Her Cowboy Defender. Kerry Connor

when the answering machine picked up, this man—older-sounding, with a slight accent—began speaking. He said they knew I was home and that I’d better stop playing games and pick up the phone if I ever wanted to see my sister alive again.

       “I picked up, of course. My first thought was that the man was talking about Pam. I had no idea Tara was missing or in any way involved. The man said he was aware of my accident, which is the only reason he allowed me to miss the original deadline, but he still wanted the information he asked of me.”

       “He thought you were Pam,” Cade concluded.

       “Exactly. Obviously I wasn’t the sister he was talking about, and we only have one other, so I knew he had to be talking about Tara. I immediately asked if Tara was okay, and he said she was for the time being, but wouldn’t be if I didn’t have the information he wanted.”

       “What information?”

       “I had no idea. I couldn’t tell him that, because then he’d know I wasn’t Pam. I was afraid that if he knew she was in a coma and incapable of providing any information, he might decide Tara was no use to him anymore and do something to her. So I said I had it. He told me to check the mailbox. There was an envelope in it with a cell phone they would use to contact me, and he would be in touch with further instructions. He hung up, and I immediately went to the mailbox. The phone was exactly where he said it would be.

       “As soon as I got back in the house, I tried to reach Tara. I hadn’t spoken to her in a few days, which wasn’t unusual. She’s in college in Pennsylvania, and is busy with school and everything. I couldn’t reach her on her cell, but I did get in touch with her roommate. She said Tara left a few days earlier, leaving a note saying she was heading home for a while because her sister was sick. That would have been before Pam’s accident, and nothing had happened to me, so I figured the kidnappers must have left the note so Tara’s disappearance wouldn’t look suspicious and the police wouldn’t be contacted.”

       “Obviously they contacted Pam once they had Tara,” he noted. “She really didn’t give you any idea Tara had been kidnapped? Did she try to reach you? What if you tried to call Tara earlier? You would have known the sick-sister story was a lie.”

       Piper shrugged. “Pam tends to do her own thing and likes to handle matters on her own. She probably thought she could handle the situation herself and get Tara back before I even knew anything had happened. Or else she was so busy dealing with the situation she didn’t have time to think about me.”

       “So did you call the police?”

       She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t want to do anything to endanger Tara, and I couldn’t trust them not to contact the FBI again, which is the protocol in kidnapping cases, especially one involving multiple states, since she was taken in Pennsylvania, not Texas.”

       “Why didn’t you want to contact the FBI? Your sister works for them.”

       “Exactly. And the information the kidnappers want must be something related to the Dallas field office. Why else would they kidnap the sister of an agent in that office?”

       “So wouldn’t the FBI be the best people to contact? They would know who would want the information so badly and probably be able to figure out who’s behind this and how to stop them.”

       “Except that’s exactly what Pam would have done, and look what happened to her.”

       He frowned. “What do you mean?”

       “Think about it. Who would possibly want to run Pam off the road? The kidnappers wouldn’t. They had no reason to. They wouldn’t have wanted to endanger her and possibly ruin their chances of getting what they wanted. No, it must have been someone else. The most likely possibility I can come up with is that Pam went to one of her colleagues for help, someone she trusted, and instead of providing it, they tried to stop her from giving the information to the kidnappers.”

       He gaped at her in disbelief. “You think the FBI would run one of their agents off the road to keep her from releasing classified materials? Wouldn’t arresting her be a lot easier?”

       “Not the FBI,” she said patiently, as though he were the one speaking nonsense. “Someone within the FBI who’s acting on their own and willing to do whatever it takes to stop this information, whatever it is, from being shared.” She sent a nervous glance in the direction they’d come from. “I think what just happened to us proves how desperate this person is.”

       “What are you talking about?”

       “I should have realized it wasn’t the kidnappers trying to drive us off the road. I was just so focused on them and trying to get to Tara that, in the heat of the moment, I wasn’t thinking straight. But of course it wasn’t. It’s like the kidnapper said, he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize getting what he wants. It was someone who didn’t want me getting to my destination and making delivery to the kidnappers, the same someone who tried to stop Pam from doing the same thing.”

       Cade tried to think of an explanation for who else might have been shooting at them, but came up empty. She seemed to have thought this all out, not surprising, given that she’d had a lot more time to consider all the possibilities than he had.

       Not willing to concede she was right just yet, he decided to set the issue aside for the moment. There was a lot more to this story he needed to hear. “Okay, so you decided not to go to the police or the FBI. What did you do?”

       “I tried to figure out what I could do to save Tara and waited for the man to call me back. He finally did last night. He instructed me to drive to Albuquerque and arrive by noon. I left immediately. At noon, he called me with the address of a copy shop where he said a fax would be waiting for me. It was that map that I showed you. I was to be at that location exactly at two.”

       “What was your plan?”

       “I was going to refuse to give them the information until they let Tara go first.”

       He frowned again. “Did you really think they would agree to that?”

       “I wasn’t going to give them a choice. I brought a flash drive with me and was going to tell them I would only give them the password to unlock the file on it once they let Tara go.”

       “Why would they agree to that? They could have just threatened to shoot Tara if you didn’t give it to them.”

       “I was going to throw the flash drive on the ground and say that if they did anything to her I would put a bullet through it and destroy it right then and there. If they tried to shoot me, they would risk me pulling the trigger reflexively and destroying the drive anyway. After going to so much trouble to get the information, I was counting on them not being willing to risk losing it when it was so close at hand. We both had something the other wanted. It would be easier to just make the exchange. And if they threatened to kill her outright, I would have threatened to kill myself if they did, because if anything happened to her, I would have just watched my sister die and wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I’d gotten her killed.”

       “Even if they agreed to let her go, they wouldn’t have let you go without the password.”

       “I know. I was prepared to stay. That was the exchange. Me, the flash drive and the password for Tara.”

       An uneasy feeling began to churn in his gut. “Do you have the information they want?”

       “No. I still don’t even know what it is. That’s why I had to get them to let Tara go before I agreed to give them the flash drive supposedly containing the information.”

       “You can’t believe they would have agreed to that without knowing you had what they wanted.”

       “It was the only chance I had, the only chance Tara had.”

       “But once they found out you’d cheated them, they would have killed you.”

       She stared back at him, unblinking. “I know,” she said simply.