That beautiful woman, dead on the ground, brains and blood and bone spattered everywhere.
He couldn’t even go there. Now that he’d found her again, he realized suddenly, he wasn’t letting go.
He’d dedicated his adult life to his country, his family had been decimated, he’d lived in hiding for six months, putting himself in a dark deep hole, isolated and alone—and then he’d found Summer again.
She made him feel alive after a long time feeling like he’d been buried in the stone cold ground. She made his heart beat again.
No one was going to touch her.
However, saying no, no way are you coming near this fucking story was not going to cut it. He had no say over her life, though he’d like to. He’d like to have the right to tell her to do whatever she wanted as long as she stayed far away from Blake and whatever fuckheads he’d been conspiring with.
If he had a staple, he’d have stapled his mouth shut because that was what it was going to take.
“Um, we’ll see. Ah, I’ll make sure Nick feeds you intel as soon as we’ve verified it. So don’t worry that you’ll, ah, miss out on this story. It’s, um—” He licked suddenly dry lips. Fifteen years lying for a living, lying for his country, and he sounded like a moron whose hand had been caught in the cookie jar and was lying his way out of it. “It’s a big story, I know—”
Summer’s eyes widened with every stuttering word. She crossed her arms and tightened her lips and everything in her body language told him she was rejecting him and what he was saying.
“Jack Delvaux.” Her nostrils flared. Damn, she was pretty when she was angry. Color high in that pale rose skin, light gray eyes flashing like lightning. He shouldn’t be thinking this. He should be marshaling his facts, preparing a counter argument, preparing to convince her that this story was like grasping a third rail. Instant death.
Instead, like a crazy fuck, he savored the feel of the air around her heating up, watched her eyes flash and thought about her mouth that very recently had been touching his.
Focus, you fuck! he told himself. But he was AWOL.
He tried on a smile. “That’s my name, don’t use it up.” The old childhood response when his mom reprimanded him for something he’d done.
“That’s not funny. This is serious.”
He nodded. Yes, it was. And she seriously was not going after this story until it was over and all the bad guys were in jail. And even then...
“You have that look.”
“That look?” He feigned innocence, though it was hard. He looked every minute of his thirty-four years and then some. And on his face it was clear that he hadn’t spent all that time reading in the library and helping little old ladies cross the street.
“That look of someone who wants to keep information secret. I encounter that look every single day of my working life, and let me tell you I make my living—a very good living at that—by getting past people who don’t want me to know anything.”
Shit. She thought this was about keeping secrets? Fuck no. This was about keeping her safe.
Jack no longer had a smile lurking in his voice. “These are very dangerous people, Summer. You know that. I’m just trying to keep you alive.”
Summer stepped closer to him, until she was almost touching him. Which was fine, fine. Except she hadn’t stepped closer to him because she wanted to give him another one of those amazing kisses. No, this was pure aggression, stepping into his personal space, up in his face.
Her expression was all business, sober and serious. “I have never run away from a story I felt to be in the public interest. Ever. And I have no intention of running away now. So you can take your fake concern and stick it—”
Jack kissed her. He couldn’t help himself. It was wrong wrong wrong. He told himself that even as he reached out to pull her toward him and crushed his mouth on hers. And yes, it was just as magical as the last time, and he was expecting the magic so it was real. It wasn’t just him being starved for a woman, any woman. He was starved for this woman, who felt so perfect in his arms. Mouth so soft, skin so warm...
Summer wrenched herself out of his arms and slapped him, hard, across the face. It was a real slap, too. Not a slap for form’s sake. His skin tingled.
He’d been tortured once. For eight hours before Hugh sent backup. It had been totally dispassionate and he’d survived.
This...hurt. Seeing Summer so angry at him hurt. She was absolutely right of course. You don’t shut a woman up by kissing her. Even Jack knew that. He’d been out of touch with women for a while, and over the past six months women had been like an alien species to him, but he knew that.
The thing was, he had absolutely not been able to resist her. Even now he was looking for a way to do it again. How could he say he was sorry when he wasn’t? Saying he was sorry for kissing her was absurd. It was the best thing to happen to him since the Massacre.
But—he had to take a stab at making amends because he saw coldness beyond the anger in Summer’s eyes and that scared him more than the anger.
He hadn’t thought it through. Jack Delvaux, ace super secret agent for fifteen years, hadn’t thought it through.
It was entirely possible that a lot of men had tried to get her to shut up by trying to kiss her. That just now occurred to him. She lived in a man’s world and men were pricks. Jack should know—he was one of them.
So he opened his mouth to give an apology when he didn’t feel in the least apologetic and he was saved by the bell. Or at least a ring tone. Sinnerman, Nick’s ringtone. Nick had programmed it in himself.
Jack held up a finger and watched as her jaws flexed. Just a minute, he mouthed then answered with the fervor of a man who’d been saved from annihilation.
“Nick. My man. Wassup?”
“Where are you?” Nick usually started off with howzzit hangin’? so his deep sober tone made Jack stand straighter and shoot a glance at Summer. Whatever this was about it wasn’t about Summer because she was standing right in front of him, glaring.
Except it was about Summer.
“I set up—or rather Felicity set up—a surveillance bot for Summer. Felicity’s a big fan of the blog and she wants to keep Summer safe. So she checked the cameras across the street from Summer’s place and got this—”
“What?” Summer asked Jack. “What is it?”
Grimly, Jack angled his screen so she could see and put it on speakerphone.
Summer cocked her head as she stared at the screen. A night view of a suburban street, greenery, an old jalopy parked on the street. His.
“I don’t see what—”
And then she could see what it was because it was a view of her apartment building. It was static, from a security camera. Not much appeared to be happening.
“There!” Jack said, and checked the timeline. Half an hour ago. He moved the slider from right to left and pointed to a spot on the screen.
Summer frowned, leaned closer. “What is it?”
Jack watched it again. “The head of someone, moving against the blinds. While we were here.” He met her eyes. “Someone’s been in your place, Summer.”
Blood drained from her face. “An intruder?” she breathed.
“An intruder.” Jack nodded. “Not me. So he didn’t mean you any good.” He addressed the screen. “Tell Felicity good catch.” She’d done superb work.
“That isn’t all that we caught tonight,” Nick’s voice was grim. “There’s more. Two agents I trust were nearby and I asked them to go into Summer’s place, see if we could get fingerprints, DNA, something. Summer’s triggered some kind of trip wire and if we can get the identity of the intruder we’ll have a trail to follow. Or we thought we’d have a trail to follow.”
This wasn’t sounding good. “And?”
“These two guys are g
ood, and discreet. Don’t worry about any leaks. One of them had the presence of mind to take out a sniffer and wand the door.”
Fear pumped a sudden icy jet in Jack’s veins. His voice turned hoarse. “There was a bomb?”
“No,” Nick said and Jack’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Something worse.”
Summer’s face was icy white. Her hands were clenched, knuckles pale. “Worse than a bomb?” she whispered. “What’s worse than a bomb?”
The screen changed and Jack could see Nick’s face, narrow-eyed and tense. “It was a new type of sensor we’re testing and it picks up about twenty types of explosives and four major bioweapons. Sarin, ricin, anthrax and botulinum.”
Summer swallowed, that long white neck bobbing. “And—and which was it?”
“Sarin,” Nick said. “They left a booby trap. The next time you opened your door, you’d have received a blast of sarin in your face. You’d have been dead inside the hour, Summer, and a sarin death is not pretty. They’re evacuating the building now.”
“That’s it,” Jack said, decisively. That was it for him. He couldn’t continue investigating in DC, not with Summer. And he wasn’t willing to leave her for a second. So he was done. “I’m taking Summer to my safe house and tomorrow we’re flying to Portland. Tell ASI to send a plane.”
San Francisco
The house was perfect. In the Mission, but enough on the edge of the fast growing and gentrifying tech sector to make it plausible for four young tech slackers to share the rent.
Drunks and addicts to the left of them, Google to the right, they set up shop. It was an old building, practically with a sell by date on its façade. It would fall to the tech giants soon. If not this year, then the next. As inevitable as looking at an old dog and knowing that it would die sooner or later.
Ostensibly the four young men were renting but actually the building and the two neighboring buildings were owned by a shell company that, if you wanted to spend about six months digging, was ultimately owned by the PLA. No one was interested enough to spend those six months and if they were, by the time the six months were up, the PLA would own most of California anyway.
The four young men operated very discreetly. They had a satellite uplink disguised as an HVAC on the roof, which was a weak spot. It was the only HVAC on the block, but the rooflines were changing monthly. No one would notice.
They had reinforced internet connections via a thick cable that snaked out of the building.
That was for the primary mission.
They were ready for the post-mission period, too. The basements of their building and the two adjacent buildings contained brand new powerful generators that could keep electricity running in their buildings for months. Special films had been put over all the windows. They were invisible from the outside but they acted as light filters. The time would come when there were no lights in the city and their building would be a beacon.
Thanks to the film, no light would escape. No one would know they were the only ones with power.
The three buildings were four stories tall. The team operated out of the first floor of the central building. That was where they worked, ate and slept. The other rooms on the other floors were filled floor to ceiling with supplies. Food, water, arms. They could live twenty years on what was in the buildings.
Twenty years wouldn’t be necessary, of course, but it was good to be prepared.
The generators and supplies had been brought in by stealth, at night, unloading vans from the alleyway in back. Supplies had been purchased from valid credit cards in fake names within a radius of a hundred miles, no purchase so big it would raise eyebrows.
Two of them had studied in the US and could easily pass for American. They made a point of hanging out in the local coffee shops and noodle shops, until they became a familiar sight. There were plenty of twenty something slackers dressed in torn jeans and tees. One of them had a favorite tee with KEEP CALM AND CODE on it. That got him knowing smiles from the baristas.
Finally, the preparations were over. They were fully stocked. Their use of power from the grid was perfectly normal—no billing anomalies would be noted. They used the grid for light and for the monitor they used for entertainment. The rest came from the monster generators in the basement.
The leader—lean and handsome, straight black hair down to his shoulders, wearing a Daft Punk T-shirt—was about to send an encrypted message in the secure uplink, directly to the overhead satellite and it was then bounced down to a secure receiver in Pudong. It was a message that could not be intercepted by the NSA.
The leader could just see the general receiving the message. General Chen Yi’s office was on the twelfth floor of an anonymous-looking building in the Pudong District of Shanghai. The General had come up with the plan, a brilliant one, for taking over the most powerful country on earth without firing a shot. Funded by the billions and billions of dollars siphoned off the American economy after the Massacre. An audacious plan, using America’s strength against it.
General Chen Yi knew that a fighting war was unthinkable. America had a million and a half active military personnel, eight thousand tanks, fourteen thousand military aircraft, twenty aircraft carriers and seventy submarines, backed by a military budget of six hundred billion dollars.
A huge, powerful dragon standing guard over the hoard of treasure that was the United States of America.
An enormous fortress, sky high and incredibly wide, almost invincible.
And the back door was wide open.
They were ready.
The leader, who blended right in with the other slackers in the coffee shops of the Mission, was actually a lieutenant in the PLA and hand-picked by Chen Li to lead the mission. In San Francisco he was known as Jason Lee, his private joke, as a huge fan of vintage Bruce Lee films. He passed as a third generation Chinese-American, fully blended in.
In truth he was Zhang Wei, handpicked by Chen Yi when he was twelve and a computer prodigy.
Zhang Wei was very aware of what he was doing and of the upheaval to come, orchestrated by him and his team. The plan was excellent. And necessary.
He sat in his chair and opened up the satellite link for the first time.
Mission-ready, he keyed in, sending his message to General Chen Yi in person.
Excellent. Everything on schedule, the reply came immediately.
Chapter Six
Summer was frozen, incapable of moving, even of breathing.
Someone had booby trapped her home. If not for Jack, she’d be dead by now, or dying. Area 8 had done a special series on bioweapons and she knew enough about sarin to know that she’d have had a horrific death.
Sarin turned the body against itself. Within seconds there was an acetylcholine buildup that made the system go haywire. Sarin gas had no smell and no taste. Summer would have no idea what was happening.
Within seconds, her body would start to go crazy, nose running, eyes leaking tears, suddenly vomiting, bowels and bladder loosening. She’d be on the floor, panicking because her body was out of control. She wouldn’t have the energy to call 911. Not that 911 could arrive in time.
She’d be dead by the time they came pounding at her door. Dead in a pool of tears, feces and urine.
Summer had seen photographs from a secret file of people who’d died of sarin poisoning and the world tuned out as she saw those photographs in her mind’s eye. Superimposed her face on those contorted bodies who’d died wracked with pain.
“Summer!”
Someone shook her, hard.
She jolted, came back to herself. Jack had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.
“Summer, snap out of it!” He bent, put his face next to hers until all she saw was him. He was frowning, concerned. “You okay?”
She looked at him, chilled to the bone.
Her mouth opened to say she was okay but she wasn’t. Not in this universe or any other could she be okay knowing someone had tried to poison her with sarin.
“We’re getting out of here.” Jack’s words barely penetrated. He disappeared and Summer felt even more chilled. Having that big body next to hers had given her some heat but now she felt frozen, bereft.
Dimly, as if from a great distance, she heard him rummaging around, with no idea what he could be doing. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even turn her head to follow what he was doing, she was nailed to the floor, trying to contain the wild trembling, trying to focus through the spots dancing before her eyes.
Something heavy and warm fell on her shoulders and her hands reached reflexively to hold it around her. The trembling eased.
Jack was back, some of that amazing warmth was back. He lifted her chin so she was forced to look him in the face. His eyes were narrowed, skin tight over the cheekbones. He had a big black hat on. A Fedora. “You’re in shock, sweetheart, and you have every right to be. But we can’t stay here, we’ve got to go. I have the flash drives and Hector’s computer. You can’t go back to your apartment so you’re coming with me.”
Nothing penetrated except the words—coming with me.
God, yes. After flashing on a horrific death, writhing on the floor alone, unable even to call for help—staying close by Jack sounded like a burst of heat in the Arctic. Because underneath the horrific image of her body on the ground in death throes was something else. Not an image, a truth.
She was alone.
If she’d been blasted by sarin gas, she’d have called 911 if she could. But who else would she call for help? She didn’t have any close friends she could call and there sure wasn’t a lover. A man who cared for her, who wanted her safe and happy.
Area 8 was mainly staffed by freelancers. Her editors—she knew them at work, had little idea of their private lives. And they were journalists—word nerds. No one you’d call for help in an emergency.