Burned: Black Cipher Files #3 (Black Cipher Files series) (13 page)

“Answer the question.” I held the cold, black, anodized metal steady using both hands. I might be shaking like a palm tree in gale force winds on the inside, but my hands were rock solid and sure on the outside.

After his initial blink of surprise at the gun, he hadn’t looked at it since. He kept his gaze squarely on my face. But he still hadn’t answered my question.

I couldn’t decide if I was impressed or pissed. Pissed won.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll shoot you?” I wanted him cringing in fear, cowering before the might of my weapon. His uncanny calm only made me more angry.

“You know, yesterday I probably would have said go for it. But today I have new reason to survive.”

He didn’t say live.

I wondered if he even realized the distinction. I sure did. For too long, I’d been surviving rather than living. And I was tired of it.

“You still haven’t explained how you knew about my grandparents.”

Zeke sighed, rubbed a hand across his neck. “It’s complicated.”

“I live for complicated.”

“Ah, can you lower the weapon first?”

I kept the Sig Sauer pointed at him. But the reality of pointing a gun at a real person, a human being, especially a guy like Zeke with his broad chest and ripped abs, strong biceps and lean forearms, generated a roiling mess in my stomach.

“Please?” He cocked his head to one side, his unruly blond curls brushed one shoulder and drew my attention right back to his body. The deep ocean blue of his eyes and the serious set of his mouth told me he understood how close to the edge I stood and how much I was teetering.

“Explain.”

“I knew about your grandparents because thirteen years ago yesterday, my grandfather died in a climbing accident,” he responded evenly.

“What does that have to do with my grandparents?”

“Their deaths are connected.”

“Connected,” I said flatly. “How?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a matter of national security and you don’t have clearance.”

I snorted. “You have got to be kidding me.” My shoulders slumped. Why had I come with him? Given in to him? Clearly he was crazy.

National security? Clearance? My stepfather had been a farmer in Kansas.

“Goddess,” I whispered. I’d let my longing for a connection with a man override thirteen years of caution and borderline paranoid isolation.

On the other hand, the good news was Zeke couldn’t possibly have anything to do with John Stanley. I wanted to relax into a puddle of relief. Zeke wasn’t after me or Mama.

Mama.

My brain was still examining, calculating, processing. And that’s when I realized that I still couldn’t relax.

We weren’t safe. The monster had found me in San Luis. Which should have been impossible.

And I was right back to where I’d started. My stepfather was still after us. And I was on my own again.

Zeke clearly didn’t know who John was. There had not been an ounce of recognition, no flinch, no flicker of an eyelid, in his response to John’s name. He’d just written the name down and then started looking for John Stanley on his computer.

I really was on my own. Zeke was crazy so he clearly couldn’t help me with him. Mama was safe with Blue. And I had the overwhelming urge to just let loose and cry. Sob until my grief was gone, and I was empty of all the wants and needs I’d had to suppress for thirteen long years. Worries I was unable to reveal, and hopes I was forbidden to indulge, chained to my psyche and dragged me down. But I was afraid if I let go, I might not be able to pull myself back from that edge. He’d given me hope and then snatched it away. The sense of loss was startling.

So my crying jag would have to wait. I had to go. Had to find out why my former stepfather had been in Cambria this morning and how he had found us. We’d been safe for nine years, so why now?

I carefully stored the gun back in the pocket I’d sewn into my patchwork purse.

I didn’t look at Zeke. Couldn’t really. He’d been a wisp of an idea. A longing to connect. A wish for something ephemeral that was just that. A silly childish wish. I would never be free until he,
John Stanley
, was dead.

Neither would Mama.

“Thank you for your time,” I said formally. My gaze shifted around the impersonal hotel room, mentally collecting my belongings and packing up my life. Again.

“Wait, what?” Zeke jumped up, blocked my path.

He’d stepped closer. So close in fact I could see the striations of aqua and navy in his blue gaze. He’d invaded my personal space. As close as he’d been when he’d kissed me. Given me a gift. There had been tenderness and desire in our brief contact this morning.

Now that I knew what they felt like, I resolved to experience those sensations again. I just had to take care of my problems first. And then, I vowed, I was going to chase that feeling again.

“I need to leave.”

The heat from his body was intense as he curled his fingers around my bicep. “You can’t.” Zeke edged closer. His warmth surrounded me like a comforting hug.

“Sure I can.” I tugged at my arm.

“I can help you. But you need to tell me why you think this John Stanley would come after you.” Zeke tilted his head, his brows scrunched in an adorable frown. “And how you know his name.”

It shouldn’t matter if I told him. Since he didn’t know who John was. I purposely swallowed down my fear and tried to keep my voice even, calm, unemotional. “I know his name because he is, was, my stepfather.”

Eighteen

Zeke opened his mouth. Closed it. The assassin was her stepfather? That was a sleeper who was way too close to his intended targets. He couldn’t wrap his brain around that kind of illicit intimacy.

“He married the daughter of his target,” he spoke the words aloud as if trying to make sense of what she was telling him. The act held a level of evil that was hard to comprehend. What exactly had happened?

“Target?”

And Zeke knew he was going to explain to her. Even if it was a breach of national security. She deserved to know.

“He was a sleeper.” He forced the words out of stiff lips. If he didn’t share something, she was never going to believe him.

She snorted. “A sleeper cell? A person or persons who are inactive for years until suddenly tasked with killing or initiating the murder of a target? You really believe a sleeper was responsible for my grandparents’ deaths?”

“Yes.” Zeke hesitated. Fuck, could he really tell her about this? Then he thought about the last few hours and wondered if could he really afford not to tell her about this. Would she feel violated from the truth that her stepfather was an assassin who specifically targeted her grandparents and in some weird twist of improper conduct married her mother? Or would she be relieved that now she had a reason for why he had killed her grandparents?

“On October nineteenth and twentieth, 1995, a group of sleeper cells eliminated twelve targets around the world.”

“John? Sleeper cell? My grandfather was an insurance salesman and my grandmother was a homemaker.” She stepped back, away from him, so slowly and carefully that he knew she was trying hard to be as nonthreatening as possible. “Why would they even have an assassin after them?”

He didn’t answer. How could he? Did he really want to get into the whole World War II history of the targets and the ultra-secret joint committee, TICOM, that had captured, interrogated, and then released German code breakers? Could he? He was already breaking the rules as it was.

“So see.” She tried to tug away from him, her scorn evident as she denied what he knew to be fact. “You are clearly mistaken.”

Zeke was silent while he ran through scenarios, thought about the other people whose families had been killed by sleepers, and the many secrets of the past.

“It’s Occam’s Razor,” she said impatiently.

“Yeah, in normal random circumstances, I would agree.” Zeke ran his fingers through his unruly curls. “When two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.”

And if her grandparents hadn’t been part of a very exclusive group of targets who were all killed within a twenty-four hour period, around the world, Zeke might have agreed with her. But, no way in hell were their deaths on that day and within that time frame only the result of an murderous son-in-law. Their deaths were not just a coincidence.

However he wasn’t authorized to share the circumstances behind the order given to eliminate twelve specific targets thirteen years ago.

And without that information, she would continue to believe that John Stanley was just her stepfather. But that still didn’t refute the fact that both Sunshine and her mother had been living in relative obscurity for years and out of the blue John Stanley was after them again.

“Why do you think he’s suddenly coming after you?” It didn’t make any sense. The whole point of a sleeper was a random anonymous killer that waited never knowing if they’d be called on to follow through with their orders. However, once they completed their job, they were supposed to fade into the background and disappear.

The sleepers who killed the targets thirteen years ago had literally been in place for years.

So why would John Stanley come after Sunshine and her mother after he completed the assassination? Especially now.

“I don’t know how he found us after all this time. We’ve been invisible and hidden for nine years.” Sunshine huffed out a frustrated breath. “This is pointless.”

No. It wasn’t. “Humor me.”

“He’s obsessed,” she whispered.

Obsession.

“With?” Zeke swallowed, suddenly aware of the ways in which her statement could be construed, and prayed that he was wrong.

“My mother.”

Thank God.

Sunshine crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed. The move accented her breasts and the top of her plump mounds spilled over the loose scoop neckline. Zeke cursed his hormones for even noticing even as his palms itched to touch.

So, her stepfather was obsessed with her mother.

“He killed them. And we ran,” she said defiantly.

“If you saw him do it why did you run?”

If Zeke had seen his grandfather’s killer he would have made sure the man or woman paid.

“He’d just killed my grandparents.” Sunshine stared at the pastel watercolor of an indistinct harbor scene, the watery faded colors merely shadows and lines without any substance. “Besides the fact that I was only seven years old? I did what my mother told me. And I was terrified of him.”

“Okay. I see your point.” He’d been thinking about it like the adult he was now rather than through the filter of a frightened child.

So they ran. And had been running this whole time?

“He kept finding us. Kept coming.” She seemed like she was a million miles away. “We couldn’t get away from him. In the first four years, he found us three times. But we’ve been safe for the last nine years.”

“What did you do nine years ago?”

“My uncle helped us.” Sunshine blinked, her gray eyes went blurry, then lasered in on Zeke. “We incorporated. Everything goes through the corporation now. Laid a false trail. And changed our names without telling anyone our new identities.”

“No one?”

“Except Uncle Carson. But even he didn’t know where we lived.”

Uncle Carson? Carson Black, deputy director at the NSA, and Zeke’s mentor.

“He isn’t really my uncle.”

No shit. But her relationship with Carson was a discussion for another time. They’d have to return to the subject of Carson later. He needed her to concentrate on Stanley. “And now Stanley is back?”

“I shouldn’t be talking about this with you.”

She stood, ready to bolt. Zeke couldn’t allow her to leave, but he needed to convince her gently. He certainly couldn’t hold her here against her will.

“Let me help you.”

Her silver eyes were wounded. Like the morning clouds over a stormy ocean before the marine layer burned off, bruised by the events of the last few hours. Zeke could tell an adrenaline let down was going to hit her soon.

“Let me help you,” he said again, trying to make his body language as reassuring and nonviolent as possible.

She shook her head. “You believe he’s a sleeper assassin, not just my crazy, abusive ex-stepfather.”

“What if he’s both?” Zeke asked desperately. And if he was both, how did Zeke keep her safe? Because, in his mind, her safety was paramount.

If Stanley wasn’t just an obsessed husband but more, if he were also the sleeper, then Zeke couldn’t let Sunshine go. Stanley would have a level of training that she would be completely unprepared to defend against. That kind of expertise combined with his obsessive behavior made John Stanley way beyond dangerous.

“I want to help you.”

She scoffed. “Really?” He could practically hear the skepticism in her voice and wondered. Hadn’t she ever had help?

“Let me dig into John Stanley.” Zeke tried to sweeten the offer. “You can stay here. Out of sight and off radar. Lie low until we figure out where he is and what he wants.”

“You think you can find out where he is?” A tentative hope shone in her eyes, lighting her up like the full moon lit the night sky and making her glow with anticipation.

“Yeah.” Zeke could find John Stanley. He could find anyone. And screw it, if for some reason he couldn’t find him, he would ask Jamie. Anything to keep that eager look on her face and the excitement in her eyes.

Another thought occurred to him. John Stanley was a link to what happened to the people killed thirteen years ago.

What if Stanley could tell Zeke who originally gave him the contract to kill Sunshine’s grandparents? If Zeke knew that maybe, even more importantly, he could determine who engineered the terminate order? Because someone, somewhere, initiated the sequence of events that resulted in twelve families being ripped apart. And Zeke would really, really like to know who was the mastermind.

When he’d tried to hack into that information at the NSA, there hadn’t been any kind of record. The sleeper information had been buried somewhere not associated with 5491. Zeke hadn’t even found a reference to the fact that there were sleepers. The only reason he knew was because Jamie Hunt and Staci Grant had uncovered the conspiracy.