* * *
“I think it might be time to pass on to phase two,” the voice on the phone said.
“All right,” Hector Blake answered and there was a faint click and then silence.
The voice, as always, had been put through an anonymizer and was a metallic tenor. It could be anyone—man, woman or child—there was no way to tell. The software program was created to disguise any identifying characteristics. Though Blake would bet good money it was a man.
Blake could bet good money because the voice at the other end of the line had made him several billion dollars overnight, and so he could be an alien from Aldeberan for all Blake cared.
Still, he had a mental image of the man, sitting at a desk somewhere.
The office would be ordered and plush, full of comforts. There was something prissy about the voice. The anonymizer changed the timbre and tone of the voice but couldn’t change the syntax, the small pauses, the vocabulary.
So, Blake had built up this image of an elegantly dressed, fussy man sitting in an elegant office, dispensing orders like God. Just about as powerful as God, actually, because the man was planning on bringing down the most powerful country on earth in several stages.
Phase one had been a resounding success. So he supposed it didn’t really matter who the voice belonged to.
He remembered clearly the day the voice had called. First of all, he’d called on Blake’s personal cell, which was interesting in and of itself. Very few people had his personal number and Blake took care to keep that number low. He had a very busy, highly successful law practice. His office had ten lines and he had two—one for internal calls and one for outside calls. His staff answered his phone at home and very few were forwarded on to him. He had two cells for business and one for personal calls, which he rarely used. The person who’d called that day had called him on his personal cell.
It had been clear immediately that the voice was altered. Right away, Blake had been both intrigued and irritated. He was a busy man and silly games bored him.
Until the caller told him what the call was about and Blake sat up straight, electrified.
This was—this was illegal and treasonous and immoral.
And yet highly profitable. Almost unimaginably so.
When Blake had asked who was talking, the voice answered, “Call me M.”
Blake had hummed the Bond tune but nobody laughed on the other end.
Blake would never have believed that someone would approach him with a plan this terrifying, this audacious. But M had, and over the course of an hour’s conversation a day for several weeks, his reaction shifted from never to maybe to yes.
And then they’d started talking details.
It had come at a moment in Blake’s life in which he was becoming a shade depressed and a little bored. He’d been born for great things and, yes, he’d accomplished his fair share. He’d turned his family’s small estate into a big one. He’d founded a successful law firm specializing in international law and he’d published so many articles in the field he was considered an expert. He’d advised the State Department and the European Union and the United Nations on aspects of treaties.
He’d been an ambassador for two years. To Andorra, it was true, but it was enough to be called ambassador for the rest of his days.
He’d run twice for the senate and won both times, but his time there had been boring and the experience soon grew stale.
However, in spite of all his success, marriage one had broken down—so many years ago he could hardly remember her face—as had marriages two and three. He had no children except an out-of-wedlock girl in Southeast Asia he occasionally sent money to.
None of his ex-wives spoke to him, though they cashed his checks readily enough.
Blake had made his mark, but it wasn’t enough.
What M proposed was enough. God, yes. More than enough. It would put Blake right up there in the history books with Alexander, with Charlemagne, with Napoleon. One of the most powerful men ever to have lived.
Viceroy of the Americas.
Every time he said that title to himself, he smiled secretly. It was becoming so real to him, his own manifest destiny, that current reality was starting to fade. And yet—it was reality that somehow seemed a veiled scrim, almost invisible.
He found himself caught up in plans for the After, completely taken up by what the world would be after the plan came to fruition, completely forgetting that the plan hadn’t been implemented in full yet.
It had begun, though.
He was wealthy beyond belief and soon he would be powerful beyond belief.
Viceroy of the Americas.
The Washington Massacre had been phase one and that had been a resounding success.
One extra special fillip to the Massacre was that it had taken out the Delvauxes, the whole brood. Simply swatted them away, like you would with pernicious flies.
Officious pricks, every single one of them.
The Blakes and Delvauxes had been friends for three generations.
Everyone thought Blake and Alex Delvaux were friends when the truth was Blake despised Alex, always had. Hated all the Delvauxes, actually, with their shock of blondish hair, athleticism and charisma. Kennedys for the twenty-first century. Seemingly destined for greatness when there had been no greatness there, just mediocrity and good cheekbones.
It had been his distinct pleasure to arrange for the Massacre to be at a campaign party announcing Alex’s candidacy for the presidential nomination.
Wiped almost all of them out.
All in all, over fifty Delvauxes killed. Every single one, actually, except for one.
Blake frowned.
Why Isabel Delvaux had been spared was beyond him. The utter vagaries of chance. She was a pretty thing, some kind of food maven, completely inconsequential. Her survival was a quirk of fate. She wasn’t political in any way, as many of the Delvauxes had been. Had gone on record as being against her father’s campaign, but for personal reasons not political reasons. Most of the Delvauxes were highly political and very vocal. Had any of the political Delvauxes survived the blast, Blake would have had them put down by his team because none of them would stand still for phase two.
Blake let Isabel be. She wasn’t going to make waves. She was a shadow of her former self and had changed her name and crossed the country to live a recluse’s life in Portland, Oregon.
It was a very good thing that it looked like Isabel could barely stand on her feet, because she’d seen things she shouldn’t have. For one electric moment that night, in the midst of the Massacre, their eyes had met and Blake saw that she’d realized something. Then the building had blown. He thought she’d died together with the rest and had been astonished three days later to discover she was in a coma at George Washington University Hospital.
He’d been very tempted to send a kill team to her. There was so much chaos everywhere that it would have been easy to slip into her hospital room and inject an air bubble in the IV line.
In the end, he’d decided to wait it out and he’d been right
But he kept an eye on her, checking in at intervals. She remembered literally nothing from the night of the Massacre.
If her memory ever came back, Blake would have her put down. He had a man in Portland keeping an eye on her.
No, Isabel was no threat.
So, now they were passing on to phase two.
He got up, poured himself a thirty-two-year-old single malt and sat down again, admiring the view outside his windows.
Viceroy of the Americas. He smiled and took another sip of his 1983 Macallan.
Chapter Two
Portland
It was freezing cold and windy, but Isabel Delvaux, now Isabel Lawton, went out anyway. Her daily torture session—a one-hour walk. It had to be done. If she didn’t grit her teeth and force herself to go out, she’d never leave the house.
Staying in her house forever. It scared her that the thought didn’t scare her.
The wind was as raw as she felt. She had three layers under her down coat but the wind made her shiver anyway. Probably because of the exhaustion. It had been another horrible, sleepless night. Just like the night before and the night before that and like tomorrow night would be. She hadn’t had one decent night’s sleep since the Massacre.
The night she lost her whole family, the night she lost everything.
Don’t think about it. Her daily—hourly—mantra.
Don’t think about Mom or Dad. Or Teddy or Rob. Or—God!—Jack. There hadn’t been anything found of Jack to bury.
Don’t think about her aunts and uncles and cousins—all gone. Her tribe—gone.
In a moment she could remember only in her nightmares, her life had been swept away and what was left was the husk—a shell of a woman who couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely walk.
She made it past the gate and after a moment’s hesitation turned left. It was a shorter walk to the park, there was no way she’d make it to the Green. Already her body was screaming for her to turn around and go back home. Close her front door behind her, curl up on the couch and stare at the wall until the light faded.
No. Keep on walking.
There was a stone wall fronting her house and she put out a hand to steady herself. It was in pristine shape, thanks to her incredibly helpful next-door neighbor, Joe Harris.
She’d left her largest pot filled with boeuf bourguignon on Joe’s doorstep. She could barely choke down yogurt herself but having Joe to cook for made cooking fun again. Running through her endless list of recipes for something Joe might enjoy was the one bright spot in her day, though she probably didn’t need to stretch and be creative—he seemed to like more or less everything she cooked for him.
Joe was always so incredibly grateful, as if she’d gone out, sheared wool off sheep, carded it, spun it and knitted him things. Or butchered the cows and harvested the wheat. As if she’d done this amazingly complex and elaborate thing just for him. It was only cooking and it kept her sane. Well, sort of sane. Sane had gone out the window on the night of the Massacre.
It barely compensated Joe for what he did for her. Everything in her house was in perfect condition. Joe would scour the place for things to fix or improve. She didn’t trust herself to drive but last month Joe had started driving and he drove her everywhere she wanted.
He’d been as messed up as she was when she’d moved here three months ago. But Joe had moved on. He’d used a cane that first day and he later told her he’d been on crutches the week before. The cane disappeared a few days after she arrived and every day after that he celebrated some milestone in putting himself back together again.
He was still thin but he was all muscle.
Yeah.
A wave of heat shot through her. Just thinking about him made her weak at the knees and her knees were already weak.
When doing repairs, Joe wore an ancient tee that was soft and thin from so many washings that every single muscle was visible through the thin cotton. When she’d first set eyes on him, thirty pounds ago, he’d been all muscle and sinew. Now he was even more muscle and sinew. Even when thin, his shoulders had still been the broadest she’d ever seen. Though, of course, in her previous life, muscles weren’t important in her crowd. She’d known more men with money than men with muscles.
Muscles were better. Who knew?
She often caught herself staring at him as he stretched or reached for something, trying to keep her jaw from dropping. He was just...magnificent.
Watching Joe move became her new favorite thing at a moment when all her favorite things had been taken from her.
He was pure sex, whether standing still or moving. Such a waste to have a guy like that for a next-door neighbor. Enticing, but out of reach.
Because the fact was that sex had fled from her world. There were the occasional nonmenopausal hot flashes when Joe was doing something manly around the house but they were rare. Mostly, she felt numb. And cold. Dizzy spells would come and go, leaving her shaken and sweating.
She had continuous flashbacks of when she’d woken up in the hospital, completely alone because her entire family had been wiped out. The nurse who had told her that had burst into tears. That horrible moment was never covered by the gauze of memory. No. Horribly, her flashbacks carried the emotional weight of living through the horror, again and again.
Isabel carefully masked what she felt about Joe because, well, what would a man as vital as Joe want with a shell of a woman like her? He’d put himself together in three months and she was exactly as he’d found her that first day—dazed, halting, wounded.
She wasn’t getting better. She was getting worse.
These were thoughts she had a billion times a day. Buzzing round and round and round in her head like angry bees. It took an almost physical effort to wrench those thoughts in another direction. Joe was off-limits because she had no business yearning after him, not in the state she was in. That day—the day she found out she lost her family, the day she lost her life... She backed away from those thoughts as fast as she could. Don’t think about that.
So many things she couldn’t think about. Things she chased from her head the instant they appeared.
No past, no future. What was left was the here and now. Pay attention to the here and the now, she told herself constantly, because it’s all you have. The here and now, though, was vicious. She suffered from crippling bouts of dizziness that attacked her without warning. In the supermarket, shopping, in bookstores, in the bank, even at home. She’d suddenly feel the world swirl around her, no shape or meaning to anything. The ground would feel shaky under her feet. The only thing to do was freeze. She’d done that in the bank and in the supermarket and it had taken everything she had not to faint.
She’d stood in the middle of the bank’s lobby and in the frozen produce aisle, unable to move, feeling nauseous and dizzy, and wishing with all her heart she could just press a button and be home, in her bed, with the covers pulled up over her while she waited for her wildly pumping heart to slow down.
It had felt like a heart attack and she’d gone to the emergency room twice. It wasn’t a heart attack. It was her craziness, it was her broken heart. No hospital in the world could fix that.
Fix it. How? Nothing short of the miraculous restoration of her family to life could work. She was in a deep hole and it kept getting deeper, blacker. The second time she went to the hospital in an ambulance, she found herself hoping she was about to die. Just put an end to it.
That really scared her. As much as the outside world did.
The outside world terrified her, because she could never be sure she wouldn’t simply pass out.
Think of something else.
Okay. What?
It always came back to him, her neighbor, Joe. That made her dizzy, too, only in a good way. No matter that she couldn’t even think about sex, about relationships, no matter that she was alone in the world in a way that nobody could understand. She couldn’t be with anyone. She was too crazy. But... though she knew thinking about him was perfectly useless, her thoughts always circled back to him.
He always moved with grace and economy, even when he’d been barely upright. He watched her carefully with those keen brown eyes of his, the color of a hawk’s eyes, that seemed to see everything so clearly. He seemed to take his cues from her. When she was really down, which was most of the time, they barely spoke. He came in, fixed something for her or carried something for her or set up something for her and then left.
On the days that were just awful and not horrible and she had the energy to talk, they’d carry on a conversation. Nothing personal, oh no. The weather, maybe, though Portland weather wasn’t very interesting. Mostly wet. It was either getting ready to rain, raining, or rain was coming. They discussed the hell out of the weather.
Then, her cooking, which he seemed to find miraculous, which was a laugh. He was a former SEAL. Those guys could send a slingshot arou
nd the moon, they could kill with a pinkie, they trained hard to be the best soldiers on earth. All she could do was cook, but he seemed to find that ability fascinating. Since he was helping her so much, she offered to teach him how to cook and he eagerly accepted her offer. It turned out, though, that he was severely cooking-challenged. Everything came out burned and oversalted and disgusting.
But that was okay. She liked cooking for him. It gave her something to do. And since he seemed to have some kind of rota system of buddies stopping by, she cooked for them too.
She had the world’s best TV and sound system, carefully put together by Joe. She could probably receive TV signals from outer space. There wasn’t one creaky door or drawer in the house. He took her bathroom’s leaky faucet as a personal challenge and not a drop had fallen since.
Wow. She stopped and blinked. She was almost at the park and she’d had very few bad thoughts along the way. Thinking of Joe had carried her from her house to the park, though the thoughts were useless. If she wasn’t such a head case, she’d have been thinking of her future, of what to do with her life instead of mooning over her gorgeous, built neighbor who had better things to think about than her.
Okay, Isabel, now focus, she told herself sternly.
Describe your surroundings. Be in the moment. That’s what a psychotherapist told her when she consulted her. She couldn’t sleep and wanted something that wasn’t pills. Pills were awful. They didn’t work but they did render her a numb walking automaton during the day. Anything was better than taking sleeping aids, even insomnia.
Focus on your surroundings. Her surroundings. Well, mostly single family homes. It was a residential neighborhood, which was what she liked about it. The small park, whimsically called Strawberry Fields, was coming up. It was a pretty park even with bare trees and gray evergreen bushes. You could see the flower beds that would blossom in spring. It would be glorious in summer.
Would she still be here in summer? Yes. Probably. Because...where else would she go? Back East was full of memories, no way. There was always California, much nicer climate. But Portland suited her. Everyone was friendly without being obnoxious. Lots of concerts. It was so green. Very little crime.
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