“They’re going to meet us in Conroe. Just drive normally and wait until I tell you, then pull over.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We drove in silence for quite a while. Amber laid her hand on my thigh, squeezing from time to time almost unconsciously. I glanced at her, wishing I hadn’t let Megan talk me into bringing her along. She’d been through enough already. She didn’t need this bullshit.
I spotted Hayden before Megan did. He was in a huge Hummer, pulled over to the side of the road with his flashers on, like he was having car trouble and was waiting for a tow. I thought I saw Dominic in the passenger seat, too. Dominic was…the man was insane. He was in the paper a year ago for dragging some guy through the streets of Katy because he’d been harassing the CEO of some technology company. The only reason he didn’t go to jail for it was because the guy confessed to attempting to rape the woman a month earlier. Dominic was hailed a hero for stopping him from doing it again. How could the prosecutors bring a case against a public hero?
“Pull over here,” Megan said, pointing out a little turn off at the side of the highway.
I pulled the car into the little semi-circle drive and parked in the center. As expected, the white panel van followed, moving up behind us as if we were friends caravanning down the highway together. I grabbed my gun—even though Amber gave me a look that suggested she’d prefer if I didn’t.
“Cautiously,” Megan warned, pulling her own weapon from a tiny holster attached to her ankle.
“This family is completely insane,” Amber whispered.
We got out of the car on the same side and turned to face the van. I wished that I could move in front of Megan, but she’d accuse me of sexism, and it would complicate an already complicated situation. Instead, I moved along side of her, checking down the length of the van for any movement. We could see the driver—he was watching us, sunglasses blocking any visible expression—but there didn’t appear to be anyone else in the front of the van.
I moved around to the driver’s side door, hiding my weapon behind my back, and snatched the door open.
“Out,” I demanded at the same moment Hayden and Dominic yanked open the side and back doors of the van. Sunlight highlighted the inside of the van, and I could now see that there were two more men in the back along with a ton of surveillance equipment.
“Hello, boys!” Dominic called quite loudly. “Fancy meeting up with you again.”
Someone uttered a few curses, but all three men got out of the van and lay on the sidewalk at Hayden’s orders. Or maybe it was simply the barrel of the automatic weapon he had pointed at their heads that inspired them.
“Are these the same guys?” Megan asked.
“One in the same,” Dominic confirmed.
She shook her head, studying them as she walked along the sidewalk in front of them.
“Were you following us?”
None of them even acknowledge her.
“Come on, boys,” Dominic called out. “Don’t make me look bad in front of the boss lady here.”
“Were you following us? Or were you checking out Mr. Fuller?”
Again there was silence. So Dominic moved up and shoved his automatic rifle into the back of the man lying in the center.
“Don’t ignore the lady.”
“You can’t do this. We’re federal agents,” the driver announced.
“You’re CIA,” Megan pointed out. “You can only investigate American citizens if they’re accused of plotting a terrorist attack with foreign allies or on foreign lands. As far as I know, I’m not doing either, so I want to know why you were following me.”
“You were seen speaking to a known terrorist,” the man on the end said.
Megan walked over to him, her curiosity peeked.
“Would that be Kurt Sanchez?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Or was it John Fuller?”
Silence.
“Come on, guys. Those are the only two men I’ve spoken to in the last two days besides these fellows here. So which is it?”
Nothing. We were seriously getting nowhere really fast. Dominic and Hayden were looking to Megan for guidance, but I didn’t work for her. I didn’t have to do what she said.
I leaned over each man and snatched their wallets from their back pockets. To the untrained eye, they appeared to be just normal guys out for a drive in a van that just happened to have more electronics in it than a tornado chase van. They had Texas driver’s licenses, credit cards, all probably under false names. Nothing to indicate they were federal agents. If a cop came along and wanted to know what the hell was going on, they probably had a very plausible story ready that would put the rest of us in jail.
But I did find something interesting behind a photograph in one guy’s wallet that I handed over to Megan.
“Where’d you get this?” she asked, kneeling in front of the guy in the center, holding the folded piece of paper in front of his face.
The guy’s eyes narrowed, but he refused to answer.
Megan straightened and gestured to Dominic. He lifted the guy to his feet and pulled him onto the grass toward a picnic table in the distance. He shoved him down onto a bench and pointed the assault rifle at his head so that he’d be clear about Dominic’s intentions.
We were fifty yards from a busy interstate. But this was Texas. No one seemed to notice.
“Start talking,” Dominic demanded.
The guy glanced back at his friends, but then focused on Megan.
“Look, I can’t tell you everything, but what I can say is that we have reason to believe that a terrorist cell in Afghanistan has connections in this area. They’ve been getting cellphones with altered software code sent to them. At first, we thought it was just a glitch in the software. But then we had a specialist check it out, and he realized that someone was using the actual software code to send messages to the terrorist. Locations. Names. Times.”
“Messages? How?”
The guy shook his head. “I’m not good with that sort of thing. But we’ve been tracing it back to several companies working in tandem out here in the Houston area.”
“Like Kurt Sanchez at TxTel? And this John Fuller up here at Fuller Technology?”
“Yes.”
“Then why were you following us?”
“We wanted to know why you were suddenly showing up everywhere we were.”
“Because of this.”
Megan waved the paper in front of him. It was some sort of computer code—a series of zeros and ones—written on a small piece of paper with Bradford Telecommunication’s logo at the top. And I was pretty sure the handwriting was Peter’s.
“What do you know about Peter Bradford?”
The man’s eyes fell to the top of the table for a long moment. Dominic was about to raise his gun, nudge him along, when he finally looked up.
“Peter was the one who cracked the code, who told us about the messages being sent to the terrorists.”
“What?”
The man tilted his head slightly. “I guess he was investigating someone in his company for selling software illegally. He stumbled on the pieces of code—I’m not sure how. He only talked to a former agent, and that man bent over double to protect him as much as possible. He’d only tell us what we needed to know.”
Luke. I could see it on Megan’s face. She knew it, too.
“What did you people do?” Megan suddenly demanded. “What’d you do to Peter?”
“Nothing. We were just trying to put it all together when he died.”
“Did you kill him?”
The man’s face drained of color. “Of course not! He was our strongest lead! We needed him to keep working on this, to tell us everything he knew. We couldn’t kill him! His death set us back months.”
“Then you didn’t protect him. And what about the agent he went to initially? Where is he?”
The man just shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I don�
�t believe you.” Megan leaned close to him. “I think you know what happened to my brother. And I think you know where Luke is. I think you know so much more than you’re telling us.”
“Yes, well, it’s a matter of national security. I could go to jail for what I have told you.”
Megan stared at him, a look of such hatred on her face that it almost hurt me to see it. She suddenly turned to Dominic and grabbed his gun, shoving it up against the man’s forehead.
“Tell me where Luke is!”
“Megan!”
I grabbed her from behind and pulled her back as Dominic—gentler than I’d ever seen him—snatched the gun from her hands. She simply dissolved, falling apart in my arms. I picked her up like she weighed no more than a feather and carried her back to the car.
“He knows where Luke is,” she said.
“I know.”
“I need to know.”
I set her on her feet next to the car and brushed my hands over her cheeks. “If Luke wanted you to know, he would have been in contact already.”
“But—”
“Megan. You knew what it would be like when Luke joined the CIA. He warned you.”
“I know. But that’s why he left. He was done with the lies and the secrets and the distance. He wanted us to be together. He was ready to commit to our future.”
“I know, sweetie. But they clearly pulled him back in.” I touched her face again. “At least you know that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to be with you. That it was his sense of duty.”
“Do you think he knew about Peter’s car accident? Do you think he could have stopped it if—?”
“Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to figure out something that you can’t figure out with so many missing pieces.”
“I miss him, Cole,” she whispered. “I miss him so much that sometimes I can’t breathe.”
“I know.”
When I was young, in middle school and high school, it was always Megan and Luke. It was never just Megan, or just Luke. It was Megan and Luke, almost like one whole word: Megan and Luke. When I got the letter, announcing their wedding, it was almost anti-climactic. Everyone had always known that they would marry someday. In fact, I think Mom and Dad were sort of relieved when she announced her intentions to go into the military after high school. I think they thought she and Luke would get married the moment they were of legal age. So, being around her without Luke was kind of strange. Even to me.
I gave my sister a hug. For a minute—a rare moment—she let me hold her. Then she straightened up and walked away. After a few minutes, the CIA guys were back in their van, pulling away. Hayden and Dominic climbed into their Hummer and sat there, the engine rumbling, waiting to escort us back to town.
We’d all been through enough for one day.
Chapter 21
Megan
I stood in the doorway, a part of me afraid to go inside. It’d been several days since our confrontation with the CIA agents. I should have done this sooner. Now that I knew Peter had gone to Luke with his concerns about the software, the part of me that had been driven to find out what happened the night of Peter’s accident was suddenly losing interest.
What if it turned out that Peter’s accident was a direct result of something Luke had done? Did I really want to know something like that?
But I needed to know.
Daddy was behind Peter’s desk, staring at the few things on the desktop, his eyes glossy with pain. I should be in there; I should be the one doing the search. But Daddy would know better what he was seeing in Peter’s files, on his computer, in the things that would tell us the most about what Peter had been up to in the final days of his life.
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
He looked up, a little light coming into his eyes when he looked at me.
“This has been a long time coming, Meg. We need this office. It’s not fair to Angela that we’ve made her stay in her smaller office while she’s taken on all of Peter’s duties.”
“I know. But I hate to force your hand.”
He shook his head. “Maybe something in here will tell us who was selling the software illegally.”
Daddy turned on Peter’s computer. I took a more leisurely tact. I walked around the office, touching Peter’s collection of photographs, the few artworks he’d admired and wanted to have around him as he worked each day. Almost reluctantly, I approached the large filing cabinet set to one side near his desk and began searching through the drawers, pulling out the odd file here and there, looking through them for something I might understand.
Software and computers and all that had never really been my forte. That was Sam’s thing. She was the one who did all that at the office. It was something she and Peter had always had in common, which likely led to the crush she had on him back when we were kids. They still talked about it quite often. Every time he came to the office, I would find them with their heads together, discussing some new software one or the other had discovered. They were like kids sharing their collection of baseball cards.
I understood invoices. I understood business correspondence, and I found a lot of both. Most of it seemed routine. There were software specs that I set aside for Daddy to go through. There were other things that I wasn’t sure how to categorize. And then, way back in one file drawer, I found a folder filled with personal correspondence.
Birthday cards. Letters from Cole when he was overseas. Letters I’d written while overseas. There were even letters from Sam that I didn’t know she’d sent to him. I found myself fighting tears as I looked through the things he’d chosen to save. Things I would have thrown away, he kept close…because they mattered to him.
Momma joined us after a while, carrying a stack of empty boxes.
“We might as well do this all at once,” she said.
I hugged her for a long moment. I knew how hard this was for her. She may still have Cole and I, but Peter was her first born. There was a special bond with the first.
At least, that’s what I’d observed.
Daddy helped her pack up the artwork while I finished organizing the contents of the file cabinet. No one seemed eager to work on the desk itself. It felt like that would be the one place where Peter would have kept his most personal items. The inhaler he occasionally needed when the dust and humidity was high. His extra pair of glasses. The comb that he kept handy so that he could freshen up before a meeting. He was always fastidious about his appearance, always conscious of the way people saw him. Seeing those things felt too much like invading his personal space.
I opened a side drawer and dug through extra pens and pencils, erasers and extra staples for the stapler. I thought I was done, but then I saw something at the very back of the drawer. I reached my hand deep and found a small, wrapped package.
It had Amber’s name on it.
“What’s that?” Daddy asked from across the room.
I shook my head. “Something for Amber.”
He came over and picked it up. He ran his fingertip over Peter’s handwriting before handing it back to me.
“You should give it to her. He clearly wanted her to have it.”
I nodded, setting it aside.
We worked for hours, but didn’t find much of anything out of the usual. By the time the movers got there to move the boxes to the storage unit where the rest of Peter’s things were, we’d come to the conclusion that there was nothing to be found. Peter had left all he had with Amber.
Fitting, I suppose.
I took the hard drive for his computer to Sam. There was definite sadness in her eyes when she took it, but she promised to do all she could.
By the time I got home, I was completely exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. For days I’d been thinking about Luke and the fact that Peter had gone to him with whatever it was he’d found. Why hadn’t either of them told me? Why did they keep me out of it?
The only answer I could come up with was that they were protecting me. But fr
om what?
None of it made a lot of sense to me.
I lay alone in bed and began to drift to sleep. Luke came to me in my dreams sometimes, and I hoped he would tonight. It was the only thing that truly got me through.
“I won’t leave you,” he whispered against my ear that night in my dream, a dream that was more a memory. “I can’t survive without you in my life.”
“You’ve made it this far.”
“Because I knew you were here waiting for me. In the darkest moments, that’s the only thing that gets me through. And now…I won’t ever leave you again.”
It was the night he showed up on my doorstep to tell me he’d quit the CIA, that he was done with all those covert operations, that he was home to stay. He even had a job, selling pharmaceuticals. I laughed and told him he’d be bored in less than a week and he should come work for me. But he wanted to show me that he could support me on his own.
That had always been a thing between Luke and me. My family was filthy rich. His mother worked as my mother’s personal chef. He’d always been so conscious of the economic differences between us. But I…well, I suppose the reason it never bothered me was because I was the one with all the money. But it didn’t. And it took me a long time to understand why it bothered him so much. But that was just Luke. That was the kind of man he was. He needed to be able to take care of me, and I…I was more than willing to allow him to.
I needed him to…now more than ever.
Chapter 22
Cole
The baby began to cry and Amber stirred, but she didn’t wake. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately. So many things were happening. She was struggling with it all, struggling to believe I really cared about her, struggling to believe Megan didn’t think poorly of her. But—most of all—she was struggling to remember everything about Peter so that she could be of help in the investigation. And that brought up things that I’m sure she would have preferred to forget.
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