Prologue
She stepped out of the service elevator, wearing black, head-to-toe, face obscured, gloves, silent shoes, a black knife strapped to her thigh. Nothing shiny. No noise. A shadow moving along the corridor of the luxury Dallas penthouse apartment. She was Onyx. In her element.
At the apartment entrance, she worked the security device, entering the code she’d been given. Once inside, she disarmed the device and killed the surveillance cameras.
As she moved through the apartment, she went through her mental checklist.
Disable security – check
Target: Senator Richard Morales
Location: Master bedroom, northeast corner
Weapon: No noise. Close contact. Knife
Exit: Service elevator, twelve seconds from target room
Moving quickly and efficiently through the living room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Dallas skyline, the glow of the city lighting her way.
She passed family photos propped on a sofa table behind a pristine white leather couch.
Photos of a beautiful wife with long blond hair, smiling at the camera.
Another of two teenage daughters, both dark-haired, wearing white, flowing dresses and sandals, taken at sunset on the beach.
She moved past them into the kitchen and beyond, pushing the images to the back of her mind, closing them off as she replayed her handler’s words, given during her mission briefing.
“Morales is selling government secrets to the Russians,” Viktor Rousseau had said in his deep, intense tone.
“He’s a traitor. Eliminating him will stop the flow of secrets, thus protecting our country.
Without you, the Russians will use the information he supplies to target our weaknesses, dismantle our defenses and destroy our country. You must save our country.”
Her mission: eliminate the traitor, save the country
When she reached the door to the master bedroom, a shaft of light spilled out through the crack. A voice sounded from within.
“Strickland and his threats can go to hell. I’m going public with the Kaufman contracts tomorrow. He can’t get away with this. He needs to be stopped. The American people deserve to know.”
She froze. Strickland? Was he talking about Deputy Director Alan Strickland? The man who signed off on her missions? A knot formed in the pit of her belly. Viktor trusted him. Took orders from him. She’d taken orders from him.
She stood paralyzed for seconds—an eternity for an Onyx operative.
Ignore the static. Viktor’s voice echoed in her head. Complete the mission.
Morales’s voice cut through the words in her thoughts. “Strickland is using government black ops funds to build a private army.” Morales paused. “This is no joke. I have proof. He’s using them to take out his opposition, clearing a path for Kaufman and his illegal contracts.”
That knot in her gut spoke to her. This is wrong.
Instinct she’d buried for years, the instinct that had kept her alive on the streets of Dallas, kicked in.
She backed away from the door and moved swiftly through the penthouse. As she passed through the kitchen, she fished an SD disk from her pocket.
“I can’t do this anymore.” She laid the disk on the white quartz countertop. If the private army Strickland was building consisted of her and the others in the Onyx program, the senator would need what was on the disk to add to whatever proof he had.
The disk contained information she wasn’t supposed to have. Information about the Onyx program. Until she’d overheard the senator’s words, she hadn’t realized what it was really about.
A private army?
Had Strickland used her and the others in a sick plan to remove his opposition? Had the people he’d had them target been innocent?
Her stomach roiled.
They’d been trained, groomed and manipulated to believe whatever Viktor or Strickland told them. They’d believed they were helping their country, that what they were doing was right. That they were the good guys, taking out bad people.
She eased through the penthouse door, closing it quietly behind her.
Head down, she hurried for the service elevator and counted the seconds it took to get her to the ground floor.
Once the door opened, she slipped out the back of the building, through the door she’d rigged to disable the security.
Hugging the side of the building, she moved in the shadows past the loading dock and crossed quickly to hide behind the giant trash bins.
A linen-cleaning service truck approached the loading dock and backed in, headlights shining on the trash bins.
She closed one eye to keep from losing all her night vision.
Finally, the driver turned off the truck and the lights.
With both eyes open, the one still adjusting, she thought she saw a shadow slip around the side of the loading dock and into the building. She couldn’t be certain with her eyes still correcting after being blinded by the truck’s headlights.
The driver climbed down from his truck and up onto the dock.
She made her move, floating through the night like a ghost, moving from shadow to shadow until she was a few blocks from the high-rise apartment building.
Pulling her communications devices from her ears, she dropped them on the pavement and smashed them with her heel, severing contact with Viktor. With her life.
Walking away from a mission, refusing to complete a job, was a death sentence. She’d gone from being an asset to becoming a liability. A loose end.
A target.
In a matter of seconds, she’d turned her world upside down. She needed time to think about her next moves in a safe place. A place only she knew about.
Because of the work she’d done for Onyx, she’d cultivated several safehouses she could use when things got hot, and she needed a place to chill and lay low for a while.
Moving swiftly, she made her way through the city, clinging to shadows, always looking over her shoulder.
Nobody walked away from Onyx.
Anyone who dared to leave the organization was carried out, and the body was buried where no one would find it.
Another shadow slipped through the night, triggering the motion sensor of the exterior surveillance camera on the apartment building. A figure dressed in black entered the high-rise and took the service elevator up to the penthouse.
Entering the apartment was easy since the security alarm had previously been disarmed.
No one heard the intruder or the shot fired from a handgun fitted with a silencer. On the way out, a shadowy trespasser moved back through the apartment, pausing at the white quartz kitchen counter. The SD disc was swapped for a different calling card.
A stone.
Black onyx.
Seventy-two hours later...
“You are Onyx,” Viktor’s deep voice drilled into her.
“No,” she cried, unable to move or free herself from the bonds holding her. “I’m Keira.”
Keira Davies jerked awake, gasping for air and struggling to free herself of the bindings trapping her arms and legs, only to realize the ties that bound her weren’t ties at all.
She kicked her way out of a sleeping bag she’d staged in yet another one of her safehouses—this one being a rarely used warehouse on the outskirts of Waco, instead of the house in the suburbs of Dallas or the cabin in the piney woods near Tyler.
Three days on the run. Three different safehouses. And she had a feeling, if not visual confirmation, that someone was getting close to catching up to her.
She stood, stretched and switched on a light in the office where she’d set up camp.
Spread across a desktop lay photos taken from surveillance cameras, more photos she’d taken herself over the past months.
For some time, she’d been following the Kaufman Syndicate and its leader, Marcus Kaufman.
Some of the photos were of him. Others were of the people with whom he was closely connected or with whom he conducted business.
Among those photos were some of her mentor, Viktor Rousseau; Deputy Director Alan Strickland; Marcus Kaufman; his girlfriend, Layne Jenner; and Senator Richard Morales.
She’d laid some out across the desk, taped some to the wall and connected the photos with strips of string between those she’d seen together.
All the work she’d done gathering intel had been for the sole purpose of digging deeper into the organization that had trained her to do their bidding under the pretext of helping her country.
Keira fired up her laptop, tuning in to the latest news from Dallas.
A male anchorman, with intense dark eyes, stared into the camera. “Investigators are still searching for the person responsible for the murder of Senator Richard Morales in his penthouse apartment. Anyone with information about the shooting should notify the police.”
The television station aired a shadowy image of a person dressed all in black slipping into the apartment building, captured by a surveillance camera.
“If you know or recognize this person of interest, notify the police. There is a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward posted for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the one responsible for the senator’s death.
So far, all the police have to go on is the video and a black onyx stone left on the kitchen counter in the senator’s apartment. ”
Keira’s hand shook as she closed the lid of her laptop. A combination of dread and rage flooded her thoughts. The perp’s clothing, the way he’d entered and left the apartment complex and the signature black onyx stone were hallmarks of the work of Onyx.
Just not this Onyx operative. Who would know the difference? She had been sent to do the job. She had been part of the Onyx collective. Part of the organization, as Morales had put it, was being recruited and trained to provide Strickland a private army to eliminate his opposition.