Midnight Remembered

And “good at what they did” brought her back to the other significant thing that had happened today: Steiner’s summons and the comments he had made as she had been about to go out his door. This was a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. Since you were the last person to see him alive…

She thought all the pertinent questions about that mission been asked back then. And as far as she knew, they had been answered to the agency’s satisfaction. Or at least to the satisfaction of anyone who had known Joshua Stone.

Had a trusted operative disappeared in order to sell that nerve agent on the black market, as Steiner implied? There was no denying such a sale would have been a huge temptation for some people. Not for Joshua Stone. She would never believe that.

Griff Cabot had believed that Stone had been captured by one of the opposing sides in the rebellion. If the Russians had taken him prisoner, they might have tried to arrange a trade, exchanging Josh for one of their own compromised agents. Washington usually agreed to such deals to get their people home, and Cabot would have done his best to influence them to make that decision. As far as Paige knew, no such offer had ever been made.

The strongest likelihood, given the time frame, was that Josh had heard someone outside the cellar that night. He had gone to investigate and been captured by the rebel forces.

Maybe they had taken him with them as they retreated from the Russian advance, intending to interrogate him later. Or maybe whoever had captured Josh hadn’t known about the theft of the toxin. Maybe they had simply killed him, leaving his body and the backpack he’d carried in the snow, never knowing what a valuable prize they’d lost.

Whatever happened, Joshua Stone, the most experienced member of the External Security Team, had disappeared forever on that mission. And Paige Daniels, the novice, had escaped from Vladistan as Russian tanks rolled across its border. She had escaped, and Josh had not. Maybe, as she had always believed in her heart, because he had gone out into that dangerous darkness to protect her from whatever he had heard.

Lying in her bed, eyes open and staring, the haunting images of that night played again through her consciousness. The same night he had made love to her for hours, until she had finally drifted into a deep and exhausted sleep.

She hadn’t allowed herself to indulge in this particular exercise in futility in a very long time, but she didn’t deny those memories tonight. And they steeled her determination to prove Carl Steiner was wrong. She was as convinced today as she had been then that Joshua Stone hadn’t been a traitor.

By bugging her apartment the agency seemed to be trying to implicate her in whatever they imagined Josh had done three years ago. And she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong on that mission. Nothing except sleep while someone took her partner. Nothing except survive when he hadn’t.

Now someone in his own agency was trying to blacken Joshua Stone’s name. And there was no one from the External Security Team left to defend his reputation. No one but her.

She had failed him once before. No one had ever seemed to blame her, but she had always blamed herself. And after three long years, she had discovered that the ghost of Joshua Stone was one she needed very badly to put to rest.

Chapter Two

Reactivated.

Paige stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. As she tried to think what else that word could possibly mean, she fought a surge of emotion she didn’t want to feel, not after all this time.

She had started her search as soon as she’d gotten into the office this morning, trying to discover what had set Steiner off. Something must have come to light fairly recently that had made him question Stone’s disappearance. Something that had made him call her in. Something that had made them plant a listening device in her apartment. Something.

She had spent most of the day scanning page after page of the tedious situation reports that had come in about Vladistan during the last four months. Because of her work in Sector Analysis, she was already familiar with most of this material. And on closer examination she had found nothing that might be construed as having anything to do with Josh or with the nerve agent he had been carrying when he’d disappeared. The computers had been next, and she had cross-referenced everything she could think of that might apply to the region, to the rebellion, or to that particular mission. And again, she had come up empty.

It was only then, an exercise in nostalgia perhaps or maybe because she had run out of ideas, that she had tried to access the old External Security Team files. Unbelievably, she had found that the access codes had never been changed. The files themselves were intact, even though the team hadn’t even been in existence for more than two and a half years.

The bureaucratic mind works in mysterious ways, Paige had thought, as she typed in Joshua Stone’s name. When the file came up, she had discovered the reactivated notation. And the date it had been made was less than four months ago. She scrolled through the whole thing, trying to find more recent additions or changes, but there were none.

Which made no sense, she thought in frustration. Why activate a dead file and then do nothing with it? Or was the reactivation simply a clerical error? Did somebody key in the wrong access number? Things like that happened, even at the CIA.

And she might have been willing to believe they had in this case, if it hadn’t been for Steiner’s questions yesterday. If you put these two things together, they had to mean something. Something obviously connected to Joshua Stone’s disappearance.

Reactivated. There was nothing else there. Nothing after that one entry, which had brought a dead file back to life and out of limbo where it should have remained. Why would someone reactivate a file and then not put anything in it? That made no sense. Unless…

When the explanation hit her, producing a rush of adrenaline so strong her hands began to shake, it all made sense. Because it fit the pattern. And the bureaucratic mind-set. Joshua Stone had been a member of External Security, and she knew what had happened to the other operatives on that team.

As far as she could tell, she was the only one who was still working for the agency. After the fiasco in Vladistan, she had requested a move back into Sector Analysis. Griff had tried to talk her out of leaving, but the transfer had gone through.

Then Cabot had been killed, and the elite antiterrorist team he’d assembled stood down. Since she hadn’t been a member long enough to have participated in any of the black ops missions the EST was famous for, Paige couldn’t represent any threat to security, and she had been allowed to stay in the CIA.

The other agents, however, had been destroyed—at least on paper. And then they had been carefully resurrected. Recreated as totally different people, their original identities erased. Their agency records had been purged, so that no one could ever trace those men, or what they had done, back to the agency.

In most cases, their names had been changed and they had been relocated. At least a couple of them, like Jordan Cross, had had their physical appearance altered as well.

Now she was looking at the agency’s file on Joshua Stone, a man who had been presumed dead before the team was disbanded. It had been reactivated, brought back to life less than four months ago. Then nothing had been added to the folder, so maybe…

Paige closed the file and backtracked. There was no “list all” feature on these kinds of secure files, so when she reached the main directory, she typed in the date when the designation on Stone’s file had been changed. Then her hands hovered over the keyboard as she stared at those numbers, almost afraid of what she might find. Finally, holding her breath, she hit Search.

And was bitterly disappointed when there were no results, other than in the folder she had just closed. There was no other file with a matching date in this entire section of the records. There shouldn’t be any recent dates, of course, since the team was no longer in existence, but that didn’t explain why someone had changed the designation of Josh’s folder.

She couldn’t be wrong about this. It fit. It made sense. Maybe she was just rushing the bureaucracy, giving them more credit for efficiency than they deserved. After all, it might have taken them a while to decide what to do.

She typed in the following day’s date. And when there were no results for that one either, she typed the next date in the blank. Then the next, working methodically now.

And finally, ten days after somebody had brought Joshua Stone’s file back to life, there it was. A matching date. In the middle of all the inactive folders of a now-defunct, highly secretive special operations team was a brand new file. A new name. But not a new man, Paige knew with absolute certainty.

“Joshua Stone,” she said softly. “Fancy meeting you here.”

NOT MUCH DOUBT, Paige thought, her eyes focused on the man seated across the crowded restaurant. Not much doubt left at all, despite the obvious physical changes.

This was the closest she had come to him. Close enough to study his features. However, even at a distance, his mannerisms had seemed heart-stoppingly familiar. The set of his head. The understated, almost elegant power of his body. Something about the way he used his hands. Even their shape.

She knew in her heart that this was Joshua Stone. The blue-black hair was threaded with gray, and then there were the scars, slightly reddened as if they were still fairly new. One crossed his right brow, causing a break in its thick black line. The other ran from the corner of his lips, slanting downward across his chin to disappear under his jaw.

Even the structure of the bones seemed slightly altered, as if they had been broken and then put back together, the fit not quite as perfect as it had once been. His nose had definitely been reshaped, molded into something less arrogant. The result was no less compelling or attractive, but it was different.

She had been trailing the man who called himself Jack Thompson for almost two days, but she hadn’t approached him. She had told herself that she wanted to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. That this wasn’t some kind of bizarre coincidence. That’s what she had told herself, although she had known the truth about who he was, almost from the moment she had seen him again.

Now there were no more excuses. The only thing left in doubt was what she wanted to do about what she’d discovered. Because she knew that no matter what Griff Cabot had believed three years ago, Joshua Stone wasn’t dead.

She didn’t know where he had been during those years, but there was no mystery about where he’d been the last couple of months. He had been living in Atlanta, working for one of the international brokerage firms headquartered here. Paige had wondered if the company was a front for the CIA or if it was simply a legitimate business that had some reason to cooperate with the agency by placing one of its ex-agents—an operative the CIA wanted to hide—on its payroll.

She didn’t suppose that really mattered. It was just something to think about instead of all the other things she’d been trying not to think about since she’d discovered Joshua Stone wasn’t dead.

She looked down at the unappetizing salad in front of her, wondering why she had ordered it. Because other than eating, there isn’t any excuse for being here.

Josh had eaten in this small neighborhood café both of the nights she’d been trailing him. He had stopped in on his way home from work. Having tried it now herself, she couldn’t say much for his choice.

She poked at a piece of lettuce with her fork, finally spearing it, along with a piece of ham and a small slice of cheese, on the tines. She dipped the combination into the watery looking salad dressing, and then raised the fork to take a bite. She looked up as she did, directly into Joshua Stone’s eyes.

She wondered if he felt anything remotely resembling the jolt that had given her, even from across the room. She looked down quickly, but she was forced to admit that this must have been what she was hoping for when she had come in here tonight. Hoping he would notice her. Hoping he would make contact, despite whatever rules the CIA had set up for his relocation.

She supposed that what the agency did with members of the EST worked like Witness Security. Contact with anyone from their former life would be forbidden. Even with a former partner.

She realized that she was still holding the forkful of food halfway to her mouth. Pretty telling, she supposed, but after all, Josh should understand. It wasn’t often one was confronted with a ghost.

She wondered what he was thinking. That this was an accident? A fluke? Or that the agency, maybe even Steiner himself, had sent her?

She put the fork down on her plate, unable to make herself take that bite. And then slowly she raised her eyes again, prepared now to make contact with his.