Primary Command: The Forging of Luke Stone—Book #2 (an Action Thriller)

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

3:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Queen Anne’s County, Maryland

Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay

“You’re home early.”

Luke looked at his mother-in-law, Audrey, taking his time, soaking her in. She had deep-set eyes with irises so dark, they seemed almost black. She had a sharp nose, like a beak. She had tiny bones and a thin frame. She reminded him of a bird—a crow, or maybe a vulture. And yet, in her own way, she was attractive.

She was a well-preserved fifty-nine now, and Luke was aware that as a young woman in the late 1960s, she had done some modeling for newspaper and magazine advertisements. As far as he knew, it was the only work she had ever done.

She had been born into an arm of the Outerbridge family, vastly wealthy New York City and New Jersey landowners since before the United States became a country. Her husband, Lance, came from the equally old-money St. John family of New England lumber barons.

As a general rule, Audrey St. John frowned upon work. She didn’t understand it, and she especially didn’t understand why someone would do the kind of dangerous, dirty work that occupied Luke Stone’s time. She seemed continually flabbergasted that her own daughter, Rebecca St. John, would marry someone like Luke.

Audrey and Lance had never accepted him as their son-in-law. They had been a toxic influence on this relationship since well before he and Becca exchanged their vows. Her presence here was going to make it that much harder to talk to Becca about this latest assignment.

“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, trying to sound cheerful.

He had just walked in. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt, but so far that was his only nod toward being home. He reached into the refrigerator and came out with a cold beer.

It was full summer now, and the weather was fine. The surroundings here were beautiful. He and Becca were living at her family’s cabin in Queen Anne’s County. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years.

The place was an ancient, rustic place sitting on a small bluff right above the bay. It was two floors, wooden everything, with creaks and squeaks everywhere you stepped. The kitchen door was spring-loaded, and slammed shut with enthusiasm. There was a screened-in porch facing the water, and a newer stone patio with commanding views right on the bluff.

They had started gradually replacing the generations-old furniture to make the place more suited for everyday living. There was a new sofa and new chairs in the living room. One Saturday morning, by hook or by crook, and by sheer animal will, Luke and Ed Newsam had managed to insert a king-sized bed in the upstairs master bedroom.

Even with those upgrades, the sturdiest thing in the house remained the stone fireplace in the living room. It was almost as if the stately old hearth had been there, looking out over Chesapeake Bay since biblical times, and someone with a sense of humor had built a small summer cabin all around it.

It really was an incredible place. Luke loved it there. Yes, it was far from his office. Yes, if the SRT job really did pan out, and it looked like it was going to, they were going to have to move closer. But for now? Paradise. The ninety-minute commute home didn’t seem nearly as bad, just knowing that this was the payoff at the end of it.

He glanced out the window. Becca was on the patio, feeding the baby. Luke would have loved nothing more than to take a seat out there with them, gaze out at the water and the sky, and just sit there until the sun went down. But it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, he had to pack for his trip. And before he even started, he had to do the hardest thing—announce that he was going.

“Did you get punched on the job?” Audrey said.

Luke shrugged. Even though he could feel them well enough, he had almost forgotten the scrape on his cheek and the swollen jaw line. Pain was an old friend of his. When it wasn’t excruciating, he could barely feel it. There was almost something comforting about it.

He cracked open the beer and took a slug. It was ice cold and delicious. “Something like that. But you should see the other guy.”

Audrey didn’t laugh. She made a sort of half-grunt and went upstairs.

Luke was tired. It had already been a long day, with Martinez laid to rest, the fight with Murphy, and everything else. And really, it was just getting started. He intended to be here for an hour before he headed right back to the city again, from there to Turkey, and then, if all the signs were favorable, over to Russia.

He went outside. Becca nursing the baby was like an impressionist painting, her bright red jumper and floppy sun hat against the green grass, and the vast sweep of pale blue sky and dark water. There was a double-mast tall ship replica at full sail in the distance, moving slowly to the west. If he could press STOP and freeze this moment in time, he would do it.

She looked up, saw him there, and smiled. Her smile lit him up. She was as pretty as ever. And a smile was a good thing, especially these days. Maybe the darkness of this postpartum depression was beginning to lift.

Luke took a deep breath, sighed quietly, and smiled himself.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said.

“Hello, handsome.”

He leaned down and shared a kiss with her.

“How’s the baby boy today?”

She nodded. “Good. He slept for three hours, Mom kept an eye on him, and I even got to take a nap. I don’t want to promise anything, but we might be turning a corner here. I hope so.”

A long pause drew out between them.

“You’re home early,” she said. That was the second time in the past five minutes someone had said that. He took it as a bad omen. “How did your day go?”

Luke sat down across the small round table from her and took a sip of his beer. As always, he believed that when trouble was brewing, the thing to do was to get right to the meat of it. And if he could get past the worst of it, maybe it would happen too fast for Audrey to come out here and pile on.

“Well, I have an assignment.”

He noticed himself fudging. He didn’t call it a mission. He didn’t call it an operation. What kind of assignment was it? Was he going to interview a local craftsman for the weekly newspaper? Maybe it was a high school science project?

Instantly, she was wary.

Her eyes stared deep into his, searching there. “What is it?”

He shrugged. “It’s a diplomatic snafu, really. The Russians took three American archaeologists prisoner, and confiscated their little submarine. They were diving in the Black Sea, looking for the wreck of an old trading ship from ancient Greece. They were in international waters, but the Russians felt they were too close to Russian territory.”

Her eyes never wavered. “Are they spies?”

Luke took another sip of his beer. He let out a sound, a short bark of laughter. She was good at this. She’d already had a lot of practice. She went right for the open vein.

He shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“And you’re going to go where, and do what?”

He shrugged. “I’m going to Turkey, to see if we can get them released.” The statement was true, as far as it went. It also overlooked an entire continent’s worth of detail. It was a sin of omission.

And she also knew that. “To see if we can get them released? Who are we?”

Now it was a chess match. “The United States of America.”

“Come on, Luke. What are you not telling me?”

He sipped the beer again and scratched his head. “Nothing of substance, hon. The Russians are holding three guys. I’m going to Turkey. They want me there because I have experience in the kind of mission that led to this. If the Russians are willing to negotiate, I probably won’t even be directly involved.”

Behind Luke, the screen door slammed. Becca’s eyes looked past him for a second. Dammit! Here came Audrey.

Becca’s eyes were suddenly angry. Tears welled up in them. No! The timing couldn’t be worse. “Luke, the last time you went abroad, I was almost nine months pregnant. You were going to Iraq to arrest someone, remember? A police job, I think you called it. But it turned out you were going to rescue the president’s…”

He raised a finger. “Becca, you know that isn’t true. I did go to arrest someone, and the arrest was uneventful…”

That was a lie. Another lie. The arrest was a slaughterhouse.

“…daughter from Islamic terrorists. Your helicopter crashed. You and Ed fought Al Qaeda militants on a mountaintop.”

“All of that happened after we were already there.”

“I’m not stupid, Luke. I can read between the lines of newspaper reports. The articles admitted that dozens of people were killed. That tells me there was a bloodbath and you were right in the middle of it.”

Luke raised his hands a tiny amount, as if she had just pulled the world’s tiniest gun on him. The baby was still there, suckling away as if none of this was happening.

“It’s an assignment, hon. It’s my job. Don Morris…”

Now she raised a finger. “Don’t you Don Morris me. I don’t even blame Don anymore. If you didn’t want to go on these suicide missions, then he couldn’t get you to go. It’s really that simple.”

Now she was crying, the tears pouring down.

“What’s going on?” a voice said. The voice was too eager. It sensed blood in the water, and was moving in for the kill.

“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, without even turning around.

Becca stood and handed Audrey the baby. She looked down at Luke, her eyes hard. Her entire body was shaking now from the tears.

“What if you die?” she said. “We have a son now.”

“I know that. I’m not going to die. As always, I’m going to be very careful. Even more so now, because of Gunner.”

Becca stood there next to her mother, her hands balled up in fists. She looked like a toddler who was about to start shrieking in the middle of the supermarket. Her mother, in contrast, was calm, simpering, self-satisfied. She bounced the baby in her thin, birdlike arms and cooed to him in quiet baby talk.

“It’s going to be okay,” Luke said. “It’s going to be fine. I know it is.”

Abruptly, Becca stormed off, up the small hill toward the house. A moment later, the screen door slammed again.

Now Luke and Audrey stared at each other. Audrey had the sharp, predatory eyes of a hawk. Her mouth opened.

Luke raised a hand and shook his head. “Audrey, please don’t say a word.”

Audrey ignored him. “One day, you’re going to come back here and you’re not going to have a wife anymore,” she said. “Or a house to live in, for that matter.”