Jae's Assignment (16 page)

* * * * *

All he knew for sure was that he was in some type of hospital.

The faint antiseptic smell was a dead giveaway. He just didn’t know why he was there. Surely not for the throbbing pain to his lip and jaw. He’d had hundreds of fat lips before. But then he wondered who’d hit him. And just like that a memory flashed in his head. He saw a fist swing and connect before he could dodge it, and with that came the metallic taste of blood.

He was, however, aware of footsteps and low male voices, or was it his imagination?
Yeah, I’m hallucinating
. That had to be it, he thought somewhat disjointedly.

Just then, Luke Grainger felt the pinching stab of a needle prick his arm. Which arm, he couldn’t say. He just knew it hurt and then he felt himself floating up from a bed, chair, or floor?

He tried to understand the voices around him. He knew they would ask him questions again. Many questions, hundreds of questions, possibly thousands of them.

What questions?

Luke just couldn’t say. He only hoped he hadn’t said too much since he was sure he’d been drugged.

Chapter Thirteen

“What the?” Darius Hall stuttered in disbelief. “Son of a bitch. Somebody stole my goddamned brand new car!”

Slamming the telephone headset down onto the base, Darius dared anyone to say anything at all to him, least of all Randy Cross, who was approaching his desk with a file dangling from his hand.

Randy stopped in front of Darius’s desk. “That’s one sweet-looking ride, Darius. So when are you going to start driving that baby?” Randy smiled.

“You need something, Randy?” Darius murmured.

“Oh, right. You asked me to run a check on some calls Jae logged onto her phone for a case,” he said, tapping the file in his hand. “Nothing’s there and my guess would be that she hasn’t used it. I need your okay to check her personal cell phone or home phone. It wouldn’t be the first time Jae logged agency business on her personal phone, you know.” Randy’s eyes circled the room. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Darius said.

“Jae out in the field?” Randy asked, watching Darius grip the base of the telephone as he let out another expletive. “Jeez.”

Iverson got up from his desk and held out his hand to Randy for the file.

“Look, guys, my plate is empty as you know, so if I can help out on something just say the word, especially if Jae’s taking another vacation.”

“Jae’s doing some legwork on an assignment with the DEA,” Darius said gruffly, then added, “Thanks for the info, Randy.”

Randy left with a head nod.

Darius recalled that earlier, after several attempts to find Jae had left them stumped, he’d ordered everyone back to meet him at her apartment.

Pulling Mike and Amil up from their posts down on the ground, Darius made one thing clear. They were not to talk about the issue of Jae or Grant.

When they’d left her apartment and gone to the garage, no one was surprised to see her Mustang gone, but they were shocked when they discovered Darius’s car was gone as well.

The howling cry that bellowed up from Darius filled the cement layers of the garage and had Iverson, Amil, McGuire, and Mike running back to Jae’s apartment.

They spent two hours in her apartment discussing what could be happening and each one came up with the same conclusion. If Grainger was Grant’s contact, maybe both Jae and Grant had gone to Grainger’s to investigate.

They also recalled that she’d been shot during a solo assignment. Now, she was out there again without backup so they were genuinely concerned for her safety.

Both McGuire and Amil definitely suspected a mole, someone who was particularly interested in Grainger and Grant. They agreed from that point on not to discuss anything in the office if there was a mole in their camp.

Darius now wished he hadn’t asked Randy to pull Jae’s smart phone records for the previous month. When he asked for that information, he’d only wanted to see if she’d been in contact with Grant.

Darius had Mike call the regional car theft force again. Darius had already reported the car stolen and couldn’t understand why the GPS hadn’t located it yet. He was kicking himself for not getting the OnStar turned on when he’d bought the car.

“I’m going to lunch,” Darius said glumly and walked out of the office.

* * * * *

Pulling the hood up further onto her head, Jae walked over to the coffee station located on the ground level of the motel she’d checked into three days earlier.

Frowning at the continental breakfast selection, she went right to the coffee urn and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Since leaving Grainger’s house, she’d been searching for both Trevor and Grainger. She’d shown their photos around and had zero results.

On the second evening she decided to stake out Grainger’s house on the chance that Trevor would stop by. She was surprised to see two familiar sedans parked out front, but was glad to see Iverson dragging two large trash cans to the end of the curb for trash pickup. If she had guessed correctly, they had emptied the refrigerator of the spoiled food.

Parking the Lexus a block away, Jae sprinted through a neighboring yard. Training her binoculars on the back of the house she spotted Mike and Darius searching Grainger’s bedroom. Jae didn’t miss the sour expression on Darius’s face and couldn’t hold back a chuckle. She was positive he was freaking out about his missing car.

Serves him right for buying an expensive car like that behind Sheila’s back.

Returning to her motel room a short while later after the stakeout of Grainger’s house, Jae pulled Grainger’s book on the history of the Mustang from her bag. She planned to stay put until midafternoon. Running a hand across the book, Jae guessed it was the original manual for the Mustang Grainger was restoring.

Opening the book, she was glad to find it in such excellent condition since it had obviously been in a trunk for a long time. Bringing it up to her nose, she noticed that it didn’t smell old or like the trunk of the car.

Flipping through several pages, she spotted a piece of paper sticking out from the bottom of the book. She flipped it open to that page.

Her eyes went wide.

“Oh, my God,” she croaked.

Jae stared down into the blue eyes of Trevor Grant sans beard, mustache, and the long hippie hair. It was him, yet it wasn’t. There were two other photos. One she would guess was at a family gathering of some type, the other was a photo ID card.

There were also two documents behind the photo that sent Jae scrambling to gather her things. Within twenty minutes, she’d checked out of the motel and was back in the Lexus parked behind the motel.

As the air conditioning cooled the car, Jae read the official witness protection program authorization form that contained Grainger’s original signature as well as what she believed to be Trevor Grant’s real name. Opening her bag, Jae dug deep to find the note Trevor had left on her nightstand before he slipped away. She compared the letters of the other signature on the document, that of Adian Cole to the one on the note. They matched perfectly.

“Well, hello, Dr. Adian Cole,” she said softly.

There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that Adian Cole had had plastic surgery after he returned to the US. That was confirmed when she found discharge papers from a private hospital located in Connecticut. He’d stayed there for eight weeks before joining the staff of the Kincaid Institute where a Dr. Trevor Grant, researcher/analyst, suddenly emerged.

To go to such extremes, suggested to Jae that Grainger didn’t want Adian Cole to be found…ever. And if he was, the plastic surgery would make positive identification all the more difficult. “So why hide this stuff in a car?” But she’d already guessed the answer. No one would look there and if they had, no one would bother searching the pages of a book on an old Mustang. She certainly hadn’t before and she and the guys had been in Grainger’s garage many times as he proudly showed them new things he’d done to the car.

After a more thorough search of the pages, she found two more documents, both taped to the underside of the back cover. She’d had to carefully lift the appendix page, which had been carefully glued over the back cover.

One document was Adian Cole’s passport and the other was his medical degree as a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Well, well, well, Dr. Cole. I’m impressed. No wonder I couldn’t find you there,” she said, picking up the borrowed smart phone and tapping several keys to connect to the web browser.

“Grainger went through a lot to hide your identity and now I have to wonder what you did to make sure it stayed that way.”

* * * * *

Trevor was home again in Rockville, Maryland. He could see them just twenty feet away from his perch on a stone bench. He thought if he strained his ears he might hear their voices, voices he’d longed to hear for so long.

Trevor watched his younger sisters, Robin and Lynette, walking arm in arm to their mother’s gravesite. If he’d stayed at that same spot five minutes longer, they would have discovered him kneeling and sticking a flag into the dirt of the gravesite of their brother, Greer, buried beside her. He had also dug into the soft earth and planted the gift he’d purchased several months earlier. It was a paperweight containing a sailboat inside with blue and white sails. Unless someone tampered with the gravesite, he knew it would be buried with Greer forever.

Earlier, he’d visited his mother’s grave and placed a bundle of tiny white flowers there. He recalled how much she liked them. Sadly, without any photos of her he was beginning to forget what she looked like, but that changed when he spotted his sister, Robin. In the five years since he’d seen her, she’d developed their mother’s classic Texas features as his mother used to say—blue eyes and thick chestnut brown hair. He cursed the heart disease that took his mother away, just as much as he hated the war and subsequent explosion that took his younger brother, Greer, from him not long after.

Trevor wondered if he had ever taken his family for granted. Had he focused so much on his studies and career that he had forgotten to really pay attention to them? Tell them how much they meant to him? Had he loved them enough? Surely, he had. He could remember his mother liking those tiny white flowers. Baby’s breath, that’s what she called them. It made him smile at the memory.

Trevor slipped inside the chapel and closed his eyes. He wasn’t praying. He was just tired, tired of feeling lost and alone. When the sting of tears pinched his eyes, he closed them. A door to his left open and he prayed that the priest wouldn’t come over.

Several sets of footsteps nearing the pew where he sat, heightened, his anxiety level and Trevor glanced up as they passed by. To his shock, he caught the profiles of his father and stepmother, followed by his sisters, Robin and Lynette.

He could smell his sisters’ perfume.

He sat at the entrance where the Aspersorium was located. As they passed, he gripped the padded seat beneath him to stop himself from rushing after them, which would have frightened them out of their minds. In any case, they wouldn’t have recognized him, not with his new face. This face now belonged to Trevor Grant.

He watched his father, Maurice, and his stepmother, Madeline, hold hands as they lit a candle. Smiling, Trevor recalled they had only been married two years when he “died”. He remembered Madeline had come into their grief-filled lives at just the right time and they all fell in love with her. She was beautiful, sassy, smart, charming, and could beat both him and his father at poker and Scrabble.

Watching her now, he wasn’t the least bit surprised when Madeline clapped her hands, rocked from side to side, and started singing a joyful, upbeat hymn. When his sisters joined in, singing slightly off-key, he also noticed his father’s chagrin.

It was the perfect time for him to slip out of the heavy double doors, but oh how he wished he could stay just to watch them, hear them. When he spotted the black limousine parked a few feet away at the curb, he pulled the khaki baseball cap from his pocket and put it on, tugging the brim down to cover his face.

Slipping behind the church, he disappeared out of sight.

For the rest of the afternoon, Trevor drove around the back roads that were familiar to him. He had taken a chance even coming back to his hometown, but nothing would have kept him away, not today.

As day gave way to night, he drove past a sub shop. Stopping the car and rolling down the window, he inhaled deeply. He even considered going inside to buy his favorite ham and cheese hoagie then smiled. He remembered eating two or three of them every week.

To him the sub shop represented all he had given up when he made the sacrifice to save the lives of his family. That couldn’t have been wrong, he thought. Not now, not when he could see them, hear their voices, and almost touch them. They were alive and well and that was all that mattered to him.

Since it was getting late, he decided to head out by the interstate to find a motel for the night. First thing tomorrow morning he would drive to the Eastern Shore.

His Internet searches had led to the address of a vacation property owned by Dr. Ross Moran. He was the only person Trevor had sent a copy of his research findings to. He recalled the doctor calling him in the middle of the night, warning him to keep quiet about his research until he’d been able to review everything. He also warned him of the serious consequences that could possibly outweigh the pros of delving into such a project.

Trevor had heard the doctor’s warnings, but the positive responses to continue the research combined with the positive results, were just too encouraging to stop. With the funding he’d received, he’d continued to recruit more research and test subjects…soldiers.

Now, Trevor wanted to know what those consequences were that Dr. Moran had cautioned him about, and if his former colleague had told anyone else.

Spotting a pay phone in a strip mall, he got out of the car and called a 24-hour diner and ordered dinner to go. Then he drove to the interstate to find a motel.

* * * * *

After finding Trevor Grant’s intel from the manual, Jae decided to check out Trevor’s hometown, which wasn’t on the Eastern Shore like he’d told her.

Her first stop in Rockville, Maryland, was to the cemetery where his mother and brother were buried. After exiting the car, she was about to walk over to the area where the graves were located, but her attention was drawn to a tall man and three women emerging from a black limousine.

As the man walked up the sidewalk and climbed the steps leading inside the chapel, he turned to look out over the tranquil setting of the garden. Jae lifted her high-powered binoculars. Even from her position about one hundred feet away, there was no doubt who the man was. The resemblance was uncanny and having now seen Trevor’s real face, Jae recognized the man as his father and the two younger women as his sisters, the older woman, his stepmother.

Several minutes later, she spotted a tall man leaving the chapel, pulling a baseball cap low on his forehead, obscuring his face. Dipping the binoculars slightly lower to his feet, Jae noticed the black boots. It was Trevor.

He hurried down the steps and ducked behind the church, where she watched him sprint across the cemetery. He walked at a fast pace and moments later Jae saw why when his family walked out of the chapel.