Shadows at Midnight by Elizabeth Jennings Page A

Security Detachment records. Expunging his name had been easy for someone who knew what he was doing. The beacons sent a signal to his computer if anyone searched for his name in the reports. His computer was programmed to buzz him if it received a signal.
    A whole year had gone by without any warning signals. He’d started to relax. Even started to think of removing the beacons, which represented a tiny risk, but a risk nonetheless. Maybe some Homeland Security nerd, bored, looking for something to do, would come up with an algorithm to find beacons. So he’d been weighing the pros and cons of removing them.
    He hadn’t come this far by courting risks.
    The buzz had come in the middle of a dinner in his honor in the grand ballroom of the Willard. Throw a rock and you’d hit an ambassador, a minister or a billionaire. All there for him, to honor him for trying to turn a continent around. Good works, writ large, the kind that went into the history books, and you could buy a piece of it. Be counted as among the great and the good.
    Black tie, twenty-five thousand dollars a plate. Cheap at the price.
    And they vied for tickets, fought over the privilege of being there, because it was the event of the month. People lining up to give him money, to praise him.
    At the discreet buzz in his two-thousand-dollar tuxedo pants, he excused himself and found a quiet corner to consult his PDA. Immensely powerful, as small as a cell phone. It gave him access to his home computer.
    Fuck! He actually stepped back in surprise, then caught himself gracefully. Someone had done a search on his name! Someone with a DIA password. What the hell was that about?
    He emailed an NSA agent who moonlighted by the hacker name of Wizard. Wizard was kept on retainer, a cool two hundred thousand a year, to be useful in exactly this kind of situation. Wizard would find out who was sniffing around his perimeter.
    Five minutes later, a message popped up on his BlackBerry. The request had been traced back to the IP address, then triangulated for the street address.
    He frowned. The request had come from a hotel, a small one, basically a bed-and-breakfast, in downtown Washington. He scrolled down . . . and froze. The request had come from room seven of the hotel. The guest who was checked into room seven was Claire Day.
    Shit!
    When he’d first heard that Claire Day had been wounded in the blast, he’d worried that she might have seen something. The embassy was supposed to have been empty except for one lone Marine Guard. And yet Claire Day had been found outside in the compound, very badly injured, and had been immediately whisked away by her father.
    He’d kept a close eye on her, ready to give the order to have her taken out at any time. But she’d spent three months in a coma and by all accounts was barely back on her feet. She was down in Florida and no threat to him.
    What the fuck was she doing in Washington DC, checking up on him? She was supposed to be down south, still loony from the blast. Barely able to walk and suffering from amnesia. Whatever she was doing, she was a danger to him. She had to go. He should have taken care of this from the start, when he first heard she’d been at the embassy during the bombing and had survived.
    It never pays to let loose ends free. They need to be snipped, fast.
    The voice of the secretary of state boomed from the ballroom. “And now, let’s give a special hand to our guest of honor, a great American and a great philanthropist, a man who single-handedly . . .”
    The secretary was going to call him to the podium very soon. He pulled out a throwaway cell phone from an inside pocket, using a handkerchief. He always carried a throwaway cell in case he had to call his team together. The cell phone would go into the drains several miles from here when he was done. The cells were never used twice.
    Heston, the head of his team, picked up on the first ring.
    “Yes?” No names, ever.
    “Clean-up action,” he