“No,” he said. “We’re doing this on the side. Nobody here knows who you are or what you are.”
“Good. Anonymity is a great idea, especially right now.” When she was escorted off the helicopter, she turned to thank the pilot, but Nico nudged her forward. “It’s just good manners,” she said. She’d been given a little bit of warning, but she hadn’t expected these conditions. She almost laughed when she walked up to the plane with the two men at her side. Several other military personnel headed onto the same airplane, but it was much less of an airliner and definitely didn’t come with stewardesses or meals or any of the other comforts that she was accustomed to.
It did, however, come with pallets of cargo strapped on tight to the floor and seats at the sides that appeared to be mostly boards, harder and more unyielding than she had ever thought possible. Alongside her was a harness strap that kept her in place, which was a good thing as she soon learned. But her ride didn’t provide earplugs, and she could use those too.
Nico leaned closer and whispered, “If you can sleep, do so.”
She quirked her lips at him. “Meaning that there’s not much else to do?”
He nodded. “You’ll find everybody zoning in and out.”
“It’s awfully noisy,” she murmured.
“It’s a cargo plane that carries personnel,” he said.
“And we have a long way to go, right?”
“We do,” he said with a laugh. “But we’ll get there pretty fast, all things considered.”
She nodded and closed her eyes, but, instead of sleeping, she tried to meditate and to let the stress of the last two days slide off her back. She hated the fact that these men were looking at her assistant Maggie. But Charlotte had heard them earlier, talking about Vanessa, how she’d been found after a hit-and-run. Charlotte couldn’t even believe that the poor young woman was dead.
It never occurred to Charlotte that something like that might have happened. Well, it had occurred to her but not seriously. She’d been sure that Vanessa had taken off with her boyfriend. Charlotte had figured that the job was something Vanessa didn’t want to do anymore. But, to find out that she was dead, and Charlotte hadn’t even known, and that she’d had such negative thoughts about a poor woman who couldn’t even defend herself made Charlotte feel like a heel. “Did they ever find out who killed my assistant?”
Nico’s head pivoted suddenly in her direction. “You heard us?”
She nodded. “Was the hit-and-run driver ever caught?”
“Not according to her file.”
She nodded sadly. “She was such a young woman. She didn’t deserve that.”
“I’m pretty sure nobody in this world deserves to be mowed down on a sidewalk like that.”
“Your terminology?” She rolled her head toward him and looked at him. “Was it deliberate?” He didn’t answer, but she saw it in his eyes anyway. She slowly straightened and looked around. Everybody else had their eyes closed or talked among themselves. She hissed, “Seriously?”
He shrugged. “We don’t have answers yet,” he reminded her gently.
“Why not?” she cried out in a soft voice like a child. “We need answers.”
“And we’re getting a lot of them,” he said.
She nodded and collapsed back, her head leaning against the wall. “But that’s just terrible. I don’t understand why these people would directly target me or those around me.”
“No,” Nico said, “but there’ll be a reason. There’s always a reason, whether we see it at first or not. The worst is when we never uncover a motive. Then it eats at us forever.”
“I don’t want there to be a reason,” she said, hating the petulance in her voice.
Nico wanted to ask her a lot of questions but not in a scenario where anybody could overhear. The best thing to do was just put in their time. And it seemed like forever when he finally got word that they would be disembarking. He looked down to see she was still asleep, her head against his shoulder and her arms curled up into her chest as she tried to shift sideways. She would be damn sore and stiff after this ordeal, but at least they were landing on American soil again. He nudged her gently and whispered in her ear, “Hey, wake up. We’re coming in for a landing.”
She opened her eyes and blinked at him and then widened her eyes as she stared around, reality slamming back into her. She nodded and said, “Good. These seats are horrible.”
He grinned at her. “But the price is right.”
She laughed. “I doubt the airline’ll refund the flight I missed though,” she said.
“No, I don’t imagine they will. But maybe because it was a kidnapping, they might.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “I’ll have to take it up with them when I get back home again.”
He helped her disembark, and, as they stood at the base, she asked, “Now what?”
“Now,” he said, “we’re leaving again.”
And he walked her across to a different pad where another plane was waiting. She groaned. “Another one?”
“Another one,” he said.
“Well, thank you for getting me home.”
“Getting you home without everybody in the world knowing.”
She winced at that. “I didn’t think about the media hype. I’m sure they all heard I was kidnapped, so they’d be all over the place every step of the way.”
“Goes along with being a public figure,” Keane said cheerfully.
“I don’t want to be a public figure,” she said. “Remember that part about staying home and writing books?”
“A lot of authors are public figures too,” Keane said. “Did you consider that?”
“I wasn’t planning on doing anything that would be quite so popular. I more or less needed to convey the words in my mind that need to be spoken in a much less volatile way.”
Keane laughed at that. “I suspect you’re the kind of person who causes chaos no matter where she goes.” He turned to look at Nico and said, “You better keep that in mind.”
She glared at him. “That’s not
