He stood in silence, waiting for the final DUH, DUH. Instead, there was the voice he knew well:
“I’m baaaaack,” said Andie.
She couldn’t carry personal items-including a house key-when she was working undercover. Jack smiled as he hurried to turn the deadbolt and open the door. He barely got a look at her face before she burst across the threshold, threw her arms around his neck, and planted her lips on his. The passion was contagious, but finally she stopped for air.
“You’re blond,” he said.
“You like it?”
He wasn’t sure-but he was glad the FBI hadn’t forced her to cut her hair for her assignment. “Looks great.” He laced his fingers with hers and noticed she was not wearing the engagement ring he’d given her.
“Sorry,” she said, attuned to his discovery. “I love my diamond, but it doesn’t fit the undercover role.”
It was the most she’d told him about her assignment to date. “Are you going to tell what role that is?”
“If I told you…”
“I know, I know: You’d have to kill me.”
“That’s the bad news,” she said, smiling coyly. “The good news is: Wait until I show you my preferred method of execution.”
“So you are going to tell me?”
“No. In your case, I punish the ignorant.”
“You mean innocent.”
“Keep arguing, Counselor, and you’re going to end up with a suspended sentence.” She closed the door with a hind kick, her eyes never leaving his. “I have to be back at noon.”
Jack glanced toward the bedroom, then back. “That doesn’t give us much time.”
“I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said. “How about you join me?”
“Hmm. Very tempting, honey. But there’s absolutely no way we’ll get out of there without having sex, and sex in that teeny-tiny shower stall rates right up there with sex on a coffee table. Alluring in theory, but what the hell’s the point when there’s a perfectly good mattress twenty feet away?”
“You’re such a putz.”
“It’s a gift. I’ll open some wine.”
She kissed him and went off to the bedroom. Jack found a bottle of red in the wine chiller. His collection was comprised mostly of gifts from clients, and this bottle of Betts amp; Scholl Hermitage Rouge was from Mr. Scholler himself-an old friend who’d had the good sense to listen to his wife and buy up declining apartment buildings on Miami Beach right before Miami Vice made art deco cool again. Timing was everything in life.
“Jack,” Andie sang out from the shower, “naked, sex-starved woman wants her wine.”
Luck didn’t hurt, either.
“Coming,” he said, a glass in each hand.
Theirs was not the perfect engagement, but Jack had given up on perfect long ago, right about the time he’d discovered that his first marriage was the perfect storm. A man didn’t ask an FBI agent to marry him and then tell her not to do her job. No more than Andie would tell Jack not to do his-with the exception of Jamal Wakefield. Andie had made it her business to tell Jack to stay away from him. More than anything else-more than the grief he’d caught for defending an accused terrorist, more than the emotional burden of a murder case involving a blind cop and a dead teenager-Andie’s decision to step on his wing tips was eating at Jack.
A billow of steam moistened his face as he entered the bathroom.
“Here you go,” he said as he opened the shower door. She was gorgeous even when shaving her legs.
Andie gave him a kiss, took a long sip of wine, and handed the glass back to him. Jack leaned against the wall, keeping an eye on the blurred beauty behind the foggy shower door. And he was still thinking about Jamal Wakefield. He just couldn’t let it go.
“So you really don’t want me to take that case, huh?”
The shower door opened a crack. She had shampoo in her hair and a look of incredulity on her face. “You want to talk about that now?”
She disappeared back into the shower, and Jack tasted the wine from his friend’s vineyard. Timing was everything, it reminded him, but for Jack, “no time like the present” was the general rule.
Probably why the wine is Betts amp; Scholl, not Betts amp; Swyteck.
“It just took me by surprise,” said Jack. “You’ve never tried to steer me away from a case before.”
The shower stopped. Jack handed her a bath towel, and Andie stepped out, wrapped in terry cloth. She towel-dried her newly blond hair and then stood before the mirror, speaking as she combed through the snarls.
“Jamal Wakefield is bad news,” she said.
“Well, what does that mean?” asked Jack.
“It means you should stay away from him.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“I’m trying to help you, Jack.”
“Help me what?”
She put down the comb, a little flabbergasted. “Okay, if you were to take this case, you’d find this out anyway. So let me tell you now. After McKenna Mays was murdered, the police got a warrant and seized her boyfriend’s computer.”
“What did they find?”
“Encrypted files.”
“So what?”
“Encrypted files from known terrorist organizations,” said Andie.
“And you know this because…?”
“Because I have friends who don’t want to see you embarrass yourself.”
“You mean embarrass you.”
“This isn’t about me.”
“It’s not? Really?”
Andie glared but said nothing. She grabbed her wineglass and walked out. Jack followed her to the bedroom.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” said Jack. “But none of this makes sense to me.”
“Well, exactly how much of my duty of confidentiality and loyalty to the FBI do you expect me to breach in order to keep you from making a huge mistake?”
“I don’t expect anything. I never asked your opinion.”
Her mouth fell open, and her chuckle of disbelief spoke more than words.
Jack said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s not that I don’t value your opinion.”
“Can we drop this, please?”
Jack breathed in and out. “I wish I could. But now I’m more confused than ever. This kid spent three years at Gitmo. They fingerprinted him there. Surely they ran his prints through every conceivable database and discovered that he was really Jamal Wakefield. Now you’re telling me that the FBI found encrypted files on his computer with links to terrorism. But no one at Gitmo ever asked him if his name was Jamal Wakefield. And at the habeas corpus hearing two days ago, the Justice Department let him walk for lack of evidence. I just don’t get it.”
“They didn’t let him walk,” said Andie. “They played their ace in the hole: They got the state attorney to indict him for murder.”
“Why play that ace? Why not just have the Justice Department tell the judge about his computer and keep him locked up on terrorism charges?”
“Because if you tell the judge about the computer, someone might want to see what’s in the files.”
“Someone like me?” asked Jack.
“Like any defense lawyer,” said Andie.
“Would that be the end of the world-if someone wanted to find out what was in Jamal’s encrypted files?”
“I don’t know,” said Andie. “But why risk letting that kind of information go public when you can keep an accused terrorist locked up for the rest of his life on a murder charge?”
“It’s all in the interest of national security-is that what you’re saying?”
