Chapter 1

"To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster: Either condemn or crown your hatred." ~ Pierre Corneille ~

Sitting in my car in the parking lot, I examined the surroundings. The building looked solid, safe, eminently professional. It was all brick and glass, and people in uniforms or in professional clothes went in and out of doors that swung smoothly closed on pneumatic hinges. The lawn outside was smooth and recently mowed, the bushes and trees were healthy and well-trimmed, and the flower beds were immaculate.

I just couldn’t believe Anthony worked there.

The car’s engine ticked with dissipating heat and Lane panted in my ear, content to rest his heavy head on my shoulder from his normal spot in the backseat. I tried to figure out what to do. On the one hand, this was the first place Rushfeldt would go, so it was the most dangerous place I could be. On the other, there was a chance Anthony didn’t know, and we really needed to at least touch base about what we were going to do. None of this could be said over the phone. I wouldn’t stay in D.C., though. Anthony had kept me safe before, but with both of us in one place, we’d make an awfully tempting target. So, really, I should just start the car back up and head out. But Anthony… I frowned. No, this wasn’t a decision I could justifiably make on my own. I needed to at least go in and talk to him.

Reaching up, I scratched Lane behind his ear. He made a noise, his equivalent of a cat’s purr. It always sounded strange coming from such a huge animal, and I smiled, looking in the rearview mirror at him. “Do you think they let dogs in there?” I asked. He made a noise that sounded like an old man laughing. “I don’t think so either. You going to be good if I leave you here? I won’t be long.”

In answer to that, Lane decided he’d had enough scratching, and quickly lifted his head away from me. Awkwardly, he turned around three times on the small backseat, then collapsed down in a pile of muscle and limbs. I turned around in my seat to smile at him. He humphed at me, then laid his head down on his front paws.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. I rolled down all four windows a little bit, then took the keys out of the ignition and grabbed my purse. “Stay,” I said. Lane only raised his head when I opened the door, and looked at me as I closed and locked it. Silently, I extended my hand in a reinforcement of the command. He put his head back down on his paws.

Satisfied, I turned and scanned the parking lot again. Finding no threats, I walked quickly towards the front door, staying aware of my surroundings all the while. It didn’t hurt to be careful, after all… I made it to the front door without incident and went inside. Once through, I relaxed a little, and went immediately to the front desk.

“Hello,” said the young man sitting there. He examined me, eyes lingering for a moment on my chin, as everyone’s did. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to see Anthony DiNozzo, please,” I said, setting my purse down on the counter.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I wasn’t able to call ahead.”

He nodded. “I’ll need two pieces of identification. A driver’s license and social insurance card, if you have it.”

I nodded curtly and opened my purse. Digging out my wallet, I extracted the two cards and handed them to him. He looked at them (very thoroughly, I was glad to see), and typed something into the computer. After a while, he picked up the telephone and dialed a number. “Agent DiNozzo?” he said. “There’s a Jennifer Levasseur here to see you. She checks out in the system.” He paused. “Thank you.” He hung up and turned to me with a smile, handing back the cards. “He’ll be right down to sign you in.”

“Thank you,” I said as I put them back in my wallet. “Oh, I think you should…” Unsure what to say that wouldn’t sound terrible, I held out my purse to him. “I don’t want you to think I’m hiding anything.”

He looked confused, but he took it from me. Setting it on the desk in front of him, he opened it and looked inside. He immediately stiffened and looked back up at me, suddenly wary.

I smiled, hoping it was pleasant and trustworthy to his eyes. “I expect you’ll have to keep it here until I come back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will.” He stood up and moved out of my reach, then reached into my purse and drew out the knife belt. I watched as he opened a drawer in the desk, put it inside, then took a key ring from his pocket, selected one, and locked the drawer. Only when all that was done did he come back and hand me my purse.

I smiled at him again. “Thank you,” I said. “Do I get a receipt for those?”

He seemed to shake out of it. “Of course,” he said, He quickly drew a pad of paper towards him and scribbled a note on it.

I had just taken the handwritten receipt when a familiar voice called my name. I turned towards it. Just the sight of him, coming towards me with his arms opening, and relief beyond anything I’d ever felt before coursed through me. My knees weakened, but not so much that I couldn’t cross the distance between us and throw myself into his arms. “Anthony,” I whispered. There were tears that threatened, but I didn’t let them fall.

“Hey.” He pulled back and looked at me critically, his hands on my arms. “Hey,” he said again. “What’s wrong?”

“Not here,” I said.

He didn’t even hesitate. “Okay. You carrying?”

I held up the receipt. “Already gave them to your man over there.”

“All of them?”

“I can keep my jackknife, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that should be fine. Stay here. I’ll get your pass.” He walked over to the desk and had a few words with the boy there, signed a paper, then took the pass he handed him. He came back to me, turning it over in his hands. He clipped it to my collar, gently and efficiently, then put his arm over my shoulders and steered me towards the elevator.

I slipped my arm around his waist. “I missed you,” I said.

He pulled me closer. “I missed you too.”

“Never coming back to Baltimore?”

“Not much vacation with NCIS. Too much to do.”

“Are you working too hard?”

He laughed, pushing the up button for the elevator. The door opened and we stepped inside. He hit the button for his floor. “What, don’t think I have it in me?”

“I know you do.” The doors closed, and I turned and embraced him again. His arms came around me, and I closed my eyes.

“Jen, what’s wrong?” he asked softly.

“I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“Rushfeldt.”

“What?” The infinite surprise in his voice confirmed my worst fear. No one had told him. I pulled back. He was smiling down on me, understanding and tolerant. “Why now? After all this time?”

“He’s out, Anthony.”

Shock and fear came first, followed by tainted disbelief. He let me go and stepped away. “What? No. Someone would have called me.”

I shook my head. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I had to find out from a nurse at the hospital. She called me three days after he escaped.”

“Escaped? Not released.” I nodded. Just then, the elevator reached the floor and the doors opened. His features hardened. “Come on. I’m going to make some calls.”

I followed him out into a well-lit example of modern corporate architecture. Open cubicles made up the bulk of the area, though there was a staircase at one end of the open room. The walls were painted a deep reddish colour, more like blood than the classic bookbinder’s red I’d painted my library at home, and the carpet was a serviceable gray. Metallic and white accents caught the light that came through the windows that made up one side of the room. My attention was briefly caught by an extensive series of headshots framed and mounted on the wall to my left; the collage was labeled “NCIS Most Wanted.” It heartened me a little to see red tape lines through several of them.

Anthony turned immediately right upon exiting the elevator, and made a beeline for the cubicles closest to the staircase. “Give me a second,” he said, sliding in behind the desk on the corner and picking up the phone. “This won’t take long.”

I nodded, and looked around. The three cubicles around his all faced together, an inanimate indication of team and togetherness. Currently, they were all unoccupied, so I took some time to examine their contents, trying to get a feel for the people who sat there, since they were likely the ones that worked with Anthony now. The one directly across from his was fairly organized. A red wool jacket was placed neatly on top of one of the bookcases. There were a few pictures posted on the back wall, a landscape, and some mug shots. The coat was definitely feminine, but the mug shots were a little incongruous. The woman who sat there would be an interesting study in contradictions. Right next to Anthony’s cubicle, on the other side of a filing cabinet, printer stand, and large screen, was a desk that was also fairly neat, but stacked with bits of technical detritus. There were less personal touches here, almost as though the person, a young man, most likely, wasn’t quite comfortable in the place yet. A new addition, perhaps? The cubicle diagonally across was inconsistent with the others. It was not arranged on the diagonal, but rather at right angles to the passage way and shelves behind it. Yet, from the placement of the chair, the individual who sat there had a good view of all the other desks, and would be able to speak to and face them without so much as spinning his chair at all. This was the focal point of the team, and I walked over to examine it closer. The other desks, even Anthony’s, were neat, but this, this was painfully neat. Everything was precise, organized. Three monitors were arrayed on the perpendicular side of the desk. Directly behind the desk was a large screen, whose display currently mirrored the one that stood next to Anthony’s desk. The presence of that screen, coupled with the extensive number of monitors, made me believe even more strongly that the man who sat there was the team’s leader. Military, I decided, or ex-military. Most likely older, as well, around my age.

Anthony’s voice rose slightly, and I turned back to him. “Yeah… Yeah… Yeah, you know what? Thanks for letting me know.” He hung up forcefully and glared at the phone. “Asshole. No honour among thieves? No honour among LEOs.”

Slowly, I walked back over to his desk. “What did they say?”

He waved his hand angrily. “Oh, you know, that Rushfeldt escaped from the institution, but that the psychologists had been making so much progress with him, they didn’t think it was necessary to warn me, since he’s likely not going to re-offend, and is going to be more focused on evading the police than anything else.”

I smirked. “Really.”

He put his head in his hands and swore viciously. I waited. Finally, he took a deep breath, sat back up, and looked at me. “This nurse that called you?”

“A friend of a friend. She wanted to warn me that she thought Rushfeldt had been fooling the psychologists. She was really surprised that I didn’t know he’d escaped at all.”

“Fooled the psychologists how?”

I chilled again, just as I had when Helen had first told me. “They think they’ve been successful in reducing his rage. He didn’t seem to be nearly as volatile around authority figures and women anymore. But Helen said that she didn’t think that was because his rage was reduced. She said it was because his rage was focused.”

“On?”

“Us.”

“Great. She say why she thinks this?”

“He doesn’t let much slip around the authority figures, but the peons? She’s a night nurse, so she’s even lower on the food chain than most. She heard him talking to himself one night; he said our names before he noticed she was there and shut up. She also said that sometimes he’ll draw at night. The ones he doesn’t want the psychologists to see he shreds and eats, but she said once she was checking on him, and she caught a glimpse of a work in progress. It was me. Very decisively dead.”

Anthony sighed. “He’s a sociopath, but he’s not stupid. Do you really think he’ll come after us?”

“I think that’s why he broke out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Helen told me he’s got terminal cancer. He’s got about three months left. I think he decided he needed to finish what he started.”

He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “He’s coming after us.”

“Oh yes.”

“Honestly, could this month get any worse?”

“You’re taking this very well.”

“So are you.”

I shrugged. “I’m not stupid. I’m scared. But I’m not weak. Not anymore.”

He reached out. I came around his desk and put my hand in his. He squeezed it tightly as I sat down on the edge of the desk. “You never were, Jen.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling.

He smiled back, then became serious. “Okay, we need to decide what to do. The first thing, I think, is to get you into a safe house–”

“No,” I said.

“Jen, you have to be kept secure–”

“And I said no, Anthony. I’m not going to be ‘kept’ anywhere, any more than you are.” I dropped his hand. “Look, I came, I told you, you’re warned. I think the best thing now is for me to go.”

“Go where?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Anywhere. I took an emergency sabbatical from the University. Maybe Lane and I will drive the country for three or four months. If he can’t pin me down, we’re both safer.”

“How do you figure?”

“He won’t want to leave the job half-done, will he? The best thing for him is to have us both in the same room and do us in at once.”

“That’s so risky, Jen. All he needs is one informant in one small town, and he’s got you. You don’t exactly blend.”

My temper started to get away from me. Damn my red hair, and damn me for being so stereotypical, but I couldn’t stop it. “So what then? You put me up somewhere here? If we’re both in D.C., we’re practically gift wrapping ourselves for him!”

“I’ve got access to resources here that are a hell of a lot better than Baltimore.”

“And what about me? I’m just supposed to sit in some hotel room being babysat by your resources?” I stood up and looked down at him. “I didn’t spend four years reconstructing myself physically and mentally just to lie down and wait for him to come and kill us both.”

I whipped around, intending to leave before he could stop me, and ran into a brick wall. At least that was what it felt like. I was pushed back by the momentum, but easily shifted what could have been a stumble into a smooth transition to a ready stance, legs bent, fists raised to hit or block. Then I was looking into startling blue eyes. They examined me, then turned to Anthony.

“Something I need to know about, Tony?” their owner asked.