Because that’s what the silence was, suddenly—a thick, hot, hard, tense, boiling sexual tension.
How could I crack the tension without letting anything happen?
I settled on a tactic: “You said you were adopted as a teenager?”
He sighed, eyeing me warily—he knew exactly what I was doing. “Yes. I was thirteen.”
“What about before that?”
He drove in silence, which was now still thick with sexual tension as well as something deeper, something more personal. Way to go, Danielle. Make it personal as well as sexual. Great tactic—you are doing exactly what you’d called him out on.
He let out a long breath. “You could probably guess—it was a lot like your deal. Orphan, bounced around foster homes, some okay, most not.” He held a moment of silence. “Got hit, molested, shit like that. Fought a lot. Bullied a lot. Around sixth grade, a couple tried to adopt me, but they turned out to be worse than any of my foster parents, and I ran away. Made it from New Orleans where I’d grown up all the way to Atlanta, on my own, on foot. Hitching rides, shit like that. Lived on the streets of Atlanta for a few years.” Another silence. “Then I met Quentin and Claire. I’d broken into their house and was trying to steal her jewelry. Quentin came up behind me, put a gun to my head, and was about to just pop me right then and there. Quentin was no softie, by the way. He’d grown up hard, too—harder than me, if you want the truth. Claire was the soft one. The kind one. She convinced Quentin to let me go, and convinced me to come back and help them do yard work to pay for the damage I’d done breaking in. In return, they wouldn’t call the cops and have me sent back into the system.”
“Wow.” I watched him openly now, fascinated by the story, and how it was revealing more about Lear’s past. “So they adopted you…just like that?”
He nodded, eyes distant. “Eventually, yes. It took a year and a half of us getting to know one another, and another…eight months or a year of them working through the adoption process. They were young, only ten or twelve years older than me, but they had each other, and they had a future together. Jobs, love, a house. The kind of shit I’d always wanted, shit I’d never had, you know?”
I laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I know.”
“Bet you do,” he muttered. “So, yeah. They adopted me. Quentin and Claire Winter. I took their name, because having been born to an addict who’d never revealed her name, I’d been called Adam Smith all growing up. A generic name chosen by a social worker.”
“Adam Smith?”
He nodded. “When they adopted me, they told me I could pick my name, if I wanted. Or I could keep the one I had, take their last name, or pick my own whole new name.” He paused, a long silent thoughtful hesitation. “Quentin, the week of the adoption, had taken me to see a community theater production of King Lear. I liked the name Lear, and I loved them, so…that became my name. Lear Winter.”
“And the grandparents?” I asked.
“Nana and Papa were Claire’s parents.” He hesitated again, this one even more pained. “I got them those mugs.”
“Goddamn.”
He shook his head. “Just stuff.”
“It’s not just stuff, Lear,” I heard myself say. “Maybe no one’s ever told you this, but…you have to give yourself permission to be upset about things.”
He drove on in silence, but his fist clenched and unclenched on his lap. “It was just stuff. I have the memories.”
“Objects can have memories attached to them. It’s okay to be upset about losing the house, the mugs, whatever else was in that house that’s now gone. Those items were signifiers of your relationship with your grandparents and parents.”
He eyed me sideways. “Something tells me you’ve spent a fortune on therapy.”
I laughed, amused but slightly bitter. “Yeah. Johnny makes me go talk to someone every couple of months. He wants me to go, like, weekly or biweekly or some shit, but I refuse on principle. He eventually holds my checks hostage until I go talk to someone, because he’s a big believer in the value of talk therapy.”
He sighed. “Mandatory counseling was part of my contract with the NSA.” He waved a hand, growling in disgust. “Bullshit. Just pissed me off worse.”
“Right?” I half laughed, half sighed the word. “Talking to some overpaid yahoo about my fucking feelings does nothing but make me angrier. Like, yeah, I get it. I have to express shit. What if I don’t fucking want to? What if internalizing my problems makes me a better operative?”
He snickered. “I think that’s the problem. You rely on the suppressed anger to stay sharp. But it’s draining in the long-term.”
I sighed. “I know, I know. But some stranger with a PhD doesn’t make me feel…validated or whateverthefuck.” I bit my tongue hard, but the words tumbled out anyway. “Honestly, I feel more validated being able to talk with someone who understands firsthand what it’s like to grow up a foster kid.”
He nodded, remained silent for a long while. Turned to me, reached out a hand. “I get it, Danielle. I really do.” He sighed. “Therapy’s about all that helps, to be totally honest. Between the shit I went through as a kid, and the shit I see and do in this line of work, PTSD is kind of a given, you know?”
“Yeah.” I took his hand. Squeezed, held on. I tried to not think about what it meant, holding his hand. How good it felt. “I know.”
I didn’t let go, and neither did he.
Miles passed, and our hands remained joined on the bench seat of the Blazer, silence thick and rife and cozy all at once.
After a while, I saw an approaching sign: Welcome to Wisconsin.
Not long after that—or maybe the strangely companionable silence between us, and the momentary lull in the danger we faced made it seem shorter than it was—Lear navigated us into suburban Madison and out the other side, into a more rural community outside the city. We ended up on a bumpy county dirt road, and from there onto a two-track, which wound through cornfields and cow pastures and stands of trees. The two-track continued on into the nothingness of rural Wisconsin, and we turned onto an even narrower single-track which barely accommodated the big Blazer, tree branches occasionally scraping against the sides. We headed deeper and deeper into the woods. Around bends, over hills, across a frighteningly rickety wooden bridge that went over a narrow but quickly moving creek, and finally into a clearing.
The cabin was small, hand-built, and very old. It had a deep front porch with a low, slanted roof, moss growing on the ancient shingles. The door was positioned in the center of the wall, and dirt clouded the windows on either side of the door. A tall chimney built from large boulders poked up over the roof, and a red-handled well pump stood off to one side.
Pulling the Blazer around so the front end faced the trail, Lear shut the engine off and just sat for a moment, rubbing his eyes.
I finally withdrew my hand from his. “I’ll keep first watch.”
He smiled at me. “Thanks, but there won’t be a need.”
I made a face. “There’s no way you even have electricity out here, much less Wi-Fi-enabled security.”
He guffawed. “Hell, no, not even running water or plumbing at this old place.” His smile was cocky. “Much lower-tech security out here, but no less effective.” He shoved open his door, reached back into the rear seat and shouldered his Steyr Aug. “I’ll take backup while I check the perimeter, though.”
I nodded, slipping the HK’s strap over my shoulder and slapping the charging handle. “On it.”
He grinned at me again, and then moved in a slow amble off into the woods just to the right of the trail mouth. I followed him, senses on high alert. He only moved about ten feet into the brush before pausing, however; crouching at the base of a tree. He came up with a spool of fishing line, and ran it back to the trail, across the clearing opening, and into the other side another ten feet, to a similar tree. There, he tied the end of the line in a tight knot around the pin of a grenade, and gently, carefully wiggled the pin about halfway loose. Trotting b
ack to the other side, I saw that the other end of the fishing line was attached to a grenade as well, and he wiggled the pin loose halfway, and then backed away carefully. Anyone crossing through from the trail would set off both grenades at once.
Lear then moved in a careful lope through the trees, stringing more fishing line along the way in a wide loop around the cabin, a good hundred yards into the woods from the clearing. Once the line was tied off at either end, and at regular intervals, he returned to the cabin, used a key to open the sloped access door of a crawl space under the cabin and came up with a canvas bag…which turned out to be full of yet more explosives of various kinds, mostly fragmentation and incendiary grenades.
He set up the grenades with half-pulled pins at regular intervals, so to pull on any point of the line would detonate two grenades facing inward, but not the whole string. The claymores he placed within the perimeter line, so anyone who may have escaped the initial explosions would face further punishment. He spaced them with calculated, preplanned precision.
His low-tech security measures in place, he finally led us back through the woods to the cabin, unlocked the front door, closed it behind us. He just stood for a moment, looking around as if familiarizing himself with the space. He looked exhausted, suddenly.
“How long have you been awake, Lear?” I asked.
He checked his watch. “Going on sixty hours, now.”
“You need to sleep.”
He nodded. “I don’t think they’ll be able to find us here any time soon, but I still want to be ready, just in case.” He gestured with a jerk of his thumb at the door. “Gotta bring in some more firepower. These walls are reinforced to withstand sustained small arms fire, so with enough food, water, and ammo, we can hold off an army here.”
“Let’s get set up, then,” I said. “You’re dead on your feet.”
He eyed me with an arched eyebrow. “You’re looking pretty peaked yourself, Cuddy.”
I laughed. “It’s only going on forty-eight hours for me. I’m good.”
“You’re also soldier enough to get rest when rest is offered.”
I nodded. “Sure as hell.”
We spent another ten minutes carting in the weaponry we’d collected and arranging them along with extra magazines and boxes of ammo at the windows. He’d had the forethought when stocking this cabin to lay in magazines of various sizes and boxes of 9mm, 7.62, and 5.56 ammo, so we had enough firepower and ammunition to legitimately hold off an army. He had a blue rain barrel just inside the back door, and we took turns filling five-gallon buckets at the pump, filling, carrying, and dumping water into the barrel until it was full. I checked the cabinets and discovered them to be stocked full of nonperishable or semiperishable food items: canned fruit and vegetables, protein bars, protein powder in body builder-sized jugs, crackers, chocolate bars, tins of flash-sealed coffee…
I glanced at him. “You’re prepped for doomsday, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “After shit went down with Puck a couple years ago, I knew Cain would be coming back around eventually, and I’d find myself on the run. So, I spent several months stockpiling goods and setting up outposts like this all over the country.”
He gestured around us—it looked like any old log hunting cabin: front door with two windows on either side, a back door, a kitchenette in the back right corner with a propane stove and a sink. A twin bed filled one corner—a simple brass bed frame, old and tarnished, with an older seaman’s chest at the foot, complete with brass hinges and lock. There was a river rock fireplace on the wall opposite the kitchenette, and a small round table and chairs in the middle of the room. Snowshoes hung crossed on one wall, and an old flintlock muzzleloader hung over the door. A quintessential nineteenth-century hunting cabin—right out of the frontier.
Taking a closer look, however, I saw evidence that it had been…updated. The glass was, at first glance, simply dirty and fogged with age, but a second look told me it was far too thick to be mere single or even double pane glass…it was bulletproof. The walls, too, looked to be the same logs that made up the exterior. A ruse, I realized—they were merely half logs hiding the fact that behind them was a three-inch-thick layer of hard-packed sand faced on either side with cement board. Cheap, and a fairly easy one-man install, it would be very effective resistance against small arms fire.
If they came at us with RPGs or other explosives, all bets were off. But against bullets, we were well protected.
“So, is this place actually old, or just made to look old?” I asked.
He grinned. “Both.” He stomped on the floor. “The cabin has been here for generations, in one form or another. It belonged to Quentin’s some-number-of-greats grandfather and was passed down as little more than an old piece of parchment and a hand-scribbled deed. It’s registered somewhere, but not in any computerized system. Search county records and plat maps and all you’ll see is a sixty-acre parcel deeded to ‘G Simons,’ a name which is a dead end no matter how you search, and I’ve looked to the best of my ability, which needless to say is considerable. There’s no G Simons in any records I can find, and that includes more than one online ancestry record service.”
“So G Simons doesn’t exist?”
A shrug. “I think he was the kind of guy who lived and died outside the purview of public society. A real mountain man who was born, lived, and died in the wilderness, leaving little or no mark on the records of society, except for some descendants. Good for me, as it means there’s no way to know this place exists.” A sigh. “Obviously Alice has locked onto our trail despite my best efforts, so I’m expecting company at some point in the next twelve to twenty-four hours. But, that’ll get us enough time to snag some rest so we’re ready to rumble when they do find us.”
“Alice is going to have to be dealt with,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s my next step—find Alice and put a bullet in her skull.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “No compunction about killing a woman?”
“Not that one,” he muttered. “She’s a fucking viper.”
I grinned. “If you want, I can do it. Less personal for you that way, and I’ve got even less compunction.”
He shrugged, an oddly shy grin on his face. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”
I watched him swaying on his feet. “Lear, you need to lay down before you fall down.”
He nodded. “I don’t mind admitting I’m dead on my feet.” Despite his obvious exhaustion, he still managed a heated smirk. “Also don’t mind admitting it took quite an effort to rouse myself to action after you left, whichever night or morning that was. Legs didn’t want to work.”
I wanted to snark back, to hit back with innuendo. Instead, I took the opposite tack—tender, personal. “Later, Lear. Sleep now.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, wiped his face, and the pivoted to lay down, boots and all. He closed his eyes, tossing an arm over his face.
His breathing evened, and I’d have sworn he was asleep, until he tilted his head and peered at me one-eyed. “You too.”
“Gotta keep watch.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. The traps were only the layer of security I had to set up manually. I’ve got other means of being alerted to intruders.”
“Like?”
“Cans on a wire, buried under layers of leaves. Trip on the wire hidden down near the ground, and you set off an almighty jangle.”
I laughed. “You really know your guerrilla tactics, don’t you?”
He smiled, eyes closing again. “Yep. I have a master’s in history from Princeton. My thesis was on guerrilla warfare tactics throughout history.”
I frowned at him as I sat down on the edge of the bed near him. “A masters from Princeton?”
He nodded. “And a PhD in computer science from MIT.”
“Bullshit.”
He laughed. “I got bored working at the NSA. My job only took about half of my time and attention, so I arranged for correspondence
courses from Princeton and MIT. I’d crunch code for forty-eight hours straight, finish my coursework, crash for twelve hours, and do it again. I eventually managed to get the powers that be to give me time off to finish the coursework that required my presence in person. I’d commute back and forth from Princeton to MIT every week, with one set of classes at MIT all day Monday and Tuesday, the other set at Princeton all day Thursday and Friday—three class blocks each day. I’d drive up to MIT Sunday nights, go to classes all day both days and do homework all night, sleep until noon on Wednesday, drive down to New Jersey that evening, go to classes, do homework, sleep all day Saturday, do it again. I was going full time at two universities.”
I boggled at him. “How the fuck is that possible?”
He shrugged. “I can go long periods of time without sleep and still function at almost a hundred percent, and my brain just functions at a speed and capacity for information retention most people’s don’t. But, really, it’s just a matter of being able to compartmentalize and hyper-focus, and not needing much sleep. I don’t know. I don’t think I could do it now, but I felt superhuman back then.”
“That is superhuman.”
Another of those lazy, dismissive shrugs. “It was a long time ago, and I was a different person. That was…before.”
Slowly, stiffly, awkwardly, I lay down beside him. “Before what?”
A long silence; I again thought he’d fallen asleep. “Before my life went totally sideways.” Another long silence, and then, his voice muzzy and heavy: “I’ll tell you about after I wake up.”
The bed was small, and he wasn’t a small person. Neither was I, for that matter. We were both still fully dressed, including bulletproof vests and gear webbing, but we were both trained to fall asleep under any circumstances, and so we did.
Or at least, he did.
I lay awake a while longer, aware of him, his breathing, his heat, of everything.
Finally, I managed to will myself to sleep.
I woke up more disoriented than I can ever remember feeling upon waking. Utterly comfortable, warm, heavy, rested. The more I woke up, however, the less comfortable I became. My face was on something lumpy and hard.
Lear: Alpha One Security: Book 5 Page 10