Dark of Night

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He awoke with a shout. “No! No!”

  Tess scrambled to his side. “Jimmy. Jim, it's all right. We're safe.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he gasped as he clung to her. “Oh, Tess …”

  “I'm here,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked. “What… ?”

  “The safe house,” she told him. “Remember?” She fumbled for the unfamiliar lamp on the unfamiliar bedside table, finally found the switch and clicked it on.

  “Shit!” Jimmy turned away, closing his eyes against the light. “Don't!”

  She switched it back off, but not before she saw that his face was wet with tears—as if she would somehow think him less of a man because he'd wept in his sleep? Still, over the past long weeks of his recovery, he'd been more vulnerable than he'd ever been before—at least in his adult life. Confined to a bed, hooked up to monitors and an IV, unable to move, forced to accept help for his most basic needs…

  The ride from the hospital had not been an easy one, and he'd been sleeping pretty much continuously since arriving here early Monday.

  His wounds, both from being shot and from the surgery that had saved his life, were still painful. And the infection that had riddled him for weeks had not only made him weak, but had prevented him from moving around, which Tess knew made his back and legs ache all the time.

  Not that he'd complained.

  Not in the hospital, and not in the cargo van in which he'd ridden here, on a stretcher. FBI agent Jules Cassidy himself had been driving, with Alyssa riding shotgun and Tess in the back.

  They'd pulled right into the spacious five-bay garage at the base of this amazing hilltop castle, and closed the door tightly behind them.

  Sam Starrett was already there, waiting for them, playing the tough-guy former SEAL even though everyone at Troubleshooters knew that he was an emotional pushover, and that the idea of bunnies falling in love in the spring made him choke up. He'd hugged Tess a little too tightly in greeting before clearing his throat about fourteen times and telling Jimmy that he looked like shit warmed over, which, for a guy who'd been dead for a few months, was pretty damn good.

  They'd wheeled Jimmy into an elevator—this place had an elevator!—and gone to a gorgeous two-room suite with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the harshly beautiful desolation of the desert. The windows were one-way—no one on the outside could see in—but Tess had noticed Jimmy's trepidation as he looked at them, so she'd shut the drapes. With the push of a button on the wall by the bed, they'd closed with the softest motorized purr, and Jimmy soon relaxed into sleep.

  Over the past day and a half, he'd roused only for meals.

  But now he was awake and struggling to control his still-uneven breathing as Tess carefully stretched out beside him. She rested her arm across his stomach as she took his hand and interlaced their fingers, her leg across his thighs.

  The full body contact seemed to soothe him, and it wasn't long before he moved—to wipe his eyes with the heel of his other hand.

  “Shit,” he said again, but softer this time. “It's the same fucking nightmare, every fucking night.”

  That was more information than he'd ever given her, but of course they hadn't been able to talk freely in the hospital, with the nurses constantly coming in and out. Here, however…

  Heart pounding, Tess quietly asked him, “Can you tell me … ?”

  Jimmy was silent for a long time—which was not a surprise. Talking about himself—his feelings and fears—was not one of his stronger skills, and she'd all but given up on his ever answering when suddenly he spoke.

  “Did we get the DNA results back from that shirt?”

  Tess sighed at his change of subject. “Not yet. Maybe in the morning.”

  “But we sent it out to the lab?” he asked.

  The shirt in question was the one he'd been wearing when some unknown person had tried to kill him. It was, apparently, only one in a number of recent incidents in which Jimmy had nearly ended up dead—and Tess couldn't think about that too much or her head would explode.

  But the shirt didn't just have only Jimmy's blood on it—it also had the blood of his attacker.

  That shirt was—and Jimmy hadn't told her this, but she'd figured it out by doing the calendar math—one of the reasons their apartment had been searched and trashed last July. His attacker had wanted his DNA sample back.

  “We sent it on Monday morning,” she told him, her frustration leaking out in the terseness of her reply. “Early yesterday.”

  “It's Tuesday?” He was surprised and disgusted with himself. “What the hell have I been doing?”

  “Sleeping,” she informed him. “It's what bodies do when they need to heal.”

  “We need to back down on my pain meds,” he told her, “because those dreams …” He shook his head—a rustle against the pillow in the darkness.

  “The dreams are all yours. Last meds you took were …” She had to think about it. “Before we got into the van.”

  He sighed heavily. “Great.”

  “I wish,” Tess said so softly she was almost inaudible, “you could tell me. …”

  He was silent again, and she closed her eyes, knowing that if he weren't still so weak, this was where he'd kiss her. Make love to her. Try to tell her, through touch and eye contact, all the things he couldn't bring himself say.

  “It's okay,” she said, “if you don't—”

  But Jimmy spoke, cutting her off. “I'm on assignment,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper in the dark. “Another black op covert from the motherfuckers at the Agency.”

  She was surprised—and a little confused. “In your dream,” she clarified, the words falling out of her mouth even as she realized she should just zip it and let him talk.

  But he seemed okay with her question. “Yeah. But the assignment in the dream has the same MO as the others. The real ones. A phone call to tell me where and when. Background information in a file in a bus station locker. Whoever it is on the other end of the phone, he knows my travel plans, my schedule at Troubleshooters—sometimes before I do.”

  Tess hardly dared to breathe, praying that he'd keep talking.

  He did. “This time I'm in New Mexico—some little town called Ket-tleston—and I can't believe I've gotten a call, but it's not a deletion, thank God.” His voice shook. “God, Tess.”

  “I'm here,” she said, through a throat that was tight from the sudden tears that sprang up—tears she didn't dare let escape. “It's all right.”

  “No,” he said, “it's not.”

  “It's over,” she reminded him.

  “Sometimes I think it'll never be over.” His voice was rough with emotion.

  “But it is,” she insisted.

  “After all this, you still have faith we're going to live happily ever after,” he said, with a sound that was half laughter, half despair. “I don't know why.”

  “You're in Kettleston,” she prompted him, tempted to shake him because she was sick and tired of his lack of faith—in her, in them. “What do they want you to do?”

  Jimmy sighed. “Almost nothing. A simple B&E for a hard-drive download from a computer that isn't connected to the Internet.”

  Hence the hard access via breaking and entering. Even a secure wireless setup could be hacked by someone with fairly rudimentary skills, but if a computer didn't have an Internet connection…

  “The target's not in Kettleston,” Jimmy continued, “it's in Albuquerque—a three-hour trip. I've got a rental car, so I make the drive.”

  Troubleshooters Incorporated had a client based out of Kettleston, New Mexico. Harrison & Sons. It was one of their many paranoia accounts—businesses run by CEOs who feared terrorist attacks despite being HQ'd in the land of cattle or corn.

  Sometime over the past year—Tess couldn't remember exactly when—Harrison & Sons had hired Troubleshooters to redesign their security system, and Jimmy had been in charge of the project. It was an easy job at a high rate of pa
y—the drawback being the travel and the days spent away from home, housed in a crappy hotel.

  “The intel in the file I've been given,” Jimmy continued quietly, recounting his “dream,” if that's what it really was, “is limited. Brief. I'm entering the home of Ronald Fenster. He's a bank manager, thirty-nine years old, divorced, no kids, heavily in debt, suspected drug use, currently in Phoenix, Arizona, at a real estate investment workshop.”

  “In other words, he's not home,” Tess said, and felt Jimmy nod.

  “No one's home,” he confirmed. “It's a simple job in an empty house. A cakewalk. I'll be in and out inside of thirty minutes, depending on how long it takes to copy his files to my flashdrive. According to the intel, the computer I'm targeting is in the southeast bedroom on the second floor.

  “The McMansion is dark,” he continued. “I drive the neighborhood, but it's after midnight and the whole development is rolled up tight. So I leave the car about a mile away and walk in. Disable the security system and enter through the back door.

  “I'm halfway up the stairs when I know something's wrong. Really wrong. I don't know how I know—maybe I smell blood, maybe I hear something. I draw my weapon as I keep going—if I stop they'll know that I know they're there. So instead of going into the southeast bedroom, I head for the master, where I goddamn nearly trip over Ronald Fenster, who's tied to a chair. He's been …”

  Jimmy stopped, and Tess just waited, holding her breath, praying that he'd do it—that he'd trust her enough to tell her.

  “He's been beaten,” Jimmy whispered. “Tortured. The ends of his fingers are … Christ, he's a mess. His throat's been cut and I slip in the blood, which slows me down. I can hear them now, they're coming for me, and I discharge my weapon at the bedroom door, and I think maybe I hit one of them as as I kick out the window screen. I jump and by some miracle I don't break my ankles, and I'm running as they shoot at me. And I'm hit, but the bullet's spent, and I know I'm not badly hurt. I can get away as long as I don't leave a trail of blood. Except then the dream shifts, and I'm back in the bedroom, only this time it's not Fenster in the chair.”

  He took a deep breath, and it sounded raspy and loud in the darkness, but then he whispered, “This time, it's you.”

  Oh, God. “I'm here,” Tess said again, unable to keep her voice from shaking. “I'm right here.” She didn't tell him that maybe—just maybe— her showing up dead in his dreams was his subconscious fear that his deceit could still kill their relationship. After all, he'd lied to her for years.

  It seemed he might be out of the woods in terms of his physical injury—which meant it was getting close to the time to tell him that the emotional damage she'd sustained from his dishonesty had nearly been fatal.

  “I know what you're thinking,” he said, and she waited to see if he really did know. “How much of the dream is a dream and … Obviously the last part, with you, is just… But the rest of it is… It's kind of a conglomerate of… What I'm trying to say is that it happened, but not that way. The assignment in Albuquerque was just a computer download. But the intel in the file they gave me was faulty. Fenster was home. He was very much alive. He heard me break in, and he had a gun, and when I went out the window, he shot at me. He didn't hit me, though. The getting shot that I dreamed about was from another black op, in Kansas, about a month later—but I was out of range and the bullet was spent, so …”

  A spent bullet was one that had run out of force and energy. It didn't do as much damage. But it still could do plenty of harm.

  “Kansas?” Tess asked, working hard to keep her upset out of her voice. He'd been shot last year—not in a dream, in reality—while in Kansas. “Smallwood?”

  She felt him nod in the darkness. “Yeah.”

  Jimmy had been part of a “red cell” team at another client's corporate headquarters in Smallwood, Kansas, last winter. He'd come home from that assignment and immediately gone out on another. And then another. And another.

  It hadn't made sense because he hated spending so much time on the road, but now Tess realized he'd been waiting for his gunshot wound to heal before sharing a bed with her.

  She had to grit her teeth in order to hold her tongue. Chastising Jimmy—or slapping him—would only shut him up, fast. And this was not the right time to roll out her list of demands. Mostly because she still hadn't recovered enough from nearly losing him to be reasonable. She recognized that promise you'll never go anywhere without me again wasn't going to fly. Although from now on, you must tell me when you've been shot was a definite add to her list.

  “At least that's what I thought at the time—that the intel was bad,” Jimmy added, and it took her a second to make sense of his words. Unlike Tess, he'd already dismissed his injury. “I suspected I'd been set up, but it wasn't until later—until Smallwood—that I knew for sure. I was supposed to die that night in Albuquerque. Fenster was supposed to shoot me as an intruder. That's what the dream's about. It's my subconscious telling me that I should have known back then that it wasn't a mistake, that they weren't just getting sloppy. That they wanted me dead.”

  “Who did?” Tess asked. “Who's they?”

  He laughed—a burst of frustration that made him wince and curse. “Tess, believe me, if I knew who they were, they'd no longer be a threat to anyone. With luck, when the DNA report from the shirt comes back …”

  He was quiet again for a while, just breathing.

  But then he said, “After Smallwood, I went back to the Agency. I walked into Dougie Brendon's office and I made him take me in to the head of the black ops division, where I told them both that I was done. They denied sending me out on missions, at least not in the past two years, but they would've denied it, you know? Considering some of the shit they made me do.”

  Tess did know. She'd worked for the Agency's support unit for several years herself. Black ops were called black ops for a reason. The assignments were never acknowledged, and tended to be well outside of the limits of the law. There was never a paper trail, never a record, never a prayer—only instant distance and disassociation from the Agency—for the black op agent who was unlucky enough to be apprehended by the “enemy.”

  “Same night I went to see Brendon,” Jimmy continued quietly, “I got a phone call. The son of a bitch who called told me that it's too late. That I can't back out now, that if I go in to the Agency again, if I talk to anyone … I'll end up back in prison.

  “I tell him to go fuck himself, and I hang up the phone. And then I went back to Albuquerque. See, I knew that, whoever they were, they were monitoring my travel. Anything the government knew about me, they somehow knew it, too. So I figured I'd send them a little message.”

  Tess nodded. She knew exactly where his story was going. Straight back to Ronald Fenster.

  “They called me the next day,” Jimmy told her, “and I bluffed. I said that I'd gotten one of their compatriots to talk to me and that I was well on my way to tracking them down so I could rip out their throats and end this bullshit. And then I waited for them to show up at our old friend Ronald Fenster's house.

  “Only somehow, they got to him first,” he whispered. “Somehow, they knew. I sat there for three days, Tess, and nothing moved outside or inside of that house. Finally someone shows up, but it's a realtor, putting a FOR SALE sign out front. She leaves, and as soon as it's dark, I go inside. And the house is empty. No furniture, new carpeting, fresh paint.

  “And I finally go back to my hotel room—I'm already freaked out— and there's a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door. So I'm careful when I enter the room and. …”

  “Fenster?” Tess asked quietly, bracing herself.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy told her. “They put him in the bathtub. He was tied to a chair, and …” He had to clear his throat. “Tortured. To make it look like they'd tried to find out what he'd told me—which was nothing, because I hadn't even talked to the man. They knew I hadn't talked to him—they'd probably contained him the day after he failed to kill me. They kne
w I'd figure it out and come back for him. And they wanted to send me a message. So they cut his throat, probably ten minutes before I got back to the hotel. His body was still warm, Tess. For all I know, I fucking walked past them in the lobby.”

  Oh, God. “He was in the bathtub,” Tess repeated, clinging to the facts. She didn't want to think about how close the killers had come to Jimmy.

  “Thoughtful of them,” Jimmy said. “I only had to get rid of a body. I didn't have to tear out the carpeting and repaint the walls.”

  Tess sat up. Something here didn't make sense. She could understand why Jimmy's mystery men wouldn't have tried to kill him as he'd waited outside of Fenster's house. Jimmy had surely been on high alert at the time, and they no doubt knew him as an operator well enough to recognize that going after him then would be a deadly mistake. But…

  “If they wanted you dead,” she asked, trying not to let her voice shake, “why not just wait for you at the hotel and kill you there? They were in your room.”

  “Or why not take me down with a sniper rifle, in the CVS parking lot? Or at the gas station, or outside our apartment or …” He shook his head. “I don't know. Best I can figure is they didn't want me dead by assassin. At least at that time. Later, I think they just wanted me dead, but back then, they seemed to want me dead at the scene of a crime—”

  “And Ronald Fenster, with his throat slit in the bathtub?” Tess couldn't help it—her voice was getting louder. How could he not have told her about this when it had happened? She wasn't just angry at the men who wanted him dead—she was angry at Jimmy, too. “Didn't he make your hotel room the scene of a crime?”

  “Well, yeah.” Jimmy gave her that. “But they would've had to wait for me in the room, and someone might've heard the gunshots.”

  Oh, God.

  “Why didn't you say something?” Tess couldn't keep the question inside any longer. “Why didn't you tell me—”

  “Because they pinned a note to Fenster's shirt that said: Don't go to the authorities, don't talk to anyone. Go home and wait for instructions, or …” He choked the words out. “Tess is next.”