Until the Dawn (5 page)

One more time she tried all of Dan’s numbers with the same depressing results. She didn’t need flash cards to tell her this was more than an appointment he forgot to tell her about.

Oh, Dan. What have you gotten yourself into?

She had one last trump card to play, one she hesitated to use except in emergencies.

But that’s what this seemed to be. Because the later it got, the more worried she became.

Reluctantly, she opened her cell phone and dialed a number she knew by heart.

“Ambassador Sommers’ office.”

Maddie was startled when the phone was answered by an unfamiliar female voice.

Who the hell was this?

“This is Madison Sommers. I called my father’s private line, expecting him to answer. May I speak to him, please?”

“I’m sorry. He’s not available at the moment. May I help you with something?”

Maddie resisted the urge to throw the phone across the room. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Caroline London. His personal assistant.”

Personal assistant? Since when?

“You must be new. I don’t remember hearing about you.” Maddie knew her voice had a nasty tone but she didn’t care.

“I’ve actually been with the ambassador for some time now.” The frost in the woman’s voice shot through the connection. “May I take a message?”

For some time now? Dad, what the hell is going on?

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Until the Dawn

“Yes. You can tell him I’m on my way over and I need to see him.”

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s impossible. He’s—”

“Make it possible. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Maddie slammed the phone shut, grabbed her purse and made a beeline to the elevators. The day that should have started with warm feelings and erotic sex was deteriorating into something that made fear skitter like a feather down her spine.

She fidgeted in the cab during the ride to Ambassador Sommers’ offices and was ready to take someone apart when she stormed into the building. In the foyer she took a moment to calm herself. Screaming never got her anywhere with her father, and she really needed to find out if he knew anything that could help her. Arthur Sommers was plugged into nearly everything in Washington. If something weird was going on and Dan was involved in it, there was a good chance he’d know about it.

Maddie was sure the woman who came forward to meet her was the unknown assistant. Tall and thin, Caroline had perfectly toned blonde hair swept up in a chignon and makeup that looked as if an artist had applied it. Maddie wondered where her father had found her and how long she’d been around. In the two years since her mother died, he’d pretty much avoided a personal life.

Or maybe he hadn’t, and just had not bothered to confide in her.

Miss Thin and Tall held out a slim hand. “I’m Caroline. You must be Madison.”

Maddie shook her hand unenthusiastically. “I’d like to see—”

“No problem.” Caroline moved her lips in a brittle smile. “He has a very tight schedule today but he said to show you in as soon as you arrived.”

Maddie and her father had never been demonstrative with each other, and had grown further apart in the past two years. Their hello kiss was perfunctory, their greeting lukewarm.

“I know you wouldn’t come here if it weren’t something out of the ordinary,” he began. “What is it you think I can do for you?”

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Desiree Holt & Cerise DeLand

“Right to the point, aren’t you?” She snorted. “All right. I won’t waste time. Dan Foreman, the planning consultant in the Speaker’s office, seems to have disappeared.

You have your finger on the pulse of everything in this city. I want to know what you’ve heard.”

“Are you sleeping with him?” Sommers asked bluntly.

Maddie felt her face flush but she didn’t look away. “That isn’t important. We work together in Trask’s office and it isn’t like him to just vanish.”

“So you’re
not
just chasing a fleeing lover?”

She turned, disgusted and angry, wild to ask if her father knew she had slept with Dan last night. But that was a little too miraculous a feat, even for omniscient former CIA operative Arthur Sommers.
Oh, god.
She should have known better than to come here. “Never mind. Thanks for all your help.” She rose to go toward the door.

“I met him several times,” Arthur said, matter-of-factly.

Maddie stopped cold and turned around. “Did you, now. And?”

“I don’t like him. There’s something very shady about him. Whatever’s happened to him, good riddance. Don’t get your skirts dirty looking for him.”

Insulted and appalled at her father’s bald words, she bit off a curse. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“It means exactly what I said. Now please excuse me. I have a meeting to prepare for.”

Standing on the sidewalk outside, Maddie had to stifle the urge to sit down on the steps and give in to tears. She shouldn’t have expected anything except what she got.

She and her father shared equally low opinions of each other. Even if he knew something, she should have realized he’d never tell her anything.

Baffled by the situation and lack of information, she walked the six blocks to the Metro and climbed on the next train. At Union Station, when she climbed out of the car to change lines, she decided to go upstairs instead. She’d cool down before she went 36

Until the Dawn

back to the office. She’d have some lunch and a big fat drink at her favorite pub.

Threading her way up the escalator and along the corridor, she was disappointed when she arrived that the place was crowded. Sighing, she scanned the booths and tables, hoping somehow she’d find one empty.

What she found pleasantly stunned her. Waving at her from the other side of the room was a very familiar figure. She and Nicole Welles had been roommates in college.

Now, ten years later, they kept in touch by email and with visits spaced too far apart.

Nikki lived in Texas and her visits to Washington were rare. What was she doing here now?

Maddie made her way across the restaurant to where Nicole was standing beside a booth. The two women hugged.

“Oh, man,” Nikki said. “You’re the last person I expected to see here. How lucky could I get? Come on. Sit down.”

When they were both seated in the booth and had given drink orders to the waiter, Nikki leaned across the table. “So how did you happen to pop into this place just at this moment? Congress is in recess. Aren’t you closing up shop and getting out of Dodge for a few weeks?”

“Trying to,” Maddie admitted, avoiding getting into a story too long and complicated for a brief reunion with an old friend. “A better question is, what are you doing in D.C.?”

“Well.” Nikki played with her silverware. “You know I started my own private investigation and security agency in San Antonio.”

“Yes. With two other women you’ve known for years.”

Nikki nodded. “One’s a former cop and the other is the greatest cyber expert you’ll ever find.” She grinned. “We call ourselves Nemesis.”

“Ooh.” Maddie gave a mock shiver. “Sounds ominous to me.”

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Desiree Holt & Cerise DeLand

“We take only high profile cases. That’s what I’m doing here, just winding one up.”

She smiled at Maddie. “You still having fun as chief cook and bottle washer for the Speaker of the House?”

Maddie smiled with little joy. “Same job. Same place.”

“So what are you doing hanging out in Union Station? You gotta have things hopping at your office right now. That new transportation bill, for one thing.”

Maddie bit her lip. Should she tell Nikki? What could she lose? “I have a problem,”

she began. “It has to do with a man in our office. A consultant.”

She told Nikki everything, carefully omitting the details of her scorching evening with Dan. She spread her hands, palms upward.

“All but one of his phones go to voice mail. One is disconnected. All just this morning. No one in the office has seen him. It’s as if he didn’t exist. The Speaker acts as if it’s nothing and my dad thinks I should just drop the whole thing.”

Nikki studied her a minute. “Is he the type to go on a bender? Take a lost weekend?”

“No.”

“The type to let someone get the better of him physically? Drop him in a dark alley?”

Maddie chortled. “No!”

Nicole examined Maddie. “The type to leave without kissing you goodbye?”

Maddie stared at her friend and whispered, “No.”

“Okay, then. Hear me. For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve never known you to be an alarmist. So I agree with you. Something’s going on here. And I don’t think your Dan is just a planning consultant.” The waiter had appeared with their drinks. “So let’s drink some of this good alcohol and you can start from the beginning. Maybe I can help you.”

38

Until the Dawn

The hours of work after her lunch with Nicole raced by. Like snails. At six-forty-two, Maddie shot up from her chair and made the excuse of a headache.

Julia frowned at her. “It’s not like you to be sick. Can’t I give you an aspirin?”

“No thanks. This one’s a blinder, Julia. I need sleep.” And some sanity before Nicole arrived to spend the night and talk more about Dan Foreman’s disappearance.

Grabbing up her purse, Maddie spoke briefly with the communications director about a major press release due out tomorrow. Then she zipped down a stairwell, through the magnetron and Capitol guards and out the side door. Walking beyond the ugly concrete road barriers that had appeared after 9/11, she donned her sunglasses against the brilliance of the late sun and inhaled the humid air of Washington in July.

Flinging her suit jacket over her shoulder, she decided to stroll west toward the Mall.

The tourists had retired for the day. The worker bees in the Capitol, Senate and House office buildings were emerging from their cocoons. Like her, coats off, sunglasses on to protect from the light of day they rarely saw, they hustled to Metro stops or into bars. Some disappeared into restaurants near Constitution Avenue. She hadn’t walked like this in months—and Krav Maga workouts at the gym didn’t compare.

When she’d been a teenager—and her family was home from some foreign posting of her father’s, her favorite activity was to escape the servants and her parents’

townhouse over in Foggy Bottom and walk the Mall. She’d take in the free museums and thrill to the dinosaurs in one, the airplanes in another and big brash florals of Georgia O’Keefe in the huge modern art gallery. When she’d gone to college north of town, she’d escape her studies and her worries about her mother’s penchant for gigolos by dropping in to her favorite haunts. When she’d first gotten a job on the Hill as a press secretary to Trask, she’d decompressed the same way. She hadn’t treated herself 39

Desiree Holt & Cerise DeLand

to the joy of it in such a long time that now she felt a pang of loss. A realization that she hadn’t been good to herself while working her ass off for Trask sobered her. Promising herself to reconnect with the things she loved and not let the job become everything to her, she smiled up at the Washington Monument and turned to search for a taxi.

When the cab pulled up to her house she paid and jumped out. Nicole would be here soon and Maddie wanted to check the guest bedroom to ensure everything was perfect for her friend who promised to help her find the man who had left her this morning. A bigger pang of loss overcame her as she inserted her key in the lock. She paused there, promising herself to find Dan.
Another thing you love, Maddie?

Maybe so.

Stunned at how much she could care for a man she had known so briefly, she turned the key in the front door.

No alarm?

I did turn it on this morning.

She reached for the display panel. But the light on the panel was off.

And when she flicked on the living room lights, they didn’t work. The only illumination came from the moonlight slanting in through the slivers between the half-closed blinds.

In the darkness, she felt the sudden torrid strength of two arms clamp around her.

“Oh, no!” she breathed and years of practicing self-defense techniques kicked in. By rote, she shrugged, stepped one leg to one side and began to elbow her attacker.

“Baby, don’t! Don’t!” a warm soothing male voice crooned in her ear.

Dan?

“Shh, it’s Dan.” He clutched her closer, his hand to the elbow that she would have used to double him over. Then, he pressed his searing lips to her cheek. “It’s me, Maddie. Just me, baby. Sorry.”

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Until the Dawn

“Oh, god! Dan!” Relief had her legs buckling out from under her, but he held her up, turning her toward him.

“I’m sorry, baby. I scared you, but I couldn’t be sure the one coming in was you.”

She blinked. “What? Why?”

“Your power lines were cut.”

“Cut? How? Why?”

“When I got here about an hour ago, they were out.”

“But who would do that?”

He froze. “Maddie, I—”

Her mind raced. “Someone wanted something of mine. The Matisse? My mother’s jewelry?” There was plenty of that. Her mother had an overwhelming appetite for diamonds. And Maddie had inherited every last little carat. “Did they take—?”

“No, baby. Not the painting or your jewelry. I’ve checked the house. Not anything of yours.”

That fake headache was fast becoming a reality. The clanging in her ears drowned out logic. “I don’t understand. Dan,” she whispered, her hands clutching his lapels.

“What’s going on? Why are you here?”

“I hoped you’d want to see me.”

“Oh, I did. Do.” She stretched up on tiptoe to give him a welcome kiss, but when she pulled away, she noted his eyes were sad yet filled with a ravenous desire. “Dan, what the hell is going on? I thought you’d disappeared on me. That you didn’t mean anything you said. But if you’re mixed up in something bad I can help you…”

“I left you too soon this morning and there was no way I could say goodbye then. I had to come back and tell you that. Tell you why.”