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do anything he does?” She shook her head. “Foreign services around the globe have written books trying to answer that question.”
Rick gazed through the windshield, wincing at the growing ache in his arm where the bullet had grazed him. According to the highway sign they’d just passed, they were near Athens, Tennessee, about an hour outside Chattanooga. Once they reached the city, they could find some nondescript little no-tell motel off the highway and hunker down for a night. Clean up his wound and maybe plot their next move.
“When we get to Chattanooga, I should call my brother.”
She shot him a look of disbelief. “We’re not contacting anyone, Rick. We have no way of knowing whether or not Quinn sent that gunman after me. And since he’s the one who sent you, he probably has your family’s phones tapped.”
Her level of paranoia was off the charts. “But why would Quinn send me to Thurlow Gap to warn you if he was in on the assassination attempt?”
“I don’t know!” Her voice rose, tinged with fear. He stared at her, barely recognizing her as the woman he’d last seen on a street in Tablis, Kaziristan, walking away with long, confident strides, each click of her high heels against the cobblestone street ripping another shred in his heart.
Tara Brady had been brazen in her sense of control and self-reliance. She’d needed nobody.
Not even him.
Amanda Caldwell, on the other hand, might share Tara’s honey-blond hair and smoky-blue eyes, but the confidence came and went. Back at the house, with the gunman breathing down their necks, she’d been all business, her training taking over with a vengeance. But now that the adrenaline rush had faded, and they were driving into an unknown future, the fear he’d seen lurking earlier behind her eyes had crept to the surface.
She was terrified, and seeing her that way was more frightening to Rick than being shot at, back at her cabin.
“Why did you leave the CIA?” he asked. She hadn’t yet given him a satisfying answer to that question, had she?
He saw her jaw set like concrete. “Got tired of it.”
“Just like that?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I asked questions about you. Back in Kaziristan.” After the debacle that had been the beginning of the end of his career with MacLear.
Losing Amahl Dubrov to the terrorists had been the worst error he’d ever made on the job. God only knew what the al Adar rebels had done to Dubrov once they got their hands on him.
Rick never should have listened to Salvatore Beckett. He should have trusted his instincts and bugged out of Tablis with Dubrov before al Adar found them.
“Asked questions?” Amanda said when he didn’t continue.
He’d wanted to see her one more time before he headed back stateside, he remembered. He had been due back in Atlanta the next evening to attend a debriefing with Jackson Melville, MacLear’s CEO. Melville wouldn’t be pleased. Rick had known losing Dubrov might cost him his job. “It was a few weeks after we last met. I was heading back to the States. I just wanted to see you one more time before I went.”
Her expression closed like a door. “I wasn’t in Tablis anymore. You wouldn’t have been able to find me.”
“Nobody had any answers for me. So I left.”
Her gaze focused on the road ahead. She said nothing else.
He sank back against the seat, resting his head against the window. In the side mirror, traffic behind him was as light as it was on the road in front of them. They’d hit the road at just the right time—
In the mirror, a vehicle that had been just a dot on the road behind them had grown several sizes larger in the span of the few seconds his gaze had settled on the mirror.
Next to him, Amanda uttered another low oath. He looked up to find her staring at the rearview mirror, her brow furrowed. “Vehicle, coming up fast.”
“I know.” He checked the side mirror again and saw the black dot was a large black SUV bearing down on them, moving at alarming speed.