“Where are you going?”
“Don’t ask me. You never saw me. You were never here. Capisce?”
“Sorry,” Alex replied, standing her ground. “You can’t talk to me like that anymore. In case you hadn’t noticed I’m not just your child. Now I’m Zeta’s child too.”
Morgan appreciated the meaning in her message. But the love they had for each other went both ways. “Well, I’m still your father. That doesn’t change no matter how old you are or what job you have.”
Alex nodded, allowing him to score the point. “But that doesn’t mean you can boss me around,” she reminded him. But as he was opening his mouth for a quick reply, she put up her hands in a surrendering position. “Oh, let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? You’re going to help Collins, right?” He didn’t respond, but his determined expression was all she needed. “Okay. Why go alone?”
Morgan exhaled sharply. “Zeta’s not letting me follow where this is leading. Someone’s playing them—someone behind the scenes. And while they go after the wrong guy, the missiles are going to slip right through their fingers. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Then let me go with you.”
“No. You’ll...” She saw him struggling to find the right words. “You’ll get in the way.”
Anger burned on her cheeks. “I won’t accept that. How many times have I saved you already? I’m an operative now, Dad. Just like you.”
“Just like me?” Morgan echoed, leaning in. “Do you have twenty years’ experience in the field? You’re barely twenty years old! Tell me, Alex. How many times have you had to stare death in the face?”
“Plenty.”
“Not enough. Not by a long shot. This is not going to be a careful operation with backup and surveillance. This is going to be me, solo, off the grid, with the US government on my ass.”
Alex couldn’t argue with that, so she retreated to her original position. “It doesn’t have to be solo. Let me help you!”
“You can’t. Not this time. Stay here and do what Bloch tells you. Nothing good will come of you getting involved in this.”
“Dad, I’ve proved myself—again and again. Whenever I got caught up in one of your missions, I went beyond all expectations. And now I’m holding my own with seasoned pros. Honestly, don’t you even see me? Do you really give me that little credit?”
“Goddamn it!” Morgan seethed, nearly dropping his bag. “Don’t you get it? When I’m with the others, my full attention is on the mission. No distractions, no fears. But when you’re there...when you’re there...”
His expression softened, seeing that tears were playing on the corner of his daughter’s eyes. “You really are a remarkable young woman. I don’t think I tell you that enough.”
“I am, Dad,” Alex replied yet finally with a full understanding of his situation. “But as much as you want to think of me as your little girl, as much as I know you want to protect me, you have to let me grow up. You have to let me make my own mistakes.”
“But in this business,” he answered quietly, “mistakes can get you killed.”
She shrugged. They both knew that risk was part of the job they had chosen. “You have to see me as I am,” she said simply.
“I do, Alex. Sometimes I forget how much you’ve grown.”
She crossed the distance to him and hugged him, squeezing him tight. She released, looking up into his eyes.
“I love you, honey,” he said.
Click.
She felt a tightness on her right wrist as her father moved away from her.
“Dad?” She tried to raise her right hand, but something jerked it back.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Her right wrist was in handcuffs, which were affixed to a wrought-iron bar from the heavy side table. “I can’t have you coming with me. Not this time.”
“Dad? You can’t leave me like this.” She yanked at the cuffs, trying to twist herself loose. “Dad!”
“Careful. You’ll hurt yourself.”
Tears streamed down her face. She was rubbing her wrists raw by tugging against the cuffs, but she didn’t care. “You can’t do this!”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. You left me no choice. This is going to be too dangerous for you. If I have to worry about you, I’m going to put both of us at risk.”
“Dad, let me go.”
He drew the keys from his pocket and tossed them into the kitchen. “Your mother will free you when she gets home.”
“Let me go!” Alex screeched.
“Stay safe. I love you.” He turned around. “Neika, come on!” He walked out, shutting the front door behind him.
“Dad!” she hollered. “Don’t do this, Dad!”
But he didn’t respond.
Alex pulled at the side table, trying to drag it across the floor toward the kitchen. But it was too heavy. It hardly budged.
“Dad! Come back!” As she screamed at him, she heard the sound of his car engine as he drove away.
Chapter Eleven
Lily woke in Scott’s arms. Early-morning light peeked through the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the bay. Scott didn’t care about decoration—it was like he hardly even noticed the spaces around him since his mind was always on some abstract problem—so his bedroom had been put together by a second-rate decorator who’d probably charged him a fortune to sprinkle his living spaces with ugly modern art. The exception was his bed—a California king with the most perfectly balanced mattress she’d ever slept on.
She left her sleeping boyfriend to shower, letting the warm water clear away everything from the day before, the good and bad. It was something approaching a ritual, preparing her to leave for her new mission.
She returned to the bedroom, wrapped in a fluffy white towel, to find him sitting up on the bed, looking despondent. She didn’t feel like dealing with him, so she just said, “Good morning,” as she wiped her exposed skin with a facecloth.
“I wish you could stay,” he said.
“Me too.” Her heart wasn’t into it, though. Not that it wasn’t true. It was just that her mind was already on the mission, and the danger to come.
“I wish—” he continued. “I wish you could come live with me.”
“Scott...”
“Well, why not? I’m crazy about you, and I think you like me too—”
“I do, but—”
“Then what’s the problem?”
She squirmed in her towel. “Headquarters is in Boston.”
“Maybe they can transfer you over here. Or I can afford to send you to Boston whenever you’d like. Business class, private jet, you name it.”
“Scott ...”
“I mean, do you even need it? This job, I mean.”
“Are you asking me if I need a job? Christ, do rich people know anything about real life?”
“I wasn’t born rich, Lily. In fact, I’ve been rich for only twenty percent of my life. I know what it means to want money. What I’m saying is that you don’t have to do this job.”
“And what is it that you think I should be doing?”
“Someone as smart and competent as you—I could get you a job that pays twice what Zeta’s paying you, guaranteed. Hell, I bet you’ve never worked an office job in your life, but smart and ruthless as you are, I already know you’d make a killer executive.”
“Well, technically—”
“I’m serious, Lily. Even with gaps in your business experience, any company in the Valley would be lucky to have you. Hell, worse comes to worse, I’d hire you myself. We’d have plenty of uses for you. And it’s not like you’d need the money anyway if you were with me. I already have more than I’d know what to do with for several lifetimes.”
That struck a nerve with Lily. “Have you considered that I wouldn’t want to be your lapdog? Or that I don’t want to work in
an office where I have to talk about quarterly earnings and marketing strategies and profit margins?”
“Is that really so much worse than risking your life?”
“What, wasting my life on something I’d hate? Yes. I mean has it crossed your blinkered male mind that I do what I want because I want to do it?” Fuming, she stood up, the towel falling to the floor. “And has it occurred to you that you fell in love with me because this is who I am and that changing everything about that would make me another one of the many women you’re bored to death of?”
“I could never be bored of you.”
“Oh yeah? Just wait until I’m two years into a high-powered corporate job. Damn it, Scott, you can barely stand to talk about that stuff. Imagine if that’s what you had to come home to as well?”
He stared at her naked shape, having a hard time maintaining his concentration. “It’d still be you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I don’t want it. I’m not a damsel in distress waiting for someone to save me. I’m already exactly where I want to be.” She picked up the towel and wrapped it around her remarkable body.
Scott took his time to reply and did not make eye contact with her. “Sorry, I guess.”
“Don’t sulk. It really isn’t a good look for you.” She got into a pair of tight black denim pants from the night before. “Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“Unless something happens to you, which isn’t all that unlikely, right?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“Tell you what,” she said, clasping her bra. “What I can promise you is that, next time I’m in town, I’m staying right here with you. Okay? No more hotels for me.” She pulled on a wrinkled emerald-green top.
“Yeah, fine,” he said without much enthusiasm. “That’d be good.”
“Whatever,” she said, now fully dressed. She planted a perfunctory kiss on his lips, knowing that he was going to resent the dry farewell. “I’ll call you.”
“If you survive.”
She shut the bedroom door behind her, swearing under her breath as she made her way out of his labyrinthine house.
Chapter Twelve
Jenny Morgan came home to find Alex’s motorcycle in the driveway.
Her daughter at home was a nice surprise, but oh, how she hated that bike. It was everything she hated about Alex’s and Dan’s lifestyle: risky and reckless and too damn fast.
She knew that loving a dangerous man would mean a lifetime of worrying, and she loved him enough to live with that.
Jenny went inside and set her purse and keys on the kitchen counter. “Alex?”
Her daughter’s voice came from the living room. “Mom?”
“Alex? Where are you?”
“In here.”
“What are you doing—oh my Lord, are you okay?”
She was sitting on the floor, holding her hand up close to her head— and only then did Jenny see the handcuffs.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Alex said.
“You sound awfully calm for someone cuffed to the furniture. What happened? Who did this to you? Was it burglars? Are we in danger?”
“No, Mom, it’s fine. It was Dad.”
“What?”
“Mom, it’s really no big deal.”
“No big deal?”
“Could you let me out? The key’s somewhere in the kitchen. On the floor, I think. I’ll explain everything.”
Jenny was annoyed by Alex’s attitude, as if she had no call to be worried at finding her daughter locked to a table, as if finding that her husband had left her there made any kind of difference.
She just let out a weary groan and went to grab the key, which she found in the corner, hidden under the edge of a kitchen cupboard. She came back to Alex and knelt to unlock the cuffs.
“I don’t suppose you’ll do me the courtesy of explaining to me why my husband left our one and only daughter chained up like an animal.”
“It’s classified,” Alex said, getting up and rubbing her wrist where the cuffs held it.
“Young lady, you will tell me what is happening.”
“I can’t—”
“Do not,” Jenny said. “I am your mother, and we are talking about your father. I have had it with being kept in the dark. I have had it with you two disappearing on me. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Oh, all right. We had a bit of a disagreement about an assignment. I mean ‘we, ’ including our bosses at Zeta. I wanted to stop him from doing something stupid, and he went ahead and did it anyway. You know Dad.”
“I certainly do.” Something struck Jenny all of a sudden. A curious absence. “Where’s Neika?”
“Dad took her with him. I have no idea why.”
Jenny’s heart sank. “I think I can imagine, and it doesn’t make me happy.”
“What?”
“Neika was trained as a bomb-sniffing military dog. Your father worked with her on a mission, and I guess he grew attached. That’s where we got her.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That makes sense.”
Alex’s nonchalance was infuriating. “Sense?” she exclaimed. “As in, it’s no surprise that my husband would need a bomb-sniffing dog?”
“Mom, really. I found out Dad wasn’t a classic-car dealer at about the same time as you, remember?”
Jenny controlled herself. “All right, all right, I get it.”
Alex rubbed her wrist. “Good. Thanks. I need to go. I need to take care of this. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine,” Jenny said unconvincingly, hoping her daughter would take the emotional bait.
But instead, Alex just said, “Great. Love you!” Then she disappeared out the door, leaving Jenny there, steaming.
Mrs. Morgan was tired of being shunted aside whenever they went off on their little adventures. She was tired of being kept out of the loop until it was all over, hoping it would work out but being blocked from any information or involvement—as every single day all she dreamed about was, first, standing at her husband’s funeral, and then, maybe even worse, standing at her daughter’s grave.
Standing in the foyer of her house, Jenny made a decision. She didn’t know how. But she knew what she was going to do.
Chapter Thirteen
Morgan parked his car in sight of Alicia Schmitt’s house in Arlington, Virginia, half an hour before dawn—which was scheduled that day for 5:22 a.m.
She was military, which meant she wouldn’t go one day without exercise. And if she was military, it was going to be obscenely early. He knew the type, and from what Shepard had been able to dig up on her, she was definitely the type.
A precocious talent, the decorated veteran had shot up through the ranks of the navy. She’d made commander the year before and was now the youngest woman of her rank. She wasn’t assigned to a ship but served as an executive officer. Whatever work she did was highly classified, and even Shepard couldn’t get to it—at least not fast enough to be useful to Morgan.
He needed to talk to her away from prying eyes. Ringing her doorbell was a bad idea, approaching her at work was out of the question, and it wasn’t unlikely that she was being watched, which meant he was going to have to force a chance encounter.
Right on cue, Schmitt emerged from her house at dawn in sneakers and a green track suit. She took off at a brisk jog as soon as her feet hit the sidewalk. He needed to keep up without attracting attention to himself. He was already dressed as a jogger in muted grays. He let her gain a little distance and then got out of his car.
His bad knee complained for the first hundred yards or so, but after a little bit of warm-up he had no trouble keeping up with her—maintaining the distance while putting cars and trees between them as much as possible.
Within
a few minutes they arrived at a park with a sign that read Alcova Heights. Instead of following her outright, Morgan took a parallel path, rounding the tennis courts. She greeted an early guard who was keeping watch. She headed for a wooded area, out of sight of any of the public.
Morgan made his move, cutting across the woods to intercept her. He slowed to a walk, keeping cover behind a thicket as he neared the path. She was approaching, her jogging keeping a steady rhythm on the crunchy leaves, growing louder as she approached. He was going to have to be careful not to spook her. In his mind, he rehearsed what he was going to say, playing out her possible reactions and how he might convince her of his good faith.
Turned out it was unnecessary. When she was on the other side of the thicket, the running stopped. He emerged from behind it, in full view of her, to find her holding a gun aimed at him. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 60 Lady Smith. Matte stainless finish, wood grip, 2.125-inch barrel. .357 Magnum, capacity five rounds, which was four more than necessary to make corned beef hash out of his brains.
“You’re a little big to think you can sneak up on me.”
Schmitt had the face of a woman who was years past taking any shit from men, like she’d hit her quota of leering jokes, drunken passes, and underestimation somewhere around her first tour of duty and decided she was having none of it from anyone.
But even she was surprised when he laughed with honest, self-deprecating, mirth, and said, “Like teacher, like student.”
She instantly recognized he wasn’t being disingenuous or smarmy. “What’s the game?” she asked. “What teacher, what student?” He shifted, and her aim moved to his crotch. “Just so I can decide where to shoot you if you take another step toward me.”
He put up his hands and tried to look as honest as possible. “Student, you. Teacher, General James Collins."
Hearing the name took her aback. He could see it in her eyes that her mind was processing, reassessing assumptions about the encounter, and trying to figure out what it meant. She opened her mouth to speak but didn’t seem to know what to say until she settled on, “Who are you?”
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