Rogue Commander, Leo Maloney [classic books for 11 year olds TXT] 📗

and crazy. The woman who had made herself “Melissa” opened the back of her cell, slipped the battery back in, powered it up, and called an unlisted number.

Lincoln Shepard answered.

“This is Bloch,” Diana said. “Tell me you’ve got something on Cobra.”

“Negative, ma’am. And I’ve been trying to reach you about something else.”

“I was having a manicure. A girl’s still a girl. Be back in half an hour.”

She hung up, put the Lexus in gear, and headed for Boston.

Chapter Sixteen

Jenny stood in the kitchen, arms folded, leaning back on the central butcher-block island and nursing a large mojito.

The house felt so empty with everyone gone, silent as a graveyard, except for the raindrops starting to patter the tree leaves outside. She’d cruised around Andover for a while after her Starbucks epiphany, but then she’d rushed home, thinking she had to walk Neika. Halfway there, she remembered that their beloved shepherd had been snatched away by the family alpha dog, Dan. Evening was coming on now, the sounds of the wind making branches click on the window panes like spooky fingernails.

Fingernails. She saw the glossy pink ones again of that woman, Melissa. This is the power. It had sounded good, but by the time she’d gotten home her enthusiasm had run out of gas. In twenty years of marriage, she’d only beaten Dan twice at checkers, and both times she suspected he’d thrown the game. What made her think she could capture his kings now? He was just so much better at all that stuff. Heck, he’d been born for it, and she’d been born as a hanger-on, his fangirl, sitting home and twirling her hair while her superhero saved Gotham.

Snoop! Melissa’s urging rang in her head, but it seemed so slimy to do it. Her marriage with Dan had always been based on trust. But was it really? She trusted him to always do the right thing, for their family, God, and country. In turn, he trusted her with nothing. She downed the rest of her drink and jammed the glass on the counter.

All right, I’m doing it. Not going to find anything anyway. And if I do, that doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it. But it’ll still feel good.

She headed for the stairs and took them two at a time, her wedding ring clanging on the banister. She walked down the carpeted hallway to the end and into Dan’s office. He never kept the door locked, which probably meant there was nothing in there to find. She flicked on the light, stood there with her hands on her hips, and looked around.

Mostly everything in there was about classic cars, which was why she’d never paid much attention to any of it. Rally posters on the walls, a bunch of the models he’d built displayed in Plexiglas boxes, a couple of trophies he’d won with the Shelby.

His big mahogany desk was pretty neat, for a man: just his computer and the requisite pictures of her and Alex. His low bookshelf was off to the side, packed mostly with car catalogues and a few war history books. Dan never read novels.

On top of that were a few framed pictures of him in his army days, and one of him and Peter Conley, both much younger, wearing nondescript uniforms and parachute gear. In all his years with the CIA, if he’d gotten any presidential citations or medals you’d never know it. Behind the desk was the evidence of Dan’s only other “collector vice,” his hundreds of DVDs.

She looked at the room’s single closet. She knew that in there at the bottom was a digital gun safe. That was no secret. He’d given her the combination long ago, just in case she ever had to use it. It would have been nice if he’d taught her to shoot, but she knew that was her own fault because she’d always resisted.

She opened the closet, swept his dress shirts and suits aside, and squatted. Then she punched in the code, and the small door hissed open. Nothing. It was totally empty. She slammed it closed and stood.

“Damn it, Dan,” she spat. He’d left her defenseless on top of everything else! She spun around, looked at his desk, and charged it, pulling his drawers open and fighting the urge to just spill everything all over the floor. Then she stopped dead still.

He’d told her once that if everything went south, he had a special place where he kept all his “real” stuff, as he put it. There, he had said, she’d find his last will and testament and some other insurance policies besides the one they kept at home. What the heck did that mean? and wherever that special place was, she knew it wouldn’t be here in the house.

What else had he said? All those weird, off-hand remarks and “spy advice.” Think.

“If you want to really hide something, you leave it out in the open.”

She spun around again and looked at every inch of wall space, but nothing jumped out. Maybe a key taped behind a poster frame? No, too obvious—he’d never do that. Then her eyes came to rest on his DVD collection. They were mostly action and war movies, a few classics, pretty much nothing of interest to her. Maybe that was the point? She’d never snoop here because their movie tastes were polar opposites. But she still ran her finger slowly across every row, scanning the titles for some sort of hint.

She stopped. Hide in Plain Sight. What the heck was that? She pulled it out, some old mystery movie from the 1980s. She opened it up, but there was nothing in there but the disc. She popped it way from its holder; nothing behind it. And then she turned it over and looked at the silver, glossy back. Carefully written with a black felt pen was one word: warm.

Her heart started pounding and her eyes went wide. She tossed the case and disc on Dan’s desk