Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) (4 page)

Chapter 7

Frank: 1988

The car door caught
Frank sharply on the knees and he tumbled back. It was a ratty 1967 Ford Fairlane, peeling white paint, Alabama plate number four-three-seven-five-something, hard to see in the moonlit semi-darkness.

It hadn’t looked like any trouble. Just a driver. Another Secret Service trainee, Jake Hellman, had him covered.

Frank had gone to the back door of the beater car and someone lying on the floor had kicked the door open, hard, just as he’d looked in. He’d fallen on his ass just like Hale at the carjacking. He fell on the red Georgia dirt of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

Then his shins stung like hell as the lower edge of the door scraped across them.

He shot out a palm strike and rammed it full force against the car door before its edge could scrape off his kneecaps. That at least stopped
the excruciating progress of the swinging steel along his shins. With his
other hand he managed to shove off the ground, into a roll, and slam his shoulder against the door, snapping it shut.

Whoever was playing the perpetrator in the car hadn’t expected that. A woman’s squeak sounded through the front window that the driver had rolled down when Frank and Jake stopped the Fairlane for inspection.

Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour. Had to be.

Hadn’t seen her in weeks, different agents rotated through the FLETC training scenarios. But she was always causing him pain when she was down here.

He yanked out his gun and rolled up to kneel on the hard-packed, deeply rutted earth. That was a big, damn mistake, his shins screamed.

No live ammo in the gun, he couldn’t shoot out the window.

Instead, he rapped the glass sharply with the butt of his gun, right where he’d glued on a bit of shattered spark-plug ceramic.

The safety glass practically dissolved, now instead of hard glass, the ceramic had triggered the safety glass into shattering. It was now a loose, wavering sheet, opaque with tiny crack lines and barely holding together. Old car-thief trick.

He shifted to his feet, swallowing the hiss of pain, and slapped the friable glass with his elbow.

The window disappeared in a shower of tiny pieces.

Even as he aimed his weapon into the car, Beatrice kicked the door again.

This time he had his hip against it and all her violent kick did was force her to slide the other way and smack her head on the far door. He couldn’t see her clearly in the shadows, but there was no question in his mind.

“You, Agent Belfour, are under arrest for bloodying an agent of the United States Secret Service.” He could feel the hot blood trickling down his shins. The long scrapes were already stinging with the sharp salt he’d been sweating from every pore since the moment he’d landed in Georgia three months before.

In answer she popped open the far door she’d just banged her head on and tumbled out the other side of the car and into the dark.

He dove over the trunk and managed to snag her by the ankle before she could sprint into the night. She was clearly the target of interest, the driver probably just a driver. And not his concern at the moment. There were big-picture moments, and stay-focused moments. Stopping Beatrice was definitely in the second category.

Already moving forward fast, his grip around her ankle and her forward momentum slammed her to the ground.

“Ow! Crap! That hurt.”

“Welcome to my world, Beat—” That’s when she flipped around to get him in a headlock between her knees.

It took three tries, but he managed to find the pressure point on her thigh that had her writhing away before she’d quite choked all the air out of him.

He managed to stand and lean forward to grab her just as she shot to her feet to run again.

The top of her head and his nose intersected.

It was mostly luck that he snagged an arm around her waist and dragged her to the ground with him.

“Damn it!” He groaned and wondered if she’d broken his nose. “Why you got a need to beat on me so goddamn hard?”

She struggled to get free.

He just kept an arm clamped around her waist, let her struggle all she wanted. He’d dropped his weapon when she’d rammed her head into his face, not a good thing for his training score, but when he’d fallen with her, he landed on the gun, a hard lump under his butt causing yet more pain he could blame on her. At least while he was sitting on it, she couldn’t steal it.

With his other hand he tested his nose. He managed not to scream in pain, so he figured it wasn’t broken. Not even bloody. Just hurting like hell.

“That’s your new name,” he told the woman who aimed an elbow at the charley-horse point on his thigh, the same move he’d just used on her to get free of the headlock.

She missed, thank God. Woman had sharp elbows he knew from experience.

“Agent Beat Belfour.”

Finally realizing that he had her and her only way out would be to shoot him, she relaxed.

Once again he was captivated by the feel and smell of this woman. So much strength and power, but so soft and warm in his arms.

He’d thought of little else since the last time she’d beat the crap out of him up close and personal like this.

With a twist of his arm, he hauled her into his lap and kissed her.

For a long perfect moment, she leaned into the kiss. Hard and strong, just like the rest of her, and soft and warm as well. What was a heady scent on her skin, was a mule kick of flavor on his tongue.

He’d been wrong before. His nightly imagination, for those few moments he’d been awake before crashing into hammered-down sleep each night, had remembered her smelling of midnight and roses. True, her lips tasted of that, but beyond that her mouth was pure fire, lit up inside him so hot he burned.

Then she got him.

Finally landed that right hook square into his solar plexus. Then Beat Belfour was gone into the night.

Chapter 8

Frank: Now

Gone! What the hell
do you mean she’s gone?”

“Keep your voice down.” Hank Henson had pulled him aside the moment that the President had entered his first conference with the U.N. Secretary-General. They stood fifteen feet from the Sec-Gen’s door, thirty-eight stories up in the Secretariat Tower.

“We don’t know much yet. You know where she was stationed?”

“Sure,” and Frank felt sick. Beat had pulled escort duty on the ambas
sador to Senegal right at the westernmost bulge of Africa. The U.S. ambassador had been receiving death threats and the Secret Service had sent her to investigate the degree of danger. She was an expert on both West Africa and personal security, so the Secret Service had loaned her to the Office of Foreign Missions for a couple of weeks. That in itself was pretty normal, but—

“Agent Belfour…” Henson kept his hands up as if to fend off Frank’s anger. Not a bad idea. Right at this moment Frank could understand the desire to kill the messenger.

“… was accompanying Ambassador Sam Green and three assis
tants, left Dakar yesterday, July first, at seven a.m. local time. They were headed to a series of meetings at Bissau in Guinea-Bissau. There’s no ambassador there because we have no permanent diplomatic mission there.”

“Because the place is such a goddamn hellhole they can’t keep a government in place.”

“Granted.” Hank rolled right on with his whispered report that several of the closer secretaries were trying desperately to overhear. “It’s only a one-hour flight. The locally-staffed liaison office called at five p.m. to ask if they’d left Dakar yet, they were eight hours overdue at that time. Then the locals went home because it was the end of the work day. When the Senegalese operator tried to confirm with Guinea-Bissau this morning, July second, they couldn’t get a response at all, so they finally reported them late. The G-B liaison office is still not answering.”

Frank needed to hit something and hit it hard.

The fine wood paneling smelled faintly of a recent lemon-oiling. The Sec-Gen’s secretaries sat in a row of neatly aligned desks. Several elegant comfortable chairs were clustered in front of the thirty-eighth floor window, with its spectacular view of the Manhattan shoreline, to accommodate waiting dignitaries. Not a single Senegalese or Guinea-Bissau office worker to punch anywhere. Not even a padded wall in a sparring gym to pound on.

“Twenty-four hours?” was all he could grind out of his tight throat. They’d been missing for twenty-four hours before word had gotten back.

“No, Guinea-Bissau is ahead of us. In local time they are thirty hours overdue now.”

“Someone just kill me now.”

“You wouldn’t like it.” Hank’s sense of humor never lurked far beneath the surface and gave Frank a tempting new target. “If I killed you, you wouldn’t have a chance to pummel whoever screwed this up.”

“Great. You’re a big help.” He paced to the Sec-Gen’s office door and back. He allowed himself up to a max of twenty feet away before he considered himself off post. Typically a nation’s guards waited in the comfortable chairs over fifty feet away, and watched the view of the Manhattan skyline. He was the United States Secret Service, Frank stayed close and watched the area around the door.

“We’re having a hard time getting any communication in or out. We think they may be having another coup. It has been over a year since the last one, and we did just capture that rear admiral of theirs in the drug-and-arms-trafficking ring.”

Frank couldn’t shake the need to do something, anything, and he had only one option on that score.

“Keep me posted.” Then he turned until he once again stood two steps to the right of the office door, behind which the President of the United States was in a meeting, and shifted into parade rest.

He scanned the room, everything and everyone where it had been two minutes before. Everything in place.

Except his world, which had now been turned upside down.

Chapter 9

Beatrice: 1988

Beatrice sat in the
dark of the Georgia night, a hundred yards
from the battered Ford Fairlane and the bleeding Frank Adams. She
hadn’t meant to bloody him, but that happened during training. Still, she hadn’t meant to.

The heat scorching the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center had been at the front of her mind while she’d waited hidden in the back of the car.

Now she had a different heat to consider. And it wasn’t one she liked. She didn’t want to feel this way about anyone. Especially not some piece of crap off the street who had tried to carjack her. Except Frank Adams wasn’t that. She knew more about him than she was supposed to, had managed to talk her way onto the background investigation team.

He lived with three other guys in a third-floor walk up. A Morningside Heights project at the far upper-west end of Manhattan. One so bad that it should never have been built to begin with, never mind torn down. When the investigating team went in, she was glad there were four agents together, the neighborhood was that rough.

They’d done round-robin interviews of all three of his roommates, each team member conducting their own individual interview. That way the Secret Service team could compare stories and answers afterward.

Big guy named Hale might have been the one to sit on her car hood. The build was right, but she’d only seen him from the back, and only
briefly at that before Frank had blinded her windshield with his win
dow-cleaning spray. She’d bet that the three roommates had all been around her car that night.

She didn’t worry about that. Without Frank, they weren’t likely to be more than petty criminals. What was interesting was that none of them would give up the least thing about Frank despite, she knew, Frank telling them it was okay. Their various stories about him were somewhat inconsistent, just as always happened in real life unless you practiced the stories, but they were totally loyal to him. She’d pushed hard on the carjacking, without mentioning that to the other agents or in her reports.

She hit a stone wall, even after saying she’d been the woman in the car and recognized each of them. These guys would lie their way right into jail to protect Frank. He’d earned absolute loyalty in a world that didn’t trade in it.

Only child of a coke whore who’d been dead half a decade. Apparently she’d tried to be a good mother despite that. Father, no one had a clue. Even Frank had simply put a question mark on his background form. Hospital records had no other information. No one in his Morningside Heights project recalled a steady boyfriend for her, especially not from twenty years ago. Memories were short in the projects. But they’d remembered his mother as a lost soul, though pleasant and seriously pretty, right up to the overdose. Those were never pretty.

School teachers were deeply frustrated by him. Intelligent. Good grades. Didn’t talk much, but had shown up consistently, a rarity in itself, and was never found without a thoughtful answer when questioned. The only telling remark she found was from a junior year science teacher. “Boy has no real focus on what to do with himself.”

Beatrice sat with her back against one of the concrete barriers of the Georgia training grounds. Despite the night’s heat, she pulled a dark hood over her head until it hung just above her eyes, masked to near invisibility like a Jawa. She wondered if Frank had ever seen
Star Wars.

She wondered entirely too much about Frank for her own comfort. She’d discovered and shepherded him through application and recruiting, then dumped him into the training system. It should have ended there.

But her world hadn’t returned to center. If it had, then what was she doing squatting in the cicada-throbbing darkness of FLETC with a knot on her head where she’d been shoved against the car door? Who knew the guy was so damn strong that he could stop a two-footed kick against the door with the palm of his hand. Her thigh still twinged where he’d dug his fingers into the nerve cluster to break a perfectly good headlock. And her lips still burned with the heat of his kiss.

She needed to put some real distance been them.

Then why are you sitting in the dark watching Frank Adams continue the exercise, Beatrice? You are so not going to be caught mooning over some man. You got away. You’ve got a role to play. Move your ass.

That the last order to herself sounded more like something Frank would say than herself, well, that only added to the problem. She kept an eye on his dark silhouette against the white Fairlane as she started moving sideways into the night.

Frank prowled the perimeter, his empty weapon drawn, aimed low, and swinging slowly before him exactly per training so that it was already in motion if he had to aim. It was faster to change direction of an active motion, than break muscle lock of a position held still for too long.

He hadn’t sprinted after her.

Again, team player. It was a two-man exercise, and he didn’t leave his partner with the unknown variable of the driver in the car. Any trainee that did was marked instantly dead by the trainers.

Actually, he wasn’t moving quite per training. He was spending the bulk of his time on the side of the test zone that she’d exited from. Still looking for her.

He froze, his massive frame silhouetted by the flashlight his partner was using to inspect the vehicle. Frank was looking straight at her, or at least it felt like that. There was no way he could see her. No way he could know she’d begun to circle around and hadn’t simply kept going.

But still he stood facing her, as if he could sense her even if he couldn’t see where she stood a hundred feet into the brush.

Then he put one hand to his lips and ran it across his mouth. As if his lips also burned.

# # #

“Frank.”

“Yo,” he didn’t turn at Jake Hellman’s call. He could feel her out there. Over by the concrete barriers, that’s where he’d bet Beat would go. At least to start, but then she’d move… that way… left. She’d be nothing but a shadow of a shadow, but he knew she was there. That kiss wouldn’t have let her just run. There’d been more than heat, more than his need… or hers. It was as if they understood each other.

“Frank. She’s gone.”

“Right, sorry.” He turned and blinked against the ghoulish brightness of Jake’s red-lensed flashlight. They said that red didn’t mess with your night vision. It did, just not as much. He’d felt, against all reason, that another thirty seconds and he’d have been able to see Beat, nickname definitely worked, out there in the darkness.

The Ford Fairlane sat on the empty dirt road. All of the doors wide open, and the dome light now definitely shot his night vision all to hell.

He ran the scenario through his head again. They’d stopped the car with a log dragged across the road, improvised road block. Driver had pretended to not understand what was going on, only speaking in something that might have been Czech or maybe just gibberish. The person-of-interest role played by Agent Belfour hiding on the floor of the back seat.

But she hadn’t acted like a victim. No, she’d acted like a bodyguard. The hidden asset.

“Jake, where’s the driver?”

“I’ve got him tied up on the other side. All nerves.”

“It’s a switch-out. He’s the target, she’s the guard.”

“You sure?” But even as Jake asked, he raced around the hood of the car while Frank circled behind the trunk.

The driver was gone.

No. He wasn’t. He’d rolled into a roadside ditch, hidden himself. Given away by his white shirt and light-colored khakis.

Wait. Not hidden. He’d gotten himself low.

Frank dove at Jake and tackled him down into the ditch on top of the driver just as a flashbang went off under the car, simulating an explosion that would have blinded them for several minutes as well as labeling them both as severely wounded if they were outside a fifteen foot radius, dead if they were inside it.

Simulated car bomb.

The Fairlane still rested in the middle of the lane instead of being blown into a thousand bits of shrapnel.

Before the light of the flashbang had fully faded, Frank had the driver up on his knees beside the ditch, and placed the barrel of his empty sidearm up against the man’s temple. He held the man around the chest, pulling him close like a shield.

He put his back to the car to ensure he made the smallest target possible.

“You okay, Jake?”

“Mostly.” Jake’s head and sidearm popped up out of the ditch for a second, then ducked back. “You ever play football?”

“Nose tackle.”

“Uh, I can tell.” Jake’s head popped up where he’d crawled fifteen feet farther down the ditch and he scanned the trees.

Closest Frank had ever gotten to football was the big screen at Slade’s Bar. But the Hispanic gangs of the Upper East Side were nasty in a street fight and Frank had learned that the best defense was indeed a good offense. Hammer them to the ground before they could respond.

But he’d more recently learned to keep that part of his past hidden. People didn’t want to know about his street background. Most agents in the various training scenarios wanted to think their partners could’ve gone All-American, rather than gone lifetime sentence for manslaughter.

The driver, still wrapped in Frank’s grip, flinched hard and looked down at his chest. Then he spoke his first clear words of the evening, “Oh shit!”

Three splotches of red oozed down his chest. He’d been shot from somewhere in the dark woods on the far side of the ditch. Three shots so fast, that he’d never stood a chance.

“Hate it when I’m sacrificed.”

“Shut up, you’re dead.” The smell of fresh paint stung Frank’s nose, almost making him sneeze.

“Don’t I just know it.” The paintball pellets must have stung through the driver-agent’s light cotton shirt. Frank could feel the man shrug, then fall limp in his arms.

That’s when Frank made the mistake of letting him slide to the ground.

Knowing instantly that he’d screwed up, Frank dove to the right, but was too late.

A line of paintball shots stitched across his own chest.

He lay on the ground, technically bleeding out, as Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour slid out of the trees.

“Bang! You’re dead.”