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  “So can you get hold of Derek—?”

  “No. He called half an hour ago; his grandmother died tonight and he’s on a flight to LA.”

  “Great timing.”

  “Well, I suppose it was inconvenient for her too.”

  “Sorry.” Craig sat down on the futon, head in hands. “I’m just so afraid for Adah.”

  “I know.” Behind Mick his monitor beeped, signaling incoming information. “Okay, now I can interrupt the search for Verke and get started on your man.” He went to the screen, looked at what was displayed there.

  “Well, what d’you know,” he said. “Verke’s former CIA. And he’s not your guy. There’s a photo. Big, mostly bald, and mean looking.”

  Craig was peering over his shoulder. “What division of the agency?”

  “Special Activities. I don’t know anything about them.”

  “I do.” And all of it was alarming. “SAD is an umbrella department. You can find out about them on official government Web sites. There’re nice detailed explanations about what they do, but they don’t tell you who else is under the umbrella—deep, covert agencies that’ll never be mentioned, even in top CIA circles.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew, the rest of the world would. One example: you’ve heard about the assassination program that they kept secret for years? That wasn’t anything new. They’ve had a license to kill since the fifties.”

  “You’re kidding. What else?”

  “Run a search on my man for CIA connections, and then I’ll tell you more.”

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11

  SHARON McCONE

  Gwen Verke cried out in her sleep—a wrenching sound that echoed the way I felt. I looked at Hy, then went along the hallway to the guest room at the front of the house. She’d settled down, so I left the door open a crack and returned to the sitting room.

  It was nearly one in the morning. After lengthy questioning, the Cupertino Police and Child Protective Services had temporarily released Gwen into my custody. She’d protested any other arrangement so strongly, and I’d supported her, so they’d bent the rules. Besides, one of them had whispered to me, since I’d earned the girl’s trust, maybe I could find out details about the mother and father. I doubted she knew much more than she’d told me, but I said I’d try.

  Gwen had been so tired that she fell asleep in the squad car that delivered us to my house, leaving Chelle to drive back alone. With relief I noted Ted’s Smart car in the driveway next door. Hy was home and he’d seen the evening news; he said nothing about my lack of communication, and helped me settle Gwen in. Since then we’d been talking about the investigation and waiting for calls to come in from various contacts.

  I sat down beside Hy again, sighing deeply. On the hearth the embers of the fire were glowing deep red.

  “She’ll be okay,” Hy said. “Anybody who can talk down social workers the way you said she did can weather a few nightmares.”

  “Hope so.” I recalled some of my own nightmares, then banished that line of thought. “Mick’s confirmed that J. T. Verke is formerly CIA. My theory is that J. T.’s been gone from the Bay Area since the divorce, but came back on assignment and took that van from his ex-wife’s driveway late Friday night or early Saturday. Reasonable that he would still have a key.”

  “But is it reasonable that he’d use a vehicle that could be traced back to him?”

  “Everybody makes mistakes. He probably assumed the ex had reregistered it in her name.”

  “His first mistake. Second was leaving evidence at the scene of Adah’s abduction. But his worst mistake was leaving the Knowles woman’s body in his ex-wife’s garage. Why the hell would he do such a thing?”

  “Maybe he planned to move it. Or didn’t put it there in the first place.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “Somebody who wanted to implicate him? I don’t know.”

  Hy looked at his watch. “God, I wish Trent would call back.”

  Sometimes you get what you ask for. His phone rang.

  “Trent. What’ve you got?”

  I watched his face; it was impassive throughout the conversation except for a small tic of surprise. No wonder he was such a good hostage negotiator. Even here, in his own home with me, he didn’t give much away.

  When he ended the call he said, “A low-level local executive protection agency—Morell Associates—handled the cleanup at Piper’s building. They’re efficient but not top echelon.”

  “Why would the CIA—or whoever—use a firm like that?”

  “Puts distance between them and the abductions. It’s not an uncommon practice. You remember the Blackwater mess. They hired a North Carolina firm for seven years to conduct antiterrorist operations overseas—and ended up netting zero terrorists.”

  Hy’s phone rang again. “Yeah, Trent… Jesus.”

  He listened quietly again, broke the connection.

  “Well, that proves we’re up against something big. Morell’s three top people were en route to a conference in Denver tonight when their plane crashed in the Rockies. There’s nobody with any authority left at their headquarters here in the city.”

  “My God! So if they work on a need-to-know basis, the crash took out the only people who could possibly tell us what happened to Adah or Piper.”

  He nodded. “Which leads me to suspect that the crash was no accident. It resembles other ploys the CIA has used to get rid of witnesses—or gain control over a situation that’s gotten out of hand.”

  “So who has the two of them? CIA or some low-level Morell operatives?”

  “Hard to say. The CIA probably has Piper; for whatever reason, she was their primary target. They may have Adah too. If by chance the security personnel have either one, it’s a bad situation. The operatives are out there with no one to report to. And those people, I’ll tell you, are not the best and the brightest.”

  “So they’ll be desperate.” I closed my eyes and felt hot tears dribble down my cheeks. Damn! Even now, eight months after I’d been shot, my emotions ran out of control at times of stress. Would it ever stop?

  I said, “If they haven’t killed them already, now they’re sure to.”

  “McCone, don’t think that way. I don’t know about Piper, but Adah’s strong and streetwise. If she’s alive, she’ll talk or muscle her way out of this—just as that kid sleeping in the guest room did with the social workers.”

  “Social workers are one thing. These people are capable of doing anything to ensure their survival.”

  Hy was silent. He’d lived in the shadowy world of high-level security too long not to know to what extremes some operatives would go.

  After a moment he said, “We’d better get some sleep. Today’s already starting out to be difficult.”

  “Sleep isn’t an option. I’m calling a staff meeting and you’re going to start surveillance on Morell.”

  He put his fingers under my chin, tipped my head, and looked into my eyes. “You’re all the way back, aren’t you?”

  “Ripinsky, it feels as if I’ve never been away.”

  CRAIG MORLAND

  His hands were shaking from too much coffee, and his eyes burned. Mick had been hunched over his keyboard for almost fifteen minutes while Craig paced.

  The phone rang and Mick said, “Get that, will you?”

  Ted. “Staff meeting in an hour, Mick. Bring everything you’ve got.”

  “It’s Craig. Mick and I may be onto something; we’ll be there.”

  When he relayed the information, Mick asked, “Who called the meeting?”

  “Shar, I guess.”

  “So she’s with us again. I suspected as much.”

  “With us with a vengeance. Too bad it took a goddamn tragedy to bring her back.”

  Mick winced visibly at the bitterness in Craig’s voice. He said, “It’s not a tragedy yet. Don’t get into that mode.”

  “You having any luck identifying the sketch?”

  “Non
e. But I know I’ve seen this guy somewhere.” A pause. “Christ, look at this site!”

  Craig peered over his shoulder. Photograph of a man in jeans, a flak vest, and a knitted cap crouching and aiming what looked to be an M4. Captioned “William ‘Jesse’ James, SAD operative in Afghanistan.” Various comments were posted on the site.

  You kick ass, Jesse!

  Awesome outfit and firepower!

  I wanted a semi-automatic for a while because I stabbed a guy to death last week and now I want to shoot one.

  Hey, sweet William, how about a little?

  Makes me want to blow somebody away too.

  I love hunky guys who kill.

  The comments were equally divided between men and women.

  “What kind of crap is this?”

  “Fan site for CIA paramilitary,” Mick said. “These guys in the photos aren’t really with the agency; it’s all staged. But it shows the fascination people have for them.”

  “I didn’t realize they had a fan club. Seriously sick.”

  “So tell me more about the Special Activities Division.”

  “Like I said, it’s an umbrella agency. Their official mission is to conduct paramilitary operations and political influence campaigns in worldwide hot spots. Their paramilitary operatives are out there without a net, no uniforms, nothing to connect them to our government—which in most cases disavows them if they’re caught.”

  “But this Verke is a former SAD operative and working within the country. Doesn’t wash.”

  “The CIA has not been known to respect boundaries.”

  “Yeah. So this group—SAD—is open about their mission.”

  “No. They also conduct very covert operations under various guises.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one, in the sixties, the Health Alteration Committee—its mission was to kill the then-leader of Iraq. They sent him a poisoned handkerchief. Didn’t work, and I pity the underling in the mail room who absconded with it. For years, their executive action unit tried to kill Fidel Castro—inane plots such as exploding cigars and a contaminated diving suit. For eight years they concealed from Congress their vice-presidentially approved plans to take out the leaders of Al-Qaeda. And their 1997 manual on killing makes interesting reading.”

  Mick shook his head.

  “Fortunately, the agency isn’t very good with elaborate plots and high-level killing. None of their major efforts has succeeded.” Craig’s head had begun to ache. “Let’s get over to the pier for the meeting.”

  HY RIPINSKY

  Morell Associates’ offices were located in a warehouse on Palou Avenue, a block off Third Street in the largely industrial Bayshore district. He’d gotten the address and promotional information on the firm from their Web site. To one unfamiliar with executive protection, it would’ve looked great: their list of clients and services was impressive and Morell’s bio boasted of twenty years’ experience with the NSA.

  And it was mostly bullshit. Morell Associates’ best-known clients were rock stars for whom they’d provided guards when the groups were performing in the Bay Area. They were less an executive protective firm than a security outfit. Two badly bungled jobs had laid them open for lawsuits that they’d settled out of court. And Kurt Morell’s stint with the NSA had been as a low-level attorney and of only five years’ duration. Add what Hy had already known about them to the location of their offices, and it spelled losers. With a capital L.

  He hadn’t had much reason to visit the area, but he’d familiarized himself with a map. The Bayshore, he knew, was predominately black and subject to all the ills of a community of poor, under- or unemployed minorities. Young men with no viable futures turned to drugs and gang violence; young women had their men’s babies and grieved when their husbands or lovers died or went to prison; mothers were strong, but there was little they could do to keep their boys off the streets; fathers were largely absent.

  A waste, Hy called it, a fucking waste. It didn’t have to be that way, but few people cared about these poverty-ridden, crime-plagued pockets of the city. Those who did didn’t have the wherewithal or influence to do anything about them.

  The majority of the warehouse was dark—Morell apparently shared the space with a trucking firm—but the section at the rear was brightly lighted. He avoided a pothole in the street, pulled to the curb, and started back there on foot. Crouching behind a Dumpster, he peered through the windows.

  A short-haired blonde woman sat at the reception desk, face buried in her hands. The phone rang, and she picked up, spoke briefly. From his vantage Hy saw that she was in her twenties, her face blotchy from crying; she took a tissue from a box on the desk and blew her nose. Grieving for her employers? In any case, why was she here at this hour?

  Hy had called a buddy at the FAA before he left the house, but he couldn’t tell him much, just that the weather had been clear when the small jet went down. Pieces of the plane and bodies were scattered all over a mountainside and the NTSB’s investigation would take weeks, even months, to complete.

  Mountain flying was dangerous under the best of conditions. Downdrafts, updrafts, unexpected snowstorms or high winds aloft. McCone, a better pilot than he, remained wary of it because of a near crash in the Tehachapis years before. Hy didn’t mind it because after he’d met Shar he’d come to believe that he wasn’t going to die anywhere but in bed as a very old man. That, among other things, was what love was about—the determination to make it in the long run.

  But accidents still happened to other people….

  The cause of the crash could have been simple pilot error or something more sinister. The NTSB might never find out the exact circumstances because, unlike the big passenger planes, jets of that size weren’t equipped with black boxes, and the pilot hadn’t contacted Denver Control. The only certainty was that three passengers and the pilot were dead.

  Hy went up to the door, knocked, and entered. The blonde woman looked up in surprise.

  “Don’t you know it’s not a good idea to leave the door unlocked when you’re here alone at night?” he asked.

  She stared.

  “Hy Ripinsky, Ripinsky International.” He placed his card on the desk. “I heard about the plane crash, saw the lights, and thought, as a colleague in the industry, that I might be of assistance.”

  “Irene Aguirre. I’m the office manager.”

  “Why are you here at”—he consulted his watch—“one-thirty in the morning?”

  “I got a call about the crash; the man asked that I come in to field phone inquiries. He told me he’d be in touch with details. So far, nobody’s called except the Chronicle, and I had nothing to tell them.”

  “The man didn’t identify himself?”

  “No. His voice sounded vaguely familiar. But no.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Find out something I can tell people.”

  Briefly he outlined what his buddy at the FAA had told him. By the time he was done, tears were leaking from her eyes again.

  “Tell me, Ms. Aguirre, was the agency working on something unusual or highly secret recently?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Mr. Morell sent me out for an early lunch a few times, and when I got back I noticed that he’d had a conference in his office. Extra coffee cups, you know.”

  “Did you ask him about them?”

  “Oh, no! The rule here is don’t ask.”

  “Need-to-know basis?”

  She smiled weakly. “That pretty much describes it.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “Stay here, in case the man calls again. I couldn’t sleep, anyway.”

  “Okay, call me if you hear from your mystery man, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything more.”

  He waited in a dark corner of the parking lot. It was only twenty minutes before a white car pulled in and parked in a similarly dark place. A tall, thick-bodied, blond-haired man in jeans and a fringed jacket got out and went i
nto the office. Hy crept forward.

  The man was standing over Irene Aguirre, gesturing widely. She looked up at him, shaking her head. Hy moved closer. The window was open a crack, and he could hear parts of their conversation.

  Aguirre: “… don’t know.”

  “Got to be something in the files.”

  “There aren’t any files. At least not any I can access on the computer. And if there were any paper files, Mr. Morell would have had them with him.”

  “Well, great, just great.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They left me out there without a safety net. What the fuck am I supposed to do now? No contact information? No nothing?”

  “He never gave me anything.” She paused. “You’re the one who called me and told me to come into the office, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You are. I recognize your voice.”

  “You don’t recognize nothin’, bitch!”

  Hy ran back to his Rover and waited. The big man came out of the office and strode to his car.

  It wasn’t until Hy had started tailing him that he realized the car was a white Prius, license number 5111234.

  Adah’s car.

  SHARON McCONE

  Thirty-six hours,” I said to my assembled staff. “I know the odds are that Adah’s dead. Piper too. If they were being held by some low-level security person with Morell Associates and they haven’t already been killed, he or she is out there without direction or authority, scared as hell, and wants them off their hands.”

  As I spoke I could feel the chill that had come over the room. I glanced around the table, making eye contact with each of them. Craig looked determined but haggard; I was certain he hadn’t slept in two days. Patrick had hung up yet another flow chart, and his hands shook as he added a few notations. Mick held some notes, jotted down a few words. Ted sat up straight, eyes fixed on the wall behind me. Thelia was alert and ready to tackle the problem at hand.

  “But those are only odds,” I went on. “All of you know Adah’s strength and determination. She’s survived a situation like this before, and I’m betting that she’ll survive the current one.”