Chapter One

WILEY LIKED THE dark—liked the way the cool, silky night settled over Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Clinging to the rocks. Cloaking him. Hiding him. Letting him slide through the fading light without detection and evade those who would harm him.

But tonight was different.

He wasn’t in control. The elements were. The sinking sun all but ensured he’d take a nosedive from the winding path into the yawning crevice. Didn’t matter. He’d take the risk.

Breathing deep from the climb, he turned to check on his buddy Kip. Great, the guy was peeved. Huffing and puffing up the trail. Scowling as he planted his hiking pole on the packed dirt.

“Dude,” he said, trying to get a full breath. “This’s crazy. Even if we get to the cache before dark, we’ll never make it down again. We need to turn back before we both break our necks.”

Wiley shook his head. “Not an option. Not when we’re this close.”

“Close?” Kip’s voice shot up. “It’s still a mile up to Triple Falls. More than that to get back down. It’ll take us ninety minutes at least. That’s if we find the cache right away.” Kip looked at his watch. “The sun sets in forty-five minutes.”

Figured Kip would wimp out. He was just like the others. Making Wiley’s life difficult. “You can turn back, but I’m going on.”

“Man, come on, Fagan. Don’t make me feel like a jerk for bailing on you.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m good to go alone. You can go back to the car.”

“Yeah, right.” Kip rolled his eyes behind large glasses. “You can’t go alone. That’s what all the stranded hikers say after they’re rescued and interviewed on TV. Don’t become one of them, man.”

Wiley ignored Kip’s warning. As avid geocachers, they used GPS coordinates to find hidden caches and often hiked over rugged terrain like this. Kip might be a coward, but after a stint in prison, Wiley could handle this or anything else by himself.

“I’m going.” He turned to head up the narrow trail flanked with trees on one side, the deep gorge on the other.

“Go ahead, risk our lives for a stupid geocache,” Kip muttered from behind.

Seeking to keep his temper in check, Wiley fisted his hands. Didn’t work. He’d had enough drama for a lifetime. Not only with Kip’s whining and complaining. That was bad enough. But his life in general sucked. Big time. Wasn’t his fault if he let off some steam now, was it?

He grabbed Kip’s plaid wool jacket that likely came from a thrift-store grab bag and slammed him against a pine tree. “I’ve told you like a million times, dude. My life sucks. No one will give an ex-con like me a job. People see my scars and cringe. Lila dumped me, and if that’s not enough for you, I still have nightmares from prison. So I need something—anything—to get my mind off it. At least until I’m able to pay that loser FBI agent back for getting me the max sentence.”

Kip shrugged free. “I get it man, but—”

“Get it?” Wiley’s voice screeched through the immense divide, echoing off the steep-walled river canyon and sending birds flapping into the descending darkness. “How could you? Not until you spend two years in prison. Two years of nothing to do. Hearing sounds in the night that you wished to God you hadn’t heard. Sights you hadn’t seen. Knowing they were coming for you. Always coming.”

“I can imagine.”

“Oh yeah?” Wiley ran his fingers over the scars crisscrossing and running down his face into the heavy beard he wore to hide some of them. “Do you get how it felt to have a homemade shiv slice through my skin? Slash after slash splitting open my face. Almost bleeding out on the shower floor. Then feeling nearly every inch of my face jerked tight with stitches. Or maybe you get how it felt to see Lila take one look at me and bolt like she’d seen Freddy Krueger.” A spray of spit followed his words, but he didn’t care. He was on a roll. “You’ve got a charmed life, man. A good programming job. Money to burn. An apartment. So don’t tell me again that you get it.” He poked Kip in the chest. “Understand? Never again.”

Kip nodded, his long pointy nose resembling a bird’s beak as he took a lurching step back.

He was afraid. Good. It was a long time coming. Wiley had to pay them back. All of them. He’d wanted to blow up at the dude for weeks. Felt amazing to let it go.

He ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “I don’t care if you come with me or not. I’m going on.”

He took off at a clip fueled by anger, keeping an ear out for Kip should he decide to stop him from reaching his goal. The steep incline would soon force Wiley to slow down, but he’d do his best to power through it. He heard Kip’s footsteps pounding on the packed trail behind him. Fine. He’d decided to come along. Honestly, Wiley didn’t care anymore. Didn’t care about anything except making people pay. Big time. Especially that freakin’ FBI agent, Nina Brandt. He would get her when the timing was right. Just like the prison psychiatrist. Fool. Claiming Wiley was paranoid. Putting him on medicine he didn’t need, dulling his senses.

They weren’t dull now. He ached to do Brandt in, but first he needed to come up with a sound plan that didn’t put him back behind bars. Until then, he’d settle for beating everyone else to this prize.

He forced his aching muscles to work harder and picked up speed, passing moss-covered trees and ferns that made the place look like a rain forest. They’d summit at Triple Falls in another mile, then cross a fallen log to the cache.

To the prize.

Motivated, he pressed on hard until he rounded a bend and heard the first sounds of water surging over the basalt rock. He stopped to catch his breath and prepare for the next challenge. He’d often hiked this trail with Lila. Hiked many of the gorge trails with her in their three years together. But he’d seen the last of her three months ago when she’d picked him up from prison on his release day, then dumped him on Kip’s doorstep like trash. Maybe Lila needed to pay, too.

Maybe. She deserved it. Like all of them did. Always watching. Waiting to pounce. To do him in.

Huffing loudly, Kip caught up and pointed across the steep ravine. “There’re the falls. Now let’s find the stinkin’ cache and get out of here. It better have been worth it.”

Geocaches didn’t usually offer anything of value. It wasn’t about the prize at the end. Cachers liked the hunt and the challenge of the search. But this one was different. Someone posted it on Hacktivist, a Portland geocache group he and Kip belonged to. The listing promised a prize every computer nerd would love.

Kip held a hand over his eyes to peer into the distance. “I don’t like the looks of the log we have to cross. It’s wet. That means slippery. I don’t recommend doing this, man.”

Wiley didn’t care. He wanted this cache. Wanted it bad enough to ignore their safety and head into the gorge minutes after he’d seen the post. He hoped others in the group were big babies like Kip and had waited until sunrise before setting out. Wiley would score the cache before they rolled out of bed.

“Don’t be such a wuss.” Wiley dug out a battery-powered headlamp, turned it on, and snapped the elastic around his head.

“Yeah, why worry, right?” Kip’s sarcasm accompanied the curl of his lip. “We’ll only fall into the river and take a nosedive into the falls.”

Wiley was ready to push the guy over the edge himself, but he shoved his hands in his pockets instead. Kip was the only person who hadn’t abandoned Wiley during his prison stay. Plus, Kip let Wiley sleep on his couch while Wiley got his life together. He would cut the guy some slack. For now.

“Maybe it’s best if you wait on this side,” Wiley suggested. “Just in case something does happen.”

Relief flashed on Kip’s face. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Coward.

Wiley marched up to the log and shrugged out of his backpack. His boots felt solid on the fallen log at first, but as he moved out over the water, the tree vibrated with the fury of the raging water below. One false move and he was a goner. He’d plunge sixty-plus feet to his death. He doubled his concentration, tuning out other sounds and watching his feet.

Step. Slide. Step. Slide. Rinse and repeat. Over and over until he reached the far side. He jumped down, his feet firmly planted on the water-soaked ground.

At the weatherworn intersection of two logs, a dark object caught his eye. He hurried over, his heart kicking up higher when he located the waterproof case.

Ooh, ooh, ooh. He found it. The prize. Before anyone else. Oh, yeah.

“Got it,” he yelled above the gushing water, and dropped to his knees. The frigid spray instantly soaked his jeans. So what? He was pumped. He was the first to open the container. He had to be.

With cold hands made clumsier by gloves, he pried the lid open.

“It’s a laptop,” he shouted as his heart sank. “I thought it’d be some state-of-the-art hardware, but it’s a laptop. I risked my life for a stinkin’ laptop.” He stood. “It’s an ultrabook, but I don’t know if I even want it. It’s probably broken.”

“Hey, bring it anyway,” Kip yelled. “You need money. Parts for an ultrabook could fetch a few dollars.”

Kip had a point. Ultrathin computers were expensive. Not that Wiley actually needed cash. Anytime he did, he could find a hacking job without trouble. But he could dismantle this one and easily score a few bucks from the parts on eBay.

Okay, so he’d take it.

Rules said he should record the find on the cache log and leave something else behind, but he ignored the log and zipped the computer into his jacket, leaving his arms free to balance on the return trip. Adrenaline fading, he moved with more caution and eyed the river, expecting it to rise up and wash him off. With the way his life had been going lately, it wouldn’t surprise him if he did fall. Maybe it wouldn’t even be a bad thing.

It would end all of his problems.

But then Agent Brandt would get away with ruining his life. That was unacceptable. She couldn’t destroy him, then go on as if she’d simply smashed an irritating mosquito.

Revenge first. Then maybe a dive into the waterfall to end it all. Who knows?

He neared the log’s end and took a leap to the spongy moss. He’d beat the odds. Made it. Beat nature. Beat the universe that kept pushing him down. Maybe it was a sign things were starting to look up, and he shouldn’t be so quick to consider ending it all. Especially when he could still look forward to paying Agent Brandt back in the most heinous way he could think of.

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