She doesn’t even like to talk about it, Stella had said.
Though she wasn’t Tom’s type—heavily tattooed, with visible piercings—she was by no means unattractive.
Tremendously fit, with a pleasing if plain face and an obvious intelligence, there was no reason, beyond the acute shyness, for her to be spending her life working and training with little else to occupy herself.
Still, despite her quirks, she was an ideal employee—she’d never once called in sick or requested time off or arrived late.
More than that, she worked six days a week and did so with the same devotion to their business that Tom and Stella had.
What more could any fledgling business owner want?
Tom watched as Krista stood in the parking lot, her chest rising and falling evenly. The nearly three-mile sprint from her place to the diner had barely winded her.
And then she did the same thing she did every time she made this run: she checked her wristwatch, as if timing how long it had taken her to cross the distance between her home and place of work.
As much as Tom tried, he couldn’t gauge her reaction to today’s time—was she pleased that she had topped herself, or dissatisfied that she had fallen short of yesterday’s sprint?
It was an odd thing, spending so much time with someone he could not read, not even slightly.
Someone who was as enigmatic as a cat.
Tom didn’t realize that Stella was behind him until she spoke.
“I’m going.”
He faced her. Her second layer of workout clothes was the sweatpants and a sweatshirt, both baggy. Though loose fitting, they did little to hide her athletic physique.
Rounded delts, strong back and legs.
Even when she was exhausted by a day’s hard work, she stood with a cadet’s posture.
“Be careful,” he said.
She smiled, securing her long curls into a ponytail. “Always. Don’t forget our dinners.” She kissed him, then nodded toward his watch. “Good luck.”
This was their daily ritual—Stella’s acknowledgment of the hour of waiting ahead of Tom, and Tom’s insistence that it was all merely a formality.
A result of the bargain he’d made for their freedom to make their own way.
Stella stepped to her side of the bed and retrieved the fanny pack she wore when running. She placed her Smith & Wesson .357 inside it.
Putting the pack on, she returned to Tom and kissed him once more. “I love you. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
“I love you, too.”
He watched from the bedroom window as Stella joined Krista in the parking lot.
The two spoke as Stella stretched.
Then they ran off together, shoulder-to-shoulder, their initial pace steady.
After they were gone from his sight, Tom went down to the diner. Leaving the lights off, he moved behind the counter and into the kitchen.
Whenever he wasn’t on the floor helping Stella by busing tables and running food, he was in the kitchen, either washing dishes or assisting behind the line during rushes.
A newbie to the business, he was becoming a jack-of-all-trades.
One of the curses of ownership was a compulsion to check and recheck things, and Tom did just that as he made his way to the walk-in.
He checked that the burners were off and that all the pilots were lit. Then he made sure the small refrigerators were closed all the way and that the walk-in unit was shut and bolted.
Finally, he confirmed that the Craftsman tool chest containing Krista’s collection of precision cutlery was padlocked.
She’d been lugging the cutlery back and forth in a toolbox till Tom had found the five-drawer chest at a tag sale.
Even as he had handed her the only key, and even as she had thanked him, Krista had strained to meet his eyes.
Retrieving the two plates from the walk-in, Tom locked up again and returned upstairs, placing the plates in the small college-boy refrigerator in their rudimentary kitchen.
It was five minutes to four when he began his own workout.
Pull-ups from a door frame, followed by squat thrusts, then those followed by diamond pushup—hard reps, fast up and slow down, all with a knapsack containing a forty-pound bag of rice on his back.
He finished his first set by four o’clock, then walked into the bedroom and removed from under his side of the mattress the burner smartphone his former CO had given him.
Powering the phone up, he laid it facedown on a table and returned to his workout, doing another hard set—fifteen pull-ups, fifty squats, thirty push-ups.
After a brief rest, he completed a third set.
He’d just begun to sweat and breathe hard and was getting ready for his least favorite part of the routine—the three-minute continuous run up and down the stairs with the knapsack held to his chest—when he heard a sound he hadn’t heard in the year and a half he’d been listening for it.
The one sound he didn’t want to hear.
The deep buzzing of his muted smartphone, vibrating on the wooden tabletop.
He hadn’t bothered assigning a specific pattern to help him immediately differentiate between an incoming call and incoming text.
There was really no point since only one person had this number, and that person would only text.
Tom’s protocols had been very specific.
And while there was a remote chance that this was a call from someone who had misdialed, or even from some telemarketer or scammer working from a list of computer-generated numbers, Tom knew in his gut he wasn’t that lucky.
The rapid buzzing, as insistent as an alarm—and arriving a few minutes past four—could only be one thing.
Walking to the table, Tom waited a moment before picking up the device, then turned it over and read what was on the display.
Fifteen
A text containing three digits.
9-9-9
The predetermined code telling Tom that his former commanding officer was requesting a meeting.
It was from the correct number—the only one to which Tom would respond.
Of course, a part of him wanted to return the device to the table and walk away, pretend he simply hadn’t heard the buzzing.
But immediately the phrase that had been drilled into him by the sender of the text pushed those thoughts from his mind.
The only way out is through.
And yet Tom froze, unwilling to move in any direction at all, much less forward.
The idea of never seeing Stella again—of risking his life in any way, and of possibly leaving her with all they had taken on—stirred in him deep sorrow.
He’d been fortunate enough to go off to war with no one waiting for him at home—no loved one or lover, not one person for whom he needed to stay alive, so no reason for him to hold back.
For the eight years he’d been a member of the ten-man Seabee Reconnaissance Team that James Carrington had commanded, Tom had followed orders without hesitation, no matter the danger involved.
He had learned early on that only those with no one to hurt could experience true fearlessness.
That obviously was no longer the case.
He had done his part for his country, first in Afghanistan and then during the five years after his discharge, when a message not unlike this one had turned his life upside down.
And he had more than enough scars to show for both his foreign and domestic battles.
But Stella was his cause now. They’d done their share of surviving—the war and the recession and the long, slow recovery from both. It was their turn to thrive.
And they seemed now poised to do just that.
As distressing as the idea of being separated from her was, even for the hour it would take him to meet with Carrington, it was Tom’s firsthand knowledge of the men Carrington would likely bring along that deepened any hesitation he had.
Out there in the world were men and women for whom duty to country and personal enrichment were two side
s of the same coin.
There was no reason to think that Tom would be spared encountering such men and women this time around.
He had, though, discerned whom among them to trust and whom to always view with skepticism.
Those who had his back, and those to whom he should never show it.
In truth, only a few had proven themselves trustworthy.
Three men, in fact.
And one of them was now calling for Tom to come in from hiding.
Thumbing an icon on the phone’s display, Tom opened his Amazon Photo account, into which he had uploaded two dozen or so photographs he had taken shortly after his and Stella’s arrival.
All of them were of local landmarks and Vermont scenery, and there was nothing specific or particularly telling about any of them.
He scrolled through those pics, choosing three, and composed a reply text that contained just three numbers.
3 8 11
The third, eighth, and eleventh photos in the queue.
As a matter of security, the phone that Carrington had used to send the coded request for an immediate meeting was not linked to Tom’s photo account.
But a separate tablet that Carrington always kept in his satchel was, so using that device he would log in to Tom’s account and use those numbers to identify the pics Tom wanted him to view.
One was of a maple tree in autumn, its branches holding leaves that were the color of fire.
Another showed a historic church, taken from its front steps and angled steeply upward to capture its tall steeple.
The final pic was of a small-town Main Street and showed a long row of shops and restaurants.
Tom had, in fact, taken several shots from that same angle, some during the day and others at night.
The one he had chosen happened to be a nighttime shot, but that wasn’t what mattered.
What did matter was what was in the background—a clock tower located in the center of a wide village green at the far end of the street.
Though that clock wasn’t prominent in the photo—cell phone pics weren’t the best choice for distance shots—it was focused well enough for Carrington to note the position of its two hands and determine the time that Tom would meet him.
Five o’clock.
Carrington would only request a meeting using the 999 code if he was nearby. And Tom wanted this over with as quickly as possible.
The other two pics revealed the location of the meeting, which was to be one of a handful of places that Tom had scouted and determined were tactically beneficial to him.
It had been a hectic few days, back when they’d first bought the property, with Tom taking the time to do the necessary photoreconnaissance as well as establish multiple points of egress from all possible meeting places.
He was an expert in identifying the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in any terrain.
Once he’d completed his reconnaissance and had everything he needed, he’d met with Carrington in person at a neutral location to convey the protocols he required.
He had laid them out, one by one.
Any deviation, Tom had warned, would set Stella and him in motion.
It didn’t matter—couldn’t matter—if the deviation was due to a simple error.
Whatever the cause, they would grab what they needed and bolt.
If Tom knew anything, it was how to keep moving.
I’m sorry it has to be that way, he had said. But Stella comes first.
Carrington had nodded and replied that he understood.
After that meeting, Tom and Carrington had parted ways.
And every afternoon since, Tom had powered up his spare smartphone at four o’clock, only to power it down again at five and return it to its place in his nightstand drawer.
The meeting would take place at the corner of Maple and Church Streets on the far edge of a town called Smithton.
It wasn’t just any town, though.
It was a town just a few miles east of the town in which Tom had been born and raised—a location he therefore knew like the back of his hand.
The tactical advantages that Tom gained by his familiarity with this area far outweighed the bad dreams his being back here had stirred.
Dreams of the family he’d lost, and of how he had lost them.
But Tom was determined to be in charge this time around and to never again be used like a pawn.
And he would endure whatever was necessary to hang on to the edge that control offered.
He waited for Carrington’s reply text.
At any point in their communication, if Carrington were under duress, he could warn Tom off by skipping a step.
Tom trusted that the man would do that.
So every stage in communication that was achieved left Tom waiting for the next stage—or its absence.
It took longer than Tom thought it should for that message to come through, but finally it did—another three-digit code, this one conveying the identities of those who would be meeting with him, just as Tom had instructed Carrington to do.
1 2 3
Of all the possible variations, this was the one Tom had hoped he wouldn’t receive, because it meant that the top players would be in attendance.
So whatever was going down, it was serious enough to bring them to the middle of nowhere.
Further communications weren’t required, so Tom quickly powered down the phone.
He paused again, but not for long.
The sooner he got this over with—the sooner he heard them out—the better.
Grabbing a small military map bag from the bottom drawer of his nightstand, he shoved the burner phone into its front pocket, where his SureFire pocket flashlight was stored.
The main pocket of the bag was divided into two separate compartments, and into one went his spare magazines, leaving the other for his Colt 1911, which he kept in its leather, inside-the-waistband holster.
He didn’t bother to shower, just changed into clean jeans, a T-shirt, and his worn-out work boots. Against the evening chill, and to conceal his pistol, he pulled on a zip-up, hooded sweatshirt.
The location Tom had chosen was thirty-five minutes away, and he wanted to get there early, so that meant he had to leave now.
If Carrington and his party arrived at five, and if the meeting didn’t take too long, maybe fifteen minutes tops, chances were good that Tom would make it back home before Stella returned from her postrun workout—that is, if she didn’t skip it tonight.
He made this his goal, setting that time frame as the schedule he would keep.
Informing Stella now of this new development would only cause her to worry. If it turned out that he wasn’t going to be home when she got there—either because she decided to skip her CrossFit workout or because his meeting ran long—he’d let her know then.
He recognized, though, the hope that he wouldn’t have to tell her anything at all.
His promise to the Colonel the last time he’d seen the man was that he would help if he could, and right now he simply couldn’t, as there was no way he was leaving Stella with an all-consuming business to run as well as no one to defend her.
Not that she couldn’t take care of herself—her long-deceased father had been a state trooper commander, and the Smith & Wesson .357 she carried with her had been handed down to her by him, along with all the necessary knowledge to handle it both safely and effectively.
She could take care of herself, yes, and had done just that two years ago, when men with the hearts of animals had come to kidnap her with the intention of using her to control Tom.
Of doing the worst to her, if that’s what it took to achieve their goal.
But despite Stella’s skills—despite her heroic heart—Tom had no desire for her to be put in harm’s way again.
He found himself, even as he prepared to leave for the meeting, coming to a difficult conclusion.
He would—had to—say no to the Colonel.
Taking the Marlin Cam
p carbine from its corner by his side of the bed, Tom carried it to the makeshift safe room down the hall and hid the weapon beneath a loose floorboard—a precaution he always took when leaving the premises.
He paused to look at what else the secret compartment contained: a fireproof money box, which he eventually removed and opened.
Inside was a mix of personal documents, his and Stella’s—both their original documents and those they had recently acquired.
Documents that had made it possible for them to safely settle down and start over.
The box also contained a small card made of copper that was stamped with Tom’s full name and the name and signature of the current attorney general of the United States.
Also stamped into the metal was a phone number for Tom to call, should he find himself in trouble with law enforcement.
That number is monitored twenty-four-seven, the Colonel had said when handing the card to Tom. Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t avoid trouble, Tomas. But something tells me you don’t need to be reminded of that.
Tom pocketed the courtesy card, then hurried downstairs, locked up behind himself, and made his way across the gravel parking lot to his pickup. The vehicle was parked just beyond a pair of industrial-size dumpsters at the far edge of the lot, where a cluster of pine trees created a pocket of shade in the summer and kept some of the snow off the plastic lids in the winter.
Getting in behind the wheel, he laid the map bag on the passenger seat, cranked the ignition, and checked his watch.
It was 4:15.
Maybe a half hour of daylight remained.
Smithton was a valley town, surrounded almost entirely by steep hills, and night always seemed to come fast there, or at least that was how Tom remembered it.
Shifting into gear, he steered onto the two-lane road and headed east, the falling sun at his back and the cradle of his current nightmares ahead.
Sixteen
Tom did his best against the onslaught of long-forgotten memories that the familiar landmarks beyond his windshield triggered.
He saw the roadside meadow he had wandered in as a child; the general store where he’d spent his allowance on treats as a boy; the second-run movie theater in which he had spent rainy Saturdays as a teenager and then later in high school took dates to.
The Rogue Agent Page 9