Angel of Desire (2 page)

The boy didn't listen to the lecture; he'd heard it innumerable times over the nearly five years he'd lived in the home.

He glanced around, half-expecting to see his mermaid, unsurprised when he didn't.

His rational mind assured him that she'd only been a hallucination, born from a lack of oxygen to his brain. But then something brushed against his cheek, something as invisible as air, as soft as a pussy willow, as warm as July sunshine.

And as impossible as it might seem, for the first time in his young life, the boy had a fleeting feeling that he was not alone.

Chapter One

HIS NAME WAS SHADE. Which suited a man who lived in shadows.

Few people knew him by this name. Indeed, he'd had so many identities over the years that there were times when he wondered if even he, with his eidetic memory, could recall them all. Not that he would want to try.

The man called Shade lived solely for the moment, an inevitable attitude for an individual whose life could end at any time. The work he did was as dangerous as it was secretive, and when a job was completed—successfully, for Shade would have it no other way—he left both the unpleasantness his work entailed, and whatever identity he'd taken on, where it belonged.

In the dark and murky past.

And then, as always, he moved on.

Shade was intelligent, fearless and intrinsically deadly. His exploits, some exaggerated, most not, were the stuff of legends, the kind of tales any spy novelist would kill for.

Before being forced into an early and unwilling retirement, he'd spent six months with the rebels in Afghanistan, had witnessed the breakup of the Baltic Republics, had been on the scene of more than one Caribbean coup, and, more familiar with the Middle East than men twice his age, had successfully infiltrated Baghdad two weeks before the UN forces began dropping their deadly smart bombs on the city.

Some of those who'd worked with him, and lived to tell about it, called him crazy. Others proclaimed him dangerous. Still others had sworn he possessed a death wish and refused to ever team up with him again.

Shade had steadfastly ignored them all. With the exception of one man, who'd become his brother on a long-ago winter day, Shade had never cared what anyone thought. He was a man alone, a cold, distant remote island unto himself. Which was just the way he liked it.

Which was why, when the bureaucratic drones in the government had attempted to bring him in from the cold and plunk him behind the safety of a shiny new desk, he'd promptly quit. He'd given up his guaranteed salary, his generous health plan, his pension, and walked away.

Shade did not look back.

Afterward, his only regret was that he hadn't begun working for himself years earlier.

Shade did not advertise his services. There was no need. His clients, for lack of a better word, consisted of desperate, normally law-abiding individuals who had first attempted to solve their problems by legal means.

But inevitably, after they found themselves hopelessly tangled in a maze of red tape, they would go looking for alternate solutions.

And that's when they found their way to him.

Shade was, quite simply, a gun for hire. A mercenary. An unpretty term for an admittedly unpretty job. He continued to do what he'd always done, but these days he had no one to answer to but himself. No conscience to concern him but his own. Fortunately, his own conscience was not all that troublesome.

He'd kidnapped children who had been spirited out of the United States by foreign spouses from remote hilltop homes that were nearly fortresses and returned them to grateful American parents.

He'd rescued terrified college students thrown into prisons that made medieval dungeons seem homey for the stupid crime of smuggling a Playboy magazine or a bit of homegrown pot info religiously fundamentalist countries.

On three occasions, he arranged escape for women who'd married dashing, dark-eyed sheikhs only to find themselves, once the ceremony was over, deprived of their passports and their rights.

Once, he'd hijacked a plane carrying an elusive Latin-American drug lord to his seaside retreat. After landing the Learjet on a deserted, little-known runway in the desert ten miles east of San Diego, Shade had walked away, leaving his hostage bound and gagged, tied up with a bright red ribbon for the widow of a DEA agent whose husband had been tortured and killed on the drug kingpin's orders.

Knowing that the unlucky agent had left behind six kids, three approaching college age, Shade had refused payment for that particular job. The knowledge that the drug lord was serving a life sentence without parole in a Honda federal penitentiary was satisfaction enough.

Currently between jobs, he was sitting on his deck, booted feet crossed at the ankle on the redwood railing, drinking in the warmth of a benevolent April sun. The air was clear and fresh as only New England air can be in springtime, making him realize that he never took time to even notice the weather unless it threatened to screw up a mission.

The portable radio beside him was tuned to a baseball game. As he drank a beer, he gazed out over the heavily wooded two acres. During the year the house had sat vacant, Mother Nature had stepped in to reclaim the land.

"Place could use some weeding," he decided, eyeing the daffodils struggling valiantly to rise above the dark thorny thicket of weeds.

As he tipped the long-necked bottle back and took a swallow, Shade decided that if Sleeping Beauty had been on the other side of that impenetrable tangle, the prince would have needed one helluva souped-up chain saw to cut his way through to her.

"Then again," he considered, "there's something to . be said for the natural look."

This was the first home he'd ever owned. Although he'd had more than his share of misgivings about joining the ranks of the American home owner, the sprawling glass-and-wood home, settled on the banks of a fast-running ribbon of crystal-clear creek, had drawn him like a siren's call. Telling himself that he was only buying the place because of the attractive tax break, he'd signed the final mortgage papers two weeks ago.

At first it had not been easy. Accustomed to apartments and hotel rooms—and a great deal less hospitable conditions when he was working—Shade had found trying to sleep amid so much space an impossibility.

He'd spent the first few nights prowling from empty-room to empty room, like a cautious jungle cat staking out new territory in the moonlight slanting through the house's many skylights.

Now, fifteen days later, as he watched a red-breasted robin yank a plump worm from the moist earth of the rockery beside the creek, he realized he was beginning to get used to the idea that this place was his.

It crossed Shade's mind that since the purchase of this house, he no longer awoke each day edgy and primed for danger, a necessary attitude when your line of work routinely got you threatened, beat up and shot at. A job where people lied to you and cheated and tried, with depressing regularity, to kill you; a job where you lied and cheated and sometimes killed.

In fact, truth be told, he was finding the idea of leaving his comfortable new innerspring mattress to sleep on the wet ground in some godforsaken jungle definitely unappealing.

Perhaps he was finally losing it. Now that, Shade decided with a grimace, was a depressing thought. Nearly as depressing as the one that had been stirring in some dark corner of his mind lately—the idea that he might be in danger of turning into a living cliché.

His frown darkening, he popped open another beer, continued to survey the backyard, thought about driving into town and buying some hedge clippers and came to the conclusion that the place had a certain wild charm.

"No point in getting carried away," he decided.

The breeze sighing through the tops of the trees, the babbling of the brook added a soothing counterpoint to the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd from the radio. Beside the deck, a lilac bush was bravely pushing the season, its early lavender flowers perfuming the April air.

When the doorbell rang, Shade reluctantly pushed himself to his feet, went into the house and made his way across the oak floor to the front door.

"Special delivery. For Shade Blackstone," the uniformed woman said.

"That's me." Figuring it must be one more document to add to the mountain of legalized paperwork buying a home entailed, he signed the sheet, receiving a slim white legal-sized envelope in return.

He grabbed a bag of potato chips from the kitchen counter on the way back to the deck. Then, settling back into the Adirondack chair, he sliced the envelope open with his fingernail.

The advisory, on a single sheet of paper, had been typewritten—on a Selectric, Shade observed on some absent, professional level. You didn't see many typewriters these days. Not with computers on every desk. The paper was the plain white kind that could be purchased in any office supply store. The note, brief and to the point, was unsigned.

The hairs on the back of Shade's neck prickled.

As he scanned the single paragraph, the potato chips, the beer, his tangle of roots and weeds and overgrown grass were all instantly forgotten.

His curse, as he ripped the paper into pieces, was short and savage. His jaw clenched. His eyes blazed with a hot inner fury.

It was noon. By twelve-fifteen, Shade had stuffed some clothes into a well-worn duffel bag and by one o'clock had placed several telephone calls to sources around the world. Three hours after the letter's arrival, he was sitting in the first-class section of a Boeing 737 winging its way south to Washington, D.C.

The flight attendant, a perky redhead with corkscrew curls and long, wraparound legs, brought his drink to him with a bright, professional smile. One look at his granite face and his cold, implacable eyes and her smile faded. Her fingers trembled as she handed him the miniature bottle of Scotch.

Later, she slipped into the cabin to warn the crew of a possible hijacking attempt.

Never, she swore on a shaky voice worlds different from the smooth contralto tones that had given seat-belt instructions prior to takeoff, never had she viewed such murder in a man's eyes.

MURDER. The word tolled warningly, dangerously, in Rachel's mind.

"I cannot let him do it," she insisted for the umpteenth time.

Her superior shrugged and folded his slender, patrician hands atop the glossy ebony surface of his desk. "The man Shade has killed before," he reminded her needlessly.

"Only in self-defense. When his life, and those of others, were in jeopardy."

Joshua gave her a long, stern look over the rim of his silver-framed glasses. He did not need the spectacles, Rachel knew. He wore them for effect. A former actor, Joshua knew how to utilize props to his advantage.

"And this time is different?"

"Very different," she admitted reluctantly. It was not easy to admit that someone she'd cared for so intimately, for so long, could be on the verge of such a deadly act. "I have every reason to believe that he intends to commit cold-blooded murder."

Joshua didn't immediately answer. Instead, he took off the glasses and began folding the steins back and forth in a cautious, thoughtful gesture that had her already keyed-up nerves jangling. The silence lingered, on and on. Patience had never been Rachel's long suit. Today's situation was stretching her self-control to the limit.