Page 107 of Security Breach
“Higher ground. We need to know where we are.” The skin at the back of his neck tingled. Not a good sign. He urged Emma to move faster. The sooner he oriented himself, the better.
Near the top of the rise, he dropped to his stomach and tugged Emma to hers. They moved cautiously the last few feet to the top. David’s eyebrows rose as he stared down the hill, recognizing landmarks he’d seen most of his life.
Marty and Jerome were arrogant fools. Did they think he wouldn’t recognize his own land? Granted, he and Emma were at the outer edges of the Rocking M, but a quarter of a mile ahead, David and his brothers had installed security cameras.
“Do you know where we are?” Emma whispered.
“The Rocking M. We’re five miles from the ranch house.”
“Let’s go.”
When she started to rise, David clamped his hand on Emma’s arm to hold her in place. “We can’t travel in a straight line to the house,” he murmured.
“Why not?”
“Too much moonlight and not enough cover. We’ll have to stay in the tree line as long as we can.” Hopefully, help would arrive before they had to make a run for it across open terrain. “Come on.”
David led her down the hill a few feet, then they hurried toward dense tree cover and the nearest perimeter security camera.
Nearly at their destination, he pulled up short and tugged Emma behind a large rock outcropping. David pressed a finger to his lips to signal for silence as he tucked her behind him and waited for an approaching intruder to walk closer.
A figure dressed in black stumbled in the darkness and uttered a soft curse. He righted himself and continued forward, walking within a few feet of David and Emma’s hiding place.
David remained motionless, alert for another hunter. Nothing. Something about him was familiar, but what?
Although reluctant to leave Emma when his gut told him that Marty and Jerome were closing in on them, capturing this hunter would improve David and Emma’s odds of surviving.
David waited until the hunter passed their location, then slipped up behind the man. Although intending to knock him unconscious with a sleeper hold as he had the man’s partner, some sixth sense must have alerted the hunter that danger was closing in because he swung around at the last instant, weapon up and aimed at David.
Phil Jones. Guess David had found the mole in the FBI. Had Jordan suspected his agent was on the take?
Without giving Jones time to pull the trigger, David kicked the weapon from his hand and tackled him. They rolled on the ground, fighting for the upper hand and exchanging multiple blows.
David slammed a fist into the other man’s face, breaking his nose. When Jones released his grip to clutch at his face, David knocked him out with an elbow strike to the temple.
Working fast, David slid Jones’ gun into his own pocket, secured his hands with the zip tie, and gagged him with his belt. Conscious of time slipping away, he jerked off the agent’s boots and socks, and carried him back to the place he’d left Emma.
Her eyes widened as David shoved Jones between two boulders where he wouldn’t be able to escape without help. He doubted Marty and Jerome would be sympathetic to their competitor’s plight and help him. That done, David hustled back to grab the socks and boots, and tossed them into the thick undergrowth.
He held out his hand to Emma who ran to join him. Together, they hurried through the woods toward the tree with the closest security camera.
When he reached his goal, David stopped and looked up at the camera he’d placed in the notch of the tree seven weeks earlier. With a series of hand signals, he warned his brothers of the two remaining hunters and conveyed the route he planned to travel. That done, he grabbed Emma’s hand and tugged her into motion again.
“What was all that about?” Emma whispered.
“You didn’t see the security camera in the tree?”
A soft gasp. “No.”
He squeezed her hand. “I warned my brothers about our pursuers. We should have help soon.”
“But it’s the middle of the night. They must be asleep.”
By tripping the early-warning system in place at the perimeter’s edge and triggering an alert with the motion-sensitive camera, his brothers were already on the move. Levi and Elliot were the closest to David and Emma. Caleb could be anywhere in the county. If Wolf Pack was still at the safe house, they were thirty minutes away. His brothers and the ranch hands were his and Emma’s closest source of help.
For several minutes, David and Emma rushed through the woods, picking their way around fallen trees and skirting terrain too dense to traverse without alerting Marty and Jerome to their position.
When Emma stumbled, David wrapped his arm around her waist and propelled her forward. Fury at the two men chasing them burned in his gut. Emma had been through so much, and now she was running for her life again. The unfairness of it all raked his insides and stoked his desire to see the members of the Hunt Club behind bars or dead.