Great Falls, Virginia: 4 June 8:35 P.M. Eastern time
The rolling hills and gently wooded glens to the west of Washington, D.C. sheltered an exclusive community of sweeping country estates and genteel horse farms known as Great Falls. There, in an imposing Tudor-style building at the end of a long, private drive, lay the Fox and Hound, an exquisite restaurant frequented by ambassadors and ex-presidents and defense industry executives. Lower level CIA officials and operational personnel like Jax Alexander rarely saw the inside of places like the Fox and Hound. But then, Jax wasn’t a typical field agent. And he wasn’t the one paying.
He’d been named James Aiden Xavier Alexander, a mouthful that just about everyone who knew him shortened to Jax. The only person who insisted on called him “James” was his mother, and that was because she refused to acknowledge the existence of his two middle names, both of which were on his birth certificate at the insistence of his father.
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask that my only child make an effort to attend his mother’s wedding,” said the elegant woman who sat across from him. Born Sophie Winston, she’d married Jax’s father and become Sophie Alexander the same week she turned twenty-one. But in the decades since then she’d had so many different husbands and names, Jax wondered how she could remember what to sign on the bottom of her credit card slips.
Jax reached for his wineglass and decided, judiciously, to refrain from pointing out that he’d already attended six of her weddings. “I said I’ll try. Matt is talking about sending me out to California next week.”
“Really, James. I can understand how this job might have appealed to you when you were younger. But don’t you think it’s time you looked around for something more…” She hesitated.
“Respectable?”
“The word I was thinking of is lucrative.”
Jax laughed and said, “I like my job,” although that wasn’t exactly true. He had liked his job until last winter, when a little run-in down in Colombia with the ambassador and some sociopaths in Special Operations had earned him a transfer to Division Thirteen, which was the CIA equivalent to being taken out to the wood-shed.
“Dick was talking to me just the other day about a position he thought you might be interested in.”
Senator Richard Talbot was the man scheduled to become Sophie’s Husband Number Eight. Jax clenched his jaw, shook his head, and dredged up something he hoped would pass as a smile. “No thanks.”
Softly pouting, Sophie stretched back in her seat and tossed her long, mahogany-colored hair away from her face in an innately feminine gesture that brought virtually every male head in the room around to stare at her.
Sophie had an undeniable gift, a gift she had long ago learned to use to her advantage. The candlelight was kind, but the fact remained that she still looked startlingly good for a woman in her forty-ninth year. She had been blessed with what she liked to call enduring bones. Of course, self-absorption, the regular expenditure of staggering amounts of money, and a little nip and tuck here and there all helped.
Most people considered Sophie a serial trophy wife, but in that they underestimated her—or gave her credit for too much guile, depending on one’s point of view. Because the truth was that, at heart, Sophie believed in love and romance, in white lace and happily-ever-after. She honestly believed every time she married that she was in love with the man she’d chosen. More incredibly, she also believed each and every time that this marriage was going to be the one that would last.
Jax had stopped believing in anything by the age of seven.
Of course, Sophie might be a romantic, but she was also one smart lady. Every man she’d married—except for Jax’s father—had had serious Money. And Sophie always managed to finagle prenuptial agreements that kept her own growing fortune safe while leaving the man’s assets open to pillage and plunder.
But then, as far as Jax was concerned, any man stupid enough to marry a woman who’d already gone through that many husbands deserved to pay for his arrogance.
“You haven’t even heard what the position is yet,” said Sophie.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m still not interested.” Jax’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket. He reached for it. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and slipped out of the dining room, to the foyer.
The call was from Matt von Moltke, head of Division Thirteen. “You need to come in right away,” he said, his voice, as always, gruff and abrupt.
Jax looked at his watch. “Now?”
“Now. And bring a bag with you. You’ll be flying out as soon as we’re finished with the briefing.”
“Flying where?”
“New Orleans,” said Matt, and hung up.