Blowback (The Black Cipher Files Book 1) (7 page)

The rough material of the chef’s pants scratched at my abused body. The odor of stale peanut oil wafted from the black sweatshirt, permeating everything. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

He sauntered over to the counter, invaded my personal space, and slowly reached out. I tensed, planning a defensive move, but his finger only stroked a stray tendril of hair. The clean scent of soap and something spicy wrapped around me, elevating my need to wash away this grime.

“Shoot. Here I was thinking I could keep you naked and chained to the sink.”

I shivered at the heat in his eyes. His verbal prodding, meant to keep me off balance, was working. I held firm against the temptation to answer with a not so subtle shift of my hips.

“Pass.”

He twisted his finger around a strand of my blonde-streaked hair. “What is your natural hair color?”

“Question number one?”

“Call it a...toll to get in the shower.”

“I don’t know.” It changed frequently. Depending on my cover. I had no idea what my natural color might be. Somewhere between blond and brown. My father....

My father had been blond. My mother’s hair had been coal black. Funny to remember that. I didn’t let myself remember my parents very often. It hurt far too much.

I also remembered my parent’s admonitions never to give up any information, no matter how trivial. I’d broken their rules without even thinking about it.

I turned toward the bathroom.

“Jesus.” His fingers wrapped around my forearm, gentle as he stopped me.

“What?”

“There’s blood on this.” He touched the napkin I’d jammed over the open cut in my neck when I’d lifted the new clothes. “It’s going to hurt when I pull it off.”

Oh brother. Like it didn’t hurt when I did it? I reached around and yanked the paper off. “All done.”

He smiled but his eyes were sharp, lethal. “I guess you’re a ‘get it over with’ kind of girl.”

“Woman.” I hadn’t been a girl for a very long time.

He grabbed a dishtowel, soaked it with warm water, and dabbed at the sore skin. It felt like he was stabbing my neck with a knife.

“I know this hurts. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged.

“Always the tough one.” He pressed a kiss to the exposed curve of my neck. The gesture was tender and completely unexpected. And very, very seductive.

“I’ll get that shower now.” I pushed away from him before my body and mind could betray me. And to remind myself that I couldn’t trust him, I turned back. “
Adios
.”

He acknowledged my verbal parry with a nod. “Guy’s got to keep something in reserve.”

I wondered what other secrets he had tucked away.

***

The shower was quick and intense.

As the hot spray hit my neck, I dug my toes into the vintage octagonal tiles of the shower floor. Thank God the beacon had been implanted shallowly.

I rushed through dressing, rolling the sleeves of his cotton dress shirt up to my forearms. I left the top three buttons undone, letting my considerable cleavage play peekaboo with anyone interested in looking.

I’d take any distraction I could get.

His jeans weren’t all that large on me. Dammit. At least the extra room in the waist gave me ample space in the small of my back. I just needed a weapon.

Lucas’s ongoing tenderness kept suspicion in the front of my thoughts. Why hold on to the syringe? There didn’t seem to be a logical connection between him and my abductors

but--I couldn’t rule it out and I couldn’t let down my guard.

Lucas sat at the desk, flipping through unopened mail. He glanced up as I entered. “You ready?”

For what?

“Dinner.” He stood swiftly. “It’s not far.”

I flexed my right hand. Out? He only had frozen french fries in his freezer and moldy spaghetti sauce and a full container of fuzzy leftover Chinese vegetables in his fridge. But he must have seen my instinctive denial.

“Even if I had any food, you wouldn’t trust anything I’d give you to eat.”

He was right. And I was starving. I didn’t even want to calculate how many hours since I’d eaten.

“We’ll go out.” He grabbed a jacket and tossed it to me. “You pick--Mexican or Chinese.”

I loved Mexican food. It was hard to find a decent Mexican restaurant at home, but even then I only allowed myself to go to the same place once every six months. I paid in cash and altered my appearance, just to be safe.

I couldn’t stand Chinese food. “Chinese.”

“Excellent.” He shrugged on a jeans jacket.

If I pushed too hard about the syringe he’d make me wait longer. I knew it but I still couldn’t waste an opportunity to attempt to retrieve it. “We should bring the syringe with us.”

“Not yet.” Lucas smiled and strode over to the door where I waited. “I don’t go back on my promises.”

I shrugged. It had been worth a shot.

Lucas set the alarm and locked his door. “It’s safer here. Locked away.”

We walked down the steep hill to a main thoroughfare. My gaze roved the still crowded city street, checking constantly for anything suspicious, out of the ordinary.

Traffic buzzed along, a Muni bus door hissed closed, music spilled from an open apartment window.

Lucas registered the same innocuous sounds and deemed them unimportant too.

I followed him along a cracked sidewalk. It was clear from our journey Lucas walked this way regularly.

An elderly man huddled on a stoop, a paper bag in his hand. He wore a cardigan with thinning patches to protect against the crisp fall night, a thin gold band around his left ring finger, and pink cheeks with tiny broken blood vessels. “Evening, Lucas.”

“Nice night, Mr. C.”

He saluted us with the bag. “Sure is. You enjoy it with your lady friend now.”

Cool air from the Bay whipped through the corridor of apartments and storefronts, chilling me. The scent of garlic and basil poured out of a transom exhaust from an Italian restaurant.

I registered a noise. In the same moment, Lucas grabbed my arm, pulling me out of the missile’s path as a kid with a bright red mohawk, skateboard wheels scraping along the concrete, whizzed past.

Not a threat.

My heart pumped blood through my veins, filling my body with fight instinct. I took a deep breath.

There’s no way they could track me here. I’d disabled the car tracker, the beacon was gone, I hadn’t made any phone calls since leaving the bus station. They must not have followed me to Lucas’s place. Unless Lucas was the reason they’d stopped.

I spotted another old man, slightly younger this time, on a bus bench, staring at us. Newspaper, bulky jacket, multiple hiding places for weapons. I tensed.

“Missed you last night, my boy.” The old man winked at me. “You musta been busy.”

Lucas waved. “Musta been.”

After the third person greeted Lucas by name, I shuddered. “Why not just hang a sign around your neck with your name on it? You’re a breeze to track.”

“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said neutrally.

He might not have anything to hide, but I did. I wondered what such an open life would be like. I didn’t have that luxury. Would never have it. Based on the background he’d hinted at previously, his open lifestyle seemed like a blatant flaunting of good judgement.

“Why do you do it?” The question burst out before I even thought to stop it. Shit. I couldn’t possibly care, could I?

“It?” he countered, amused.

I pressed my lips together, refusing to elaborate. He knew what I meant. I couldn’t look away, searching for a chink in his seemingly ironclad nonchalance. I really wanted to understand.

Lucas sighed. “I was tired of living in the shadows.”

“Shadows work,” I defended.

He was silent. I didn’t think he was going to answer.

“There are big ways to live and small ways to effect change,” he said slowly. “I’d tried the big and frankly that didn’t work out very well...so I’m focusing on the small.”

I couldn’t miss his inference. We turned onto a less busy side street, traffic more muted and pedestrians few and far between.

Finally, I gave in. “Okay, okay. Tell me more about the kid.”

NINE

"John Michael Wishbone is eighteen.”

“Legal.”

“His mother asked me to look for him after he disappeared.”

“He’s a big boy.” What was the problem? He was eighteen, plenty old enough to take care of himself.

I waited, knowing he’d volunteer the information when he got around to it. So far, nothing raised any flags. Kid took off. Mama wanted him back.

I thought back to when I was eighteen. I’d been learning about anti-aircraft missiles and studying five different languages, burying my grief about my family in learning to protect my sister.

“Kid probably just wanted a little freedom. This mother sounds a bit overprotective.” I ignored the pang of longing, the wish for a mother who’d been around to be overprotective. No one had worried about me in a very long time.

I sensed him stiffen. I glanced around quickly, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My gaze went back to Lucas. His face was still, impassive. That’s what clued me in to how disturbed he was about this kid.

“Why doesn’t the mother just wait for him to come home?”

“He’s not a typical eighteen year old. His father--” He stopped, his voice devoid of any expression but his eyes were tortured. “Was killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers.”

Ouch. That kind of hurt I understood. Of course, I’d pushed away the devastation of my parents’ death and immersed myself in learning everything I could about avenging them.

“He’d been depressed, moody. He was on medication and in therapy, then suddenly, he stopped.”

Wish someone had thought to give me happy drugs when my parents bought it. Then again, maybe they hadn’t on purpose.

The angry wail of a fire truck ripped through the night air. I blinked, did a quick recon of our surroundings.

A trio of women in business suits spent an inordinate amount of time staring into a shop window. But, when a fourth woman came out loaded with shopping bags, I relaxed.

“He started hanging around with ME’s, young men of...Middle Eastern descent.”

“Maybe he was trying to understand their culture.” Or learn the enemy. The thought popped into my head before I could censor it.

“His mother wasn’t happy with his choice of friends. But he was eighteen and he’d stopped needing all the other forms of coping. He seemed to have a purpose. The new friends seemed to give him a focus.”

But what had the focus been? Despite myself, I was intrigued.

“He was in a car accident with minor injuries. They decided to keep him overnight for observation. Hospital officials told his mother a woman visited her son in his room and twenty minutes later, he checked himself out. And disappeared.”

I waited. But Lucas seemed to be done.

“No trace?”

“None.”

Jesus. It was as if this kid had replicated my life. Except I hadn’t had a mama at home to worry about me. A pang echoed in my chest. I shoved away that traitorous longing for
someone
to care.

“What’s wrong?” Lucas slowed, going to high alert, his body tensed and ready to fight.

“Nothing,” I said abruptly, totally unsettled he could pick up on my mood shift. “Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“So he ran away.” I shrugged, struggling for no reaction. Happened all the time.

He eyed me knowingly. “I don’t think so.”

“Why didn’t the mother call the police?”

“She was worried about the consequences.”

“Consequences?”

He hesitated, so I nudged. “I need to know all the facts if you want my advice.”

“She was afraid of a kind of John Walker Lind type lashback. She didn’t want her son in prison for the rest of his life.”

“Why would she think that?”

“The son of a slain FBI agent joins a terrorist cell.”

I raised a brow. So Lucas’s missing boy had a Fed for a father. Those headlines would sell a lotta newspapers. I finally connected the dots. The mysterious woman who visited the kid had a name. Staci. Shit.

“Staci Grant is the one who visited him in the hospital,” Lucas said calmly.

That posed a serious problem. Staci Grant was dead.

And I had only assumed her identity two days ago, which meant one of two things. Either the agency had two people undercover as Staci--unlikely.

Or someone outside had decided to take over her ‘trade’ since she was gone.

“When did this happen?”

“Can’t refresh your memory, Staci?”

I gave him a blank stare. “I never visited this kid.”

“Three weeks ago.”

“You need to work on your PI skills if it took you this long to track down the wrong person.”

“You aren’t the wrong person,” he said patiently, ignoring my slam. “You also aren’t Staci Grant, but you’re the closest thing to her.”

In that respect he was right, but he still had a snowball’s chance of help from me. I’d never even heard of this John Michael Wishbone kid. “What is it you think I can do for you?”

“Check the files at the NSA and see if any branch of the government has a record of him--in any capacity.”

“What do you mean?”
Spell it out for me, Lucas.

“I want to know if he is training at a terrorist camp in Africa under his own steam or....”

We stopped in front of a bright yellow sign with red letters flashing: The Lucky Dog.

I watched him swallow hard, then purposely looked away from the conflict I sensed in him. “Or?”

“Deciding to work for the government as an undercover terrorist trainee,” he said tightly.

The possibility had crossed my mind. I could even see how whoever had recruited him would have done it. Probably very similar to my own recruitment.

Avenge your daddy.

“I can’t help you,” I replied calmly, held his gaze steadily while I lied. “I’m just a simple adjunct lecturer at Georgetown.”

“You have the connections,” he insisted.

“Is this the place?” I deflected his attention away from the request.

“I’m surprised by now you haven’t figured out that I won’t give up.”