No Turning Back (3 page)

“The CIA and Luke Hutchinson?”

Sam stilled. The blood pounded in her head as she stared up at him. He knew Luke's name? How could he know it, unless her boss had sent him after her?

“Sir.”

She jerked when one of the others called out in Arabic, but the man holding her didn't break eye contact with her.

“What?”

“We need her password to access the laptop.”

The glint in his pale brown eyes intensified. His hand tightened slowly until she feared he'd fracture her mandible. “Your password.”

Uttered in that silky voice, the threat sent another wave of apprehension through her. Would they torture her if she didn't tell them? Her mind raced with all sorts of awful possibilities. They might torture her anyway, once they confirmed from her laptop who her employer was, so what difference did it make if they saw what was on it?

Teeth chattering, she opened her mouth to force the password out of her tight throat. “N-Neveah.”

“Spell it.”

She did, but halfway through, something hard punched into the wall above her.

The man holding her flinched and ducked as a fine shower of dust rained down on them. Sam's stupefied gaze traveled up in that split second and found the bullet hole in the wall a foot above her head. Someone had
shot
at them?

Oh, God, please help—

Two more sharp cracks followed, one pinging off the taxi. Sam let out a strangled cry, her heart slamming against her ribs so hard it made her dizzy. Another bullet zinged past, so close she felt a puff of air against her cheek. She shrieked. Her captor swore and released her, hitting the ground with the others amidst their shouts, rolling to his front with his rifle up to return fire.

Sam dove onto her belly and landed atop her backpack on the pavement, covering her head with her arms as she cowered into as small a target as possible. Chaos reigned around her. Men shouted in Arabic. The staccato shots of automatic gunfire popped like fireworks.

Yanking the strap of her pack, she belly-crawled as fast as she could toward the corner of the building, intent on getting around it for cover.
Almost there
. The breath exploded in and out of her lungs, muscles screaming as she scrambled to safety. Grabbing the edge of the building, she hauled her body around the edge and shrank up flat against the wall.

What the hell had just happened? Shaking, she sucked in a few breaths of air and squeezed her eyes shut, sending up another prayer that God would be paying attention this time. Cold, greasy sweat trickled down her sides, over her back and between her breasts.

The firing out in the street intensified until a continuous barrage of noise filled the air, deadly projectiles peppering the buildings and vehicles. Over the cacophony, someone screamed as if they'd been hit. She shuddered. Death squads. Had to be. Two death squads firing at each other. Pressed against the cool, shadowed wall, her panicked brain began to come out of its fog. She was free. No one was coming after her yet. This might be her only chance. Whipping her head to the side, she glanced down the deserted alleyway and back toward the street. Then she took off.

Run. Run!

With the speed borne of terror, she burst from her hiding spot and tore as fast as she could down the alley to the first thing she could hide behind— a dumpster. She waited a few breaths, lungs heaving. Convinced no one was following yet, she darted out again and sprinted on, whipping around the next corner.

With her skin crawling like a sniper's crosshairs were lined up on her back, she ran, heedless of the stares she elicited. She ran until the stitch in her side burned like a hot poker between her ribs, until her quads trembled with fatigue. Sweat poured off her, rank with her fear. Even when she slowed, her lungs about to explode, she kept jogging, zigzagging through the back streets. Every cell screamed at her to get as far away as she could.

She must have run for more than fifteen minutes before she had to stop and collapsed forward, hands resting on her knees as she fought to fill her starving lungs. Still the sense of urgency pushed at her.
Keep going, keep going...

Sam forced her exhausted body onward, driving it past its limits, fueled by adrenaline and the fierce will to survive.

If she was going to die today, it would be from a heart attack or heat stroke, not an assassin's bullet.

Two days later

Baghdad, morning

Ben Sinclair stood outside Sam's apartment with a 9 mm Beretta in his right hand and his left curled around the doorknob. His fraternal twin, Rhys, stood ready behind him, a looming presence at six and a half feet tall with a build like a heavyweight fighter.

“Let's do this,” Rhys growled.

For an instant, Ben hesitated. They'd already lost one teammate in the truck bombing at their compound, then Dec and Bryn, plus two other members had been injured in the Basra op. Their leader Luke was still in the hospital down there from the same friendly fire incident that had taken Dec and some of his SEALs out. Could Sam have been behind any of that? He liked to think not.

The tension in him ramped up another few notches as he tightened his grip on the knob. He wasn't really sure he wanted to find out what was inside. He didn't want to confirm she'd set them all up to die.

Ben's expression hardened. Screw it, he thought, and twisted it open. Aiming his weapon through the doorway, he stepped in. The place was dark and quiet. With his brother at his back, they swept through the rooms, silent as ghosts.

“Clear,” he said.

“Clear,” Rhys echoed.

Not that they'd really expected to find anyone waiting for them. Still, both of them were paranoid enough to take every precaution. Holstering his weapon, Ben went back to the desk in the living room and started looking for evidence. Her laptop was gone. BlackBerry, too. She hadn't left any other electronic devices behind except for an iPod she'd put away neatly in one of the drawers, all of its little wires and cables individually wrapped with twist ties to keep them from getting tangled. So very Sam.

Whatever else she was, Samarra Wallace was a neat freak. Daughter of a well-respected American archaeologist, she'd been named after the Iraqi city of Samarra. Ironic that she'd wound up stationed in Baghdad.

Like everything else in her home, the desk was immaculate. Everything was stacked just so, each item in its proper place. The top drawer housed a little tray with dividers separating paper clips and thumb tacks from elastic bands, post-it notes and spare batteries. Not your average junk drawer. She'd sorted her mail into little wicker baskets on the desk and labeled them with a P-touch. Her fricking pens were all capped and standing end down in a little holder next to a color-coded stack of office supplies, also labeled with a P-touch.

Little OCD, Sam?

The devil in him wanted to rifle through the desk and mess everything up, just to get a rise out of her. He smothered the impulse, but even after all his years of military discipline it wasn't easy for him. If he was honest, he owed whatever he'd learned about self-control to his iron-willed twin. Judging by what he saw in front of him, Miss Wallace shared the same control-freak tendencies his brother did.

The meticulously organized way she kept her things made Ben feel worse about this whole situation. It meant they were dealing with a woman who was anything but careless. He already knew she was intelligent and charming. All right, wicked smart and charming. She had an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree from MIT, after all. But standing in her living room, he had to wonder if the whole time he'd been looking at her and seeing an efficient, reliable teammate, she was really a cold-hearted, calculating bitch who'd sold them all out to the same terrorists they were tracking. Could she really have duped him and all the others like that?

She'd sent him a text message while Rhys and the others had been out doing the op in Basra that bothered him more than anything else.

Intel leakd. Op cmpmisd. Abort.

If she was up to no good, why had she bothered to warn him at all? To try and clear her name? As the acid in his stomach started to churn, Ben groped in his pocket for the roll of Tums he kept on hand, and popped two into his mouth. Goddamn, he was going to have an ulcer before this was all over. If he didn't already. His friend Bryn had been kidnapped and nearly killed in the op two days ago, and his guts still hadn't recovered. This thing with Sam was making it worse.

“Anything?”

Ben turned his head toward Rhys, standing in the kitchen doorway. Man, the guy could be a giant pain in the ass, but he'd been so glad to see him in one piece after that botched op he could almost forgive him for being such a hard-ass. “No. You?”

“The picture of her and her cousin is missing.”

Ben remembered Rhys staring intently at it when they'd come to Sam's aid the other day. When they'd found those damn transmitters.

“Must have taken it when she left.”

Ben grunted. That was the thing. Her disappearance seemed carefully planned, and the fact that it was premeditated left him wondering about her involvement. But why would anybody run if they were innocent? If she was in trouble, why hadn't she contacted him or his brother like she had when she'd found the first transmitter? She had no reason not to trust them. So why would she have disappeared off the radar and gone AWOL like this? It didn't feel right. None of it did.

“Like to get my hands on that photo,” Rhys continued. “Thought I saw someone in the background I recognized, but it doesn't do us any good now. You checked her room yet?”

“Just about to.” They went to her bedroom together.

Neat as a goddamn show home. Not a scrap of clothing on the floor, not a single wrinkle in the bedspread. Only thing that pointed to her hasty getaway was the fact she'd left the closet open a little, and some of the hangers were empty. From the looks of it, she'd only taken a few things, so she was traveling light. Ben couldn't help but notice all the clothes were organized perfectly, too. By color, for the love of God. The hangers were evenly spaced, and he was willing to bet if he took out a tape measure, they'd all be pretty damn close to an inch apart. For interest's sake, he pulled open the drawers and saw even her bras and underwear— most bore Victoria's Secret labels, he noted with approval— were organized by color and folded neatly too.

Jesus, who
lived
like that? Talk about control issues. No wonder she and Rhys got along so well.

“Bathroom's clean.”

Well, no surprise there. Ben moved to the connecting bath and peered around Rhys’ wide shoulders. Clean was right. Damn, except for a few empty shelves that told him she'd taken some things, the place looked like a photo shoot in a magazine. All gleaming and orderly, no clutter. How could she stand being so damned organized?

“She didn't take much,” Rhys added. “Maybe she just wanted to get away until the dust settles.”

Yeah, or maybe hop a flight and get out of the country for good. “You still think she might be innocent?” Rhys had a better sense of her character because he'd worked with her before.

“She's not the type for subterfuge. Doesn't play games.” Rhys shrugged. “We don't know what happened to her. She might have been threatened.”

Yeah, but then why wouldn't she have gone to them for help? Ben scrubbed a hand over his face and scratched the goatee he'd grown in an effort to appear more Middle Eastern, though when he wasn't wearing shades his light green eyes killed any chance of that. “Want to look around some more, or are you good?”

“I'm good. She wouldn't have left anything incriminating behind if she was guilty anyway. She's way too smart for that.”

Wonderful. Even Rhys, who knew Sam better than any of them, thought their chances of tracking her were pretty much nil. Since they were all ex-Special Ops soldiers, that said a lot, didn't it? “So what now? Want to check in with Davis?”

The former Green Beret and resident CIA spook was out scouring the city to find whatever intel he could about their darling Sam. At Rhys’ nod, Ben dug out his phone and called Davis. While waiting for the call to connect, he thought about Luke back in the hospital in Basra. Dude was going to be out of action for a while yet, and that had to drive him mental— edgy, controlling bastard that he was. At least Dec and Bryn were safe back in the States, but they'd lost Ali in the bombing, Fahdi because of it, and now Sam and Luke too. Their team was down to three members now.

“Hey,” he said when Davis picked up. “We're at Sam's place, but didn't find anything. Got any news?” He glanced around the tidy apartment, mindful of the transmitters they'd found planted in the smoke detector, phone and behind a painting. He didn't delude himself they'd found all of them. Someone was probably watching and listening to them right now.

As Davis’ words registered, Ben's heart leapt. “
What?
”

He met Rhys’ sharp gaze as his jaw tensed. Hanging up, he shook his head. “Apparently Sam was caught at a fake checkpoint yesterday in a cab. Driver said three armed men hauled her off, then a firefight broke out between whoever grabbed her and another militia. Police found her passport next to the bullet-riddled taxi she'd been in. So far there's no match from the blood samples they've collected.”

“Jesus. Mahdi army?”

The uncharacteristic worry on his controlled twin's face sent another wave of dread through Ben.

He swallowed. “Looks like.” The Mahdi Army were Shi'a. Known to be linked to the terrorist mastermind they'd been hunting.

Ben ran a hand through his short hair. Holy shit, if it was true, then Farouk Tehrazzi could have orchestrated the whole thing, from Fahdi planting the bomb that had killed Ali, to the ambush the team had walked into in Basra. His guts clenched with fear for Sam. She might have been tortured for information. Raped. Christ, if Tehrazzi was behind this, she was probably already dead, and knowing that sick fuck, it hadn't been quick or kind.