“Veer this way.” Adam crawled over the half-rotten trunk of a fallen pine.
I “Why?” The way was clear straight ahead. Tracy started to defy him just to show him she could, then decided that was stupid. The hallowed halls of the military judicial system were her playground. This was his turf. She lifted a leg to hike over the tree trunk.
Adam assisted her, set her down on the ground beside him, and looked back to the path.
A rattlesnake slithered to its nest.
” Oh, God.” Tracy felt her knees buckle.
Adam held her up, and smiled. “It’s okay, counselor. We’re going this way.”
Damn straight, they were. Way, far away, from the snake. “Um, Adam, what other kinds of wildlife might we find out here?”
His eyes twinkled. “Honey, you don’t want to know.”
She swallowed hard. “I was afraid of that.”
He pecked a kiss to her cheek, then stepped away, and started walking.
They trekked for hours. Tracy cursed the relentless sun. The muscles in her legs burned, her feet throbbed as much as her head, and she jumped at every twig snap, fearing another snake-or worse. Why hadn’t Adam just told her what else they might encounter in the way of wildlife? Then her imagination wouldn’t be in overdrive.
He stopped suddenly in front of her.
So attuned to placing one foot in front of the other and just walking, Tracy stumbled into his back. If he called her fluff, she swore she’d just turn around and march right out of this hellhole. She’d warned him she’d be lousy at this.
He dropped the black bags without a word. “We’re coming up on Area Fourteen.”
Coming up on it? “Where have we been?” They’d been hiking for three miserable hours.
“In the safety zone.” Adam dropped to a squat and unzipped one of the bags. “Here”- he passed her a suit of clothing and a pair of gloves-“put these on.”
Tracy recognized the clothing from the gaschamber simulator hangar, when she had gone to see O’Dell. The shamefaced lieutenant had been wearing it. “Chemical gear?” her voice shrilled. “Where in heaven did you get chemical gear?”
“I appropriated it.” He put the suit on, passed her the headgear, then put on his own. “Quit glaring at me and put on your gear, okay? I didn’t save your neck to get you killed before you can prove I’m innocent and expose whoever is guilty.” He clamped a black cube to his belt.
“What is that?” Putting on the gear, she nodded toward the cube.
“A chemical alarm.” He depressed a button that distinctly clicked, arming it.
“Adam, I know damn well you didn’t get clearances or file any requisitions with Environmental for this equipment. How did you get it?”
He shot her a sly smile. “Anyone with a little ingenuity can get around the requirements, counselor. At least, for long enough to perform a quick recon mission.”
I “Reconnaissance mission, my eye.” She folded her arms over her chest, half admiring him, half wanting to choke him. “Sergeant Phelps from the hospital got it for you, didn’t he?” Phelps could file the requisitions for a trauma medical exercise without raising a single eyebrow.
“No he didn’t.”
An ally in Environmental? Perhaps, Tracy thought. Or perhaps an ally in Tracy’s office. One who formerly worked with Adam Burke in Intel. Janet?
Not asking Adam proved challenging, but to avoid yet another “Trust me” response, Tracy stifled herself, and put on the gloves. The less she knew about this, the better.
With not an inch of skin exposed, Adam started hiking again, and within minutes, Tracy admitted she had been wrong. She hadn’t been in hell before, but she was in it now. The chemical gear was heavy and hot. Sweat soaked her back, trickled down between her breasts, drenched her hair and burned her eyes. And she was furious. “You realize that by ‘appropriating’ this gear, as well as your fistful of other charges, you’ll be tried for theft and unauthorized use of controlled government property.” The mask muffled her voice.
“If I’m caught, I will,” he said, sounding just as croaky as she had. “And for kidnapping you-which are all more reasons you have to survive.”
He shoved at a low-slung branch encroaching on the path and held it until she passed and stood even with him. It snapped back, rustling the leaves. “I’m going to need a hell of a lawyer.
He thought she was a hell of a lawyer? Her heart contracted, slowing a beat and then racing out of control. She looked beyond the mask’s frog-eye lens and into his eyes. God help her. She had done the most stupid thing, on a long list of stupid things, in her life.
Knowing it was insane, that he’d never love her, she’d fallen totally and completely in love with Adam Burke.
Chapter 23.
Adam pointed to a dense spot where the undergrowth appeared crushed. “I passed out here.” Tracy frowned. It did appear that something had fallen there, but surrounded by miles of woods and brush, how could he know this was the exact spot he had fallen?
“Are you positive?”
“I’m positive,” he said in his “Trust me” tone. He took off, following an erratic path.
Skirting a spiny bush, she followed him, not at all convinced. He paused to finger broken branches and examine hollows in the uneven ground. She saw the tracks he picked up on, but only after he had found them. If his Intel file hadn’t proven it, this venture would: Adam was very good at his job. He definitely had not gotten lost or terrain-disoriented the day of the incident.
“I put on the chemical gear here.” He stopped and looked back at Tracy. “And this is where I got dizzy. See the jagged ruts in the dirt?”
Tracy squatted down for a closer look at the ground. “It is more disturbed than what we’ve seen so far.” She squinted against the sun, up at him. “Can one person staggering around leave this much evidence?’
“Sweepers,” Adam said, approval shining in his eyes.
Resenting the gloves that kept them from touching skin to skin, she grasped his outstretched hand and straightened her knees, standing up. “What are sweepers?”
“People who clean up messes in missions that have gone sour. Black Operations, Tracy.”
Even sweat-soaked, her skin prickled and chilled. Everyone in uniform had a healthy respect for, and a fear of, Black Ops.
Adam walked on. She followed, becoming more adept at seeing the signs. Just to her left, the leaf-strewn ground looked scraped. “You staggered here.”
“Yes,” Adam confirmed. “I suspect O’Dell laced my oxygen supply with disabling drugs, and here’s where I was when they kicked in full force.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
Adam must have understood her concern, because he quickly reassured her. “Don’t worry. I checked out this equipment myself. You’re breathing pure oxygen.”
Grateful he had checked, she nodded, determined to keep a tight leash on her fear. It threatened to build to volcanic proportions. “Your being drugged is consistent with Sergeant Phelps’s comments.”
“Is that what he told you on the rooftop patio?”
“Yes.” She reiterated the conversation with Phelps, and then told Adam about Randall and Dr. Kane checking out her and the device. “It looked like a grenade,” she said, realizing she was back to babbling. “But it was just a smoke bomb.”
“No.” Adam disagreed. “It was far more than a smoke bomb, honey Honey. She liked hearing the endearment, even if she hated what Adam had attached to it.
“It was a warning.”
She kicked at a stone, watched it tumble under a squat bush. “I know.”
“Careful. Don’t risk tearing the gear.” He grunted. “That bomb must have scared ten.years off your life.”
“At least ten,” she confessed, . not feeling at all weak for the admission. When he walked on in front of her without a word, she stared at his back. “What? No smartass ‘fluff’ comment?”
He shrugged. “I’m thinking maybe sometimes fluff is good.”
The alarm at his belt beeped.
Adam stiffened. “Whatever you do, don’t take off any of your gear.”
Her stomach lodged in her throat. “What is it?”
Adam looked at the cube-shaped device. “Lowleavel chemical exposure.”
Each word struck her like a surprise left hook to the chin.
“Without ‘testing equipment, I have no idea what kind.”
Somehow, she found her voice. “But it is lethal.”
“Or unrecognized.”
“So it could be retrosarin.”
He nodded. “Let’s get the canister and get out of here.”
Minimizing their exposure sounded great to her. “Which way?”
“There.” He pointed past a patch of wild berries to the base of a sprawling oak. “Between the two protruding roots on the south side.”
Adam dug up the canister. It was painted like camouflage BDUS and Jeeps used in combat. Just the sight of it made her sick to her stomach.
“It’s definitely a nerve-agent dispenser.”
“But it doesn’t have the yellow or blue band.”
“I told you it didn’t, and that’s why I originally discounted it.”
He set the canister into the black bag, which was lined with some kind of strange-looking fabric she didn’t recognize. Hoping that lining kept the chemical from spreading-Adam had said it had airborne capability-she watched him zip the case. He smoothed the ground and then spread dry leaves over the hollow where the canister had been. On finishing, he stood up and swiped his gloved hands, knocking off the loose red dirt. It sprinkled to the ground, grains pattering against the leaves and the toes of his combat boots.
When he looked at her, no tenderness shone in his eyes. Worry flooded them. “The canister triggered the alarm, Tracy.” He manually silenced the terror-inducing beep. “It’s definitely not a smoke-filled dummy.”
His voice shook. “It’s live.”
Tracy didn’t want to believe it. Gus O’Dell, a major in the Air Force-the same Air Force she proudly served couldn’t, wouldn’t, have done what it appeared he had done. She didn’t want to believe Colonel Hackett, an ambitious but highly decorated officer, had sanctioned-or had planned-such a heinous crime against a team under his command-his own men!-against the Air Force, the country. Against Adam. Oh, they had speculated on it, but doing so in safety felt a lot different from considering it while standing on a bombing range dressed in chemical gear, hearing the damn alarm sound, and seeing the lethal canister with her own eyes.
The canister. Hope flared in her chest. “Couldn’t this be a different canister, Adam? Maybe it isn’t the one involved in the incident with your men.”
Adam paused, clearly frustrated and regretting what he had to say. “Look around you, honey. What do you see?”
Blue jays chirped in the trees overhead, and she scanned the area. “Woods. Bugs. Birds. Leaves. Dirt. Bushes. Trees.”
“Exactly,” Adam said. “This is an active bombing range, right?” When she nodded, he, went on. “So why don’t we see any evidence of bombs?”
There hadn’t been. In all their walking through the range, there had been the snake, tons of squirrels and birds, and lots of pits in the ground where previous bombs had in fact fallen, but there hadn’t been one single sign of a bomb canister. Had they all exploded? Maybe only specific types of chemical canisters remained intact when detonated. Maybe the other intact canisters had been collected for study-or to hide evidence. “Bloody hell.”
“We can prove this is the right canister.” Adam lifted the black bag. “All we have to do is have the trace Contents examined.”
Sick at heart, Tracy nodded. “Discretion would be wise, don’t you think?”
“Most definitely.”
“I swore I’d never ask Randall for anything ever again. He’s a liar, but he has lab access.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Tracy had the feeling Adam was keeping something from her about Randall. Something vital she should know. He had warned her to be careful around Randall. Adam wouldn’t do that without reason. When he didn’t answer her, she became sure of it, and persisted. “Why not, Adam?”
He looked at her through the mask. “I have legitimate doubts about the good doctor’s integrity that go beyond his falsely identifying my body.”
If he’d belted her a right jab, he couldn’t have shocked her any more. “What kind of doubts? Are you thinking he substituted John Doe’s corpse for you in the fire?”
“I have no proof of that, and I already told you, I consider it unlikely. Too many people would have to be involved. Intel rule is strive for simplicity.”
“Then what doubts are you talking about?”
” Randall is under an unofficial OSI investigation, Tracy. This is confidential, but under the circumstances, I feel justified in telling you-provided you keep it in the jurisdiction of attorney/client privilege.”
“I will.”
“Unofficially, concerns have been raised that the doctor could be passing along to hostile parties technical information that renders obsolete new technology either in production, or soon to be contracted for production.”
“What!” she shouted, unable to restrain herself.
“Randall?” Seeing Adam nod, she sputtered. “But that’s absurd. The man is obsessed with his image and goals and with appearances. He doesn’t rock boats. He’s terrified of displeasing the hospital board. I can’t believe he would dare something like that. Good God, Adam. You’re talking treason.”
“Yes, I am.”
Treason? Randall? Impossible. Just … impossible. “If the OSI had reports of this, Randall would have been arrested on suspicion. Then they’d work to discern the truth.”
“If the OSI had a formal report, then they would have arrested him. But they don’t,” Adam countered. “What they’ve got is an unofficial, informal hypothetical situation intimating that it might be beneficial to the interests of the United States for the OSI to monitor a ‘potential situation’ and obtain clues to Moxley’s identity. He wasn’t specifically named, Tracy.”
But those clues made his identity apparent-which is why Adam had warned her to be careful around Randall. Oh, God. And she’d been friends with the slimy slug.
The urge to hang Randall on suspicion herself burned strong in her belly. But she couldn’t think about this now. She was too angry to be reasonable, much less objective or fair. She dipped her chin to the black bag holding the canister. “Since Randall is out of the question, how do we have the contents verified?”