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Nealy sighed and settled back on the lounge, determined not to think about Lucy, Button, or Mat Jorik, but that only led to worrying about money. Steelworkers made good salaries, but this was proving to be an expensive trip. Could Mat handle the repairs for Mabel on top of the other trip expenses? And did she really want to spend the rest of her grand adventure in two pairs of shorts, a couple of tops, and a change of underwear?
She had to have money, and Terry Ackerman was the only person she could trust to get it for her without turning her in. She made her way to a pay phone and called him.
* * *
FBI Special Agent Antonia “Toni” DeLucca pulled out of the parking lot of the truck stop near Mc-Connellsburg, Pennsylvania, where Jimmy Briggs had stolen the Chevy Corsica. She and her partner had questioned employees and truckers, but no one had seen anything. In a few hours, they’d come back to talk to the workers on the next shift.
She gazed across the seat of the government-issued Taurus at her new partner and wondered how she’d ended up with someone named Jason. Secret Service Special Agent Jason Williams. Nobody over the age of thirty had the first name of Jason. And maybe that was what irritated her the most because Jason Williams wouldn’t see thirty for another four years, while Toni had passed it more than a decade and a half ago.
When Toni had entered the Bureau in the late seventies, she had been one of only two hundred female agents. More than twenty years later, she’d managed to survive the gender wars by being tougher and smarter than everybody she’d started out with. She’d considered it her duty to rise through the ranks, only to discover that what she loved most was working as a field agent. Three years ago she’d gone back to doing just that, and she’d never been happier.
Late last night she’d been ordered to report to the resident agency in Harrisburg, which was too small to have a field office, and at the early morning briefing, she and the other agents who’d been called in had learned of Cornelia Case’s disappearance. As concerned as she was about what had happened to the nation’s First Lady, she was excited to be part of an elite task force of agents assigned to find her. Unfortunately, she’d been given a new partner—one who wasn’t even with the Bureau. And, although she’d worked with the Service before, the agents had been seasoned veterans, not twenty-six-year-olds named Jason.
He had that scrubbed-up white bread look of a lot of Secret Service agents. Short light brown hair, symmetrical features, and what looked like a tiny zit on his chin. How could they have given her a partner who still got zits?
They’d also given her a partner who didn’t have to battle his weight or worry about wrinkles. A partner with no gray in his hair. She didn’t have to look in the rear-view mirror to know how much of it threaded her own short dark hair. Still, her olive skin was relatively unlined, and even though her shape was curvier than she’d like, she was still fit.
So far, she and the kid hadn’t said more to each other than they needed to, but now Toni decided it was time to put her new partner through his paces.
“So tell me something, kid. Whose butt did you have to kiss for
this assignment?”
“Nobody’s.”
“Yeah, tell me another one.”
He shrugged.
She was Italian, and she hated being put off with white bread shrugs. The kid sank another rung lower in her estimation. “Interesting. All you had to do was show up, and they decided to put you on an elite task force. Aren’t you the lucky one? In the Bureau, we have to work for assignments like these.”
He turned to her and smiled. “I was handed this assignment because I’m very good at what I do.”
“They gave me a real live hotshot,” she drawled. “Isn’t this my lucky day?”
He frowned, so she knew that she’d scored. Her satisfaction faded, however, as she realized the frown wasn’t a sign of irritation but deep thought.
“How bad do you want this?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“How bad do you want to find Aurora?”
Aurora was the Service’s code name for Cornelia Case. The members of a president’s family always had code names that started with the same letter. Dennis Case had been Arrow.
She took her time deciding how to answer. “I wouldn’t mind having it on my record.”
“Not good enough. And not honest, either. The word is, you’re the one who’s a hotshot.”
“Is that so? What else have you heard?”
“That you’re arrogant, hard to work with, and one of the best field agents in the Bureau.”
“Snoopy little shit, aren’t you?” She decided to turn the tables on him. “I don’t like failure. And I don’t like scrubbed-up kids who think just going through the motions means they’ve done their job.”
“Then we’ve got something in common.”
“I doubt it. Your career’s so new it doesn’t matter whether you’re the one who finds Aurora.”
