Perfect Stranger (13 page)

These sons of bitches
wanted him to hunt them, to find Chloe. They wanted him to
fear
for her as though
this were some twisted form of punishment.

Well, he did fear for her.

And now they would get his undivided
attention and the retribution he thirsted to give them.

Jericho grinned as one of the men called the
other over to light a cigarette, lifting the pack in the air. The
man looked at the cabin hesitantly, but crossed the yard to meet
the one with the pack. They exchanged pack for lighter.

He switched his weapon to semi-automatic,
and two quick blasts from his SCAR sent the patrols to the ground,
their weapons and cigarettes flying from their hands, their bodies
dropping to the ground.

The door to the cabin quickly flew open. As
the men spilled out and came off the small porch, they spotted
their fellow brethren. They instantly began shouting and spraying
the area with rounds. As they reloaded, one hedged over to the two
lying on the ground and shouted to the others that they were indeed
dead. Another joined him the yard to scan the area, but the last
man stayed on the covered porch with his weapon lifted.

Jericho stayed put, hoping he wouldn’t be
hit as more shots were fired into the surrounding area.

As a bullet whizzed overhead, Jericho sent a
whoosh of air from his lungs and squeezed the trigger of his own
weapon.

His target moved at the last second, and the
bullet struck his cheek. He ducked, yelling, and the other two
followed suit. Jericho growled low and squeezed the trigger
again.

The dead man fell in the path of his friend,
and the one man left in the yard tripped over him, scrambled,
tangled in the weeds. He cried out as he lifted his weapon, trying
to regain his footing, and shot at the same time. His lower
position threatened Jericho with more accurate shots only because
they were now on the same level.

"Shit!" Jericho hissed. A bullet whizzed
past his ear.

The remaining man on the porch backed into
the cabin. A stab of dread knifed at Jericho, and fearing for
Chloe, he leapt from the brush. He fired once at the man in the
yard, and his SCAR jammed. With a curse, he sped up, dropping the
useless weapon to push back on its strap.

The man fired at him again, but Jericho
dodged the round and leapt on him, knocking the man out with his
fist. He had no more time to spare for this one. He wanted Chloe
safe, and he needed to know where she was.

Jericho scrambled to stand, but at the same
instant caught sight of the man dragging her from the cabin. He
immediately drew from his leg holster. The man yanked Chloe in
front of him as a shield.

Coward
.

"Let her go," Jericho shouted to him. "She
has nothing to do with this. Your fight is with me," he
shouted.

"No," the man said in a thick Middle Eastern
accent. He lifted a weapon to point at Chloe's temple.

She whimpered against a gag, trying
desperately to pull the man's arm away where he grasped around her
shoulders, holding her close.

Jericho remained as calm as he could. "Don’t
hurt her. I'm putting my weapon down, you see?" Jericho let the
pistol flip upside down on his finger, and gingerly, he laid the
piece down and began to raise his hands as he stood back up slowly,
purposefully keeping his body at an angle to block the man from
seeing his other weapon.

The hostile relaxed, smiling triumphantly.
He even laughed.

Chloe reacted quickly, slinging her bound
hands up over her head and knocking the pistol away. She fell to
the porch at the man's feet and spun herself around to plant a
solid kick to his groin.

As the man gasped, clutching himself,
Jericho drew his other sidearm and shot the man between his
eyes.

Chloe screamed, the sound muffled, as the
man fell on top of her, dead.

She kept screaming, but Jericho was there in
a flash and picked the man up, tossing his dead weight aside.

Jericho's hands shook as he pulled the tape
away from over Chloe's mouth.

She spat a wad of cloth to the side as he
cut her bonds. When she was free, she threw her arms around
Jericho, hugging him tightly.

"Oh, Jericho," she breathed in relief.

He closed his arms around her, burying his
face in her unbound hair as he stood, lifting her with him. Her
breath shuddered against his neck.

"Did they hurt you?" he asked, a new wash of
fury overtaking him at the thought, and he took her head with his
hands to inspect her, holding her back the slightest so he could
look down her body.

"No," Chloe said, shaking her head.

Jericho smoothed his thumb over her cheek.
His eyes flared when he saw the small nick on her throat. "They
didn't touch you?"

Chloe shook her head again.

Jericho looked at her in disbelief. "You're
not crying. You're not … you're not upset? Why, what happened?" Her
easiness now disturbed him more than her usual emotions did.

Chloe reached up to smooth her palm over his
neck and down to his shoulder. "I'm just so relieved they hadn’t
killed you. I thought I would never get out of here if they had."
She laid her hand to his cheek, her fingers trailing down over his
jaw to his neck. Though she tried to hide it, her fingers trembled
against him. "You found me," she whispered.

Jericho breathed a sigh of relief and rested
his forehead against hers. "Let's get out of here," he said,
rising, and looked around. The hostiles had brought their jeep here
when they couldn’t get through the thick jungle to chase them,
after they had given up in the brush the day before.

Somehow, they must have known he and Chloe
would have come out of the gallery on this side, in this spot, and
had chosen to wait for them. "There must be a road of sorts near
here," he commented to her.

Jericho started off the porch, his arm
around Chloe's middle, but a radio clipped to the dead man's belt
stopped him. The static on the line pulsed, and then a voice.

"Tahir?" There was a
pause. "
Yallah, akh,
" the voice said with some impatience. "Tahir? Aariz?
Marhaba?
" The static
dropped. There was a long pause, and then a moment later came back.
"We are coming there, Eden. Do you hear me?" the man's accent
trilled on each word. The static dropped.

"There's
more
of them?" Chloe
asked with incredulity.

Jericho ignored the question, not surprised
in the least. He did wonder at how they knew his name. Alarm
stabbed at his gut, thinking of his men.

He looked at Chloe. "They know something is
wrong," he said. "We have to get far away from here, now. Do you
know which of these guys has the keys?" He indicated the jeep with
a tick of his head.

"No, but I will check him," Chloe said,
first kicking the man on the porch in the side, and then stooping
to check his pockets.

Jericho leapt from the porch to the ground,
ignoring the step, and hurried to check the other two. "Got them,"
he called to her a moment later, dangling the keys.

Chloe hopped off the porch, and they both
ran to the jeep to climb in. Jericho roared the engine to life,
spinning out only seconds later.

Chloe held on in the passenger seat. There
was no real road, only lots of bumps and holes on the edge of the
savanna.

They had only just pulled out from the cabin
when Jericho flinched as a bullet whizzed past his head from
behind, and he swerved to the right, scraping palm trees on Chloe's
side. She gasped and ducked over the console. Jericho drew his
weapon, reaching behind the seat, and fired back.

Two jeeps similar to the one they had
commandeered followed over the ruts and brush, ignoring any safety
to their vehicle or selves. A spray of rounds thwacked into the
brush at their sides, and one struck the side of the jeep; and
Jericho swerved again, this time to the left.

Chloe ducked again and then turned to look
out the back through the seats. "They are closing in, Jericho!" she
screamed over the heavy thuds and thunks of the tires on bramble
and ruts, over the screeching and flapping of leaves and vines
tearing at the sides of the jeep. The engine roared as he sped
along.

"I can't go any faster," he called back,
throwing his arm over the seat again and sending off another few
rounds. He dropped the magazine and handed her the pistol. "Load
this thing for me."

She grabbed at the backpack and pulled a
loaded magazine from the pocket on the front, pushing the mag into
the weapon as he had done before, charging the weapon for him, too,
and handed it back. Chloe gasped in surprise a moment later and
dove into the backseat. She popped back up with a grenade in
hand.

"No, don't—" Jericho didn't finish.

Chloe pulled the pin and threw the
grenade.

Jericho floored the jeep, and they shot over
a small hill.

The explosion ricocheted through the jungle.
The blast didn’t hit their pursuers, but sent a tree crashing into
their path, and the hostiles’ jeep skidded into the fallen tree
with a crash. The jeep careened wildly, and Chloe slammed into the
dash as Jericho fought to regain control.

"Are you all right?" Jericho called to her,
steering with one hand as they fishtailed, and reaching over to her
with the other.

Chloe sat up holding her head, pulling her
hair from over her face, but smiled. "I stopped them!"

Jericho fixed her with a stern look. "That
was the craziest damn thing you could have done," he said, bumping
along with the jeep. "But, yes, you stopped them."

Chloe gave a loud
whoop
of excitement.

Chapter Eleven

1300 hours, Monday

The Cerrado, Brazil

As Chloe rode along, jarred by ruts and
occasionally ducking for the lower hanging leaves and vines, she
wondered if they were still being followed, or if at last they
would get away now that there was no transmitter on them.

They were on the edge of the jungle now,
somewhere between the thicker vegetation and the open savanna. They
had splashed through a small stream earlier, but luckily the
watercourse had not been deep nor formed a chasm between banks. The
place they crossed looked well used by animals and possibly other
vehicles.

At last she asked, "Why are Muslim
extremists in Brazil, and what do they have to do with you?"

Jericho looked over to her and sighed hard.
He shook his head, perplexed. She could tell he was pondering what
the point was in keeping anything from her now.

Chloe rolled her eyes. "I mean, hell, they
kidnapped me. There are very few blank spots left."

He stared ahead with a cross look. "Two
months ago, my team and I arrived in Brazil for reconnaissance on a
suspected terrorist compound leaking insurgents into the U.S. The
night before I met you, we embarked on a mission to locate and
transmit the location of the compound back to Central Command. The
gear we needed for this got blown up." A wash of fury crossed him
then. "One of my own threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of
us."

Chloe choked on a gasp, covering her mouth.
Her eyes teared at the visual he had given her.

"Everything quickly went downhill from
there. Another of my team was taken, and later, when we returned to
the safe house to transmit the location from there, Conyers named
him a top suspect." Jericho clenched his jaw.

Chloe's brow furrowed.
"Who is Conyers? You told me he was a handler, but for what?
What
is
a
handler?" she asked.

"He's CIA. He handles
other agents in the Southwest Asia Theater so, he has ties to the
Middle East and influence there. He would know exactly who to go to
for any bartering on an arrangement like this. I can't imagine what
they offered him in return for this setup. Obviously, he gave them
intel on where we were weakest, where we lack force. Where they
would be least suspected. Conyers was their watchdog. That's why he
got himself pulled in on this, to brief my team on what he
wanted
us to
know."

Chloe's eyes widened a degree. "How could
you not have suspected him to begin with?"

Jericho scoffed. "It's not so easy to
discern. Conyers is an agent. That is what he does. He pulled the
wool over the eyes of the CIA director himself."

"What happened after Conyers showed up?" she
asked.

"He sent us back out to find MacKall, the
man he suggested led us into the ambush. Had I only known." Jericho
pounded a fist on the steering wheel. "Conyers set us up to fail.
When we got to that compound, we were already surrounded. He gave
us a bird to use, so they would know exactly when we were there. We
dropped onto the roof, and someone hit me on the back of the head
with a weapon. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the back
of a trunk shortly before we met."

Chloe stared at him a long moment. Their
jeep went over a large rut, and she hung on as the bump sent her
swaying in her seat. "It's a wonder they didn’t kill you then. This
might sound crazy, but I am glad I helped you. I don’t regret what
I did in Rio at all," she told him with certainty.

Jericho snorted. "I suspected all along, but
that confirmed it. You are crazy." They both laughed.

A short bit later, Jericho stopped the jeep
at the side of some murky water. "The ride is over," he told her.
"We've been running on fumes the last few kilometers."

Chloe tried to open her door, but apparently
one knock too many from the trees they'd bumped had crushed the
door into the vehicle's side, so she slid over and took Jericho's
hand as he helped her from the driver's door.