“OKAY, LET’S review. What did you do wrong?”
Jack raised a sardonic eyebrow. “You mean apart from getting my head blown off?”
Sean’s brows came together in a frown. “You really think this is the time for smartass remarks? If this had been real life instead of a training simulation, you’d be buried in an unmarked grave right about now.”
Jack suppressed a sigh. Obviously Sean wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. Not that he usually was, but Jack didn’t think he’d done that badly at the simulation. Apart from the last few minutes, it had pretty much been smooth sailing.
As if he read Jack’s mind, Sean’s frown darkened. “Let me give you a few clues,” he said icily. He ticked each point off on his fingers. “First, that penlight you were packing was totally useless. If I ever see you that badly equipped for a mission again, you’ll find yourself on lockdown until your hair turns gray. Second, you left blood at the scene. You might as well have left your goddamned business card. Third, you didn’t even see the camera in the courtyard.” He stopped for a moment to shake his head incredulously. “I mean, you didn’t even check. Not once! That’s where we picked you up, and you didn’t have a clue we were on you.”
He paused to pull in a breath, and Jack groaned inwardly. It looked as though this was going to be a long evening with an unpleasant outcome. At least for him. He winced when Sean held up a fourth finger.
“Screwup number four, you left the broken lock on the goddamned ground where any passerby could have seen it.” He shrugged, his frown clearing momentarily. “I’ll give you some credit for disabling the guard quickly and cleanly.”
Jack barely had a second to silently congratulate himself before Sean was off on another tirade. “But if he’d been anywhere other than a few steps past the door to the stairwell, you’d have been in deep shit. He’d have called in the alarm before you’d landed your first punch. Worse, he could have pulled the weapon he was carrying, and then you’d really have regretted the completely reckless decision to open the door before you were sure you knew what was behind it. Do I have to go on? The office furniture had been rearranged to add additional security features. Which you didn’t notice. Do you even remember that you failed to turn off the computer before you tried to leave the room? The assignment was to get in and out without leaving a trace. What part of that did you find so goddamned hard to understand?”
Jack dropped his gaze, deciding his best chance of coming out of this intact was to button his lips, plaster on a conciliatory look, and accept whatever punishment Sean was cooking up.
“Where’s your head at these days, Jack?” Sean said.
Jack risked a glance at Sean’s face. He sounded exasperated instead of totally infuriated. Jack thought it was a step in the right direction.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Sean wagged a warning finger. “You’re going to be,” he said. “That much I can promise.”
JACK GRIMACED as he barreled into the gym and skidded to a halt in front of his trainer, Evan. He glanced at the clock on the wall and sucked in a breath. It was two minutes past six, which meant he was late for his training session. Evan looked at him coolly and tapped his watch.
“Please, Evan?” Jack begged. “I’m already up to my neck in it.”
“I heard you were on the shit list. Again,” Evan said.
“I’ll work like a slave. I swear it!”
Evan snorted his skepticism, but to Jack’s relief, he jerked his head toward the weights. “I’ll let you off this time.”
Jack murmured his thanks and took off at a run. He began his warm-up routine, determined to give a 100 percent effort. Evan had let his lateness slide, even though he could have reported Jack, which would have added another demerit to the ones he had already racked up today. Evan was right, Jack was already heading for a beatdown; he didn’t know what Sean would do if he added another black mark to the growing list.
As he powered through his warm-up routine, Jack’s thoughts turned to all the things that had him tripping up on every lesson and training module over the past few weeks. It wasn’t exactly a challenge to figure it out.
He mentally ticked off the items, just as Sean had done earlier. First, he was still reeling over the discovery of his real name. Agent Anna Baxter, who had worked with him on his previous mission, had purposefully spilled that secret.
John Sebastian Palmer.
It still made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he silently mouthed the name. He hardly dared to say it out loud, afraid one of the listening devices embedded in every room in the Center would pick up the whisper, and his handlers would find out what he knew. Agent Baxter told him he had been named after his father, who had always been called Jack. It made his own first name seem more significant, especially when Baxter spilled her second secret.
The man he knew only as his guardian, who had raised him since the age of three to be a covert operative, had once been a close friend of Jack’s father. They’d worked together as partners at the Center, until Jack’s father fell in love with his partner’s wife and the two of them ran off together.
That was the most stunning revelation of all: His guardian had once been married to Jack’s mother. It seemed impossible Jack would ever get his mind to accept that fact.
“Watch what you’re doing, Jack. You’re losing focus.” Evan sounded annoyed, and Jack tuned back in quickly. He couldn’t afford to piss off his trainer, especially after he’d been so understanding.
“Why don’t you move on to repetitions?” Evan said. “You can’t do as much damage there!”
Jack nodded sheepishly and lowered the set of hand weights to the ground. He crossed the room to the training mat and began a series of sit-ups, trying to concentrate on nothing but the workout and Evan’s occasional instructions.
The stunning revelations about his identity had taken place five weeks ago. Every day since then, Jack sat across from his guardian at breakfast and dinner and tried to hide the fact that he finally knew who he was. At first he tensed every time his guardian spoke to him, afraid he would betray his secret discovery with a misplaced word or gesture, with an accusatory look or an inappropriate expression. After a while he realized his guardian knew nothing about Baxter’s offhand disclosures, and he relaxed slightly. Jack knew damned well that the tension of trying to hide what he knew had tied him into knots. His seemingly careless work over the past weeks could be traced to the stress of keeping secrets in a place where everybody had been trained in investigative procedures and could usually read him like a book.
“How’s your wrist feeling?” Evan asked.
Jack lay back against the mat, catching his breath. He flexed his wrist slowly and nodded. “It feels okay.”
“You didn’t overdo the weights?”
“No. Feels good,” Jack said.
The cast had only recently been removed from the wrist broken during his last assignment. He had barely come out of the mission in one piece, having been badly beaten by the target after his role as an operative had been purposefully revealed. He sometimes thought Agent Baxter had only shared information on his real identity because she felt guilty. After all, she had been the one to throw Jack to the wolves in order to accomplish her operational goals.
“I don’t think it’s strong enough for the punching bag yet,” Evan said. “Give me three fast laps, and then you can go.”
Jack sprang to his feet.
“And Jack?”
He stopped and turned a questioning look on his trainer.
“Next time you turn up late, don’t expect to get off so lightly,” Evan said flatly. “I’m letting it pass because you’re already in enough trouble. But if it happens again, you and I will be having words. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Jack said, chastened. Evan was by far the easiest-going of Jack’s handlers, but it never paid to take his leniency for granted.
He walked onto the track that circled the gym and kicked into a trot, picking up the pace after a few seconds. Running always seemed to have a calming effect, and Jack soon found he was able to push all the worries and uncertainties to the back of his mind. He still had to face his guardian and Sean over dinner, and he knew his latest screwups hadn’t done him any favors. He wasn’t going to get to the end of the night without some kind of reprimand, and maybe one of Sean’s more creative punishments.
But as endorphins kicked in, Jack decided there was no point sweating it since there was absolutely nothing he could do to change the outcome. Instead he let the tension and stress melt away and concentrated all his energies on the run.