Other than that, the doctor said, he was lucky. The bullet had nicked a few other organs before digging into his back, but somehow he hadn’t bled to death and the shock hadn’t killed him.
Lucky? He couldn’t feel anything below his belly button and didn’t quite see how that made him lucky. But he didn’t feel up to arguing with the doctor, either. So he closed his eyes and let himself drift away, half-asleep, half-awake. Dan thought he’d known what it was to be afraid. But he’d never felt more alone, never felt such stark terror.
If he couldn’t walk...
Someone was with him, sitting beside him. There was a small, soft hand tucked into his. He thought he smelled a hint of scented soap or lotion that was hauntingly familiar.
Jamie.
Dan knew he should send her away, for her own sake. But he didn’t have the energy. Maybe he didn’t have the courage, either. Tomorrow, when he was stronger and not feeling so absolutely alone, he would send her back into Josh’s arms, where she belonged.
Chapter 4
It was painfully apparent at the memorial service for Doc three days later that the agency was his family. He’d never married, never had children, had few friends outside his work. In the pouring rain, agency personnel and a few colleagues from his days in the army stood huddled together under a tent erected at the gravesite.
Jamie knew she didn’t want to end up all alone like Doc. She wanted to have babies, a husband to grow old with. The agency was fine for now; she was young. She enjoyed the challenge, the excitement. But it would never take the place of her family.
She glanced down the rows of somber faces and felt the horror of the situation take hold once again. Doc was truly gone. Dan’s life was still hanging by a thread, due to a post-operative infection that had proven especially difficult, given the shock his body had suffered. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness soon after the doctor told him the extent of the damage to his body and hadn’t awakened since. Geri was going to be okay eventually, and the agency had screwed up its biggest case ever.
Abruptly, Jamie realized the crowd was moving, some people rushing for cars, others turning to talk to those around them. The service was over. Lost in thought, she’d missed the end of it. Pulling herself back to the present, she nodded at several of her colleagues. Andy Wade, a techno wizard affectionately known as the gadget master; Jack Malone, a communications expert; Chris Reynolds, an expert in acquiring and forging credentials allowing them access to just about any place in the world. She turned to head out the other way, thinking it might be less congested, and found herself face-to-face with Amanda Wainwright, who was on the secretarial staff.
“Jamie, how’s Dan?”
She took a breath and forced out the words. “Hanging on.”
With tears in her eyes, Amanda nodded. Standing next to her was a tall, slender man Jamie recognized. “Rob?”
“I’m sorry,” Amanda said, turning to the man at her side. “This is my fiancé. Rob Jansen. Rob, you remember Jamie Douglass?”
“Of course,” he said, shaking her hand.
He was with the FBI, but he’d spent the previous summer at Division One establishing a specialized, direct computer link between Division One and some of the FBI databases. And he’d been smitten immediately with Amanda Wainwright, and she with him.
Jamie had been the one who’d introduced them. It was something for which he claimed he would be forever in her debt. She hadn’t seen him since.
“It’s good to see you again, Rob.”
“You, too,” he said.
Jamie remembered that their wedding date was just around the corner. “I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”
“Thanks,” Amanda said. “If there’s anything we can do for Dan...”
“Pray,” she suggested.
“Of course. I will.”
Jamie excused herself. She was on the edge of the crowd, ready to make a run for her car, when she ran into the agency’s director, John Mitchell. Instinct and a military background made her jump to attention. “Sir,” she said.
“Anything new to report on our investigation?” he demanded.
“The lab has gone over the ballistics evidence twice more,” she said. “They’re confident their first findings are correct. Both agents outside the warehouse were shot with the same weapon, with one of the prototypes we’re using.”
“We still haven’t recovered any of them?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“And we don’t know which agent’s weapon was used?”
“No, sir.”
“Is your second agent conscious yet?”
“No.”
He scowled. ‘You should know, Ms. Douglass, that except for the internal review of the shooting, we’re off the case.”
Jamie kept her expression carefully blank. She heard right before the funeral service began that Mitchell and her direct supervisor, Martin Tanner, had spent the morning in the Oval Office, getting a tongue-lashing from the Commander-in-Chief himself. Apparently, the president was so angry about the bungled mission, he’d stripped the agency of any responsibility in locating the missing scientist, whose fingerprints were on a Colt .45 found six blocks from the scene, the one used to kill Doc.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it was true, that the agency didn’t have the right to go find the man who shot and killed their own colleague. But Mitchell had just confirmed it. He glared at Jamie for another long minute, then, in an intensely intimidating voice said, “Don’t screw up this investigation.”
“No, sir.”
Martin Tanner walked up to them a moment later, nodded, shook hands with Mitchell, then turned to her. “I just spoke with one of Dan’s doctors. His vital signs are improving. They think he’s close to regaining consciousness.”
God, she’d give anything just to see him open his eyes.
“I’ll get right over there,” she said, then turned and fled.
Twenty minutes later, her expression carefully blank, chin up, shoulders thrown back, she flashed her ID at the two guards stationed at the first checkpoint just off the main corridor of the hospital.
“Any problems?” she asked crisply.
“No, ma’am,” they chorused, eyeing her curiously, still a little uneasy about following the directives of a woman.
She’d learned early on how to take orders, more recently how to give them. Calmly, authoritatively, without hesitation. If she expected the people under her to carry out those orders with any confidence, they had to believe she knew exactly what she was doing. More often than not, she did.
But this...
Jamie rounded another corner and found herself in a narrow, deserted corridor, bordered at either end by a ninetydegree turn. She was less than fifty yards from Dan’s room when she put her back to the wall, sagged weakly against it and concentrated for a moment on simply breathing in and out.
The past four days had been crazy. Every time the phone rang, every time her pager went off, she wondered if that would be the message she’d been dreading. That Dan was gone.
And now she was going to see him—a man clinging stubbornly to life who seemingly wanted nothing to do with her. If she had any pride left, she would pull herself together, and he would see nothing but an agent doing her job.
Jamie heard footsteps coming down the hall toward her. She snapped to attention and found herself face-to-face with one of the legion of specialists working on Dan’s case. “Dr. Richardson?” she said. “How is he?”
“He’s awake, Ms. Douglass.”
Her only reaction was a quick, deep breath. “And?”
“He’s still weak, in a lot of pain and on a great deal of medication. I expect he’ll be fading in and out of consciousness for another day or so.”
“I have to see him,” she said, the demand instinctive.
“Fine.” The doctor nodded. “Make it quick. And don’t wear him out.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, walking briskly toward the door to his room
.
Another pair of guards snapped to attention at her approach. She flashed her ID, and at their nod, pushed open the door to Dan’s room. Calling on every bit of her training, she paused just inside the doorway to steady herself, then walked slowly toward the bed.
Dan turned his head slowly at her approach, his only reaction to seeing her a tightening of his jaw before he looked away and his eyelids drifted down. She quickly took note of his ashen face; she was still afraid he might die.
But she got set to work. She’d come here with a job to do, one she truly hated at the moment. Clearing her throat, she sat down, opened the briefcase she carried, found a notebook and a pen. “Dan, I need to know what happened.”
His voice weak, he rattled off an amazingly detailed description of two young men and a girl he’d seen that night. Jamie took notes, looking for discrepancies between his recollection of the suspects and Geri’s, looking for additional details he remembered that Geri hadn’t mentioned. Jamie would have preferred to let him work with a sketch artist on his own to come up with a drawing, but it might be days before he was strong enough to do that. So she pulled out the composites made from Geri’s descriptions and held them up for him to see.
“Look at this,” she whispered, thinking he might have drifted off already. “Is this one of the people you saw that night?”
His eyes opened, stared, then he nodded.
“And this one?” It wasn’t nearly as detailed, but it was all they had.
“That’s him.”
“The girl?” She held up the final drawing, of a young, vulnerable-looking girl.
“Her hair’s longer. Fuller. She had a small scar....” He touched his index finger to the right side of his mouth. “Here. She was too thin. Had a busted lip. A bruised cheek...”
“How old?” Jamie asked. “Sixteen?”
“Maybe. Maybe younger. Did you pick them up yet?”
“No.”
As Jamie finished writing up her notes on the descriptions, she was dreading what she had to do next. She wasn’t sure how much he had seen, how much he remembered, and she didn’t want to be the one who told him about Doc. She also didn’t want to sit in judgment of him and the actions he’d taken that night, but Tanner had put her squarely in the middle of it. She had no choice.
There was a slight tremor in her right hand as she pulled a miniature tape recorder from her briefcase and placed it on the table by his bed.
When she looked down at Dan again, he was sleeping.
Two hours later, she was back in his room. She’d spent the time thinking about how to handle this, and decided that all she could do was steer clear of anything personal. Maybe, when the job was done, he would talk to her. Maybe he would let her be his friend, if nothing else.
She sank into the chair at the side of his bed. He looked better now, she thought, more alert, and not so very weak. Though still not glad to see her.
“Sorry I faded out on you,” he said.
“It’s all right.” She found her pen, her notebook and her tape recorder again. There was no way to stall any longer. “Mitchell’s ordered a Section 123 investigation into the shooting.”
“One twenty-three?” he repeated, staring at her, at the tape recorder in her hand.
She nodded.
He knew exactly what that entailed. After all, he’d written many of the rules and regulations that governed the agency.
Section 123 was a rarely used formal internal investigation triggered when an agent or a civilian was seriously injured or killed during an agency operation. It was about deciding who was at fault, about laying blame—reviewing an agent’s judgment or actions to discover whether orders were disregarded, basic safety procedures not followed, or the lives of others recklessly or carelessly endangered. It was the kind of investigation that had the power to end careers. Or worse, to find one person responsible for the death of another.
God, she didn’t want to do this to him. Or to anyone.
Daring to look him in the eye, she saw that he was more alert, more focused than she’d seen him at any time since the shooting.
“What happened?” he said tightly.
“You know how this works. You tell me,” she said, clicking on the recorder. She could almost see the thoughts racing through his head, the questions he would fire at her as soon as she was done asking hers. He gave her what she needed, quickly, succinctly recounting the events of that night.
It had been 2:23 a.m. when a car, a four-door, late-model white sedan with darkly tinted windows, the stereo blaring, stopped at a traffic signal on the west side of the warehouse. The passenger-side door opened. A girl was shoved from the car. She screamed as she landed hard on the pavement. The first suspect climbed out of the car. He pulled her to her feet, smacked her across the face with his gun, then put it to her head.
“You thought they were going to kill the girl?” Jamie asked. That point was critical.
“Yeah. Geri and I took off to try to stop it.”
“Both of you?”
“Yes,” he insisted.
Jamie didn’t believe him. It was the first discrepancy between his version of the events leading up to the shooting and Geri’s, and it was a crucial point. “Both of you decided to leave your posts to try to save the girl?”
“Yes.”
“But Geri got there first?”
“I took the time to call Doc on the radio to tell him what we were doing.” The look Dan threw Jamie’s way as he spoke told her she wouldn’t shake him on that point. He knew exactly what she was getting at, and he knew the tape recorder was running. He wouldn’t say anything else for the tape.
Frustrated, Jamie continued. “When you told Doc what you were doing, he acknowledged that message?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure? You’re sure it was his voice you heard?”
Dan’s arm came out, shoving the recorder aside. It tumbled off the bed and clattered to the floor. His voice dangerously quiet, he growled, “What the hell happened out there?”
Jamie could tell by the look on his face, the worry in his eyes, that he knew something terrible had happened, something worse than the injuries he’d sustained. To give herself time to think, she bent over to tind the tape, checked to see that it was still working, then carefully placed it on the bed beside him again.
He and Doc had been close. They’d worked together off and on for fifteen years. There was no way to spare him, no way to cushion the blow.
“What happened, Jamie?” he said, more forcefully this time.
“You know I can’t tell you that until you tell me everything you know first.”
He stared at her. Four years ago, the fiercely determined look on his face would have left her shaking in her shoes. Even today, if it came to a test of wills between them, she would lose. And it was silly to go up against him when she knew she would lose.
“I’m sorry,” she added, not knowing what else to say. “I hate this as much as you do. Please, just answer the questions and then I’ll tell you everything I know. Doc acknowledged the message?”
“Yes,” he said tightly.
Jamie started the tape again. “What happened then?”
In a clipped, dry tone, he told her. Jamie closed her eyes, envisioning the alley as she’d seen it near dawn, about twenty-four hours after the shooting. It would have been even darker the morning he’d been there, the sky covered with thick clouds, the rain falling, the streets slick and all but deserted. She could see Geri running, Dan chasing after her. Geri tackled the man holding the girl, had him pinned to the ground. The girl got up and ran into the alley, and Dan went after her. He tried to reassure her that she had nothing to fear from him, that she was safe. And then a figure appeared through the fog and the rain, a gun in his hand. The girl they’d gone to rescue disappeared into the early morning darkness, and Dan felt something slam into his side, felt his head connect solidly with the pavement, and then everything went black.
Jamie h
ad been to the scene, had seen the traces of blood on the pavement that the rain hadn’t washed away, had reconstructed it in her mind the way she thought it happened. But listening to it now, in his own words, it was even more real.
So close, she thought All of them had come so close to dying. And she was supposed to make sense of it all somehow.
They ran through it three times, and she still hadn’t been able to get him to admit that Geri had been the one to take off after the girl, leaving Dan with the difficult choice of watching her run headlong into danger or going to help her. Geri readily admitted it, but even when Jamie told Dan, it didn’t sway him on his version of the story. He knew what was at stake, and he’d decided to protect Geri, even though it might mean his career.
Jamie turned her attention to the weapons. “When you took off after the suspects, where was your weapon?”
“In my hand.”
“And when the second suspect emerged from the alley with his gun drawn? Where was your weapon then?”
“At my back. The girl was hysterical, and I didn’t think I had a chance of calming her down with a gun in my hand. So I tucked it into the waistband of my pants, at my back, so she wouldn’t see it.”
“So the second suspect—”
“Walked right up to me. He would have put a bullet between my eyes if Geri hadn’t drawn his attention away from me for a second.”
“She took the first shot?”
He paused. “I’m not sure.”
“Think about it,” she urged. “Did Geri have a shot? Did she take it?”
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