Around her, several people pulled back quickly, almost violently, one woman stepping on Summer’s toes. The woman didn’t even turn around to excuse herself. She was being crowded by the person in front of her.
Summer wasn’t tall, so she had to go on tiptoe to see what was going on.
Oh. A homeless guy. A tall vet, dressed in filthy, tattered BDUs, smelling of urine and body odor, long lank greasy dirty blond hair hanging in dreadlocks over his face, down his back, an unkempt beard covering half his face.
Well. Though her own heart swelled with pity—with the economic downturn there were a lot of homeless vets on the streets—she understood the people in front of her jerking away from him. Homeless vets didn’t fit into the elite’s mindset. They shouldn’t exist and when the elite came across them, they shied away.
The vet turned his face toward her for a second and that’s when their eyes met. Sharp, bright-blue eyes. Eyes she’d seen in her dreams a thousand times. Eyes that had stared into hers when they’d made love.
He turned immediately and ran. Though Summer pushed through the crowd brutally, stepping on toes and elbowing people aside, she lost him.
The vet was nowhere to be found.
Summer stood, frozen, unable to believe her eyes, yet knowing exactly what she’d seen.
Jack Delvaux, dead these past six months.
* * *
Fuck! She made him!
Jack Delvaux vaulted down the great stone steps of the National Cathedral, pushing people out of his way. But they parted for him anyway. He looked bad, he smelled bad and Washington’s elite simply broke ranks to let him through because the alternative was him touching them and their skin crawled at the idea.
Good.
Pretending to be homeless had kept him alive these past six months since the Washington Massacre. Everyone thought he was dead, which was just fine by Jack.
Because the Washington Massacre hadn’t been carried out by jihadi terrorists. No, the Massacre had been carried out by homegrown monsters, masquerading as terrorists. The Massacre hadn’t been about terror, it had been all about money, and dear departed Hector Blake had been right in the middle of it.
Jack had been present when Hector had really died. Had been part of it, actually. Hector had drowned in the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon four days ago while trying to abduct Jack’s sister, Isabel. Like him, she was one of the few survivors of the Massacre that had taken the lives of their parents, their younger twin brothers, their aunts, uncles, cousins and about seven hundred other people in the Burrard Hotel.
Jack’s heart still burned when he thought of it.
He wished Hector were still alive so he could kill him all over again.
But Hector had left a lot of secrets behind. A deep conspiracy that reached into the upper levels of the American intelligence community, including Jack’s former employer, the CIA, and Jack wasn’t going to rest until he unveiled it all and saw the conspirators in jail or in the ground. Preferably the latter.
Everyone thought Jack had been killed in the Massacre. Jack had stayed off the grid by pretending to be homeless, while living in a hidden safe house no one else knew about, set up by his former boss, who was now dead.
Pretending to be a homeless vet made him invisible. People didn’t want the homeless around at all. And homeless vets? No way.
Jack had bought old BDUs from the Salvation Army, pissed on them a couple of times a week and kept them out on the safe house’s little balcony where they got rained on and snowed on and grew more and more filthy.
He showered but took care to never wash his face. He shaved his head regularly and wore a filthy dreadlocks wig and pasted a scraggly beard on his face every time he went out, to confound the facial recognition bots. It worked. He didn’t even recognize himself.
For the entire funeral, Jack had watched from the edges of the crowd outside, keeping an eye on the Jumbotron, looking for clues, looking for something and wasn’t once recognized in the city he’d grown up in.
Except for Summer.
Damn.
She’d always been too smart for her own good.
He vaguely remembered the summer she’d been around at Hector’s place—she was some kind of relative of one of Hector’s wives—after she’d lost her folks. She’d been a funny looking little thing, eyes and mouth too big, a messy mass of reddish-brown hair sitting on her head like a bird’s nest. Stick-thin and quiet as a mouse. It was the summer he’d had the crazy idea of training for the Olympics as an archer but it had turned out to be too much work and interfered with his social life. Life had been really good back then. He’d been pretty busy all that summer training and competing and partying and hadn’t really paid her much attention.
Then she disappeared. People were appearing and disappearing from his life constantly in those years because he was too clueless and self-involved to pay attention.
And then in his senior year at Harvard he’d run across her and—whoa. Her face had grown so the eyes and mouth were sexily big without looking weird. She didn’t have a rat’s nest at all, but a smooth auburn bob and had filled out nicely. Very nicely.
He’d barely recognized her and had been able to place her thanks to her voice. She’d grown up abroad, dragged to a thousand places by her hippie parents. She spoke beautifully but with a tinge of an exotic accent that had made him smile when she’d been twelve and made him sweat when she was eighteen.
And then he’d fucked her and left her. Which was what he did on a massive scale in those years, thinking with his little head and not his big head.
It felt like ancient history, something you’d study in a textbook. The Years of Fucking Around: 1997—2001.
He had to get out of here, fast, because Summer would follow her instincts and try to catch him.
His years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service had taught him to walk really fast without appearing to hurry. He just lengthened his stride and made sure he wasn’t pumping his arms.
He didn’t really have to worry about anyone other than Summer, because no one noticed him, except to draw back or even cross the street to avoid him. Down the hill from the Cathedral and four blocks away was a black SUV with mud on the license plates and smoked windows. It looked exactly like every other official vehicle in the city.
Jack jerked the passenger door open and sat down.
“Well that was fun,” Nick Mancino said as he started the engine. Nick wrinkled his nose. “Man, you smell.”
“That’s the point,” Jack said. “Now drive.”
The SUV pulled out and headed for Jack’s safe house. “So?”
“I think I was made,” Jack said sullenly. Six fucking months without being made in a city full of intelligence operatives and government agents and one girl—woman—made him in an instant.
“Well...fuck,” Nick said, driving fast. Nick, a member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, was under unofficial cover. Only one person knew he was here investigating the Massacre, the Director of the FBI. With possible CIA involvement, it was the hottest of hot potatoes and so far, the investigation was off the grid.
Officially, Nick was on leave from the FBI and would stay on leave until they unmasked the conspiracy. He was almost as driven as Jack to find the fuckers responsible. Almost.
Jack had lost his entire family except for his sister, Isabel. He was going to find out who was responsible or die.
“Who made you?” Nick’s eyes swept the side view mirrors and the rear view mirror in a constant rotation. Jack was a good driver but Nick had taken combat driving training at Quantico.
Jack clenched his teeth. “Summer Redding.”
Nick’s eyes widened and he flicked a glance over to Jack. “Summer Redding? The blogger? Area 8?”
Jack nodded.
“W
ell, hell.” Nick shook his head. “That is very bad news. Redding is one sharp lady. Are we going to read about you being alive after all in today’s blog? If so, we’re fucked.”
They were fucked. If Summer posted that he’d been seen today—alive—the entire mission was endangered. It wasn’t just a question of himself. Jack knew that forces inside the CIA were working against the country. The Massacre was just the first of what he felt might be more attacks coming soon.
A drumbeat of dread thrummed through him.
Just before the Massacre, Jack had stepped on some kind of trip wire. He’d first come across whispers in Singapore, where he’d been posted for the past four years. An informant had contacted him about a secret plan at the highest levels of the Chinese government to destabilize the United States with the help of a few very highly-placed American citizens, including a few in the CIA. When Jack heard that, every hair on his body had stood up.
The plan had several steps and the first one had been the Massacre and the second one was going to be an attack on US soil. He had nothing more than that. No timetable, no indication of where.
And then the informant had disappeared and reappeared as a floater in the Singapore city morgue. The corpse had been so bloated it had taken the coroner an hour to discover the slit across the informant’s throat.
But it had been serious enough for Jack to fly home to talk to his boss, the head of the National Clandestine Service, Hugh Lownie. He’d been meaning to fly home anyway because his dad, against the entire family’s advice, had announced his intention to declare his candidacy for the presidency. His mom had gone into panic mode, frightened to death that someone would assassinate him. Rumor had it that they were fighting, close to a divorce, but that was bullshit. His parents loved each other deeply.
His dad was an idealist, wanted to run, and Jack had come home.
He’d met with Hugh in a park with no microphones anywhere because he didn’t trust anyone or anything at Langley. Hugh had promised to start an in-house investigation.
That night, the night his father was slated to declare his candidacy at the Burrard Hotel, Hugh had called him. Jack had been on the podium because whether or not he agreed with his dad about running for President, he loved the guy and would swing his support behind him.
Everyone he loved had died that night with the exception of his sister, Isabel.
Nick wrinkled his nose. “Dude, do something. You fucking reek.”
Jack unfastened the seat belt, took off the stinking jacket and slid out of the uniform pants. He also snatched the smelly wig off his head. He hated it almost more than the sweat-and piss-soaked BDU. The wig itched and was heavy as fuck. Underneath, Jack kept his hair shorn and did it himself. Looking at himself without the wig, he looked like a prisoner of war. He pulled the beard off, too. The beard was stuck on by a miracle glue like that on Post-its that he could apply and tear off without pain.
Nick kept his eyes firmly on the road. Jack reached behind him for a hoodie and sweat pants, put the stinking homeless uniform in a plastic bag, tied the handles together, and put the bag in a gym bag. The funk factor in the vehicle dropped by about a thousand.
“Thanks,” Nick said, sighing with relief. “So, what are we going to do about Redding? She made you, she’s going to put it in her blog. We have to stop that, stop her. It would be a disaster. She can’t write about it. Not now, it would put the entire mission in jeopardy.”
“Whoa,” Jack shot up in the seat. “We’re not touching her. The hell you talking about?”
“Calm down, bro.” Nick clutched the steering wheel harder. “I don’t mean hurt her, Christ, what do you think I am, CIA?”
Jack let that slide. A couple of years ago he wouldn’t have taken any abuse from an FBI puke, no sir. The CIA wasn’t perfect but he’d been proud to serve. At least in the beginning. Then later...
And now? Now someone in the CIA had killed an informant, carried out the Massacre and moles—he had no idea how many—were plotting to bring his country down. So he kept his mouth shut. Slumped back into the seat. “We’re not touching Summer,” he repeated. “She won’t post anything, she never posts anything without some kind of proof. So we’re okay.”
He hoped.
Nick narrowed his eyes at the road and slapped his hand against the wheel. “You fucked her. That’s what this is about.”
Jack sighed. “Yeah. About a million years ago. I fucked a lot of the women who were at the funeral. I was a man slut. So what?”
“So you were imprinted on her, that must be it. Because no one else noticed you. And if that’s the case, she’ll be like a dog with a bone. Must have been some fuck.”
Jack stiffened. Nick was a good guy but no one could talk like that about Summer. Jack swiveled his head and glared. “Say anything like that again and I’ll rip you a new one,” he growled, meaning every word.
Nick’s eyes widened. “Dude. Sorry. Whoa, didn’t mean it that way. Hell, she’s an incredible woman. She followed the trail of Senator Rowland’s abuse of the family au pair like a terrier with a bone. If we have one less shit in the Senate, it’s thanks to her. I read Area 8 regularly, love it.” He blew out a breath. “So—now that we’ve got that out of the way—we still got a problem. A big one.”
Jack clenched his jaw.
“Problem. We’ve got a problem. You see that, don’t you? Talk to me, Jack.” They were at the safe house and Nick pulled into the covered alleyway in the back. “What are you going to do about it? One of the most well-known bloggers in America knows you are not dead. How do we remedy that?”
Silence.
“Jack?”
“I’m going to go talk to her,” Jack said finally.
Chapter Two
Jack Delvaux is alive!
But...Jack was dead. He’d died in the Washington Massacre.
There’d been a memorial service for him and she’d cried bitterly over the golden boy who was no more.
Summer sat in her cute yellow Prius in front of her apartment in Alexandria, shaking hands still on the steering wheel, mind whirling.
Jack Delvaux, alive.
Most people would shrug the thought off as a figment of their imagination. Most people, knowing Jack had been dead for six months, would have told themselves that they were mistaken.
So anyone else who thought they’d seen a man who’d been dead for six months would have said to themselves—that homeless man really looked like Jack Delvaux, but...nah. He’s dead.
But Summer couldn’t do that because she had irrefutable proof that she’d seen Jack.
Her body. Her body had told her.
The week they’d been lovers at Harvard, her body hadn’t been her own, it had been connected via some magic spell to Jack. Everything about her had changed. Her skin had felt different—too tight. Every time she saw him heat flashed through her, head to toe, an unstoppable blast that made her breath stop in her lungs. Her fingers and toes and breasts tingled and heat blossomed between her legs, as if seeing him threw a switch that made her body change. It had never happened to her before and after he’d dumped her, it had never happened to her again.
And this afternoon, right outside Washington National Cathedral, her body had bloomed alive, like she’d been zapped by something. She’d channeled her 18-year old self.
Her body had recognized Jack before her head did and it freaked her out.
For a second there, outside the National Cathedral, she’d wondered if she was having a stroke. She hadn’t connected the boiling sensations under her skin to the tall homeless vet. And then...then she’d recognized him. First by his effect on her—the only man who’d ever made her feel as if she had an “on” switch and knew how to use it—and then by those intensely blue eyes.
Crazy as it sounded, she believed she really had seen Jack.
So—how could that even be possible? The only way it would be possible would be if he’d survived the Massacre but had been so badly injured in the explosion he was unable even to say who he was.
If he’d been so concussed he couldn’t communicate, if he was disoriented, he’d end up living on the streets.
The thought was disturbing. It was disturbing for anybody, but for Jack Delvaux...he’d been destined by DNA to lead a long, happy, golden life. Isabel too, and yet look at her. She’d been in a coma, had lost her entire family, had quit her food blog. Her life shattered.
Isabel. Isabel had been so nice to her that summer. Then they’d lost touch, of course, as people do. But if Isabel, who’d disappeared from view, thought her brother was dead, and he was alive...
Summer had to tell her. It was a moral obligation, wasn’t it? Except how could she do that unless she were certain? It would be cruel beyond words to tell Isabel that her brother was still alive unless Summer were absolutely certain.
And just because a man made her tingle wasn’t exactly proof of life, was it?
She dragged the groceries out from the back of her Prius. It had been a long sad, startling day. A nice meal at the end of it would put her in a better mood. After eating, she’d tackle the Jack problem, though it was going to be hard to find one homeless man among so many others.
Maybe check video footage at some shelters, to start. Since the Massacre ten new ones had opened for the masses of men and women who had suddenly lost everything in the economic shock. So...shelters. And then?
The security at her door was, as always, reassuring but balky. Keypad and deadbolt, which always meant putting on the floor whatever she had in her hands. What an English friend had called “belt and braces.” It did make her feel safe, though.
Finally, she was through the door and in the calm, fragrant quiet of her apartment. Her refuge. She loved coming home to her pretty apartment, where everything was orderly and clean and sweet-smelling, so unlike the kind of places her parents had lived in. They hadn’t cared that they lived in squalor. Why not? It was a question she still couldn’t answer.
Midnight Fire Page 2