Mountain Investigation. Jessica Andersen
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the investigation immediately afterwards, a couple of sales receipts and a glitchy security camera had led the FBI agents to Lee Chisholm—who called himself Mawadi among his “real” family within the terror network—along with his co-conspirator, Muhammad Feyd, and the mastermind himself, al-Jihad. The evidence had been enough to convict the men—barely—and get them sentenced to life-plus at the ARX Supermax. The clues hadn’t seemed to point to the involvement of Mawadi’s wife, who at the time had been dealing with bad press, a quickie divorce and her father’s forced retirement and subsequent near-fatal heart attack. In the end, Mariah Chisholm, née Shore, had been cleared of suspicion as far as the higher-ups were concerned.
As far as Gray was concerned, though, they’d missed something.
He’d been part of the initial interviews of Mariah and her father, and he’d memorized all the reports—both the official file and the assembled news stories. The reports from two years earlier, during the time when Lee Mawadi had been arrested, tried and convicted, had described Mariah as “shocked,” “devastated” and “grief-stricken.” One Shakespeare of a journalist had even called her a “doe-eyed innocent played false by the man she thought she knew.”
The pictures and film clips had backed up those descriptions, showing a lovely, sad-eyed woman with curly, dark-brown hair and full lips that had trembled at all the right moments. For the most part she’d tried to avoid the cameras. On the few occasions she’d spoken publicly, she’d read prepared statements in which she had apologized for not having seen her husband of six months for what he’d been—a monster—and had urged swift justice for Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad. Even Gray, an admitted cynic, had bought the routine, all but forgetting about her once Mawadi and the others were behind bars. He’d shifted his attention away from them and focused on tracking down more of al-Jihad’s terror cells.
All that had changed the previous fall, though, when Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad had escaped from the ARX Supermax with the help of fellow prisoner Jonah Fairfax. Fairfax had proven to be a deep undercover Fed who’d been charged with flushing out al-Jihad’s contacts within U.S. law enforcement, and had planned to do so by facilitating the escape and then netting all the conspirators when they made their move. But the setup had backfired badly when it turned out that Fairfax’s superior, who had progressively isolated him over the previous two years, had turned, becoming one of al-Jihad’s assets.
In the end, Fairfax had helped al-Jihad escape, and the only conspirator he’d flushed out was his own boss, code-named Jane Doe, who had vanished in the aftermath of a foiled attack on a local stadium. The Feds and local cops had managed to recapture Muhammad Feyd, but so far he had refused to talk, which left the authorities pretty much chasing their own tails.
Worse, in the immediate aftermath of the thwarted stadium attack, Gray himself had wound up as a suspect in the conspiracy. Which was just plain stupid.
Yes, he’d failed to pass along a potentially crucial message, but that wasn’t because he’d been working for al-Jihad. He’d made the decision in a split second of distraction, a moment when his version of justice and the law had clashed and he’d gotten caught up in his own head, stuck in memories. And yeah, maybe there’d been other factors, too, but they were nothing he couldn’t handle. He could—and would—bring the bastards down. No way he was letting the Santa Bombers go free. Not now, not ever. Not after what they’d done.
The thought brought a flash of memory, of concussion and screams, and the rapid flutter of a dying child’s chest in the sterile confines of an ICU.
Shaking off the image, Gray forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. Moving silently he worked his way through the thick forest, headed for Mariah Shore’s cabin. He had no orders, no official sanction. Hell, he was on probation. He was supposed to be riding a desk, monitoring transcribed chatter and helping with the tip lines.
“I’m just out for a hike,” he murmured, keeping his voice very low, even though he hadn’t seen or heard anything to indicate that he had company. “Is it my fault I just happened to wander out of the state park and stumble on her cabin?”
It wasn’t much as plausible deniability went, but he was done with waiting around for a break that wasn’t coming. He’d helped jail Lee Mawadi, Muhammad Feyd and al-Jihad in the first place, using slightly less than orthodox methods in his zeal to gain some measure of justice for the victims of the Santa Bombings. He’d do the same thing again, even if it meant the end of his career.
“Well, well. Will you look at that?” he said, whistling quietly under his breath as the ex-wife’s isolated cabin came into view. He stopped amid the cover of a thick stand of trees and scrubby underbrush, and peered through, scoping out the scene.
It looked like Mariah had been doing some landscaping.
Originally, the cabin had been tucked into the woods, with trees very near the structure, shielding it even from satellite view. Now there was a clear-cut swath a good fifty feet in all directions, with raw stumps giving mute testimony to where trees had once stood. In one corner of the lot, a huge pile of cut and split logs sat beside a gas-powered wood splitter. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the cabin’s central chimney, indicating that someone was home, as did the vehicles parked in the side yard. One was the banged-up Jeep Mariah had registered in her name. The other was unfamiliar, a nondescript, dark-blue four-by-four SUV.
Two cars. Two people, maybe more? Gray thought, tensing further as a quiver of instinct ran through him.
When he’d asked Mariah Shore point-blank why she’d bought the forest-locked cabin no more than thirty miles from the ARX Supermax Prison, she’d claimed it was a sort of penance. She’d said she wanted to be able to see the prison on one side of her, the city of Bear Claw on the other, that she wanted to be reminded of how many lives had been destroyed because she hadn’t recognized her husband for what he was.
And maybe that explanation would’ve worked for him if she’d come off as the grief-stricken victim she’d played two years earlier. But the newer reports—some of which Gray had written himself—described her as “closed off,” “detached,” “unfriendly,” and “nervous”…which weren’t the kind of words he typically associated with innocence. They were more in line with the behavior of a woman who had something to hide.
Unfortunately—as far as Gray was concerned, anyway—a detailed check of her activities since Mawadi’s incarceration hadn’t turned up any indication that she was in contact with her ex. Heck, she’d kept almost entirely to herself, not even visiting her parents when her father had been hospitalized again a few months ago for his recurring heart problems.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and with all the available information suggesting that Mawadi, al-Jihad and Jane Doe had fled the country, SAC Johnson had ended all surveillance of Mariah Shore, despite Gray’s protests that she was one of their few remaining local links to the terrorists.
In retrospect, Gray knew he probably should’ve kept his mouth shut. Rather than making his boss take a second look at the decision, his opinion had only made Johnson dig in harder, to the point that he’d ordered Gray to stay the hell away from Mawadi’s ex-wife. But Johnson hadn’t known that she had clear-cut the area around her cabin and strung up what looked to be some serious motion-activated lights and alarms, along with a low electric fence that was no doubt intended to keep deer and other critters out of the monitored zone, lest they trigger the alarms.
She’d turned the place into a fortress.
Question was, why?
“And won’t Johnson be glad I just happened to be hiking this way?” Gray murmured, having taken up the dubious habit of talking to himself over the last few years, ever since he and Stacy had split up.
Refusing to think of his ex-wife, or how things had gone so wrong so fast after their so-called “trial” separation just before the bombings, Gray moved out of the concealing brush and eased closer to the cabin, his senses on the highest alert.
He hadn’t gone more than two paces before the door swung open, and Lee Mawadi himself stepped out onto