by Fiona Brand
The children, huddled close to their mother, and the nostalgia of gaily colored bags stuffed with bargains from the spring sales spun her back to her own childhood. Hot blue San Francisco skies, winters without snow, windblown beaches and walks in Golden Gate Park.
Looking back, the years she’d spent in a cramped apartment a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean with her parents had seemed bright and happy, although she now knew that normality had been a sham.
Her father, Jack Jones, had always been an arresting, larger-than-life figure. When he’d been home from his “sales” trips, she had spent every spare second trailing after him. She could see why her mother, Dana, had fallen in love with him, and why she’d been so angry when she’d found out he was a cheap, two-bit con artist with a gambling addiction instead of the traveling salesman he had claimed.
The betrayal had cut deep. Dana had worked in international banking and her career had depended on a squeaky-clean reputation. She and Jack had fought for months. Then one day, Jack had slammed out of the apartment and had never come back. Two months later he had been killed in a hit-and-run accident.
The rain turned to sleet, stinging her cheek and sizzling off Chen’s hot plate. Abruptly she grinned. At least she was alive and still kicking. Icy weather or not, she got a warm feeling inside every time she thought about the fact that not only had she escaped Lopez, but so had Rina. Now safely hidden on the Witness Security Program and settled into a relationship, Rina finally had a shot at happiness.
Brushing ice off her cheek, she finished the sentence the car horn had interrupted. “At least sleet makes us appreciate fine weather.”
Chen fastened a lid on the fried rice and handed her the containers. “Hey, I could live with sunshine every day. It’s good for business.”
Still smiling, Taylor searched in her purse and counted change. Something zinged past her cheek. Frowning, she lifted a hand to her face. Her gaze caught on another dent in Chen’s take-out stand. Adrenaline kicked. She was already moving when something punched into her back, shoving her forward. The containers of food spilled from her fingers. Blinking, she gripped the edge of the counter. The reason the dents looked so fresh and shiny was because they had just been made.
Chen’s voice penetrated. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Taylor felt like she had once when she’d come around from being knocked out, disoriented and a little shocky, only this time she hadn’t been hit on the head. Her chest felt numb. “Call an ambulance. I’ve just been shot.”
She was still standing, but her knees had turned to jelly and she was having trouble breathing. Disbelief gripped her.
The card. The jaguar’s head.
Lopez, his voice flat. “I will kill you…it’s only a matter of when.”
Not when. Now.
“Get down…just in case—”
Chen was screaming. Around her, people were dropping to the pavement. The day was fading. Weirdly, she couldn’t hear the traffic anymore. Funny, but she’d never thought it would feel like this, heat where she’d been hit, a cold numbness all around—a weird pastiche of sensations as muscles went into spasm and her legs folded.
The next bullet sliced a gash in Chen’s arm and ended up in the bottom of the pool surrounding the fountain.
The sleet thickened, coating the sidewalk and turning the city gray. Chen pushed to his knees and peered over the top of his counter. People were still lying on the sidewalk. He could see the long dark hair and outflung arm of the woman he’d just served. After she’d fallen over the counter, she’d slid down onto the sidewalk and didn’t appear to be moving.
In the distance sirens wailed. Someone must have called the police and, hopefully, an ambulance. He clutched his bleeding arm, wincing at the pain, his attention drawn to the sleet-covered outline of the woman’s arm. She hadn’t moved in a while. No matter how fast the ambulance came, he didn’t think they were going to be in time.
Rico stepped out into the street, bracing himself against the icy wind. The guitar case bumped against his left thigh as he strode toward his car. A short, thickset man stepped out of a doorway, pausing to turn up the collar of his coat. The eye contact was brief and electric. Aldo Fabroni.
He ducked his head and walked on. As he strode down the street he could feel the older man’s stare boring into his back. He swore beneath his breath and controlled the panicked impulse to break into a run. He couldn’t get into his car, because that would give Aldo an opportunity to approach him and another point of reference to identify him, which meant he had to take the subway. He couldn’t afford to stop a cab, not while he was carrying the gun and with a homicide one street over.
Rico couldn’t believe it. He usually worked out of L.A., which was why he’d been chosen for this particular job. The client had wanted to make sure the hit was untraceable. In this business, secretive as it was, it was sometimes possible to trace the triggerman by asking around to find out who was available in the area to do the work. He had been the perfect choice for an East Coast job. Until Aldo.
He rounded a corner and stepped directly into the wind. Sleet pounded his face and froze his fingers. Shielding his eyes, he broke into a run, the ice-laden air shoving into his lungs hard enough to hurt. The sirens were closer.
As he dodged around pedestrians, he studied the street to orient himself. This wasn’t his city, but he had done his homework. There was a subway entrance a block away.
Seconds later the subway sign came into view. When he reached the entrance, he slowed to a jog, grabbed the railing and slipped, almost losing his footing and the guitar case.
Breathing hard, he steadied himself and took the stairs as quickly as he could with the awkward weight of the case. A train pulled out, gathering speed, as he reached the platform.
He checked the displayed timetable. He was going to have to wait.
Clenching his jaw, he strode into the men’s washroom, grabbed a wad of paper towels, dried his face and hair and wiped down his suit jacket. With any luck Aldo hadn’t recognized him. If he ever asked him about it, Rico would simply say he had made a mistake; he hadn’t been to D.C. in years.
When Rico exited the men’s room, a familiar figure was staring at the timetable.
His stomach sank. He put on a smile. Finally, his acting classes were good for something. “Hey, Aldo. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” His attention dropped to the case. “No, don’t tell me. You’re in town for a concert.”
Rico assessed the hard greed in Aldo’s expression. He was a two-bit drug dealer and a fence, small potatoes all around, but he wasn’t stupid. “How much?”
Aldo named a figure. Rico’s stomach bottomed out.
Aldo grinned. “Don’t worry. For that price your secret’s safe with me.”
Five
Steve Fischer stepped into the FBI building. It was just after four-thirty. The office was still open, but a lot of people had left early, eager to avoid the evening rush hour and worried that the escalating blizzard might create further delays.
Dusting sleet from his jacket, he stripped off his gloves, slipped them in his pocket and produced his ID. “Cold night.”
The security guard checked his face against the photograph then waved him through. “Yes, sir.”
He took the elevator, stepped out into the corridor and found the office he wanted. The door opened as he approached, which meant he didn’t have to use his card and PIN number, which would record his presence in the office. He had a working agreement with the FBI, but Marc Bayard wouldn’t tolerate interference in his investigation, old friendship or not. A woman and a man stepped out. Colenso and Burrows.
Colenso held the door. Burrows gave him a speculative look, but it was more female than curious. She had only recently transferred into D.C. and was still working out who was who, while Colenso had briefly met Steve during the hostage situation in Eureka last year.
The door closed behind him. Aside f
rom a light in one of the end booths, the field room was empty. Walking through to an interview room, he took a seat and waited until the occupant of the booth left. Seconds later, the lights went out and the door clicked closed, signaling that he now had the office to himself.
Strolling to Taylor Jones’s workstation, he sat down at her computer. The screen flickered the instant he touched the mouse. The computer hadn’t been switched off, as he had expected. It had been in rest mode, which meant that when Taylor had left the building to get lunch, she had left the computer on, the system open. Frowning at the uncharacteristic sloppiness, Steve withdrew a disk and a flash card from an inside pocket of his jacket and plugged it into the USB port. The flash card was larger than normal, about the size of a pocket calculator.
He inserted the disk and waited for the program to install. Seconds later, he removed the disk, unplugged the flash card and slipped them both back into his jacket pocket. Taylor’s security breach in leaving her computer on and unprotected while she was out of the building had just been solved. There was nothing to copy; her computer was clean. Someone had gotten there before him.
An hour later, he stepped into Taylor’s apartment. Pocketing the duplicate master key he’d had made several weeks previously, he closed the door behind him and thumbed on a penlight. He didn’t want to risk turning on a light in case Taylor’s mother, Dana Jones, had caught an early flight and was already in town, although it was more than likely she would go directly to the hospital.
He moved soundlessly through the rooms in case one of Taylor’s neighbors had caught the evening news and was nosy enough to check out who was in apartment 10A when the tenant was on the critical list.
The master bedroom was empty, the quilt a little wrinkled, as if she’d sat down on it that morning after the bed had been made. The quilt itself was plain, the bedroom furniture elegant but neat. No surprises there.
He moved through a second bedroom. The lack of luggage in the spare room confirmed that Dana Jones hadn’t yet arrived. Given the weather conditions and the fact that even if she got a direct flight from San Francisco, it would take several hours to reach D.C., he didn’t expect her to fly in until the morning.
The bathroom was cramped but spotless and contained the same clean, faintly sweet smell he had noticed in the bedroom and which he now identified as soap, not perfume. One towel was neatly draped over a towel rail.
Checking the luminous dial of his watch, he moved through to the sitting room. Like the rest of the apartment, the room was tidy, except for one corner, which was occupied by bookshelves jammed with reference books and a large computer desk awash with papers, notebooks and a stack of files. If he had needed further confirmation of what Taylor did with her spare time, apart from a rigorous fitness program, this was it. She worked.
And for the past few months, she had been busy. He’d had a tail on her ever since she had been discharged from the hospital after the hostage crisis in Eureka. Taylor’s personal connection to Lopez, and the fact that, since Rina Morell had disappeared into the Witness Security Program, Taylor was Lopez’s only link to his ex-wife, made her an automatic choice for surveillance. The fact that she had obsessively researched Lopez and the cabal, despite being first cautioned then pulled from the case, made her even more interesting. And now she knew about the book.
Locating the Internet files she’d searched had been easy. On a previous visit he had bugged her computer with a highly illegal piece of spyware designed to mimic the security system she used. His electronic friend recorded Taylor’s online research and mailed to him the sites she had accessed and duplicates of any e-mail messages.
The microfiche material was something else entirely. Other than the time periods and the newspapers she had been researching—information that was noted on the register held at the front desk of the library—he had no idea what she was reading unless she created a computer file and e-mailed it to her work address.
Sitting down at the desk, he booted up the computer, inserted the disk and connected the flash card. A small window running percentages at the bottom of the screen indicated his copy program was complete. Removing the disk and flash card, he inserted a second disk into her drive. This one contained a powerful wipe program. Minutes later, her hard drive was clean.
Retrieving the disk, he took a small tool kit from his pocket, unscrewed the back plate of the CPU and attached a tiny, state-of-the-art transmitter, which was designed to look like part of the hard drive. FBI technicians would go over her computer with a fine-tooth comb, but until he activated satellite transmission, they were unlikely to locate it.
Six
Jack Jones was tall, about six-two, lean and rangy, with dark eyes and hair, courtesy of a Sioux grandfather. His hair was streaked with gray at the temples, just like it would be if he were alive, which Taylor knew wasn’t possible. Jack Jones had been dead for more than twenty years.
She forced eyelids that felt like they’d been glued shut wider, so she could continue to study her dead father. The fact that he was standing just feet away, staring out of a window, convinced Taylor that the bullet that had punched through her back and sliced and diced at least one lung had, most likely, been fatal. If she was in Jack’s company, she definitely hadn’t gone to Heaven.
The only alternative to death was that she was alive and having a drug-induced vision, because to the best of her knowledge, Taylor didn’t have a psychic bone in her body.
She turned her head and, like a switch flicking on, pain flared, burning in her chest and all down the back of her throat. She swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in her mouth, and the pain went ballistic.
A sharp click registered. Someone dressed in white bent over her. “She’s awake and she’s not supposed to be.”
There was a second metallic clink, a cool sensation running up her right arm.
The next time she surfaced it was dark. A light glowed beside the bed, illuminating the fact that she was in a private room and her mother, Dana, was sitting beside the bed. Her chest still felt painful and tight; her throat was even sorer. A tube ran across her face: oxygen.
Dana’s hand gripped hers. “Thank God. I thought I was going to lose you.”
Taylor tried for a smile. Dana looked fragile, dark smudges under her eyes, the skin across her cheekbones finely drawn. “I’m hard to kill.”
Although, if the way she felt now was any indication, she must have come close to dying. She was having trouble breathing. Speaking was even more difficult.
With an effort of will, she tried to remember what had happened, but her mind was a blank from the time she had consciously registered that she had been shot until she’d woken up and hallucinated that Jack Jones had been standing beside her bed. “Which hospital am I in?” There were wires and tubes everywhere. A shunt ran into her bandaged right wrist, and to her left she could hear the beep of a heart monitor.
“George Washington. They moved you out of ICU yesterday.”
Yesterday. That meant at least a day had passed since she had last woken up. “How long since I was admitted?” She cleared her throat, suddenly ferociously thirsty.
“Two days.” Dana leaned forward with a plastic cup and a straw. “You can have a few sips, but not too much. They don’t want you throwing up in case you rupture your stitches. And don’t worry about the back of your throat. The reason it’s sore is because they’ve had a tube down there.”
Ice-cold water filled her mouth then flowed down her throat. She winced at the rawness, took another sip and watched as Dana replaced the drink on her bedside table.
Two days. The amount of time that had passed explained why Dana looked so tired and rumpled; she would have caught a flight out yesterday. Dana had a key to Taylor’s apartment but, knowing her mother, she would have bypassed the apartment and come straight to the hospital. She had probably slept here last night.
Dana’s hand tightened around hers. “The bullet broke a rib and punctured the bottom lobe of your left
lung. They’ve got you strapped up so the rib doesn’t move. Luckily the bullet went all the way through so they didn’t have to dig it out. They did keyhole surgery to repair the lung, but unfortunately, you had a reaction to one of the drugs they used, which is why you’ve been out for so long.”
The sound of footsteps in the hall was followed by the glimpse of a woman carrying a brightly colored plastic bag. Taylor had a flashback of a woman with two children and other shoppers huddled against the cold. “Was anyone else hurt?”
“The guy who owns the take-out stand got grazed, but that was all.”
Despite the fact that Chen had gotten hurt, relief channeled through her. There had been women and children on the street and at least three shots had been fired, maybe four if Chen’s injury had happened after hers. “Did they get the shooter? Who’s got the case?”
“The city police department picked it up, but when they realized you were an agent, they let the FBI step in and take over. And no, they haven’t caught anyone yet.”
A nurse stepped into the room, his gaze sharp as he took in the fact that she was awake. After a few routine questions, a check on her pulse and blood pressure and the drip feeding into her left arm, he made a note on the chart clipped on the end of her bed and left.
A metal trolley rattled in the corridor outside. With stiff movements, Dana got to her feet. “It’s after eight. I need to get something to eat and freshen up. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Is there anything you need?”
Taylor didn’t know when she’d be able to wear them, but she needed some real clothes and some toiletry items. Her hair felt stiff, as if it hadn’t been washed in days—which it hadn’t—and her teeth felt fuzzy.
