by Fiona Brand
For a moment she didn’t recognize him, then the faint bluish glow around him registered. Something about his size and the smooth way he moved clicked into place. She hadn’t seen James Thompson, or JT as Taylor had called him, up close with her physical sight before, but he was recognizable despite the flak jacket and the lip mike.
His gaze locked on hers, the impact faintly shocking. Thompson was a stranger, and male. It was an odd time for that fact to register.
“Put the gun down. On the floor.”
His voice was cold, measured. She dragged her gaze from Thompson’s and stared at the gun gripped loosely in one hand. She had forgotten she was holding it.
With slow movements, she complied.
“Kick the gun under the sofa.”
The words were flat and very clear. He wanted the gun out of commission. Using the side of her foot, she nudged the gun so that it slid across the tiled floor and disappeared beneath the nearest sofa.
His gaze swept the room as he stepped around Cesar. His questions were curt. How many men had gotten on the chopper with Alex? Had Slater been one of them? Was there anyone else in the house? All while he held a separate conversation with someone on the other end of the lip mike.
His assessment of her injuries was lightning fast and clinical, but that didn’t disguise the fact that he checked her out for more weapons. Dressed in sneakers, jeans and a clinging tank top, she didn’t have many places to store one, although, in the world Thompson came from, maybe that was a defeatist attitude.
He checked the hallway. “Most of the security staff are concentrated at the front of the property, so we’ll be going out through the kitchen. Are you okay to walk?”
“I’m fine.” Her gaze touched on Cesar. Her throat closed up. “Just give me a moment.”
Crouching beside Cesar, she touched his sleeve, brushed her fingers over the back of his hand and gripped his fingers. Abruptly, the memory she’d had of Esther holding her hand after the car accident was strong in her mind. The prayer flowed as clearly as if she was still ten years old and in church. A split second before she opened her eyes, she caught a glimpse of light floating, shimmering, then JT’s hand closed around her upper arm and they were moving through the house.
JT paused at the entrance to the path that led to the garages, then pulled her to one side into a clump of shrubs. Seconds later, a shadowy form ghosted past. Rina recognized one of Alex’s regular security staff.
The pressure on her arm increased, the signal to move on. As they moved behind the garages, lights flared in the house and a flat popping noise split the air.
Thompson changed direction, pulling her deeper into the shrubs and trees that bordered the river boundary.
When they reached the river, he released her. “We’re going to cross. It’s not deep here, but the stones are slippery. I can carry you if you can’t make it.”
“I can make it.” She still couldn’t breathe through her nose, but she would run if necessary.
He went first, stepping into the slow-moving water with barely a sound. Bracing herself against the chill of the water, Rina followed, taking care with her foot placement. She’d spent enough time wading on the fringes with Baby to know that the rocks were treacherous.
Baby.
Her heart almost stopped in her chest. She hadn’t seen or heard Baby for a good ten minutes. She wanted to whistle, but doing that would give away their position and she wasn’t about to jeopardize either herself or Thompson. Besides, after the episode with the gun, she was under no illusions that Thompson would tolerate interference of any kind.
A pale blur in the distance that could have been Baby distracted her and her foot slipped sideways on a rock. She went down on one knee, her hand shooting out, saving her from submerging completely.
Thompson’s arm clamped her waist. He hauled her up and half carried her to the far bank where a chain-link fence formed the boundary of the property. Crouching down, he began clearing branches away from the wire.
Rina gripped a trailing shrub to keep from sliding down the bank. “The fence is electrified.”
“I disconnected it when I came in.”
If he’d done that the alarm should have gone off, which meant he had altered the security program at some previous point. The permutations required to bypass Alex’s security so that none of the complicated series of checks and alarms had alerted the security staff was briefly mind-boggling. The “hole” in Alex’s security explained how Thompson had come to be in the house the previous evening.
Peeling back a section of chain mesh, he motioned her through. Seconds later they were on the other side, the branches pulled back in place and the cut section of the fence fastened down.
The thin beam of a flashlight cut through the darkness. Thompson’s hand closed around her arm and they were moving again. Long minutes later, they stepped out onto the street. A van was parked at the curb, its dark paint job making it almost invisible beneath the arching shelter of an oak.
She stopped short of the van. “Mr. Thompson—James—”
“Call me JT.”
It suited him, short and direct, not one unnecessary frill. “I need to get Baby out. I can’t leave without him.”
A short dark man in an FBI jacket climbed out of the front of the van. “There’s no time. We need to go.”
Gunfire erupted in the vicinity of the house.
The side door of the van slid open. A second man, this one with blond hair, touched her arm. “Come on, Rina. It’s just a dog.”
Rina’s jaw clenched. The blond agent was Mr. Nice Guy in the double act, unlike Attila with the cold eyes. “Baby isn’t just a dog.” He had been her eyes and her lifeline. He had saved her more than once. Without Baby she wouldn’t have survived Alex.
JT spoke briefly into his lip mike. He checked his watch. “I’ll look.” His gaze shifted, fixing on Attila. “Wait.”
Taylor clambered out of the van. “And that’s an order,” she said beneath her breath.
She wrapped a jacket around Rina’s shoulders and hugged her quick and hard. “I heard about Cesar.”
Grief surged. Rina’s throat clamped tight. She was aware of Attila watching her and the fact that from this point on, everything she said, every reaction, every detail of her life, past and present, was under a microscope.
When Taylor released her, Rina huddled into the jacket. Despite the mild temperature, she was cold, probably because her jeans and her sneakers were soaked.
Taylor tried to coax her into the van, where it would be warmer. Attila sent her a cold glance when she refused to get into the van until JT came back with Baby.
Moments later, JT melted out of the darkness. “I can’t locate him. I’ve been feeding him for weeks. Unless he’s with you, he comes when I call. He didn’t come this time, which means he’s not within hearing distance.”
And for dogs, “within hearing distance” was a long way, which meant Baby had either been forcibly removed or he was unconscious. There was a third option, but she stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. She would know if Baby was dead.
“Right, that’s it.” Attila started the van.
Rina allowed herself to be hustled into a seat. Mr. Nice Guy, who she noticed had a not-so-nice gun jutting out of a shoulder holster, slid the door closed. Taylor fastened a safety belt across her lap as the van pulled smoothly away.
Rina glanced back. JT was no longer on the sidewalk. Since he hadn’t gotten into the van that meant he must have gone back to the estate.
“Don’t worry about JT, he’s got other fish to fry.” Taylor settled beside her and fastened her own seat belt. “Besides, he was never coming with us. He’s not FBI.”
Rina stared out of the tinted windows, scanning the streets. Baby was out there somewhere. Minutes later, as they left the outskirts of Winton, she abandoned the search and sat back in her seat. Her head was aching, her eyes hurt and her nose was sore.
An image of JT, calmly giving Attila the order
to wait—and it had been an order—before he merged back into the trees to search for Baby, popped into her mind. He had gone back to look, despite the risk. “What is he, then? An undercover cop?”
“He’s a contract agent for the CIA. With Lopez’s connections outside of the country, they wanted in on the action.”
Rina studied the shadowy landscape flashing by, fewer and fewer houses now and longer stretches of farmland interspersed by glimpses of the sea on the right, which indicated they were headed south. The prospect of having to cope with a murder inquiry, retelling the past few days and hashing over her relationship with Alex, wasn’t a pleasant one, no matter how necessary. The unpleasantness was highlighted by the fact that she wasn’t just a key witness. For years, she had also been a suspect in the case. “What happens now?”
“We’re taking you to a safe house for tonight. Translate that as meaning we’re checking into a motel until Genius—” she jerked her head at “Attila” “—can get the interviews done.”
“Then what?”
Taylor’s hand gripped hers. “WitSec. Witness Security. I’m sorry, Rina, but there’s no other option. You need to disappear at least until the trial, and probably for a lot longer.”
Part 3
Eighteen
Beaumont, Texas, three months later
A divorce, a new identity, a new town.
Rina, now known as Rina Mathews, should have been happy she had escaped Alex’s tight grip with her life, but she couldn’t settle. Stepping back from her easel, she studied the still life she was working on. The moment she had picked up a brush and started painting, she had known this was what she was meant to be doing. Sculpture had satisfied a creative need, but now that she could see color, light, the urge to sculpt, powerful as it had been, had faded.
Out of curiosity, she had walked into the foyer of the building that had commissioned her last piece, which she had finished in the weeks following the bust. Even though she had created it, the sculpture had been subtly unfamiliar. She was used to relating to it by touch, not sight, and picturing it in her mind in a three-dimensional, spatial way, not glinting in sunlight with water pouring over the delicate rills.
Rina continued to study the canvas, her gaze slightly out of focus, letting the swimming light register so she could reproduce the glowing bowl of peaches she had set on a small table beneath the dappled shade of an oak.
The FBI debrief and the slow, painstaking dissection of her life from the time of the accident through to the present day had been intrusive and unsettling. It hadn’t taken hours, it had taken days, and had involved repeated questioning until the evidence was as clear as “Attila,” otherwise known as Paul Hennessey, an agent from the Portland field office, and Marc Bayard, the special agent from D.C. who was heading up the investigation, could get it.
On top of the evidential work, they had requested that she undergo various forms of therapy, including hypnosis, to try to unlock her memory and retrieve the account numbers. Rina had been more than happy to agree, despite the fact that she had been in and out of various clinics for years trying to achieve the exact same result. If wanting to remember made a difference, then she should remember. She had seen what Alex was firsthand; she knew what had driven Esther, and what she had been fighting to avoid. Esther had died and Alex had destroyed their family, but if the money could be salvaged and used in some way to capture Alex, that would be a victory of sorts.
The sessions had been interesting, and at times harrowing, but apart from clarifying what she had already remembered, they hadn’t been able to unlock anything new.
Bayard’s distinct lack of humor at her inability to remember wasn’t improved by the fact that his investigation, which had taken months and cost millions of dollars in man-hours and federal resources, had been compromised. Despite the tight security, Alex had been tipped off. Bayard had closed in on his cocaine operation, making significant arrests, but Alex and Slater had escaped and Cesar had died, taking a mountain of evidence with him.
JT had penetrated Alex’s organization, following a trail of stolen armaments, in this case missile components destined for the Middle East, but the shipment hadn’t materialized. To further complicate matters, a military nuclear arms specialist, a chemist and two administrative officials from separate military bases had died, reducing the suspect pool to almost zero. The executions had all been carried out in different parts of the country, but they had occurred on the same night and in the same way—two shots to the chest, one to the head.
With most of the players dead and Alex gone to ground, JT and Bayard’s investigations were stalled. But on the plus side, he was now wanted on a number of counts, including illegal entry into the country, grievous bodily harm, murder and conspiracy charges. Rina’s testimony would put him away on the murder charge alone.
Once her statements had been made and the legalities of her participation in the case as a witness for the prosecution had been finalized, Rina had met with Ed Marlow of WitSec.
Ed was a U.S. Marshal in his mid-fifties, lean and clean cut, with a precise way of speaking that cut out any possibility of gray areas. He had given her two options: the East Coast or the South.
Her knee-jerk reaction against going anywhere near Boston, where Alex had supposedly gone to school, was enough to make her settle for the South. Moving so far away from Winton made sense, and it was in line with WitSec’s policy that, with the risk that Alex would find her, she cut ties with her old life. Relieved as she was at the promise of safety and anonymity while she waited out the months before Alex was found and put on trial, Rina couldn’t dismiss the nagging worry that putting all those thousands of miles between her and her past also made it less likely she would ever locate Baby.
Taylor had searched for Baby in the days following the bust, but he hadn’t been sighted on any of the neighboring properties and he hadn’t turned up in the local pound or the animal shelter. She had handed Rina the photo she had used for her inquiries, a snap of Baby she had taken just months previously. In a last-ditch effort, Rina had circulated the photo in Wiston’s local paper for several weeks, but seemingly, Baby had disappeared from the face of the earth.
Touching her brush to her palette she delicately smudged the outline of a peach so that the shape appeared to shimmer on the page.
Three letters, followed by four numbers, popped into her mind.
She blinked at the sudden intrusion. The numbers, clear as day—black on white—winked out. Suddenly cold, she painted the letters and numbers onto the canvas before she could forget them.
Heart pounding, she studied what she had written. For a split second, knowledge hovered at the edge of her mind. Then it slid away, leaving her mind blank.
She stared at the figures, trying to recapture the relaxed looseness of mind that had allowed the memory to surface, but her mind was once more locked down. It was entirely possible that this was just some kind of short circuit, a random wisp of memory left over from her childhood and, like the indented numbers she had found on the notepaper in Alex’s desk, another dead end.
From the configuration, the numbers could be a vehicle license plate. She would pass the information on to Ed Marlow, to give to Bayard to check out.
After lunch, Rina walked to her local shopping center. As wonderful as it was to be able to see and to have the freedom to go wherever she wanted without assistance, she couldn’t get used to not having Baby by her side.
She stopped at the newsagent and picked up a number of newspapers, including the local one. Reading the written word wasn’t her strength, but she was improving. WitSec had helped rehabilitate her. For two months she had been enrolled in the same kind of intensive language lessons and training program that a foreign refugee was granted, with one difference—she had been the only pupil in the class. Marlow had personally overseen the program. He knew how important her testimony was, and he was as interested as Rina in making sure she could blend comfortably into Beaumont.
With the papers and a glossy magazine tucked under her arm, Rina began the slow trek home, enjoying the afternoon breeze and the warmth of the sun. So far she had resisted buying a car, for the simple reason that she didn’t have a driver’s license and the walk to the shopping center only took a few minutes. She had started driving lessons a few weeks ago, and was booked in to take her test, but, like reading, managing a vehicle wasn’t her best skill.
A kid with a golden retriever on a leash walked out of a gate and crossed the road to a park. Rina’s chest squeezed tight as she watched the boy unlatch the lead and let the dog streak across the grass.
As happy as she was in Beaumont she couldn’t forget Baby, and she hadn’t given up on him. Marlow would have a fit if he knew, but she had kept her contact with Taylor, and through her was continuing to try to locate him.
Fifteen minutes later, she collected a glass of water and a dictionary from the sitting room and carried them, along with the papers, out to the picnic table she’d set up beneath the oak. Anchoring the papers with the bowl of peaches and the glass of water, she began to read the first paper, stopping to check words as she went. After twenty years of reading selected information through Braille publications or listening to what was served up on television or radio, access to the huge variety of information available in newspapers was like a drug; her mind soaked it up like a sponge.
Her photographic memory was still intact. She had tested herself, curious to see if after years of zero visual stimuli she could still do her childhood trick, and had found to her surprise that the odd quirk was still there.
Turning to the classifieds, she reanchored the pages. Automatically, her gaze ran down the lost-and-found column and snagged on a snapshot of a dog in the pet’s section.
She studied the picture, frustrated at the grainy texture of the newsprint. Frowning, she bent closer. Her elbow connected with the glass, water splashed across the table. Jumping to her feet, she grabbed the paper, pulling it away from the moisture and letting the wet part of the page drip onto the grass. The breeze gusted, tugging at the rest of the newspaper and sending it tumbling over the lawn until it caught in the thick tangle of shrubs at the far end of the yard.
