Betrayals (Black Cipher Files series Book 2) (8 page)

The effort behind this search meant time, money, and training. With the resources already expended, the logical assumption would be they also planted a bug. He wasn’t touching this conversation inside where anyone could be listening in.

“Outside,” he barked.

He yanked open the floor-to-ceiling glass slider and stalked out onto the cream stone patio. Waves crashed against the shore while seagulls squawked lazily, dipping and swooping into the surf for their lunch.

Jordan studied the pergola.

They hadn’t neglected the outside either.

Neli paced around the patio, her jerky movements irritating him on some subconscious level. Finally she twisted around to stand awkwardly to his left. He pivoted away from the interior of the house. Even if there was a camera or bug out here, the sound of the pounding waves should mask their words.

“Why haven’t you been here before now?” He kept his voice low so she would have to lean in to hear.

“Miss Staci, she called me about a few weeks ago and said not to worry about cleaning the house for some little bit. Knew she wouldn’t be back.” Her gaze skittered away from him.

She was lying.

The question was--about Staci calling or about when she called?

“Really?” He crossed his arms over his chest, flexing his muscles and expanding his shoulders. At six foot three he could be pretty damn intimidating. “Have you seen her since?”

“I’ve been talking to you every day, haven’t I?” She countered, fluttering around the patio like a dragonfly on speed, picking up chair cushions, trying to stuff batting back inside. “Just look at dis mess.”

Her distress at the destruction was clearly real. However, she hadn’t answered the question.

“What yuh doin’ here?” She planted her hands on her hips and glared at him.

“Staci is...missing.” He tried to keep the emotion out of his voice, but a tiny tremor rippled through. Ruthlessly, he suppressed the betraying quiver. “I’m looking for her, any place I can think of.”

“She’s missin’?”

He went for shock value. “Presumed dead.”

“Dead?” Neli fell back a step, her head canting back to her right, then looking around again at the shredded remnants of Staci’s patio.

Interesting. She hadn’t considered Staci being dead. Why not?

“Her other house in Massachusetts was trashed as well.” He analyzed her reaction. “Whoever did this may be after her.”

Neli squeezed her hands together as if in prayer. “She in danger, yuh tink?”

“Yeah. Grave danger. I want to help her.” She clearly needed help. “Has anyone else called you about Staci?”

She blinked, her lashes moving in slow motion. “No.”

“You’re sure? No one called with a seemingly benign inquiry, like the newspaper or utility company or...the phone company?”

“Well, the electric company called because my phone number is on record for emergencies, sayin’ they wanted to put her on some monthly maintenance plan.”

“What did you tell them?”

“They’d have to talk to her when she was in town.”

“Did they ask when she would be here?”

“Why, they did.”

They’d been pretexting Neli, fishing for information about Staci. “You didn’t give them details, did you?”

“No. I know how to keep me mouth shut.” She firmed her lips, making a locking motion with her long brown fingers.

“She’s in danger,” Jordan said urgently. “I want to help her.”

Neli shifted again. “I never thought about that phone call. I hope I didn’t mess up.”

He interpreted her words, heard the worry. If she didn’t give them information, why was she worried about messing up?

Suddenly he realized her appearance was awfully convenient. How had she known to show up exactly when he was here?

He grabbed her by the shoulders, feeling the bony outline of her thin body through the worn cotton dress. “Where is she?”

Neli shook like a palm tree shivering in the aftermath of a hurricane. “Please don’t hurt me, Mister Jordan. Please don’t hurt me.”

Fear, sweat, and lemon furniture polish rose from her skin.

The feeling of being watched trickled over him. He should know better. Hadn’t he done surveillance on narcos from nine hundred feet away?

“How did you know to show up here, right now?”

“I didn’t know you’d be here.” She bent back, trying arch away from him. “Please, please don’t hurt me. I got a child.”

“Tell me what I want to know.” Impatiently, he tightened his fingers on her shoulders and pulled her up, toward him. His voice was low and rough as he forced his face right up to hers. “How did you know I was here?”

“I...I....”

She tried to hunch away again, the whites of her eyes stark in her shiny black face. His grip was too strong and his will too fierce.

“Please, don’t hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to know how you knew I was here.”

Her breath jerked out of her body in great huge bursts. “I was,”
gasp
,

“cleaning,”
gasp
,

“Pearsons' house,”
gasp
,

“heard,”
gasp
,

“car.” Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body went limp beneath his hands.

“Shit.” Jordan lowered her carefully to the wicker chaise lounge. He put two fingers to her neck and felt the rapid fluttering of her pulse. She’d be okay in a second. Terrific. He’d scared a little housekeeper so badly, she’d passed out.

Jordan rubbed the back of his neck and from his crouch swept his gaze around the patio. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being watched.

A camera could be hidden anywhere in this mess. If they’d wanted to make a move on him, they’d had ample time.

He stood, stretched.

Jordan bent down and checked on Neli again. Her breath was slow and deep, her eyelashes fluttered.

“The Pearsons' house,” he repeated. Jordan pictured the layout of the street in his head, stared into the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, and then toward the neighbor’s house. Where Neli had been working, where she’d looked when he said Staci might be dead.

The neighbors.

Jordan pounded down the shell driveway, shoes crunching loudly as he sprinted toward the other house.

He ripped open the side door of the Pearsons' house and tore through the elaborate kitchen and ornate rooms.

But the house was empty.

A lone can of lemon furniture polish and a rag rested on an end table near the windows. Jordan lifted the rag and looked toward the window. From here, there was a clear view into Staci’s house.

Maybe it really was that simple. Maybe Neli had been cleaning here, happened to see him walk in, and come to talk to him.

Shit. This had been a total waste of time.

But he wouldn’t, couldn’t give up on finding Staci.

He refused to believe the decapitated woman in the picture was Staci. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. The scar was missing.

Staci was alive.

He felt the truth in his soul. He would know if she were dead, he thought fiercely. He wouldn’t rest until he found her and made sure she was okay.

Jesus, he was a mess. His sniper's calm was completely trashed by worry. He needed to slow down and
think.

Little things had started to add up after their fight, after she’d left, after he’d learned she worked for the CIA.

She had been more paranoid, more protective of her privacy and more cautious than he’d ever realized. As each detail stripped away his blinders, he acknowledged he’d been taking note subconsciously and ignoring signs from the beginning. Her requests to keep their relationship private, their almost clandestine meetings in places other than D.C.

What he’d intuited as a sense of adventure and travel had really been attempts for them to be together outside of her main home city, Washington.

Reviewing their conversations, discussions about how to deal with the threats against the United States, he had begun to piece together what she really did for the CIA and his suspicions weren’t pretty.

If he was correct, she’d been a recruiter, recruiting on several different levels. One level for the CIA and on another level, she’d recruited potential terrorists. He figured the CIA tracked and turned those recruits later on, assuming they could catch them before they committed a grievous act against the US or their allies. Those recruits would be infiltrating groups who wished the U.S. harm, without realizing that the government was watching them and recording their contacts.

Where Jordan had been working to mitigate and eliminate terrorist threats, Staci had been actively developing new recruits.

Jordan and Staci’s positions really had been polar opposites. He’d just ignored the clues. And while he actively disagreed with what she had been doing, in the end, her job didn’t matter to him. What mattered was Staci was in trouble.

He was honor bound to help her, without tipping off the CIA that he knew she was alive. He’d go home. And start trying to dig into those private computer files he knew existed in her hidden office in the attic. He’d find the link, he’d find the leak, he'd find whoever was searching her houses. He'd find her.

He’d make amends for their final, bitter confrontation. Then they’d be done. He could move on.

If the process ripped a hole in his heart, so be it. He’d right the wrong.

As he left the Pearsons' house, Jordan could swear he smelled the faint scent of gun oil.

NINE

September 15

Nassau, Bahamas

The Nassau airport hallway had an industrial feel, walls either a soft, pale yellow or a warm cream, dingy from years of incessant heat, dust from the field along the airstrip, and the insidious dirt of thousands of travelers.

Security personnel inspected every bag with a languid, inattentive sweep of the bomb detection cloth and less interest in the luggage contents than a teenager listening to their parents drone.

They waved me through, and I made my way to the gate. My insides heaved but I kept down the bile rising in my throat. Acid burned through my esophagus, igniting a sharp pain. I rubbed my breastbone to soothe the ache.

I couldn’t afford to throw up. If they thought I was sick, they might not let me on that plane.

Sunlight streamed through intermittent windows. Guards in pairs sat in metal folding chairs at regular intervals, their burnished ebony skin gleamed with sweat as their gazes skimmed with a routine boredom over the passengers herding toward the gates.

Ceiling fans circled lazily, swishing the oppressive heat in new directions, doing little to cool off the long bare hallway. An occasional gust of wind, a precursor to the approaching tropical storm, would swirl through the windows and grant momentary relief.

I had my cover story in place. My passport was Bahamian, and I was a fifty-year-old black woman going to visit her sister in Philadelphia.

From Philly, D.C. is a short two hour drive.

The sheen of perspiration should be taken for perpetual sweating, not the uncharacteristic nervousness that gripped my stomach.

I’d planned for one more week of treatments to change the amount of pigment in my skin. Fortunately, I had turned even darker in the past twenty-four hours, because after Jordan’s visit, I decided to step up my timetable and get out of the Bahamas now.

I’d told Neli to stay permanently away until I figured out what the hell was going on. She was happy to do so after her run-in with Jordan.

Poor thing. She’d barely recovered. Jordan continued to call Neli every day to check in. Every day he pressed harder.

He wouldn’t hurt her and I told her so.

After their altercation, I wasn’t sure whether he’d been involved in my capture, or not. His reaction to Neli, his desperation, had come through with every movement.

I wanted to hope the desperation was for my safety. Not for my harm.

I wanted to believe he’d come to the Bahamas to help me. Wanted to believe far more than was wise.

On one level I couldn’t believe he had anything to do with my imprisonment and torture. On another I knew plenty of operatives before me had been exploited and betrayed and there would be plenty more afterward.

Any type of physical relationship left an agent vulnerable to undue influence and betrayal.

If he wasn’t involved, he needed to shut up about me, or someone was going to notice him asking questions.

First things first, I had to figure out who was after me and why.

In the brightly woven canvas bag slung casually over my shoulder, a USB flash drive was sewn into a false lining. The information on the drive was the ticket to discovering why I’d been targeted.

Thank my paranoia for making a copy of the file I’d compiled on Department 5491 and putting the storage device in the bank on my last visit here.

The file consisted of details on me and eleven other people.

An unusually high percentage of people on the list were currently in government service. A few with the NSA and CIA. One with the DIA. One college student. One with very little information beyond a name. She’d dropped off the grid several years back.

And one final person identified only by the initials A.D.A.

That was all the information I had right now.

“Passengers may now begin boarding. Please have your passports and tickets ready.”

I heaved up from the hard plastic chair and shuffled toward the line of passengers, trying to quell my thumping heart. I had two more gauntlets to pass before I was back in the States. Getting on the plane was first. Going through customs in Pennsylvania was second.

Gripping the cheap metal cane in my uninjured right hand, I dragged my sore leg behind me. My cane had been checked thoroughly by the swabber.

No explosives on this baby.

The deep contusions from the wrist manacles looked like age spots on my arms increasing my look of frailty and adding to the image of an older woman.

I waited patiently in line, pretending to stare out at the shimmering tarmac and watching the airport personnel inspect each passport and person cautiously. When my turn came, I presented the papers to the woman with a steady hand and smiled politely.