If he wanted to, he could sneak over to Willow’s and whisk her away, too. But that
would blow everything. Not that he wasn’t tempted, all the same.
Any second now, Duke and Buddy would get a good whiff of Jack and come running to
tear him apart. Until they caught the scent of something infinitely more seductive
and headed off in pursuit of fun that didn’t exist. And took their raucous barking
with them.
Jack grinned as he heard the patter of approaching paws. The hounds of hell would
come pounding around the corner, hit the bushes, and head off in hot pursuit of a
willing female. Or unwilling. Dogs didn’t care.
Sure enough, the two dogs barked and bared their teeth, heading directly to where
Jack leaned against the barn in the shadows, invisible to anyone in the house.
Kennett stepped out onto the porch in his boxers and a T-shirt and called out after
them, “What do you see, boys? What’s out there?”
When they caught the scent Jack had planted, they took an abrupt right turn and, barking,
ran down the floral path to total frustration.
Boys and their hormones!
Kennett shook his head. “Damn, dogs! Stop waking me to run after squirrels and deer!”
he yelled. Then he stepped back inside.
Jack watched the lights go off in the house in a pattern that led to the bedroom.
The Rooster had gone back to bed.
Jack surveyed Kennett’s apple barn. The door was padlocked shut. That was a cinch
for Jack to break through. The lock didn’t worry him.
It was the rest of Kennett’s elaborate security system that concerned him. Kennett
was an out-of-the-box thinker, as that gun in Jack’s oven indicated. What other crazy
devices had the Rooster rigged to keep intruders out of his precious apple barn and
away from that hidden bomb shelter?
Thoughts of
Home Alone
and a blowtorch that would singe Jack’s head when he opened the door raced through
his mind. He could disable electronics. He’d already jammed Kennett’s monitoring devices
and cameras. It was the unexpected homebrew gadgets that worried Jack.
Kennett had apparently gone back to bed. Which didn’t give Jack much comfort. Kennett
could spring up and awake any moment, recovering from a concussion or not. Jack didn’t
feel like lingering.
Kennett’s system was way too elaborate for protecting a cashbox and a few bins of
apples.
Jack shrugged, donned his shielded gloves in case Kennett had electrified the padlock,
got out his industrial-strength bolt cutter, and nipped the padlock off.
So far, so good. Jack’s hair wasn’t standing on end. He moved in and surveyed the
barn. It took him a minute to locate the hidden trapdoor. Kennett had concealed it
with a covering of hay.
Jack kneeled and brushed the hay away. As he hunkered down in Kennett’s barn, staring
through his night-vision goggles at the trapdoor that led into Kennett’s bomb shelter,
he felt the familiar mission thrill. Which was a very good thing, and the payoff for
being bored out of his mind as he’d watched Kennett’s house and orchard all afternoon,
mapping Kennett’s pattern of everyday life and watching person after person troop
in to pick and buy apples and get another good dose of Kennett’s poisonous lies.
Jack took a myriad of devices from his backpack and scanned the door, checking for
explosives and electric currents.
Damn!
Just as he thought. The door was wired. Without knowing how it was rigged, it was
too risky to try to break in.
Jack bent down and sniffed the trapdoor. Some people have a nose for fine wine. Jack
had a nose for chemicals and explosives.
Oh yeah. He picked up overtones of various apple scents, hay, dirt, and …
He grinned. As he suspected, the bastard had a boatload of fertilizer and chemical
explosives stored in the bomb shelter. Ingenious and ironic bastard. Who, besides
Jack, would look in a bomb shelter for a bomb?
Jack pushed back to a squatting position. Time to call in a favor. He knew a guy with
an airplane and a piece of high-tech wonder who could map this bunker out from the
air. But first Jack had to sneak back to Aldo’s.
* * *
Willow lay in bed, thinking about Jack and Con. The way the Sense lit up every time
she was around Con, the way her body reacted to him, all the clues …
Hang the DNA. Con was Jack. She believed that with every part of her being. Drew was
right—no one and no evidence would convince her otherwise.
She just had to prove it. Had to get Con to admit he was Jack. She knew her husband.
He’d never break his cover and never abort a mission. She kept going back to that.
Jack was here for a reason. She liked to think it was to see her and make sure she
was doing okay. He’d always been protective. But tonight had convinced her there had
to be more to it than that. Jack, of all people, would certainly realize the risk
to his cover that she presented. He knew about the Sense and her intuitive nature.
Emmett Nelson knew it, too. Neither one of them would take it lightly.
So why risk it? What was at stake here, in this tiny, out-of-the-way town where apples
and sunshine reigned supreme? Was evil lurking somewhere she couldn’t see? Could she
help Jack? How could she help him if she didn’t know what his mission was?
Drew hadn’t reported back to her yet. She could bug him, but what good would that
do?
She had to discover what Jack’s mission was. If he was here, something sinister was
going on. He was here to stop some serious evil from happening. Jack’s whole goal
in life was to serve his country and protect its people from horrors they would never
even know they faced.
She wasn’t a jealous woman. She didn’t hold a grudge. She didn’t blame people for
their actions, especially if their motives were pure. She always believed the best
in people. Another kind of woman would have been furious with Jack for cutting her
out of his life and choosing his spy career over her.
Willow wasn’t that woman. She knew, from the core of her being, that Jack loved her
and always would. If he’d chosen to go deep under the cover of death, it was to protect
her and the country. Unless that explosion had messed with his head. But judging from
the way Con behaved, it hadn’t. He seemed to have all his faculties firmly in place.
And, rats, she’d come close to seeing just how firmly.
No, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that Jack was here to
save her and probably thousands of innocent people, too. Which didn’t alter her plan
to sleep with him and prove to herself for sure and certain Con was Jack.
Once she had, she’d have Jack right where she wanted him. She’d be able to convince
him to take her undercover with him wherever he went, even if she had to fake her
death, too.
She lay back, looking up at the ceiling, and thought for a while longer about everything
that had happened since she’d first seen Con at the apple growers’ dinner. Had that
really been less than a week ago?
In those few days since Con turned up, Shane had taken suddenly ill, running completely
against type and reputation and getting plastered after only a few drinks. Then someone
had spiked the punch and half the town ended up hungover.
Willow suddenly smiled.
Jack! You bad boy.
Those pranks were exactly the kind of thing Jack would do, especially if he was trying
to keep her and Shane apart. She shook her head as her smile widened. Suddenly she
saw Jack’s hand in everything. Things began to fall into place and make sense—the
rooster falling from the second story. The way the Sense had warned her at the exact
moment Con had noticed it and tried to protect her. Her sense of imminent danger,
the foreboding …
Her mouth went dry. She gasped. That crazy, unruly hair on her neck stood straight
up again, for the zillionth time. The rooster! She saw the incident in a different
light now, as a real attack on Con, not just an accident.
Jack’s here fighting someone and that someone is fighting back.
Her heartbeat roared in her ears. She took a deep breath and tried to keep her thinking
calm and clear.
Think, Willow, think.
Who could be at the heart of all this?
Shane.
The name popped into her head. Everything revolved around him. He was relatively new
to town, too. He and Con clearly didn’t like each other. And Shane was always pumping
her for information about Jack. She shuddered.
Jack would risk the cover of death to come back and protect her from an evil man.
She knew he would.
Oh, Jack.
She wished she could talk to him, confront him. But she knew it was pointless. He’d
never admit to a thing.
She had to know for sure. She had to make certain she wasn’t wrong. There was only
one thing to do—investigate Shane. Alone. She couldn’t share her fears with anyone.
They’d think she’d turned into a conspiracy theorist and nutcase.
She’d have to be exceptionally careful. Because if Shane
was
an adversary of Jack’s he was an extremely dangerous man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jack returned to Aldo’s. The two cups of spiked tea were still sitting on the coffee
table where Willow had left them. He grabbed one and downed it. What the hell? His
stomach had finally settled down and he needed a stiff one. For an alcoholic tea drink
it wasn’t bad cold.
The scent of Willow’s perfume lingered in the chair where they’d been groping and
on the cold air he’d let in when he’d aired out the bathroom.
He pulled his secure phone from his pocket, plopped into the chair, and inhaled deeply,
dreaming just for a minute about Willow and what had almost transpired in the recliner.
Damn, he’d have to be more careful from here on out.
He punched in the number of an old buddy of his from the Defense Intelligence Agency,
Josiah Zaran, someone Emmett had cleared Jack to talk to, should he ever need Zaran’s
help.
Zaran answered on the first ring. “Are you the first person in history to break through
from the afterlife? Houdini must be mad as hell you beat him to it. I thought you
were dead, my man.”
Jack laughed. “Stop bullshitting me. You’re one of the very few people with clearance
to know better.”
Zaran was sometimes known as the Mole in intelligence circles because of the years
early in his career that he’d spent belowground in Grand Forks, ND., tending intercontinental
ballistic missiles in their hardened eighty-foot-deep silos. Now Zaran worked as an
intelligence officer in the Underground Facility Analysis Center, a joint effort of
various intelligence communities, including the National Security Agency, that was
housed not too far from Langley, Virginia. Former CIA director John Deutch had established
the center as a think tank where intelligence officers could brainstorm ways to find
and destroy the United States’ enemies’ underground clandestine weapon sites.
Zaran had access to a plane or two equipped with electromagnetic gear that beamed
electromagnetic energy down, illuminating underground sites powerfully enough to map
a fly on the wall of a bunker beneath the ground.
“I need a plane, Zar.”
“What the hell, radio silence for two years and now you need a plane. Where, when,
and what the hell for?”
Jack started with the easy questions. “Immediately if not sooner. To map an underground
bunker I believe is housing explosives and plans to disrupt the upcoming G Eight auxiliary
meeting.” He took a deep breath and explained about Orchard Bluff, hoping Zaran didn’t
laugh in his face.
“Holy shit,” Zaran said. “You want me to buzz an apple orchard on U.S. soil?”
“No,” Jack said calmly. “I want you to fly over at fifty thousand feet and map out
an enemy combatant’s lair so I can carry out my mission to stop him from killing innocent
people.”
Zaran laughed again and let loose a string of casual, conversational curses. “You
don’t ask for much. You know how much jet fuel I’ll use sending out one of my spy
planes?”
“Yeah, I have a pretty good idea. Less than you use on most of your test runs.” Jack
took a breath. “Look, Zar, you know I never ask unless it’s important. Take it all
the way to the President to get clearance if you have to. Let him decide whether he
wants a terrorist attack on his watch or not.”
Zaran cursed some more. He used curses as filler words the way some people used
um.
“I don’t need the President’s approval for a mission like this. Fine, you have your
plane. One fly-by should do it.”
“When will I have my data? I need to strike quickly and get the hell out of Dodge,”
Jack said.
“I’ll have it to you tomorrow morning. You can wait until oh seven hundred, I assume.
It’ll take me an hour or two to get the proper clearance to get a pilot and flight
plan. And since you’ve been dead for two years, I imagine you could use your beauty
sleep. We should give you a new code name. How about Zombie?”
“I liked Sariel better, but I guess that one’s out of commission now.”
“Yeah, like you were ever an angel.”
* * *
Willow opened the caramel shop, thinking of Shane. She needed to get into his house
and see what Jack could be interested in.
She’d never paid much attention to Grant’s place before, even after she met Shane,
other than to decide it was a mess and still reeked of fussy old lady. But Con had
gone up into Shane’s bedroom and seen something there. Willow was certain of it now
that she thought back and remembered how Con had looked when he’d come down from the
room Shane was staying in. And it hadn’t been a ghost, either. Con had also been particularly
curious about the bomb shelter. If Con was Jack, as she believed he was, he had a
reason.
Shane. She couldn’t believe she was suspecting him of who knows what. She certainly
didn’t have a clue. He didn’t
seem
like an enemy spy. But then, Jack didn’t seem like a spy, either. And no one would
ever think all-American Drew was a spy. No one in her family even suspected Jack might
be one. But the ones you didn’t suspect were the best spies, weren’t they? The ones
who went around destroying cars and buildings like James Bond were a bit too obvious.