by Fiona Quinn
“Spyder’s involved with a cult runaway?” Striker asked.
“That can only mean one thing.” I pressed a kiss onto Striker’s cheek.
“He’s taking another run at the Hydra.” Striker reached for my arm and held me still. “Christen’s getting into town Monday morning.”
“I can’t wait.” I smiled. Christen was flying in from a forward operating base in the Middle East, where she was a pilot with the Night Stalkers. She’d saved up her leave time so she could marry my teammate—one of my best friends, Gator Aid Rochambeau—then head off on an extended honeymoon.
Striker and I got to stand with them as part of the wedding party—an honor.
“I’m bringing it up because you’ll have the wedding on your mind,” Striker was saying. “And we’re heading to the CIA.”
I tipped my head back so he could clearly see my eyes. “I won’t cause a scene.”
“No?” He released my hand.
“What do you think I’m going to do? I could maybe walk across their sacred CIA seal, stand in front of the hero’s wall, and yell out to all that will hear, ‘I was told I was a widow. I grieved my dead husband. I picked myself up, moving on with my life, only to discover that it was a CIA ploy. Angel was alive all that time. I was promised a private divorce, sealed by the courts, in exchange for my silence about their black ops mission.’” My voice was ramping up. “‘You reneged, CIA. You tortured me with my grief, CIA. And then, didn’t even follow through with this teeny tiny ask on my part.’ You think I’ll do that, Striker?”
“Might.” He set his mug on the counter. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” He crossed his arms over his chest. Protector-mode. “But you’d probably be arrested for voicing classified information.” He tipped his head and sent me a warm smile. “Christen and Gator really want you to wear a dress to their wedding and not prison orange.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll do my best. And you?” I took a step back to give my neck some relief. I was five foot six, and Striker stood head and shoulders above me. “You have every right to burst into the CIA feeling as angry as I do. After all, the CIA’s decisions affect you, too. We can’t be married until I can do it legally. Our relationship is constrained by their lack of action. It means nothing to them. It’s still unfathomable to me that Angel agreed to their black ops plan. Think of all the pain he caused. All the grief—mine, Angel’s family. His Abuela Rosa.” I laid my hand on my chest. “She nearly died of a broken heart. I...”
My lungs forced the trapped air out in a fast stream.
Heat washed over me as my emotions collided.
Waves against the rocks.
I was done playing with the CIA.
But the CIA was a formidable adversary.
Something needed to move this along. I just needed a plan that would release me from their shackles.
I guessed it mattered how loud and how ugly I wanted to get.
Chapter Four
I plotted it out. I could take the Metro to a bus and then walk a block. That way, there was zero chance someone would see me getting in and out of my car.
When I had dressed this morning, I had put on some basic makeup, but I decided to wash it off and scrape my hair into a ponytail. A pair of ripped jeans, a t-shirt with a stain, and a pair of old tennis shoes, and I’d call it done.
I twisted this way and that in the mirror.
This look was neutral. It said very little about me.
Yeah, this was a go.
I wondered what kind of “pocket debris” I should gather. The minutiae that went into my pocket or my purse so that anyone looking would find artifacts of the life I wanted them to believe I led.
A bit problematic since I didn’t have a handle on my role yet.
No purse. I’d carry my phone, some crumpled low denomination bills, a Chapstick…
Yeah, the less I had with me, the more malleable my character would be for me to construct in the future.
Metro and city bus cards.
Ready.
Striker was standing at the bottom of my staircase, keys in hand.
I quirked an eyebrow. Did he think he was coming with me?
“You’re taking public transportation since you don’t have time to develop a cover car, right? I thought I’d give you a ride to the Metro, so you don’t have to figure out what to do with your keys.”
“You’re so smart.” I stood on the bottom stair and gave him a gratitude kiss. “And darned cute.” I sighed as I stepped off the step.
“I hear you, Chica. I’d much rather stay home and play but—”
“Duty calls.”
***
“Oh, wow.” I put my hand on the window as the bus rumbled down the street. I knew exactly where I was.
Bouncing over the potholes, the lights of oncoming traffic chewed through the early morning fog. Sirens and the flashing red lights of an ambulance passed by on the other side of the road and thrust me back in time to when I had looked up this very street, watching rescue lights coming toward me.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, the hiss of air conditioning sprayed upward from the tiny perforated holes. Sweat slicked my skin with the recognition and was dried into a salty tightness freezing my features as my system took the hit.
In my memory, I was back, reliving the horror.
That dreadful rain-slicked night, Dad and I had been driving along, belting out a song on the radio. We had been having a wonderful time when suddenly my life cracked open.
It was a feeling of utter helplessness. There was the boom of impact, the shrill wrenching of metal, the tinkling of glass shards as they hit the pavement.
Our car was upside down in the ditch.
With ringing ears and blood dripping into my eyes, I turned to find Dad dangling from his seatbelt.
My door was mangled, but with the window broken out, I was able to wrestle myself free. I dashed around to Dad’s side of the car and reached in, trying to rouse him.
The next part was a blur. Pulling my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, I’d cut him free.
Should I have cut him free?
Even now that I’d been trained and had worked with the local rescue squad, I was conflicted about my decisions.
I hadn’t found a pulse. But that might have been the tremble in my hand, like a hummingbird’s wing, flapping against his carotid.
I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. But I was in shock, myself. Maybe my mind was stuttering. Maybe I’d just missed his shallow inhales.
It doesn’t matter. It’s over. What I did was what I did.
Right or wrong.
With his safety belt cut free, gravity tugged Dad from his seat.
All I could do was try to protect his head and then drag him out of the wreck to the hard surface of the road where I could perform CPR.
Was he still alive in the driver’s seat?
Would he have survived had I waited for the rescue crew?
I’ll never know.
The what-ifs were always there in my memories of him. They coated the images of my amazing dad with my shame and guilt at not having helped him.
I didn’t know how I got Dad as far as the road.
I didn’t remember ripping open his shirt or positioning my hands.
I did remember the compressions.
I tried. Tried for a long time. Tried until I knew that even if he came back, by some miracle, that his brain had been deprived of oxygen far too long.
That realization came on the tail end of exhaustion.
It was a whisper and not the gnashing of teeth and screaming to the heavens. I simply crawled up to rest his head in my lap, and I chanted, “Please be okay, please be okay.” Though, I knew that “okay” had nothing to do with being alive or smiling at me again. It was more like a wish that his soul’s journey be gentle.
That he be at peace.
I had stroked my fingers over Dad’s hair and thought about the night when Mom had died the first time. They had
shocked her back down to Earth again. Before she was fully conscious, she had lifted her arm to point and said, “Oh, I want to be there.”
As painful as it was in that moment for me, I was sorry the doctors had saved her.
The conviction in Mom’s voice was so powerful. Whatever she’d seen was good. That place that Mom didn’t want to leave—that’s the place I imagined my dad had reached.
Now that my bus had rumbled closer to the diner. I was out of the vicinity where Dad had laughed his last laugh, sung his last note, breathed his last breath.
I closed my eyes and tried for a slow, steady inhale.
My stop was next.
If I was going to try to parallel Modesty’s situation, my eyes should look haunted.
I looked over my shoulder and whispered, “You two obviously want my attention.”
Ghosts…
I didn’t disbelieve in ghosts like I disbelieved in vampires. I had never experienced them before. The otherworldly? Sure. The psychic realm? Yup, I spent a lot of time training and working in the ether.
Ghosts…
Somehow that wasn’t something I’d really thought about before. If what I was sensing of my parents was ghost-like—ha! I was thinking about Harry Potter and the way his parents had died protecting him. I felt an affinity for that sentiment. My parents died, not specifically protecting me from evil, but I had always felt that they had died in service to me. Though, now that I lay down those thoughts for scrutiny, it wasn’t quite right.
Certainly, when I felt my parents close, I never saw them as apparitions. They had no visible form. And yet, there they were.
The bus came to a stop, and I stood, gripping the pole, waiting my turn to exit.
I wasn’t in the mood for this. There, I’d just admit it. I was in the mood to go by the florists and get my mom some of her favorite sunflowers, take them to the graveyard, and hang out with my folks.
Talk things out.
Let the wind carry my words and sprinkle them in the distance like the seeds of a dandelion afloat on the breeze.
It would be nice to rest against my parents’ headstone with a sketch pad and draw just like I did as a child while Mom napped.
What I didn’t want to do was climb off this bus and go look Modesty in the eye. Read her like a book. Bring my findings to today’s meeting.
Meetings.
Two of them after this.
It wasn’t a good day for that. My concentration was blown, and my body still hadn’t recovered from the hours of somnambulant rowing.
I nodded at the bus driver as I sidled past.
She shot me a look of sheer boredom.
Or maybe she was exhausted and despondent, too.
Spyder wants me here, I reminded myself as I stood on the sidewalk, looking around as the bus continued its circuit.
The weather was reflecting my gray drippy mood.
I gave myself a good shake, forcing myself away from Memory Lane. I needed to be focused and strategic as I laid the groundwork for this new mission.
This was the point where mistakes had the greatest impact on outcomes.
Whoever this woman Modesty was, she had a role to play in something big and bad. I just needed to figure out why she was under the lens of an FBI terror specialist.
Chapter Five
Okay. Deep breath.
According to my phone app, the diner was just down this street and around the corner to the right.
I decided to cut across the parking lot and come up behind the restaurant. It would give me a chance to peek and see if a car was parked out back with an out-of-state license plate.
It was still pretty early, six-forty. Usually, I’d have another twenty minutes before my alarm sounded, or one of my dogs, Beetle and Bella, woke me with their tongue laps.
This week they were staying with their trainers, the Millers; they were learning how to do cadaver scents on waterways. It was good that they’d be having fun learning new things and enjoying the outdoors this week. Their training was pre-planned, freeing me up for whatever Christen and Gator needed from me to make their wedding beautiful and memorable.
Lousy timing for Spyder to put this new mission on my radar.
Ah well, it was hard to schedule the bad guys.
The parking lot over here was empty, but around the diner, it was much more congested.
The website had said that the diner was open all night. I assumed that this was the on-the-way-to-work breakfast rush in full swing.
I hoped so.
I wanted to be able to slide in and hang out, getting lost amongst the comings and goings of workaday folks.
As I got closer, I heard a commotion on the other side of the fencing that enclosed the dumpsters.
A young woman’s words were hard to decipher as they warbled with fear.
Men’s voices—one angry and taunting, the other finding whatever was going on to be funny as all get out.
Could this be Modesty in trouble? Should I intervene?
The first rule on a mission was typically “Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.” Spyder had shown me enough videos and talked me through enough scenarios during his mentorship that I realized stepping in and thinking I understood the dynamics of a situation just wasn’t a thing.
It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t carry concealed. Imagine seeing a man shoot someone; I pull my gun on him and shoot, later to find out that he was an undercover cop, and he was taking down a terrorist. Or equally awful, I pull my gun and hesitate, trying to grasp what was going on. The undercover cop sees me with a gun pointing at him and pulls the trigger a second time.
I was not a superhero. It wasn’t my role to play one. If something terrible was happening, I should call the police. Possibly make a distraction.
Still, I was trained that unless I knew the backstory, stay away.
Easier said than done when I heard a woman in distress.
I melted into the background to get a read on the situation. This technique was what my martial arts teacher, Master Wang, called shadow walking. It was the technique taught to Ninjas so they could move through a space without being detected.
In this technique, the shadow walker must observe the colors around them, not just that a tree trunk was brown, but it was light and shadow, crease and crevice, flecks of gray and white, green and tan. If I used a solid color when I shadow walked, I could always be seen. When I thought of the process like painting a canvas, I was successful.
This was a honed skill that took years and years of practice. Master Wang said I was a stellar student, the best he’d seen. Learning as a child, shadow walking was one of my favorite things to do. I’ll admit that at that time, my whole goal was to win at the hide-and-seek games the kids from my apartment complex played in the park just up the road from our apartment building. Sometimes it even got me out of a punishment at home when disappearing meant I wasn’t at the scene of the crime of the missing cookies.
I always thought of it as a mental ghillie suit like the coverings snipers draped over themselves so they could lie unseen to the enemy.
To do this, I had to imagine the hues and shades of my surroundings dappling over my body.
My success had a great deal to do with my mother teaching me art skills. My eye perceived variants in colors that were missed by the untrained eye.
My mother’s art training blending with Master Wang’s martial art training.
Both were tools in my toolbox.
Useful, applicable tools, especially in situations like this one.
As I started training under Spyder’s mentorship, time refined my shadow walking goals.
Since then, too many times to count, shadow walking was the difference between my life or my death.
Now, using the technique, I rounded the dumpster to find three men triangulated around a waitress. A bag of restaurant trash in each hand, her back was to the dumpsters.
She was trapped.
Projecting the color of
dumpster blue and rust patches out in front of me. Stilling my breath to observe, I watched the young woman trembling.
She was a tiny woman. Maybe five foot two. A hundred—a hundred and ten pounds.
The men, in comparison, were hulking. My guess was that these guys did construction or landscaping. Their muscles had the look of men who didn’t need to go to the gym because their jobs built their bodies up. While they dressed in clean jeans and T-shirts, their dusty boots with mud-caked along the edges made me wary. They’d have steel toe reinforcements. Lethal weapons if they knew how to kick.
I was wearing tennis shoes.
Realizing that I was assessing my own clothing choices for my ability to fight in them, I slipped behind the trash to drop my shadow walking concentration. There, I quickly texted Iniquus Operations Control a message that there was an emergency unfurling, send a police car with backup.
Iniquus monitored all of its operators when they were on task. The control room would have my location up on their map. As soon as the message dropped, they’d shift into go mode.
After I saw the “delivered” indicator on my phone, I turned off the volume. An ill-timed ping could endanger me further.
“Look, guys,” The woman was pleading. “I’ve been on my feet for the last eight hours earning the money. I need it to eat. I have kids.”
Robbery?
I took in a breath, calmed my system, and dropped back into my shadow walking mode, so I could observe.
If this was Modesty, her being hurt might create issues moving the mission forward. I had no idea if Modesty had children or not. Of course, this woman could be lying about the kids to garner sympathy.
If she handed them her money, and they went away, that was one thing. But now that I had my eyes on the men, I realized that was not their plan.
One of the men kept glancing over to a mustard-yellow car, the sides lacey with rust. No hubcaps. I read off the license plate to memorize it—in case that became important.
The man with the snicker, his lower lip distended with a plug of tobacco, reached out and gave the waitress a shove, sending her back two steps.