facilities near the edge of the Panama Pacific International Airport. The place had food, showers, and doctors to take a look at their wounded. Everyone had laughed and joked as they cleaned up and got some warm food, but Kendra hadn’t felt like doing either. The only thing she’d wanted to do was spend some quiet time with Declan. Unfortunately, he’d disappeared the moment they’d landed, saying something about needing to rest and heal up. She didn’t have the guts to go after him, not if he was going to snap at her again.
She hadn’t seen him again for six hours, not until they all boarded the C-17 Globemaster John had rerouted to their location. Even then, Declan had immediately headed to the back of the plane. The aircraft had been almost empty, and yet the place he’d chosen to crash was about as far away from her as he could get.
A short time after leaving the Panamanian airfield, she’d walked back to check on him, but he’d been in a deep sleep. It was obvious that Declan was still avoiding her for some reason, even if that meant sleeping all the way back to the States.
Kendra continued to replay the last few hours of their time in Costa Rica, looking for that one thing she’d done that had pushed him away, when Ivy slipped into the seat beside her.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Ivy said softly. “I thought you’d be sleeping like everyone else, especially after the week you’ve had.”
She shrugged. “I guess I’m too tired to sleep right now.”
Ivy didn’t say anything for a while, probably assuming she would continue. But Kendra didn’t feel like chatting. Not about what was really bothering her anyway. She would tell Ivy about everything soon enough, but now wasn’t the right time.
“You okay?” Ivy whispered. “Did something happen out in the jungle you haven’t told me about?”
Yeah. She mused silently. I fell in love with Declan. But even though Ivy was her best friend, those weren’t the words that came out. “I’m fine, really. I’m just thinking about what we’re going to have to do when we get back. With John, I mean.”
She could feel Ivy’s gaze on her in the darkness and figured her friend knew she wasn’t really being honest. But Ivy was intuitive enough to know that if Kendra wasn’t ready to talk, she shouldn’t push. She heard Ivy shift in her seat, then sit back with a sigh.
“I know it’s going to be hard for you to sneak around behind John’s back, but you understand why we have to do it, right?”
Kendra wanted to get Ivy focused on another topic of conversation, but she honestly didn’t like this one any more than the previous. At least she could talk about this subject, though.
“Yeah, I understand why we have to do it,” Kendra admitted. “I just wish we didn’t. John has always been someone I looked up to. I have a hard time believing he’s behind any of this.”
“Me too,” Ivy said. “But the fact is, we rarely know people as well as we think we do. And sometimes the people we think we know the best are the ones who can surprise us the most.”
Ivy told her about the plan she and Landon had come up with to follow John, maybe even put a tracking device on his car, but Kendra wasn’t really listening. Instead, she was thinking about what Ivy had said about how the people we think we know the best can surprise us the most.
Maybe that was the case with Declan. Maybe she didn’t know him nearly as well as she thought she did, even after everything they’d gone through out in that jungle.
Chapter 15
Ivy couldn’t believe that she and Landon were actually conducting a surveillance operation on John. After all the red tape their boss had gone through to get them down to Costa Rica, then back out, it just seemed wrong. But Landon was right. If John was clean, that was great, but if he wasn’t, they needed to know. Because their lives were being put at risk every day in the normal course of their jobs. If John was working another agenda, —possibly with people on the Committee—then the risk they were facing was even greater. One way or the other, they had to know for sure. She’d always thought of John as one of the good guys, but there was simply too much at stake to have blind faith in anyone right now.