he’d left. The hallway was empty.
Cautiously, he stepped out, motioning for Cassidy to stay where she was. If he got caught, he didn’t want her caught as well. He moved to the doorway and looked out. Nothing moved in the dim light of the hallway. No sound came up from the floors below.
Ed had taken the elevator. That meant he hadn’t expected anyone to be in the building, otherwise he would have sneaked in as they had. Jack felt a little better at that thought, which meant there was a good chance Ed wasn’t waiting outside for them. Jack had parked the truck away from the building and on a side street. Ed would have taken the main street to the office, so he wouldn’t have seen it.
At least that was Jack’s hope as he motioned that it was okay for Cassidy to come out now. He stepped close to her to whisper, “I think he’s gone, but we aren’t going to take any chances.” He held his finger to his lips and she nodded jerkily.
He could tell that she was scared. It had been a close call. Also, he was pretty sure that she’d heard what Ed had said. The big man was still looking for her. But now he was also looking for the boss of T.D. Enterprises’ son—Jack Durand.
From Cassidy’s expression, she hadn’t put that part together. At least not yet. He hoped she thought that the boss’s son was one of the men in the van.
“He had a gun and he knows we have the box,” Cassidy whispered, eyes big and round with fear. “What do you think is in it?”
He had no idea as he glanced at the battered and tarnished metal still tucked under his arm. It was a Pandora’s box. He feared what would come springing out the moment he opened it.
She still looked scared, but he was terrified of what his father had hidden inside an old locked metal container he’d kept for years inside a locked drawer. “Let’s get out of here.” Shifting the metal box to his hands, he heard that faint metallic rattle again from within.
Cassidy must have heard it as well. “Maybe we shouldn’t take it.”
Did he really believe the answer to why his father would have the probable future president’s daughter kidnapped was inside this box? But he now knew that his father had secrets—and some of them were apparently in this beat-up metal box.
Jack needed to know what he was dealing with—who he was dealing with.
“HOW IS SHE?”
“Sarah’s shocked and confused right now,” Dr. Ralph Venable said into the phone. “It’s to be expected.” He’d been regretting making this call, fearing the outcome, ever since he’d left Sarah. Buck would be home by now. At this point, Doc could only hope that she didn’t confess everything. “She’s having a tough time.”
Joe Landon sighed. “You know I never stopped loving her. When she went out to Montana to meet Buckmaster Hamilton and get close to his father, Senator JD Hamilton, I almost went after her, wanting to stop her. I was ready to run away with her and put The Prophecy behind us.”
He thought of the young Joe and Sarah as they had been at nineteen. Such a beautiful couple. Joe had brought Sarah into the anarchist group with his handsome face and his passion, as well as his radical ideas.
“Why didn’t you go after her?” Venable asked, thinking how different things would have been if Joe had.
“Because she didn’t love me enough. She wouldn’t have renounced The Prophecy for me.” Venable heard the sharp edge of bitterness in the man’s voice.
“You don’t know that.”
Joe laughed. “Actually, I do. The night before she left, I told her I was in love with her. It didn’t make a damned bit of difference. She was determined to start a revolution and that meant going after the Hamilton who everyone thought would be the next president. And yet, years later, she tries to kill herself rather than go through with her own plan all because she’s fallen in love. She had what she wanted so to hell with the rest of us.”
Venable said nothing. There was nothing to say since it was true. Sarah had fallen for Buck and adored the children they’d had together. She had wanted to wash her hands of The Prophecy and had refused to go through with the plan.
There’d been only one thing to do after she’d failed at suicide and called him. He had wiped away the years with Buck and her children and taken her to Brazil to keep Joe from killing her.
“So,” Joe said now. “Are you going to be able to control her like you said you could?”
“So far she has done exactly what you require. She’s gotten close to Senator Buckmaster Hamilton again, encouraging him in his race for president.”
“She was briefly engaged to some cowboy named Russell Murdock,” Joe said angrily. “That wasn’t exactly in the plan.”
“But we took care of that when we exterminated the senator’s wife, Angelina. Just as I predicted, Sarah broke her engagement and moved onto the ranch.”
“I want them married,” Joe said through gritted teeth.
“You also want him to win the election or all of this would be for nothing,” Venable pointed out. “You got me back to handle this, so let me.”
“Even if you can get the two of them married and Hamilton wins, I’m not convinced that you can make Sarah do what we need when the time comes. If she no longer believes in our cause...”
That was putting it mildly, Venable thought as he rubbed the gray stubble at his chin. There were days he felt just as she did. Like Sarah, he’d been on fire with fanaticism all those years ago. He’d believed that a handful of people could change the world. That they owed it to themselves and the world to make that change. He’d been full of confidence and brazen disregard for everything and everyone but the members of The Prophecy, the group he’d started since he was the oldest of them.
It was Joe, though, who not only adopted his radical views, but also pushed the others to do what they had to in order to get the attention they deserved.
When one of their bombs had killed innocent people and Mason Green and Wallace McGill had gone to prison, Venable had wanted to stop. This wasn’t what he envisioned.
It had been Sarah who had insisted they couldn’t quit. They owed it to Mason and Wally. They owed it to the lives they’d taken. They owed it to their country to try to change the things that were wrong with it but to do it peacefully.
That’s when she’d come up with the plan to make a real difference from the inside. Joe had been against it, but he’d gone along thinking Sarah would come back to him.
“From my source inside Hamilton’s campaign, I understand that Buckmaster is also having doubts,” Joe said. “We can’t let him do what his father did. He can’t pull out of the race.”
Venable thought of JD Hamilton. Sarah had done her part beautifully. No one could have predicted that JD would fall in love with some young girl and be willing to give it all up. Love, he thought with a curse.
“There are always variables that have to be
