Protector in Disguise, page 2
Several officers present spread out and searched the neighborhood for “A male suspect, approximately twenty-five years of age, over six feet, black T-shirt, Caucasian, dark hair,” as Dunlop had reiterated what Fiona told him.
She looked around. A maze of streets created an easy escape for someone who had left a car one or two blocks over. “You should be able to get his DNA off the blood on the floor.”
Dunlop’s partner shook his head. “There’s no sign of any forced entry and nothing in your house looks disturbed.”
“I stabbed him in the leg. There had to be blood on the floor or on the pen. I dropped it after he hit me with the stool.”
“Can you show me inside?” Dunlop asked.
Fiona hesitated. She didn’t want to be ambushed again, and despite the police officer’s presence, something felt off. She told Matt to remain outside with the other officers as she reentered the premises with an armed guard.
The entire scene appeared quite mundane under the five cool-toned track lights illuminating every surface in the kitchen. After her eyes adjusted from the dark, she scanned the room. Not a drop of blood anywhere. It was as though her brain had malfunctioned and now everything was back in order. Even the stool had been placed back next to the island. Officer Dunlop remained beside her, watching over her shoulder, glancing in every direction she looked.
The kitchen floor was cleaner than it had been when she’d left for her dinner date. The man who had assaulted her didn’t do this. It would have been too much detail work for someone with an injury. The first officer didn’t have time to turn the room over in the five minutes he was in the kitchen before coming outside. Someone else?
“Where’s the lasagna?” she asked.
“Lasagna?” Officer Dunlop shook his head as though he were being baited.
“There was a half pan of lasagna on the stove. Right there.” She pointed to where she’d seen it when she walked into the room. It wasn’t in the sink or the refrigerator. Her stomach twisted as she opened the trash can. Not there either. Even more than having a stranger in her house trying to harm her and her son, the loss of the lasagna scared the hell out of her.
Chapter 2
Jason spent years setting up a perimeter around his wife and child to protect them in case someone from his past came looking for revenge. He wiped the sweat from his brow. Even with every safeguard he could think of, someone came close enough to kill them. The thought of what could have happened tonight burned. For five years, his family had lived unaffected by his past, and he’d let his guard down. He never would again.
For now, Fiona and Matt were safe. He took a deep breath and leaned back against the passenger seat of the delivery van he’d repurposed for surveillance. Regret never fixed anything. He’d take the information learned and up the security around them. He’d also have to face the consequences of withholding the truth from his team.
After returning to the States from a military deployment in Colombia, he’d been permanently removed from his military position—not really discharged since it had been agreed that his family would be safer if he died on the mission. Awarded a small stipend and new identification to start an alternative life, he created Fresh Pond Security, a security firm specializing in the protection of individuals at risk who were entitled to little or no protection from regular law enforcement units. The company started as a front to keep his own family protected, but the enterprise expanded into something fairly profitable. He only employed the best of the best. Men and women who were highly skilled and unable or unwilling to continue their work for the government. They risked their lives to protect their clients and they had the right and the need to know and understand Jason’s past in order to provide the best protection possible for Fiona and Matt.
He rubbed the place where his wedding band had once been. The cool fall air reminded him of the first time he’d met his wife. A graduate student in Global Affairs at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, Fiona had a parade of admirers following her about like pathetic ducklings. She dismissed most of the men who wanted a place in her orbit with an apologetic smile and the excuse of a schedule too busy for dating. Jason, however, saw obstacles as opportunities. After watching her from a distance for a week or so, he came across her in the library, trying to study, her blond hair twisted at the nape of her neck, her focus on a twenty-pound geopolitics textbook. Two aspiring diplomats sat across from her, peppering her with questions about her time in Belarus. Her frown at their constant interruptions gave Jason an excuse to finally meet her.
“Guys, I would appreciate you annoying someone other than my girlfriend.” He sat in the empty chair next to her, pulled out his laptop and proceeded to ignore her while he finished a term paper in his Contemporary Spanish Literature course. Her classmates left, leaving Fiona and Jason to study in companionable silence. If she didn’t have any interest in him, she had the option of packing up her things and leaving, no explanation necessary. Instead, she remained. After an hour, she invited him for coffee. They had remained together ever since...until the day he “died.”
He carried three other memories of her with him everywhere he went, anchors to a past he never wanted to lose. The first was the moment Fiona stepped out to walk down the aisle on their wedding day. Dressed in a stunning black gown with her blond hair curled into a 1950s siren’s bob, she dazzled. Despite protests from her parents, she’d refused to dress as a virgin and pretend an innocence that wasn’t there. Instead, she radiated confidence, sex appeal and an independence that kept him happily caught in her web.
The second memory involved the thirteen hours of labor and physical exertion Fiona went through at Matt’s birth. She had ten pounds and three ounces of complaints to use against him and she did curse quite a lot, but not once at Jason. They were a team even in the worst of times.
Then there was her lasagna. Double the ricotta and beef, and half the tomato sauce of a regular recipe, but enough sauce to fill each bite with a perfect tang. She always broiled it for five minutes at the end to turn the mozzarella golden brown. She could easily seduce a man into her bed with that dish. He shouldn’t have taken it, but he was a man starving for a taste of his past. If he couldn’t have a relationship with Fiona or Matt, the lasagna would have to do.
“You could have shared.” Steve, Jason’s business partner, stared at the empty pan.
“Not a chance. You almost blew the whole operation with your insistence on running into the bathroom.”
“You pulled us into this assignment at the last minute. I didn’t have time before I was shoved into the van.”
“Always prepared?” Jason echoed his partner’s favorite catchphrase.
“Sure. I even cleaned the blood off the pen. I have to give Ms. Fiona Stirling a lot of credit. She looks like Marilyn Monroe and fights like Ali. She nailed that guy. Almost took him down without a hair out of place. Now that’s what I call a mother bear.”
Fiona always drew attention with her movie star looks, light blond hair veiled over one of her bright blue eyes. Her appearance was a weapon, disarming everyone around her. That’s what had made her so exceptional at her job at the State Department negotiating international trade agreements.
The intruder stirred and tumbled forward on the van floor. Steve pushed him back toward his seat. The man fell against the side of the van—not that he’d be going anywhere. They’d put handcuffs on him before they cut the phone cords and pulled him into the van in the street behind the house just as the sight of the police lights caught the neighborhood’s attention.
Jason called up to the driver, Finn. “Any word on our passenger’s identity?”
“The photo you took of him wasn’t the best quality since his eyes were closed and his nose was broken.”
Steve bent over to look closer at their passenger’s face. “He had a gash in his forehead and his leg was bloody from the pen, but his nose was fine when I caught up to him.”
“My fist must have accidentally hit him while I was moving him to the van,” Jason said, feeling the impact on his knuckles. He would have done far worse to the person who had threatened his family, but the information in the asshole’s head was more important than letting his rage fly.
They turned the corner into a garage under a storage facility one town over from Fiona’s house. The proximity allowed them to arrive and disappear before the police pulled up. Jason had monitored her house from the moment she’d moved in.
He went to his office to wait for the suspect to wake up. The asshole had better be willing to speak or he’d have a very uncomfortable night.
Two hours later, Finn, one of his best security consultants, contacted him with an update on his family. Jason had pulled him off an assignment protecting the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, leaving only Sam protecting him. Sam could handle the job while Finn watched over Jason’s family. Although they’d been too late to prevent the break-in in the first place. Despite all his preparation for just such an event, he’d failed. He shuddered to think what would have happened if she hadn’t been able to fight off the intruder. She’d been so lucky to have gotten away with only a bloody nose.
“Hey, boss.”
“What’s their status?” Jason didn’t have time for pleasantries.
“They packed up and headed to the Seagull Hotel.”
“You’re kidding me.” They were sitting ducks if someone was truly after them and not anything in the house. The Seagull Hotel was so named not from a view of the ocean, but for the throngs of birds circling the local Walmart parking lot next door.
“Wish I was. The police think she’s safer there for the night, but don’t have the resources to watch over them. They’re calling it a bungled burglary.”
“It doesn’t matter what the police do. We’re going to keep them secure.” An absence of actual police presence was for the best. Jason wanted to limit their involvement until he understood the exact risk. Any press would place a spotlight on Fiona and Matt. She’d already brought too much attention to herself with her skyrocketing book career.
“I agree. I checked into the room next door and have been keeping an eye out for anything unusual, but I’ve been working on both assignments for over twenty-two hours combined. I’m ready for a replacement.” Finn prided himself on his eagle eye and sniper-perfect shot, which meant he demanded rest when he needed rest.
“Noah’s on the way. Thanks for keeping an eye on them. Can you send me the room numbers?”
“Sure.”
“And Finn?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for switching assignments so quickly.”
“That’s my job.”
Jason closed his eyes when he hung up. Part of him wanted to drive down there and tell Fiona she had to go into hiding to protect herself and Matt from his past, but he knew she wouldn’t listen. Her stubbornness was her biggest asset and most annoying quality. She’d survived his death and raised their son into a strong and competent soul. She left her government job because of its heavy travel schedule and her need to be closer to Matt. Then she published a whole series of thriller books and made a name for herself. She deserved the recognition and the income helped her where his life insurance couldn’t, but it also brought attention from the wrong people. Hiding her would be near impossible unless she agreed to tamp down her personality and become average. Fiona was anything but average.
His phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring as he always did for Kennedy, an analyst in the NSA who assisted him.
“DJ?” she always asked, as though someone might have compromised his phone. Jason used DJ as his alias to keep his name as buried as his former life.
“Go ahead.”
“Great news. My sources identified the guy’s mug as a Robert Harper.” Her sources were unmatched in the field.
“That name means nothing. Who is he?”
“A hired gun for Federated Security. They have many clients, some not so aboveboard. They have a reputation in the field as being outside the law and are more than willing to do anything if the money is right.” The constant tapping on her keyboard was her official soundtrack, digging down under layers and layers of security walls to find out what they needed.
“Thanks. Let me know if you learn anything else.”
“Will do.” She hung up, leaving him staring in silence at the wall.
The news reinforced the urgency to find a safe place for Fiona and Matt until Jason could eradicate the risk. His past might have finally come for his family.
He strolled into the back room, a place with no windows, one door and a whole lot of safeguards. Mr. Harper was on the floor gaining consciousness. He’d be remaining here until Jason figured out what he wanted with Fiona.
Although Jason had lost his wife’s companionship five years ago when he’d faked his own death, he’d never given up looking after her. His love hadn’t faded one bit. If anything, by watching her from a distance, he’d only fallen in love with her more. She aged like a fine wine, more complex but in a mellow way.
And Matt? He couldn’t imagine loving a person more. He looked out for his mother, received good grades, used his strength to protect people from bullies in school and broke enough rules to make Jason assured that he’d never be a pawn for anyone. Not like his father had been.
The memories sent a surge of regret through him. He leaned back in his black leather chair and squeezed his eyes shut. It wasn’t enough to orchestrate their safety—he longed to pull them into his arms for as long as he could.
Steve walked in without knocking, eating one of the energy bars he always seemed to have in his pockets.
“I’m going to replace Noah in a few minutes,” Jason said. “He was pulled from another assignment like Finn, and I want them both to have a break.”
“I can do it if you want.”
When he started this business, Jason didn’t trust anyone. Money and power could transform someone from loyal to backstabbing. Yet, over the years, the team showed more commitment and reliability than any group he’d ever known. His deception, if they knew about it, could burn the entire operation to the ground. But it was time to come clean.
“I’ve got this,” Jason said. “Before I go, we need to talk about Fiona Stirling.”
Steve nodded. “Sure. What’s up?” He sat down in the chair across the desk.
Jason took a deep breath and told him everything.
Chapter 3
The sound of cars rushing down Route One outside her window did nothing to ease the stress hammering through Fiona. At three in the morning, both she and Matt should be asleep. They weren’t. Back-to-back-to-back reruns of Law and Order: SVU allowed them to sit in their respective beds without speaking to each other. Her duffel bag and Matt’s backpack with his homework in it rested on the table.
Her mind ran over everything they’d done in the week and month prior to the break-in. She’d had her share of readers targeting her after something she wrote, but all the harassment came in the form of social media bullying. She’d never experienced anyone physically threatening her as an author. Matt had no known enemies, especially men who probably had ten to twenty years on him. Her writer’s brain had all sorts of reasons they were attacked. An obsessed fan, an everyday burglar, someone from her husband’s world or maybe someone from her own sordid past.
While Jason had thought she had a respectable job at the State Department, she actually worked as a specialized skill officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Division. She acted as an employee of the State Department in order to move in normal diplomatic channels, a deadly weapon dressed in navy suits and carrying a briefcase. She enjoyed acting as a diplomat who wined and dined business executives all over the world, but her actual assignments had more sinister ends. She had handed over a piece of her soul for a large sum of money to pay off her student loans. It was a decision that took her outlook from sunny and optimistic to stormy and destructive. They trained her to take out the most villainous men with the most minimal fanfare. Her techniques had become so refined that her targets often didn’t die until long after she departed whatever country in which she had delivered her death sentence. Only she and a few higher-ups knew her actual objectives. Even Jason had been excluded from her inner circle. After giving birth to Matt, she could no longer handle the work. She wanted out. Jason’s death gave her the perfect excuse. She had to raise her son alone. She couldn’t travel anymore. She had lost her touch. It was for the best that she left the government all together. An old friend from college encouraged her to write a book based on her past. She couldn’t, but she could make things up. Her first novel had no plot and no character development. Her next one? Better. Three attempts later, she was a published novelist making up stories for a living. She never wrote about or looked back at her former occupation.
If her past had been outed, they’d never be safe.
After another hour of television, Matt fell asleep, to the drama of the night. With him sleeping soundly, she had a chance to think about everything that had occurred. She pulled out her notebook and looked at the notes she’d jotted down. The names of the police officers who had responded to the call, the assistant district attorney who wanted to meet with her the following Monday, and the phone number for a victim assistance agency. One page had a hastily drawn sketch of her assailant. The police took a picture of it to compare to databases. Regrettably, the blood all over her clothes was her own.
When she had gone back into the house to pack, she had examined every nook in the cabinets and on the floor. Not a drop of blood found. She had even picked up the pen and opened it up. The inside was damp as though someone had taken the time to rinse the blood away, but didn’t have time to thoroughly dry it.
