Lexi bit the edge of her lip as Trent sped across the sand in the stolen Land Rover. She’d expected Adam’s men to return, but she’d never expected this. Her lungs still burned from breathing in the fumes from the smoke bomb, but her heart hurt more. She never imagined her own brother would stoop to kidnapping her.
“I’m sorry, Lexi.” Trent finally broke the silence between them.
Sorry? He had no idea what his actions had put her through the past few days. Sorry couldn’t begin to make up for what he’d done.
“If you’re sorry, then tell me what’s going on.” She glanced at him, but he kept his eyes on the road straight ahead of them. “Tell me what you’re doing here, why you took me and why we left Colton and Bret back there.”
His fingers tightened against the steering wheel. “You’d been taken hostage. I’m your brother. What did you expect me to do? They would have killed you.”
“Don’t even start to play games with me, Trent.”
“Their orders were to kill you.”
She didn’t believe him. Because it was just another lie. She knew him well enough to be certain he hadn’t come all this way just to rescue her. With him there was always a hidden agenda. Whatever his motivation was, she knew it was a selfish one.
“I know about the embezzlement and the lengths Adam is willing to take to recover his money.” Lexi leaned back against the headrest. She was tired and achy and wanted to go home, but first she needed to convince him to stop whatever he was trying to do. “I want to know what your plan is now. You do have one, don’t you?”
“Those men back there...they’re involved in a lot of highly illegal things.”
“And from what I understand, so are you. Why did you really come with them, and where are we going now?”
“It was my only way out, selling out both sides. And I needed some kind of guarantee that I could leave the country and get into Europe without getting shot on sight.”
“So you took me.”
“I’m sorry to have to involved you—”
“No, you’re not.” She reached up to scratch her arm, then drew in a sharp breath, temporarily shoving Trent’s betrayal aside. Blood had seeped through the sleeve of her dress and was running down her arm. “Trent...”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled her hand away. It was covered with blood. “I don’t remember getting hurt.”
Neither had she felt any pain. Maybe it was because of the adrenaline, but now that she saw the trail of blood dripping down her arm, she could feel the intense sting of the wound slicing through her like a hot knife.
“You must have been shot,” Trent said.
“Shot?” She shook her head. “That’s not possible.”
Or was it? She’d heard at least one gunshot.
“There’s probably a first aid kit in here somewhere,” Trent said. “Look in the glove compartment and under the seat. If nothing else, you need to stop the bleeding.”
She started looking, but that wasn’t all she needed.
“We need to go back, Trent.” She felt under the seat with her fingers, then pulled out a small first aid kit. “We have to get help. And I need to make sure Colton and Bret are okay.”
Trent pressed his foot against the brake, stopping the vehicle, then grabbed the kit from her. “Forget it. We’re not turning back. But let me at least try to wrap your arm up.”
She felt the muscles in her back and shoulders tense as he opened up the box and pulled out a compress dressing and a small roll of tape. Her heart was racing. Since when was she afraid of her own brother? Saying nothing, she felt the burn of the injury as he pulled up her sleeve, then pressed the dressing against her arm.
“It’s just a surface wound. You’ll be fine.”
Except she wasn’t fine.
“Tell me why you’re here. Why we’re here,” she said.
“Long story short, I struck a deal with the FBI. But it didn’t take me long to realize that while I don’t want to face the retribution from Adam and his men, I also don’t want to be stuck in prison for the next decade.” Trent ripped off the tape and made sure the makeshift bandage was secure. “So I took the third door, which will hopefully land me on some tropical island somewhere completely off the grid.”
“And in the meantime, you don’t care who gets hurt?”
Trent finished bandaging her up, then dumped the first aid kit on the floorboard in front of her and started driving again. “If you’re talking about your friends back at the compound, then you’ll be happy to know that the US military were right behind me. If all went according to plan, which I’m sure it did, they arrested Adam and his men.”
“How did they know how to find us?”
“They fitted me with a tracking device so they could follow me.”
“And I’m guessing you ditched the device?”
“You bet I did.”
Lexi worked to put the pieces of the puzzle together. At least there was a chance that Colton and Bret were okay. “So why is our military showing up now?”
“Adam Tazi’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. That’s pretty good motivation. Made striking a deal with them easy.”
“And you?” she asked. “What do they want with you?”
“Somehow my name got connected with Tazi and my passport was flagged.” Trent fought to stay in the ruts of a stretch of soft sand. “I never meant to hurt you, Lexi. You have to believe that. I honestly never thought Adam would involve you in this.”
“So you didn’t think there would be consequences to stealing money from a man wanted by the FBI?”
“It wasn’t supposed to end this way. I was going to disappear. Start over somewhere on the other side of the world and no one would get hurt. It’s not like Adam doesn’t have millions coming in far and beyond what I took.”
“But people did get hurt, and I got caught in the cross fire.” Literally. “I don’t understand how you thought you could simply disappear?”
“That was—and still is—my plan. When I came to see you, I didn’t think he’d connect us. I never talked about you, and we have different last names. I needed a place where I’d be safe until I could finish clearing the money and work out the details to disappear.”
“What about your father? What’s he going to think when you end up in prison?”
“Like I said. I have no intention of going to prison. Not even at a reduced sentence. That’s why I have you. All I need is a second chance to start over and put all of this behind me.”
Lexi shook her head. Her arm was beginning to throb along with her head. She reached for the first aid kit, needing something for the pain, but even more, needed a way to get through to her brother.
Didn’t he understand that there was no way he was going to be able to simply walk into Spain with a marked passport? And if—when—the FBI took him back into custody, any deal he’d made with them was already off the table.
She found an individual package of Tylenol and managed to swallow them without water. “You’ll never make it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll never make it across the border. And even before that, you’ll have to deal with the frequent police checks on the main road. They’ll demand passports. Yours is marked and I don’t have one. And then what? But if you turn yourself in now—”
“Forget it, Lexi. Because I have connections. There are people who you can pay to smuggle you across the border. It’s the connection I was working on before all of this went down. I’ll get a new identity and disappear, and you won’t have to put up with my indiscretions anymore.”
She glanced over and caught the determined set of his jaw. “What happened, Trent?”
“What do you mean? How did I go from being the black sheep of the family to a wanted criminal?” He shook his head. “It’s easier than you think. You see an opportunity—right or wrong—and you decide to take it. Eventually you end up where I am.”
“There’s always a way out—”
“Don’t start preaching at me. My dad did enough of that over the years.”
“Maybe, but there are always choices.”
He’d never been one to listen to anyone else. He’d always preferred to learn the hard way. But this time his decisions might very well have cost him everything.
Five minutes later, he pulled onto the main road and headed north. She knew they were five, maybe six hours from the border of Morocco and Spain. What she didn’t know was where Colton and Bret were. Because despite Trent’s assurances, she didn’t even know if they were alive. The men who’d set off the smoke bomb had been armed. And even with Colton’s military experience, the odds against them had been high.
“So what happens now?” she asked, breaking the silence.
“You come with me to the border as my insurance policy until I can disappear into Europe where I’ve got someone waiting to pick me up. It will be a lot easier for me to hide there than it is here.”
“What about me?”
“Assuming everything goes as planned, and no one tries to stop me, you can head back to Morocco. There are always foreigners driving down who can give you a lift.”
So this was how it was going to end? With him dumping her off at the border of some third-world country while he disappeared? At least it would be over. Though that hung on a very big if they even made it there.
Lexi studied the road ahead of them, then looked at Trent. Just as she’d said, there was a blockade with uniformed police.
“Trent...”
“It’s not a big deal. Most of the time they just wave people on.”
He might sound in control, but she didn’t miss the edge in his voice.
“And if they don’t?” she asked. “If they stop you and ask for my passport?”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Lexi.” He pressed his lips together, then lowered his voice when he spoke again. “I’m sorry. But please. Don’t test my patience. Because I’m going to get out of this country one way or another, and I’m not afraid to do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
She felt her mouth go dry, unable to speculate if he would actually follow through with his threat as one of the uniformed police officers holding an AK-47 stepped out into the road and signaled for them to stop.
* * *
Colton caught himself tapping his fingers against his leg in the front seat of the Land Rover. He flattened out his hand. He needed an outlet for his nervous energy. No matter what had happened back there, he felt responsible. Lexi had counted on his protection and yet he’d been unable to stop her from vanishing.
“How long till we get to the main road?” he asked the lieutenant, who had taken the wheel and was driving as fast as he could across the sand back toward the coast.
“A couple miles at the most.”
He started tapping again. The problem was that once they got to the main road there was no way to say for certain if Trent had headed north or south. Or if he’d decided to hunker down in the city until things quieted down.
He dismissed the last idea immediately. Trent was smart he would want to get as far away from the authorities as possible. Which left the other two options. But even then, only one was truly viable. Heading south would take him down into the Western Sahara and Mauritania. If he were Trent, Colton would head north then take a ferry out of Tangier, a Moroccan port city on the Strait of Gibraltar, or for the right price, he could even pay someone to smuggle him across the eight mile stretch of shipping lanes into Spain.
“Which way are you planning on heading once we get to the main road?”
“Without the tracking device it’s going to be impossible to know for sure, but the logical choice is to go north.”
“Agreed,” Colton said, glad they were thinking the same thing. “But if Trent doesn’t go in that direction?”
“We’ll still find him. The man’s got nowhere to run. And on top of that we’re working closely with the Moroccan authorities, who want to find Adam Tazi’s entire network just as much as we do.”
A minute later, they turned onto the dusty main road. Stones bounced under the wheels as the lieutenant maneuvered his way through the edges of town, past camels, donkeys and herds of goats. Trucks crawled north with oversize loads next to long lines of schoolchildren walking along the road on their way home. Soon the business of the city gave way to stretches of rust-colored earth with clumps of grass and plants in the distance, along with lone, stone houses, earthen mosques, olive groves and copper mines.
But the details of the surrounding scene blurred together as Colton focused on only one thing. They had to find Lexi.
“What’s your connection with Lexi Shannon?” The lieutenant’s question broke into Colton’s thoughts. “I’ve only heard parts of your story, including your brother-in-law’s kidnapping. But even from the little I do know, it’s obvious the three of you have had a rough few days.”
“That’s an understatement.” Colton let out a low laugh, but the worry gnawing at him over Lexi’s disappearance only grew. He had no idea how Trent was going to react in a situation like this, but the man had chosen to walk away from a deal the FBI had offered him that would have lessened his time in prison. If he got caught at this point, Colton assumed that the FBI wouldn’t uphold whatever agreement had been made between them. Which meant Trent was desperate not to get caught.
“Bret was kidnapped two months ago and his kidnappers demanded two million dollars,” Colton began. “Knowing there was no way we could come up with the money, I ended up making a deal with the Malian government. And our plan worked. Sort of. At least until my plane got shot down as we were leaving.”
“Wow... You took quite a risk.”
“I didn’t exactly have a lot of options. As for Lexi, she’d been abducted the day before and was being held at the same place as my brother-in-law.”
“These kidnappings for ransom are a no-win situation,” the lieutenant said, passing a large truck filled with propane tanks. “When the ransoms are paid they become a huge source of funding for terrorist groups, which governments can’t encourage, and yet when people’s lives are at stake it suddenly becomes a complex and serious matter that just can’t be ignored.”
He was right. There was no easy resolution.
The lieutenant glanced at him. “We’ll find her. I promise. There’s no way they’ll get far. The police have their descriptions and this country’s full of speed traps and checkpoints.”
Colton nodded, but the man’s assurances didn’t erase his anxiety, or his urgency to find Lexi. He didn’t know Trent beyond what Lexi had told him, but if he was desperate enough to escape both Adam Tazi and the FBI, how far was he willing to go to secure his freedom?