An Eye For An Eye Read Online Free Page A

She shook her head again and sighed. “Men!”
    “Did you ask?” He found, somewhat unexpectedly, that he was enjoying himself.
    “Okay.” She chuckled and shook her head. “I’m guilty.” She gestured to the room. “I can see that was a mistake.”
    He grinned. “So I guess my mistake was letting you pick the restaurant?”
    She grinned back. “Are you saying you want to sneak out of here and grab a pizza?”
    “Heck no! Not after you made me walk past the kitchen.”
    The waiter came and they each ordered a glass of wine. They chatted for several minutes and Richter realized that he was glad he’d come. He’d been on only a few dates since Stephanie’s death two and a half years ago, each time realizing that he wasn’t yet ready. This was the first time, though, where he thought about taking a relationship beyond the occasional cup of coffee or racquetball game. He must have been sending out signals because most women, after one or two dates, stopped calling. That he had never called them either wasn’t lost on him.
    Patty Curtis was different, though. He never would have guessed that the woman he’d met two months ago in the condominium parking lot was a college professor, teaching political science at Princeton. One Saturday morning when he was strapping his bike to the rack on his car, he noticed her. She was wheeling her own bike out of the building.
    “Where are you off to today?” she had called over.
    An hour later, he was following her through the trails of a nearby state park. They met twice after that to explore other trails. And even though they had stopped for lunch each time—nothing more than a slice of pizza or a burger at a local diner—this was their first real date.
    Richter tasted the wine—a Bordeaux—and found it was better than he had expected. Patty took a sip and he watched as she studied her glass, nodding appreciatively. She set her glass down and leaned forward.
    “Okay. So next time it’s your job to pick the restaurant.”
    He grinned. “Oh, so you think there’s going to be a next time?”
    She smiled confidently. “Oh, I know there will be.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Holy shit! DEA agent Juan Ortega thought as he stared down the length of the tunnel. Gun held in front of him, he stood silently for a moment, looking and listening for signs of activity. After a few seconds, he let his hand drop to his side then shook his head in amazement. The tunnel, which seemed to go on forever, was eventually swallowed up by the darkness.
    He ran his hand over the six-by-six-inch pressure-treated column, part of the framework that supported the tunnel. And prevented a collapse, he thought. Hopefully. A string of lights, turned off at the moment, stretched along one wall as far as he could see. How long had it taken them to do this? he wondered. Especially without raising any suspicions. He studied the framework and then the walls between the support columns, his night vision goggles revealing scalloped indentations in the packed earth. He frowned until he realized they had been made by a shovel blade. Did they do all of this by hand? he wondered. What the hell did they do with all of the dirt?
    He studied the ground below him and the sheets of plywood laid end to end that stretched into the darkness. Through his goggles, he could make out the faint black markings of rubber tires. They were using some kind of cart, he realized. He had heard about tunnels before, but those—at least the majority discovered so far—had been farther west, in Arizona and California. This was the first he had ever seen. The radio interrupted his thoughts.
    “Boss. You okay?”
    He pulled the wand to his mouth.
    “Clear,” he whispered into the microphone.
    Moments later, he heard movement behind him.
    “God damn!” he heard as three more agents joined him. He glanced back, grinning. He saw the looks of amazement on his fellow agents’ faces—looks, he knew, that matched his own.
    “You got the video