She could barely make out the silhouette of the man advancing on her. She pulled her neck in on reflex, brought her hands up.
“Get out! Get out! Sixty seconds to explosion!”
This time, she finally comprehended the words and lunged away from the bed, heart racing, blood rushing. Get out! Get out! The order screamed in her brain now, her body propelled forward by stark terror.
The man stepped in front of her before she could reach the door. He shoved her back.
“Let me go!” She pushed forward and thrust her arm out to slap him aside.
He didn’t budge.
“Why are you doing this?” Who was it? Burge? He had hated her from the get-go. Didn’t he realize that if they didn’t get moving they were both going to die?
She kicked and went for his face with a fist at the same time. To hell with him. To hell with what she was going to get for attacking a guard. Somehow she squeezed past him and ran down the hall, realized a few steps out that it wasn’t the hall outside her cell. Where was she? Why weren’t the emergency lights on?
She could still be dreaming, she thought and slowed, then the man gripped her shoulder to pull her back—definitely real. She turned back to fight.
“Stop it, Burge! What are you doing?”
He said nothing, but slammed her against the wall and blocked her way. He was holding something in his left hand, his fist closed around a small object she couldn’t make out. A hand grenade? Was he crazy?
She ducked under his arm, kicked sideways at his knee then ran for all she was worth, fully awake now, the memory of where she was coming back to her. She turned right at the end of the hall, boots falling heavily on the tile floor somewhere close.
She slammed through the door to the staircase and leaped her way down. Then she was at the exit, throwing her body against the metal door, tumbling out into the wet night and away from the building. The man was right behind her.
She could see his face now in the light of the lamp-posts and stopped running, braced her hands on her knees as she gasped for air. She cursed the man who stood before her wearing a black T-shirt with black cargo pants, and an even blacker scowl on his face.
“Sixty-one seconds.” Stopwatch in hand, Nick Tarasov stepped forward until his combat boots were toe-to-toe with her bare feet. “You’re dead.” His voice dripped with contempt, his gaze as hard as the steel door she’d slammed her shoulder into moments ago.
Screw you. Her heart still beat like crazy. She was shaking inside, but she straightened and looked him in the eyes without reaching up to massage her aching shoulder. She didn’t want him to know how badly he’d messed her up.
A slow rain drizzled on her head, her body wishing for the warmth of her blankets. “If you’ve had your fun, can I go back to bed?”
He leaned forward, until he was in her face, his expression hard. “Night training,” he said, then shouted at the top of his lungs, “Obstacle course. Get moving, soldier!”
Now? The course was nothing but a mud hole. “I don’t have my shoes on.”
He nodded toward the sidewalk by the building. Her boots and socks lay scattered on the concrete. He must have tossed them out the window after he’d chased her from her room. “Move! Move! Move!”
She collected and yanked on her footwear then turned toward the track and the obstacle course behind it, got going on the double, running on the slippery grass.
“Faster.” Nick passed her and turned around, jogging backward with ease.
Drop dead. She pushed harder.
Why had she ever thought that it was some awesome good luck being the first of the women to be let out? David Moretti had advised her lawyer to appeal her case. The appeal had been speedily accepted. Anita was left to serve out her sentence. She was expected here, at the FBI’s training course at Quantico, Virginia, tomorrow. Gina and Sam were getting out on parole next week within days of each other.
Carly had gotten out two weeks before anyone else. It hadn’t turned out to be two weeks of freedom. She was locked up at Quantico as tightly as she’d been locked up in prison. And each day, Nick Tarasov, the cold bastard, did his level best to kill her.
She tripped but caught herself, ran on.
“Let’s just focus on the first step and make sure that’s executed to the best of our abilities,” he said. That seemed to have become his mantra since she’d gotten here. Was he under the illusion that he was teaching her life skills as well as pushups?
The first obstacle course began with the old tire trap. She stepped into the first and moved forward, lifting her feet high as she ran across the tires, squishing into the mud in the middle.
“Again. Faster,” Tarasov yelled when she reached the end. He did the exercise himself, as he had done everything he expected her to do, always, from the very beginning.
She ran back to the start, her mud-crusted boots adding extra pounds. Her muscles were stiff, still aching from their work the day before.
“Again. Faster!” He was right behind her.
That much yelling couldn’t be good for a person. His blood pressure was bound to go up. Maybe he would have a stroke. There was a thought. She pressed her hand to her side and tried to hide that she was already starting to gasp for air.
He made her run the tires a half-dozen times before he let her move on to the rope. She lunged and caught on with her hands, but her muddy boots were too slippery to find purchase.
She needed long pants. The wet rope scratched her thighs where the shorts she had used in lieu of pajamas left her skin bare—a place she would just as soon not bring to his attention.
He was watching her closely. “Don’t use your feet. Use your arms. Go!”
She glared at him but put one hand over the other, made some progress, wiped her forehead on the rope when sweat rolled into her eyes. She’d worked out in prison. It had been something to do in solitude, passing the time. She’d been in far better shape when she’d gotten out than when she’d gone in. Decent shape, she’d thought. It had taken Tarasov less than half a day to prove otherwise.
“Another ten feet and you’re there,” he called up to her.
Might as well be a hundred. It seemed impossible that her arms would support her that long. She was still tired from her training the day before. She’d had two, maybe three hours of sleep. She had nothing left to give.
In her brief moments of rest, she’d been considering finding a way to break out of the compound, but each time she had pushed the impulse aside. Patience. Training wouldn’t last forever. Getting away would be much easier once she was out of here, in a normal, civilian environment. And whatever she learned in the meanwhile would aid her in escape and evasion later on.
She glanced at the man standing at the bottom of the rope. What would it take to get by Tarasov?
He grabbed the rope next to hers, went up, paused for a second at the top, then effortlessly eased himself down.
