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She tried to memorize the route they took, to keep her sense of direction, and to stay oriented as to where they were. And above all, she tried not to panic. But it was hard not to. A man had a freaking gun pointed at her. On cue, her shoulder throbbed fiercely, a pointed reminder of how real a threat such weapons posed.

Realization that Alex was not crazy at all twisted and turned in her gut. This dark reality did, in fact, lurk just below the surface of what she’d always thought of as the “normal” world.She’d just been too naïve and stupid to see it. Or maybe too stubborn.

It wasn’t as if she’d never heard her brothers and dad talk about it. But they’d always downplayed its danger any time she’d expressed concern about it. Although, truth be told, she’d chosen to ignore the warning signs of its existence with them.

Come to think of it, she’d done the exact same thing with Alex. No wonder he thought she was stubborn and refused to see what was right in front of her eyes. No wonder he was fed up with her and was counting the seconds until he could ditch her forever.

God, she’d been a fool. Only now, when it was far too late, did she finally let go ofherdelusions long enough to realize Alex wasn’t the least bit delusional. He’d had it right all along.

Worse, they were both going to die because of her stubbornness and stupidity. Poor Dawn. She’d singlehandedly orphaned an innocent child. Sure, her family would step up and make sure Dawn had a great life. But look at the damage that Alex had suffered by not having a mother and by having a twisted, terrible father.

“I’m so sorry, Alex,” she muttered.

His gaze flickered toward her just long enough for her to be sure he’d heard her, but he didn’t respond to her apology in any other way. He was probably too busy observing the driver and thinking up some diabolical scheme to extricate them from this pickle. At least, shehopedhe was devising a brilliant escape plan.

Goodness knew, she didn’t see a way out of this mess. In fact, she had a sinking feeling that this time they wouldn’t miraculously elude disaster. Something bad was going to happen to her and Alex, and it was all her fault.

The cab drove for maybe fifteen minutes on the highway and then exited onto a country road headed west, inland and awayfrom the Atlantic coast. Before long, the vehicle turned down a deserted, two-lane road.

The driver took the turn at dangerously high speed. He must be worried about them making a jump for it out the back doors. Not that she would try it at these speeds. She was no trained stuntwoman.

Outside was a mixture of farmland and forest, and human dwellings were becoming sparse. The driver was taking them out in the middle of freaking nowhere. This could not be good.

Who was this guy? And how had he known where to be conveniently available for her and Alex to jump in his cab? He had to have been working with whoever’d tailed them after they left the library. The sophistication of this kidnapping was daunting, to say the least. It reeked of coordination and communication on a scale that only a government agency could pull off on short notice.

But which agency? And for that matter, which government?

It might help answer her questions to know which one of them was the target, her or Alex. The people who’d been shooting at her obviously wanted her dead, not kidnapped. Did that mean this elaborate abduction was directed at Alex?

The obvious culprit was the CIA. They had shown deep distrust of Alex from the beginning and it had only intensified recently. But she supposed this could just as easily be his father attempting to snatch him from the clutches of the CIA.

Man, Alex’s life was complicated. She didn’t envy him the pushes and pulls coming at him from all directions. And now his mother was somehow part of the tug-of-war over him. That had to be messing with his head big time.

The cab careened onto a narrow gravel road. The tires skidded as the driver took this turn at high speed, too. The vehicle’s back end fishtailed wildly, and she braced herselfagainst the door with her good shoulder, doing her best not to become motion sick at the violent ride.

The car turned off the dirt road onto a barely passable driveway, hardly even a path through the weeds. Crap. Nobody would ever find them out here in the boonies. She’d had no idea that portions of New Jersey were this rural and isolated.

The cab stopped in a sunny, weed-clogged clearing in the bottom of a swale. On the rising slopes around them, thin trees cast dappled shade over thick undergrowth.

No sooner had the vehicle stopped than the barrel of the pistol aimed straight at Katie from the driver’s seat. The implied threat was obvious. Pull any stunts and the girl got her head blown off.Great.

“Get out,” the man ordered them. “Slowly. The girl first.”

If she wasn’t mistaken a hint of triumph flashed in Alex’s eyes for an instant, as if to say the driver had just made a fatal error. She didn’t see it, though. She couldn’t seem to peel her gaze away from that tiny, deadly black hole gaping at her face.

“Out!” the driver barked.

She looked over at Alex, and he nodded in encouragement. She fumbled at the door handle and pushed the door open.

“Move ahead of the car,” Alex murmured in Zaghastani. It was a rare dialect spoken only in one tiny region of central Asia. When they’d gone on a mission to Zaghastan last year, they had both taken a crash course in the rare tongue and learned enough of it to be conversational and render first aid to the locals.

She did as he instructed. She circled wide of the door and moved toward the front of the vehicle. The cabbie tracked her with his pistol, aiming it at her through the driver’s side window, which he’d opened.

“Now you,” the driver snapped at Alex. “No funny business, or I kill the girl.”

What was she supposed to do? Dive for the front of the cab and use the engine for cover? Stand here like their kidnapper told her to? Run? Poised on her toes and ready to bolt, she waited and watched for a signal, any signal, from Alex.

He stepped out of the car, slowly. But then he moved so fast she barely saw the blur of motion. Alex lunged forward, shoved him arm through the driver’s open window, grabbed the pistol by the barrel and twisted it violently free of the man’s hand all in one lightning-fast attack.