by Cindy Dees
“Thanks.” Out of long habit, Gray glanced around, looking for the security cameras he knew would be recording his every move. In true NSA fashion they were so cleverly disguised that even he, a seasoned operative, couldn’t spot them. But then, security was particularly high at this facility. Although its existence was no big secret, its function—gathering every single electronic signal in all of North America and most of South America—was incredibly secret.
Another guard, even beefier and more brusque than the gate guard, examined his credentials again just inside the building. After deeming him not a security risk, this guard pointed him to the first door on the left. No surprise, when Gray opened the door yet another guard met him. This one was reasonably friendly, however, and escorted him down two flights of stairs and into a nondescript hallway. The guy stopped in front of a door and opened it for Gray.
He peered inside what turned out to be a small, no doubt electronically shielded room with a gray metal desk in the middle of it. Sitting on its surface were a black rotary telephone with a series of small, plastic lights mounted along its side, and a reasonably new-looking computer with a flat-screen monitor.
“Take your time, Agent Pierce. Get your fill before you have to go back to the Stone Age out there, eh?”
He grinned at the guard and nodded in commiseration. When the door had safely latched behind him, Gray dialed a memorized number on the STU-3 phone. The secure phone system was old, but reliable. And presumably it didn’t give off a whole lot of electronic emissions.
“This is Brighton. Go ahead.”
“Hi, sir. It’s Grayson Pierce.”
“Gray. How are things going in the Black Hole?”
“Interesting.” He filled his boss in quickly on Sammie Jo’s arrival and their discovery of Luke Zimmer’s body. He omitted any reference to Sam’s bizarre eyesight. He doubted his boss would believe him if he mentioned it anyway.
“And Winston? What’s he up to?” Brighton asked.
There it was. The question of the day. Uncomfortable with the whole subject, Gray answered carefully, “He’s worried about Wendall Proctor. I get the impression he thinks there’s more to the Proctor group than a bunch of crazies who want to live off the grid.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
“No idea. Jeff’s playing his cards close to the chest.”
Brighton asked sharply, “Does he suspect you’re investigating him for us?”
“I highly doubt it. We’re old friends. Why would he think I’m spying on him?” The words tasted bitter on Gray’s tongue. Why, indeed? Jeff had never been anything but upfront and loyal with him. Why should he expect any less from one of his oldest friends in return?
“Can’t you weasel what Winston’s worried about out of him, Gray?”
“Not without making him suspicious.”
“What about his employee, this Jessup woman?”
“I don’t think she knows any more than I do.”
“Turn the charm on her. Get her to push Winston for more information.”
Gray winced. He hated the idea of using her that way. It was bad enough having to spy on one of his best friends. Unfortunately, spies didn’t always get to choose who they betrayed. But he’d be damned if he betrayed her, too.
He thought fast. He had to get Brighton to back off the idea of squeezing Sam. He spoke evenly. “It’s not that simple, sir. I think I can develop her as a usable asset beyond just this junket in the NRQZ.”
“A mole inside Winston Enterprises long-term? Well, now. That would be a coup.”
Ahh, the joys of working for the only American intelligence agency with a mandate to spy on its own citizens. For years, he’d been the perfect spy. He had no family beyond his mother with whom he had infrequent contact, no friends to speak of, no close contact with any other human beings. He had no weak spots to exploit.
But in a few days, Sammie Jo Jessup had somehow managed to ignite his long-dormant protective instincts. Here he was, lying to his boss to cover for her, and he barely knew her. Brighton would ask if she was good enough in the sack to be worth ruining his career over. Funny thing was, he hadn’t even slept with her. And she’d still gotten under his skin.
Brighton distracted him by saying, “I’m glad you called in. We’ve been having more signal interruptions.”
“Same as before?” he asked. One of the reasons the NSA had been willing to send him on this particular off-the-record assignment was because for some months, periodic short bursts of...something...had been disrupting the supersensitive antennas they relied on for collection of wireless data. The experts in radio interference had been banging their heads against walls trying to find the source, but to no avail. The hope was that a fresh set of eyes on the ground could solve the problem.
“Yup, same as before,” Brighton said. “Under a minute in duration, originating from a different location each time. And each time the coordinates of the interference are investigated, nothing’s there. Some spot in the woods with absolutely no electronic source to cause the interference.”
“Have you guys considered using satellites to look down passively and spot the interference that way?”
“The request is sitting on the desk of the director of the William Byrd Observatory,” Brighton answered.
“Keep me apprised.”
“Will do. Speaking of keeping you apprised, my people did a little research on the Jessup woman. I’ve sent their report to your email account. It’s an interesting read.”
Gray mumbled an acknowledgement, but his gut squirmed in dismay at invading her privacy like this. He would like to know more details about her early life, though. It might give him a better insight as to what made her the complex creature she was. It would give him more ammunition to keep her off balance, if nothing else. And Lord knew he needed all the help he could get in staying one up on her.
He disconnected the call with his boss and stared at the computer in distaste. He really shouldn’t look at the report. But sharp desire to know more about her goaded him. Finally, his better self lost the fight with his curiosity. He signed on to his email account quickly and popped up the most recent email from Brighton.
...Joanne Jessup of Hollywood, Florida, has a 98% likelihood of being the mother of subject, Sammie Jo Jessup...
He swore colorfully and closed the email. Now that he knew where her mother was, he couldn’t un-know it. How was he supposed to keep that information to himself and not use it against her down the road in a moment of weakness? It was one thing to keep secrets when he surrounded himself with strangers and people who didn’t touch him emotionally. But Sam? She had the darnedest way of slipping past his guard and getting him to open up in ways he’d never dreamed possible. Hell, she had him kissing again, and they’d barely known each other three days. He’d sworn off women for good years ago, and to date it hadn’t been a problem to stick by that vow.
He scanned through the list of his other email messages quickly. There was a second email from Brighton with an attached file. Presumably that was the background report on Sam. In a belated fit of nobility, he deleted the post and its attachment without ever opening the thing.
Hollywood, Florida. Joanne Jessup. The words rolled through his head over and over, a damning litany of knowledge that was not supposed to be his. If he wasn’t careful, he’d wake up tonight shouting the information in his sleep. Brighton was a bastard, and that was all there was to it.
Why was the guy so interested in Jeff Winston, anyway? Winston Enterprises had been nothing but a good friend to the U.S. government. Supposedly, operatives from Winston had taken care of several sticky situations that the government couldn’t afford to be directly involved in. Jeff himself had nearly died a year ago on one such operation. And the way Gray heard it, an entire team of Winston operatives had died.
Did Brighton’s fascination with Jeff have something to do with the Code X project? Had the NSA gotten a whiff of Jeff’s secret research? It would be just like Bri
ghton to want a piece of the action for his agency. The guy was a political climber who played the bureaucratic game exceedingly well.
An urge to warn Sam and Jeff swept over him. But to do so would ruin his career. It wasn’t like he needed the money. The insurance payout had been substantial and he could live off it comfortably for the rest of his life. But he needed the work. The purpose. The sad truth was he didn’t have anything else to live for.
Predictably, a wave of pain washed over him. It was gentler in its coming than most, but burned like acid as it passed over him. Twenty-eight days. He just had to hang on that long. If the pain wasn’t better by then, he could release himself from this agonizing grief.
Grateful that no one was coming through that soundproof door any time soon to disturb him, he gave in to the wave for a change, laid his head down on the desk, and lost himself in the fire of searing memory.
* * *
Sammie Jo bounced in her seat as she drove, singing at the top of her lungs to the oldies on the lone AM radio station the Ladybug was receiving. It was a beautiful day, crisp and cool, with achingly blue skies and autumn painting the hillsides around her.
Charleston, West Virginia, came into view sprawling across the valley in front of her. Hallelujah. Modern civilization! As fun as a junket in the NRQZ might be, she was unashamedly addicted to her electronic gadgets. She turned on her cell phone, delighted to have a dozen voice mails waiting for her. She hit the play button.
“Where the hell are you, Sam? We gotta talk.”
Ricki the Rocket. She’d made it crystal clear to him the last time they’d talked that she never wanted to see his sorry face again. Why was he calling her?
“Sam? WTF? Are you avoiding me? I ain’t done nothin’ to you. C’mon, baby. Gimme a call. I gotta see you.”
More like he was horny and wanted to bed her. Jerk. At least she’d never consented to sleep with him. Not for lack of him trying, however. But there’d always been something a little bit off about him. She’d never been able to quite shake the feeling that he was capable of being more crazy, and maybe more violent, than he let on.
“All right, you smart-mouthed little slut. Are you hiding from me? If you’re giving some other guy what you refused to give me, I swear I’ll find you. And when I do—”
Sam deleted the message without hearing the end of it. Ricki could go jump off a bridge for all she cared. Irritated, she listened to his next several messages, which got increasingly angry and threatening. The guy was such a loser. What had she ever seen in him?
Compared to a man like Gray...well, there was no comparison. It was hard to believe both men came from the same half of the same species.
The last, slurred voice mail from Ricki ran in her ear. “I’m gonna find you, Sam, and I’m comin’ after you. You’re gonna regret leaving me. You hear me? When I find you, I’m gonna hurt you, bitch. Bad.”
A chill shuddered down her spine. Ricki had a vicious temper that had already landed him in jail for three-to-five on assault and battery charges. Only his father’s legal connections had gotten the time served reduced to under a year. And when Ricki was drinking, everyone and everything in his path had better beware.
Thankfully, the odds of the jerk finding her in the NRQZ were nil. She had to admit, sometimes it was good to live off the grid. Missing her techno toys a lot less all of a sudden, she tucked away her phone and pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall that boasted its very own internet café.
She gave the clerk a credit card and sat down at a terminal in the back of the joint.
“C’mon, baby. Let’s make some magic,” she crooned to the unit. She started typing, quickly moving into a deep web search of one Grayson Pierce.
She wasn’t shocked that his employer’s name was nowhere to be found. Her guess was he worked for the NSA. If he’d been a CIA field agent, he’d be operating under aliases, and the name Grayson Pierce would completely cease to exist. But she did find the occasional hit on him. He was mentioned as a guest at a charity ball a few years back. That article even had a picture attached. He was dashing in a tuxedo, but looked acutely uncomfortable as a well-preserved and artificially enhanced brunette clung to his arm.
“Don’t know who you are, lady, but you’re coming on too strong to Gray. He likes his women classy. Reserved. And besides, you’re too old for him,” Sam announced in disgust to the monitor.
“Okay, Gray. Time to get serious. What didn’t Jeff want me to find out about you?”
She dug deeper, accessing private investigation sites and various restricted databases. Well, at least she now knew the guy had superb credit and no debt. She went back further in time, and even broke into a database of police records.
And that was when she got the hit. Or rather hundreds of hits, scrolling down her screen faster than she could read them. She went back to the top of the list and clicked on the Boulder, Colorado, police file that was listed first.
Words leaped off the scanned documents at her: Quadruple homicide. Young mother and three small children murdered in their home. Boy, aged six. Twin girls, aged four. Throats slit. Woman tortured. Sexually assaulted. The list of horrific violations against the woman’s body went on to a second page. Emily Pierce was the adult victim’s name. Christian, Paige and Payton Pierce were the children. Bodies discovered by their father when he came home from a night shift at work—
Oh. My. God.
Sammie Jo surged up out of her chair and ran for the restroom. She stumbled to her knees and retched into the toilet, emptying the remains of her breakfast violently into the bowl. How long she knelt there, sobbing, she had no idea.
The clerk, a young kid, poked his head in the open door. “You okay?”
She stood up slowly, feeling like an old woman all of a sudden. She ached all over. How had he survived it? To have walked in on the bloody bodies of his entire family...small children...to have seen what had been done to his wife...
Hollow-eyed, she pushed past the clerk and splashed cold water over her face in the sink. It didn’t help, but it gave her something to do while she fought to collect herself.
“Is there anything I can do?” the kid asked from behind her.
“Yeah. Bring me a cup of coffee and keep the electrons coming until I’m done. This could take a while.”
She’d finally recovered enough from the initial shock for a thousand questions to crowd into her brain. Had they caught the killer? What had happened to the guy? What had happened to Gray afterward? Where had he gone? Was he a spy before his family was killed? Did their deaths have anything to do with his work? Oh, God. How had Gray survived if that was the case?
Grimly, she sat back down at the monitor. If he could live through his family’s gruesome murder, she could live through reading about it five years after the fact. She owed it to him as a friend to do this.
But Lord, it was hard. The crime scene photos sent her back to the toilet. And her outrage that Gray was actually a suspect in the killings for a while all but did her in. She couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, to be grieving and suffering and then accused of perpetrating that horror on his wife and children. To say she now understood that haunted look in his eyes was an understatement. Frankly, she was stunned that Gray was functional at all. He had every right to curl up in a little ball in a corner and never come out again.
As she dug deeper into the police report, she saw large chunks of it had been redacted—blacked out in such a way that the underlying text was completely eradicated. It was standard procedure for protecting classified information within otherwise publicly available reports. Her suspicion that Gray had been in the intelligence community even before his family’s murder became certainty in her mind.
She read around the redacted sections to see if she could guess from context the gist of what had been blacked out. But the missing chunks were too big. It was possible that the investigation had connected the killer to some sensitive or classified work that Gray was involved wit
h.
She was relieved, however, to read that the killer had ultimately been identified. The guy was shot to death in a standoff with police when he refused to surrender. She took dark satisfaction in reading that the bastard had been shot twenty-two times, in fact. Apparently, the Boulder police hadn’t been any more amused over the killings than she was and they’d unloaded on the sonofabitch.
There had been an investigation to see if the killer had been working for hire for someone, but almost all of that section of the police report had been redacted. There was no way for her to tell, shy of asking Gray. And wild horses couldn’t make her open up his old wounds anew.
At least Gray had the closure of knowing the murderer was dead and would never harm anyone else. But God, the damage the killer had done. She scrolled through pictures of the young family alive and laughing together and cried again, not only for Gray’s loss but for the tragedy of promising lives cut short. The kids had been so little. So innocent. Emily had been pretty. Sweet-looking. Obviously head over heels in love with her husband, at whom she gazed adoringly in many of the photos.
Hopefully, the bastard had slit the kids’ throats fast, in their sleep, without them ever knowing what had happened to them. But somehow, she doubted it. Not given what the guy had done to their mother. The pain of it sliced through her so hot and sharp, she didn’t know how Gray stood it.
She spent hours reading through every last bit of it, not in morbid fascination, but because she cared about the man who’d somehow risen from the ashes of this nightmare and gone on.
And then she found the audio file attached to a police report. It was a recording of the 911 call Gray made to police moments after he discovered his family’s bloody bodies in their beds. She put in her earbuds and hit play.
She recognized Gray’s voice immediately. He was hysterical, trying to ask for help and describe what had happened in between gasping breaths that erupted from his throat uncontrollably. And then, finally, after he’d choked out his address and a desperate plea to send all the police, he’d devolved into one long scream of primal agony. The sound reached into her chest like a fist and ripped her heart out with such agony that Sam had to tear her earbuds out of her ears and run for the bathroom again.