Price Of Honor

Chapter One

In the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

Jane had had so many names in her life, she could barely remember the one she was born with. She’d been known as Angela Jones in Eugen Corp, where she’d worked in the Level 4 lab up until the day she’d disappeared with a vial of deadly avian flu virus tucked into a fold of her clothes. In the paramilitary compound deep in the Idaho mountains, she’d been Captain Jane Graves to her fellow militia. She’d liked being known by the name she shared with her father, General Augustus Graves. Now she was neither Jane Graves nor Angela Jones or any of the long-ago names she’d had as a child moving from place to place with members of the freedom movement who’d taught and trained her. The FBI and Homeland Security knew her by those names and were looking for her. And her father was dead and had taken his name, all their names, to the grave with him.

Now she was just Jane.

She smiled as she slid the blades of the drugstore scissors along her neck and closed them on the strands of wet crimson hair scalloped on her skin. She knew her father was dead. She’d seen Cameron Roberts’s face in the starburst light of the muzzle flash when Roberts gunned him down. Graves had gone to the grave. No matter. She knew who she was. A name was only a mask she wore, part of her camouflage. She was a soldier, a freedom fighter, a defender of the Constitution. She’d learned that as soon as she had learned to talk, when she’d had the first name, the one she could barely recall. Her father and those who had stood for him had raised her to be a patriot. God, family, country. These were the things that mattered.

Her country, America’s America, was being perverted, weakened, humiliated in the eyes of the world by politicians who cared only for their own power and greed, by misguided and self-serving bureaucrats who pretended to care about the common man while undermining the strength and fabric of the American middle class. Her father and those like him understood that a strong America began with its leaders, men who believed in the words of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, who’d ensure America was for the Americans, and that the world knew it. His vision. Her vision. God and country, forever strong.

She was the head of the family now, and she had two missions, each part of the larger goal. She must carry out her father’s plan to show the American people, not through empty words but by positive action, the failings of the politicians they had elected to the highest offices in the land. People had grown numb to words but not to the images of their own vulnerability made brutally visible to them on their televisions and computer screens and the front pages of newspapers. Only fear for their own safety would ever change the minds of those who had grown deaf and dumb to the truth. Her father had known this, had taught her this. She and her sister and her brother had been shaped to do their part in the patriotic war. That war had not ended with the destruction of their compound or even her father’s murder. The fight had barely begun, and she would not allow the enemy an easy victory. She would continue the war, and she would free her sister.

Jennifer had been the first to fall, not killed, but captured. She was somewhere in DC, in a temporary holding facility, and Jane had only a small window of time to free her before she disappeared into the black hole of the justice system. They had all known this could happen—to any of them. She thought she’d been prepared, but the ache of Jenn’s absence was worse somehow than her father’s death. He had always been a symbol, a distant force that guided her life. Jenn was her friend, her confidant, the only one who knew her.

Methodically, she collected the fallen strands and dropped them into a plastic supermarket bag to dispose of when she left the motel where she’d spent the last few days waiting for the influx of local and federal law enforcement agents to diminish. She had no idea how many of the others had escaped, or what if anything of the compound remained. All she’d managed to salvage were her rifle, two handguns, and a gym bag filled with a quarter of a million dollars. She’d had to kill the biker who double-crossed them and tried to steal the money her father had obtained from an anonymous political donor to purchase weapons. She couldn’t risk contacting any of the other militia, not yet. She couldn’t risk returning to the compound, for it might never be a safe place again. She had no home, no refuge. All she had now were her siblings and her father’s words resounding in her mind.

She stared into her own flat blue eyes in the pitted mirror above the stained porcelain sink and decided her appearance was altered enough with the ultra-short cut and red dye she’d used. She still had a weapon more powerful than a bullet. She had Robbie, close to the president’s inner circle. And she had the phone number of the man who’d provided the money.

She should have a new name for this new phase of the mission. She studied her face, smiling softly as the German she studied another lifetime ago surfaced. Racher. Jane Racher. Jane the Avenger.

*

“You should be the one who passes on this trip,” Blair said, setting aside the newspaper she’d been pretending to read. She couldn’t concentrate on the headlines that seemed only to be a repeat of the ones from the day before, and the day before that. Dire economic forecasts, genocide in Africa and Eastern Europe, protests at home over racial profiling and sexual harassment in the workplace and on college campuses, and cries of moral decline from the increasingly vocal far-right factions. They’d been back in DC not quite three days since Cam and another agent had been taken prisoner and nearly killed, and Cam was still hollow-eyed and pale and limping. The abrasions on her face and hands from showering glass, gravel, and wood splinters were scabbed over but still red. A huge bruise, multi-hued in storm-cloud purples, covered the right side of her chest and abdomen, and the through-and-through wound in her left calf was swollen and angry. “You’re in no shape to travel.”

“Your father isn’t going to delay opening his campaign because of an action no one is supposed to know about,” Cam pointed out. “Besides, it’s only a week, and we’ll be on the train a lot of the time.”

“Yes, and the rest of the time we’ll be stumping at community meetings and donor dinners and charity balls. We’ll be eating bad food, sleeping a couple hours a night, and always running to keep on schedule. You don’t know what the campaign trail is like.”

“I know I missed all the fun the first time Andrew ran,” Cam said, easing down onto the sofa next to Blair. She slowly lifted her injured left leg and propped it on the coffee table, took Blair’s hand, and squeezed gently. “I won’t be doing any of the heavy lifting. I’ll be fine.”

“I see.” Blair set the paper aside carefully, even though she wanted to fling it across the room. The quick burst of heat welling inside her was familiar, and once, she would’ve vented, would’ve pulled away, pushed Cam away. She recognized the anger for what it was now. Somewhere in the course of living with Cameron, loving Cameron, she’d come to understand that the anger that had motivated her to act out when she was a teenager, to put herself at foolish risk when she’d gotten older, to push away those who cared about her, was really fear. She wasn’t proud of that, but she was learning to forgive herself for it. She didn’t remember when the fear had begun, but sometime between the age of twelve when she realized her mother was not going to get well, and understanding a few years later that her father’s job, his mission, put his life at risk, a chunk of ice had settled deep inside her, burning even as it froze. She’d lost her mother. She could lose her father. Love was a risk she wouldn’t take, and so she had lived with anger choking her until Cameron made it impossible for her not to love. She loved now with everything in her, and the fear of loss was huger than ever. She took a deep breath. “You know, you always say that—that you’ll be out of it. That you’ll be fine. You realize, it’s almost never true.”

“Blair,” Cam sighed, wondering if Blair had any idea how plainly her emotions played across her beautiful, expressive face. First the anger flared, bright and hot and familiar, darkening too quickly into grief and pain, and finally settling into a kind of calm Cam wasn’t sure she preferred. She’d never minded Blair’s anger, not once she’d understood its source and realized the fight was part of Blair’s strength. She’d only cared when the anger blinded Blair to danger. She threaded her fingers into the tangle of blond waves on Blair’s shoulders and sifted the golden strands through her fingers. “You ought to be angry. You’re right. Just so you know, I’ve never consciously tried to fool you. I’ve obviously been fooling myself, though.”

“I don’t want an apology. I know by now you’re doing what you have to do.” Blair slid closer on the sofa and rested her hand on Cam’s thigh. “I just don’t want you getting into a situation you can’t handle because you’re not a hundred percent.”

“I understand. What if I promise, swear right now, I’ll only be there in a supervisory capacity? We’ve got plenty of excellent people who excel at their jobs to handle anything that needs handling. No boots on the ground this time.”

Blair dropped her head onto Cam’s shoulder and sighed. “Cameron. I adore you. And I know you mean every word. But this time, if you even think about saddling up, I’m going to tie you down myself.”

Cam laughed and kissed Blair’s temple. “Is that supposed to be a threat?”

Blair stroked Cam’s abdomen and slid her hand under her faded gray T-shirt. “You could think of it as a promise.”

Cam took a swift breath, the heat of Blair’s fingertips spreading through her, swamping the ache in her bone-weary body with a flood of pleasure. “Believe me, I will.”

“Lucinda emailed me the almost-maybe-for real-final itinerary,” Blair said. “We leave tomorrow at zero five hundred. First stop, Chicago.”

“I got one from Tom Turner too. The next countdown meeting is this afternoon. I want to pay a visit to Jennifer Pattee before that.”

“Cam, you could use another day in bed.”

“I won’t argue,” Cam said. “But I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

“I’ll come with you to the White House. I want to talk to my father about what he needs me to do, anyhow.”

Cam cupped the back of her neck and kissed her. “We’ve got the morning to ourselves, then.”

Blair shifted on the sofa and slipped her hand higher, caressing the underside of Cam’s breast. “I think you should go back to bed.”

“I’m not tired,” Cam said, her stomach tightening in anticipation.

Blair lightly scraped Cam’s lower lip with her teeth, ending with a soft flick of her tongue. “I didn’t say you should go to sleep.”

*

Idaho Senator Franklin Russo clicked the remote and turned off the morning news. The local channels were still carrying follow-up stories to the destruction of the local paramilitary compound in the Bitterroot Mountains. They didn’t call it a paramilitary compound, but a wilderness camp owned by Augustus Graves, a local businessman who’d perished in the fire. The federal agents had obviously spun many of the details because there’d been no discussion of a firefight, hostages, or casualties. The story in the news was of an accidental explosion of a stockpile of weapons a local survivalist group had acquired in anticipation of future gun restrictions. From what he’d been able to learn from Hooker’s contact in the local sheriff’s department, the weapons exchange fronted by his money—or rather, the money of several of his wealthy donors—had never taken place. The Renegades, a biker group supplying the weapons, had started a shootout with the militia and all hell had broken loose. He’d helped instigate the gun battle by spreading a rumor that the militia was in bed with the ATF and planned to entrap the Renegades. He’d known he might sacrifice his money, but he’d had no choice once he’d learned the militia had captured a federal agent. As it turned out, not just one agent, but two. He couldn’t be involved with something like that. He’d needed distance, and the best kind of distance was the silence of the dead. There’d been no rumor in the news or anywhere else that could lead back to him. The only people who knew of his involvement with the militia were his aide, Derek, who he trusted completely, and his hired gun, Hooker, who he trusted quite a bit less. Still, Hooker had his uses.

Hooker was a mercenary with the kind of contacts Franklin couldn’t approach himself. As long as their association with the now-deceased Augustus Graves was unknown, he could continue to use Hooker. After all, he still had an agenda. His presidential campaign was growing in strength, but Andrew Powell was still a popular president among both the left and the center. Only the far right could see Powell for the debauched liberal he was, and in order to strengthen his own position with the less radical contingents, Franklin needed to weaken Powell’s. And what better way to shake voter confidence than to show the American people their president was incapable of leading. That he was vulnerable and weak. Franklin’s money was still out there, and if Hooker could find it, he just might be able to buy himself another weapon.