Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

She consulted the directions he’d written out for her-she supposed she should be grateful for that much consideration-and turned as indicated. She kept her car at a moderate speed, not only because the road cut through dense forest, making it dark and winding, but because she needed time to reflect on her experience with Raley and prepare herself for what lay ahead. Before things could get better, they would get worse, and she dreaded that interim.

She had been on her own since her parents had died less than a year apart-her father of lung cancer when she was a senior in high school, her mother of a stroke a few months later.

As a college freshman, she hadn’t had the luxury of mourning her mother. Not wanting to skip a whole semester, she’d taken only a week off from classes to handle the funeral and deal with all the paperwork left in the wake of a sudden passing. Then she’d dusted herself off emotionally and returned to her studies, accepting that she was an orphan now and that what she made of her life was strictly up to her.

She was the beneficiary of her parents’ modest life insurance policies, which she used to finance her education. Upon graduation, she sold the family home. That had been a painful decision, as it represented a definitive severance from the only family life she’d had, but she’d needed the proceeds from that sale to subsidize the menial wages she earned at various cable stations. These jobs amounted to little more than internships, but she used them to gain experience with video cameras and editing equipment, in addition to writing and producing her reports.

At one station, in exchange for access to the editing room, she had to empty the wastepaper baskets and sweep up each night after everyone else had gone home. She didn’t like it, but she did it, telling herself that it was character building. It also earned her an extra thirty-five dollars a week.

Eventually she moved to a station with a wider viewership where she didn’t have to pull janitorial duties to augment her salary. Over the course of the next few years, she went from station to station, always moving up, learning, gaining experience, and developing her on-camera technique.

By the time the job in Charleston became available, she had acquired industry know-how along with an engaging TV persona-salable assets. Being hired as a feature reporter represented a quantum leap in her career. The job wasn’t going to make her rich, but she could afford her mortgage and good designer knockoffs.

Although she would always lament the premature deaths of both parents, she was suited to living independently. Or maybe she had embraced her solitary state only because she knew she had no choice. Either way, she was accustomed to earning her own keep and standing on her own two feet. She was reliant on no one. She was free to make decisions without interference from anyone.

Tonight, however, she wished to be not quite so free. She didn’t feel so much independent as alone, friendless, and vulnerable. These were rare and unwelcome sentiments for her, so she wasn’t sure how to cope with them. Why, after living totally on her own, was she wishing for someone on whom she could lean, from whom she could seek counsel, receive reassurance?

But there was no one, was there? Just as there had been no one when at age eighteen she’d been left parentless. Now, as then, she must accept and deal with the circumstances with as much determination and dignity as possible. She had survived so far. She would survive this.

But how could she help but be apprehensive over what the next few hours would bring? Would the policemen staked out at her house treat her kindly, or would they swarm her as she alighted from her car? Would she be handcuffed, read her rights, and hustled into a squad car before being given a chance to offer any explanation for her disappearance?

However it played out, it would be unpleasant and humiliating. She was a suspect now. The detectives wouldn’t extend her any more courtesies just because she was a television personality. Clark would be less polite, Javier more cynical. The interrogations would be more grueling.

Even if Bill Alexander acted with dispatch, he couldn’t get her released on bail until her arraignment hearing, and that wouldn’t take place until tomorrow at the earliest, requiring her to spend at least this night in police custody.

Jail. The very thought of it, even for one night, made her physically ill.

And then something even worse occurred to her. She was accused of murdering a police officer. As if that weren’t bad enough, to the court’s eye, it would appear that she had fled to avoid arrest. Thank you, Raley Gannon.

While his kidnapping stunt had given her ammunition for a more solid defense than the feeble “I don’t remember,” it also had greatly reduced her chances of being released on bail. Prospects were good that she’d be kept in jail until her trial, and God knew how long that would be.

One second she was grateful for Raley’s intrusion, because his information would be invaluable to her defense. The next second she wanted to throttle him. For a number of reasons.

When he’d grabbed her like that, why hadn’t she pushed him away or put up some kind of resistance? She hadn’t been afraid that he would hurt her. If he hadn’t harmed her in the last twenty-four hours, he wasn’t going to.

Still, she shouldn’t have just stood there and let him manhandle her like that.

Calling him a coward had been a calculated attempt to keep him talking. As much as he’d told her, there was more he had omitted. She’d deliberately goaded him, hoping to make him lose his temper and blurt out something that would help exonerate them both.

The taunt had sparked more of a reaction than she’d bargained for. And a different kind of reaction than she’d anticipated. Her ill-chosen words had given him an opening, and he’d taken it. He-

The thought was interrupted by her cell phone’s musical ring.

Automatically she reached for her handbag, then thought: My cell phone?

The two men were bored.

They were extraordinarily patient men who could sit for hours without moving, or even blinking, if the job required them to do so, but they’d rather be out and about, active, doing something instead of sitting in a room waiting for their next assignment.

They were presently playing an unambitious game of gin rummy and monitoring a telephone line on which they’d planted an illegal bug earlier today. Of all the boring aspects of their work, monitoring a telephone line was perhaps the biggest snore.

They were currently operating under the aliases of Johnson and Smith, and like the false names, the two men were practically interchangeable, having matching skills and personalities. They had no ties to anyone on the planet and had loyalty only to whoever was paying them at the time. In cash.

Their names weren’t on any rolls for taxes, driver’s licenses, Social Security, nothing. They’d left the country a decade and a half ago to fight a secret war against various factions in an African nation that few Americans had even heard of, much less could point to on a globe. There, the individuals they had been vanished. When they reentered the United States, they had different names, fingerprints, identities, and even those records had soon been destroyed.

Their employment was always temporary, but they sometimes worked for a client more than once, and they had a long list of satisfied customers-nations, cadres, individuals. They always worked as a team and were exceptionally good at what they did because they had absolutely no compunction about doing whatever was necessary to get the job done. Neither possessed a conscience. Their souls had been sacrificed in a wasteland of unimaginable violence.