by Eason, Mary
“What are you doing?” I asked when he would have walked away from me without so much as another word, inviting whatever trouble he represented back to my side.
“I’m leaving you...for now, that is. I think tonight is definitely my lucky night.”
“Oh? And why is that? Because I’m not cuffing you and hauling your butt off to jail or interrogation? Because I’m willing to let you go for now?”
“No, Cameron Alexander,” he answered in that attractive voice that didn’t bother disguising just how full of it he considered me to be. “Because I had the pleasure of seeing you again. You were right, you know. I was following you. But you wouldn’t have taken me in. Sorry to burst your little bubble, sweetheart, but you weren’t very convincing. Maybe you’ll have better luck the next time we meet.”
With those words, he simply walked away from me unthreatened. Certainly not intimidated one little bit. And I sank down to my knees.
Who was this guy? How did he know me? I didn’t recognize him as any known fugitive as my instinct was telling me that he was. But surely, if I’d met him before, as his words had clearly implied, then he’d be...what? In custody? Yeah, I’d really proven that point tonight.
I’d acted as if this was my first day on the job. I wasn’t a novice. I’d been with The Organization for more than three years now. I knew how to handle a possible threat like this guy posed, for crying out loud. So who was this guy? More importantly, why was he following me?
Something in the way that he’d emphasized my last name made me believe that he knew about my marriage to Noah, although how anyone could have found out that fact was hard to imagine. Not even the higher-ups in the FBI, not even Adam Manning, Noah’s boss knew about it. We’d deliberately covered up our marriage and backtracked it to the point that we were certain no one would ever stumble across any record of its existence. So how had this guy found out?
I turned to look in the direction that he’d left but he was gone, but certainly not for good. Not if I could trust that uneasy feeling at the base of my spine that had never once let me down before.
I would face this guy again. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot. He’d only been playing with me tonight. I’d meet him again, no matter how desperate I was to get out of the game. Like it or not I still had unfinished business with him.
I had a decision to make before that time came. I had to decide how I was going to manage to stay alive.
I was still trying to understand why I’d reacted to him the way that I had when my cell phone sounded reminding me all over again, of just how late I was.
I’d made so many mistakes tonight leading up to this final one. Standing down against an enemy agent. If I hadn’t made the fateful decision to walk instead of listening to Noah, then I wouldn’t have ended up being followed by my mystery man in the first place. And I wouldn’t have ducked into the club to try to catch him at his own game, which clearly had failed miserably, then I wouldn’t have ended up on this ridiculous personal mission, instead of concentrating on what I should be doing in the first place.
I could almost hear Noah’s anger and frustration with me. I’d put my life on the line. For what? For a stupid hunch. I could be completely wrong about the guy. Given my emotional state as of late it was a very real possibility that I’d simply misread everything.
If I hadn’t wasted the time, it took to put my child and myself in jeopardy without any clear results I could be with Noah now. Not standing here alone in this deserted alley.
But none of that mattered now. The point was I hadn’t done any of the things that I should have. I fished the cell phone out of my purse when it continued to ring off its little hinges.
“Hello?”
“Cameron? What exactly do you think you’re doing? We’re all here. So where are you?”
That was Gina Manning’s way of getting the point across to me in no uncertain terms. Not that I needed any help. I knew how much Gina disliked me. Even if I’d been on time tonight, Gina would have found another way of showing her displeasure. At least I always knew where I stood with her.
As the only other female agent in our group, I believed Regina, a.k.a. Gina Manning, resented my presence in her men’s only club. She had been the queen bee for five years before I’d come onto the scene. Gina didn’t like to share her ‘boys’, as she was so fond of referring to the other four male members of our team.
But that wasn’t the only reason Gina and I were never going to be friends. I’d saved her life about two years ago when I was still considered a rookie, and she was supposed to be the seasoned pro. Gina had resented that obligation to me from the start.
And then there was the fact that I was ‘seeing the boss’ or so she and everyone one else in The Organization believed was to be the extinct of Noah’s and my relationship. I think this was actually something that Gina pictured herself doing. After all, Noah and Gina’s father were good friends. Adam Manning was like a father to Noah.
“Gina, I’m sorry. I ran into a little snag, but I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” It seemed that no matter how hard I tried I could never bridge Gina’s resentment towards me.
“Whatever, Cameron. Just get here. This is an important meeting--you knew that. Noah told us all to be here on time. We have a lot of information to go over tonight. You’re holding things up.”
Without so much as a goodbye, Gina hung up on me and I felt my frustration continue to grow. Gina and I were co-workers, fellow Agency pledges against the forces of evil. But that was it. We’d never be close. But then, that was the nature of our business. We worked close to people for years, but we didn’t fully trust any of them. It just doesn’t pay to get too close, because you never really knew whom you could trust completely.
Most people might wonder how and more particularly, why anyone would put themselves in a position that could be both emotionally crippling as well as thankless in the first place.
Well, you don’t just wake up one day and decide you want to be this type of work for a living. It’s a calling so to speak. And how do you get such the calling? Unfortunately, it usually comes at the cost of someone close to you. It comes with death. In my case, it was my parents’ death.
The ‘official’ ruling had been an accident. Local authorities believed my dad had simply lost control of his car and plunged through the railing and down a mountainside killing himself and my mother.
I didn’t believe that version for a minute. I knew my dad. He never took chances. If he thought he couldn’t control the situation for a second, he would never put himself or my mother in harm’s way. Something hadn’t been quite right about the whole accident report. I knew that the moment I got the news of their deaths a little more than three years earlier.
It came in the form of a call from the local constable assigned the ugly task of notifying the next of kin. The man was from a small town along the North Carolina border where my parents had been staying at the time of their deaths.
It wasn’t so much, what the constable had to say about the accident, or the fact in his very detailed report. It was what he wasn’t saying.
I’d driven all night to reach the place, where I was forced to identify my parent’s bodies. It took me all of two minutes of talking to the uncooperative constable and the equally unfriendly coroner, to realize things were not as they seemed. The day after I buried my parents, I was back there in that little town once more where I'd pretty much wore my welcome out and was told point blank to leave. But not before I understood a little bit more about what I was dealing with.
All I can say was that there was nothing short of sheer paranoia throughout that whole region. No one trusted anyone, especially outsiders. No one was talking. Including the constable and most of the town folk. Something had them spooked. It was a long time before I realized what that something was. After I joined The Organization, I found out that the Red Jihad had a stronghold on the town.
After banging on more doors than I can e
ven remember anymore without getting any answers, I was just about ready to give up when out of the blue, Noah had showed up at my hotel room.
He was there unofficially as a representative of the government my father had worked for and officially, he was there to offer me a job.
Noah had done a very thorough background check on me, and knew just how talented I was. I was fluent in seven separate languages not to mention a few that were obscure. And I was smart. I’d graduated top in my glass at UV. Noah saw a need within The Organization for my particular skills. I was signed on with The Organization as their linguistics specialist, but I was mostly called upon to figure out obscure codes used amongst the terrorist cells to communicate with each other.
Much later, I found out that Noah was actually been sent there to stop me from asking questions that were coming close to jeopardizing a mission that had been in place for quite some time. I was getting too close to discovering classified contact names.
And that was how I’d first met Noah Rogers. He never would tell me what he’d been authorized to do if all of his other techniques had failed. Not that it mattered. I’d fallen head over heels for Noah from the second I laid eyes on him.
Noah was pretty much every girl’s dream come true. He was well educated, and highly trained in the art of tracking terrorist. With more than ten years’ experience on the international scene, Noah had come back to the US to help found The Organization. He’d gone through more training and covert missions by the time he’d turned thirty than most people had watched on TV.
And Noah was excellent at one of the first rules of the trade that I struggled with. Never show your emotions. Sometimes even now, after he told me he loved me, I wasn’t sure I believed him.
You see, Noah was good. He could look at you and make you want to confess things that you’d never even considered before. That was why it was so hard for me to keep anything secret from him. It was next to impossible, in spite of the fact that I’d been trained pretty well myself.
Somehow, Noah always knew when I was lying, or when something was bothering me. That’s why I’d known for weeks that it was only a matter of time before things came to a head between us. Because every time I was with Noah, it was obvious that he was aware of my restlessness and all the reasons behind it.
Noah knew I wanted out. Had known for some time. He knew he’d have to deal with me at some point. I wondered what he would say when and if he I ever had the nerve to tell him I was pregnant?
CHAPTER TWO
After three years in the trenches with plenty of on the job training, I could pretty much spot a terrorist a mile away and usually I was prepared no matter what.
That was why tonight’s little mishap had been both disturbing and dangerous. I’d been caught off guard. Unprepared. All it took was one false move and one very determined bad guy and I’d be gone.
As I left the crowded club and headed towards Noah’s shop, I tried to understand what exactly I’d been thinking lately? Well, besides the obvious.
I was twenty-eight years old. I’d been doing this enough years now to know better. It was just the unexpected return of my brother, I told myself. That coupled with discovering I was pregnant had me confused. Off my game. But in the back of my mind, an uneasy feeling warned me there would be no coming back from this. It was over. I was over. Burned. Toast. I needed to get out while I still could.
The Organization had been Noah’s brainchild. He’d seen the need and fought all the Nay Sayers before winning Adam Manning’s support. Adam could be a formable alliance to have. Noah was a natural born leader. His first recruit had been Matt James who joined up with Noah one year later and was Noah’s first convert. Matt was The Organization’s intelligence specialist. He was a genius when it came to the computer. Matt was the best of the best when it came to intelligence gathering.
Shane Rodriguez and Gina Manning had both come on board around the same time, but from far different backgrounds.
Shane was a former Army Ranger who had served in the first Gulf War. He knew everything there was to know about weaponry. It was his specialty. He knew all about them and he knew where to find them. Shane could track where just about any terrorists’ organization purchased their weapons. He was a true genius to watch in action.
Gina was our accounting and financial specialist. You’re probably wondering why exactly is a bean counter part of such an elite group. Simple. Terrorists have to have financial support to buy all those weapons as well as fund those missions they performed. Gina was good at her job, as well. She could find the money. But she had very little training in the field.
Personally, I still believed Gina had taken the job simply because she’d had the hots for Noah. Gina was rich, beautiful and spoiled rotten. She wanted to work with Noah, she was good at what she did, and her father just happened to be Noah’s boss.
Of course, she and Noah never really had that fling Gina was hoping for, in spite of all her attempts at seducing Noah. When I joined the group, Gina dislike for me had been readily apparent. After Noah and I started seeing each other well, it was all out war.
I reached the half way Matt for Noah’s little rented shop off Forty-Eighth Street that doubled in the daylight hours as a computer retail and repair shop. Noah’s cover job.
I found myself wondering if my current outlook on life could be due more to the fact that this was the same time of year that my parents had died than anything else. It had been three years ago almost to the day that I was a naïve young thing living alone in this same city with only one worry in my innocent life. Which of the numerous job offers I’d received to accept?
I’d just finished four years of college where I’d taken every possible language class that I could, to help me fulfill my lifelong dream of working for the US State Department just as my father had before his retirement. I didn’t care which country or what job. I’d take whatever was available. I’d applied for several posts and had in turn received some very promising offers.
Growing up, my father had been stationed in just about every country there was in the thirty plus years he’d worked for the State Department. And my mother and I had been right there with him through it all. As a child, it had been easy for me to pick up most of the languages of the countries we’d lived in. At seventeen, I’d come back to States to attend the University of Virginia. The same university that both my father and mother attended and where they had met and fallen in love.
I was anxiously trying to decide my future when my parents were killed in that car accident in a small North Carolina town. Their deaths came during the first year of their retirement.
For me, one of the biggest surprises, well beyond discovering there really was such a thing as true evil in the world, was finding out how little the folks at the State Department were actually willing to help me find out the truth about my parent’s death.
Learning that they had been searching for Judah in a known hideout of the Red Jihad was the main reason I’d given up my desire to work for the State Department. I became an agent for the FBI instead because I believed I could make a difference in the world.
Each of us at The Organization has a cover job so that to the world we appear to be just your average citizens. Mine was working as a substitute teacher at a private school. Not exactly where you’d picture someone cold and calculating working. Especially someone who could take a life without thinking twice about it. But that was the beauty of it. No one ever suspected me of anything so dark and deadly. Being a substitute had its advantages as well. It allowed me the freedom needed to make all those covert trips that was essential to Agency business.
Still, I always wondered what my ‘kids’, as I called my middle-school classes that I worked with, would think if they knew what Miss Alexander really did in her spare time. All those stories about how much I loved to read and how much time spent at home curled up with a good book, would be blown to smithereens that was for sure.
When I reached the dark side-do
or entrance to Noah’s shop, I hesitated for a moment, dreading the inevitable. I stood with my hand on door, knowing going into that room what I would be faced with. I was in deep trouble. For one, I was late for a meeting, which was bad enough. Noah was very particular about people being on time. For the most part, he pretty much left us to our own schedules during the week, but Noah expected us to be on time for our weekly meetings.
I decided my best course of action at this point was to keep my mouth shut about what had happened tonight at all costs.
“You are definitely losing your touch, kiddo.” I said to myself, my voice sounding shaky in the still night air, reflecting the uncertainties that still lingered in me.
I unlocked the door that led from Noah’s storage area to the small room that served as his office and the official meeting place of The Organization.
At my somewhat clumsy entrance, everyone in the room stopped talking and turned to watch as I fumbled with the door that always seemed to stick just for me.
“Cameron, where have you been? We were starting to get worried about you. You know with the heightened security in place right now, none of us should ever be unaccounted for.” That was Noah’s way of letting me know that he was worried about me. The others no doubt could care less. But then, Noah had reason to be worried. We all did.
A few weeks earlier, I’d intercepted an email from the Red Jihad that had a reference in it that to anyone else would have seemed innocent enough. But not to me. My heart had kicked into overdrive when I read the word anchor. It might mean nothing more than what it appeared to mean on the surface, or it might mean everything. You see, anchor was Noah’s code name. In the context of the note, it simply said that the anchor was loose and off shore. At the time I’d intercepted the email, Noah was on assignment. Of course I had no idea where or what type of assignment he was doing, but that reference had sent up all sorts of red flags. I’d called Noah’s secure cell phone and told him what I’d found out and he’d immediately flown back to D.C. Since that time, we were all watching our backs.