Authors: Toni Anderson
He peered through the kitchen window but saw no one so he went over to the sliding doors and looked into the living room. His blood chilled. The place was torn apart. Christmas tree overturned, decorations scattered. Trinkets and picture frames smashed and lying on the floor. Worse—what he assumed were Ken Maidstone’s feet lay in view.
One foot twitched.
Shit. The guy was still alive. Matt drew his SIG from the holster at his waist and tried the kitchen door. It swung open. Senses on high alert he strode inside, down the hall and crouched beside Maidstone, who lay across the threshold between the living room and the hall. He put two fingers to the man’s carotid and felt a subtle throb against his fingers. Still alive. Judging from the blood that pooled around his body, he wouldn’t last much longer without serious medical assistance.
He grabbed the phone off the side table and dialed 911. “Need an ambulance ASAP. GSW to the chest.” He hung up on the operator. Was the perp still inside the house? He didn’t have time to search. Maidstone would bleed out.
He lay his gun beside him but kept his senses wide open for any hint of another person nearby. He ripped the man’s shirt open and saw a small caliber bullet hole in his chest. He eased the guy up and discovered a much messier exit wound. It looked like it had taken out one of his lungs and the guy struggled to breathe. Maidstone’s eyes followed him. Wide with fear and pain. Matt grabbed a small cushion off the couch, pressed it tight against the man’s back, applying pressure to try to stop the bleeding.
There was a lot of blood. A series of images flashed rapid-fire through his brain. Blood. Guts. Severed limbs. He shook his head to clear the memories. He saw blood all too often in his work, but never when the victim was still alive. “Hold on, Ken. Hold on, buddy.”
The guy’s breathing was hoarse and shallow, lungs too weak to drag in a decent breath. Matt had basic medical training but zero supplies and the only real thing that was going to save this man was a trauma surgeon, a blood transfusion, and some serious good luck.
The sound of a siren grew louder. Matt holstered his weapon. Someone started banging on the front door. He leapt up and unlocked it, but it wasn’t the EMTs. Scarlett looked at the blood on his hands and then her eyes went to the man on the floor.
“Did he attack you?” she asked as he went back to the injured man.
Maidstone groaned.
“He was like this when I found him.” Matt frowned at Scarlett’s question. Did she really think he’d shot the guy? “Mr. Maidstone. I’m FBI Agent Lazlo and this here is Scarlett Stone—Richard Stone’s daughter. You’ve been shot.”
Duh
. “Hang on, we’ve got emergency services on the way.”
The man turned toward Scarlett, lips parted as if he wanted to say something.
Scarlett clasped Maidstone’s hand. “Hold on, Mr. Maidstone. Please hold on. Who did this to you?” She knelt beside him, not flinching as blood soaked into the knees of her jeans.
A ragged sound emerged from Maidstone’s lips. Matt and Scarlett both leaned closer to hear what he said.
“Ma…”
“Ma?” Matt asked urgently.
The man tried again. “Marlon.”
“Is that who did this to you?” Scarlett demanded. She was on the edge of tears.
The man lost consciousness and she looked at Matt, eyes wide with fear. Scarlett didn’t get the significance of the name, but he did.
Marlon was the code name used by the Russians for the same spy Richard Stone had confessed to being. The name had never been made public, and wasn’t in the case files he’d let Scarlett read. Why would Stone want this man dead after all these years?
Answer:
He wouldn’t.
Shit. Matt got a very bad feeling about this. They needed to get out of here. Cops and emergency services would do what they could to save Maidstone, but if they found him and Scarlett here, they’d be suspects. They’d be separated, and the fact they’d both survived the bombing would become public knowledge. Scarlett would be vulnerable not only to the Russians but also to this new threat. Because if Marlon wasn’t Richard Stone, he—or she—had everything to lose if they were identified.
Matt grabbed Scarlett’s hand and pulled her after him.
“We can’t just leave him!”
“We have to.” He forced her into a run. When he got to the car he opened the car door and pushed her inside. The shooter might be watching them right now. He got in and reversed into a neighbor’s driveway before turning around and driving in the opposite direction. Thankfully, the guy didn’t live in a cul-de-sac. Matt drove quickly, knowing they had seconds to get out of there before they were detained—and they should be detained. They had information. They had disturbed a crime scene, but they hadn’t shot the guy and didn’t know who had.
Damn. His prints were on the phone. He contemplated turning around but the flash of red lights in the rear-view made him abandon the idea. With that one act, he might have just deep-sixed his career.
He called Frazer who didn’t answer, so he called Parker next, slowing as he hit the main road and headed out of town. “Maidstone has been shot. Medics just arrived on scene. Place looks like it was burglarized, but lots of things of value still lying around.” He’d noticed an iPad, big-ass TV. Wallet on the table.
“Is he alive?” asked Parker.
“Just. Get this, he said ‘Marlon’ shot him.” The silence on the other end was intense. “I called the cops and got out of there. My prints are on the phone and my voice will be on the 911 tape, though I didn’t identify myself.”
Fuck.
He looked at Scarlett, who sat shaking beside him. They were both covered in blood, but his jeans were more or less clean and it didn’t show on his black t-shirt. “We need a place to lay low and figure out our next move.” He needed to think.
Matt heard a mumbled conversation, then Parker was back on the phone. “Nothing about this feels right. I’ll call Frazer again—he’s been out of touch for the last few hours. We need to arrange protection for Maidstone in case the guy survives, which I can do.” He reeled off an address for them to head to. Matt repeated it to Scarlett, who plugged it into the GPS system.
Matt kept alert for cops, thinking aloud. “Why shoot this guy now? Did someone know we were going to see him?”
“They couldn’t listen in to our phone conversations or intercept our email—I made sure of that. But Frazer got permission to access the case file last night. Someone knows we’re looking at the evidence.” Someone
inside
the FBI was the unspoken subtext. “It appears someone is trying to clean up any loose ends.”
“This goes well beyond Scarlett breaking into Dorokhov’s office last night.”
“She stirred up a hornets’ nest. She thought Dorokhov might have something to do with her father’s arrest. If her father wasn’t
Marlon
, maybe the real spy panicked.”
Which likely made Maidstone an accomplice who needed silencing. “
Could
Dorokhov have set up Richard Stone?” asked Matt. Russians had money and therefore power, but could they have orchestrated setting up an FBI agent?
“Not without help from the inside.”
His gut churned at the idea of being fooled.
The idea that the Russians had gotten the better of his agency, had lied and manipulated the confession and conviction of an innocent man was…inconceivable. Except why else would someone be cleaning house—two attempts on Scarlett’s life, blowing up the residence of an FBI agent, the shooting of the man who’d stated Richard Stone had failed the polygraph. Too many things happening too close together to believe they were all unrelated.
Stone had been caught at a dead drop with Top Secret information. He claimed it was already there when he arrived and he’d been following a tip off. What if he was telling the truth? What if Scarlett had been right about her father all along?
Matt couldn’t believe he was starting to entertain the possibility that Scarlett’s father might actually be innocent. Fuck. If that were true, Richard Stone was a patriot who’d been betrayed, locked up, and forgotten, and everything that had happened to him and his family was a win for the Russians and an insult to the American way. And Scarlett was the only one searching for the justice that had so far eluded her family.
He caught her eye.
“Is this my fault? Did I get that man shot?” Her eyes were huge and he was immediately reminded of when he’d first met her eighteen short hours earlier.
Matt shook his head. “No, but I think you scared someone into taking action.”
“So I was right?”
Matt didn’t want Scarlett getting her hopes up. It was hard to believe the system he’d dedicated himself to for so long was this flawed. “It might just have been a burglary gone wrong. Even if Maidstone was shot because the polygraph evidence was tampered with, it
still
doesn’t mean your dad is innocent.” But he didn’t sound convincing; he sounded like he was grasping at straws.
She pressed her already bloodless lips together and nodded. Her skin looked icy white as shock started to set in. “I get that. I even get the fact you need to believe in the justice system you represent. But be careful, Matt. My father believed in it just as fiercely as you do. And look what happened to him.”
* * *
Scarlett’s hands trembled
in her lap. Seeing a man bleeding from a bullet wound brought home the magnitude of the risk she’d taken, and the fact she wasn’t the only one in the line of fire made it worse. She’d been wrong to stir things up. She should have accepted everything that had happened.
But her father was innocent.
How did she let the destruction of her family slide? How did she live in a society where she knew the justice system was a sham?
Matt drove slowly and steadily out of town. His hands were smeared in blood but his breathing was normal, his eyes extra-vigilant in the rear-view. Calm in a crisis. Trained for situations like this. Unlike her.
Her teeth clacked together noisily. “S-sorry. I can’t s-stop shivering.”
The blood that had soaked into her jeans was drying, making the material stiffen. The sticky sensation made her skin itch. Her stomach flipped and she couldn’t stand it any longer. She unclipped her seatbelt. Undoing her button and zipper, she lifted her hips so she could slide out of her jeans.
“What are you doing?” Matt’s eyes went to her legs.
“I can’t stand it. It’s making me feel sick.” She pushed them off, sneakers and all, then kicked them into the footwell. She plucked tissues out of a box in the console, spat on one and scrubbed at the rusty-red blotches that marred her knees. “I can’t deal with the idea of his blood on my body. It sounds awful and selfish, but I can’t.”
Matt blew out a controlled breath. “Fine. I get it.” He cranked up the heat. “But don’t take off anything else without warning me first. I’ll crash the damn car.” He muttered the last under his breath.
She dragged her shirt as far down as possible and it covered her upper thighs. Refastened her seatbelt. “Will we be suspects?”
“If anyone saw us running out of there covered in blood and tagged our plates then we will definitely be suspects. Me being with the feds will only get us so far.”
As she knew too well.
“We need to find somewhere to regroup. I feel like a headless chicken running around with no real idea what the hell is going on.”
She drew her knees to her chest and hugged her legs. “You think Maidstone is dirty?”
Matt turned those clear hazel eyes on her. The gold in them glinted. “Honestly? It’s a heck of a coincidence for him to get shot if he isn’t involved in this in some way.”
“Do you know who Marlon is?”
He hesitated, clearly debating whether or not to tell her the truth. She’d thought they were beyond that. Dammit.
He nodded curtly. “Marlon is the codename the Russians used for their spy. The spy your father was convicted of being.”
“You don’t think my father orchestrated that, do you?”
His fingers tightened on the wheel. “I don’t see why your father would have arranged a hit unless he’s after revenge before he dies. It still doesn’t make sense.”
“The way Maidstone said the name, it was as if Marlon himself had shot him.”
Matt nodded. “That’s how it sounded to me too.”
“Which would mean my father isn’t ‘Marlon’ and is therefore innocent.” Scarlett spelled it out. No more room for evasion.
“Unless there were two spies and they only caught one.” Matt suggested.
Crap. If she couldn’t convince this man, she’d never convince anyone. “Why won’t you even consider he might have been set up?”
His jaw flexed as he considered his words. “Because it’s easier to deal with the thought of one man being dirty, than the idea that the FBI, as an institution, fucked up, imprisoned the wrong guy and destroyed his family.”
He believed her. He finally believed her. She didn’t think he even fully realized it yet.
They sat in silence as the wheels put more and more distance between them and Thornton. Finally Scarlett whispered, “How will he ever get justice if no-one fights for him?”
Matt was silent for another moment before he said tightly. “You’re fighting for him, Scarlett.”
“What if I’m not enough?” That was her greatest fear. That she wouldn’t be able to prove him innocent in time to set him free. That she wouldn’t be able to fight through the red tape and bureaucracy, even if she did find the evidence.
Matt took her hand, squeezed her fingers. “If your dad is the guy you think he is, he’ll understand you tried. If he isn’t, then he was never worth the effort anyway.”
There was a bitterness in his words that Scarlett realized wasn’t aimed at her father, it was aimed at his. “Not all dads are like your father, Matt.”
He jerked his head in a nod, obviously not wanting to talk about it. He cleared his throat. “We need to clean up and grab some food.” They were approaching a gas station. Matt reached back and groped for the laptop case and put it on her lap. He pulled up beside the restroom. “Stay in the car. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
A hand stopped
Frazer’s forward progress toward the operating room where doctors were struggling to save Richard Stone’s life. He opened his jacket to reveal his badge to the US Marshal who blocked his way. “The warden said he was going to call to allow me access to Stone as soon as he was out of surgery.”