“Ready?” He grasped the door handle.
She didn’t look ready to face the tempest. It struck him how small she was. She looked like a beautiful bird, fragile yet fierce, unable to fly but unwilling to give up. He wanted to slam the door, wrap her in an embrace, and hold her there until they both felt the warmth of it. But there was no affection in her eyes, only stony strength that masked a fathomless pain.
“Yes,” she said, and he lifted the latch.
The gust would have ripped the handle from his grasp if he hadn’t been braced against it. An out-and-out wail of wind and moisture slashed at them. The trapdoor wasnext, and then they were climbing down, holding each rung in a death grip as they descended.
He’d gone first, not that there was much he could do to protect Mackenzie if Al and Jerry were waiting in the tempest to pick them off. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled. Nothing like clinging to a ladder a hundred feet in the air to underscore a person’s vulnerability.
“Gideon.”
He jerked a look up. She clung there with the raincoat flying around her as if she were the figurehead on a ship lashed by a typhoon. Her first attempt at communication was snatched by the wind, but he caught the second.
“Car.”
He stared in the direction she pointed, where a slender trail snaked in loops through thick trees. That was all he saw, trees, until a quick flash of movement, the bare flicker of metal mingling with a drop of moonlight. Truck or car, he couldn’t be sure.
His chest went tight. The vehicle was probably two miles in the distance, but that safe cushion wouldn’t last.
They scrambled as fast as they could down the ladder. It was only minutes, but it felt like days before his boots hit the bottom, squelching into the mud that threatened to grab hold.
She landed next, more gracefully.
They dashed to the slight shelter of a gnarled oak.
Mackenzie’s eyes were wide but not panicked. “If we take the trail we planned, they’ll catch us.”
“Agreed, but deviating will cost us more time in this valley.”
She nodded. “We have to risk it. Retrace our steps back to the stable and get to the bridge from that direction.”
“You realize we’ll be heading right into the path of our pursuers and the people who probably betrayed us.”
“That’s what you’re good at, right? All this tactical stuff?”
He quirked a grin at her. Survive, evade ... He hoped there would be no need for resistance because on that count they were outmanned, outgunned, and surrounded. Talk about surviving in enemy territory. “Yes, ma’am. That’s it exactly. We’re going to evade them in the most unexpected way possible.”
Onward they trudged, sticking to the woods as much as they could. The sun rose, lifted higher in the sky, but the light was so weak, it was as if it were in a permanent state of withdrawal. Without his waterproof watch, he would have lost all sense of time, but his stomach reminded him that they’d missed breakfast and his feet throbbed from traversing the long stretches of uneven ground. There could be no stopping if they were to outrace the water release.
After they diverted around a partial ground failure, he brought out his compass and surveyed the most direct route. There was no way to tell what specific obstacles lay in their path, topographical or human. One thing was for sure. Time was as big an enemy as Bullseye’s men.
He settled his cap more firmly on his brow.
“Let’s pick up the pace, shall we?” He’d hardly gotten the comment out of his mouth when everything changed.
Ten
Mackenzie darted a lookat the sky, but Gideon was already pulling her toward the shrubs as a helicopter rumbled through the clouds. The machine was light and agile as a dragonfly, dipping to the right and left, rain gleaming on its sides. When it flew closer, she caught a glimpse of a person in the rear, leaning out the open door, tethered, binoculars scanning, a rifle pinched under his arm.
“Bullseye’s got helicopters at his disposal? How big is his budget anyway?” Gideon snapped.
“You don’t want to know.” She scanned frantically for a hiding place as they ran.
The thickly clustered trees at the edge of a hollow beckoned, but the wide oblong of tall grass meant they would be spotted and shot well before they reached it. Gideon was urging her toward a dip in the ground where an oak tree had fallen long ago, the bark crumbling from the decaying branches.
He dove behind the tangle of wood that rose only about two feet above the grass line and she followed. How was this going to help?
“Arms up,” he said.
