When Nitro answered the phone with an instantly alert voice five minutes later, she had to concede her dad was right.

      “Nitro…It’s Josie.”

      “What’s up?”

      She’d gone outside to an isolated phone and made sure no one was in hearing distance, but still she spoke in a low tone. “There’s been an explosion at the Mercenary Training Camp. When I left it looked like most of the compound was gone.”

      “Are you all right?” The words whipped out like bullets.

      “I’m fine. I was out walking.”

      “What about Tyler?”

      She couldn’t help noticing he had asked about her first.

      It made her feel tingly inside, and she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with a feeling like that. “Dad was sleeping. He got hit by debris, and he’s in ER right now. They’ll be moving him to a private room shortly, and he wanted me to call you.”

      “What hospital?”

      She told him the name and grimaced at Nitro’s curse. “I wanted the anonymity of the city.”

      “Yeah, but it’ll take me an hour and a half to get there.”

      “We’re not going anywhere, not right now anyway.”

      “Tell your dad to stay put until I’m there, but here’s my cell phone number just in case he doesn’t listen.”

      She wrote down the number and rang off, her heart beating too fast for a simple telephone conversation with her dad’s partner.

      Chapter 2

      Josie had to go to the waiting room while her father was moved. The holes in his memory had become more apparent the longer they’d talked, and she was glad she’d brought him to a larger hospital for treatment as well as anonymity. A nurse came to tell her that her dad had been moved, but had requested she wait to come to the room until he got cleaned up.

      Josie took the time to talk to the doctor again, but the harried ER physician had little to add. So, she sat down and waited for a nurse to come and tell her she could go to her father’s room. After thirty minutes, she was pretty certain she’d been forgotten, and she went to the nurses’ station to inquire.

      “He’s in room 312. It’s just around that corner,” the young blond aide said as she waved her hand toward a corridor to her left.

      Josie found her father’s room, but the door was shut. Was he still indisposed? She knocked, but when no answer came a chill ran down her spine. She pushed the door open without knocking again and found an empty room. The bathroom door was closed. Her instincts were screaming at her that her father was not in there either. She pushed the door open to a dark cubicle and knew she was right.

      Going over the room in minute detail, her instincts on high alert, Josie looked for sign of a struggle, but there wasn’t one.

      The I.V. shunt he’d been wearing was in the waste basket, and his clothes were missing from the plastic bag that still sat on the floor of the tiny closet. The blanket was folded neatly at the bottom of the bed, and a piece of paper was sticking out from under one corner.

      She grabbed it, immediately recognizing her dad’s handwriting. The note read, Josie-girl. Read the journal in my private footlocker. Watch your back and don’t worry about me. The Viet-Kong couldn’t kill me and neither can these bastards. He’d signed it, Love Dad.

      She rushed out of the room, but knew before she talked to the nurse at the desk that no one had seen anything. Her dad was the best. He’d been a long range reconnaisance patrol in Vietnam and knew how to disappear too well. If she’d been expecting him to run, she might have been able to catch him, but she hadn’t and therefore held out little chance of finding the smallest clue to his whereabouts.

      It gave her no satisfaction to discover she was right.