mean, the part where we were walking back and the fire jumped across the road?”
“No!”
She nodded. “Yeah. For a few seconds all I could see was fire. Everywhere. But it was arching through the branches overhead. Not down to ground level yet. We ran like hell, and the next thing you know it was behind us. It was way cool.”
“Cool? You are an adrenaline junkie.”
She rose from the chair and began pacing, unable to hold still despite the jackhammer in her head.
“Y’know where the real adrenaline rush is?”
“Tell me.”
“Writing the piece up under deadline. Racing the clock to get the front page done when the people down in production are screaming for the layout and everyone around you is yelling at someone because they need some little tidbit to finish what they’re working on. TV blaring so if the world comes unglued we’ll know it, plus so we know what the Barbie-and-Ken world are saying about the story. It’s barely controlled chaos, a dozen blindfolded foxes chasing chickens around the same yard, knowing Farmer Time is just around the corner with a shotgun and that’s why they call it a deadline. That’s the real rush.”
She realized she’d been talking a blue streak, and sat down and went silent for a moment. He was eating his salmon, yet she knew he’d taken in every word. Finally he looked up. “I knew guys like you in special ops. The crazier it got, the more they felt at home.”
“But not you?” she asked.
His eyes took on a faraway, haunted look. “Nah. I couldn’t feel at home when I was holding an artery closed, trying to keep a buddy alive until the evac team got there. All that training and discipline and focus, and y’know what I was thinking at that moment?”
“No,” she said, and forced herself to down a spoonful of soup.
“That he and I wouldn’t be shooting hoops anymore. That’s what we’d done, last thing at night, every night. There was a basketball net in the hangar back at base, and every night, we’d wind down from the shit by playing three-on-three or H-O-R-S-E or just whacking the damn ball off of the backboard until the world no longer seemed so…loud. No way we were ever going to do that again, not with his leg hanging by a tendon and me pinching the femoral artery so he wouldn’t bleed out. That’s when I knew I wasn’t like you, that I couldn’t shut everything out and learn to love the chaos. That’s when I knew I had to get out.”
Her soup had lost its appeal. She pushed the bowl aside and looked at him. “I know. Kind of. Some stories still give me nightmares. Ever since a plane crash I covered, I still can’t eat spaghetti. A county commission meeting may be boring, but at least I know that after the deadline rush passes, I’ll sleep.”
He nodded, but offered nothing else in return. She fell silent, then got up and began once again pacing the room, hating this caged feeling, hating the notion that her movements were limited because someone was after her. They really wouldn’t go far enough to kill her—would they? It was like a bad movie. Reporters didn’t get killed for doing their jobs.
But this story…Something inside her seemed to freeze. Maybe some stories were worth killing over. Maybe this was one of them. It was certainly worth dying for.
“What are they after, Erin?” Jerrod asked quietly behind her.
She paused, then wrapped her arms around herself. She realized that someone else had to know. In case…This was too important. If something happened to her, someone else had to be able to pursue this, and who better than an FBI agent? She decided to take the leap of faith.
“I think Mercator’s in the white slave trade.”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Then he said, “You think, or you know?”
“I knew most of it. I needed confirmation.”
“Jesus.” He was quiet for a little longer. “And they took everything you had.”
She faced him. “I’m not a bimbo. When I work on a story this big, I keep backups.”
“So they didn’t get it all?”
She almost forgot and shook her head, but caught herself just in time. “I send everything I get to an anonymous e-mail account.”
“Could they trace it from your computer?”
“Not unless they’ve been following me. I used cybercafés all over town. I guess at some level I was already paranoid.”
“Not paranoid,” he said. “Careful. There’s a big difference. So…what do you know?”
“I had a source. Inside Mercator, I think, but I’m not positive.”
“Then he’s in their crosshairs, too,” Jerrod said.
She shook her head. “Maybe not. I hope not. After our first contact, I never dealt with him on my work or home machines.”
“Why did he contact you to begin with?”
“He saw the story in Fortune. He said I’d caught the jaywalkers and missed the killers.”
“He said that?”
“Word for word,” she said. “He said it was one of the perks Mercator offered for some customers. Buy Mercator’s stuff and they’ll get you a girl.”
His face seemed to freeze. “Shit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Can you prove it?”
“That’s what I was working on.”
He nodded. “And your boss knew about it?”
She faced him. “Yeah.”
He sighed and rubbed his face, as if he were tired. “You really do need protection.”
“They don’t know I have anything. With luck they think they took it all.”
His cheeks were taut, the muscles in front of his ears flexing as he drew a slow breath through his nose, as if trying to hold back some part of him that she found almost…frightening.
“They want the whistle-blower. They think you know who he is. Or she. That means they need you, Erin. And you don’t want to even think about what they have in mind once they have you. You don’t know these people.”
“And you do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I was one of them.”
5
“Okay, who are you really?” Erin asked.
It was a good question, Jerrod thought. He wasn’t sure it had a good answer. “I’m not who I was.”
“So who were you? You said special ops before. But
