his older sister Miriam would be in for a mighty lonely existence if they couldn’t communicate with their peers by the time school started in a few months.
“Why do we go on this road?” Charlie asked in English. “It is bumpy like a goat trail.”
“I told you earlier. We need to check on my cattle grazing up here and then we’re going fishing.”
“Why?”
The kid’s favorite question, in English or in Tagalog. He had become mighty damn tired of that question in the last three weeks since he’d managed to bring them out of the Philippines—and the two months before that, spent doing his best to get them all to this point.
Mason swallowed his sigh as his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. He could spot a hostile operative in a crowd of a thousand people, could sniff out a few ounces of plastic explosives like a bloodhound, but he felt like a complete idiot when it came to dealing with these children.
“It’s fun, that’s why. Trust me, you’ll like it.”
He hoped.
It was worth a try anyway. He had vivid memories of early-summer fishing trips with his own father up here amid the aspens and willows. Here in the Uinta Mountains was where he and his father connected best—one of the only places they managed that feat—and he supposed on some level he hoped he and Charlie and Miriam could forge the same bond.
He and the kids had to build a life together somehow. For the last ten weeks they had tiptoed around each other, afraid to breathe the wrong way, and it had to stop.
Mason was uncomfortable with children, especially these children. Whenever he looked into their dark eyes, he couldn’t help thinking about Samuel and Lianne, their parents—two of the most courageous, most honorable people he had ever been privileged to know.
Assets, the intelligence community called them, but they were far more than that. They were friends, friends who risked their lives for years so they could feed him vitally important information about terrorism activity in their country.
He knew he shouldn’t have come to care for them, just as they knew the dangers going into it. When the pair began to suspect their carefully woven cover had begun to fray, Samuel had begged Mason for help in sneaking his family out of the country. He had tried, but in the end his superiors had said they believed the Betrans’ worries were unfounded and they were too valuable where they were.
After all their years of service, the people they had risked their life to help had turned on them and Mason counted himself among that number. He had done nothing to help them. Guilt and fury still overwhelmed him when he thought of their violent deaths in a car bombing two months earlier.
He hadn’t been able to help the parents, but he’d be damned if he was going to leave Samuel and Lianne’s children in some crowded, dirty Philippine orphanage.
What else could he do but bring them home to the Utah ranch where he’d been raised?
He’d hoped that after a few months as the children’s guardian he would be better at the job but he still felt as stiff and awkward with them as a squeaky new boot.
Miriam and Charlie would always grieve for their parents just as he would always be consumed with guilt over the deaths of his friends. But the three of them had to go on from here. They couldn’t live in this tense détente forever.
The pickup hit a rut on the dirt road and jostled them all together. Miriam’s eyes widened nervously but Charlie giggled.
“I like this bumping. It tickles here,” the boy said, pointing to his stomach.
Mason summoned a smile. “You’re a little daredevil, aren’t you? You ever been on a roller coaster?”
He had to laugh at the boy’s blank look. He was trying to think if he’d ever heard a Tagalog word for roller coaster when Miriam sat forward suddenly.
“Sir! Look out!”
He jerked his attention back to the road, barely in time to slam on the truck’s brakes. The big three-quarter-ton pickup fishtailed to a stop just inches before he would have plowed over a woman lying in the middle of the dirt road, as if it was the ideal spot to take a little nap.
What in the hell?
He gazed through the windshield at the woman, but she didn’t move even with the growling diesel engine practically crawling up her ear.
“She is dead, yes?” Miriam asked. There was resignation in her voice and Mason’s jaw clenched. The girl had become obsessed with death since her parents had been killed. He supposed it a natural byproduct of what she’d been through but it still broke his heart.
“I don’t know. I’ll find out, though,” he promised. “You two stay right here. Don’t move.”
He repeated the command in Tagalog to make sure they understood before he unlocked the jockey box for his Ruger and then stuffed in a couple of cartridges.
The woman didn’t move even when he shut the door with a loud thud that seemed to echo in this quiet solitude. He approached warily, his weapon ready at his side. He might be overreacting, but a man with his life experience didn’t take stupid chances.
One of the first rules of espionage. Anything out of the ordinary attracted attention, just as it should. And a woman lying in the middle of such an isolated mountain road was pretty damn extraordinary.
She definitely wasn’t dead. Though she was laid out just like a corpse in a casket, her slight chest beneath her folded hands rose and fell with each breath.
She wasn’t a hiker who had fallen, he saw as he approached. Not in those sandals and those dressy summer slacks. He scanned the mountains, looking for any sign of what might have brought her here. A car, a bicycle—a helicopter, for Pete’s sake—but he saw nothing but trees.
Mason turned back to the woman, cataloguing her pretty features with dispassionate eyes. She looked to be mid- to late-twenties maybe, Caucasian. She had straight brown hair with streaky blond highlights, a small straight nose, a generous mouth, high cheekbones—one of which had traces of dried blood, he noted.
He did a quick visual scan for more injuries but couldn’t see anything from here.
What was she doing here? He looked around again, his shoulder blades itchy. This would be a hell of a place for an ambush, isolated and remote enough to leave no witnesses.
Good thing there were no rebel fighters hanging out in Utah. Nothing stirred here but a few magpies chattering nearby and the wind moaning in the tops of the trees and fluttering the bright heads of the wildflowers that lined the road.
Still on alert, he engaged the safety on his weapon and shoved it into the waistband of his Levi’s at the small of his back, then crouched near her and picked up one slim hand.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?” An inane question, he thought, even as he asked it. She obviously wasn’t all right or she wouldn’t be lying in the middle of an isolated mountain road.
She didn’t respond so he gave her shoulder a little shake. That seemed to do the trick. The woman opened her eyes. They were blue, he noted. The same clear, vivid blue of the columbines
