He had his arm around her tonight, their sides pressed up. Clara wanted more—always wanted more—but the elevator was slowing down.
He rested his hand at the small of her back. “Are you ready for this?”
“I can’t wait,” she said. “Just one last interview and then we get on with our lives.” The doors slid open and they stepped out, walking side by side down the hall. “How about you?” she asked. “Are you nervous about not having your trusty legal counsel?”
Dave had gone back into the art of private practice. And Sam would be his first client, accompanying him to all the meetings just to “keep an eye on things.” But Dave had some problems of his own to worry about.
“I’m not nearly as nervous as I am about him,” Sam said. “This morning he has to be his own lawyer.”
Dave had been charged with a DUI on top of a handful of reckless driving charges. It was the cost of being a national hero.
“Is he still famous?” she asked.
“Famous enough to get fired from A&M.”
“Oh, no.”
“Happened this morning. But don’t feel too bad for him. He’s still getting 24/7 calls from the media. Calls for him to fly out to LA to be on TV shows. It’s crazy. He’s got people sending him money.”
Dave, the drunken hero, had turned into an overnight sensation, while Sam and his DARC Ops men fell quietly back into the shadows. According to Sam, that was the way they wanted it. Apparently, in his line of business, it wasn’t good to have too much attention.
At first that meant Clara’s attention. For her supposed protection, he had downplayed his DARC Ops work to the point of lying. He hadn’t wanted her to worry, he’d said. She could understand his motivations, why he hadn’t told her what he was really doing there at the parade, but he’d been swiftly informed he was never doing that again.
Now it was her turn for some misdirection.
“Here we go,” he said, knocking on the door.
Her hand slipped into his while they waited. When the door opened, she felt a hard squeeze.
“What the hell?”
Instead of just another nameless bureaucrat staring back at them, it was Jackson’s warm grin. “Hey, guys. Come on in.”
They walked in, submerging themselves in the cheers of his brothers in arms, the other DARC men.
“Surprise,” Clara said after he’d spun around to look at the boardroom full of yuletide friends and decorations.
“What is this?”
“An early Christmas party,” Jackson said. “Most of us have to fly back tomorrow.”
They had the conference room strung with banners and little blinking Christmas lights. There was even a fake tree in the corner, which had given Molly and Bren something to do throughout the day, the two of them coming away from the tree now with sparkles all on their faces and arms.
“A tree with sparkles,” Bren said with disgust. “Look at all this crap.”
“Look!” Molly held out her arms, “Aren’t I so pretty?”
Yes, she was so pretty. Clara grabbed her into a big hug.
“Mommy,” she said, pulling away. “What’s eggnog?”
“Something gross that only adults like.”
“Like coffee?”
Sam smiled. “Please tell me there’s lots and lots of booze in that eggnog.”
“There is,” came a voice from behind them. “And thank God.”
“Matthias,” Sam said, shaking the man’s hand and then introducing Clara.
“And I’d like to introduce the latest addition to DARC,” Matthias said, reaching out and pulling over a young lady by the hand. “This is Laurel.”
She seemed a little shy, smiling politely and nodding to Clara. “Your daughter is adorable,” she said before winking at Molly.
Matthias looked at her with admiration. “Sam wanted me to show you an example of what moving to D.C. could be like. We’ve got her mother out there, and Laurel’s working away in our hack lab. Most importantly, we’re together.”
“That’s a good thing,” Laurel said. “Depending on the day.”
Clara laughed and then raised her eyebrows at Sam. “You sure you want that kind of exposure?”
“It’s no secret he wants you there,” Matthias said.
“But to do what? Type?”
“I actually just had a conversation with Jackson,” Sam said.
“Who’s talking about me?” Jackson said, walking up to her and Sam, one of his arms around the waist of an attractive, tall blonde. Mira, Sam had told her. She’d gotten a crash course on everyone’s names that morning.
“Should I tell them the news?” Sam said.
Clara turned to him. “What news?”
Sam said, “Jackson and I talked, and we’ve come to an agreement. I’ll be staying in New Orleans.”
“Yep,” Jackson said. “I learned from what happened here that he can occasionally be right about things. Plus, I can’t fire the guy on Christmas.” Sam rolled his eyes.
Clara turned to Sam. “You’re staying?”
“I’m the new Southern contact for DARC Ops. And whatever I can’t do remotely, I can always fly up to the capitol.”
“That’s amazing,” Clara said, staring at him as if he was the only one in the room. She was amazed he could keep the secret all day. It was a day of both of them holding on to surprises. And though they were good surprises, she hoped they were the last for a while. She needed their lives to be nice and boring for a while.
“An early Christmas gift.” Sam said.
“But what about your college?”
“I’m transferring to Gulf A&M.”
“You know I wasn’t ever moving up to D.C.,” she said, feeling Molly against her legs. “But I thought you were burned out with teaching.”
“I was burned out on a lot of things before you came around,” Sam said, pointing up at something on the ceiling. “Burned out on life.”
“What is that?” Clara asked, looking at what looked like twigs and baby spinach suspended in string.
“Mistletoe,” Sam said, leaning down to kiss her.
“Hey,” cried Molly, injecting herself between their bodies as they came together.
Clara said, “I hope you don’t get burned out on this little elf down here.”
From below: “Can Santa get me a puppy?”
“A toy one?”
“A real one.”
“Honey, his elves can’t make real ones.”
After Molly ran away in defiance, Clara looked back at Sam, her head leaning back as she stood up on the tips of her toes. His face nearing close, his eyes closing, his lips on hers. She closed her eyes and they were alone in the room.
Thank you so much for reading Clara and Sam’s story. Trapped. On the run half a world away from home. Can Tucker Quinn save the woman he loves before the CIA's assassin finds her and kills them both? Click here to find out.
Dark Lies
1
Macy
She was finally going crazy.
As Macy crept through the dark hotel room, hands shaking around her CIA-issued Beretta, she felt her mind unraveling again. A layer of sanity peeled back by another night in a foreign city with no safe harbor and no one to trust. She’d become raw.
What the hell is that sound?
All it took was three years of running away from death. She’d felt the hints long before tonight, if she let herself stop and think about it. It was a slow, painful, and confusing process, stretched out through a dozen countries, a chase across two continents, and potentially ending here in a dirty little hotel in Angola. But now Macy knew, as she approached the bathroom door and the strange hissing sound behind it, that she was most certainly going nuts.
Crazy or not, someone could still be in there, behind the door. Maybe an assassin caught off-guard while waiting for her, washing his hands in the sink.
Macy listened through the door. It sounded like running water. She slowly turned the knob, kicked the door op
en hard, and then aimed her gun at an empty bathroom.
The sound had come from the toilet, its water running. But now there was another problem. The shower curtain . . .
She gritted her teeth, building up the courage to do it all over again, flung the curtain open with a loud metal screech, and then finally exhaled.
After sweeping her gun sight across moldy shower tiles, she moved to the toilet, tightening the water supply valve to finally end the distracting white-noise of water. She looked in the mirror, regretfully, into a prematurely aged face, then walked back to the bed.
Macy was spending the night in the outskirts of Luanda, Angola’s capitol city. She couldn’t afford anything closer than the outskirts. She’d wished she could, because it would be safer. The streets closer to money would be busier, brighter, the people a little less desperate for a quick buck. Two thousand Kwanzas to follow the American woman, to see what hotel she’d gone to.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been hired to hunt her down. It had become routine since Syria, the first round of assassins having been trained and instructed by her own people—and funded by her own tax dollars. It was a big scandal back home, American forces helping Syrian rebels take out a rogue CIA agent. The bigger story, as far as ex-CIA Macy was concerned, was how it got broken up at the last second by some civilian cyber-security company from Washington. That led to a congressional investigation which spurned the largest house cleaning in US history, dozens of high-ranking military and political figures behind bars for life.
But it solved nothing for Macy. She had been imprisoned with them. An invisible, traveling jail. That jail and its captors had followed her from Syria to Sub-Saharan Africa, despite US media outlets declaring the thing to have been “all wrapped up.”
She sat down on a hard bed and took a swig of cheap Port wine. It definitely hadn’t been all wrapped up. She’d come down to Luanda for that very reason, a city on the edge of the Atlantic with a major seaport. Here, there were options for an inconspicuous crossing to South America, where she’d try her luck across Panama, and then, somehow, the Mexico–US border.
She would figure out the details later. For now her focus was on staying alive in a Luanda hotel room. Staying alive and awake with a bottle of Port.
Sometimes, in a drunken moment, she’d laugh about it, losing track of who was trying to assassinate her. Was it the CIA? Islamic terrorists? The skin color of her adversaries had gone from brown to black. But she knew the real problem color was white. American as apple pie.
Macy took another swig, letting the gun rest in her lap.
She had other, older enemies, too. But there was something slightly unbelievable about a corrupt St. Louis police chief, her old boss, having the resources to track her down across the world.
It almost didn’t matter who it was trying to kill her. She’d still be dead. She had stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago.
Macy bolted awake.
She’d been sitting in bed, her back against the headrest, her neck sore. Night had set in and the room was completely dark. Exhaustion had kept her from her plan of staying awake and watching the room across the courtyard. Through her balcony’s sliding glass door, she had a direct line of sight to a darkened Room 210.
In the log book at the front desk, someone might have found her name, Macy Chandler, written in the column for room 210. She’d signed it herself. When the sun was still up, and with everyone watching, she waltzed into Hotel Topenka and booked herself a room under no false pretenses. No disguises. She spoke loud, obnoxious English to the teenager at the front desk. It was one of the most blatant broadcasts she’d made since arriving in Africa. The bait and switch came after, when she paid the old man to book a room directly across the courtyard. Her real room.
Macy could deal with cheap wine and bug-infested hotels if it meant she’d have money for a decoy room—a necessity out here. She watched it through the glass. The rooms on either side of 210 had their lights on. But her decoy was still dark. She waited, watching.
Her heart almost exploded when the telephone rang on the table next to her. Macy jumped off the bed, only to stand motionless and numb in the dark. Frozen, thinking. Don’t answer it. What were the benefits of answering? This was supposed to be Kwame Botha’s room.
Her blood pressure spiked with each ring. She could hear her pulse buzzing her eardrums. As illogical as it was, it was as if the rings were drawing unwanted attention. She’d tried so hard to be quiet. And now this.
It was silly. She’d been silly tonight with the bathroom scare, her almost ripping the shower curtain clips. She’d been crazy.
Macy looked back outside across the courtyard, through the dark, and into the fully lit window of room 210.
She gasped between telephone rings, her lungs exploding along with her heart, a puff of air rushing out like she’d been kicked in the stomach. She stumbled in the dark, trying to get closer to the glass. But her legs wouldn’t work right. She was afraid to get any closer to that light across the courtyard, and whoever had turned it on. It was a sickly yellow glow, the kind you’d find seeping out of the basement window of a morgue. Its silence horrified her, as did the idea of a gunman snooping around that room, expecting to find his American payday. He might be in the bathroom right now, pulling back the curtain slowly, the metal clips screeching across.
He might be figuring out her game.
Macy rushed back to the bed. She’d forgotten the gun. The Beretta and that old man were the only two things she half-trusted on this side of the Atlantic. And despite having that cold metal by her side for two years, she felt more trust for a white-haired cab driver she’d known for two days. After all, it was the CIA that issued her the piece. Whatever else they’d given her, she’d left in a pile of ashes back in Damascus.
The Beretta gave her a little more courage to approach the window. Her eyes strained across, her nose almost pressed against the glass when she saw a black shape flicker across the room. Whoever was inside 210 was in a hurry. Aside from tall, she wasn’t sure how else to describe the shape. She waited for another chance to identify her would-be assassin. But nothing. And then the light went out.
It would have been impossible for her to be identified in the darkness of her room across the courtyard. She knew that. But standing there in the dark still sent chills down her spine. She waited, watching the dark space where she was supposed to have been killed. It was like a stage gone black before the tragedy set. A foreshadow.
She listened to the hotel’s silence. Nothing in the rooms on either side. Nothing in her hallway. After a while she could hear the cars on Rua Munadi. The siren of an emergency vehicle thrusting its way through traffic. Even from this far away, from the outskirts of the port city, the mournful wail of an ocean freighter reached her ears.
She wished she was on it.
Her dream of escape shattered at the sound of voices in the hall.
And then a knock on the door.
2
Tucker
He knocked on the door and then waited. Everything was still quiet inside. Tucker brought his fist back to the door, but it opened before he could knock. A familiar face stared back at him. A sullen face.
“Where have you been?” Jasper said, before shoving some kind of pastry in his mouth.
“My room. What the hell is that?”
“Breakfast,” Jasper mumbled around his pastry, his mouth full.
“Jet lag?”
“Big time.”
Tucker walked into the double-bed hotel room. Tansy sat in front of a laptop. “Working already?” Tucker asked him.
“No.” Tansy kept his eyes on the screen. “Sports highlights. Can’t get anything here.”
“They’ve got football,” Tucker said.
“The wrong kind.”
“And cricket.”
“The wrong kind of baseball.”
“Alright,” Tucker said. “So I guess we’re off to a slow start.”
&nb
sp; “African time,” Jasper said, scrunching up a plastic wrapper and throwing it in the trash by Tansy’s table. He flopped down on the bed. “The real question, right now, is how the hell did you get your own room?”
Tansy finally looked up. “No, the real question is why the hell are we sharing one?” He seemed to be sincerely annoyed at his coworker, despite them only having shared the room for an hour. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You’d think Jackson could spring for three separate rooms. We’ve got the budget to fly around the world a hundred times and back again, yet here we are like sardines.”
“Maybe the hotel was over-booked,” Tucker said. “Or maybe I got the single, because I’m the only one here who’s single. Makes sense, right?”
Tansy said, “Only if you can somehow convince a girl to come home with you. Until then, it’s a wasted resource.”
“And hookers don’t count,” Jasper added.
“Does that mean you were still a virgin until last year?” Tucker said, chuckling. A pillow flew his way.
“So like I was saying,” Jasper said, sitting up on bed, “you’re late to our first briefing.”
“African time.” Tucker looked around the small room, his coworkers’ things still mostly packed. The clothes they wore were still rumpled from the flight, their eye sockets extra dark and deep. Tucker had been in South Africa since yesterday and felt only slightly fresher. He figured he should play nice. He sat in the chair in front of grumpy Tansy, who’d turned back to his sports.
“Tansy,” Jasper said. “You ready?”
“No, but yeah.” He closed the lid and smiled at Tucker. “You excited, Kid? You made it to the big time.”
“We’re all excited to be here,” Jasper said. “It’s a great opportunity. A chance to make the world a whole lot safer.”
DARC Ops: The Complete Series Page 105