CHAPTER 10
MARCUS prided himself on the notion that his guests could count on any meal he served to be not only grand, but entirely satisfying. Everything from the sophisticated display of foods right down to the Tansu table from American Drew that he served them on, it all showed how much Marcus enjoyed the art of dining.
Even if it was just him, which it usually was, he was never one to skimp when it came to a good meal.
He referred to this one as brunch because he was serving it much later than the first meal of the day. But, in reality, it was nothing more than an elaborate spread of breakfast foods. It was all there. Eggs, biscuits, potatoes, bacon, sausage, pancakes and various fruits—all ready and available for the taking.
From the head of the table, he dished the foods nearest him onto both Eric and Grace’s plates, and passed his own for them to return the favor. Eric tossed strips of bacon and sausage medallions onto Marcus’s plate and passed it to Grace, who carefully spooned country fries next to the meats before handing the dish back to Marcus.
“I’m not saying this is all tied together.” Marcus sat his plate down and grabbed his fork. “But I’ve heard stories.” He hesitated, unsure if he should be telling this to anyone. Even Eric, whom he trusted implicitly. With that notion, he continued, “Different versions of the same tale, more than once. About some poor schmuck who’d insisted he was being framed.”
Up till now, Eric had been listening quietly, only stealing quick looks at him every-so-often. But the revelation grabbed Eric’s attention and hauled it to Marcus.
“Framed?” Grace, who’d been concentrating more on the food, chimed in. “For what?” She stilled, confirming she was ill-at-ease. “And by who?”
“For what...” Marcus shook his head. “That never really matters. And by whom is purely a matter of speculation.” A secretive tone fueled his words. “The important thing is that they all had two things in common.” He waited until their curiosity caught up with his disclosure. When sufficient interest lit their faces, Marcus continued. “They all said they were being framed.”
“Isn’t that the usual defense?” Eric chuckled and chomped on a piece of bacon.
“Yeah, but, when they also say they were offered a position—one they’d subsequently turned down—with an elite military-type government agency...one that doesn’t exist under any branch of the United States Government...you tend to take notice.”
“Just how many times have you run across this?” Eric wasn’t laughing anymore. His face had become dreadfully sober.
“Every time somebody said they’d been framed, they were first approached with a clandestine proposal to join some mysterious organization.” Marcus’s mind teetered on the edge of uncertainty. What sane person believed the bill of goods he was trying to sell?
“Huh?” A faint thread of hysteria cracked in Grace’s voice as she placed her glass of orange juice back on the table. Her eyes had a strange glare in them as her attention bounced between Eric and Marcus.
The girl was clearly spooked, but Marcus sensed there was more going on inside her head that had nothing to do with the General’s disappearance.
“Spike teams,” Eric said, before Marcus had a chance to delve too deep into what might be troubling Grace. “Hatchet forces.”
“Close. Close.” Marcus nodded perfunctorily. “Just not quite so universally known. And a bit more clandestine.”
“So, they work pretty much under the same pretense as our good friends in the Army?” Eric posed the question, but judging by his perceptive expression understanding had awoken in him. “But with a lot less scruples,” he added, confirming Marcus’s suspicions.
“You’re getting there now,” Marcus said, almost laughing. To see that he and Eric still had the ability to anticipate each other’s thoughts was refreshing. “They take what they want. No matter the costs. And they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.”
Playing with the scrambled eggs on his plate, Eric asked, “No rules, huh?” His light tone melted some of the tension that had started brewing when Marcus received Eric’s phone call yesterday.
“Just don’t get caught,” Marcus said, opting to drive the mood in an informal direction. Finally, somebody had found a way to ease the tension and he had no plans to thwart the effort.
“Wait a minute...” Grace’s objection invaded their repartee as she waved her fork elaborately in the air. “Isn’t that the kind of shit you guys live for?”
“Typically,” Eric said, as if he really knew the topic. Marcus doubted it. If Eric was that knowledgeable on the subject, he wouldn’t have come looking for Marcus.
Time to shed some light. “But not when we have to be reinvented as a person.”
“Maybe you should just go ahead and spell it out for me,” Grace said with the dejected look of surrender, and laid her fork across the center of her far-from-empty plate.
“Well...” Marcus glanced at Eric. Who better to use for show-n-tell? “If Eric here decides to join our secret military group...at that point, Eric Wayne no longer exists. He gets a new identity and is forever cut off from his former life.”
“And if I say, no...” Eric said with a grand air and reached for his cup of steaming coffee. “I find myself in some serious shit.” As he sipped the coffee, Marcus doubted Eric was truly aware of his accuracy.
“Precisely.” Marcus’s zeal poured out in a full-throated roar. “It’s then that he’s accused of some crime or another that’ll buy him twenty-to-life in Leavenworth.”
“Why?” she asked with a long, exhausted sigh and reached for her fork.
“Because...” Marcus said as Grace poked at the mixed fruit, mostly melons, on her plate. “If you say no, you have to be neutralized.” He couldn’t begin to appreciate this reasoning, but he understood it. “These types of operations depend upon secrecy and no one but its own agents knowing it exists. Well, no one credible anyway.” The entire concept was clever, and Marcus had to laugh at the irony. “And who’s going to believe Eric Wayne’s accusations if he’s doing time in Leavenworth?”
“So what you’re saying is...” Grace’s words lingered on the air as she paused, probably searching for some viable logic to what sounded like nonsense. “If Eric is targeted for recruitment, but he says ‘no thanks guys’...then they go out and frame him for a crime he didn’t commit just so they can lock him away in case he decides to tell somebody? And all the while, they’re hoping against hope that nobody’ll believe him, if they decide to listen to him in the first place, since he’s supposedly a criminal locked up in Leavenworth?” Grace judged Marcus with doubtful, shuttered eyes. “I ask you, where is the logic in that?”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, Gracie.” Marcus let it go. Acknowledging what he was proposing had to be right up there with discovering the General’s grave was missing. He just needed to make her see the validity of his claim. “Besides, who’s going to believe Eric if he speaks up? Hell, I’m not even sitting in Leavenworth,” he pointed out, “and you don’t believe me.”
Marcus didn’t blame Grace for doubting his theory. Swallowing it was tough. Especially when nobody, not even Marcus, understood the reasoning behind its purpose.
Grace stabbed her fork into the mound of potatoes on her plate and waved her catch at him. “And you’re saying my father was a part of this?”
“At this point, I wouldn’t rule anything out.” Marcus let his words roll off his tongue in a calm, careful, and casual manner. “Especially since the General’s grave has disappeared.”
“Geez, Marcus,” Grace said as if the entire conversation was beyond her tolerance level. “You’re starting to sound as crazy as those V.A. records they sent me.”
Crazy, maybe. But Marcus wasn’t half as cracked as the lunatics who’d tampered with the General’s V.A. file and made off with his grave. That scheme took ingenuity, not to mention nerve. He wished he understood their thought processes. What good could come from the ruse?
Marcus had always been able to figure out the criminal intent of his clients. But these guys—he was so far from understanding their objective that he doubted he’d be able to follow a road map, even if they gave him one.
That’s why Eric and Grace needed more help than Marcus could offer. Luckily, Marcus had a good idea about who they could turn to—if she was still in the same place.
Then again, “they” might anticipate that Marcus would head in her direction, and if that was the case, he could be leading Eric and Grace into a trap.
Not a comforting feeling. Perhaps he should consider bringing along “the girls”.
E
ric woke up in the same position he’d passed out in—flat on his back. He had to give Marcus credit, the bed in this guestroom was damned comfortable and almost succeeded in luring him to stay there. But he couldn’t do that.
The room had been brightly lit when Marcus showed him to it, but now, only darkness seeped in through the slated blinds covering the window. He’d been asleep for hours. While he needed the rest, he wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Nothing was a good idea that didn’t bring him closer to finding the General, so he could get on with his life. An impossible feat until he parted ways with Grace.
He pushed himself to the side of the bed and lingered there for a moment, allowing the fog of sleep to dissipate as he swabbed his hands over his face. Finally, Eric rose and lumbered toward the doorway, softly illuminated by a dim light in the hallway.
If he hadn’t fully awakened during the time it took to traverse the hallway, he was jerked out of his drowsy state when he entered the living room and saw Marcus sitting on the couch polishing a sawed-off shotgun.
A subtle chill rolled up his arms, and Eric tried to hide the shudder that followed by shoving his fingertips inside the pockets of his Levi’s. “Holy shit!”
“You’re awake.” Marcus barely glanced up at Eric, but it didn’t break his concentration. “That’s good. We’ll want to get going soon.” Still, there was no urgency in his tone or his actions as he continued his task of buffing the gun.
“You think those are necessary?” Eric asked with a waving gesture at Marcus and his hardware. He sat down in the chair across from his friend, and fixed his gaze on the unsettling sight.
Not that Eric was afraid of guns, or the prospect of using them. Hell, he was an expert marksman. He could nail a target from a thousand yards—if he had to. But the thought that he might have to put his skill to use, that raised the danger level a notch or two above Eric’s comfort plane.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Marcus carefully laid the shotgun at his right hand side and turned to the .9mm handgun to his left. He checked the clip and patted the barrel. “This is Helen,” he said, offering the weapon to Eric. “She has a hair-trigger, so you’ll need to watch that.”
Eric cradled the handgun in his palm and carefully checked the safety. It was on. Good. He tucked the gun into the waistband at his back and pulled his t-shirt down, concealing it. “That one have a name?” he asked, imbued with idle curiosity.
Marcus held her up, resting the butt of the shotgun on his knee. “This is Lorraine.” His broadening smile conveyed his pride. “They are
my girls
.”
“Well, I guess if you’re going to have some girls hanging around, this is a good kind.”
“They haven’t let me down yet.”
“Well, let’s hope their track record remains intact.” Eric tried to infuse a bit of laughter into his worrisome tone. But the doubt was there, lingering on the edge of his thoughts. Just how much trouble were they in? “What are the odds you think we’ll need them?”
“In light of a missing grave and military records that have obviously been tampered with—” Marcus’s apprehensive tone bothered Eric. “—I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
Okay, well if he was going to put it like that, then Marcus might be on to something. But what, exactly?
Eric preferred the scenarios running through his mind, to Marcus’s—his need for guns. But Eric wasn’t convinced that there wasn’t a logical explanation, and logic, by definition, didn’t include conspiracy theories and an elaborate scheme to ‘erase’ a man’s entire existence.
He’d humor Marcus and Grace, for now, but in the end Eric was confident they’d discover this mystery was nothing more than a case of erroneous mis-identity.
“So, you have a plan then?” Eric asked with a fair amount of curiosity. Watching Marcus’s investigative intellect in action would be interesting.
“Sort of,” Marcus said with an offhanded shrug. “Mostly, I’m just making it up as I go along.”
At least Marcus was capable of thinking on his feet in a less than ideal situation. Eric was happy to pass the leadership roll off to him, it was better than trying to figure out their next move himself.
“So what is our next move?” Eric asked. “Should we consider leaving soon?”
“Yes.” Marcus motioned toward the hallway where they’d stashed Grace inside a guestroom. “Maybe you should go ahead and wake her.”
Eric stood, checked the gun at his back and strode toward the hallway, stopping at the first room on the right. He paused in the doorway for a brief moment, drinking in the sight of Grace sleeping soundly, her slender figure defined by the dim light in Marcus’s other guestroom. He was infused by a feeling of warmth and tried to push aside the desires he thought long extinct, buried, and forgotten... damn near it, anyway.
The stone center of his heart crumpled.
Remembering why they were here, at Marcus’s, Eric was overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense of danger. He considered his options, quick to discard all but the one where he had to protect Grace.
Since time was of the essence, he mustered the strength to tuck his wounded feelings aside. If they survived this thing—and that was a big if—there’d be plenty of time later for his incessant obsession.
He shifted from foot to foot before pushing himself across the room toward her. Leaning over her, he laid a delicate hand on her shoulder. A tingling tremor ran up his arm.
“Gracie...” he whispered, “wake up.”
Eric’s voice yanked her from the throes of sleep. She’d been dreaming about him, back when they first met. She wanted to go back, back to that wonderful dream. The memories were so fresh now. She recalled so vividly the unadulterated desire that invaded his eyes every time he’d looked at her. Back when they were falling in love.