Finding North (8 page)

“
Yes, yes, very funny,”
Alex grinned.

She turned the map over
and leaned in closer.

“
This mark is familiar,”
she said.

She pointed to a
sixteen-point compass rose on the back of the map. The longest
spines of the star were black and designated the cardinal
directions — north, south, east, and west — and the four ordinal
directions — north-east, south-east, south-west, and north-west.
Spines that were shaded on one side and blank on the other marked
the secondary-intercardinal directions. There was a circle in the
center of the compass rose. The very center of the star was an oval
shape that looked like a human eye with a swoop of an eyebrow. The
entire compass star was about the size of a US quarter. Rebecca
turned over a corner of another map to look at the mark.

“
It looks like a compass
rose,” Raz said.

“
This is an old one,” Alex
said. “They would have called it a wind rose or a compass star. See
how it’s formed in the shape of a star?”

She held up the symbol for
them to see.

“
It’s probably the mark of
whoever copied the maps, like my fairy,” Alex said. “They indicate
that these duplicates were created at the behest of the owner of
the original maps.”

Alex lowered the
magnifying circle over the mark.

“
Compass Rose,” Rebecca
said. “Isn’t that the name of your health insurance
company?”

“
It is,” Raz said. “All
the intelligence community and civilians in the Department of
Defense and the Department of State.”

“
Yeah,” Alex said, without
looking up. “We have a different plan because I’m not a civilian.
But Col and Raz, they have that insurance, plus the supplemental we
carry.”

“
And it’s called Compass
Rose?” Rebecca asked. “Weird coincidence.”

“
I guess,” Alex
said.

“
Are you finding
anything?” Raz asked.

“
I’ve seen this mark
before,” Alex said. “In fact . . .”

Alex went to the safe and
opened it. She looked around for a moment before finding Rebecca’s
father’s caliper. She took the cartography tool to the table and
held it under the magnified light.

“
The same mark is on the
side of the caliper,” Alex said. “Even the eye.”

So as not to disturb the
babies, she held the caliper in front of Rebecca. She pointed to
the mark and held it out to Raz.

“
I’ve seen this
mark . . . somewhere else,” Alex said. “For the life
of me, I can’t place it.”

“
My father had a ring with
the symbol on it,” Rebecca said.

“
Any idea what it means?”
Alex asked.

“
No,” Rebecca said. “He
had cufflinks and a tie tack with the symbol on it,
too.”

“
I wonder if it’s his
symbol,” Alex said.

“
I’ve seen this mark
before,” Raz said.

Alex looked at him. His
face had drained of color.

“
Are you all right?” Alex
asked.

“
You look like you’ve seen
a ghost,” Rebecca said.

“
I think I have,” Raz
said. “You remember me talking about my NYPD partner?”

“
Dexter Zeno,” Alex
said.

“
Great name,” Rebecca
said.

“
He goes by Dex,” Alex
nodded. “Dex Zeno.”

“
That’s an even better
name,” Rebecca said.

Alex nodded.

“
He was obsessed with this
symbol,” Raz said. “Or really two symbols — the outer star and the
eye with the eyebrow. See how the eyebrow goes up in the middle?
That’s what makes this eye unique. What made this particular
compass rose unique was the use of both symbols. I never paid that
much attention, but . . .”

Raz shrugged.

“
But?” Alex
asked.

“
It was some kind of
family thing,” Raz said. “We’d been friends for a long time,
partners for almost ten years, when his father died suddenly. His
father passed to Dex something that had to do with this symbol. I
don’t know what. Dex said that his father had learned about it only
upon his grandfather’s death; his grandfather learned of it upon
his grandfather’s father’s death, and so on, all the way back to
the middle ages.”

“
He could trace his family
that long?” Rebecca asked.

“
It was in his father’s
belongings,” Raz said. “After his father died, Dex became obsessed
with this compass rose.”

“
Compass roses are in the
legend of every map,” Alex said. “The eye and star on this one
makes it unique but not unusual.”

“
It was the whole thing,”
Raz said. “The compass rose with the eight dark points, eight
shaded points,
and
the eye. Or one and not the other. The compass rose is
special in some way. Dex used to see the symbols all over the city
— on buildings, churches, everywhere.”

“
The eight-pointed star
with the eye?” Alex asked.

“
Both, and sometimes just
the eye. After his father died, Dex received a file from his
father’s lawyer,” Raz shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a lot going on
then, stuff with Vicki, work . . . I didn’t have
that kind of family so, honestly, I didn’t really understand his
fixation. It seemed insane. He seemed kind of . . .
nuts. I thought he was upset because his dad died so suddenly. But,
one night, just before I started working with Ben, he told me that
his father had been collecting all of this . . .
stuff.”

“
Stuff?” Alex
asked.

“
That’s what I remember
him calling it,” Raz said. “‘Stuff.’ I guess after Dex’s
grandfather died, his father became obsessed with this ‘stuff.’ Dex
didn’t know what to do with all of it. Throw it out, and he might
miss something of value. Keep it, and get lost in it. I asked if I
could help, but he didn’t want to ‘get me involved.’”

“
And it had to do with
this symbol?” Alex asked.

“
Yes,” Raz said. “This
exact symbol.”

“
Is this Dex still
living?” Rebecca asked.

“
I think so,” Raz said as
he looked up at Alex. She nodded.

“
Looks like we’re going to
New York,” Alex said.

“
Sounds fun,” Rebecca
said.

Raz looked at Alex, and
she shrugged.

“
I don’t think it will be
very fun, Mom,” Alex said.

“
You’re right,” Rebecca
said. “How could being away from these gorgeous babies be
fun?”

“
Exactly,” Alex
said.

F

Chapter
Six

Sunday evening

May 15 — 7:27 p.m.
MDT

Denver,
Colorado

“
Samantha,” John said from
where he was sitting at the dining-room table, working on his
laptop. His London accent made the sound of her name seem like a
proper invitation. “I was hoping to catch you.”

“
I was looking for Alex,”
Samantha said. Uncomfortable with her own lie, she shifted from
foot to foot. Maggie got up from her dog bed to say hello. Samantha
bent down to cuddle the dog.

“
She’s speaking with your
father,” John said. “Max, too.”

Samantha looked up at him.
She went over to pick up Joey, who was sleeping in a bassinette on
the table.

“
I heard she’s leaving,”
Samantha said. She kissed Joey’s cheek.

“
Tomorrow morning.” John
looked up at Samantha. “She and Raz are going to New York for what
we hope is only a week.”

Samantha
nodded.

“
You knew that,” John
said.

“
Colin told me,” Samantha
said. “He told me that I should talk to . . . well,
you know.”

“
I do,” John said. “That’s
what I was hoping to catch up with you about.”

“
Oh?”

“
I wanted to show you
these photos,” John said.

He turned the laptop
around so the screen was facing her. She set Joey in his bassinette
and took a few steps closer to the table. There was a picture of
Alex with a man. He was a few inches taller than Alex. He had brown
hair about her color and similar skin tone. They looked like they
were going to a party. The man seemed enraptured with
Alex.

“
That’s Alex,” Samantha
said. “Who’s the guy?”

“
Her first partner,” John
said. “Notice anything?”

“
They look like
they . . . belong together,” Samantha glanced at
John and bit her lip.

“
They do,” John said. “She
was assigned to him a couple months after we got married. You can
imagine how awful that was for me. When she wasn’t working with her
hunky team, she was wandering the globe with . . .
Mr. Awesome. That’s what I called him — ‘Mr. Awesome.’”

John grimaced at
himself.

“
I didn’t learn that he
was
gay
until
long after he was no longer Alex’s partner,” John said.

John turned the laptop
around and clicked a button. He turned it back for her to
see.

“
This was her second
partner,” John said.

Alex was standing next to
another man. This man had thick, brown, shoulder-length hair that
had an almost perfect curl to it. His arm was around her shoulder,
and she was looking at him with what looked like
fondness.

“
Wow,” Samantha said. She
took a seat across the table from John.

“
By this time, I was
beginning to understand that
looking
like she was married to this
guy was her job,” John said. “The whole ruse was designed to
protect her, to save her life in dangerous situations.
But . . . I was young. We were young. It was very
hard on me. I was an orphan, a college student, and the
‘left-behind husband.’ That’s what I called myself. I’m not proud
to say that I made things difficult for her.”

John turned the laptop
around again and changed the photo. Joey made a small noise. John
picked him up.

“
This is Carlos.” John
tucked Joey into the crook of his arm. “I can attest to the fact
that Alex hated Carlos.”

“
You can’t tell it here,”
Samantha said.

“
Nope,” John said. “That’s
the job — pretend to be married to someone with complementary
skills so that you can get the information you need to keep the
country safe. Over the years, I’ve met other partner teams. Some
are lovers. A few are actually married. But most of them were like
Alex — they are assigned to someone who looks like they should be
their partner. More than once, a partner will kill the other just
to be rid of them. One time, an agent tricked someone else into
killing her partner. Very slick.”

“
How did you find out?”
Samantha asked.

“
Alex knew,” John said. “I
think she killed him, but she never said.”

“
Wow.”

“
That’s the job,” John
said. “These agents are the best and highest-trained professionals
the CIA, NSA, DHS, MI-6, KGB, or whatever puts out. They are deadly
on a good day.”

John turned the laptop
around with his free hand and clicked the picture. He slid it
around so Samantha could see the image of Alex and Raz. Samantha
scowled. She stared at the picture for a while before looking up at
John.

“
How did
you . . .?” she pointed at the screen.

“
We made an agreement,”
John said. “If something happened, she would tell me. We would work
it out. Kissing each other, and sleeping in the same
bed . . .”

Samantha cleared her
throat.

“
Yes, it’s hard,” John
said. “But Alex doesn’t tell personal lies. She’s never hidden what
happens between her and her partners. Ever. To her, it’s always
been a job she’s had to perform in order to be what she wants to
be.”

“
A Green Beret,” Samantha
said.

“
Right,” John said. “She’s
never crossed the line we agreed to.”

“
Sex,” Samantha
said.

“
Of any kind,” John
nodded.

“
You’re sure?”

“
Have you ever known Alex
to lie about something personal?” John asked.

“
Not well,” Samantha said.
“She gets kind of blotchy red and acts weird.”

“
I ask her the direct
question and look in her eyes,” John said. “She doesn’t lie. But
that doesn’t make her answers any easier. At the same time, she can
ask me the same question. The temptation is all around me almost
more than it is for her. My job is to be as brutally honest as she
is. That’s the hard part. For me. I’m sure that it’s the same for
you.”

Samantha gave a slow nod.
John fell silent and turned the computer back around to look at the
image.

“
There’s something else,”
John said. “You know that Raz and Ben found Alex in the doorway of
that dreadful vault, right?”