Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(77)

She grabbed his head and nearly pulled it off his neck getting his face to hers. The kiss was soft, their lips barely touching, only a slight compression. The tickle of her stitches. But the electricity of it, Jesus Christ.

“You fucking come back,” she murmured without backing off at all. “You understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Most definitely.” He gently disengaged from her hands and stood to his full height. He thumped his fist to his chest, his eyes on her the whole time. Then turned away to the left and into the trees.

? ? ?

HE’D BEEN WORRIED about being backlit by the house’s security lights, but the perimeter growth was at least twenty feet deep and so thick that he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face. Which meant, he told himself, that nobody else could see him, either.

It was good to tell yourself these things.

His night vision was shit from the house lights, and he wished he’d grabbed the night-vision goggles from the armory inside. But that decision was already made. His eyes were adjusting, and he’d be under the streetlights again soon enough.

The night was wet, but somehow it was even wetter inside the screen of brush and trees. Water ran off everything he touched, down the back of his neck, soaking the pants of his black suit. The medical boot felt like a wet towel wrapped around his lower leg. His hands were bare and cold on the HK. Peter wasn’t sure how the weapon would react to this wet environment, but he wasn’t worried about it. This was no AK or M16, or even the moderately better M4. This was a whole different level of gear. The rifle felt utterly natural in his hands, even with the suppressor. An extension of his mind.

Alive, alive, he was alive.

He found the barbed wire by walking into it. An improvised fence made of individual wires strung from tree to tree, stapled to the trunks at varying heights. Easy to install and hard to see. Peter thought he’d have liked the master sergeant, if the man hadn’t tried to kill Peter on two different occasions.

He crept along the fence line, still heading left toward the corner, crouched and working his way through the dense black vegetation, his predatory backbrain looking for shapes and shadows that shouldn’t be there while his conscious mind thought ahead. Where he might find them, if they were there to find.

These guys weren’t official, he was sure now.

Their shit was too nice. The teddy bears were too cute.

He was willing to consider that they might be some off-the-books group. He’d met enough spooks overseas to have a working knowledge of the subterranean depths of paranoia and ambition passed off as patriotism. Somewhere in Virginia, he was sure, hidden basement departments led to secret subbasement operations that led to rough-hewn downward-sloping passages to bat-filled caverns of lunatic bullshit that went so deep the maps had never been made to chart their existence.

Peter had never liked the spooks.

He still thought these guys were opportunists, soldiers for hire. But not on their own, or they’d be robbing banks or something. Not trying to commandeer some fucking algorithm.

Someone was running them. They were under orders.

He made his way slowly forward. Shapes and shadows. No expectations. There might be a fire team coming through the backyard. But he didn’t see anyone in his area. It would take some discipline to get out of the car on a dirty night like this.

He found a wider gap between the wires and snaked through, now headed toward the street, cracked ribs singing softly. He wanted to come out near the corner of the lot, but not too near.

He got down on the ground and did a slow belly-crawl toward the open space, his ribs complaining louder now, the HK cradled in front of him, held out of the wet leaf rot.

The street was lit by a single lamp at the intersection. He found a low-hanging big-leafed bush, yet another rhododendron, and went underneath its canopy to peer out at the street.

A shining black Ford Explorer stood on the far shoulder, directly in front of him, parked the wrong way. Headlights off.

He thought he could see two people in the front seat. Maybe. It was hard to tell. Shadows and raindrops and line of sight.

Exhaust puffed from the tailpipe, so they had heat and defrost. They were just waiting for him and June to drive back out. So why bother getting cold and stiff, limiting their visibility? But he never saw the wipers go. So they had some discipline. If it even was an assault team. If it wasn’t just a pair of teenagers making out, or some guy trying to finish his phone call before going inside to see his kids.

He’d told June fifteen minutes. He could text her, but he didn’t want to take out his phone, risk the light or the movement. And he’d told her to ignore his phone anyway.

He figured his time was almost up. Time to decide.

He leaned a little farther out. Looked right, down the road. And there it was, about twenty yards past the master sergeant’s gate.

A matching black Explorer.

Headlights out.

The faint haze of exhaust.

He was pretty sure they weren’t both necking teenagers.

What were they waiting for?

He was worried about June. But he didn’t want to light up a pair of cars in a residential neighborhood, either. Collateral damage, he’d seen it happen too many times. He checked the lines of fire. There wasn’t a house directly behind either Explorer, the lots were big and the houses spaced apart. But surely there was a house on the next block, or the block after that.