“I’ll need a moment to use the bathroom,” she said. “Then I’ll lie to the investigators.”
Cumerford and Gordon exchanged nervous glances.
They expected her to take part in a cover-up. She knew when she began at the FBI that these things happened in government, and that she might be called on to lie someday. She hoped she’d never need to. Showers had run her own background investigation on the mysterious “Steve Mason” when they first met and he claimed to be a private detective. There were no records about him anywhere — no legitimate driver’s license, no private detective credentials. She had always known Steve Mason was not his actual name. It was a CIA legend. And Steve Mason had been careful not to give her any clues that might have helped her identify him. Until after they arrived in London. Until the night when they had gone on a long walk and ended up in a pub where they’d downed shots of whiskey and beers. She had told him about her father, a Virginia State Trooper who had been killed in the line of duty after stopping and fatally shooting two drugged-up predators who had kidnapped and raped a ten-year-old girl. Her father had saved that girl’s life. Her father was Showers’s hero, and when she asked Storm about his own father, he dropped his guard.
“My father was an FBI agent,” he’d said.
If that was true, it was start. She would begin investigating as soon as got back to Washington. It wasn’t much, but it was an opening. Jedidiah Jones had forced Steve Mason into her life. Judging from her loose tongue while under sedation, he had invaded her subconscious, too.
It was time for her to find out who this mystery man really was.
CHAPTER FOUR
lara Strike was smiling. They were eating breakfast at an outdoor café in New York City on a beautiful summer morning. Storm was a down-on-his-luck private eye trying to stay one step ahead of bill collectors. The night before he’d nearly been killed. He’d been peeking through a window in a seedy trailer park, secretly recording a cheating husband in a compromising position. It had taken Storm four months to track down Jefferson Grout, but Storm was tenacious, although he didn’t take much satisfaction in it. He’d longed for a better class of clientele — and better paying ones than cuckolded spouses. Two redneck neighbors in the trailer park had spotted him and emerged with guns blasting. An angry Grout had fired two rounds, too. But Storm had escaped. Clara Strike had entered his life the next morning, appearing in his office with a sexy smile and a seductive invitation. Over breakfast, she’d explained that Grout was actually a CIA operative gone rogue. The agency had been searching for him for a year. The fact that Storm had found Grout when the agency couldn’t impressed her. Grout had been trained, as she put it, to “dance between raindrops.” She’d asked for Storm’s help and slipped him an unmarked envelope filled with hundreds. He’d been naïve that morning. He’d taken her money and jokingly asked her for a poison pill, a spy camera, a pen that was a gun, and an invisible jet. She’d laughed. It was her smile that still haunted him. He could still smell her perfume. He was looking into her face right now. A morning breeze tousled her hair. She was blushing. He rose from the café table and walked to her. He bent down and kissed her hard. When he looked up, he looked into her eyes — only it wasn’t Clara Strike looking back. It was Agent April Showers.
The military transport’s tires struck the runway, jarring Storm awake. He’d been dreaming. Clara Strike. April Showers.
He rubbed his tired eyes and felt the stubble on his chin.
It was Clara Strike who had introduced him to Jedidiah Jones, and it was Jones who had made him more than a private eye. Jones had recruited him as a contract operative. A tracker of men. It was Jones who’d sent him to Tangiers, where he’d ended up wounded, lying on a cold tile floor in his own blood. Tangiers had been a trap. Someone inside the agency had betrayed the operation.
A black Lincoln Town Car waiting on the tarmac whisked him to CIA headquarters.
“You look like shit.” Jones said when Storm plopped into a familiar seat across from the spymaster’s desk.
“Nice to see you, too,” Storm said.
Jones closed a bright red file with the title “PROJECT MIDAS” emblazoned on it. “Things got a bit ugly in London, but you accomplished your assignment. You found the gold.”
“Actually, it was April Showers who got you those coordinates,” Storm reminded him. “And it almost cost her her life.”
“It’s all part of the game,” Jones said. “She’s a big girl.”
“Easy to say when your butt is safe behind a desk.”
Jones snickered. “You think I got this pretty face working as a desk jockey?”
It was true. Jones’s nose had been broken so many times that even the best plastic surgeon couldn’t have fixed it.
“Let’s get to it,” Jones said. “Before you left for London, I told you there were others like you who were living off the grid. The agency helped a few of them ‘die.” Others simply disappeared into our version of a witness protection program.”
Jones tapped his finger against the “PROJECT MIDAS” file. “I’ve found it useful periodically to call on our ‘D or D’ operatives to perform missions that must be completely untraceable to this agency and our government.”
“D or D?”
“Disappeared or Dead.”
“Who comes up with this stuff?” Storm asked.
Ignoring him, Jones said, “Trying to recover sixty billion in gold bullion and other precious commodities that once belonged to the Communist Party is definitely not something we want traced back to the agency or to the White House.”
“I understand,” Storm said. “We discussed it before I left for London. Technically, the gold belongs to the Commies who are still running around Russia, and anyone who goes hunting for it would be operating as pirates according to international law.”
“That would be a position the international court might take,” Jones said, “but I think a good lawyer could argue that the KGB leadership stole the gold when they had soldiers sneak it out of Moscow in the dead of night just before the entire country imploded. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a legal entity in 1991, so did the Soviet Communist Party, and since the KGB stole the gold, it really belongs to no one at this point.”
“I don’t think the Kremlin believes in finders keepers, losers weepers. Especially when you’re discussing sixty billion.”
“Especially when the country is being run by President Barkovsky,” Jones added. “And he has access to nukes and is itching for a fight. That’s why the U.S. government and this agency are going to walk away from all of this. We are not going to go after the gold, even though Agent Showers has discovered where it is hidden.”
Storm looked at Jones’s eyes and said, “You’re talking officially, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Officially, we’re not interested. But I’m sending you and three other D or D operatives after it.”
“And if I say no?”
“You can do that,” he said. “You can go back to Montana. You can go back to being a faceless nobody who spends his days fly-fishing and remembering past adventures while he’s letting his talents and his life go to waste.”
“You make that sound appealing,” Storm said.
“C’mon, Storm, isn’t it time for you to face reality? To face the fact that you aren’t someone who can live off the grid. You need the action, the excitement, the adrenaline rush. Besides, in your heart, you’re someone who cares — not only about helping people but about your country. You can put on that tough guy mask for the likes of Agent April Showers, but you don’t fool me. Clara Strike saw through it, too. That’s why I had her recruit you to work for us. It’s why I need you now.”