"What I'm trying to say is, if you really want Lindsey, go and get her. Stick around long enough, sooner or later she'll cave. She likes you, M. She does. And I know you're totally in love with her, so stop pretending you're not. But me and Tracy?" Izzy laughed. "She doesn't like me, she likes-"

"I get it," Jenk said.

"Plus, she made it very clear she was going back to Lyle. I'd be stupid to believe her, or want to start something with her that wasn't...I mean, Christ, I don't exactly earn six hundred dollars an hour, do I? Besides, there's something seriously wrong with a girl who'll marry a guy who treats her like shit."

"So you're risking your career for someone you allegedly don't even like."

Izzy nodded. "Yeah, pretty fucked, huh? But if something happens to her while I'm sitting around on my ass...I'd rather spend the rest of my life living with the consequences of an unauthorized absence. Shit, I'd rather be arrested than spend the rest of my life thinking, maybe I could've been the one who found her before she froze to death."

He turned away, looking out into the darkness of the night. His concern for Tracy was palpable. Jenk could practically smell it on him. And yet he didn't even like her? Didn't want to like her was more like it.

They drove in silence for quite a few miles before Izzy spoke again.

"Can I just say that she was unbelievably hot? Like, smoking."

Typical Izzy-acting like an asshole to hide any hint of vulnerability.

"Not unless you want to walk from here," Jenk said.

"Can't say that I do," Izzy said with a sigh. "I can't say that I do."

What would Lindsey do?

Tracy fought the panic that kept creeping in and overwhelming her by imagining Lindsey caught in this terrible situation.

She'd approve of the whole pretending-to-be-a-nurse thing, that much was for certain.

Stall, she'd tell Tracy if she were here. It's not like we won't notice that you're missing. You left that message on my answering machine-of course it was my home number. But hey, I'm a professional. Surely I call home on a regular basis to pick up messages. Right?

Tracy had no idea.

But God, what she wouldn't give for Lindsey and the rest of the Troubleshooters Incorporated team to come crashing through that little window, weapons blazing. She'd even welcome Izzy Zanella with open arms.

She'd looked at the window again. It wasn't just painted shut, it was locked, with shiny new hardware that required a key. There also appeared to be some kind of security system. An alarm would go off if the window were opened.

If Mr. Slice-off-your-eyelids got pissed at Tracy talking to the bed-woman, imagine how less than thrilled he'd be at her setting off his alarm.

She'd gotten the woman-she refused to use his name for her, Five-cleaned up. Aside from a seriously infected cut on her arm, Tracy found no other injuries. Bruises and scrapes, sure, but nothing life-threatening.

Of course her illness could have been a case of the good old flu, on top of that nasty wound. But something contagious, something that would take her kidnapper to the floor, was too much to hope for. Tracy's luck just wasn't that good. Still, that wasn't going to keep her from watching him for any little sign of weakness.

She'd also keep trying to get him to leave the house, so she could attempt an escape.

"She needs nourishment," she told him one of the times he came into the room. "The medication I'm going to try first needs to be taken with food. But it's not going to be easy for her to keep anything down, so it's got to be something simple. Chicken broth. If you don't have any, I can make some. If, you know, you have chicken."

He didn't say anything, and she couldn't stop herself from babbling.

"Of course, you'll have to let me use your kitchen."

That made him smile, for some reason. "You want to go into my kitchen?"

"No." The woman from the bed spoke, her voice weak, but the word still forceful.

Tracy nearly crapped her pants. Even Eyelid-man was startled. But then he laughed.

Still laughing, he left the room. He laughed his way down the hall and clattered in what was probably his kitchen.

"I'm Tracy," she quietly told the woman, her heart in her throat, because she was particularly attached to her eyelids. "How long have you been here, locked up like this?"

"I'm Beth," the woman whispered. "And I don't know." She shook her head sharply then, holding a finger to her lips and warning Tracy with eyes bright with fever.

Yes, Tracy heard his footsteps growing louder. He was coming back.

"Did you think I was kidding?" he asked. He threw three slices of white bread, of the Wonder variety, onto Beth's bed before turning to Tracy. He had a Ziploc bag, one of those larger, pink-colored ones, and he shook it, emptying it out onto the floor.

At first she thought it was pieces of dried fruit, dried apricots maybe, as a whole pile of them spilled out, but then she realized...

Some of the smaller ones had a fringe of...lashes?

Eyelashes.

Tracy lunged for the bucket she'd placed beside the bed in case Beth got sick again, but the sound of her own violent retching didn't drown out his voice.

"After a while, the lashes fall out," he said. "There's no way to prevent it, which is a shame."

Almighty God.

"Pick them up," he ordered her. "And don't speak to Number Five again."

DARLINGTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2005.

As the very first streaks of dawn lit the winter sky, Lindsey stood outside the cabin where Tracy had last been seen, hoping...what? That she'd find some vital clue that they'd all previously missed?

Like maybe burn marks from the landing craft that the aliens had used when they'd abducted her?

But why not? In the past hours since Tracy had disappeared, Tom had sent teams to check the bus stations and local airports. They'd visited hospitals and even police station drunk tanks. But no one had seen their missing receptionist. She was gone without a trace.

Headlights swept across the black-and-gray skeletons of the bare trees. Lindsey went to see who else had come back here because they, too, were out of ideas.

"Hey."

It was Mark Jenkins-the last person she'd expected to see today. Izzy also climbed out of the car and into the glow from her flashlight.

"Is the entire team back?" she asked them.

"Just us," Jenk told her. "I called in some favors and came back as quickly as I could." He exchanged a glance with Izzy. "As we could."

Izzy pointed in the direction that Tracy had disappeared. "I'm gonna go and..." He vanished into the trees, no doubt to see for himself that she had, indeed, headed directly for the road.

His doing so left Lindsey alone with Jenk.

"I'm sorry I didn't call you." She tried, but she couldn't hold his gaze. "I was waiting until we found her and..." Unable to stand still, she went up onto the cabin's little porch. She was running on pure caffeine. "Tracy left a clear trail. I know it was dark, but...She didn't stop, she didn't turn around, she moved at a brisk, even pace. It couldn't have been easier to follow if she'd left a trail of bread crumbs."

Unless Lindsey, in her arrogance, had missed something.

Jenk followed her into the cabin.

The fire that had been burning merrily mere hours ago had been doused when Tom pulled the remaining search teams from these woods. This area was in one of the computer system's hot zones. It was twenty miles-at least-to the nearest dead zone. Unless Tracy had suddenly started running fourteen-minute miles-for five hours straight-it seemed likely that she had gotten a ride from someone.

Comspesh Tess Bailey was working, among other things, on establishing a clear map of those areas where cell signals were nonexistent or even patchy-assuming the reason they weren't picking up the signal from Tracy's jacket was because she was in one of those zones.

But right here and now, Jenk's attention was drawn to the fireplace.

Lindsey had set kindling there. She'd built a ready-to-burn fire, complete with wads of paper to make it easier for an inexperienced person to light. She'd tried to make it idiot-proof, putting a box of matches on top of a nearby pile of blankets. A cell phone-one of those disposable ones-was next to the matches.

"In case she finds her way back here," she told Jenk. "I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her to get warm, get a fire started."

He turned to face her. "You think she's still out there, somewhere in the woods."

He'd left out the most important words-lying dead, frozen to death.

"What if the jacket's malfunctioning?" Lindsey asked. "The technology's not infallible. Yet everyone's acting as if it is. Besides, if someone gave her a ride, then where is she? Why didn't she come back to the motel?"

"I'm assuming Lyle was called," he said.

Lindsey nodded. "He claims he hasn't heard from her. But Tom's got a friend in the Manhattan DA's office who's verified that Lyle's in the middle of some relatively high-profile criminal case. If there's been foul play-"

Just saying those words made her sick. Not because she believed someone had intentionally killed Tracy. No, if Tracy were dead-and as each hour ticked past it was looking more and more likely that she was-then she'd died from exposure. From being lost in the woods. From falling and hurting herself and being unable to keep moving. The temperature was still well below freezing. A person lying unconscious and unprotected would have frozen to death in mere hours. As a SEAL, Jenk had surely had cold-weather training. He had to know that.

She forced herself to look at him, to hold his gaze despite the tears that were welling in her eyes. "I'm so sorry. I was sure I'd be able to find her."

"Lindsey, this isn't your fault."

"But maybe if Team Sixteen hadn't left..." Her voice broke, and she felt all the emotion of the past few grueling days hit her square in the chest. "Maybe we could have found her right away."

"Hey," he said, reaching for her as-damnit-she actually started to cry. "Hey, come on." This time she didn't sidestep him or pull away. She couldn't. She didn't want to. She just went into his arms, just closed her eyes and leaned into him, her head tucked beneath his chin.

"The team didn't leave because of anything you said or didn't say," Jenk told her, his voice as warm and solid as his body. "You know that. We get called, we go. That's how it works in SpecOps. We don't put in a call to SOCOM and say Sorry, it's inconvenient. Try us next week. The only reason I'm here right now is because it was all just another drill. If it were the real deal, I'd be on that plane."

He paused, and she knew she should take a deep breath and pull away from him. Force a smile and acknowledge his words-it wasn't her fault-as being true. Instead, she'd turned into a little crying girl. But now that she'd started, she couldn't seem to stop.

And it wasn't just Tracy being lost. It was everything.

Her father's phone call. And not just that one where he'd canceled their holiday plans, but all of them. He was so distant, so remote-and even more so since her mother had died.

Her mother's death. The relief Lindsey had felt that her mother's pain had finally ended, mixing unpalatably with the looming sense of total loss. Her mother was gone.

It was Jenk being so kind and inviting her home for Christmas when she wouldn't have blamed him for never speaking to her again. Jenk, naked amidst the rumpled sheets of his bed, smiling at her, his eyes sparking with amusement and attraction and...

Satisfaction. He'd found what he was looking for-or so he'd thought.

Of course, she'd had to go and prove him wrong.

"Dan Gillman's sister lived in New Orleans," he told her now, clearly just talking to fill the space so that they didn't have to stand there awkwardly-more awkwardly-listening only to the sounds of her ragged breathing. "His dad died a few years ago, and his mom moved down to live with his sister and her family. When Katrina hit, we were in Iraq. News started coming in that New Orleans had flooded, that people were literally dying of thirst, their homes destroyed, that nobody was helping them-the whole FEMA goatfuck, remember that?"

He didn't bother to pause, as if he knew that even a nod was too much for her right now. He just kept going. "Dan was frantic. He had no idea if his family was even alive, if they'd gotten out of their house in time, if they were trapped in their attic, if they were dying right that moment, while he was an entire world away. There was no word for two whole weeks, but we were fighting insurgents. It's what we do. He couldn't just pack up and leave.

"Turns out they all survived," he continued, "but it was a nightmare for a while. They made it to the Superdome, which was twice as terrifying after the storm ended. The kids finally got put on a bus to Houston, but by the time Sandy and her husband and mom got out, they ended up in San Antonio. Then they spent all their energy finding the kids. Getting to a computer to e-mail Danny just didn't happen." He paused. "Maybe something's going on with Tracy that's taking all of her attention. Or maybe she walked until she reached a house, knocked on their door...Maybe she's sleeping on someone's couch, and she'll call when she wakes up. Or maybe she's somewhere safe and warm, but she's waiting to call because she's pissed at...us."

"She wouldn't not call on purpose," Lindsey told him. "If she hasn't called, it's because she can't." He let her turn away, so she could wipe her eyes, her face, blow her nose.

"I wouldn't have expected her to go out and get ripped the other night, either," Jenk pointed out. "I respect your opinion. You know I do. But I just don't think any of us knows her well enough to rule out the possibility that she's purposely hiding. I think we're going to find her-well, really I think she'll just turn up, call in for a ride, whatever. I also think she's going to be really disappointed that Lyle isn't up here, helping with the search, wringing his hands." He smiled ruefully. "Actually, hand-wringing probably wouldn't cut it. Tracy'll be disappointed with anything less than hair tearing and rending of clothes."

Lindsey had once believed that Jenk didn't really know Tracy, that he couldn't see the true person behind her Girls Gone Wild body type, pretty face, and perfect hair. Apparently, he'd been taking a closer look.

He'd also come to this cabin not only because this was where Tracy had last been seen, but because he knew Lindsey would be here. He'd come because he knew how upset she was. He'd come to offer support and comfort. And a solid shoulder to cry on.

"I was jealous," Lindsey admitted, as much to herself as to him. "Of Tracy. When she called that night, and you just...were ready to leave, like I didn't matter..."

"Ah, Linds, I'm so sorry." He stepped toward her, but she stepped away.

"It scared me," she said. "That I should care so much. And then you scared me even more by doing a complete one-eighty, by suddenly being so into me when, God, you don't even know me and...But I can't stop thinking about you. About us, about the sex," she admitted.

"The sex was great," he agreed. "It's kind of hard not to think about."

"But I don't want to hurt you more than I already have," she told him. And she really didn't want to put herself in a position where he would end up hurting her. Except wasn't that exactly what they'd been doing, pretty much continuously since that night? Hurting each other?

Jenk was looking at her with what she thought of as his Navy SEAL face-an unwavering gaze, steady determination in the set of his jaw. "Maybe I should be the one to decide when and if I'm being hurt."

Her cell phone rang, saving her from having to respond to the quiet reasonableness of his words. Lindsey took off her glove with her teeth so she could dig in her pocket. "It's Sophia," she told Jenk as she pulled it free.

"Maybe it's good news," he said, as she opened it.

"Fontaine." At this point, any news would be good.

"Are you still up at the cabin?" Sophia asked. "Are Jenk and Izzy with you?"

"Yes and yes," Lindsey told her. "What's going on?"