Manhunt in the Wild West

Lee was a lemming, but Fax suspected he was a nasty critter, the sort that would bite you before it ran off the cliff in pursuit of its leader.

“No need to kill her,” Fax said in answer to Lee’s question. “She’s out cold.” He shifted the woman’s deadweight, figuring on dumping her off to the side, out of harm’s way. The younger, male morgue attendant was beyond help, but if Fax played it right, he could probably leave the woman alive without attracting too much suspicion. Motioning to the van with his chin, he raised his voice and called to the other members of the small group, “Let’s get out of here. Our cover’s blown to hell thanks to Lee’s itchy trigger finger.”

As planned, they’d come out of the coma-inducing meds mid-transpo. Fax had suffered a moment of atavistic terror at finding himself zipped inside a body bag, but al-Jihad had come through as promised. The bag was taped shut rather than zippered, and one of the four guards had distracted the others long enough for the prisoners to emerge from their bags and get into position. Then they’d killed all four guards—including their accomplice, whom al-Jihad didn’t trust to stay bought—by breaking their necks, so as to keep their uniforms unbloodied. Then they’d switched places, four for four. Fax didn’t know what the death-mimicking meds had contained, but they’d left him with a nasty hangover and occasional double vision. That didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, his cover intact. His job was to keep it that way until he figured out who al-Jihad was working with, and what they planned to do next.

With fanatical monsters like him it wasn’t a case of if; it was a case of when and where.

“Hey!” Slow to catch the insult, Lee spun in the midst of dragging the younger man’s body into the van. “The guy recognized me. I had no choice!”

“Maybe,” Fax retorted, propping the woman up against the cold cement wall, partially hidden behind a Dumpster. “Maybe not.”

Knowing he was pushing it, he slid a look at the other two men, who as far as he was concerned were far more dangerous than Lee Mawadi.

Muhammad Feyd’s dossier pegged the dark-eyed, dark-haired man at thirty-eight, a fanatic among fanatics who’d left al Qaeda in search of a more proactive group of anti-Western terrorists. He’d found exactly that in the man seated in the passenger’s seat of the prison transpo van…a man known simply as al-Jihad.

The terrorist leader’s dossier was thin, devoid of any information predating the new millennium. He’d appeared on the world stage just before the September 11th terror attacks, had slipped out of the country immediately thereafter, and had played tag with Homeland Security for the next several years. Federal law enforcement suspected that he’d been the mastermind behind numerous bombings and other atrocities, but had never managed to concretely tie him to any of the attacks until he’d finally been tried and convicted for the Santa Bombings that had occurred in several major Colorado cities a few years earlier.

Targeting six shopping malls all owned by the American Mall group, the bombings had been planned to coincide with the ceremonial arrival of the mall Santas to their decorated thrones. All six of the Santas had died…along with the parents and children who’d been lined up, eagerly awaiting the kickoff to the holiday season.

It had been terrorism at its most horrible, and local and federal law enforcement had worked around the clock to indict and convict al-Jihad and his henchmen. They had succeeded, but the evidence had been more circumstantial than proof-positive. The terrorists’ high-powered defense attorney had lodged appeal after appeal, but the filings had wound up logjammed in the legal system, which Fax figured was no accident. The courts had no love of terrorists.

The delay had given Jane time to formulate Fax’s cover and arrange to have him locked up in the same prison as the terrorist leader and his two lieutenants. She’d turned Fax’s honorable military discharge into a dishonorable ousting, cast him in the role of anarchist, invoked the USA PATRIOT Act and held him without trial, making him that much more attractive to an anti-American bastard like al-Jihad.

And thus, an unholy alliance had been born, right on schedule.

In person, the terrorist leader was tall, thin and angular, and graceful enough in his movements that he almost appeared effete…except for his eyes, which were those of a killer.

From reading the available reports, Fax had known that al-Jihad would be a smart, driven, dangerous man. Meeting him in the flesh had reinforced that impression and added a new realization: the bastard wasn’t just dangerous; he was completely without a conscience when it came to killing Americans. Worse, he enjoyed the hell out of it.

That put Fax in an even more tenuous position than he’d anticipated, making it a seriously bad idea to draw attention. Yet that was just what he was risking if he fought too hard to save the pretty medical examiner from becoming part of the collateral damage.

“Boss?” Lee said plaintively, looking at the passenger’s seat of the van, where al-Jihad sat silent and square-shouldered.

The terrorist leader sent his follower a dark look that all but said “get a spine,” yet he said nothing.

Muhammad aimed a kick at Lee and growled, “Get in the damn van.” He jerked his chin at Fax. “You, too. And bring the woman. We’ll need a hostage if things get sticky on the way out.”

The original plan had been for Rickey Charles—whom al-Jihad had somehow contacted and bribed—to cover the switch for as long as possible, giving them time to get well away. In the absence of that help, their window of opportunity to escape cleanly was closing fast.

“But—” Fax bit off the protest, knowing he was already on tenuous footing with the terrorists.

The only reason he was there at all was because he’d developed the contact for the death-mimicking drugs they’d needed to get on the meat wagon. He’d contacted al-Jihad through a Byzantine trail of notes hidden in the few common areas the prisoners were given access to, one at a time. He’d offered the drug in exchange for a place within al-Jihad’s terror cell, and the plan had been born.

Frankly, he was somewhat surprised they hadn’t tried to kill him yet, now that they were outside the prison walls. That they hadn’t tried to off him indicated that they still had some use for him, but he had a feeling that amnesty wouldn’t last long if he started arguing orders.

She’s acceptable collateral damage, he told himself, and went back for the woman.

Damned if she didn’t stir a little and curl into him when he picked her up and held her against his chest. Surprised, he looked down.

She had dark, chestnut-highlighted hair and faint freckles visible through a fading summer tan. Her cheeks and lips were full, her chin softly rounded, and her nose turned up slightly at the end, giving her an almost childlike, vulnerable air. But there was nothing childlike about the curves that pressed against him, and there was sure as hell nothing juvenile about the unexpected surge of lust that slammed into him when she shifted and turned her face into his neck, so her hair tickled the edge of his ear and feathered across the sensitive skin beneath his jaw.

“Move your ass,” Lee snapped from inside the van.

Muhammad finished disabling the vehicle’s state-issued GPS locator and got in the driver’s seat, then gunned the engine to warn Fax that he was running out of time.

Sometimes it’s necessary to sacrifice a few to save the rest, Fax reminded himself. Still, his stomach twisted in a sick ball as he slung the woman through the side door of the vehicle, so she landed near her dead friend, whose corpse was stacked with two of the guards’ bodies. The other two bodies were still on the gurneys, one of which was jammed in at an angle where Lee had shoved it in after their escape plan had blown up in their faces.

Even without Rickey Charles, they might’ve bluffed their way through the body transfer and talked the woman into signing off without confirming the identities of the corpses, but once Lee killed the morgue attendant, even that slim chance had disappeared.

Their escape could get real messy real quick, Fax knew. Problem was, he needed them to get free so the terrorists would reach out to their contacts and plan their next move.

Which meant the woman’s life—and his own, for that matter—were expendable in the grand scheme of things.

Hating the necessity more than he would’ve expected to, he jumped into the van and rolled the side door closed just as Muhammad hit the gas and the van peeled away from the ME’s office.

The four men braced to hear the alarm raised any second, to see pursuit behind them. But there was no alarm, no pursuit as al-Jihad’s second in command navigated the city streets of Bear Claw.

Fax noted that they were heading roughly northward, back in the direction of the prison rather than away, but he didn’t ask why, didn’t even let on that he’d noticed or even cared. He simply filed the information, and hoped like hell he’d have a chance to get it to Jane before al-Jihad and the others decided he’d outlived his usefulness.

Maybe five miles outside the city limits, well down a deserted road that wound through the state forest, Muhammad pulled off into a small parking lot that served a trailhead leading into the wilderness.

Al-Jihad, who was still riding shotgun, turned to Lee and Fax, and said in his dead, inflectionless voice, “Kill the woman and dump all of the bodies in the canyon. We won’t need them where we’re going.”

Which is where? Fax wanted to ask but didn’t because he knew the game too well. The more he followed orders without question, the longer he would live, and the more information he’d gain about the structure of al-Jihad’s network inside the U.S.

So instead of asking the questions he wanted answered, he nodded and rolled open the side door, then waited while Lee climbed out. When the other man turned back, Fax shoved one of the body bags at him.

Lee caught the dead guard and nearly went down. “Watch it!” he snapped, glaring at Fax.

“Sorry,” Fax said with little remorse, having already figured out that al-Jihad and Muhammad liked the fact that he didn’t let the lemming push him around. Jerking his chin in the direction of the trailhead, he said, “I’ll be right behind you.”

Lee muttered something under his breath, but slung the body bag over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and headed off into the woods, struggling only slightly under his burden.

Hyperaware of the scrutiny he was receiving from the two men in the front of the van, Fax reached down for the woman, his mind spinning as he desperately tried to figure out a way to keep her alive while protecting his cover.

He didn’t know her name, but somehow she’d become the symbol of all the warm, civilized things he’d dreamed of from the confines of his cell, all the beauty and laughter he lived in the darkness to protect.

Jane might be his boss and sometimes lover, but the pretty medical examiner was a real person, one who belonged in the sunlight, not the shadows.

Hefting her over his shoulder, he turned and headed into the forest in Lee’s wake. Once he was out of earshot, he said under his breath, “I know you’re awake. Don’t do anything stupid and you might live to see our backs.”

CHELSEA STIFFENED at the sound of his voice, but was too terrified to process his words. The only reason she wasn’t already screaming was because she was too damn scared to breathe. That, and she was pretty sure there was nobody nearby to hear except the escaped convicts, who would probably enjoy her terror. So she kept the panic inside, save for the tears that leaked from beneath her screwed-shut eyelids.

She couldn’t believe she’d been kidnapped, couldn’t believe that the blue-eyed guard—or rather, the blue-eyed escaped convict—she’d been ogling on the loading dock was carrying her into the state forest, acting on a terrorist’s orders to kill her and dump her in Bear Claw Canyon.

Things like that just didn’t happen to small-scale people like her.

She would’ve thought it was all a dream, a nightmare, except that the sensations were too real: her head pounded from the blow that’d knocked her unconscious, her tears were cool on her cheeks, and the man’s shoulder dug into her belly as he carried her along the path. Opening her eyes, she saw that what she’d figured were signs of recent muscle gain were actually places where his uniform didn’t fit; the material gapped at the small of his back, where he’d tucked the guard’s weapon into his belt.

WWJBD? She knew she should struggle, she should try to escape, but when? Now or after they reached their destination? What were the chances she could grab that gun and turn the tables?

“Don’t,” he warned in a low voice.

Before she could respond, or act, or do anything, really, she heard another man’s voice from up ahead, saying, “I found a cave. Dump her and put a bullet in her. I’ll go get another load.”

The man’s voice was casual, careless, like he was talking about things rather than people. But to him she and the others were things, she realized. They were Americans. The enemy. Yet the speaker was blond, and his voice carried a trace of a Boston accent. She would’ve passed him on the street and never once thought to wonder about him.

Vaguely, she remembered a snippet of newscast that’d said one of the three escapees, Lee Mawadi, was a homegrown terrorist who’d hooked up with al-Jihad for the Santa Bombings.

Back then, sitting safe in her living room, terrorism had been an abstract concept, something she saw on TV and exclaimed over while secretly thinking that such things would never happen to her. She hadn’t even been in Colorado during the Santa Bombings; she’d been finishing a nice, safe rotation in a private practice outside Chicago, reveling in the early stages of a relationship she’d thought was The One, but had turned out to be another Not Quite.

Now, though, she was all alone, with terror her only companion.

“Sounds good to me,” the man carrying her said, his voice easy as he agreed to the plan of shooting her and dumping her in the cave.

But his touch, while firm, was disconcertingly gentle and he’d hinted at the possibility that she might live. Did that mean he had a soft spot for her because of their shared look out by the loading dock? Would he somehow prove to be an ally?

Get a grip, her inner voice of practicality snapped. He’s a murderer.

If the other speaker was Lee Mawadi, then the blue-eyed man she’d shared a long look with must be Jonah Fairfax. That meant he hadn’t been part of the Santa Bombings, but it didn’t make him innocent or safe. The ARX Supermax didn’t cater to white-collar criminals, and Fairfax had been jailed for torturing and murdering two of the FBI agents sent to infiltrate the anarchist camp he’d been a member of.

Yet he’d made it sound like he wanted to save her somehow. It made no sense.

When footsteps warned that the other man—Lee Mawadi—was passing them on the trail, Chelsea screwed her eyes shut. Moments later, the sunlight beyond her eyelids cut to black and the echoes told her that they’d entered the cave he’d spoken of.

The blue-eyed man—Fairfax—flipped her off his shoulder without warning, then caught her before she could slam to the ground. She kept her eyes shut as he lowered her so she was half propped up against a rock wall. She could feel him crouch over her, leaning close and blocking any hope of escape.

“I need you to stop playing dead and listen very carefully,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I think I can get you out of this, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

She opened her eyes at that, and nearly screamed when she saw that he’d put her down right next to one of the body bags. Worse, it was open, revealing one of the dead guards, shirtless, his eyes open and staring in death.

She held in the scream, but plastered herself against the rock wall, her quick, panicked breaths rattling in her lungs.

“Look at me.” The blue-eyed man touched her chin and turned her head toward him. “Don’t scream and don’t move. Lee is going to be back in a minute, so we’ve got to work fast.” He paused as though gauging her. “I need to get something out of my shoe. Can I trust you not to try to run?”

She nodded quickly, though she didn’t mean it. The second an opportunity presented, she was so out of there.

He gave her another, longer look. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” As though he’d read her mind, he stayed between her and the mouth of the cave, which was little more than a crevice in the rock, probably part of the canyon that’d been pushed up and over ground level by a long-ago glacier or earth shift, or maybe even one of the recent landslides.

Fairfax worked at his right shoe for a moment and came up with a small ampoule of pale yellow liquid. He crowded close to her, leaving no room for retreat or escape. “This is going to knock you out and depress your vitals so far that it’ll look like you’re dead, but you won’t be. You’ll come around in twelve hours or so, and we’ll be long gone.”

Then, before she could react, before she could protest, or scream, or any of the other things she knew she damn well ought to do, he’d broken off the tip of the ampoule, jammed the needle-point end into her upper arm, and squeezed the yellow liquid into her.

Pain flared at the injection site, hard and hot.

She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. She struggled to stand up and run, but her legs wouldn’t obey. Her muscles turned to gelatin and she started sliding sideways, and this time Fairfax didn’t catch her or break her fall.

She heard him stand, heard a weapon’s action being racked in preparation for firing. Then there was a single gunshot.

Then nothing.

FAX KNEW HE didn’t have much time, if any. He went to his knees beside the body bag containing the dead guard, whom he’d just shot. Pressing his hand against the wound, he got as much cool blood as he could from the dead man, and slathered it across the unconscious woman’s face, concentrating on the hair above her temple.

When he heard footsteps at the entrance to the cave, he readjusted the body bag and wiped off his hands on part of the woman’s coat, then tucked the stained section beneath her before he stood.

Feigning nonchalance, he put the safety on his gun and stuck the weapon in his waistband before he turned toward Lee, hoping like hell the lemming wouldn’t notice that the blood on the woman wasn’t exactly fresh.

Only the newcomer wasn’t Lee. It was al-Jihad himself.

The terrorist leader stood silhouetted at the cave mouth, a lean, dark figure whose presence was significantly larger than his physical self.

A shiver tried to crawl down the back of Fax’s neck but he held it off, determined to brazen out the situation and keep himself in the killer’s good graces. Gesturing casually toward the woman, he said, “She’s all set. Want me to go help Lee with the other guards?”

Al-Jihad moved past him without a word, gliding almost silently, seeming incorporeal, like the demon he was. Crouching down beside the woman’s motionless, blood-spattered body, he touched her cheek, then her throat, checking for a pulse.

Fax forced himself not to tense up, reminded himself to breathe, to act like the cold, jaded killer Abby’s betrayal had made him into. Only the thing was, something had changed inside him. He’d been playing the role of convict for so long it’d become second nature to hold the persona within the prison, but he found he was in danger of slipping now that they were outside those too-familiar walls.

Hell, face it; he’d already slipped. There was no rational reason for him to jeopardize his position by faking the woman’s murder. The ampoule of the death-mimicking meds he’d tucked into a false, X-ray-safe compartment inside one of his not-quite-prison-issue shoes was supposed to be a safety net, a way for him to fake his own death if the need arose. Similarly, the GPS homing device he’d activated and placed in her coat pocket was supposed to be used only if he thought he was in imminent danger of being killed, and wanted to make sure Jane could find his body.

Sure, he’d also planted a message on the woman, information he needed to get to Jane. But he could’ve gotten the info to her in other ways, ones that wouldn’t have used up so much of his dwindling bag of tricks.

So why had he gone all out to save a woman whose name he knew only because he’d palmed the ID tag off her scrubs?

Reaching into his pocket to touch the plastic tag, which read Chelsea Swan—a lovely name for a lovely woman—he thought he knew why he’d endangered himself and his mission for her. It was the freckles. Abby had had freckles like that, back when they’d been high-school sweethearts, before he’d done his stint in the military, blithely assuming things would stay the same while he was gone.

Back when Abby’d had freckles, their biggest problems had been arguments over which movie to see, or which radio station to play as they’d tooled around town in his beat-up Wrangler with the soft top down. Eventually, though, she’d outgrown her freckles…and him.

Chelsea Swan reminded him of those earlier times. Good times. Times that might as well have happened to someone else. But because they hadn’t, and because she looked like the sort of person who ought to have more good times ahead of her, he’d dabbed blood over her scalp and face to simulate a head wound, and he’d used his meds to make her body play dead.

Question was, would it be enough to save her?

Al-Jihad stood without a word, and gestured for Fax to return to the vehicle. “Go help Lee.”

Fax stayed tense as he followed orders, fearing that al-Jihad was playing him, that the bastard knew what he’d done and was teasing him with the illusion of success. But the terrorist leader returned to the van a few minutes later, and on Fax’s next trip into the cave, he saw that Chelsea remained just as he’d left her.

He and Lee finished unloading the other bodies, opening up each of the bags so the scent would attract scavengers, in hopes that they’d deface the bodies, further complicating forensic analysis when the dump site was eventually found. At least that was the terrorists’ theory. In reality, the homing beacon would have Jane’s people on-site in a few hours.

Once the job was done, Fax hung back in the cave.

“Move it,” Lee snapped when they both heard an impatient horn beep from the direction of the road. “The cops’ll get the roadblocks up soon.”

“I’m right behind you,” Fax said. But as the other man hustled down the trail, Fax stayed put.

Moving fast, he pulled the jacket and heavy sweatshirt off the dead morgue attendant, and packed them around Chelsea’s limp body. When that didn’t look like it’d be enough, he whispered, “Sorry,” and pulled the attendant’s still-warm corpse over her as added insulation. It was too cold and her vitals were too depressed for him to worry about niceties. If Jane took too long to respond, Chelsea could freeze to death.

Hopefully, though, Jane would send someone right away. The responding agent could then administer the counteragent to the death-mimicking drug, collect the GPS beacon and info pellet Fax had planted on Chelsea, and phone in an untraceable tip that would lead the locals to the location. The agent would undoubtedly also reset the scene, making it look as though her survival had been accidental rather than intentional.

With no way of knowing where al-Jihad had eyes and ears, they had to be careful not to make it obvious that the terrorist had a traitor among his small crew.

“Just hang on for a few hours, Chelsea,” Fax said quietly, his words echoing in the cave. “Help should be on its way soon.”

Then, knowing he’d done the best he could for her, he paused at the cave mouth and looked back at the six bloodied bodies, five of which weren’t going to wake up ever again.