An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense)

by Bridgeman, Hallee

  She ran ten miles, letting the rain hit her face, wanting to cleanse herself from the inside out, wishing it could also wash away the fresh, sharp pain of betrayal. When she got home, she put a pot of tea on to steep then took a long hot shower. Once she had showered and dressed in a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt, she poured herself a cup of tea and sat down at her desk, booting up her laptop.

  Her fake e-mail address showed she had incoming mail, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then accessed the mail folder. The message was short and to the point.

  5 PM Monday.

  After she turned off her computer, she clenched her fist and pressed it against her rolling stomach.

  ¯¯¯¯

  Chapter 9

  NICHOLAS "Nick" Williams woke with a start — eyes wide open and heart racing — fighting to keep calm despite the temporary panic of the nightmare that had roused him. He ascertained his surroundings, scanning every corner and using all of his senses to get a handle on his racing thoughts. Within seconds, he'd gotten his bearings and forced his pulse back down.

  He had awakened in his cousin Marcus Williams' apartment in New York City, thousands of miles away from the Middle East and the harsh desert of his nightmare. The dial on his watch gave a faint green glow as he pushed the button on the side and read the time. One o'clock. He'd managed to get three hours of straight sleep this time, which was pretty good for him. Normally he didn't make it past two. The trip back to the States must have worn him out more than he realized.

  He got up and took a shower, enjoying the luxury of hot clean water and a massaging shower head. He'd learned the hard way that many things in life were taken for granted; clean sheets and hot showers with massaging shower heads sat at the top of that list.

  He dressed quickly, impatient to drive to D. C. and check in with the agency, debrief, and more importantly, start his vacation. He had in mind a hut on a beach and endless tall glasses of icy lemonade, maybe a fishing pole, definitely his Bible. He and God had to have a long awaited conversation.

  There was little packing to do since he'd only spent one night. He once again wrapped his worn Soldier's Bible in the linen handkerchief it came with and put it into the pocket of his slacks. He carefully checked the clothes he'd worn on the long journey home, ensuring that all the obvious and not so obvious pockets had been emptied. They went into a plastic laundry bag he would drop off down the street from the apartment at the one hour cleaner's he had used a few times before. His cousin would pick them up and have them here for the next time he was in town.

  When he came out of the bedroom, he was surprised to see Marcus awake and in the kitchen. Since it was barely one in the morning, he didn't expect to see him.

  "Cuz," Marcus said, expertly using one hand to crack an egg into the hot skillet. "I have breakfast just about ready."

  Marcus was the head pastry chef for the world-renowned Viscolli Hotel. When he wasn't managing and coordinating the desserts served by dozens of chefs around the world, he traveled the globe designing and making cakes for presidents, celebrities, and kings.

  Marcus was Nick's second cousin on his father's side, but had as much to do with his family as Nick did — which was basically nothing. He attended Nick's basic training graduation to see his best friend graduate, and recognized Nick's name. He approached him and introduced himself. Nick had nothing to do with his father or his side of the family. Regardless, Marcus pursued a friendship with Nick that Nick very cautiously accepted.

  After Nick's "death", Nick was in Dubai en route to Libya, and accidentally ran into Marcus while Marcus was participating in an international pastry competition in a hotel there. Marcus immediately recognized him, and Nick shared a meal with him, explaining his covert life and the need to keep his existence quiet.

  Now he always came back into the country through New York, and always spent one night with Marcus. The two forged a bond that only grew over time. Marcus kept Nick's existence a secret, and Nick had an ally outside of NISA who he could trust and rely upon.

  "Thanks, man," Nick said, setting his bag near the door. "I'm heading back to D. C. as soon as I eat."

  "After you debrief, where are you going?"

  "Some place with sand, warm water, and cold lemonade." He slid onto a bar stool. "Care to join me?"

  Marcus stopped artistically plating the corned beef hash and fried egg to look his cousin in the eye. Nick felt like he'd been read thoroughly and he tried not to shift under the gaze. "No. I think you need some alone time to decompress." He went back to the plate, added an orange slice that had been twisted to look like a seashell, and slid it across the bar to Nick. "Besides, I have a baby shower cake to do in Boston for a friend of Mrs. Viscolli."

  Nick snorted. "Booties and bows?"

  "Mrs. Viscolli always goes for simple, but definitely with chocolate and ganache. She's my favorite client."

  Marcus paused while Nick bowed his head and said a prayer of thanksgiving for the meal. "I don't know how you bake cakes all day long without going crazy," Nick said, shoveling a forkful of corned beef into his mouth.

  "God gave all of us different gifts. Mine just come with a master's degree in culinary arts." He pulled a bottle of water out of his refrigerator. "I personally prefer flour on my hands to Afghanistan sand." He took a drink of the water and grinned. "Of course, that's just me."

  Nick laughed and took another bite of the perfectly prepared meal.

  The drive to Washington, D. C., took him less than four hours. There was very little traffic this early on a Tuesday morning, and the streets showed the effects of the rain showers that had come through the area the night before. It was always weird to be back in the States. He'd been out of country for so long that the lights, buildings, and surplus of material things would take some getting used to on his part.

  He pulled into the Department of Treasury building and parked in the employees' parking garage below street level. In the elevator, he opened a stainless steel access panel and punched a code into the keypad. The authorization light blinked green, and the elevator began its descent. Three stories down, the doors opened and Nick stepped out of the elevator into a tastefully decorated lobby one hundred and six feet below ground. Two stern looking and armed U. S. Marines stood guard at the only door leading out of the lobby, and Nick nodded to them when he stopped in front of the door.

  He accessed another computer panel within the door, and a screen slid out from the panel. He inserted his digital Common Access Card and typed in a 10 digit PIN. Almost immediately, he heard the door unlatch, giving him authorization to enter. That meant that the armed guard directly inside might not shoot him dead the moment he stepped inside.

  He stepped into the mantrap with a bulletproof window to his left and a guard station behind it. He passed his CAC and cell phone to the guard via the steel bank drawer. The guard waved him through without asking him to place his hand on the Plexiglas fingerprint scanner.

  On the other side of the mantrap, Nick walked down a short hallway and entered a small room where, to his pleased surprise, a young woman named Jennifer Thorne sat at a table in front of the door. Nick felt his cheeks fight fatigue to form a sincere smile when he recognized her and took her in. He had not expected to see her back at the agency and the sight of her made him unconsciously relax as he felt a wave of friendship flow through him.

  He could count on one hand the people in the world that he trusted — much less liked — and Jennifer Thorne topped that list. A long while ago, he had figured out that Jen Thorne felt the same way about him, and more. He tried never to think about Jen's thoughts or feelings where he was concerned. Her thoughts about him — and feelings for him — always led to dangerous territory; territory where feelings of mutual respect, trust, and admiration for sharply honed skills intersected with pain and loss in often confusing ways.

  Jen Thorne had light brown hair pulled into a loose ponytail on the back of her head, wire-framed reading glasses perched atop her n
ose, and a prosthetic arm. Nick remembered the night she lost her arm very vividly. If he ever got fuzzy on the details, he knew that picturesque and relentless nightmares would soon refresh his memory.

  She looked up from her computer screen as Nick came into the room. A returned smile lit up her face when she saw him standing there. "Well if it isn't Nick Williams in the flesh! I didn't know Nighthawk was back in country!" she exclaimed as she stood up and began to walk around her desk to greet him.

  "How's the 'one-winged' Dove?" Nick inquired in a teasing tone of voice.

  "Just Dove!" With a grin, Jen punched him in the shoulder, hard. Then she asked, "Did you just arrive?"

  "I just got in yesterday, well … this morning early, you know," he explained, giving her a warm hug, always mindful of her prosthetic. It often surprised him how warm and gentle her plastic hand felt laid against the back of his neck. In her ear, he asked, "What are you doing here? Last I heard, you'd taken another medical leave."

  She dismissed the remark with a wave of her human hand as they separated. "It wasn't a medical. Just a leave of absence. Did some consulting work in the private sector for some big bucks, but honestly, missed this place too much." With a grin that she only ever shared with Nick Williams, she said, "If you can imagine that."

  The grin said that Jen Thorne had a lot more to say that she would not say. The grin said she didn't miss the place like some kind of cat. She missed the people, or one person in particular. The grin and the distant look in her eyes silently announced that an entirely different life path lay just within reach, just on the edge of possibility, if only either of them could ever confront it and work out the details.

  All of that went unsaid and Jen perched on the edge of her desk, swinging her denim-clad leg. "Where're you coming from? Can you say?"

  Nick eased himself into the chair in front of her desk and leaned his head back, jet lag seeping through his system. There were too few moments in his life where he was given the opportunity to completely relax, and he decided to take advantage of this one. He absently rubbed the thin white scar that graced his temple. "Djibouti," he said, answering her question.

  Jennifer frowned, knowing a few details about recent activities in the Horn of Africa. "Ooh. How did you manage to pull that duty?"

  In other words, who at higher headquarters had a grudge against him to assign him that mission? He winked at her and leaned back in the chair, stretching his long legs in front of him. "Charlie thought that it might help purge some demons from my system," he acknowledged.

  "Good old Charlie. Did it work?" she asked, maybe not realizing that this now constituted the longest conversation she had held with another human being in months.

  He gave a wry smile. "I purged a few of them." He looked at his watch. "Cable news will probably be reporting the details in about an hour."

  She put her hand up, palm toward him. "Don't give me the details. I have a few demons myself when it comes to explosives." The telephone on her desk chirped twice. She walked back around and stabbed the speaker button with plastic fingertips. "Yes, sir?"

  "Take me off speaker!" Charlie Zimmerman ordered.

  She picked up the receiver with her remaining hand then listened for a moment. She sat back down in her chair and said, "I'll have him come right down." She hung the phone up and opened the desk drawer, pulling out an orange identification badge and some keys. "Charlie said for us to quit yacking and for you to get yourself downstairs yesterday."

  "Good old Charlie." Nick quipped, then accepted the ID badge and keys as he stood. He walked to the door behind the desk and waited. "Leave me word where to get up with you, Jen. We'll go shooting or something."

  "Sure thing, Nick. Maybe we can get a game of croquet going if you have mallets. I have some wickets somewhere." Her expression remained stoic, perfectly unreadable as she pressed the button beneath her desk that buzzed him through the magnetic lock of the inner door. Even without the visual clues, Nick knew without Jen having to say another word that she wished he'd want more than time spent in target practice with her, but neither one of them ever said it. They both knew he didn't want more, never had, and likely never would.

  "Check your SIPR mail later," she called as he walked through.

  ¯¯¯¯

  "I'M tired, Charlie. No way do I want to go to China. The only way I want to go to China is on a tourist visa. Do you know I've never actually seen the Great Wall from ground level? Why don't you give me some cushy desk job here in the States for a couple of months and let me relax for a bit," Nick suggested. He'd just finished his debriefing about his trip to North Africa, and cut his boss off when he started to explain another mission. "After I come back from two weeks at the beach on Little Creek."

  "Do this one job and you got it," Charles "Charlie" Zimmerman agreed affably before leaning back in his chair. Being behind a desk for the last five years had done nothing to soften the rugged planes of Charlie's body. He was a few inches over six feet and kept his salt-and-pepper hair cut military short. He had a long scar down one side of his face, and when that wound had healed, he'd finally accepted the job as Director of NISA, the National Intelligence and Security Agency.

  NISA is what personnel assigned to the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Treasury called an O.G.A or "Other Government Agency" whose mandate was murky and objectives remained largely undocumented. The National Security Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, and Department of Homeland Security all clandestinely called upon NISA to carry out tasks which they needed completed but for which they required plausible deniability in terms of involvement. Essentially, agents assigned to NISA were all volunteers who were unsung heroes whenever matters of national security ended favorably and very public fall guys whenever events ended badly. In short, NISA didn't exist. It was a "Black Operations" arm of the United States government.

  Nick Williams was a spook.

  "You told me the same thing right before you sent me to Djibouti," Nick said. "I'm through playing games here, Charlie. It's been ten years. I'm actually tired, and I won't be of any use to us out there if I burn out." He stretched out in his chair and propped his feet on the corner of Charlie's desk.

  Charlie's face remained thoughtful for about thirty seconds before he nodded his head. "You're right. China isn't a place where we can afford any mistakes right now." He pulled a file out of the basket on his desk and opened it. "I need someone to take this job. It's smooth and easy, and you stay in CONUS."

  In CONUS meant a domestic operation, specifically inside the continental United States. Charlie pulled out hard copies of an e-mail transmission that had been forwarded to him. "I need you to meet with this guy, find out what he has for us."

  Nick shook his head. "I'll look at it later. I'm going to the beach." He started to push himself to his feet, but Charlie stopped him.

  "Nick, this is personal."

  Nick sat back down. He didn't owe Charlie Zimmerman a thing; quite the opposite, in fact. That meant the chain of obligation between them was about to undergo further strain, somehow.

  Charlie folded his hands. "I've been pressing for a summit. A real one. A summit with the leaders of this country with a single agenda item. That is to discuss the ramifications to this great nation of bringing our soldiers up on charges for their efforts during the war," he said abruptly.

  Nick felt a wave of sympathy. "Your son."

  Charlie's lips tightened and he cleared his throat. "You were a soldier. You know as well as I do that my son did everything right. He never violated the 'Rules Of Engagement' and he followed every legal order to the letter, yet faced felony charges like a common criminal."

  He gestured at a stack of files on his desk. "You know what's up here at home. We've had two agents arrested in the last six months, and our agency barely breaches the security industry."

  Nick slowly sat back down. Charlie continued. "In three weeks time, and for the first time ever, we'll be speaking d
irectly with the President, the Vice President, a good portion of the members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs, and even a few Supreme Court Justices … all together in one place to talk this out in person. No one phoning it in. I've been working on it for six months, and," he said as he lifted up the file and let it fall to the desk again, "this guy here is saying there's knowledge of the summit, and that it's being threatened.

  "Now, you and I both know that it's probably nothing, and will just be a big waste of your time, but we can't let something like this go. We can't afford any more delays. And now that I've told you, quite frankly, you're the only person, other than me and Jen, in this entire organization who knows about the summit. I can't trust anyone else."

  Nick fought an internal war for about a millisecond. Then he took the file and scanned through the paper briefly. "Any hard proof been sent to support his allegations?"

  "No. He refuses to do so. Says if we want to see hard proof we have to meet him to get it. I think he doesn't trust the electronic communiqué. Fair enough. After Patraeus, who trusts e-mail? You have a strong sense of people when you first meet them, Nick. I trust your judgment with this guy. You'll probably be able to tell right away if he's for real."

  "Have you traced the e-mail?" Nick asked.

  Charlie laughed. "It's taken us a week to do it. This guy knows his way around a computer. We've been bounced from satellites to third world countries to Des Moines. The e-mail originated from the Portland, Oregon area. Jen should have more info soon."

  Realizing that Nick had accepted the mission, Charlie pulled a pack of cinnamon gum out of his desk drawer and offered a stick to Nick, who refused. Charlie popped a stick into his mouth and thoughtfully chewed. "Set everything up. Head on out to Portland today. Meet this guy, then take a couple of weeks off. Maybe head up to Vancouver or head south and hit San Francisco or Vegas. Not more than three weeks, Nick. I need you. Get your head on straight and we can discuss China when you get back."