Merrick's Eleventh Hour

Take me back, my love. My wife. My life.

Stay focused.

Don’t wake up.

Another kiss.

Another moan.

Another night wrapped in ghostly arms.

No more thinking. No more sorrow. No more tears.

Nothing but the dream. Nothing but the memories. Nothing but Johanna swallowing him up body and soul and taking him on a wicked midnight ride.

The incessant rain tapping at the window like an unwelcome voyeur roused Merrick. It was dawn, another dreary, rainy day in April. He tossed back the white satin sheet, soiled now from making love to his ghostly wife. He dropped his feet to the floor and rubbed the gray stubble along his rugged jaw.

The fire had died sometime in the middle of the night, but not the memories. He realized now that he should have hired someone to box up Johanna’s things. Her clothes still hung in the closet. Her jewelry box on the vanity. The quilt she’d made for their bed was still folded over the rocker—all of it wrapped in cobwebs, surrounded by yellowed curtains, peeling wallpaper and wood floors stained from a leaky roof.

The tattered remains of heaven on earth.

He should have sold the house years ago, before it became an eyesore. He’d planned to, but he had always come up with some lame-ass excuse.

He shoved himself up from the bed and walked naked into the bathroom with a powerful grace that, at age fifty-two, still garnered him a second look from a beautiful woman. By society’s standards Adolf Merrick was one of the lucky ones. Like a renowned bottle of port years in the making, he seemed to get better with age.

The only evidence that he was past his prime was his silver hair—a phenomenon that had happened virtually overnight following Johanna’s death.

He turned on the shower and stepped inside. He kept the water cold—a strategic maneuver to quash the residual effects of making love to Johanna’s ghost. Five minutes later, back on track, with a towel wrapped low around his hips, he headed for the kitchen.

The windows faced Johanna’s rose garden in the backyard, and when she hadn’t been sharing his bed at night, or cooking something fabulous for dinner, he would find her in the garden with her roses. He’d left the windows open last night, and he could smell the heavy sweet fragrance—the scent as caustic as the memories.

His cell phone rang while he was cooking the hell out of a cup of instant coffee in the microwave—after all this time he still couldn’t brew a decent pot of coffee. He backtracked to the bedroom and picked up his phone from the nightstand, checked the number and saw it was Sly McEwen.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got bad news.”

Merrick heard the distress in Sly’s voice. “Let’s hear it.”

“Peter Briggs is dead and so is the operative we had staked out in front of his apartment. That’s all I know. No details. The Agency called me after they couldn’t reach you.”

“I must have been in the shower.”

“I’m on my way to Briggs’s apartment now. My guess is Krizova sent Holic Reznik to clean up a loose end. Maybe we should have locked Briggs up.”

Merrick hadn’t wanted to do that. As of yet they hadn’t been able to prove that Briggs was guilty of treason. They needed concrete evidence, and that had been damn hard to come by.

“When should I expect you?” Sly asked.

“One hour. I’m at my country house.”

“I thought you sold that old monster years ago.”

Merrick set his jaw, sidestepped the issue, as well as his personal obsession with the old monster, saying, “Damn good thing I didn’t or I’d be homeless, thanks to Krizova blowing up my apartment. I don’t want Briggs’s body touched until I get there. One hour.”

The country house was north of D.C. As Merrick drove through the rain, he called Jacy Madox and got him out of bed in Montana. Since he’d slipped the flu virus into Briggs’s wine a week ago, Jacy had been going through the data on Peter’s computer while he was housebound. Although Jacy’s field agent days were over, he continued to work for Onyxx from his mountain home miles from nowhere. A cybergenius, he was considered one of the best hackers in the intelligence world.

“Sorry about Briggs,” Jacy said. “The news is I didn’t find anything on his computer. If he was Krizova’s mole, he left no evidence behind.”

“All right. I’ll be in touch.”

Merrick hung up, his mood sinking past sour. It was starting to look like finding Cyrus’s latest hideout was going to take an act of God. Not that he wasn’t thankful for the surprise resurrection of Sully Paxton two months ago. After believing his agent was dead, Merrick had learned that Sully had given new meaning to the word survival. It had been the salt the Agency needed to step up their commitment to ending Cyrus’s fanaticism with Onyxx, as well as his global terrorism.

With Sully’s help they’d found two of Krizova’s compounds in Greece, rescued more than a dozen government agents imprisoned in the bowels of one of his monastery hideouts and recovered a cache of weapons bound for rebel hands. They had also rescued Melita Krizova from Cyrus’s warped sense of fatherly love.

But at the end of the day—once again—Cyrus had managed to elude capture.

Sully Paxton was still in Greece, on the island of Amorgós with Melita. He’d been tirelessly combing the islands trying to pinpoint Cyrus’s latest hideout. He would need to fill Sully in on the recent turn of events, but he’d wait until he had all the facts.

Merrick swung his black Jag to the curb of the ten-story apartment building where Peter Briggs had lived for the past twenty-two years, since the Prague incident. Out front Pierce Fourtier and Ash Kelly, two of his elite Rat Fighters, were standing under the awning smoking.

Pulling up the collar on his black leather jacket to combat the rain, he joined them. “Got a name on our stakeout agent?”

“New guy. Nathan Connor. Shot three times, just like Briggs,” Ash said.

“Sly’s inside,” Pierce offered.

Merrick nodded and headed in. Peter’s apartment was on the ground floor, halfway down the hall. He walked through the open door. Sly McEwen was standing at the window, his stance in sync with his serious attitude. Over six feet, rock-solid, Sly had proven himself to be a man you could count on. He didn’t know what the word quit meant, and Merrick liked that about him. It’s why he’d made him his second in command.

Sly turned from the window and motioned to the bedroom. “Nothing’s been touched. I called Harry Pendleton and gave him the news. Nathan Connor was his nephew. The kid was twenty-three. Onyxx activated him six months ago.”

“I thought I recognized the name.” Merrick walked through the living room and headed for the bedroom. Briggs’s body should have been his primary focus, but instead his eyes locked on the peach-colored roses in a crystal vase on the nightstand.

There was only one flower shop in D.C. where you could buy Medallion roses without placing a special order. Merrick knew that because they had been Johanna’s favorite and he regularly purchased the rare hybrid to place on her grave.

Merrick left Sly with the task of seeing to Peter’s body and, twenty minutes after his arrival, he was on his way to Finny Floral. Sarah Finny lived in the apartment above the flower shop, and when he pulled up he noticed that the Open sign was on in the window. He leapt from the car and crossed the street. As he passed the window he saw her standing behind the counter waiting on a plump bald man in a gray suit. The little bell rang above the door as he swung it open.

She glanced up, saw him, then turned back to the elderly gentleman. There was no surprise in her soft brown eyes when she’d seen him, which told Merrick she’d been expecting him.

The bald gentleman left with his purchase, and Merrick stepped up to the counter. Before he could say anything, Sarah spoke.

“You’ve come about the Medallions. The ones he bought yesterday.”

“What did he look like, Sarah?”

“Very tall, with dark gray hair. Not silver like yours. And shorter.” She glanced at the overnight shadow on Merrick’s jaw. “Clean shaven. He had a nasty scar,” she touched her neck, “here.”

Merrick had been expecting her to describe the scrawny build of Holic Reznik, a hired assassin who had become involved in Cyrus’s nefarious activities years ago. Instead she’d given him a description of Krizova himself.