Secret Assignment (6 page)

A third man circled around, moving with more speed than stealth. Through the pine fronds sheltering his hiding place, Gideon saw the leader wheel around aggressively as he reached them. Even though the third man was the largest of the three by far, he took a faltering step back as the leader hissed his displeasure.

“Stupid idiot, what part of silent force don’t you understand?”

“No sign of Stone,” the big man said in a growling bass. “I thought you said he would be trouble.”

“He will,” the leader said. “He’s already on guard, thanks to the misstep earlier,” the leaders said. “If we give him more time to shore up his defenses, we may not get a second chance. He thought he won today. He thinks he has time.”

“Arrogant son of a bitch,” Midwest muttered.

Gideon frowned. That remark sounded personal.

The men moved forward toward the house, away from Gideon’s hiding place. With their backs to him, he took a chance to check his watch. Five past ten, and still no horn.

Where was Shannon?

* * *

“
G
IDEON’S NOT GOING
to be happy that I’m letting you wander out here while there are intruders about,” Shannon whispered to Lydia as she followed the older woman through the high sea grass behind the caretaker’s cottage.

“He asked you to sound the horn,” Lydia said sensibly. “We need to find out why the switch didn’t work. And because you don’t know how the contraption works and I do...”

They’d already checked the electrical connection to the house and found that the circuit appeared to be intact. “The problem must be on the lighthouse end,” Lydia had told her solemnly. “The lines between the lighthouse and here run underground,” she added, showing Shannon where the cable ran down into the sandy soil. “We have to go to the lighthouse to see if someone has disabled the horn on that end.”

Shannon hadn’t protested Lydia’s pronouncement at first, her mind on Gideon somewhere out in the woods, outnumbered at least three to one. But the farther they walked from the house, the more vulnerable she felt.

Gideon had told her to stay put, and while she wasn’t the sort of woman who needed a man to make her decisions for her, she knew the odds were against a natural explanation for the switch malfunction. More likely, someone had sabotaged the switch at the lighthouse.

Would that someone be guarding his handiwork? Were they walking into a trap?

She kept her hand on the butt of her GLOCK as she walked through the sand, her calves beginning to ache from the extra exertion. Up ahead, Nightshade Island Lighthouse glowed as pale as alabaster in the blue moonlight peeking through scudding clouds overhead.

“There are two places where the connection could have been disrupted,” Lydia whispered as they neared the base of the lighthouse. “Here, where it comes out of the building and goes through a circuit box. And then there’s also a connection up in the lighthouse itself.”

Using a small penlight Shannon had grabbed from her duffel bag, they examined the connector. “It looks all right,” Shannon murmured.

“That leaves the direct connection to the horn at the top,” Lydia said, gazing up at the tall lighthouse. “There’s a spiral staircase inside that leads to the service room and then up to the lantern room at the top, where the beacon is located. The beacon no longer works, but Gideon had an electrician from the mainland rig the horn. It’s located on the catwalk outside the service room.” Bathed with moonlight, her face creased with regret. “I’m afraid I can’t manage all those stairs with my arthritic knees. You’ll have to check it.”

“How will I know if it’s connected?”

“I’m not sure, but I suspect if it’s been tampered with, you’ll know.”

“You’ll have to stand guard,” Shannon said, hating the idea of leaving Lydia alone. “I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”

She opened the faded wood door of the lighthouse, her nerves twitching as her footsteps on the stone floor echoed up the tall structure. With her penlight, she traced the curve of the spiral staircase. At the top, there seemed to be a large, enclosed platform. That must be the service room.

She started up the steps, keeping her gaze directed upward. The steps were rusted but seemed sound enough, though the creaks and groans of metal echoed through the stone tower as she climbed.

She was breathing hard and her legs were shaking by the time she reached the service room, although she suspected fear, more than exertion, was the source of her weakness. She leaned against the damp stone wall and flashed her penlight around, taking in the small space.

There was little left of whatever had been inside the service room when the place was a working lighthouse. A rickety table, missing one leg and lying in a lopsided heap against one wall, took up half the space. Fortunately, it didn’t block the door that led out to the narrow catwalk circling the lighthouse. Light seeped in through a cracked and dirty window. From elsewhere—either the broken window or the narrow space beneath the door—a draft blew in, cool and fragrant with the sea.

Heart racing, Shannon opened the door and crept out onto the metal catwalk. With the Gulf of Mexico spreading around the island as far as the eye could see, she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t standing on a rusted metal platform thirty feet in the air. She’d never considered herself afraid of heights, but that perception was about to be tested.

The foghorns were a pair of long metal horns that jutted out from a flat platform about ten feet to Shannon’s left. Walking closer to the horns, she saw that whatever mechanism created their sound was back in the service room after all. She started to head back inside but paused, reorienting herself until she faced east, toward the wooded part of the island where Gideon had disappeared.

Suddenly, the air split with the booming moan of the foghorn, the sound rattling the catwalk beneath her feet. Shannon stumbled to her hands and knees, the penlight bouncing off the metal slats of the catwalk and tumbling over the side. The whole lighthouse seemed to vibrate with the horn’s basso profundo, as if the structure was about to collapse in on itself and sink into the sandy earth below.

Shannon crawled to the door of the service room, dizzy from the loud vibrations of the horn. It took a second, therefore, to realize what she was seeing in front of her.

The door to the service room, which she had most certainly left open when she went out onto the catwalk, was now closed.

* * *

T
HE FOGHORN’S PLAINTIVE
moan finally filled the air, sending birds rising from their treetop perches and soaring into the air in a cloud of dark silhouettes against the moonlit sky.

Ahead of Gideon, the three men froze only a hundred yards from Stafford House. Gideon crouched low, keeping an eye on them from behind the cover of a palmetto bush. He squeezed himself into a tighter ball as the men started moving quickly toward him, away from the house.

“I thought you said it was handled,” the leader spat at Midwest.

“It was!”

“If that horn doesn’t stop in five minutes, there’ll be a rescue crew from the mainland,” the big man growled. “I talked to a guy at the marina this afternoon when we regrouped.”

“We can’t get back there and stop it in five minutes,” Midwest complained.

“Then we need to abort,” the leader said firmly. “Again.”

They passed Gideon’s hiding place, moving at a fast march through the woods. A fourth dark shape glided out of the woods to join them on the fast trek back to the shoreline. They weren’t even trying for stealth now.

As they moved farther away from Gideon’s hiding place, he was torn between following and heading back to Stafford House to make sure Shannon and Mrs. Ross were okay.

He couldn’t be sure there were only four men on the island. There could be a whole other intruder force holding Lydia and Shannon captive at this very moment.

He watched only long enough to see the four men pile into the Zodiac. The engine started with a low roar and then they were dark shapes moving across the moonlit Gulf.

With his heart in his throat, he started running toward the house.

* * *

G
ROPING TO HER
feet, Shannon pressed herself flat against the stone wall of the lighthouse, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes shut against another rush of dizziness. She tried the handle of the service room door and discovered, to her profound relief, that it was unlocked.

She pushed it open and stumbled inside. The sound of the horns was still loud, but the stone walls muted it enough that her ears stopped ringing and her head quit spinning. She dropped her hands away from her ears and peered into the gloom of the service room, wishing she had the penlight back.

There was enough light from the moon outside, pouring through the service room door, to see the path to the spiral stairway. From there, she could hold on to the rail and feel her way down to the bottom.

She paused at the top of the staircase, looking back into the murky bowels of the small room. She had a strange sense, all of a sudden, that she wasn’t alone.

“Hello?” she whispered. She couldn’t hear herself over the low keening of the foghorn.

Her eyes strained to see into the deepest shadows of the small room, and for a second, she fancied she saw a hint of movement. Fight-or-flight instincts kicking in, she started down the spiral staircase with more speed than was probably wise. Nevertheless, she made it down to the bottom with only one terrifying stumble and burst out of the lighthouse at a fast clip.

Lydia was waiting for her, her hands over her ears. “You did it,” she said, her voice barely audible over the sound of the horn.

“I didn’t touch the horns,” Shannon replied as they hurried back through the sea grass to the caretaker’s house. “They just came on while I was on the catwalk—literally knocked me to my knees.”

“Let’s go inside.” Lydia grabbed her hand and pulled her to the stairs leading up to a wooden deck at the back of the caretaker’s house. The door was unlocked, offering no barrier to their entry.

“Better!” Lydia said with a sigh of relief, shutting the door, and much of the noise, behind them. “I wonder how the horn fixed itself?”

“Perhaps the connector up in the service room is loose, and wind blowing through the cracked window knocked it back into place?”

“Perhaps.” Lydia shrugged, leading Shannon through the darkened house as if she had the entire layout memorized. Perhaps she did. The house had been in her family for years, no matter who lived in it now.

It was hard to make out much in the gloom. Shannon got the impression of large furniture in sparing doses, which seemed to fit what she knew of Gideon Stone. He needed big things because he was a big man, but he probably didn’t care much for clutter taking up the remaining space.

“This house used to be my son’s. He would live here on the rare occasions he was home on leave.”

The son who had died saving Gideon Stone’s life, Shannon thought, wondering how Gideon felt, living here in a place that had once belonged to his friend. “You must miss him terribly.”

“We all do.” Lydia’s hand caught hers briefly. “We knew it was a possibility—a soldier’s family doesn’t send their loved one to war without knowing the potential costs. But we never really believed it would happen to us. We couldn’t let ourselves think about it, or we’d go insane.”

Shannon had seen two brothers go off to war. Several of her cousins had served their country as well. She’d been fortunate not to lose any of them, although she’d mourned with her sister Megan after the death of Megan’s husband, Vince, in what they’d thought at the time was a combat death.

Thoughts of Vince’s death led her mind straight to Gideon, who was still out there in the woods somewhere, surrounded by at least three men whose motives for being on this island were suspect in the extreme. “Do you think we should go back to the house?” she asked Lydia. “If Gideon doesn’t find us there, what will he think?”

“Nothing good,” Lydia admitted. For the first time since the ordeal began, Lydia sounded like a woman in her late sixties. “I am almost afraid to hope he’s survived unscathed,” she said in a weak voice. “I’m afraid I have become more accustomed to loss these days than not.”

Shannon put her arm around the older woman. “I don’t know Gideon very well, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty sure about, it’s that he’s a big, tough guy who knows how to take care of himself. They don’t call marines Devil Dogs for nothing, right?”

Lydia managed a smile. “My husband was appalled that Ford—our son—joined the Marine Corps. Edward was a soldier, through and through. Only the army was good enough for him.”

“One of my cousins was in the navy, and two of his younger brothers were marines. He thinks they’re lower than pig snot.” At Lydia’s surprised laugh, Shannon chuckled a little herself. “Not that he really thinks that—Sam and Luke are both the best, and J.D. knows it. But families are like that, I guess. Got to keep everyone in the right pecking order.”

“I wish we’d given Ford a brother or sister. Perhaps it would be easier—” Lydia stopped and shook her head. “I don’t suppose anything would make it easier.”

Shannon started to respond, but a faint scrape outside the door stopped her in mid-breath. She tugged Lydia behind her and pulled her GLOCK, edging her way forward.

There was no peephole in the front door, only a narrow pane of glass about five and a half feet above the ground, clearly placed there by a tall man, because she had to rise on tiptoes to see anything.

A large, shadowy figure climbed the last porch step and scooted out of sight, moving quickly and smoothly.

“Someone’s outside,” she whispered to Lydia.

“Is it Gideon?”

“I can’t tell,” she whispered back. “You need to find someplace to hide, Lydia.”

“My Remington and I will stay right here,” Lydia retorted. She cocked the rifle for emphasis, making Shannon grin in spite of the terror rising like bile in her throat.

A faint rattle of the door handle set her into motion. She slid sideways to flatten herself against the wall by the door.

Like all Cooper Security employees, including clerks and interns, Shannon had undergone rigorous self-defense and crisis management courses before she’d been allowed to work for the company. One of the things she’d been taught was how to disarm an armed intruder.