Dark of Night (8 page)

A spent bullet was one that had run out of force and energy. It didn't do as much damage. But it still could do plenty of harm.

“Kansas?” Tess asked, working hard to keep her upset out of her voice. He'd been
shot
last year—not in a dream, in
reality—
while in Kansas. “Smallwood?”

She felt him nod in the darkness. “Yeah.”

Jimmy had been part of a “red cell” team at another client's corporate headquarters in Smallwood, Kansas, last winter. He'd come home from that assignment and immediately gone out on another. And then another. And another.

It hadn't made sense because he hated spending so much time on the road, but now Tess realized he'd been waiting for his
gunshot wound
to heal before sharing a bed with her.

She had to grit her teeth in order to hold her tongue. Chastising Jimmy—or slapping him—would only shut him up, fast. And this was not the right time to roll out her list of demands. Mostly because she still hadn't recovered enough from nearly losing him to be reasonable. She recognized that
promise you'll never go anywhere without me again
wasn't going to fly. Although
from now on, you
must
tell me when you've been shot
was a definite add to her list.

“At least that's what I thought at the time—that the intel was bad,” Jimmy added, and it took her a second to make sense of his words. Unlike Tess, he'd already dismissed his injury. “I suspected I'd been set up, but it wasn't until later—until Smallwood—that I knew for sure. I was supposed to die that night in Albuquerque. Fenster was supposed to shoot me as an intruder.
That's
what the dream's about. It's my subconscious telling me that I should have known back then that it wasn't a mistake, that they weren't just getting sloppy. That they wanted me dead.”

“Who did?” Tess asked. “Who's
they?”

He laughed—a burst of frustration that made him wince and curse. “Tess, believe me, if I knew who they were, they'd no longer be a threat to anyone. With luck, when the DNA report from the shirt comes back …”

He was quiet again for a while, just breathing.

But then he said, “After Smallwood, I went back to the Agency. I
walked into Dougie Brendon's office and I made him take me in to the head of the black ops division, where I told them both that I was done. They denied sending me out on missions, at least not in the past two years, but they would've denied it, you know? Considering some of the shit they made me do.”

Tess did know. She'd worked for the Agency's support unit for several years herself. Black ops were called
black
ops for a reason. The assignments were never acknowledged, and tended to be well outside of the limits of the law. There was never a paper trail, never a record, never a prayer—only instant distance and disassociation from the Agency—for the black op agent who was unlucky enough to be apprehended by the “enemy.”

“Same night I went to see Brendon,” Jimmy continued quietly, “I got a phone call. The son of a bitch who called told me that it's too late. That I can't back out now, that if I go in to the Agency again, if I talk to
anyone …
I'll end up back in prison.

“I tell him to go fuck himself, and I hang up the phone. And then I went back to Albuquerque. See, I knew that, whoever they were, they were monitoring my travel. Anything the government knew about me, they somehow knew it, too. So I figured I'd send them a little message.”

Tess nodded. She knew exactly where his story was going. Straight back to Ronald Fenster.

“They called me the next day,” Jimmy told her, “and I bluffed. I said that I'd gotten one of their compatriots to talk to me and that I was well on my way to tracking them down so I could rip out their throats and end this bullshit. And then I waited for them to show up at our old friend Ronald Fenster's house.

“Only somehow, they got to him first,” he whispered. “Somehow, they knew. I sat there for three days, Tess, and nothing moved outside or inside of that house. Finally someone shows up, but it's a realtor, putting a FOR SALE sign out front. She leaves, and as soon as it's dark, I go inside. And the house is empty. No furniture, new carpeting, fresh paint.

“And I finally go back to my hotel room—I'm already freaked out— and there's a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door. So I'm careful when I enter the room and. …”

“Fenster?” Tess asked quietly, bracing herself.

“Yeah,” Jimmy told her. “They put him in the bathtub. He was tied to a chair, and …” He had to clear his throat. “Tortured. To make it look like
they'd tried to find out what he'd told me—which was nothing, because I hadn't even talked to the man. They
knew
I hadn't talked to him—they'd probably contained him the day after he failed to kill me. They knew I'd figure it out and come back for him. And they wanted to send me a message. So they cut his throat, probably ten minutes before I got back to the hotel. His body was still warm, Tess. For all I know, I fucking walked past them in the lobby.”

Oh, God. “He was in the
bathtub,
” Tess repeated, clinging to the facts. She didn't want to think about how close the killers had come to Jimmy.

“Thoughtful of them,” Jimmy said. “I only had to get rid of a body. I didn't have to tear out the carpeting and repaint the walls.”

Tess sat up. Something here didn't make sense. She could understand why Jimmy's mystery men wouldn't have tried to kill him as he'd waited outside of Fenster's house. Jimmy had surely been on high alert at the time, and they no doubt knew him as an operator well enough to recognize that going after him then would be a deadly mistake. But…

“If they wanted you dead,” she asked, trying not to let her voice shake, “why not just wait for you at the hotel and kill you there? They were
in
your room.”

“Or why not take me down with a sniper rifle, in the CVS parking lot? Or at the gas station, or outside our apartment or …” He shook his head. “I don't know. Best I can figure is they didn't want me dead by assassin. At least at that time. Later, I think they just wanted me dead, but back then, they seemed to want me dead at the scene of a crime—”

“And Ronald Fenster, with his throat slit in the bathtub?” Tess couldn't help it—her voice was getting louder. How could he
not
have told her about this when it had happened? She wasn't just angry at the men who wanted him dead—she was angry at Jimmy, too. “Didn't
he
make your hotel room the scene of a crime?”

“Well, yeah.” Jimmy gave her that. “But they would've had to wait for me in the room, and someone might've heard the gunshots.”

Oh, God.

“Why didn't you say something?” Tess couldn't keep the question inside any longer. “Why didn't you tell me—”

“Because they pinned a note to Fenster's shirt that said:
Don't go to the authorities, don't talk to anyone. Go home and wait for instructions, or …”
He choked the words out.
“Tess is next.”

“So … what? You decide to come home and … and … break up with me?” Suddenly Jimmy's erratic behavior over the past year made sense—in a backwards, twisted, utterly imbecilic way.

“I didn't know what else to do. I thought you'd be safe if I—”

“You should have come to me, or, God, at least told Decker!”

“I thought—”

“That I'd just let you go?” Tess asked him.
“Oh, well? Thought he was the love of my life, but I guess it didn't work out?”

He was silent again, for such a long stretch of time that she stood up, putting some distance between them, afraid that if she didn't, she'd smack him.

But he didn't answer her and he didn't answer and she got tired of waiting. “Don't you shut down on me now,” she said, all of her anger and fear and frustration coming to a boil. Her voice got even louder—she couldn't help it. “Don't you dare!”

“I was scared,” he shouted back at her. “All right? I was fucking terrified. I've never gone up against anyone like these motherfuckers. I have never searched so hard and so long and come up so empty. That doesn't happen to me, Tess. I can do this job with my eyes closed. I'm better than everyone—except for these guys. They want me dead, and they'll go through you to do it!”

There was a knock on the door. A voice from the other side. “Everything okay in there?”

Great. It was Jules Cassidy, come to see what all the shouting was about.

The fastest way to get rid of him would be to give him a visual, so Tess quickly crossed to the door. Opened it. The light was on in the hall, and she squinted in the brightness.

The FBI agent was actually wearing Mighty Mouse boxer shorts, a Juicy Fruit T-shirt, and a rueful smile, his hair charmingly rumpled and his feet bare, as if he'd rolled out of bed.

Stopping on his way to get his sidearm, which he held loosely but with total authority.

“Jimmy's feeling better, but I don't think he's quite ready yet to be shot for being a jerk,” she told Jules. “But thank you. I'll stick to yelling at him for now.”

He laughed his surprise, even as he looked past her to do a quick visual
sweep of the room. Tess, too, glanced back to where Jimmy was in bed, his arm up, covering his eyes, his nose tucked into the crook of his elbow, his misery apparent.

“We're clear,” Jules said, and Tess realized that he was wearing his miniaturized headset—an earpiece that was about the size of a large hearing aid, with a microphone that was aimed vaguely toward his mouth.

She and Jimmy had been given similar headsets, so they would always be in the communications loop.

“I'm sorry we woke everyone,” she apologized.

“Nah,” Jules said, good-natured as always. “It's barely nine o'clock. I turned in early because I'm still on eastern time. I figured it'd be better for me to stay on that schedule. That way I can take the morning watch and not have it, you know, kill me.”

“Still,” Tess said.

“The timing was good,” Jules reassured her. “We'd scheduled a drill for nine thirty, so … We're going to be running worst-case scenarios pretty much constantly over the next few days. Tomorrow, if Jimmy's up for it, we'll do several where we get the two of you, plus Robin and Ash, into the security room. See how long it takes us.”

The security room doubled as a panic room. Once its door was locked, it would take a tank to blast through the reinforced walls.

“Late morning's probably best for that,” Tess said. “Let Jimmy sleep in as long as he can.”

Jules nodded, his smile kind. “We'll figure it out tomorrow. Hey, as long as he's awake, take his blood pressure and temp, okay?”

“I will.”

“Tell him I'm glad he's feeling better enough to get the verbal ass-kicking he deserves. And be sure to throw in a
you're a freaking idiot
or two for me, while you're at it.” He nodded at the door. “Don't forget to lock it.”

Sophia was going to be sick.

The man in the hospital bed was a stranger—a frail, desiccated old man who looked as if he'd lived far longer than the slightly-less-than-sixty years she knew her father to be.

Of course, considering his years of drug abuse, plus nearly two decades of hard time in a foreign prison, it was amazing he was still breathing.

It was only if she squinted and tilted her head that she could see a shimmering ghost of the vibrant, laughing man with the long, sun-bleached, dirty-blond hair that she'd known all those years ago.

The rush of memories was dizzying—playing Frisbee with him in what looked like a park but was, in fact, royal gardens, her father turning the potential trauma of getting chased away by soldiers on horseback into just another game. It was he who insisted she dress in boys’ clothes, giving her precious freedom as they traveled through countries where women and girls were treated as second-class citizens.

She remembered him reading to her, always reading, his voice slow and lazy, but still melodic even when he was stoned. She remembered him singing to her, too—Lord, he'd loved his guitar.

She'd carried it with her for months after he'd vanished. She'd nearly died fighting to keep it from being stolen, and, badly beaten, she'd wept— not over her scrapes and bruises, but over the guitar's loss, over having failed him.

And over her realization that he was never coming back.

“Hey,” Dave said, his voice in her ear, in tune with her as always. “Okay, it's okay, I've got you. Hold on to me and just breathe, all right, Soph?”

She nodded, closing her eyes against the nausea that swirled around her, as he pulled her down the hall, all but carrying her, his arm strong and warm around her waist.

He was speaking to someone in his team-leader voice—commanding, authoritative—and within seconds, he'd found her some blessed privacy in a bathroom, and had closed and locked the door behind them both.

Sophia went right to the sink and ran cool water on her hands and wrists, splashing it up onto her face, her makeup be damned. Dave hovered, pulling paper towels from the rack on the wall and holding them out for her.

“How can I help you?” he asked as she dried her face, his voice as filled with his concern for her as his eyes. “Tell me what you need.”

Sophia had to laugh—it was either that or cry. “You mean, besides a trip to Hawaii and a new car? A Prius, I think. Or maybe one of those cute little Smart Cars.”

Dave smiled, but it wasn't enough to hide his worry as he pushed a stray lock of her sodden hair behind her ear, his fingers gentle against her
cheek. “Seriously, Soph. Just say the word and we're out of here. Seeing your father shouldn't make you physically ill.”

“I'm okay,” she said. “It was just… weird. I'd hated him for so long that… I'd forgotten how much I loved him.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and he didn't hesitate. He pulled her close and tucked her in against him, enveloping her in his arms, his chin against the top of her head. “I'm so sorry,” he murmured, his voice a rumble in his chest. “I can only imagine how hard this must be. It's completely okay if we just go to the hotel—”

“No.” She shook her head. It had taken her a day to decide to come to Boston, another day of travel—heading east, they'd lost three hours of daylight. She was jet-lagged and nauseated and needed a shower, a hot meal, and some seriously tender lovemaking, followed by a full night of sleep. But only after she did this. “I want to see him.
Talk
to him.” She pulled back to look up at Dave, wiping her eyes with the crumpled paper towel in her hand. He didn't look convinced, so she said it again. “I
want
to.”