Deception Lake Page 11

  He sent a text back to the number Hannah had used. I know. I’m on it. Then he stuck the phone back in his pocket and lay back against the pillows, gazing up at the darkened ceiling.

  Outside, the thunderstorm had finally subsided, the rain decreasing until he heard only the sound of a light drizzle seeping through the thin walls of the motel room.

  On the other bed, Mallory had settled into a deep sleep, her breathing slow and even. If she dreamed, she showed no sign of it.

  What am I going to do with you, Mallory?

  She’d chosen to trust him, for the moment. To allow herself some sleep, to rest up against whatever they were going to face next. But he didn’t kid himself that she truly believed he was on her side.

  She clearly trusted no one.

  Not even herself.

  She jerked suddenly in her sleep, then sat up in a rush. She sat rigidly upright for a few seconds, and then her shoulders slumped and she turned to look at him, her expression impossible to discern in the darkness. But he heard a taut quality to her voice that betrayed her agitation. “What time is it?”

  He pushed the stem of his watch, making the face glow. “Almost five in the morning. You slept a long time.”

  “I slept enough.” She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp, flooding the middle of the room with light.

  Jack squinted against the sudden assault on his dilated pupils. “You can sleep a couple of hours more.”

  “We need to hit the road before morning traffic picks up.” She threw off her covers and reached for her duffel bag on the floor. “I’ll take the bathroom first.”

  He caught her hand as she started past him, and she lifted her gaze slowly to meet his. Arousal flickered in the cobalt depths of her eyes, and he felt an answering fire building low in his belly.

  He cleared his throat. “Where are we going?”

  Her gaze dropped. “I haven’t decided.”

  But she had, he saw. And he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it.

  She attempted a smile. “You’ll be the first to know when I do, I promise.”

  He wasn’t sure he believed her.

  * * *

  “WE’RE GOING BACK to Purgatory?”

  Mallory kept her eyes directed forward, despite feeling the full impact of his questioning gaze as surely as she might have felt a touch of fingers on her cheek. “I realize it seems crazy, given what we’ve learned.”

  “I’ve come to expect crazy from you,” he murmured.

  They were still idling in the motel parking lot exit, despite the road being clear in both directions. A right turn would send them north, away from Purgatory. Left would lead back to Deception Lake.

  “If that was Endrex I talked to last night, he mentioned Resurrection Point for a reason.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt. “Maybe he wants me to meet him there.”

  “Maybe he wants to kill you there,” Jack snapped.

  She looked up at him then, took in the glowering expression in his dark eyes and realized he actually gave a damn about whether she lived or died.

  It was a disconcerting feeling. Even before Mara’s death, she’d been living on the outer edge of society, with only a handful of acquaintances and no real friends. The thought of making a real connection with someone, of letting another person see beyond the tough outer layers of her self-protective shell, was utterly terrifying.

  And so very, very tempting.

  A tense silence descended, broken only by the sound of Jack’s thumbs tapping an agitated rhythm on the truck’s steering wheel. She was at his mercy, at least for the moment, and what he decided to do next could change everything.

  His eyes drifted closed for a moment. Then he opened them and swung the truck into a left turn onto the highway. “You don’t know where we can find a laundry, do you?”

  The question, so banal and out of the blue, almost struck her dumb. “A laundry?”

  “All I have to live on is a bag of dirty clothes, remember? You’ll want me to find a laundry. Trust me on this.”

  She felt her lips curve, quite against her intentions. She didn’t want to smile at him, didn’t want to find his dry humor funny. She didn’t want to feel anything about him at all, neither anger nor desire.

  She didn’t want to feel anything, period.

  “There’s a laundry on the left about a quarter mile up the road. But are you sure it can’t wait till we get where we’re going?”

  “It can wait,” he said with a grimace. “But why the hurry now? You really think this Endrex guy is going to be waiting for you on the front porch of your cabin?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “But he may have left a message there.”

  “Or set up an ambush,” Jack reminded her.

  “What would you suggest I do? Ignore the message? I need to find this guy. You know why.”

  “Actually no, I don’t.” Jack pulled the truck off the road suddenly, parking on the narrow shoulder. He engaged the flashing caution lights and turned to face her. “So why don’t we just cut right to it, okay? What do you suspect Endrex may be into here?”

  “If we stay parked here on the side of the road, sooner or later a cop’s going to come by and start asking a lot of inconvenient questions,” she warned.

  “So start talking and I’ll start driving.”

  Damn it, she thought. Why was she so tempted to tell him everything she knew? He was such a wild card, a man whose past exploits hardly tagged him as dependable or trustworthy. But there was something about him, a calm doggedness that didn’t mesh with anything Mara had ever told her about him, that made her want to spill her guts and hand all her worries to him for safekeeping.

  “Endrex was undercover for a while with a criminal enterprise run by a man named Wayne Cortland.” She shot him a pointed look, nodding toward the hazard light switch.

  He disengaged the hazard lights and put the truck back in Drive, easing onto the mostly empty highway. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Probably not,” she admitted. “Cortland’s death and the subsequent exposure of his criminal activities was mostly a local story. Out of southern Virginia, really, but Cortland’s reach extended to eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, as well.”

  “What kind of criminal enterprise?”

  “Drug-running, money laundering, general graft. All neatly hidden behind the facade of a successful lumber mill and retail store owned and run by a well-liked and respected businessman. I stumbled onto Cortland’s group a couple of years ago while messing around online. There were these anarchists I came across who were passing coded information through a hacker forum I sometimes frequent.” She glanced at him to see if his eyes had gone glassy yet. Anyone outside the hacker community tended to tune out after a few seconds, but if he had lost interest, he didn’t show it. “I can’t say I really suspected they were up to anything bad. Most anarchists aren’t really anarchists, you know. They’re just rich kids with way too much time on their hands and no real respect for hard work or civil society.”

  That earned her a quick sidelong glance. “How bourgeois of you.”

  She suppressed a smile. “Like I said, I didn’t really suspect them of anything. I just like to break codes for fun. I have a database of codes I’ve cracked over the years—some really easy stuff and some mind-blowing multilayered codes even the government’s had trouble deciphering. Anyway, when I was working through this particular code, it occurred to me that I’d seen it before. So I sent through my database, and sure enough, I had. It was one of Endrex’s codes.”

  “And so you decrypted this particular message and—?”

  “And it was a plot for a cyberattack on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They were planning to use a denial of service attack on the plant’s SCADA system—”

  “SCADA?”

  “Acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition—it’s the computerized system that monitors and controls the plant’s critical
functions.”

  “Such as radiation leaks?” Jack guessed, darting another look at her.

  “Exactly.”

  Jack uttered a low, succinct profanity. “I never heard anything about that plot.”

  “That part never got out to the press. I guess Homeland Security didn’t want to start a public panic that might cripple nuclear energy production. Too much was at stake.”

  “Endrex was part of that plot?”

  “That’s what I had to find out,” she answered. “So I called someone I knew in the government and outlined a hypothetical situation for him.”

  “Quinn?”

  He was quicker-minded than she’d expected. “Yes. Quinn tried to blow it off as the paranoid suspicions of a computer geek with too much time on her hands, but—”

  “But you’re not the type of computer geek to let a spook like Quinn blow wind up your skirt?”

  She couldn’t stop the grin at his choice of words. “Exactly.”

  “And you turned out to be right?”

  “I was. And Quinn brought me in on the research.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “That’s just it. I wasn’t really allowed in on the final findings of the investigation.” She released a gusty sigh of frustration. “Apparently in the realm of things I need to know, whether or not Endrex was a black hat wasn’t one of them.”

  “What about now? Quinn’s not CIA anymore—and he’s still keeping you in the dark? How the hell are you supposed to do your job?”

  “My job is to find Endrex, not to figure out his motives.” Her tone came out more bitter than she’d intended. Maybe even a little more bitter than she’d realized she felt.

  He fell silent for a few minutes, and she took advantage of the lull in conversation to let her eyes drift closed. She was too keyed up to really sleep, but she’d gotten very little rest for the past few days, working late hours trying to track down the elusive hacker. Endrex had always kept late hours, so she’d followed suit, sifting through forums for any sign of his particular style of conversation, with no luck.

  Maybe she should have taken Jack’s advice and slept a little longer that morning—

  “We’re getting close to the turnoff to the lake, aren’t we?” Jack’s tense voice jarred her nerves. She opened her eyes and looked around to regain her bearings, sitting up straight as she caught sight of what had put that note of alarm in Jack’s voice.

  Ahead, above the tree line, a thin column of black smoke rose into the cloud-strewn sky.

  “The turnoff is just ahead.” She bent forward, trying to peer through the trees to see what was burning. Hoping she was wrong.

  But she wasn’t.

  Jack slowed the truck, pulling over to the side of the road as they rounded a curve and a Purgatory Fire Department truck came into view, its strobing lights painting the woods with crimson. It was parked on the gravel drive that led to her cabin.

  Or, to be accurate, the burning ruins that had once been her cabin.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Are you sure you can trust them?” Mallory fidgeted on the seat beside him, her restless gaze flicking back and forth between the twisting road ahead of them and the highway they’d left behind.

  “Riley and Hannah are the closest thing I have to family.” Jack slowed the truck as they approached another curve in the road, missing Wyoming for the first time in a long while. He’d never liked the cold winters, escaping at age eighteen to follow his rodeo dreams in Texas and the Southwest and never really looking back. But the roads there were more or less straight and flat, the vista stretching out for miles ahead, as far as the eye could see.

  Here in the Smokies, switchbacks were as common as the never-ending mist that often hid the rounded mountain peaks from view. Narrow shoulders and perilous drop-offs lurked around every bend, setting his nerves on edge as they navigated the road to Purgatory.

  “That’s not really an answer,” she muttered.

  “I trust them. They’re good people. And they both know a little bit about being under the gun.”

  He felt her gaze warming him, but the road ahead was too treacherous to spare her a glance. She didn’t say anything else for several minutes, but he could swear he heard the cogs meshing in her brain.

  “What?” he asked when the silence between them grew oppressive.

  “Why were they under the gun?”

  They had finally reached a relatively straight stretch of road, giving him the chance to slant a quick look her way. She’d kicked off her shoes and pulled her sock-clad feet onto the seat, her arms wrapped around her knees, keeping them tucked up to her chest. She reminded him of a porcupine he’d spotted once on a hike in the Teton Range, rolled into a defensive ball, all quills and jangling nerves.

  He’d avoided injury on that surprise encounter, but he wasn’t sure he’d be so lucky this time.

  “Which time?” he answered.

  She swiveled her head, their gazes clashing for a second before he had to look back at the road. “How many times have they been in trouble?”

  “Well, there was the time the serial killer who killed my sister went after Hannah,” he murmured, slanting a quick look her way to gauge her reaction. One auburn eyebrow rose a notch, but she didn’t comment. “Then there was the time when a South American drug cartel targeted her family for something one of her brothers did while he was in the Marine Corps.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “And there was the time a terrorist took her brother and his wife hostage not far from here to flush out the wife’s brother.”

  She dropped her feet to the floorboard. “Sinclair Solano. Right?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Hard not to—the big showdown took place up in Poe Creek. It was all over the news.” Her lips quirked. “Plus, Solano works at The Gates. Just got engaged to another agent.”

  “Oh.”

  “He credits his sister’s in-laws with saving his hide. So does Quinn.”

  Jack nodded. “Hannah’s one of those in-laws. She and Riley were both here last fall, saving your buddy Solano’s ass.”

  They were nearing Purgatory proper, dense woods giving way to residences, then a handful of businesses that lay on the outskirts of town. Just beyond the tiny downtown lay their next destination, a green park where Hannah and Cody would be waiting for them with Jack’s things.

  He glanced at her again, taking in her tense-set jaw and stony expression. “What’s it going to be, MJ? Stop or keep going?”

  She looked at him. “Don’t you mean, trust or no trust?”

  He nodded.

  “Five minutes,” she said after a beat of silence. “If you’re not back at the truck in five minutes, I won’t be here.”

  He knew she wasn’t bluffing.

  * * *

  THE GREEN PARK turned out to be less a traditional park and more a scenic overlook. Jack made his way across the slender ribbon of grass between the small car park and the tree line about thirty yards away. Past the trees was a sharp drop-off plunging toward a shining ribbon of water about thirty feet below the rocky bluff.

  “Little Black Creek.” Hannah’s voice was impossibly close.

  He whipped around at the sound and found her standing a couple of feet away, Cody napping against her shoulder.

  “What?”

  She nodded toward the water below. “It’s called Little Black Creek. I read it on a monument plaque back near the parking lot entrance.” Her brow furrowed as she looked him over with sharp eyes, reminding him for a moment of his sister Emily, though Hannah and Emily weren’t very much alike at all, at least in appearance. Hannah’s eyes were green, not brown, for one thing, and her straight bob of hair was auburn, not dark and glossy as a raven’s wing as Emily’s had been.

  But she had Emily’s strong sense of justice. Of the importance of family. Jack liked to think Emily would have been happy to see Riley find love again with someone like Hannah. “You okay?” sh
e asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Still want to play it this way?”

  “I have to.”

  “She’s not Mara.”

  “I told you, I know.” He leaned a little closer, making a show of tucking Cody’s jacket more tightly around his little shoulders. “How did you find out?”

  “We got a visit from Alexander Quinn.”

  Of course. “Did he tell you anything else?”

  “Just that she’s not what she seems.”

  No, he thought, she’s not. “Where are my things?”

  “Hidden behind the picnic table about twenty yards behind me.” Hannah put her hand on his arm briefly, her touch outwardly light and impersonal. But her moss-colored eyes were dark with concern. “Don’t be a stranger. And be careful, okay?”

  “You know me. I’m always careful.”

  She rolled her eyes at him as he turned and walked toward the picnic table she’d indicated. She wandered off, out of sight, and for a second, he felt a gut-twisting fear he would never see her, Riley or their little boy again.

  The battered old duffel bag he’d packed for the fishing trip lay under the picnic bench nearest the tree line. Jack sat on the bench a moment, pulling out his phone and making a show of checking his messages, but he was scanning the park around him for any sign of prying eyes.

  The park was mostly empty at this time of morning on a weekday, though a minivan pulled up a few parking slots down from where he’d parked his truck. As a harried-looking woman got out of the van and went around to open the side door, Jack caught the handle of his duffel bag and got up unhurriedly.

  The woman emerged from around the side of the van with three kids in tow, all preschool aged and as golden-haired as she was. He spared them only a cursory glance as he crossed the narrow strip of grass between the picnic table and his truck.

  Sunlight glared off the windshield, making it impossible for Jack to see clearly inside the truck’s cab. He took a quick glance at his watch and saw that six minutes had passed since he left Mallory alone in the truck.

  Had she made good on her threat to leave?

  The truck looked empty until he reached the door and checked inside the cab. Huddled in a little knot on the floor of the truck, Mallory lifted her head just enough for her blue eyes to meet his.