Page 12 of Jacking Jill

SOMEWHERE IN VIRGINIA.

“Is it safe to enter?”

John Benson peered through the half-open door that led to Nancy Sullivan’s office in the still-under-construction Darkwater Headquarters nestled in the Virginia woods. Of course, Nancy insisted her starkly furnished new office was only temporary, just like her return to Team Darkwater was just temporary. But Benson knew better than that. He’d thought he’d lost Nancy, and now she was back and he’d be damned if he was letting her walk away again. Putting her in charge of setting up the new Darkwater HQ would keep her busy for a solid eighteen months, Benson figured. And with the growing Darkwater family that was almost three dozen strong if you counted the babies, Nancy would be locked in by the sense of belonging to a community.

Locked in by Benson’s favorite trap.

Emotional manipulation.

“What do you want, John?” Nancy glanced up from where she’d been squinting at some new building blueprints from the government-contractor architects that did top-secret work for the Department of Defense. Her red hair shone like fire under the golden halogen lights that Benson had insisted on installing because he hated those white LED bulbs that were only good for interrogation rooms. “If it’s about the hunt for Diego Vargas or the cover-up after that car-bomb or recruiting some more Special Forces guys to your merry band of matchmaking mercenaries, I don’t want to hear it. I offered to help out until you recovered from your injuries and were back on your feet.” She removed her tortoise-shell cat-eye reading glasses, focused those sharp blue eyes on Benson’s grinning face, flicked her gaze down towards the shiny aluminum cane that Benson had been using while recovering from the shrapnel wound that left a nice long scar on his left leg. “Do you even need that cane anymore, John? Or is it just a prop to trick me into thinking you still need me around?”

Benson glanced down at his cane, then raised it off the static-free black industrial carpet and pointed it at the blueprints spread out on Nancy’s desk. “Darkwater needs you around. You aren’t going anywhere until we’re all settled into our new digs.” He strolled through her roomy office overlooking the dark Virginia woods, twirling his cane like a baton, then tossing it carelessly against the side-wall, grinning when it stuck the landing, resting upright against the wall like a warlock’s broomstick with a life of its own. “I saw that the bulletproof glass windows got installed last week. Good job. How are we doing on the underground levels beneath the new parking lot?”

Nancy sighed, rubbed her eyes, sat back in her swivel chair and crossed her arms over her dark blue sweater that went well with her red hair and matching blue eyes. “Why are we building a fortress in the middle of Virginia, John? You expecting an invasion?”

Benson dragged over a chair from by the window, parked his ass in the seat, straightened out a crease in his tailored wool trousers. “Darkwater is evolving, Nancy. We’ve got some serious enemies now. And the missions are getting more complex, leaving more loose ends. Dangerous loose ends like Diego and that mysterious IMG Corp that took over Northrup Capital after the Hogan-and-Hannah mission.” He shrugged beneath his matching wool suit jacket. “Darkwater is in the line of fire now, and I can’t risk any of our Darkwater families getting hit in their homes. Not with kids involved. Once construction is complete, this place will be our sanctuary. I want it to be bulletproof and blastproof, with accommodations to house all the families underground in case a mission gets out of control.”

Nancy raised a well-manicured eyebrow. “When has a Darkwater mission not gotten out of control, John.” She waved away Benson’s grin, then glanced up when Keller walked past the open door talking on the phone. She waited for Keller to get far enough away, then got up and closed her office door quietly before turning back to Benson. “Hey, listen, are you sure about this guy Keller?”

“You’re not?” Benson asked, his habit of answering every question with another question taking over with practiced ease.

Nancy shrugged, her jaw tightening like she was biting her tongue for letting on that she still cared about the Darkwater family, cared about the kind of men Benson was bringing into the community which included her own daughter Brenna and five of Brenna and Bruiser’s kids—Nancy’s grandchildren—the oldest of whom were already in first grade. “All right, I admit I checked out Keller’s file after Ice mentioned that some of the Delta Force veterans called him Keller the Killer.”

Benson shrugged, waiting for Nancy to dig herself deeper into the Darkwater trap of irresistible intrigue. “All Delta guys are killers, Nancy. They’re just on our side, thank God.”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Nancy said with a tight-lipped smile. “Something about an accidental death during Keller’s Delta training. Then a clean discharge, leaving behind a sanitized military record.” She pointed towards him with her reading glasses. “That only happens when the CIA quietly recruits a Special Forces guy.” She sighed. “Was it you, John? Did you run Keller when you were still with the Agency?”

Benson stroked his clean-shaved chin which was considerably less smooth than two months ago, when he and CIA Director Martin Kaiser had gotten pockmarked with shrapnel from Benson’s exploding Ford Crown Victoria. He shook his head, then shrugged, finally nodding in his trademark noncommittal way. “I didn’t personally recruit Keller from Delta. But yes, he was being run by the Agency. We crossed paths on a couple of covert jobs back when I was the Middle East CIA Station Chief. I’ve worked with Keller enough to trust the guy.”

“If you trust Keller so much, why did you pull him back into HQ where you can keep an eye on him, John?” Nancy’s eyes sparkled with a glimmer of that old excitement that Benson knew was more addictive than any drug. “He was out there working with Jack, but you ordered him to come back into the office.” She shook her head and smiled grimly. “You don’t completely trust him, John. I can tell. And I see why, after being around him these past few weeks. There’s something off about the guy. Can’t put my finger on it, but he’s not like the others. They’re all hot-blooded warriors with the ability to stay cool. But Keller . . . he’s just . . . cold. It’s unnerving. Almost eerie.”

Benson touched his left eyebrow, which had been burned off in the blast and wasn’t fully grown in yet. “You’ve still got it, Nancy. That sixth sense about people.” He took a breath, exhaled slow, checked to make sure the door was closed all the way, then rubbed his eyes and nodded. “You know the studies done by the military about the psychology of killing, right?”

Nancy nodded darkly. “All humans have a natural aversion to killing another human. About eighty percent of the human population will not be able to pull the trigger and shoot another person even to save their own life.”

Benson nodded, but with a businesslike precision. The military was in the killing business, and it made sense for them to be good at it—which meant they needed to study it like a science, putting aside prejudice caused by emotion. “Correct. Eighty percent will not be able to bring themselves to kill. Of the remaining twenty percent, eighteen percent will be able to kill, but will experience deep remorse—sometimes for the rest of their lives.” He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers, narrowing his silver-gray eyes at Nancy. “Then there’s the remaining two percent.”

Nancy’s face paled to ghost-white. She blinked twice, swallowed once, maintained her composure admirably even though Benson could tell she was affected. “People who experience no remorse after taking a human life,” she said hoarsely. “The true psychopaths.”

Benson leaned forward, shook his head forcefully. “No. A true psychopath enjoys killing. There’s only a very tiny fraction of that two percent who actually take pleasure in killing. Keller is not one of them. He does not feel remorse, but nor does he get any sort of kick out of taking a life. He’s a textbook assassin, completely emotionless. He doesn’t feel remorse. Doesn’t feel much of anything else, either.”

“So that’s why you brought him into Darkwater?” Nancy chuckled dryly. “Because what, you think there’s some special woman out there who’s going to make an emotionless assassin feel something?” She shook her head, rubbed her eyes, groaned softly. “Oh, John. You’ve now moved on to conducting your own psychological experiments? Men like Keller are wired differently. They don’t have the capacity for normal human emotion.”

“Define normal human emotion,” Benson snapped, his eyes flashing cold with a sudden spark of defensiveness. He’d forgotten that Nancy was perhaps the only person alive who could see right into his coyote-crooked heart and call him on the questionable nature of his schemes. “Were you experiencing normal human emotion when you manipulated Alexei Yankov, turned him into a patsy for a Treasury Department undercover operation, then proceeded to have a child with him?” He grinned. “How is Brenna, by the way? She and Bruiser and the kids doing all right? How many grandkids now, Nancy? I’ve lost count.”

“You’ve also lost any sense of decency, John,” said Nancy, her hair looking redder as her temper flared. “If this is your way of trying to keep me in Darkwater, you’re losing your edge.”

Benson chuckled. “Just want to make sure you don’t forget what brought you into Darkwater to begin with, Nancy. Human emotion that is very much not normal.” He leaned forward, his wolf-gray eyes flashing like full moons. “None of us are fucking normal, Nancy. We were all meant for something bigger, and Darkwater is the vehicle that carries us there. To our destiny.”

Nancy closed her eyes, muttered an uncharacteristic curse under her breath, then shook her head and sighed through a resigned smile. “There it is. John Benson reminding me of my destiny.”

Benson laughed like the hyena-headed deity that lived inside him. “Speaking of which, did you turn up anything on IMG Corp, that mysterious offshore company which bought out Northrup Capital and now owns the Zeta Nation bonds that are financing Diego’s little drug-trafficking empire in South America?”

Nancy shook her head. “Nothing more since my last update. IMG uses a complicated network of shell-companies based in all sorts of offshore banking havens from the Caymans to Cyprus. Haven’t managed to figure out who actually owns the damn company. I’ll get back to it once I’m through checking these blueprints for the Darkwater HQ and can get the construction guys started next week. There are gaping holes in the building right now. Not much of a fortress quite yet.”

Benson nodded. “IMG isn’t the number one priority right now. They probably aren’t even a direct threat, especially now that Senator Robinson is protected by the Secret Service. It’s already December, primaries will be done by the spring, general elections next November. If things go as planned, Marcus and Delilah Robinson will be in the White House in just over a year. IMG probably already sees the writing on the wall and might just exit the game, take the loss to their portfolio and move on when the Robinsons win the White House.”

Nancy smiled, her eyes lighting up with the same excitement that Benson felt when he thought ahead to what those two remarkable Americans could do for the country. A country which Benson understood had its own great destiny, a future mission even greater than the past two hundred years of shining the light of freedom into a world of darkness, It sounded hopelessly romantic and blindly patriotic, but Benson had an unshakeable faith that although the United States was by no means perfect, it was still the best they had as a human race, a nation that was the closest embodiment of the Good and the Right that humankind, with all its beautiful flaws, had created.

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