Surrender (Careless Whispers #3)(61)

Still, this nagging feeling that something isn’t right won’t go away, and I start scanning footage again, finishing the last few screen shots we have to review, then starting all over again.

“I have something for you,” Kayden says, drawing my attention back to the door, where I find him approaching with a book in his hand.

“That doesn’t look edible.”

“Not edible,” he says, “but I do think you’ll like it.” He stops beside the bed and hands me what turns out to be a copy of the book Carrie, the same book my father had owned. “I thought it might help you remember more about your father and your past.”

“I can’t believe you have this. Thank you.”

“Kevin was a diehard King fan, and he was a big reader. He always said that a good Hunter was an educated Hunter, and that meant reading often and broadly, fiction and nonfiction.” He motions toward the door. “I’ll leave you to it and grab that food.”

“Okay,” I say, amazed at how he hits every right mark for me.

He walks away and I call out, “Kayden.”

He stops at the doorway and turns to me, arching a brow. “Really,” I say, holding up the book. “Thank you for this. It feels like a little piece of him right here in Italy.”

“I’m glad,” he says softly, giving me a tiny nod and then disappearing.

I turn my attention to the book and start flipping through pages, and in my mind, I see so very much. I grab a piece of paper and start writing. Events play in my mind and I can’t wait to tell Kayden. I keep hold of the piece of paper, and I run down the hallway and into the kitchen.

“What is it?” Kayden asks, setting a plate down on the island, clearly reading my urgency.

I meet him on the opposite side of the island. “I just remembered things. Lots of things. This is what I found on the paper inside my father’s copy of the book, and it wasn’t his handwriting. It was someone else’s.” I rotate the pad to show him what I’ve printed:

Urgent: Tell DOD, Candycand5 to RumbleRed11, bury deep. That problem is a problem.

“What’s this address you’ve written underneath it?” Kayden asks.

“I found it in another part of his copy of the book,” I say. “Both were torn off in tiny strips that were barely noticeable. I’d been cleaning out the house to sell it and I wanted to feel close to my dad, so I took it to bed with me to read.”

“Sounds like the book was a way someone delivered him information.”

“That’s what I thought at the time, too,” I say, “and I wanted to know who DOD was, so I started digging for anything I could find with that name. One of his old Rolodexes had a David Densen in it, but I found nothing. So I started going through every one of my father’s hundreds of books, starting with the common denominator of Stephen King novels.”

“And you found something.”

“An email address.”

“And?”

“Every option had flaws, but I finally settled on going to a public computer and emailing as my father. The message was: Tell DOD I’m alive. Must talk. Candycand5 to RumbleRed11. Meet in person.”

“And then what happened?”

“Somehow the CIA knew it was me. They showed up at the house. Told me DOD was now dead, thanks to me, and that I was to never speak of such things again. They questioned me and asked where I found the information. I lied and said in a desk drawer. I wanted to go through the rest of the books. The next morning, I was sent on an assignment in Washington, D.C. that lasted a month.”

“What assignment?”

“A double agent I was supposed to expose and deliver, which I did. Upon returning home, I was handed a check for my family home that had burned down, which they said was related to the DOD murder and the reason they got me out of town. And why I was being assigned to San Francisco as a schoolteacher.”

“Where were you living?”

“North Carolina, right across the border from the Virginia training facility for the CIA.”

“Just far enough to not make it obvious your father was CIA,” Kayden assumes. “You used a public server to email that message?”

“Yes. A local copy shop. And I cleared my history, but that can be retrieved.”

“They’d been watching you, thinking you’d lead them to something connected to your father.”

“They had to be, which must mean whatever it was is big. I mean, I was a long shot, but . . . it can’t be the necklace, right?”

He taps the address I’ve written down. “Paris and the CIA are common denominators. I don’t think we can rule that out. I’ll go to this address myself while I’m there.”

“Why would the necklace show up now, not a year ago when I sent that email and the CIA came to my house? That makes no sense.”

“Unless DOD wasn’t dead, but hiding, and he knew where RumbleRed11 was.”

“And RumbleRed11 was the necklace,” I supply. “Maybe.”

“What do you remember about the CIA now?”

“I was—am—in a program called Black Forest. We don’t exist to the rest of the CIA.”

“Who did you report to?”

“A man named Drew Nelson, though I have no idea if that’s his real name. I met him once. He said he knew my father, and that’s why he recruited me.”