Kodiak Sky (Red Cell Trilogy Book 3) (8 page)

Baxter stood up, too. “Where are you going, sir?” he asked quickly as Dorn headed for the corridor door.

“I’m exhausted, Stewart. I need some sleep.”

The First Lady was on a goodwill tour of six European capitals. The president had invented the trip, though the First Lady didn’t know that. All of which had Baxter very suspicious of this sudden exit. Dorn rarely needed sleep. It was one of the things that made him so unbeatable on the campaign trail.

“Mr. President.”

Dorn stopped at the door. “Yes, Stewart?” he asked, obviously irritated.

Dorn couldn’t have a Monica Lewinsky scandal on his hands, especially with all the positive momentum going for him right now. Baxter was intensely loyal, even when he and the president weren’t seeing eye to eye. More to the point, Baxter didn’t want his name associated with a scandal, especially one like that.

“Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“Do I think
what’s
a good idea?”

The Teflon syndrome was setting in. Baxter had seen its insidious effects before on other high-ranking officials. But this was the first time he’d seen Dorn yielding to it. “Sir, I mean, we just talked about how it wasn’t good for anyone to have skeletons in their bedroom closet.”

“I’m not going to
my
bedroom.” Dorn turned his head slightly as a warning when Baxter didn’t laugh or even grin a little at the insinuation. “Don’t give me attitude, Stewart. I deserve a few distractions.”

That was a fat, juicy rationalization by the leader of the free world. “Yes, sir.”

“Do I need to hire someone who understands me better?”

“No, sir, I—” Baxter was interrupted by a sharp knock on the Oval Office door.

Dorn reached for the knob and pulled the door open. “Yes?”

“May I come in, sir?”

Dorn gestured inside. “Of course.”

“Thank you, sir.”

With his eyes glued to the blue carpet, the aide slipped past the president and moved quickly to where Baxter was standing. When the young man had finished whispering to his boss, Baxter sent him back out again with a curt nod at the door. The kid sprinted from the Oval Office.

“What was that?” Dorn demanded.

Baxter pointed at Dorn and then at the chair behind the great desk. “Sit down, sir.” He was rather enjoying how quickly the president’s face had drained of its normal, healthy glow. Being the president’s chief of staff wasn’t easy—especially when that president was David Dorn.

“What is it, Stewart?” Dorn asked in a wavering tone. “Tell me.”

“We have a situation, sir. It’s not good.”

“Come on, Stewart, stop with the games.”

“Do you have a daughter, sir?” President Dorn and the First Lady had no children. Not being a family man had been the only constant thorn in his side during the campaign for the Oval Office, Baxter knew. “One you haven’t told me about. One you haven’t told
anyone
about.”

President David Dorn suddenly looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

And Baxter loved it.

“Y
OU’VE BEEN
telling everyone you’re twenty-one. But you aren’t. You’re actually older than that. You’re twenty-five, aren’t you?”

Leigh-Ann glanced up as the man walked toward her across the room. Her hands and ankles were bound tightly to the uncomfortable wooden chair, so she could barely move. Only enough to turn her head slightly to the side to try and shield her eyes from the bright rays of a flashlight he was aiming straight at her face through the darkness from close range. She took a quick try at making out his features, in case there was a reason for that later. But she couldn’t. He was being very careful to make himself nothing but a dark silhouette. So she shut her eyes and turned away again.

“You’ve let people think you’re from Savannah.” He hesitated. “And that you’re from money.”

“Why am I here?” she murmured, ignoring his questions. “What are you going to do to me?”

“And you’ve been telling everyone that your name is Leigh-Ann Goodyear. But I know the truth, Shannon.”

That
caught her attention, though she tried not to show it. They knew her real name. “Who are you?”

“You’re from Boston,” he continued as he moved behind her so she could no longer make out even his silhouette. “From Southie.”

“How do you know all that?” Shannon jerked away as fast and far as possible when he ran the backs of his fingers gently down the soft skin of her cheek. But it wasn’t very far, and she had no place left to go when he did it again. “Stop!” That had sounded far too demanding for the vulnerable position she was in. “Please stop,” she begged this time. “Please let me go.”

“You did a nice job turning that harsh Boston accent into a sweet Southern twang, didn’t you, Shannon?”

Shannon could feel the tears welling up as he continued to stroke her face gently. “Who are you?” she asked. He was breathing heavily. “Please tell me.”

He laughed softly in her ear as he leaned down close. “You’re asking the wrong question, Shannon. You should be far more concerned with your own identity.” He chuckled again. “I wonder, sweetheart. Do you have any idea who you really are?”

She gazed up at the man. She knew exactly what he was talking about. But how did he know?

CHAPTER 11

K
ODIAK
I
SLAND,
Alaska, was Commander Skylar McCoy’s home. She’d been born on this island, grown up here, and learned how to be a warrior here. So it was good to be back after two years away, even if her stay would be short. She needed to recharge, especially after that mission to Daran, and Kodiak was the perfect place to do it. Those three boys were the youngest lives she’d ever taken, and it was the first mission she’d ever reflected upon. She didn’t regret it, but she couldn’t shake it, either.

What she liked most about coming home, particularly to this remote spot on the island, was that it never changed. She was just twenty-four, but many things had already died or deserted her. However, this spot in the middle of the forest was always waiting, and it was always the same.

She glanced down into the puddle at her boot tips—it had rained heavily last night. Staring back up was a pretty young woman, she had to admit, and she wasn’t being arrogant. Her beauty was simply a fact of nature. She’d been blessed that way. She was a product of good genes—a handsome, wonderful father and a gorgeous, hateful mother. Well, mostly good.

She was five-five with jet-black hair—a precious reminder of her distant local heritage. She would have preferred to keep it long, but, given the physical nature of her missions, that wasn’t practical. So she kept it trimmed above her shoulders, and usually pulled back in a brief ponytail, as it was today.

She had a slim face with high cheekbones, full lips, and big eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea as well as every drop of New Zealand water she’d ever seen. She was “cut,” in excellent physical shape, though she was not at all bulky and took great pains to avoid that thick build. She worked out constantly but maintained her slender, feminine shape despite the demanding regimen.

She was pretty, but she’d been only the second prettiest girl in her two-daughter family. Her younger sister, Bianca, had been headed for the fashion runways of Paris before being killed four years ago at seventeen in the pickup truck of a drunken boyfriend—who, regrettably, had survived the wreck.

That guy was dead now, the victim of a mysterious backwoods fall off a steep cliff in Denali on a wonderfully clear day just like this one. He’d been a good climber, too. No one could figure out what had happened, especially with the weather so fine.

Skylar turned away from the image at her boot tips and moved through the forest to one tree in particular, which stood at the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the ocean. It had been two years since she’d been here, but the tall spruces of this familiar grove on Kodiak’s northeast coast didn’t seem different at all. And her initials, SIM for Skylar Indigo McCoy, which were carved into the trunk, were as legible and sharp as they had been the day thirteen years ago she’d carved them, on her eleventh birthday—after making her first overnight trek out here, with only her father’s Remington rifle strapped securely to her shoulder as company.

The stream at the bottom of the slope behind her hadn’t changed course a degree through the shiny black rocks, either. The clear, cold waters were still teeming with rainbow trout, too, just as they’d always been.

And the incredible view of Katmai over on the mainland from atop this ridge near the water’s edge was identical to the one she remembered after that trek thirteen years ago, still untouched and unblemished.

It was as though time stood still in this place.

Skylar smiled nostalgically as she thought about Betty Malutin. The old Alutiiq woman had taken her in and mentored her after her father had died on the Bering Sea. A few months after her father had gone down in his crab boat in a terrible storm, Skylar had moved in with Betty when her mother had moved back to California, fed up with the solitary life on Kodiak without a husband and no serious prospects of finding another—not one she wanted, anyway. Betty had died in Skylar’s arms four years later, the victim of a heart attack.

She missed Betty so much. Betty had finished the warrior lessons her father had begun.

And Skylar hadn’t spoken to her birth mother in a decade. Bitch.

She still missed her father every day, even more than she missed Betty. But she didn’t blame the Bering Sea for tearing his ship apart during that raging storm so quickly that none of the five-man crew even had a chance to climb into their orange survival suits. When you went out on the Bering Sea, you knew what you were getting into—or you were stupid. Either way, whatever happened was on you. Those had been her father’s very words many times at the dinner table when he wasn’t on the hunt.

She turned away from the waves crashing on the rocks far below to stare into the dense forest. At a hundred miles long and averaging forty wide, Kodiak was the United States’ second largest island. In area, it was more than double the size of Long Island, which included the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

She took a deep breath of crisp, clean air, filled with the pungent scent of spruce. Long Island’s population exceeded eight million, while Kodiak was home to just fifteen thousand—most of whom lived in the only major town on the island. It was lonely out here in the woods and the wilds, and she loved it.

There were thousands of bears, many more than humans living outside Kodiak’s lone town, and they were huge brown bears. Not the puny little black ones that terrified the population of the Lower Forty-Eight. The Kodiak subspecies was the largest and most ferocious of all grizzlies, as big as polar bears thanks to a steady diet of protein-rich salmon and rainbow trout that constantly ran the waters of this island. The inland grizzlies of the Alaskan mainland were still big, but not like the Kodiak strain.

She took another even deeper breath of crisp, clean air. God, she loved it out here
so much
. So much more than any of the other exotic destinations she’d slipped into lately—Afghanistan, North Korea, Iraq, and Venezuela. Those places had their allures, but none of them stacked up to Kodiak. Not even close.

The snap of the twig was faint but clear, and Skylar pressed her body to the closest tree.

As she listened intently, she glanced down at the two rainbow trout lying on the rock beside the tree. A few minutes ago she’d snagged three of the red-stripes from the stream at the bottom of the ridge with her bare hands. She’d eaten the first one raw, as it was still struggling, seconds after catching it as she stood knee-deep in the crystal clear water—including the eyes and eggs of the beautiful fish, which were the most nutritious parts. She’d needed energy after the long hike and paddle. But she was going to cook the other two in butter and with the spices she’d brought along in her pack. Despite her disdain for the civilized world, she still enjoyed bringing a tiny piece of civility to the wilds of Kodiak.

A second twig snapped, even more faintly than the first. It seemed she might be adding another source of protein to tonight’s menu.