Secret Assignment (17 page)

“It’s not them,” Damon said with confidence. “I need to talk to you.”

“Not now,” she said flatly, turning and striding out to the stairs.

“Leave your balcony door open,” he called softly after her.

She made her way down as quickly as she could, hampered by the utter lack of light. But she made it to the ground without incident and hurried out into the fresh air.

A light rain had begun falling while she was inside the lighthouse, and as she dashed across the uneven ground toward Stafford House, she heard the growing restlessness of the Gulf, swelling waves slapping against the shoreline with increased agitation.

The storm was on its way.

By the time she reached Stafford House, the foghorn had stopped wailing. She dashed through the French doors and found Lydia sitting on the sofa, looking sheepish and a little bit frail.

“Are you okay?” Shannon asked, hurrying to her side. Gideon sat on the coffee table in front of Lydia, his expression hard to read.

“I’m fine,” Lydia said with an embarrassed grimace. “I had a thought about Edward’s journal and I went to your room to look for you, but I didn’t see you. And then, when I looked out on the balcony for you, I saw lights in the lighthouse and, well, I guess I overreacted.”

Shannon caught Lydia’s hands between her own. “We’re all on edge.”

“No harm done,” Gideon said in a gentle rumble.

“Where did you go?” Lydia asked.

“I saw Shannon heading to the lighthouse, so I went to see where she was going.” Gideon spoke when Shannon didn’t answer right away. His blue eyes turned to her. “What were you doing up there?”

Now
, she thought.
Now’s the time to tell him about Damon.

But a memory flashed through her mind, something her brother Rick had said a few months earlier, when Damon North’s plan to smoke out some SSU assassins had gone badly wrong, putting her brother and the woman who was now his wife in deadly danger.

“Undercover is hell,” he’d said flatly when Shannon and the rest of the family had expressed outrage at Damon’s actions. “He lives every day as someone he’s not, and he knows that breaking that cover for a moment could mean his death. He has control over little, but he’s got the guts to go out there and take a risk for a good reason. I’m not going to second-guess him.”

Even Amanda, the target of the SSU goons Damon had been trying to bring down, had agreed with Rick. “I’ve been in that same place. You can’t make everything come out right. Undercover operatives play cynical, wretched games with some of the baddest bad guys there are, because it’s the only way to get on the inside and stay there long enough to do the job. It’s something you can’t understand unless you’ve been there.”

Damon had asked for her silence. She could give it to him, at least until she heard him out.

Shannon pasted on a smile. “I thought I saw you moving around up in the lighthouse, so I went to look.”

That much, at least, was the truth, and it was easy enough to tell without flinching.

“Wasn’t me,” Gideon said thoughtfully.

“It was probably my imagination,” she said with a self-conscious smile. She turned her attention back to Lydia. “You said you had a thought about the general’s journal?”

“Well, two thoughts, actually. Or, really, two people. My husband spent a lot of time during the last days of his life conferring with a couple of old military friends. Generals he’d served with on his last tour before his retirement.”

Shannon’s skin prickled, remembering the reason she’d gone to the lighthouse in the first place. She wanted to tell Gideon about the three generals, but her encounter with Damon North had upturned her world.

“You think one of them might know how to break the code?” Gideon asked.

“I think it would have to be both of them,” Lydia said. “Before Edward died, he told me about a way the field commanders sent top-secret coded messages to them—the cryptographers devised a multipart code that required input from all the parties involved to completely decrypt the message. It sounded hopelessly complicated to me, but apparently with the problem of underlings passing information to those internet leakers—”

“They’d want a code that only they would understand between them,” Gideon said with a grim nod.

“So you think to break the code in the journal, we might have to contact the other two generals,” Shannon said, her heart sinking.

“It makes sense,” Gideon said. “The other two generals—Harlowe and Marsh, right?” He looked at Shannon, adding for her benefit, “Those were the other two top men heading the Kaziristan peacekeeping mission.”

“I know,” she said bleakly. “And there’s something you should know.”

Both Gideon and Lydia looked at her, concern in their eyes at the troubled tone of her voice.

“I talked to my brother earlier this evening.” Shannon looked at Gideon. “It’s why I went looking for you at the lighthouse. But first, I have to tell you about something that happened back in the spring.”

It had all started with an attempted assassination. “My brother Rick’s wife, Amanda, is a former CIA agent. And the reconstituted group of mercenaries who used to work for MacLear Security were sent by Barton Reid to kill her because of something she knew.”

Lydia lifted one hand to her mouth, her eyes widening.

“Amanda had been captured by al-Adar rebels in Kaziristan a few years ago. She’d seen the face of a rebel leader and could identify him.”

“Khalid Mazir,” Gideon growled.

“Yes.” Shannon looked at him. “They kept Amanda’s name out of the papers when that mess went down, but she was the informant who identified him as an al-Adar operative.”

“Your sister-in-law put Barton Reid back in jail,” Lydia said with growing understanding. “Well, good for her. Never cared for the slimy old bastard in the first place.”

Shannon smiled at Lydia’s unfiltered words. “No argument from me.”

“What does this have to do with the three generals?” Gideon asked.

“That’s another twist in the story.” She looked at Lydia. “My sister Megan was married to a soldier who died in Kaziristan four years ago. We’ve recently learned that MacLear SSU agents were behind his death—Vince had begun asking inconvenient questions about some things he’d seen Barton Reid doing in Kaziristan. He told the wrong person in his chain of command, apparently, and ended up dying for his effort.”

“My God.” Lydia’s hand flew to her mouth again.

“We didn’t know he was murdered at the time. We assumed it was a combat death. But last spring, my sister finally learned the truth, although she nearly got killed for it, too.”

Gideon shook his head. “Your family seems to be made up of trouble magnets.”

“Sometimes, when you try to do the right thing, that’s what happens.” Lydia reached out to touch Shannon’s hand. “Your sister must have been devastated to learn how her husband died.”

“She was, but it was better to know the truth.” Shannon took a deep breath, aware that she was about to deliver a similarly devastating bit of news to Lydia about her own husband’s death.

Gideon’s hand closed over her arm, drawing her gaze to his face. She saw his troubled thoughts shining from his blue eyes. He might not know exactly what she was about to say, but he clearly knew it had something to do with his own suspicions about General Ross’s death.

She held his gaze, her chin up. Lydia had to know the truth, even if it was painful. “You may have heard about a new witness in the Barton Reid case. He was an army captain who had helped cover up my brother-in-law’s murder. He’d been blackmailed into it and finally turned state’s evidence. He ended up going into witness protection.”

Gideon nodded, as if he’d heard at least part of the story before, but Lydia looked surprised. “I knew Barton Reid had been indicted again,” she said quietly, “but all this horror about murdered soldiers—”

“My brother talked to the witness right before he went into witness security. The captain gave him a new piece of information about the case against Reid. It seems the captain overheard Barton Reid talking about the trouble he was having with three generals.”

Lydia straightened suddenly.

“The implication,” Shannon added slowly, “was that the generals may have known too much about what Reid was doing. They were trouble.”

Lydia looked stricken.

Shannon reached across, placing her hand over Lydia’s trembling hands. “I’m sorry. There’s really no easy way to say this—”

“Shannon—” Gideon’s voice was low and strangled.

“Let her talk,” Lydia said quietly, turning her hands to clasp Shannon’s.

“My brother believes your husband’s crash wasn’t an accident.”

“He can’t know that,” Gideon said harshly.

Shannon turned to look at him. “Maybe not, but here’s what we do know. A couple of days ago, General Emmett Harlowe, his wife and his adult daughter were all reported missing.”

* * *

O
NE OF THESE
days, all the sleep he was missing was going to catch up with him, Gideon thought as he hung up the phone and leaned back against the soft cushions of Lydia Ross’s sofa. Lydia had gone to bed, and Shannon was up in her room, trying to catch a few hours of sleep before morning, but he’d been on the phone with old friends from his Marine Corps days who were now working as civilian cops in Georgia, where the Harlowe family had disappeared.

The facts were sparse on the ground. From what his buddies could tell him, General Harlowe, his wife, Catherine, and their daughter, Annie, made the trip to Pea Hollow, Georgia, where Mrs. Harlowe’s family had owned a small fishing cabin for generations. It had been Mrs. Harlowe’s sister who’d arrived for a planned visit earlier that day and found the place in shambles and all three of the Harlowes missing.

“There was blood,” Mitch Sweeney had told Gideon, his voice grim over the telephone line.

“How much?”

“Enough to be worrisome,” Sweeney had admitted. “Just got off the phone with one of the local deputies who investigated. He thinks it’s possible one or more could be bodily hurt. And here’s another nasty thought—nobody’s actually seen them for about five days. They may have been missing since the day after they arrived.”

Sweeney hadn’t been able to add much more, but what he’d told Gideon was enough to send his mind swirling. He’d been suspicious for a while about the general’s car crash, but to hear Shannon speak his nebulous thoughts aloud, tying them to a conspiracy that could very well run deep and wide through a large swath of the U.S. government—

From outside, a soft scraping sound drew his attention. He listened carefully, but it didn’t repeat.

Quietly, he stood and went to the front door, peering through the narrow glass inset at the top of the door. Outside, all looked quiet, although the Gulf was churning even more than it had been earlier that evening when he’d been out on patrol.

Lydia had plans to meet a friend for lunch tomorrow—today, he amended with a quick glance at his watch. It might be the last day they’d be able to take the boat out safely before the tropical storm hit.

Maybe he should insist Lydia stay on the mainland. They could all move into a motel in Terrebonne, or even drive up to Mobile where there would be safety in numbers. It would leave the island unprotected, but he had a feeling that the coded journal Shannon had found was almost certainly the item the intruders were looking for.

He wondered how they knew about the book. And why they hadn’t looked for it before now.

Nobody’s seen them for five days.
Mitch Sweeney’s words flickered through his mind.

Emmett Harlowe surely knew about General Ross’s journal, didn’t he? He’d have to know to help decode it should the time come to do so.

If the SSU had somehow gotten their hands on the Harlowes, maybe used the general’s wife or daughter as leverage, would he have spilled what he knew about the journal? As secrets went, it wouldn’t have been a hard choice, he supposed. The coded journal would be useless without input from Harlowe and the third general, crusty old Baxter Marsh.

He would make more calls in the morning, he decided. See if he could get in touch with General Marsh.

As he started toward the kitchen to turn out the lights, he heard the same furtive scuffling sound he’d heard before. But this time, it hadn’t come from outside.

It was somewhere in the house.

* * *

W
HEN THE
F
RENCH
doors from the balcony outside Shannon’s room opened silently, she wasn’t exactly surprised. She’d left the door open, as Damon North had asked. But seeing his dark shape glide almost noiselessly into her bedroom still made her heart skip a beat.

She turned on the bedside lamp, illuminating his tall, lean form.

“Turn off the light,” he commanded softly.

“You don’t give the orders around here,” she answered flatly.

“Please.”

With a sigh, she turned off the lamp, plunging the room back into inky midnight. “You’re a fool to come here tonight. Gideon Stone is right downstairs. If he hears you—”

“Just shut up and listen.”

Shannon clamped her mouth into a line of pure annoyance, but she let him speak uninterrupted.

“I’m undercover. Believe it or not, the business with your sister-in-law last spring got me back in, even though the SSU operation was a bust.”

“Congratulations.”

The mattress shifted beneath her, and she made out the dark, amorphous shape of him at the end of her bed. “I don’t know how much you know—”

“Why don’t you tell me what I don’t know,” she answered guardedly.

“There’s something in this house that the SSU wants.”

“What is it?”

“A journal. Information has come into our—” He paused, making a noise of frustration. “Into
their
hands. They know General Ross kept a coded journal regarding some of the things that were going on in Kaziristan a few years ago. Something that is probably still going on today, if not in Kaziristan, then in other hot spots around the globe.”

“What kind of conspiracy?” From her family’s experiences with the SSU, she knew there must be some sort of global power-grab going on, but so far, even government investigators weren’t sure how far the corruption went or just how ambitious it might be.