Paula Graves - Secret Identity

Downstairs, she set the box on the floor beneath a steel worktable that had been left in the house by its former owners. She grabbed a box cutter from her jumble of a tool chest and crouched by the package, slicing a square in the side of the box and pulling out the cardboard plug.

Nothing happened.

She sat back on her heels, staring at the wad of cushioned plastic wrap poking through the hole she’d just cut. A self-conscious chuckle escaped her lips.

She sliced a bigger hole and pulled the cushioned wrap through the opening. It unfolded as it came out, revealing a small box of matches.

She set it aside and shined a flashlight through the hole in the box, checking the interior. It was just a plain box. No wires, no detonator, no C4 strapped to the cardboard anywhere.

Puzzled, she picked up the matchbox and gave it a light shake. Whatever rattled inside didn’t sound like matches. She opened it slowly, waiting for something to burst free from the box, but nothing jumped out at her.

It took a second for her to realize what lay inside the box. As it registered, the box fell from her suddenly numb fingers, spilling its contents on the floor.

Artificial fingernails, painted bloodred.

Amanda flexed her hands, phantom pain skittering along the nerve endings at the tips of her fingers. She pushed back the unwanted memory and picked up the now-empty matchbox, examining it. A ten-digit number was scrawled in black ink across the inside of the box. 2565550153.

Ten digits could be a phone number, she thought. A north Alabama area code. Did she even know anyone in Alabama?

She pushed to her feet and carried the matchbox upstairs, her mind racing through all the possibilities. The fake nails she understood—whoever had sent her the box had known her in her former life, known what happened in Kaziristan. It was a calling card.

The number, though—what did the number mean?

She stopped in her room to shed the body armor and helmet, shoving them back into their closet hiding place. Dropping on the side of her bed, she contemplated the phone on her bedside table. If the number on the matchbox was a phone number, should she call it? What if it was someone trying to confirm who she really was?

She flipped the matchbox over to the blue-and-white imprint on the front. She had the same brand in her kitchen right now. Anyone could have sent it.

Something small and black in one corner caught her eye. It looked like little more than a tiny smudge, as if the ink on the box label had spattered during printing. But Amanda had seen something like it before.

She took the box to the kitchen and found a magnifying glass in the utility drawer. Under the magnifying lens, the smudge became a couple of tiny letters: A. Q.

Alexander Quinn.

Part of her wanted to pack up and leave Thurlow Gap before sunset. But the same part knew there was nowhere she could go that Quinn couldn’t find her. The master spy who’d trained her in covert ops had come by the nickname “Warlock” honestly.

She might as well dial the bloody number. He already knew where she was.

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, basked under an unseasonably warm late-March sun, humidity making Rick Cooper’s shirt stick to his back beneath his suit jacket. He would take the jacket off but he was armed—legally, of course; over the years, he’d learned to strictly adhere to any law that didn’t absolutely have to be broken. Still, no need to draw unwanted attention by sitting in an open-air bistro wearing a Walther P99 in a shoulder holster.

He checked his watch. He’d been waiting for almost an hour, but so far no one had approached his table besides the flop-haired teenage boy who kept refreshing his water glass and asking if he was ready for a menu yet. Derrick Lambert, the prospective client who’d emailed him with directions to the meeting, was apparently a no-show.

As he reached for his wallet to pay the waiter for his time, his cell phone rang. He checked the display—the call was from an unfamiliar number with a local area code. Was it his prospective client, explaining his late arrival?

He answered. “Hello?”

He heard a faint inhalation, then silence.

“Hello?” he repeated, loudly enough to draw a look from patrons at the next table.

The phone clicked dead. Rick took out his frustration on the off button and jammed his phone in his suit pocket.

“It wasn’t a wrong number.” The smooth voice behind Rick sent adrenaline jolting through him. He turned and gazed up into the hard hazel eyes of Alexander Quinn.

“Derrick Lambert, I presume?” Rick turned his back on the CIA spook, anger flooding his chest.

Quinn took a seat across from Rick and waved off the approaching waiter. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No, you’re not.”

Quinn inclined his head. “Was the number blocked?”

“No.”

“Good. Now, remember this. Sigurd.” Quinn rose and started walking away.

Rick tossed a ten on the table and followed, falling into step as they neared the traffic light at the corner. “That’s it? I wait an hour in the sun for ‘Sigurd’?”

Quinn stopped and turned so quickly that Rick almost knocked into him. “Just follow the number, Cooper.” The CIA agent walked away, cool and unhurried in the warm sunshine.

Bitterness rose in Rick’s throat as he reversed course, striding toward the Dodge Charger parked at the curb near the bistro. Screw the phone number. Alexander Quinn had mucked up his life enough already.

He unlocked the door and slid into the hot interior of the car. The jacket went to the passenger seat, followed by his tie. Starting the car, he cranked the air up a notch, struck, not for the first time, by how good people in this country had it. Clean water. Beautiful homes. Big, shiny cars with air conditioning. He’d been in places where those luxuries would have been as out of reach as a trip to the moon.

The Charger’s engine growled to life under him as he pulled out into the moderate midday traffic on Summer Street. Stopping at a red light, he pulled out his phone and punched in his brother’s direct line. Jesse Cooper answered on the first ring.

“Meeting was a bust,” Rick said. “I’m headed back. I’ll be in the office first thing in the morning.”

“Guy was a no-show?”

“He showed. But it’s nothing we want to handle.”

“Are you sure?” Jesse asked.

Rick’s mouth tightened. “You said my experience would be an asset to Cooper Security. Do you trust it or not?”

“I trust it. You know I do. I’ve got to go. Isabel’s back with a prospective client.” Jesse hung up.

Rick looked at the cell-phone display. Pressing the back button, he took a look at the previous caller’s number. It would be easy to hit Redial and see who answered, just to satisfy his curiosity.

“Sigurd,” he muttered.

The traffic light turned green, forcing the issue. He laid the phone atop his jacket and accelerated through the intersection, forcing his focus back on navigating the unfamiliar Knoxville streets.

He’d been back stateside only a year now, after almost a decade in a dozen different trouble spots in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. Kaziristan hadn’t been the first, nor the last, but it had been the one that made him start thinking long and hard about his choice of occupations.

He was what some people would call a mercenary, though he didn’t think of himself that way. He had been a private-security contractor, working for a company called MacLear Enterprises, until MacLear had gone belly up in a scandal last year—a scandal exposed by his own cousin Luke Cooper, who’d been protecting a woman being terrorized by MacLear’s corrupt secret army-for-hire.

Learning the company he’d given a decade of his life to was corrupt to the bone had been a pretty hard hit for Rick’s confidence. Why hadn’t he seen the truth?