as much of her fingers as possible.
And true, it wasn’t dangerously frostbite-inducingly cold, so that at least was a plus.
He’d grilled her on her kidnappers—there were six or seven, she wasn’t quite sure—all men, all white, all heavily armed. The voices she’d heard had American accents, but she didn’t think she’d heard them all speak.
Had she noticed any dogs?
To Thomas’s relief, there were none that she’d seen or heard. Being hunted by men with assault rifles wasn’t great, but it would be far worse if there were dogs involved.
Tash had told him that the cabin where they’d taken her was small and three point four miles off the main road, then another twenty-two point seven miles back down the mountain. The fact that she’d had the presence of mind to pay attention to the SUV’s odometer while fleeing her captors was impressive.
After she’d finished giving him every little last detail that she could remember, they’d fallen into silence as they’d walked. But now she shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t make sense. They had me. If they wanted me dead, why not shoot me? They had guns. I’m assuming they had bullets.” She looked at him, her blue eyes wide in the waning late afternoon light. “I mean, it’s gotta be easier to get ammunition than it is to get those assault rifles.”
“Pretty easy, these days, to get both,” he agreed.
“So why did they leave it to chance?” she asked. “My death? Yours, too.”
Thomas shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t know, Tash. I’m just happy we’re alive.” Understatement.
“At first, I was thinking they wanted it to look like an accident,” she said. “Brakes fail—although not at first, because I jumped on them hard when I first saw you. But okay, maybe they’d damaged them, and my stopping that way finished them off. So eventually the brakes fail, which they did, and the SUV... plunges from a cliff...? But that doesn’t explain that bomb, with a trigger or a timer or whatever it was. Forensics will find evidence—even if just traces of the explosive shows up—and it will... No way that will it be labeled an accident. So are they stupid or...?”
“Or,” he told her. “Bomb-making’s an art.”
The outraged confusion she shot him made him wish for his phone’s camera. “I would argue a hard no to that,” she countered. “Art?”
“Skill,” Thomas corrected himself. “Skill’s a better word. See, bombs have signatures that tie them to the maker and whatever group of tangos—terrorists—they’re part of, so... It really does make sense.”
“But if the terrorists wanted to be sure to take responsibility, why not just take video? If they want everyone to know they killed me,” she clarified. “Film it, post it online.”
“Unless the bomb’s stolen or a, well, forgery for lack of a better word.”
Now Tasha was still giving him a new WTF look, so he explained. “Maybe whoever set up that roadblock wants the authorities to think you were killed by a certain group of different bad guys. Let them take the blame.”
“Bad Guy Team A frames Bad Guy Team B for my murder.” She got it. “Okay.” But then she shook her head again. “But why risk my not-dying by letting me go? Why not tie me to a tree with the bomb-that-frames-their-mortal-enemies securely in my lap?”
“Because they’re not as smart as you,” he suggested, adding, “Thank God.”
“Or maybe I’m not the target,” she said. “I mean, maybe the point isn’t to kill me, specifically. Instead, maybe they just want to scare people by planting a bomb that went off, so they didn’t really care if I lived or died—I’ve been thinking about that, too. I mean, seriously, who besides Queen Wila would want me dead?”
It was meant to be a joke, but as Thomas glanced at her, he saw a flurry of emotions cross her expressive face.
“No,” she said, even though he’d said nothing. “Ted’s mother would never... That’s not even remotely possible. Ted is... No. I’m just some convenient pawn. Maybe the they-who-planted-that-bomb-in-the-SUV would’ve gone after anyone who was heading up to the Ustanzian compound.”
This time she seemed to want a response, so he gave her back a “Maybe.”
She was getting out of breath—from their conversation, or the hiking, or more likely a combination of the two.
These mountains weren’t very mountainous. On a scale from one to ten, with one being Florida and ten being the Rockies, they were maybe a five and a half.
Maybe.
Time and ice-age glaciers had worn them down, turning them into more