Meg Gardiner - The Nightmare Thief

Gabe scanned the crown of the forest. All around, covering the mountainside, were lodgepole pine, white fir, and dogwoods turning crimson. He pointed at a soaring conifer whose dusty green boughs spread above them.

“That’s Jeffrey pine. It only grows above six thousand feet.” He smiled at her, a challenge. “Still way too low to worry about supplemental oxygen.”

“Yeah, sure—you could have HALO jumped and beaten me here. No need to brag.”

“Nah. The government gets annoyed when a PJ uses Air National Guard resources to meet his girlfriend for a date.”

He set his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. He looked like he was in fighting trim, and he was talking like it too, as a deflective mechanism. But he couldn’t keep Jo from surreptitiously doing a visual sweep of his vital signs.

His skin tone was good: bronze, with a ruddy glow from the hike. Respirations were rapid, but that could be expected because of the altitude. His pulse was strong. She could see it beating in his neck, where it met the line of his jaw. His eyes were clear, dark, and focused. On her.

She slid her arms around him and kissed that beating pulse point. Wordlessly he pulled her tight against him and held her. She felt him breathing. He kissed the top of her head and then she tilted her face up and he kissed her right, on the lips. Twice.

Then he smiled, patted her backside, and picked up his pack again. “Wasting daylight, campers.”

Jo saluted. Don’t make a big deal out of it.

But she couldn’t stop herself from keeping an eye on him. Tough cookie didn’t begin to describe Gabe, even on his worst day. And today was far from his worst.

He was strong and young and resilient. But he hadn’t fully recuperated from being shot in the chest with a 9 mm bullet.

He had only recently returned to work with the California Air National Guard, and to grad school at the University of San Francisco. He had not yet received medical clearance to return to active military duty. He hadn’t put back on all the weight he’d lost in the hospital or recovered his stamina. A patch of sweat darkened his USF T-shirt between the shoulder blades. He still had a considerable amount of pain, which he refused to dampen with medication.

That, Jo knew, stemmed from pride and machismo and the determination to provide a clean and sober example to Sophie. And it stemmed from being a PJ, a pararescueman, with the Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. Gabe worked search and rescue on land, sea, and air. And when on active duty, he performed CSAR, combat search and rescue, sometimes leaping into firefights from thirty thousand feet, using HALO parachute jumps—high altitude, low opening—designed to maximize stealth and speed and a PJ’s chances of reaching the scene of the rescue alive.

Jo followed him along the crest of the ridge, through slices of sunlight in the cool air. The terrain was dry and spare and wild, beautiful and incredibly quiet. Looking up, past the green tops of the pines, she saw only sere blue. Her footfalls landed softly on dirt and pine needles. Beyond them she heard the rustle of the breeze through the boughs of the trees. The only signs of human encroachment were power lines strung from metal pylons that towered atop nearby ridges in the mountain range. The lines skimmed high above gorges and rivers, and for a moment Jo wished she could simply hang a zip line from one and slide directly toward the mine.

Gabe followed her gaze. “No way.”

She laughed. Ahead, the trail switchbacked to the bottom of a ravine before crossing a rocky stream and climbing up the other side. But upstream, where the slope steepened and began its climb to the timberline and snowcapped crags of the high Sierra, power pylons stood on opposite ridges of the ravine, linked by an aluminum catwalk.

“It would cut three miles off our trip. Save us a couple of hours and hundreds of feet of climbing,” she said.

Gabe leaned toward her. “Bzz.”

“Okay, there’s high voltage, and the danger that the bridge would collapse.”

“If it’s thrills you want, let’s get out of here and get a room. So come on and examine this mine, pronto.”

“Right.”

They had a reservation for the night at the Lodge at the Falls in Yosemite. That meant a couple of hours driving still to come, after the hike out. The wind sent a shiver through the trees. It sent a shiver through her as well.

Phelps Wylie would never have chosen this as an afternoon’s recreation.

Maybe he had taken a joyride in his warm, luxurious Mercedes, listening to Madama Butterfly on his German stereo system. But he never would have driven two hundred miles from home into a mountain range where, not much more than a century earlier, the Donner Party had become trapped for the winter and ended up eating each other.

Wylie’s death was no accident.

“Wylie had a map. Or he had a guide. He had some reason for being up here.”

Gabe glanced over his shoulder. “Not a good one.”

“Got that right, Sergeant.” A gust lifted her hair from her collar. “Okay, let’s pick it up. This wind is only going to get stronger. And we’re going to lose the sun.”

Gabe nodded. “Weather’s coming.”

She felt a cold thread skim past her, like a hundred pinhead snakes. Bad vibe about covered it. “Let’s move.”

Chapter 7 Contents Cover Title Page The Nightmare Thief Meg Gardiner Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Acknowledgements About the Author Also by Meg Gardiner Copyright About the Publisher

Haugen eased off the throttle. As the speedboat settled lower in the water he counted the people on the shore ahead, running toward the beach.

Three women, four men. What was an extra man doing there?

“Maybe it’s a random picnicker,” Von said.

Haugen’s jaw tightened. “Who runs toward a boat driven by men in ski masks?”

Von didn’t reply.

The boat crept forward. The wind raised spray on the water. Haugen tented a hand over his forehead to cut the glare, then adjusted his sunglasses to get a clearer view of the extra man on the beach. With a start, he was reminded that these weren’t his prescription pair. He had purchased these sunglasses this morning with cash, just as he had purchased his black work boots and gloves and pants with cash, all at separate stores, and had bought his black tactical gear online through a corporate account that couldn’t be linked to him. Should anybody report his description to the police, nothing he wore could tie Viking, the kidnapper, to Dane Haugen.

But as a consequence, he couldn’t get a crisp view of the people on the sand. He grimaced and covered. “We’ll find out who it is in sixty seconds. We play it by the book, until we have to play it by ear. Follow my lead.”

“No shooting,” Von said. The black mask, stretched across his basketball of a head, rendered his expression unreadable. But complaint was in his voice.

Haugen turned his head toward the man. Haugen’s dead-eyed glare was hidden, but Von still cringed, intimidated. Good.