She glanced at Eric, seeing only the hard line of his jaw and his rigid grip on the wheel in the semidarkness. Her physical exhaustion combined with the numbing shock of being kidnapped to act like a hallucinogenic drug, giving the whole experience a sense of eerie unreality. Feeling the first tentacles of madness squeezing at her mind, she spoke quickly to bring her back to sanity.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Up.”
“Where?”
“Away from the tender clutches of C. Major Denison.”
“Why me?”
Silence. It stretched on for several minutes before she spoke again. “Eric?”
Silence.
“I—I didn’t push the buttons to terminate Dr. Cameron. They wanted me to, but I—” She sighed, giving up in the face of the hostility hanging like a barrier between them.
Silence. He could have been miles away. Angry now, she bit her lip and rolled down the window, staring into the night. She jumped and gave a startled cry as a cold nose pushed over the seat and touched her bare arm. “Lay back down, Cricket!” she commanded sharply, pushing the dog away.
As Eric had led her to the back alley behind her house, Nicole’s German Shepherd had bounded up happily, wagging her tail. In Shalev, watchdogs were unnecessary, but a bark or two? Was that too much to ask? Even a curled lip and low growl would have been appreciated, but Cricket had never lost her puppylike friendliness, and she bounded up to everyone in welcome. When Eric had opened the door of the stolen car and motioned for Nicole to climb in, the dog had beat her to it, slipping into the back seat quickly. To Nicole’s surprise, Eric had given in when she pleaded that the German Shepherd would starve with no one to care for her. She had been glad then, but now, irrationally, her anger boiled over, and she jerked away from Cricket’s nuzzling. “Lie down!” she snapped, knowing even as she did so that it wasn’t really Cricket she wanted to lash out at.
The dog whined, then pulled away and lay back down in the rear seat. Suddenly chilly, Nicole rolled up the window and stared out at the moon-bathed trees whipping by.
“So who did?”
“What?” For a moment she wasn’t even sure he had spoken.
“Who did push the buttons?”
She hesitated, thinking of Travis, how he had jumped guiltily when the Major shouted at him.
“At your house, Travis said the Major did. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“He told me to, but I couldn’t.”
“I thought we had done something wrong.” He spoke as if from another world. “I thought we’d missed our timing. Mine came out without a hitch, then suddenly, just as we were about finished—” He lapsed into silence again for almost a full minute. Then finally he added, almost laconically, “It must be a real source of pride to work for an organization with so much compassion for people.”
“I—” She bit her lip. “I am terribly sorry about Dr. Cameron.”
Silence. She looked away again, too tired to care anymore.
A few minutes later, Eric slowed suddenly and veered to the other side of the road. After a moment, he gave a little grunt of satisfaction, stopped, and clicked on the headlights for a brief moment. A small sign with hand-lettered lines was nailed to a tree. “Kurt’s Circle K Ranch. Riding—Backpacking—Wilderness Guides.” He turned in, and after a hundred yards the pines thinned out into a small clearing. He stopped and turned off the motor.
“Come on,” he said gently, anger no longer tightening his voice. “I can’t offer you a lot of comfort tonight, but I think I can give you one pleasant little surprise.”
He got out of the car and came around and opened her door, but she was frozen in place, staring at the two figures who had emerged from the trees and were approaching them. As they came out of the deep shadows of the trees and into the full moonlight, her mouth dropped open. The first man was tall, angular, with wavy gray hair.
“Dr. Cameron!” she whispered, stunned.
Eric nodded, watching her reaction. “Let me introduce you to a couple of friends of mine.”
Nicole got out slowly, dazed, certain that the madness had broken through the walls of her mind.
“Hello, Nicole,” Clifford Cameron said.
“Dr. Cameron! But you—how could you be…”
“It’s the real me,” he said, chuckling softly. “In the flesh.”
“Nicole’s a little taken back, Cliff,” Eric said. “She thought you were dead.”
“So did we,” Chet Abernathy said, stepping forward.
“Nicole,” Cliff said, “this is Dr. Chester Abernathy. You probably heard about him in Central Control tonight. Chet, this is Nicole Lambert, Eric’s Monitor.” He laughed quickly. “Only now I think it’s the other way around.”
“Nicole explained what happened,” Eric spoke up. “Our timing was fine. The Major was on to us—figured out what was happening and pressed your termination button.”
Even in the moonlight, Nicole could see the lines around his eyes deepen. “Oh?”
“Yes, it was even closer than we thought.” Eric turned to Nicole to explain. “We had a system worked out once the incision was made. On the count of three, I was to cut the band and Cliff would yank out the computer chip. Cliff had a hold on the chip and I had just said ‘one’ when suddenly he jerked violently. Fortunately, his hand pulled the chip out. That must have been when the Major hit the button. Cliff was writhing on the table, screaming with the pain, and it took me another second or two to cut the band. By then he was unconscious. I thought he was dead. I even listened for a heartbeat, but I must have been in too much of a hurry.”
“I think it was stopped,” Cliff said. “Eric gave me mouth-tomouth resuscitation. I think he saved my life.”
“Then I heard a car drive up,” Eric continued. “It was Clayne.”
“Thank heavens you didn’t just leave me there,” Cliff said.
“I did that once before. Not again.”
“Did you have any trouble clearing the roadblocks?” Chet asked.
“No. Travis was at Nicole’s when I came in the house. He gave us a helpful, though somewhat unwilling, hand and pulled all the units into Shalev. We left him sleeping peacefully on Nicole’s living-room floor. In fact, if you hurry, it may help you get back in with less trouble.”
Back in? Nicole was still reeling from seeing Dr. Cameron alive and had been having trouble following anything coherently for the last two minutes.
“Good,” Cliff said. “Come on, the horses are over here in the trees.”
“Did the ranch owner suspect anything?” Eric asked.
“No. We just told him we were off to a very early start, headed for the high country. We’ve got two good riding horses and a pack horse. Everything is loaded, all set to go. Use those pain pills and antibiotics in the pack. The ultimate irony would be to get infection in that incision and die.”
Eric laughed shortly. “Right.” He took Nicole’s elbow and firmly guided her as Chet and Cliff walked to where the three horses were tethered.
“Have you got the cutters?” Eric asked.
Chet reached into the saddlebags of the nearest horse and retrieved a heavy set of bolt cutters.
So that’s how they got the wrist computers off. Nicole stared as Chet turned back around and stepped next to her and Eric. She tried to jerk away, but he was too fast for her, and his fingers dug into her flesh. “Just relax, Nicky,” he said easily. “All we want to do is make you free.”
She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Then let me go.”
“All in due time.” He turned her arm over, and Chet inserted the band into the jaws of the cutter.
“The minute this is cut, they’ll have a fix on us,” Cliff said, even as the computer started its shrill buzzing, “so we’re going to have to move out of here fast.”
The cutters snapped sharply, and the wrist computer dropped into Eric’s hand. He released Nicole’s arm, spun around, and flung the bu
zzing object smashing into a tree. “There. Now you’re free from the Major’s all-seeing eye. Let’s get Cricket and get out of here.”
She rubbed her wrist, and the bitterness made her voice almost a whisper. “It isn’t the Major who’s taken away my freedom.”
Chapter 19
Eric reined up his horse and looked around. They were at the edge of the thick stand of pines that clung to the north side of the slope. His eyes methodically scanned the open area and then the sky. Finally he clucked softly and nudged the horse with his heels. The mare flicked her ears once, then reluctantly moved forward into the bright sunshine. Nicole’s horse followed without urging. Cricket raced forward ahead of them and disappeared over the ridge into a clump of heavy brush.
Nicole drew in a quick breath and stared, the numbing weariness momentarily forgotten as her eyes drank in the panorama before them. Spread out as far as the eye could see to the north and west was a lush carpet of deep green, rolling over gentle hills, surrounding a turquoise jewel of a lake, then racing up steep mountainsides and spilling over the top. A glint of the afternoon sunshine caught her eye, and she could see a thin ribbon of silver at least a mile below them. It was the North Fork of the Flathead River, which they had forded shortly after dawn.
Above them, towering monolithic peaks propped up a sky so incredibly blue as to hurt the eyes. Jagged spots of glaring white signaled the location of several small glaciers clinging to the twisted, convoluted cliffs as they tried to stave off the steady, hungry embrace of the August sunshine.
For almost a full minute they both sat transfixed, and then Eric spoke. “I always thought our valley was about the prettiest place on the earth, but I think this tops it.”
Nicole didn’t answer, his voice bringing her sharply back to the where and why of reality. Then Eric turned and gave her an appraising look. “How are you doing? Are you about ready to stop?”
Pride is a seductive master. By dawn, after only three hours in the saddle, she had felt as though her backside had been pounded steadily with a heavy wooden paddle. By ten she had decided that the horse knew that every inch of her from the hips down was one combined mass of searing agony and was deliberately walking stifflegged to add to her misery. By noon she was praying fervently that lightning, or some other act of God, would strike either her or Eric or the horse—preferably in that order. But when she heard Eric’s question, her head came up, her jaw jutted out, and her eyes were defiant. “I’m fine. Don’t stop for me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course. I’m doing fine.”
“Good.” He squinted up into the sky. “I figure we should make it to our base camp by late tonight, another six or seven hours maybe.”
Nicole barely stifled a groan. “Whatever you say.” Her chin came up defiantly as she sensed his probing gaze.
He chuckled softly to himself. “On the other hand, we could drop back to that little spring we passed about a quarter of a mile back and call it a day.”
She couldn’t help it. The rest of her body rebelled against her reckless tongue, and she had such a look of longing, hope, and relief on her face that he laughed out loud. “Maybe you can go on all day,” he said, “but after two months without riding a horse, I’m getting just a mite tender. So unless you feel strongly about it, I vote we stop.”
She nodded, knowing that he had read her precisely, but too sore and tired to care. Tomorrow she could be proud and angry again. Now she just wanted to detach herself from this hated horse and its conspiracy to pound the lower half of her into a shapeless, unrecognizable pulp.
The spring gurgled out of the ground in a small clearing, forming a tiny creek less than a foot wide. The tall pines were so thickly clustered that only a tiny portion of sunlight filtered down to the ground. The sounds of the horses’ hooves, soft and muffled in the thick carpet of forest needles and leaves, barely interrupted the gentle sighing of the wind through the upper branches.
Eric swung down and tethered his horse and the packhorse to a tree branch, then turned and watched as Nicole gingerly dismounted. Reaching up, he fumbled in his saddlebags briefly, then extracted a dark brown bottle. “Here,” he said, tossing it to her.
She grabbed quickly and caught it. “What is it?”
“Some liniment Cliff put in. He knew we’d both be needing it.” He moved to the packhorse and began untying the ropes. “We can’t do anything about the stiffness—that will just have to wear off—but I imagine the skin on the inside of your legs is pretty chafed, right?”
She nodded, keeping her face impassive. Never, to her knowledge, had she heard such an understatement.
“Well, this will help it heal and toughen up more quickly.” He took down the bag she had packed her things in and walked over to her. “Here. I’d suggest you change into something warm. It’ll be very cool tonight.”
Her eyebrows shot up, but before she could speak, he went on. “You and I are going to be living together for the next few days, so we need some ground rules. I have every intention of respecting your privacy.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, as she felt her cheeks color slightly.
“However, I can’t have you slipping away from me either. So whenever you want to be alone, just stay within shouting distance. Call to me every minute or two, and I’ll stay clear of you.”
“I understand.”
“But,” he added firmly, “don’t forget to call, or I’ll come charging down, ready or not. Now go change, and don’t be afraid to rub that liniment on liberally. We’ve got another two full days of riding.”
When she returned ten minutes later, dressed in tennis shoes, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt, he was squatting down in front of a small fire. Two forked sticks had been thrust into the ground on either side of it, and an iron kettle hung suspended over the flames from a cross bar between them. He was slicing something into the pot with a hunting knife.
He looked up. “Hungry?”
The pot was steaming slightly and giving off a delightful aroma. “Yes,” she admitted, realizing that famished would be a better word. “What is it?”
“Stew.”
Nicole sat down gingerly next to the fire and leaned back on one elbow, feeling the weariness and yet strangely content for the moment to forget the harsh realities of the situation. She was a hostage, he a fugitive. But sitting here in a shaded mountain glen, with the delicious aroma of food tickling her nose, it was hard to believe that.
A few minutes later Eric sipped a spoonful of the stew, murmured his approval, and then served them with a flourish. Cricket was first and had gulped her portion down before Eric could even finish getting Nicole’s in the plate. To her surprise, once he had served her, he walked over to the spring, bent down for a moment, and came back, a bunch of small pink flowers in his hand. He bowed slightly as he handed it to her, ignoring her astonished look. “I know you’d rather be dining somewhere else tonight, so I hope this will make up for it a little.”
Too surprised for words, Nicole reached out and took the flowers. Then suddenly, she was angry—at him and at herself. “Is this supposed to make me glad I’m here?”
His expression had been friendly, offering a temporary truce. Slowly that faded. “Look, Nicole, I just wanted you to know that I—well, I don’t like this any better than you, and I—”
“You don’t like this any better than I!” she cried. “How dare you stand there and make a condescendingly stupid statement like that? You break into my home in the middle of the night at the point of a gun, you nearly kill my fiancé, you threaten his life and mine, you drag me up into the mountains against my will, then you have the unmitigated gall to stand there and say you don’t like it any more than I.” She flung the flowers into the flames. “Your arrogance is incredible, Mr. Lloyd. You think one tiny bunch of flowers makes all of that all right?”
His eyes narrowed into gray slits, which sent a chill up her spine. “You are the wonder, Miss Lambert. Because of y
our precious fiancé, six good men lie buried in the black dirt of a riverbank. Six! And you’re upset because I left him lying peacefully on the floor of your living room? You say you’re outraged that I dragged you up here against your will? Then tell me, Miss Lambert, where was your outrage when a whole village was trucked like cattle to a place five hundred miles from their homes? Why wasn’t your voice trembling with fury then?”
She rocked back, as though he had struck her, her face drained of color.
“You talk about gall to me?” he said, spitting out the words like red-hot slivers of steel. “When I stick probes into the brain of a six-year-old and send her crumpling to the floor because she was accidently ‘overprogrammed,’ then you can talk to me about gall. And on the day I push the buttons to execute an old man for the highly treasonable act of wanting to be free, then you can fill your voice with horror and talk about my arrogance.”
“I didn’t push the buttons,” Nicole whispered.
“You were there!” he thundered. “Did you try to stop them?”
The blood drained from her face. “I—”
His voice was suddenly deathly quiet. “Did you even so much as protest?”
She looked down quickly and stared at her knuckles, white now as they gripped the plate.
“Did you?”
She shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“Well, so much for offended conscience and flowers in the fire.”
Chapter 20
For several moments Nicole stared at the flickering shadows on the pine needles directly over her head before her mind registered where she was. After the blowup at dinner, Eric had worked swiftly to construct a small but snug shelter of pine boughs stacked against an A-frame. He had then laid nearly six inches of additional branches on the ground and rolled out her sleeping bag on top of them. When she had crawled in, she found it surprisingly soft and comfortable and had dropped instantly into a deep sleep.
Now it was full dark, though moonlight filtered through the trees and mixed with the faint light from the campfire. As she lifted up on one elbow, she saw Eric’s dark shape across the fire, dragging a large rectangular-shaped object, and realized that that was what had awakened her. As she watched, he sat down on a rock, leaned over the dark shape, then began to speak.