Chapter 25
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It was some time later when Fiona sighed and laid her head on his damp chest. "I like hearing your heart beat like this," she said.
He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips. "You do."
"Hmhm. It makes me happy."
"Me, too."
Careful officially died the day they were married, only to give birth to something entirely new. It brought a gift of unexpected intensity and a deeper intimacy. An intrinsic coupling of mutual desire accompanied a primal human need neither had been fully aware existed before they found how much each of them wanted their child.
If such a miracle occurred they agreed what would be abandoned and what would be kept, should it come to that. There had been too much heartache between where they had started until now to delay something so important, so necessary.
Their marriage had yet to occur when Michael returned to the tender subject he touched on when Fiona told him she wasn't in any condition to drive. She'd been trembling, unsteady and she knew her distraction would hamper her ability to drive safely.
He shouldn't have told her about the marriage license that way, but he was compelled by a sense of urgency.
No condition to drive. Her words flipped him end for end and turned a snapping breeze of emotion into a hurricane force he couldn't slow or hide.
He wanted this condition to mean something. And it might have, but it was too soon since she had only been free to be his for such a short time. No. They had not been careful. He hadn't been because he didn't want to be, but when he told her this condition could mean something else, she worried. He tried to reassure her, but he could tell it didn't.
A wink of time returned a memory of her watching a small girl held in her father's arms remove his cap from his head and put it on hers. It was so large it slid over her eyes and the child turned the moment into a game of peek-a-boo. When Fi glanced back at him with the warmth of delight, he frowned. Soft, curved lips dropped into a straight line as she coolly evaluated him then stood and left Carlitos without waiting for him to follow. A few years later, she'd worn the same expression and had walked away again after correcting him for calling Nate's infant son it. "Babies have genders, Michael."
They had never spoken of what he had protected himself from, but in the past year so many things had changed between them, they should have talked about it.
It had always been there, always between them, with every precaution he took. He always assumed she had done the same, but he realized he had never asked. Not once. Not even when he hadn't remembered to say no because the urgency of seeing her again overpowered his ability to say it.
That no had always been his.
It was sensible. Intelligent. Protective.
He owned it.
He'd embraced NO from the moment he first understood the power of his body. No.
He hadn't understood the power of his no, until every no he had given her resounded as loud, discordant clanging he'd been unable to hear until the moment she disappeared, surrounded by that SWAT team.
In the first weeks after he'd lost her, he'd returned to every conversation he could recall between them. Pieces here and there, words that meant something to her, words he'd heard but purposefully denied, deflected or ignored, knowing his interpretations hurt her, yet he couldn't stop. He had not wanted to stop because . . . then . . . then she would be angry with him and it was always so much easier for him because she was angry.
Until.
Until she'd raced through sniper fire willing to die with him.
Until she'd willingly surrendered her freedom to free him.
Until he understood there might never be a way to free her, and walls and bars and barriers would always be between them.
Until he discovered he no longer wanted barriers.
Until he discovered he wanted no to be yes.
Until he struck that bargain with God.
He'd promised if God could see His way to free Fiona, he would give her everything her heart needed from him. The first was that ring he'd kept safe, kept hidden for too many years. Then he promised to honor her need to have a home, something he always believed best suited for anyone other than himself. And he promised if she wanted this final gift he could give her, he would say yes. He was dazed to learn how much he wanted it.
So he'd sat there in her car after they'd purchased the ring she wanted him to have. He'd taken a deep breath. Before they promised each other with vows he never intended to break, before they began as husband and wife, he needed to know if she wanted to be a mother if he was the father.
Fiona held her breath at his question. She didn't speak. She looked down to her lap then pressed a hand to her chest. He had misread her. He looked away, turning to stare without seeing out the car window, thinking this would be the price for saying no so many times, but he would gladly pay it if it meant she would be his.
"I'm sorry, Fi. I thought . . . hoped . . . it would be . . ."
"You've made it very clear you didn't want that. Ever. And after learning about your father, I understand."
He continued to look away. If these were her conditions, he would take them. "Maybe I didn't, but now . . . I . . . " He couldn't finish.
"Michael, I have always wanted your child."
He turned then to look at her but she was staring straight ahead. "Always, Fi?"
"Even when I wanted to do great bodily harm to you."
He smiled. He had given her countless opportunities.
She turned her face to look into his and put a hand on his arm. He'd looked down at her hand, felt its warmth, then looked into her eyes, so sad, so dark, so serious, so beautiful.
"For as much as I love you, Michael, I could never allow you to put our child in harm's way by what you do."
"I would not do that," he said softly as she lifted the greatest of weights from him.
She studied him for a moment then opened her door. "We need to swap. I can drive now."
Neither fully regained equilibrium until much later that day, until they both said yes to each other.
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Jesse's choice for dinner had been perfect.
She didn't know what she was hungry for until he started opening the take-out boxes. He never asked what she would like. What he brought home would be what they would eat. If he was expecting her to complain, it didn't happen.
She'd learned they shared nearly identical tastes in food.
Tonight, he brought take out from an Italian bistro, something bursting with flavor, not too heavy, not too much, perfect. He had wine; she had ice water. Any form of alcohol didn't mix with the pain meds she was taking, and she still needed them, as much as she wanted that not to be true. When she'd gone to take her meds, he'd cleaned the kitchen.
After dinner they sat across from each other, reading. She'd requested the material from Michael and he'd retrieved the files from headquarters and brought them to her. Jesse had been reading some kind of technical spec sheet of something that appeared mechanically complicated, but as soon as she put down one file to pick up another, he dropped his sheet and picked up what she'd finished. Eventually, he'd moved to sit on the same couch. Between them, stacks of intelligence reports provided an ample barricade.
She'd looked into his background after she'd first worked with him. Until Michael burned him, he'd had a rising career in counterintelligence. Now, he wanted nothing to do with it, and despite his self-expired government background, she wasn't about to pull the Confidential rubber stamp out, not for this, not for him.
When she grew weary, she yawned and rose and went into his bedroom. She used the bathroom, took some more drugs, brushed her teeth, then turned off the light and situated herself near the center of the bed, snuggled under the afghan and dozed off.
When he joined her later, he slid his arm under her to tug her closer. She moved up, sighed and rested her cheek on his t-shirt covered chest. He turned his head and kissed her forehead. She carefully moved her injured arm over his middle and he gently rested one broad, warm palm against her arm.
"Dani?" It was nearly a whisper.
"Mmm."
"You know we're going to have to talk about this."
"Mm."
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Jesse called around noon to ask Michael to meet him at his office.
"Why don't I just walk down to your . . ." Michael started to say.
"I'd rather meet at the office, if you don't mind. I'm here now."
Jesse was waiting at the main entrance to let him in. On a Saturday afternoon, most SecuriCorp employees were elsewhere. Their footsteps echoed loudly across the lobby and up the sweeping stairs to Jesse's private office. They went past his assistant's desk and entered his office.
"Why did you want to meet here?"
"I've been thinking about your operation."
"We all have."
Once they got to Jesse's office, he turned and asked, "how well do you know Sophia Valdez?"
"Not well," Michael admitted. "Beyond what we did to help her several years ago, I hadn't seen her until the flight to D.C."
"Then let me show you what I found." He motioned to the table and the laptop sitting open there. "Take a look."
Michael sat down and looked at the screen, then clicked on the VALDEZ file. Page after page after page, the file contained nearly 70 years of the Valdez family history of marijuana and heroin smuggling in Mexico. Newspaper clippings and old microfiche documents had been selected and stored. It wasn't until he reached the last page in the first folder that he saw the family photo and read the caption. He looked up at Jesse.
"And look who's next to her."
"I saw that. Her husband. They were cute kids. They might have grown up here, but there's a family link to Mexico, and it's not just his family."
Michael looked away for a moment. "Where did you get this?"
"Here."
"Here?"
"Yeah." Jesse pulled out a chair across from where Michael was sitting. "This company was founded in the 1940s by some former Bureau of Internal Revenue people. We were at war on two fronts then, and Japan controlled the Asian opium supply. So these were the guys helping the ag advisers who were showing the locals how to grow the stuff here. Poppies."
"Meds for soldiers."
"Exactly. We'd been worried about that even before Pearl Harbor, so we convinced Mexican farmers to grow it because we needed a morphine supply. Taught them the a-b-cs of growing, drying, shipping. It wasn't the best quality, but it worked, and we used them until the war ended and regained access to the high quality Asian stuff . But you don't give up a crop you sell just because you lose a buyer. You find new buyers. You smuggle it until you get something better to smuggle, like cocaine in the 80s."
"By then drugs were in the culture. Everywhere,"Michael observed.
"And we were responsible because we wanted to take care of our people. Yeah, peace, love, LSD, whatever." Jesse snapped his attention back. His mother had been murdered by a druggie for the cash in her register. "So these guys from the 40s foresaw what could happen and the kept records on what and who they dealt with. When they formed this company they kept recruiting agents from the Drug Abuse Control Bureau and then the Federal Bureau of Narcotics."
"The DEA's parent agencies."
"Yeah, and when those people left government work for SecuriCorp, they updated with their material, which is why there's such a long timeline. The founders did this out of self-interest and self-protection. At one time, they thought they could turn the company into a partner with the new DEA, but it never happened. They wised up, the company diversified and now we provide high end protection for everything that needs high end protection. But we don't deal with drug dealers. They've got their own people.
"You shouldn't make the mistake of thinking these people are not as intelligent, skilled and as lethal as anyone on our side. The folks who run the cartels don't use drugs. They're professionals the same way we are, only their business is really ugly."
"Yeah," Michael agreed. "What made you look through your company's old files? It's not a logical place or something anyone could know about."
Jesse looked around the room, his own personal kingdom.
"You were off with Raines and Max somewhere when I first came back. You wanted back in. I thought I did. But I couldn't take it. I wanted out as soon as I got there, so I couldn't really believe my good fortune when the first place I looked into offered me an incredible opportunity in place I like, near people I like. And they put me in a position where all the doors were open on the inside. Well, you know my suspicious nature. I took the job then had to dig' that's when I found all this stuff," he motioned toward the laptop, "it triggered an alert. But it only went to one person. One of the original founders of the company. He'd been waiting to see how long it would take me to find it."
"You're still here, so I'm assuming that was good thing."
"It was," Jesse agreed. "I came back from lunch one day, and he was sitting at my desk, flipping through stuff."
Michael smiled. "What'd you do?"
"I was prime. Asked him who the hell he was and why he was in my office. So he told me. And then he asked me why I'd been snooping into stuff I had no business looking into. I told him it's always good to know where the skeletons are, and the people who founded the company had a lot of them. He's not the only one from the 70s who's still active but out of sight. No, what triggered this today was something I read in one of the reports you brought Pearce last night."
"Those were classified."
"I know, Westen. So are these files, privately. Not everyone can access them. There's another folder there. Open it."
Michael glanced back to the screen. The second folder was labeled Buller. He clicked it open and there, first page of the first file was a grainy image of . . .
"Fullerton."
Quickly, Michael scanned the content. Anson was the son of one of the agricultural advisers from the1960s who helped the Mexican government export their illegal crops and bypass their government's weak oversight.
Jesse shook his head. "I think he's blackmailing them. Might be good to figure about what before you fly to the Dominican Republic with her. Sam's right about the DEA objective. It's all politics. This game is getting deeper. I'll be honest, Mike. I don't think our little tag team is up for it, even with Peterbaugh and Carnahan helping. Not when you got two cartels on the opposite end of the field."
Michael blew out a deep breath. "I have to agree."
"I don't think we want to risk anyone, do we?"
"No. Did you tell Dani this yet?"
"Not yet. I wanted to come down and verify this before I called you. I know you're still working the problem. Where are you at?"
Michael leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "Not much farther than asking all the questions.
"I find one question, it raises more. I can start with Raines. His former partner. And why the hell Larry let himself be captured outside my mother's house? I thought I understood, but I keep going back to that. Then there's Anson. When he wants to show up on a surveillance camera, he does. Where the hell is he? But if he has Sophia in his sights, we've got a door to that one. The other thing I keep going back to from last year is Larry and Tyler Brennan. Brennan imported Larry to keep me in line, until Larry killed him. Brennan was an arms trader. Is that why Larry killed him? To get his hands on Brennan's supplies? And then Management. He just vanished. Or did he?"
"Yeah, that's a big, messy picture." Jesse got up and walked over to look out an office window and stuck his hands in his pockets. The room was getting darker as the sky turned grey with the approach of a late afternoon storm.
"It makes me wonder if we have it all yet." Michael got up and joined him. "Thanks for this. This just - "
"By the way, I'm supposed to recruit you."
"Yeah?"
Jesse smiled. "I think I get a bonus."
"Well," Michael said, "If Fi gets pregnant, you got a shot at it."
"You serious?"
"I am."
They stood watching the storm clouds skid across the horizon, over the water, with a pale display of flickering lightning.
"Do you think we could do this one without guns, Jess?"
"Our own coups d'état? Yeah, it's probably the best option, but we need keep the guns handy."
"Only sensible."
"So, what kind of take-out do you want? I'm thinking we need to tell Sam and Pearce about this sooner instead of later." Jesse looked at his watch. "Meet at my place at six?"
Michael agreed. "Six. I'll call Sam."
"We need get everyone on the same page."
Michael turned and looked at Jesse. "Are you and Dani on the same page?"
Jesse turned and walked away. "Don't ask, okay? Just . . . don't ask."