She cast another dark glance over her shoulder at him. “Oh, wow, way to be transparent.”
Hugging the very edge of a five-hundred-foot drop, the path took a sharp turn upward at that point. As she looked back at him she was silhouetted against nothing but gray fog and grayer sky. For a moment there it looked as if she would fall off the side of the mountain if she took one more step, and he felt a stab of alarm over her safety.
“Quit looking back at me. Watch where you’re going,” he said irritably.
“What, are you afraid I’m going to die?”
If she’d ever been afraid of him—and she had been at first, he knew, and was also forced to admit that her fear hadn’t been without reason—she was clearly over it. Her eyes snapped at him. Her tone was caustic.
“Falling off a cliff works as well as catching a bullet for that.” His response was mild.
She made a hmmph sound but focused her attention on the trail. Climbing behind her, Cal absentmindedly admired her ass, admired her legs—he was nothing if not a multitasker—while turning the pieces of the nightmare they were trapped in over in his mind, trying to make sense of them. Seeing the bodies in that building, seeing the firepower that had turned out, the only conclusion he could reach was that they—the nameless they he couldn’t quite pin an identity on yet—somehow knew or suspected that someone had survived the crash. It was possible that pictures of his rescue had been picked up by satellite. Remembering the cloud cover, he thought it was far more likely that someone on the ground, most likely whoever had fired that surface-to-air missile, had spotted Gina pulling him from the water. They would have had to have been close enough to see what was happening, but too far away to do anything about it—like, say, shoot him and Gina both and be done.
“Tell me something: are you with the military?”
There she went again, frowning back over her shoulder at him. As precarious as the trail was, her inattention to it made him nervous. And annoyed.
“No.”
“Some kind of government agency? CIA? FBI? Something like that?”
“No.”
“You must work for somebody. Who?”
That much he could tell her. “I work for myself.”
“Is that another way of saying you’re a mercenary?”
He shrugged. “We’re all mercenaries, one way or another.”
“You know, someday I’d love to engage in that philosophical debate with you. Right now, I’d just like a straight answer.”
“I’m a private contractor. Okay? End of discussion.” His tone was short, and she made another of those hmmph noises in response. But they’d come upon a patch of ice, and she let the conversation lapse as they picked their way over it.
In the ensuing silence, he had an epiphany: if they knew someone had survived the plane crash, they probably knew it was him. He, Ezra, and Hendricks might all prompt the degree of firepower that had been summoned to deal with the threat a survivor posed—Rudy’s survival would have merited the response equivalent of a flyswatter—but Ezra and Hendricks had presumably been on the other side. Unless they’d been tricked, which he considered possible. Surface-to-air missiles had a range of only fifteen thousand feet, and there was a chance that the thirty-million deal for Rudy had been offered as a way of getting the plane to descend under that ceiling so that it could be shot down.
For safety’s sake, however, he had to presume that his sole survival was known, and all this was in his honor. The intensity with which they were going about ensuring his demise made him think, too, that this wasn’t just about Rudy’s information, or the crash of Flight 155. The way they were going full scorched-earth here, in attempting to wipe out not only him and the others on his plane but a dozen civilians as well, set off all kinds of alarm bells in his mind.
Rudy had said that there was chatter that what had befallen Flight 155 was being set to happen again to another plane. For his survival to merit this kind of response, that almost had to be true. Whoever was behind this was prepared to do whatever was necessary to protect whatever was getting ready to go down.
Cal was willing to bet all his money that another civilian airliner was getting ready to fall out of the sky.
If he was right, it wasn’t just his and Gina’s lives at stake. Hundreds of others could die.
Cal blew out a frustrated puff of air. “I’ve got to get off this damned island.”
HAVING REACHED the edge of the patch of ice she’d been negotiating with such care, Gina responded to the first words Cal had said in several minutes with a skeptical “By stealing a plane.”
“Yep.”