GARRET STAYED and watched Kit until her form was swallowed up by the snow and she was no longer visible. And then, for a moment, he stared into the empty whiteness in front of him. All his fears reared their heads in one fell swoop and he nearly dropped the plan and went after her. Nothing he had ever done—and he had done a lot—had ever been so difficult as watching her walk away.
Forcing his gaze and his body to move away from the road, Garret climbed into the car and dropped heavily into the driver’s seat. For a moment, he sat waiting, hoping she’d come back. But as soon as he acknowledged the wish, he put the car in gear and pulled away. He didn’t really want her to come back. Not if they wanted this thing with Kašović to be over. And if she did come back, he couldn’t be there because he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to watch her walk away a second time.
So he made his way down the snowy road to where he and Caleb had agreed to meet. Kašović was lying in wait near the house. The plan was to come at him from behind. Or at least he was planning on coming at Kašović from behind. Caleb would take the car straight to the house and circle back behind the building. From where Kašović had stationed himself, he was facing the southwest side of the house, more to the west. He would be able to watch the car make its way up the drive, but once it came around the last bend toward the parking area, it would leave his line of sight.
Both Caleb and Garret were counting on the reduced visibility and lighting to help ensure that Kašović wouldn’t be able to see who was—or wasn’t—in the car. There weren’t many perks about working in these kinds of weather conditions, but it did make the element of surprise a little easier. Unfortunately, that worked both ways.
Forcing his mind to stay focused on the plan and not on Kit, Garret pulled to the side of the road. Rather than climb out of the car and into the snow, he crawled to the back and pulled out his own pack. He donned his own winter gear, checked his kit and then, once he was sure everything was in order, he checked the pistol he had strapped to his ankle. Confident it would stay dry and in place, he double-checked the weapon now strapped to his chest as well. Only then did he climb out of the car and around to the back.
Staying under the protection of the back door, he pulled out a locked box, keyed in the security code, and gently lifted the lid. His rifle lay there, cleaned and ready to go.
He examined it quickly, made sure it had ammunition loaded, locked it, and slung it over his back. He didn’t think he’d need it, but just in case, he grabbed some extra ammo and shoved it in the pocket of his white jacket. Gently, he closed the trunk, took a deep breath, and began to make his way toward Caleb.
One of the other benefits of working in snow, Garret mused as he made his way to Caleb, half a mile into the woods, was that it didn’t let you let your mind wander. There was no way he could spare any deep thoughts for Kit as he made his way through the conditions that were now rapidly changing from a snowstorm to an ice storm.
With a glance upward, he hoped the change would hold off long enough they wouldn’t have to worry about any branches coming down under the weight of the ice. He was pretty sure they would have Kašović under control fairly quickly, but then they had to wait for Drew’s team for the retrieval. Though he trusted Drew and knew he had everything covered, Garret wasn’t sure how the weather would impact the arrival of the team.
Garret paused and checked his GPS. Caleb was less than forty feet away, and Garret couldn’t even see him. For a moment, he wondered just how close his partner had had to get in order to see Kašović. But he pushed that thought aside and made his way a little farther into the woods. Two minutes later, he could make out Caleb’s form against a tree.
Caleb stood, binoculars in hand, not moving from his position. But Garret didn’t need a greeting to know that the other man knew he was there—not after all these years.
Garret came up beside his partner, who handed him the binoculars without a word. Putting them up to his face, Garret could see nothing but the heat signature of a man—or what he assumed was a man. Kašović.
One more benefit of the snow was that it certainly made heat signatures easier to spot.
Kašović was lying on one of the many big boulders that littered the area. From there, he would have a perfect view of the house and the path that led from the parking area to the front door, though not the parking area itself. Garret wished he knew what kind of rifle the man was holding, but while the binoculars were good for some things, they weren’t good for that kind of detail, and Kašović was too far away to see anything else. Especially in this weather.
Lowering the binoculars, Garret unstrapped his rifle. “How did you even find him?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
Caleb shrugged and shoved himself off the tree. “I would have seen him anyway since he picked one of the five spots I’ve been keeping my eye on for his position. But he also happened to walk about twenty feet in front of me.”
Garret shot his partner a look.
“Yeah, surprised the hell out of me too. Thankfully, lady luck was on my side and I’d been lying low on the ground with a thin layer of snow covering me. I don’t know that he would have seen me even if he’d been looking, but he wasn’t and I just blended in.”
“You’ll have to toast Mother Nature for that little bit of aid when this is all over,” Garret answered as he handed Caleb the keys.
“Many times over,” Caleb replied. “Hopefully, with some hot whiskey. And maybe some hot women,” he added with a grin. Leave it to Caleb to grin at a time like this.
“I’ll join you in the whiskey and I already have a hot woman, so I’m good on that front,” Garret said, bringing the binoculars back to his eyes. Kašović hadn’t so much as twitched.
Caleb let out a little snort. “Yeah, that’s my sister, so you’d better be good with just the one.”
Garret smiled, but kept his eyes trained on Kašović. “What, no warnings, no threats to beat me up if I hurt her? Which I won’t, by the way.”
He heard the light rustle of Caleb’s jacket and assumed he was shrugging. “I don’t need to warn you or threaten you. You know perfectly well what I’m capable of, and it would just insult us both for me to spell it out.”
Garret had to chuckle at that. It was true. Anything Caleb put into words wouldn’t be half of what he was actually capable of doing. He was about to reply when his phone buzzed with a message. Handing Caleb the binoculars, he fished his phone out his pocket, tugged a glove off, and pulled up the message. A wave of relief washed over him; he keyed in a quick response to the sender and then another quick note to Kit before slipping the device back into his pocket.
“Our backup has arrived. They’re getting their gear ready,” Garret said, pulling on his glove and taking the binoculars back.
“Did you let Kit know to expect them?” Caleb asked.
Not taking his eyes from the binoculars, Garret nodded. “I told her our backup was here so she wouldn’t worry. They know about the cave, of course, but the plan is for them to gear up at their vehicle and intercept us between here and there,” he answered. “Kit should never even see them.”
“Or any part of what we’re all about to do.” Caleb voiced Garret’s thought.
It wasn’t that what they were about to do would shock her, but if Garret had his way, Kit wouldn’t see any of it and would only know when it was finished and Kašović was no longer a threat.
“You better get going or he’s going to get suspicious about how long it’s taking us to get back,” Garret said. “I’m sure he knows what time the signing ended and the snow has bought us some leeway since it will be easy to assume it slowed us down...” His voice trailed off.
“I’m on my way,” Caleb said without further ado.
But after he took two steps, Garret heard him pause so he swung around to look at his partner.
“Are you really okay?” Caleb asked.
Garret gave a tense nod.
“I know the mechanics of this operation are something you could do in your sleep, but this one, with Kit,” even Caleb’s quiet voice caught a little as he spoke her name. “Well, with Kit involved, it turns it all into a little bit of a nightmare.”
Garret wasn’t sure what to say about Caleb’s concern, so he simply gave another short nod.
“But you’re good with this plan? I could take your place,” Caleb offered. “You could go be with Kit.”
Garret bit back the “yes” he wanted to answer and shook his head. “You know it won’t work that way. Not now that our backup is in place. We have to get Kašović walking toward the meeting spot and it has to be me who gets him there. I’m the only one he’ll believe.”
Caleb regarded him for a long moment then gave a sharp nod, not so much in agreement but in recognition of the truth of what Garret was saying.
“How long do you need?” Caleb asked.
Garret swung the glasses back to Kašović. He was about a quarter of a mile away, maybe a little more. “Fifteen minutes,” he answered. He didn’t need to see Caleb to know he’d heard; within seconds the sounds of Caleb moving toward the car were swallowed up by the dampening snow.
Ignoring the cold touching his cheeks and seeping through his gloves, Garret stood still and quiet as the mix of ice and snow fell around him.
With another look at Kašović, still flat out on the boulder, Garret pulled his eyes from the binoculars and glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go. Slinging the binoculars over his shoulder, he began to make his way toward the assassin. Moving quietly enough to seem as though he was trying to sneak up on his target but loud enough to alert Kašović, Garret approached the man from his left. A few times he paused, more for effect than for any other reason, but mostly he made his way steadily forward.
Garret heard Caleb intentionally rev the engine as he pulled the car into the parking area. By this time, Garret was close enough to see Kašović through the falling precipitation, which had now turned almost completely to ice. He paused for a reason this time and watched as Kašović’s head came up and his back tensed in anticipation. Garret’s eyes flicked toward the man’s hands and he saw the assassin’s finger twitch lightly on the trigger—not enough to pull it, but just enough to remind the digit of what its job would ultimately be.
Only that wasn’t going to happen.
Garret was thirty feet away when he saw Kašović realize that something wasn’t quite right. No one, not Kit or anyone else, had emerged from the parking area to walk the path to the front door—the path that would lead her right into his crosshairs. Kašović drew back from his scope just enough to look with his naked eye, though Garret knew this movement was more of an instinctive move than anything else, since the visibility hadn’t improved that much. Whatever Kašović could see through his scope would be much clearer than anything he would be able to see without it. Although, Garret conceded to himself, what the man could see through his scope was somewhat limited in range—the narrow site wouldn’t be able to show Kašović what was going on anywhere else other than what could be seen through the tiny hole.
Silently, Garret swung his rifle up. This was the moment of truth. The moment he could—the moment he would—bring an end to everything that was happening to Kit. And then Kašović swung around, moving faster than any man of his years ought to. Before Garret had a chance to bring his rifle to the ready, he was in Kašović’s crosshairs.
They both froze in that tableau. Garret didn’t even bother to look toward the house to see if he could make out Caleb. But rather, he kept his eyes locked on Kašović, on those ice-blue eyes that had already tried not once, but twice, to kill Kit.
“If you kill me, you’ll never find her,” Garret said, his hands in front of him, still gripping his rifle.
“And I’m supposed to believe that if I don’t kill you, you’ll tell me where she is,” Kašović countered.
Garret didn’t answer.
A hint of a knowing smile lifted Kašović’s lips. “So we’re at a bit of an impasse, aren’t we?” he said, his Serbian accent tinged with the hint of a South American inflection.
Garret inclined his head.
“It turns out, I don’t much like impasses,” Kašović said.
Garret heard the words but before he had time to react, he heard a shot. Searing pain lanced through his chest and the last thing he remembered before everything went black was the icy sharpness of the snow burning into his cheek as he collapsed.
***
Kit paused, then glanced behind her. Well, if anyone looked with anything more than a passing glance, they’d see her tracks. She had tried to cover them as best as she could using the technique Garret had taught her, but it wasn’t as easy as swishing a branch over her footprints. Thankfully, the snow, and now ice, was still falling, which helped camouflage her trail a bit.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket to look at the time just as a text message from Garret came in. She let out sigh of relief reading that their backup had arrived as planned. She didn’t really know what that meant, or what the specifics of the actual plan were, but at least she knew Caleb and Garret weren’t alone.
It had taken her fifteen minutes to get to the cave—well, almost to the cave. She could see the angled birch tree that marked its entrance even though she wasn’t quite there yet. She sighed and admitted to herself that she’d been lollygagging. She potentially had hours to wait for Garret; it was easier to waste some of that time walking to their meeting spot than getting there fast and sitting with nothing to do but stare at the walls and think about all the things that could be happening. All the things that could go wrong.
Of course, Garret could also be coming along at any moment. She knew the rough workings of his plan to sneak up on Kašović, but she didn’t know—and Garret couldn’t tell her—how he was going to do that or how long that could take. She hoped not long; she hoped Garret would come along within the next thirty minutes. But she was also trying not to get her hopes up too high.
Her breath fogged in front of her as she sighed and turned back toward the cave. To her left, a branch cracked under the weight of the weather and she startled, then turned to watch the limb crash down in a big puff of snow and ice. Momentarily distracted, she nearly stumbled over her own feet when she caught a glimpse of movement—human movement—just beyond the settling branch.
For one fleeting second, she was frozen, her mind refusing to comprehend what she’d seen. Then adrenaline exploded through her system. Her heart launched itself into her throat and any chill she’d been experiencing from the freezing temperatures was now a thing of the past. Sweat gathered on her neck and her breaths came fast and furious.
She cursed herself for taking so long to get to the cave—if she hadn’t been needlessly wasting time, she’d already be safe inside. But now, as it was, she was pretty sure she didn’t want to go in there. She didn’t know who was in the woods with her, but she knew it wasn’t her brother or Garret—they would have called out to her, or at least texted her a message. And leading someone she didn’t know into a place with only one entrance and one exit wasn’t something she was dumb enough to do, not even with all the panic coursing through her system.
Forcing herself to take a deep breath and slow down, she stood as still as she could. She was still somewhat in the forest; she hadn’t yet made it to the clearing they’d designated as their meeting place. Maybe she was still hidden. Maybe whoever was out there hadn’t seen her.
And just who was out there?
Of course her first thought was Kašović. But as the seconds ticked by, her gut was telling her what her mind wouldn’t accept quite yet. It couldn’t be Kašović. She knew her brother had his eyes on the man and that if Kašović had started heading in her direction, either Caleb or Garret would have let her know. There was always the possibility that Kašović had gotten to her brother, but the possibility that he’d gotten to both Garret and Caleb before either could send her some signal didn’t seem possible.
But even her slow recognition of the logic didn’t entirely ease her mind. There was still someone there, and she had no idea who. It could be the backup that Garret had texted her about. But he hadn’t said anything about them being anywhere near the cave. And while she supposed it could be a neighbor who hadn’t seen her so hadn’t bothered to say hello, she wasn’t quite ready to buy that. Mostly because the movement she’d seen had been swift and sure—not those of someone out for a leisurely winter walk in the forest or of someone trying to take cover from an unexpected ice storm.
Slowly, she inched her way toward the trunk of a large tree. Its diameter was enough to hide her if someone was watching from the other side, but it wasn’t so large as to provide much more cover than that. Still, the solid wood against her back provided an unexpected sense of support.
Casting her eyes into the forest around her, she willed herself to see more than just the falling snow and ice. Within a few seconds, she could make out the lines of other trees more easily, leafless bushes crushed under the weight of the winter, and even the rocky shore of the lake off in the distance.
What she couldn’t see was any sign of a human presence.
Taking more comfort from the tree than she knew she should, she waited—silent and unmoving. Slowly, the cold began to penetrate her clothing and her body grew chilled after the initial adrenaline rush. And still, she heard nothing. Saw nothing.
Kit shivered in her coat and began to wonder if maybe she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. Perhaps all she’d seen was another branch falling in an unusual way, or snow being thrown as it was knocked about by the falling limb. A few more minutes of silence passed, and she knew she had to do something. The cold was seeping through to her bones, and the snow and ice mix had turned sharply to ice alone—or, as she thought when one pelted her in the face, ice daggers.
She thought about trying to text Caleb or Garret, but didn’t want to disturb them if they were in the middle of something. And so, standing there on her own, she accepted that she’d have to make her own plan. Pushing away from the shelter of the tree, Kit turned toward the cave.
She’d taken six steps when a man appeared out of the storm before her. She stumbled backward; the shock was so great that she had a fleeting thought she might actually be having a heart attack. But then she heard the report of a rifle off in the distance and everything coalesced into one crystal clear moment.
Knowing it probably wasn’t her only option, but it was likely her best, she spun and ran.
Right into the arms of another man.
On instinct, she scrambled back, fighting to get out of the second man’s grip. But in the snow and ice, her feet found no purchase. Finally, she twisted away and, sucking in a deep breath, she prepared to scream and run. But the man grabbed ahold of her jacket from behind just as her boot landed on a patch of packed ice.
As her feet left the ground and she started to fall backward, she knew she’d just made what would likely end up being the biggest mistake of her life. When her head slammed into something hard under the thick snow and pain shot through her body, a crushing sense of having failed Garret was her last thought before her mind faded into darkness.