Fischer had been competent, likable and damned good at his job. His son was in another category entirely. In anyone’s terms, Steve Fischer was a high achiever. He had cruised through basic training, completed BUDS without a hitch and graduated from the College of Command and Staff with honors. With a string of awards and medals for active service with the SEAL teams in the Gulf and Afghanistan, he had fast-tracked his way through the ranks. A lieutenant commander already, according to the assessments of his superior officers, Fischer would make commander by the time he was thirty-five. If a new theater of operations opened up, the promotion would be effective immediately. “What do you want?”
Fischer slid a letter outlining his resignation from the navy across the polished walnut of Saunders’s desk. “A job.”
Two
Washington, D.C. Eight months later
The barnlike chamber of the library was chilly, the central heating cranky and inconsistent, so that some areas were warm and others existed in a flow of icy air. FBI Agent Taylor Jones was unlucky enough to be sitting in a room with a windchill factor somewhere in the arctic range.
Huddling into the warmth of her lined woolen coat, she scrolled the microfilm until she reached the date she was searching for and began to skim newspapers that had been published more than fifty years ago. Outside, the night was black, the wind fitful, driving sporadic bursts of rain against tall, mullioned windows. Somewhere a radiator ticked as if someone had just turned up the heat. The sound was comforting and oddly in sync with the yellowish glow of the lights, and walls lined with books that had moldered quietly for decades.
She made a note on the pad at her side then continued to scroll. A clock on the wall registered the passage of time. One hour, then two. The ache in her shoulder and wrist that had developed from hours spent making the same small movement over and over became more insistent. Taylor dismissed it in favor of sinking into the familiar cadences of sifting through information, and the well-worn comfort of being in utter control of her world. If the pain became sharp enough to interfere with her concentration, she would take a break and do a few exercises to free up the muscles.
Somewhere behind her a chair scraped on the tiled floor. The measured step of the only other occupant of the room, a thin man wearing bifocals, registered. The double click of a briefcase unlocking was distinct in the muffled quiet of the room.
A terrible alertness gripped her.
Eyes glued to the screen, she concentrated on controlling her breathing. Stay calm. Stay focused. The tightness in her chest and stomach, the sour taste flooding her mouth, were a mirage, leftover symptoms from a nightmare that had ended months ago. A nightmare she had worked hard to forget.
She had read the psychiatric reports on the effects of the four days she had spent as a hostage; she’d had the therapy. She had even gone back for further sessions so she could understand and control the anxiety attacks which, according to her therapist, were her mind and body’s remembered response to the experience. The way out was simple: instruct the mind that there was nothing to fear and so invalidate the body’s responses.
Inhaling again, she forced her focus outward, away from the coiled tension, away from the memories. Her gaze skated over shelves of books, a wooden stepladder, and snagged on her own reflection, white faced and strained, in a window.
Not a dim, claustrophobic shed with bars at the window. Endless shadows, the snick of a briefcase, the sting of a needle. The smothering paralysis as the drug anesthetized her body, leaving her formless, floating, eyes wide, staring into a darkness that shifted, reformed—
Stop.
Don’t let the mind go back.
It was late. Instead of working she should have gone home and eaten dinner. She was tired; her therapist had warned her that tiredness and stress were, in themselves, triggers.
As dangerous as briefcases and needles.
She drew in another controlled breath and checked her watch, anchoring herself in the normality of that small gesture. The hostage crisis was over, finished. Earl Slater was behind bars, Diane Eady and Senator Radcliff, the man whose property she had been held on, were both dead. She had escaped; she was safe. But Alex Lopez, head of a Colombian drug cartel, and the man who had drugged her with a powerful hallucinogen called ketamine hydrochloride, had gotten away.
Rain swept against the windows, and the sense of cold increased.
Don’t go back.
But in order to catch Lopez, she had to.
He was dangerous, a psychotic killer, and she needed him caught. When he had injected the first dose of ketamine he had stated that he would kill her, regardless of whether Rina Morell—Lopez’s former wife and a federal witness—handed herself over in exchange for Taylor or not. The only question was when.
Normally, that kind of rhetoric wouldn’t have shaken Taylor. Lopez was powerful and influential; if he had wanted her dead, she would be dead. But caught in the grip of a hallucinatory drug, her normal reasoning process hadn’t worked. She would never forget the experience, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else.
Apart from her own determination to capture him, her appetite for the hunt was further whetted by the fact that Rina Morell was a personal friend. The damage Lopez had done the Morell family was a matter of record now, but that didn’t alter the horror of the ordeal Rina and her parents had endured.
She registered a second click as the briefcase was closed. Jaw tight, she swiveled around in the chair and studied the owner of the briefcase who was strolling toward the front desk, the box of microfilm he had been studying tucked under one arm. He was midforties, about one hundred and forty pounds, six feet tall, give or take an inch. Height was always the most difficult detail to estimate.
She wondered what he had been doing here this late on a Sunday night, but the flare of curiosity was brief. It was automatic for her to notice people. The clinical assessment was part of the job, but for as long as she could remember she had been aware of the people around her, how they looked and what made them tick. Her mother’s standard complaint had been that she hadn’t produced an eight-pound baby girl, she had given birth to a cop. It had been a mild form of rebellion for Taylor to become an agent instead.
Still on edge, she returned to the screen. A heading caught her attention, drawing her once more into the past. None of the key search words she had noted down were included, but the name was familiar.
She flipped through the files in her bag until she found the relevant one. It contained research she’d done while she was recovering from the hostage situation and the depressive effects of the ketamine. Locked out of the office for a month on mandatory sick leave, she’d had nothing better to do than attend therapy sessions and try to break open the Lopez/Morell case, which had unaccountably stalled.
She’d combed FBI files, the Internet and microfilms of old newspapers for anything to do with Lopez who, aside from drugs charges, was wanted for illegal entry into the United States, collusion in the theft and sale of decommissioned missile components, fraud, grievous bodily harm and murder.
Lopez’s real name was Alejandro Chavez, and he had been living in the States under a false identity from the age of twelve, courtesy of a brutal series of mass murders in Colombia that had made it impossible for him to live in his own country. Marco Chavez, Lopez’s father, had orchestrated the murders to force his son’s release from prison. Marco had succeeded in obtaining
