Mountain Investigation

As part of a terrorist cell, under the leadership of mastermind al-Jihad, he’d gone by the name of Lee Mawadi, and had arranged to meet Mariah because of her father’s connections to one of al-Jihad’s targets. Lee had wooed her, courted her, pretended to love her…and then he’d used her and set her up to die.

She hadn’t died, but in the years since, she hadn’t really lived, either. And now, seeing her own death in her ex-husband’s face, she cringed from him, her heart hammering against her ribs, tears leaking from her eyes.

Lee, no. Don’t! she tried to say, but the words didn’t come, and the scream stayed locked in her throat because she couldn’t move, couldn’t struggle, couldn’t do anything other than hang limply in his grasp and suck in a thin trickle of air.

Then he let go of her. She fell to the floor at the threshold of the cabin and landed hard, winding up in a tangled heap of arms and legs, lax muscles and terror.

He crouched over her, gloating as he held up the small styrette he’d used to drug her. “This is to shut you up and keep you where you belong,” he said. Then he stood, drew back his foot and kicked her in the stomach. Pain sang through her, radiating from the soft place where the blow landed. She would’ve curled around the agony, but she couldn’t do even that. She could only lie there, tears running down her face as he said, “That was for forgetting where you belong, wife. Which is by my side, no matter what.”

He grabbed her by the hood of her parka and dragged her inside, kicking the door shut.

The sound of it closing was a death knell, because Mariah knew one thing for certain: the man she’d once promised to love, honor and obey didn’t intend to let her leave the cabin alive.

Five days later

Michael Grayson was a man on a mission, and he didn’t intend to let inconsequential details like due process or official sanction interfere. Which was why, just shy of six months after he’d nearly been booted out of the FBI for sidestepping protocol, Gray was back on the edge of the line between agent and renegade, between law officer and vigilante. Only this time he was well aware of it and knew the consequences; his superiors had put him on notice, loud and clear.

The threats didn’t stop him from taking his day off to drive up through the heart of Bear Claw Canyon State Forest to the hills beyond, though, and they didn’t keep him from using a pair of bolt cutters on the padlocked gate that barred entry to a narrow access road leading up the ridgeline. Up to her house.

He drove into the forest as far as he dared, just past a fire access road that marked the two-thirds point of the journey. He tucked his four-by-four into the trees, off the main track so it couldn’t be seen easily from the road, pointing it downhill in the event that he needed to get out of there fast.

Then he started walking, staying off the main road and out of sight, just in case. As he did so, he tried to tell himself that it was recon, nothing more, that he just wanted to get a look at Lee Mawadi’s ex-wife six months after the prison break. But he couldn’t make the lie play, even inside his own skull. His gut said that Mariah Shore had secrets. There had to be a reason she’d moved into a cabin on a ridgeline that, on a clear day, provided views of both Bear Claw City and the ARX Supermax Prison.

His coworkers and superiors in the Denver field office had put zero stock in Gray’s gut feelings—which admittedly had a bit of a hit-or-miss reputation. The higher-ups had written Mariah off as nothing more than she seemed: a pretty, dark-haired woman who’d married a man in good faith, not realizing that he was using her twice over, once to create the illusion of middle-American normalcy and disguise his ties to al-Jihad’s terrorist network, and a second time to gain entrée to her family.

When the newlyweds moved to a suburb north of Bear Claw City to be close to her parents, Mariah had leaned on her father to find a job for her engineeringtrained husband within the American Mall Group, where her father had been an upper-level manager. It wasn’t until after the attacks and subsequent arrests, when the story had started coming together, that it became clear Lee had manipulated Mariah into getting him the job, just as he’d manipulated her into serving as his alibi through the first few rounds of the investigation.

Or so she had claimed. Gray hadn’t fully bought her protestations of innocence two years earlier during the original investigation, and he sure as hell hadn’t believed them more recently, when her husband had escaped. There were only so many times he could hear “I don’t know anything” before it started to wear thin, especially when the suspect’s actions said otherwise.

Mariah Chisholm, who had gone back to using her maiden name of Shore after the divorce, knew more than she was admitting. Gray was positive of it…he just couldn’t convince his jackass, rules-are-God boss, Special Agent in Charge Johnson, to lean on her harder.

Then again, SAC Johnson was in this investigation to make his career and avoid stepping on any political toes. Gray was in it for justice.

The horrific terror attacks two and a half years earlier, dubbed the “Santa Bombings,” had targeted the start of the holiday season, when families with young children had gathered at each of the American Malls to welcome the mall Santas. The bombs had been concealed in building stress points near the elaborate thrones where the Santas had sat for whispered consultations with hundreds of hopeful, holiday-crazed kids. The explosives had all gone off simultaneously, in six malls across the state. Hundreds had been killed—families destroyed in a flash—during the most joyous of seasons.

It had been an inhuman attack, directed solely at the most innocent of innocents. Terrorism in the truest sense of the word.

In the investigation immediately afterwards, a couple of sales receipts and a glitchy security camera had led the FBI agents to Lee Chisholm—who called himself Mawadi among his “real” family within the terror network—along with his co-conspirator, Muhammad Feyd, and the mastermind himself, al-Jihad. The evidence had been enough to convict the men—barely—and get them sentenced to life-plus at the ARX Supermax. The clues hadn’t seemed to point to the involvement of Mawadi’s wife, who at the time had been dealing with bad press, a quickie divorce and her father’s forced retirement and subsequent near-fatal heart attack. In the end, Mariah Chisholm, née Shore, had been cleared of suspicion as far as the higher-ups were concerned.

As far as Gray was concerned, though, they’d missed something.

He’d been part of the initial interviews of Mariah and her father, and he’d memorized all the reports—both the official file and the assembled news stories. The reports from two years earlier, during the time when Lee Mawadi had been arrested, tried and convicted, had described Mariah as “shocked,” “devastated” and “grief-stricken.” One Shakespeare of a journalist had even called her a “doe-eyed innocent played false by the man she thought she knew.”

The pictures and film clips had backed up those descriptions, showing a lovely, sad-eyed woman with curly, dark-brown hair and full lips that had trembled at all the right moments. For the most part she’d tried to avoid the cameras. On the few occasions she’d spoken publicly, she’d read prepared statements in which she had apologized for not having seen her husband of six months for what he’d been—a monster—and had urged swift justice for Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad. Even Gray, an admitted cynic, had bought the routine, all but forgetting about her once Mawadi and the others were behind bars. He’d shifted his attention away from them and focused on tracking down more of al-Jihad’s terror cells.

All that had changed the previous fall, though, when Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad had escaped from the ARX Supermax with the help of fellow prisoner Jonah Fairfax. Fairfax had proven to be a deep undercover Fed who’d been charged with flushing out al-Jihad’s contacts within U.S. law enforcement, and had planned to do so by facilitating the escape and then netting all the conspirators when they made their move. But the setup had backfired badly when it turned out that Fairfax’s superior, who had progressively isolated him over the previous two years, had turned, becoming one of al-Jihad’s assets.

In the end, Fairfax had helped al-Jihad escape, and the only conspirator he’d flushed out was his own boss, code-named Jane Doe, who had vanished in the aftermath of a foiled attack on a local stadium. The Feds and local cops had managed to recapture Muhammad Feyd, but so far he had refused to talk, which left the authorities pretty much chasing their own tails.

Worse, in the immediate aftermath of the thwarted stadium attack, Gray himself had wound up as a suspect in the conspiracy. Which was just plain stupid.

Yes, he’d failed to pass along a potentially crucial message, but that wasn’t because he’d been working for al-Jihad. He’d made the decision in a split second of distraction, a moment when his version of justice and the law had clashed and he’d gotten caught up in his own head, stuck in memories. And yeah, maybe there’d been other factors, too, but they were nothing he couldn’t handle. He could—and would—bring the bastards down. No way he was letting the Santa Bombers go free. Not now, not ever. Not after what they’d done.

The thought brought a flash of memory, of concussion and screams, and the rapid flutter of a dying child’s chest in the sterile confines of an ICU.

Shaking off the image, Gray forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. Moving silently he worked his way through the thick forest, headed for Mariah Shore’s cabin. He had no orders, no official sanction. Hell, he was on probation. He was supposed to be riding a desk, monitoring transcribed chatter and helping with the tip lines.

“I’m just out for a hike,” he murmured, keeping his voice very low, even though he hadn’t seen or heard anything to indicate that he had company. “Is it my fault I just happened to wander out of the state park and stumble on her cabin?”

It wasn’t much as plausible deniability went, but he was done with waiting around for a break that wasn’t coming. He’d helped jail Lee Mawadi, Muhammad Feyd and al-Jihad in the first place, using slightly less than orthodox methods in his zeal to gain some measure of justice for the victims of the Santa Bombings. He’d do the same thing again, even if it meant the end of his career.

“Well, well. Will you look at that?” he said, whistling quietly under his breath as the ex-wife’s isolated cabin came into view. He stopped amid the cover of a thick stand of trees and scrubby underbrush, and peered through, scoping out the scene.

It looked like Mariah had been doing some landscaping.

Originally, the cabin had been tucked into the woods, with trees very near the structure, shielding it even from satellite view. Now there was a clear-cut swath a good fifty feet in all directions, with raw stumps giving mute testimony to where trees had once stood. In one corner of the lot, a huge pile of cut and split logs sat beside a gas-powered wood splitter. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the cabin’s central chimney, indicating that someone was home, as did the vehicles parked in the side yard. One was the banged-up Jeep Mariah had registered in her name. The other was unfamiliar, a nondescript, dark-blue four-by-four SUV.

Two cars. Two people, maybe more? Gray thought, tensing further as a quiver of instinct ran through him.

When he’d asked Mariah Shore point-blank why she’d bought the forest-locked cabin no more than thirty miles from the ARX Supermax Prison, she’d claimed it was a sort of penance. She’d said she wanted to be able to see the prison on one side of her, the city of Bear Claw on the other, that she wanted to be reminded of how many lives had been destroyed because she hadn’t recognized her husband for what he was.

And maybe that explanation would’ve worked for him if she’d come off as the grief-stricken victim she’d played two years earlier. But the newer reports—some of which Gray had written himself—described her as “closed off,” “detached,” “unfriendly,” and “nervous”…which weren’t the kind of words he typically associated with innocence. They were more in line with the behavior of a woman who had something to hide.

Unfortunately—as far as Gray was concerned, anyway—a detailed check of her activities since Mawadi’s incarceration hadn’t turned up any indication that she was in contact with her ex. Heck, she’d kept almost entirely to herself, not even visiting her parents when her father had been hospitalized again a few months ago for his recurring heart problems.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and with all the available information suggesting that Mawadi, al-Jihad and Jane Doe had fled the country, SAC Johnson had ended all surveillance of Mariah Shore, despite Gray’s protests that she was one of their few remaining local links to the terrorists.

In retrospect, Gray knew he probably should’ve kept his mouth shut. Rather than making his boss take a second look at the decision, his opinion had only made Johnson dig in harder, to the point that he’d ordered Gray to stay the hell away from Mawadi’s ex-wife. But Johnson hadn’t known that she had clear-cut the area around her cabin and strung up what looked to be some serious motion-activated lights and alarms, along with a low electric fence that was no doubt intended to keep deer and other critters out of the monitored zone, lest they trigger the alarms.

She’d turned the place into a fortress.

Question was, why?

“And won’t Johnson be glad I just happened to be hiking this way?” Gray murmured, having taken up the dubious habit of talking to himself over the last few years, ever since he and Stacy had split up.

Refusing to think of his ex-wife, or how things had gone so wrong so fast after their so-called “trial” separation just before the bombings, Gray moved out of the concealing brush and eased closer to the cabin, his senses on the highest alert.

He hadn’t gone more than two paces before the door swung open, and Lee Mawadi himself stepped out onto the rustic porch. Gray froze, adrenaline shooting through him alongside a surge of vindication and the hard, hot jolt of knowing he’d been right all along.

Mariah Shore was in this conspiracy right up to her pretty little neck.

Chapter Two

Gray stayed very still. He was wearing camouflage and stood hidden behind a screening layer of trees and underbrush; as long as he didn’t move, Mawadi shouldn’t be able to see him. Gray wasn’t totally motionless, though: his blood raced through his veins and his heart pumped furiously, beating in his ears on a rhythm that said he was right, the ex-wife was part of it, after all.

And Lee Mawadi had very definitely not fled the country, as all the reports had indicated.

The bastard stood there—blond and Nordic, looselimbed and relaxed, cradling a Remington shotgun in the crook of one arm as he scanned the forest. Then he headed for the corner of the porch, shouldered the shotgun, unzipped and urinated, all the while scanning the forest. He seemed to be looking for something, but what? Had he seen Gray skulking in the trees? Was he expecting company?