Midnight Remembered

Steiner was still standing behind his desk. He was looking down at the file he had just closed, the tips of the fingers of his right hand resting on top of it, as if it might spring open if he didn’t hold it shut.

“Why now?” she asked again.

His dark eyes lifted, questioning.

“Why bring me in to talk about this now?” she asked.

There was the smallest of pauses, not even enough to call suspicious, unless you were already suspicious. “The region is becoming unstable again. This is a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. The agency doesn’t like those. Since you were the last person to see Stone alive…”

A loose end? Somehow Paige didn’t think he meant the disappearance of Joshua Stone. Steiner’s concern was almost certainly for that incredibly dangerous chemical weapon, which had gone missing in a region noted for being a powder keg.

As she watched, the thin lips of the head of Special Ops moved into what was supposed to be a smile. It seemed cold, lacking in feeling. Maybe someone like Steiner didn’t really feel. Maybe that’s what made him good at this. And maybe that’s what had made her such a failure.

“Good luck,” she said, barely avoiding sarcasm.

She put her hand on the knob and opened the door, stepping out into the deserted hallway, and then closing it carefully behind her, deliberately not letting it make any noise.

She hadn’t believed him, she realized. Intuition, maybe, but she thought Carl Steiner was lying about wanting to tie up loose ends. Something had happened, something besides the ongoing instability of that area. Something that had revived the mystery of Joshua Stone’s disappearance.

However, whatever was happening in Special Operations these days, she told herself determinedly, was no longer of any concern to her. And thank God, it was also no longer her responsibility.

JACK THOMPSON hunched his shoulders, holding the evening paper he’d just bought over his head as he made a run for the cab that had finally pulled up to the curb in front of his office building. He hated rain. Especially cold rain. It made all the bones that had been broken ache with a renewed vengeance.

He jerked open the cab door, slid in across the cold vinyl of the back seat, and then slammed it shut against the downpour. After he gave the driver his address, he settled gratefully into the taxi’s stale warmth.

He’d take a couple of extra-strength aspirin when he got home, he decided, and turn up the thermostat. He had some stronger stuff, but he saved that for the headaches. He hadn’t had one of those in almost three weeks, he realized, and he hoped to God he never had another.

He gazed out the window as they began to move, watching the twilight-darkened streets rush by through the screen of raindrops on the glass. A car had pulled out from a parking place on the opposite side of the street at the same time the cab had, and its headlights briefly haloed the droplets with rims of gold.

“Rain’s a bitch,” the driver said, “but I hear this stuff’ll turn to snow tonight. I ain’t looking forward to that either.”

Jack pulled his eyes from the wet gleam of the sidewalks, which were reflecting the lights from the stores behind them, and glanced at the back of the driver’s head.

“I hadn’t heard about the snow,” he said.

“Not from around here, are you?” the driver asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Originally, I mean.”

“No,” Jack said. His accent was different enough that it sometimes evoked comment, although Atlanta was pretty cosmopolitan these days. He wasn’t from the South, however, and anyone who was spotted that immediately.

“Where you from?”

He knew the driver was only making conversation, maybe to relieve boredom, maybe in hopes of a larger tip. And Jack could have supplied the facts easily enough. Trying to feel some connection with them, he had gone over the information the cops had provided a million times.

He knew everything on those sheets by heart. And none of it felt real. Or meant anything to him. That would pass, the doctors had assured him. That feeling of disassociation with who he was. Simply the lingering result of the head injury. And, they had said, he was lucky its effects hadn’t been more severe.

“Don’t push it,” the psychiatrist he had seen at the last hospital had warned. That had been just before Jack had been released from the rehab center, his physical injuries healed, even if his memory hadn’t yet returned. “If it comes, it comes. If you try to get it all back, if you push too hard, then…who knows what may happen?” the doctor had said, shrugging.

Jack could remember wondering exactly what he meant by that. He had made it sound as if Jack’s brain would implode or something if he tried to force the return of those memories.

Still, he knew they were there, lying just below the surface of his mind. Sometimes, especially in dreams, they were so close he could almost touch them. It was like looking down into a dark pond and seeing things beneath the surface, murky and unclear, but definitely there. Just a little too far down to reach.

“Hey, buddy,” the cabbie said.

Jack’s eyes came back up, meeting the questioning ones in the rearview mirror. The cabbie was looking at him as if he thought Jack was some kind of nutcase. People did that sometimes. They seemed to pick up on the fact that there was something wrong. That something about him didn’t fit anymore. Jack never was quite sure how they knew, but their eyes always looked at him just like this guy’s were now.

“Des Moines,” he said.

“Yeah?” the driver said, his voice relieved. “Could’a fooled me. That don’t sound like the Midwest.”

Jack smiled, and then he deliberately turned his head, looking out the window again as the rain-glazed streets swept by. He had heard that comment a couple of times before, and it had bothered him enough that he had even checked it out. Not so much because of the accent, but because of the way he felt.

So he had paid one of those people-find agencies on the Web to do a search for a Jack Thompson from Des Moines. It had all been there. Exactly like the cops had told him.

Then why the hell can’t I remember any of it? Why the hell doesn’t any of it feel as if it has a damn thing to do with me?

There was no answer from the gathering darkness to either of those questions. Just as there hadn’t been for the past three months. And he was beginning to be forced to think about the possibility that there never would be.

PAIGE KNEW as soon as she opened the door to her apartment that someone had been there. A hint of something alien lingered in the familiar air. It took her a second or two to identify the smell as cigarette smoke.

Maybe not the smoke itself, she acknowledged, taking a deep breath, but the whiff of it that clings to a chronic smoker’s clothes and hair. She stood before the door she had closed behind her, wondering if there was someone else in her apartment. A burglar? Or another, more dangerous kind of intruder?

It felt empty, however. She knew intuitively that whoever had been here was now gone. If she had come home half an hour later, the heating system and the filters would probably have taken care of the faint odor, and she would never have known.

The first thing she did was to take the semiautomatic out of the bedside drawer where she kept it. Although she was grateful to have it in her hand, it felt almost as alien as the ghostly scent she was chasing. Then, despite her sense that there was no one here, she checked out all four rooms, opening closets, looking under the bed and behind the shower curtain.

Nothing seemed to have been taken or disturbed. Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel as if she had been invaded. Violated, somehow. This was her home, and someone had come into it without her permission.

It wasn’t until her hand was on the phone to report the break-in, that she remembered the call to maintenance she’d made. More than three weeks ago, she realized. It had been her first request for repairs since she had moved in. Was it possible, she wondered, that the maintenance staff had let themselves in without notifying her they were coming?

Which should be easy enough to check out. She walked over to the light switch by the door that led from the living room into the kitchen. It controlled the overhead fixture in the kitchen and had started malfunctioning a few weeks ago.

Of course, she could walk across the kitchen and turn on the overhead light by using the switch beside the sink, but since these were newly constructed apartments, something going wrong so quickly had seemed strange. She had been afraid it might mean faulty wiring, which had made her nervous enough to call.

She pushed the switch up now, and the fixture in the middle of the kitchen ceiling didn’t respond. Which didn’t necessarily mean maintenance hadn’t been here, she acknowledged. Just that they hadn’t fixed whatever was wrong.

Paige walked back to the phone, shrugging out of her coat and throwing it over the back of the couch as she did. She took the resident manager’s card out of the drawer of the end table where the phone was sitting, and laying the pistol down, she punched in his number. She’d feel better knowing that he had sent someone up here today, she thought, as she listened to the distant ring. A hell of a lot better.

When he said hello, she got right to the point. “This is Paige Daniels in 1228. I was just wondering if you sent somebody up here to look at my kitchen light switch?”

“Hold on a minute,” the manager said. In the background she could hear the sound of papers rattling and finally he came back on the line. “It’s gonna be a while on that, Miss Daniels. The crews are taking care of emergency situations first—heating and plumbing problems. You did say the other switch still works?”

One part of her mind was assimilating his denial and his questions. The other part was trying to figure who had been here if not maintenance. “It works,” she agreed. The hand that wasn’t holding the phone closed over the pistol again. “Look, are you absolutely sure no one’s been up here today?”

“The switch start working again? Sometimes wiring does that. Probably just a short. If I were you, I’d just keep it off until we can get somebody up there to take a look at it.

“Would it be better to throw the breaker?” she asked, realizing only now that it was possible what she had smelled hadn’t been tobacco smoke. Maybe it had been hot wiring.

“I don’t see why you’d need to do that. Besides, that breaker probably controls some other stuff, too.”

“I’m a little nervous because I smelled smoke when I came in from work,” she said, readily discarding her original theory.

“Just now?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“You still smell it?”

She took a breath, drawing air in through her nose. She had been inside long enough now that she couldn’t smell anything. Coming in from the fresh air outside had made the scent of smoke obvious. Now however…

“I’m not sure. Look, could you just come up here and check out that switch? Maybe something’s hot under the plate.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. She couldn’t blame him. It was Friday night, already late because she had stopped for dinner on the way home. And maintenance wasn’t his job. Of course, keeping the complex from burning down probably was, at least as far as his employers would be concerned.

“I’ll be right there,” he said, apparently reaching that conclusion at the same time. “You understand I can’t fix the switch, but I can make sure nothing’s smoldering under it.”

“Thanks,” Paige said. “I really appreciate this.”

She put the phone down and walked back over to the wall plate. It looked innocent enough. No telltale threads of smoke escaping from behind the ubiquitous plastic rectangle. She was probably being ridiculous.

She took a quick look around the apartment. There were a few dishes in the sink and her coat was out. She walked across to the couch and picked it up. She opened the drawer of the phone table and slipped the pistol inside before she carried her coat over to the hall closet and hung it up.

After she had shoved the dirty plate and cup from breakfast into the dishwasher, she headed back to take another look at the switch plate. She put her nose close to it, inhaling deeply, trying to find any trace of what she had smelled before. It seemed to have vanished, however, and she straightened, blowing the air she had just inhaled out in a small sigh of frustration.

She was headed back to the bedroom to look into her closet again when the doorbell rang. Maybe maintenance was slow, but the resident manager seemed to be on the ball.

Paige hurried to the door and looked out through the peephole. It was the same guy who had showed her the apartment six months ago. She turned the latch and the knob at the same time, a two-handed operation, and threw open the door.

“Hi,” he said. The shoulders of his jacket were dark from the rain. He was carrying a small screw driver, and he had a pager on his belt, revealed by the open windbreaker.

Just as she had earlier, he stopped on the threshold and, lifting his nose, scented the air like a hunting dog. “Don’t smell a thing,” he said, smiling.

“Maybe it’s a false alarm, but I definitely smelled something when I came in.”

She didn’t mention that her first impression had been cigarette smoke and that she had thought someone had been in here. Right now all she wanted was for him to make sure that during the night her apartment wasn’t going to go up in flames with her inside it. Little enough to ask, she told herself.

He walked over to the switch and made the same sniff test she had made. She expected another comment about not smelling anything, but he didn’t make it. Instead, he walked into the kitchen, and she heard him open the circuit box. There were clicking noises, and the light in the kitchen went off.

When he came back, he said, “Let’s take a look.”

He placed the tip of the screwdriver into one of the tiny Phillips head screws and began to unthread it. When he had finished with the first screw, he took the other one out, slipping the plastic plate off the wall. There was no whiff of smoke from the rough cut opening behind it. There was only a tangle of wires, none of them smoldering.

The manager put the screwdriver and the cover plate on the floor, carefully laying the screws on top of it. He bent so that he was on eye level with the hole in the wall. Then he reached into it with one finger, pushing around amid the wires.

“Nothing hot. No smoke. I think that it probably—” His voice stopped, as his finger probed deeper into the hole. “What in the world?” he said, the words almost under his breath.

Hearing them, Paige edged closer, anticipating a glimpse of a frayed or burnt wire. She couldn’t see anything, however, and other than bending down and putting her head next to his as he poked around in there, she wasn’t likely to.

Almost as soon as she thought that, he inserted his thumb as well as his index finger into the hole, fumbling among the wires. And when he straightened, he brought something small and dark out of the opening. He laid it on the palm of his other hand.

“Never seen anything like this before,” he said. “Not in a wall switch. Maybe they were going to put in a dimmer and then changed their minds. Cost overruns, maybe. They must have decided to go with a less expensive option.”

He held the object he’d retrieved from the faulty switch out for Paige’s inspection. She didn’t need a closer look. She had recognized it immediately. What the resident manager had just taken out of the wall of her apartment was the latest version of a very sensitive listening device. At some time during the six months she had lived here, someone had bugged her apartment.

SHE SPENT most of the night tossing and turning, everything that had happened running endlessly through her head. She replayed Steiner’s words, examining each of them, even trying to remember the expression on his face when he’d said them. And every time she did, she came back to the same comment. Something that hadn’t reverberated as strongly then as it should have.

Of course, at the time she hadn’t known that the agency was bugging her apartment. She still didn’t know that, she admitted, trying to be reasonable. What she did know was that there had been a very sophisticated listening device planted in her wall, exactly like the state-of-the-art ones the CIA used.

She couldn’t know how long the bug had been in place, but the light switch had started acting up after she’d moved in. Maybe a couple of months ago. Maybe a little less.

And another thing she knew was that someone had been inside her apartment today. To put the device in her wall? Or to check on it because it had stopped working?

Or had they been there for some reason totally unrelated to the bug. To search the apartment? To read her computer files? She hadn’t found any evidence of either of those things, but she knew that whoever the agency sent would be good at what they did.

And “good at what they did” brought her back to the other significant thing that had happened today: Steiner’s summons and the comments he had made as she had been about to go out his door. This was a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. Since you were the last person to see him alive…

She thought all the pertinent questions about that mission been asked back then. And as far as she knew, they had been answered to the agency’s satisfaction. Or at least to the satisfaction of anyone who had known Joshua Stone.

Had a trusted operative disappeared in order to sell that nerve agent on the black market, as Steiner implied? There was no denying such a sale would have been a huge temptation for some people. Not for Joshua Stone. She would never believe that.

Griff Cabot had believed that Stone had been captured by one of the opposing sides in the rebellion. If the Russians had taken him prisoner, they might have tried to arrange a trade, exchanging Josh for one of their own compromised agents. Washington usually agreed to such deals to get their people home, and Cabot would have done his best to influence them to make that decision. As far as Paige knew, no such offer had ever been made.

The strongest likelihood, given the time frame, was that Josh had heard someone outside the cellar that night. He had gone to investigate and been captured by the rebel forces.

Maybe they had taken him with them as they retreated from the Russian advance, intending to interrogate him later. Or maybe whoever had captured Josh hadn’t known about the theft of the toxin. Maybe they had simply killed him, leaving his body and the backpack he’d carried in the snow, never knowing what a valuable prize they’d lost.

Whatever happened, Joshua Stone, the most experienced member of the External Security Team, had disappeared forever on that mission. And Paige Daniels, the novice, had escaped from Vladistan as Russian tanks rolled across its border. She had escaped, and Josh had not. Maybe, as she had always believed in her heart, because he had gone out into that dangerous darkness to protect her from whatever he had heard.

Lying in her bed, eyes open and staring, the haunting images of that night played again through her consciousness. The same night he had made love to her for hours, until she had finally drifted into a deep and exhausted sleep.

She hadn’t allowed herself to indulge in this particular exercise in futility in a very long time, but she didn’t deny those memories tonight. And they steeled her determination to prove Carl Steiner was wrong. She was as convinced today as she had been then that Joshua Stone hadn’t been a traitor.

By bugging her apartment the agency seemed to be trying to implicate her in whatever they imagined Josh had done three years ago. And she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong on that mission. Nothing except sleep while someone took her partner. Nothing except survive when he hadn’t.

Now someone in his own agency was trying to blacken Joshua Stone’s name. And there was no one from the External Security Team left to defend his reputation. No one but her.

She had failed him once before. No one had ever seemed to blame her, but she had always blamed herself. And after three long years, she had discovered that the ghost of Joshua Stone was one she needed very badly to put to rest.

Chapter Two

Reactivated.

Paige stared at the screen, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. As she tried to think what else that word could possibly mean, she fought a surge of emotion she didn’t want to feel, not after all this time.

She had started her search as soon as she’d gotten into the office this morning, trying to discover what had set Steiner off. Something must have come to light fairly recently that had made him question Stone’s disappearance. Something that had made him call her in. Something that had made them plant a listening device in her apartment. Something.

She had spent most of the day scanning page after page of the tedious situation reports that had come in about Vladistan during the last four months. Because of her work in Sector Analysis, she was already familiar with most of this material. And on closer examination she had found nothing that might be construed as having anything to do with Josh or with the nerve agent he had been carrying when he’d disappeared. The computers had been next, and she had cross-referenced everything she could think of that might apply to the region, to the rebellion, or to that particular mission. And again, she had come up empty.

It was only then, an exercise in nostalgia perhaps or maybe because she had run out of ideas, that she had tried to access the old External Security Team files. Unbelievably, she had found that the access codes had never been changed. The files themselves were intact, even though the team hadn’t even been in existence for more than two and a half years.

The bureaucratic mind works in mysterious ways, Paige had thought, as she typed in Joshua Stone’s name. When the file came up, she had discovered the reactivated notation. And the date it had been made was less than four months ago. She scrolled through the whole thing, trying to find more recent additions or changes, but there were none.

Which made no sense, she thought in frustration. Why activate a dead file and then do nothing with it? Or was the reactivation simply a clerical error? Did somebody key in the wrong access number? Things like that happened, even at the CIA.

And she might have been willing to believe they had in this case, if it hadn’t been for Steiner’s questions yesterday. If you put these two things together, they had to mean something. Something obviously connected to Joshua Stone’s disappearance.

Reactivated. There was nothing else there. Nothing after that one entry, which had brought a dead file back to life and out of limbo where it should have remained. Why would someone reactivate a file and then not put anything in it? That made no sense. Unless…

When the explanation hit her, producing a rush of adrenaline so strong her hands began to shake, it all made sense. Because it fit the pattern. And the bureaucratic mind-set. Joshua Stone had been a member of External Security, and she knew what had happened to the other operatives on that team.

As far as she could tell, she was the only one who was still working for the agency. After the fiasco in Vladistan, she had requested a move back into Sector Analysis. Griff had tried to talk her out of leaving, but the transfer had gone through.

Then Cabot had been killed, and the elite antiterrorist team he’d assembled stood down. Since she hadn’t been a member long enough to have participated in any of the black ops missions the EST was famous for, Paige couldn’t represent any threat to security, and she had been allowed to stay in the CIA.

The other agents, however, had been destroyed—at least on paper. And then they had been carefully resurrected. Recreated as totally different people, their original identities erased. Their agency records had been purged, so that no one could ever trace those men, or what they had done, back to the agency.