by J. R. Ward
"Screw you, Matthias. You can take this and--"
She wheeled around, half a mind to throw the thing in his face.
He was gone.
Jogging around the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, she looked down the aisle in front of her...the stacks to the left and the right...the people milling through the store.
"Goddamn you..."
Mels marched all over, searching the Fiction section; then the lower level by the magazines, and even further on to the checkout area. Matthias was nowhere to be seen, no matter where she went or what she looked at. Hell, for all she knew, he'd taken off through a staff-only door.
Hitting the exit, she stepped out into the pale sunlight and shielded her eyes, measuring the crowds.
When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth--that was real, the only real I've ever had.
Okay, right, the healthy thing to do was throw his little parting gift in the trash and walk away from the drama to focus on something that actually mattered--like what she was going to do with the rest of her life or wrapping up that article on the dead women.
For all she knew, he'd just downloaded a bunch of eighties ballads off iTunes.
Left with a whole lot of nothing doing at the mall, Mels strode back to the CCJ offices, pushed her way inside the newsroom, and stopped as the chaos enveloped her. So familiar, the sounds of phones ringing and voices muttering and feet hitting the concrete floor as people paced by their desks or went back and forth to the kitchen for more coffee.
She was going to miss this place...
Holy crap--she was actually going to leave.
The irrevocable decision settled onto her shoulders not as a weighty burden, but more like a grounding that felt right. And God, she hung on to the positive sensation because, at the moment, she really needed something that didn't feel like an epic failure.
That run-in with Matthias had taken the wind out of her sure as if she'd been knocked in the chest.
Walking over to her desk, she sat in her chair and took a stab at writing her resignation letter. The wording came out stiff and formal, but like there was another option? After massaging the text around for a while, and redoing the beginning, she saved the thing without printing it out. There was stuff yet to wrap up here, and Dick was just the kind of prick to take her two weeks' notice and shove it down her throat by telling her to leave right away.
Besides, it was probably better to know where she was going first. In this economy, no one just walked out of a job.
Easing back in her chair, she stared at her computer screen again.
Hard to say how long it was before she took the SanDisk out of her pocket. Could have been ten minutes. Fifty. An hour and a half.
Rolling it around in her palm, she eventually eased down on the white slide, and extended the silver metal plug-in.
Leaning forward, she went to put it into the USB port...and stopped just short of pushing it home.
Getting up, she put her purse on her shoulder and went across the aisle to Tony's partition. "I'm taking off for the day--just on follow-up. If anyone's looking for me, tell them to hit my cell?"
"You got it," he said as his own desk phone rang. "Tony DiSanto--hey, yeah, I was waiting to hear back from you...."
As he waved at her and fell into his conversation, she remembered she still didn't have a car.
Outside, it took some time to get a cab, and of course, four in the afternoon was close enough to rush hour so that her taxi got stuck in the congestion on the Northway. When she finally got home, her mom was out, and as she checked the calendar on the wall and found that it was bingo night, she wondered why she hadn't noticed all the entries in the little boxes before. Bridge, Pilates, yoga, volunteering at the church, manning the help desk at St. Francis in the pediatrics department, lunches and dinners with the girls...
Glancing around the kitchen, at least she knew that after she left, her mother wasn't going to be alone.
Mels grabbed a raspberry Snapple out of the fridge and went upstairs, the wooden steps creaking in the same way they always had. Up in her room, she closed the door and turned to her closet.
For some reason, she felt like she should get out her mismatched suitcases and start packing.
But instead of starting that job way prematurely, she looked over at her desk. Her old laptop was sitting on the same stretch of painted wood she'd done her homework on when she'd been in middle school and high school.
Going over, she sat down in the spindly chair and took out the SanDisk.
Before she plugged it in, she reached around the back of the laptop and disengaged the modem wire. Then she logged on and disabled Wi-Fi.
"I've got to be out of my mind."
She shoved the flashdrive in and the AutoPlay pop-up appeared in the center of the screen. Out of the options for Removable Disk (E:) she chose "Open folder to view files."
"What the...hell?"
The file directory was so big, she had to scroll down. Word documents. PDFs. Excel spreadsheets. The titles were alphanumeric codes that were clearly part of an organizational system, but they made no sense to her.
Picking one at random, she double-clicked, and frowned, pivoting into the screen.
The data appeared to be...dossiers of men, with their pictures, names, dates of birth, height, weight, eye and hair color, medical details, training certifications, and assignments--God, the assignments. Arranged by date, and with notes about countries and targets...and exterminations.
"Oh, my God..."
Shifting back to the directory, she opened another file, which seemed to detail sums of money, huge sums of money...and another, coded one about contacts in Washington, D.C., and the "favors" these individuals had asked...and still more about recruitment and training...
You want the story of a lifetime? You got it.
As the daylight dimmed and night came over Caldwell, she sat at her childhood desk and read everything.
Eventually, she returned to the dossiers, and this time, she took it slowly.
In a way, the men were all the same, their faces and ethnicities blending into one archetype of aggression and effectiveness. And if these assignments listed were true, she'd read about the deaths, some of which had been defined to the international public as "natural causes" or "accidents" or "counter-insurgent attacks." Other targets she thought were still alive...but perhaps that was just a case of the worldwide news machine not yet catching up with reality?
Was it possible this was legit?
Sitting back, she took a drink from her now room-temperature Snapple, and tried on for size the concept that maybe, just maybe, this was real.
Okay, assuming it was, Matthias's paranoia didn't seem unjustified...and it would also explain why he'd been on the run the night she'd hit him with her car. Also might explain why the identity he'd had was someone else's--and the reason that even with his amnesia, he'd had sensed that the house at the address on his driver's license hadn't been his own.
And maybe this was what was behind him killing that man down in the basement of the Marriott. If Matthias had been part of this organization--and this level of access seemed to suggest he most certainly was--then it made sense if he were on his way out of it that someone would be sent to kill him.
And he'd have to defend himself...
Going through the dossiers a third time, she noted that each one had a red, green, or orange check by the name--
Jim Heron was among the men. Which somehow wasn't a surprise.
And he had an orange marking. Which, assuming the traffic-light connection was correct, meant he wasn't alive, but he wasn't dead either.
Interesting.
Continuing on through the listings, she gasped. About seven men down, she found a red-marked name with the notation, Caldwell, New York, RECLAIMED and the date of the night before last.
It was the dead guy. From the Marriott.
Who Matthias had shot.
And look...here was another. An
orange mark by the name, last contact in Caldwell, New York, twenty-four hours ago.
What did she want to bet that he was a second man sent for Matthias?
Mels took another hit of the Snapple and grimaced at the sickly sweet taste. As her heart started to beat hard, she knew it wasn't from the caffeine.
What if it had been real, she thought again. All of it...
Going back to the directory, she carefully reviewed the other files again and started to piece together the structure of the organization, including its recruiting strategy and the way its funds flow worked. There was nothing about where its headquarters were, or what kind of administrative support they had, or exactly how its "clients" knew to contact them.
Was this organization affiliated with the government? Was it private sector?
She grabbed a pen and scribbled some notes on a pad.
Given the identities of the targets that had been effectively eliminated, she was struck with a chilling sense that this shadow organization--which had no logo, no title even, on any of the documents--went very high up. Those who had been taken out were largely political figures overseas, suggesting an international agenda far too broad-based to be generated by a private citizen, a common-interest group, or even a large, multi-national corporation.
This was the business of a whole nation.
And with her knowledge of current events over the last three years, it was pretty clear that the exterminations forwarded America's position across the globe.
Tapping her pen on the desk, she thought of other special ops groups, like the Navy SEALs, for example--or the Rangers. Those men were heroes, legitimate soldiers who functioned within rules of engagement.
This network of killers was completely outside of that.
The final spreadsheet was probably the most chilling one: a list of all the missions over the previous decade--and the dead, including a column for collateral damage.
Not a lot of that. Not much at all. And no women or children--at least, not that were listed.
Considering how this operation worked, she had a feeling the latter was not the result of any moral objection, but rather out of a directive to stay under the radar.
And again, for the men who had been killed...she knew ninety percent of the names, and they were evil...pure evil, the kind who slaughtered their own citizens or headed up brutal regimes or set in motion events of horrific proportions.
She imagined that the few she didn't recognize were of the same ilk.
This group of exterminators had done good work in a bad way, she supposed: Hard to argue that their efforts weren't justified, given the resumes of the targets.
It was like her father's ethos on a global scale...
Mels returned once more to the dossiers.
Matthias was nowhere to be found in the pictures or the names.
But she had a chilling suspicion as to the why.
He was the basis of it all, the driver. Wasn't he.
When it came to you, and being with you, I always told the truth--that was real, the only real I've ever had.
Rubbing her face, she cursed into her palms.
He had given her this to prove himself--and as much as she wanted to find some lie in and among the files, some fiction that revealed itself in contradictions among the nitty-gritty, too much of it was verifiable when it came to current events. She'd seen the articles, the newscasts, the commentaries around these deaths for herself over the years.
This was real....
This was the story of a lifetime.
Across the street from Mels's house, Matthias stood in the lee of a large maple, arms crossed over his chest, feet planted a hip's distance apart.
He could see her in the upstairs dormer, at her desk, her head bent, her brows down hard in the light shining from the ceiling above her. From time to time she eased back in whatever chair she was sitting in and stared straight ahead--then she returned to her laptop.
She was going through everything.
His job was done.
So why didn't he feel at peace? Surely this was his prove-it-or-lose-it crossroads, this confession through her that was going to go out to the world? On that single flashdrive, he'd undone his years of work, sending his organization into a free fall that was going to wipe it out: The operatives would scatter for cover. The politicians would go ultra-earnest and disavow all knowledge. A congressional or senatorial special committee would be convened. And at the end of countless taxpayer dollars and months of inquiry, the matter would be closed.
And then another arm of the operation would be started by someone else: Dirty work was still going to be sought by this otherwise lawful nation, because sometimes you had to sink to the lower level of your enemies and play ball in their sewer.
That was reality.
So why the hell was he not, at this very moment, dragging himself to Manhattan, getting his cache, and hitting the road for parts and countries unknown?
It wasn't Mels.
Leaving her was the death of him in a lot of ways, but he was okay with that. His disappearing was the right thing for her, and that was all that mattered--even though he was going to miss her for every heartbeat between now and when he actually died and stayed that way.
And it wasn't his conscience. He didn't feel the need to turn himself in just so his enemies could find him and kill him in a prison. His only chance of survival was out in the real world--and it wasn't like the constant hiding was going to be a party.
That shit was just a movable set of bars.
He was going to pay for the rest of his life for what he'd done.
So what the hell was his problem?
Abruptly, a scene in the desert came to him, the recollection of him and Jim in that crude hut, the sand under his operative's feet...the bomb under his own.
Matthias hadn't remembered anything after the explosion, not the horrible pain he must have been in, not the miles through the dunes or the Jeep that Isaac Rothe had come in or that first, endless night after he'd blown himself apart. But he knew what had happened a little while afterward: Jim had come to his bedside and threatened to expose what he'd nearly done to himself.
He had granted Jim his freedom from XOps then, giving the man a pass to get out.
The only one.
And then, after two years, their paths had crossed once more, up in Boston. In contrast to what had happened on the other side of the planet, that slice of the recent past was still unclear to him, the precise ins and outs of what had gone on fuzzy, even as the rest of his life was clear as a bell--
At the end of the block, a man turned the corner at a lazy pace and entered into the pool of light beneath a lamppost. He was walking a dog, a large dog, and he was dressed in some kind of suit...an odd suit, something that looked old-fashioned--
It was the man from the Marriott's restaurant.
Matthias put his hand into his pocket and settled his palm on the butt of the gun he'd gotten from Jim.
When you were in the situation he was, just-in-case was the only way of thinking.
The man came closer, going out of the reach of the illumination briefly before reentering into the lit skirt of the next streetlamp.
The dog was a wolfhound, an Irish wolfhound.
And as the pair passed, the man looked at Matthias with eyes that seemed to glow. "Good evening, sir," he said in an English voice.
As Mr. Dapper kept going, Matthias frowned. There was something off, something wrong....
The guy didn't throw a shadow, he realized. Except how could that be?
Matthias quickly looked up to Mels's window. She was okay, still sitting there at her desk, reading about him--and when she dialed her phone and put it to her ear, he wondered who she was calling.
Time to go.
It was his theme song with her, wasn't it.
He glanced back, expecting to see the man and the regal beast.
They were gone.
Okay, he was losing his ever-loving mind.
Turning away, he walked over to his rental car and took out the key with its little laminated tag. As he opened the door, Jim Heron was still on his mind, almost as if the guy had been placed there, like a cognitive billboard.
Matthias got in, locked the doors, and started the engine. Doing a three-sixty with his eyes, he double-checked that there was no one around, making sure that dog and the Englishman hadn't decided to magically reappear--
At that moment, a sedan turned in off the main road and traveled at a slow pace right to the driveway of Mels's place. The garage door went up, and a tidy-looking woman got out and went inside, pausing to hit the button to reclose the panels.
Mels was not alone.
This was good.
Matthias hit the gas and took off, thinking about the information, the challenge, the opportunity he'd given her. The good-bye that he hoped, maybe over time, would recast their short tenure together in her mind.
He was an evil man, and she had brought the only good out in him he'd ever had. Perhaps she would believe that someday. After all the truth was ugly, but hopefully it had served a purpose--
Matthias jerked in the driver's seat, shock flooding through him as the last thing he'd looked at before signing off on that desktop at the Marriott came back to him: his profile, his live profile, his current one that had not been included, on purpose, in his cache of exit strategy intel--
Jesus Christ.
That made no fucking sense.
As far as XOps knew, he was dead--it had been right there, so blatant he hadn't paid any attention to the red check by his picture.
So why the hell had they sent an operative to Caldwell for him?
He hit the brakes for a stoplight at the very moment it all became clear. "Oh...shit."
The first operative had come to the Marriott. The second had shown up at Jim's place at that garage. And in both cases, everyone had reasonably assumed the assassins had been sent for Matthias.
Except he wasn't the target.
Jim Heron was.
The man's dossier had been marked orange, which meant his death hadn't been confirmed in person when he had "died" in Caldwell. So as far as the organization was concerned--and they were right--Heron was living and breathing.
And they were going after him.
The first rule of XOps always had been no loose strings. And there had been a number of people who had disapproved of Matthias's letting the man go--and now that he was out of the picure?