Midnight Remembered

Something about the question bothered her. Not the words themselves, which were only the truth, but the nuance of tone in which he had asked. Was that skepticism she heard?

“Griff believed Josh must have been killed shortly after he left the building where we had taken shelter. The whole area was in chaos. Full of rebel patrols.”

“Yet Stone, an experienced operative, left the safety of your hiding place. And he left it alone, leaving you asleep.”

“Maybe he heard something and went out to investigate.”

She had tried for three years to come up with a viable explanation for Josh’s actions. That was the only one that made any kind of sense to her. She could tell by Steiner’s eyes that it made none to him.

“Or maybe he had an appointment,” Steiner said. “A highly lucrative one.”

At the time of his disappearance there had been elements within the agency who suggested Joshua Stone had seen an opportunity to make a fortune and had taken it. A new and very lethal nerve agent would bring millions on the terrorist black market. Stone had both the skills to get it out of the country, and, with his External Security Team experience, the contacts that would be necessary to sell it.

Griff Cabot had never credited that explanation for Josh’s disappearance. Cabot had always had complete confidence in the integrity of his team. Stone, however, wouldn’t have been the first CIA operative to have gone rogue, Paige admitted. And there had been something about his eyes that last night…

“If you’re suggesting that Joshua Stone turned traitor, then you need to review his record,” she said aloud, blocking that niggling, disloyal image. “Griff Cabot, who knew Stone better than anyone else, dismissed that possibility out of hand.”

“Griff would never admit that one of his operatives had gone bad. I’m afraid I’m not quite that…trusting.”

“If you seriously believe Joshua Stone sold that nerve agent to the highest bidder, then how do you explain why it’s never been used?” A shot in the dark, Paige acknowledged, but she had heard nothing in the last three years to suggest it had.

“Maybe whoever bought it is biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity.”

“Or maybe whoever killed Stone never found the toxin,” Paige said. “Maybe they never realized what he was carrying.”

“I confess I prefer your scenario to mine,” Steiner said. “I suppose only time will tell which of us is right.”

“It seems to me that three years is time enough to tell. Joshua Stone wasn’t a traitor.”

“And I sincerely hope you’re right about that, too,” Steiner said, closing the folder and getting to his feet. “If we need any further information, we’ll be in touch.”

His face was unreadable, but it was clear from his words that he considered the interview to be at an end. Paige knew she should be relieved, both that it was over and that his questions had been no more probing. For some reason, however, there was a letdown after the abruptness with which this questioning had ended. The whole thing seemed anticlimactic, especially in the face of the frightening suggestions he had made.

Paige stood, pushing the heavy leather chair back from the edge of the desk. She wondered if she should offer him her hand and decided, illogically, that she didn’t want to shake hands with Carl Steiner. She didn’t want anymore contact with him than was necessary. She reached the door to his office and then, very definitely against her better judgment, she turned back.

Steiner was still standing behind his desk. He was looking down at the file he had just closed, the tips of the fingers of his right hand resting on top of it, as if it might spring open if he didn’t hold it shut.

“Why now?” she asked again.

His dark eyes lifted, questioning.

“Why bring me in to talk about this now?” she asked.

There was the smallest of pauses, not even enough to call suspicious, unless you were already suspicious. “The region is becoming unstable again. This is a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. The agency doesn’t like those. Since you were the last person to see Stone alive…”

A loose end? Somehow Paige didn’t think he meant the disappearance of Joshua Stone. Steiner’s concern was almost certainly for that incredibly dangerous chemical weapon, which had gone missing in a region noted for being a powder keg.

As she watched, the thin lips of the head of Special Ops moved into what was supposed to be a smile. It seemed cold, lacking in feeling. Maybe someone like Steiner didn’t really feel. Maybe that’s what made him good at this. And maybe that’s what had made her such a failure.

“Good luck,” she said, barely avoiding sarcasm.

She put her hand on the knob and opened the door, stepping out into the deserted hallway, and then closing it carefully behind her, deliberately not letting it make any noise.

She hadn’t believed him, she realized. Intuition, maybe, but she thought Carl Steiner was lying about wanting to tie up loose ends. Something had happened, something besides the ongoing instability of that area. Something that had revived the mystery of Joshua Stone’s disappearance.

However, whatever was happening in Special Operations these days, she told herself determinedly, was no longer of any concern to her. And thank God, it was also no longer her responsibility.

JACK THOMPSON hunched his shoulders, holding the evening paper he’d just bought over his head as he made a run for the cab that had finally pulled up to the curb in front of his office building. He hated rain. Especially cold rain. It made all the bones that had been broken ache with a renewed vengeance.

He jerked open the cab door, slid in across the cold vinyl of the back seat, and then slammed it shut against the downpour. After he gave the driver his address, he settled gratefully into the taxi’s stale warmth.

He’d take a couple of extra-strength aspirin when he got home, he decided, and turn up the thermostat. He had some stronger stuff, but he saved that for the headaches. He hadn’t had one of those in almost three weeks, he realized, and he hoped to God he never had another.

He gazed out the window as they began to move, watching the twilight-darkened streets rush by through the screen of raindrops on the glass. A car had pulled out from a parking place on the opposite side of the street at the same time the cab had, and its headlights briefly haloed the droplets with rims of gold.

“Rain’s a bitch,” the driver said, “but I hear this stuff’ll turn to snow tonight. I ain’t looking forward to that either.”

Jack pulled his eyes from the wet gleam of the sidewalks, which were reflecting the lights from the stores behind them, and glanced at the back of the driver’s head.

“I hadn’t heard about the snow,” he said.

“Not from around here, are you?” the driver asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Originally, I mean.”

“No,” Jack said. His accent was different enough that it sometimes evoked comment, although Atlanta was pretty cosmopolitan these days. He wasn’t from the South, however, and anyone who was spotted that immediately.

“Where you from?”

He knew the driver was only making conversation, maybe to relieve boredom, maybe in hopes of a larger tip. And Jack could have supplied the facts easily enough. Trying to feel some connection with them, he had gone over the information the cops had provided a million times.

He knew everything on those sheets by heart. And none of it felt real. Or meant anything to him. That would pass, the doctors had assured him. That feeling of disassociation with who he was. Simply the lingering result of the head injury. And, they had said, he was lucky its effects hadn’t been more severe.

“Don’t push it,” the psychiatrist he had seen at the last hospital had warned. That had been just before Jack had been released from the rehab center, his physical injuries healed, even if his memory hadn’t yet returned. “If it comes, it comes. If you try to get it all back, if you push too hard, then…who knows what may happen?” the doctor had said, shrugging.

Jack could remember wondering exactly what he meant by that. He had made it sound as if Jack’s brain would implode or something if he tried to force the return of those memories.

Still, he knew they were there, lying just below the surface of his mind. Sometimes, especially in dreams, they were so close he could almost touch them. It was like looking down into a dark pond and seeing things beneath the surface, murky and unclear, but definitely there. Just a little too far down to reach.

“Hey, buddy,” the cabbie said.

Jack’s eyes came back up, meeting the questioning ones in the rearview mirror. The cabbie was looking at him as if he thought Jack was some kind of nutcase. People did that sometimes. They seemed to pick up on the fact that there was something wrong. That something about him didn’t fit anymore. Jack never was quite sure how they knew, but their eyes always looked at him just like this guy’s were now.

“Des Moines,” he said.

“Yeah?” the driver said, his voice relieved. “Could’a fooled me. That don’t sound like the Midwest.”

Jack smiled, and then he deliberately turned his head, looking out the window again as the rain-glazed streets swept by. He had heard that comment a couple of times before, and it had bothered him enough that he had even checked it out. Not so much because of the accent, but because of the way he felt.

So he had paid one of those people-find agencies on the Web to do a search for a Jack Thompson from Des Moines. It had all been there. Exactly like the cops had told him.