by Jeff Gunhus
* * *
“It’s all right,” Lucy said, her voice so frail that it hurt Mara to hear it. The hospice was an improvement from the hospital wing, where they’d been for the last two months. Mara had brought in framed photos and paintings from Lucy’s house. There had been a flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the bed, but Lucy had told Mara to take it down. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend a minute of the time I have left watching TV,” Lucy had said on move-in day. True to her word, she hadn’t.
The spot where the TV had been was where Lucy’s favorite photo hung. It was a beautiful image, her and Mike next to a garden filled with sunflowers.
Lucy was pregnant in the photo, Mike’s hand on her stomach, grinning like he’d won the lottery. There was so much hope and love in the photo, but such sadness, too. It was the closest Mike ever came to meeting his son. A month later, a uniformed Casualty Assistance Calls Officer knocked on her door, the visit dreaded by every military spouse. Training accident was what she was told. But Mara had arranged a second visit, this one unofficial, from Mike’s Force Recon squad leader Lt. Dan Suarez. She’d held Lucy’s hand while Suarez told them the real story.
The mission had been a target in Afghanistan, a terrorist the military intelligence analysts had decided was worth the risk to try and grab. Only it’d been a setup. Mike had died a warrior’s death, fighting for his country but dying for his men. Suarez left no doubt that without Mike’s sacrifice, neither he nor the rest of the team would have made it out alive. Openly weeping, he begged Lucy’s forgiveness for leaving her husband’s body behind.
Mara found it hard to look at the photo of the two of them without feeling the gut-punch, but it was a source of strength for Lucy. Maybe it was the joy framed in that moment. Or maybe the consolation that she’d be back with her husband soon, able to tell him that his son had been born strong and healthy. Mara didn’t ask. She just made certain that the flowers brought into the room from Lucy’s friends never blocked the photo from her line of sight.
Lucy spent hours staring at the photo. Sometimes, she told Mara one day, it was her focal point when the pain came, when the agony raged like a storm inside her. Other times, it just soothed her and transported her to the scene in the painting, far away from the machines hooked up to her, far away from the cancer consuming her, far away from the inevitability of leaving her son an orphan. But after Mara’s confession at the edge of her sister’s bed, she saw in her eyes that not even the painting could ease the pain that day.
“I’m sorry . . . I just can’t . . .” Mara said again. She’d cried when she’d practiced the speech, but she didn’t now that she was there doing it for real. She almost wished she could, thinking that would somehow make her sister understand that this wasn’t a decision she took lightly. “I thought I could when you first asked me, but now . . . now . . .”
“Now it’s real,” she said. “Now it’s really going to happen and you know it.”
“Don’t say that. You could still . . . there’s a chance . . .” They both fell silent. The only sounds in the room were the faint hum of the machines monitoring her sister’s gradual descent into Death’s open arms.
Lucy reached out and put her hand over Mara’s. It was cold and thin, mostly bone. Yellowed skin hung loosely from it. “Don’t worry, kid. It’ll be all right. Joey will be fine. I’ve talked to Ted and Marie already. They’ll take him.”
This caught her off guard. Ted and Marie were Mike’s parents. The image of their grief-stricken faces as they lowered their only son into the ground flashed in her mind. They’d seemed so old that day, so worn-out by life. How could they raise a little boy? “You already spoke to them?”
Lucy patted her hand. She closed her eyes, the slight wince telling Mara that the pain was back. “It’s all right,” she said softly. “Maybe it’s for the best. I just wanted him . . . I don’t know . . . you can still be part of his life.”
“Teach him to be a screwup?”
“I was thinking you could give him that fire you have inside you. But being a screwup works, too.” Lucy smiled, but it was a strained action, pushing its way through the wave of pain she was riding. “I wish Dad would come visit again.”
Mara looked away, blinking back tears. The hallucinations of seeing their dad had started a few days earlier. Another sign the end was near.
“Should I get the nurse?” Mara asked. “Get you something for the pain?”
Lucy’s eyes wandered first to the ceiling and then tracked back down to the photo on the wall. “Joey’s off school soon. I want to be awake. I don’t want to miss it.”
Mara brushed her sister’s hair back. “I’ll wait with you. Do you want me to sing you a song?”
Lucy’s chest bounced as she laughed. “God, you trying to kill me or what?”
Mara laughed with her, but somewhere along the line, it turned into crying. She tried never to do that in front of Lucy, always trying to be strong for her, but she couldn’t stop herself this time. She edged herself onto the bed and laid next to her big sister, the way she used to do during thunderstorms when they were kids. They didn’t say anything more, but just waited there for Joey to get back from school. It wasn’t long until Mara fell asleep.
A nurse woke her up, an older woman Mara didn’t recognize. The woman’s face was kind, but laced with sadness as she spoke. Mara didn’t understand the words at first; then she understood them but didn’t believe them. After putting her hand on her sister’s still chest, she believed but didn’t accept. When the nurse told her that Joey was at the front desk, home from school and eager to see his mom, she accepted and didn’t know what to do.
And so she did the only thing she could think of and went out and wrapped Joey in her arms and promised to take care of him for the rest of his life.
* * *
She rolled down the window, gulping down the fresh night air, trying to clear her head from the memory of her sister. Only a year and yet it was so raw that the wound ripped open at the slightest pull. She couldn’t afford to have her judgment clouded. Whatever path her dad was leading her down, she was going to need to be sharp and ready to take advantage of any opening she had to twist things to her advantage. She’d already made the decision that if she could sacrifice her dad in exchange for Joey’s safety, she’d do it in a heartbeat.
Still, being around him had been tougher than she’d imagined. After so many years of hating him for what he’d done, she’d successfully turned him into a cartoon villain in her head. A scheming double agent who’d lost his moral compass and sold out his family and his country for a big pay day. A narcissist who’d skipped out on visiting his daughter’s deathbed to avoid capture. Lucy had wanted so desperately to see him that she’d imagined he visited her, even speaking to him in her sleep. One more thing that broke Mara’s heart in two.
The psych guys had prepared her pre-mission about the risk of feeling the pull of the father-daughter relationship once she was around him. She’d dismissed the idea. Her hatred of the man who used to be her father was rock solid.
But with his claims of innocence, the way his voice cracked when he talked about her mother, even the familiar sound of his breathing next to her, she did feel the self-doubt creep into her mind. She hadn’t forgotten that she was dealing with a professional manipulator, perhaps one of the best in the world. Whatever feelings she had for him were likely only there because he wanted her to feel them.
But there was a chance that he was telling the truth. He might somehow hold the key to getting Joey back. Certainly there was someone high in the Agency who was still his ally. His knowing about Joey being taken before she knew had been proof of that. Perhaps that same person who fed him information would be able to tell her where they were keeping her nephew.
She rifled through her contacts in the Agency, thinking who she might call for help. Who she could trust. The problem was that Jim Hawthorn would have been on that list only a few hours earlier. In her line of work, paranoia was
part of the skill set that made her good at her job. Now it kept her from having even a single lifeline back into the Agency for help. With one possible exception. There was one person who might be able to help, but she needed to figure out how to reach out to him. She’d dumped her phone after the prison to avoid being traced, not that she would have used it anyway. The NSA would be sitting on that phone like barn cats waiting for a mouse to poke its head out of a hole in the wall.
No, she needed to find a new phone. She tucked an idea in the back of her mind to revisit later.
She checked her watch. They’d be in Chicago by the morning. She decided to let things play out once they got there, but if there wasn’t clear progress by noon, then she was making the call to Hawthorn and risk coming in.
As the moon rose up over the rural landscape and turned the swaying cornstalks into eerie oceans of silver, she thought about where Joey was sleeping that night and whether he was being brave. The sudden mental image of him alone and afraid in a dark room caught her off guard and she choked back a sob. She glanced over to make sure her dad was still asleep. Satisfied he was out, she allowed the carefully constructed walls holding back her emotions to break down. Mara Roberts, hardened CIA operative and decorated ex-Marine, did something she hadn’t done since her sister’s funeral. She let herself cry.
CHAPTER 6
Jim Hawthorn was pissed.
He sulked in the back of his Lincoln Navigator, the privacy window up between him and his driver, watching the lights of Washington, DC, pass by. Nothing had gone to plan. He was used to some degree of improvisation from his field agents and deviations over a long mission, but this was supposed to be a simple exercise. Then again, nothing involving either Scott or Mara Roberts was ever simple. He’d known that but failed to think through all the variables they introduced into the mix. Was it really possible to predict the path any destructive storm would take?
The cell phone he held in his hand rang. He thought about just not answering it, but he knew that wasn’t an option. There weren’t many people in the world who could make him nervous, but the woman sure to be on the other end of the line was one of them.
“You didn’t call,” the voice said, slightly modulated from an electronic distortion device. She wasn’t going to let him hear her real voice. And she left no path to discovering her true identity; Hawthorn had put that to the test. “I find that disrespectful,” she said.
He felt his body tense at the way she said the word. It came across as an expletive.
“I wanted to bring the situation under control before I contacted you.”
A pause. He parted his lips and heard the tackiness of his suddenly dry mouth in the silence.
“Is it under control?” the voice finally asked.
“It will be.”
“Which means it’s not,” she said.
“There was a complication, but nothing we can’t recover from.”
“You said we,” the voice said softly.
Hawthorn tried to swallow and found it hard to do so. He leaned forward and grabbed one of the water bottles in the drink holder. “It’s nothing I can’t recover from,” he said. God, he hated this woman. She called herself the Director. He had more descriptive names for her.
“Because if you fail at this, it’s you who has a problem. Not we,” she said. “Unless the we you’re referring to is your family. Your wife left behind quite a legacy. Three children. Six grandchildren. Your first great-grandchild is due, when? Three weeks? Are Megan and Travis planning on having the baby at Bangor Memorial? It’s a twenty-minute drive from their home, so it only makes sense.”
His stomach tightened. He’d argued against her plan to take the five-year-old Joey as leverage. He’d thought it was an unnecessary complication, but she’d insisted, so he’d complied. Taking the kid was supposed to have been a trump card if things went south with the assignment, not the reason the thing went south. Part of him wanted to tell her he’d been right about leaving the kid out of it, but he didn’t dare. It was what it was now. Just one more thing that had to be dealt with. Ultimately, using the kid as leverage was just business. But hearing his own family threatened was a different matter. “You’ve made your point.”
“Have I? If this isn’t resolved in the next twenty-four hours, I will need to do something to make certain of it.”
Hawthorn gripped the phone so hard that he thought he might crack it. It took every bit of his self-control not to lash out. He held the phone in front of him and flipped it off, mouthing the words he really wanted to say. But fear is a powerful deterrent and he held his tongue. He took a deep breath to steady himself and put the phone back to his ear.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The plan will be on track before noon tomorrow.”
A long pause. Too long this time.
“Hello?” he said.
“I’ve been told you have some problems in your house.”
She was referring to Mara’s call to Sidwell Friends. That call only happened if Roberts told his daughter about the abduction. It followed that Roberts only knew if someone on the inside told him. Goddamn shit show. “I’m on it.”
Hawthorn thought he heard another voice in the background, then the stillness of a phone being muted. He waited. It was thirty seconds before the voice returned.
“There’s some conversation about activating an additional asset,” she said.
“With all due respect, I don’t think—”
“This is not an option I want to pursue at this time,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ve told the Council that you can handle this. Am I correct in that calculation?”
“I can handle this.”
“Next time I want an immediate situation report, good news or bad. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“One last thing,” she said. “Don’t ever flip me off again. It’s unseemly.”
The line went dead. Hawthorn was left alone in the car, looking back and forth at the interior of the Lincoln Navigator, wondering how the hell they’d gotten a camera past his security team. The answer was simple: They had someone on his security team.
Omega had someone everywhere.
It’s what made the group so dangerous. And so powerful.
He lowered the privacy screen and called up to his driver. “Change of plans. We’re going to the house in Silver Spring.”
“Yes, sir,” his driver said.
Hawthorn wondered if the driver was the traitor in his group. The truth was that there was no way to know. And if he switched out his entire protective detail, there would probably just be another infiltrator in the new group. It was better to just assume his employer was always watching and act accordingly. It made his job all that more difficult, like threading the eye of a needle in the middle of a hurricane.
His driver made the turn and headed out of DC into the upscale Maryland suburb of Silver Spring. It was where Mara Roberts’s nephew had been taken. He hadn’t planned on the kid seeing his face just in case it worked out that he could let the boy go when it was all over. But he realized now that he was on a trajectory that was inevitable. There was no turning back now.
The kid had started out as an insurance policy, but now he was an integral part of piecing this mission back together. No matter what lies Hawthorn was going to tell Mara Roberts along the way while others were listening, there was only one way he was going to let things end for Joey. And that meant it no longer mattered if the kid saw his face.
CHAPTER 7
Mara yawned as she pulled off the freeway. The adrenaline from the escape was long since gone, and even her worry about Joey had settled into a dull ache instead of the throat-constricting panic of the first few hours of the drive. As hard as it was not to call Hawthorn, her dad’s logic was solid. A hostage was no good dead. And there was no upside to hurting him except as a punishment for her noncompliance. The second she talked to them, they’d ask her to do something and attach something specific to Joey. Do X or he lose
s a finger. Do Y or he loses a foot. She knew exactly who she was dealing with. She only hoped they remembered who they were dealing with, too. If there was one hair out of place on the boy’s head when she got him back, she intended to open a world of pain on whoever was responsible.
There was a massive truck stop, brightly lit with signs promising great food, showers, and clean facilities to the weary road warriors passing through the Midwest on their great treks across the country. As tempting as it was, she passed by the gleaming palace and drove down the road another two miles until she found a tiny, broken-down gas station; BILLY-RAY’S GAS AND CONVENIENCE, it proclaimed on a sign that was only half lit up in the predawn sky. She knew the big truck stop down the road would have had dozens of cameras around the property, all of them linked and their feeds accessible to the CIA’s intercept teams. The supercomputers in Langley’s basement would be chewing through terabytes of data, using advance facial recognition software to spot them. She didn’t want to take the chance. Billy-Ray’s would have to do. She doubted there were any cameras there.
She pulled in and saw that most of the pumps had little signs on them that said NOT WORKING. She rolled the pickup past these until she came to the single pump that had a sticky note on it that said CREDIT CARD BROKE PAY INSIDE. She parked in front of it and turned off the engine, eager to get out and stretch her legs. Scott stirred next to her and looked around.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Texas,” she said.
Scott sat up straighter in his chair. “What are we . . .” His voice trailed off. It didn’t take a genius to figure a gas station in Texas wouldn’t have a Chicago Cubs banner hanging on one side of the building. “I see your weird sense of humor hasn’t really changed.”
She opened the door. “Driving for ten hours will do that to a person. Especially sitting next to someone snoring the entire time.”
He stretched and opened his door. “I would have driven some if you’d woken me up.”
