Finding North (4 page)

Alex moved to get out of
the limousine.

“
You purchased the duplex
on the other side of you,” Patrick said.

“
Ooljee — you remember
Marine Sergeant Margaret Peaches’ daughter?” Alex asked. “She came
to live with Cian and Margaret around Christmas last
year.”

Patrick nodded.

“
She grew up in a
hogan
in the middle of
the Navajo reservation. She couldn’t tolerate the noise and
activity of our house,” Alex said. “They moved downtown to be
closer to the bakery, but Cian couldn’t handle being away from us.
He had a full-scale breakdown. We thought we might have to
hospitalize him. Living with us and running the house, for better
or worse, kept the demons of his mind at bay.”

“
PTSD?”

“
Among other things,” Alex
said. She was unwilling to discuss the demons her brother-in-law,
Cian Kelly, had acquired during the brutal war in Northern Ireland.
“They moved in next door. Everyone’s happy.”

“
Cian gets to your
house . . .”

“
Through the back,” Alex
said. “We took the fence down to combine the lots. That gives
Ooljee a lot of open space, which she likes.”

“
And the other side of the
duplex?” Patrick asked.

Raz came to her side of
the limousine and tapped on the window.

“
We haven’t decided what
to do with that yet,” Alex said. “We might combine it with Cian and
Margaret’s place or rent it or John’s sister is being released soon
or . . .”

“
Meet me there,” Patrick
said. “Later today. Bring Max.”

Alex gave him a long
look.

“
How about before Sunday
dinner?” Alex asked. “Five-thirty or so. Everyone’s coming tonight
because of the twins’ birthday.”

“
That will work,” Patrick
said. “You should know that your mother is coming over this morning
to celebrate the twins’ five-month birthday. She’s on the
warpath.”

“
I should have drowned,”
Alex said.

With nothing else to say,
Alex grabbed her stuff and got out of the limousine. Her partner,
Raz, helped her into the waiting SUV. She slipped next to US Army
Captain Troy Olivas on the middle bench in the back of the SUV. Raz
got into the passenger seat.

“
Drowned?” Troy asked.
“That’s new.”

“
At least it’s not
something someone
else
did to me,” Alex croaked. She grinned, and the men
laughed.

“
Where to?” US Army
Captain Andrew “Trece” Ramirez asked from the driver’s seat. He
looked at her in the rearview mirror. She caught the faintest
outline of the teardrop tattoo that had once adorned Trece’s left
eye. She smiled.

“
Home,” Alex said. Her
voice cracked. She tried to say something else, but nothing came
out.

Troy put his arm around
her and jostled her.

“
Home it is,” Trece said
as he put the SUV in gear.

F

Chapter
Three

Sunday
afternoon

May 15 — 3:18 p.m.
MDT

Buckley Air Force Base,
Aurora, Colorado

“
We’re almost ready,”
Alex’s assistant, US Army Sergeant Alexander Roger Ulysses “Dusty”
Cummings III, said.

The team had been milling
around the large workroom while Sergeant Dusty worked through the
technical details with the base IT technicians. The entire team had
been returned to base when Alex had almost drowned. While no one
wanted to work on a Sunday, not one of them had
complained.

“
Take a seat,” said Alex’s
chief in charge of personnel, Major Joseph Walter. “Leena, can you
get Vince?”

“
Any idea where he is?” US
Navy Petty Officer Leena Carmichael asked. “I looked, but I
couldn’t find him.”

“
My office for that
magazine interview,” Alex said. “They’re doing it over the phone,
and it’s quieter there. He should be just about done.”

“
On my way,” Leena
said.

After a long shower, a
round of IV antibiotics, Alex managed to negotiate with her mother.
The five-month breakfast birthday party for her twins was a huge
success. With a baby on each knee, Alex finally had a chance to
read the memo from French Intelligence.

They had been looking for
the owner of the bookstore, where she and Paul had taken
The Gadfly
for an
appraisal. The bookstore owner took pride in the fact that his
family had opened their store every day for more than a hundred
years. But the morning after the Fey Special Forces Team was
murdered, the bookstore owner had locked the door and never
returned. Interpol had obtained custody of the bookstore owner from
his beach-front home in Cameroon on Friday. He was quietly moved
through official channels.

The French government had
gained custody of him yesterday. In a few minutes, he would be
transitioned to French Intelligence, where her uncle, the head of
French Intelligence service, Direction Centrale du Renseignement
Intérieur, Dominic Doucet, would get first crack at speaking with
him. Dominic’s interrogation of the bookstore owner would start in
three minutes.

In order to limit the
spread of information — and risk — Alex had planned to watch the
interrogation alone. Colonel Howard Gordon, her superior officer,
had overruled her. He’d insisted that the team was already at risk,
regardless of what they knew. Their only protection was in knowing
everything. Alex had nodded her head, but she remained
unconvinced.

She sat down near the
front of the team’s large workroom. Sergeant Dusty had set up the
connection to the video camera in the facility where the bookstore
owner was being held. The video feed would project onto the large
white board in the front of the room. As they took their regular
seats, her team laughed and joked around her. Raz set a sharpened
yellow lead pencil and a pad of paper in front of Alex before
sitting down in the chair next to her.

“
Here we go,” Sergeant
Dusty said.

He clicked a switch, and a
small room appeared on the white board. The walls of the room were
covered with what looked like photographs. There was a small table
with two chairs in the center of the room. Two French soldiers
wearing balaclavas to cover their faces dragged a small, elderly
man into the room. The soldiers dropped the man near the table in
the center of the room and turned to leave. The man scrambled after
the soldiers.

“
Don’t leave me here,” the
bookstore owner begged in French. “I am not without resources. Get
me out of here, and we’ll . . .”

The soldiers shook off the
bookstore owner, and the elderly man fell onto the tile floor. The
door’s lock gave a loud “click,” and the bookstore owner ran to the
door.

“
I will pay you!” the
bookstore owner continued to beg. “I have money, influence.
I . . .”

The man noticed the images
on the walls. His mouth fell open, and he screamed in horror. He
tripped and fell onto the ground again. The man pushed himself into
a corner of the room with his feet. He tucked his head into his
knees and covered his head with his hands.

“
No, no, no, no, no, no,
no,” they heard the man say in a low, moaning voice.

“
Any idea what’s on the
walls?” Alex’s second-in-command US Army Captain Matthew Mac
Clenaghan, in charge of missions, asked.

“
Life-sized pictures from
the vault after the assault,” said Joseph.

“
How can you tell?” Leena
asked.

“
I took them,” Joseph
said. He went to the screen to get a closer look. “This one’s
new.”

Joseph pointed to an image
near the door.

“
That’s Y,” Alex said.
“Yvonne, Dom’s assistant.”

“
After the ambulance blew
up,” Raz said. Having grown up outside of New York, Raz’s voice
still held the harsh edges of a Queens’ accent. “Last year.
Paris.”

“
He’s fixated on one
picture.” US Navy Chief Petty Officer Royce Tubman walked to the
screen to point to a photo on the wall. “Who’s that?”

“
Paul,” Alex and Joseph
said in unison.

Joseph pointed to the wall
opposite from where the bookstore owner hid his eyes.

“
You can see his boxer
shorts,” Alex said. “He was practicing his dance moves
when . . .”

An uncomfortable silence
came over the room. Alex never talked about the assault that had
killed ten members of the Fey Special Forces Team, her team. Alex
had barely survived. Most people believed she didn’t remember
it.

“
What’s this?” Alex walked
to the screen and pointed.

Joseph moved to look at
what she’d seen.

“
That wasn’t there when I
checked to see if he was alive,” Alex said. “What is
it?”

“
Looks like his dress
shoes,” Joseph shrugged.

Joseph had been the Fey
Special Force Team’s staff sergeant. The assault happened just six
weeks before he was to return from paternity leave.

“
He wasn’t wearing shoes,”
Alex said. She rubbed her forehead against the growing pain in her
head. “He’d just taken off his pants. He was in socks.”

“
That’s weird,” Joseph
said. “When I got there, to the vault, and took this picture, he
was wearing dress shoes. I’d never seen him in dress shoes. I
remember thinking it was odd at the time. I think that’s why this
picture shows them so prominently.”

The apparition of Alex’s
best friend, Sergeant Jesse Abreu appeared near the front of the
room. He turned to Alex and shook his head.

“
Paul didn’t own dress
shoes,” Jesse said.

“
I don’t think Paul owned
dress shoes,” Alex said. “Remember he was going to get married in
his jeans and red Converse All-Stars?”

“
Why would any man wear
dress shoes and no pants?” Vince asked.

“
It’s a good question,”
Joseph said. “With everything that was happening, I must have
missed it.”

As their staff sergeant
and the only survivor of the team, Joseph was on a plane to Paris
five minutes after they were discovered by Raz and his boss, Alex’s
mentor and biological father, Benjamin. Joseph had spent the next
six weeks making sure that Alex was safe and sending his friends
and teammates home to their families.

“
I wonder what happened to
those shoes,” Alex said.

“
Why?” Joseph
asked.

“
They’re a clue,” Alex
said. “They had to come from somewhere.”

“
You’re sure they weren’t
there when . . .” Joseph started.

Alex nodded. On the
screen, the door to the room opened, and Alex sat down. Dominic
Doucet came into the small room.

“
I know you,” the
bookstore owner said in French. “You work for the French
government.”

Dominic gave the bookstore
owner an unreadable look.

“
I have rights,” the
bookstore owner said. “I am a French citizen. I have rights. You
can’t . . .”

“
What makes you think
you’re in France?” Dominic said in French. He pulled a chair away
from the table and sat down.

“
I am still a French
citizen,” the bookstore owner said. “I have rights! I want
to . . .”

“
What makes you think
anyone here gives a crap?” Dominic’s voice sounded almost
amused.

“
I am a French citizen.
I . . .”

“
You’re not in France,”
Dominic said. “You’re not even in Cameroon. You’re in a place where
no one will ever find you. When I say
ever
 . . .”

Dominic pointed to the
video camera.

“ 
. . .what
I really mean is, no one knows where you are,” Dominic said. “Not
the people watching, not the soldiers who brought you here, not
even myself. You are lost to the world, and no one is looking for
you.”

“
I . . .”
the bookstore owner started talking but stopped. His face turned
ashen, and he swallowed hard. “Why am I here?”

“
Recognize any of them?”
Dominic nodded his head to the walls.

“
I . . .
uh . . .” The bookstore owner licked his lips. “No,
I don’t know any American soldiers.”

“
You should,” Dominic
said.

“
Why is that?” the
bookstore owner asked. “I make it a policy not to know
Americans.”

“
Then why did you murder
them?” Dominic asked.

“
I’ve never killed
anyone,” the bookstore owner said.

“
As sure as you pulled the
trigger,” Dominic said. “This one?”

Dominic got up from the
chair. He walked to near the door and touched the image of
Yvonne.

“
She was my assistant,”
Dominic said. “A citizen of France, a public servant, killed last
year as a result of your actions.”

“
I’ve never
seen
her before,” the
bookstore owner said. His voice rose with indignation and
arrogance.