Page 2 of Heart of Danger
He’ll kill your car, your cellphone, your computer, your GPS, your music player.
Not words so much as images. They hadn’t made any sense then but they did now.
She’d been told how to find him.
He will hole up somewhere on Mount Blue. Take the most deserted road. The road will be almost impassable. There will be an obstacle—a fallen tree, a boulder. Drive around the obstacle. He will know you are coming. He will find you.
So, here she was, clutching her useless steering wheel with two sweat-dampened hands, on a deserted mountain road, in a dead car, in the dead of night. Actually, it was more a track than a road, and seemingly led to nowhere.
The last human outpost had been forty miles back and that had been two stores and one of the last gas stations left in California. She’d glanced curiously as it as she drove by. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a gas station. This one had looked ramshackle and deserted, tattered, faded pennants flapping in the rising wind.
Heat was draining out fast. A vicious gust of wind rocked her car. She loved her car. It was sleek and lavender and stylish. But it was made out of a revolutionary lightweight yet tough resin that would tighten in a crash, but which was no match for this icy mountain wind. What made it so good on the freeways made it a deathtrap in a freezing snowstorm.
Another gust rocked the car, hard. The wheels on the right side lifted a little then dropped the car back with a bump. Catherine’s heart pumped hard as she fought panic. A flash bloomed in her mind. The car, buffeted wildly by the howling winds, slowly sliding off the road, tumbling down the mountainside.
The road gave little purchase. It was a perfectly possible scenario.
Catherine tried never to dwell on future problems. The present had its share. But this one held the awful bite of possibility.
She’d go down with the car if there was a sudden blast of wind. What a way to end her life—tumbling in a car until it encountered an obstacle that would stop it. A boulder, a particularly strong tree. The car wouldn’t explode, of course. But if she lived, she’d be trapped in the wreck, bleeding out, with no hope of rescue. No one knew where she was. She was in the wilderness. It was perfectly possible they’d find her body only in the spring.
Another powerful gust. The car shifted on its suspension, the wheels slipping an inch or two. She broke out in a sweat which instantly chilled her skin in the cold. A wild white sheet of snow lashed across the windshield. However awful it was to contemplate death tumbling down the mountain, it was only a possibility.
Getting out of the car was certain death.
The steering wheel was icy under her hands. She relinquished the wheel and tucked her hands under her arms. There were gloves in the baggage compartment but it was electrically operated and would never open now that the car was dead. And even if she could open it, there was no question of getting out of the car. The gloves might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean for all the good they could do her back there.
Catherine shivered again, a full-body shudder. She was a neurologist, but she was also an MD and understood quite well what was happening. Her skin and lungs were shedding heat with every passing second and her body was trying to generate it by shivering.
Her core temperature would start dropping soon. The rest was utterly inevitable—confusion, amnesia, major organ failure.
Death.
This is insane, she thought. Yet it was the logical ending to the poisoned chalice at the heart of her life.
Her gift. Her curse.
All her life, she’d worshipped reason. Bound herself to rationality with iron clamps, studying math and biology and medicine and then neuroscience. Trying with all her might to banish her gift from her life.
This crazy quest for a man she’d never met, this Tom McEnroe, was going to cost her her life. Like the appointment with death in Samarra, Catherine could evade her gift no longer.
The wind shook her car again, angrily, as if claiming it for its own. She shivered again. The cold was so intense it was painful. Pain was good. As long as she felt pain, she was alive and the hypothermic damage could be undone.
Soon there would be no pain, she would be beyond rescuing and then no life at all.
Time stood still as she listened to her heartbeat. At first she tried to count the beats to give herself a sense of time. After two hours she lost count. After another eternity, she felt the exact moment her heart started to slow. Her core temperature had dropped. She was beginning the slide into hypothermia. It felt as if she were already dead and buried deep underground.
In the dark, too exhausted for tears, Catherine leaned her head against the steering wheel, preparing to die. Hoping it would be quick.
A hard, loud rap startled her. She sat up, heart beating painfully, trying to figure out where the noise came from.
The next instant her door was opened and an arm yanked her out into the snow. She stood there blinking. A big hand on her arm was all that was keeping her muscles from collapsing, dropping her to the snow-covered ground.
There was barely enough ambient light to see by. If the man had been even a foot away from her, she wouldn’t have been able to see him.
He was incredibly close, though, close enough for her to feel his body heat, the first source of heat in what felt like forever.
He was huge, shoulders filling her field of vision, so tall she had to crane her neck back, though she couldn’t see his features. He was dressed in black, head to toe, with a gun strapped to his thigh and a long knife in a sheath, face covered with a black ski mask with insectoid eyes, a sight so terrifying she’d have screamed if she had the breath.
