Midnight Vengeance Read online

  He couldn’t smile back. His face just wouldn’t. A smile felt small and inadequate to what he was feeling. She was sitting like a queen, pale and glowing, looking at him with softness in her gaze. No woman had ever looked at him like that. Women looked at him pre—and post-fucking. The pre-fuck look was speculative and the post-fuck look was, thank God, usually satisfied. But there was never any emotion there.

  Lauren’s feelings were written all over her face. Feelings for him.

  He had no idea what was on his own face; he could barely feel himself, he was so concentrated on her. He had tons of feelings rolling around inside, so many and so strong he couldn’t express them. He had no words to tell her what she meant to him. What he felt seeing her on his couch smiling at him as if he were the center of her world. He couldn’t explain it to her in any way.

  There was one thing he could say, though, and it came from the deepest part of him.

  “I’ll keep you safe.” He wanted to say more but the words just wouldn’t come.

  “I know you will, Jacko.” Lauren smiled at him, cupped his jaw with a hand. He shifted and kissed the palm of her hand, a little calmer now. She’d understood all those unspoken words. He didn’t have to say them because she understood.

  She understood him. He’d allowed her glimpses inside himself, something he had never allowed anyone before and instead of running away screaming, here she was, sitting naked on his couch, looking at him with softness in her eyes.

  His own little miracle. Oh yeah, he was going to keep her safe.

  Because she was his.

  Heat rose inside him, heat and lust, desire so strong he’d die if he didn’t have her, right now. In a second, he was naked too. Some instinct, some muscle memory that didn’t require thought, like switching out a mag in a firefight, something he’d done so many times he barely noticed, had him ripping open a condom and sliding it on, then he lifted her over him as if she were weightless. She was in that instant. He didn’t feel the weight, just her softness as she settled over him. His hands pulled her thighs apart, then he positioned her with a hand on her back and he felt her, oh God yes. Felt her wet heat against his cock, opening to him. She was bracing her hands on his shoulders, looking down at him. Not smiling, eyes slitted. She blew out a breath, circling her hips with him just inside her.

  Jacko’s heart was hammering, muscles twitching. This was a moment for self-control. He knew that; he wasn’t stupid. He was just blasted by lust, not quite in control of himself. Lauren was lifting away from him, then settling back down on him, a little deeper each time.

  It was taking her goddamned forever. Sweat trickled down his back from the effort of staying still. When she rose back up on her knees, with him barely inside her, her head bowed over his, her dark hair forming a little curtain around them.

  Jacko tightened his hands around her back, looked up into her silver-gray eyes glowing with an unearthly light.

  “I have to—” he gritted.

  She nodded and he pulled her down onto him while slamming his hips up until he was deep inside her, and the god of soldiers smiled on him because she was coming, pulling on him with sharp little strokes of her sheath. He started jetting inside her in spurts so strong he thought he’d pass out.

  They were holding each other tightly, neither of them moving except where they were joined, panting, eyes closed, lost in their own world.

  Jacko came back into himself slowly. When he realized he was clutching Lauren so hard he could be hurting her, he loosened his hold, letting out a long low breath. Man, it had been so freaking intense. For all the years he’d been having sex—more than half his life—nothing like that had ever happened to him. He’d lost all notions of self, of where he was, completely taken up by the woman in his arms.

  He let out another long breath, relaxing a bit on the couch, feeling tight muscles loosen. Lauren slumped onto him, head nestled on his shoulder, and he rested his cheek on the top of her head. The sharp smell of sex rose, but it was a great smell, with an overlay of her perfume, something that smelled like spring.

  He was still partially erect and he’d be up for a second round but he could feel Lauren relaxing and the feeling was so precious he didn’t want to spoil it. She’d been through hell and if she could find peace with him, well...that was worth more than another round of sex.

  And besides, they had all the time in the world.

  The rest of their lives, in fact.

  At any other moment, that thought would have shocked Jacko, but right now it just popped every single pleasure center in his head.

  “That was quite a welcome, soldier,” Lauren said and he could feel her lips moving in a smile against his shoulder.

  “Hmm.”

  Lauren gave a little sigh and he could feel her slipping into sleep. Oh man. She was a warm weight against him, soft and light. He cupped her head and adjusted himself so she’d be as comfortable as possible.

  Something warm and heavy and unfamiliar passed through him. It took him minutes to realize it was happiness.

  Chapter Eight

  Palm Beach

  George Town had been very interesting, Frederick mused. Two days of intense talks with the president of the Caymans Credit Bank, with a scheme that could net a lot of money over the next ten years. A lot of money. And it was even legal, marginally. He’d probably have to relocate at some point, but the idea was intriguing. There was even talk of becoming a citizen of the Cayman Islands. Which Alfonso had told him did not have an extradition treaty with the US.

  Perfect. Just perfect.

  While he was in George Town, Frederick had seen a mansion high on a bluff overlooking the sea, which the president had told him was called Cliff House. It had belonged to a minor British royal, and was for sale.

  In his hotel room Frederick had looked it up on the site of a very exclusive Realtor’s and it was indeed magnificent. And selling for a tenth of what a home like that would cost in Palm Beach.

  Oh yeah. Frederick was going to retire in ten years’ time a very rich man, living a life of leisure, untouchable by U.S. law.

  In the meantime, though, he had a job to do. Mechanical Voice wanted results. He turned himself to the task of finding Anne Lowell, one lone woman in a country of over three hundred million people. Impossible, one would think. And yet...

  What was a face after all? Most people imagined faces as endless iterations of a few facial features. Eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Expressions: happiness, sadness, rage, curiosity. Everything that makes us human can be summed up in the face.

  But that wasn’t what faces were at all. Faces were sets of data points. About eighty of them, in fact. Nose width, eye socket depth, length of the jawline, distance between the eyes. All data points. Algorithms making up faceprints like the data points of fingertips make up fingerprints.

  You can run, but you can’t hide.

  Frederick had found Anne Lowell twice by small mistakes she’d made, but then Jorge’s goons were morons and let her slip through their fingers. What did he care? He’d been quite happy to stay on retainer, no skin off his nose. But now he had half a million incentives to find the woman and deliver her.

  Just not to Jorge.

  Anne Lowell was adrift somewhere in a country of three hundred million faces. Three hundred million sets of data. A number-crunching problem.

  Time to bring out the big guns.

  Faces were data and all he needed was a big enough bot array to crunch the numbers, because somewhere Anne Lowell’s face was on film. There were an estimated thirty million surveillance cameras in America, not counting the cams and drones operated by the NSA, the CIA and the Pentagon. Unless she was dead and in a hole in the ground, someone somewhere had filmed her, and recently.

  She was a set of data in someone’s computer and all he needed was enough crunching power to find her.

  There was an app for that. An idea simmering in his head for a while, a secret weapon for when serious amounts of computer power might be
needed. He’d put the idea away for a rainy day and now that rainy day was here. Frank Sinatra singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” provided a nice soundtrack as he worked his way into QUANTUM.

  QUANTUM was a shadow network with a vast hidden infrastructure of secret servers and routers used by government alphabet soup agencies, the NSA in the forefront. But the infrastructure was huge and had required years and thousands of man-hours to build. Frederick knew one of the coders, known as the Whiz, a talented young man with an unfortunate taste for drugs and debauchery. The Whiz had been responsible for building a small corner of QUANTUM, much like a mason who erects a minor wall in the construction of a palace. QUANTUM had undergone a vast expansion and required work from many talented coders just like the Whiz.

  For the price of several months’ worth of highs, courtesy of stolen goods from Jorge’s deliveries, Frederick managed to buy himself a backdoor into QUANTUM. It was a small secret little hatch in a forgotten corner of the vast structure that, however, led into the palatial rooms, leaving behind no sign of intruders. QUANTUM had a built-in redundancy factor so that the theft of bandwidth, even vast quantities, never showed up in the system.

  Getting in required delicacy and time. But Frederick had time and a very deft touch. By midnight, he was in and set to work. He had plenty of photographs of Anne from when she was a young girl and a college student. Her mother had been a cold bitch and actually preferred photographs to the person. Particularly since her daughter was photogenic enough that the beautiful silver frames looked good in arrangements.

  So Frederick was able to scan over two hundred photographs into his facial recognition system, starting from age ten. He also had almost five hours of video from her graduation ceremony and several birthdays.

  He brought up snapshots of her a few years ago, taken when she was in her last year of grad school. They’d been taken at a beach. She laughed into the camera, arm around the shoulder of the friend that idiot Jorge had killed by mistake. She had the face of one of America’s upper class. Very pretty, excellent teeth, full figure. The expression reflecting invincibility—nothing could touch her and she was destined to sail through life without hitting any speed bumps. In one of the photographs she was holding a young man, her male equivalent. Blond, excellent teeth, the slight arrogance of the young and the healthy and the rich. He was her, only ten inches taller, without breasts and with a penis.

  The system used a 3D model where bone was more important than soft tissue. Weight gain or weight loss made no difference at all.

  The program then measured the underlying bone structure on a microwave scale and created a template. It was dawn by the time a 3D scan of Anne Lowell’s face appeared on his monitor.

  By midmorning he could make Anne Lowell’s template smile, frown and laugh. So, a sprinkling of fairy dust, a little soupcon of algorithms and he could set his construct free. His finger hovered over the enter key. He was about to unleash the greatest concentration of virtual firepower in the world on to the search for one young woman, who had done no one any harm.

  But, such was the way of the world.

  He pressed Enter and waited.

  His computer didn’t hum, of course. But Frederick imagined humming going on somewhere underground, in refrigerated banks of servers somewhere in Virginia. Working for him, about to earn him a lot of money.

  A blank monitor was boring. Frederick went out for an early lunch at Les Deux Renards, a charming French restaurant known for the chef’s light hand. He allowed himself a glass of pinot noir because, well, he wasn’t the one combing the internet, was he? QUANTUM was. A quick visit to his gym, a lovely massage and home by five, in time for a drink on the terrace. The red-and-yellow-streaked clouds above the horizon were slowly turning purple when a soft ping sounded behind him.

  Ah. Found. Excellent.

  Frederick took his glass of Pimm’s with him as he sauntered over to his workstation. He had six monitors, top of the line, with incredibly sharp images. Spread over the monitors were thumbnail photographs, in chronological order. He took in the visual data at a glance, noticing that Anne had cycled through platinum white hair, auburn and, on the right-hand monitor, chestnut. She was a dark blond naturally. He shook his head. She’d spent a lot of money at the hairdresser’s for nothing. His algorithms didn’t even look at hair color. Not even part of the data set.

  The thumbnails to the left showed where she’d been. He’d study them for patterns but he wanted to know where she was right now.

  And there she was, on the far right monitor, in a Twitter feed dated three days ago.

  He went to the Facebook page of one Monica Shaw, sometime actress/artist, full-time caterer. She’d Instagrammed photos of an art show held in—Frederick leaned forward, squinting at the coordinates that the program instantly geolocated for him. He rocked back on his heels.

  The art show was held in an art gallery in the center of Portland, Oregon.

  Portland, hmm? Maybe not such a bad place to come to ground, all things considered. Small but large enough to hide in. Multicultural so nobody stood out. A percentage of the population newcomers, so one woman arriving sparked no interest.

  Monica Shaw carried drinks and manned the buffet table while surreptitiously taking shots with her cell phone. She was interested in a famous harpist and singer, Allegra Kowalski. She was excited at the presence of event organizer Phillip Barton, a big shot in the art world. Manga artist Wu was there and she sneaked in a selfie with him.

  So as of last night, Anne Lowell, who had evaded him for two years, had been at the vernissage of Inside/Out, a series of watercolors and gouaches of designs by one Suzanne Huntington.

  The caterer had no interest at all in the actual works on the walls, or the star of the show, Suzanne Huntington. On another monitor, Frederick checked the website of Suzanne Huntington who, it turned out, was seriously talented. The Gallery section showed ninety offices and homes she’d decorated.

  When he bought his mansion at the top of the bluff, he just might hire her and fly her out to the Caymans—she was that good.

  And...there she was, at the gallery! Anne Lowell, or whatever she was calling herself nowadays. Brunette.

  Not good enough, sweetheart, he thought. Anne had never noticed the caterer taking shots from her cell phone. She was never in direct line of sight, but most of the shots were quite clear nonetheless.

  She was still very pretty. Being a brunette suited her, with her silver-blue eyes and pale skin. She’d lost some weight, too. Maybe a little too much. Being on the run could do that to a girl.

  The program isolated her face inside a red box. In all, there were ten shots of the evening where she appeared. In five of them she was holding the arm of a big bruiser. Not tall but immensely broad. Shaved head, dark complexion, grim expression. A rough-looking guy.

  Really ugly mean-looking bastard. Hmm. The man looked—looked as if he’d be hard to deal with. It had never occurred to Frederick that she would hook up with someone. She was on the run, for Christ’s sake. What was she doing having sex with someone? And someone who looked like that?

  Anne Lowell, of the Boston Lowells, with a masters in business management of cultural institutions, choosing this person who looked like one of the more unsavory Sons of Anarchy in a tux—well.

  They looked strange together, a Beauty and the Beast kind of couple. The man was wearing a tux but it didn’t look right on him. Yet in two of the shots, Anne was looking up at his dark, ugly face and smiling.

  The man was stiff, unsmiling. He didn’t look like a guy who’d unexpectedly scored a beauty. Could he be a bodyguard? Could she afford one?

  But no. Bodyguards stood back from their primaries, scouting the terrain. This guy looked as paranoid as a bodyguard—in each shot he was examining a different part of the room—but he was definitely escorting Anne. In one shot, one huge dark hand covered hers in the crook of his elbow. Bodyguards didn’t do that.

  Interesting.

  Hmm. So she
had some muscle behind her. Well, brains trumped muscle, always.

  Okay, time to get to work.

  Frederick kept a number of identities on file. They were fully fleshed out, with websites and active FB pages. There were over three trillion websites in the world. His passed unnoticed.

  He scrolled through his files like a connoisseur choosing the perfect bottle of wine from a well-stocked cellar. Ah, there was a good one. He tapped on the screen and a very distinguished head shot of himself came up. He remembered when he’d had the portrait photo taken. He’d made sure to get an excellent haircut, had had lunch at a 5-star restaurant and had been to the spa. He looked ruddy, self-satisfied, pampered and very rich.

  Paul Andrews. Investment broker. Owner of Stonewell Financial. The website was a little vague as to exactly what he brokered and what he invested in, but he’d modeled it on the sites of other investment gurus, so it didn’t stand out.

  Paul Andrews was thinking of buying a major property in downtown Portland, Oregon, and he wanted it redecorated floor to ceiling. And he had heard such very good things about Suzanne Huntington...

  Yes, that’s how he’d play it.

  He took out a throwaway cell that would show up on the other end as a number connected to Stonewell Financials. It was the little details that counted.

  “Yes, hello,” he said to the pleasant female voice that answered. “My name is Paul Andrews, of Stonewell Financial. I would like to make an appointment with Ms. Suzanne Huntington, tomorrow afternoon if possible. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  He poured himself half a glass of Prosecco. No harm in that. He still had a cross country flight ahead of him. The Prosecco would dissipate in his blood well before that. And, well, he had something to celebrate. He had that unmistakable feeling he got when his plans coalesced.

  The secretary came back on.

  “Excellent,” he said, giving himself the plummy accent of the super rich, the voice of a man used to getting his own way. “Three o’clock. I’ll be there.”

  He tapped another screen and an inset of his pilot popped up. “Sir?”