Shiver

and absurdly pretty, given what she had been through and the circumstances. She had an arm around her kid, who was curled up against her side, clutching his teddy bear and sound asleep. “ Sam. You make sure you two stay with me. Don’t let them railroad you and Tyler into going anyplace without me. Do you hear?”
    “I hear.”
    The last glimpse he got of her was of her frowning after him as he was rolled away. It was getting on toward 5:00 a.m., and besides being scared to death and traumatized, she had to be dead tired, but she was still hanging in there and he knew that her continued vigilance was for the sake of her boy. A pair ofarmy medics, having loaded Danny onto a gurney, were hustling him away to emergency surgery in a hastily rigged operating room, where he would be put out briefly while they patched up his leg and other injuries. He didn’t have much choice but to let it happen, but the catalog of things that could go wrong while he was out of commission was so long that he was worried sick. Over the week and a half before tonight’s debacle that he as Marco had been in Sanders’s supposed custody, Danny had learned something of how the other man worked: he was the master of high-handed decisions reached in the spirit of getting the job he was assigned to do done. He was perfectly capable of deciding that Sam and her kid were not his problem, and in fact were a detriment to doing what he had been ordered to do. He was, in short, perfectly capable of shipping them off somewhere while he, Danny, lay unconscious, then shrugging his shoulders about it after the fact.
    Bottom line was, nobody official much cared about the fate of Samantha Jones and her son. Their involvement was accidental, and their rescue was, in Sanders’s case at least, grudging. They had nothing other than basic descriptions of their attackers—which they had already provided to the marshals, during the latter part of the car ride to the airfield, confirming that Veith at least had been on the premises—to contribute to the case. With no vested interest in keeping them safe, no one, in any agency, would be going out of his or her way to do so. As long as Sam and Tyler had no knowledge of where “Marco” was being taken next, it wouldn’t even officially matter to anyone in the game if Veith or some other whack team sent by the Zetasshould find them. Which, unless mother and son were provided with first-rate assistance, the Zetas’ guys eventually would do. As far as the government was concerned, Sam and Tyler were unneeded and expendable, which placed them in extreme danger.
    Unless they were with him. The protection surrounding him had its flaws, not the least of which was that he had to be at least a little bit traceable to keep the Zetas on his trail rather than that of the real Rick Marco, but it was reasonably solid protection, the earlier debacle notwithstanding. But the thing was, as long as Sam and Tyler were with him, he could protect them. Which he had just made it his own personal mission to do. Of course, it would help if he were operating at something near full capacity, but he was hoping that would happen soon. The good news was, he tended to heal fast.
    “You understand me?” he said to Sanders as the gurney was pushed through a pair of double doors into the small clinic where the surgery was going to happen. The antiseptic smell hit him in the face first. Then a glance in the direction that he was headed found a number of gowned and gloved medical professionals looking at him expectantly as he was rolled into view. Damn, this is going to hurt. But other, more urgent matters pushed the thought out of his mind. Danny frowned up at Sanders, who had already made it clear that he wasn’t about to leave his charge’s side. “They’re not with me when I wake up, I don’t say a word to anybody about anything.”
    “You get your kicks trying to blackmail the government?”Sanders growled in reply. But Danny was reasonably sure his point had been made. If it hadn’t been, it was too late to do anything about it. They were already at his side, shoving a needle into his arm. As something cold shot into his veins, he grimaced . . .
    When he woke up, he was groggy and dry-mouthed and feeling way too good for it to be due to anything but a particularly felicitous combination of IV drugs. For a moment he floated, not thinking about anything in particular except that not being in pain was something to savor. Then