“We’re going to get your daughter back,” the attorney general said with quiet conviction.

Rhett threw her an angry look. “Seems to me you’ve got to find her first. Is Vernon certain she’s not at McCullough’s?”

She hesitated a beat too long. “Not absolutely certain, no. And there’s no way they can be until they get in there. But rest assured, he and Henry will take no overt action until they know your daughter is out of harm’s way.”

“Pat, this isn’t a damn press conference,” he snapped, then immediately followed that with a heavy, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes, breathing deeply.

Only once before in his life had the future seemed so black, so terrifying, ironically also a time when he’d feared his children might be lost to him forever. Sixteen years ago, and it seemed like yesterday. Back then, too, it had looked as if he might be forced to make an unthinkable choice. Back then the choice had been between his children and Dixie, the woman who had become as essential to him as the air he breathed. Now, as then, the stubbornness inherent in his nature insisted there had to be another possibility. A third choice.

“This man Henry’s got on the inside-the one he says is going to keep my daughter safe. What have you heard from him? Seems to me if anybody’d know where Lauren is being held…” He paused at something in the attorney general’s eyes. “What?”

The woman’s face was a study in mute sympathy. “I wish I knew. At last report he hadn’t checked in since the night before Lauren was taken. Henry hasn’t heard from him in almost forty-eight hours. We don’t even know if he’s-”

“Alive?” Rhett finished for her.

Pat shrugged and looked away.


They arrived at the entrance to the camp around midnight, by the light of a full moon. Bronco suspected Lauren had been dozing in the saddle for the past hour or so, but she came wide awake when he spoke to the sentry. As they rode close together through the barbed-wire gates, she murmured in a voice slurred with exhaustion, “Where are we?”

He allowed himself a wry smile, knowing she couldn’t see it in the moonlight. “Welcome to Liberty.”

“Liberty?” Though her face was turned toward him, its expression was hidden from him by shadows. He could only hear her confusion in her voice.

He didn’t even try to keep the irony out of his. “That’s the sovereign and independent nation of Liberty. The laws of the oppressive and totalitarian regime known as the United States of America have no dominion here.”

“You people have your own country?” She had missed the irony. No longer sounding the least bit sleepy, her voice cracked on the last word.

He gave it some thought, debating whether to point out to her that, as a matter of fact, his people were indeed a sovereign nation. “Well, now, I’m not sure whether you could call Liberty a country, at least not yet, but we have declared our independence from the U.S. of A., yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

He intoned, “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights-”’

“You’re quoting me the Declaration of Independence?” Lauren squeaked, edging toward outrage before adding sourly, “And, anyway, it’s ‘inalienable rights.’ At least get it right!”

“You sure about that?” Bronco pretended surprise.

“Yes, I’m sure. It’s ‘inalienable’-everybody knows that.”

Her tone-huffily superior-amused him. “Well, now,” he said somberly, “maybe you ought to look it up before you go and bet the farm on that.”

“Bet! Who said anything about a bet?”

“So, you’re not sure.”

“Of course I’m sure-I’m a lawyer, dammit! Don’t you think I know the Declaration of Independence?”

“And I’m a revolutionary,” Bronco countered in an even tone. “We take our creeds pretty seriously. And by the way, it goes on to say that ‘whenever any form of government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government…as shall seem to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness.’ End of quote. That’s all we’re doing here-exercising our rights as set forth by our founding fathers.”

“Your founding fathers! You just said you people declared yourself independent of the ‘U.S. of A.’ What, you get to pick and choose what parts you want to keep?” She was wide awake now and becoming more and more incensed by the minute. So incensed, in fact, that Bronco wondered if maybe it was some kind of protective mechanism kicking in, so she wouldn’t have to think about the position she was in and how scared she was.

He, on the other hand, was enjoying himself more than he had all day. More, in fact, than since he’d had the in credibly bad judgment to dance with the woman at Smoky Joe’s.

He watched the dark shapes of rabbits bounding through the silvery meadow like fish jumping in a moonlit ocean, and said serenely, “That’s about the size of it. Throw away the stuff that doesn’t work, keep what does. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well…sure.” Her tone was grudging. “But you don’t do it with violence!”

“Who said anything about violence?”

“Oh, I suppose I’m here because you asked me nicely to please come and help you blackmail my father out of the presidential race! And what about that guard back there? You think I didn’t notice he had a gun? A very big gun.”

The shadow of a hunting owl brushed silently past them and the rabbits vanished. But an instant later Bronco heard a high-pitched squeal, cut ominously short. “He has a gun,” he said mildly. “He’s exercising his constitutional right to bear arms.”

Apparently too preoccupied to have noticed either the owl or the rabbits, Lauren turned her face toward him. In the moonlight her eyes looked like soot smudges on blue marble. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” she said in a cold contemptuous voice. “That’s all you militia types care about. Guns. You know what my father stands for.” Swearing angrily under her breath, she shifted around to face forward again.

A moment later the gray mare broke into a gallop. Not as if the woman was seriously trying to escape, Bronco realized. More likely her horse had picked up on some unconscious need to blow off steam. It was a condition he more than understood, but even so he wasted no time catching up with her. He’d hate for the sentries tracking their progress across the meadow with infrared cameras, high- powered binoculars and night-vision scopes to get the wrong idea.

“Lady, it’s too damn late and too damn dark to be doin’ that,” he scolded as he took hold of the mare’s bridle and slowed them back to a walk. “It’s a rough trail. Take it easy. You may’ve been napping in the saddle since dark, but the horses are dog tired and so am I.”

She glanced at him and didn’t say anything, and he was glad he couldn’t see the look in her eyes.

Actually, he decided he rather liked having her mad at him. He’d a lot rather have her riled up than the way she’d been this morning when he’d found her hanging on to the gray mare’s saddle, looking about one good gulp of air away from breaking down.

Bronco wasn’t exactly known for his tender heart, except where horses were concerned, and it had surprised him more than he cared to admit how close he’d come to gathering her into his arms right then and there. How much he’d wanted to stroke his fingers through that hair of hers that reminded him of a high-country meadow in the wintertime and tell her if she’d just trust him, everything was going to come out all right.

He’d thought about telling her the truth right then, just to keep her from trying anything stupid, if nothing else. Thing was, he didn’t know whether he could trust her. In the end he’d decided he couldn’t take the chance that she might, in some small way, maybe with a look or a gesture, give him away. He’d been under a long time-too long. The number-one commandment of the undercover operative-Thou shalt not blow thy cover-was so ingrained in him it was a natural part of who he was. He wasn’t even sure there was still the capacity for truth in his soul.


They crossed the rest of the meadow in silence. Lauren kept her eyes fixed on the road-no more than a track, really, gravel or trampled grass in places, marshy in low spots where water had collected from a recent thunder shower-and tried not to think about what lay ahead. Liberty. She shuddered and wished she could find something amusing in the irony of that. But her sense of humor had deserted her. Everything she could recall reading about militia organizations involved well-publicized acts of violence, and her circumstances seemed far too perilous for levity.

It occurred to her, though, that under different circumstances the night might have held a certain magic. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it, a moonlight ride through a high-country meadow with a man who stirred her senses and ignited the romantic fires in her soul-fires she thought she’d snuffed out long ago, but that, it now appeared, had only been temporarily banked.

A pine-scented breeze stirred her hair, and she opened her eyes to find that the man riding beside her, prudently close enough to grab her mount’s bridle if she tried to run away, was still Johnny Bronco-a charming lying renegade Apache with nothing less than the violent overthrow of the U.S. government on his agenda. The last man on earth she’d have chosen to be alone with on a lovely moonlit night.

But the instant the thought formed in her mind, she knew there was something wrong with it, something that didn’t fit, something she’d overlooked. But as she chased it through the chaos in her mind, trying her best to pin it down, the stallion, Cochise Red, suddenly bugled a warning. Beneath her she felt the gray mare tense and tremble with her own shrill reply. A moment later, dark shapes emerged silently from the trees to surround them with guns at the ready. Welcome to Liberty.