Midnight Remembered

When he held up his hand, inviting her to join him on top of the two parkas, she never thought about refusing. She put her still-trembling fingers into his strong, dark ones, letting him pull her down to the spread coats. As his body lowered over hers, moving as if he had all the time in the world, the last thing she saw before the subtle remains of daylight faded away into night were Joshua Stone’s eyes looking down into hers.

And no matter how many times she recreated that scene during the next three years, she found she could never quite be sure what had been in them.

Chapter One

“Special Ops is asking for you.”

Paige glanced up from the magnifier through which she was studying the latest satellite images of a site along the Russia-Afghanistan border. Her boss hadn’t stopped at her desk. He had simply tossed the paper that held the message he had delivered down on it and then disappeared into his own office.

Special Ops, she thought, wondering how long it had been since she had heard those words. Not nearly long enough.

She wished she could treat the summons as casually as Pete Logan had. Instead, the phrase created an unwanted frisson of anxiety. Almost in self-defense, she looked down through the magnifying glass again, ignoring the paper Logan had dropped on her desk and trying to bring her concentration back to the photographs that had come in only an hour ago.

She had been totally absorbed in them before the interruption. After all, this was her job. Being at the beck and call of Special Operations was not, she thought fiercely, feeling her anger build, despite her attempt to focus on the satellite images. The days she had spent with the spooks were over and done. Long gone. Long forgotten.

Which was why, of course, her ability to concentrate was all of a sudden shot to hell, she thought in disgust. She pushed the magnifier away, the motion almost violent.

Special Ops. What the hell could Special Ops want with her? She glanced at the paper lying on the outer edge of her desk, as reluctant to pick it up as if it were something vile.

The print was facing the other direction, and she couldn’t quite manage to decipher the upsidedown signature of whoever had issued the request. After a fruitless few seconds of trying, she reached out and turned the paper around, her eyes automatically scanning the one-line message before they fell to the name at the bottom. It was one she recognized.

Her gaze lifted to the door of Logan’s office, but she resisted the impulse to go in and ask if he knew any details. Even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. She knew that. She would have to answer this summons, no matter how unpleasant reentering that world, if only for a little while, might be.

Too many memories, she thought. Too many ghosts. And she wasn’t looking forward to resurrecting a single one of them.

“WHY NOW?” Paige asked. “I told you people everything I knew when it happened.”

“You people?” Carl Steiner repeated pointedly, his tented fingers resting under his chin. His dark eyes were amused.

She understood why he had questioned her wording. She had once been one of the people assigned to the CIA’s Special Operations Branch, which Steiner was now head of.

“I told Griff,” she said. “It’s in the incident report.”

“Tell me,” Steiner said. He hadn’t raised his voice, but that was obviously an order. As an assistant deputy director, he was entitled to give them.

Paige didn’t know why she would hesitate to tell him. Other than the fact that she couldn’t see any point in bringing something to life that had been stone-cold dead, maybe even back when she had reported on it to Griff Cabot. Nearly three years ago, she realized with a sense of disbelief.

It didn’t seem possible it had been that long since she had sat in this room pouring out that painful story to someone she considered a friend. Her eyes rose to study the face of the man who now sat behind Cabot’s desk. A man who wasn’t her friend and never had been.

She didn’t have any reason to dislike Carl Steiner. Not any concrete one, anyway. When the External Security Team had been disbanded, however, there had been a lot of rumors that this man had had a major role in that decision.

They had all known, intellectually at least, from the moment of Cabot’s death that the demise of his team would follow. But when the order had come down, none of them had been prepared. The team and their relationships to one another had been too important. Too much a part of who each of them had been then.

“I want you to tell me about Joshua Stone,” Steiner said, his eyes on her face.

Paige had no idea what it might reveal, but that same sensation she had felt when she had heard her boss say Special Ops lurched through her stomach again. Just at the sound of the name. His name.

“He disappeared,” she said. And then nothing else.

She didn’t know what Steiner wanted from her. Or why they were bringing this up after all this time. Joshua Stone was almost certainly dead and buried in some frozen wasteland thousands of miles from here. There was no reason not to let him stay buried, she thought, resenting Steiner’s stirring of the ashes of her life. Particularly these.

“Circumstances?” Steiner prodded, glancing down at a folder in front of him.

Paige’s eyes followed his, wondering if he were looking at Griff’s report. And wondering if Cabot had written down everything she had told him. Even those parts she had clearly intended to be for his ears only.

Maybe there ought to be an official designation within government communications for the kind of conversation they had shared that day. She had never told anyone else the truth about what had happened in Vladistan. No one but Griff. And no matter what Steiner said, she knew she never would.

“We had completed our mission,” she said. As soon she uttered the word “mission,” her mind had gone back, reliving those long-ago events, in spite of the fact that she had sworn never to revisit these memories.

Steiner hadn’t given her much choice, however, and she supposed it would be better just to get this over. Tell him only as much as she wanted to and no more. And trust that Griff hadn’t betrayed her confidence about the rest.

“We were supposed to meet our contact the next day,” she continued, forcing the words through her throat, which seemed constricted. “There was more rebel activity along the border than we had expected. We had to hide a few times from patrols, the last time just a few miles from the border. We knew we were cutting it close, but…it hadn’t been an easy assignment.”

Her voice faded, thinking how true that was. The area had been unstable when they had been sent in, and in the months they had spent there, everything had fallen apart. Including their in-country support. At the last, it had been just her and Josh.

“Go on,” Steiner prompted.

“And then…Stone disappeared,” Paige said, her voice softer than she had intended. More emotional? People like Steiner didn’t like emotion, not of any kind. That’s why they were here. Why they were the ones in charge.

“You woke up the morning before you were to cross the border and found that Stone was missing.”

She nodded, determined not to remember the events of the night before that discovery. She had done that too many times. Especially during that first year.

A long time ago. Just saying those words in her head was a form of comfort, putting distance between her life now and what had happened then. Do it, she told herself. Tell him the rest and be done with it. Put it behind you again.

“Russian tanks rolled in less than four hours later, and Griff, through our contact, ordered me out. I wasn’t given any choice about whether I wanted to leave or not.”

“And exactly what did you do in those four hours?”

There seemed to be accusation in the tone of the question, and Paige’s eyes narrowed against it. “I tried to find Josh. We had to get out before the Russians came, so I tried to find him.”

“And the nerve agent?”

That’s why they had been sent into Vladistan. To find and bring out a deadly neurological toxin, a new class of nerve agent for which there were no antidotes. It had been developed in one of the old Soviet weapons complexes, located in the region. When the rebellion started, the fear in the West was that the rebels might use the agent against the invading Russian troops, provoking a nuclear retaliation.

And then suddenly, feeling stupid that she hadn’t figured it out before, Paige realized this was what Steiner’s summons was all about. There was again unrest within Vladistan. Some people were already predicting another rebellion. Had that nerve agent now shown up in the wrong hands?

It could, of course. It could have at anytime during the last three years, she supposed, because when Joshua Stone had disappeared, that lethal toxin had disappeared with him.

“Josh was carrying it in his backpack,” she said. “I never saw it again.” Or him.

She had told Griff the truth about what had happened between them. A truth that might even be included in the folder Steiner had in front of him, but she didn’t intend to mention her personal involvement with Joshua Stone unless Steiner brought it up. The uneasy silence built until he broke it.

“When you woke up,” Steiner said, his voice flat, no longer questioning, “Stone was gone.”

Paige nodded.

“And you never saw him again?”