Midnight Remembered. Gayle Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ was still standing behind his desk. He was looking down at the file he had just closed, the tips of the fingers of his right hand resting on top of it, as if it might spring open if he didn’t hold it shut.

      “Why now?” she asked again.

      His dark eyes lifted, questioning.

      “Why bring me in to talk about this now?” she asked.

      There was the smallest of pauses, not even enough to call suspicious, unless you were already suspicious. “The region is becoming unstable again. This is a loose end that was never satisfactorily resolved. The agency doesn’t like those. Since you were the last person to see Stone alive…”

      A loose end? Somehow Paige didn’t think he meant the disappearance of Joshua Stone. Steiner’s concern was almost certainly for that incredibly dangerous chemical weapon, which had gone missing in a region noted for being a powder keg.

      As she watched, the thin lips of the head of Special Ops moved into what was supposed to be a smile. It seemed cold, lacking in feeling. Maybe someone like Steiner didn’t really feel. Maybe that’s what made him good at this. And maybe that’s what had made her such a failure.

      “Good luck,” she said, barely avoiding sarcasm.

      She put her hand on the knob and opened the door, stepping out into the deserted hallway, and then closing it carefully behind her, deliberately not letting it make any noise.

      She hadn’t believed him, she realized. Intuition, maybe, but she thought Carl Steiner was lying about wanting to tie up loose ends. Something had happened, something besides the ongoing instability of that area. Something that had revived the mystery of Joshua Stone’s disappearance.

      However, whatever was happening in Special Operations these days, she told herself determinedly, was no longer of any concern to her. And thank God, it was also no longer her responsibility.

      JACK THOMPSON hunched his shoulders, holding the evening paper he’d just bought over his head as he made a run for the cab that had finally pulled up to the curb in front of his office building. He hated rain. Especially cold rain. It made all the bones that had been broken ache with a renewed vengeance.

      He jerked open the cab door, slid in across the cold vinyl of the back seat, and then slammed it shut against the downpour. After he gave the driver his address, he settled gratefully into the taxi’s stale warmth.

      He’d take a couple of extra-strength aspirin when he got home, he decided, and turn up the thermostat. He had some stronger stuff, but he saved that for the headaches. He hadn’t had one of those in almost three weeks, he realized, and he hoped to God he never had another.

      He gazed out the window as they began to move, watching the twilight-darkened streets rush by through the screen of raindrops on the glass. A car had pulled out from a parking place on the opposite side of the street at the same time the cab had, and its headlights briefly haloed the droplets with rims of gold.

      “Rain’s a bitch,” the driver said, “but I hear this stuff’ll turn to snow tonight. I ain’t looking forward to that either.”

      Jack pulled his eyes from the wet gleam of the sidewalks, which were reflecting the lights from the stores behind them, and glanced at the back of the driver’s head.

      “I hadn’t heard about the snow,” he said.

      “Not from around here, are you?” the driver asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Originally, I mean.”

      “No,” Jack said. His accent was different enough that it sometimes evoked comment, although Atlanta was pretty cosmopolitan these days. He wasn’t from the South, however, and anyone who was spotted that immediately.

      “Where you from?”

      He knew the driver was only making conversation, maybe to relieve boredom, maybe in hopes of a larger tip. And Jack could have supplied the facts easily enough. Trying to feel some connection with them, he had gone over the information the cops had provided a million times.

      He knew everything on those sheets by heart. And none of it felt real. Or meant anything to him. That would pass, the doctors had assured him. That feeling of disassociation with who he was. Simply the lingering result of the head injury. And, they had said, he was lucky its effects hadn’t been more severe.

      “Don’t push it,” the psychiatrist he had seen at the last hospital had warned. That had been just before Jack had been released from the rehab center, his physical injuries healed, even if his memory hadn’t yet returned. “If it comes, it comes. If you try to get it all back, if you push too hard, then…who knows what may happen?” the doctor had said, shrugging.

      Jack could remember wondering exactly what he meant by that. He had made it sound as if Jack’s brain would implode or something if he tried to force the return of those memories.

      Still, he knew they were there, lying just below the surface of his mind. Sometimes, especially in dreams, they were so close he could almost touch them. It was like looking down into a dark pond and seeing things beneath the surface, murky and unclear, but definitely there. Just a little too far down to reach.

      “Hey, buddy,” the cabbie said.

      Jack’s eyes came back up, meeting the questioning ones in the rearview mirror. The cabbie was looking at him as if he thought Jack was some kind of nutcase. People did that sometimes. They seemed to pick up on the fact that there was something wrong. That something about him didn’t fit anymore. Jack never was quite sure how they knew, but their eyes always looked at him just like this guy’s were now.

      “Des Moines,” he said.

      “Yeah?” the driver said, his voice relieved. “Could’a fooled me. That don’t sound like the Midwest.”

      Jack smiled, and then he deliberately turned his head, looking out the window again as the rain-glazed streets swept by. He had heard that comment a couple of times before, and it had bothered him enough that he had even checked it out. Not so much because of the accent, but because of the way he felt.

      So he had paid one of those people-find agencies on the Web to do a search for a Jack Thompson from Des Moines. It had all been there. Exactly like the cops had told him.

      Then why the hell can’t I remember any of it? Why the hell doesn’t any of it feel as if it has a damn thing to do with me?

      There was no answer from the gathering darkness to either of those questions. Just as there hadn’t been for the past three months. And he was beginning to be forced to think about the possibility that there never would be.

      PAIGE KNEW as soon as she opened the door to her apartment that someone had been there. A hint of something alien lingered in the familiar air. It took her a second or two to identify the smell as cigarette smoke.

      Maybe not the smoke itself, she acknowledged, taking a deep breath, but the whiff of it that clings to a chronic smoker’s clothes and hair. She stood before the door she had closed behind her, wondering if there was someone else in her apartment. A burglar? Or another, more dangerous kind of intruder?

      It felt empty, however. She knew intuitively that whoever had been here was now gone. If she had come home half an hour later, the heating system and the filters would probably СКАЧАТЬ