Darkness at Dawn (2 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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He was a good operative, a brave man, who’d been on a successful mission and had something vital to report. Duty was bred into his bones, and it was duty that had him feebly pressing the commo unit against his throat. He was so weak he couldn’t press hard enough. He tried once, twice, three times . . . ah. Finally.
Static crackled in the earpiece curled almost invisibly behind his right ear.
“Mountain bear, come in.”
The commo unit operated on encrypted bursts of very low-frequency radio waves. There were two places in the world capable of receiving the messages, one in Langley and one in Fort Meade. Fort Meade was listening, but he was reporting to his bosses at Langley.
He could barely speak, could hardly think, was operating on pure instinct. “Mountain bear, coming back from a walk.”
Mission successful
.
At least he remembered the code.
He didn’t remember what the mission was exactly. He had to get more information across, even if he couldn’t remember much more than the basics. He pressed his finger against his throat again. “Hot zone,” he gasped. “Intel . . . Palace.”
He couldn’t say any more because another fountain of red vomit came out of his mouth before he could take his finger away. A vestige of craft remained in the recesses of his mind, and he knew the signal was bouncing off what was officially a weather observation satellite and traveling down to the other side of the world, and whoever decrypted the signal would also be hearing the sound of his retching.
Didn’t matter. He painfully turned his head in the snow, his visual horizon now reduced to a few inches past his face. A chunk of what he’d vomited was right in front of his eyes, and with a last burst of consciousness, he recognized it for what it was. Lung tissue.
He was coughing up his lungs.
He closed his eyes and let the red tide carry him away.
 
FOUR hundred miles above him, the new Keyhole-13 satellite in geosynchronous orbit received a coded message to direct its SWIR/thermal cameras four degrees north, which in its six months of operation it had never done. It was designed for the Troubled Latitudes, covering Pakistan and India, and had never been given instructions to turn its eye north to the small Himalayan states. But now the cold, pitiless eye moved according to instructions beamed up from fifteen thousand miles away.
Ten photograms a second, the lens caught the infrared signature of a living being in the snowy wastes. A large mammal, perhaps not human, since its temperature registered 101 degrees, then 102 then 104, not normal human temperatures. The mammal stumbled, fell. The instructions were to keep the Eye in the Sky on the mammal, and the lens did just that, taking photographic evidence, indifferent when the mammal fell to the snow and lay there, unmoving, as the heat slowly leaked out of it. Eventually the mammal became invisible to the infrared lens—as cold as the snow on which it lay in a large pool of red.
O
NE
 
DOCUMENT RESTORATION LABORATORY,
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
WASHINGTON, DC
TWO DAYS LATER
 
SHE smelled him before she saw him—an unmistakable funk of photocopy liquid, good wool, an expensive men’s cologne and anxious sweat. She didn’t know who he was, but she imagined what he was.
CIA.
She sighed quietly.
Lucy Merritt looked down at a first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, a lovely illustrated book, which some moron had kept in a moldy garage with leaky pipes. When it had come to her, it had been almost lost forever. Lucy had worked very hard to coax it back to life, for its kind would never come again.
She loved this, loved restoring books and manuscripts, piecing together pieces of human history that would otherwise be lost.
All in all, a highly satisfactory day, and she was looking forward to a very pleasant evening. She had a great apartment just off Dupont Circle, which she’d carefully decorated. Each stick of furniture, the rugs, the artwork on the walls, the kitchen tiles and bathroom fixtures—all just so. A perfect blend of beauty and comfort. She always breathed out a sigh of pleasure as she crossed the threshold and shut the door behind her, closing out the world.
Tonight she had a bowl of butternut squash soup and a slice of rosemary focaccia just waiting to be heated, a half bottle of Sauvignon Blanc chilling in the fridge and two absolutely perfect peaches for dessert. The new CD of Rossetti playing Rachmaninoff just waiting to be cracked open. Fresh, perfumed sheets on the bed. Perfect, just perfect.
Except for Mr. Musty, lurking at the door.
Lucy slowly peeled off her pristine white cotton gloves—bare fingers left oils on delicate pages—and turned around.
There he was, hunched in the doorway, bringing the beauty quotient of her little lab down by several degrees.
Everything in her office had been chosen by her and reflected her tastes. Her coworkers teased her but they, too, liked sitting on the comfortable silk bergère in the corner, sipping her special lemon ginger tisane out of Limoges china breathing in the scent of the homemade potpourri in a small crystal bowl and looking at her watercolors. She wasn’t a half-bad artist and had been asked more than once to show, but that would make her private pleasure a commercial enterprise and she already had a job she loved.
Yes, just about everything in her life was perfect, and now look what had come crawling out of the woodwork.
“Dr. Merritt? Edwin Montgomery sent me. May I come in?”
She looked him up and down. More than forty, less than fifty, which would put him at a GS-14 grade, unless he had sold secrets to North Korea or had been caught on film having sex with barnyard animals. Not too unattractive, but exhausted, deep and brand-new grooves carved into his cheeks, with eggplant-colored bags under his eyes. His suit was a Brioni, excellent cut, but looked as if he’d slept several nights in a row in it.
Something was wrong at Langley.
Not her problem.
She’d paid all her dues to Langley, for this life and, if the Buddhism she’d been taught as a child was true, for many more lives to come. Langley had taken everything away from her. What were they doing now, coming knocking at her door?
He still stood there patiently, and she narrowed her eyes at him. “Come in if you want, but I’m about ready to go home. You can go back to Langley and tell them no, to whatever it is they want.”
They looked at each other and Lucy broke first. She gestured at her small armchair. “Sit down,” she said, clenching her teeth against the automatic
please
that rose to her lips. She wasn’t going to say please to a CIA agent. Ever. They’d taken too much from her.
“No,” he said, folding his hands neatly in front of his crotch, a little modified civilian-at-ease stance. “I’m fine where I am. And this is a time-sensitive issue. I have orders to take you with me, Dr. Merritt. Whatever it takes.”
His voice was polite, firm, unyielding,
Knowing who he worked for,
whatever it takes
could mean forcibly subduing her, drugging her and taking her in shackles to wherever he wanted her to go. These people didn’t fool around, and they wanted what they wanted.
She’d had an . . . interesting childhood, under the iron rule of CIA hard-asses. Her first instinct was to refuse, absolutely, but . . . they were stronger than she was. She knew that through bitter experience.
Lucy waited a beat, locking eyes with his, but there was a lot of male will behind those tired brown eyes. Backed up, of course, by over fifty thousand employees, at least five thousand of whom were trained covert operatives who could kill you with a fingernail, and a budget of over sixty billion dollars accountable to no one but themselves.
Yep. Stronger than she was. No contest.
The butternut squash soup, the Sauvignon Blanc, the peaches, the new CD—they’d all have to wait.
“Okay,” she told the guy. His face was expressionless, but he gave a little exhale. Lucy hid a smile. “What? Did Uncle Edwin tell you I’d be difficult? He should know better.”
She’d caught him completely by surprise with that one, the man’s eyes actually opening wider when she said
Uncle Edwin
. Lucy knew perfectly well that Edwin Montgomery, Deputy Director of Operations, was feared by everyone at the CIA. Grown men, men trained to withstand torture, quailed at his mildest expression of displeasure. He was known for his iciness and control and ruthlessness.
She’d only seen him show emotion once, at her parents’ funeral. She’d been fourteen.
Lucy stowed all her restoration tools neatly away, taking her time and doing it right. She was naturally neat, but life had taken that and polished it diamond-bright. Two years of her childhood had been spent in a hut in the Indonesian jungle with a beaten-earth floor. Anything she held dear had to be kept in sealed plastic cases or they’d be destroyed by insects or by the relentless humidity.
When it was done, she took off her lab coat, hung it up on a perfumed padded hanger, hung that on the ornate brass clothes tree, took off her glasses, which she only needed for the very close, meticulous work of manuscript restoration, pulled out the scrunchy that kept her shoulder-length hair away from her face and turned to the operative.
His eyes widened slightly, only this time it wasn’t her mention of the Boss of All Bosses. This time it was pure male appreciation.
Lucy knew she was good-looking. Big deal. It had never got her any advantages. In fact, it had been a serious handicap throughout her childhood, spent on undercover missions with her parents. The prime directive for undercover agents was not to attract attention, and pretty little girls are attention magnets all over the world. Her mother used to make her dress in the most drab, unattractive clothing possible, and cut her glossy chestnut hair in a pudding bowl shape, which was why Lucy loved pretty clothes and now went to the hairdresser twice a week.
The man—whose cover name would be Brown or Gray or Smith—hid his male interest immediately, treating her, as she locked her lab door and walked with him down the corridor, with no more interest than if she’d been a seventy-year-old crone with four chins, which was exactly the way Lucy liked it.
She concealed her surprise at finding another operative waiting for them in the parking lot. Two guys to pick her up? Uncle Edwin must have been expecting a
lot
of resistance.
Without a word, Lucy got into the backseat of the SUV. The door closed with that extra special expensive-sounding
whump
that armored vehicles have. No doubt there was a small armory in a lockbox in the back, two pistols in fast-draw harnesses underneath the driver and shotgun seats, and in all likelihood the engine had been reconfigured for extra bursts of power during evasive maneuvers.
There was utter silence in the car as they drove away from the small building housing the restoration section at the back of the monumental Smithsonian buildings and headed south. The guy driving was a clone of the guy who’d come for her, now riding shotgun.
Mr. Black, possibly. Or maybe Mr. White.
The driver broke speed limits on the way, obviously trusting to some secret signal given off to traffic police that Homeland Security was doing its thing and not to bug them. It was also entirely possible that the driver was at times exceeding 90 mph in order to get home in time for a martini before dinner.
You never knew with the CIA.
Lucy was very good at disappearing into her head. The forty-minute trip barely registered as she planned out the various restoration stages for her next project, ten foxed and moldy notebooks by John Steinbeck, arriving tomorrow. Found in a box in the attic of a woman whose great-grandmother had possibly had an affair with Steinbeck. The woman who’d sent the notebooks said that her great-grandmother’s diaries had hinted that the notebooks might contain an undiscovered novella, though it would be almost impossible to tell until major restoration work had been done.
Lucy entertained herself with all the possibilities, paying no attention to the landscape dimly visible through the darkly tinted windows.
She knew where they were going.
The entrance took her by surprise, though.
When the SUV finally pulled into the long driveway of CIA Headquarters in the McLean suburb of Langley, it pulled up into the Old Headquarters.
The New Headquarters was flashy—with a four-story curved atrium full of light, elegant and airy. It was the face of the new, consumer-friendly CIA, everyone’s best friend, a bulwark against world terrorism.
The atrium of the Old Headquarters they were entering now was low and brutal and businesslike. Stalinesque, even, because that’s who they were fighting when it was designed.
The old entrance was cavernous, like some sepulcher of lost lives and lost hopes.
She crossed over the huge star inset in the marble floor, the Agency seal with the compass rose signifying the CIA’s worldwide reach, looking neither to the left nor, especially, to the right, to the Wall of Honor.
So when Mr. White or Mr. Brown held open the door, she swept past him and into the building and walked down to the end of the endless lobby to wait for clearance. She looked straight ahead, aware of the security cameras that were following her progress. She wasn’t about to give Edwin or anyone at the CIA the satisfaction of seeing her look at the Wall of Honor, a white marble wall with inset black stars, each star representing a nameless CIA officer who had given his or her life in the line of duty.

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