Why wasn’t he here? Of course, they weren’t close, had never been close. But goddammit, Bard’s entire life was duty. He was a warrior, a fucking SEAL. Always do the hard thing was their unofficial motto. And though Bard long ago cut himself off from the family and the Redfield money, he did his duty. He was on mission when Maddy died, but he came home for the funeral. He hadn’t cut himself off from his mother, Maddy, though Maddy, too, had become estranged from Court. Had asked for a divorce before breast cancer took her away.
Court had since married twice, but Bard hadn’t come home for either of the marriages.
Court could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he and Bard had actually had a discussion over the past thirty years. And most of the times had ended with Bard slamming the door behind him.
Court didn’t need to be loved, but he did need to be obeyed and damn it, Bard should be here now as he prepared for the move that had been decades coming.
If he wasn’t here, did that mean … Did Bard know what had happened all those years ago? Could he know?
Court shut that thought down immediately. Of course Bard didn’t know. Court had seen to that. The entire connection had been severed, completely contained, for almost three decades. And the person who’d made the connection again, via freaking DNA, was dead. But the girl … the girl who was improbably alive …
She’d be dead too. Soon. For the second time. If Court had had any idea that the girl had survived, he’d have dealt with it long ago.
How the hell had she survived? Who’d taken care of her?
Maybe he should have checked, sent a man to the morgue to see the bodies. But those had been different times and he hadn’t had many people on call. He had them now, by God. He had a fucking army, and they were highly competent, the best of the best. Former SpecOps soldiers, recruited when he was heading the Special Activities Division of the CIA and totally loyal to him now. Considering he paid them a fucking fortune, they’d better be loyal.
He’d once calculated that his little army had cost the US government a hundred million dollars to train.
And now they were his.
His son, the best of SpecOps, a legend, should be one of them. Should be by his side, right fucking now.
Instead he had two bodyguards in front and three behind him. Two already in the dining room, waiting. If anyone so much as yelled at him, they’d be quietly taken away. His Pretorian Guard looked after him well.
And still, it should be his fucking son looking after his father. Where was he?
Inwardly, Court seethed as he walked along the plush gold-patterned carpeting of the long elegant corridor toward the dining room. He could hear the excited jabbering halfway down the hallway. Rich men, excitable like children. How they’d squeal when he gave them a new toy.
Where the hell was the girl? The DNA scientist had kept the girl’s name off the test, only a code was given.
Court’s own DNA had been taken off the national database, but he’d left instructions to leave a tripwire to notify him in the unlikely event someone tried to trace his DNA. A stroke of luck and paranoia.
He’d nearly had a heart attack when his most trusted tech in the CIA — and who now worked secretly for him — told him that his DNA was being checked. At first he hadn’t worried. The top levels of national security agencies — all seventeen of them — had had their DNA scrubbed from any files accessible from the outside. But there’d been a hole in the scrubbing procedure and his file apparently had been accessible. Hard to get to, yes. But it was doable and someone had done it. Luckily his tech had put in that tripwire and they were warned. They’d tracked the scientist down — a Dr. Kyle Ackerman, genius geneticist, now CEO of a company specializing in DNA analysis.
The scientist was easy to get rid of — nerds rarely pay attention. Ackerman hadn’t noticed the car trailing him until it was too late.
His own tech had had some difficulties in cracking Ackerman’s code and finding out who had ordered the DNA test, but he’d managed it and told Court. It was a name that meant nothing to him. Hope Ellis. But the photograph of her meant a lot. His heart had skipped a beat when he’d seen a copy of her NSA badge. She looked so much like Bard and Court’s own father it was crazy. She was of their blood, there was no contesting that.
Ackerman had been talking to her when he’d been eliminated.
The girl nerd — not even in his head could he think of her as his granddaughter — turned out to be surprisingly hard to take out. She’d disappeared. Nothing in her file said she had experience as an operator. She’d worked in national security — for the NSA — but only in an analytical capacity. She’d never been trained. And yet she’d disappeared.
Which meant she’d had help. This was a problem that was fast growing viral and needed to be stopped. Right. Fucking. Now.
He thought he’d gotten rid of her and her bitch of a mother twenty-five years ago.
He needed to get rid of her now.
But first he had to find her.
And keep Bard in the dark. That was what scared him more than anything. Not that an illegitimate child could show up during his campaign. Nowadays, that could be massaged. Turned into a tiny little flurry in one news cycle and nothing more.
No. What had Court sweating as he walked down the corridor was the idea of Bard finding out that Court had … done what he’d done. Bard had said he loved the girl, which was ridiculous. Court had done what had to be done. But Bard would never understand. Bard already hated him. Bard was a trained killer and Court would not swear that Bard wouldn’t kill him.
This had to be stopped, the girl had to be eliminated before any of this became public.
He stopped before a door and let his man open it. From now on, all his doors would be opened for him.
As he walked in, the excited jabbering rose to a crescendo. A fund raiser. Only not for a Senate seat. For the big job. Several billion dollars on the hoof were in the room, which smelled of freshly-pressed clothes and expensive cologne and expensive wine.
Everyone here for him.
His press secretary bent his head to the mike.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Let’s give it up for the next President of these United States, Senator Court Redfield!”
And the room roared with cheers.
Portland
Hope dug in her heels.
Luke was surprised. He’d seen it all and he’d done it all and he was rarely surprised when it came to people, but this stopped him in his tracks.
Hope Ellis was small and pretty and cerebral. And soft, he thought. Well, what else would someone who worked with computers be?
But nope, she wasn’t soft at all. There was a core of steel there.
She absolutely refused to leave until she’d solved Felicity’s problem. Felicity hadn’t thrown her the equivalent of polishing the silver. She’d thrown her something thorny, apparently. And Hope was dug in like a tick.
Luke explained, slowly and carefully, that there was a thread to tug in Sacramento. One of ASI’s corporate jets was even now on the tarmac, waiting for them. They’d borrowed a safe house in Sacramento from Black Inc, another company that was quivering with eagerness to help her as repayment for the magical mystery firewall that had their tech people salivating. There was a whole machine revving up, just waiting to go and … she dug in her heels.
“But —” he began, in his reasonable tone.
“No.” Hope’s voice wasn’t adamant or stubborn. There was no emotional overtone at all. That ‘no’ was said as if he’d offered her a whiskey and she’d said no. No biggie.
Except it was.
She pulled out the chair from the side table that was acting as a workspace and she sat and pulled her laptop toward her. She’d been working since breakfast, had taken a coffee and muffin break and was now settling back in.
Luke was … well he was at a loss. If this were an operation where her life was in immediate da
nger, he’d have no compunction in tossing her over his shoulder and getting her out of there. But her life was in no immediate danger. If anything, she was super safe right where she was.
“Hope, it really would be best to get going.” Said quite reasonably. With absolutely no irritation in his voice, which was an act of heroism right there.
She touched a key and her screen came to vivid life, colors so bright they almost hurt the eye. Her screensaver was …
“Rivendell,” he said. The Peter Jackson version.
That earned him a quick upside look. “Right.” She gave him a slow elevator look, boots to hair. “You’re too built to be a nerd. What is this?”
He took a step toward her. “When I was eleven and discovered Lord of the Rings, I was short and underweight. I looked about seven and I was bullied. I discovered books, dived into them and didn’t come up again until I started growing. So in a real way, Tolkien saved my bacon. And my dad. He saved my bacon too.”
She stopped, put her hands in her lap. “Tell me about your dad. I love good dad stories.”
He just bet she did. Her own father wasn’t her father after all and had ignored her, from what he understood. And maybe her biological father was trying to kill her. So he could imagine that good dad stories were appealing.
Well, he was happy to oblige. He’d had one of the best.
Luke perched on the edge of the table and felt her interest as a palpable thing. God she was just so irresistible — that pretty face turned up, those intelligent eyes focused like green lasers on him.
“My dad was the best,” he began.
Her pretty face fell. “Was. You told me.”
He nodded, sighed, feeling that punch to the heart he always felt. “Yeah. Unfortunately.” He wouldn’t repeat that his dad had essentially died of a broken heart right after the trial. It wasn’t the time for sadness. “Anyway. Seventh grade. Middle school. I was the runt of the class. Short and scrawny. Classic nerd. Straight As. D&D, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. Bullied mercilessly by a gang of tough older kids who were much bigger than me. The main bully was Lou Garrett. Mean son of a bitch. I used to come home with black eyes, once with a cut that required ten stitches. But my dad … he didn’t do the TV dad thing. Go to the bully’s house, talk with the asshole’s father, talk to the school principal. Nope. That would have just painted a bullseye on my back. He took me to the gym of his good buddy and former Marine, Nelson Harmer. Known as The Hammer.”
She winced. “Ouch.”
“Nah.” Luke shook his head. “He was a good guy and always took me to my limits but never beyond. I trained hard, three afternoons a week, for seven years. During those seven years I shot up a foot and a half and put on fifty pounds. The Hammer made sure it was all muscle. After the first year at the dojo no one bullied me again. And that is the story of how I can be a former Ranger and still know Rivendell.”
That brought a smile to her face. “What happened to the bully?”
The thought always made him happy. “He’s asking customers if they want fries with that.”
“Oh, man.” Hope sighed. “I do love me a happy ending.”
Luke leaned forward. He’d taken the tense expression off her face, which was good. Now for the rest of it. He made his voice very gentle. “Hope, we really need to go to Sacramento. Metal has turned off Felicity’s phone and he just texted that she is sleeping and he won’t have her disturbed. But she found something that seems to lead to Sacramento. You have her files and you can figure out what she found on the way down. But I think we need to be there.”
Hope turned in her chair until she faced him completely. She touched his knee and instinctively, he put his hand over hers. It felt small and soft, but he understood now that she wasn’t soft.
“I get it, Luke. Absolutely. But whatever might be there in Sacramento has been there for the past twenty-nine years and can wait a day longer. Right here, right now, Felicity needs me.” He opened his mouth and she held up a hand. “I know her job isn’t at risk. I know she is a very valued member of your company, as she should be. But I also know her and know how sad and frustrated she is that she isn’t keeping up with the workload. If I can help take even a pound of that weight off her shoulders, then that’s what I’m going to do because it’s my absolute priority. Are we clear on that?”
“Absolutely clear.”
He looked deeply into her eyes. Fiercely intelligent and focused. Amazingly beautiful forest green interspersed with streaks of bright yellow. For a second, he spaced out on her eyes, falling into them so intensely the world disappeared.
She wasn’t defiant and she wasn’t challenging him. He understood that. It wasn’t rebellion — but it was stubbornness. Hope was absolutely committed to helping Felicity and wasn’t about to be swayed.
And, fuck. Luke understood that, understood it to the bone. Loyalty to teammates was bred into him. He’d learned loyalty at his father’s knee. Loyalty was absolute and not conditional.
You weren’t loyal to your friends when it was convenient and it suited you. You were loyal, always. Even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
He sighed. “Okay.”
She lifted her fingers from his knee and looked at him, surprised. “Okay?”
Luke nodded. “Yeah.”
“You’re a soldier. Were a soldier. And a cop. Those are professions where you’re used to being obeyed.”
He gave a wry smile. “Yep.”
“But you’re not freaking out at not being obeyed.”
“Nope. I’m not going to convince you with words. And that’s all I’m willing to use. It’s essentially your show.”
“That’s a nice example of cooperation. In a spirit of compromise, I’m going to work as hard as I can and as fast as I can.”
Luke deliberately didn’t smile at her earnest words. “Okay. Fast is good.”
She nodded, turned around and … disappeared. He’d never seen anything like it. Soldiers — and especially SpecOp soldiers — knew how to focus. Fuck, their lives depended on it. During briefings, studying maps, getting ready for action, a soldier was nothing but focus. But this — this took it to a whole other level. Hope sort of leaned forward and essentially entered her laptop. Her fingers flew over the keyboard like a pianist playing rock music. The Elton John of keyboarding.
She also disappeared Luke right off the face of the earth. When he understood that she wasn’t even aware of his presence, he took himself off to be useful somewhere else. He settled in another area and cleaned his weapons, rearranged his go-bag, took care of some admin on his own laptop, which Hope would probably consider a pitiful thing. It was the latest of a popular brand, but didn’t look anything like Hope’s laptop, which was so advanced it seemed like an alien artifact, beamed down from space.
He was thinking with interest about lunch when there was a soft sound of satisfaction. He turned and watched Hope punch a key.
“There!” She cricked her neck to the left and then to the right and stood up.
Luke held the menu in his hand and watched as she folded down her laptop. “Done?”
“Yeah. I sent it off to Felicity. Can I talk to her now?”
He punched the number on his cell and got Metal’s plain mug.
“Yeah?” Metal looked like he’d just fought the battle of Pellenor Fields, all by himself, and lost. “What?”
“Hey man.” He tried not to wince. But he had to ask. “How’s it going?”
“How do you think it’s going?” The words were aggressive, but his tone wasn’t. He was beat. Luke felt really sorry for him. “She’s still spotting and she wants to go back to work.” He shot an acid look to the side, clearly aimed at Felicity. Who was also awake.
“Can I talk to her?” Hope asked.
Luke held out his cell.
Hope was smiling as she took it. “I want you to listen, not talk,” she said, trying to sound authoritative. Her voice was too soft to be commanding, but there was steel there. “
I sent you my conclusions re the file. You can go through them if you want, but I think you’ll agree with them. I’d feel good, I’d feel really good, if you just fed them straight to your bosses and took a nap instead. In that file you sent me, there were a few outstanding issues with regard to your command server, just a little flotsam and jetsam, and I took the liberty of cleaning it all up. I think you’re all caught up, now. So Luke and I are going to …” she shot him a look and he nodded his head. “We’re going to go chase that lead in Sacramento, but you can always shoot me an email if something needs doing. I’ll drop everything.”
“Thanks, Hope.” Felicity sounded tired. “Emma got in touch from San Francisco. She was worried about you but I told her you’re in good hands. She said to send her stuff to do because she’s bored. And for you to get in touch via HER room, if you need help. So between the two of you, I’m completely covered and you’ve got backup. I’m going to switch off now and sleep for a while.”
“For a couple of years,” Metal’s voice said to the side. “I’ll wake you up when the boys go off to college.” Metal disconnected.
Hope handed Luke’s cell back to him.
“Do we know any more about Sacramento?” he asked. Up to now Felicity had called it a thread.
“I’ll check when we’re in the air.” She squinted at him. “The plane has wi-fi. Right?” It was said in the same tone someone else would use to ask if the airplane had wings.
“Yep.” Her face smoothed out. “It also has a bathroom with a shower, food and beverages.” The plane also had enough weaponry to start a small war, full combat gear, including armor for five people, gas masks, bioweapons detectors, a Geiger counter and parachutes, and enough survival gear to survive the apocalypse for a week.
No flies on his guys, no sir.
“Cool. Let’s go.” She’d already stowed her laptop. She hitched her backpack onto her shoulder and made for the door.
“Just a minute, Lara Croft.” Luke tugged at her elbow. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Midnight Kiss Page 7