Shadows at Midnight by Elizabeth Jennings

in the report. As absent on the twenty-fifth of November, due to a two-day meeting with the deputy prime minister of Algeria in Algiers. He’d arrived in Algiers on the evening of the twenty-fourth and made it back to the Laka Embassy only after the siege and the bombing.
    Claire froze, trembling fingers curved over the keyboard. Oh, God. The memory had been wrong. The clouds hadn’t parted at all. What she’d seen so clearly for a tempting moment hadn’t been a memory—it had been the artifact of a still-sick mind.
    She wasn’t getting better. If anything, her hallucinations had picked up enough real-world grit to seem true. Maybe this was going to be her reality for the rest of her life—flashes and visions from a sick mind. This was so scary .
    Over the past year, Claire had gritted her teeth as she lost her father, learned to walk again and slowly brought her body back from near death. There had been endless sleepless nights, days and nights of heart-wrenching panic, nightmares where she woke in a nest of sweaty sheets, heart pounding, curled up against the headboard in defense against the monsters of the night.
    That were in her head.
    She bore all of that with, if not grace, then stoicism. And she realized now that all this time, in the back of her mind was the conviction that it was all temporary. That sooner or later she’d get her health and then her mind and then her life back.
    It had been a given. She was too young for life to be over, she’d barely begun it. Wasn’t that what always happened on those made-for-TV movies where the heroine overcomes extreme odds and prevails by sheer dint of willpower?
    But . . . what if that wasn’t the scenario? What if the scenario for the rest of her life was this bleak and empty reality? What if she was going to be like this the rest of her life? Weak and hurting and alone, because who would want a woman on the borderline?
    Another forty, fifty years of this. Of waking up from a restless sleep with tears drying on her face. Of having flashes of violence suddenly flood her mind. Of finding herself crouching, terrified, in the post office or the frozen foods section of the supermarket. Of seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, but still felt terribly real.
    A lifetime of being afraid, nauseous with anxiety.
    She powered the netbook down, closed the lid and sat there with her hands on the shiny pink surface, seeing her slightly distorted reflection. Pale, mouth a thin line. She sat for a long time, trying not to think of anything at all.
    Finally the hotel phone rang. She glanced at her watch. Seven sharp.
    Dan, waiting to take her out to dinner.
    She put the laptop in its case and vowed to do her best to enjoy the evening out, her first in a year and maybe her last for a long time to come.

F IVE
    WILLARD HOTEL WASHINGTON DC
    HE was careful, cautious, thorough. Always. Those traits had taken him a long way, and would take him to even greater heights. He was halfway there already. Laka had laid the groundwork, been the base. He’d built on that, until now he was rich and powerful and about to get even richer and more powerful. He was damned if he’d let anyone or anything stop him.
    So far, it had been smooth sailing, but he knew enough to keep his guard up. Some would call it paranoia, but then he’d been CIA for twenty years. Paranoia was in the CIA songbook. Paranoia was in his DNA. It had kept him alive and prospering in a hell of a lot of dangerous places with dangerous people.
    So he kept his ear close to the ground, had trip wires everywhere, letting him know if anyone came prodding at his perimeter. Any unhealthy interest in him and his affairs, well . . . one of the advantages to his time in the CIA was a small army on call. Good men who’d served their country and now served him. And he sure as hell paid a lot better than Uncle Sam.
    He’d placed beacons in the pixels of the logos of all the reports on the Laka bombing. CIA, DIA, State, Marine