“Whoa! Hold on, Miss Browder.” With excruciating slowness, Crais withdrew his hand from his jacket. He held up a phone—not a gun. Noel released the breath he’d been holding and waved at her to stand down.
“Yasmine? He’s not going to kill us or turn us in. Right?” The tension in the room was so tight Noel feared it might snap at any moment.
Crais’s attention slipped from Yasmine and the gun back to Noel, a hint of a strained smile in the corner of his mouth. “Make it look convincing, Black. My hands are tied, but you’re not technically on the clock for another five days. I’ll let you follow the breadcrumbs, and I’ll have your back where I can, but I’ll also need to play along with the Department of Defense as much as possible to buy time for you to figure out what’s going on.” He shifted his attention to Yasmine again. “Sufficient, Miss Browder?”
For a moment, Noel feared she might not believe him—that she still suspected a double-cross—but she lowered the gun and nodded. “As long as you follow through, yes.”
Noel opened his palm again, but Yasmine still clung to the weapon. “You’ll have to give the Department of Defense a reason we’re not in custody, and it’ll need to be believable.”
Crais waved the phone. “I’m expecting a call at any moment to confirm that I’ve detained you both. If I answer, I’ll have to lie, and I can’t do that. If I don’t answer, you’ll have only a few minutes before reinforcements arrive.”
“What should we do?” Yasmine’s voice remained steady, to Noel’s surprise. If she felt as anxious as he did, she didn’t show it.
“You’re going to take my car keys so that I can’t be coerced into going after you,” Crais said, pulling a set of keys out of his pocket. He tossed them to Noel. “And then you’re going to knock me out.”
“Sir?”
“Based on what you’ve told me so far, Black, this is a life-or-death scenario. If I’m going to be any help to you on the inside, there can’t be any suspicion cast my way. I need to appear one hundred percent compliant with Department of Defense requests.”
Noel felt sick to his stomach. “But it’ll look like we assaulted a federal agent.” If they didn’t figure out what was going on, that action alone would end Noel’s career before he’d even started it. His hands began to shake as the consequences of what they had to do sank in.
And then Yasmine was beside him, touching his arm. “It’s okay. I won’t let you put your future, your career on the line. I’ll do it.”
“Yasmine, no.” He couldn’t ask that of her. Crais cleared his throat, and Noel stared at his mentor. “You, too?”
“If this comes back to either of you, an experienced lawyer can claim self-defense for her, whereas you’d lose your job before you checked in for your first day.”
Noel groaned and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “This can’t be happening.”
“But it is,” Yasmine said. “It’s all right, Noel. I’ll do it.”
“Time’s up,” Crais said, his voice rising. As soon as the words left his mouth, the trill of a cell phone ring cut through the silence of the safe house. “It’s my contact.”
Noel met Yasmine’s gaze and tilted his head. She nodded once in return and strode forward while Crais tossed his phone across the room as though he’d lost it in a struggle. Noel watched, overcome by a sense of helplessness as Yasmine used a curtain tie to secure Crais’s hands behind his back. As she stood up, his mentor met his gaze.
“Be careful,” he said. “This is big, Black. You make it through this and you’ll be the most promising recruit I’ve ever had the honor of mentoring. I’m sorry you were thrown into the fire before you’d even started, but I’ll do what I can from the inside.”
Before Noel could verbally extend his gratitude, Yasmine had drawn her arm back, still standing behind Crais. He realized what she meant to do only in the moment that his Glock swung down and across the side of Crais’s head. It connected with a loud thwack and the man fell over, unconscious.
Noel couldn’t stop his shout of alarm, but he also knew that Yasmine had only done what she needed to in order to protect both his and Crais’s careers in the FBI.
She extended the gun back to Noel. Her eyes were red and filled with sadness, but no tears fell. “We should get out of here. The phone isn’t ringing anymore, and Crais said we’d have only minutes to exit the place before reinforcements are sent in.”
Noel nodded, surprised to feel a strange veil of calm settling over his shoulders. Nothing was as it seemed. All he’d wanted to do was make a difference in this world, and now he’d stumbled onto something big and terrifying and totally beyond his abilities or training. But Crais believed in him, and that was the encouragement he needed to keep moving forward.
Plus, whatever came next, he wasn’t going to have to face it alone.
“Ready to run?” he asked, looking at the motionless body of his FBI mentor.
Yasmine sighed, sounding as though the events of the day had caught up with her. He didn’t blame her one bit. She crossed the room, then pulled back the edge of the curtains to look outside for a moment before dropping them back into place. “Let’s go.”
* * *
They left the house, moving as quickly as they could back to Noel’s mom’s car. Yasmine climbed into the front passenger seat.
Noel scowled at her. “What are you doing? Get back there and lie down.”
“You’re going to need an extra set of eyes, right? I can endure a little bit of pain for that.”
Noel shook his head and muttered under his breath. He reversed the car and pulled out of the driveway. They made it less than a block before he hit the brakes. “You see what I’m seeing?”
Yasmine squinted down the long residential road and groaned. A vehicle drove toward them, big enough to be a black SUV like the one that had smashed into them. “Reverse. Now.”
“Already on it.”
Here in this deserted subdivision, anything could happen, and it’d be a long time before anyone found out about it. Yasmine gripped her seat as Noel reversed and pulled back into the driveway.
“What are you doing?” She gaped at him. Had he lost his mind?
“We have Crais’s keys, so his car must be around here somewhere.” He climbed out of his mom’s car, and Yasmine followed him as he ran back toward the house. He fiddled with the gate latch to the backyard. “Come on, come on.”
Moments later, he pulled the gate open, and they dashed through.
“Uh, Noel?” Yasmine heard the sound of an engine drawing closer. They’d definitely run out of time. “I doubt Crais parked his car in the backyard, considering it’s fenced in and that’s therefore impossible.”
“True, but I have a strong hunch we’ll find the yard connects to the neighbor’s place on the other side.” He shut the gate behind him and surveyed the yard, which was fenced in with no sign of an exit save for the gate they’d entered through. They were trapped, but Noel held a finger to his lips and raced across the grass. Yasmine’s heart lurched into her throat at the crackle of tires rolling onto a driveway.
“Noel?” she whispered as loud as she could without giving away their position. Slamming doors and pounding feet told her that they were seconds away from being discovered. If anyone moved to the back of the house and looked out the blinds, they’d be seen.
Noel ran his hands along the back fence, one on their side and one overtop on the neighbor’s side. His face grew tighter and tighter until he stopped his forward motion. He waved her over with the barest hint of a smile.
Did she dare? Maybe they could wait until all of the people in the vehicle got out, then run through the front of the house and hijack the SUV—No, what was she thinking? It might be risky without cracked ribs and a body covered in bruises, but considering her injuries, it’d be impossible. She walked as fast as she could to where Noel yanked at something on the other side of the fence. He pushed on the slats in front of him. A second gate swung open, perfectly positioned along the fence to hide that it was there at all.
She slipped through and he followed, closing the gate and latching it at the same moment the glass patio door at the back of the house slid open. Noel held his finger to his lips, but Yasmine’s heart pounded a nearly deafening rhythm inside her chest. It was a wonder that that alone hadn’t given away their position.
A walkie-talkie beeped near the house, and Yasmine heard the crackle of garbled instructions through the device’s speaker. Seconds later, the glass door slid closed.
Noel held up three fingers and counted them down, lowering his fingers one by one. She shook her head. Did he remember that she couldn’t run?
Three. Two. One.
On one, Noel ran across the neighbor’s yard in a crouch, moving along the edge of the fence. Yasmine moved along the same path, but crouching was out of the question. When they reached the front of the house, Noel stood in the driveway, hands on his hips. He looked stumped.
“What did you expect to find?” Yasmine took in this new street. It looked more or less the same as the one they’d come from. “Are we holing up inside one of these places, or…?”
Noel glanced down the street again. “No. I thought we’d find Crais’s car. It’s a tactic to avoid detection, park on the other side of the fence. There’s a house and fence set up similar to this in Hogan’s Alley.”
“Hogan’s Alley?”
“Yeah, the tactical training facility at the FBI Academy.”
Yasmine pointed at the garage. “Would he have parked it in there?”
Noel’s smile sent a rush of warmth to Yasmine’s cheeks. Wordlessly he reached for the bottom of the garage door and bent his knees to raise it. The door resisted for a moment before sliding up, creaking with the sound of equipment left to decay. Yasmine winced at the noise. If anyone had been outside at the safe house, there was no way they’d have missed hearing that.
Sure enough, a shiny black Suburban sat inside the garage. Noel dug inside his pocket and pulled out Crais’s keys. He unlocked the doors and they climbed inside. Then he started the vehicle and pulled onto the street. “It figures. We’re going to have to stop for gas soon. I’ll do what I can to maximize mileage until we find a station that’s safe to pull into.”
Yasmine heard the tension in his voice, the effort to keep panic and fear from taking over.
“And there goes our lead.” He adjusted the rearview mirror and growled, “They heard us.”
Of course they had. The past two days had been nothing but a nightmare that showed no sign of stopping. Yasmine watched in the side mirror as another black SUV similar to the one they sat in pulled onto the street, closing the gap between them even as Noel increased their speed.
Within seconds, an arm snaked out the passenger side of the SUV. A gun aimed toward her and Noel as the distance that separated the vehicles grew slimmer.
For the first time since all of this had begun, a stark truth hit Yasmine right between the eyes.
They weren’t going to make it.