Secret Identity

Had he turned a blind eye because he was too in love with the adrenaline and adventure of his job?

After the exciting life he’d led, going home to Chickasaw County again had been a daunting proposition. He’d fielded offers from other security agencies, had considered taking a few of them, but in the end, the call of home and family had proved a stronger pull than he’d anticipated.

Not that there weren’t problems. A guy didn’t leave his family behind and turn into a virtual ghost for ten years without creating a little interfamily tension. And he knew his brother Jesse, in particular, resented that Rick had gone with a civilian security unit rather than serving his country the way Jesse had.

Fat bit of irony, that, given that Jesse’s first act upon leaving the Marines was to open his own security agency. And even Jesse couldn’t deny that Rick had skills the security agency needed. He hoped in time they’d work through the old resentments and come out stronger for it.

Plus, he admired the hell out of his brother for the kind of company he was building. Cooper Security was a for-profit company, but profit wasn’t the bottom line with Jesse. He was in this work to do the kinds of jobs the government couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do.

Few who drove past the low-slung stucco office building on Jones Street in Maybridge knew what went on inside, what sort of men and women staffed the agency’s headquarters. Most of the operatives formerly worked for an alphabet soup of U.S. government agencies—CIA, FBI, DSS, ATF, DEA, military special forces.

Most of the Cooper Security agents—even Rick—shared one thing in common: a connection to Kaziristan, a former Soviet satellite located in the midst of some of the world’s hottest hot spots. Some had worked embassy security or run covert operations. Others had tracked Kaziri terrorists worldwide or interdicted their funding. His sister Megan had lost her husband in combat in Kaziristan.

For Rick, the Kaziristan connection had started with a blonde bombshell from the CIA.

IT HADN’T BEEN RICK. The voice was similar—deep and smooth, with a Southern drawl—but it couldn’t belong to Rick Cooper. He was probably half a world away, tracking down suicide bombers in Karachi or running a scam on Russian mobsters—anywhere but Alabama, answering a number Alexander Quinn had put a lot of effort into sending to her. Quinn wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to reunite two people he’d worked so hard to separate.

We don’t fraternize with mercs. Ever.

She closed her eyes, tucking her knees to her chin. She’d always known Quinn was a manipulative bastard, but he generally had a good reason. What was his reason this time?

She looked down at the matchbox beside her on the front porch. It lay partly open, the fake nails peeking from inside, a vivid reminder of a past she wanted to bury.

Quinn knew what happened in Tablis. He’d been the first agent to reach her after she’d escaped the rat hole where the al Adar militants had kept her for almost two weeks. He’d seen the full picture of her ordeal, painted in the rainbow hues of bruises, welts and slashes all over her body. In the bloody nubs where her fingernails had been.

She’d been overjoyed to see him that day. She’d thought the nightmare was over.

She’d been so wrong.

Tears burned her eyes like acid. She dashed them away, angry at herself for the show of weakness. Her time would be better spent trying to figure out just what Quinn was trying to tell her with the matchbox and the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone number he’d given her.

To make her earlier call, she’d used the pay phone at the gas station down the road, hoping it would offer her a semblance of anonymity. Maybe she should go back there and call the number again. Say something this time, rather than hanging up like a scared teenager too chicken to finish a prank call.

She tucked the matchbox in her pocket and started the half-mile walk to the gas station down Dewberry Road. Heat rose in shimmery waves off the blacktop, fragrant with the odor of gasoline and melting tar. The afternoon sun stung her bare arms, bringing with it a sense of déjà vu that caught her by surprise. She hadn’t thought of home in a long time, of the lazy Southern summers of her childhood, when the sun couldn’t get too hot or the day too long.

She’d taken a risk by choosing another tiny Southern town to escape to, but after Kaziristan and the aftermath, she’d needed that sense of familiarity. Small Southern towns were all alike in fundamental ways. Ways that made it a little easier to sleep at night.

She reached the gas station within ten minutes and pulled the matchbox from her pocket, although by now she had the number memorized, having stared at it so long before she got up the nerve to call the first time. She crossed to the phone set into the station’s brick facade, sparing a glance at the lanky attendant teetering on the back legs of a metal folding chair and fanning himself with a folded piece of cardboard with a motor-oil logo peeking out of one end.

“Sure is hot for March,” he muttered halfheartedly and closed his eyes, showing no signs of wanting to start a conversation.

She murmured agreement and reached for the pay phone. But before her fingers touched the receiver, it began to ring. She grabbed it on instinct. “Hello?”

There was no answer, just the sound of a car’s engine. The caller must be in a car.

“Hello?” she repeated.

“Who’s speaking?” a familiar voice asked.

The voice that sounded like Rick Cooper’s.

Her hand trembled. “Who’s calling?”

After a pause, the caller said, “Sigurd.”

Amanda slammed the receiver back on the hook, the tremor in her hand spreading like wildfire to the rest of her body.

The gas station attendant looked her way, his expression mildly curious.

“Wrong number,” she managed to rasp out. She wheeled and started walking away, her stride fast and purposeful.

The man’s last word echoed in her head. Sigurd.

The phone behind her started ringing again.

“Hey, it’s ringing again,” the attendant called out.

She ignored him, walking faster. She heard the scrape of the attendant’s chair against the cement, and a moment later, the phone stopped ringing.

She kept going, her mind racing.

If the call was a message from Quinn, it made no sense. The CIA cut her off almost three years ago. She had no operational value to anyone, friend or foe.

Surely she’d misunderstood the caller. He’d said something else. Anything but “Sigurd.”

After all, who would send an assassin after her?

Chapter Two

As Rick passed through Maryville, heading east, he checked his phone to make sure it was still working. He’d left a message earlier to let Jesse know about his change in plans, but so far, his brother hadn’t called back for any details.

Not that Rick had any details to give him.

Thurlow Gap didn’t even show up on the map he’d looked up on his phone, but the drawling local who’d answered the phone the second time gave him directions from Knoxville. He’d also shared what he knew about the woman who’d answered Rick’s earlier call. She was a freelance artist named Amanda Caldwell. At least, that was the name she was going by now. But after hearing her voice on the phone, Rick knew better.

She was the woman he’d known as Tara Brady.

Tara had been a dry-witted, leggy blonde working out of the U.S. embassy in Tablis, Kaziristan. He’d been in the Kaziristan capital supporting a joint force investigating allegations of American citizens of Kaziri descent fighting with anti-government rebels north of Tablis.

Tara had never told him she was CIA, but he knew it, and she knew he knew it. It should have kept their interactions limited and circumspect—mercs and spooks didn’t get involved.

But he and Tara had.

Their affair had been brief but torrid. Lingering glances led to stolen moments of intimacy, then a few nights of frantic, amazing sex in a flea-bitten hotel on the outskirts of the city. He’d never fallen for a woman so fast or so hard in his life.

But of course, it had to come to an end.

He put the memories out of his mind and concentrated on the winding drive east through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian chain. Ahead, the expansive cloud-tipped peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park spread before him in hues of jade, turquoise and sapphire.

Tara loved mountains. She’d hoped one day to cross the Timrhan Mountains, the craggy, unforgiving border between Kaziristan and Russia to the north. He’d laughed at her bravado. She’d told him not to underestimate her.

That had been their last night together.

He reached the Thurlow Gap city limits around four-thirty. Though the sun was still high in the sky, nightfall hours away, the town already looked buttoned up for the evening. The gas station was still open, but the only person around was a buxom woman behind the cashier’s counter near the front window.

Rick refilled the Charger’s tank before approaching the woman—people often responded more openly to nosy questions if you asked them while handing them money. He added a package of cinnamon breath mints to the tab and asked her if she knew Amanda Caldwell.

“Who wants to know?” the woman asked in a whiskeyed rasp, eyeing him with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

“I’m an old friend. Rick Cooper.”

The woman’s brow creased further. “Can’t say she ever mentioned you.”

“She called me earlier today, but I didn’t ask for her address. I was in the area so I thought I’d drop by to visit.”

“She don’t get many visitors.”

Not surprising, Rick thought. “No significant other?”

The woman gave a loud snort. “Hell, the girl don’t even have a dog keepin’ her company.”

He couldn’t quell a glimmer of satisfaction at the woman’s words, though shame followed fast on its heels. What right did he have to wish her a life of solitude? When his hand was forced, he’d chosen a mission over her. She’d made a similar choice. Things between them ended abruptly, and apparently she’d never looked back. He hadn’t, either.

At least not that he’d ever let anyone see.

His coming here to talk to Tara—Amanda—wasn’t personal, even now. He just wanted to know why a CIA master spy like Alexander Quinn was pulling his strings where she was concerned.

The clerk inclined her head. “Come to think of it, I reckon maybe she’d like seein’ an old friend, at that. Especially a good-lookin’ fella like you.” Her lips quirking, she lifted a sun-leathered arm and pointed down the road. “She lives in a house a few blocks down Dewberry Road. On the left. The house is set back a bit, but you really can’t miss it—she has a big black mailbox with the number 212 on it.” She winked at him. “Tell her she can thank me later.”

Rick smiled and thanked her, heading out to his car. As he slid behind the wheel of the Charger, his cell phone rang. It was Jesse. He considered not answering but finally thumbed the connector. “Hey, Jesse.”

“Why the hell are you heading north?”

“I can’t tell you that yet.”

“You can’t tell me?” Irritation edged his brother’s drawl.

“Not yet. But it’s important or I’d be on my way back to the office.” Rick started the Charger.

The pause on Jesse’s end was thick with annoyance. “You may be family, but that doesn’t mean you can keep pushing the envelope quite so hard, Rick.”

“And you know as well as I do that some things happen we have to deal with on the q.t., Jess. This is one of them. I’ll explain everything later, okay?”

Jesse sighed. “Stay in touch.” He hung up.

Rick checked to see if he was safe to pull out. A black Toyota Land Cruiser turned into the gas station and pulled up at the pump behind him, leaving him in the clear.

As he waited for traffic to open up enough for him to take a left onto Dewberry Road, his gaze drifted back to the pumps, where a sandy-haired man wearing a black T-shirt and black trousers unfolded himself from the Land Cruiser and reached for the pump handle. He met Rick’s glance briefly before his gaze settled on the gas pump’s fuel gauge as it rang up his purchase.

Something about the sandy-haired man dinged Rick’s internal radar. He didn’t recognize him; Rick had a good memory for faces, and he’d never seen the man in the Toyota before. But something about him just didn’t fit here in Thurlow Gap. There was a foreignness to him. As if he didn’t belong.

Heading east on Dewberry Road as the clerk had directed, Rick met his own gaze in the rearview mirror. Brown eyes stared back at him under dark, quirked brows.

There’s a foreignness to you, too, Rick Cooper.

He’d been away from home entirely too long.

AMANDA SCRABBLED THROUGH the closest box, cursing herself for falling into willful complacency. There was nowhere safe in the world, not even Thurlow Gap, Tennessee. No paradise was safe from murderous rage.

She should have prepared better for this moment from the second she set foot in this town.

Her former life came with baggage, but stupidly, she’d shoved that baggage into a bunch of boxes stacked haphazardly on metal shelves in her basement and told herself that she was safe enough with two dead bolts on the front door and a cheap alarm system she’d installed herself.

She’d thought the danger was over in this paradise of mountains and forests and friendly neighbors. Three years of mind-numbing normalcy had lulled her into a false sense of peace now shattered by a phone number on a matchbox and a single word spoken by a man she’d once thought she might love.

She should have had a disaster kit handy. Forget her past with the CIA; she lived within fifty miles of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for God’s sake. She should already have been stockpiling food and water and batteries.

At least she had her savings. She’d driven to Maryville an hour ago and withdrawn all but a hundred dollars from the savings account. She had twelve grand in cash to work with. She could buy a lot of peanut butter and bottled water with money like that.

Buying a brand-new identity would be pricier, but at least she knew how to make that happen. She just had to make it to a big-enough city.

By four forty-five, she’d packed two duffel bags full of survival provisions, including two of her three handguns—the Walther P99 and the SIG Sauer P238—and nine boxes of ammo. Upstairs, her Smith & Wesson M&P 9 mm was already loaded, with an extra round in the chamber.

She’d also packed a gym bag full of underwear, jeans, T-shirts and a denim jacket. All that was left now was packing a box of nonperishable foods and she’d be ready to go.

To where, she wasn’t sure.

She looped the canvas straps of the duffel bags over her arms, grunting at the weight as she started up the stairs. As she hauled the bags through the door into the kitchen, a high-pitched beeping sound started echoing through the house. It took a second to realize what it was.

Someone had tripped her perimeter alarm.

She dropped the bags on the kitchen floor and raced down the short hallway to her bedroom. A red light on the alarm system’s control panel was blinking with each beep.

She hit the code and stopped the alarm from sounding before a call went out to the local police. Whatever happened next would have to happen without putting anyone else in danger, including the local law. The good old boys who wore the uniform of Thurlow Gap’s police department wouldn’t be prepared for what they’d find here.

She grabbed her Smith & Wesson from the nightstand. The heft of it in her hand gave her a renewed sense of control, easing the rapid-fire cadence of her pulse. She crept down the hall to the front of the house and moved to one of the windows looking out on the shaded front yard. Sliding the curtain aside an inch, she peered out at her driveway but saw nothing.

Still, something had tripped the perimeter. Might have been an animal.

Might not.

She took a couple of deep breaths to brace herself and scooted through the doorway into the kitchen to check out the side window. But when she peeked through a space in the curtains, all she saw was movement to her right, a flash of charcoal disappearing around the side of her house, heading toward the front.

She started toward the front door, then froze when three loud raps rang through the silent house.

An assassin who knocked first?

She moved away from the door, her footfalls whisper-soft against the hardwood floor. It might be a ruse to bring her to the doorway. Even peering through the fish-eye security lens was too dangerous; any large-caliber ammunition would penetrate the wood door. Should’ve replaced it with a steel-reinforced one, she thought.

Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve. Too late now.

Knocks sounded on the door again, louder this time. She backpedaled, old instincts kicking in. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed a box of ammunition for the Smith & Wesson. Tucking the box in her waistband, she headed out the back door, hoping her visitor would keep knocking long enough for her to reach the woods behind her house. She could set up a defensive position there, her familiarity with the terrain an advantage.

She had barely reached the carport, however, when she heard the sound of footsteps coming down the flagstone walk toward the corner of the house. She raced around the back of her car and crouched behind the front fender.

The footsteps continued a moment, then fell silent. Amanda’s pulse thundered in her ears. She tightened her grip on the 9 mm and held her breath, waiting for his next move.

“Tara?”

The voice, deep and familiar, sent a shiver down her spine.

“Sorry, it’s Amanda now, isn’t it?” Rick Cooper asked.

She remained silent.

“I know you’re out here. I can feel you.”

Her stomach knotted, inconvenient tears stinging her eyes.

His footsteps made a scraping sound on the concrete as he walked slowly toward her car. “I saw Alexander Quinn not two hours ago. Have you spoken with him?”

“Stop there,” she commanded, pleased at the steadiness of her voice, considering how hard her heart was pounding.

He stopped.

She dared a quick peek over the hood of her car. Rick stood about ten feet away. His coffee-brown eyes met hers, his lips parting.

“You called me earlier,” she said.

His mouth quirked. “Technically, you called first.”

“Did Quinn tell you what to say?”

“Not exactly. You know how damned inscrutable he is.”

“But he did tell you to say ‘Sigurd’?”

“He told me to remember the word. I chose to say it.”

As Quinn had known he would. Manipulative bastard. “What have you been doing since MacLear went down?”

“Working.”

She sat back on her heels. “Doing what?”

“Security-threat analysis. My brother has an agency.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I have two of them. And three sisters. I didn’t just hatch out of a rock somewhere, you know.” Rick’s gaze focused on the barrel of the Smith & Wesson. “I really don’t like having a weapon pointed at me.”

“Too bad.”

He pressed his lips in a tight line. “Very well. What does ‘Sigurd’ mean?”

“Nothing.” She motioned with the gun. “I need to leave. You’re standing in front of my car.”

“What does ‘Sigurd’ mean?” he repeated.

Before she could answer, something hit her windshield with a loud crack, spider-webbing the glass.

“Get down!” she shouted to Rick.

She heard a soft thud and a low groan.

“Rick?”

Scrabbling sounds came from the other side of the car, moving toward her. She wheeled and aimed the Smith & Wesson at the sound. Rick ducked around the front of the car, tumbling forward onto his hands and knees at the sight of the gun. “May I please hide behind your car?” he gritted between his teeth.

She made room for him. “Are you hit?”

“Grazed my arm, I think. Sigurd, I presume?”

“Sigurd’s a warning, not a person.” She risked a quick peek over the hood of her car. She saw a flash of black move between the pines in her front yard. “There’s someone in the front yard. Dressed in black.”

Rick crouched beside her, looking through the car windows. He took a hissing intake of breath as a black-clad figure slipped one tree nearer.

“Is there a way out of here?”

“We can escape into the woods, but I’m guessing whoever’s out there isn’t alone.”

“I’m not so sure.” Rick told her about a stranger he’d spotted at the gas station. “He was definitely alone, and I’m pretty sure the man in black out there is the same guy.”

“How can you tell? He’s wearing a ski mask.”

“Same body build, same clothes. If you spot a Toyota Land Cruiser nearby—”

Amanda peered over the hood of the car. The man in black was on the move again, slipping out into open. For the hell of it, Amanda fired off a couple of quick shots in his general direction, the gunfire echoing in the surrounding woods.

“Don’t waste the ammo,” Rick warned. “We’ll need it.”

“What we really need is a vehicle. We can’t hike out of these woods.” She looked at Rick, her heart giving a small leap as she realized his face was only inches away.

For a moment, the rest of the world seemed to disappear, and she was back in Tablis, her body tangled with his, hot and straining for more—more pleasure, more closeness, more communion. But the crackle of footsteps on the dry leaves in her yard dragged her back to the present, a sobering reminder that there were damned good reasons not to let herself get wrapped up in anyone again.

“Let me lead him away,” Rick suggested. “You can take the car and get out of here.”

“And leave you to die?” She shook her head. “No way in hell. I don’t leave a man behind.”

He gave her a quizzical look, and she dropped her gaze, hiding the chaos of emotion churning in her chest. He probably had no idea what had happened to her the day after they ended their affair. The CIA never publicized its casualties.

“We can’t wait here for him to reach us.”

“In my kitchen is a duffel bag. I packed it to run. I’m going around the back and out into the woods. I’ll lure him away from here. Where’s your car?”

“Parked down the road.”

“He may have seen it—and if he disabled it—”

“I hid it off the road. Didn’t want it stolen.”

“Take the duffel. Go to your car and drive a mile east. I’ll meet you if I make it.”

There was a pained look in his eyes as his gaze met hers. “No ifs,” he said fiercely. “You make it or else.”

She fought against a sudden flood of weakness. Where had he been when she was rotting in a Kaziri rebel prison, wondering if anyone remembered her at all?

You’re the one who started pushing him away.

But he was the one who’d spoken the final words.

“Wait for me to draw his fire away from here, then go inside. There’s a first-aid kit in the duffel, but I don’t think you’ll have time to waste.”

He moved suddenly, cupping the back of her neck and pulling her to him. “If you can kill him, do.” He kissed her forehead.

Swallowing hard, she scooted backward, losing cover for just a moment. No gunfire came her way, to her relief. She must have caught the attacker changing positions.

She edged her way around the side of the house, straining for any sound ahead. Her house butted up to a bluff, offering little room to maneuver. But if she could get around to the other side of the house, the woods spread for almost three miles to the east. She knew Bridal Veil Woods like the back of her hand. If she could get a head start into the cover of the trees, she could outmaneuver the gunman and get away.