“So that’s why Tony and I had to learn that thing about the magazines. I always thought it was a little strange that we needed to know that ‘your issue is on the way’ meant you were coming for me, but I just passed it off as my Drama Mama making a big deal out of shadows.”

  “Never underestimate the threat that shadows can pose,” Nicole said.

  “Okay,” J.J. began. “That’s all very screwed up. Not the least bit mind blowing at all! Daddy, what did you think when you found all this out?”

  “For several hours, I couldn’t think,” he replied. “But clearly, you’ve got your mother’s ice-water blood, because you seem fine with it.”

  “Not fine, just not… completely surprised.”

  Now it was Nicole and Dan’s turn to speak in unison. “What?” they chorused.

  “I don’t know. There was just something about when Mom went on ‘business trips.’ She was usually in her office almost constantly the day before she left, and she always seemed… I don’t know, a little different, I guess, when she left. And when she came back, she seemed distant and distracted for a few days. I always figured she was working through some sort of issues with the CUC franchise she was visiting and took a little time to decompress when she got back. I promise that I never even began to guess at the reality of it all, but now that I know, I guess it makes sense. It answers questions I never quite formed but nagged me just the same.”

  “Wow,” said Nicole. “Your dad is right. You do have some icy blood!”

  J.J. was far from done, however. “So that explains quite a bit. My mom is an experienced assassin, and my dad is an apprentice assassin.”

  Dan let out a snorting laugh. “I like to think of myself as an assistant assassin,” he said, eliciting a snort from Nicole.

  “Assistant to the assassin,” she said, channeling Michael Scott from The Office.

  J.J. ignored them both and went on. “How about my part in all of this? Why did I end up in South Carolina?”

  Dan’s eyes were on the road, so he didn’t catch the change in Nicole’s expression, but J.J. did. She could tell her mother was struggling to go on with her story.

  “To explain that, I’ll have to tell you why I left Greenville, and why I hate it so much to this day.”

  That was not what Dan had expected, and he realized he might be on the verge of having a decades-old mystery solved. He also stole a glance and recognized that his wife was stressing badly at the thought of telling. Fortunately, he saw the hotel’s sign a block away.

  “Let’s save that till we’re in our room and everyone is a little more comfortable,” he said.

  Nicole looked at her husband. As twisted as her insides were at the moment, she couldn’t help but instantly fall in love with him all over again. It was true. J.J. had taken the news far better than he had. But she could tell that he was in tune with her level of comfort, or more accurately, her discomfort. The fact that he responded to it by asking patience from his daughter so that she could be slightly more at ease, sitting in their hotel room as opposed to a moving vehicle, was an act of subtle heroism on his part.

  They entered the lobby of the Westin Poinsett, and the desk clerk, still the same one who’d been on duty when Dan checked in, waved him over. “There’s a message for you, Mr. Walker.”

  As Dan walked away, J.J. whispered to her mother, “Why is Dad answering to ‘Mr. Walker?’”

  Nicole smiled. “Aliases are part of the gig,” she whispered back.

  Dan spoke to the desk clerk for a few minutes, during which time Nicole’s mind, flushed with relief at recovering her daughter with such ease, thought, not for the first time, that it was unquestionably too easy. She needed to get to the safety of their room, maybe hit the minibar for something stiff to wash away the cobwebs brought on by almost twenty-four hours of controlled panic and more than one adrenaline system flush. She looked at J.J., who, in turn, was still looking at her father with a quizzical half-grin.

  Nicole did not look appreciatively different at age forty-seven than she had when Dan had met her twenty-one years prior. Oh, she’d aged. But remarkably, each change brought on by advancing time only seemed to enhance the beauty of her younger self.

  And J.J.’s face looked like a Polaroid of herself when had been she twenty.

  But Nicole was becoming more and more aware of something else about Jennifer June. She carried a spark of the flame that burned inside of her own breast. When Nicole was twenty, she was in a life-place that was very different from the one J.J. enjoyed. That was not to say her life had been bad, for by all measures, it was better than it had ever been in her life. She was travelling the world. She was learning skills that would mold her into a new, improved version of herself. She never lost who she’d been as June Barker; she added to her.

  Did J.J., her advantages aside, have the steely inner strength that Nicole had relied upon to rise from the ashes of her childhood? And if so, what could it be molded into?

  Jesus Christ, she suddenly thought. I’m glad all this reflection is going on in my head. If I started thinking out loud, they’d escort me to a nice padded cell. This is what sleep deprivation does to the brain.

  At that moment, her reverie was broken anyway as Dan returned. “You need to call Darlene when we get upstairs.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Dan made a combination nod and shrug gesture. “I think so. It was just a handwritten note by the overnight desk clerk that she’d enquired if we’d arrived and for us to give her a call when we get settled.”

  “Hmm,” said Cole pensively. “She doesn’t usually check in like this.”

  “Yeah, well. Not a normal assignment, I guess?”

  “Good point, Two-Gunz,” she said, giving his ribs a poke as the elevator door slid open.

  “Why do you guys insist on using that ridiculous nickname?” J.J. asked.

  “Oh, you know us,” Nicole said as the elevator door slid closed. She mugged a crazy-person face. “We’re just weird.”

  Dan thought for an instant about being offended. After telling J.J. about CUC (news his daughter took almost pathologically well), she deflected rather than explain how he’d gained… no, earned that “ridiculous nickname.” But as he looked at his grimacing daughter, he was so happy that she was safe and with them that he blew right past being mad and settled into feeling blessed.

  Dan opened the door to their room. Because the arrangements had to be changed at the last minute when J.J.’s abduction moved the timetable forward an entire day, this room was not quite of the quality that was one of the normal perks of Cleanup Crew. Because cleaners were being asked to do something that many, in their core beliefs, would ordinarily find abhorrent, the leadership of the company, as soon as it had the revenue to do so, began putting their frontline people in lodgings that were beyond comfortable during a mission.

  This was no rat hole, by any stretch of the imagination. But it was a single room, not a suite, and J.J. would be sleeping on a fold-out love seat, a few feet from Dan and Nicole’s bed.

  And so though Nicole could have been a little dissatisfied with her quarters, maybe even mentioning it to Darlene when she called her momentarily, she was disinclined to do so. There were matters of far greater weight that needed to be hashed through.

  J.J. realized a need that trumped hearing the rest of her mother’s story and immediately asked to use the shower. When she closed the bathroom door, Cole said, “I’m calling Darlene.”

  Dan sat on the end of their bed and listened to Nicole’s end of the conversation.

  “Hey. What? Darlene. Dar- calm down. Listen to me. We have her. She’s in the bathroom right now. She’s safe. Yes! Well, that’s one of the first things I need to talk to you about. It was very fast and very easy.” She stressed the word “very” in a way that even Dan realized actually meant “far too easy.”

  “Well, yeah,” she continued after a pause as Darlene spoke for a moment. “I mean, I honestly don’t believe they could have had any knowledge that we were already in Carolina, and I have had contact with no one other than Gail. Oh…” Nicole’s voice faltered momentarily.

  From his seat, Dan actually heard Darlene’s words as she loudly asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I just remembered one other point of contact. There was the cab driver from GSP.” Dan looked as Nicole listened to Darlene, then nodded. “Ordinarily, I’d pretty much discount the encounter too, but it was… atypical.” After another pause, she shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. I don’t know what it was. I can’t really say.”

  Dan began to lose interest in the conversation, but even if he’d been listening closely, he would have missed the coded phrase his wife had just spoken. The combination of the last two sentences were intended to sound, to anyone who might be listening, as if Nicole was slightly confused about something but didn’t think it very important. In fact, it meant “I can’t talk about that right now.” The thought that the charming driver could be involved was a longshot, but she didn’t want to elaborate with Dan able to overhear.

  She continued to speak with Darlene for an additional fifteen minutes, finally disconnecting, and Dan was about to ask for the Cliff Notes summary of the conversation as J.J. emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a plush terrycloth robe, her long blond hair still wet from the shower. Not yet fully aware of Nicole’s level of comfort with the free trade of information moving forward, he refrained.

  He needn’t have.

  “Okay, here’s the plan. I need to go meet with Gail again. She needs to brief me on my original assignment. You two should probably find something good on the TV. I’m thinking you’re going to need to stay here, J.J., until I’m comfortable that it’s safe to let you head back to Indiana.”

  “Whoa!” Dan said, almost involuntarily.

  Nicole stopped short. “What?”

  Dan shook his head apologetically. “It’s nothing. Really. I had just been wondering if you were going to tell J.J. any more about this mission. Question answered.”

  Cole nodded. “I guess the rest of my story is going to have to wait till later. There’s no time now to work through all the new twists and turns this is going to add to our lives. But I have a feeling you may want to grab on to something in case your world flips over yet again, Danny.”

  “Um, not to be the problem child, but do you have any idea how long before you’re going to be comfortable letting me get back to school? Practice starts back up on Monday.”

  Nicole smiled. “After what just happened? Maybe when you’re thirty.”

  “Mom!”

  “I know softball is important, but your life is more so. I’m just saying, if they could take you after you passed security at DIA, they can do it here just as easily. Probably more easily.”

  “How big an operation is this?” Dan asked. “I thought you had one guy to take care of, then wham-bam, Happy Anniversary, Ma’am.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping Gail can tell me. You remember Gail, right, Dan? Twenty-dollar Gail?”

  “Damn! That’s right,” Dan moaned, pulling out his wallet and extracting the portrait of Andrew Jackson, serving as legal tender for all debts, public and private.

  “Thank you,” Nicole said, snatching the bill from his outstretched fingers. As she did, her phone chirped. “Unfortunately, I don’t have sufficient time to gloat. That’s Gail texting.”

  “Wait, you bet on who Mom’s handler was going to be?”

  “Yup. Wagered and lost,” Dan said, feigning great sorrow.

  “You guys are…” J.J. began, only to be interrupted by a yet another chorus in unison:

  “SO WEIRD!”

  “Okay. I’ve got to go. Sweetie, I need the keys to the rental. I don’t have any idea what the next move is going to be, so I’ll see you after my meeting.”

  “Sounds good. Jayj and I will find something to watch in the meantime.”

  “J.J., you can use my blow-dryer, since, unlike you, your luggage did make it to South Bend.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” J.J. said, but as Nicole turned to leave, J.J. grabbed her hand and repeated herself. “I mean it. Thank you, Mom. You too, Daddy. I’ve never been so scared.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Nicole said, giving her daughter a kiss on the cheek. All I saw was ice water in your veins. Now I have two gangstas working with me. Two-Gunz and Ice.”

  She blew them a kiss, then headed to the parking lot.

  “I guess we’ll have to wait for that big reveal she promised us,” Dan said once she’d gone.

  “I get the distinct impression that neither of us is going to enjoy hearing what she’s going to say,” said J.J. presciently.

  10

  The Unthinkable

  Nicole, as she drove to the address that Gail had texted her, was bleary-eyed and exhausted. Gone now was the adrenaline that had seen her through the night and, along with the coffee Gail had given them, kept her focus unwavering. Reabsorbed into her body after a period of grueling stress lasting well over twenty-four hours, it was no longer enhancing her blood circulation, respiration, and carb metabolism. It had abandoned her.

  This was problematic for her, because she was a long way from being done with her mission, and probably even further from knowing that her family would be safe. This was no time for her physiology to fail her.

  Cole knew the area toward which she was headed. It was not the same house they’d gone to for the weapons, which had been in an upscale urban neighborhood. This was a slim suburban strip at the extreme northern limit of the city. This, in turn, phased quickly into full-blown rural splendor. It wasn’t an oppressively long drive, but it would be a difficult one nonetheless.

  It was late afternoon now, and Nicole thanked the universe that she wasn’t driving west as the sun hung right in her line of sight, causing her to squint, to close her eyes…

  “JESUS!” Nicole screamed as a truck’s horn blared and she swerved back into her own lane. Just thinking about the sun hitting my eyes made them close. This is going to be hellish, she thought.

  As she left the city behind, the road became winding. This and the crushing fatigue were a deadly combination. She bit her lip, hard.

  Ow! As she flicked her tongue over the spot, she tasted blood. She also realized that her focus had sharpened; not totally, but to the point that she was able to formulate a plan.

  She glanced at the SUV’s clock. She’d been driving for nearly twenty minutes. If her memory served, she had another fifteen ahead. If I’m going to keep my shit together, it will be because I chose to keep my shit together. I’ve been in far worse shape than this. A little bit of pain brought me around, and I won’t hesitate to rely on it again if need be.

  She thought back to the other day when she’d been driving to the Masons’ farm, to how she’d used the road time to exercise her senses. She had done it then because she believed they’d been blunted by the extended period of inactivity after Bucharest. She decided to do it again now, only this time, it was to stay alive.

  This time, Nicole began the exercise by tuning in to her sense of touch. She wasn’t particularly aware of the steering wheel pushing back against her grip, or of the warm afternoon breeze through her hair. The thing she felt was something within her. Now that she knew her daughter was safe and with Dan, she felt her recently broken heart mending itself; the bruises, rips, and tears disappearing as the tissue knit itself together.

  Immediately, the hyper-critical Nicole who always worked hard to make sure, to know without the barest mote of doubt that she was doing the right thing... that Nicole called foul. You’re not really touching your heart, though, are you, cheater? she thought.

  But almost as quickly, the rejoicing mother Nicole spoke up. I would expect you to totally miss the point, you legalistic twat, she told her other self. The heart, especially when it’s no longer broken, touches everything!

  She drove, internally silent, for a quarter-mile before Nicole the prosecutor answered the rebuttal. I withdraw my objection.

  The whole time her warring factions were squaring off (she pictured the two Nicoles in the familiar guises of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other), she had been noticing the gradual transformation from city air to country air. It was possible, she knew, to get into a car with the windows up, turn the air on, and thereby get into the vehicle breathing the air from Greenville. One could actually carry that scent memory with them so that when the door opens in the less populated outlying area, the difference is immediate, striking.

  Nicole drove with the windows down, however. She had all of them down. This, unless she was somewhere dangerously hot, was her preferred mode of travel. In this instance, it had the added benefit of helping her keep slightly more alert as it whipped her hair around, forcing her to move it from her mouth and eyes. But in every case, every time she moved from one area to another, she became aware of subtle but significant differences in the smell of the air she was breathing. Often times, the rural area would have a seemingly heavier atmosphere, as if infused with water vapor… and bloated by it.

  Now, as she drew closer to her destination, she could sense a transition moving further from the crowded streets and buildings of the city.

  Nicole stole another glance at the clock. She’d pondered the first two senses so long that giving the other three equal time was not going to be possible.

  So she turned what seemed like failure into another challenge. She would find a way to combine the stragglers.

 

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