The Secrets We Keep

by David Horne

  “The Secrets We Keep”

  M/M Gay Romance

  David Horne

  © 2019

  David Horne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.

  Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/ (courtesy of Jerry Cole).

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images and are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.00 (2019.12.02)

  http://www.DavidHorneauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Penny T., David C., RB, JayBee, Naomi and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  US Marines Registry Center

  Chicago, Illinois

  Ten years ago

  The city of Chicago was a bustling metropolis situated on the bank of Lake Michigan. As with pretty much every other city in the US, its citizens considered it “the greatest city in the world”. Twenty-three-year-old Curtis Holmes had to respect that patriotic, American spirit, at the very least.

  New Yorkers would tell you all about The Knicks stadium, the Yankees stadium, Times Square, the Empire State Building.

  Texans, about the Houston Space Center. West Coasters would never shut up about Beverly Hills, San Francisco, the Space Needle in Seattle. Every city in America was the best city in America to somebody who lived in America. To Curtis? Well, he wasn’t, strictly speaking, American. His mother was, but his father? Far removed. And Curtis’ home was, in his opinion, the good old city of London town. There really was no place like it, when push came to shove at the end of the day.

  But, in Chicago, Curtis was about as far away from London as it was possible to be, and he had been for a few months now. When people asked him about this, he said that he was “traveling.” The truth was that Curtis’ mother had lung cancer, and it’d been her first request after getting the news that her children—if not all, at least one—come to live with her for the little time that she had left in the world. Curtis had expected his four other siblings to make the journey too, and yet none of them had made the trip, and Curtis had found himself arriving in Chicago by himself.

  Each and every day, he felt as though his mother—once and proud, strong and healthy wife and mother—woke up a shadow of the woman that she had been the night before. He felt like he was losing her, and he felt hopeless. Curtis Holmes was many things, but he was done being hopeless. He’d spent sunlit days and sleepless nights thinking and pondering about what he was going to do; not about his mother, no, she was beyond his help. What was he going to do about his life?

  He’d expected the answer to come to him in a brilliant flash of inspiration, and yet he was wrong. If truth be told, Curtis believed that deep-down, he had always known where his purpose lay. What he wanted to do. And that was the reason that he was here, at the US Marine Corps induction center in Chicago, barely an hour’s drive from his mother’s house.

  And there he’d been, for most of the morning, twiddling his thumbs until he was finally called to the front desk. “Next.”

  Half asleep in his hard, plastic chair, Curtis jerked awake and was fully awake before he’d even fully stood up. He paused for a moment to pat the breast pocket of his shirt to make sure his application form was still there before rushing forward, down the corridor, to the reception.

  Sitting behind the desk was a man nearing his fifties. He had a short, military haircut, a couple of scars on his cheeks like he'd been in the forces long. Probably one of the high-ranking Marines, Curtis reckoned.

  Joined at a young age, maybe had been a bit of a wildcard in his youth. Then he'd straightened out a bit once he'd been given a bit of power and was ending his career with a comfy desk job after a few years of hectic missions.

  Probably.

  "Form," the man said gruffly.

  Curtis opened his pocket, slipped out the folded square of paper, and tossed it down onto the desk mutely. The man swiped it up, unfolded it noisily and rustled it a few times, glaring at Curtis over the top edge of the sheet before flicking his eyes downward at it.

  Curtis counted eighteen seconds before the man's gaze moved back up. Curtis noticed that he was white-knuckling the sheet of paper.

  "Mr. Holmes?”

  Curtis nodded, slightly embarrassed. He really hoped that the old-timer wasn’t about to make the “Sherlock Holmes” joke. If Curtis had a penny for every time he’d heard that one, he’d never need to work again in his life!

  "Curtis Steven Holmes?" the man checked. "Resident of... 344 Jester Grove, Rockford, Illinois?”

  Curtis nodded again, eyes narrowing uncertainty.

  The old-timer nodded. “Wait a moment, please.”

  He reached for the phone on his desk and picked it up. He didn’t speak for a long while, seemingly either waiting for a connection or was just listening to someone on the other end and was a really good listener.

  Then, finally, he spoke. “Yes, sir,” he said gruffly. “I have him right here, sir. Yes, sir. Hard to miss a name like ‘Holmes’, sir.”

  Curtis’ nerves were rapidly approaching critical mass. What was wrong? Was he in trouble? Was he being arrested, assassinated? What could justify this? Curtis briefly wondered if he was being attacked, and he gulped. He’d only recently gotten his black belt at Wing Chun, but training and being in an actual fight were two different things. Completely different things.

  The old-timer finally put the phone down and gestured to the corridor behind his desk. “Down there, second door on your right,” he said clearly. “If you get lost, say you’re looking for Director Oswald.”

  Curtis nodded a word of thanks and proceeded past him into the corridor. Thankfully, he wasn’t an absolute numbskull, so finding the second door on the right proved to be a simple task. His confusion only increased when he stepped inside, however. The room was empty.

  Plain green walls, laminated floor, empty frames hung on the walls. The only thing of interest was the man that stood in the room, his back to Curtis. Curtis didn’t immediately speak, not quite knowing what to say. The black-suited man turned to face him, smiling with kind eyes. “Good mo
rning, Mr. Holmes,” said the man. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Curtis frowned. “Who are you?”

  “My name isn’t important,” the man shrugged. “I work for a federal agency, that’s what you need to know.”

  “Which one?” Curtis half-snorted.

  The man snorted right back. “And there’s your first mistake. Thinking that there’s more than one.”

  Curtis blinked. “Wait, what?”

  “I work for a federal agency that handles specialized intelligence and espionage, Mr. Holmes,” the man said. “We recruit people who we think would fit our line of work. And I want to offer you a chance to join us. You should know that this isn’t a Hollywood movie about spies. This is serious. And as of right now, you have two options. You can go back out there. Your credentials are impressive enough to get you into the USMC, no questions asked. Or, option B, you can come up with me, and change with the world. What’s it going to be?”

  Chapter One

  Hong Kong, China

  February 11th, 2019

  Ten years later

  Career paths always were an odd, fickle thing. Nobody could ever see them coming, and when they collided, lives were completely rearranged. Some were destroyed, others were built up, but they were almost always very nearly catastrophic. They came out of nowhere, and one minute you want your life to be back how it was, and then the next minute, you can’t imagine your life before this amazing thing happened.

  Curtis Holmes had always wondered whether that was him just forgetting the past, or was it his whole perspective adapting?

  Case in point, if you could have gone back ten years in time and told Curtis that in ten years he was going to be an accomplished federal intelligence agent with a string of accomplished missions under his belt, he would have called you crazy. As a matter of fact, somebody did offer him the chance to become an accomplished federal intelligence agent with a string of accomplished missions under his belt ten years ago, and while he didn’t outright call them crazy—not in so many words—it was clear to all parties involved that Curtis Holmes didn’t consider himself cut out for espionage work.

  Which is ironic, considering he had a surname like “Holmes.” That’s like he was born to do espionage work, in fact. It’s so perfect, that if Curtis were to write a biography about his time in espionage, it’d technically be copyright, and Arthur Conan Doyle would have been able to sue him for ridiculous amounts of money.

  Luckily for him, Curtis had ridiculous amounts of money. Unluckily for him, he never actually had the time to spend it. The life of a secret agent is not one lush with luxurious hours with which to pursue anything they feel like doing. No, those tuxedo’s that James Bond wore didn’t come cheap, and they don’t pay for themselves either. Curtis, like many of his fellow field agents, was always off in some exotic country, not catching a tan, rather catching international terrorists. Considering he was only thirty-three, Curtis actually considered his horizons officially broadened. He’d been to perhaps not every country, but certainly every continent, and had made official arrests in all of those continents.

  He’d stopped assassins from taking out foreign dignitaries. He’d helped to cripple entire crime syndicates and toppled foreign countries. Once, Curtis even claimed to have stopped an eco-terrorist from launching nuclear ordnance which he stole from the Kremlin in Russia, although nobody was there to corroborate this story, and the general consensus is that he stole it from the plot of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

  All-in-all, Curtis was very much a “been there, done that” kind of person. He liked to think he’d been everywhere and done everything, but even for an intelligence agent of his caliber, even for a man who could prevent whole wars, there were certain forms of warfare to which Curtis was woefully ignorant. And those are perhaps the deadliest.

  There weren’t many places in the world like Hong Kong. Officially it was the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, but as anybody who had access to the Interpol database knew, it was a hotspot of Triad activity. A common misconception was that the Triads were a vast crime syndicate that operated in China. Hollywood was to blame for that. In actuality, the Triads would never allow themselves to be so limited as to operate out of a single country, even one that was as vast as China.

  Not only were they populous across the entire Eastern seaboard, including Japan and Taiwan, but Triad cells could be found in any country with a significant Chinese or Oriental population, including the US, Canada, France, Belgium, Spain, the UK, the list went on. With influence over one of the most powerful countries on Earth, the superpower that was China, the Triads were at the top of the list of most dangerous crime syndicates in the world, and certainly so in Asia, closely followed by the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia.

  The dunderheads at Interpol kept what they imagined to be a close eye on organized crime syndicates such as the Triads, and did what they could to strike out at the Triads’ assets, but they were fools if they thought that they were anything more than a flea on the dog’s back, nipping at the ankle of the beast. To bare teeth at its throat, Interpol didn’t have the gall for that. They left that to the quote-unquote “big boys” of the playground. The world’s first and foremost intelligence services. There were a lot of misconceptions and false assumptions surrounding the very idea of secret services, populated by the mainstream media.

  The average Joe on the street watched TV and believed what it told him. Americans believed that their secret service program was head-up by the CIA or the Central Intelligence Agency. An organization headquartered in Virginia. What poppycock! What kind of secret service would have a building with its name on it? And a logo? And business cards? What kind of secret service would have a website? The CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the US Secret Service, they were all fronts.

  The real big boys of the playground were the ones that nobody knew the names of. The ones that no one had heard of. The ones who didn’t show up wearing vests with brightly colored acronyms on them, or have ID cards with logos, and who didn’t report to giant buildings with the company name emblazoned across it. Those were the real secret services.

  And for the USA, their one and only true secret service were called Columbus, a name that you wouldn’t find anywhere on the internet, with any kind of correlation to specialized intelligence. They didn’t have a logo, they didn’t have business cards or any officially known HQ, and they most certainly didn’t have a website or a motto that could be found on Google.

  Columbus was an entity that existed only in the minds of its agents. It had been formed directly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in August of 1776, almost three hundred years ago, but its training regime was so harsh that the first agent didn’t graduate until almost two decades later, shortly after the election of the first POTUS, George Washington. In honor of the new President, that agent was codenamed, Chief Agent Washington. There would be forty-nine more additions to Columbus before the start of the 1900s, each with a codename in honor of America’s fifty states. These fifty agents would come to be known as the Founding Agents, the best of the best.

  But Columbus wouldn’t officially be legislated as a federal agency in its own right until nearly two centuries after its start. A dismissed agent went rogue, assassinated the President and impersonated him, intending to assume control of the country. However, this threat was quelled when another Columbus agent, Lee Harvey Oswald, codenamed Agent Wyoming, shot the impersonator in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. To the whole world, Oswald was a murderer, but behind closed doors, he was honored above all else. Columbus would go on to prevent well over twenty more uncredited, long-term, terrorist threats to the United States mainland.

  The United States’ true secret service had quite a rich backstory, to voice the truth of it.

  There were few who were more familiar with this backstory than Curtis Holmes. An intelligence operative of dual citizenship—an American mother and a British fa
ther—Curtis had spent his childhood in England and much of his teenage years living in Detroit with his mother. A highly intelligent and resourceful young man with an incredible ability to learn and retain information, he was a black belt at three forms of martial arts and knew six languages by his twenties. With a taste for combat, he’d applied to join up to the US Marine Corps but instead was streamlined to the top-secret application process for Columbus. Halfway through basic training, however, the English government got wind of his ability and offered him a place at Cicada, the highest echelon of British Intelligence.

  Wanting to be in the UK near his home and his father, Curtis accepted and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of Cicada’s best Special Agents. Curtis did what he loved and loved what he did, but he couldn’t always stop himself wondering what could have been had he stayed at Columbus.

  To this very day, they had countless agents in foreign countries. Some working to destabilize foreign nations, sometimes working on infiltration or extraction, but there were almost always scores of their agents running espionage. Going under deep cover to gather intelligence and reporting back. And in fact, Columbus had several agents under such cover operating in China on that very day. Coincidentally, the chief Triad cell in Hong Kong had just busted an undercover foreign agent within their ranks that very day.

  But the agent they’d uncovered wasn’t American. Instead, it was Curtis himself, on a reconnaissance detail for Cicada. For an undercover agent, having your cover blown is high on the list of the worst things that can happen to you, and Curtis was well aware of the standard regulations of what he should do if caught or exposed. But he’d known from day one that suicide wasn’t exactly his cup of tea, and so he’d have to freestyle this one. Having said that, Curtis wasn’t feeling very optimistic about his chances. Curtis still wasn’t sure what exactly had blown his cover; perhaps it had been outside intelligence monitoring his transmissions.