and usual to confirm success or failure, he set a fire in the nearest building and called the authorities. In the distraction, he grabbed Rio, hauled him out. Everyone else left in a body bag, and as far as the world knew, they’d been killed in a devastating car accident. But Rio knew the truth.

Kimmer’s words ran through his mind.
It’s a trust thing, I’ll bet.
“I told you you knew me well enough.” He gave her a wry grin she probably didn’t see, her attention on the road as she entered the merge lane for I-79. “And you know I can’t talk about it.”

“Give me a break.” She flashed him a briefly scornful frown. “I don’t need classified details. What happened to you?”

Rio laughed again. It still hurt, but somehow the surge of affection he felt covered it with a kind of warmth. “You put everything up front, Kimmer. Just like that. You don’t play people. You could have played those boys just then, and sucked them right into the action for your own uses. Cannon fodder.”

“Red shirts.” Kimmer nodded. “No, I don’t do that.
Not everyone likes that about me. Not everyone likes to get straight to the matter of things.”

“Some people,” said Rio, “do.” He took a moment for thought, trying to scrape his way through the details and the emotion and the intruding memories. “Let’s just say I had an exfiltration gone bad. Another officer’s asset turned out to be a compromised double, and before he blew town he also blew a handful of operations in progress.”

Kimmer studied the rearview mirror—looking for the truck probably. “But that happens. I mean, you expect that sort of thing, don’t you?”

“Not when your chief of station gets wind that asset might be a double and warns his case officer—and the case officer decides he knows better. Mine was a high-percentage op, and until the moment the bullets started flying, it was going smoothly. I lost my asset—he was a good man. A friend. And the officers who were running countersurveillance for me, they—” It welled up so suddenly as to take him by surprise, all the fury and grief of the moment, still lurking as strongly as ever. He fought it—and when he realized Kimmer was heading for the road shoulder, shook his head in an emphatic gesture. She hesitated, then stepped on the accelerator again. He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’m still alive.”

PEPPLER had paid, of course. Sent back to Langley and stuck at a desk until—and if—he could earn himself another chance at fieldwork. Torture for an experienced case officer…if not quite torture enough.

Kimmer startled him; her hand crept over to take his, tentative but strong. Small within his as he closed his
fingers, squeezing back as though she weren’t quite sure how it was done, and then withdrawing to the steering wheel. She didn’t look at him as she said, “I haven’t spotted the truck.”

“Neither have I.” He checked the side-view mirror again as he spoke. “Do you think they’ll follow through?”

She shrugged. “No telling. Leo seemed pretty determined—and he’s got the most motivation to put me in his debt, if he’s been stewing all these years about—”

“Did they really promise you to him?”

She grinned, and oddly enough, looked truly amused. “Absurd, isn’t it? Yes, they did. I was everything he said, too. And he…well, it’s not like he had prospects, and he didn’t look any better then than he does now. Anyway, those boys could get distracted by jacklighting deer along some feeder road for all I know. But they just might come through, and if nothing else, it got us out of there without spilling any blood.” She finally looked at him again, a quick, assessing glance with compassion mixed in. “Doesn’t matter. I intend to pass along Carolyne’s notes myself—along with Carolyne.”

But he noticed she kept glancing at the rearview mirror anyway.

Kimmer kept herself eight miles per hour over the speed limit—riding the line between pushing time and grabbing the attention of the state cops. The car finally warmed up, and Rio dozed for a while. When he woke she pushed the forgotten apple his way and asked him to grab an energy bar from her backpack. In the process he found her camera, and while she peeled printed
Mylar foil away from the fake food, he flicked on the display and cycled through her cache of photos. The scenic stuff, close-up studies of color and shadow and nature turned into the abstract, a few pictures from Mill Springs. She’d captured the worn face of an old man sitting in the park, his eyes blank and staring; she’d caught Missy on a smoke break, unaware she was being watched, expression distracted and dreamy. Then the images turned more practical. There was the B&B, down to the last bit of garden statuary—with special attention paid to exits and entries and clever little hiding places.

“Did your homework,” he commented, and she didn’t do anything but shrug. She knew what came next—the pictures of the goonboys she’d taken out at the B&B. That got a low whistle. “Poor Angelina. I can’t imagine she and Brad took this well.”

“They did their best,” Kimmer allowed. She nodded at the camera, still stuck on the goonboy she’d shot. “These two were part of the team who approached you at Hillside Gas & Foo.”

He looked up from the image, grinned. “That sign caught your attention, too, did it?”

She grinned back. “I was going to buy me some foo in a can, but I found other uses for it.”

“They had the car bugged,” Rio said, and gave a scowl that seemed directed inwardly. “It had to have been while we were packing. I had no idea this thing she’d found was so big…I left the car unlocked while we loaded it.”

“We all got caught by surprise at how fast the BGs moved,” Kimmer said, awkward in her attempt to relieve
his guilt. “Anyway, they never made it to Carolyne. Our current crop is either part of the team who tailed me and bugged this car before I even got into it, or we’ve got another set of players on our hands.”

“They were on to you before you even left?”

She nodded. “I didn’t much like it, either. Someone knew Hunter would be working this right from the start. Even so, how they found the camp, I don’t know. They didn’t follow me. They went straight to it.”

“When we catch up with them,” Rio said grimly, “we’ll have to ask them. Firmly.”

“Firmly,” she agreed.

And then he fell asleep again, and Kimmer reached over to remove her camera from his lap, twitching the sleeping bag up over his leg and waist, her hand lingering over his to take blatant advantage of this chance to touch him unencumbered by her own uncertainty in how to have that kind of exchange between two people. Affection. Comfort. Attraction. Need. She’d never succumbed to them before. She touched his arm and smiled to herself.

They drove straight through into dusk, losing time to a construction-narrowed road and then losing a little more to a truck that had dumped its load of lumber in the middle of the highway. Still, when she pulled oh so casually into that final rest area before Erie, they were well within the safety zone of timing. Scott shouldn’t be here yet, and Hunter associates would arrive soon enough. Kimmer gave a huge stretch, considering the red brick buildings, the poorly lit picnic area, the huge stretch of trucker parking, the pet exercise area. All were surrounded by those gorgeous Pennsylvania hardwoods.

At the far edge of the lot, a dark sedan sat by itself,
snow dusted and forlorn. Another car had parked somewhere in between, and not far from Kimmer, a family piled out of their van, clutching inadequate travel clothing against the wintry air.

Carolyne might be in the sedan, or she might not. Kimmer didn’t want to spook anyone by simply strolling out to see. She’d check the rest rooms, and then walk around the buildings. She didn’t expect to find anything there, but it was the first step.

As soon as she cut the engine and the inadequate heater, cold crept into the car. A few sulky flakes of snow made their way down to land on the hood, melting instantly. Kimmer unlatched her seat belt and reached into the back for her heavy new jacket, peeling out of the vest and quickly transferring anything she wanted to have on hand. Rio hadn’t woken; she hesitated, studying him. Assessing him.