Texas Hero. Merline Lovelace
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course I know! To paraphrase your earlier remark, the viciousness of that threat is the reason, the only reason, I agreed to the nuisance of a bodyguard.”
Hooking his thumbs in his jeans pockets, Jack tried to get a handle on the woman who’d emerged from the girl he’d once known.
“So why are you hanging around San Antonio, Ellie? Why offer yourself as a target to the kook or malcontent who issued that warning?”
“Because I refuse to let said kook or malcontent interfere with my work. In all modesty, I’m good at what I do. Damned good.” She speared him with a hard look. “You predicted I would be. Remember, Jack? Right about the time you and Uncle Eduardo jointly decided finishing college was more important to me than my… Let’s see, how did he phrase it? My passing infatuation with a hardheaded Marine.”
They’d have to scratch at the old scars sometime. Better to do it now and give the scabs time to heal again. If Jack was to protect her, he needed her trust. Or at least her cooperation. He wouldn’t gain either until he’d acknowledged his culpability for the hurt she’d suffered all those years ago.
“You were only nineteen, Ellie. I thought… Your uncle thought…”
“That I didn’t know my own mind.” Her chin came up. “You were wrong. I knew it then. I know it now.”
She couldn’t have made her meaning plainer. Jack Carstairs wouldn’t get the chance to wound her again. He accepted that stark truth with a nod.
“Why don’t we get settled in different rooms, and you can tell me exactly what it is you’re so good at. I need to understand what you’re doing here,” he said to forestall the stiff response he saw coming, “and why it’s roused such controversy.”
The hotel staff moved them to adjoining suites two floors down. The rooms looked out over the inner courtyard of the hotel instead of the street. Like the rest of the historic hotel, they were furnished with a combination of period antiques and modern comfort. A burned-wood armoire held a twenty-seven-inch TV and a well-stocked bar. The wrought-iron bedstead boasted a queen-size mattress and thick, puffy goose-down comforter.
While Jack checked phones, door locks and ceiling vents, three valets transferred boxes of files and equipment on rolling dollies. Ruthlessly rearranging the furniture to meet her work-space needs, Ellie promptly turned her sitting room into a functional office. She’d already replaced the stolen computer and hard drive, which she now hooked up to an oversize flat LCD screen.
A smaller unit sat beside the computer. Jack studied it with a faint smile. Mackenzie Blair, OMEGA’s chief of communications, would light up like a Christmas tree if she caught sight of all those buttons and dials and displays. The palm-size unit was probably crammed with more circuitry than the Space Shuttle.
Evidently Ellie Alazar shared Mackenzie’s fascination with electronic gadgetry. She gave the small metal box the kind of pat a fond mother might give a child.
“This holds the guts of a technology I developed the summer after we…” Her brown brows slashed down. Obviously impatient with her hesitation, she plowed ahead. “The summer after I met you. I didn’t make the trip to Mexico City that year. I didn’t go down for several years, as a matter of fact.”
Jack wasn’t surprised. Elena’s emotions ran close to the surface. In the short months he’d known her, she’d never once reined them in. Looking back, he could see that was what had drawn him to her in the first place. Everything she thought or felt was all there, in her eyes, her face. Impatience, passion, anger—whatever emotion gripped her, she shared. Honestly. Openly.
She’d certainly shared her feelings the day her uncle sent his police to arrest Jack. She’d been furious with Eduardo Alazar. But not half as angry as she’d became with the Marine who refused to stand and fight for her.
“You didn’t go to Mexico that summer,” Jack acknowledged, steering the conversation to less volatile subjects. “What did you do?”
“I worked for the National Park Service on a dig in the Pecos National Park. We were excavating the site of the battle of Glorietta Pass. The battle took place in 1862 and was one of the pivotal engagements in the Civil War.”
“The Gettysburg of the West. I’ve heard of it.”
She gave him a look of approval. “Then you know the battle turned the tide against Confederates and sent Silbey’s Brigade scuttling back to Texas in total disarray.”
Another Texas defeat. Evidently Ellie had started her career at the site of one disastrous conflict for the Lone Star state. Now she was up to her trim, tight buns in controversy over another. No wonder some loyal local citizens wanted to roll up the welcome mat and send her on her way.
“We used metal detectors to locate shell casings at the battle site,” she explained, warming to her subject. “We marked their location on a computerized grid, then categorized the casings by make and caliber. We also analyzed the rifling marks on the brass to determine the type of weapon that fired them.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“It was. Three summers’ worth of digging and mapping. Plus hundreds of hours of detailed research into the weaponry of the time. The Confederates tended to carry a wide variety of personally owned rifles and side arms. Union weapons were somewhat more standardized. By matching spent shell casings to the type of weapon that fired them, we were able to map the precise movement of both armies on the battlefield. We also built a massive database. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I expanded and translated the raw data into a program that allows forensic historians to reliably identify shell casings from any era post-1820.”
“Why 1820?”
“The copper percussion cap was invented in the 1820s. Within a decade, two at most, almost every army in the world had converted its muzzle-loading flintlocks to percussion. More to the point where my research was concerned, the copper casing retained more defined rifling marks, which aided in identification of the type of weapon that fired it.”
Jack was impressed. He could fieldstrip an M-15, clean the components and put it back together blindfolded. He’d qualified at the expert level on every weapon in the Marine Corps inventory, as well as on the ones OMEGA outfitted him with. Yet his knowledge of the science of ballistics didn’t begin to compare with Ellie’s.
“So how do we get from the invention of the percussion cap to your finding that the hero of the Alamo deserted his troops and ran away?”
“It’s not a finding.” She shot the answer back. “It’s only one of several hypotheses I surfaced for discussion with my team. Honestly, you’d think simple intellectual curiosity would make folks wait to see whether the theory is substantiated by fact before they get all in a twit.”
“You’d think,” Jack echoed solemnly.
Flushing a bit, she backpedaled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. I’m just getting tired of having to deal with outraged letters to the editor, picketers at the site, skittish team members and a nervous National Park Service director who’s close to pulling the plug on our funding.”
There they were again. The fire, the impatience. She hadn’t learned to bank, either. Jack found himself hoping she never did.
“And this hypothesis is based on what?” he asked, the evenness of his tone a contrast to hers. “Start at the beginning. Talk me through the sequence of events.”
“It would be better if I showed you.” She speared a glance at her watch. “It’s only a little past two. If you want, we can start here at the Alamo, then drive out to the site.”
“Good enough. Give me ten minutes.”
With the controlled, smooth grace that had always characterized him, he executed what Ellie could only describe as an about-face and passed through the connecting door. It closed behind him, leaving her staring at the panels.
The old cliché was true, she thought