Trigger Warning

by Allan Leverone

  The philosophical inclinations of their bosses were irrelevant. What mattered was gaining the experience and contacts a political career would require.

  After several years, Kim left the workforce when she became pregnant with the first of a pair of Chilcott boys, and Bradley moved on to a job at the CIA in the administration of the newly elected U.S. president, who’d been backed both financially and politically by the very influential senator from Massachusetts.

  After ten years at the CIA, during which he’d developed the kind of contacts most power-hungry politicians could only dream about, Bradley and Kim returned home to Maryland to take the next step in the grand plan.

  It was here Bradley made the mistake that would lead directly to today’s telephone call he was so anxiously anticipating. Finally prepared to begin his long-awaited run to the White House, Bradley took his first shot at elective office, announcing his candidacy for lieutenant governor of Maryland and aligning himself with the eventual winner in the gubernatorial election, Jim Studds.

  The pairing was perfect from Bradley’s point of view. The Democrat Studds was a highly visible and popular ex-prosecuting attorney who would have no trouble winning votes and who was facing a weak opponent. And the best part was that he was old. Nearing seventy at the time of the election three years ago, Studds had made it clear to Bradley he was interested in one term only, then retirement to his estate in the Maryland countryside.

  Bradley would then be in line to move to the governor’s mansion.

  Perfect.

  But there was one problem.

  And it was a big one.

  Bradley Chilcott’s political career was in danger of running straight into a brick wall. A dead end before it had even really gotten started.

  Because Jim Studds had changed his mind about retirement. He advised Bradley just a few weeks ago that his health was good and he loved being governor and rather than retire after one term he’d decided to run for reelection next year.

  Of course, he would love it if Bradley would team up with him again.

  As lieutenant governor.

  And that was unacceptable.

  It was more than a year until the election, and then assuming the ticket was victorious—and it would be—another four years would pass with Bradley stuck in his current useless, pointless, career-ending position.

  Five years from now, the contacts Bradley had worked so hard to attain would be ancient. Worthless. All of them, at the CIA, the Department of State, in the White House and the administrations of key battleground national election states, they would all be cold as ice. Most of them would have moved on and forgotten Bradley Chilcott ever existed.

  The implications for Bradley’s action plan were obvious and chilling. He would have wasted virtually his entire adult life. His political career would be as good as finished, and now in his mid-forties he was far too old to start over.

  Besides, his action plan included no provision for a reboot.

  No provision for failure.

  Bradley had given plenty of thought to potential responses to Jim Studds’ shocking announcement in the weeks since being caught completely off-guard. It would not be inaccurate to say that those potential responses were all he’d been thinking about.

  And after those awful first few days, when he’d wallowed in anger and despair and self-pity—and allowed himself to blow off steam by beating Kim even worse and more often than usual—Bradley Chilcott had done what he always did: he rebounded. He amended his action plan to deal with Studds’ stunning betrayal.

  The first step in his updated plan had been to send Mike Hargus on assignment. This afternoon’s highly anticipated telephone call would—hopefully—set that updated action plan into motion.

  And Bradley could hardly wait.

  3

  So far, the call wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. Bradley’s mood was darkening as his anger seethed.

  He’d selected the target for Hargus’s reconnaissance very carefully, and after serious deliberation. He pored over files he’d liberated from the CIA during his tenure at the agency, smuggled out because he’d anticipated a time when he might require certain services so discreet and dangerous even Hargus could not handle them.

  After making his selection he’d verified through one of his remaining contacts at the agency that his choice was a good one for what he had in mind. Speaking hypothetically and off the record, of course.

  And now Hargus was on the other end of the line, telling Bradley there was some sort of “unanticipated situation.”

  Bradley sighed heavily. Unanticipated situation.

  “English, Mike. Speak English, for chrissakes. What’s the problem?”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s a problem, exactly. Just something I hadn’t expected based on our intel regarding Sheridan.”

  Bradley’s mood soured a bit more as he sipped his Chivas. He was having a hard time getting past Hargus’s choice of wording. “Unanticipated situation.”

  He hated the sound of those words. They brought a bad taste to his mouth. Unanticipated situations represented risk, and the project Bradley was considering was plenty risky already.

  Hargus remained silent on the other end of the line, waiting for Bradley to ask the obvious question instead of just volunteering the information like he should. Asshole.

  “Well?” Bradley barked. “Are you going to explain what the hell you’re talking about or do I have to guess like a goddamn carnival psychic?”

  “There’s a woman.”

  “A woman? What are you talking about? What woman?” Everything Bradley knew about Jack Sheridan—and it was a lot—suggested the man was eminently aware of the risk posed by the nature of his work, and unwilling to expose innocent lives to that risk by involving himself in any significant way with any woman.

  “Her name is Edie Tolliver. She owns a small restaurant near Sheridan’s home.”

  “What makes you think they’re together? Maybe they’re just friends. Not everyone’s an antisocial loner like you, you know.”

  “Point taken. But based on what I saw at Tolliver’s diner a few days ago, if they’re friends it’s one hell of an intimate friendship. I thought they were going to clear off a table and get busy in front of the whole restaurant.”

  “Well,” Bradley said thoughtfully. He sipped his drink and stroked his chin. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  He’d known almost from the moment his new action plan began to take shape that Jack Sheridan was the man for the job. His skill set was perfectly suited to the task he had in mind. Sure, Bradley had done his due diligence and considered other operators. It would have been foolish not to. But he’d always known he would come back to Sheridan.

  And in the end he had.

  There was only one problem, and it was a doozy: there was no way in the world Sheridan would agree to carry out the assignment. Bradley had been so certain of that fact he almost didn’t even bother sending Hargus to New Hampshire.

  But shrinking violets didn’t succeed in the political arena, and Bradley possessed a supreme confidence in his ability to get the job done. So he’d decided to begin surveillance on Sheridan and then try to figure a way to convince the man to do his bidding when the time came.

  There was always a way.

  And, as usual, Bradley’s intuition seemed to have been proven correct. If the news about a woman in Sheridan’s life was accurate, it could be a game-changer. Because a man with nothing to lose is a man you cannot control. Threatening someone like Jack Sheridan directly, he knew, would be…counterproductive.

  Not to mention, in all probability, deadly.

  But a man with emotional ties, especially when those ties were to a woman, was a different story. That man could be manipulated.

  Controlled.

  Convinced—okay, forced, Bradley admitted to himself—to do things he would never otherwise consider.

  Reprehensible things.

  Things exactly like what Bradley Chilcott
had in mind.

  This telephone call had gone nothing at all like Bradley had expected. But rather than being filled with bad news, as he’d feared when Hargus started talking, it had taken a promising turn. A very promising turn.

  “And there’s more,” Hargus said.

  “More? Like what?”

  “The Tolliver woman has a child. A seven-year-old daughter.”

  “A child.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Seven years old.”

  “Yes.”

  Game-changer indeed, Bradley thought as he drained his Chivas.

  4

  Janie Tolliver screamed. The sound was loud and piercing, and when she stopped she did so only long enough to draw in a deep breath and scream again.

  Then she burst out laughing.

  Jack was laughing as well as he held the girl by the wrists and helicoptered her in a circle, her feet suspended in the air and her blonde pigtails streaming behind her like tiny propellers.

  Eventually he lost his balance and collapsed in a heap. The little girl landed next to him and rolled through the thick grass, a victim of her momentum.

  Next to them Edie Tolliver grinned. “Had enough yet?”

  Jack looked up at the pretty young woman who at the moment was spinning against the backdrop of the sky. “Which one of us are you talking to?”

  “The one who’s supposed to be an adult.”

  “Oh-oh,” Jack said to Janie in a conspiratorial stage whisper. “I think you’re in trouble.”

  Janie burst out in a fit of giggles and Edie shook her head. “I’m pretty sure you’re only dating me so you can play with my daughter and roll around in the grass and act like a little kid. Any truth to that?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny,” he said and rolled away as she pretended to aim a kick at his head.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “The truth is, I enjoy playing with you, too. Just wait until the world stops spinning, you’re going to get the same treatment as Janie.”

  “Yeah, yeah, do it!” the little girl shouted and crawled toward them on her hands and knees.

  The trio had spent the afternoon at a movie, and then gone to an early dinner followed by a trip to Janie’s favorite playground. The sun had by now almost fully set and even in May, evenings tended to get chilly in New Hampshire. The ground had begun to cool and was leaching the heat out of Jack’s body where he lay. He knew Janie must be getting cold in her light jacket, but she would never admit to it while having so much fun.

  He climbed to his feet, brushing the dirt and grass off his clothes and helping Janie do the same.

  “I think your mom’s helicopter ride is going to have to wait until next time,” he told her ruefully. “It’s getting late. I know you have school tomorrow so it’s important to get you home before bedtime.”

  She scuffed at the ground with the toe of one dirty sneaker and he smiled.

  “Besides,” he added. “Your mom’s pretty old. We wouldn’t want her to fall and break a hip or anything.”

  Edie rabbit-punched his shoulder as Janie dissolved in another fit of giggles.

  They walked slowly toward the parking lot and it occurred to Jack that the petite blonde woman’s playful comment about his relationship with her daughter really wasn’t that far off the mark.

  He adored everything about Edie, from her seemingly unlimited energy in restoring her business after her husband had walked out on her and their young child, to her bubbly personality and good humor, to her straightforwardness, to her breathtaking natural beauty.

  Jack had known her for years as owner of his favorite restaurant, The Three Squares Diner, but only very recently had they begun dating. And already he suspected he was falling head-over-heels for her. He wasn’t someone who’d had a lot of experience with relationships, so he couldn’t say for certain what he was feeling.

  But it sure felt a lot like love.

  And what was more, he knew she felt the same way about him. The proof was walking along right next to them: Edie was fiercely protective of her daughter and would never have considered allowing Janie to start getting close to a man she wasn’t serious about.

  Having said all that, he really did enjoy spending time with little Janie Tolliver. She’d gotten a raw deal from her father, and Jack knew that as badly as Edie had been hurt by the man’s cowardly disappearance, the effect on Janie had been worse. If Jack could help remove her lingering pain, even if only slightly and for a little while, he was happy to do so.

  And he loved seeing the world through the innocent eyes of a seven-year-old. How she could look at an ordinary cloud and see not water vapor but rather a lion or a dragon or a medieval fortress.

  How she could pick a dandelion out of a field of a thousand dandelions that all looked exactly the same, then shield and protect it during a walk before finally presenting it to her mother after they’d returned home.

  How she could ask an endless litany of questions on any subject, all of them perfectly sensible through the lens of a child’s experience. How she was never satisfied with a pat answer to those questions and would continue to badger the adult until receiving a response that made sense to her.

  He especially loved how that trait drove Edie crazy.

  The more time he spent in their company, the more fascinated he became by the striking similarities between mother and daughter. The way they both chewed on the corners of their lower lips when they were lost in concentration. The way they both threw back their heads and laughed when something struck them as funny.

  The similarities were simultaneously eerie and captivating.

  But the biggest reason he so enjoyed including Janie in his time with Edie was simple. He’d spent his entire adult life alone and he was sick of it. One-night stands during his time overseas in the military, and random hookups as he crisscrossed the country performing his unique duties for The Organization became much less satisfying the older he got.

  Sex was wonderful.

  Sex without companionship and emotion and tenderness was starting to seem pointless.

  So while Jack treasured his time with Edie, and was careful to plan events for just the two of them, he relished including Janie whenever possible. The girl’s outsized personality never failed to bring a smile to his face, and lightness to a heart that had grown increasingly heavy with all he’d seen and done over the years.

  And although she had never spoken of it, Jack knew Edie appreciated his unreserved affection—hell, maybe love would be an accurate description here, too—for her little girl.

  Jack’s longtime fear of exposing someone he cared about to undue risk had never faded, and he knew it never would. Given his career choice, it could be no other way. But as time passed, he found that the desire for companionship and family was beginning to override his concerns about security.

  After all, The Organization was so secretive, so shadowy, only a handful of people in the entire country were even aware of its existence. They were powerful, rich and influential people, to be sure, but there were still only a few of them. And they had as much to lose as Jack—or any other Organization operative—should the existence of the group ever become public knowledge.

  As a result, Organization management protected the identities of their members zealously. Security was their prime consideration, yesterday, today and always. Thus the odds of Jack’s Organization status ever putting those close to him at risk were minimal, unless his own actions during an assignment compromised his personal security.

  Thus, provided he remained vigilant—and he knew he would—there should be no reason why he couldn’t have the companionship, and eventually maybe even the family, he craved while still keeping those closest to him safe.

  It was doable.

  It was definitely doable.

  ***

  The temperature continued to drop as the sun settled below the horizon. Janie’s reluctance to leave the playground was obvious and
she dawdled, despite the fact she was beginning to shiver under her jacket.

  Edie was alternately coaxing and threatening in her attempts to move the little girl along, and Jack could sense her mounting frustration.

  He bugged his eyes out and turned toward Janie. Began walking stiff-legged in her direction like a zombie and in as spooky a voice as he could manage, said, “We need to hurry, it’s getting cooooold out.”

  Janie laughed and screamed at the same time and sprinted off in the direction of the parking lot.

  Jack grinned and waggled his eyebrows at Edie, then took off behind the girl.

  He yelled, “I’ll bet if we’re really good on the ride home, your mom will make us some hot chocolate!”

  Janie turned around and answered, “I bet she will!” before resuming her all-out sprint toward the truck.

  Moments later, Edie touched Jack on the elbow as he was lifting Janie into the truck. “That’s not fair, Mister. I don’t have any choice about the hot chocolate now.”

  He winked. “I don’t play fair. I thought you knew that.”

  They climbed into the truck and drove off toward Edie’s home.

  5

  Kim Chilcott twirled a stray lock of hair with her finger as she loitered outside the closed door of her husband’s home office.

  The hair thing was a nervous habit she’d never realized she had until after the first time Bradley assaulted her. That revelation—that her husband was a sociopathic monster—had occurred years ago, not long after the birth of their first child, but Kim could still recall every last detail of that awful day as if it had just happened.

  She doubted the clarity would ever fade.

  They’d been fighting. The subject of their disagreement was the same thing young couples had struggled with since the beginning of time: money. Bradley was convinced Kim spent too much of it. He felt she wasted his hard-earned cash on unnecessary extravagances.