Flash of Death (23 page)

He subsided back on the edge of the table. “Oh, yeah? I can’t wait to hear this.”

In line with her scheme of keeping this guy as happy as possible for as long as possible while rescue came, she explained, “Barry Lind was embezzling the money.”

Herrera shook his head sharply. “He didn’t have access to all the accounts money was going missing from. But you did.”

“You’re right,” she replied. “He either had more than one accomplice inside the company, or he had a top-notch hacker outside the company working with him.”

Herrera looked surprised at the admission, but then snapped, “So where’s the money now?”

“I have no idea. But if you give me a computer and a few days, I can probably track where it went.” That, of course, was a lie. She had no way of getting banks to surrender transaction records to her, and goodness knew, she wasn’t a good enough hacker to break into any bank’s computer system and steal the records. It would take the FBI’s clout to do what she had promised.

Herrera snorted. “You may have been clever enough to steal some money, but you’re not that good.”

Dang. He’d seen through the lie.

He took an aggressive step forward. “You seem to have no idea exactly who you’re dealing with, Chloe. But you’ve made a terrible mistake stealing from my employer. They kill without a second thought.”

“I know exactly who they are, thank you very much,” she snapped. “Well, I don’t know exactly which cartel it is, but I know I’ve been laundering drug money for the past six months.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew them for the monumental mistake they were. This was not a man to be that honest with. Particularly not with that pistol in the holster under his left arm.

Herrera reeled back at that. “You knew? And you didn’t turn them in?” he demanded incredulously.

Must backtrack hard and fast if she didn’t want to get shot in the next sixty seconds. She shrugged. “I think it’s insane that drugs aren’t legal. At least some drugs. It’s not my job to wonder where Paradeo’s money comes from. I’m just a bean counter collecting a paycheck and trying to get by.” God, she hoped he bought it. She delivered the explanation with as much sincerity as she could pack into her voice.

One of the thugs opened the door and told Herrera in Spanish that the area was clear. Miguel snapped back that they should split up and guard each side of the house. From outside. The thug nodded and left.

“How did you discover that Mr. Lind was stealing money?” Miguel asked, his voice dangerously quiet.

She briefly considered how to answer him. Sticking to the truth as much as possible was her best bet.

“Answer me!” Herrera barked so sharply she about fell off the chair. Lord, that man scared her. The violent look in his eye promised worlds of pain beyond anything she’d ever imagined.

She stammered, “Barry called me when I got back into town after my sister’s wedding. He wanted to talk with me.” She described in detail her meeting and conversation with Barry, including every detail she could recall. Now it was all about stalling until help came. But finally, she was down to the meat of the matter. She took a deep breath and admitted, “And then he gave me a flash drive. He told me he’d copied every financial record he could lay his hands on, and he wanted me to take a look at them and see what I could find.”

Herrera stared. “How did he get every record the company has? He didn’t have that kind of access across the board.”

She nodded. “You’re smarter than I am. It took me until yesterday to ask myself that very same question.”

“And?” Herrera sounded genuinely interested.

“Like I said, the only way for Barry to have obtained the records he did was to have help. I have to say I don’t think Barry was good enough with computers to have broken into the various compartments of the company’s records by himself.”

“Neither do I,” Miguel answered thoughtfully.

How did he know Barry well enough to have an opinion about the guy? Lind had been murdered within a few days of Herrera arriving at the company. Weird.

“It’s not nice to throw a dead man under the bus,” he commented lightly.

“Excuse me?”

“Obviously, you were one of Mr. Lind’s accomplices. And now that the guy’s dead, you’re trying to throw all the blame onto him.”

“I am not! I was
not
one of his accomplices!”

Herrera’s arms were crossed in a posture of patent disbelief, but all he said was, “Convince me.”

How on earth was she supposed to do that? She opened her mouth to ask for a computer so she could show him the trail of transactions Barry had used, and how she’d figured out the accounting entries led back to an ISP address that turned out to belong to one Barry Lind. But before sound could come out of her throat, the door burst open.

It was the van driver. He announced in rapid Spanish that a pickup truck had been spotted on the main road headed this way with its headlights off.

Herrera surged up off the edge of the table and strode over to her, grabbing a handful of her hair and yanking her head back painfully. “Who knows where you are?” he demanded harshly.

Her scalp felt like it was about to detach from her skull and tears ran down her cheeks from the sharpness of the pain. “Nobody!” she cried out.

He flung her head forward in disgust, snapping her neck hard enough that it ached. Miguel moved over to the driver. She had to strain to hear him tell the guy in Spanish to guard the driveway and scare off any trespassers.

A pickup truck? Trent would be either be in her car or the small SUV he’d been driving. Had Winston Ops already sent someone out to investigate her open cell phone line? It had only been a few minutes. No way could they have responded already. Who was it, then? She desperately hoped it wasn’t some innocent bystander about to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The driver left and Herrera turned to her. He looked violent. Angry. But in a few seconds, it was almost as if he...deflated. It was the strangest thing. He pulled the only other chair from the kitchen table over and sat down in it directly in front of her, knee to knee.

“Tell me exactly how you figured out Barry Lind was the thief,” he ordered quietly.

His demeanor was so strikingly different from a few moments before she had no idea what to make of it. If he was playing some sort of interrogation head game with her, it was working.

In all the detail she could muster, she described her search of Paradeo’s financial records, of spotting the first discrepancies, of tracking the pattern that emerged. “It looked for all the world like I took the money,” she confessed. “It was almost like I was being framed.”

“By Barry?” Miguel scoffed. “He wasn’t that smart.”

“Maybe his accomplice is the brains behind the scheme,” she replied.

Herrera stared at her hard for a long time, like he was thinking hard. Abruptly he asked, “Who hired you to work at Paradeo?”

Her gaze slid away from his before she realized what she’d done, and she looked back at him hastily. She named the woman in the HR department who had interviewed her, adding, “I don’t know who made the final decision. But she must have been the one to recommend me.”

Herrera leaned in aggressively. “You’re lying. Don’t do it again, or you’ll regret it. If you want to live past tonight, you’ll tell me the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

An ironic choice of words, this hardened criminal quoting the U.S. Court system’s oath for witnesses.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” he snarled. “Who hired you?”

She’d never been any good at lying, and there was no reason to believe she’d get away with it now. But admitting to be an FBI plant was as good as signing her own death warrant. “An interested party asked me to try and get hired at Paradeo and take a look at its books.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

She took a deep breath and told the God’s honest truth. “Because you’ll kill me if I do.”

His brow lowered thunderously and he leaned back hard, staring at her. “Which is it, Chloe? The Feds or a rival of my employer’s?”

Wow. He’d drawn the logical conclusion darned fast. It was easy to forget how smart this man was beneath all that brawn and threatening swagger.

Time for one last bit of honesty. “So here’s the thing, Miguel. If I tell you, you’ll kill me. At this point, I’m better off refusing to talk and enduring whatever torture you have planned for me than I am answering any more of your questions. I think it’s safe to say we’re done talking.”

For an instant, she thought she saw admiration flash in his black gaze. But then he stood abruptly, dumping his chair over behind him with a crash. “So be it,” he growled.

* * *

Trent was grateful for the pickup truck that had swung in between him and the van. It provided great cover for his smaller vehicle from the van’s driver. But as the miles passed and the roads became more and more deserted, worry began to set in. How was it this truck was going in the exact same direction and making all the exact same turns as the van? Was its driver an accomplice of the kidnappers? His suspicion became certainty that the truck was following the van as the miles rolled by. He was looking at four or more kidnappers—no doubt all armed and dangerous—that he was up against. Alone. This night just continued to get worse.

Caution dictated that he drop much farther back than he’d like to, trailing both truck and van from far enough behind that they couldn’t make him as a tail. It was dicey, keeping visual contact and not losing the two vehicles. They wound higher and higher into the hills and the road deteriorated to a rutted and poorly maintained dirt road.

The van’s brake lights went on and he made out the white blob ahead turning left. The truck continued on. He swore. Where was it going? Why had the kidnappers split their forces? Was the truck heading around back to set a trap for anyone who might try to rescue Chloe?

It wasn’t like he had any choice. He’d walk right into their trap if he had to. He’d die before he allowed harm to come to her. The mental declaration shocked him to his core. Not because he wasn’t prepared to do his duty and lay down his life—he surely was. He knew he loved her, but was stunned to realize he was willing to die for her.

In spite of her unwillingness to open up or maybe because of it, he loved her. In spite of her prickly exterior, he couldn’t get enough of the woman beneath. In spite of her cussed independence, in spite of her lousy self-esteem, in spite of her difficult past.

No, he corrected himself. It was because of all of that that he loved her. She’d survived everything life had thrown at her. She’d raised her sister, kept her little family together as a child herself, managed to scrape together a decent education and to make something of herself. He loved her protectiveness, her fierce loyalty, her determination and drive. She was a hell of a woman. And all those qualities would stand her in good stead now. She just had to hang on a little while longer.

He turned where the van had, squinting ahead into the darkness. He’d turned off his headlights miles ago, and in spite of his eyes being fully adjusted to the night, he could barely see a thing ahead. His progress up the twin tracks of what looked like an overgrown driveway was maddeningly slow.

He paused yet again, window down to listen for the van ahead. This time he heard nothing. Immediately, he eased the car off the track and into the brush. Picking up the pistol he’d lifted off the guy in the parking lot, he slipped out of the car and into the woods.

It didn’t take long for him to see a clearing ahead nor to spot an armed man slouching at the end of the driveway. Trent hunkered down to watch for a few minutes and get the lay of the land, even though a terrible need to hurry pressed in upon him. God only knew what was happening to Chloe inside that cabin.

Based on where this guy was deployed, he guessed there was another man on the other side of the cabin as well. He moved off to his right to check it out. Just as he moved out of sight of the first guard, he spotted a second man. But this one was moving stealthily through the trees.

He crept after the guy, his entire body screaming for action. This sneaking around stuff was the complete opposite of how he was designed to function and it took an extreme act of discipline not to explode into motion. It was for Chloe, he reminded himself. His nerves calmed slightly.

The man he was following made his way carefully toward...a third man! This one was armed and leaning against a tree just beyond the clearing that contained the cabin. Trent frowned. What was the sneaking man he was following doing? Playing a practical joke on his buddy? Or had the pickup truck’s driver not been an accomplice in the kidnapping after all?

Confused, he followed along. The sneaking man eased a knife out of an ankle sheath and closed in on the third man. There was a flurry of movement. The sneaking man jumped, slashed the guy leaning against the tree across the throat with the knife, and blood erupted everywhere. The guy with the slit throat didn’t go down quietly, however. He let out a hoarse cry and grappled with his attacker.

Who in the hell was the guy with the knife?

The first guard came sprinting around the corner of the cabin, and the guy with the knife was about to be outnumbered. The guard with the slit throat wasn’t bleeding out fast enough to die before guard number one joined him.

Trent made a fast decision. He didn’t know who knife guy was, but he’d taken out one of Chloe’s kidnappers, and the enemy of Trent’s enemy had just been promoted to the status of friend. He scooped up a fist-sized rock and glided forward, his muscles weeping with relief at finally getting to move quickly. The first guard, focused entirely on the fight in front of him didn’t even look to his right as Trent swung in behind him.

It was child’s play to race the last half-dozen strides forward and clack the first guard across the back of the head with the rock as hard as he could. The first guard tumbled to the ground, rolled over once, and sprawled unconscious.

The kidnapper with the slit throat was finally collapsing in knife guy’s arms, and their struggle was moments from over. Knife guy’s back was turned, and Trent took advantage of his unknown friend’s distraction to slip back into the woods and out of sight. No sense revealing himself if he didn’t have to. For all knife guy would know, the unconscious kidnapper could have tripped on a tree root and knocked himself out.