Page 56 of Acting on Instinct
She was going to be fine.
Now, it was her turn to ease forward.
Kira turned on her interior lights and had her ID ready to hand out.
The dogs moved up to sniff her vehicle. The guard scanned her pass and handed it back, “I’m sorry, ma’am, the base is on heightened security. We’re admitting mission-essential personnel only.”
“Heightened security?” Kira asked, accepting the pass from the guard and dropping it onto her lap. “I’m going to my fiancé’s house.” That was quasi true. It was true enough.
When Kira was waiting for intelligence to clear her for the long-term pass, Ty had to come to the gate to escort her. He wasn’t here; was she willing to wake up one of the Echo wives? Was that even a possibility?
“Should I have someone come down to the gate to escort me?” Kira’s lungs tightened with anxiety. She thought that signs of distress would make her look culpable in this situation. She reached for normal, slowing her breath so she didn’t pant, letting her lips feel dry instead of slicking her tongue over them.
“If there’s a military member who can prove the necessity of your entrance,” the guard responded.
No, Kira didn’t know a military member on base at that moment who would come and prove her presence necessary. The fort was necessary for her safety; she was not necessary to the fort.
“That’s not the case,” Kira admitted.
Another guard finished a mirror sweep of her vehicle before allowing her to drive forward to make a U-turn and leave.
Kira had never been turned away at the Fort Bragg gates.
Why now?
If she was making this personal, conspiratorial even, Kira had a story in her imagination. The people who watched her or the people who wanted to interrogate her had made a call from a burner phone.
It seemed an easy way to keep someone out. Even if the person accepting the call didn’t believe there was an actual threat, they’d need to act “as if” until something could be resolved, right?
Lula could probably find out. As soon as Lula called, Kira would ask her if there was a bomb scare, and if it happenedaround one o’clock-ish when Kira got on the highway heading to Bragg. Any earlier and it would have nothing to do with her.
Kira very much wanted this to have nothing to do with her.
This had to do with her, and Kira knew it from the tinnitus ringing in her ears so loudly that she was getting nauseated with vertigo.
Driving a short distance, far enough away that Kira wouldn’t make any of the MPs nervous, close enough that if she screamed, the dogs, at least, might hear and react, she slowed to a crawl. After scanning the edge of the road to see if any cars had pulled off to the side, waiting for her ejection from the fort, so they could follow her to her next destination, Kira pulled off the side of the road.
There, Kira searched the internet for information about the fort’s alert status, and finding none, she next looked for an all-night doughnut shop near the police station. “Yes, Lula,” she said to the emptiness around her, “that is something I read in a book.” She put her car in gear. “But it seems reasonable, right?”
This time, as she drove, she kept the radio off. She needed all her senses primed as she followed the blue line on her app toward lights and people.
“Zero dark thirty” was what Ty called the time between midnight and break of dawn.
So damned cut and dagger sounding.
Dangerous sounding.
Why were there so many people out at this time of night?
Every passing car, every headlight moving up from behind, made Kira sweat. She reached out, turned off the heat, then cracked the window to let the bright night chill brush her cheek.
Her blood throbbed in her ears, mixing with the high-pitched squeal of tinnitus, and Kira felt like she was trapped at a nightmare concert of heavy drumbeats and audio feedback.
She didn’t know how to turn the volume down on her ears, and equally on her sense of paranoia.
London sent the note. Kira had no idea when it was written, or whether London had misheard or misinterpreted the conversation that she’d relayed.
If her own body didn’t seem to conspire, if her own thoughts weren’t aligning, Kira would be much more likely to go sit in a hospital emergency room or a bus depot or somewhere else safe and impersonal to wait for daylight to steady her.
