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Panic washes over Michael. He plants his feet. “Move,” the man says, ramming the gun barrel harder into Michael’s back. Michael knows one thing: If he gets inside, he’s going to die. And his daughter will be as good as dead too.
He raises his hands, walks toward the vehicle. The thing with accountants is that everyone thinks you’re too bookish to be tough. That you can’t take care of yourself. But most accountants didn’t do a tour in Iraq.
Hands still raised, Michael glances around the warehouse. He sees no sign of Taylor. The SUV has O’Leary’s other goon in the back seat. In the front passenger seat is someone he can’t quite make out.
“Get in,” growls the man who is most certainly not a U.S. Marshal.
This is his only chance. Michael places a foot on the SUV’s footrail and raises himself up, as if he’s going to climb inside. Then he kicks back quickly, planting his heel in the fake marshal’s chest. The gun goes off, but the shot goes high as the well-dressed man hits the ground.
Michael spins and dives on top of him. Grabs his wrist, bangs his hand on the concrete until the gun skitters away.
Footfalls. Michael grabs both sides of the fake marshal’s head and slams it into the floor before jumping to his feet.
Shots ring out.
Michael feels no bullet impacts as he sprints toward an old oil barrel and ducks behind it.
He has no weapon, nowhere to run. And Taylor is out there somewhere. Through a rust hole in the barrel, he sees a figure with a handgun approaching.
It’s over for him, and probably for Taylor.
From nowhere comes the roar of an engine, and Michael’s sedan jets past him and plows into the approaching gunman, tumbling him like a bowling pin. The car screeches to a stop and Michael sees Taylor behind the wheel, ghost white and terrified.
There’s still another gunman. Michael crouch-runs to the car, opens the back door, and dives inside. Taylor is already flooring it in reverse, making their way out of the warehouse.
She screams when the sound of more gunshots rings out and the windshield spiderwebs. But she keeps driving, ducking low, panting, navigating via the rearview camera on the dash.
More shots. The sound of tires squealing. But she’s on the street now.
The car juts forward and they peel away. Michael peers out the back window and sees a figure of someone getting smaller as his daughter and he disappear into the night.
They drive seventeen hours—through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, then Missouri—stopping only for gas and fast food, and once at a Starbucks for Wi-Fi so Michael can transfer O’Leary’s money to Michael’s own Swiss accounts. It’s early evening and they now sit in a diner in Leavenworth, Kansas.
“We’ll be safe here. My military buddies live here. One of them’s the sheriff. He’s already got new papers for us.”
Taylor is silent. She’s not crying anymore. She’s shell-shocked.
“Your name is Alison Lane now…” He pauses. “I’m so sorry.”
Michael couldn’t know then that she would thrive for four years in Leavenworth, graduate from high school—fall in love. Or that their troubled past would rise again when O’Leary and his men found them.
PART 2
46
“I’m not sure Mac’s gonna make it,” Sheriff Walton says down the phone. “I’m sorry to call you, Michael, but I thought you’d want to know.”
Michael gets a lump in his throat, holds back tears. It’s hard to believe that after clearing IEDs and VS-500 mines and pressure plates, investigating car bombings, and kicking down doors to find bomb makers, it was cancer that might take out Mac.
Ken sounds tired on the other end of the line.
“I’m glad you called,” Michael says, looking out his window of his modest home. A bicyclist pedals down the street, a little girl bouncing in the plastic child’s seat mounted to the back. The girl is clutching a brown bag with a baguette sticking out of it. “You’re using the burner?”
They’ve kept communications to a minimum over the past five years. To protect them both.
Ken confirms he’s using the disposable phone. He’s in his car, about to leave the hospital shortly after midnight in Kansas.
“I wish I could be there,” Michael says. He means it. Life was good in Leavenworth until someone on O’Leary’s payroll saw the viral video of his daughter taking down those high-school bullies and things spiraled.