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skill anybody could call on. “Lex, your Immediate Response Team can handle anything you face.”
    “Damn it, Massey! If I could call in the IRT, I wouldn’t have come here to beg you to help me with this. Do you think I would pull you into a dangerous situation if I had any other choice?”
    “Lex, last time out, I could feel the odds shifting, and a professional who should know warned me that I was operating out of my depth in a world of monsters like him. And I knew he was right about part of it, and wrong, too. I am fully capable of operating in his world, but I had to decide whether I would let go and join his world—with the monsters—or stay in this one. I know how good at this crap I am, Lex. But I owe it to Sean, Rush, and Olivia to stay alive.”
    “You’re right, Winter.” Alexa smiled weakly as she searched his eyes with hers. “You have too much here to chance sacrificing it for two strangers. But I had to ask. It all seemed so perfect in my mind. The two of us side by side again. The only person I know I can totally trust with my life. Someone who will stay on goal and succeed no matter what other people throw at him.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” he asked again.
    “Wasn’t something I could discuss over the telephone. And because I guess I thought you couldn’t refuse me if I was sitting with you when I asked.”
    “Alexa, I’m a civilian now. No badge. Even if I wanted to help you, I couldn’t do it legally. Why can’t you involve the Bureau? Locals?”
    “We go back too far for me to deceive you, Massey. I thought I couldn’t do this alone. I thought I had to have you to succeed. But I really don’t. You were my first choice, but I can go with a second or third.”
    Her smile didn’t play. Winter saw the disappointment in her eyes.
    “Tell me what the problem is,” he said.
    “You know Judge Hailey Fondren?”
    “I’ve been in his courtroom a few times on marshal business. Spoken a few times.”
    “Night before last, somebody kidnapped his daughter, Lucy Dockery, and her son, Elijah, from their home in Charlotte.”
    “So, you are here with the Immediate Response Team.”
    Alexa shook her head. “The judge didn’t call the FBI,” she said. “He couldn’t without risking their lives, so he called me for help . . . as a friend. I’ve known Hailey for years through the job. I knew Walter Dockery, his son-in-law, who was an assistant federal attorney.”
    “Fondren going to pay a ransom?”
    “This is not about money.”
    “Revenge?”
    Again, Alexa shook her head. “How much do you know about Hunter Bryce?”
    “Ex–Army colonel. Charged with killing an undercover ATF agent. Something about a weapons deal.” Winter remembered something. “Hailey Fondren’s been trying Bryce on the murder charge.”
    “Bryce was a Special Forces honcho, connected at the hip to Military Intelligence. He has powerful friends in the intelligence community, and he knows secrets about powerful people who don’t want him talking about them. His military records are mostly officially authored lies. He ended his career as a field functionary for M.I. in Afghanistan. Something happened there that should have ended in a court-martial and a life term for him and a couple of his men. Instead, Bryce was allowed to retire honorably.”
    “I’m not a big fan of shadowy men with powerful friends. I’ve never found it smart to trust any intelligence agency, and that’s based on near-death experience.”
    “Judge Fondren knows enough about Bryce to understand that his intelligence friendships extend into the Bureau, so he can’t risk any official FBI involvement in the kidnappings. Patrick Taylor, the ATF agent that Colonel Bryce killed, was a deep undercover agent who was known only to ATF personnel with top-level security clearances. Somehow Bryce found out about him.”
    Winter had seen the headlines about the high-profile trial. He despised the political nature of the