Excerpt of Internal Affairs by Jessica Andersen

The pain speared from his shoulder blade to his spine and
down—raw, bloody agony that consumed him and made him want
to sink back into unconsciousness. But at the same time,
urgency beat through him, not letting him return to oblivion.

The mission, the mission, must complete the mission.

But what was the mission? Where was he? What the hell had
happened to him?

Cracking his eyes a fraction, careful not to give away his
conscious state if he was being watched, he surveyed his
immediate surroundings. Tall pine trees reached up to touch
the late summer sky on all sides of him, their bases furred
with an underlayer of smaller scrub brush. There was no sign
of a cabin or a road, no evidence of anyone else nearby, no
tracks in the forest litter but his own, leading to where
he'd collapsed.

He was wearing heavy hiking boots, dark jeans and a black
T-shirt, all of which were spattered with blood. Something
told him not all of it was his, though when he moved his
arms, the agony in his right shoulder ripped a groan from
his lips. He felt the warm, wet bloom of fresh blood,
smelled it on the moist air.

Shot in the back, he knew somehow. Bastards. Cowards. Except that he didn't know who the bastardly cowards were, or why they'd gone after him. More, he didn't know who the hell he was. Or what he'd done. The realization brought a sick chill rattling through him, a spurt of panic. His brain answered with I've got to get up, get moving. I can't let them catch me, or I'm dead.

The words had no sooner whispered in his mind than he heard
the sounds of pursuit: the sharp bark of a dog and the terse
shouts of men calling to one another.

They weren't close, but they weren't far enough away for
comfort, either.

He struggled to his feet cursing with pain, staggering with shock and blood loss. He didn't know who was looking for him, but there was far too much blood for a bar fight, and the pattern was high velocity. Had he killed someone? Been standing nearby when someone was killed? Had he escaped from a bad situation, or had he been the bad situation?

He didn't know, damn it. Worse, he didn't know which answer
he was hoping for.

The mission. The words seemed to whisper from nowhere and everywhere at once. They came from the trees and the wind high above, and the bark of a second dog, sharper this time, and excited, suggesting that the beast had hit on a scent trail.

One thing was for certain: he needed to get someplace safe.
But where? And how?

Knowing he wasn't going to find the answer standing there,
bleeding, he got moving, putting one foot in front of the
other, holding his right arm clutched against his chest with
his left. The world went gray-brown around the edges and his
feet felt very far away, but the scenery moved past him,
slow at first, then faster when he hit a downhill slope.

He saw a downed tree with an exposed root ball, thought he
recognized it, though he didn't know from when. His feet
carried him away from it at an angle, as though his
subconscious knew where the hell he was going when his
conscious mind didn't have a clue. Urgency propelled him—not
just from the continued sounds of pursuit, which was drawing
nearer by the minute, but also from the sense that he was
supposed to be doing something crucial, critical.

His breath rasped in his lungs and the gray-brown closed in
around the edges of his vision. He tripped and staggered,
tripped again and went down. But he didn't stay down. He
dragged himself up again, levering his body with his good
arm and biting his teeth against the pained groans that
wanted to rip from his throat.

Instead, staying silent, he forced himself to move faster,
until he was running downhill through trees that all looked
the same. He saw nothing except forest and more forest.
Then, in the distance, there was something else: a
rectangular blur that soon resolved itself into the outline
of a late-model truck parked in the middle of nowhere.

Excitement slapped through him, driving back some of the
gray-brown. He didn't recognize the truck, but he'd run
right to it, hadn't he? It stood to reason that was because
he'd known it was there. More, when he'd climbed into the
driver's seat, he automatically fumbled beneath the
dashboard and came up with the keys.

It took him two tries to get the key in the ignition; he was
wobbly and weak, and he couldn't lean back into the seat
without his shoulder giving him holy hell. But he had
wheels. A hope of escape.

He couldn't hear the dogs over the engine's roar, but he
knew the searchers were behind him, knew the net was closing
fast. More, he knew he didn't have much more time left
before he lapsed unconscious again. He'd lost blood, and God
only knew what was going on inside him. Every inhalation was
like breathing flames; every exhalation a study in misery.
He needed a place to crash and he needed it fast.

After that, he thought, glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing piercing green eyes in a stern face, short black hair, and nothing familiar about any of it, I'm going to need some answers.

Knowing he was already on borrowed time, he hit the gas and
sent the truck thundering downhill. There wasn't any road or
track, but he got lucky—or else he knew the way—and didn't
hit any big ditches or deadfalls. Within ten minutes, he
came to a fire-access road. Instinct—or something more?—had
him turning uphill rather than down. A few minutes later, he
bypassed a larger road, then took a barely visible dirt
trail that paralleled the main access road.

The not-quite-a-road was bumpy, jolting him back against the
seat and wringing curses from him every time he hit his
injured shoulder. But the pain kept him conscious, kept him
moving. And when he hit a paved road, it reminded him he
needed to get someplace he could hide, where he'd be safe
when he collapsed.

Animalistic instinct had him turning east. He passed street signs he recognized on some level, but it wasn't until he passed a big billboard that said Welcome to Bear Claw Creek that he knew he was in Colorado, and then only because the sign said so.

His hands were starting to shake, warning him that his body
was hitting the end of its reserves. But he still had enough
sense to ditch the truck at the back of a commuter lot,
where it might not be noticed for a while, and hide the keys
in the wheel well. Then he searched the vehicle for anything
that might clue him in on what the hell was going on—or,
failing that, who the hell he was.

All he came up with was a lightweight waterproof jacket
wedged beneath the passenger's seat, but that was something,
anyway. Though the fading day was still warm with late
summer sun, he pulled on the navy blue jacket so if anyone
saw him, they wouldn't get a look at his back. A guy wearing
dirty jeans and a jacket might be forgotten. A guy bleeding
from a bullet wound in his shoulder, not so much.

Cursing under his breath, using the swearwords to let him
know he was still up and moving, even as the gray-brown of
encroaching unconsciousness narrowed his vision to a tunnel,
he stagger-stepped through the commuter car lot and across
the main road. Cutting over a couple of streets on legs that
were rapidly turning to rubber, he homed in on a corner lot,
where a neat stone-faced house sat well back from the road,
all but lost behind wild flowering hedges and a
rambler-covered picket fence.

It wasn't the relative concealment offered by the big lot
and the landscaping that had him turning up the driveway,
though. It was the sense of safety. This wasn't his house,
he knew somehow, but whose ever it was, instinct said they
would shelter him, help him.

Without conscious thought, he reached into the brass,
wall-mounted mailbox beside the door, found a small latch
and toggled the false bottom, which opened to reveal a spare
key.

He was too far gone to wonder how he'd known to do that, too
out of it to remember whose house this was. It was all he
could do to let himself in and relock the door once he was
through. Dropping the key into his pocket, he dragged
himself through a pin-neat kitchen that was painted cream
and moss with sunny yellow accents and soft, feminine
curtains. He found a notepad beside the phone and scrawled a
quick message.

His hands were shaking; his whole body was shaking, and
where it wasn't shaking it had shut down completely. He
couldn't feel his feet, couldn't feel much of anything
except the pain and the dizziness that warned he was seconds
away from passing out.

Finally, unable to hold it off any longer, he let the
gray-brown win, let it wash over his vision and suck him
down into the blackness. He was barely aware of staggering
into the next room and falling, hardly felt the pain of
landing face-first on a carpeted floor. He knew only that,
for the moment at least, he was safe.

Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney's day started out badly
and plummeted downhill from there.

It wasn't just that her coffeemaker had finally gone
belly-up. She'd known it was on its last legs, after all,
and simply kept forgetting to upgrade. Sort of like how she
kept forgetting to replace her anemic windshield wipers
because they only annoyed her when it was raining. Or how
she hadn't yet gotten around to having the maintenance crew
that served the Bear Claw ME's office fix her office door,
which stuck half the time and randomly popped open the other
half.

No, it wasn't those petty, mundane, normal irritations that had her amber-colored eyes narrowed with frustration as she worked her way through her sixth autopsy of the day, dictating her notes into the voice-activated minirecorder clipped to the lapel of the blue lab coat she wore over neatly tailored, feminine pants and a soft blue-green shirt that accented the golden highlights in her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair.

No, what annoyed her was the memo she'd gotten from Acting
Mayor Proudfoot's people, turning down yet another request
to hire new staff, even though she'd only proposed to
replace two of the three people she'd lost over the past
year—two to the terrorist attacks that had gripped the city
in the wake of a nearby jailbreak, one to the FBI's training
program. What annoyed her further was the knowledge that she
was going to have to work yet another twelve-hour day to
catch up with the backlog. It didn't help that her three
remaining staffers—receptionist Della Jones, ME Stephen
Katz, and their newly promoted assistant, Bradley Brown—were
all taking their lunch breaks glued to the TV in the break
room, with the police scanner cranked to full volume as they
followed the manhunt that was unfolding in Bear Claw Canyon,
not half an hour away.

Sara didn't want to think about the manhunt, or the fact
that the combined Bear Claw PD/FBI task force had lost two
men in an op gone bad, leading to the manhunt. She didn't
want to think ahead to those autopsies, and felt guilty for
hoping the dead men weren't any of the cops or agents she
knew. She also didn't want to think about the fact that
until terrorist mastermind al-Jihad and his followers were
brought to justice, people in and around Bear Claw were
going to keep dying.

She didn't want to think about it, but she had to, because
it was happening even as she stood there, elbow-deep in the
abdominal cavity of an overweight, chainsmoking
sixty-three-year-old man whose badly clogged arteries
suggested an all too common cause of death. The autopsy was
routine, but the events transpiring outside Sara's familiar
cinder block world were anything but.

Bear Claw City was at war.

It had been nearly ten months since al-Jihad had managed to
escape from the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw
Creek, gaining freedom along with two of his most trusted
lieutenants. Since then, it had become clear that al-Jihad's
network was deeply entrenched in Bear Claw, twining through
both local and federal law enforcement.

Each time a conspirator was uncovered and neutralized, new
evidence surfaced indicating that the internal problems
extended even further, and that al-Jihad was continuing to
unfold an elaborate, devastating plan that the task force
just couldn't seem to get a handle on. The cops and agents
had uncovered pieces and hints, but the terrorists' main
goal continued to elude them, even as the groundswell of
suspicious activity seemed to suggest that an attack was
imminent.

Of course, the general population knew only some of what was
going on. Sara knew more than most because her office was
intimately involved with the BCCPD, and because she was
close friends with a tightly knit group of cops and agents,
three couples plus her as a spare wheel.

The seven friends had banded together the previous year when
FBI trainee Chelsea Swan—though back then she'd been one of
Sara's medical examiners—had fallen in with FBI agent Jonah
Fairfax. Fax had assisted in the jailbreak in his role as a
deep undercover operative, only to learn in the devastating
aftermath that his superior was a traitor and he'd been
unknowingly working on al-Jihad's behalf. Sara, Chelsea, Fax
and the others had managed to foil al-Jihad's next planned
attack, but they'd only managed to capture one of the
terrorists, Muhammad Feyd, who'd proven to be a loyal
soldier and had defied all efforts to get him talking.

Al-Jihad and his remaining lieutenant, Lee Mawadi, along
with Fax's former boss, the eponymous Jane Doe, remained at
large even now, ten months later. In that interim, there had
been other, smaller incidents, along with a deadly riot at
the ARX Supermax. Which Sara so wasn't thinking about right now.

She didn't want to remember the men who'd died in the riot,
or the one man in particular whose death had hit her far
harder than it should have.

Focus, girl, she told herself. The day's only getting longer the more you stall.

Concentrating on the innards at hand, Sara went through the
process by rote, weighing and sampling, dictating notes as
she worked. But although the actions were automatic—they
ought to be, after six years on the job, two heading the
Bear Claw ME's office—they weren't without compassion.
Sara's top-flight surgeon mother might consider her
daughter's medical skills wasted on the dead, but Sara knew
she worked for the families as much as the corpses, and took
satisfaction from providing answers, shedding light onto
causes of death that might otherwise be misinterpreted.

"