Code Name: Daddy

by Marilyn Tracy

  He wrapped up his monologue with, “So, I knew about the cover-up, knew someone in the FBI was responsible for what happened at the WHO two years ago. Then I saw you on television last night—God, was it only last night? It already seems a month ago now—and I rushed to you, bringing danger with me.”

  Cait nodded. “This is all horrible. But I still don’t understand why someone wanted you dead.”

  Alec shook his head. “I don’t have a clue. Until last week, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for any one of those three men to be involved at all. I really thought we were working together to ensure those super right-wing operations wouldn’t get out of hand.”

  “If only we had some idea, some glimmer as to why, going to the press with a cover-up story would carry so much more weight,” she said, pacing back and forth in front of him.

  He reached out and grabbed her, holding on to her cold hands with his own warm, rock-firm fingers. “If we can figure out the motive, maybe we can figure out who the culprit is.”

  “We know it’s not Jack,” she said, glancing back at the blank television set. “We just saw him. He’s not the man in the suit I saw that day.”

  “You’re right, Cait. It’s definitely not Jack,” he said, and a strange, rather beautiful smile lit his face. “It’s... not...Jack.”

  Cait frowned at him. “But he sure put us in a pickle. You heard him. He just practically accused you of kidnapping me and of setting up the whole thing at the WHO two years ago! He just said the most dreadful things—”

  “And the most illuminating”

  “What?”

  “Cait,” he said, standing suddenly, dwarfing her, making her acutely aware of his sheer size, his presence.

  He didn’t seem to notice though his voice deepened, his tone roughened. “Any partners who work together for years arrange codes. Call it crazy, call it incredibly brilliant. But partner codes sometimes mean the difference between life and death.”

  “I’m not following you, Alec,” she said. But she was in tune with the sharp glint of joy in his eyes, the infusion of adrenaline in his body, the power exuding from him, the feel of his warm hands around hers. For the first time since he’d shown up at her doorstep, she felt a sense of union with him.

  “He sent me a definite message during that interview. He used a code we developed years ago. He was trying to warn me.”

  Apparently unaware of how he was affecting her, he slid his hands up her arms and shook her a little. He paused then, staring at her, and a new wholly exuberant Alec stared at her. “He used the code, Cait. Jack used the damned code.”

  Alec grinned at her as though the sun had just broken through a tornado-darkened sky. His smile broadened just before he drew her sharply to his chest and kissed her fiercely.

  Cait felt her response through every pore of her body. Alec’s kiss was no gentle exhortation, no quest to test the turbulent waters between them. This was a hard, demanding statement of vitality, strength and of triumphant awareness.

  He let her go almost as swiftly as he’d drawn her close and clapped his hands together before grabbing up the remote control device. “Ha! Jack sent me a signal,” he said almost ferociously, waving the remote at her.

  Cait stood just inches from him, her body still quivering in reaction to his deep, powerful kiss. She couldn’t seem to think.

  She smoothed back her hair, stalling for time, stalling for any semblance of rational thought to return. He seemed so happy over that oblique warning, but to Cait there seemed too much he was tossing out without consideration.

  She drew a deep breath then forced herself to dampen his enthusiasm. “This Jack, the man you saw, we both saw, in front my garage just now—?”

  He interrupted her, still cresting his high. “Damn. I knew it couldn’t be him. You don’t stand side by side with someone for fifteen odd years and not know them. Fifteen years have to count for something!”

  “So it’s one of your other friends.”

  He stopped in midstride, an arrested look on his face, as if she’d just uttered a total non sequitur. “It really threw me when he showed up at your house, though. He must have been trying to bring me in, then. Somehow he knew. Hell, he’s known all along. I wonder—”

  “Alec—”

  “He gave the signal.” He looked at her with brightly lit blue eyes. “From the movie Casablanca. Corny but effective. ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ It’s the line Louis uses with Humphrey Bogart—Rick—letting Rick escape so he can save Ingrid Bergman and all of France. See? It fits perfectly.”

  Cait felt a cold chill work down her arms. “Alec, why would he tell that reporter such things?”

  “To let me know he knows. He’s not a threat, don’t you see, Cait? We’ll have help now,” Alec said. He tossed the remote on the bed as if his words cinched the argument.

  “So what does the code tell you, Alec?”

  “To sit tight and wait. That he’s on my side. I know he could still be trying to double-cross me, Cait, but I have this gut feeling that I can trust him.”

  Cait was never so grateful in her life as to Allie for clamoring for attention at that precise moment. She dampened a washcloth before going to her.

  She stepped back onto the strange teeter-totter they shared; the impossible and the mundane. Murder and mothering. She wiped her daughter’s face and hands and directed Alec to look around for anything Allie might be able to fit into her mouth.

  He looked blankly at her.

  “On the floor. Buttons, pins, anything a maid might have missed. She’s mainly through the hand-to-mouth stage, but no sense having to rush her to the emergency room at this point. We have enough of an emergency on our hands without having to relearn the intricacies of the Heimlich maneuver on infants.”

  She felt a rush of sympathy for him as he paled even more and immediately began searching the room for the most minute of potential dangers. He found a spent match in the corner behind an easy chair and held it up in mock triumph. Cait didn’t have the heart to break it to him that cardboard and charred sulfur weren’t likely to cause any permanent damage to their daughter’s health. But after his thorough search, she was satisfied that nothing on the floor could harm Allie. And his searching had given him back a measure of his natural color.

  She lifted her daughter from the chair and set her on the ground. She waited until Allie found her legs and tottered toward Alec.

  “Man,” she said. “Trow.”

  “At least I’m not Stranger Man anymose,” he said, his voice slightly unsteady.

  Cait’s heart beat erratically as she watched Allie reach her father’s impossibly long legs and tug at his trousers. “Up,” she demanded.

  Cait’s heart constricted as Alec glanced from Allie to Cait, as if asking permission. So much, too much, had been stolen from them. He shouldn’t have to query her about lifting his daughter into his arms. That should be a right, a gift between him and Allie only. What should she tell her daughter to call Alec? Father? Daddy?

  He was her father. By blood, by genetics. But he wasn’t her daddy. He’d only seen her for the first time early that morning. Daddy was an endearment born of time, designated out of love, respect and trust.

  She waited until he settled Allie in the crook of his arm and obligingly waggled his eyebrows for her, before saying, “All right. Let’s suppose that your friend Jack is not the one who’s been funding the separatists. Let’s suppose it was one of the other two men you know.”

  Allie slapped at her father’s face, trying to get him to move his eyebrows by sheer force.

  “We have to suppose that,” he said. “And I’ve got to go get a newspaper right away. If one of us ever gets in trouble and needs help outside the usual channels, we run an ad in the personals.”

  “How original,” Cait said dryly but with a faint smile.

  “Well, if something works, you don’t change it,” he said. “Besides, you can always get a date if you can’t get help.”

&n
bsp; “Is it possible that Jack would go along with a cover-up of such magnitude?”

  “Maybe he was like me, maybe he only just found out.”

  “And maybe he’s in on it,” she said. She held up a hand to forestall his interruption. “Not innocent, but not evil. Maybe he let us both live because he’s basically a nice man. And he doesn’t want to see you hurt for the same reason. So he gives you fair warning that he’s going to let you go. Even as he crucifies your good name.”

  Alec stood utterly still, something not to Allie’s liking. She continued lightly slapping his brow to get his eyebrows moving while shouting, “ ’Gin!”

  Cait had to turn away to hide her smile as Alec did as his daughter asked. Here they were discussing men who hired killers, talking about people who orchestrated terrorism, while indulging a toddler’s demand for play.

  For Allie, at just over a year, such horrors as murder—and a jagged-edged tension between two adults— didn’t have any meaning. She only wanted her father’s thick eyebrows to wiggle up and down so she could laugh.

  Cait’s smile faded at the realization that Allie’s innocent game could be ended at any second. There was a very real chance that whichever of Alec’s fellow agents wanted him dead would succeed. She instinctively knew that they wouldn’t hesitate to use either Allie or herself to get to Alec. And that the only way anyone would get to her would be over Alec’s dead body.

  And Alec had died for her once already.

  “Aunt Margaret,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We have to call Aunt Margaret.” She reached for the phone and had the receiver in her hand before he could stop her. But his large hand covered hers and he pressed it back to the set.

  “You can’t call her,” he said quietly.

  “I have to. She’ll have seen or heard the news about me disappearing. She’ll be worried sick.”

  “Cait...whichever one of them is after you, whether it’s Jack or one of the others, they’ll be waiting for us to call her. We’re talking about people from the FBI. My people. If anyone knows how they operate, it’s me. They’ll already know about her.”

  “But—”

  “Cait, we’re not dealing with a couple of small-time hoods. These are trained federal agents.”

  Cait blanched. “Is she in any danger?”

  “I wouldn’t think so, no. But we can’t risk contacting her. For your sake.”

  “We have to,” she said far more calmly than she felt. “I won’t let her worry. And besides, we need her.”

  “What? Why?”

  “To take care of Allie—”

  “But we—”

  “In case anything happens to you.”

  Alec fell silent, though he didn’t take his hand from hers. Allie leaned out from him, reaching for her mother. Cait took her daughter almost absently, acutely conscious of Alec’s warm hand covering hers.

  Alec’s fingers wrapped around hers. He lifted her hand from the receiver and on to his lips. He turned her hand palm upward and, without taking his eyes from hers, pressed a kiss in the sensitive center. A shiver of reaction flash-fired through her.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he vowed, his hot breath fanning her palm.

  Tears stung her eyes. Her knees felt weak. Chemistry, promises, past and present. Too little, too late, and frightening her, far too much, too soon.

  “You can’t promise that,” she said unsteadily.

  “I am promising just that,” he said,

  A tear spilled free and snaked down her cheek.

  “Mamatry?” Allie asked, patting the tear away.

  Cait linked gazes with Alec, feeling the connection to her depths. “I thought you were killed two years ago. You thought I was. What if something like that happens again? What would happen to Allie?”

  He let go of her hand, not releasing her gaze. His face was pale and his eyes haunted. Cait could see that every scrap of training in him fought with his instincts; the need to solely protect them warred with the understanding that in the present situation, safeguarding her might not be possible.

  He closed his eyes, opened them on Allie. He lightly stroked his daughter’s dark curls before shifting his tortured gaze back to Cait.

  “I can’t call anyone else for help,” he said, sounding anguished by the confession. “I don’t dare just call Jack, and there’s no one I can trust anymore.”

  Cait drew a deep, ragged breath. He couldn’t have spoken words more designed to break her heart.

  Chapter 11

  Saturday, November 10, 4:30 p.m. EST

  Alec knelt beside the makeshift crib, rubbing Allie’s back and murmuring a soporific, monotoned litany of go-to-sleep phrases. He’d asked to perform this job, as much to connect with his daughter as to escape the tension with Cait and to avoid her unspoken pleas to once again review their modest plans for escape.

  He’d called two of the larger newspapers in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and handed them silverplated tips. He’d done the same with all three major network affiliates in the region.

  It had daunted him to think his gift of the tips wasn’t taken with wild enthusiasm. The reporters he’d talked to weren’t like reporters in the movies; they wanted the entire story handed to them, fed line by line, word by word. And even with all he’d told them, the separatist angle, the dead-not-dead twist, they had seemed blasé about the story.

  He should have realized in this era following Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair and a host of others, a cover-up was old hat, common fare for reporters whose palates required greater and greater amounts of seasoning. He shouldn’t have tried offering appetizers, he should have leapt in with the highly spiced main dish: two years ago someone in the FBI murdered the terrorists and, secondhand, the hostages, after setting up the entire scenario to begin with. That might have grabbed them. Or it might have made them hang up on what they would assume was a nut case. Short of revealing his identity and offering them proof in the form of documentation—not to mention Cait and Allie—he was left with their painful apathy. Because he couldn’t offer the proof without handing Cait over to whoever wanted to kill her.

  God, what a mess. For ten cents he’d pack Cait and the baby into the stolen sedan and drive into the sunset, getting as far away from all this as possible. Not New Mexico—his pals would look for them there—but somewhere. They could change their names, pull together some form of a life. If living in constant fear of discovery—and murder—could be called a life.

  And if that wasn’t a pipe dream, what was? He didn’t even know how Cait felt about him anymore. Perhaps he’d never known. She’d never said, then, and she didn’t seem inclined to voice her feelings now. Hell, he wasn’t even sure how he felt. There was too much of the past separating them, days when they should have been getting to know one another, learning the little things that comprised a relationship, developing inside jokes and outside commonalities.

  Every time he looked at her, he felt an ache deep inside his chest, as though her slender, lovely form radiated some jagged electricity that sent sparks of pain through him. He wanted to rail against the sheer unfairness of their separation, and worse, their reunion.

  And now they would be complicating things even more, because hours after Cait had brought it up he’d reluctantly given in to her demands to contact her aunt Margaret.

  He was adamant on the point that the FBI would very likely have a tail on Aunt Margaret and would know something was up should she try going anywhere outside her daily routine.

  “So we go there,” Cait had countered.

  That was the last place they needed to go. His friends would expect her to do just that. The bushes at her aunt Margaret’s place were probably crawling with field agents.

  But Cait had finally convinced him that she knew her aunt’s habits so well, it needn’t appear Aunt Margaret was doing anything out of the ordinary. They could easily connect with Aunt Margaret and pass her Allie without anyone being the w
iser.

  “She volunteers at the animal shelter on Mondays and Fridays. We’ll be waiting for her.”

  Alec had scoffed, but Cait had blithely ignored his arguments. “It’ll work, Alec. She’ll recognize my voice. She’s always taking animals home. She’ll come. She can take Allie home in a dog carrier. No one will be the wiser.”

  Alec felt torn apart at the notion of separating Allie from Cait and vice versa. And he could see the struggle Cait was making with the hard decision, as well. But he had to admit she was right; if something did go wrong, Allie had to be safe. And no matter what happened to him or Cait, there would be no reason for his friends to go after Aunt Margaret and Allie.

  But, worried that her aunt Margaret would suffer far too much anxiety if she wasn’t assured her niece and great-niece were safe, Alec played with Allie while Cait pretended to be a friend of her aunt’s calling to ask Margaret if she’d had any word from Cait. As she’d known would happen, her aunt recognized her immediately. And before she’d hung up, Cait had managed to convey a hint of their plan.

  At his questioning look, Cait had smiled tremulously and informed him that aunts and nieces had codes and signals also.

  She’d held Allie tightly against her after the phone call and Alec had the wrenching feeling she was already saying goodbye. He hadn’t been around his daughter more than a few hours, but already he knew how painful a separation from her would be. How much stronger that fear and pain must be for Cait.

  Somehow, arranging Allie’s safety struck Alec—and probably Cait as well, to judge by the bleak expression on her face—as an admission of failure, as if tucking Allie away was to admit he couldn’t protect them.

  But they wouldn’t be handing the baby over to Aunt Margaret until Monday. That gave them roughly a days and a half to do nothing but wait and spend time together. Alec couldn’t help but think of the similarity to the past. They’d had only days together then. Only days now: