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When he held up his hand, inviting her to join him on top of the two parkas, she never thought about refusing. She put her still-trembling fingers into his strong, dark ones, letting him pull her down to the spread coats. As his body lowered over hers, moving as if he had all the time in the world, the last thing she saw before the subtle remains of daylight faded away into night were Joshua Stone’s eyes looking down into hers.
And no matter how many times she recreated that scene during the next three years, she found she could never quite be sure what had been in them.
Chapter One
“Special Ops is asking for you.”
Paige glanced up from the magnifier through which she was studying the latest satellite images of a site along the Russia-Afghanistan border. Her boss hadn’t stopped at her desk. He had simply tossed the paper that held the message he had delivered down on it and then disappeared into his own office.
Special Ops, she thought, wondering how long it had been since she had heard those words. Not nearly long enough.
She wished she could treat the summons as casually as Pete Logan had. Instead, the phrase created an unwanted frisson of anxiety. Almost in self-defense, she looked down through the magnifying glass again, ignoring the paper Logan had dropped on her desk and trying to bring her concentration back to the photographs that had come in only an hour ago.
She had been totally absorbed in them before the interruption. After all, this was her job. Being at the beck and call of Special Operations was not, she thought fiercely, feeling her anger build, despite her attempt to focus on the satellite images. The days she had spent with the spooks were over and done. Long gone. Long forgotten.
Which was why, of course, her ability to concentrate was all of a sudden shot to hell, she thought in disgust. She pushed the magnifier away, the motion almost violent.
Special Ops. What the hell could Special Ops want with her? She glanced at the paper lying on the outer edge of her desk, as reluctant to pick it up as if it were something vile.
The print was facing the other direction, and she couldn’t quite manage to decipher the upsidedown signature of whoever had issued the request. After a fruitless few seconds of trying, she reached out and turned the paper around, her eyes automatically scanning the one-line message before they fell to the name at the bottom. It was one she recognized.
Her gaze lifted to the door of Logan’s office, but she resisted the impulse to go in and ask if he knew any details. Even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. She knew that. She would have to answer this summons, no matter how unpleasant reentering that world, if only for a little while, might be.
Too many memories, she thought. Too many ghosts. And she wasn’t looking forward to resurrecting a single one of them.
“WHY NOW?” Paige asked. “I told you people everything I knew when it happened.”
“You people?” Carl Steiner repeated pointedly, his tented fingers resting under his chin. His dark eyes were amused.
She understood why he had questioned her wording. She had once been one of the people assigned to the CIA’s Special Operations Branch, which Steiner was now head of.
“I told Griff,” she said. “It’s in the incident report.”
“Tell me,” Steiner said. He hadn’t raised his voice, but that was obviously an order. As an assistant deputy director, he was entitled to give them.
Paige didn’t know why she would hesitate to tell him. Other than the fact that she couldn’t see any point in bringing something to life that had been stone-cold dead, maybe even back when she had reported on it to Griff Cabot. Nearly three years ago, she realized with a sense of disbelief.
It didn’t seem possible it had been that long since she had sat in this room pouring out that painful story to someone she considered a friend. Her eyes rose to study the face of the man who now sat behind Cabot’s desk. A man who wasn’t her friend and never had been.
She didn’t have any reason to dislike Carl Steiner. Not any concrete one, anyway. When the External Security Team had been disbanded, however, there had been a lot of rumors that this man had had a major role in that decision.
They had all known, intellectually at least, from the moment of Cabot’s death that the demise of his team would follow. But when the order had come down, none of them had been prepared. The team and their relationships to one another had been too important. Too much a part of who each of them had been then.
“I want you to tell me about Joshua Stone,” Steiner said, his eyes on her face.
Paige had no idea what it might reveal, but that same sensation she had felt when she had heard her boss say Special Ops lurched through her stomach again. Just at the sound of the name. His name.
“He disappeared,” she said. And then nothing else.
She didn’t know what Steiner wanted from her. Or why they were bringing this up after all this time. Joshua Stone was almost certainly dead and buried in some frozen wasteland thousands of miles from here. There was no reason not to let him stay buried, she thought, resenting Steiner’s stirring of the ashes of her life. Particularly these.
“Circumstances?” Steiner prodded, glancing down at a folder in front of him.
Paige’s eyes followed his, wondering if he were looking at Griff’s report. And wondering if Cabot had written down everything she had told him. Even those parts she had clearly intended to be for his ears only.
Maybe there ought to be an official designation within government communications for the kind of conversation they had shared that day. She had never told anyone else the truth about what had happened in Vladistan. No one but Griff. And no matter what Steiner said, she knew she never would.
“We had completed our mission,” she said. As soon she uttered the word “mission,” her mind had gone back, reliving those long-ago events, in spite of the fact that she had sworn never to revisit these memories.
Steiner hadn’t given her much choice, however, and she supposed it would be better just to get this over. Tell him only as much as she wanted to and no more. And trust that Griff hadn’t betrayed her confidence about the rest.
“We were supposed to meet our contact the next day,” she continued, forcing the words through her throat, which seemed constricted. “There was more rebel activity along the border than we had expected. We had to hide a few times from patrols, the last time just a few miles from the border. We knew we were cutting it close, but…it hadn’t been an easy assignment.”
Her voice faded, thinking how true that was. The area had been unstable when they had been sent in, and in the months they had spent there, everything had fallen apart. Including their in-country support. At the last, it had been just her and Josh.
“Go on,” Steiner prompted.
“And then…Stone disappeared,” Paige said, her voice softer than she had intended. More emotional? People like Steiner didn’t like emotion, not of any kind. That’s why they were here. Why they were the ones in charge.
“You woke up the morning before you were to cross the border and found that Stone was missing.”
She nodded, determined not to remember the events of the night before that discovery. She had done that too many times. Especially during that first year.
A long time ago. Just saying those words in her head was a form of comfort, putting distance between her life now and what had happened then. Do it, she told herself. Tell him the rest and be done with it. Put it behind you again.
“Russian tanks rolled in less than four hours later, and Griff, through our contact, ordered me out. I wasn’t given any choice about whether I wanted to leave or not.”
“And exactly what did you do in those four hours?”
There seemed to be accusation in the tone of the question, and Paige’s eyes narrowed against it. “I tried to find Josh. We had to get out before the Russians came, so I tried to find him.”
“And the nerve agent?”
That’s why they had been sent into Vladistan. To find and bring out a deadly neurological toxin, a new class of nerve agent for which there were no antidotes. It had been developed in one of the old Soviet weapons complexes, located in the region. When the rebellion started, the fear in the West was that the rebels might use the agent against the invading Russian troops, provoking a nuclear retaliation.
And then suddenly, feeling stupid that she hadn’t figured it out before, Paige realized this was what Steiner’s summons was all about. There was again unrest within Vladistan. Some people were already predicting another rebellion. Had that nerve agent now shown up in the wrong hands?
It could, of course. It could have at anytime during the last three years, she supposed, because when Joshua Stone had disappeared, that lethal toxin had disappeared with him.
“Josh was carrying it in his backpack,” she said. “I never saw it again.” Or him.
She had told Griff the truth about what had happened between them. A truth that might even be included in the folder Steiner had in front of him, but she didn’t intend to mention her personal involvement with Joshua Stone unless Steiner brought it up. The uneasy silence built until he broke it.
“When you woke up,” Steiner said, his voice flat, no longer questioning, “Stone was gone.”
Paige nodded.
“And you never saw him again?”
Something about the question bothered her. Not the words themselves, which were only the truth, but the nuance of tone in which he had asked. Was that skepticism she heard?
“Griff believed Josh must have been killed shortly after he left the building where we had taken shelter. The whole area was in chaos. Full of rebel patrols.”
“Yet Stone, an experienced operative, left the safety of your hiding place. And he left it alone, leaving you asleep.”
“Maybe he heard something and went out to investigate.”
She had tried for three years to come up with a viable explanation for Josh’s actions. That was the only one that made any kind of sense to her. She could tell by Steiner’s eyes that it made none to him.
“Or maybe he had an appointment,” Steiner said. “A highly lucrative one.”
At the time of his disappearance there had been elements within the agency who suggested Joshua Stone had seen an opportunity to make a fortune and had taken it. A new and very lethal nerve agent would bring millions on the terrorist black market. Stone had both the skills to get it out of the country, and, with his External Security Team experience, the contacts that would be necessary to sell it.
Griff Cabot had never credited that explanation for Josh’s disappearance. Cabot had always had complete confidence in the integrity of his team. Stone, however, wouldn’t have been the first CIA operative to have gone rogue, Paige admitted. And there had been something about his eyes that last night…
“If you’re suggesting that Joshua Stone turned traitor, then you need to review his record,” she said aloud, blocking that niggling, disloyal image. “Griff Cabot, who knew Stone better than anyone else, dismissed that possibility out of hand.”
“Griff would never admit that one of his operatives had gone bad. I’m afraid I’m not quite that…trusting.”
“If you seriously believe Joshua Stone sold that nerve agent to the highest bidder, then how do you explain why it’s never been used?” A shot in the dark, Paige acknowledged, but she had heard nothing in the last three years to suggest it had.
“Maybe whoever bought it is biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity.”
“Or maybe whoever killed Stone never found the toxin,” Paige said. “Maybe they never realized what he was carrying.”
“I confess I prefer your scenario to mine,” Steiner said. “I suppose only time will tell which of us is right.”
“It seems to me that three years is time enough to tell. Joshua Stone wasn’t a traitor.”
“And I sincerely hope you’re right about that, too,” Steiner said, closing the folder and getting to his feet. “If we need any further information, we’ll be in touch.”
His face was unreadable, but it was clear from his words that he considered the interview to be at an end. Paige knew she should be relieved, both that it was over and that his questions had been no more probing. For some reason, however, there was a letdown after the abruptness with which this questioning had ended. The whole thing seemed anticlimactic, especially in the face of the frightening suggestions he had made.
Paige stood, pushing the heavy leather chair back from the edge of the desk. She wondered if she should offer him her hand and decided, illogically, that she didn’t want to shake hands with Carl Steiner. She didn’t want anymore contact with him than was necessary. She reached the door to his office and then, very definitely against her better judgment, she turned back.
Steiner was still standing behind his desk. He was looking down at the file he had just closed, the tips of the fingers of his right hand resting on top of it, as if it might spring open if he didn’t hold it shut.
“Why now?” she asked again.
His dark eyes lifted, questioning.
“Why bring me in to talk about this now?” she asked.
There was the smallest of pauses, not even enough to call suspicious, unless you were already suspicious. “The region is becoming unstable again. This is a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. The agency doesn’t like those. Since you were the last person to see Stone alive…”
A loose end? Somehow Paige didn’t think he meant the disappearance of Joshua Stone. Steiner’s concern was almost certainly for that incredibly dangerous chemical weapon, which had gone missing in a region noted for being a powder keg.
As she watched, the thin lips of the head of Special Ops moved into what was supposed to be a smile. It seemed cold, lacking in feeling. Maybe someone like Steiner didn’t really feel. Maybe that’s what made him good at this. And maybe that’s what had made her such a failure.
“Good luck,” she said, barely avoiding sarcasm.
She put her hand on the knob and opened the door, stepping out into the deserted hallway, and then closing it carefully behind her, deliberately not letting it make any noise.
She hadn’t believed him, she realized. Intuition, maybe, but she thought Carl Steiner was lying about wanting to tie up loose ends. Something had happened, something besides the ongoing instability of that area. Something that had revived the mystery of Joshua Stone’s disappearance.
However, whatever was happening in Special Operations these days, she told herself determinedly, was no longer of any concern to her. And thank God, it was also no longer her responsibility.
JACK THOMPSON hunched his shoulders, holding the evening paper he’d just bought over his head as he made a run for the cab that had finally pulled up to the curb in front of his office building. He hated rain. Especially cold rain. It made all the bones that had been broken ache with a renewed vengeance.
He jerked open the cab door, slid in across the cold vinyl of the back seat, and then slammed it shut against the downpour. After he gave the driver his address, he settled gratefully into the taxi’s stale warmth.
He’d take a couple of extra-strength aspirin when he got home, he decided, and turn up the thermostat. He had some stronger stuff, but he saved that for the headaches. He hadn’t had one of those in almost three weeks, he realized, and he hoped to God he never had another.
He gazed out the window as they began to move, watching the twilight-darkened streets rush by through the screen of raindrops on the glass. A car had pulled out from a parking place on the opposite side of the street at the same time the cab had, and its headlights briefly haloed the droplets with rims of gold.
“Rain’s a bitch,” the driver said, “but I hear this stuff’ll turn to snow tonight. I ain’t looking forward to that either.”
Jack pulled his eyes from the wet gleam of the sidewalks, which were reflecting the lights from the stores behind them, and glanced at the back of the driver’s head.
“I hadn’t heard about the snow,” he said.
“Not from around here, are you?” the driver asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Originally, I mean.”
“No,” Jack said. His accent was different enough that it sometimes evoked comment, although Atlanta was pretty cosmopolitan these days. He wasn’t from the South, however, and anyone who was spotted that immediately.
“Where you from?”
He knew the driver was only making conversation, maybe to relieve boredom, maybe in hopes of a larger tip. And Jack could have supplied the facts easily enough. Trying to feel some connection with them, he had gone over the information the cops had provided a million times.
He knew everything on those sheets by heart. And none of it felt real. Or meant anything to him. That would pass, the doctors had assured him. That feeling of disassociation with who he was. Simply the lingering result of the head injury. And, they had said, he was lucky its effects hadn’t been more severe.
“Don’t push it,” the psychiatrist he had seen at the last hospital had warned. That had been just before Jack had been released from the rehab center, his physical injuries healed, even if his memory hadn’t yet returned. “If it comes, it comes. If you try to get it all back, if you push too hard, then…who knows what may happen?” the doctor had said, shrugging.
Jack could remember wondering exactly what he meant by that. He had made it sound as if Jack’s brain would implode or something if he tried to force the return of those memories.
Still, he knew they were there, lying just below the surface of his mind. Sometimes, especially in dreams, they were so close he could almost touch them. It was like looking down into a dark pond and seeing things beneath the surface, murky and unclear, but definitely there. Just a little too far down to reach.
“Hey, buddy,” the cabbie said.
Jack’s eyes came back up, meeting the questioning ones in the rearview mirror. The cabbie was looking at him as if he thought Jack was some kind of nutcase. People did that sometimes. They seemed to pick up on the fact that there was something wrong. That something about him didn’t fit anymore. Jack never was quite sure how they knew, but their eyes always looked at him just like this guy’s were now.
“Des Moines,” he said.
“Yeah?” the driver said, his voice relieved. “Could’a fooled me. That don’t sound like the Midwest.”
Jack smiled, and then he deliberately turned his head, looking out the window again as the rain-glazed streets swept by. He had heard that comment a couple of times before, and it had bothered him enough that he had even checked it out. Not so much because of the accent, but because of the way he felt.
So he had paid one of those people-find agencies on the Web to do a search for a Jack Thompson from Des Moines. It had all been there. Exactly like the cops had told him.
