Without a Trace by Nora Roberts Page A

he’d taken off for a long—supposedly peaceful—vacation.
    Quite a bit could change in two or three months. Charlie, being Charlie, would have keyed into it.
    Trace breezed by the basic data. Hammer had been founded in the Middle East in the early seventies. With a combination of luck and money, and a complete disregard for life, they had pulled off a number of bombings, taken hostages. The last hijacking the organization had attempted had ended with someone’s itchy finger pushing a detonator and blowing eighty-five innocent people and six terrorists to oblivion.
    That was their style, he thought. Win some, lose some.
    “Husad,” Gillian said, honing in on one name as Trace flipped screens. “Isn’t he the leader?”
    “He’s the one with the bucks. Jamar Husad, political outcast, self-proclaimed general and complete lunatic. Come on, Charlie,” he muttered at the machine. “Give me something.”
    “You’re hardly looking,” she began.
    “I already know all this.”
    “How?”
    “I worked for them for six months,” he said half to himself.
    “You
what
?” She took a step back.
    Annoyance flickered in his eyes as he glanced up. “Relax, sweetheart, all for the good of the cause. I infiltrated.”
    “But if you were inside, then you should know where they would have taken Flynn and Caitlin. Why are we fooling with this computer when—”
    “Because they moved. They were just getting set up in the new location when I got taken out.”
    “Taken out?” Puzzlement veered into horror. “You were shot?”
    “Part of the job description.”
    “You were nearly killed—a scar like that …” She trailed off and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You were nearly killed by those people, but you’re doing this.”
    He shook her hand away. He couldn’t afford to let her feelings soften toward him. Then it would be too easy to let his soften toward her. “I got a personal investment here. There’s a matter of a hundred thousand—myticket to paradise.”
    She curled her fingers into her palm. “Do you expect me to believe you’re only doing this for the money?”
    “Believe what you like, but keep it to yourself. I’ve never known anybody who asks so many questions. I’m trying to concentrate. Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “I know they were in Cairo, that’s old—
    “All
right.
I knew I could count on Charlie.” Trace leaned back. “New base of operations: Morocco.”
    “Morocco? Could they have taken Flynn and Caitlin all that way?”
    “They’d want the best security for them. In Morocco, Hammer would have allies close.” He continued to flip from screen to screen until he came to the end of the file. “Nothing on your brother here yet.” He instructed the computer to print out the pages that interested him, then turned to Gillian. “It would only take a phone call to bring the ISS in on this. I want you to think about it.”
    She had thought about it, worried about it. “Why didn’t Mr. Forrester do that?”
    “I’ve got some ideas.”
    “But you’re not going to tell me what they are.”
    “Not yet. Like you said, it’s your family, you make the choice.”
    She moved away from him. It was more logical to call the ISS. They were an organization with sophisticated equipment, with manpower, with political clout. And yet … every instinct told her to go with this one man, the man Charles Forrester had called a renegade. With her hands linked, Gillian turned to him. He still didn’t look like a hero. And she was still going with her instincts.
    “One hundred thousand, Mr. O’Hurley, and I go with you every step of the way.”
    “I told you I work alone.”
    “Perhaps you haven’t seen me at my best, but I’m a very strong and capable woman. If I have to, I’ll go to Morocco alone.”
    “You wouldn’t last a day.”
    “Maybe not. Hammer’s agents are looking for me. If they find me, they’ll take me to my brother. At least that way I’d know he and my niece were all