Code Name: Daddy

by Marilyn Tracy

  Her sandy blond hair was shorter than it had been two years ago, more businesslike. Then, it had been long enough that one of the terrorists had grabbed a handful of it, cruelly dragging her head back.

  This night, before the news cameras, Cait’s green eyes were clear and reflected the lights in whatever studio or office the reporter interviewed her. Then, tears of pain and anguish had flooded her eyes, drowning them. Drowning him.

  “We’ve programmed in a wide variety of psychological responses based on crisis situations, such as how a mother with her children will react as opposed to a mother whose children are safe at home.”

  Cait disappeared as a facsimile of her program flashed across the screen and her voice continued to explain her software. Computer-imaged people ran for narrow doorways, jamming them, then falling as smoke or debris caught them. Other images showed rescue workers climbing through broken windows, rescue dogs reaching small children, and panicked employees ignoring fellow workers as they sought any means of escape.

  Alec knew how they felt; his thoughts kept gumming up in the doorways of his mind.

  “I understand rescue workers are using your program today to see what might be done for the hostages here in New York. Can you tell us a little bit of what that entails?”

  Alec didn’t hear Caits response, he only listened to the cadence of her low-pitched voice, her lilting rhythm. It played on him like a musical instrument.

  “You survived just such a traumatic incident two years ago in Washington, didn’t you, Cait?”

  No, Alec thought. Cait hadn’t survived; she’d been murdered. The terrorists took her away and executed her. He knew this, had known it for two agonizing years. His hands were shaking, and his heartbeat was erratic.

  “What in the hell—?” he whispered.

  “You were one of the hostages the White Separatists held for three days,” the interviewer stated.

  Alec realized with a dim shock that he’d always thought in terms of murdered victims: Cait and himself. Dead but not.

  As he frowned at the television, he saw that Cait no longer appeared calm. Her gaminlike features stilled, her eyes slightly flattened, as if she were poised for a hit. The question, for some reason, had upset her. God, how could he still know what would trouble her?

  She hesitated, then said, “Yes.” She looked down at her hands, then back at the camera. “Hopefully the software program I was showing you earlier will be able to help people in similar situations.”

  “The other hostage, a federal agent, and all four of the terrorists were killed when authorities rushed the building. How did it come about that you were the only survivor?” the interviewer asked, leaning forward. The question seemed to imply that Cait was guilty of wrongdoing.

  Alec sat as if carved from stone. The interviewer had it wrong; he wasn’t killed—even supposedly—when the FBI rushed the building. He suddenly realized how much the memorandum, so filled with truths, had still left unsaid. From the look on Cait’s face and from the interviewer’s words, Alec realized a very real possibility existed that the FBI had deliberately and cold-bloodedly mowed down the very terrorists someone within the FBI had hired. Dead men really don’t tell tales.

  “How did you manage to survive the gunfire, Cait?”

  Alec leaned forward. Yes, how?

  “I—I was just lucky, I guess,” Cait stammered. She looked disconcerted by the question, uncertain of her standing.

  Alec’s heart thundered. How could she be alive?

  “I understand this is the first interview you’ve granted since that morning two years ago,” the interviewer said, her eyes as avid as a hungry wolf’s.

  “That’s true,” Cait said softly.

  “Could you tell us why?”

  Cait smiled and a slight glimmer of mischief lit her green eyes. “I wanted to publicize my new software package. As you can see, it offers—”

  The interviewer interrupted Cait. “But are we correct in assuming you were closeted with slain federal agent Alec MacLaine for three days before his death?”

  Cait’s full lips tightened for a moment, and even from where he sat, a full fifteen hundred miles away, Alec knew the question—or interruption—had angered her. Her anger had been one of the things he most trusted in Cait. In the three days he’d known her, her ire was always accurate, always sincere and incredibly on target.

  “Can you tell us something about him? Did he attempt to defuse the situation?”

  “Of course he tried,” Cait said impatiently, and added, “Alec MacLaine died trying to save my life.” Then, very coldly, she added, “It was thanks to him that I got through it sane, let alone alive.”

  As if he were back there, as he’d been so many times in the past two years, Alec remembered the strong odor of ammonia, the mildewed drop cloth they’d used as a blanket, the roll of toilet paper Cait had used to wipe the blood from his forehead where one of the terrorists had smashed the gun butt before throwing them into the dark closet.

  Alec rose to his feet. He mouthed her name, but couldn’t force the necessary air through his lungs to gain control of his voice.

  Unlike now, his legs hadn’t been able to support him those first few hours in that narrow closet. Cait had held him, a total stranger, as if they’d known each other for years, as if it were only natural to meet a bleeding man in a utility closet while waiting for death. She’d held him, cradled him, muttering caustic word pictures of what would happen to the terrorists in the afterlife. Sometime during that enchanting, falsely brave monologue, his head had ceased swimming, and he’d managed a few suggestions himself. Her green eyes had met his with an odd combination of anger and humor, with only a latent acknowledgment of their inevitable death. He’d thought then, and nothing had changed his mind since, she was the most courageous woman he’d ever met.

  Alec reached one unfeeling hand to the screen as if he could really touch her face again. In his mind he could feel the soft, warm curves of her lovely face, he remembered the velvet texture of her throat, the silk of her hair, the tears that spilled free more than once, tears that stained his heart forever and lingered even now on his tongue.

  Alive. Not dead. Alive and well.

  He heard her correcting the announcer’s statement that Cait had worked in the World Health Organization. He remembered the reason she’d been there as vividly as he recalled every second of the time they’d spent together. She’d only dropped in to personally deliver a software package she could have sent later in the day by a bicycle courier. She had walked from her office on Fourth Street and had arrived at the WHO at the worst of all worst moments, just in time to be roughly seized along with the man they were really after.

  If she hadn’t chosen that morning to walk off her annoyance at a minor traffic accident, if she hadn’t finished her software package on worldwide tracking of communicable diseases two days ahead of schedule, and if she hadn’t taken a shortcut across the monument’s mall, she would never have been a hostage. And Alec would never have met her, known her, and would never have had to spend two years reliving the sounds of the shots that killed her.

  With each step closer he’d come to uncovering the money and power behind the terrorists, Cait’s screams had seemed to grow a little dimmer, even if the two sharp reports and her abrupt silence seemed to grow louder in his mind.

  And now he discovered she was alive.

  The screams, the shots, the sudden cessation of her frantic calling of his name had all been proof enough, but it had been the look in his friends’ eyes, that commingled expression of sympathy, wariness and loss that had underscored his knowledge. He’d seen their eyes when he woke. Beyond that, he hadn’t wanted to know anything. That, more than anything else, made him dead, as well.

  Sending an anonymous sympathy card would have held little or no meaning for Cait’s aunt Margaret. He’d seen photos of his fake grave—why would he have wanted to visit Cait’s all-too-real resting place? Just to take her flowers, as if on a date
they never had?

  But he wished to God that he’d done all of those things now. He wished he’d grabbed Jack, Fred or Jorge by the lapels and demanded every last detail of Cait’s passing, because then he would have known she lived. Then, he might have truly lived, not merely survived.

  They’d all been there during those dark, touch-and-go early days of recovery. Abiding by company rules—an injured agent working with sensitive material must always be attended by another agent to ensure that no vital information slipped out while under influence of drugs or delirium—and he’d seen one or another of them each time he groggily opened his eyes. Each of his three possibly murdering friends.

  Alec hadn’t been too clear when he first woke in the hospital. Nights and days, weeks blurred together. Pain was a demon presence that gnawed at his insides, clawed at his chest. But surely one of them had heard him muttering Cait’s name, sometimes even waking himself screaming for her. Why hadn’t they told him the truth? Why hadn’t they just told him she was alive? Why hadn’t he asked?

  He couldn’t remember which of his three friends had been present when he’d finally regained a few of his marbles. The time in the utility closet had seemed like only yesterday to him, but he’d discovered that even the investigation of the hostage situation had already concluded, six full weeks after the fact. The terrorists were judged independents, the FBI was absolved of any possible wrongdoing. And to the world, Alec MacLaine was dead.

  The bureau had decided Alec’s name was too public for him to be of any use in undercover operations. Jack had explained that Alec had been given a new name, a new past, so that his future would be safer. And, when Alec returned to field work, he’d be better able to go deep under cover.

  Alec hadn’t given a damn what name they put on his driver’s license. Cait was dead. And it was fitting that Alec MacLaine was dead, as well.

  He survived, his body healed, he assumed a new name, was useful as a deep-cover agent and eventually wound up in New Mexico, researching land grants by day and seeking revenge by night.

  And now he’d discovered the past two years had been a colossal sin of omission. His friends had known about Cait. All they would have had to do was say, “Cait Wilson survived.”

  Three little words.

  Instead, they’d let him believe he’d failed her. Let her die. Had they guessed something had happened to him inside that closet that defied rational rules of behavior? Had his friend who wanted him dead gleaned that his interest in Cait went far beyond mere concern for a fellow human being? Someone had wanted him dead, and he’d lived. Take away what a man wanted most and he was as good as dead. Letting him live as if he was dead was the next best thing.

  Somebody was going to pay for making the sun go out for two years. Somebody was going to pay very, very dearly.

  Alec stood rooted to the floor of his mountain cabin, his current assignment utterly forgotten, telling himself he didn‘t—couldn’t—still possess those inexplicable feelings he’d found with Cait.

  And he stared at her living face in full technicolor, seeing the ghost of a woman he’d come closer to believing he could love than any before her. Surrounded by danger, linked together by fate, they’d shared three intimate days of raw intensity. They’d connected in a rare communion of spirit that only the jagged edge of certain death can arrange.

  And his own inability to talk about her, to ask about her, combined with the lie of omission had stolen her from him.

  “Cait,” the interviewer said, leaning nearer, as if closing in for the kill, “Did you actually witness the shootings?”

  A dark emotion shadowed Cait’s face. “Alec.”

  “What did you see?”

  The camera zoomed in on Cait’s face as she frowned heavily, cocking her head as if perplexed by the question. “I saw the terrorists shoot him as they dragged me out of the room.”

  “You’re aware that the FBI’s investigation stated you had been unconscious when they arrived on the scene— and at the time of Mr. MacLaine’s death.”

  Alec felt his stomach clench. Why had Cait been unconscious?

  Cait shrugged. “It’s difficult to remember everything that happened that morning.”

  The interviewer could read Cait as easily as Alec could; the woman knew Cait was lying, but didn’t know what about and, therefore, didn’t know what to ask as a follow-up.

  “How is it that you weren’t called before the Senate Investigation Committee?” the interviewer asked, pouncing.

  Cait allowed a half smile. Even through the medium of television, Alec could see the glint of humor. “I was.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you,” the woman said.

  “You didn’t. I gave them a written deposition.”

  “Was your testimony read aloud to the committee?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely, as an eyewitness, you would have been brought forward to tell your story.”

  “I guess they didn’t think what an unconscious woman would have to say would be of any help. The time I was conscious, I was locked in a utility closet and didn’t talk to anyone but Alec MacLaine.”

  Two years later and riveted to the screen, Alec chuckled. But his amusement was short-lived as he listened to Cait’s next words.

  “You seem to want me to say something dramatic about what happened two years ago, but I can’t. A man I barely even knew talked to me, made me laugh and gave me a sense that dying wasn’t such a nightmare. Then he was shot and killed right in front of me. That’s plenty dramatic in my book.”

  “You sound as if you loved him,” the interviewer said.

  Alec held his breath as Cait answered. “I did. With all my heart, and for every minute of those three days. And now he’s gone.”

  Caitlin Leigh Wilson.

  Cait was thanked for coming into the studio and the screen faded to a commercial about a breath freshener for those moments when a person wants to be close. And Alec thought about three days without toothpaste, mints or amenities of any kind and a woman who had never once complained or whimpered or acted as if it were anything but the normal state of affairs. And he thought about the past two years living with her ghost.

  “She’s alive,” he said aloud. Then he slapped the Off switch on the front of the television set, spun around and gave a mock jump shot. For the first time in two years his back and shoulders didn’t hurt even a little bit. “She’s flesh-and-blood, sassy-faced alive!” he yelled. And it felt good to hear the timbre of his own shouting voice.

  Suddenly the self-imposed loneliness, the emptiness he’d embraced like sackcloth seemed to fall away. Whatever scheme the boys in his office might have hatched up two years ago, whatever darkness had come over them, nothing would ever again be as bleak as thinking Cait was dead.

  Alec stopped his restless pacing and frowned. There had been no mention of Cait Wilson in that memorandum he’d stolen. She hadn’t spoken before the Senate subcommittee. This was her first interview about the soured situation. It didn’t add up. The press would have been all over her.

  He’d rashly assumed the lack of her name in the memo was simply an expedient glossing over of the down side of the situation. But now that he’d seen her, watched her, knew she was alive, he wondered if the answer wasn’t amazingly simple, as simple as the reason he’d been allowed to live: whatever she’d seen that morning couldn’t hurt whichever of his three friends had wanted him dead.

  Things had not gone as originally planned, but as Cait wasn’t part of their scheme, and had apparently been cooperative enough to stay out of the limelight, then she was essentially a nonentity and, therefore, not a threat to the overall cover-up.

  It was difficult for Alec to conceive how Cait might be considered a “nonentity.” But it wasn’t tough to see how her natural reticence—or something else?—had managed to keep her from harm. If someone had gone to such lengths to take him out of the action, it didn’t stretch his imagination too far to see that same someone easily t
aking Cait out if the need should arise.

  If he’d been thinking solely in terms of black and white, bad guys and good guys, he could well have imagined that Cait would have been killed within minutes of her apparent escape from the hostage situation. But when it came to longtime friends and colleagues, one couldn’t afford the luxury of the lack of shades of gray.

  Humankind doesn’t think in absolutes. Alec knew that. He was fully aware that egos, needs, motives, desires and ambitions colored every single waking moment of each person out there in the hodgepodge world. To assume that a man wouldn’t order another’s death while also apparently allowing a young, victimized hostage to live was to fall back into childhood beliefs that the world was comprised of only two types of people: good and bad.

  A world with only two types of people wouldn’t have need of the CIA, FBI, police, security guards or any of a host of other peacekeeping authorities. It would be a world in fiction only, because people did have multifaceted and highly complex rationales for their behavior.

  Alec didn’t care, for the moment, why Cait had been allowed to live; it was enough to know that in another part of the country she was breathing the same planetary air as he.

  And within as short a time as possible, he planned to see her in person.

  Chapter 3

  Saturday, November 10, 1:25 a.m. EST

  The telephone pealed with an urgency only the middle of the night could lend it. Jack King shifted from deep sleep to utter wakefulness and barked his name into the receiver.

  “The archangel’s flown.”

  Jack pressed a button on the small box attached to his phone, activating a scrambler. “We’re secure,” he said. “Now talk to me.”

  “MacLaine’s left New Mexico.”