Midnight Vengeance

  At home he could take precautions. His keyboard was TEMPEST-proof. His computer had a firewall that, if it were a real wall, could be seen from the moon.

  The walls of his home had a special cladding that bounced any type of electronic surveillance, and the windows had a molecule-thick graphene film coating that protected against laser listening devices.

  Essentially his house was what intelligence agencies call a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence Facility. What happened in his home stayed in his home.

  Everything on his computer was saved to a cloud managed in Estonia, guaranteed anonymity for ten thousand USD a year, cheap at the price.

  His home was as secure as he could make it, and he preferred to work there.

  Long silence. Then finally Mechanical Voice spoke. “Word has it you’re the best.”

  Damn straight. “Yes,” he said.

  A mechanical sigh. “All right. But I want results soon.”

  “You’ll have them. And now...about the fee.”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  Not enough for what would eventually lead to a dead body. Frederick didn’t care what happened to Anne Lowell but blood shed was always more dangerous than shifting bitcoins around. The police were more tenacious about blood spilled than money lost. There was a remote possibility that this could somehow boomerang.

  “Half a million,” he replied.

  Another pause, then—”Done.”

  “Half now and half when I make her available to you.”

  “Ah.” The mechanical voice stopped. “I was thinking you could, um, extract the information yourself.”

  Frederick was many things, but he wasn’t a thug. Nor a torturer. He shuddered at the thought. He was a civilized man. “No,” he said firmly. “I hand Anne over to you and you do the honors.”

  A slight hesitation. “Done. Text your account details to this number.”

  Nail it down, Frederick thought. “Two hundred and fifty K, up front.”

  “Yes. The second half when I take possession of the girl.”

  It was clear that Mechanical Voice wasn’t going to let Anne live after he got his hands on the jewels. Whether by Jorge’s or MV’s hand, Anne Lowell was already dead. The only difference was that one option would net him half a million dollars more. This guy sounded serious. Frederick didn’t think Jorge had much money anymore. There was no question which boss Frederick was going to choose.

  “So I call this number when I have the girl?” he asked.

  “Yes.” The connection was broken.

  Frederick texted his Caymans account number and waited. Gratifyingly, the money showed up in minutes. In untraceable bitcoins.

  It was always good dealing with a better class of criminal.

  Portland

  Lauren screamed and turned as white as the snow outside. She stumbled.

  Fuck! Jacko hadn’t thought it through. He took a fast step forward and put his arms around her.

  “Whoa.” She was shaking so hard she vibrated against him. He held her tighter. “Hey. Sorry to scare you. Let’s get you inside. It’s cold here in the garage.”

  She didn’t move. “Jacko?” she whispered, voice trembling. She pushed against him weakly. “How did you—you don’t understand. I have to go.”

  Jacko looked down at her. He hated the look on her white face. The same look she’d had last night when the fucker’d taken her photograph. Drawn, terrified. His instinct then was right. She was scared to death of someone. Jacko had no idea who that fucker could be but he was a walking dead man. And he wouldn’t lay a finger on Lauren, guaranfuckingteed.

  She was panting with distress, breath a cloud around her beautiful head in the freezing garage. She was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering.

  The hell with this.

  “Come on, honey.” It was really hard to keep his voice even because just the thought of someone after Lauren, someone wanting to hurt her...shit.

  Jacko knew he had a deep, rough voice. Nothing he could do about that. But he tried to modulate it, keep his rage out of it, be reassuring. He wasn’t good at the reassurance thing, he was better at being a badass, but this was Lauren and whatever she needed, he needed to give it to her. Right now she needed him to be calm and reassuring. “Let’s go back inside. You can’t stay here—you’re freezing to death.”

  She pulled away, movements slow, uncoordinated. Jacko recognized shock. He’d seen enough of it in his life. He kept her trembling, ice-cold hands in his.

  Even terrified and shocked, she was still so fucking beautiful. Those frosted blue eyes searched his. He didn’t know what she was looking for but she wasn’t finding it. She wheezed, pulled in air. Though she tugged at his hands, he wasn’t letting go. His hold tightened, painless but firm.

  “Jacko, you don’t understand. I have to go. Have to. Right now.”

  Jacko brought her hands to his mouth, hoping he was transferring some warmth to her. “No, I don’t understand. Tell me about it. Make me understand. Whatever it is, we can face it together.”

  Her hands jerked in his; she became even paler. “No!” Lauren shuddered deeply. “God no. He could hurt you too.”

  Man, whoever this fucker was, he was dead meat.

  “I’m hard to hurt, honey,” he said gently. “Now come inside and tell me what this is all about.”

  She must have seen that he meant business, that she wasn’t going anywhere, because when he pulled her toward the door leading back into the kitchen, she didn’t resist. Good.

  The first thing he did was sit her down on her sofa and drop his tux jacket over her knees. It would retain some of his body warmth, which she needed. He got up briefly to turn her heating back on. She jumped at the whump! of the boiler switching on.

  When he sat down beside her again and held her hands, she pulled away.

  “You need to let me go.” A small slender hand covered her mouth. “You don’t understand, Jacko. He’ll find me again. He killed two people to get to me. I’m putting everyone in danger by staying. I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to.”

  Two people had been killed? The hair on his forearms stood up. This was worse than he thought.

  Lauren, dead.

  The image bloomed in his head, in vivid colors. Jacko had seen a lot of dead people over the years, some by his hand. It was never easy, never pretty. His head couldn’t wrap around the idea of a murdered Lauren.

  Sure, she would die some day. A beautiful, white-haired Lauren seventy years from now, gorgeous and peaceful in her casket. Dead in her sleep.

  Jacko knew, bone deep, what people who’d been killed looked like. Violent death was his thing, what he’d trained all his adult life for. He knew it inside out and it should never be anywhere near Lauren.

  Violent death was grotesque. Lacerations, burned skin, blood everywhere. He couldn’t think of that in relation to Lauren—it messed with his head. That pale, perfect skin, slashed. Beautiful head, the pink mist of a head shot surrounding it. Slender limbs, broken.

  Someone killing her, then walking away. It was bad enough thinking of her being hunted before he knew her. Now that he knew her, now that she was his—no. It drove him crazy, just the thought of it.

  Something big had come into his world with Lauren. Bits and pieces of it had slid into his life as he spent time with his bosses’ women. Quick glimpses of a new world, a different world. Beauty and grace and stillness and peace. Things he had never had in his life. And then Lauren had arrived and a door had been thrown open. He hadn’t actually thought of walking through that door. It was enough to see what was on the other side.

  But last night he’d walked through that door and there was no going back.

  He didn’t believe in God and he didn’t believe in heaven or hell. But if he did, he could say he’d glimpsed heaven with Lauren. Which was crazy, of course.

  But still.

  She was watching him out of huge eyes. “How did you know? I thought you’d gone. Ho
w did you know to come back?”

  Because the entire morning was a goodbye. “Instinct,” he said. “I lifted the car keys from your purse. When I left, I parked around the corner and doubled back, picked your garage lock, waited for you.” It had been child’s play. For a woman on the run, Lauren had no notion of tradecraft. No matter. She didn’t need it. She had him now. “On my way in, I disabled the security cam across the street. There were no others. Right now there are no eyes on you.”

  Her eyes widened. She’d had no idea of the existence of the vidcam on the front porch of her neighbor’s house.

  “Okay. That—that’s good.”

  “So you wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  Lauren’s face turned serious. “I don’t know, Jacko. I’ve never told anyone. It’s—it’s so hard. Once I tell you, you’re involved.”

  She studied his face and he let her. He didn’t think words would do the trick, and he wasn’t good with words anyway. All he really had was himself and what he felt about her, which was that he was a mean motherfucker and that he would lay down his life for her. It had to be enough.

  She took her time, which was okay by him. If he was running from someone he’d be careful who to trust, too.

  Finally, Lauren gave a sigh, turned her hands in his and held his hands tight. Her body told him before the words did that she had decided.

  “My name isn’t Lauren, Jacko,” she started. Jacko wasn’t too surprised. In the military there were lots of guys who were running from their background and they all had nicknames.

  He nodded. “Jacko’s not my name, either.”

  “I know,” she said. “But you didn’t change yours to hide from a madman.”

  He was listening to her voice but he was also listening to the pattern of her breathing, watching the blinking of her eyes. He casually held a finger to her racing pulse. Those things told him as much as the words did.

  She was stressed, terrified.

  He’d been trained in interrogation. He knew how to break bad guys, how to extract all the intel possible, and he wasn’t gentle about it. He didn’t want to break Lauren though, God no. But he did want to understand. So he wouldn’t trick her out of intel or beat it out of her, but he could make her trust him enough to talk. He turned still, letting her take her time to decide. Stillness was a gift and he’d always had it.

  For Lauren, he could wait forever.

  She continued watching him and he turned himself into a still pool. No possible threat, just acceptance. Whatever she wanted to tell him, he was ready to hear it.

  Quiet, inside and outside the small pretty house. Snow was falling steadily, damping sounds. He turned himself into a statue, breathing from his diaphragm, slow, steady, silent.

  She watched him for a full minute, two.

  Jacko wasn’t used to opening himself up in any way to anyone, but he did it now. With most people he presented an opaque front. He had a rough background and he’d learned the hard way that you don’t present any weakness to the world.

  He’d been born to a druggie mom who dragged home a succession of “uncles” who rarely spent more than a weekday or two with them. One of the fucks had been his father, though he had no clue which one. Neither did his mom. He didn’t even have a clue what race his dad was. One thing was for sure, though—the fucker wasn’t white bread, no sir. Jacko looked like a mongrel with a hundred different ethnicities swimming in his blood. In the Navy he put himself down as Mixed Race.

  He’d zipped fast and hard through adolescence where he’d been thrown out of high school for fighting so often he just stopped going, then straight into the Navy where he got his GCE. From there just kept moving faster and harder up into the SEALs.

  SEALs weren’t touchy-feely kind of guys. He didn’t like talking about his childhood and he couldn’t talk about his missions with the SEALs or for ASI, which didn’t leave much space for small talk. Fine with him. He wasn’t into emoting or group hugs. Right now, though, he tried to dismantle a lifetime of thick concrete walls, the ones that had saved him as a child and that allowed him to function in the hellholes he was sent to as an adult.

  He wanted Lauren to trust him, instinctively. He wanted to be the guy she turned to, instinctively. So he sat, wanting her to understand she could trust him.

  It wasn’t that hard. His teammates knew everything about him they needed to know, which was that he was loyal and knew how to shoot. Lauren could know more. No walls with Lauren.

  Finally, she nodded. “Okay. I grew up in Boston. My parents divorced when I was ten and my father died soon after. My mother married a very rich man from Florida, originally from Colombia. Very, very rich. Alfonso Guttierez. He didn’t make his money the nice way, though she didn’t care. He had enough money to create a patina of elegance around him, but he was a crime lord. Drugs, guns, you name it. Officially, his money came from a string of casinos and hotels and restaurants he owned.

  “My mother liked the money, and didn’t care how he got it. I was sent to boarding school throughout my teens and then went directly to college in upstate New York and got a job at a museum in Chicago. I rarely went home to Florida. There was something creepy about my stepfather and all that wealth. I didn’t want any part of it. I would have died rather than touch a penny of my stepfather’s money. He had a big family back in Colombia and took a nephew in to what I guess you could call the family business. Scumbagitude. Alfonso was able to hide what he was under an elegant façade but Jorge was...” she shuddered. “Jorge was bad news. Violent and a little crazy. And unlike Alfonso he gambled and took drugs himself. Two years ago, my mother and Alfonso were in a car crash that killed them both. Alfonso had made my mother his universal heir. She outlived him by an hour and the entire empire came to me.”

  Lauren’s head fell slowly forward to his shoulder. Jacko cupped the back of her neck and waited. He placed his thumb along the carotid and felt the fast pulse there. Her warm breath washed his neck.

  She pulled back, looked him in the eyes. “I inherited millions. I don’t even know how much. I didn’t want it, but the law wanted to give it to me anyway. Six hours after my mother’s will was read, Jorge tried to kill me. He killed a girlfriend who was staying with me instead. And he killed another friend his goons mistook for me. I barely escaped that time, too. I survived this long in Portland because a—a friend got me new ID. But he is after me and he will never stop.” For a second, Jacko was so filled with rage he couldn’t think, which was bad. Elite soldiers don’t have feelings. They don’t want to kill. They could when they had to, no question, but that’s not what SEALs were about.

  But right now? Right now he wanted to rip this Jorge’s heart out of his chest, see his blood flow, look down on his dead carcass and spit on it. He shook with the desire to kill.

  Jacko had to wait a moment until his voice was calm. Inside he was raging but Lauren needed to see him in control. He pulled away, lifted her head so she could look him in the eyes to see the truth of what he said.

  “That’s over, honey. It’s all over. No one is ever going to hurt you again, even come near you, not as long as I am alive.” He waited for the words to sink in. “Do you believe me?”

  “I—I think I do.” She nodded jerkily. “I really really don’t want that money, Jacko. I don’t even know how to give it to him, which I would if I could. I think I could renounce it legally but I’d have to come out in the open and he’d get to me. That money is tainted—it makes me sick just to think of it. But he wants me dead now, no matter what.”

  Lauren put her hand against his face. He hadn’t shaved so she’d be feeling bristly stubble. Her hand was cold against his cheek. She tried to smile. “I know you think you can keep me safe but you’ve got a job, Jacko. A life. You can’t stick by my side 24/7.”

  Oh yes I can, he thought.

  “I’ll show you.” Jacko put his hand under her elbow and rose. She rose with him, surprised.

  “Show me what?”

  “You’ll
see. Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  * * *

  Jacko was fast.

  It had taken her two hours to pack her car but it took him only fifteen minutes to transfer all her car’s contents to his SUV, even though there wasn’t that much room with the huge bike in back. He brought his vehicle around, backed it into her garage and worked quickly and quietly.

  When she asked if she could help, he said she could pack more of her stuff if she wanted, so she did. Including things it had broken her heart to leave behind. It felt good to be able to have more of her books, the two sets of linen Frette sheets, the posters of Picasso’s bullfighters she’d had framed in light maplewood.

  He came to get her in her bedroom, kissed her nose and lifted the bags from her hands.

  Lauren looked up at him, at that dark intent face. As usual, she couldn’t read his expression. He presented a completely blank slate to the world and for the first time, she wondered whether it was a tactic as opposed to his nature. Because the man who’d been in bed with her was not a blank slate. He was a man of fire and passion.

  She put a hand on his forearm, savoring the power and the warmth, and said the hard thing that needed to be said. “Jacko, last chance. Some very powerful people are after me. Jorge has an army of goons. The last thing I want is for you to be hurt.”

  “Honey.” He put his hard hand over hers and oh wow, it felt like he was transferring strength to her by touch. “I’m not going to get hurt and neither are you. Guaranteed.”

  Guaranteed. Nobody could guarantee anything in this world. She knew that. Her mother and stepfather had been protected by vast amounts of money and a phalanx of thugs and in the end, they’d succumbed to a drugged-up teenager. Life at times was like a scorpion, stinging everything within reach. So no, Jacko couldn’t guarantee her safety or even his own.

  But she felt better. It was like a small lifeboat suddenly appearing in a storm where she was barely keeping her head above water. Crazy as it sounded, she felt reassured. And she didn’t feel so alone.

  It had been so very hard before Portland, completely on her own with her secrets and in hiding. Sure she had Felicity and Felicity was great, but Lauren liked being surrounded by friends. It had been the hardest part of being a runaway—being alone. It was why she had slipped up here in Portland, lulled by the friendship of Suzanne and Allegra and Claire. Enveloped in their warm embrace.