Her Baby, His Secret

by Gayle Wilson

  Just as he had needed to hear Claire tell him Gardner was his child, needed to hear her say the words, although there had really been no doubt after he’d received that ransom note. And he needed to know that each of these men knew going in exactly what they would be up against.

  “Then I’m in,” Hawk said.

  Three words, but Hawk’s ice-blue eyes, locked on his face, said all the other things Griff knew he would never hear from Lucas Hawkins. No words about bonds of friendship. Or old debts. Those would remain unspoken, because, between the two of them, they didn’t need to be expressed. They never had.

  “Then I’ll let Jake tell you what he’s found out,” Griff said, fighting unwanted emotions, especially gratitude for a brotherhood that had been forged on missions just like this one would be. Dangerous. Precisely planned. And dependent on each other for its success.

  “We’d never get him at home,” Jake said, “not without losses. Security’s too tight. Location’s too isolated. Griff doesn’t want to take that chance, and there’s no need.”

  “So where?” Hawk asked.

  “He has a meeting set up with his major distributors in three days,” Jake said. “In the States. We need to do it here. But he’ll fly out of Miami on the fifth or the sixth, so that’s our window of opportunity.”

  “Not a lot of time,” Griff interjected, “but doable. We’ve planned missions in less. Jake will fly down in the morning and make arrangements for the equipment we’ll need. The three of us follow on different flights.”

  “I don’t understand how they could have known you’re alive,” Jordan said. “Or how they could know about the baby when you didn’t.”

  The fact that he hadn’t been aware of Gardner’s existence was something Griff had rather not go into. They had the right to ask questions, however, considering what they had just agreed to do, motivated by nothing more than friendship.

  “People in the agency knew I was alive,” he said. “They probably knew about the baby as well.”

  “You think they could be behind this? Steiner and that crowd?” Hawk asked.

  There was no love lost between Hawk and the man who had taken Griff’s place, but as much as he had thought about the possibility that this was someone within the agency, Griff couldn’t fathom a motive. Not for the assassination or for wanting him involved in something like this. The agency had more to lose with the possibility of his involvement becoming public than anyone else.

  “Someone was in the system during the last couple of months,” Jake said softly. “I could feel them. Someone who had to be operating from inside.”

  “I was in the system,” Griff said, remembering Steiner’s frustration over how he had known what was going on with his team. “I kept expecting you to backtrack to me.”

  Jake laughed, sounding a little relieved. “Guess I taught you pretty good.”

  “You really didn’t know?” Griff asked.

  “Not that it was you,” Jake said. “But that still doesn’t explain how these people could know what they seem to know.”

  “If I could get in, Jake, so could someone else,” Griff said. “Someone from the outside.”

  “When pigs fly,” Jake said softly, but obviously challenging that conclusion.

  “Then figuring out how they knew is your job,” Griff suggested. “While you’re at it, figure out how they sabotaged Claire’s alarms.”

  “What about the exchange?” Jordan asked when Jake nodded.

  Griff looked up and found Jordan’s gray eyes on his face. At least they were still familiar.

  “Down there,” he said. “I’ve already arranged that with them. They’re demanding proof. And that’s going to be the tricky part, given how security conscious the subject is.”

  “But you’ve already figured out how we’re going to do it,” Hawk said, amusement threading the quiet comment.

  Griff’s mouth moved slightly in response before his eyes again found Lucas Hawkins’s face. “I’ve figured out how you’re going to do it,” he said. “All I’m going to do is take a plane ride and work on my tan.”

  “Sounds like business as usual,” Jordan said. “We take the chances, and you and Jake get a vacation.”

  Hawk laughed. For the first time in months, Griff heard the sound of his own laughter, joining that of the others. And despite the grim purpose that had brought these few members of his team together, he knew that Carl Steiner had been right. He had missed this. And he had missed them.

  DESPITE HER GRANDFATHER’S efforts within the agency, Claire hadn’t been able to get in touch with Jake Holt. Maybe she had been wrong in thinking he would remain at headquarters. Maybe he didn’t need their computers to do whatever it was he did.

  And that thought had led her to undertake tonight’s journey—a drive to the old summer home on the coast of Virginia that the Cabots had owned for generations and that Griff had utilized before for the activities of his team. A place where both Jordan and Hawk had sought refuge. A place where there was a lot of computer equipment that Griff had used for agency business.

  And a place that now seemed as dark and devoid of human life as a tomb, she acknowledged, looking up to where the towers of the Victorian house loomed above her on the top of the seaside cliff. If Griff and his team were working here, they were being damned low-key about it.

  Wild-goose chase, she thought, beginning the climb up the flights of wooden steps that snaked along the side of the cliff. She had managed more than half of them when she remembered Griffs cane and realized again how foolish this visit was.

  Pausing to catch her breath, she looked up at the structure, so dark and forbidding and obviously unoccupied. She almost turned around and left, but since she was already here, she decided that she might as well make sure.

  WILD-GOOSE CHASE, she thought again, as she directed the beam of her flashlight about the dark, empty rooms. She had been a little surprised that the codes for the security locks hadn’t been changed. It seemed, however, that nothing had changed, she acknowledged, letting the light probe the perimeters of Griff’s study.

  She had already turned away, heading back to the hall and the front door, when a small flash attracted her attention. It had come from something on the desk, so she allowed the flashlight to play again over its surface. What she had caught out of the corner of her eye, she realized, was a reflection of her light off the glass of a photograph.

  She stepped back into the room and walked over to the desk to pick it up. A snaggle-toothed, towheaded tomboy laughed out at her from the silver frame. A moment from her own childhood. A single moment that had been captured in time, almost as Griff’s face had been that night in the garden. Frozen. Unchanging.

  Griff’s study. And her photograph. The only one he had ever asked her for. A picture no one could associate with the woman she was now. And that caution had been for security reasons, to prevent the very thing that had happened to Gardner.

  Claire put the picture down where she had found it, but she didn’t go back to the door. She stood there instead, remembering the times they had spent in this house. They hadn’t been able to get away often, given their conflicting and equally crowded schedules, but the weekends they had stolen had been very special to them both. And rare. Far too rare in their relationship.

  A relationship she had destroyed, she acknowledged, just as Griff had said. Destroyed deliberately and after careful thought. Over principle.

  Her lips tightened, but resolutely she turned away from the desk and retraced her steps across the room. She had almost reached the door when she heard a noise. She stopped, quickly pressing the off button on the flashlight with her thumb. Then, holding her breath, she listened.

  It had taken only a second to place the first sound. And then those she was hearing now. Someone had closed a door and was coming down the hallway, his steps echoing slightly in the long empty space.

  Griff? she wondered, but instinctively she shrank against the wall beside the door. Not Griff. She
had realized that by the even rhythm of the footsteps. She closed her eyes, putting her head back against the wall. Maybe there was a caretaker living nearby. Maybe he had seen her light and had come to investigate.

  Whoever this was, she realized, he was apparently doing exactly what she had done, stopping in each doorway and examining each of the rooms that led off of it. But he was working from the back of the house.

  She opened her eyes and turned her head toward the door. She could see the light he carried moving sporadically. Sometimes it seemed brighter—directed down the hall toward the room where she was hiding—and then it would fade as it was turned in another direction.

  It was clear, however, that whoever held the flashlight was coming this way. She began edging to her right, toward the door that led from the study and out onto the gallery that ran around the back of the house. The footsteps were getting louder, and moving on tiptoe, she hurriedly closed the distance between herself and that outside door. She had her hand on its knob before she remembered the alarms.

  She looked for the security pad, but couldn’t find it in the darkness. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t dark anymore. She whirled, and the beam of a flashlight focused on her face. Just as Griff had done that night, she put her hand up to block the intensity of the light, and it went out at once.

  “Sorry, Ms. Heywood. I wasn’t sure who was up here.”

  She lowered her hand, but her eyes were momentarily blinded. Gradually they adjusted to the return of darkness, and the figure standing in the doorway swam into focus.

  “Jake said you’d been looking for us,” Lucas Hawkins said.

  She had met the man called Hawk only once, during the abortive meeting she had arranged for him with his superiors at the CIA. A meeting where he had traded his freedom for Tyler Stewart’s life.

  She had seen Hawk, however, before that meeting. At the time, she hadn’t known who he was. She had realized when she’d met him later that he, too, had been visiting Griffs grave. And she wondered how he felt about the lie Griff had told them. Or had he had known all along Griff wasn’t dead?

  “And how did Jake know that?” she asked.

  Since all her efforts to find Holt had ended in the same denials her previous inquiries about Hawk and Jordan had provoked, she was really curious.

  “Jake knows everything,” Hawk said easily. “Or didn’t Griff tell you that?”

  “You know he’s alive,” she said.

  “I didn’t. Not until this.”

  Not until this. Not until Griff had gotten the demand from the people who had taken Gardner and had called on his friends for help. She had been right about that, at least.

  “And it doesn’t bother you that they lied to us?”

  Hawk had killed the man who’d ordered that terrorist attack at Langley. He had killed him because Griff Cabot had been one of the victims of that massacre. And since they now knew that he was not, she was curious as to how Hawk felt about the deception.

  “I’m just glad he’s alive.”

  “You killed a man because they told you Griff was dead.”

  Even to her, it sounded like an accusation. She didn’t think she had meant to accuse him. Perhaps she just wanted to be reassured that Hawk felt as betrayed as she did by what Griff had let the CIA do. Or as angry, perhaps.

  After all, Hawk’s life had been as disrupted as hers by that lie. Perhaps more so. Only her intervention, and Jordan Cross’s, had saved Hawk’s life. And he had lost his profession as a result of the revenge he had taken for Griff’s death.

  “The man I killed had a lot of blood on his hands. A lot of murders through the years had been laid at his door. The five who did die at Langley were only his latest victims. And I’ll save you the trouble of asking again. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “And this?” she said, her voice very low. “Does...this bother you?”

  “The assassination the kidnappers have demanded?” Hawk asked, putting the reality she had skirted into concrete terms.

  She nodded and then was unsure he could see her clearly enough to detect the motion. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I don’t make those decisions, Ms. Heywood. I take orders. But I take them from a man I trust. And I always will. As long as he wants to give them to me.”

  The simplicity of Hawk’s answer left her with nothing to say. A man I trust. That was the kind of loyalty Griff evoked in those who worked with him. Only she, apparently, had not been able to give him that unquestioning trust.

  “If you want to talk to Griff,” Hawk offered, “I’ll take you to him.”

  She hesitated only a second before she stepped out of the shadows beside the gallery door and moved across the room to where the man called Hawk was waiting.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE, Claire?” Griff asked.

  He glanced up when Hawk opened the door, but only long enough to see who was with him. Then he redirected his attention to the display on the monitor he had been studying, leaning over the shoulder of the man who was seated in front of the computer.

  Jake Holt? she wondered. If so, apparently she had been wrong about what he needed. There didn’t seem to be any more computer equipment in front of him than she had at home.

  Finally, when she didn’t answer his question, Griff straightened away from whatever he had been concentrating on and really looked at her. His eyes were shadowed, but even across the room, she could feel their impact. A physical impact.

  Unexpectedly, a slow, roiling wave of heat moved through her body. The same hunger, the same need, that had driven her to come to him that night more than a year ago. The night Gardner had been conceived.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, but his mouth tightened, the grooves she had noticed beside it deepening with the pressure he was exerting.

  “I think you know everyone here except Jake,” he said.

  “Hello, Claire.”

  Jordan Cross’s deep voice, touched with that unmistakable Southern accent, came from across the room. Across the basement, she amended, her eyes lifting to find a man leaning against the original bricks of the cellar wall.

  Jordan, she realized, although he looked very different from the man she had met at the Lincoln Memorial that day. The new face, courtesy of the CIA’s surgeons, was almost as attractive as the old.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Jordan added.

  At least his tone seemed friendly, Claire thought. Uncondemning. But of course, Hawk’s had been, too, even when he had made that pronouncement about trust. She had time to wonder what Griff had told them before the man at the computer turned, looking directly at her for the first time.

  She was too far away to be able to tell anything about the color of his eyes. In the light from the computer, his hair appeared to be lighter than Griff’s. A dark chestnut, perhaps.

  Then he stood up and crossed the room toward her, putting out his hand. Automatically Claire took it, and found that his handshake was as warm and friendly as his smile. And his eyes were amber, she realized. Far too golden to be called brown.

  “So you’re the head hotshot’s woman,” Jake said. “Nice of you to drop by. I wondered what you’d be like. We all did. Nobody but me will ever tell you that, by the way.”

  The head hotshot, she thought. She couldn’t imagine anyone using that phrase to describe Griff. Especially not in front of him. Her lips tilted, despite the seriousness of the task that had brought her here.

  “Don’t mind Jake,” Jordan said from across the room. “He likes to rattle cages. Sometimes he forgets what’s inside.”

  “Hotshot number two,” Jake said, almost under his breath.

  “You’re not... a hotshot?” she asked, smiling openly at him, a little of the stress of the last three days easing with his friendliness.

  “I’m the geek. No field trips for me. I just tell them where to go and keep them safe.”

  She nodded, not quite sure how to respond to that
. “You do that with the computers,” she said finally.

  “I see someone’s been taking my name in vain,” Jake said.

  “Griff said that’s what you do.”

  “I find things,” he said.

  “Have you found my daughter?” she asked softly.

  The teasing light faded from his eyes. “No, ma’am,” he replied, all amusement gone from the pleasant voice as well. “I wish I had, Ms. Heywood, but I haven’t found out much that tells us anything useful about where your baby is right now.”

  “Then what is that?” she asked, gesturing with her head toward the screen they had been so focused on when she entered.

  Jake held her eyes a moment before he turned to face Griff. “You want to tell her or do you want me to?” he asked.

  “I think that depends on why she’s here,” Griff said.

  Her eyes moved to Griff’s. In their dark depths was a challenge. And clearly, there was bitterness as well. And she couldn’t really blame him, not after what she’d said.

  “I’m here because I want to know what you’re going to do.”

  “Whatever it takes to get her back,” he said simply.

  His tone was as cold as his eyes. Cold because she had unfairly blamed him for what had happened to Gardner. And Griff was, she knew, the only hope for getting her daughter back.

  Because of that, they would have to find some way to deal with their past. With their conflicts. Some way to put them into perspective and concentrate on what was important. She knew it was up to her to make the first move.

  “I’d like to talk to you about that,” she said. “Alone,” she added softly, her eyes still locked on his.

  “Upstairs,” he said finally, and when he led the way, again she followed.

  “HIS NAME IS RAMON DIAZ. He’s one of the most powerful of the new below-the-border drug lords.”

  “Drugs?” she asked, feeling some small portion of her guilt over being here ease.

  Griff had told her that a lot of people would want this man dead, but she hadn’t known exactly what the implications of that might be. And frankly, understanding now what he had meant by that, she was relieved.