Her Cowboy Defender. Kerry Connor

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СКАЧАТЬ “Think about it. Who would possibly want to run Pam off the road? The kidnappers wouldn’t. They had no reason to. They wouldn’t have wanted to endanger her and possibly ruin their chances of getting what they wanted. No, it must have been someone else. The most likely possibility I can come up with is that Pam went to one of her colleagues for help, someone she trusted, and instead of providing it, they tried to stop her from giving the information to the kidnappers.”

       He gaped at her in disbelief. “You think the FBI would run one of their agents off the road to keep her from releasing classified materials? Wouldn’t arresting her be a lot easier?”

       “Not the FBI,” she said patiently, as though he were the one speaking nonsense. “Someone within the FBI who’s acting on their own and willing to do whatever it takes to stop this information, whatever it is, from being shared.” She sent a nervous glance in the direction they’d come from. “I think what just happened to us proves how desperate this person is.”

       “What are you talking about?”

       “I should have realized it wasn’t the kidnappers trying to drive us off the road. I was just so focused on them and trying to get to Tara that, in the heat of the moment, I wasn’t thinking straight. But of course it wasn’t. It’s like the kidnapper said, he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize getting what he wants. It was someone who didn’t want me getting to my destination and making delivery to the kidnappers, the same someone who tried to stop Pam from doing the same thing.”

       Cade tried to think of an explanation for who else might have been shooting at them, but came up empty. She seemed to have thought this all out, not surprising, given that she’d had a lot more time to consider all the possibilities than he had.

       Not willing to concede she was right just yet, he decided to set the issue aside for the moment. There was a lot more to this story he needed to hear. “Okay, so you decided not to go to the police or the FBI. What did you do?”

       “I tried to figure out what I could do to save Tara and waited for the man to call me back. He finally did last night. He instructed me to drive to Albuquerque and arrive by noon. I left immediately. At noon, he called me with the address of a copy shop where he said a fax would be waiting for me. It was that map that I showed you. I was to be at that location exactly at two.”

       “What was your plan?”

       “I was going to refuse to give them the information until they let Tara go first.”

       He frowned again. “Did you really think they would agree to that?”

       “I wasn’t going to give them a choice. I brought a flash drive with me and was going to tell them I would only give them the password to unlock the file on it once they let Tara go.”

       “Why would they agree to that? They could have just threatened to shoot Tara if you didn’t give it to them.”

       “I was going to throw the flash drive on the ground and say that if they did anything to her I would put a bullet through it and destroy it right then and there. If they tried to shoot me, they would risk me pulling the trigger reflexively and destroying the drive anyway. After going to so much trouble to get the information, I was counting on them not being willing to risk losing it when it was so close at hand. We both had something the other wanted. It would be easier to just make the exchange. And if they threatened to kill her outright, I would have threatened to kill myself if they did, because if anything happened to her, I would have just watched my sister die and wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I’d gotten her killed.”

       “Even if they agreed to let her go, they wouldn’t have let you go without the password.”

       “I know. I was prepared to stay. That was the exchange. Me, the flash drive and the password for Tara.”

       An uneasy feeling began to churn in his gut. “Do you have the information they want?”

       “No. I still don’t even know what it is. That’s why I had to get them to let Tara go before I agreed to give them the flash drive supposedly containing the information.”

       “You can’t believe they would have agreed to that without knowing you had what they wanted.”

       “It was the only chance I had, the only chance Tara had.”

       “But once they found out you’d cheated them, they would have killed you.”

       She stared back at him, unblinking. “I know,” she said simply.

       He had no response to that, could only stare at her, the magnitude of what she was telling him hitting him square in the chest.

       “You can’t be serious,” he said, unable to hide his disbelief. “What good would that have done? Once they killed you, they would have gone after her to prevent her from talking.”

       “I was going to try to give her as much time as I could to get away. I have a map in my bag that I was going to leave in the car with a note telling her to drive to Colorado to get to the police or FBI there and to avoid the main roads. I didn’t think they would expect her to go there and would have a harder time tracking her that way. I also didn’t think she could trust anyone around here in case the kidnappers had connections with the police or the locals. There had to have been a reason they chose this area for the meeting. Pam had two guns in her house. I had one on me and left the other in the car for Tara. I also had the suitcase I brought with me to Dallas so she would have clothes, though I didn’t have time to grab it before I got in your truck. My ATM and credit cards are in my bag, along with enough cash to see her through for a few days. I would have left it in the car for her, too. It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment, but I had to pray it would be enough to get her to safety.”

       Cade studied her, too stunned to do anything else. She really had thought the whole thing through. There was no doubting it. This had been a suicide mission. She’d come here fully expecting to die, and had done so willingly, to save her sister. No, it hadn’t just been willing. She’d been desperate to do so, fighting tooth and nail and doing whatever it took to get to a rendezvous where she thought she would die.

       She had to understand the enormity of the sacrifice she’d been willing to make. Yet there was no sign of it on her face—no pride, no regret, no misgivings. Just simple straightforwardness, as though it was clear what she’d had to do, as though it were nothing at all.

       Maybe it was to her.

       He tried to think of anyone he’d ever known who would have been willing to do that for him. Not his father, who’d never wanted a kid in the first place and only cared about what he could find at the bottom of the nearest bottle. Certainly not his mother, who’d walked out on them when he was a boy. Not Caitlin, the one person he thought he would have been willing to do anything for—yeah, probably even die—who’d walked out on him, too. There was Matt Alvarez, his right-hand man on the ranch and the closest thing he had to a friend in this world, but he didn’t know if Alvarez would be willing to make such a colossal sacrifice, and frankly, Cade wouldn’t expect him to.

       He wondered what this sister of hers was like, wondered if she was worthy of the sacrifice this woman had been willing to make. Obviously Piper Lowry thought so.

       It suddenly struck him that he was just standing there, staring at the woman in front of him. He cleared his throat, his anger gone, replaced by an emotion he couldn’t really name. Any doubts he’d had about her story were gone now. СКАЧАТЬ