"Right, will do." The driver saluted as he passed by, heading the truck another mile up the road. "Have a good day."
Odds were the guard wouldn't even look at the paperwork on his return trip.
He should've waited until dark to do this, but it'd be harder to get past the guard at night. Anyway, he'd done his homework and wanted to take advantage of the major being gone. Typically people used any excuse to get out of work. Deer season was a perfect excuse for a skeleton force.
The driver didn't encounter anyone else as he pulled around to the back of the farthest building at the base of a rock outcropping. Traveling along a worn path, he approached the aircraft landing runway. Against a shallow enclave in the rocks a natural barrier hunkered between the runway and the salt flats beyond.
He stopped and pulled his truck alongside the largest ridge. When he stepped from the truck, he could see that he'd made a good choice. The shelter effectively hid him from the view of anyone glancing out the windows.
Walking to the back of the truck, he lifted the tarp that covered a metal container. He rolled it off the tailgate and hauled it closer to the rocks. Pulling a wrinkled handkerchief from his hip pocket, he swiped at the sweat drizzling down his cheeks. He grunted as he shoved the barrel on its side and pried open the cover with a crowbar from the truck bed.
The woman tumbled from the container, her arms and legs freed from their cramped positions, her pale skin damp and slick. He checked her eyes beneath the lids, and watched as they rolled back in her head until only the whites gleamed against the ghostly hue of her face.
Pressing two fingers to her carotid, he grunted. Good, she was still alive.
He began to dig.
A hot, white thrill shot through Jack's veins like liquid fire. The muscles in his arms bulged with strain while a faint sheen of sweat beaded across his forehead.
Good, she was still alive.
He jerked up in the unfamiliar bed, feeling the humid Mediterranean air wafting in through the open window.
Good, she was still alive.
Unbidden, the thought ripped through his mind again, and along with it, the image of a wide alkaline sweep of flat sand and rocky terrain.
He'd recently travelled through Jordan to his favorite Recovery site here by the blue, blue sea in the busy, crowded city of Tel Aviv. Was the image a memory of the Dead Sea he'd just gone by? Or something else?
Good, she was still alive.
A flash of dark hair tangled around a pale face. A body tumbled onto packed, sandy ground. Undeniable pleasure tightened his groin, but it wasn't his own lust. Jack pushed it away, not understanding the source, but intuiting that it was bad. Really bad. His heart skittered in his chest, erratic and painful, as he pulled on shorts and walked out onto the balcony.
The Mediterranean Sea stretched in front of him stories below. He poured water from a carafe, leaned against the railing, and drank deeply, wondering what the hell the dream mirage meant this time.
As he turned to go inside, a sharp pain sliced through his right temple, ugly and relentless, and he staggered, braced himself against the glass pane of the sliding door. He groaned as agony seared through his head and left him panting.
After a few minutes, he recovered enough to stumble to the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face. When he looked at his reflection in the mirror, the ghostly face of a green-eyed girl with long, dark hair stared back at him. God, he hadn't thought of her in years.
What did it mean? Was she in trouble?
Chapter Four
In just a few months Olivia Gant had made a comfortable life in Sacramento. She trailed her fingers down the mahogany railing of the ancient staircase. The worn wood smelled of lemon polish and antiquity. Sunlight glinted off the stained glass windows in the foyer, refracting red, blue and gold images across the tiled entry floor.
Heading toward the bedroom, she removed her jacket and slacks as she went, stripping down to her underwear by the time she reached the bathroom. A shower, a nice hot shower, to ease her tired muscles. The first month of the school year always left her feeling a little ragged, her voice hoarse from repeated instructions to new students.
Standing under the hot shower, she let the water work its magic into her sore muscles and puzzled over the task of which staff member to place with which post-grad candidate. She decided her office mate, Dr. Howard Randolph, might be a good mentor to Ted Burrows, after all. Howard had taught at the university for years and was likely experienced at handling a charismatic, but lazy student like Ted.
That problem settled, she stepped out of the shower, slipped on a robe, and padded downstairs to pour a glass of wine. Always mindful of her mother's drinking problem, Olivia permitted herself one glass a day.
For the next several hours she pattered around the house she'd inherited last spring from her grandmother. The grandmother she hadn't even known about until her last year of graduate school when the elderly woman had contacted her out of the blue. Sarah Morse had died last spring and left Olivia this beautiful old home in Sacramento. At first she hadn't been sure she wanted the house. She'd built a solid career at Cal Berkley and was inching toward tenure. A move to the Sacramento area had been the farthest thing from her mind.
Then her floundering marriage had taken a precarious nose dive, and she'd felt both abandoned by and freed from her philandering husband. Rather than become a cliché, she'd taken a year's leave of absence and scooped up the offer from Our Lady of Fatima University. Not a practicing Catholic, she still had a healthy respect for the history and tradition of the ancient church.
In her spacious home library she began unpacking the rest of her research books. After a few minutes the door knocker sounded from the front of the house like a bomb in the quiet evening. Olivia glanced at the antique clock on the mantle. Nine-thirty. Who in the world?
Now a firm rapping set up from her porch landing. She peered through the slatted window by the front door, but saw nothing more than a shadowy shape. She hesitated, her bare feet chilly on the cold tiles of the foyer, the old fear sneaking up on her again.
Another riff of knocking caused her to jump back. "Who is it?" she asked.
"Olivia? Open the door."
"Bill?" Relief and then irritation swept over her as she unlocked the dead bolt.
Her ex-husband stood in the faint light of the landing, his brown wavy hair ruffled by the breeze. Bill Gant lived in an apartment in Oakland over his family's dry cleaning business.
"What are you doing here?" she exclaimed suspiciously. "Did you follow me?"
"I just wanted to be sure you got settled in." He jammed his fists in his jeans pockets and gave the boyish smile that had captured her heart seven years ago.
She didn't invite him in. "Surely you didn't drive from the coast in the horrible Friday-night traffic."
He shrugged. "Like I said… "
Even though Bill's marital affairs had been legend in their small circle of friends, he'd had a hard time believing the marriage was over. He'd taken nearly eighteen months to sign the divorce papers. Olivia shook her head and made her voice sharp. "You can't stay, Bill. You know that."
His pretty face tightened and his blue eyes went hard. "And you know I didn't want our marriage to be over."
"You signed the papers," she reminded him.
"You forced me into that. I told you we could work it out. I offered to go to counseling, whatever you wanted."
She was tired of the old argument. At first she'd worked hard to save her marriage. It'd taken her five years to figure out that Bill was a narcissistic womanizer, completely incapable of being faithful to one person.