Darkness(54)

“I think it’s time you told me what’s going on.” Her voice was sharp.

That the runway was being cleared bothered him. There was already a ton of muscle here—who or what were they bringing in? Pondering that question, he answered her almost at random. “We’re running for our lives?”

The look she gave him told him that she wasn’t in the mood for even that lame attempt at humor.

“It’s the why I’m interested in,” she said.

He couldn’t tell her. His contract was subject to the rules that governed the highest security clearances, and anyway, the objective of saving her life was to let her keep living it after it was saved. Around the circles he ran in, people who knew too much tended to die young. Their current situation being a case in point. The man he’d killed back there in the camp kitchen—he hadn’t known him, but he knew the type. He was hired help, a paid killer whose allegiance went to the employer with the biggest bank account. The only question was whom he was working for. Whom they were working for. Cal still didn’t know, not for sure. Somebody who could infiltrate his company, get to Hendricks, and do what Cal would have thought was impossible, which was get to Ezra.

When Ezra had fired through that door on the jet, he’d aimed low. The only conclusion Cal could draw from that was that Ezra hadn’t been intending to kill him. Although how Ezra had thought that was going to work out in the long run Cal couldn’t quite fathom. He refused to feel anything—grief, loss, anger at the betrayal—for his erstwhile friend. He had no time for emotion now. Emotion got you killed. He meant to live, and to keep the woman frowning at him alive, too. It was a big job, and he wasn’t going to let feelings get in the way of that.

The fact that he had one gun, a Beretta 92FS semiautomatic pistol with about half a clip in it, only served to make things interesting.

He told her, “You’re better off not knowing.”

Her frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “You know what you can do with that. My friends were murdered today. I was almost murdered today. I think I have a right to know why.”

She stumbled on a rock in the path. He once again automatically reached out to steady her. He let go almost instantly, as soon as it became obvious that she wasn’t going to pitch face-first over a cliff, but not before he registered that the body part he’d grabbed had been her slender upper arm, which he could feel even through his gloves and her parka.

Damn. He was still all too aware of her as a woman.

Which was a complication their situation did not need.

“Well?” she demanded, sounding testy.

In the spirit of throwing her a bone to keep the peace, Cal said to her back, “You and your friends fall under the heading of collateral damage. My plane was the primary target.”

“Why?”

Jesus, she was persistent. “Because of some information we had.”

“What information?” she shot back.

Okay, enough. “Can’t say.”

She cast another dark glance over her shoulder at him. “Oh, wow, way to be transparent.”

Hugging the very edge of a five-hundred-foot drop, the path took a sharp turn upward at that point. As she looked back at him she was silhouetted against nothing but gray fog and grayer sky. For a moment there it looked as if she would fall off the side of the mountain if she took one more step, and he felt a stab of alarm over her safety.

“Quit looking back at me. Watch where you’re going,” he said irritably.

“What, are you afraid I’m going to die?”

If she’d ever been afraid of him—and she had been at first, he knew, and was also forced to admit that her fear hadn’t been without reason—she was clearly over it. Her eyes snapped at him. Her tone was caustic.

“Falling off a cliff works as well as catching a bullet for that.” His response was mild.

She made a hmmph sound but focused her attention on the trail. Climbing behind her, Cal absentmindedly admired her ass, admired her legs—he was nothing if not a multitasker—while turning the pieces of the nightmare they were trapped in over in his mind, trying to make sense of them. Seeing the bodies in that building, seeing the firepower that had turned out, the only conclusion he could reach was that they—the nameless they he couldn’t quite pin an identity on yet—somehow knew or suspected that someone had survived the crash. It was possible that pictures of his rescue had been picked up by satellite. Remembering the cloud cover, he thought it was far more likely that someone on the ground, most likely whoever had fired that surface-to-air missile, had spotted Gina pulling him from the water. They would have had to have been close enough to see what was happening, but too far away to do anything about it—like, say, shoot him and Gina both and be done.

“Tell me something: are you with the military?”

There she went again, frowning back over her shoulder at him. As precarious as the trail was, her inattention to it made him nervous. And annoyed.

“No.”

“Some kind of government agency? CIA? FBI? Something like that?”

“No.”

“You must work for somebody. Who?”

That much he could tell her. “I work for myself.”

“Is that another way of saying you’re a mercenary?”

He shrugged. “We’re all mercenaries, one way or another.”