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Then why the hell can’t I remember any of it? Why the hell doesn’t any of it feel as if it has a damn thing to do with me?
There was no answer from the gathering darkness to either of those questions. Just as there hadn’t been for the past three months. And he was beginning to be forced to think about the possibility that there never would be.
PAIGE KNEW as soon as she opened the door to her apartment that someone had been there. A hint of something alien lingered in the familiar air. It took her a second or two to identify the smell as cigarette smoke.
Maybe not the smoke itself, she acknowledged, taking a deep breath, but the whiff of it that clings to a chronic smoker’s clothes and hair. She stood before the door she had closed behind her, wondering if there was someone else in her apartment. A burglar? Or another, more dangerous kind of intruder?
It felt empty, however. She knew intuitively that whoever had been here was now gone. If she had come home half an hour later, the heating system and the filters would probably have taken care of the faint odor, and she would never have known.
The first thing she did was to take the semiautomatic out of the bedside drawer where she kept it. Although she was grateful to have it in her hand, it felt almost as alien as the ghostly scent she was chasing. Then, despite her sense that there was no one here, she checked out all four rooms, opening closets, looking under the bed and behind the shower curtain.
Nothing seemed to have been taken or disturbed. Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel as if she had been invaded. Violated, somehow. This was her home, and someone had come into it without her permission.
It wasn’t until her hand was on the phone to report the break-in, that she remembered the call to maintenance she’d made. More than three weeks ago, she realized. It had been her first request for repairs since she had moved in. Was it possible, she wondered, that the maintenance staff had let themselves in without notifying her they were coming?
Which should be easy enough to check out. She walked over to the light switch by the door that led from the living room into the kitchen. It controlled the overhead fixture in the kitchen and had started malfunctioning a few weeks ago.
Of course, she could walk across the kitchen and turn on the overhead light by using the switch beside the sink, but since these were newly constructed apartments, something going wrong so quickly had seemed strange. She had been afraid it might mean faulty wiring, which had made her nervous enough to call.
She pushed the switch up now, and the fixture in the middle of the kitchen ceiling didn’t respond. Which didn’t necessarily mean maintenance hadn’t been here, she acknowledged. Just that they hadn’t fixed whatever was wrong.
Paige walked back to the phone, shrugging out of her coat and throwing it over the back of the couch as she did. She took the resident manager’s card out of the drawer of the end table where the phone was sitting, and laying the pistol down, she punched in his number. She’d feel better knowing that he had sent someone up here today, she thought, as she listened to the distant ring. A hell of a lot better.
When he said hello, she got right to the point. “This is Paige Daniels in 1228. I was just wondering if you sent somebody up here to look at my kitchen light switch?”
“Hold on a minute,” the manager said. In the background she could hear the sound of papers rattling and finally he came back on the line. “It’s gonna be a while on that, Miss Daniels. The crews are taking care of emergency situations first—heating and plumbing problems. You did say the other switch still works?”
One part of her mind was assimilating his denial and his questions. The other part was trying to figure who had been here if not maintenance. “It works,” she agreed. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone closed over the pistol again. “Look, are you absolutely sure no one’s been up here today?”
“The switch start working again? Sometimes wiring does that. Probably just a short. If I were you, I’d just keep it off until we can get somebody up there to take a look at it.
“Would it be better to throw the breaker?” she asked, realizing only now that it was possible what she had smelled hadn’t been tobacco smoke. Maybe it had been hot wiring.
“I don’t see why you’d need to do that. Besides, that breaker probably controls some other stuff, too.”
“I’m a little nervous because I smelled smoke when I came in from work,” she said, readily discarding her original theory.
“Just now?”
“About five minutes ago.”
“You still smell it?”
She took a breath, drawing air in through her nose. She had been inside long enough now that she couldn’t smell anything. Coming in from the fresh air outside had made the scent of smoke obvious. Now however…
“I’m not sure. Look, could you just come up here and check out that switch? Maybe something’s hot under the plate.”
There was a moment’s hesitation. She couldn’t blame him. It was Friday night, already late because she had stopped for dinner on the way home. And maintenance wasn’t his job. Of course, keeping the complex from burning down probably was, at least as far as his employers would be concerned.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, apparently reaching that conclusion at the same time. “You understand I can’t fix the switch, but I can make sure nothing’s smoldering under it.”
“Thanks,” Paige said. “I really appreciate this.”
She put the phone down and walked back over to the wall plate. It looked innocent enough. No telltale threads of smoke escaping from behind the ubiquitous plastic rectangle. She was probably being ridiculous.
She took a quick look around the apartment. There were a few dishes in the sink and her coat was out. She walked across to the couch and picked it up. She opened the drawer of the phone table and slipped the pistol inside before she carried her coat over to the hall closet and hung it up.
After she had shoved the dirty plate and cup from breakfast into the dishwasher, she headed back to take another look at the switch plate. She put her nose close to it, inhaling deeply, trying to find any trace of what she had smelled before. It seemed to have vanished, however, and she straightened, blowing the air she had just inhaled out in a small sigh of frustration.
She was headed back to the bedroom to look into her closet again when the doorbell rang. Maybe maintenance was slow, but the resident manager seemed to be on the ball.
Paige hurried to the door and looked out through the peephole. It was the same guy who had showed her the apartment six months ago. She turned the latch and the knob at the same time, a two-handed operation, and threw open the door.
“Hi,” he said. The shoulders of his jacket were dark from the rain. He was carrying a small screw driver, and he had a pager on his belt, revealed by the open windbreaker.
Just as she had earlier, he stopped on the threshold and, lifting his nose, scented the air like a hunting dog. “Don’t smell a thing,” he said, smiling.
“Maybe it’s a false alarm, but I definitely smelled something when I came in.”
She didn’t mention that her first impression had been cigarette smoke and that she had thought someone had been in here. Right now all she wanted was for him to make sure that during the night her apartment wasn’t going to go up in flames with her inside it. Little enough to ask, she told herself.
He walked over to the switch and made the same sniff test she had made. She expected another comment about not smelling anything, but he didn’t make it. Instead, he walked into the kitchen, and she heard him open the circuit box. There were clicking noises, and the light in the kitchen went off.
When he came back, he said, “Let’s take a look.”
He placed the tip of the screwdriver into one of the tiny Phillips head screws and began to unthread it. When he had finished with the first screw, he took the other one out, slipping the plastic plate off the wall. There was no whiff of smoke from the rough cut opening behind it. There was only a tangle of wires, none of them smoldering.
The manager put the screwdriver and the cover plate on the floor, carefully laying the screws on top of it. He bent so that he was on eye level with the hole in the wall. Then he reached into it with one finger, pushing around amid the wires.
“Nothing hot. No smoke. I think that it probably—” His voice stopped, as his finger probed deeper into the hole. “What in the world?” he said, the words almost under his breath.
Hearing them, Paige edged closer, anticipating a glimpse of a frayed or burnt wire. She couldn’t see anything, however, and other than bending down and putting her head next to his as he poked around in there, she wasn’t likely to.
Almost as soon as she thought that, he inserted his thumb as well as his index finger into the hole, fumbling among the wires. And when he straightened, he brought something small and dark out of the opening. He laid it on the palm of his other hand.
“Never seen anything like this before,” he said. “Not in a wall switch. Maybe they were going to put in a dimmer and then changed their minds. Cost overruns, maybe. They must have decided to go with a less expensive option.”
He held the object he’d retrieved from the faulty switch out for Paige’s inspection. She didn’t need a closer look. She had recognized it immediately. What the resident manager had just taken out of the wall of her apartment was the latest version of a very sensitive listening device. At some time during the six months she had lived here, someone had bugged her apartment.
SHE SPENT most of the night tossing and turning, everything that had happened running endlessly through her head. She replayed Steiner’s words, examining each of them, even trying to remember the expression on his face when he’d said them. And every time she did, she came back to the same comment. Something that hadn’t reverberated as strongly then as it should have.
Of course, at the time she hadn’t known that the agency was bugging her apartment. She still didn’t know that, she admitted, trying to be reasonable. What she did know was that there had been a very sophisticated listening device planted in her wall, exactly like the state-of-the-art ones the CIA used.
She couldn’t know how long the bug had been in place, but the light switch had started acting up after she’d moved in. Maybe a couple of months ago. Maybe a little less.
And another thing she knew was that someone had been inside her apartment today. To put the device in her wall? Or to check on it because it had stopped working?
Or had they been there for some reason totally unrelated to the bug. To search the apartment? To read her computer files? She hadn’t found any evidence of either of those things, but she knew that whoever the agency sent would be good at what they did.
And “good at what they did” brought her back to the other significant thing that had happened today: Steiner’s summons and the comments he had made as she had been about to go out his door. This was a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. Since you were the last person to see him alive…
She thought all the pertinent questions about that mission been asked back then. And as far as she knew, they had been answered to the agency’s satisfaction. Or at least to the satisfaction of anyone who had known Joshua Stone.
Had a trusted operative disappeared in order to sell that nerve agent on the black market, as Steiner implied? There was no denying such a sale would have been a huge temptation for some people. Not for Joshua Stone. She would never believe that.
Griff Cabot had believed that Stone had been captured by one of the opposing sides in the rebellion. If the Russians had taken him prisoner, they might have tried to arrange a trade, exchanging Josh for one of their own compromised agents. Washington usually agreed to such deals to get their people home, and Cabot would have done his best to influence them to make that decision. As far as Paige knew, no such offer had ever been made.
The strongest likelihood, given the time frame, was that Josh had heard someone outside the cellar that night. He had gone to investigate and been captured by the rebel forces.
Maybe they had taken him with them as they retreated from the Russian advance, intending to interrogate him later. Or maybe whoever had captured Josh hadn’t known about the theft of the toxin. Maybe they had simply killed him, leaving his body and the backpack he’d carried in the snow, never knowing what a valuable prize they’d lost.
Whatever happened, Joshua Stone, the most experienced member of the External Security Team, had disappeared forever on that mission. And Paige Daniels, the novice, had escaped from Vladistan as Russian tanks rolled across its border. She had escaped, and Josh had not. Maybe, as she had always believed in her heart, because he had gone out into that dangerous darkness to protect her from whatever he had heard.
Lying in her bed, eyes open and staring, the haunting images of that night played again through her consciousness. The same night he had made love to her for hours, until she had finally drifted into a deep and exhausted sleep.
She hadn’t allowed herself to indulge in this particular exercise in futility in a very long time, but she didn’t deny those memories tonight. And they steeled her determination to prove Carl Steiner was wrong. She was as convinced today as she had been then that Joshua Stone hadn’t been a traitor.
By bugging her apartment the agency seemed to be trying to implicate her in whatever they imagined Josh had done three years ago. And she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong on that mission. Nothing except sleep while someone took her partner. Nothing except survive when he hadn’t.
Now someone in his own agency was trying to blacken Joshua Stone’s name. And there was no one from the External Security Team left to defend his reputation. No one but her.
She had failed him once before. No one had ever seemed to blame her, but she had always blamed herself. And after three long years, she had discovered that the ghost of Joshua Stone was one she needed very badly to put to rest.
Chapter Two
Reactivated.
Paige stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. As she tried to think what else that word could possibly mean, she fought a surge of emotion she didn’t want to feel, not after all this time.
She had started her search as soon as she’d gotten into the office this morning, trying to discover what had set Steiner off. Something must have come to light fairly recently that had made him question Stone’s disappearance. Something that had made him call her in. Something that had made them plant a listening device in her apartment. Something.
She had spent most of the day scanning page after page of the tedious situation reports that had come in about Vladistan during the last four months. Because of her work in Sector Analysis, she was already familiar with most of this material. And on closer examination she had found nothing that might be construed as having anything to do with Josh or with the nerve agent he had been carrying when he’d disappeared. The computers had been next, and she had cross-referenced everything she could think of that might apply to the region, to the rebellion, or to that particular mission. And again, she had come up empty.
It was only then, an exercise in nostalgia perhaps or maybe because she had run out of ideas, that she had tried to access the old External Security Team files. Unbelievably, she had found that the access codes had never been changed. The files themselves were intact, even though the team hadn’t even been in existence for more than two and a half years.
The bureaucratic mind works in mysterious ways, Paige had thought, as she typed in Joshua Stone’s name. When the file came up, she had discovered the reactivated notation. And the date it had been made was less than four months ago. She scrolled through the whole thing, trying to find more recent additions or changes, but there were none.
Which made no sense, she thought in frustration. Why activate a dead file and then do nothing with it? Or was the reactivation simply a clerical error? Did somebody key in the wrong access number? Things like that happened, even at the CIA.
And she might have been willing to believe they had in this case, if it hadn’t been for Steiner’s questions yesterday. If you put these two things together, they had to mean something. Something obviously connected to Joshua Stone’s disappearance.
Reactivated. There was nothing else there. Nothing after that one entry, which had brought a dead file back to life and out of limbo where it should have remained. Why would someone reactivate a file and then not put anything in it? That made no sense. Unless…
When the explanation hit her, producing a rush of adrenaline so strong her hands began to shake, it all made sense. Because it fit the pattern. And the bureaucratic mind-set. Joshua Stone had been a member of External Security, and she knew what had happened to the other operatives on that team.
As far as she could tell, she was the only one who was still working for the agency. After the fiasco in Vladistan, she had requested a move back into Sector Analysis. Griff had tried to talk her out of leaving, but the transfer had gone through.
Then Cabot had been killed, and the elite antiterrorist team he’d assembled stood down. Since she hadn’t been a member long enough to have participated in any of the black ops missions the EST was famous for, Paige couldn’t represent any threat to security, and she had been allowed to stay in the CIA.
The other agents, however, had been destroyed—at least on paper. And then they had been carefully resurrected. Recreated as totally different people, their original identities erased. Their agency records had been purged, so that no one could ever trace those men, or what they had done, back to the agency.
In most cases, their names had been changed and they had been relocated. At least a couple of them, like Jordan Cross, had had their physical appearance altered as well.
Now she was looking at the agency’s file on Joshua Stone, a man who had been presumed dead before the team was disbanded. It had been reactivated, brought back to life less than four months ago. Then nothing had been added to the folder, so maybe…
Paige closed the file and backtracked. There was no “list all” feature on these kinds of secure files, so when she reached the main directory, she typed in the date when the designation on Stone’s file had been changed. Then her hands hovered over the keyboard as she stared at those numbers, almost afraid of what she might find. Finally, holding her breath, she hit Search.
And was bitterly disappointed when there were no results, other than in the folder she had just closed. There was no other file with a matching date in this entire section of the records. There shouldn’t be any recent dates, of course, since the team was no longer in existence, but that didn’t explain why someone had changed the designation of Josh’s folder.
She couldn’t be wrong about this. It fit. It made sense. Maybe she was just rushing the bureaucracy, giving them more credit for efficiency than they deserved. After all, it might have taken them a while to decide what to do.
She typed in the following day’s date. And when there were no results for that one either, she typed the next date in the blank. Then the next, working methodically now.
And finally, ten days after somebody had brought Joshua Stone’s file back to life, there it was. A matching date. In the middle of all the inactive folders of a now-defunct, highly secretive special operations team was a brand new file. A new name. But not a new man, Paige knew with absolute certainty.
“Joshua Stone,” she said softly. “Fancy meeting you here.”
NOT MUCH DOUBT, Paige thought, her eyes focused on the man seated across the crowded restaurant. Not much doubt left at all, despite the obvious physical changes.
This was the closest she had come to him. Close enough to study his features. However, even at a distance, his mannerisms had seemed heart-stoppingly familiar. The set of his head. The understated, almost elegant power of his body. Something about the way he used his hands. Even their shape.
She knew in her heart that this was Joshua Stone. The blue-black hair was threaded with gray, and then there were the scars, slightly reddened as if they were still fairly new. One crossed his right brow, causing a break in its thick black line. The other ran from the corner of his lips, slanting downward across his chin to disappear under his jaw.
Even the structure of the bones seemed slightly altered, as if they had been broken and then put back together, the fit not quite as perfect as it had once been. His nose had definitely been reshaped, molded into something less arrogant. The result was no less compelling or attractive, but it was different.
She had been trailing the man who called himself Jack Thompson for almost two days, but she hadn’t approached him. She had told herself that she wanted to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. That this wasn’t some kind of bizarre coincidence. That’s what she had told herself, although she had known the truth about who he was, almost from the moment she had seen him again.
Now there were no more excuses. The only thing left in doubt was what she wanted to do about what she’d discovered. Because she knew that no matter what Griff Cabot had believed three years ago, Joshua Stone wasn’t dead.
She didn’t know where he had been during those years, but there was no mystery about where he’d been the last couple of months. He had been living in Atlanta, working for one of the international brokerage firms headquartered here. Paige had wondered if the company was a front for the CIA or if it was simply a legitimate business that had some reason to cooperate with the agency by placing one of its ex-agents—an operative the CIA wanted to hide—on its payroll.
She didn’t suppose that really mattered. It was just something to think about instead of all the other things she’d been trying not to think about since she’d discovered Joshua Stone wasn’t dead.
She looked down at the unappetizing salad in front of her, wondering why she had ordered it. Because other than eating, there isn’t any excuse for being here.
Josh had eaten in this small neighborhood café both of the nights she’d been trailing him. He had stopped in on his way home from work. Having tried it now herself, she couldn’t say much for his choice.
She poked at a piece of lettuce with her fork, finally spearing it, along with a piece of ham and a small slice of cheese, on the tines. She dipped the combination into the watery looking salad dressing, and then raised the fork to take a bite. She looked up as she did, directly into Joshua Stone’s eyes.
She wondered if he felt anything remotely resembling the jolt that had given her, even from across the room. She looked down quickly, but she was forced to admit that this must have been what she was hoping for when she had come in here tonight. Hoping he would notice her. Hoping he would make contact, despite whatever rules the CIA had set up for his relocation.
She supposed that what the agency did with members of the EST worked like Witness Security. Contact with anyone from their former life would be forbidden. Even with a former partner.
She realized that she was still holding the forkful of food halfway to her mouth. Pretty telling, she supposed, but after all, Josh should understand. It wasn’t often one was confronted with a ghost.
She wondered what he was thinking. That this was an accident? A fluke? Or that the agency, maybe even Steiner himself, had sent her?
She put the fork down on her plate, unable to make herself take that bite. And then slowly she raised her eyes again, prepared now to make contact with his.
