Darkness at Dawn (3 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

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

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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Nameless, because no one could ever know their names. No information was given as to how or where they died—just the anonymous black star. Often, not even the families knew.
Lucy knew.
She wasn’t going to give anyone any satisfaction, so she marched right over the Seal and right by the Wall of Honor, hoping against hope the cameras couldn’t pick out the tears in her eyes.
Because two of those anonymous stars were her mother and her father, who had been killed right before her eyes.
 
CAPTAIN Mike Shafer of the army’s Tenth Mountain Division hopped down from the Black Hawk hovering over the helipad at Langley. The roar of the rotors precluded conversation, so he simply gave a thumbs-up and then rotated his index finger.
I’m okay, you guys can get going.
The pilot gave him a two-fingered salute off his helmet, lifted the nose of the helo and angled away fast. The skids never touched CIA soil, and Mike was sorry that his combat boots had to. Ten years army and he’d never been to Langley. He liked it just fine that way. Army pukes and CIA spooks don’t mix. And now that he was ready to leave the service, at the last minute the spooks had reeled him in.
It was clear that the spooks at Langley wanted
him
. They’d come for him ten thousand feet up in the Granites in Alaska, on the third week of an intense, six-week mountaineering training cycle, preparing men to take over, combat-ready and acclimatized to the high altitudes, in the Hindu Kush.
Mike had any healthy army man’s distrust of the CIA, but he was also seriously annoyed at having to interrupt the training cycle, particularly since it was his last.
He’d hoped to give Uncle Sam at least another four years, but his old man was sick and it was time for Mike to step up for his family and take over Shafer Demolitions. Responsibility for his stepmom and his half brothers and sister and more than 150 employees now fell on his shoulders.
So though he was giving his all to the men he was training in Alaska, there was a part of him that was already gone. He did not want to be reeled back in by Christians in Action.
Yet here he was, having been pulled without any advance notice from three weeks straight in the field, bundled onto a CH-17 Chinook down to Fort Greenley in a raging snowstorm, taken from there by military jet transport to Andrews and from there by Black Hawk to Langley. He was filthy, exhausted and seriously pissed.
As the rotor wash eased up, Mike straightened and turned at the hand on his arm.
“Captain Shafer?” a man yelled. The Black Hawk’s powerful engines were still loud even though it was lifting away.
Mike nodded tightly. Something in his face made the man drop his hand, fast.
“Follow me,” the man mouthed, and made his way across the parking blacktop.
The man guiding him was a classic bureaucrat—of moderate height, thin, elegantly dressed in an expensive suit by some designer Mike couldn’t recognize but his stepmom probably could. Expensive, shiny shoes. Closely shaven, hair recently barbered by someone who knew what he was doing. Cuff links. Fucking
cuff links
. The CIA was known for its snappy dressers.
Mind you, they couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight. They’d missed the implosion of the Soviet Union and had been dead wrong about WMD in Iraq, but the creases in their trousers were just so.
Next to Mr. Elegant, Mike felt like the Abominable Snowman. He hadn’t shaved and he hadn’t showered this past week. He’d worn the same fatigues day and night for a week, too. He was hungry, thirsty, sleepy and filthy—and in a lousy mood—as he followed Elegant into a side entrance to a bank of elevators where they went down, way down.
There had been a turnstile and guard at the entrance, but Elegant pulled out a card at a small side door before the turnstile, so Elegant obviously had a top security clearance, probably higher than Mike’s own.
In the elevator he could smell himself, and it wasn’t pretty. He could also smell Elegant, who smelled very pretty, of an expensive cologne. The inside of the elevator was lined with brass panels so polished they were like mirrors. Mike stared at their reflection.
Elegant looked like a member in good standing of civilized society, and he looked like a nineteenth-century trapper just in from a winter of murdering and scalping settlers on the plains.
He heard his own teeth grinding.
Finally the elevator stopped dropping and the doors whooshed open onto a plush, quiet corridor with cove lighting along the ceiling. They walked down empty corridors for what felt like almost a mile. Mike walked fast and was delighted to hear Elegant’s breathing turn heavy. Finally, they reached the heart of something.
They caught up with three well-dressed men and two very elegant women walking along the corridor, conferring quietly. One of the women greeted the man by Mike’s side and froze when she saw Mike. She simply stopped walking. Her four companions stopped, too, startled at the sight of him in their civilized space.
Mike lifted his lips in a feral smile, and one of the women stepped back instinctively. He was swarthy by nature, and the high-altitude sun had baked him a deep brown, almost the same color as his dark bushy beard, so all they’d be seeing is a slash of white in a nut brown face. A none-too-friendly face.
Mike was also armed. No one had told him much, so he’d come loaded for bear. Elegant’s special clearance had obviously been extended to him, since he hadn’t been disarmed and still had his Glock 18 strapped to his thigh. With this lot he wouldn’t need weaponry, though. He was an expert in close-quarters combat. Everyone in this corridor was a paper-pusher. No contest.
He sighed silently. The thought of venting his frustration on these pencil-dicks—even the women were pencil-dicks—was tempting, but of course he wouldn’t. Even the CIA had its place in keeping his country safe.
Sort of. When they could get their shit together.
He was frustrated because with each hour that passed, he was losing acclimatization it had taken him time and hard work to achieve.
More and more people were streaming into a room halfway along the long corridor, and that was obviously where they were headed, too. Mike tucked away his frustration and worry about leaving his men ten thousand feet up with no leader. There was nothing he could do about it now.
The room was large, with an enormous polished wood conference table looking at a twelve-foot blank monitor above their heads, covering one entire wall.
The man accompanying him started to take his arm to direct him to his seat, but at Mike’s snarl, he lifted his eyebrows and nodded to a chair at the table, near the middle. Mike was surprised to see his nameplate already there.
Captain Michael Shafer, Tenth Mountain Division, US Army.
In front of him was a sterling silver pitcher of ice water, a big water glass, a pad and pen, a netbook and a microphone.
The chair was sinfully comfortable he found as he eased into it. Definitely the most comfortable seating arrangement he’d had in . . . shit, in almost a month. He and his men had been living in Jamesway huts that had lethally uncomfortable tubular steel chairs. He was also massively sleep deprived. If he didn’t watch it, he’d drift off if they doused the lights for that huge monitor.
Then any thought of sleep fled his mind as the Secretary of Defense walked in, followed by the Director of the NSA, the Director of Homeland Security and the Deputy Director of Operations of the CIA.
And then any thoughts of anything at all fled from his mind as the DD/O was followed by the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Christ, what was a babe like
her
doing here? Not too tall but long-legged, with shiny shoulder-length chestnut hair, a heart-shaped face with huge blue eyes and an Angelina Jolie mouth . . . The woman was distraction itself in a room meant for business. Serious business, judging from the top honchos in US security who were taking their seats on the other side of the table.
Interestingly, Hot Babe was seated on the power side, right next to the DD/O, looking utterly out of place.
Mike wasn’t a Neanderthal. He worked well with female officers. He’d grown up with a strong stepmother he loved and respected, and he had a half sister who’d kick his ass if he ever showed a woman disrespect. So it wasn’t the woman’s femaleness that bothered him. Per se. Though that degree of sex quotient should be illegal.
Once he got his mind out of his pants, though, he realized that his first instinct was right.
She doesn’t belong.
There were other women in the room, types he was very familiar with. No-nonsense professional women, dressed well, even expensively, but for the office. They came equipped with BlackBerries, Macs and briefcases the way eagles come equipped with feathers. They scowled and gave off
I’m very important
vibes that were almost palpable.
Hot Babe was dressed for a dinner date with a guy she liked a lot, in a soft curve-hugging sweater with some shiny bits in a blue that exactly matched her eyes, straight black skirt with a flirty little something around the hem, black stockings, black high heels.
Where everyone who wasn’t the head of a multibillion-dollar government agency was burdened down with sheaves of papers and communication devices, she was carrying nothing but a purse, though it looked like one of those purses that cost more than his Remington 700.
Above all, she didn’t look self-important, didn’t check the other people in the room in an instinctive settling of pecking order as everyone else was doing. She looked a little bored and a little amused.
The big door closed. Everyone who was supposed to be here was here. Voices died down as the business of the day was ready to begin.
Something about the intensity of his stare must have charged the air between them because she suddenly looked up and met his gaze from across the ten shiny feet of table.
Mike’s breath stopped in his chest. Fuck. She was
gorgeous
. Movie star beautiful. Hardly any makeup, so it was all her. Her look was direct, intelligent and . . . sad? Could that be? He was mulling over what she could be sad about, and why someone who didn’t have government agent written all over her should be here in this room, when Secretary Connelly tapped his finger against the microphone for everyone’s attention, something Mike hated.
And just like that, his head was back in the game. Whatever it was that they had called him in for, interrupting an extreme training mission, which would cost him in lost acclimatization and leave a group of elite soldiers leaderless, was about to be explained.
It better be good.
 
“THIS meeting is called to order,” Secretary Connelly said.
He was tall, had a shock of blindingly white hair and was as dumb as a rock. Her mother used to say it was a miracle he could tie his own shoelaces. Lucy remembered her parents making fun of his blank expression when he’d been the senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
She’d been called away from her squash soup, a lovely wine and two perfect peaches to listen to this bozo?
Lucy tried to wipe the boredom off her face and found it hard. Then she sneaked a glance at Uncle Edwin and straightened up, suddenly no longer bored.
Uncle Edwin looked tense, deep brackets around his mouth, nostrils white with stress. Lucy had never seen him looking even remotely like that. Even at her parents’ funeral, he’d looked sad and devastated but not tense and anxious. He’d been a top security official for well over two thirds of his life, and he’d seen everything, twice. Whatever was going on was serious.
She looked around the room while Connelly droned on about the “grave threats to our way of life” without ever mentioning exactly what the threat was. But then, he had the brains of a cocker spaniel, so it was entirely likely that if it was a complex threat, he had no real grasp of it, as Uncle Edwin obviously did.
The room was full of security types. Not for the first time, Lucy thought how ill at ease her parents would be with the modern intelligence apparatus, staffed almost entirely with officers completely dedicated to climbing a career ladder while looking good. And never mussing their hair.
Her parents, on the other hand, had been serious and dedicated type A’s who never shrank from danger or—she had to admit—adventure. They wouldn’t recognize the corporate types here as belonging to their business.
Well . . . there was one person here who wasn’t a brown-nosing paper-pusher, and he was sitting across the table staring at her. He didn’t look like a drone or a bureaucrat.
He looked like trouble.
He was dressed in some kind of ragged battle uniform, otherwise he’d seem like a homeless person, though no homeless person she’d ever seen looked as athletic as he did. Tall and very broad, incredibly fit underneath the grungy uniform, shaggy hair and untrimmed beard. Not homeless, then. Maybe he was what her parents would have called a “snake eater.” Special Forces.
He seemed to be fixated on her. In any other setting, she’d take it as masculine interest, but it didn’t seem to be that. He seemed surprised and . . . and disapproving. Obviously thinking she was out of place in this room of movers and shakers.

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