Chapter 31

Noah and me tumbling across a mattress. It was a hallucinatory image. A fantasy.

We wouldn"t be in that bed. They were coming to take us away.

Wake up!

"Slate?" Noah touched my elbow. "You all right?"

"Yeah. Sure." I faked a laugh. Toed at the guy at my feet again. He had shoes which were a lot more than I had. "You"re a sweet guy, Noah. Don"t assume I give a flying fuck about what happens to them after we dump them. We were dumped here too. They can go up to the house and help themselves. After a while, that guy will come by with supplies. They"ll be fine."

"Sure, babe." He squeezed my arm a little harder. It felt good.

All we had to do was push through a little more. Take that helicopter somewhere, anywhere. Any place with any number of people would have some kind of air traffic control and some kind of air force. As soon as we got picked up on radar, they"d get in touch with us, and they could talk us through anything we needed to get us back to civilization.

Back in the chopper, we found some scrubs in a supply closet. The smaller set was that distressing shade of tomato that I associate with surgeons. The bigger set was that sad shade of medical green. Noah could fit into the tomato, and I (barely) fit into the green, but we didn"t exactly look like a pair of male models ready for our closeup.

"Emergency extraction, that guy said," Noah mused. "So what does that mean? Who are we running from?"

"I was thinking about that too. If it"s the FBI, if they finally figured out where we were taken, we don"t want to run. We want to wait for the rescue. But..."

"But..." He was going to make me say it.

"There"s no law that says there"s only one set of bad guys or one criminal organization that we"re fighting," I said. "Whatever this is, it"s big. If it"s big, lots of people want it."

"The enemy of my enemy could be just another enemy piling on," he said.

"Yeah." When you play a game that involves strategy, when you spend a lot of time thinking about all the ways a cool plan can go terribly wrong, well... It"s a useful state of mind but also a stressful one. Why couldn"t I just sleep? Why couldn"t I just tell him to hike up to the house? Crawl in bed? Cuddle up and wait?

But I couldn"t.

We were both frowning. We had so little information. What we did have was a helicopter and a tranquilizer gun that still had a few darts left.

Enough to fight off an enemy if that"s who was coming for us?

I doubted it.

"Here"s my problem," I said slowly. "Mitchell was supposed to track me. By now, he"s had plenty of time to send in the cavalry. So I don"t know if he doesn"t know where we are, or he"s still holding back until we make contact with somebody more important than these bozos." I gestured out the window of the chopper.

A pink line was appearing on the horizon. That must be east. And dawn.

"So we"re bait." Noah cupped his chin in his hand.

How was that even legal, using a college kid for bait? Especially a star quarterback?

You volunteered. You agreed to do this. For Noah.

But also because I was manipulated.

How did I know there were any good guys in this story at all? Noah was the only one I could trust. The only one who"d really proven himself.

"Well, if we"re bait, they"re waiting for bigger fish than the front line kidnappers," Noah was saying.

"Yeah."

"But if we go to them, if we take the offensive..."

"And how do we do that?" As if I didn"t already know.

It was still drizzling, but most of the lightning had moved away. A sudden crack startled me, even though it was fairly far off. In the ensuing silence, Noah reached over to adjust my seat harness. The sound of the thunderbolt seemed to echo in my head.

He handed me a pair of headphones but didn"t let go of them. I closed my hand around them but didn"t pull away. We looked at each other.

"I"m afraid to ask how much time you spent on that flight simulator," I said.

"That"s fair. I"m afraid to answer."

We were silent for a while. He went through his pre-flight checks. Even made it look like he knew what he was doing. I checked my headphones and seat restraints again.

He got back in the air, turning the bird to follow the storm.

"Um, not to question your strategy," I said, "but..."

"That"s the programmed destination," Noah said. "I could override it but..."

"You want to see where it leads." I knew what he was doing, but I had to hear him say it.

"Kind of? Not fly all the way in but maybe enough to get an idea...?"

"It would certainly be nice to know what"s going on."

"Or even what continent it"s going on."

I laughed. My heart swelled. My feelings were all over the place. "Let"s do this."