by Quinn, Fiona
Somehow he was naked. His silken erection brushed down my inner thigh as he moved over me, tormenting me.
“Please.” I gasped. His fingers hooked my panties, easing them slowly, slowly down my hips and off...
“Striker?” My voice sounded small and quivery. He moved back up; hovering over me, he looked down into my eyes and waited. I gulped. “I love you touching me.” I said on the exhale.
He smiled and kissed me.
“Striker?”
He opened his eyes to look at me again.
“I want you to make love to me. . .but…”
When I said ‘but’ he lowered his forehead to mine. He had to regroup, shift gears. So did I. Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m such a freaking prick tease! But could I do this? Body and mind were in full out battle.
“But what, Lexi? Tell me.” His voice had the gruff and lusty quality to it like in Miami.
“If we make love, we’ll keep making love. We’ll be lovers.”
“Yes.” He smiled. He seemed to like the idea.
“And that means we’ll be in a relationship.”
“Chica, we are in a relationship just an unusual, undefined relationship.”
“Being lovers would define us. We’d be a couple. I’m not there, Striker. I’m not ready to be in a new defined-couple relationship, yet.” There it was — my truth — no matter how my body longed for him, I wasn’t ready.
“So, being in bed with me leaves us undefined. Making love defines us. You’re okay with me sleeping with you. The line comes with making love?” Mirth shone in his eyes along with…wariness? Frustration?
“I guess so.” Guilt, love, loneliness, contentment, deprivation…I was full to overflowing with clashing emotions. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t just be your lover. I’m not wired like Amy. I don’t want to be your Amy.” My voice rose with conviction.
“Amy? What has she got to do with us?” He asked quietly brushing my hair from my face, looking down into my eyes in the moon light.
“Well, here she is wishing for a relationship, and she gets sex and Gater’s emotional leftovers instead.” I lifted my hand to caress the beginnings of his morning stubble. God but Striker was breathtaking. He was everything - everything I ever wanted, but I wanted it all. Not scraps. My thumb outlined his lips, hoping the right words would come out of his mouth - whatever they were. . .
“I’m not asking you to be my Amy, Chica.”
Oh? “Then what exactly are you asking me to be?” I held my breath and mentally crossed my fingers.
Striker paused for a long time. I didn’t say anything. I understood my question was a complex one, and if he’d had a response readily at hand, he’d already have shared it with me.
“I can’t answer you. I’m sorry. My love for you doesn’t seem complicated until I try to think in practical terms.”
“What a mess.” I whispered, softly running my fingers along the planes of his face.
He brought my hand to his lips, pressing a kiss into the pulse point on my wrist, then laying my palm on his heart. “No, not a mess, Chica. Everything’s alright.” Striker lay flat on top of me then rolled to his side with me still in his arms. “We’ll figure this out. And until then, I’m trying to understand your sleeping parameters.” I pillowed my head on his bicep. He nuzzled against my ear. “Can you tell me how far I’m allowed to go?” He ran his warm hand along my naked side, fingers grazing my breast. I loved how the roughness of his callouses made me feel ultra-feminine. “Is this no actual intercourse, but maybe a little fooling around kind of sleeping?” His hand slid between my thighs and rested lightly. He nipped my shoulder playfully.
“One would kind of lead toward the other wouldn’t it?” I asked. “I’m feeling guilty here about saying no to you, and that adds some pressure.”
“I’m the transmission. All you need to say is, ‘shift gears’ or ‘back up,’ and I will. No pressure, Chica. Really. None.”
His reassuring kiss was light, friendly, warm — definitely no pressure, I noted with a little disappointment.
“Can I sleep with you tonight?” he asked.
“All right,” I sighed. “But if you snore, I’m going to get Beetle and Bella involved.” When I said their names, my girls stuck their noses up over the bed to see if a command would follow, and when it didn’t, they plopped back down on the floor.
“I missed you,” Striker whispered as he tucked his knees up to spoon.
“I missed you, too,” I whispered back.
With another kiss, he settled the covers over us and fell asleep, his arms holding me possessively against him. He deserves better than me.
Twenty-Two
A few hours later, the team assembled in the Puzzle Room waiting for Jack and Striker to brief us on the case and give us our assignments.
“Gentlemen and Lynx, we are up against a short time frame. Tomorrow evening, at twenty hundred, a plane will leave Reagan International for Abu Dhabi carrying Andrew Brennon and two of his associates. Once he’s on the plane, we will have lost our opportunity to bring him to justice. Our job is to put together a strong enough case to keep him on American soil. He’s wealthy. He’s well-connected. He has a pile of get-out-of-jail free cards in his pocket. We have to craft a solid, irrefutable, case.”
“What charges are we looking at?” Deep pulled out a chair and sat down at the evidence table with his coffee mug.
“Espionage, cyber-terrorism, and blackmail for starters, and anything else we can possibly pin on him,” Jack handed out photos of Brennon.
Striker continued, “We believe his first attack was a test balloon - a five-second computer anomaly interrupted a single Wall Street purchasing algorithm. It seems simple but in that five seconds there was what they call a ‘flash crash’ and 9% of the Dow disappeared. Intel indicates Brennon recently uncovered another hole that opens the door for a second attack. His intent, according to our sources, is to play games with the stock market undermining US financial security. He’s a megalomaniac after the triumvirate — power, money, and prestige on the world terrorism stage.”
We sat stone-faced, focused.
Striker continued. “…highly intelligent and vicious. Pretty heinous things happen to people who stand in his way. If you’re out in the field, you’ll take every precaution. Lynx, you’ll obviously be here puzzling. Jack and I will be working with you, explaining everything we have from the other agencies. I don’t mean to add any pressure here, but this is a huge deal. Our various clients are all taking a stab at this. We want to be the ones who take him down.”
“Understood.” I crossed a foot underneath me and leaned forward to study the photo. Good God, this was intense. Breathe. You’re a professional - act the part.
“Deep, you’ll be on the computer. Gater and Blaze are Alpha Team. Axel and Randy make up Bravo. We need to have eyes on this guy until we get him, or he gets on the plane, so we’re borrowing Clay and Bonz to give us a third surveillance team. They’re Charlie. Remember, there are a lot of government runners in this race, so try not to step on any toes. We don’t want to get yanked off the field after all our efforts. We’ll do five-hour shifts. Brennon deplaned at Kennedy at zero-seven hundred, Charlie took the first shift. Axel and Randy, you’ll relieve them at 1200, then Alpha will take over at 1700. You will continue this rotation. Make sure you’ve been fed and had adequate rest between rotations,” Striker directed.
“Yes, sir,” the men replied in unison. The surveillance teams headed out. Deep moved to the seat in front of my computer and entered his codes.
Nervous energy made my palms sweat and my toes tap the floor. I don’t work well under pressure. And last time we had been on a time crunch, with the Schumann case, I failed, and he wound up dead – you can’t get much worse than that.
Striker and Jack pulled out a box with files in it. They went through the cyber-attack that had already crazied up Wall Street last week.
I squinted at Jack. “Did
he launch the attack from the United States?”
“No, Pakistan,” Jack answered without glancing up from the map in his hands.
“Is that where you two were?”
“Classified.” Jack said.
“It’s not part of this case? Or you don’t think I should be privy?”
“Classified, Lynx. Move on.”
I slit my eyes at Jack. If he wouldn’t share, I couldn’t puzzle. “Okay. Did he come in from Pakistan this morning?”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“And that’s where he’s going tomorrow?”
“Correct.”
“Does he have a return ticket? What about family? Are they scheduled to head out with him?”
And so went the day. I asked billions of questions and Jack and Striker patiently answered - when they had data. Deep searched our massive data banks to fill in the holes. We listed everything on the white board that still needed fleshing out.
Command sent meals in. Coffee comprised a major food group. Progress was measured in millimeters. Frustration. I saw no clear lines of reasoning in the copious data spread out in front of me. Truth be told, this was darned complicated, and probably needed weeks or months instead of hours.
After dinner, I went into the bathroom off my office and took a long hot shower until my skin turned red and prune-y. I let my muscles relax. I dressed in yoga pants and tank top, snagging my hair in the zipper as I pulled a fleece jacket over my head. I stayed barefoot, so I could think better. I always thought better barefoot. I slogged into Striker’s office and spent twenty of our precious minutes meditating - freeing up my mind, letting the myriad facts percolate.
I re-approached my mound of clues, making piles, making lists, asking questions, drawing possible connection charts…and so it went through the day, through the night, and back through the day again. Crimes were obviously being committed, but I couldn’t find the smallest shred of evidence to implicate this guy. Everything was indirect and circumstantial. I might even have chosen to venture down a different route, along a different set of clues, if Striker and Jack weren’t absolutely convinced that Brennon was at the top of this food chain. Rrr.
Working a puzzle under time-pressure and no sleep makes me feel overwhelmed. I really can’t speed up the process. My brain didn’t work that way, and the team knew it. I felt them trying to be patient, but this was a big deal. This really bad guy had the potential to do a lot of harm to our economy, and the hourglass was draining quickly. Striker realized the stress was getting to me, shutting down my ability to gather a strand of understanding from here and there and spin them together. Even though time was precious, he ordered me outside to run. He and my dogs jogged beside me. I breathed in frigid air. I tried to unknot my muscles and relax, so inspiration would bloom, and I could save the day.
As we headed back around the trail, Striker’s phone buzzed. He listened, and told the caller we’d be right there.
“What?” I asked.
“Gater’s coming in from his surveillance shift and brought you photos. He doesn’t think they’ll be very helpful. But then, we don’t think the way you do. I need to get you back, and let you take a look at them.”
“Who’s watching Brennon now?”
“Axel and Randy are on. Charlie Team’s racked out before their next op; the rest of the team is in the Puzzle Room waiting for instruction. Why don’t you head back? I’ll take Beetle and Bella over to the barracks for now.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a minute.” I jogged off toward headquarters.
When I reached my office, the team was bent over the photographs laid out on my table. They had coffee mugs in their hands. Gater held one out to me.
I shook my head. “No thanks. Give me a second, and I’ll come see what you’ve got.” I went into the bathroom and washed the sweat from my face and swiped on some deodorant. “All right, what’s the story?” I walked over to them.
“Ma’am, Blaze and me were out on surveillance today, and I c’ain’t say we got much of anything,” Gater said.
He handed over the pile of photos. I looked down and gasped. The energy radiating from them was overpowering. There was the bad guy, Andrew Brennon - average good looks, about five foot ten; a hundred-and-seventy pounds, with straight, black hair; hazel eyes, thin lips on an over-wide mouth. He was with his family: his wife, Naomi – who looked like a Scandinavian model. The two didn’t visually fit together even if he was rich and powerful - his two little girls, who would grow up to look like their mother, and …When I looked at the other woman in the photograph it was as if I was punched in the stomach. I couldn’t inhale. This woman was frantic, hopeless. This woman had the answers we needed.
I felt the tug and familiar pull, a call from behind the Veil. I was teetering between two planes. I had a choice to make. The Veil was open to me. If I wanted to, I could walk behind it now and merge with this woman – maybe get the answers we needed, maybe find something to implicate Brennon and keep him on American soil. In an American prison. Should I go? The call lured my awareness behind the Veil. It sounded familiar to me — “Come. Come,” chanted the African women who helped me save Striker’s family. “Come,” they sang. I trusted these women. Yes. I’d go.
I dragged my eyes up from the photographs, and found Jack staring at me. “Jack, I have to go help her.” I pointed at the woman in the photo. “You know the rules.”
Jack didn’t usually wear his emotions on his sleeve. He was a huge man whose carved features lent themselves well to stoicism, but right now, it was easy to read the anguish in his eyes. I put him through hell last time - when I went behind the Veil to save Lynda and Cammy.
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice was tight. “I will not leave beginning to end. I will not touch you. I will not allow anyone else to touch you. No one else will come in…What about Striker? I don’t think I can keep him out once he knows what you’re doing.”
I nodded my consent. Now that I had made my decision, any interaction in the here and now was a monumental effort.
Jack continued, “I will not allow you to leave until you are able to walk out on your own two feet. Please, Lynx, we should wait for Striker. This isn’t a good idea.”
“She needs me now, Jack. I’m so sorry…”
The Veil pulled at my consciousness.
Jack got on his phone, “Striker, Code Red. Puzzle Room.”
I sat down, with the photos, but I barely felt the chair. I was already on my way out of my body. I looked at the photo in my hand. I didn’t pay the least bit of attention to the Brennons; they made my stomach heave, but they wouldn’t be the ones to tell me what was going on. This girl would.
I sat with the photo. She was my age - maybe nineteen? twenty? In the photo the wind had caught her raven black hair and whipped it across her high cheek bones. Her dress was chic, if extremely modest, the dark blue wool outlined her rounded breasts and cinched in at her tiny waist. She was model-beautiful. Especially her eyes. I focused on her eyes. Tell me. Her eyes were tormented, staggering, mesmerizing. She was in hell. I waited as a name formed in my mouth.
“Anna, Anya, Anyushka. She is Anyushka,” I said out loud pointing to the photo. “Yes,” replied Blaze; he looked quickly over at Jack to see if he should have responded. Jack and Striker had never told the team about this talent of mine. They had protected my secret at their own expense. This meant that Blaze, Deep, and Gater were in the dark right now, watching something very peculiar transpire.
Striker burst into the room. He looked over at me, and then Jack. “She’s gone behind the Veil? Why?” Striker sounded like a commander, but there was a frantic tinge to his voice, belying his control. He knew I was going somewhere where he had no power, and no way of helping me.
I heard Jack. “She said she had to go.”
Striker turned away from me to address the team. “Men, this will be explained later. There will be silence unless you can corroborate a fact. The only words you will use are ‘confirmed,’ or ‘refuted.�
�� You will under no circumstance, and I mean NONE, touch Lynx. She’s on a mission.”
“Yes, sir,” they replied.
I looked at the pictures again. Brennon and his wife were too distracting. I tore the picture so only Anyushka stared back at me with her hollow gaze. She was incomplete. There was something important missing. I felt empty arms. Unbearable grief. There was someone missing from this picture — a baby. I drew a baby on a piece of paper and cast about for a name.
Two names came to me in layers. Both belonged to the same child, yet both did not belong to the child. I didn’t understand.
“Anastasia,” I mouthed, “Olivia.” I looked up for confirmation; the men stared at me blankly. “Can you confirm an infant? A baby less than one year of age?”
“No, Lynx,” Blaze said. “I can neither confirm nor refute. We haven’t seen any babies and no other children other than the Brennan’s children in the photo.”
“The names Anastasia and Olivia mean nothing to you?” I mumbled rhetorically.
I breathed in waiting for Anyushka to speak to me. Volcanic heat enveloped me. My skin prickled from fear sweat. My center dragged forward as I merged with Anyushka. Oh my God, the heat. I jerked off my fleece hoodie. Even in my sleeveless jogging tank, I sweltered.
My forearms rested on the arms of my chair; and now to my horror, I couldn’t lift them. I was held in place by panic and some kind of leather binding. I glanced around a windowless room lit dimly from above. Cement walls, unfinished ceiling beams. A basement? A desk sat on my left and bookcases to my right. Andrew loomed above me, naked from the waist up, his black suit pants were unbuttoned and sliding down his hips. His psychopathic face was purplish-red and transformed, hideous with anger and evil. Dear God, what is he doing?
He leaned in – inches from my face. His breath was ragged with excitement and stank of salami and cigarettes. His eyes were blood shot, glowing red with anticipation. He licked his lips, and I cowered the best I could given my restraints.