White Tide Rising

The Beginning: 1995

Two figures in military fatigues slipped into the alleyway, the San Francisco fog obscuring their movement as they made their way toward their target in the dark. The taller of the two men leaped atop a dumpster and hoisted himself onto the fire escape with practiced ease. Within minutes, his silhouette disappeared through a window on the second floor, which was his partner’s cue to follow.

The shorter man pulled a balaclava over his face before ascending, cursing under his breath until he reached the second-floor platform and made his way inside the apartment.

In the darkness, he could just make out the tall man’s silhouette at the end of the hall, motioning him forward. They stood together, motionless, as they listened for breathing from the bedrooms.

The two men crept forward into the master bedroom. The tall man slipped a roll of duct tape from the pocket of his fatigues and moved around to the far side of the bed. He paused briefly to study the sleeping woman and synchronize his actions with his partner. They exchanged looks, and then the tall man slapped his hand over the woman’s mouth.

The shorter man sprang onto the bed and tightened the quilt around her body, restricting her movement within a tight cocoon. A muffled scream and a moment of violent thrashing ensued before the tall man could secure the duct tape over her mouth, free her from the quilt, and tape her wrists and ankles.

The tall man hoisted the woman into a standing position, his breath pounding against her face. He hesitated to use brute force as he grabbed her slender frame, but when she wrenched sideways to escape his grip, his arms tightened around her torso, and he heard a cracking sound. He winced as she recoiled in pain, but this was no time to indulge in sympathy. A flush of rage washed over him at having been dragged into this job—he was a technical guy, used to mental wrangling, not some low-level street thug.

The shorter man stepped over to the walk-in closet and opened the door. Unexpectedly, a flood of light poured over the three of them, and the tall man found himself staring directly into his victim’s eyes. For a timeless instant, they stared at each other until he recovered his wits; then he spun her around and shoved her into the closet. She hit the wall with a thud before slumping backward into a helpless heap on the floor. The realization shot through his mind: she’d gotten a good, long look at his face.

“I told you to wear the goddamned hood, Jack!” the shorter man hissed.

Jack Barnett stared back at him in the half-light without responding.

The shorter man spat the order, “Go on. I’ll take care of this. Get over to the other room!”

Jack Barnett cursed under his breath as he stepped out of the bedroom. In the shadows of the hallway, he leaned back against the wall, his brow furrowed. He took several deep breaths as he waited for his body to stop trembling, then wiped the sweat from his eyes with a gloved hand. Being recognized was an unacceptable failure, even minutes before a kill; if something went wrong at the last moment, it risked exposure. He scowled at the bitter knowledge that his partner would never let him forget it.

The woman’s frightened groans pierced the darkness, shocking Jack into action. He headed toward the second bedroom and quietly opened the door. He had a job to do, and he wanted no part of what his partner, Colin, would do in the other room.

Colin Peterson looked down at the woman in the closet, her auburn hair wet from a flood of tears, her terrified green eyes staring up at him, pleading, asking him why. The primal smell of fear rose like perfume from every pore in her body. He took a moment to calm his adrenaline-fueled thoughts and focus.

He remained motionless above her, his icy blue eyes burning into hers through the eyeholes in his balaclava. Centered now, in total control, he watched and waited like a Zen master. A long moment stretched between them as she stared up at him, wide-eyed and motionless, and then he saw it—the understanding. She had stopped struggling and knew she was going to die; she had surrendered to her fate as if death had already come and only her corpse remained.

Colin closed his eyes and imagined the moment after death bleeding backwards through time and pouring over the living, an ethereal backwash from the afterlife offered as foreplay to their ultimate union of souls. They would traverse the cusp of life and death together, and after he drove her soul from her flesh, it would live on inside of him forever.

As he stared down at her pale face, a wave of déjà vu passed over him. There was something about that face, those eyes. What was it? Slowly, the memory rose from the deepest recesses of his mind. Eliza—the woman looked so much like his own Eliza!

He flashed back to the moment of Eliza’s death, those last seconds after the bullet ripped through her neck. Her piercing green eyes looked up at him, asking him why, before shifting up into the Montana Big Sky as if to ask God instead. His mind reeled as fleeting images flooded his brain, dredged up from a past that surfaced in sweat-drenched dreams he tried to keep at bay with frequent shots of Jack Daniel’s. His mind’s eye flashed to the crimson stream of blood pouring from Eliza’s body. He saw the split-second silhouette of a tall man standing in the barn doorway, holding a rifle, where the nightmare always ended.

Colin reached up angrily and smashed the overhead light so he couldn’t see that face in the dark—Eliza’s face. Then suddenly, as he stood alone with his prey, a wave of heat began flowing through his body like an erotic tsunami, and his fantasy of a perfect kill shrank into a demoralizing moment of shame. He paused to shake it off and regain control before looking back down at the motionless woman and proceeding with his mission. But when he pulled out his gun and lifted it to take aim, he realized he hadn’t attached the silencer. He spewed a string of profanities, his confidence shattered with this second, inexcusable failure…but at least Jack Barnett didn’t witness it.

Colin pressed the cold barrel against the woman’s temple and stood there, his hands now shaking, but even as he held his breath with his finger on the trigger, he couldn’t pull it. A gunshot was not part of the plan, and he had no intention of letting Jack find out about such a major error. What was he to do with this woman now that his virility had left him—a powerless Samson, fallen to this unexpected Delilah?

The raspy whisper of Jack Barnett calling from the other room startled him. He reacted instinctively, turning the gun around in his hand and bringing the butt down hard against her skull. He heard the crack of bone as she slumped, and he inhaled the rusty stench of blood. His heart pounding madly, he took a moment to justify the fact that he’d completed his contract despite whatever else had just happened. As he backed out of the closet, he closed the door behind him.

In the other bedroom, Jack Barnett was fulfilling his role in the pair’s covert mission: to honor a comrade’s deathbed request to retrieve his five-year-old twin daughters from his estranged wife and bring them home—with the added necessity of taking out the children’s mother in the process. It was a mission handed down from high up in the chain of command, which neither man dared to question or refuse.

Colin entered the hallway just as Jack emerged with a loaded quilt over his shoulders. Confused cries rose from within a pink cocoon, hanks of blond hair glowed from tangled bedding, and four little feet dangled from Jack’s arms in the sepia darkness.

Silently, the two men hoisted their cargo out the window and vanished into the night.

 San Francisco, California, 1999

**********

Virginia DuFour pushed away from the security station in her client’s shop and flashed a confident smile at the owner of San Francisco’s exclusive DeRaggio Diamonds. A recent heist had cost the shop millions, but thanks to Virginia, it was now protected by SecureTech9—the most advanced security system on the market.

The staggering DeRaggio consulting fee spun through Virginia’s mind in a merry-go-round of dollar signs as she left the shop. She had just finished her first high-profile security job in four years, but that momentary high didn’t last; a tiny voice rose to squelch it.

You forgot all about them while you were working. What kind of mother are you?

Dark images flooded Virginia’s mind in surreal vignettes from a past she could not escape: the devastating kidnapping of her twin girls and the brutal beating she took on that awful night; desperate meetings with police and the FBI, emotional breakdowns and depression, candlelight vigils, and false sightings of her children.

Virginia caught hold of her racing thoughts and took a deep breath.

Remember what you’ve practiced—one day and one hour at a time.

As her rational mind pushed back against the shadows of unresolved trauma, she acknowledged that somehow, with the mercy of time and the love of friends and family, she had regained a fragile footing on the path to healing.

She thought back to two years ago, when her greatest challenge was the fear of leaving her house. It forced her to settle for a home-based tech support job for which she was obscenely overqualified and underpaid. With her savings depleted, it was survival that ultimately pushed her to return to her profession as a top IT security consultant.

It’s not a betrayal to get on with your life as best you can. It’s time.

Today, for a little while at least, she would try to celebrate a hard-earned success with friends. She wiped her eyes and headed up the block toward their favorite oyster bar.

As Virginia rounded the corner, a short woman with an armful of packages bumped into her, and the packages went flying. “Virginia DuFour!” the woman exclaimed. “How are you?”

Virginia grabbed a stray package and handed it to the woman with a forced smile. The encounter was a shock, and she rose awkwardly, then departed into the flow of pedestrian traffic to escape the inquiring mind of Geraldine Engelhart, the KSFX news reporter who had been her best friend and worst enemy in recent years.

Unfazed, the reporter trotted along behind her like a Shetland pony. “I need to talk to you, Virginia. Please… I’m sorry, okay? It was a stupid rookie mistake. If we could just sit down and talk, I could explain. Can we go somewhere, please?”

Virginia threw a glance back at Geraldine and shook her head as a rush of blood pounded in her ears. She dodged in and out of pedestrian traffic until Geraldine was out of sight, ducking into a hotel lobby to catch her breath.

On any other day, Geraldine would have followed in hot pursuit like a terrier on the mailman, but with her arms full of packages, she fell behind, her kitten-heeled feet no match for Virginia’s stride.

Virginia continued up the block to JJ’s Oyster Bar. The pub’s interior was designed to replicate the chambers of an old-time sailing vessel, its walls studded with buxom maiden mastheads carved in the days when San Francisco was a booming port city fueled by gold.

She scanned the room, looking for her best friend, Azure McCall, and several other friends gathering to celebrate Virginia’s big DeRaggio payday—one that would provide funding for a much-needed healing retreat.

She realized with disappointment that her friends had not arrived. A heavyset stranger at the end of the bar stared at her intensely, and for a moment, she feared he recognized her from the local news. When he rose and headed toward her with an eager smile, something in his approach conjured disturbing images. She turned to leave, but before she could escape, he appeared next to her and smiled, then reached out with a drunken laugh and touched her wrist.

“Hey, what’s the hurry? Let me buy you a drink.”

She withdrew her hand sharply and muttered a refusal as she headed toward the door.

The unexpected run-in with reporter Geraldine Engelhart brought up unresolved feelings, and now this stranger’s aggression was pushing her anxiety toward a full-on attack. She rushed out the doors and moved rapidly down the street toward the parking garage, eager for the refuge of her car.

By the time she approached the garage entrance, Virginia’s heart was racing. On full alert, she scanned the fifty yards to her parking place before loping over to her silver Mercedes, slipping behind the wheel, and locking the door.

Virginia heaved her work bag onto the passenger seat as a wave of nausea churned into vertigo. She grabbed her water and took a long drink as her head spun. It was tempting to let her anxiety run unchecked, but she couldn’t allow that to happen again—not today.

She retrieved a wet wipe from the glove box and ran it over her face, shutting her eyes and pressing her body into the cool leather of her seat. The world-churning wave of vertigo began to slow.

Suffering is pointless. Refocus.

Her thoughts turned to her daughters playing together in the park, laughing in her bed, shaping cookie dough into sugary hearts and stars in the kitchen. As minutes passed, tension slowly left her brow, and a smile softened her face. As the warmth of those memories filled her heart, the earth stopped spinning, and her head with it.

I need a glass of wine.

As she backed out of her parking space, Virginia caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Her mop of red hair was a mess, mascara formed dark half-moons under swollen eyes, and rose-colored lipstick was smeared across her chin. Her disheveled image offered a painful reminder of the dualistic ride that defined her life as she toggled between resistance and acceptance, suffering and peace.

As she wiped the lipstick off her chin in the mirror, she scowled at her reflection and whispered, “Holy shit, sistah… you are one seriously messed-up bitch!”