Live and Let Love
Kennett stepped out onto the porch in his boxers and a T-shirt and called out after them, “What do you see, boys? What’s out there?”
When they caught the scent Jack had planted, they took an abrupt right turn and, barking, ran down the floral path to total frustration.
Boys and their hormones!
Kennett shook his head. “Damn, dogs! Stop waking me to run after squirrels and deer!” he yelled. Then he stepped back inside.
Jack watched the lights go off in the house in a pattern that led to the bedroom. The Rooster had gone back to bed.
Jack surveyed Kennett’s apple barn. The door was padlocked shut. That was a cinch for Jack to break through. The lock didn’t worry him.
It was the rest of Kennett’s elaborate security system that concerned him. Kennett was an out-of-the-box thinker, as that gun in Jack’s oven indicated. What other crazy devices had the Rooster rigged to keep intruders out of his precious apple barn and away from that hidden bomb shelter?
Thoughts of Home Alone and a blowtorch that would singe Jack’s head when he opened the door raced through his mind. He could disable electronics. He’d already jammed Kennett’s monitoring devices and cameras. It was the unexpected homebrew gadgets that worried Jack.
Kennett had apparently gone back to bed. Which didn’t give Jack much comfort. Kennett could spring up and awake any moment, recovering from a concussion or not. Jack didn’t feel like lingering.
Kennett’s system was way too elaborate for protecting a cashbox and a few bins of apples.
Jack shrugged, donned his shielded gloves in case Kennett had electrified the padlock, got out his industrial-strength bolt cutter, and nipped the padlock off.
So far, so good. Jack’s hair wasn’t standing on end. He moved in and surveyed the barn. It took him a minute to locate the hidden trapdoor. Kennett had concealed it with a covering of hay.
Jack kneeled and brushed the hay away. As he hunkered down in Kennett’s barn, staring through his night-vision goggles at the trapdoor that led into Kennett’s bomb shelter, he felt the familiar mission thrill. Which was a very good thing, and the payoff for being bored out of his mind as he’d watched Kennett’s house and orchard all afternoon, mapping Kennett’s pattern of everyday life and watching person after person troop in to pick and buy apples and get another good dose of Kennett’s poisonous lies.
Jack took a myriad of devices from his backpack and scanned the door, checking for explosives and electric currents.
Damn! Just as he thought. The door was wired. Without knowing how it was rigged, it was too risky to try to break in.
Jack bent down and sniffed the trapdoor. Some people have a nose for fine wine. Jack had a nose for chemicals and explosives.
Oh yeah. He picked up overtones of various apple scents, hay, dirt, and …
He grinned. As he suspected, the bastard had a boatload of fertilizer and chemical explosives stored in the bomb shelter. Ingenious and ironic bastard. Who, besides Jack, would look in a bomb shelter for a bomb?
Jack pushed back to a squatting position. Time to call in a favor. He knew a guy with an airplane and a piece of high-tech wonder who could map this bunker out from the air. But first Jack had to sneak back to Aldo’s.
* * *
Willow lay in bed, thinking about Jack and Con. The way the Sense lit up every time she was around Con, the way her body reacted to him, all the clues …
Hang the DNA. Con was Jack. She believed that with every part of her being. Drew was right—no one and no evidence would convince her otherwise.
She just had to prove it. Had to get Con to admit he was Jack. She knew her husband. He’d never break his cover and never abort a mission. She kept going back to that.
Jack was here for a reason. She liked to think it was to see her and make sure she was doing okay. He’d always been protective. But tonight had convinced her there had to be more to it than that. Jack, of all people, would certainly realize the risk to his cover that she presented. He knew about the Sense and her intuitive nature. Emmett Nelson knew it, too. Neither one of them would take it lightly.
So why risk it? What was at stake here, in this tiny, out-of-the-way town where apples and sunshine reigned supreme? Was evil lurking somewhere she couldn’t see? Could she help Jack? How could she help him if she didn’t know what his mission was?
Drew hadn’t reported back to her yet. She could bug him, but what good would that do?
She had to discover what Jack’s mission was. If he was here, something sinister was going on. He was here to stop some serious evil from happening. Jack’s whole goal in life was to serve his country and protect its people from horrors they would never even know they faced.
She wasn’t a jealous woman. She didn’t hold a grudge. She didn’t blame people for their actions, especially if their motives were pure. She always believed the best in people. Another kind of woman would have been furious with Jack for cutting her out of his life and choosing his spy career over her.
Willow wasn’t that woman. She knew, from the core of her being, that Jack loved her and always would. If he’d chosen to go deep under the cover of death, it was to protect her and the country. Unless that explosion had messed with his head. But judging from the way Con behaved, it hadn’t. He seemed to have all his faculties firmly in place.
And, rats, she’d come close to seeing just how firmly.
No, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that Jack was here to save her and probably thousands of innocent people, too. Which didn’t alter her plan to sleep with him and prove to herself for sure and certain Con was Jack.
Once she had, she’d have Jack right where she wanted him. She’d be able to convince him to take her undercover with him wherever he went, even if she had to fake her death, too.
She lay back, looking up at the ceiling, and thought for a while longer about everything that had happened since she’d first seen Con at the apple growers’ dinner. Had that really been less than a week ago?
In those few days since Con turned up, Shane had taken suddenly ill, running completely against type and reputation and getting plastered after only a few drinks. Then someone had spiked the punch and half the town ended up hungover.
Willow suddenly smiled. Jack! You bad boy.
Those pranks were exactly the kind of thing Jack would do, especially if he was trying to keep her and Shane apart. She shook her head as her smile widened. Suddenly she saw Jack’s hand in everything. Things began to fall into place and make sense—the rooster falling from the second story. The way the Sense had warned her at the exact moment Con had noticed it and tried to protect her. Her sense of imminent danger, the foreboding …
Her mouth went dry. She gasped. That crazy, unruly hair on her neck stood straight up again, for the zillionth time. The rooster! She saw the incident in a different light now, as a real attack on Con, not just an accident.
Jack’s here fighting someone and that someone is fighting back.
Her heartbeat roared in her ears. She took a deep breath and tried to keep her thinking calm and clear. Think, Willow, think.
Who could be at the heart of all this?
Shane.
The name popped into her head. Everything revolved around him. He was relatively new to town, too. He and Con clearly didn’t like each other. And Shane was always pumping her for information about Jack. She shuddered.
Jack would risk the cover of death to come back and protect her from an evil man. She knew he would.
Oh, Jack.
She wished she could talk to him, confront him. But she knew it was pointless. He’d never admit to a thing.
She had to know for sure. She had to make certain she wasn’t wrong. There was only one thing to do—investigate Shane. Alone. She couldn’t share her fears with anyone. They’d think she’d turned into a conspiracy theorist and nutcase.
She’d have to be exceptionally careful. Because if Shane was an adversary of Jack’s he was an extreme
ly dangerous man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jack returned to Aldo’s. The two cups of spiked tea were still sitting on the coffee table where Willow had left them. He grabbed one and downed it. What the hell? His stomach had finally settled down and he needed a stiff one. For an alcoholic tea drink it wasn’t bad cold.
The scent of Willow’s perfume lingered in the chair where they’d been groping and on the cold air he’d let in when he’d aired out the bathroom.
He pulled his secure phone from his pocket, plopped into the chair, and inhaled deeply, dreaming just for a minute about Willow and what had almost transpired in the recliner. Damn, he’d have to be more careful from here on out.
He punched in the number of an old buddy of his from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Josiah Zaran, someone Emmett had cleared Jack to talk to, should he ever need Zaran’s help.
Zaran answered on the first ring. “Are you the first person in history to break through from the afterlife? Houdini must be mad as hell you beat him to it. I thought you were dead, my man.”
Jack laughed. “Stop bullshitting me. You’re one of the very few people with clearance to know better.”
Zaran was sometimes known as the Mole in intelligence circles because of the years early in his career that he’d spent belowground in Grand Forks, ND., tending intercontinental ballistic missiles in their hardened eighty-foot-deep silos. Now Zaran worked as an intelligence officer in the Underground Facility Analysis Center, a joint effort of various intelligence communities, including the National Security Agency, that was housed not too far from Langley, Virginia. Former CIA director John Deutch had established the center as a think tank where intelligence officers could brainstorm ways to find and destroy the United States’ enemies’ underground clandestine weapon sites.
Zaran had access to a plane or two equipped with electromagnetic gear that beamed electromagnetic energy down, illuminating underground sites powerfully enough to map a fly on the wall of a bunker beneath the ground.
“I need a plane, Zar.”
“What the hell, radio silence for two years and now you need a plane. Where, when, and what the hell for?”
Jack started with the easy questions. “Immediately if not sooner. To map an underground bunker I believe is housing explosives and plans to disrupt the upcoming G Eight auxiliary meeting.” He took a deep breath and explained about Orchard Bluff, hoping Zaran didn’t laugh in his face.
“Holy shit,” Zaran said. “You want me to buzz an apple orchard on U.S. soil?”
“No,” Jack said calmly. “I want you to fly over at fifty thousand feet and map out an enemy combatant’s lair so I can carry out my mission to stop him from killing innocent people.”
Zaran laughed again and let loose a string of casual, conversational curses. “You don’t ask for much. You know how much jet fuel I’ll use sending out one of my spy planes?”
“Yeah, I have a pretty good idea. Less than you use on most of your test runs.” Jack took a breath. “Look, Zar, you know I never ask unless it’s important. Take it all the way to the President to get clearance if you have to. Let him decide whether he wants a terrorist attack on his watch or not.”
Zaran cursed some more. He used curses as filler words the way some people used um. “I don’t need the President’s approval for a mission like this. Fine, you have your plane. One fly-by should do it.”
“When will I have my data? I need to strike quickly and get the hell out of Dodge,” Jack said.
“I’ll have it to you tomorrow morning. You can wait until oh seven hundred, I assume. It’ll take me an hour or two to get the proper clearance to get a pilot and flight plan. And since you’ve been dead for two years, I imagine you could use your beauty sleep. We should give you a new code name. How about Zombie?”
“I liked Sariel better, but I guess that one’s out of commission now.”
“Yeah, like you were ever an angel.”
* * *
Willow opened the caramel shop, thinking of Shane. She needed to get into his house and see what Jack could be interested in.
She’d never paid much attention to Grant’s place before, even after she met Shane, other than to decide it was a mess and still reeked of fussy old lady. But Con had gone up into Shane’s bedroom and seen something there. Willow was certain of it now that she thought back and remembered how Con had looked when he’d come down from the room Shane was staying in. And it hadn’t been a ghost, either. Con had also been particularly curious about the bomb shelter. If Con was Jack, as she believed he was, he had a reason.
Shane. She couldn’t believe she was suspecting him of who knows what. She certainly didn’t have a clue. He didn’t seem like an enemy spy. But then, Jack didn’t seem like a spy, either. And no one would ever think all-American Drew was a spy. No one in her family even suspected Jack might be one. But the ones you didn’t suspect were the best spies, weren’t they? The ones who went around destroying cars and buildings like James Bond were a bit too obvious.
Shane’s interest in Jack was also suspicious and a little too coincidental. There was something going on there. She just didn’t know what.
She hated the thought of being alone with Shane, but she had to know what Jack was up to if she was going to blackmail him into taking her with him when this mission was over. Once she slept with him and confronted him, of course.
She’d have to be careful, very, very careful, if she was going to potentially step into the middle of one of Jack’s missions.
She weighed the risk for less than a second. Any peril was worth getting Jack back. Life without him was just too empty.
There was no one in the store. She grabbed her phone and texted Shane: I need to talk to someone about Jack. Can I see you tonight?
* * *
Jack sat at the kitchen table in the guesthouse and went over the intel Zaran’s spy plane had collected. Outside, Aldo cussed and swore as he righted the metal rooster sculpture someone had tipped over in the night.
Rooster tipping. Only in Orchard Bluff.
Jack studied the images with the skill an ultrasound technician uses in detecting cancer or healthy babies. His trained eye picked up on things the casual observer would be oblivious to.
The bunker was a terrorist war room and command center. Bulletin boards full of airport and hotel floor plans and electronic circuit schematics. An adequate supply of food to last for weeks if Kennett needed to hide out there, waiting for a chance to escape. A decent supply of fertilizer and explosives, enough to blow up the bunker if the need arose. And a freezer filled with Grant Cooper’s body. Well, a body, anyway. Who else would it be? Jack wondered why Kennett hadn’t disposed of it yet. He liked to keep trophies?
Jack took a sip of coffee he’d made himself. He wasn’t chancing the wrath of Ada again at Bluff Country Store. He cursed beneath his breath.
Intel collected by NCS indicated Kennett was masterminding and orchestrating the attack on LA from sleepy little Orchard Bluff. Which was convenient for two reasons—its complete ordinariness and proximity to Willow. The details of that attack were certainly on those bulletin boards and easels. Jack had to get in there to take a look before he blew up Kennett’s stash of explosives.
As Jack suspected, Kennett had an elaborate protection system on the bunker. If someone tried to break in, they’d be blown to bits along with any evidence of Kennett’s sinister plot.
Archibald Random, head of RIOT, was behind this. Jack didn’t know how it fit into Random’s overall plot for world domination. And Jack really didn’t care. He’d leave that for big-picture minds like that of his boss Emmett Nelson to worry about.
Jack was one little, very important cog in the plot to foil Random. And Jack was damn well going to do his job and have some fun.
Jack was as much an explosives expert as Kennett. And after having been blown up once himself, he had a healthy appreciation for the finesse required. It wouldn’t exactly be a piece of cake getting past Kennett’
s defenses and blowing up his bomb shelter with Kennett in it. But it would make for a hell of a show.
* * *
Ada stopped by the shop, arriving with Willow’s favorite fall coffee drink—Ada’s signature apple harvest pumpkin spice latte.
“What did I do to deserve this treat?” Willow walked around from behind the counter and took the warm paper cup from her.
Ada pulled off her lightweight driving gloves. “I needed a break from the store. I thought I’d save you a trip and pick up my order of caramel sauce myself.”
“That’s sweet of you. Do you have time to sit and visit for a minute? I’m due for a break, too. I’ve been up since dawn making caramel.” She indicated one of the three small tables reserved for guests. She wished she could confide in Ada. She really needed to talk her plans over with someone. But there was no way she could divulge a word of what she knew to Ada. She couldn’t even share her plans with someone in the know about Jack like Staci.
Being a living spy’s widow was a lonely, isolated life. What she really wanted to do was talk things over with Jack. He’d get a kick out of her plot. And absolutely stop her from implementing it.
“I’ve got a minute.” Ada pulled out a chair.
The two of them sat. Willow took a sip of latte and sighed. “You’ve outdone yourself.”
Ada smiled back. “I’ve been working on perfecting the recipe. The secret is a sprinkle of Ceylon cinnamon on top. I get it from a top-secret supplier of mine. I must protect my sources.”
Willow laughed at Ada’s spy reference, though she was sure Ada had no idea why she found it so funny.
“So, I hear you and Shane have a date tonight. What happened to your interest in Con?” Ada’s lack of enthusiasm for the situation shone on her face.
“Nothing. And it’s not a date with Shane. Just friends getting together,” Willow lied.
“Well, Shane has a different opinion of your evening together. When he stopped by the store this morning for his coffee, he was simply beaming. And bragging. I think he thinks he’s going to get some action, if you know what I mean.” She tilted her head and studied Willow. “I can’t explain it, Willow, but I don’t trust Shane, even though he is Grant’s friend. There was something almost sinister about his good mood.”