* * * *
Down the block, tucked back into Post Office Street, Melissa sat in her silver Lexus and watched Jenny’s crimson Toyota flash by. She smiled, reached up, took off the red wig, and scratched her itchy scalp.
Jenny was now in play, and with Alex already a major worry for Morgan, adding his wife to the mix would keep him from doing anything too wild and crazy. The woman who had made herself “Melissa” opened the back of her cell, slipped the battery back in, powered it up, and called an unlisted number.
Lincoln Shepard answered.
“This is Bloch,” Diana said. “Tell me you’ve got something on Cobra.”
“Negative, ma’am. And I’ve been trying to reach you about something else.”
“I was having a manicure. A girl’s still a girl. Be back in half an hour.”
She hung up, put the Lexus in gear, and headed for Boston.
Chapter Sixteen
Jenny stood in the kitchen, arms folded, leaning back on the central butcher-block island and nursing a large mojito.
The house felt so empty with everyone gone, silent as a graveyard, except for the raindrops starting to patter the tree leaves outside. She’d cruised around Andover for a while after her Starbucks epiphany, but then she’d rushed home, thinking she had to walk Neika. Halfway there, she remembered that their beloved shepherd had been snatched away by the family alpha dog, Dan. Evening was coming on now, the sounds of the wind making branches click on the window panes like spooky fingernails.
Fingernails. She saw the glossy pink ones again of that woman, Melissa. This is the power. It had sounded good, but by the time she’d gotten home her enthusiasm had run out of gas. In twenty years of marriage, she’d only beaten Dan twice at checkers, and both times she suspected he’d thrown the game. What made her think she could capture his kings now? He was just so much better at all that stuff. Heck, he’d been born for it, and she’d been born as a hanger-on, his fangirl, sitting home and twirling her hair while her superhero saved Gotham.
Snoop! Melissa’s urging rang in her head, but it seemed so slimy to do it. Her marriage with Dan had always been based on trust. But was it really? She trusted him to always do the right thing, for their family, God, and country. In turn, he trusted her with nothing. She downed the rest of her drink and jammed the glass on the counter.
All right, I’m doing it. Not going to find anything anyway. And if I do, that doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it. But it’ll still feel good.
She headed for the stairs and took them two at a time, her wedding ring clanging on the banister. She walked down the carpeted hallway to the end and into Dan’s office. He never kept the door locked, which probably meant there was nothing in there to find. She flicked on the light, stood there with her hands on her hips, and looked around.
Mostly everything in there was about classic cars, which was why she’d never paid much attention to any of it. Rally posters on the walls, a bunch of the models he’d built displayed in Plexiglas boxes, a couple of trophies he’d won with the Shelby.
His big mahogany desk was pretty neat, for a man: just his computer and the requisite pictures of her and Alex. His low bookshelf was off to the side, packed mostly with car catalogues and a few war history books. Dan never read novels.
On top of that were a few framed pictures of him in his army days, and one of him and Peter Conley, both much younger, wearing nondescript uniforms and parachute gear. In all his years with the CIA, if he’d gotten any presidential citations or medals you’d never know it. Behind the desk was the evidence of Dan’s only other “collector vice,” his hundreds of DVDs.
She looked at the room’s single closet. She knew that in there at the bottom was a digital gun safe. That was no secret. He’d given her the combination long ago, just in case she ever had to use it. It would have been nice if he’d taught her to shoot, but she knew that was her own fault because she’d always resisted.
She opened the closet, swept his dress shirts and suits aside, and squatted. Then she punched in the code, and the small door hissed open. Nothing. It was totally empty. She slammed it closed and stood.
“Damn it, Dan,” she spat. He’d left her defenseless on top of everything else! She spun around, looked at his desk, and charged it, pulling his drawers open and fighting the urge to just spill everything all over the floor. Then she stopped dead still.
He’d told her once that if everything went south, he had a special place where he kept all his “real” stuff, as he put it. There, he had said, she’d find his last will and testament and some other insurance policies besides the one they kept at home. What the heck did that mean? and wherever that special place was, she knew it wouldn’t be here in the house.
What else had he said? All those weird, off-hand remarks and “spy advice.” Think.
“If you want to really hide something, you leave it out in the open.”
She spun around again and looked at every inch of wall space, but nothing jumped out. Maybe a key taped behind a poster frame? No, too obvious—he’d never do that. Then her eyes came to rest on his DVD collection. They were mostly action and war movies, a few classics, pretty much nothing of interest to her. Maybe that was the point? She’d never snoop here because their movie tastes were polar opposites. But she still ran her finger slowly across every row, scanning the titles for some sort of hint.
She stopped. Hide in Plain Sight. What the heck was that? She pulled it out, some old mystery movie from the 1980s. She opened it up, but there was nothing in there but the disc. She popped it way from its holder; nothing behind it. And then she turned it over and looked at the silver, glossy back. Carefully written with a black felt pen was one word: warm.
Her heart started pounding and her eyes went wide. She tossed the case and disc on Dan’s desk and started madly staring at the movies nearest to the empty black slot. Guns of Navarone? She snapped it open and found nothing and tossed it on the floor. Heat? That made no sense, but she tried it anyway; nothing. Help? Maybe that was it! Dan was a die-hard Beatles fan! Fingers shaking, she popped that one open and came up empty.
She scanned the row below and the one above, looking for place names now. She pulled Casablanca, getting the same results, threw it onto the growing pile on the floor and mumbled, “Idiot. He’s not hiding his stuff in friggin’ Morocco.”
Calm down. Think.
She leaned back on the desk and took a long breath. Then she glanced down at the first case and picked it up. Hide in Plain Sight, starring James Caan. Tapping her fingernails on it, she looked at the DVD rows again. Warm. That means close, right?
To the left of where she’d found that first one, was something called Gardens of Stone. She reached out and slipped it from its slot and looked at the cover. Starring. . . James Caan.
She snapped it open and pulled out the disc and looked at the back. Another word in carefully scripted black letters: “Toasty.”
“Oh my God,” she yelped, and she dropped the disc and charged right for the stairs.
She hit bottom and ran through the kitchen, then skidded to a stop, and ran back. Between the fridge and the wall was an antique wooden ammunition crate that Dan had picked up at a yard sale. She popped it open, snatched up a flashlight, and bolted for the backyard door. When she pulled it open the rain was sheeting off the upper sill like Niagara Falls, and it was already pitch dark outside. She snatched a blue slicker from a hook, thrust herself into it, and charged into the backyard.
The tall elms were whipping in the wind, and thunder boomed nearby as she marched across the sodden lawn. Gardens of Stone. Well, they only had one garden like that. Dan had once come back from some trip to Japan and announced how much he admired their Zen gardens, which turned out to be bare of greenery, floored in manicured sand, and decorated with rocks, whose positions were supposed to mean something spiritual.
She’d gone alon
g with his plan, mostly because it was rare that they had the time to enjoy some project together. It had turned out nicely—a small raised plateau of white sand with beautiful stones poking up like the thick dorsals of whales. It sat there on a small rise at the edge of their back fence, between a pair of lush, normal gardens.
She clicked on the flashlight and scanned the stone garden. Her hair was already soaking wet so there was no point in pulling the hood up. The stones were arranged in no overtly specific pattern, but she counted them anyway. Thirteen. That didn’t mean anything. A bolt of lightning split from the sky a few houses away and she jumped. This is sooo stupid, Dan, she fumed. You’re going to get me electrocuted on a dumb-ass treasure hunt!
She stopped herself again and calmed her pounding pulse. Treasure. Where do you find the treasure, like if you’re a pirate? On a treasure map. What’s on a treasure map? An X! X marks the spot!
She looked around and found it, a broken stick from one of the trees above. She picked it up, fell to her knees in the soaked earth, and leaned over the garden, drawing a thick line in the sand from the top above to between her knees below and then left to right in as perfect a symmetrical design as she could. Then she tossed the stick away, lay the flashlight on one of the rocks, crawled to the middle of the garden, and jammed her wet fingers straight down in the middle of the X.
Nothing. Just soaking-wet sand crawling through her fingernails. Her other hand joined the first, and she dug, tossing gobs of wet sand between her legs, just as Neika always did when she was digging up one of her bony treasures. She went deeper and deeper, thinking that this was the stupidest wild-goose chase she’d ever been on. Except it was real, and he’d left her the clues for a reason, and, heck, if it wasn’t somehow exciting to be out here in the dark in the rain with the thunder and lighting and...
She hit something. It was probably just another rock. No, it felt smooth and flat on top. She leaned down and dug some more, the water dripping off her chin and her lungs panting steam in the air. She got her fingernails and around whatever it was, leaned back hard, and pulled. It popped from the ground. She stared at it. A small, rectangular black metal box.
She snatched up the flashlight, sprinted back for the house, and slammed the door behind her as she puddled the kitchen floor. She put the box on the island and whipped off her slicker. She took a breath and turned the box over, carefully. There didn’t seem to be any way to open it: no latch or lock—in fact, no top. Then she gripped it with one wet hand and smeared the bottom with her thumb. Something clicked. She pushed harder. It slid open.
A key. It was brass and about two inches long. She plucked it out, and there underneath was a small green tab of waterproof paper, like from one of those Rite in the Rain pads that Dan used whenever they’d all gone camping. Typed on the tab were two words: Uncle Bob.
Who the heck was Uncle Bob? Did anyone in the family even have an Uncle Bob? No, there was nobody like that. Wait, maybe it was a restaurant or something. Jenny looked around and spotted her iPhone where she’d left it next to the sink. She snatched it up and pressed the home key.
“Siri, who is Uncle Bob?”
“I don’t see Uncle Bob in your contacts.”
Jesus. “Siri, show me Uncle Bobs in Massachusetts!”
“Okay, here’s what I found.”
Jenny looked at the list. At the top was “Uncle Bob’s Storage, North Andover.”
She grabbed the slicker, her car fob, her phone, and the key. She was out the door in five seconds.
* * * *
It was a huge, three-story tan corrugated metal building at the end of a road at the edge of a forest. The sides gleamed with drenching rain under the pale wash of floodlights. A few moving trucks were parked in the lot but no other regular cars. Jenny hurried into the office entrance, where a college girl with big glasses sat behind a high octagonal counter surrounded by plastic plants.
“Hi.” Jenny swept her soaked slicker hood back and smiled. “I need to get something out of our locker, but I forgot the number.”
“Do you have the key?”
Jenny fished in her pocket and pulled it out. “Right here.”
The girl took it from her, turned it over and showed her the back of the thumb grip. “It’s right here, three twenty-six.” Her expression said, “Poor old folks.”
“Oh, of course! Thanks!”
“You bet. It’s down the first hall all the way to the end, then turn right.”
But there were no lockers in the building, per se. They were all big, corrugated, garage-like doors, one after the other. She found 326, the last one at the end of a hallway of smooth concrete floors. A huge padlock hung from its hasp. She held her breath as she slipped the key inside, turned it, and the lock popped open. She bent down and hauled the door up.
A light flicked on, automatically. The space was huge, and it was filled with...junk. There were boxes and old chairs, a wooden table turned up on its side, old lamps, rubber tires, steel wheels, and hubcaps, and they were all piled up and impassable. Right in front was a tall French closet. Jenny stepped inside the space, pulled the garage door back down, and then perused the mess with a shake of her head. How am I supposed to find anything in here?
She reached over and pulled the closet doors open. Nothing but a tightly packed row of old clothes, like Salvation Army finds. Maybe Dan’s big secret was that he watched Hoarders too much. She pushed some of the clothing aside, just out of curiosity, and saw nothing behind but the back wall of the closet. Just for the hell of it, she pushed it...and it opened. She gasped as another light clicked on, deeper.
She scrambled her way through the closet and the clothes, and then she was standing inside some sort of container, like one of those “pods” people used for storage or moving. It was totally pristine, with shiny aluminum walls, standing filing cabinets, a small metal desk in the center, and behind that, a tall and wide heavy green safe of some sort. It had a digital lock. Her fingers trembled as she punched in the same code she’d just used for the one in Dan’s office. The door hissed open.
Guns. Of all kinds. There were automatic pistols arranged on steel pegs on both side walls, and in the back stood racks of longer guns, mostly black and scary-looking—some of them in cases. At the top was a shelf of ammunition boxes in all sorts of colors, with numbers and names like Remington. A small leather satchel hung from one peg, right in the middle. Jenny unslung it and opened it.
Inside was Dan’s CIA diary. At one point he mentioned that Zeta thought they had found it, but then he’d just smiled. This one was nothing more than a small black leather notebook, but he’d also mentioned before that it was something he’d kept throughout the years, a habit that was strictly forbidden as an intelligence operative. But Dan had a mind of his own, as she knew only too well. This was his “insurance policy.”
She flipped it open and scanned through some pages. His writing was careful and legible, but none of it meant anything to her. The pages had dates at the top, but the rest of it was just code words and numbers and phrases she couldn’t possibly decipher. She flipped through the yellowed pages, looking for the latest entry. And then she found it.
Yesterday’s date, and below that, two words: Collins and Tomahawks. Neither one meant anything. But wait...Collins. That was someone, a person Dan knew. And Tomahawks? She’d have to ask Siri. Below those words was a weird sort of message.
“Need to find me? Call the Civil War president.”
And below that was something that looked like a phone number, no dashes. She took out her iPhone and tapped the number into her Notes. She thought about taking Dan’s diary with her, but somehow that seemed like going too far. She put it back in the satchel, hung it back up, got ready to go, then stopped, and looked at the gun rack.
That one there. The ugly-looking one with the wide black tube and wooden grip underneath—like the one on her gardening trowel. T
hat was a shotgun, the kind Dan always said was a “showstopper.” She pulled it out of the rack, holding it like it was a hissing cobra, and stuffed it nose first into one of the empty black canvas cases, zipped it shut, and looked up at the shelf. She took a box that said “12 Gauge Shot,” stuffed it into her slicker pocket, crawled back through the closet, closed the secret door, and reordered the clothes. She went out, pulled the big metal door down with a clang, and locked it up.
The shotgun case was heavy and menacing, and just holding it made her feel like a bank robber. She held it alongside her leg as she passed through the office again, hoping the girl wouldn’t ask any questions. But the kid was head-down in her phone and only mumbled, “Good night.”
“Thanks. See ya.”
The rain was still pounding. Jenny looked around and opened the trunk of the Camry. She stuffed the shotgun and the shells deep into the small shelf at the back and then pushed some of her canvas shopping bags in front to conceal it. Then she closed the trunk quietly, got in the car, pushed the starter button, belted in, and took off—heading back down that long, slick road toward town.
She was smiling like a schoolgirl who’d just been asked out by her dreamy crush. For once in her life, she felt what it was like to be a spy.
She didn’t even notice the black Audi with its headlights off that pulled out from a grove of trees and followed her.
Chapter Seventeen
Lily was no stranger to the club scene in Seoul.
She’d been to the city before, once as a student, and twice on jobs. The first time, as a freshly liberated university grad, she’d explored the exotic foods throughout the Itaewon district, a place designed mostly to separate spoiled foreigners from their cash, and she’d wound up thrashing the night away at a wild disco called Octagon.
The second two times had been quick in-and-outs, albeit not the sexy kind. The first was a simple package recovery—spotting a chalk mark on a lamppost and finding a dead drop, the old-fashioned way. The third time was supporting a hit on, ironically, a hit man, and it had nearly cost her life.
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