Free Black List by Brad Thor

rang from his computer.
    He looked down and clicked on one of the windows he had left open. Caroline had just posted a message for him: Coming out.
    Nicholas looked around. Was she in one of the cars? The hotel? He couldn’t be certain.
    When none of the car doors opened, he assumed she meant she was coming out from the hotel itself. Bringing up the live camera feeds from inside the hotel, he began searching for her.
    Near the bar area on the ground floor, a woman stood waiting for an elevator. Was that her? She wasn’t facing the camera. Her head was down and she seemed to be looking at her phone. She was about the right size, but so was every other woman who had walked into the hotel that night. When the elevator doors opened, she stepped inside and disappeared.
    Less than a minute later, the elevator arrived at the third floor and thewoman walked out. Once again, he couldn’t see her face. She seemed to know where all the cameras were. Nicholas’s heart had begun beating faster but not because he was excited to see Caroline Romero. He had a bad feeling something wasn’t right.
    Even so, he tried to tell himself to calm down. Caroline was an exceedingly intelligent woman. If she was in enough trouble to call him for help, she was very likely in enough trouble that she didn’t want her face captured on a security camera. Nicholas wanted to believe in her abilities, but he was having a hard time. Instinctively, he reached down and wrapped his hand around the butt of his pistol. The dogs could sense their owner’s unease and leapt up in back, their eyes scanning out the cargo area windows as they tried to figure out what was going on.
    Suddenly the woman appeared on the pedestrian walkway. She stopped when she got to the parking area and looked around, unsure of where to go.
    Nicholas took a deep breath and tapped his brake lights. The woman began walking forward.
    She was attired like the other women he had seen entering the hotel that night, in heels and a short dress that clung to her body. A small cocktail purse hung from her left shoulder. The phone now gone, both of her hands appeared empty. His eyes flicked from her hands to her face, which he still couldn’t see. She walked with her head tilted down. Was she trying to throw off the cameras? Or was this all about throwing me off?
    The woman was closing in on the Denali, and Nicholas’s trepidation was going through the roof. As she neared, alarm bells started going off inside his head. Everything inside him was yelling that danger was approaching. Put the truck in gear and go—drive and don’t look back, the voices told him. Yet he ignored them. Argos and Draco had started growling.
    Any time he may have had to react was now gone. The woman was so close she could touch the vehicle. And as quickly as that, he lost sight of her.
    The dogs were now barking as they lunged at the back window. Nicholas craned his tiny neck from side to side as he tried to figure out where she had gone. A trap. He should have known.
    Revving the Denali, he prepared to slam it into gear, when a face suddenlyappeared at the passenger-side window. Without even thinking, Nicholas raised his pistol to fire.
    He centered it on the woman’s forehead and began to depress the trigger. But before he could fully engage, he jerked the weapon to the left.
    The barking of the dogs was so loud that Nicholas couldn’t hear himself think. They had raced forward and were straining to leap into the passenger seat to get at the figure outside. He yelled for them to be quiet.
    He had never seen this woman before in his life. It wasn’t Caroline, but there was something familiar about her.
    She reached down and tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. She looked back at Nicholas.
    “She was wearing leather pants,” the woman said through the glass. “She had short, spiky black hair back then.”
    Before he knew what was going on, the woman was reaching into her purse. Nicholas reflexively