Maverick

by Lisa Marie Rice

  How could she have forgotten how much she loved chocolate?

  And the wine. She loved wine. Why had she stopped drinking it? Because it was too much trouble to go to the wine shop and buy it? Because in her knotted-up mode it turned sour in her stomach? Because she’d forgotten about the very concept of pleasure?

  This wine went down like a dream, tasting of summer and sunshine, and relaxed her. The bed beckoned even more loudly than before. She changed into her pajamas and slipped under the covers, expecting to lie there for a couple of hours, bleary-eyed and tense as she usually did. Instead, she went out like a light.

  It was dark when she woke up again. For an instant’s panic, she thought she’d slept through until seven, but the clock showed five thirty. She’d slept a solid four hours. Another first. In the past year, she hadn’t managed to sleep for four hours straight through the night, let alone during a nap.

  Though packing for a possible date hadn’t even occurred to her, she did have a change of clothes. Black pants, black cashmere turtleneck sweater, black boots. And some Body Shop creams. The bath’s hot water finished relaxing her, and she had fun grooming, lavishly overdoing the White Musk body cream, head to toe, drying her hair carefully with the hotel dryer and a round brush, instead of just letting it air dry.

  And makeup! She’d almost forgotten makeup existed, and found pleasure in applying the Dark Female Arts. Leaning forward over the sink, she almost didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror, with color in her face and on her lips. One natural, the other artificial, but still. She looked… normal. Not white-faced and pinched, some alien being from a cold, airless planet.

  Welcome back, she told her image in the mirror. You’ve been gone for a long time.

  Even drawing out the womanly preparations for a night out—her first in over a year—she still had 45 minutes left before Dan was stopping by to pick her up.

  The novel she’d packed held no appeal. Clearly it was the brother-in-law who had offed the banker. Money, power, revenge. Important things in the world, but now faraway concerns.

  Out of sheer habit, she’d packed her laptop, simply because she’d packed a computer in every suitcase since she was sixteen. She hauled it out and powered it up.

  This whole Bowen-in-Algiers thing was so strange, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. At times, everything was strange to her. But still…

  Bowen was a master of misdirection. He was CIA after all. Suppose he’d spun a story and had actually been in Laka that day?

  If he had been, if her memory—or what she thought was a memory, or a memory of a memory—was correct, maybe it might mean she was getting her mind back. Her life back. If not, if he’d been away as Dan insisted, she’d be no worse off than before. Still crazy and out of it.

  Hmmm. Why not do a little digging?

  Claire logged on to the DIA website, clicking through until she came to the section containing reports, password-protected. She was no longer an active member of the DIA, and her badge and pass had been cancelled, but experience told her that they’d probably forgotten to cancel her password.

  She knew people who had 123456, their date of birth, their mother’s maiden name, their pet’s name as passwords. It was little short of lunacy. Claire had always had complex, randomized passwords she committed to memory.

  39*Zan103hzy.

  Her computer whirred discreetly.

  Bingo. She was in.

  A minute later, she was scrolling through reports back to last November. It took a while. DIA had been busy this past year. The world was a huge, dangerous place, and DIA kept track of it all. She flipped through the world’s hotspots and crises patiently and… there it was.

  The Embassy bombing in Laka, in a pdf file. The report was 60 pages long. No time to read the whole thing. The easiest thing would be to do a search and find. She typed Bowen McKenzie into the search field, pressed enter, and discovered that he was only mentioned once in the report—as absent on the 25th of November, due to a two-day meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister of Algeria in Algiers. He’d arrived in Algiers on the evening of the 24th and made it back to the Laka Embassy only after the siege and the bombing.

  Claire froze, trembling fingers curved over the keyboard. Oh, God. The memory had been wrong. The clouds hadn’t parted at all. What she’d seen so clearly for a tempting moment hadn’t been a memory—it had been the artefact of a still-sick mind.

  She wasn’t getting better. If anything, her hallucinations had picked up enough real-world grit to seem true. Maybe this was going to be her reality for the rest of her life—flashes and visions from a sick mind. This was—this was so scary.

  Over the past year, Claire had gritted her teeth as she lost her father, learned to walk again, and slowly brought her body back from near death. There had been endless sleepless nights, days and nights of heart-wrenching panic, nightmares where she woke in a nest of sweaty sheets, heart pounding, curled up against the headboard in defence against the monsters of the night.

  That were in her head.

  She bore all of that with, if not grace, then stoicism. And she realized now that all this time, in the back of her mind was the conviction that it was all temporary. That sooner or later she’d get her health and then her mind and then her life back.

  It had been a given. She was too young for life to be over—she’d barely begun it. Wasn’t that what always happened on those made-for-TV movies where the heroine overcomes extreme odds and prevailed by sheer dint of willpower?

  But… what if that wasn’t the scenario? What if the scenario for the rest of her life was this bleak and empty reality? What if she was going to be like… this, the rest of her life? Weak and hurting and alone, because who would want a woman on the borderline?

  Another forty, fifty years of this. Of waking up from a restless sleep with tears drying on her face. Of having flashes of violence suddenly flood her mind. Of finding herself crouching, terrified, in the post office or the frozen foods section of the supermarket when a car backfired. Of seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, but still felt terribly real.

  A lifetime of being afraid, nauseous with anxiety.

  She powered the laptop down, closed the lid, and sat there with her hands on the shiny surface, seeing her slightly distorted reflection. Pale mouth a thin line. She sat for a long time, trying not to think of anything at all.

  Finally the hotel phone rang. She glanced at her watch. Seven sharp.

  Dan, waiting to take her out to dinner.

  She put the laptop in its case and vowed to do her best to enjoy the evening out, her first in a year, and maybe her last for a long time to come.

  CHAPTER 5

  WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, DC

  Bowen McKenzie was careful, cautious, thorough. Always. Those traits had taken him a long way, and would take him to even greater heights. He was halfway there already. Laka had laid the groundwork, been the base. He’d built on that, until now he was rich and powerful and about to get even richer and more powerful. He was damned if he’d let anyone or anything stop him.

  So far, it had been smooth sailing, but he knew enough to keep his guard up. Some would call it paranoia, but then he’d been CIA for twenty years. Paranoia was in the CIA songbook. Paranoia was in his DNA. It had kept him alive and prospering in a hell of a lot of dangerous places with dangerous people.

  So he kept his ear close to the ground, had tripwires everywhere, letting him know if anyone came prodding at his perimeter. Any unhealthy interest in him and his affairs, well… one of the advantages to his time in the CIA was a small army on call. Good men who’d served their country and now served him. And he sure as hell paid a lot better than Uncle Sam.

  He’d placed beacons in the pixels of the logos of all the reports on the Laka bombing. CIA, DIA, State, Marine Security Detachment records. Expunging his name had been easy for someone who knew what he was doing. The beacons sent a signal to his computer if anyone searched for his name in the reports.
His computer was programmed to buzz him if it received a signal.

  A whole year had gone by without any warning signals. He’d started to relax. Even started to think of removing the beacons, which represented a tiny risk, but a risk nonetheless. Maybe some Homeland Security nerd, bored, looking for something to do, would come up with an algorhythm to find beacons. So he’d been weighing the pros and cons of removing them.

  He hadn’t come this far by courting risks.

  The buzz had come in the middle of a dinner in his honor in the grand ballroom of the Willard. Throw a rock and you’d hit an ambassador, a minister, or a billionaire. All there for him, to honor him for trying to turn a continent around. Good works, writ large, the kind that went into the history books, and you could buy a piece of it. Be counted as among the great and the good.

  Black tie, $30,000 a plate. Cheap at the price.

  And they vied for tickets, fought over the privilege of being there, because it was the event of the month. People lining up to give him money, to praise him.

  At the discreet buzz in his $5,000 tuxedo pants, he excused himself and found a quiet corner to consult his phone.

  Fuck! He actually stepped back in surprise, then caught himself gracefully. Someone had done a search on his name! Someone with a DIA password. What the hell was that about?

  He e-mailed an NSA agent who moonlighted by the hacker name of Wizard. Wizard was kept on retainer, a cool $200,000 a year, to be useful in exactly this kind of situation. Wizard would find out who was sniffing around his perimeter.

  Five minutes later, a message popped up on his cell. The request had been traced back to the IP address, then triangulated for the street address.

  He frowned. The request had come from a hotel, a small one, basically a bed-and-breakfast, in downtown Washington. He scrolled down… and froze. The request had come from Room 7 of the hotel. The guest who checked into Room 7 was Claire Day.

  Shit!

  When he’d first heard that Claire Day had been wounded in the blast, he’d worried that she might have seen something. The Embassy was supposed to have been empty except for one lone Marine Guard. And yet Claire Day had been found outside in the compound, very badly injured, and had been immediately whisked away by her father.

  He’d kept a close eye on her, ready to give the order to have her taken out at any time. But she’d spent three months in a coma, and by all accounts was barely back on her feet. She was down in Florida and no threat to him.

  What the fuck was she doing in Washington D.C., checking up on him? She was supposed to be down south, still loony from the blast. Barely able to walk and suffering from amnesia. Whatever she was doing, she was a danger to him. She had to go. He should have taken care of this from the start, when he first heard she’d been at the Embassy during the bombing and had survived.

  It never pays to let loose ends free. They need to be snipped, fast.

  The voice of the Secretary of State boomed from the ballroom. “And now, let’s give a special hand to our guest of honor, a great American and a great philanthropist, a man who single-handedly…”

  The Secretary was going to call him to the podium very soon. He pulled out a burner cell phone from an inside pocket, using a handkerchief. He always carried a burner phone in case he had to call his team together. The cell would be crushed and would go into the drains several miles from here when he was done. The cells were never used twice.

  Heston, the head of his team, picked up on the first ring.

  “Yes?” No names, ever.

  “Clean-up action,” he said. “Room 7, Kensington House, Warren Street, off Massachusetts. Booked in the name of Claire Day. Get the computer in the room, then trash the room. Make it scary, like some lunatic broke in. She’s messing with me. We want to make sure she stops.”

  “Yessir. What about the woman herself?”

  He thought about Claire Day. What did she know? Had she seen something? Had she been biding her time, waiting to strike him down? Was she planning on fucking with him?

  She’d been a looker in her day, though she probably wasn’t one now. And a real uppity bitch, too. Turned him down flat, secretly laughing at him while she did it. Well, it was payback time. Whatever she thought she was doing, she had just made a big, big mistake. No one crossed him. No one.

  And he wanted no loose ends, not now. Especially not now.

  “Terminate. Make it look like she interrupted the burglary,” he said, closing the connection. He strode down the carpeted hallway under the enormous chandeliers and entered the ballroom to thunderous applause, the man of the hour, a true American hero.

  There she was!

  Coming down the hallway, as stunning as ever, only now thin and pale. This morning she’d terrified him.

  As she clutched at him, as his arms went around her, it had been like holding an injured bird in your hand. The contrast to the Claire Day he’d known in Laka—smart, resilient, tough—had been shocking.

  She’d been rendered down to bedrock by the blast, and was barely holding herself together.

  At least right now she was looking just a little better than she had in his office, thank God. She must have eaten at least part of the lunch he’d had sent to her, and she clearly had gotten some rest. He wouldn’t bet on her stability in a stiff wind, though.

  But she was still Claire. Heart-stoppingly beautiful, a deep intelligence in those gorgeous silvery-blue eyes, even if the expression in them now was sadness and despair.

  She was smiling at him faintly as she walked down the corridor, eyes meeting his, and Dan’s heart simply turned over in his chest as he watched her.

  He was a Marine, always would be, even if he was out of the service. He’d been one of the best.

  Marines by nature and by training are tough and unsentimental. Dan was particularly unsentimental, especially about women. His mom had run off when he was two, because his dad had been one real mean son of a bitch. Apparently, it had never even occurred to his mom to take her son with her, wherever she went. So she’d left him behind, a small child in the hands of a violent drunk.

  Most of the women Dan had had sex with were out for a good time, which he did his damndest to give them. The few others who wanted more were the women who hung out at military bars, hoping for a soldier husband, with a regular paycheck and government benefits.

  Women who weren’t too good at holding down regular jobs, who often drank a little too much, and partied a little too hard, and were casting their net for a husband who’d keep them. Most of them expected to divorce eventually, but Uncle Sam would make sure they got those alimony checks, which is what counted. Particularly if they’d popped a kid or two.

  Claire was completely different, in every way, from any other woman he’d ever known.

  She simply exuded intelligence. It was like an aura around her. Even now, beaten down by life, wounded inside and out, nothing could quench the sharpness of her gaze. He’d done a little rooting around on her in his days of crazy infatuation back in Jakarta, and she was exactly what she looked like. Smart, dedicated, hard-working.

  She’d raced through high school—two high schools, actually, a French one and an American one, though Dan could hardly fathom how that could be. He’d gotten his GED after joining the Marines. Though, after that, after not worrying about where his next meal was coming from and not having to deal with his father’s drunken rages any more, he’d aced more or less everything.

  She’d gotten top marks all the way through college. Info was a little harder to come by after she’d been recruited by DIA. They didn’t throw around data on their agents, but the Foreign Service Gossip Machine was the most potent intel-gathering machine in the world, bar none. And FS scuttlebutt had it that Claire Day had been one of the finest officers in the system, her reports sharp and accurate and cogent. Personally, too, in a business that often beat its agents down into alcoholism or paranoia, she’d stayed right on top of it.

  Even now, nearly killed by a blas
t that had taken out an entire Embassy, she was diminished and physically weak, but not once had he heard her complain about her losses. She’d lost a job she loved and a year later was a shadow of her former self, but she hadn’t mentioned that once. Dan had heard injured SEALs bitch and moan more than Claire.

  Hell, when he’d realized that he had to leave the Marines on a medical disability, he’d gone on a five-day bender with Frank Colacella, who’d lost an eye in Iraq.

  Dan went to meet her.

  “Hi.” Her mouth was tilted up. She touched his coat sleeve. “Thanks for the lunch. I really appreciated it.”

  Dan put his hand over hers, feeling the delicate bones and soft skin. He forced himself to smile into her eyes, instead of closing his, leaning down to her, and sniffing like a dog.

  Man, she had something on her that reached into his head and messed with him there. And then, well, travelled down to his gonads and grabbed him, hard.

  He tightened his hand on hers slightly. “Did you eat it all?”

  Her eyes rolled in her head and she gave a half laugh, letting her hand drop from his arm. “Yes, Mom. I ate most of it and drank a glass of wine, and then slept for four hours. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Great.” He held out his arm to her in an exaggerated gesture of chivalry. “Shall we go, Madame? Your chariot awaits.”

  That beautiful smile broadened for just a moment, then her face lapsed into its default somber expression. “I’ll just leave the key,” she said softly. “Then we can go.” She looked up at him. “And you’ll tell me what happened that day?”

  His own smile disappeared. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you everything that happened that day.”

  She approached the small wooden counter that served as a reception desk, in a corner of the cozy room, made to look like a living room. Now there was a young guy with a head of thick, black, curly hair behind it, wire-rimmed glasses gleaming, finger on the open page of a thick book.