Part 2

SPOV

Chapter 31

Two weeks later

I should have felt relaxed, even maybe happy sat on a beautiful beach with the sun shining down on me. The sea was a turquoise color and was so clear that you could see to the bottom where the shells and stones had collected, where the small fish played. I didn't feel relaxed or anywhere near happy. Today I felt empty of any emotion, which was actually a change for me. I'd gone through every emotion in the book, several times since that awful day in New Jersey.

Driving along that road with Ranger I'd felt so happy with where Ranger and I had been. He'd tried so hard to accommodate the demands that I'd made of him and for that I could honestly say that I was head over heels in love with him. Everything had begun to come apart when I'd looked down at the ring on my finger, in fact I was pretty shocked. It wasn't a fancy ring or anything, but it was special. I'd been wearing it ever since we'd stayed at that house with Stanley. I'd liked that man and not just because he seemed to hate Correll, he actually seemed concerned for Ellie and me. In some ways he'd made me think of Ranger. He was ex military, though he wouldn't say where or what he had done, but he had similar mannerisms to Ranger. He was quiet, but when he spoke, he made sense. He had no idea why Ellie and I were at his house but knew that for some reason we were hiding from danger.

He'd given both Ellie and I a ring to wear. It was our safety net, so I was told, but I never dreamt that I would ever have any need for it. Normally the colored stone was blue, just like my eyes apparently, but if I needed to be careful it would change to orange. It had this clever little receiver inside that would make it change colors. Flashing red meant get your arse out of there, immediate danger.

As Ranger had driven along that road, I was engrossed with looking at the large houses and manicured lawns that we were passing. It was only as more trees appeared and the houses disappeared behind us that I'd looked down at my hand. To be honest I just stared at the orange hue coming from the stone, thinking how pretty it was, until it started to flash red and then my brain had kicked in. I just couldn't understand why it was doing that, I was with Ranger, I was safe. Then the words that I'd heard less than a week ago came back to me.

"Don't trust anyone"

I'd argued that I could trust my life to Ranger but had been beaten down with who he worked for, the type of jobs that he did and who his allegiance would be with in the end. Yeah, he'd make sure that I was safe but at the cost of everything that I'd done so far and still needed to do.

At first, seeing that ring change color had me confused, I mean how could anyone possibly know where I was? Then it changed to sadness as those words reverberated through my head, I really couldn't understand that Ranger would betray me like that. I knew I had tears in my eyes when I'd looked at him and could see the concern on his face and hear it in his voice, as though he had no idea what the hell was going on. When I said that he had lied to me and hadn't trusted me I was so sure that he was being honest with me when he told me that he did.

I don't know why I said what I did as I tumbled from the car, maybe I wanted him to know how much he meant to me and to know that I'd loved him. I'd never told him that before even though I was so close to saying it, something always held me back. I suppose it was because I felt that if he pushed me away again after opening my heart to him then it might just break. I couldn't bare the idea of that happening. I was prepared to have the friendship if it meant that I would see him. When I'd said that he had betrayed me I meant that he had betrayed my love for him, okay maybe my trust in him as well.

I had hit the road hard with my shoulder, but the adrenaline was rushing through my body, so I never felt it. I ran, pressing the stone in the ring hard to get it to activate the panic button inside, knowing it was a tracker. As I ran through the trees my tears blurred what was in front of me. Several times I tripped and fell but the further I ran the more annoyed I became. Angry at Ranger, at myself and the damn stupid tree roots that were in the way.

I'd felt arms grabbing hold of me, panicked that someone had caught me only to have them tighten around me.

"Hey, calm down. Come on, we have to get out of here"

I knew the voice and it helped to calm me, but it didn't stop the anger from overwhelming me. I was soon the one to be holding tight to them as we quickly moved through the trees on a scrambler bike. I was sure the noise would attract someone's attention and was waiting for men to jump out from behind every tree that we passed. It hadn't happened and as we came to a road there was a truck with a trailer, one meant to carry livestock, which was where we drove into. Once the bike was on its stand, I was dragged off it to sit on the floor, arms around me as I cried my eyes out again.

That was two weeks ago, which seemed like an age ago. Ellie had everything organized for us to be safe. You might be asking who was driving the truck that we had escaped in, well that was Stanley. Maybe you're confused, because it had been a hell of a confusing time over the past few months.

Everything that I'd told Ranger and his guys had been true. Eula had been so distraught when the girl that she knew as Lainey had gone missing, so seeing as there weren't any skips, I had offered to look for her. It had happened as I'd said, talking to those men and then by chance coming across that warehouse. Hell, even Joe turning up and making me go with him had been the truth. I suppose we'd never lied. I'd learnt from the best, Ranger, never lie just omit information.

I'd liked the girl Ellie and to be honest I had no problem using Joe's money and taking the passports. The idea of leaving the country hadn't exactly appealed to me, and not being able to talk to anyone at Rangeman had unnerved me, but I was captivated with the story that Ellie had told me. We spent time on the flight talking about our respective lives. It gave me an opportunity to get to know her, but yeah, I still had reservations about what we would be doing once in Serbia. Ellie wasn't the person who I thought she was, which I have to admit worried me to the point where I even questioned if she really was the girl that Eula had asked me to look for.

It seemed that her mother, the one who had adopted her, was good at protecting and suppressing the person underneath. That sounded familiar to me as I compared Ellie's experience with mine with my mother. The difference between us was that I was too stubborn to let my mother run my life. When Ellie had gone to university to study child psychology, she had been that quiet, conservative girl, but it hadn't lasted long before she wanted to fly. She had changed courses part way through her first year, though had never told her mother. She hated the idea of a life working with children, not that she hated children, it was the constricting career prospects that had her wanting more.

She'd moved across to criminal psychology but found herself facing a whole new type of fellow student. They tended to be male whose ambitions were to work for the FBI or some other law enforcement agency. They weren't very friendly to Ellie and that was when she'd decided to redefine who she was, who she wanted to be. She became super fit and even did some self defense classes and with the help of extra classes became excellent at using computer programs to source out information. It was like she was a different person and she seemed to like it.

It was as she'd said, she'd eventually got that information about her birth parents. Maybe it was something that she needed to do to really find herself. Going to Belgrade to discover her origins had been an eye opener. Her mother was struggling financially but was happy with her life. That reunion had been pivotal for Ellie, especially hearing about what her father had done. That was when she started to find out as much about him as she could, though on that visit she had only met Savic. Savic had apparently both admired Markovic and hated him. Admired him for getting out of Serbia yet hated how he had done it. Yeah, I think we could all guess that the American government didn't do it for nothing, so Ellie's curiosity had gone into overdrive.

We had bonded on that flight, after all we had both saved each other's lives. So you might be wondering that if I never lied to Ranger then what did I omit? I know the whole boat incident wasn't expanded on and to be honest I wasn't even sure I was ready to face it myself. That we had decided to go after that device that Savic had sold was, in retrospect, madness. It seemed that we both had issues with spontaneous actions, not thinking through the consequences enough. Though it had allowed me to deactivate what could have been a dangerous device. I know, you thought it was some nuclear bomb and maybe at first, I'd been scared shitless that it could have been.

Petco, though, he had taken seriously the ideals of Albert Einstein and designed and built a protype for what he saw as the end to all wars. It wasn't nuclear, though it was a bomb, something that Petco had called a NNEPB. A mouthful to say, but to give it its full name it was a Non Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb. Petco was regretting what he had made, old age had mellowed him, and he realized that something like that had the potential for destroying more than just war mongering leaders. The age of global terrorism had reared its head and the ability of greedy men to make themselves richer.

He'd shown me drawings and talked through with me exactly what I would have to do to make a device totally safe and to do that I had to understand the principles of what the thing looked like and how it worked. That had really boggled my brain at the time, but I got there in the end. To render the EMP safe, I had to remove two small electronic boards, thank heavens that they just pulled out. One received a signal and detonated the explosives while the second board was something to do with the capacitor and the coils. I got lost on the science of that part.

You might be asking about the laptops, but I had no idea which was the real one or the decoy. Apparently, they had the same opening pages after a password was put in but with the decoy it was impossible to detonate the EMPs. Petco thought that Markovic would try to get to it, or someone else, and might use it. You might ask why. Well, he assumed that if Markovic had traded his life in America for those designs then someone would build more. He was so worried that Markovic had made more of the devices with the intention of using them for greed or power. Or that the American Government would unleash them in an effort to obtain world domination, no one else knew was that the programming, that they were bound to have used, would only work with his original configuration and that was on the laptop.

That was why people were after his laptop. I sent one of the laptops to Silvio in Miami, but I had no idea what Ellie had done with the other one. Me, I would have destroyed them both, but it seemed she was way ahead of me on thinking that one through. Which was probably wise on her part because of course it might be possible for someone to bypass the need for Petco's programming.

The retreat, well that was real. It was very upscale and had clients that weren't famous but more infamous. It turned out that Pavkov was a regular there, though I'm not sure how Ellie found that out, but we felt we needed to find out more about him. We didn't stay there but got friendly with one of the women who worked there. We did spend some time at the retreat, but not as guests. Working as a cleaner or waiting on the "Healthy" drink bar gave us access to some of the people who were there. I was being serious when I said that she was trying to get me to re-evaluate my life and make some changes. I spent a lot of time thinking through what she had meant by that.

I could maybe understand why Ellie had changed who she was. She'd been brought up in a way that was probably alien to her, yeah, the old argument of nature versus nurture. Me, well no doubt my upbringing had probably influenced some of my behavior, but I knew that I was very much like my grandmother, so felt that I was comfortable with who I was. Okay, becoming fitter and eating more healthy food was a struggle but that was the only concession that I was prepared to make.

It was while we were in Cyprus staying with this woman in her apartment that Ellie eventually managed to hook me into being more fit. I actually loved the pole, once I got over the bruising that I first got from it. We paid the woman well for staying with her and the information on Pavkov, so had headed over to Istanbul.

The fire at the warehouse, it was not my fault. Though I never was sure if Ellie had been responsible for the fire, she was adamant that it was an accident.

When we came back home Ellie was the one who got in touch with a friend of hers called Lizbeth. I honestly had no idea who she was, but it seemed that her and Ellie had got on so well when Ellie was living on the streets that she felt comfortable asking her for her suggestions on where to stay. I had actually liked that house, probably because it was by the sea. Lizbeth, having done her good deed had left us and not long after that, that man Correll had turned up. Neither Ellie nor I could work out why he'd suddenly arrived or why he was there. Turns out that Lizbeth knew him and asked if she could use the place for a few days, Correll had turned up expecting to see her. Talk about embarrassing. It was as awkward as hell him being there, especially as the wound on my stomach was hurting like a bitch.

To say that he was paranoid was an understatement. I had no idea who he thought would want to break into the house, but he had motion sensors under the rugs by all of the windows and doors.

"Stay in your rooms or I'll think that you're an intruder and shoot you"

That was how Correll knew that Ranger was inside the house, and he just fired the tranquillizer dart into him. I couldn't swear to it, but I was pretty certain that when Ranger turned as he fell and Correll shot at him again, it was because Correll had recognized him. It had been me who had pushed the panic button on Ranger's watch because when I started to insist to Correll that we move him all I got was "He'll be dead in a few hours with the two shots he got"

I'd totally lost it, just as I had done when Ranger had been shot by Scrogg in my apartment. The notion that Ranger was dead had me inconsolable, which was probably why someone gave me something to knock me out. I wasn't too sure what had happened next because I'd woken up in another strange house still with Correll and another man named Stanley. Man, he was pissed with Correll and the atmosphere in the house was toxic.

I felt really guilty for what had happened at Stanley's house, though he was quick to laugh it off and forgive us. No damage was done, and he was pleased that we'd managed to escape. I'd known that Ranger was near, I could sense him, that tingle on my neck that was my early warning system. I'd needed to be with him for me to feel safe again. I knew that we would need a diversion to make our escape from Correll and his damn pressure mats, so just before I'd left the kitchen, I'd set the timer on the oven. With oil poured around the inside we knew that the heat from the oven would cause the oil to produce a lot of smoke, enough to have Correll focused on that and not us. I never had found out who Correll was, until Ranger told us on that day at the Bat Cave, yeah that news had shocked me especially when I realized that Ellie already knew. That was when she had left.

I didn't see her again until that day when I had bailed out on Ranger. I was a total emotional wreck, had almost shut down with shock and really didn't care what the hell happened to me. It took a few days to be coaxed out of the state that I was in and that was when I realized that both Ellie and Lizbeth were with me, and we were staying in a little cabin next to this glorious beach. We were on an island off the coast of Belize called Ambergris Caye, where Stanley had bought a cabin years ago. Yeah, the island had been developed over the years for tourists and there were areas that had the usual bars and restaurants and hotels, but where we were was private with a few beach shacks further down that provided drinks and meals cheaply.

Stanley had a boat that he used to get to the mainland but the idea that I had actually been brought here on his old seaplane made me thankful that I couldn't remember that part of the journey. I think by then Lizbeth had knocked me out with something.

So, as I said I was sat here on the beach, a book on my lap and a drink in my hand, waiting. Ellie was due back soon and while I had questions for her regarding how she had found me I was also keen to know how she had got on up in New Jersey. I also had some news for her, something that I'd been working on for the last two weeks.

I looked up as a shadow fell over me to see Lizbeth turning to sit on the lounge chair next to me.

"Any news?"

I asked, hoping that she would know when Ellie was due back.

"No, shouldn't be too long though"

I'd been worried about Lizbeth being with us to start with. But it seemed that she was absolutely furious with her father, Correll. Lizbeth had found out who her father was as her mother was dying. Apparently her mother thought it was something that she should know about.

"Anything on your father?"

I asked, knowing that Lizbeth was at the stage of hating him. Seemed after she'd got in contact with him, he'd been this nice man who on first appearances wanted a relationship with his daughter. It had been him who suggested that she move closer to him in Trenton, and he had been a constant source for knowing of available jobs in the area. When he'd suggested applying for the bounty hunter job with Vinnie, Lizbeth had actually been keen to do it. She was capable, having done detective work with Stanley and Stanley had made sure she could look after herself.

When her father told her that she needed to read up on me, her predecessor, because then she was sure to get into Rangeman, especially if she got to know the owner well, that was what she'd done. In fact, her father had pushed her to do that. We were all puzzled with what his motives were for telling her to do that and to be honest I was annoyed until Lizbeth told me how Ranger had totally refused to have anything to do with her. Okay, I was jealous.

When Ellie had disappeared from the Bat Cave she been on a mission, to find Lizbeth and confront her. Having it confirmed that Correll was FBI had shocked Ellie and she was livid that Lizbeth had been trying to set her up. I'd loved to have been a fly on the wall when they'd met. Lizbeth went ballistic and was threatening to poison, stab or worse the man that had wormed his way into her life. She denied any knowledge of him working for the FBI and had believed him when he said that he was accountant, working in the city. She hated him as much as Ellie hated her father.

"No. I bet he's in his office going through every morsal of data trying to find out something"

He was on my shit list as well, below Ranger, but on the same level as some Colonel called Raynor and Markovic. To be honest I just couldn't work out how Raynor and Markovic knew that we'd be on that road that morning. That they had the laptop had compounded the guilt that I had felt, and that was why Ranger was at the top of my shit list because he was the only one who knew that I had it. I honestly believed that he was putting his mission ahead of me, providing the laptop that he'd been sent to find. The only thing in his favor was that he hadn't told them exactly where we were going. You might ask how Ellie and Stanley knew where I was or how I was in danger, simple, the ring. Ellie told me that she had stayed in New Jersey with Lizbeth keeping a watch on Markovic and Stanley was there keeping a watch on Correll.

When they saw where I was, Ellie had tailed me on the bike while Stanley was going to be driving from Princeton. He'd spotted the jeeps hiding off the road and put in place a hasty rescue for me.

Stanley had visited the shop and found exactly what I was looking for, a letter sent to Einstein from Petco. I think Stanley had maybe stolen it, but I didn't ask, pleased because at least no one else could see it. It was my clue that I had hoped would break the second set of passwords on the laptop. The laptop that seemed to disappear, well Ellie had sent it to the FedEx depot in Trenton, to be collected in person. Though we still had no idea which was the real one and which was the decoy.

I was aware of Lizbeth still sat there so tore my thoughts back to what we were talking about.

"Any idea yet what his angle is?"

"Nah. I mean he seems almost OCD to me, thank god I don't seem to have inherited many of his genes"

Thinking of that my thoughts went to my family. I had no idea what was going through their heads or even if they thought about me. Ranger had been right, I didn't want to face anyone from the Burg and have to try and answer questions about Joe. I knew that Joe had been murdered, but not by who. I could only assume that it was the person who had given him the money and instructions to help me find Ellie. I hated him for doing that and then for thinking that I would stay with him. Not enough that I would want him dead but to honest I had too much else to think about to mourn his death.

I'd had Ellie post a letter from Miami to my grandma though. I hated to think that she thought that I wasn't thinking of her. All I'd said was that being with Joe wasn't what I wanted but being away from Trenton was. No doubt she'd make sure that made the rounds through the gossip.

"I get my quirks from my grandmother. I want to be like her when I grow up"

I think Lizbeth had heard stories of her when she was in Trenton and seeing her laugh, I mock hit her arm. That was when I noticed movement back at the cabin.

"Ellie's back"

Was all I said as I quickly moved from the lounger and started to walk up the beach. I spied Ellie stood on the porch watching me, an enormous smile on her face. To say it was a cabin wasn't quite true. It was made from wood but was spacious. There were three bedrooms, one hidden in the roof, and a large kitchen living space. The porch was a great place to sit and relax or eat a meal and the bathroom, that was mostly open to the skies, was enormous.

"You look as though you had a successful trip"

"Yep, sure did. Mission accomplished"

In some ways I felt saddened by what Ellie had done but I suppose that I knew that she needed to do something, to rid herself of the constant threat that Markovic posed.

"How did you do it in the end?"

Because I really couldn't see Ellie killing Markovic face to face, that would have put her too close to him and the bodyguards that he employed. Plus, it needed to be done so no one would know who was responsible.

"I got into that nurses house. A few drops of aconite into one of the bags of dialysate and we were watching the nurse panicking after her visit. Because he was so ill anyway an attending doctor gave heart failure as his cause of death"

I didn't want to delve any further and spoil Ellie's mood, after all this would be the first death that she would be responsible for. I knew too well the after thoughts of doing that, but I suppose in her mind it was a question of her or him. A movement behind Elaina caught my eye and at first, I thought that it was Stanley visiting. My heart started to race when I was looking at Ethan's smiling face. What the hell was he doing here?