Beneath the Surface

That caught Rafe’s attention. Challenged, he stared around the neighborhood. Since Allison was somewhere at her desk, currently—or so she said—in Fort Meade, Maryland, he knew she had to have some means of electronic surveillance.

Unless she was using satellite coverage. Knowing Allison as he did, Rafe wouldn’t have put it past her, but he knew she was wanting to keep this op on the down-low. Whatever business he’d bought into, it was personal to her.

Allison was one of the best ELINT and SIGNIT people he’d ever worked with. Electronic Intelligence and Signals Intelligence were two huge fields in espionage. Usually a person didn’t overlap in the job. Allison did.

“Tired of playing Where’s Waldo?” Allison asked.

Rafe knew she’d caught him looking. “If I didn’t have to watch the bar so closely, I’d find it.”

“There’s a drugstore on the northwest corner,” Allison said.

Rafe squinted against the darkness and didn’t look right at the drugstore. Peripheral vision was stronger and clearer at night than direct line of sight. He spotted the familiar rectangular bulk of the camera bolted to the second-floor corner of the building.

“Are you getting my good side?” Rafe asked.

“No. You’re sitting on it.”

Despite the long hours spent following his target around for the last few days, Rafe had to laugh. He’d met Allison in the flesh twice, but he’d worked with her a couple dozen times over the last five years. He’d been a field agent with the National Security Agency. Allison was tech support—on steroids. There didn’t seem to be any computer system she couldn’t hack or information packet she couldn’t sniff out. She wasn’t known for her humor, but—on occasion—he’d seen it.

Rafe turned his attention back to the seedy bar and rolled his watch over to have a look. It was 11:28 p.m. His target had gone inside—

“Seventeen minutes ago,” Allison said. Her voice was quiet and controlled coming through the earwig he wore in his left ear.

It was creepy how she did that, but Allison was a queen at multitasking. Agents Rafe had talked to had been blown away by how she could enhance an op and build in rabbit holes when things went south.

“Seventeen minutes is a long time,” Rafe said.

“If you’re holding your breath, maybe.”

“Vincent Drago isn’t a nice guy.”

“I know. That’s why I asked you to look into this when I found out he was involved.”

Maybe it would help if you would tell me a little more about what’s going on, Rafe thought. But he knew she wouldn’t. Agents learned to be careful with the knowledge they had. Information was currency of the realm for a spy, and they never spent it casually, even at home.

In the handful of years that Rafe had worked with Allison, three of them spent before he’d ever gotten a face-to-face with her, she’d never asked for anything. She didn’t seem like the type. Her phone call to the rental house in Jacksonville, North Carolina where he’d been recuperating for the past eight months, had been totally unexpected.

The fact that she was so grudging with the information had hooked him further. He’d known better, but he’d trusted Allison.

And you needed to get out of there, he reminded himself. Don’t forget that. That oceanside rental was becoming as much a prison as the other place.

For a moment Rafe didn’t see the seedy bar. He saw that small underground prison outside Kaesong, North Korea, where he’d been kept for five months. Cinder-block walls had threatened to crush him physically and spiritually every day. The long hours of torture and questions had rolled into one another until they’d become one long, unending nightmare.

The only reason he hadn’t told his inquisitors what they’d wanted to know was because he hadn’t known. He was certain they’d known that, too.

For a moment fear touched him intimately. It was strange how he’d accepted his death after the first few days of imprisonment yet had been more filled with fear after he’d returned home. Well, not home exactly. After being released from Walter Reed Hospital, he’d tried to go home and ended up renting that summer home in Jacksonville.

He’d gone armed every day. Even though he’d tried to sit in the sun and find that piece of himself that hadn’t been shattered by his experiences, he hadn’t been able to. He’d been more at home in the night and in the bars.

Come back, he told himself. You’re not there anymore. You’re here. You’re helping a friend. Stick with the program.

The gnawing pain in his right knee helped him focus. He absently reached down and massaged it. Kneading the flesh was hard to do through the orthopedic brace he wore.

“Are you doing okay?” Allison asked.

Rafe was embarrassed and irritated at the same time. She’d caught him. He didn’t like dealing with weakness or infirmity. The injuries he’d sustained had kept him out of active duty.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Are you still taking your meds?”

Rafe blew out his breath slowly, aware that she’d be able to pick up the sound over the earwig if he didn’t keep it quiet.

“Yes,” he lied.

A buzzer rang in his ear.

“Wrong answer,” Allison said. “I checked with Medical. You haven’t refilled your pain pills. If you were using them the way you should have been, you’d have run out forty-one days ago.”

Despite his irritation, Rafe had to grin. Only Allison would know so much. Or would even think she needed to know so much, he amended.

“The pills weren’t working very well,” Rafe said. But that was a lie. The pills had been working entirely too well. He’d only noticed that problem when he’d started using alcohol with them. When he’d caught himself doing that, he’d poured the pills down the drain and hadn’t touched so much as another beer. He’d seen what liquor and pills could do to people.

“Maybe you need something different,” Allison suggested.

Maybe I need to work again, Rafe thought angrily. Then he realized that Allison’s favor had been a chance to do exactly that. He relaxed a little when he figured out that she wasn’t passing judgment on him. She knew exactly what she was doing. More than that, she’d figured him out, too.

“Why are you smiling?” Allison asked.

“Man, that camera is good if you can see that well in the dark.”

“I’m running a vision-enhancement-package upgrade on it that I designed. The software takes the available picture, repixelates it based on available light and light sources and reinterprets images.”

“Very techie.”

“Very techie,” she agreed. “The hardest part was collapsing the size of the program so it would run in real time. By the way, you evaded the question.”

“Have I told you how much I appreciate you letting me do this?”

“You’re doing me the favor.”

“Seriously, I think it’s the other way around.”

“Even if it turns out to be a glorified babysitting job?”

“If you’d thought it was going to be a glorified babysitting job, you wouldn’t have asked me to look into this.”

Allison sighed. “You’re right. So stay sharp out there.”