LITMIR.BIZ

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everyone these days.

      He thoughtfully chewed the end of a pencil. She was truly struggling, and he’d tried everything. She wasn’t letting him in, and after four weeks of begging and pleading to let him help her, he was still getting the big brush-off. He was getting tired of her obstinacy, but didn’t know what else to do. And he had his own demons to wrestle.

      He watched her stop and glance up at the window. He waved and she waved back. She looked almost happy for the first time in weeks. Maybe things would be all right tonight. He smiled at her, then went back to his desk. Felt like he was turning his back on her. Maybe he was.

      His chest was heavy. He was losing her. And after watching her get shot, going down on the floor in a bloody heap, then praying for days that she’d wake up, that she’d be normal, then the constant fighting…all the tension had drained him. She wasn’t exactly giving him a lot to work with—the occasional smile, a laugh here or there. Some emails and handwritten notes.

      She’d pulled into herself, shut him out. He knew she was angry and upset. Hell, he didn’t blame her. But he also felt like she was being unfair. She was fighting her own battle, and not giving him any consideration. He was beginning to have his doubts that she loved him enough to forgive him. He should have told her, yes. But she was carrying the grudge like a mantle, swinging it from end to end with bull’s horns.

      She couldn’t experience the emotions he was feeling. How could she? It was his son that was missing.

      His son. He’d only found out about him last year, when the child had just turned four years old. The boy’s mother, Charlotte Douglas, was dead. Their affair was a momentary fling during a high-pressure case, and when she’d gotten pregnant, she told him she’d aborted their child.

      And he, damn himself, had believed her. Stopped speaking to her, fled to Nashville. He hadn’t seen her in years.

      Charlotte had carried and delivered the child in secret, gotten him adopted out, and never told Baldwin of the boy’s existence. All Baldwin wanted was to find his son and bring him home.

      Charlotte hadn’t named the boy on the birth certificate. Another slap. Baldwin knew he shouldn’t be getting so emotionally involved—this was the kind of situation that often ended badly, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d never wanted kids, but suddenly felt the need for family. For permanence. For marriage. Three kids and a dog, no. But something to anchor him to an otherwise elusive world.

      He thought Taylor wanted that, too, but the shooting seemed to shake something loose inside her.

      Baldwin needed to let that all go for the time being. He had an emergency meeting to attend. Atlantic had sent word that he needed Baldwin, immediately.

      His contact was currently eight hours ahead of him, and an early riser. He got into his address book and started dialing numbers. Getting in touch with his handler was a process—phone calls, codes, paging services, emails—all designed to bounce off multiple servers and systems and be nigh on impossible to track.

      Atlantic wasn’t CIA, or MI-6, or Mossad, or any other official agency. Atlantic ran people from them all from behind the scenes, an agent here, an agent there. Covert missions that were performed by operatives from all branches of the intelligence services across the world on a need-to-know basis. Missions that were so top secret that they simply didn’t exist.

      Baldwin finished dialing, then sat back and listened to the bells and beeps and whirrs that told him he was being routed through a secure line. The computer screen came to life, and Atlantic popped up like the Wizard of Oz, his disembodied bald head pixilated into submission.

      “Good evening, M,” Baldwin said.

      “Being a smart-ass will get you nowhere, my boy.”

      Atlantic’s gaze was as cold and frigid as the ocean, a genetic anomaly that made his blue eyes abnormally light, like a Siberian Husky. Baldwin had finally figured out Atlantic’s heritage: he’d thought the man Belgian for a time, but moving farther east into Eurasia gave him what he was looking for. Baldwin was convinced Atlantic was a full-blood Ainu, the indigenous Japanese, who are often mistaken for Caucasians. The blue eyes were the giveaway; they couldn’t belong to any creature that wasn’t half-tied to the beginnings of the earth. Atlantic was a big man, broad through the shoulders and torso. His fingers were like sausages, with precisely trimmed and buffed square nails. Baldwin had no doubt that Atlantic could choke the life from a man with one hand while examining the other for hangnails. He was ice.

      “We have a problem. One of our specialists has gone off the grid. Julius. I need you to look into it, let us know where he may be headed.”

      Baldwin was a reluctant member of one of Atlantic’s more covert groups, known as Operation Angelmaker. He profiled the men and women Atlantic had on call to do wet work, the assassins tasked with keeping the world a safer place. Atlantic’s world, at least. Baldwin was responsible for determining their mental status using thorough psychological examinations and his own special talent for profiling. When one started acting up, Baldwin’s job was to predict just how bad the situation might get.

      The problem was he had to immerse himself in the case, and he wasn’t sure that taking on a job of this proportion, with Taylor so strung out, was such a good idea.

      “I assume you’ve already cleared this through Garrett?”

      Garrett Woods was Baldwin’s boss at Quantico. He was the one who’d gotten Baldwin wrapped up with Atlantic in the first place.

      “Yes. You’re teaching at a private enterprise for the week. Substituting for another profiler who got sick at the last minute. The cover is secure.”

      “Fine. I’ll do it. But Taylor…if I have to travel, I’m worried about leaving her alone.”

      “You have to stop worrying about that girl. She’s tough as nails. Now get to work. The files have been sent to you. I expect a briefing Wednesday morning.”

      The screen went black. Atlantic was gone.

      Well. Dinner was certainly going to be interesting.

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      Taylor went around to the back of the house, through the gate, so she could steal one last moment of peace before she went inside. She stopped midway through the yard and stood looking out over the woods. She’d seen a deer the other night, and the damn owl that had taken up residence in their river birch had hooted in alarm. The doe, soft-footed and sweet, seemed utterly unconcerned with the frantic owl and nibbled delicately at a dried corncob Taylor had thrown out for her.

      To have that calm confidence back, that was what Taylor wanted.

      She smiled at the memory, said, “Mmm, Mmm,” twice more for good measure, then took a deep breath and entered the house. The downstairs was deserted. Baldwin must still be up in his office.

      The answering machine was blinking, so she grabbed the notepad they kept next to the phone and hit Play.

      Three messages.

      The first was from a reporter at Channel Four, after her for a comprehensive sit-down exclusive interview.

      She deleted it before the girl stopped talking. No way, no how, was she going to do that.

      The second was Dr. Benedict’s office, needing some arcane insurance detail. She wrote down the information and deleted the message.

      The last one shook her.

      A voice at once familiar and alien emanated from the speaker.

      “Um, hi, Taylor. This is your dad. Listen, um, I’m getting out today. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s early. Good behavior. This place has been getting crowded, so they sprang a few of us that weren’t considered a ‘threat to society.’ I’m heading down to Nashville and I thought that we could, I don’t know, talk. I’ll be at the house. Call me.”

      He rattled off a number and the machine went dead.

      Taylor

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