Chapter Nineteen
Dylan called his friend Ike again.
“I have some classified very sensitive data.
I honestly don’t know who to give it to.
Can you find out what you can about a man named Brian Fuller.
He spelled both names.
He introduced himself as an officer with the regional CIA agency with a photo ID badge that would get him into the CIA office building. But my question is, can I trust him?”
“I’m going to have to get back to you.”
Disconnecting, Dylan pulled off the main road and drove back into the hills to a spot where he could see the road behind him.
It was empty.
He waited, wondering how long before Fuller called.
What he was really wondering was how anxious Fuller was to get his hands on this data.
Too anxious might make Dylan suspicious.
The sun dipped behind the mountains, casting the landscape in shadow as clouds gathered and the temperature dropped.
Spring in Montana, he thought.
It was the ficklest of seasons, teasing with warm sunny days only to turn into winter in the snap of your fingers.
He thought of his nephew and hoped he was someplace warm and safe.
His thoughts turned to Cat only moments before she called.
“Hey, I was just thinking about you,”
he said without preamble when he picked up.
Silence.
He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, the cab of the pickup suddenly colder than just moments before. “Cat?”
The word came out on a breath as his chest tightened and his heart began to pound harder.
“And I was hoping you were thinking about me,”
said his wife.
He gripped the phone.
Some kind of DNA mix-up, wasn’t that what Ike had said.
He’d thought it had to do with Beau’s DNA from the bombing.
He thought of those few seconds when the car with his wife had been out of his sight.
Enough seconds that she’d gotten out of the car before it blew? And what? Someone else had climbed in?
“Ginny?”
He sounded calmer than he felt.
His mind raced.
This was no trick.
It was definitely Ginny, and she was definitely calling from Cat’s cell phone.
“What’s going on?”
Her laugh chilled him to his bones.
“I was just visiting with your… Cat.”
She laughed again.
“Really, Dylan?”
“Catherine Jameson is the acting sheriff there in Fortune Creek, Ginny.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.
I’m also aware of your…relationship with the very pregnant acting sheriff.
Not yours.”
“I wish, but no.
Didn’t meet her until recently when she came out to the ranch suspecting me of murder.
But you wouldn’t know anything about that, right? Because you’ve been playing dead.”
“You sound bitter.
I had really hoped that you had found happiness out here in the sticks and were getting over me.”
“Let me talk to Cat.”
“She’s busy.”
He ground his teeth.
His hand gripped the phone so hard it ached.
“Ginny, I was hoping that it would turn out that you were one of the good ones, double-crossing your bad friends to do the right thing and that’s what had gotten you killed.”
“You never understood me, Dylan.”
“But I’m definitely beginning to.”
“Good, since we should meet.
I’ll bring your little sheriff along for the ride.
Come to the ranch, oh and, lover…? Be sure to bring the thumb drive.
Make sure it is just you, no feds; otherwise, it would be awful if anything happened to your… Cat.”
With that, she disconnected.
Dylan swore.
Ginny was alive.
Why wasn’t he more surprised? Because the woman was a liar, a spy, a killer since she’d let some other woman die to cover her tracks.
Some relative of hers since the DNA had been a close-enough match that it hadn’t been caught the first time around?
He took a breath, let it out and tried to calm down.
He couldn’t underestimate what Ginny might do, especially to Cat.
Rowena must have told her about him and the acting sheriff.
He’d only managed to put Cat in more danger, but now he had to play this carefully, he told himself, as he started his pickup and drove toward the ranch.
He made only one call.
“Ike, Ginny is alive and has taken the acting sheriff from Fortune Creek, who is seven months pregnant.
I’m headed to the ranch.
Let the FBI know—but tell them not to move in until I give them a signal.”
“A signal.”
“They’ll know if they are close to the ranch,” he said.
“Good luck.”
It didn’t take a lot of persuading to get Cat into the van that pulled up behind the sheriff’s department.
She recognized the driver from earlier today when he’d come racing up in a boat.
Luca Harmon drove while Cat rode in the back with his sister Sharese.
Cat recognized her from her Montana driver’s license photo.
Like Cat, Sharese didn’t look happy to be there, especially with Ginny holding a gun on them both.
“So how did it work?”
Cat asked Ginny.
“You got in the car but didn’t go far before you got out and someone else got in before the car blew up? Or did Dylan just think he saw you get into the car? Someone in the same dress, about the same height, same hairdo?”
Ginny mugged a face.
“What does it matter? I’m alive and here.”
“Anyone we know?”
Sharese asked, sarcastically.
“Or just someone you chose off the street to die in your place?”
Ginny ignored her.
“But where did Beau Walker fit in?”
Cat asked.
This got a smile out of Ginny.
“He was very helpful.”
“And apparently paid a high price for it,”
the sheriff said.
“Unless he got out of the car too.”
Ginny shook her head.
“Some people have to die for the cause.”
“Just not you,”
Sharese said, seeming not bothered as the gun moved to point more in her direction than Cat’s.
“When’s your baby due?”
Ginny asked.
“Six weeks or so,”
she answered, thinking it was probably obvious anyway.
“What about Rowena? I’m assuming like Athena, she’s dispensable,”
Cat said.
“What about Athena’s baby though?”
Ginny shook her head and called up front to Luca.
“Are we about there yet? I’m really getting tired of being interrogated back here.”
“Rowena is a foot soldier,”
Sharese said.
“She just isn’t smart enough to know what happens to the foot soldiers when they are no longer needed.
Like Athena.”
“Athena turned on us,”
Ginny snapped.
“She knew the price of betrayal.”
“Did her baby know that price too?”
Cat asked and grimaced, her hand going to her stomach.
She saw Ginny’s eyes widen just as she’d hoped.
“Where is the baby?”
Sharese asked.
“If I find out you killed—”
Dylan’s not-so-dead wife gave her cohort a warning look.
“We aren’t monsters.
We’re no different from people in this country.
We just have our own beliefs and see the world order differently.”
Cat kept pretending to have contractions.
She could see Ginny’s worried look since another baby wasn’t part of her plan.
“Were you driving the truck that night six months ago when you killed my husband or was Luca?”
The question caught Ginny completely off guard.
It was the first time Cat had seen the gun in her hand waver.
Not that she was about to try to disarm Ginny in this van.
They were on their way to the ranch.
All she could hope was that she would get a chance once there.
“I don’t know what—”
“Sure you do,”
Cat continued, holding her hand over her stomach and wincing.
“You’d taken that big old farm truck out of the barn and driven up to the border probably carrying some form of contraband when you hit a white car my husband was driving on his way home from a fishing trip.
He lived long enough to give a description of the truck—just not the driver.”
“That was him?”
Luca asked, turning from the driver’s seat.
“I told you to slow down.”
“Shut up,”
Ginny snapped at him, her gaze locked with Cat’s.
“So it was you,”
Cat said.
“Once I saw the truck I had a feeling you were driving it that night.”
“She’s known for her reckless behavior,”
Sharese said.
“Always just looking out for number one.”
“You really should shut up too, Sharese,”
Ginny ground out from between clenched teeth even as her gaze remained locked with Cat’s.
“That was your husband?”
She motioned her head toward Cat’s baby bump.
Cat spoke as if in physical pain.
“I never got to tell him I was pregnant.”
Ginny looked uncomfortable and concerned now.
“I always wanted a baby.”
“That’s not what Dylan says,” Cat said.
She shrugged.
“There’s a lot Dylan doesn’t know about me, but it seems he knows you fairly well and in such a short time.
He apparently didn’t learn anything about falling in love too quickly with me.”
“It wasn’t love with you,”
Sharese said.
“It was the package you presented with that whole body of yours and the lies you told him.
He didn’t see the ugly self-centered rotten insides of you.”
The tension in the van kicked up a few more notches.
Cat half expected Ginny to shoot the woman.
“I do what I do for the cause,”
Ginny snapped.
Sharese scoffed.
“You don’t care about the cause.
You jumped on board because it gave you an excuse to hurt people in the name of some ideal that I doubt you even understand.”
“Enough,”
Luca called back to his sister as the van slowed and he made the turn into the ranch.
The air felt heavy and dark as they bumped along the road to the gate.
Cat wondered if Dylan was already here.
He’d said that he’d changed the code.
Even Rowena shouldn’t have been able to get in.
But as they approached the gate, Cat saw that it was standing open.
The sight gave her little hope of how this was going to end.
Dylan stood on the deck of his cottage waiting.
Ginny had Cat.
He could feel the thumb drive in his jeans’ pocket.
His phone was in his other pocket, ready to send in the troops.
His weapon was tucked into the back of his jeans, covered by his shirt.
But it wasn’t the only one on him.
He feared if it came down to gunplay, they would all lose.
But at the same time, he knew he’d do whatever he had to so Cat and her unborn baby left here alive.
In the distance he saw a van come roaring out of the trees headed for him.
He fisted his hands at his sides for a moment, then tried to relax.
He had no idea how many people were in the van or what Ginny would do once she had the thumb drive.
Three of her associates were dead—probably killed by friendly fire.
Did she plan on getting rid of everyone who knew about the thumb drive? That led him to believe that she didn’t plan to turn it over to either the US or Russia.
She must have put it up for auction, betraying not just her native country and her adopted country, but those comrades she’d pulled into her scheme.
The van stopped just feet from the deck.
Still, he waited.
Ginny was in control—at least for the moment.
The side door on the van rolled open loudly a few moments before Ginny stepped out.
If she was scared, she didn’t look it.
She didn’t look all that much different from the last time he’d seen her.
Except now she wore canvas pants, a T-shirt and combat boots and held a gun in her hand.
She smiled at him for an instant before she pulled Cat out of the van, using her as a shield.
He saw the gun leveled at the acting sheriff’s back.
For a moment, no one moved, then the driver of the van killed the engine and climbed out.
Luca Harmon.
Ginny said something to whoever was still in the van and a moment later a woman he recognized from the salon photo stepped out.
Sharese Harmon.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for Ginny’s orders.
“You know what I’m here for,”
his not-so-deceased wife said.
“Give it to me or I will kill your…Cat.”
“That was cute the first time, Ginny, but now it’s getting a little stale.
I want to know where my nephew is.”
She eyed him, seeming surprised that he didn’t look scared or worried or even anxious.
She glanced around as if realizing she might have walked into a trap.
The spring day had turned into a cloudy, cold evening with the sky spitting ice crystals that hung in the twilight.
Any moment it would start to snow.
“Why don’t we take this inside where it’s warmer?”
he said and started to turn toward the cottage.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sharese and her brother start toward the deck steps and stop abruptly as Ginny spoke.
“This isn’t that kind of visit,”
she barked.
“Give me what I came here for and then we’ll leave.”
“You won’t be leaving with Cat.”
Ginny chuckled at that.
“I’m still waiting.
Where is my nephew?”
he demanded.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know why you’re stalling but it’s making me nervous.
I hope I don’t pull the trigger accidently and kill your girlfriend.
The thumb drive, Dylan. Now!”