"There he is!"
"Get the sonofabitch!"
"Go, go, go!"
The driver gunned the truck, drowning out any further words she might've heard. She felt the dampness on her cheeks only when her tears soaked into the knees of her jeans.
The second shot she heard was not from a flare gun. Neither were the three that followed. When she heard Jase scream, her entire body jolted. When she heard laughter and howling, she began to shake uncontrollably.
It wasn't until she heard footsteps behind her that she managed to go blessedly numb.
She lifted her chin, lifted her gaze, watched the figure of a man come toward her like a ghost out of the dark. Once he was near enough for her to see him better, her being numb came in handy. She couldn't react. Not to his camo fatigues. Not to his assault rifle. Not to the knife hanging from his belt halfway down his thigh.
When he reached her, he held out a hand. She gave him her fingers, eerily white against his black skin, and he pulled her to her feet. Then he pointed toward the sky.
"Do you know of the North Star, Miss Mitchell?"
Oh, God, he knew her name. He knew her name! It sounded strange when he said it; his accent reminded her of the rapper Sean Paul that Jase was constantly listening to. It was like Jamaican or something . . .
"Miss Mitchell? The North Star?"
She nodded, her teeth chattering as she found the point in the sky. "My folks used to take me and my brother camping when we lived in California. Before they got all into Jesus and we moved here." At least here she'd met Jase. They were like two peas in a pod, both hating Earnestine.
Or at least they had been . .. "What happened to Jase? Where is he? He didn't mean anything bad by taking that money. We just both want to get out of this town—"
"You must do what I say now, Miss Mitchell, and not worry about your Mr. Bremmer. Do you understand?" He took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him. "There is nothing you can do for him now."
She nodded, tears welling in her eyes, wondering if her hair would look as good as his did in dreadlocks, wondering if she would ever see Jase again, wondering where she was going to go because she couldn't go home.
Wondering how anyone could be so nice when he took the bandana from his head and used it to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
"You follow the North Star for an hour and you will come to the county highway. You walk and you do not speak of tonight to anyone. You do not ask questions. You act as if none of what you heard or saw happened. If you do, you may very possibly die. And I may very possibly be the one to kill you. Do you understand?"
She didn't understand anything. "Nothing," she wanted to scream. Instead she asked, "Where am I supposed to go?"
"You are only supposed to walk. That is all that you can do." He placed his hand in the middle of her back and pushed. "Now go. Go before it is too late."
She'd only gone twenty steps when her shoe came off. She was not going to be able to walk like this for an hour and turned back to tell him so, but he was nowhere to be seen.
God, if her parents hadn't gotten all righteous and moved here for the family's spiritual good, she would have dozens of places to go and people to help her. If she actually made it to the highway, maybe she could hitch to El Paso and find a library where she could get on the Internet.
She had to find that website. The one she'd overheard Sherry Petersen whisper about to Teresa Monaghan the day after Sherry's sister went missing and her wedding to Mr. Gaston was canceled.
Sherry swore her sister was with the woman who ran the rescue shelter for girls escaping the arranged marriages in Earnestine. What was it? What was it?
All Liberty could remember was something about a barn.
One
One week later
The structure shimmered like a mirage on the horizon.
Waves of heat danced above the hard-packed earth and around the hulking concrete bunker, nondescript, deceptive. A squat bulge like a pregnant belly atop the life teeming below, where the Spectra IT command center monitored the crime syndicate's Western U.S. activity.
And where the syndicate's filthy lucre was sent to begin the process of laundering. Deposits here, wire transfers there. This bank, that bank. Tricky sleights of hand.
Mick Savin dropped his binoculars and squinted against New Mexico's fireball of a sun glaring angrily over the Chihuahuan Desert. He was barely over the Texas border, but the bloody bitch in heat seemed to beat down with twice the number of red-hot hammers she had fifteen miles ago.
He'd left his Range Rover parked just inside the gate off U.S. Highway 62 and had hoofed it the two hours it had taken to get here—here being deep inside the seventy thousand acres of working cattle ranch that served as Spectra's cover.
His own cover, provided by the Smithson Group, the covert spy organization paying him a hell of a hefty salary, was that of a hunter scoping out prime locations for mule deer season. He had his paperwork in order and every reason to be exactly where he was . . . almost.
His leased plot, the one designated in the documents above the Rover's driver's-side visor, was approximately sixteen clicks north. The fact that he'd run across the bunker's location at all was pure dumb luck.
Up until a month ago, he'd been chasing leads gathered in Coahuila, Mexico, by Smithson Group operatives Eli McKenzie and Harry van Zandt. The pair had managed to nail down a nice hard body of evidence before the explosion—the
