Secret Hideout

“They visited today.” Scanlon told Brand about Davy McCoy’s unexpected appearance.

“Sounds like a breakthrough to me,” Brand said. “And the invitation came from Addie Tolliver herself?”

“That’s what Davy said. I think it’s a test.”

“I’d concur.”

“But I can’t have Isabel staying here,” Scanlon added, the extra layer of desperation in his voice having little to do with his worry about her safety.

He was still feeling the effects of the kiss he’d planted on his partner at the Fort Payne Mountain View Inn.

Right now, she was watching him with that excited grin she got when a case started going her way, and it was all he could do to keep from hanging up on Brand and hauling her back to his bedroom to kiss that smile off her smug little face. Six months away from her had done nothing to quench the passion he’d been nurturing for almost as long as he’d known her.

But Brand didn’t know anything about those feelings. Isabel certainly didn’t have a clue. He’d worked hard to keep his attraction to her carefully hidden, staying within the bounds of their professional relationship.

“You’ve been puzzling over those files for months now without being able to figure out if any of the Swains are even involved in last year’s bombings. The bombings were Cooper’s baby in the first place—let her do the profiling work while you’re out in the field. She can give it a fresh eye.”

Any other agent, and Scanlon would have agreed without another argument. He hated pushing around paper, looking for clues, much preferring to be out in the field.

But Cooper wasn’t any other agent. “If they catch her here, we’re both dead.”

“So don’t let them catch her,” Brand responded, reprising his earlier argument.

Scanlon growled with frustration. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you planned this.”

“Good thing you know better,” Brand said.

“She’s going to need clothes. A weapon.”

“Maybe they left my Beretta and my clothes in my hotel room,” Isabel suggested. “Can they look?”

Scanlon passed along the information to Brand.

“We’ve already secured her clothing. The Beretta was there, as well. But there’s going to be the matter of her family. They’ll be looking for her.”

“That’s why we should send her home to them. Let the bad guys think she got to a safe place and contacted her family.”

“My brothers and sisters aren’t going to believe just any old story,” Isabel warned from her position near the stove. “You’ll have to let me talk to one of them.”

“Let her call one of them,” Brand said.

“We can’t take that chance—”

“I’ll have the Huntsville office deliver a new phone with her clothes and her weapon when an agent comes to pick up the van this evening,” Brand said calmly. “Let her call one of her family on the phone you’ve got.” He hung up without warning.

Scanlon swore under his breath.

“Boy, didn’t take long for you to go all lone wolf,” Isabel said, her tone flippant. But he knew her well enough to recognize the hurt in her dark eyes.

“Everything here’s so dangerous,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you in the middle of it.”

“I’m trained to be in the middle of it.” She lifted her chin, trying to look tough, but she wobbled a little, lingering weakness from the drug injection betraying her.

He couldn’t hold back a smile, slipping his hand under her elbow to steady her. His fingers seemed to burn where he touched her. “I know.”

“This investigation has to do with the serial bomber, doesn’t it?” she asked, letting him lead her to the futon sofa.

He dropped beside her, allowing himself the secret pleasure of sitting close enough that their arms brushed when they moved. “It does,” he admitted. “At least, we think it’s connected. Either way, I’ll be happy to bring the bastards down.”

He had his own personal reasons for wanting the Swains to pay for their crimes, reasons that had nothing to do with the serial bomber investigation. Even Adam Brand didn’t know what motivated him, as far as Scanlon knew. Then again, the wily SAC had a way of learning things only God himself could know.

“Well, you have plenty of time now to bring me up to speed.” She nudged him with her shoulder, a light, friendly touch that shouldn’t have sent fire pouring into his gut.

But it had. And now the memory of the kiss outside the hotel—the kiss she didn’t even remember because she was so drugged up she could barely stand—assaulted his mind with a barrage of images designed to make him crazy.

He wanted to kiss her again, this time when she was conscious and would know what it meant when her lips pressed back against his. Her reaction to his kiss had caught him by surprise, a fierce, passionate response that had almost knocked him from his own feet.

Had she known it was him? Or had she been hallucinating some phantom lover, one she saw as more than just a partner and friend? The question had damned near begun to haunt him.

He crossed to the stove, needing distance from her. “At the time of the Virginia bombing, we’d already begun looking at older blasts that might fit the bomber’s MO.”

“Right—the explosion in Rome, Georgia, that killed a judge, and there was a bombing here in north Alabama—” She paused, her brow crinkling. “Are we still in north Alabama?”

“Yeah. A place called Bolen Bluff, about fifteen miles northeast of Fort Payne.”

Her eyebrows notched upwards. “Jasper Swain’s hometown.”

Scanlon nodded. “Exactly.”

“But Swain’s been in jail for over twenty years,” she said. “We talked about the possibility of a copycat, but—”

“But the Swains are concentrating on meth and weed these days,” he finished for her. “I know. But the MO was so close to the Swain bombings. And the bomb in Virginia happened only after we started snooping into the Swains’ business.”

“You think they targeted us specifically?”

“Targeted you,” he said flatly. He’d let her run the investigation into Jasper Swain’s bombings, despite his own personal interest in the case. He’d even let her be the one to go visit Jasper at the jail in St. Clair County, afraid the old man might recognize him even after all these years.

Funny to think about now, considering he was living in the middle of the bloody Swains, trying to worm his way into the family business.

That had been Brand’s idea, too. He’d seen a golden opportunity to kill off Scanlon’s old self and create a whole new person for the undercover assignment he’d been thinking about for months.

“They’re up to more than just drugs and protection down there,” Brand had insisted soon after the bombing, while Scanlon had been hidden away at the SAC’s hunting retreat in central Virginia. Scanlon had agreed to the undercover assignment and headed south to Alabama as soon as he recovered from the worst of his injuries.

Fortunately, he apparently looked different enough from the child he’d been the last time he was in Bolen Bluff that nobody had recognized him at all, at least as far as he knew.

“This was Brand’s idea—sending you here.” Isabel echoed his own thoughts so closely he had to smile. After years of working together, they’d formed the habit of finishing each other’s sentences, their minds honed to think in similar directions.

It was the differences between them—her logical, scholarly approach contrasting with his more freewheeling, improvisational style—that had made them a good team. Brand had never tried assigning them to work with other agents after the first few times they’d worked together on cases.

“Yeah, Brand thinks the Swains may be up to more than just cooking meth and harvesting weed.”

“Does he think the bombs in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama are connected to the Swains, too?” she asked. “Did you finally make a connection between the victims?”

The bombing cases he and Isabel had been investigating centered on attacks on targets that, as far as they could tell, seemed completely random. The first had been the murder of a Georgia family court judge, which had seemed significant at the time in terms of motive—until the second bombing took out the office of a small movie theater a few miles west of Meridian, Mississippi.

A third blast had destroyed half a warehouse in Gadsden, Alabama, and a fourth blew up a junkyard in western Birmingham. Only the judge died in the bombings. The others had suffered property damage only.

“We still haven’t figured out any connection,” he admitted. “None of the people have any overt relationship to each other, and if there’s a covert one, we haven’t come across it yet.”

“I’ve thought about the cases from time to time,” Isabel admitted, flashing him a faint smile. “You know how I like a puzzle. But Jesse’s kept me pretty busy since I started working for him, and then there was the business last month with my brother Rick and his wife—”

“Rick got married?” The last Scanlon had heard, Isabel’s brother was having trouble settling in at his new job with Cooper Security. Something about personality conflicts with his brother, Jesse, who ran the company.

“He did,” she said, her smile widening. “He reconnected with someone he knew when he was working at MacLear.”

Isabel’s brother Rick had worked for years at a private security contractor, MacLear Enterprises, before the company had been busted for running a secret criminal enterprise under the table. The company owner, Jackson Melville, was under indictment for the actions of the company’s secret SSU—Special Services Unit—which had kidnapped a child and terrorized a woman from California.

Isabel’s brother Rick had nothing to do with the SSU—according to Isabel, Rick hadn’t even known the unit existed. But the entire company had collapsed under the weight of the allegations against Melville and the SSU, Rick’s field operative position included.

“Was she another MacLear agent?” Scanlon asked.

“No—she was a CIA agent.” She smiled at his arched eyebrow. “Apparently they got hot and heavy when they were both working out of Kaziristan about three years ago. They reconnected last month—she was targeted by assassins—”

“Boy, you die for a few months and you miss out on everything,” he muttered drily.

“Oh! Did Brand tell you what we learned about the old MacLear SSU?”

Scanlon and his boss had conversed about little besides the undercover case he was working, and isolated as he was up here in the north Alabama mountains, Scanlon didn’t have much access to news, either. He’d left his BlackBerry and laptop behind when he became Mark Shipley, the disabled vet with just enough disability pay to buy this ramshackle cabin in the middle of nowhere. “What about the SSU?”

“They’re still operating. At least, the ones who escaped indictment or capture. And they may be picking up new members.”

Alarm rippled through him. “How do you know?”

“They went after Amanda—Rick’s wife. Turns out Khalid Mazir, one of the candidates for president of Kaziristan, was an al Adar mole. Rick’s wife, Amanda, was the only person outside al Adar who knew about Mazir’s terrorist ties—the guy kidnapped and tortured her a few years ago. She got away, and I guess it wouldn’t have mattered much if she hadn’t seen Mazir’s face.”

“So she could identify him as an al Adar operative, which would mess with his plans to become president?”

“Exactly.”

“And this guy hired SSU people to, what? Assassinate her?”

“Damned near succeeded,” Isabel said with a grimace.

“I wonder if they were operating as far back as last summer,” Scanlon mused.

“When the first bombing happened?”

He shrugged. “Probably not connected, but I know some of the SSU were explosives and munitions experts. What if they studied Jasper Swain’s MO and decided to mimic it?”

Her brow creased in thought. “It’s a pretty old fashioned MO. His style is primitive compared to the electronically triggered explosives available these days. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would use that kind of bomb if they had other options.”

“Unless it’s sentimental somehow.”

“Sentimental?”

“Maybe the serial bomber is a fan of old Jasper. Maybe he builds the bombs the Swain way as a tribute.”

Isabel looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t a more famous bomber be a better choice? Someone like the Unabomber or Rudolph—”

Scanlon shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just spitballing at this point.” He held out his hand to her, bracing himself for the feel of her warm, strong hand in his.

She took his hand, and the tingling commenced, but he managed not to let her see how she affected him as he pulled her to her feet. She gave him a quizzical look but followed as he led her into the hall.

“I keep the files in here.” He opened the linen closet door and pulled up a loose floorboard. Besides the lockbox with the satellite phone, he also kept hidden a rectangular plastic box marked MISALGA, the Bureau shorthand for the bombing cases in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. He opened the box and handed her the thick portfolio where he kept copies of all the files on the case. “You up to a little light reading?”

She took the portfolio and grinned at him. “You bet.”

They both turned to head back into the living room when a sound from the front of the house brought them up short.

A second later, someone knocked on the door.

“Closet,” he said tersely, nodding toward the bedroom.

Holding onto the portfolio, Isabel disappeared behind the bedroom door, while Scanlon hurried to the living room and took a quick look at the porch through the window beside the door.

A curvy blond woman dressed in a linen suit stood in front of the door, glancing at her watch. Scanlon closed his eyes and released a sigh of frustration.

Dahlia was back.

“Mark, are you in there?”

He opened the door and pasted a smile on his face. “When did you get back in town?”

“Just a little while ago.” Dahlia McCoy lifted to her tiptoes and brushed her pink lips against his. “I ran into Davy in town and he said you were home, so I thought I’d drop by to say hello before I go back to the office.”

She entered without being asked, shrugging off her jacket to bare her toned, sun-kissed arms. She went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Diet Coke. Settling on the sofa as if she intended to stay awhile, she smiled at Scanlon.

He smiled back, hiding his dismay with the skill of a now-practiced liar.

He’d forgotten to tell Isabel about his girlfriend.

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