Her Baby, His Secret

by Gayle Wilson

  “I’m not working on anything,” she said, but Claire understood what he was getting at. And it frightened her. The possibility that this might not be about money at all but about...anger? Retaliation? Something personal.

  Mentally she reviewed the features she had done in the last six months. Although there was always the chance that someone who had been touched on in one of her analyses might be unhinged enough to do something like this, it seemed unlikely, as most of them were highly respected figures on the national scene. People she knew personally. And who knew her or her family.

  Politics in this town were many things to many people, but seldom did they involve violence. The only things that she could think of that she had been involved in lately that might possibly be connected to anything violent...

  Had to do with the members of Griff’s team, she realized.

  She didn’t know how that sudden thought was reflected in her face, but it must have been. An involuntary widening of her eyes, perhaps. A hesitation in her breathing. There must have been some reaction, obvious enough that Detective Minger hadn’t missed it.

  “You think of something, Ms. Heywood?” he asked softly. “Something we ought to know about?”

  Slowly she shook her head. Even if it were possible that Gardner’s disappearance might in some incredible way be connected to what she had done for Jordan Cross or for the man they called Hawk, Minger wouldn’t be the one to deal with it. She understood that. Minger wouldn’t get to first base with any inquiries he tried to make concerning Griff Cabot’s External Security Team.

  “No,” she said softly. “I can’t think of anything else I can tell you, Detective Minger.”

  He nodded, still holding her eyes. He knew she was lying. Apparently Minger was better at his job than she had given him credit for. For a second she thought about telling him the truth, afraid that if she didn’t, he would draw his own conclusions about what she was hiding.

  She resisted the impulse because she knew she had been right before. The things she had gotten involved with in helping the CIA agents who had once worked for Griff Cabot couldn’t be handled by the cops.

  And she wasn’t exactly sure who might be able to inquire about them within the dark and dirty bowels of the agency itself. Perhaps her grandfather, although the people he had been associated with there were, like himself, long retired from the intelligence agency.

  And Claire herself probably wouldn’t get any further within the CIA than Minger could. Not unless she could contact Jordan or Hawk directly. Again, as she had earlier, she felt a surge of hope at that thought.

  There would be no one better to find Gardner than the men of Griff’s team. There was no one with more expertise at tracking someone down, as Hawk had proved in finding Griff’s assassin. No one more experienced at putting the pieces of a puzzle together, as Jordan Cross had done in coming up with the location of the millions that had been stolen from the Mafia.

  And they both owed her. Quid pro quo, she thought. They owed her. And, of course, they owed Griff Cabot even more.

  With her daughter missing, Claire knew that she would call due every favor she had ever been owed by anyone in this town. With these men, however, she also knew that wouldn’t be necessary. All she would have to say to them was that Griff Cabot’s daughter was missing. And that she needed their help to get her back.

  Chapter Two

  “And what the hell makes you think someone within the agency had anything to do with what happened?” Carl Steiner asked angrily. “You have to know better than that, damn it. You have to know us better than that.”

  When Griff Cabot didn’t answer, Steiner shook his head in disgust. After a few seconds he closed his eyes, rubbing his forefinger tiredly up and down the bridge of his narrow nose, as if his week had already been too long, and this at the end of it was too hard to deal with.

  And then Carl had driven out to the wilds of southern Pennsylvania, fighting the holiday weekend traffic, Griff remembered. He supposed he should be grateful for the swift response to his message. However, he was having a tough time evoking gratitude for anything right now.

  His leg hurt like a son of a bitch. And he was furious. Steiner had certainly known him long enough to read that fury, although Griff was working hard at presenting his case calmly and rationally, just as he would have done when making any professional argument. After he had allowed the echoes of Carl’s anger to fade into silence, he again ticked off the points he had already made in his original message to the director.

  “One of my men is fingered for an assassination he didn’t carry out. As a result, he almost ends up on the most wanted list. Another is set down in the middle of a deal that’s an open invitation for somebody to murder him, in a very slow and extremely painful way. Those things happen within weeks of each other and within a few months of my agency-engineered death. So I find all these incidents to be just a little too coincidental, Carl. Those kinds of things don’t happen by chance. Not in our world.”

  Griff watched as Steiner’s lips tightened, but thankfully Carl resisted reminding him that it wasn’t exactly “our” world any longer. When he had agreed to go along with the story they had put out after he’d been injured in the terrorist attack at Langley, Griff hadn’t believed they would use his “death” as an excuse to cut his people loose. Or that if they then got into trouble, the agency would refuse to help them.

  “Normally I’d agree,” Steiner said, his voice carefully moderated to sound calm and reasonable. “However, in those two particular cases—”

  “Spare me the crap, Carl,” Griff said succinctly.

  He pushed up out of the chair he was sitting in, the one behind the desk, of course. Assuming that position of power hadn’t really been intentional, however. It was simply force of habit.

  For too many years Griff Cabot had been the one in charge. The one people reported to. Now he was on the outside looking in, having to depend on old friendships to get to the bottom of what had been happening to his team. And he found he didn’t like that position worth a damn.

  He limped across the library, leaning on a silver-headed cane. Griff Cabot had hated all the restrictions his injuries had imposed, but most of all, he had hated this damn cane, a constant reminder that he was no longer the man he had once been. So he had worked particularly hard on being able to get along without using it. Most of the time he succeeded.

  Today, however, he’d had another poking and prodding session with the surgeons, who had spent the afternoon putting him through their tests and congratulating themselves on their latest handiwork. The combination of that and the cold rain he’d been out in most of the day had had its effect. As a result, he had been forced to acknowledge that if he wanted to be mobile during Carl’s visit, then the hated cane was his only option.

  It seemed to him to be a symbol of everything that had happened. The attack. The agency’s reaction to his injuries. Their lingering effects. The sooner he accepted those, one of the doctors had told him this afternoon, the quicker he would make peace with his limitations.

  Screw them. Screw them all, Griff thought, looking out the window at the rain-drenched garden below.

  Not that it was much of a garden. Not at this time of year. In the winter downpour it looked exactly like what it was—cold and gray and dead. Just like him.

  His eyes flicked upward, expecting to catch the reflection of his guest in the glass, which had been darkened into near opaqueness by the twilight outside. Instead he found his own image, distorted by the streaks of rain. He could see enough to know, however, that he didn’t like what he was looking at.

  His body canted slightly to the side because of the cane. His hair was too long by his own once impeccable standards. And the eyes reflected in the glass appeared to be without color. Cold and gray and dead echoed again in his head. He watched his jaw tighten in frustration, and he forced it to relax.

  He turned around to face his visitor, propping his left hip on the deep ledge of
the windowsill and leaning gratefully against the glass behind him. Standing probably hadn’t been such a hot idea, he acknowledged.

  He realized gratefully that his leg was protesting a little less, now that some of his weight was borne by the ledge. He hadn’t taken anything for the pain, but he knew he would have to eventually. If he intended to sleep tonight.

  And to him that would be another triumph for the terrorist bastard whose bullets had shattered his leg. Another small defeat in a battle he had fought every day of the past year.

  “I know you’re concerned about your people,” Carl said quietly.

  Griff looked up to find Steiner watching him, compassion evident in his eyes. He hid the emotion as soon as he realized Griff was looking at him, but the fact that it had been there angered Cabot anew. He wasn’t even sure whether the cause of that pity was his injury or the concern for his men Carl had just referred to.

  “But I can assure you,” Steiner added, “and the director has asked me to give you his assurance as well, that those were totally unrelated and coincidental events. They had nothing to do with the team or with operations.”

  “They’ve both been retired. Two of the best people we had, Carl, and you let them go.”

  “Their choice. They chose to leave. And we gave them all the help we could to successfully make that transition. All the help they would accept from us.”

  “Things just...went wrong?” Griff asked, his voice as low as Steiner’s, but edged with sarcasm.

  “In Hawkins’ case he tried to help a woman. Chivalrous perhaps, but foolhardy as well, given his profession. And it put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’d have to admit that when we saw Hawk on camera at the scene of a political assassination, we had a right to be a tittle...shall we say wary? Even suspicious?”

  “Not unless you sent him there,” Griff argued. He stretched his aching leg out in front of him. using the cane to push himself farther back onto the deep sill of the window.

  “We didn’t send him to Baghdad, either,” Steiner reminded him.

  Griff supposed he should have known Hawk would undertake that mission, but he hadn’t been in any condition to make that assessment at the time. Even if he had been, Griff suspected he wouldn’t have attempted to dissuade Hawk. After all, five people had died in the terrorist attack for which Hawk’s mission had been payback. But the sixth...

  Like Mark Twain, he thought, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. The firm line of Cabot’s mouth moved slightly in amusement. “That was personal,” he said softly. Because Hawk was my friend. And because I was his.

  “We had no way of knowing that the other wasn’t personal as well. When we saw Hawk on the videos, we assumed al-Ahmad had some connection to the terrorists responsible for the Langley massacre. We couldn’t afford to have an agent operating on his own agenda, not on an international level. Not as volatile as the region is. You know that. You would have been the first to rein Hawkins in.”

  He would have been, too. Griff would never have allowed a member of the team to make that kind of decision. Not even someone like Hawk, whom he trusted implicitly.

  Steiner’s explanation made sense. And from everything Griff had been able to discover about her, Tyler Stewart had really been an innocent pawn in that assassination. Griff knew he was one of the few people who could believe Hawk was romantic enough to have done what Steiner claimed he had—played knight errant to protect a woman.

  “But that doesn’t explain why you let Stewart out of protective custody,” Griff said.

  “Obviously,” Steiner said, his own anger creeping out again from under the surface calm he had imposed, “we let her go because we thought it was over. When Holt confirmed what we’d been told about the assassination being an extremist plot, we didn’t see the need to protect Ms. Stewart any longer. We were wrong, but what happened as a result of that error didn’t impact on Hawk. He was never a target for retaliation. Not by us.”

  “And what happened to Jordan?” Griff asked. “Are you trying to tell me that was another coincidence?”

  “After the fiasco at the airport, Cross needed a new face,” Steiner said simply.

  His voice, however, reflected his displeasure with what had occurred in Mississippi that day. Again Griff couldn’t blame him. Any time an agent was exposed, the organization suffered, especially if it were someone whose responsibilities were as sensitive as Jordan’s had once been.

  “And so the agency gave him one that belonged to a man who was the target of a Mafia manhunt,” Griff said softly.

  He was careful to keep any accusation out of his tone. Antagonizing Carl wouldn’t be smart, since Steiner was one of the few people within the CIA who knew Cabot hadn’t died in that attack on headquarters. One of the few people he could still talk to about the operations of the agency whose missions had occupied more than half his life.

  Griff admitted that he missed being in on policy decisions and on the day-to-day running of the intelligence unit once known as the External Security Team. His job had encompassed a lot of diverse and fascinating activities during the dozen years the team had been in existence.

  Now he had been put out to pasture, and the men he had trained were slowly being reassigned or dismissed or, like him, forcibly retired. Griff didn’t have a right to object to that process, he supposed. Not when he got down to the bottom line, which was that he had agreed go along with their announcement of his death.

  He had done that because he had known the director was probably correct in what he’d suggested. That was the safest way to protect Griff from the possibility that someone might try to retaliate for the team’s past operations. At the time, the agency had viewed the terrorist attack at Langley as just such a retaliation.

  Griff’s life had already been a shambles. Given the extent of his injuries, it had been evident that his professional life was over. And then, considering what had happened between him and Claire... He took a deep breath, remembering.

  At the time, it had seemed like the simplest thing to do. Maybe it had been just following the path of least resistance. Allowing them to “retire” him with a gravestone rather than a gold watch as his monument. After all, they all knew there weren’t that many special operatives who lived long enough to collect on the watch, anyway.

  And there had been increasing pressure within the agency to do away with his particular branch of the Special Operations Group. The External Security Team had been Griff Cabot’s brainchild, although the concept behind it certainly wasn’t new. Just more politically unacceptable with each passing year.

  However, despite the strictures and limitations now in place on CIA operations, there was still occasionally a need for the so-called quiet option. The need to do away with a dangerous madman whose continuing existence threatened the security of the nation. That was one of the primary jobs of Cabot’s group.

  One of the last assignments the team had undertaken under his direction had been to find a Russian gangster who had somehow acquired a handful of suitcase nukes. To find him, to take him out and then retrieve the weapons.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot more nuclear devices were showing up on the international black market. Most of the world couldn’t begin to conceive of the kind of terrorism that would engender. It would soon be able to, however, and Griff wondered who would be around then with the mandate the team had once had. A team that, with his retirement, was slowly being destroyed.

  Griff hadn’t realized, of course, the implications his “death” would have for his people. And although he would certainly have argued against standing down the team, whether the agency’s agenda where his men were concerned was smart or not was not really the question.

  Mothballing them was one thing. Getting rid of agents who knew too much was another. From the outside looking in, Griff Cabot had begun to suspect that was what was being done, especially in Jordan Cross’s case. And Griff wasn’t about to let them get away with that.
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br />   “You know how it works, Griff,” Steiner argued. “We don’t make the decision as to whose face someone gets. The surgeons do that, based on existing facial structure, coloring, whatever. Why the hell would anyone want to expose Cross to something like what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Griff said. “I’ve been trying to decide that since I found out what was happening.”

  “And frankly, I’d like to know exactly how you found out,” Steiner said quietly. For the first time there was a hint of challenge in his eyes. Of personal affront.

  Again Griff didn’t respond, but he didn’t allow his gaze to drop. It was a legitimate demand. One he certainly would have made had he been in Carl’s position, probably a lot more forcefully. That didn’t mean, however, that he intended to answer it.

  “If you’re in touch with someone in the agency, then that’s a breach of security,” Steiner continued. “You know that. If you were still in charge of the division, you wouldn’t put up with it, and you know that as well.”

  Carl was right, of course. He wouldn’t have.

  “I can’t allow it either, Griff. No matter how well intentioned you are—and I believe that, by the way—I can’t allow you to interfere with the functioning of the division.”

  “I was not aware that I’ve interfered with anything,” Griff said. “Are you?”

  Steiner’s eyes assessed him before he answered, his voice softer now. “For a lot of the members of your team, their primary loyalty was never to the agency. Or even to their country. It was to you. That’s a dangerous situation, Griff, and we both know it.”

  “Is that why I was retired?” Griff asked. He could hear the bitterness in his question.

  “You were retired because you could no longer function as the head of a vitally important intelligence division. At the time, no one was willing to predict that you would ever be able to function in that position again. The DCI made the decision that was in the agency’s best interests. He always will. That’s the director’s responsibility. And you felt that way, too. At the time,” Steiner reminded him.