Without a Trace Read Online Free Page A

some of the best agents in the world will be looking for your brother.”
    “I can give you a hundred thousand dollars.” Her mind was made up. She had discarded logic for instinct. Forrester had said this man could do it. Her father had agreed. Gillian was throwing her vote with theirs. “The price isn’t negotiable, because it’s all I have. Find my brother and my niece, and with a hundred thousand dollars you can retire in style.”
    He stared at her for a moment, and then, biting off an oath, he walked toward the sea. The woman was crazy. He was offering her the skill of the best intelligence organization in the world, and she was tossing money in his face. A tidy sum.
    Trace watched the sea roll up and recede. He’d never been able to hang on to more than a few thousand at a time. It just wasn’t his nature. But a hundred thousand could mean the difference between retiring and just talking about retiring.
    The spray flew over his face as he shook his head. He didn’t want to get involved, not with her, not with her family and not with some nebulous formula that might or might not save the world from the big blast.
    What he wanted was to go back to his hotel, order up a five-star meal and go to bed on a full stomach. God, he wanted some peace. Time to figure out what to do with his life.
    “If you’re determined to have a freelancer, I can give you a couple of names.”
    “I don’t want a couple of names. I want you.”
    Something about the way she said it made his stomach knot. The reaction made him all the more determined to get rid of her. “I just came off nine months of deep cover. I’m burned out, Doc. You need someone young, gung ho and greedy.” For the second time he ran his hands over his face. “I’m tired.”
    “That’s a cop-out,” she said, and the sudden strength in her voice surprised him enough to have him turning around. She stood straight, loose tendrils of hair flying around her face, pale as marble in the light of the rising moon. It suddenly struck him that in fury and despair she was the most stunning woman he’d ever seen. Then he lost that thought as she advanced on him, her Irish leading the way.
    “You don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to be responsible for the lives of an innocent man and a young child. You don’t want to be touched by that. Mr. Forrester saw you as some kind of a knight, a man of principle and compassion, but he was wrong. You’re a selfish shell of a man who couldn’t have deserved a friend like him. He was a man who cared, who tried to help for nothing more than the asking, and who died because of his own standards.”
    Trace’s head snapped up. “What the hell are you talking about?” His eyes caught the light and glittered dangerously. In one swift, silent move he had Gillian by both arms. “What the hell do you mean? Charlie had a stroke.”
    Her heart was beating hard in her throat. She’d never seen anyone look more capable of murder than Trace did at that moment. “He was trying to help. They’d followed me. Three men.”
    “What three men?”
    “I don’t know. Terrorists, agents, whatever you choose to call them. They broke into the house when I was with him.” She tried to even her breathing by concentrating on the pain his fingers were inflicting on her arms. “Mr. Forrester pushed me through some kind of hidden panel in his library. I heard them on the other side. They were looking for me.” She could remember even now how hot and airless it had been behind the panel. How dark. “He was putting them off, telling them I’d left. They threatened him, but he stuck by the story. It seemed that they believed him.”
    Her voice was shaking. Trace watched her dig her teeth into her lower lip to steady herself. “It got veryquiet. I was more frightened by the quiet and tried to get out to help him. I couldn’t find the mechanism.”
    “Two inches down from the ceiling.”
    “Yes. It took me almost an hour before I