An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense)

by Bridgeman, Hallee

  Nick took the file folder and walked to the door. "Better get somebody else. I'm not going to China in a few weeks, Charlie."

  "We'll discuss it when you get back, Nick. Right now, we're spread too thin," Charlie said. As Nick left his office, he heard Charlie pick up the phone and say, "Jen? Take me off speaker. You know I hate that. Give Nick any details you have on the trace you made on those e-mails."

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  Chapter 10

  NICK landed in Portland during a rainstorm. He knew weather like this was typical for the Pacific Northwest, but the deluge didn't make this little assignment any better. Airport construction forced the passengers to walk across about twenty feet of runway. During that short twenty foot space, Nick got thoroughly soaked. The weather was cold and his wet east coast clothes made him feel even colder.

  He hated the cold. He'd take a tiger cage in Syria over snow skiing in Siberia any day of the week.

  The construction made the traffic worse than the streets of Bangkok, and by the time Nick pulled out onto the interstate, he was gritting his teeth in annoyance. He'd memorized the map of Portland on the plane, and worked his way through the afternoon traffic to the motel where he'd arranged to stay. He could hardly wait to get into a pair of warm, dry socks.

  Once he checked in, he took a hot shower, forcing his body to relax, then he lay down on top of the covers on the bed. He didn't intend to sleep, just shut his mind off for a while, but the jet lag finally caught up with him.

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  THE pain in his temple vibrated through his whole body. He wanted to open his eyes, but his body wasn't cooperating with him. His ears rang and it made him feel isolated and trapped in darkness. Heat blasted his skin from his left. Acrid smoke burned his throat and when he coughed, he inhaled more of it, causing a gag reflex.

  As he turned his head to the side, coughing, he finally forced his eyes open. He lay on his back, on the deck of the helicopter. The medic lay next to him, his eyes open and staring blankly, clearly not breathing.

  Nick rolled over to his hands and knees, crawling to the medic. He couldn't find a pulse. Dead. Nick fought back the memory of the medic rushing out to him and pulling him to his feet, leading him back to the cover of the aircraft. If the medic hadn't saved Nick's life, the man would likely still be alive.

  Shaking his head, Nick pushed himself to his feet and fought his way through the debris to the door. The pilot and copilot lay still and unmoving on the other side of the burning engine outside.

  Stumbling around, he worked his way back to his prisoner, who screamed and fought against the restraints. Nick ripped the hood off of his head and looked the man in the eye, putting a finger to his lips to silence him. Suddenly, the civilian on the other side of the prisoner reached up and grabbed Nick's wrist with a hand covered in blood.

  NICK awoke with a start, his pulse beating rapidly. He forced himself to take a deep breath and felt his body relax. This was the type of nothing job they gave new recruits, not seasoned veterans. He was in Portland, not Persia. He could dial down his vigilance about eight or nine notches. He glanced at his watch and knew it was time to call in a report.

  Jennifer answered on the first ring, and told him she'd been waiting for his call. "I have a name and address for you. A.C. Suarez."

  Nick could hear papers rustling in the background, but a feeling of dread started to work its way through his gut. How many people in this country had the initials A.C. with the last name Suarez? He gripped his cell phone a little tighter.

  Jen continued, "We cross-checked the population within a hundred mile radius of Portland and found a likely candidate in the greater metropolitan Portland area working for NWT. Matches the name but this is a female." Jennifer paused to take a breath, but Nick didn't need to hear anymore. He almost said the name himself, but stopped in time. "Her name is Aria Suarez. Let me give you her address."

  Nick committed the address to memory without having to write it down. In his business, he had learned never to write anything valuable down and never to write anything on stacked sheets of paper. "Thanks, Jen. I'll check in before Sunday. Usual times for station calls. Proof of life word is 'hacking' and I'll be using code blue protocol until further notice."

  He hung up and reached into the pocket of his slacks to retrieve his Soldier's Bible, still wrapped in a linen handkerchief given to him as a token of the affection Aria Suarez felt for him a lifetime ago. To be honest, Nick had not connected the dots between the gift and the giver in nearly a decade.

  He fired up the internet screen on the hotel television and pulled up an image search engine. Using the television remote control was cumbersome, but he eventually entered the name of his high school and the year he had graduated. In no time he was reading an ancient news article from his senior year in high school when Aria had made the front page of the Leisure section. There she sat at the school's baby grand piano wearing a pink sweater, her hair pulled back with a matching pink headband.

  Nick thought back past a decade to the last time he had seen Miss A.C. Suarez. Could it really be her? What in the world was she doing in Portland of all places and working for a government contractor of all things? If it really was her, she still had the last name of Suarez.

  That didn't seem like her style. It was inconsistent with the Aria Suarez he had known all those years before. He always knew she planned on claiming her husband's last name. In Nick's mind and heart, Aria Suarez set every standard for female beauty and desirability. Aria remaining single all this time simply did not compute.

  Could she be divorced? No. No way. What kind of moron would marry her then divorce her? No moron Aria would ever marry in the first place, that's for sure.

  Widowed? Maybe. She was an Army brat. She very well could have married a soldier or a man with a similarly dangerous line of work. That seemed consistent. She would require her husband to be physically and mentally tough. If that were the case, though, Aria would have kept her married name after losing her spouse.

  It couldn't be her, he decided. This just had to be some kind of cosmic coincidence. With the shake of his head, he forced himself out of the past, turned off the television, and sat up. He had work that needed to be done. His top priority was to find out what kind of trouble surrounded this Miss A. C. Suarez and what she knew.

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  WHEN Nick first acquired his target, it had taken him a good long while to recover from his shock upon seeing her again. Aria Suarez, his Aria Suarez, looked the same yet somehow different. Ten years had added a confidence to her movements that had been largely absent throughout high school. It made him wonder how he had changed in the last ten years. Maturity or experience, he supposed, only accented and highlighted her already natural grace and beauty. In fact, each time he watched her she looked more beautiful than the last.

  He mentally noted — but filed away in the "to be dealt with later" category — the fact that each time he caught sight of her while performing his surveillance that his pulse began to race. Once, he even realized that he was holding his breath while watching her through a high powered sniper scope from six hundred meters. He wrote it off to his sniper training, but knew there was more to it.

  Nick had been watching Aria for three days now. So far, there didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary in her life, other than the fact that she'd e-mailed the FBI with suspicions that someone whom she knew was planning a nuclear attack on the nation's leaders. In observing her, he noticed how she favored one hand; something he could not help noticing given Jen Thorne's circumstances. He also observed her genuine warmth toward her coworkers.

  Mostly, he noticed her stress levels. Nick observed that she was still just as little as the last time he saw her, and he knew someone more powerful could break her in half with little effort. She was so small, so petite. He knew just how quickly he could disable her if tasked to do so. As he watched her, he noted that she felt anxious, maybe even scared. She continually darted furtive glances over he
r shoulder and checked reflections everywhere she went. This made her a difficult tail due to her vigilance.

  Every morning, he watched her leave her little cottage — which sat in a small neighborhood within walking distance to a beautiful cove of the Willamette River — and go for a jog armed with her MP3 player and a can of pepper spray. Then she'd return and, within an hour, leave for work. During the day, he sat in his car near NWT to make sure Aria didn't leave for any reason. He stood ready to follow her wherever she went during the day which was, so far, nowhere.

  Saturday morning, she didn't leave her home. Nick kept waiting for her to go out for a jog, but she stayed put. Mid-afternoon, he heard the sounds of her piano playing come through the open windows and he hit her with the parabolic microphone. He leaned back in his car and closed his eyes, listening.

  Nick hadn't thought of her playing in years. Years ago, he had stumbled upon an old recording of Aria in recital during music school but listening to her play felt an awful lot like self-flagellation and Nick really wasn't into self-torture. In fact, it was when he disposed of that recording that he also began to purposefully evict and eliminate any further thoughts or years-old- feelings for the little girl from his former life.

  Sitting in his car nearly half a mile away and well out of her sight with his stereo headphones connected to his powerful parabolic microphone, he couldn't keep the memories back — and didn't want to. Nothing beat listening to her play live. He closed his eyes and let it take him back to high school, to Georgia sunshine, to laughing brown eyes and shining blonde hair and soft, warm lips.

  As the last of the chords of the piano faded in the air, he reached for his optics. He saw her come out of her house and start walking toward the river. He slipped on sunglasses and a baseball cap. As soon as she was out of sight around a curve, he started his car and drove down the same road on which she walked, passing her. He pulled into a convenience store parking lot and went inside. While thumbing through the Saturday Portland Tribune, he watched her cross the road, walk to a dock, and into a seafood restaurant.

  He didn't expect her to emerge before ten minutes had even passed. If he hadn't been staring at the door of the restaurant, he would have missed her coming out. She stood at the curb and paused, looking down the street. Then she shook her head and headed back home without any more stops.

  That evening, a man driving a silver Volvo S80 and a pouty teenage girl arrived and picked her up. He memorized the license plate and took a picture of the man and teenager with his telephoto lens. So there was a man in her life. Nick wondered who he was and what he might do for a living. Part of him was happy for her, but just a small part. As the man walked up to ring Aria's doorbell, Nick mentally killed him eight different ways.

  They left and Nick cautiously followed. He shadowed them to a strip mall about a twenty minute drive away where they shared a pizza and some cheese bread before hitting a family movie. Nick waited until they left the theater and realized that the guy was taking Aria directly back to her home. This made the tail difficult in the thinning evening traffic.

  Nick had no choice but to pass them and perform a "block" maneuver to avoid detection. After he passed them he accelerated sharply to open up space, then turned left, sped for a block or so and turned left again then rapidly accelerated. After his third left hand turn he ended up well behind them again. He slowly drove into her neighborhood and parked within binocular range to observe them. The man delivered Aria to her door with a chaste kiss before walking back to the car where the teenage girl waited, patiently playing with her smart phone.

  Sunday morning she walked to her church two blocks away in the pouring rain. Nick knew that he would have at least an hour so he quickly and easily broke into her house. The tricky part was not leaving any obvious traces, like wet hand prints or foot prints, that would serve as evidence of his presence.

  A quick run through the house showed nothing out of the ordinary. He tried to get into her laptop, but didn't waste any time attempting to break the password and decided to leave it alone. He went into the bedroom and searched through her dresser and night stand drawers, and still couldn't find a single thing out of the ordinary. He performed a thorough check, looking under the drawers in case she had taped things to the undersides, and checking between and under every mattress and cushion.

  Just as he made to leave her bedroom, something on her far wall caught his attention. He walked over and looked at it closely. A warmth that he wasn't used to and couldn't define spread through him when he realized that it was his Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart. The medals were tastefully framed with a copy of the newspaper article which faithfully reported his official obituary.

  He left the room, feeling for the first time ever, like he had invaded something private. When he got back to his car he called Jennifer Thorne.

  "Dove this is Nighthawk."

  "How's life, Nighthawk?" Jen asked.

  "I've had a hacking cough since yesterday, Dove." he replied. The phrase confirmed, with his proof of life safe word, that he was on mission and not under any kind of duress.

  "Task?"

  "I have been observing the target and I believe contact is in order to close the file."

  "Roger. We'll arrange an in person meeting with the principal. Code blue protocols are in order."

  When Nick didn't respond, she asked, "Something else?"

  Nick knew that if he informed Jen about his prior knowledge of this woman, he would be off to China on the next flight. Instead he said, "Yeah. You still owe me a croquet match."

  Jen simply hung up without another word.

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  ON Monday morning Aria called in sick to work. She'd been with NWT for nearly four years and had used a total of two sick days in all that time. She shot Julie an e-mail and let her know she was taking a couple of personal days and asked her not to call her for any reason. While she felt nervous and apprehensive, she wouldn't stop now. She'd made her decision and planned to follow through.

  She checked her e-mail all morning long, but as of ten, there was no new message on where or when to meet whom, so she paced her house for a while, finally deciding to escape into music.

  She sat at the piano and ran through a couple of warm-up exercises before she played the opening to the third movement of Prokofiev's 8th Sonata, the piece she had very nearly perfected in high school. It didn't take long for her wrist to begin to ache under the strain of the piece, so she gradually eased into a simpler composition to give the muscles and tendons in her right hand a break.

  She let her mind wander to Adam's new screenplay and thought about the plot; an action-oriented thriller set in San Francisco's Chinatown. As she thought about the complexity of the plot, the dark moments broken up by sheer action, she started thinking about music that would go with it. When her wrist couldn't take her playing anymore, she pulled out some staff paper and penciled in the notes she heard — the code she saw — in her mind.

  It still sounded slightly imperfect and the chords would have to be adjusted to match the mood and tone of specific scenes in the film, but she thought perhaps she'd stumbled upon the right melody to connect the entire plot to all of the characters' individual harmonious themes. It excited her that this one came so easily. The last soundtrack she wrote was the result of a week's vacation spent in 20-hour days of sweat and tears with maybe even some blood mixed in.

  Smiling, she looked up from her piano and realized it had been several hours since she last checked e-mail. She wondered if a location for the meeting had been arranged. She slid off the bench and went to her laptop, quickly typed in the security code, and accessed the program that allowed her to keep her identity somewhat of a secret.

  While her computer worked with the program, she went to her kitchen and grabbed a container of yogurt. By the time she came back into the room, she saw she had received another message. Taking a deep breath, she accessed the message. "Five o'clock today, coffee shop on Macadam Avenue n
ear Willamette Park, far northeast corner table outside, male in a blue shirt. He'll wait for you there."

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  Chapter 11

  ARIA Suarez stood on the corner of the patio at the coffee shop on Macadam Avenue observing the man wearing the dark blue shirt who occupied the corner table of the outdoor cafe. Sunlight glinted on his brown hair, revealing highlighted streaks that nearly glowed, lending his visage a halo-like appearance. He'd flirted with the waitress each time she'd come by, and had even grinned at a small child making a mess at a nearby table. He looked harmless enough, though she couldn't completely make out his face behind the sunglasses he wore and the Monday edition of the Portland Tribune he continuously ducked behind.

  She clenched the purse strap in her hand a little tighter. She kept a sharp eye toward the crowd, scanning faces for anyone who looked either familiar or out of place. Finally, she mustered the courage to step forward.

  Aria hesitantly began her approach, unsure of how this might work and trying very hard not to reveal even a hint of uncertainty. Then she remembered that she also didn't want to attract any undue attention to herself by appearing uncomfortable or out of place in any way, and she smoothed her stride.

  When she reached his table, she stood still and waited for him to look up from his newspaper. When he failed to do so, she cleared her throat. When that didn't work, she said, "Excuse me."