by Misty Evans
He wondered how late she’d been out, and if Flynn had caught up with her. “You took off so suddenly last night, I didn’t have a chance to talk to you.”
She took a couple of careful steps toward him, as if she were tentative to get too close. “I believe you kicked me out.”
He had, but until he figured out the puzzle standing before him, it was better to befriend her than push her away again. “My apologies. You caught me at the end of a long and stressful day.” He gave her a smile that had charmed everyone from the Duchess of York to his mother. “The situation has me on edge. I’m sure you understand.”
She studied the smile, studied the sincerity he willed into his eyes. Relaxed a bit. “Of course. If I overstepped my boundaries with your family, forgive me. I’d like to help if I can.”
She didn’t realize it, but she’d just opened the door for him to keep an eye on her. “Ruthie could use someone to talk to. A friend.”
A faint quirk of her lips let him know she was pleased. “Ruth is a good person. I’ll call her when I’m done here and try to stop by this evening if she’s up to having company.”
As Helena ushered Dr. Kent into the dining room, Michael tapped the PDB under his arm. Unlikely enemies were everywhere, and apparently conspiring with the president.
Brigit entered the dining room, flushed from Michael’s apparent change of heart. She wasn’t fooled by his sudden friendliness, his smoldering Clooney eyes or the flashy smile, but, jeez he was hard to resist when he turned on the charm.
She greeted the president and turned down the coffee Helena offered her. Trying not to teeter on her heels, she snagged the first chair she reached at the table, even though it was enough distance from President Jeffries to cause him to raise an eyebrow. She motioned at the newspapers and files fanned out before him. “At it already, I see.”
He winked at her. “No rest for the wicked.”
Like most men in power, Jeffries probably had wickedness on tap, to be served up whenever necessary. His good-guy persona wasn’t completely false, but Brigit didn’t trust him any more than she would trust a cobra swaying stealthily in front of her.
However, as his personal consultant—a job even his wife didn’t realize Brigit held—Jeffries demanded her loyalty like a pet dog on a leash. “So what did you bring me on my enemies today, Doctor?”
Brigit pulled the BlackBerry from her jacket’s hip pocket and punched several buttons. As the file she wanted emerged on the screen, Michael Stone’s smile flashed across her mind. Blinking it away, she also tamped down the tiny flare of betrayal in her stomach. “Would you like to start with Thad Pennington,” she asked the president, “or Ruth?”
Chapter Seven
Maryland
Peter Donovan had known deep passion in his life. Cutting pain as well. He’d sold his soul as a young man for a cause people believed was past history. A bloody, pointless war buried in political correctness these days and discussed in university studies as a conflict.
Even back home in Belfast, the cause he’d prayed for, bled for and killed for had been reduced to the Bombs and Bullets Tour given by taxi drivers who escorted tourists from the Protestant side of town to the Catholic side and back again. They gawked and snapped photos of monuments and murals depicting the two most prevalent objects in most wars…crosses and guns.
Fingering the tiny gold cross in his right earlobe, Peter repeated the only prayer he ever said anymore. Know thy enemy. Know thyself. While he still fought for the Catholic tradition, he no longer believed in a merciful or just God. God had deserted him too many times. Left him to bleed and suffer the betrayals of his family, his friends and his conscience. After all the fighting, all the struggles, he now believed only in the truth.
Before exiting the delivery van he was driving, he slipped a pair of leather gloves on his hands and pulled the brim of his painter’s cap down until it touched the frame of his sunglasses.
The side of the van was labeled Conglomerate Painting Services. It claimed the company did interior and exterior painting. A toll-free number, long ago disconnected, was stenciled under the lettering.
Behind the sunglasses, Peter scanned the residential neighborhood as he walked around the van to the sidewalk. Pedestrian traffic was minimal, but starting to pick up. Car traffic was too, as people exited their townhouses and condos and jumped in high-end SUVs for work.
Dry leaves scattered around his feet, and he flipped the collar of his paint-splattered coveralls up against the cool wind rushing by. As he pushed a button on the key fob, the van’s side door opened to reveal a collection of tarps, paint cans and tools. Hoisting a rolled-up canvas onto his shoulder, he stepped back and hit the key fob button again. The side door slid shut.
Jogging up the front stairs of the duplex, he kept his head down and whistled softly under his breath. The door was unlocked. Stepping inside, the smell of freshly sawn wood and primer filled his nose. He knocked the brim of his cap up with his knuckles and lowered his sunglasses to glance around. The duplex was undergoing a complete remodel. One that had already taken months longer and thousands of dollars more than the owners had ever dreamed. After today, however, their ailing budget and mounting impatience would dissolve in a heartbeat when the pull of a trigger from the top floor of the duplex sent a message to the world.
Taking the inside stairs with a purposeful, if slower, gait, Peter mentally reviewed the day’s plan. Like a 3D topographer’s map, all the important physical details of the assassination rose in his mind. The location of ground zero, the obstructions, like cars, trees and nearby buildings, the placement of his sniper—he could zoom in on each quarter of the kill zone and then efficiently pull back a degree and again review the physical details.
Cormac O’Bern, a famous modern Irish poet and an American poet laureate, would be honored for his body of written work as well as his international peace-promoting propaganda in a library renaming a quarter mile northeast of the duplex. The ex-IRA member had always had the gift of leadership and a love of Hollywood. Now he traveled the world with an entourage worthy of a movie star and spoke the words rock stars to politicians wanted to believe about attaining worldwide peace. All they had to do, Cormac claimed, was believe.
Peter scoffed at such juvenile ideas. Peace was an imaginary friend to human beings, no matter their socioeconomic status, religion or nation. The figurative image of peace helped them sleep at night. Like the image of God, it gave them hope in the face of tragedy, illness and loss. But it would never materialize, no matter how badly they wanted it to because it only existed in their mind.
War was real. Struggle was real. Peter didn’t believe in peace any more than he believed in the leprechauns his mother had claimed lived in the woods behind his childhood home. His mother had believed in everything…God, peace, four-leaf clovers. She’d reached for hope in any element available. When Peter’s father died in a retaliation bombing outside a pub in Belfast, Roberta had blamed bad luck and unrepentant sin.
Peter had blamed peace.
Roberta then turned her back on Irish Nationalism, betraying her dead spouse and her son. Five years after burying Peter’s father, she married his archenemy, a parliament member with secretive ties to the British spy group MI5. She bore William Kent two daughters.
On the third floor, Peter entered a cramped room gutted to squeeze out floor space for a small home gym. As he moved toward a tall, skinny window where he could look across the neighborhood and nearby park, he caught sight of the barricades already erected near the library. Traffic was being diverted around the block. From this distance the black and white police cruisers lining the street looked like Matchbox cars and the large green sign over the library’s entrance was clearly visible but unreadable.
He unrolled the canvas, uncovering a tripod and rifle. Carefully, he spread the canvas flat and snapped the tripod into a standing position. As he anchored the rifle to the tripod, the leather gloves hindered his fingers, slowing down his usual effic
iency. Even though they were snug-fitting stretch leather, he couldn’t get a good feel for the metal under them.
Grunting, he removed one of the gray gloves and threw it to the floor in frustration. The leather made a soft smacking sound, the glove landing palm up as if in defeat. Peter took a deep breath, yanked the ball cap off his head and ran his forearm over his sweating forehead.
The gloves were a necessity. A fingerprint was too easy to leave behind. No matter how carefully a person wiped off surfaces they knew they’d touched, the chance at leaving behind an errant fingerprint was high. Forcing patience into his fingers, he also forced it into his mind. He could not afford to leave behind such blatant evidence. He returned the cap to his bald head—there would be no hair fibers left behind either—and slid the glove back on his hand.
Once he attached the rifle to the tripod, he removed a scope from inside his overalls, fastening it to the top. He peered through the scope, adjusted the coordinates and read the library sign. Cormac O’Bern. The Power of Peace.
Cormac and Peter had been inseparable during their teenage years. Cormac, a few years older and wiser, had drawn Peter in like a magnet to steel. While Cormac persuaded people to their cause with his smooth rhetoric and winning smile, Peter carried out guerilla war tactics to spotlight their continuing war.
But then Cormac betrayed him, just like his mother. Just like Brigit.
Love, like peace, was an illusion. An imaginary friend.
Adjusting the range of the scope, Peter again referred to the three-dimensional map in his mind. From memory, he pulled up Cormac’s handsome face, its long nose, dark hair and fair skin, and set the scope’s hairs on the spot between his bushy eyebrows. Peter pressed the trigger on the rifle and mentally heard the report, absorbed the kick of the gun, and watched in slow motion as Cormac slumped out of the scope’s range, crumpling to the ground of the stage.
Today, Cormac would be reminded, if only for the briefest of seconds, that his life, his promise of peace, was a joke.
A voice from behind him startled Peter from his daydream. The accent was thick with Palestinian genes. “You would like to do this job yourself?”
Peter removed his eye from the scope but didn’t turn to face her. Of course he wanted to pull the trigger himself, but he wasn’t stupid or careless. He was not the professional assassin like the woman standing behind him, and today, a professional was needed. That’s why he’d paid her ransom to the Israelis and sent Tory to pick her up.
He glanced at his watch. “In two hours fifty-three minutes, the dedication will take place. The FBI and local law enforcement are already strained to the breaking point by the kidnapping and the presence of a dozen rich and famous attending the event. Your escape after Cormac’s murder should be the smoothest you’ve ever encountered.”
“Ah, yes, the kidnapping. How is the girl doing?”
Peter turned to Moira Raphael. Her dark auburn hair was pulled tight in a high ponytail. Her brown eyes were rimmed with black and her lips shone with thick, red gloss. A bruise on her left cheek, provided by her captors, was still visible under the layers of her makeup. “The Pennington child is a sniveling runt but still an effective tool to help us.”
The right side of Moira’s mouth tilted up in a smirk. “There is no us, Peter, you know that.” She waited for him to contradict her. He didn’t and she shrugged. “I’ve recently been in the same predicament as the child. Cold, hungry, abused and alone in the dark. It’s quite terrifying, even for someone like me.”
“She hasn’t been abused.”
“But knowing you, she has been neglected. Perhaps if you fed her, she would stop crying.”
Peter tightened his hands into fists. The child was the least of their concerns. “I don’t tell you how to kill people.”
The left side of her mouth joined the right. She walked to the rifle, shouldered him out of the way so she could double check his work with her own gloved hands. “After this, my debt to you is paid.”
Removing a brown envelope from the inside pocket of his overalls, Peter watched her adjust the scope. “When the job is done, head to Canada. I’ll meet up with you as soon as I’m done here.”
She raised her gaze from the scope and studied his face. “There’s more at stake here than my usual jobs. No matter what measures you have taken, leaving the country will be difficult. This job is an even trade for the ransom.”
Peter handed her the envelope. “You won’t encounter trouble leaving the country unless you fail to follow my orders.”
Moira considered his words in silence. He could see caution warring with her independent nature in her eyes. “Canada it is then.”
Leaving her with the gun and envelope, Peter descended the stairs and returned to the van. He knew Moira would run when the job was done, just like she had before. If he hadn’t been in love with her, been in love with what she did so flawlessly, he’d have let her go years ago. But he was in love with her, as in love as he could ever be.
He told himself it was simply the amazing sex they had that kept him tracking her down, chasing her like a fox after a rabbit. Deep in his gut, though, he knew it was more. The sexy assassin meant far more to him than a good fuck. Her ability to take a human life without a moment’s regret matched his own. However, with Moira, there was no agenda, no mission, no loyalty to anyone or anything. He envied her that. His own mission was so ingrained in the cells of his body, he couldn’t imagine a life without such passion.
Possessing Moira had become as much his passion as his homeland’s nationalism. A part of him believed he could dissect her and when he did, he’d finally have the antidote to emotion. Only then, when he no longer felt anything for anyone, would he find the guts to pull the trigger on his friends as well as his enemies.
Back in the van, Peter pawed through a grocery sack and pulled out a Snickers candy bar. He’d give it to the Pennington girl when he got back to the room he’d rented. Contrary to what Moira thought, he was not a monster like the Israelis. The girl was warm and dry, and Tory had given her a doll she’d picked up at a nearby convenience store.
I even left a nightlight on for her so she wouldn’t be afraid of the dark.
Chapter Eight
Arlington
Julia tossed her car keys on the kitchen counter and shrugged out of her jacket. Conrad sat at the table with a laptop, a cup of coffee and a spread of papers. He didn’t glance up from the screen when he spoke. “Explain.”
She didn’t want to explain and even if she had, his demanding tone raised her hackles. “Business meeting.”
He pecked at the keyboard. “Since when does my London operative work a case inside the States with you?”
So he knew. She hadn’t fooled him at all. Now she had to find a way out of this confrontation without making things worse for Zara.
Tired and in need of a serious jolt of caffeine, all Julia could think about was how nice it would be to have a hot shower and an understanding husband. Noting the set of Con’s jaw, she knew the last item on her wish list was a pipedream. As long as she was this deep in shit, she might as well ignore his question. “Zara’s in the hospital. She’s dehydrated and her electrolytes are messed up. The doctor’s running some blood tests, but he suspects she has a serious case of influenza.”
“What case are you working, Jules?”
She wasn’t sure if it was his tone or the fact he wouldn’t look at her that made anger bite low in her stomach. “Don’t you care Zara’s sick? That she’s in the hospital?”
His gaze left the computer screen and crawled up her body to her face. “Of course I care about Zara. I also care about my wife. You’re both walking a dangerous high wire right now, and maybe neither of you realized it, but if you get caught, I’m the asshole who’s going to meet the firing squad. I have a right to know what you’re involved in.”
She hated it when he was right. “Zara is your espionage operative, but what I do on my off hours has no reflection on you as Directo
r of Operations.”
“Wrong.” He rose from the chair and tamped his finger on the table. “Everything you do reflects on me, like it or not. A caveat of being married, Mrs. Flynn.”
Julia’s heart plunged. The few times Con had referred to their marriage over the last six months, he’d always made it sound constraining, damning almost. He was still annoyed she hadn’t taken his name, as evidenced by the way he constantly used the term Mrs. Flynn like a challenge.
Julia understood the political workings of Washington as well as anyone. Through the years as a CIA analyst and then an operative, she’d broken rules and challenged authority on a regular basis. Always, though, with the complete understanding that her butt, and only hers, was on the line. Marriage to Conrad changed that. Now if she went outside the borders of her job, it would reflect badly on him.
Like Michael, Con had enemies in Washington. Enemies waiting to ambush him, to implicate him in illegal or immoral activities if it served their purpose. He’d been a rogue agent once and the shadow hung over his head. These days, he had to go above and beyond proper protocol or be suspected again.
Acknowledging the truth in his statement with a nod, she still refused to give in. “I’ll tell you what we were doing if you promise not to reprimand Zara.”
He drew in a deep breath, as if reining in his impatience. “Why are you so damned protective of my spy?”
“She’s been kidnapped by a Mafia drug lord, held at gunpoint by a psychotic terrorist and injected with a deadly virus all in the span of the past four months. Being one of your secret army has hardly been a walk in the park for her.”
“Well, if you don’t come clean about your covert activities, Zara will lose her secret decoder ring before the day’s over. Maybe you can put in a good word for her with your boss. Get her a job with FBI. Oh, wait.” He snapped his fingers. “If you’re involved with what she’s doing, you’ll lose your job too.”
