"We have a problem."
"We do," Caleb grumbled. "My effing feet-"
"Forget your feet. We have a problem, and it involves Jaimie."
Caleb"s eyes focused tightly on his sister"s face.
"Tell me."
So she did.
She told him everything that Jaimie had told her, watched his eyes narrow, saw the set of his jaw turn to stone.
"This SOB has a name?"
"Young. Steven Young."
"Seems to me that Mr. Young needs to be taught what a mistake it is to mess with a Wilde. I"m glad you told me about this. Jake and Travis and I-"
Lissa punched her brother in the arm.
"Idiot," she hissed. "What about what Jaimie needs? You take this b.a.s.t.a.r.d apart, you"ll feel better. So will I. But you don"t know how he"ll react. He needs more than a lesson. He needs to be caught in the act of following her. Jesus, breaking into her apartment and going through her things."
"OK," Caleb growled, "OK. You"re right. Any suggestions?"
Lissa blew a curl off her forehead.
"You"re the spook. You tell me."
"Ex-spook. And it"s a stupid word."
"Fine. You prefer to be called a spy?"
"I was an intelligence agent," Caleb said, with dignity.
"Did you spy on people?"
"I did some reconnoitering, yes."
"Meaning, you watched people without letting them know they were being watched."
"What"s your point?"
"Did you protect people? Without them knowing you were protecting them?"
"Lissa..."
"Dammit, I"m not asking you to give away state secrets! Did you keep people safe by being around them without them realizing you were there for that purpose?"
"I provided certain covert services from time to time, yes."
It was Lissa"s turn to roll her eyes.
"Well, don"t you know anyone who still does that kind of thing? Someone you can trust, someone you can rely on, someone tough enough to make sure nothing happens to Jaimie even as he gathers information?"
"Last I heard," Caleb said dryly, "Batman was busy."
Lissa folded her arms. "Just what we need. Comic relief... What?"
"There is this one guy," he said slowly. "Tough as nails and smart as h.e.l.l. I"d trust him with my life." A quick, harsh laugh. "Actually, I have."
"Well?"
"He"d need to find a way to ease into Jaimie"s life..." He paused. Then his lips curved in a slow smile. "He has one h.e.l.l of a condo in Manhattan. He could pretend he wants to sell it."
"Jaimie works in D.C."
"Details," Caleb said blithely. "He"ll come up with something, I"m certain of it."
"Great! That"s great! What"s his name? And when are you going to call him?"
"I"m not going to call him."
"But you just said-"
"This is the kind of thing I"d rather discuss in person." Caleb dug his cell phone from the pocket of his sweatpants, hit the speed-dial number for the pilot of his Learjet, made a quick apology for waking him and arranged for his plane to be ready at 5:00 a.m. "OK," he said briskly, after he"d ended the call, "I"ll fly out tomorrow."
"Jaimie mustn"t know!"
"She won"t. If she asks, I"ll say something"s come up and I have to take a quick meeting, but I"ll be back by dinner." He wrapped an arm around his sister"s shoulders and hugged her. "We"ll have our holiday weekend, just the way we always do, and by the time Jaimie returns to D.C. Sunday night, my guy will be on the case."
Lissa let out a breath she didn"t realize she"d been holding.
"That"s fine. It"s excellent. I just hope he"s as good as you say he is."
"He"s almost as good as I am." Lissa rolled her eyes again and her brother grinned. "Trust me, sweetheart. Zach Castelianos is just what our Jaimie needs".
CHAPTER EIGHT.
Zach wasn"t an early-morning type.
Given a choice, he stayed up late, sometimes until the soft pink fingers of dawn stroked the gray sky.
There were things he liked about the hours that unfolded after sundown. Cities revealed the truths they"d kept hidden: Streets that were quiet and crowd-free. Skysc.r.a.pers that rose into the dark like silent sentinels. Owls swooped through the trees in Central Park. If you were quiet, a fox or a racc.o.o.n might run across a path ahead of you. Once, he"d even seen a coyote and he"d wished it well.
It wasn"t easy to make it in this world, for either men or beasts.
He liked the night away from cities, too. He"d trained and served in vast stretches of desert and on mountain peaks that reached for the skies and the stars blazing in them.
He"d always loved the dark hours, even as a kid.
His father had seen it as a sign of rebellion.
Night was night, he said. Day was day. It was against the laws of nature, G.o.d and man to try to replace one with the other.
When Zach had tried to explain that it had nothing to do with any kind of laws, his father had voiced his disapproval.
Sitting on his terrace in the chill day-after-Thanksgiving morning, a mug of coffee held between his hands, Zach snorted at the memory.
Voiced his disapproval? The old man never "voiced" anything, unless it was a command. What he"d done was beat the c.r.a.p out of him for disobedience.
"If I say it"s a law," he"d said, "it"s a law. You got that, boy?"
Zach got it.
He got everything. Beatings, demands, commands. That was how life was.
His father was in the service. A Marine. Even worse, a Marine sergeant major who had been the kind of bada.s.s drill sergeant that made the movie versions look like p.u.s.s.ies.
Georgios Castelianos ruled the Castelianos household with an iron fist.
Up at dawn. To bed by nine. By the time you were four, you knew how to make your bed so that a coin dropped on it would bounce how to scrub your face and hands, how to slick back-not that a military crew cut left much to slick.
You were a Castelianos, you had rules to live by, you and your mom both, and G.o.d help you if you broke those rules.
Growing up, moving from base to base, Zach had known lots of kids whose fathers were Marine Corps strict. He"d observed their families and, yeah, it wasn"t always easy to live with dads and husbands who lived regimented lives.
What he"d never observed or seen were kids who were beaten for the bedding not bouncing that quarter high enough, or women who learned to cower even before the first blow fell.
That was good. It taught him that not every family lived in fear and that not all men who wore uniforms in the service of their country were bullies, but it wasn"t enough to change the way things went in his own life or his mother"s. His father was a dark presence that at first engendered fear, then rage and, ultimately, rebellion.
By the time he was sixteen, Zach was pure trouble.
He drank beer until he puked, popped whatever pills he could get his hands on, skipped school more often than he attended it. And he screwed every good-looking girl who was willing, and d.a.m.n near all of them were because by then he had his old man"s height and leanly muscled build, his mother"s dark hair and green eyes.
At first, his mother pretended not to know the dangerous game he was playing. That had been her pattern with him; she never acknowledged anything that happened to him, even the beatings. There"d been a time he"d despised her for it. Eventually, he"d figured it was her method of survival and, after a while, whether she loved him or not no longer mattered.
But there came a time when not even she could ignore his behavior. He knew it was because she feared that the old man would blame her when he finally found out that his son was bad news.
"You have to stop misbehaving," she said, early one morning.
A morning just like this one, Zach thought as he sat on the terrace of his condo.
It had dawned cold and clear, the scent of winter in the air and Thanksgiving a day-old memory.
Why he was thinking about all that now was beyond him, but he"d awakened early even though he"d been out late last night. Force of habit, after all these years. He hadn"t been doing anything special: Thanksgiving was just another day.
Sitting on the terrace, wearing sweats, his feet bare despite the chill, he could almost hear his mother"s admonishing voice after the school counselor phoned and warned her that one more incident of insolence and her son would be suspended.
"You have to stop misbehaving! Daddy"s bound to find out, and you know he"ll be upset."
Zach had laughed, first at her insistence on calling the monster who abused them Daddy and then on her making it sound as if he"d be in for a verbal reprimand.
Two hours later, when the old man arrived home, his mother told him about the call from the school. About Zach laughing.
The old man took a well-worn Garrison belt from where he always kept it, hanging from a hook in the kitchen, a constant reminder of what the word discipline meant.
Zach got the worst beating of his life. It might have killed him if his mother, for the very first time, hadn"t tried to stop it.
"f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h," his father had snarled, and he"d hit her so hard she"d flown across the room.
The sight of her on the floor, this woman who had borne him, who had finally come to his defense, turned Zach from cowering boy into enraged man.
He"d gone at his father.
His father had tried to fight back but Zach was bigger, stronger, and fueled by years and years of despair. Minute later, the son of a b.i.t.c.h slid down the kitchen wall, moaning, hands raised before his bloodied face in a gesture of surrender.
Zach had stood over him, panting. Then he"d gone to his mother, helped her to her feet.
"Mom," he"d said.
She"d pushed him away, run to her husband, squatted beside him crooning his name as she took him in her arms.
Zach had watched for maybe half a minute. Then he"d stumbled to the bathroom, showered, put on clean jeans and a clean T, packed his clothes in a duffel bag, stuffed his wallet with the little money he"d saved from an a.s.sortment of odd jobs, and walked out. He"d hitchhiked north, washing dishes in grungy diners, sweeping out small town bars, hiring on to do whatever jobs he could find that required muscle, not brains.
He"d landed in a small city outside New York. People were friendly, but they didn"t intrude; he got a room in an old-fashioned boarding house, found a steady job as a stock boy at a supermarket. He was young enough to need working papers, but he looked old enough for n.o.body to ask for them.
At first, he"d been too busy getting through each day to do much thinking about the rest of his life, but gradually it dawned on him that unless he wanted to wind up a b.u.m on the streets-because, logically, what kind of future was there in being a stock boy-he"d have to do something to turn his life around.
Zach took a sip of his rapidly cooling coffee.
Night school first, to get his high school equivalency diploma. Then more night school, to start on the long road toward a college degree. A better job, not by much but still better, loading boxes at a warehouse. Sixteen months after he"d left home, he moved to New York City, found a job as an a.s.sistant supervisor at a big warehouse, rented a room the size of a closet in a dingy flat in the part of the Bowery that had not yet felt the velvet touch of gentrification.
Then, on his way to work one morning, terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers.
He saw it happen. Watched the beautiful buildings collapse. Stood helpless as those who"d done nothing except get up and go to their jobs that fateful day died. Ached for the cops and firemen and EMTs who epitomized the true meaning of heroic.
Zach went to a recruiting office the next morning. A Marine recruiting office, because not even his son of a b.i.t.c.h father had been able to dim his love and respect for the Corps.
He had a high school diploma, but he didn"t have a birth certificate.