It was Bard who was his main worry. Bard, son and heir of the Redfield dynasty, who wanted nothing to do with it and especially nothing to do with him. Bard, who’d joined the Navy to get away from him.
Voters could deal with three marriages. They’d done it before. Hell, everyone Court knew had been divorced at least once. It was almost a rite of passage. Voters didn’t really care.
But what voters really didn’t like was the idea of parents and children being estranged. That was one of the last taboos. If your kid didn’t trust you, how could a voter?
Things between Bard and himself had been tense since that damned bitch in California.
Bard could have had his pick of girls if he was wanting to settle down. Girls that came from decent families, girls whose families were connected, whose parents would appreciate the thought of marrying into the family of a man on the rise, like Court was. State representative, Governor, Deputy Director of the CIA, Senator and now candidate for the Big One.
Who wouldn’t want that? Be married to that?
Bard had been courted. Pretty girls, rich girls, had thrown themselves at his feet when he was young. Bard had been discreet, but Court knew he’d bedded a lot of them. Not one stuck. And then he had become fixated on that trailer trash girl, Lucy Whatthefuck. Once she was gone, Bard never had a serious relationship again. The most serious relationship he’d had was with the US Navy, and he’d been ferociously devoted.
So devoted that he’d disappeared for years at a time. Even as a Senator, even as the goddamned deputy head of the goddamned CIA, Court had been able to follow Bard’s military career only in broad strokes. As a SpecOps officer, Bard had been almost nonstop on top secret missions not even Court’s clearance could give him access to.
Or, for all he knew, Bard had spent the past twenty years at Little Creek, Virginia, two hundred miles from Washington and just hadn’t told his father. Court couldn’t afford to use official channels to track his son. What father didn’t know where his son was? When in truth, most of the time he’d had no idea where Bard was and what he was doing.
All he knew was that his son had erected his SEAL career as a wall between him and his father.
Sometimes Court wondered whether Bard deliberately sabotaged his career to stay away from him. By any measure, by any standards, Bard should have been an admiral by now. He had the combat experience, he had the connections, he even had the goddamned look of an admiral. Tall and broad-shouldered. Straight backed and handsome, though weathered. Court had tried to discreetly pull strings behind the curtain and had been assured that of course Bard would advance, but he never did. He’d been a Captain for a decade. He should have become a Rear Admiral by now.
The only possible explanation was that Bard preferred being in the field to being at the top levels in the Pentagon.
God, how the optics of Court standing next to his son, a decorated war hero, wearing a rear admiral’s dress whites, would help. It surprised him how much he wanted that because it would just be so goddamned effective. He yearned for it.
But no. The two of them had wavelength problems and could barely spend an hour in each other’s company without fighting. Bard was easy to love and admire from afar, when he was abroad, on deployment. Not so easy when he was in the same room as his father and contested every fucking word that came out of his father’s mouth.
He’d been a rebellious teenager but you factored that in. The serious hatred had begun with the trailer trash. Court had been horrified when he first realized that his son was serious about that girl in Sacramento all those years ago. Bard should have just fucked her and moved on. Granted, in the photos she was a really pretty girl. And bright, apparently. But impossible. Since his son was too besotted to see that, Court had had to take steps. Thought he’d done a good job, too. But then five years later, the bitch tried to contact Bard again. And she’d had a child! A girl. At the time, Court thought she was lying. That she’d had a child with some drifter and tried to pass it off as Bard’s.
It had actually been a miracle that he’d managed to intercept her letters to Bard. Letter after letter. With photos of the kid. Who, damn it, looked just like Bard.
He’d dispatched two men to Sacramento with a story of a young woman who’d stolen secrets from the CIA. In truth, the men didn’t care what the story was. They considered themselves expensive weapons. Point, aim, fire. Two days later Court read police reports about a fatal car crash involving a young Sacramento woman and her five-year-old daughter.
It was after that he decided to set up his small army. A private army, answerable only to him. Best decision he’d ever made.
His army had proved useful over and over again, and Court hadn’t given the woman in Sacramento and her daughter a second thought for 25 years.
His heart nearly stopped when he saw the photo of the woman who had engaged the geneticist, the one who’d found his archival DNA.
The female version of Bard. If the two were ever seen in public together there would be no doubt that they were related, that they were father and daughter.
For just a second, Court was … not sorry, really. He always did what had to be done and never suffered regret. But … sort of sad that they couldn’t claim her. Genius IQ, Harvard, MIT, computer expert, skilled in things Court didn’t even recognize. Not a mark against her name, not even a parking ticket.
What a pity. Life played such ridiculously cruel games, sometimes. The mother had been impossible for Bard and by extension for him, but the daughter … The daughter would definitely have been an asset.
Court sighed.
It was not to be. Not only was it not to be. If Bard found out that a child of his had been hidden from him, it would not be pretty. Bard wasn’t stupid. If he dug into the past, he’d realize what Court had done. And then …
Court shivered.
Bard was a man who had trained and trained hard to kill. He was a superb shot, he was skilled in hand to hand combat, he was a leader who led willing men at times to their death.
His son was a stone-cold killer.
Court couldn’t swear that Bard wouldn’t kill him for what he’d done. If Court were capable of feeling regret, he’d regret having killed the child. Maybe he should have given orders to drive the mother off the road when she was alone in her vehicle. That way they could have had the child. Bard would have quit the military, or at least stopped being a field officer. There were plenty of jobs at the Pentagon for a man with his talents, with time to raise a beautiful and smart daughter.
Court sighed. It was a pretty dream but it would never have worked. Bard was professionally paranoid and the first thing he’d have done was investigate the mother and her death.
No, Court had done the only thing he could do. By some wild card of fate, the child hadn’t died, had lived, and was now looking for her biological family. If she was smart — and by all accounts she was — she’d find her way back to Sacramento, to that trailer park.
Resnick would intercept her.
Sorry, honey, Court thought, with a touch of sadness. You’re likely to be the only grandchild I’ll ever have — but you have to go.
He made a note to call Resnick for a sitrep.
Sacramento
The safe house was unusually nice. It surprised Hope. In thriller movies, the safe house was a cheerless anonymous apartment in a cheerless anonymous neighborhood. Flaking walls and an empty fridge. Maybe some cockroaches. Or else a dilapidated and ramshackle farmhouse at the end of a dirt-track road far from anywhere.
Instead, the safe house Luke drove her to was in an attractive, bustling part of Sacramento with restaurants and art galleries and offbeat shops along the streets. Part of a gated community with a guard and landscaping, and inside it was comfortable and well decorated.
Well, hats off to Black Inc.
The entire drive she’d been completely lost in thought. Actually, it couldn’t even be called thought — more like drowning in images. What she’d seen resonated stro
ngly, like someone had switched on a tuning fork inside her. It felt like the vibrations would shake her apart. She sat and tried to hide her trembling but it didn’t work. Luke switched on the seat heating on her side as well as the cabin heating. It wasn’t cold, but she was.
Hope could usually think her way out of problems but there was no thinking her way out of this. There was no rational thread to pursue, nothing really to grab hold of beyond vague impressions, memories so fleeting they couldn’t even be called memories, just flashes. A swimming pool and a bright red inflatable tube. A blue bike with trainer wheels. A small dog with long hair.
A beautiful woman. When the woman’s face flashed in front of her, too fast to fix it in her memory, her heart started beating so hard she thought she was having a heart attack.
Nothing made any sense.
It was dark by the time they got to the safe house, one of a series of small townhouses, surrounded by large lawns, along a series of winding roads. Luke parked nose out in the driveway. Before getting out, he pulled up an app on his cellphone and started tapping.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The map of the complex and the security cams,” he replied distractedly. “Plus the ability to turn them off selectively. There they are. I turned them all off along our route. I’ll turn them back on when we’re in the house.”
“May I see?”
He raised his eyebrows but handed her his phone. “Sure.”
Hope took a quick tour of the app. It was simple, but effective. She added a feature — making visible the cams Luke had turned off in the form of a pathway. “Here.” She tapped onto the screen. “Looks like you forgot the cams along the driveway just before the security gate. Maybe we should turn those off too? I also memorized the whole thing so you don’t have to turn the cams off manually. With one tap, you can turn the same ones on and then off again as long as we follow the same route.”
She handed it back to Luke but he wasn’t taking his cell. He was looking at her really strangely. “Luke?” He didn’t say anything, just stared at her, light blue eyes focused on her like twin headlights.
What the hell?
Luke made a strangled noise in his throat. “Were you familiar with that app?”
What a weird question. “No. Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so because it was developed especially for Black Inc and they shared it with us. I can’t believe what you just did. It took all of us a morning’s worth of training to familiarize ourselves with that app. You figured it out in about two seconds.”
She shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t complicated.”
He shook his head and gave a half smile. “It is. It is complicated. But you aced it immediately and also figured out where I’d made a mistake. Plus added a function. I think from now on, I should just carry the weapons and the bags. Muscle work. And you do all the thinking.”
That coaxed a smile out of her. Her first in a long while. She opened her mouth to reply but her stomach growled.
“That’s the third job I have here. Feeding you. Come on, let’s go.”
Inside, the house was like a luxury hotel suite. Like the hotel they’d stayed in back in Portland, it had two bedrooms. Plus two bathrooms, a living room, dining room and a surprisingly well-equipped kitchen. Not that she’d be using it. She was hopeless in the kitchen.
She watched him as he closed the curtains, put their bags away, switched on the lights. Like watching the enchanted kingdom come back to life when Sleeping Beauty woke up, after the kiss.
Aurora wasn’t the only one to wake up after a kiss. In all the terror and horror of the past few days, leaving her chilled and shaken, one thing stood out. That kiss. An infusion of heat and life, a punch to the solar plexus that didn’t hurt, that instead infused her with sensations she couldn’t name but left her feeling light and free and alive. Just for the space of that kiss, but still.
Everything else was darkness and emptiness.
She looked around. “This apartment is incredible. I thought safe houses were gloomy, with scuffed second-hand furniture and dead flies everywhere.”
“Yeah, not here. Black Inc does things with style. But operatives are in Sacramento all the time, so I guess they use this safe house often. The company’s HQ is in California. In San Diego. So they often have business here at the state capitol and the big boss wants his men and women to be comfortable and safe. God knows they are often in the field in hellholes.”
“What’s he like?” Hope sat and patted the seat next to her.
Luke sat, holding his cell. Though he was lean, he still made a dent in the couch. He was heavier than he looked. He finished tapping and looked up. “Who?”
“Jacob Black. He’s sort of a legend.”
“Yeah, he is. I’ve only met him a few times. No nonsense. Good leader. Straight shooter.”
“Probably the only straight-shooting billionaire in the world.”
“He’s a billionaire because he’s really good at what he does. Not because he wants to be a billionaire. In the field, he lives exactly like his operators.”
She sighed. “If you talk to him, thank him for me.”
“Yeah. We’ve all got a stake in helping you. We all feel —” He stopped, studied her. As if he were checking for wounds.
“What?”
Luke nodded, as if coming to an agreement with himself. “We think that whoever is after you is someone either very high up in government or very high up in the security business. There are maybe ten guys — all men — in private security who could command the resources we’ve seen. And we know them all. Not all are good men, but coming after a woman like that —” Luke shook his head. “Takes a certain kind of person. And in government it would have to be people at the top, too. You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, honey, and none of us are happy about that.”
She blushed stop-light red at the ‘honey’ and looked away. “I’m really sorry to be creating so many problems. Maybe I shouldn’t have alerted Felicity, I should have —”
A look of horror crossed Luke’s face. “God no!”
He picked up her hand, brought it to his mouth. His lips were warm, as was the skin of his face. Warmth spread from her hand down through her body. He pressed a soft kiss in the palm of her hand. Pulling away, she closed her fist, as if to keep the kiss there.
“Somehow you got onto the radar of some bad people, either in or outside of government. Bad is bad. We’ve all tripped over them. My buddy Matt is — was — a SEAL. A squid. But I forgive him for that. Anyway, his path crossed a CIA operative’s path, and he was one of the worst men on the planet. He tried to ruin Matt’s life as a prelude to poisoning a major city and almost managed it. But with some help Matt prevailed and we’ll prevail here. No one is going to let anything happen to you. Not me, not anyone. You’ve got a team on your side now, and it’s a good one.”
She was watching his face carefully, listening to the things he was saying, listening to the things he wasn’t saying. He was speaking from the heart, as someone whose life had been ruined. As someone who knew first hand what that felt like.
“Nice thought,” she said. It was. Very nice. A team, on her side. The first and only time that had happened had been at the NSA, for about a year. Emma, Riley and she had formed an unshakeable team. And Felicity had joined them for about three months.
They’d put up with round-the-clock work, unspeakably dweeb semi-autistic men, a red-hot crisis a week. None of that mattered and they’d rolled with the punches like pros. Then, the horror of their handsy and bullying boss was too much and they scattered. All four quitting within a week of each other. They kept in touch via HER, the special room in the darkweb they’d set up, but the physical presence of her own team, day-to-day, was no more.
It had been great while it lasted.
“You don’t sound convinced.” Luke was frowning. Oh man, how could he look so good all the time? Frowning, smiling, thinking, driving. It didn’t matter what was going on w
ith him, he just looked good. All the time. So amazingly good-looking without being in any way a pretty boy. Fine, stern features, icy blue eyes, clean lines, strong lean body. He could have been a Roman Emperor, one of the better ones before they started electing their horses to the Senate. Or maybe a Roman general, that was more like it.
Yeah, on a rearing steed, sword in hand.
“—you think?” God, he’d said something and she’d zoned out.
“What?”
“You’re tired,” he said gently. “And you need to eat.” He looked up at the sound of a buzzer and smiled. “Good timing. Hope you like what I ordered.”
Entry to the apartment was via two locked doors, like a spaceship airlock. Luke had Hope stand to one side and not open the inner door unless she heard him rap out ‘Shave and a haircut’. He closed the door behind him and opened the outer door that gave out onto the covered porch. The murmur of voices, the special knock and she opened the door.
Luke carried in what looked like enough food for a football team. Hope followed him to the dining room where they set out two place mats, dishes, cutlery and glasses and he set out the food.
“I got plenty of vegetables. I know you had steak last night, but don’t know how often you eat it.”
“As often as I can. Love meat,” she said, watching as he unpacked the food. “I like everything that’s here.”
He looked up at her and gave her a rare smile. It was good that he smiled so seldom because his smile was almost blinding and a reminder — as if she needed it — of just how handsome he was. Wow.
“Not picky, eh?”
“What?”
“Well, most women your, uh, size, are uh, your size because they are incredibly picky about what they eat or they eat very little or both.”
She scowled, hands on hips. “By, uh, my size, are you saying I’m scrawny?”
His face was covered in blond scruff but she could swear that he blushed. Though that couldn’t be, could it? Warriors didn’t blush.
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