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Katie opened her mouth to speak, but Alex shook his head at her again. And this time she shrank back against the seat, as well.

That look had entered his eyes. The one he’ had the first night he’d gotten home. The look of a killer. Absolutely chilling calm rolled off of him.

Oddly enough, it comforted her. Spy Alex was in the house. And she trusted that version of him with her life.

Why didn’t Alex shoot the driver? Although there was the whole business of the taxi traveling at seventy miles per hour down a highway.

If Alex shot the guy, the vehicle would crash spectacularly.

Still. They might have a better shot of surviving a crash than whatever their kidnapper had in store for them.

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 na?ve 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 of her delusions 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, she hoped he 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 away from 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 herself against 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.

“Get down, Katie!” Alex bit out. She dropped like a rock as the driver’s door started to open.

In the next millisecond, the pistol fired deafeningly, a single shot. A spray of blood coated the inside of the windshield.

“Get in the back seat,” he ordered, already pulling the driver’s door open.

She pushed to her feet, causing her injured shoulder to send a wave of fiery pain through her. As she took a deep breath and released it slowly, Alex opened the driver’s door and commenced dragging the body out of the vehicle.

She’d seen her fair share of blood as a nurse, but never like this, sprayed all over the inside of a car, along with brain matter and bits of bone and other gore. Even she was grossed out by it.

Alex slid behind the wheel and picked up a jacket that must’ve been lying on the front passenger seat. He leaned forward to wipe off the windshield with it, but a fusillade of gunshots erupted around them, and she flattened herself against the back seat while Alex did the same in front.

How he managed to start the engine from his prone position, she had no idea. But the cab’s motor roared to life.

As he threw the car into gear, another barrage of bullets unleashed around them.

She threw her arms over her head and rolled off the seat onto the sticky rubber floor mats.

It was a tight squeeze between the front seats and rear ones, and the hump between the seats was insanely uncomfortable. But this was better than being dead.

Alex swore from the front seat and returned fire.

“These guys are pros, Katie. They’ll kill the car. We’re sitting ducks in here. When I say go, kick open the door with your feet and run like hell for the woods. Zig zag. It makes you much harder to hit. I’ll cover you.”

“Pass me the driver’s pistol,” she responded in a trembling voice. “Then I can cover you while you join me.”

A hand came over the back of the front seat and she took the weapon from it. All those years of shooting tin cans with her dad and brothers were finally going to come in handy, apparently.

She couldn’t actually believe she was about to run out into a firefight.

But she and Alex were in life threatening danger.

He was outnumbered, which meant he was also outgunned.

If she didn’t help him, he would die. They would both die.

Determination temporarily overrode her panic.

She reached back, staying low to unlatch the door.

“I’m ready,” she reported.

“On my mark. Three. Two. One. Go!” Alex popped up from the front seat and sprayed gunfire at whoever was out there.