Shadows Amongst Light (The Spy Who Loves Me)

by Eason, Mary

  The usual grumbling followed that statement, which Noah was quick to silence.

  “Matt’s right, guys. This could be major. We’ll meet back here on Friday--same time. And, if anyone has an inclination to go out on their own, in the middle of the night...don’t.”

  That got just the reaction Noah was hoping and I’m sure exactly the one he’d been expecting from me. I headed for the door when his next words stopped me.

  “Cameron, we need to talk.”

  I waited while the rest of the team filed past me.

  “What?” When we were, finally alone, I took my usual stance when faced with an emotional situation that I couldn’t handle. I went on the defensive.

  I expected the same from Noah, who was never big at showing his tender side. You see you just had to know Noah. Sometimes his anger was just that. But sometimes his anger masked his concern.

  “What the hell do you think you’re were doing, going out alone in the middle of the night like that? Cameron you of all people should know the danger that is out there--especially for us right now. We don’t know if our cover has been compromised or not. Or by whom, for that matter. We have to stick together on this.”

  This time I saw Noah’s anger for what it truly was. He was worried about me. It was all there clearly in those dark eyes.

  “I know. It was stupid, but I couldn’t sleep and we’d just had that terrible fight...so I couldn’t talk to you.”

  “So this is all my fault?” He added with a grin.

  “No that’s now what I’m saying. I don’t want to fight with you, Noah. I screwed up. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry to leave? Stay with me tonight?” he asked me quietly taking another step closer. Not touching me yet, but close enough to make my resolve crumble. I knew he was waiting for me to make the next move.

  Tell him the truth, my heart pleaded. Tell him about the baby. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know where I stood with Noah or what our future might be.

  I loved him. There was never any doubt about that. Noah was the only man I’d ever dated who treated me like his equal. He valued my opinion and often times it ended up the cause of our disagreeing, because frankly, if I have an opinion I’ll give it. Somehow, we’d always managed to work beyond that, unlike all the past boyfriends who took my five-foot-three inch height as being weak and defenseless, not to mention my short blond curls as a sign that I needed a man to tell me what to do.

  “No,” I said at last before reaching up to pull him closer to me. We were equals and I enjoyed Noah’s company, but I was restless again tonight. Searching for something that was just beyond my definition.

  “Why no, Cameron?” he asked as he stroked a strand of hair behind my ear a gesture that I would always associate with Noah.

  “Because,” I told him before I kissed him once and pulled away.

  I turned back in time to catch his hurt expression and for a moment, I wavered. What was wrong with me anyway? Noah was my husband. I loved him, not to mention the fact that he was just an all-around nice guy? What was I looking for anyway? I knew that Noah was just waiting for me to say the word to move our relationship forward or end it entirely, but I couldn’t give that word.

  I told myself that I wasn’t ready for any changes in my life yet. I told myself that the work we did was too dangerous to get into a serious discussion about the future with him, but deep in my heart, I knew those were all lies. I really didn’t want to hear Noah’s answers because you see I believe that I knew them all by heart. Noah wouldn’t let anything stand in his way of the job. Not even me. It was his first love after all. Someday soon, I was going to have to face my lies and deal with them. But I wasn’t ready to do that just yet. Not tonight.

  “Cameron, don’t go out there alone tonight. At least let me call you a cab? Think about what you’re doing? Do you really think it was an accident that this person found you twice in less than a week? You’re not that naïve.”

  “I’ll be fine, Noah. I’ll call you in the morning. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

  “Cameron...”

  I turned back to him and blew him a kiss, before closing the door on Noah and our uncharted future...together?

  CHAPTER THREE

  I left Noah’s shop and started walking in the direction of my apartment. Of course, Noah had been right. I knew the dangers and I was behaving irresponsibly by making light of them, but I was restless again and needed the night to exorcise my demons, just as much as I feared being alone in it.

  It was no coincidence that I’d run into my little friend again tonight. In fact, as I thought about it a little more, I realized the whole set of circumstances that had brought me to that area tonight in the first place wasn’t normal. I never went to that section of town and it wasn’t on the way to any place I ever frequented. The area was a renovated section of midtown that had been converted into a section of trendy nightclubs and fancy twenty-something restaurants. Not my scene at all.

  The truth was I’d started out the evening with plenty of time to be at the meeting on time. I didn’t have a clue that I would soon to be side-tracked to corners of the city that I wasn’t familiar with. I’d been thinking about the past and my suspicions about my brother none of which I could mention to the team.

  Everyone who knew me since I’d moved back to D.C. believed my brother had died years ago. No one knew the whole story. No one knew the strange circumstances surrounding Judah’s disappearance.

  You see, Judah had simply disappeared one night from my parent’s home and from our lives entirely when I was still just a child.

  My brother is ten years older than I am. Even as a child of seven, I knew, Judah was involved in something bad. My parents had told me that Judah had emotional problems but from the scrapes of conversation I’d overheard through the years, I was able to piece together the truth. My brother had gotten himself mixed up in a serious drug addiction.

  By age seventeen, Judah had graduated to hard drugs. My parents and my brother argued all the time about it, which usually ended up with Judah storming out of the house where he would stay gone for days. My parents had tried to get him help. Judah was scheduled to check into one of the foremost drug treatment centers in the state when he’d simply disappeared in the middle of the night never to be heard from again, and my parents spent the rest of their lives, and thousands of dollars, searching for the truth behind his disappearance. I had always believed they had died without ever knowing the truth about their son. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  No one knew the real reason why my parents had been in that small village in the middle of nowhere that ended up costing them their lives in that mysterious car accident except me and the private investigator they’d hired years ago to find Judah.

  Through the years, there had been small moments of hope that Judah might still be alive. Two weeks before their deaths, the PI working the case had received a key piece of information. Someone had spotted someone resembling my brother living in the small encampment along the North Carolina State line. My parents had died without being able to tell me what they had found there.

  Since their deaths and after I’d pretty much resigned myself to the fact that Judah was either dead or didn’t want to be found by any of us, I’d fired the PI. That was the last that I’d believed I’d ever hear about my brother until about a month ago when someone started leaving messages on my answering machine claiming to be my missing brother.

  At first, I’d simply dismissed the messages as the work of someone very disturbed or perhaps someone who knew about my father’s career and was after money, but when the calls continued, well let’s just say they got my attention. A few weeks ago, I’d spotted the person that I was certain was Judah. I knew that he’d been watching me, just as I knew he was the one leaving those messages. It was around that time that I’d first become aware of the stranger from tonight.

  I still wasn’t sure why I’d kept my brother’s past from Noah, I mea
n he was my husband. But then, I guess maybe my brother was still too painful of a connection to my parents’ death to talk about with anyone. Or maybe I really wanted to believe that I wasn’t completely alone in this world.

  I glanced up as the moon went behind a cloud, bringing the world around me into shadow and realized I wasn’t heading for my apartment after all. I’d come back to the spot where I’d first spotted my brother.

  The clouds rushed across the night sky at a strange, unusual speed. Watching them took my breath away and made me aware of the dangers of the night. I felt the first uneasy prickle at the base of my spin reminding me of Noah’s words. Reminding me that I was no more prepared for danger now than I had been hours earlier. I’d been foolish to wander off on my own like this. After all how many chances did I have left before I’d reached my limit?

  From somewhere close behind, I heard a sound that brought my attention back to my current situation. It was not a pretty one. I was alone on an unfamiliar street.

  It was then that I saw him standing there. My brother. Or at least the man that I believed to be my brother. But even from the distance that separated us, I knew he was no longer the confused young kid that had walked into the night all those years ago.

  “Judah?”

  The sound of my voice startled him but he didn’t answer, didn’t move.

  “Judah, it really you? You’re alive. Mom and dad were right. You’re alive.”

  I took another step closer when it hit me that the man standing before me was a very different version of that gangly teenager I remembered from the past. A boy of seventeen had disappeared into the night. Before me now stood a man who looked at me with cold, empty eyes.

  “Judah, I can help you if you let me. Whatever you’ve done, I can help. But you have to turn yourself in Judah. I can help if you turn yourself in.”

  “Stop.” The first sound of his voice sent me back into the past. That voice was only a thin reminder of the troubled kid I’d known in those days. “Cameron, don’t come any closer to me.”

  At the sharp tone of his voice, I stopped only a few feet closer to him, watching him more cautiously. After all what did I really know about the man he’d become? The things I knew about Elijah Jacobs made it hard for me to believe they could be the same person. “Judah, it’s okay. You can trust me. I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you. Whatever happened, whatever you’ve done, I can help you.”

  The sound of his laughter sent a chill through me. It sounded nothing like the boy I’d known all those years ago.

  “You can’t help me, Cameron. There’s nothing you or anyone you’re connected to can do to help me now. It’s too late for me. I only came back for you. To warn you. You have to get out of this before it’s too late for you as well. Please, you have to stop what you’re doing. You don’t really understand what’s going on here. There are…things that you don’t know. Walk away from this while you still can. Walk away from me, from what you think you know about me. Let go of the past. Get out before it’s too late.”

  “I don’t understand you? What are you talking about?” I took another step closer before what he had to say next, stopped me cold in my tracts.

  “You’re on the wrong side, Cameron. You’re fighting the wrong enemy. You can’t win this. What you are doing is destined to fail. Walk away before it costs you your life. You think you know what’s happening here. You think you know who I am. Who you’re really fighting for? You have no idea what the truth is. You think you’re fighting against evil, but you don’t even know what that is.”

  “Judah, what are you trying to tell me? Tell me what you mean, Judah? Please, help me understand how I can help you? What happened to you, Judah? Where have you been all these years? Judah, did you really do all those things that you are being accused of? Did mom and dad...”

  I didn’t finish those words. Judah was no longer listening to me. Something caught his attention in a distance. Somehow, I knew my brother was ready to flee.

  “Wait, Judah--don’t go. Let me come with you. I can help you, Judah.”

  “No!” For a moment, his eyes came back to mine--those cold lifeless eyes. But only for a moment. Then his attention went back to something just beyond me in the distance. “Don’t try to follow me, Cameron, and don’t try to contact me again. Stay out of this. Get out of it while you still have the choice.”

  Without another word and just like before my brother left me standing there, watching after him and wondering if I’d just imagined the whole incident. Had I, in my desperate need to find him again, created this whole incident?

  I’m not sure how long I stood staring into the darkness, hoping that he would somehow return and dispel those doubts, but it never happened. When I finally gave up and went home to my apartment, it was well after midnight.

  I unlocked the door to the ringing phone and knew even before I answered the call that it would be Noah. The flashing red light on my answering machine told me that this was not the first time he’d made that call to my number tonight.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Cameron, where have you been? I’ve been calling you for hours now. I was about ready to go searching for you. What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing...I just needed to think.”

  “You needed to think? About what?”

  “About nothing...about everything. I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry that I worried you, Noah, but I’m okay. And, it’s late and I’m tired and I have to be up early tomorrow.” At that out and out lie, I crossed my fingers behind my back and said a silent prayer for forgiveness. I wasn’t scheduled to go into the classroom until next week, but I wasn’t ready to face the inevitable with Noah tonight.

  “Cameron, don’t hang up on me.”

  “I’m not, but I don’t want to talk about anything right now Noah, so...goodnight.” At that point, I did hang up on the man that had been there for me through so many bad moments in my life.

  I was stunned, ecstatic...frightened. Restless. All those emotions ran through me as I went back over every little detail of my first real face-to-face encounter with my brother in over twenty years.

  Surprisingly I found that there were tears in my eyes. I hadn’t cried in years. Not since my parents’ death. I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew that I had to do something and soon.

  Surely, the very fact that Judah had come back into my life after all these years had to mean...something? A sign that it was time for me to take a new direction in life maybe? But even if that were true, I still didn’t know what to expect or what I was looking for.

  I glanced down at my hands that still held the phone and realized that they were trembling. Tonight had shaken me beyond what I wanted to admit.

  I made coffee, more to give me something to do with my hands and hopefully to stop their trembling than anything. All the while, my mind working overtime. I certainly didn’t need any more stimulation.

  “My brother is my enemy.” I said those words aloud, barely registering that I’d spoken them at all.

  “That’s not possible. That’s not possible.” Against my will, I remembered all the terrible details The Organization had been able to uncover about Elijah Jacobs. And one fact stood out above all else. Elijah Jacobs was a cold-blooded killer.

  How could I even begin to understand much less accept all those terrible truths that I’d seen very real, and very hard evidence of as being my brother’s crimes. How had my brother, the kid that had everything including a promising future ahead of him become a terrorist? How had the two of us ended up on opposite sides?

  I tried to understand what Judah had been trying to tell me tonight. He’d said I didn’t understand what was happening. Judah told me that I was fighting the wrong enemy. But what had he been trying to imply? That he was actually on my side? That someone within The Organization was really the enemy? As hard as I tried to make sense of it, I found myself coming back to what I couldn’t accept. My brother could not be Elijah Jacobs.
He was capable of those terrible crimes. But then, I didn’t really know what my brother was capable of. If what I’d read about Elijah Jacobs were true, then how could I possibly hope to save him from his crimes. And how cruel was it that I’d finally found Judah again under these circumstances?

  Outside the clouds had disappeared. The moon, rising above the neighboring apartment complex, spreading its light across my balcony into the small window of my dining room where I sat. The allure of the night was just too strong to resist. There was something else in the air tonight. A certain electricity. Almost as if something unstoppable had been set into motion. For the first time I found myself looking around the dark shadows of lawn below me and wondering. There was nothing there. Or at least nothing that wanted its presence known.

  “Judah?” My only answer was silence. A strange, uneasy silence of something waiting to happen.

  It was a long time before I fell asleep that night and even then, my sleep was broken by uneasy dreams that disappeared with the light of day.

  When I awoke the following morning it was late, but all of my past transgressions were there to haunt me.

  I’d lied to Noah, the man that I cared deeply about. I’d been dishonest with the team--the people who were responsible for saving my life, and I’d failed to disclose valuable information that might someday be responsible for getting someone killed. I was not in the best of positions here.

  After I’d made more coffee, I found the old box I’d long ago hidden away in my closet. The box that contained all the information gathered by my parents’ private investigator.

  Through the years, I’d probably read those documents a thousand times. I pretty much knew all of it by heart and yet I couldn’t help but believe that somewhere amongst those papers there had to be something that I’d overlooked. Some thread of evidence that would have given my parents hope that my brother was still alive. The reason they’d gone to North Carolina in the first place. The reason that had ultimately gotten them killed.