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changes that were coming up in his career, and he couldn’t expect her to know what he was giving up. Nevertheless, she ought to know him well enough to understand that he was, above all, responsible. “What are you getting at?”
    “Has it occurred to you that the intruders at my cabin might not be enemies of my parents? They might be someone connected to your terrorist cell.”
    Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had acknowledged and dismissed that possibility. “They wouldn’t know about you. You’re not my wife.”
    “Over the past couple of months, you’ve sent me a lot of baby presents, emails and flowers. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out our relationship.”
    She was right. The attempted kidnapping could be because of his work. It might be his fault that she was in danger.

Chapter Four
    After he’d ordered room service and Olivia had retreated to the bedroom to contact her parents, Troy used his secure cell phone to place a call to Gunnery Sergeant Blaine Nelson, who had recently taken Troy’s place as the leader for their seven-man special ops team.
    Nelson answered his phone with a yawn. It was two hours later at Camp Lejeune on the North Carolina coast but still too early for Nelson to be asleep. Troy wasted no time with pleasantries. “I have a situation.”
    “Where the hell are you?”
    “Wake up, Gunny. I need intel on the whereabouts of the terrorist cell, and I need it now.”
    “Yes, sir, Captain Weathers, sir.”
    Troy couldn’t help grinning at the overly formal form of address. “What are you trying to tell me, Nelson?”
    “That you’re being a pain in the butt, sir.”
    “Duly noted,” Troy said. “Give me an update.”
    “Nothing’s changed since this morning when you left. We can’t pinpoint locations, but chatter indicates that they’re planning their attack in New York City.”
    “I want you to trace any possible connection to Colorado. There’s been a threat.”
    “No joke? Fill me in.” Nelson was now fully alert. He and Troy had worked together for eight years. They were more than associates, more than friends. They were as close as brothers. “What’s the nature of this threat?”
    “Somebody’s after Olivia,” he said. “She’s had the feeling that she’s being watched. About an hour ago, an intruder broke into her cabin. It could be a kidnap attempt.”
    “Do you think the guys we’ve been tracking are behind it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Their code name for this terrorist group was Hatari, the Swahili word for danger, and they were based in Rwanda. Troy and his team had been responsible for capturing two of their leaders while they were investigating a totally unrelated issue in Africa. If the cell in the U.S. planned to grab Olivia, it could be meant as payback for Troy.
    “You said they were tailing her,” Nelson said thoughtfully. “That doesn’t sound like Hatari.”
    Troy agreed. The M.O. for these terrorists was anything but subtle. In their home country, they were responsible for wiping out villages, poisoning wells, burning fields and decimating entire families. They went in with guns blazing, operating under the premise that more firepower was better. If they wanted to threaten him using Olivia, they would have killed her.
    But Colorado wasn’t their homeland. And the U.S. cell of Hatari was operating under a different set of priorities. They had hooked up with a man whose alias was Kruger—the name he’d used when he’d disappeared off the radar twenty-two years ago. Kruger was under such deep cover that he was nearly transparent. Though he’d lived in the United States, his current identity was unknown. He had no fingerprints on file. There were no existing photographs of him.
    “Kruger could be running the show,” Troy said. “He might be inclined to pull a kidnapping and use Olivia to force my hand.”
    “Wish we knew more about him. He’s a ghost, an old-school kind of spook.”
    Similar to Olivia’s dad and mom.