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Chapter Two

Annie couldn’t remember the dream, only that it had left her heart thundering in her chest and her stomach roiling with nausea. She woke to pain—in her shoulders, her wrists, her knees and especially her head, which felt as if it had been hollowed out and filled with burning agony.

For some reason, she expected to open her eyes to bright lights and chaos, but the room around her was blessedly dark, save for a faint light seeping in from the doorway several feet away. The unfamiliar bed supporting her weakened body was uncomfortable, the gloom-shrouded surroundings dull and sterile.

A shadow moved to her right, and her heart skipped a beat.

“You’re awake.” The voice was low and soft, broadened by a southern accent.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

“I’m Wade Cooper,” the shadow answered. “And you’re on the fourth floor of Chickasaw County Hospital.”

The pain made a little more sense. “How’d I get here?”

“I found you semiconscious in the woods near Gossamer Lake.”

She narrowed her eyes and instantly regretted it as agony streaked through her forehead. She lifted her hand to the aching spot and found a bandage. “What happened to me?”

“Don’t know yet,” Wade said. “Think you can handle the light?”

She wanted to say no, as she was pretty sure the last thing her throbbing brain could handle was anything bright. But she didn’t like talking to a shadow, so she said, “Yes.”

He rose to his feet and turned on a light over the bed. After the initial shock, her eyes adjusted quickly to the mercifully dim light and the headache settled into bearable territory. Her visitor sat down, giving her a better look at him. Early thirties, she guessed. Lean and fit, with broad shoulders and a pugnaciously masculine jaw. In the low light, his eyes looked coal-black and mysterious, but his calm, neutral expression suggested her mind was playing tricks on her.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.” She noted his clothing—jeans and a green plaid shirt under a faded denim jacket. “You’re not a doctor.”

He smiled, flashing a set of straight white teeth. “No ma’am, I’m not.”

“Where did you say I am, Chickasaw County? In Georgia?” She couldn’t remember if there was a Chickasaw County in Georgia. She seemed to have a lot of gaps in her memory all of a sudden.

“Chickasaw County, Alabama,” he corrected.

“Alabama?” She frowned, the movement sending another dart of pain through her injured scalp. What the hell was she doing in Alabama?

“You don’t remember how you got here?”

Before she could answer the question, the door to the hospital room opened and a man in green surgical scrubs entered, holding a chart. His eyes widened with surprise when they met hers. “You’re awake.” He glanced at Wade. “And you have a visitor,” he added, his tone disapproving. “Well past visiting hours.”

Wade looked briefly sheepish but didn’t move. “I didn’t want her to wake up in the hospital all alone.”

Annie slanted a quick look at him, surprised by the kindness in his voice. She worked in Washington, D.C., where random acts of kindness weren’t exactly the norm, at least not in the circles in which she ran.

“Nice of you,” the doctor said without much sincerity in his clipped tone. “But I need to examine my patient now.”

Wade started moving toward the door. For the first time, Annie saw that he walked with a visible limp.

“Wait,” she said as he reached the exit.

He turned in the doorway, his powerful shoulders and lean hips silhouetted by the light from the corridor. Built like a cowboy, she thought, her dry lips curving at the notion. “Yeah?” he said.

“Are you leaving? The hospital, I mean.” Hating the neediness she heard in her voice, she told herself she’d be better off if he said yes.

“No, I reckon I’ll stick around a bit.” His face was in shadow, but she thought she could make out a smile.

Then he was gone, leaving her alone with the doctor.

“I didn’t get your name,” she said to the doctor.

“Dr. Brady Ambrose,” he answered briskly, reaching for her wrist to check her pulse. Even the skin of her wrists hurt when he touched them. “How long have you been awake?”

“I don’t know—a few minutes?”

He checked her eyes with a pen light. “Headache?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anything else hurt?”

“Everything else hurts,” she admitted. New aches and pains seemed to be cropping up with each passing second. She looked at her wrist, which still stung from the doctor’s touch, and saw a deep purplish-red bracelet of bruises and abrasions. She lifted her other hand and found the same marks.

Those were ligature marks, she realized with rising alarm.

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Friday.” The doctor looked at his watch. “Actually, Saturday by now,” he added with a rueful smile.

“The date, I mean.”

“September 8.”

Her alarm exploded into full blown panic. “September?” That wasn’t possible. Just this morning, she’d flown from D.C. to Chattanooga to meet her parents at the airport for the drive to their vacation cabin north of Dahlonega. The last thing she remembered was—

What? What was the last thing she remembered?

Nothing. The airport was the last thing she remembered. Walking through the terminal, grabbing her suitcase from the baggage carousel and heading off to look for her parents, who would be waiting to pick her up.

That had been August 18.

Almost three weeks of her life were missing.

* * *

“S HE SEEMS LUCID ,” Wade told his brother Jesse, who sat across from him in the fourth floor waiting room. “But I don’t think she remembers what happened to her and her parents. It would have been the first thing she’d have asked about, don’t you think?”

Jesse ran his palm across his face, his eyes dark with frustration. “So it’s not going to be the lead we hoped.”

Next to him, their sister Megan shot Jesse a sharp look. “A woman I was pretty sure had to be dead turned out to be alive,” she said flatly. “That’s not nothing.”

“Of course not,” Jesse agreed with a faint smile. “But we aren’t any closer to decoding General Ross’s journal than we were before.”

“Maybe she doesn’t remember now,” Megan said, “but that doesn’t mean she won’t remember eventually. Remember when Hannah was attacked and lost some of her memories? They eventually came back.”

“Eventually,” Jesse agreed. “But three weeks have already passed. And apparently she escaped from her captors, which may put her parents in even graver danger.”

“She’s not out of danger, either.” Wade looked toward the waiting room door, remembering the look of confusion and vulnerability in Annie Harlowe’s caramel-brown eyes. “If she escaped, she may know something that could lead us to the kidnappers. And they’ll be looking to stop her from telling what she knows.”

“The kidnappers won’t be the only people who’ll want custody of her,” Jesse warned. “I imagine the Pentagon will want to know everything she knows about what happened to her father, too.”

Wade nodded. The Department of Defense certainly wasn’t feeling very sanguine about a recently retired Air Force general with years of operational secrets stored in his brain going missing for three weeks. The hunt for the missing general was all over the news, with conspiracy theories flying all over twenty-four-hour cable news channels.

Coverage of his missing wife and daughter had been tangential in comparison, thanks to the general’s potential significance to American national security. But the news shows had flashed their photos often enough. Someone in the hospital could have already recognized Annie Harlowe’s name and face.

Wade stood and limped over to the window, which looked down on the front entrance of the hospital four stories below. No news trucks yet. But information would get out soon enough. Then what?

“We have a limited window of opportunity to get anything out of her,” he told Jesse, who’d crossed to stand next to him at the window.

“Aaron’s supposed to be here any minute to ask her questions in an official capacity.”

Aaron had called in a crew of Chickasaw County deputies to do a grid search of the woods behind Wade’s house. Along with his wife, Melissa, he’d stayed with them to direct the search while Wade followed the ambulance to the hospital.

“That may not be soon enough,” Wade warned, spotting a Huntsville television news van moving up the drive toward the hospital entrance.

Megan joined them at the window. “Here come the newsboys,” she said with a grimace.

“They’re just doing their job,” Jesse said.

“They’ll be all over her like stink on a pig.”

Wade had to smile at his sister’s description. Apt, probably, but Jesse was right. The news people had a job to do.

Just like he did.

“I’m going to go see if the doctor is finished examining her,” he told his brother and sister. “Why don’t y’all go see if you can waylay the reporters for a little while?”

Jesse clapped him on his shoulder. “What are you going to tell her?”

“The truth,” Wade answered simply.

The door to Annie Harlowe’s hospital room was half open when he reached it. He listened for the doctor’s voice but heard only a soft, snuffling sound coming from within the room.

Crying, he thought, his heart twisting with a disconcerting mixture of sympathy and dread.

He made himself knock lightly on the door. “Annie, it’s Wade Cooper. Can I come in?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “Yes.”

He crossed to her bed, trying to keep his limp to a minimum. He wasn’t very successful. She lay with her head turned away from him, as if she were staring out the window. But the window shades were drawn.

“What did the doctor have to say?”

“I have a concussion. Some scrapes and contusions.” She turned her face toward him. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. “And I’m missing three weeks of my life.”

* * *

I NTERESTING , A NNIE THOUGHT, watching Wade Cooper’s face for a response. His only reaction was a softening in his dark eyes, a hint of sympathy creasing his forehead.

Her words came as no surprise to him.

“You already know who I am,” she whispered.

Wade sat in the chair by her bed. “You’ve been all over the news for three weeks.”

“Why aren’t my parents here? Has anybody even thought to call them?” They must be frantic, she thought, showing up at the airport only to discover their daughter had disappeared from the airport without a trace.

Or had there been a trace? She didn’t know. Everything after the baggage carousel was a big blank.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Wade asked.

“Arriving at the Chattanooga airport,” she answered, not liking the fact that he hadn’t answered her question. “Where are my parents?”

“We don’t know,” Wade said. “You all went missing at the same time.”

She stared at him, nausea rising in her gut. “My parents are missing?”

“You don’t remember anything after the airport?”

“No. I thought—I assumed that’s where I was abducted or whatever.” A new, horrifying thought blackened her mind. “Was I—did anybody check to see if I was raped?”

Wade’s face blanched. “I don’t know.”

She struggled against a sudden flood of nausea. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Wade grabbed a small bedpan from the table by the bed and thrust it into her hands. A series of dry heaves racked her aching body, but apparently her stomach was empty, for nothing came up.

Wade disappeared from view for a moment, returning with a wet washcloth from the bathroom. He handed it to her and she took it gratefully, pressing the cool cloth against her mouth.

“I know they looked you over carefully in the E.R. before they brought you to a room,” Wade said gently. “There was a female deputy with you, so they probably checked for that. I think the doctor would have told you if they’d found anything.”

“Three weeks,” she rasped, her throat aching. “They might not even find anything after three weeks—”

Wade closed his hand over hers. Heat spread through her from his warm, firm touch, helping to settle the shakes that threatened to take over her body. She took a couple of deep breaths, willing herself to deal with what she knew rather than what she didn’t.

She had to separate herself from how the story affected her personally and stick with the facts. She had to think like a reporter.

“Is there a theory behind what happened to me and my parents?” she asked aloud, dreading what Wade’s answer might be.

He hesitated before he spoke, drawing her gaze to his eyes to see whether she’d find truth in them or more secrets. “The official story is that the investigators have formed no theories.”

“And unofficially?”

“The fact that your father is such a high-ranking military officer suggests a national security angle.”

Of course, if she were thinking straight, the thought would have crossed her mind already.

And there was also her father’s odd behavior when he’d called her the Monday before her flight to Chattanooga to ask her to make time for a family vacation the next week. “There’s something I need to tell you about,” he’d said, sounding serious.

Had he ever gotten a chance to tell her whatever he’d wanted to share?

“How did anyone kidnap all three of us from a busy airport?” she wondered aloud.

“They didn’t,” Wade answered, squeezing her arm with gentle strength. She looked down at his long fingers, at the play of muscles and tendons in the back of his lean hand as he squeezed again and let go. “You and your parents arrived at the cabin on the eighteenth of August as planned. The caretaker handed the key over to your father, and you and your mother were both there with him. You were seen the next morning in Dahlonega, where you’d apparently gone for breakfast. The caretaker remembered seeing you and your parents return in your father’s silver Ford Expedition around ten-thirty on the nineteenth. That’s the last anyone saw of you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“Your concussion could have caused a memory loss.”

“Will I get it back?”

“I don’t know.”

The nausea was knocking on the back of her throat again. She wrestled it back to mere queasiness. “Why do I get the feeling you know more about what happened to me than I do?”

“I don’t think I do.”

He sounded honest enough, but she saw more mysteries behind those big brown eyes. “You’re keeping something from me.”

Wade Cooper was saved by a knock on the door. When nobody entered a moment later, Wade stood. “I’ll see who it is.”

He crossed to the door, favoring his right leg. His right knee looked a little larger than his left, straining against the faded jeans he wore. Bum knee?

He spoke in low tones to someone outside the door. The other voice sounded male as well, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Wade closed the door behind him and returned to her side, pulling his chair closer. His dark eyes were deadly serious.

“Two men from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations are downstairs asking to talk to you. It’s up to you. If you want to talk to them, fine. If you want to wait until you’re feeling better, that’s fine, too.”

The last thing she wanted to do was face an interrogation by the A.F.O.S.I. But all she’d be doing was putting off the inevitable. “You can tell them I’ll see them.”

Wade nodded and stood. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a narrow wallet. He removed a card from one of the inside pockets and handed it to her. “That has my cell number on it. You need to talk to me about anything, you call. Understand?”

His urgent tone made her stomach hurt, but she nodded, wincing at the flare of pain in her head. “Are you leaving?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be just down the hall. Call that number, and I’ll come running.”

As he disappeared through the doorway, she released a slow, shaky breath. She wasn’t used to feeling weak and vulnerable. She hated it. But her world had upended in the span of a few minutes—or, more accurately, three missing weeks. She had to find her feet again.

She had to find out what happened to her parents.

A brief knock on the door preceded two men dressed in dark suits who entered the room in tandem. They filled the small space with an air of authority, introducing themselves as Braddock and Hartman from the A.F.O.S.I. Braddock, who was taller, darker and leaner than stocky, sandy-haired Hartman, did most of the talking. Hartman stood slightly behind the other man, holding a small duffel bag. Annie eyed the bag with curiosity.

“We need to know everything you can tell us about the incident in Georgia,” he began without further preamble.

“I can’t tell you anything,” she said carefully. “I have a head injury and I don’t remember any of it.”

Braddock’s eyebrows inched upward. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

The two men exchanged a look that gave her the creeps.

“Could I see your identification?” she asked.

Their gazes snapped to her. Braddock’s tense expression melted into an engaging smile. “Certainly.” He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

Annie tensed, an image flashing through her muddled brain. A needle, glistening in the glow of a single, bare bulb. A tiny droplet of moisture trembling on the point before it fell.

Panic seized her insides, threatening to turn them to liquid.

The man withdrew his hand. It held only a flat black wallet. He flipped it open and showed her an official-looking name badge. Arthur Braddock with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Looked legit.

So why couldn’t she shake the feeling these guys were anything but what they claimed to be?

“What is the last thing you remember before waking up?”

“I was standing at the luggage carousel at the Chattanooga airport,” she answered.

“And you remember nothing else?” Braddock sounded skeptical.

“I have vague memories of being in the emergency room earlier tonight, I think,” she answered carefully. She didn’t mention the image of the needle, mostly because she didn’t really trust these two men. But the truth was, she did have some memories of being examined in the emergency room. They’d cut off her clothes. Poked and prodded and X-rayed. She had a vague memory of being in a cool, white cavern—a CAT scanner?

“Why were you and your parents in Georgia?”

“Vacation. We like to get together once or twice a year.”

“Just the three of you?”

“We had plans for lunch with my aunt Phyllis on Thursday.” Her mother’s sister lived in Gainesville, Georgia. They usually tried to meet her for lunch or dinner at least once during each trip. Annie guessed they hadn’t made it to lunch, if the last time she and her parents had been seen was on the nineteenth.

“Your aunt is the one who reported you missing,” Hartman said.

Braddock looked at the other man. Annie got the feeling he’d prefer that Hartman stay quiet.

“I really don’t have anything else I can add,” Annie said.

“I think you probably know more than you realize. We’d like to take you back to Quantico with us. There’s a hospital on base that can see to your medical needs, and the staff psychiatrists can help you work on recovering more of your missing memories.” Braddock’s voice was gentle and encouraging, but Annie realized, with alarm, that she didn’t believe a bit of it.

These people were not here to help her.

“We’ll need you to sign the transfer papers for the hospital, so they’ll release you. We can transport you tonight.”

Don’t go with them. Whatever you do, don’t let these men get you alone. The voice she heard in her head wasn’t her own. It was her father’s, the low, gravelly coastal Carolina drawl she’d always loved so much.

“I don’t have any clothes—they cut them off of me in the E.R.”

“We’ve brought you some clothes to wear.” Hartman put the duffel bag on the bottom of her bed and stepped back.

“You thought of everything,” Annie murmured. She faked a smile. “Okay, then. I need a few minutes alone to get dressed,” she said quietly. “That will give you time to finalize the transfer with the hospital staff. Then I’ll sign the papers, and we can go.”

Braddock and Hartman exchanged glances. “Okay,” Braddock said with what she supposed was meant to be a gentle smile. The expression looked predatory.

To her relief, they left the room, closing the door behind them. She slumped back against her pillows, her pulse pounding a cadence of agony in her head. With shaking hand, she reached for the phone on the small bedside table and pulled it onto the bed next to her.

Opening her hand, she looked at the slightly rumpled card she’d held in her tightly clutched fist during the meeting with Braddock and Hartman.

Wade Cooper. Cooper Security.

She picked up the receiver and dialed the number.

Wade Cooper answered on the first ring. “Cooper.”

“They want to transfer me to a hospital in Quantico,” she said without preamble, keeping her voice low, in case the men were just outside the room, listening in.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” he asked.

“No,” she answered flatly. “I think you need to get me out of this hospital. Right now.”