He went in with her while he checked for escape routes and potentially lethal weapons, then left her with the succinct warning, “Five minutes-then I’m comin’ in after you.”

While he waited for her, he took a sweatshirt out of a drawer and a poncho from the closet. He laid the poncho out on his bed, placed the sweatshirt in the middle of it and rolled them both into an oblong bundle the right size for tying onto the back of a saddle. Then he leaned across the bed, fingered back the window shade and looked out.

Though the sun was up, it was early yet. The air coming through the dusty screen was still cool and smelled of juniper and wild grass. There were no signs of life from the main house; McCullough had left last night to follow Ron and pick him up after he’d dumped Lauren’s truck and trailer. They’d be going straight on to the base camp after that. He could just see the back end of Katie McCullough’s SUV parked in the semicircular drive in front of the house, though, and that worried him. He hoped it didn’t mean she’d changed her mind about going to stay with her mother in El Paso until after the dust had settled. The last thing he wanted was for this to turn into another Ruby Ridge.

Time was running out.

The thought had no sooner entered his mind when he heard the faint click of the bathroom-door handle. He was there waiting beside the door when it opened.

His prisoner didn’t say anything, just glanced at him as she moved past him, carrying the saddlebags over one arm. She smelled of mint toothpaste. Her hair looked damp around her forehead and her face had a just-scrubbed look. Her shirt was rather fiercely tucked into the waistband of her jeans, giving her slender curves more definition than they should have had, a taut and tidy look he found unexpectedly erotic.

Shutting out thoughts he had no business thinking, Bronco watched her move into his bedroom, easing into his personal space the way a familiar melody comes to the mind.

“So this is where you live?” She asked the question with casual curiosity, as if she was some easy woman he’d picked up in a bar and brought home for the night and this was the morning after. Her eyes traveled around the room, taking in the neatly made twin beds and the rolled-up bundle on his, then came back to him. “Nice digs.” Her lips twitched in an aborted attempt at a smile. “Not exactly what I expected.”

Bronco grunted, feeling as if she’d sucker-punched him. It was an old wound, and he reacted with reflexive anger, lashing coldly at her, “It’s a room. What were you expecting-a tepee?”

He regretted the remark when he saw her flinch. What the hell was the matter with him? She hadn’t meant it like that, and he knew it.

He was glad she didn’t try to flounder through some guilt-ridden apology. She leveled a shaming look at him, then said quietly, “Night before last I saw you get dead drunk, start a brawl and get tossed into the parking lot, remember? This room-beds all made, that squeaky-clean bathroom in there-they don’t exactly go with that ‘drunken Indian’ image, do they? You don’t fit that image.” And though her eyes narrowed in speculation when she said it, there was something else there, too-a whisper of suppressed excitement in her breathing, a certain tension in her body.

Bronco felt himself go quiet and wary. “Well, now, what kind of image do you think I fit?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

“I’m just a plain ol’ horse wrangler,” Bronco muttered, turning to retrieve the rolled-up poncho so she couldn’t see his eyes. Acting-playing a part-was one thing, but outright lying didn’t come easy to him and never had. “Believe what you want-”

She broke in with a snort of anger before he’d finished. “Yeah, right. And this is just a horse ranch, Gil McCullough is John Wayne and I’m Maureen O’Hara, and that’s why I spent last night locked in a tack room with bars on the windows while a bunch of people I don’t even know cleaned out my motel room. What do you think I am, stupid?” Her voice trembled, and the tears she had yet to shed shimmered in her eyes.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” Bronco said evenly as he took her arm. What he did think-about her and the whole damned mess-didn’t bear looking at too closely. “Time to go. Come on.”

It surprised him when she struggled against his grip, twisting to look at him. “Who are you people? What’s this all about? What do you want with me?”

You’ll find out soon enough, he thought grimly as he hustled his captive out the door of the cottage and down the wooden steps. A whinny rose from the corrals behind the stables. His body tensed and he paused, listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, but a thrill of urgency rippled down his spine as he tightened his hold on her and quickened his step.

She went with him unresisting for several paces. But her voice, when she spoke again, had gone tense and quiet. “It’s about my father, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer her. After a moment he heard her take a deep breath. “Well, whatever you people are planning, it’s not going to work. My father won’t let you get away with this. He won’t be blackmailed, either.”

This time Bronco did reply, on an exhalation that was almost prayerful. “Laurie Brown, for your own sake, I sincerely hope you are mistaken.”


A council of war was taking place in a seventh-floor room at the Watergate in Washington, D.C. Present were the acting U.S. attorney general, Patricia Graham; Henry Vallejo and Vernon Lee, heads of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI, respectively; and last but not least, the former attorney general, now the top con tender for his party’s nomination for president of the United States, Everett Charleton Brown, known to friends and family as Rhett.

Three of the four people in the room were seated around a table littered with coffee cups and the sort of mess created by people in the process of deciding among equally untenable options. The fourth, Rhett Brown, was up and pacing. He hadn’t slept, and looked it. He knew his hair was rumpled, his tie askew, and that he needed a shower and a shave. He could have used a toothbrush, too; his mouth tasted like the bottom of a Dumpster, after too many cups of coffee and the Philly steak sandwich he’d forced himself to eat late last night against his better judgment.

He looked at his watch and his heart ached. How much longer could he put off calling Dixie? Don’t tell anyone, they’d said, with the usual warning of dire consequences if he disobeyed that directive. But how was he going to get through this without Dixie by his side? He’d have to tell her soon. She had a right to know. To prepare herself for the worst.

The worst. His mind slammed shut on that thought. Cold to the depths of his soul, he pivoted to face the group at the table.

“Okay-” he huffed out a breath and drove a hand through his hair “-we know what they want.” Their demand had made that clear. They wanted him out of the presidential race. They meant to keep Lauren until after the national convention, to insure that he would refuse the nomination. And after that…what then? He ground his teeth thinking about it. “So. Let’s summarize. What do we know about these people, these…Sons Of Liberty? Who, where, what, why and how many.”

Not, he thought, that it mattered much how many they were. Look at Oklahoma City. How many had it taken to destroy more than two hundred lives? How many would it take to kill one small person? Just one. Lolly, his precious little girl.

Pat Graham looked at him. The burnt-umber eyes that were a legacy of her African-American heritage lit with compassion. A veteran of the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, she knew all about pain and fear and loss. Rhett couldn’t imagine anyone he’d rather have succeed him as attorney general, or anyone he’d rather have beside him now. How many years had they worked together on the weapons-control project? She’d begged to be put on it in the beginning, he remembered, when he’d considered it too inflammatory a position for a woman. With her courage and passion she’d made him ashamed of that view. Illegal-weapons trafficking wasn’t just a political hot-button issue to Pat Graham. She’d grown up in a south-central L.A. neighborhood where the slaughter of children with assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns had become so common that it seldom even made the evening news anymore. To her, keeping guns off the nation’s streets and out of the hands of its children was a true crusade of the heart.

She swiveled back to the table and nodded at the FBI director. “Vern, you want to do the honors?”

Vernon Lee cleared his throat and shuffled through papers already in rumpled disarray. “Okay. We know they call themselves SOL.” He pronounced it “soul” and went on to explain, “That’s Spanish for sun. That’s their signature, their logo-the rising sun. The good news is-” he leaned back in the upholstered chair, leaving one hand palm down on the papers in front of him “-we know quite a bit about them. The leader of the group is a man named Gilbert McCullough-ex-marine, war hero, spent five years as a POW in Vietnam. Supposedly he’s a legitimate rancher out in Arizona now-owns several thousand acres of land, most of it pretty rugged. Raises cattle and horses. And runs a fair-size militia on the side. Actually,” he added almost as an afterthought, “SOL is one of the better run of these kinds of groups. Well organized, well trained, well disciplined.”

Vernon leaned forward again, forearms on the tabletop, hands clasped. “And that’s the bad news, I’m afraid. They’re careful. They don’t make mistakes. They cover their tracks. We believe McCullough’s goal is to eventually arm and unite all the various militia groups in that part of the country under one supreme commander-himself. That’s an ambitious undertaking for a man who never achieved a military rank above sergeant. Also expensive. We believe the group is directly responsible for a large number of bank robberies and truck hijackings in the Southwest and upper Midwest, but so far we can’t prove it. They’ve learned from others’ mistakes, it seems. They pay their taxes, for example, stay on the good side of local authorities. Up until now they’ve been real careful not to give us any excuse to go after ’em.”

Rhett rubbed at his burning eye sockets. Well, he thought, we sure as hell have an excuse to go after them now. And if we do, and if we make one mistake in the process, I’ll bury my only daughter.

He drew a steadying breath. “Okay. Give me an idea what the situation is out there. Local law enforcement-” He stopped as the head of ATF made a soft inarticulate sound. “Sorry, Henry, what was that? This is your bailiwick, after all.”

Up till now Henry Vallejo had been sitting with his chin tucked against his barrel chest, watching his fingers turn a pencil end over end. He shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “We don’t believe local law can be trusted. It’s highly likely some are members of SOL themselves. We know for sure some are sympathetic to the cause. The code of the Old West, you know. Those people out there do love their guns.”

Rhett frowned. “You suspect, or you know that for a fact?”

“Fact.” Henry squirmed uneasily and glanced at Vernon Lee. “Uh…our intelligence sources have confirmed it.”

“Intelligence sources?” Rhett felt his chest quiver with a new excitement as he moved in beside Henry and leaned down close to him, gripping the table with his hands. “Are you telling me you’ve infiltrated this group? You have a man on the inside?” He looked across the table at Pat, who raised her eyebrows. He transferred the look to Vernon Lee. Vernon shrugged. Henry cleared his throat. No one appeared to be breathing. “Henry,” said Rhett, his voice turning soft and dangerous as he came back to the ATF Director, “are you telling me you knew about this? Before last night? You knew they planned to kidnap my daughter?”

At the look on Rhett’s face, Henry reared back in alarm and held up a hand. Pat Graham pushed back her chair. “Rhett-”

“You knew? And you let it happen? You stood by and let these people kidnap my daughter?”

“Look, I’d only gotten the word from my guy the night before. There wasn’t anything he could do, not without jeopardizing his own position-”

“Jeopardizing his position? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

The ATF man was on his feet and facing him. So was Pat Graham, who had taken Rhett’s arm in a calming grip. Which, since she was five-two and 110 pounds on a good day, was a little like a Jack Russell terrier trying to corral a Great Dane.

Vallejo’s face was flushed. “Look, Rhett. I know how you must be feeling. But think about it. You know how long it takes to get a man in position with one of these groups-they’re paranoid as hell. This man is one of the best agents we’ve got. I couldn’t risk him. For what? We keep your daughter from being taken-this time. What then? These people are hell-bent on keeping you out of the White House. As far as they’re concerned, you are the great Satan. They’ll stop at nothing-and I mean, nothing-to keep you from accepting that nomination. How many people do you figure would die if they pull off an Oklahoma City at the Dallas Convention Center? Are you prepared to pay that price for your daughter’s safety?”