Shadows Amongst Light (The Spy Who Loves Me) (18 page)

             
By seven that evening I was exhausted enough to go to bed.

             
Bo and I went to sleep like the night before and just like the night before I was awakened after midnight to the sound of my puppy’s frantic barking once again.

             
Only this time Bo was barking at something downstairs.

             
This time I hadn’t made the same mistake from the night before. I found my weapon from its hiding place underneath my pillow and slowly searched my room carefully not turning on any lights. I picked the puppy up and sat him down on my bed whispering to him to stay and hoping that he understood that command.

             
Downstairs I saw that one of the windows in the great room was open. It took me a minute or two to remember that I’d locked it before going to bed.

             
I peeked out of the edge of the window searching the darkness beyond. At first, I saw nothing out of the ordinary but then only a slight movement caught my attention. It happened so fast, that if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have been so sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

             
Again, I sat waiting for the dawn. This time I wasn’t able to fall asleep again.

             
Just before morning, my phone rang startling me from my thoughts. This was the first call I’d had since moving here. As far as I knew, no one even knew I was here.

             
“Hello?” I picked up the receiver slowly and listened.

             
“Cameron? Are you okay?” The sound of my brother’s voice so unexpected had my full attention.

             
“Judah? Judah why are you calling me? How did you find out where I was? Judah, are you fallowing me?”

             
“No. Cameron what are you talking about? Of course, I’m not following you. I told you I would find you. I wanted to make sure you were okay?”

             
“Someone was just here.” I couldn’t quite keep my voice from shaking.

             
“Where? At your house? Who was it?”

             
“I don’t know. I thought maybe it was you?”

             
“Cameron, I’m thousands of miles away and no one I know would be following you.”

             
“Then who?” I asked.

             
“I think you have to ask yourself that. Who stands the most to lose by you leaving D.C.? Who needs to keep an eye on you?”

             
“The Bureau?”

             
“Try a little closer to home than that?” Judah said.

             
“The Organization? Noah? Who are you talking about Judah?”

             
“How sure are you that you can trust any of them to simply let you walk away completely? Maybe they need to keep an eye on you to make sure you don‘t cause trouble?”

             
While I sat, trying to deny his words Judah told me that he needed to hang up. He didn’t want to stay on the line too long for fear someone might be tracing his call.

             
“Wait, Judah, tell me what Jezzuha means.”

             
“The document again. Cameron I told you,” he said in frustration.

             
“Tell me Judah. It’s not Aramaic.”

             
“You’re right it’s not Aramaic. It’s Arabic. At least a slang version of it anyway.” He hesitated enough for me to realize what he was about to tell me wasn’t good. “It means traitor, Cameron.”

             
“You suspect someone in the Red Jihad?”

              “I didn’t say it was someone in our organization,” he said slowly. Before I could grasp his meaning, the phone went dead and Judah was gone.

             
I was left trying to untangle what he’d just said to me. Was Judah trying to warn me that someone within The Organization was bad? If so then who?

             
Over and over that chilling implication went round in my head. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t fit the pieces together. Only one thing was clear. Someone had been in my house tonight while I was sleeping. I didn’t know what they had been looking for or if they had found what they came for. Or would they be returning. The only thing I knew for certain was I no longer knew who the good guys were anymore.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

              When daylight finally broke, I wasn’t any closer to unraveling any of these things than I was to figuring out who it was that was following me.

             
I felt sick again as much by my own inabilities as the nausea that had followed me since my move to Colorado. I was alone and lonely. I’d be an easy target right now.

             
I searched the house looking for my frightened dog and found Bo hiding under the desk in my office. It took a whole lot of coaxing to convince him it was okay to come out of his hiding place.

             
Something had frightened him into abandoning me and seeking cover. I think it was that fact that finally made me see I needed to take action.

              I was on dangerous ground here alone. I didn’t know who was after me and whether or not they meant to harm me. The only thing I felt certain of was that they would return.

              And when they did, what would happen to me and my child? None of the possibilities was pleasant ones.

             
The alternative was to run. If I ran, would I ever be able to run far enough or fast enough for that matter to escape my past? I didn’t believe that was possible. So where did that leave me and what chance did I have? And was I really as out as I’d believed?

             
As I sat there trying to make the right decision for my child and myself I had an overwhelming feeling of closeness to Noah. I couldn’t accept what Judah had hinted at. I wouldn’t believe that Noah was in some was corrupt or involved what was happening to me somehow.

             
Maybe it was because of all the years that we’d been together and all the trouble he’d saved me from. I couldn’t help but think that somewhere out there, if he were truly still alive, then Noah was aware that I was in trouble and he would help if he could.

             
The one person I knew that Noah would turn to was Matt. Because of that, I knew that I needed to get to some place where I could call Matt with as much assurance as I could have under the situation that my call wasn’t being traced. I figured the best solution was to get away from Eagle’s Bluff for the time being. I needed to find somewhere that would at least appear to be safer. Somewhere where there would be lots of people around me. It was easy to get lost in a crowd.

             
I needed to get in touch with Matt as soon as possible.

             
Of course, in a town the size of Eagle’s Bluff that was impossible so I decided my best chance of getting lost was in Denver.

             
It wasn’t a permanent solution by any means but it would work temporarily. Losing Noah had left me feeling vulnerable and second-guessing myself. I needed distance to regroup and consider a better course of action.

             
Late that afternoon, I packed up Bo and drove to Denver, which was a little more than sixty miles away. I found a motel that was pet friendly, dropped my puppy off in the room, and went to hang out at an all-night diner. Okay, so it probably wasn’t the best solution around, but it was the only one I could come up with in my current state of mind.

             
I sat nursing my diet coke and eating a sandwich while most of the patrons looked at me in a way that I suspected I must have a big banner across my chest with something along the lines of ‘she’s hiding some big dark secret‘ written across it.

             
I called and left a message for Matt to call me back at the pay phone number and I sat close to the phone in a booth trying not to look to conspicuous.

             
Unfortunately, I failed at that as well when the waitress came a third time to ask me if I was okay.

             
“Sure, I’m fine.” I smiled at her concern while wishing she would just go away.

             
“Well, you know if you need some help. There are some friends of mine here tonight that are cops. They can help you if, oh say, you were in trouble.”

             
“Thanks, but I’m okay--really. Just really hanging out. I like the music on the jukebox. And I’m expecting a call.” I added when she continued to look at me with the skeptical expression on her face. She knew I was lying. The truth was the music was terrible.

             
“Sure thing, honey. You just let me know if anyone gives you a hard time. I’ll sick my friends on them.”

             
If only that worked for the people I was running from, I thought to myself but only smiled at her.

             
“Thanks I’ll do that.”

             
I stayed at the dinner another half-hour before Matt called me back.

             
“You going to tell me why you left such a vague not to mention confusing message on my secure line,” Matt told me not at all pleased when it hit me with the time differences, it was early morning in D.C.

             
“Matt do you have someone following me?” I asked not bothering with polite conversation.

             
“What? What are you talking about Cameron? Why would I have someone following you?”

             
“I don’t know--you tell me? What are you up to Matt?”

             
“Cameron, no one is following you. At least as far as I know. Maybe you just imagined it. Or maybe it’s all your years in The Organization making you paranoid.” He added trying to sound uninterested.

             
“Matt, I’m not paranoid. Someone broke into my house. Are you sure the Bureau isn’t having me watched for obvious reasons?”

             
“I don’t know what you mean by obvious but as far as I know no one is worried about you Cameron. We have bigger concerns.”

             
I knew then that he had been briefed on my connection to Elijah Jacobs but I decided not to have that argument with Matt just yet.

             
“All right, any suggestions on who else might be watching me?”

             
“I’d say you need to ask your Adam that one.”

             
“I can’t do that Matt. Maybe I should be asking Noah instead?”

             
I heard him sigh before saying, “Look Cameron, I don‘t want to argue. What’s done is done. I want to help you. Noah would want that.”

             
At those words, my radar went into full alert. Matt wasn’t interested in helping me for any reason but getting information from me.

             
I slammed the phone down checked my watch and saw there was no way the Bureau would have had time to trace it be still I decided I’d worn my welcome out here.

*****

              After two more wasted nights in Denver doing pretty much the same thing, I decided I’d run away from my problems long enough. I’d had time to consider all the possibilities and believed that my first assumption had been wrong. The Bureau or The Organization wasn’t watching me. If they had wanted to keep tabs on me, they would do it without ever alerting me to the fact. I knew it wasn’t Judah. In my mind that left only one person. Davis.

             
The man that I suspected was the true leader of the Red Jihad if not the very person responsible for my parents’ death.

             
I didn’t believe Davis’s intention was to hurt me. After all, he’d certainly had enough opportunities if he’d wanted me dead. Both here and in D.C. I believed Davis was interested in finding out what I knew about Judah and about my parents.

             
I decided it was time to learn the truth about what happened all those years finally. Whatever the truth was, I owed it to myself to figure it out.  

             
So I packed up Bo and started out early the next morning for Eagle’s Bluff.

             
I didn’t go straight home. Something drew me back to that one route I’d taken to the small town and to the diner where I’d met Gladys.

             
I wasn’t really sure why I had this need to see her again. Maybe I needed to hear more about the love that she’d lost. Or maybe I needed to know that she was happy in her decisions.