Volcano by Gabby Grant

he falling apart? Had Albert seen it?
    “Oh hell, Mark. You and the rest of the boys- all of you-
are so damn well ready to put me out to pasture.”
    Mark stood abruptly, feeling the fury spike to his limbs. He
may very well be the torn-apart husband, but Mark was also a god damned
professional. And it was his professional side that held the greatest chance
for bringing Ana back.
    “No, sir. Wasn’t thinking that at all.”   Mark walked to the back of the office
and thumped the window glass. “Somewhere out there some putrid son of a bitch
is holding my wife, your daughter. And you’re right, sir. Absolutely
right. All you and I have got to do is get our shit together. We’re
professionals, you and I, with years of training. Decades, combined. And if
anybody can get Ana back...
    Something akin to faith alighted in Albert’s eyes. He stood
and joined Mark at the window. “Where do we begin?”
    “We begin by going through the files, all two hundred and
nine of them that we’ve gotten in so far. Major Walker can fax anything you
don’t have here from the DIPAC.
    “We check for the commonalities, the trends.”
    “We search for the motive,” Albert said solemnly, his gaze
fixed on the Capitol dome.
    “And,” Mark said, following Albert’s line of vision, “we
look for a group powerful enough to infiltrate the US intelligence community
and scare it senseless.”
    Albert met Mark’s eyes and Mark knew instantly they were
both thinking the same thing.
    Scaring was only the first part, the precursor to
something much more explosive.

 
 
 

CHAPTER 9

 
    Al Fahd glowered at McFadden. “Those were not your
orders, Mr. Smith, and you know it.”
    McFadden shrugged and clunked his pistol down on the Arab’s
desk. “The gal got feisty, Al Hakeem, what can I say?”
    Al Fahd narrowed his ebony eyes into slits. “You can say
you’ve accomplished your mission, Mr. Smith. This does not bode well for future
involvement. Not well at all.”
    Joe slowly shook his head, then leveled his fearless gaze on Al Fahd’s. “You wanted her dead, one way or--”
    “On our time table, Mr. Smith. Not some cocky
American’s.”   Al Fahd paused to
study his gritty fingernails.
    “Where is the body?” he asked finally.
    “Where it will never be found.”
    Al Fahd sprung to his feet and leapt around the desk.
“Fool!” he said, stringing his gnarly fingers around McFadden’s throat. “I want
to see her, see her here!   Do
you understand?”
    McFadden brought his hands to the Arab’s choke
hold , until Al Fahd slowly, slowly released his grip.
    “I can do it, Al Hakeem. But it’s going to take some
fishing...”
    Al Fahd checked the dial on his gold watch. “You have
forty-eight hours, Mr. Smith. Forty-eight hours exactly.”
    “Al Hakeem, I’m certain you know that the flight alone--”
    “Not a minute more. Or you will wind up fish bait,”
Al Fahd said, loudly cracking his knuckles. “I’ll see to it with my own hands.”

 
    ***

 
    Ana pushed through the gnarl of branches and kept running.
She’d been running for she-didn’t-know-how-many miles now. In and out of pine
forests, across towering corn fields , through the damp
heat of an unseasonable afternoon and now beneath the bitter chill of the
December moon.
    It had all happened so fast, too fast to calculate. Too fast
to make any sense of as he’d thrust her through the alley’s slight opening with
bruising force.
    “Run!” he’d told her, snapping something from his wrist.
“Take this and run like hell!   Now
go!”
    But instead of fleeing, Ana had remained glued there in her
narrow passage of escape, her feet anchored to the ground by some invisible
chord. A steel wool wire that sliced right through her and sent her reeling at
the thought of what was happening.
    Joe had been sent here to kill her! And now he was pressing
his wristwatch into her hand and commanding her to run?
    “Damn it, Ana, for the love of- Isabel...”
    Her eyes