Two years later
Alec pulled his glasses from his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His back ached with a grinding, brutal demand for surcease. His neck was stiff and made him long for soft hands that could knead away tension.
He wanted to growl, wanted to pound something, anything. But anger didn’t help the pain in his body any more than it assuaged the torment in his mind: He shifted slightly, grimacing at the ripples of agony that sitting too long in one position inevitably produced. The misery that chewed on each individual muscle fiber in his chest and shoulders was a result of the shooting two years before, a pain endurable only because it was the least consequence of that particular day’s horrors.
Alone, on an undercover assignment high in the New Mexico Rockies, he only talked face-to-face with the few Pecos villagers who sold food or gasoline. He’d grown a beard that gradually hid his features until the sheer size of it masked his identity completely, even if it couldn’t hide the bleakness his mirror revealed in his eyes. He exercised daily, forcing his body to levels of endurance that had left him shaking and swearing for the first year and now only served to mitigate his anger.
And in the evenings he sat behind his computer, his unauthorized and wholly personal quest for vengeance magnified by the sheer weight of his enforced loneliness, intensified by his careful, methodical and ruthless need for an answer to a question he’d only just begun to understand.
Forswearing sleep, ignoring all but the basic need for food and water, he endlessly, restlessly searched his cache of compiled and stolen information, combing through each notation and photograph for the clue that would give him the one name behind the terrorists who had gunned him down and murdered Cait Wilson.
He glanced at his wristwatch and, seeing it was close to six o’clock, moved into the living room to catch the evening news. His cabin may have looked empty and his lifestyle might have felt woefully incomplete, but he managed the solitude by constant contact with the world outside the canyon. A computer, a telephone, a satellite dish, a coffeemaker and a television—and he was golden.
Alec clicked on the television set and sat down on his Salvation Army sofa, his elbows resting on his upraised knees. He pressed the remote until he found one of the primary networks. He stared at the screen, without consciously seeing the wrap-up of a talk show.
His thoughts kept swerving back to a memo he’d found just last week. As the tongue will probe a sore tooth, his mind kept prodding at the implications found in that damning document. And each nudge, each glancing touch raised more questions, greater confusion, and strengthened an already glassy, core-deep fury.
In some possibly misguided attempt to stay privy to the goings-on of his former division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he’d routinely culled all interoffice communication. He’d made his usual hit-and-run theft, downloading everything, and a password-encoded file had shown up in his private collection of misappropriated information. The urge for knowledge hadn’t proved so misguided after all.
Two days of decoding finally produced an FBI memorandum of record, a detailed, lengthy memo outlining a top-secret internal investigation of a suspected, highly intricate cover-up of the soured hostage situation that took place two years ago at the World Health Organization in Washington, D.C.
The evening news opening credits rolled to unlikely jazz music but all Alec heard was the steady buzz of his own thoughts. For two years he’d assumed his role was the only lie to come out of that disaster. Unconscious and near death, he hadn’t been in any shape to argue when the FBI announced to the world—and most of the FBI, as well—that agent Alec MacLaine had perished in the melee of gunfire that fateful morning in Washington. And to be honest, later he simply hadn’t given a damn. Without Cait, knowing he hadn’t been able to save her, he’d faced his “death” with a stoic and bitter acceptance. He’d even watched news clips of his so-called funeral, the full honors for a federal agent routine.
But the memo decoded during the past week revealed things said and done that Alec had never guessed. Apparently drafted by the new director of his former division, the memorandum questioned motives, rationales and statements issued by the FBI team taking the WHO that fateful morning. Most of the so-called “facts,” claimed the memo, were in direct conflict with Alec MacLaine’s deposition, and, as MacLaine had been in a coma at the inception of the cover-up, his testimony could be taken at face value.
After highlighting the list of stories slated for the evening, the station broke away for another commercial. Alec swore, but not because of the delay in hearing the news. He swore because he couldn’t hit something, couldn’t vent the rage boiling inside him as he mentally reviewed other points contained in the memo. The document suggested that the terrorists hadn’t been random, that they hadn’t been simply crazy zealots out for a day’s suicidal madness. The author of the memo speculated that the terrorists had been after him. Period. End of story. Meaning Cait Wilson had been murdered just because she’d been in the wrong place at the worst of wrong times.
The understanding of this truth gnawed at Alec like so much broken glass. It had been bad enough just to know she no longer lived in this world, but to know that she’d died because of him was nearly unbearable.
But his very soul cringed at the next hideous and utterly paralyzing conjecture revealed in the memorandum. The author theorized that someone within Alec MacLaine’s own division had put the contract out on him, had hired the killers and had orchestrated the cover-up.
In addition, the memorandum revealed a precise and remarkably current assessment of Alec’s whereabouts, his assignment and his habits. The author implied the assignment was a make-work project only and that, until the investigation was completed, he was being kept out of sight and, therefore, out of danger.
Now, miles away from Washington, listening to a toothpaste commercial, he held information in his hands that could bring the entire FBI to its knees. He’d worked for the FBI for some fifteen years and never questioned the innate integrity of the organization. Now he did, and the realization sickened him.
Someone, someone he knew, had wanted him dead and had killed Cait in his place. If what the memo outlined was true, and he knew in the pit of his stomach that each word reeked of the rotten truth, then whichever of his former pals had orchestrated the setup two years ago had conceived of an utterly Machiavellian plan.
It would have been so very easy to take him out at any time; an assassin could practically be hired just by riffling through the classified section of any major newspaper. But this someone had used Alec’s own business, his training and his expertise to kill him. This someone had neatly arranged for Alec MacLaine to perish at the very hands of the type of terrorist he’d been investigating.
The trouble was, he hadn’t died. The question then became Why not? If the unnamed someone had created such an elaborate plan, why hadn’t the terrorists just done as they were hired to do? What stopped them? Did they get greedy and want more money, guns, whatever? Besides which, if this someone had wanted him dead badly enough to arrange all the circus trappings, why hadn’t that person just finished him off while he was in the hospital? So, the source of the hit hadn’t necessarily cared if he lived or died so long as he was effectively out of the picture. And investigating a land-grant scheme in the mountains above Pecos, New Mexico, was about as out of the way as a man could get.
A pretty announcer introduced the evening news team and launched into the night’s account of world trauma while Alec wondered which of his colleagues, his so-called friends, was going to find himself damned sorry Alec MacLaine hadn’t really died two years ago.
The top story of the day was a live report from the scene of a hostage situation in one of New York City’s convention centers.
Instantly Alec focused on the screen.
“To recap the events of the day, this morning shortly after opening ceremonies at a convention of left-wing activists, four masked and heavily armed gunmen broke in
to the convention hall, barricaded the doors and took some fifty conferees hostage. Police report that at present none of the hostages have been released and, as far as they can ascertain, none killed, though the terrorists are threatening loss of life if their demands are not met.”
A muscle in Alec’s jaw jerked as he clamped his teeth together. He stared at the screen but didn’t see the mammoth convention center in the heart of the Big Apple. Instead, he saw the broad, curved, creamy interior of the World Health Organization in Washington, D.C.
As though from behind a news camera, he saw the man he’d been only two years ago, and watched that Alec MacLaine openly appreciating the pretty woman crossing the empty lobby. He was in the building that early in the morning, somewhere between dark and dawn, because he had a meeting with a source, a man who had promised to fill him in on a few details of the Aryan Nation’s underground activities. The pretty woman had looked up at him, smiled and said, “Cold out, isn’t it?”
Looking back, it was hard to imagine that he hadn’t known she would become the single most important person in his life. He should have recognized her right then and there. Her smile, her throaty voice and her innocuous words.
“We have the NYPD police commissioner, Allen Jamison, with us tonight. Commissioner, exactly what demands are the terrorists making?”
The usual, Alec thought: transportation, money and the release of fellow psychotics. Different cause, same scenario, same bloody and horrible conclusion.
“And what can you tell us about the possibility of safely getting to the hostages?”
Next to none, Alec thought bitterly, though back then, as one of the two hostages, he’d certainly been praying somebody was trying their damnedest.
“Reaching the hostages isn’t our first priority. The safety of those people being held inside has to remain our foremost concern. Getting to them may prove the most damaging. If you’ll recall the hostage situation in Washington two years ago...”
Alec winced, recalling it in minute detail. One moment he’d been chatting with the pretty woman, making her smile, thinking how a lovely woman’s smile was sometimes better than a month of straight sunshine, the next he’d been pinned against cool marbled walls, the barrel of a 9 mm assault rifle—the kind favored by Aryan Nation activists and White Separatists-brutally pressed against his jugular vein.
And the pretty woman—he hadn’t even known her name then—was roughly pinned in another thug’s arms, a deadly .357 Magnum distorting her full lips to a terrible grimace.
Their attackers didn’t ask questions or make demands. They simply strong-armed their hostages into a janitorial closet and slammed and locked the door behind them. But Alec had seen enough to know the four men were professionals. He’d had the terrible suspicion the men were after him—it was only logical to assume he’d been set up, that the meeting was a ruse. But he’d never been sure and had been told point-blank during his days in the hospital that it wasn’t true, that he’d only had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Cait.
He should have known better. He should have trusted his instincts. He’d have been two years closer to avenging Cait’s untimely death. Two years closer to taking down the man who had robbed the world of Caifs smile.
“And with their current demands, what do you feel is the likelihood of all hostages surviving this siege?”
“Nil,” Alec said aloud. “They’ll murder some innocent. Or many innocents. Then the bastards holding the guns will be killed.”
As they had been two years ago. And dead men don’t tell tales.
“And we don’t want to risk the lives of any of our peace officers, either,” the commissioner said.
“As happened in the WHO incident,” the reporter added, briefly capsulizing the fall of federal agent Alec MacLaine.
That same fallen agent stared at the screen with dull bitterness. The doctors in the hospital had repeatedly told Alec he was lucky to be alive. But he hadn’t felt lucky— he’d felt battered, chewed up and horribly cheated.
Then, slowly, he’d found a pain-deflection technique that compelled him to ignore the searing in his chest and shoulders, that drove him beyond the limits of endurance: revenge. It served as anodyne to his multiple wounds, painkiller for his tortured thoughts, and as an impetus to keep searching, keep tracking until he nailed the source responsible for ordering the terrorists into the WHO that tragic morning two years ago.
And now he knew his own paycheck came from that same organization. Damn them. Damn them all.
He wanted to kick at the television in a violent act of denial. But he didn’t move, didn’t duck the truth, even though everything in him rebelled against facing it. Hearing about this other hostage situation, remembering the past, continually replaying the memo, he knew with bile-black emotion that one of his friends had killed Cait Wilson. Murdered her as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger himself.
From the details in the memorandum, the primary suspect could be one of only three men. He could rule out most of the some seventeen agents in his division, simply by eliminating any cross-reference between his assignments and theirs. Anything remotely related to the Aryan Nation investigation he kept, and the list dropped to three with access, sufficient seniority and similar assignment schedules: Jack King, Fred Masters and Jorge Sifuentes.
All three he’d considered friends. They were men he’d eaten dinner with, shared the rare bottle of debriefing Scotch with, men whose children he could name, men he knew.
He’d entered the agency with Jack King, fourteen years before. They’d been in the same class, gone through the same exercises, retreats and psych examinations. They’d partnered for several missions, including the one that created the scar Cait had traced after making love two years before. Jack had a similar scar on his right flank, a reminder of a time he ate a bullet for Alec.
They’d swapped a thousand conspiracy theories and had collared more than their share of psychos and bad guys. They’d even run the occasional kitten-in-the-tree missions, the do-good public relations runs. Alec had held Jack’s son at his christening, accepting the honor of godfather, and stood by Jack when his marriage failed and his family moved to California.
And Jack had fought right beside him every day of the grueling physical therapy, refusing to let him give up and accept a broken body. A man couldn’t lay claim to a better friend than Jack. Or so he’d always believed.
Until now.
Fred Masters was also a good man in a tight spot. He’d covered Alec’s tail more than once and was a veritable wizard at ferreting out vital information from the most unlikely sources. The polished Princeton man, with a degree in engineering as well as law, was an experienced agent when the ink hadn’t dried on Jack’s and Alec’s fresh law degrees. When they opted for the bureau instead of hanging up a shingle, Fred had shown them many of the proverbial tricks of the trade, carefully grooming them to ascend the hierarchy of government service. Before the soured hostage situation, Alec had been a frequent visitor in the Masters’s sprawling Virginia home.
He hadn’t been there in two years now.
And Jorge Sifuentes was the brilliant up-and-comer. He could speak any of five different languages with more facility than most Americans tackled English. With his dark hair and flashing eyes, his only real problem was the constant entourage of beautiful women following him everywhere he went. His ready sense of the ridiculous was always close to the surface; he’d been the only one who had been able to bring a smile to Alec’s lips in the past two years.
But facts didn’t care about relationships, and to assume that one of these three men couldn’t be corrupted, couldn’t slide into that zone existing between honor and bankruptcy, or to cling to a belief that one of these fine men couldn’t have taken that dangerous turn on the double-agent highway was tantamount to condoning their actions.
And he didn’t, couldn’t, let this cover-up lie. Not and live with himself. A woman had died. Cait had lost her life be
cause of it.
Which one of his friends had killed Cait?
The on-the-scene reporter thanked the NYPD commissioner and sent Americans back to the studio announcer, who recapitulated everything discussed in the past few minutes. She told the viewing audience the studio was lucky today to have with them a guest from the Crisis Intervention Unit in Bethesda, Maryland, a survivor of the hostage incident in Washington two years before.
Alec felt as if someone had thrown a pitcher of ice water at his face. One of the survivors? There were none. Not even—according to the general public—him. His heart started to pound in heavy, thundering beats.
The television camera view shifted to a close-up of the survivor.
Alec’s mouth went dry as he stared at the face of a dead woman.
Chapter 2
Friday, November 9, 6:15 p.m. MST
Alec closed his eyes, sure he was hallucinating, fantasizing again. He whipped them open, riveted to the screen. Her lovely face was still in front of him.
Cait!
It had to be some bizarre coincidence. Same features, same general type of work. But it was, had to be, a different woman; he’d heard the shots that killed her.
“Cait Wilson, designer of a software package crisis experts are hailing as the greatest boon to rescue workers since the portable gurney. Thank you for joining us at such short notice, Cait.”
Same face...same woman. Cait was alive.
On-screen, Cait nodded and smiled slightly. She was calm, her features composed. She gave the impression of expertise, a deep inner peace, and yet something sad lingered in her eyes. When he’d seen her last, she’d been screaming, straining to break free of her captors.
“What we’ve done,” Cait explained in that contralto voice that still had the capacity to make him shiver, “is to compile profuse amounts of psychological data collected from victims and survivors of emergency situations and constructed that data in such a way that rescue workers can simply call up a given situation—let’s say an earthquake, for example—and cross-reference it with known factors, such as twelve-story building, built in the sixties, lots of glass windows, and so on. After all the physical parameters are established, we factor in the number of possible victims or survivors inside.”
Code Name: Daddy Page 2
