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What if your mother was the vice president—and a murderer? Oh, the secrets we uncover…
Jacob Stearne can’t remember who shot him. He wakes up with amnesia obscuring the events of recent weeks. Both his girlfriend and his boss have vanished. With his dream of starting a family crushed, Jacob decides to hang up his Glock and find a job less deadly. That doesn’t stop a former president from demanding that he find Pia Sabel. He refuses. But his past catches up with him when four assassins stop by intent on ending his life.
Pia isn’t lost. She’s dropped off the grid to get her mental health under control. While chilling on the French Riviera, curiosity gets the better of her. When she traces a clue back to an art gallery, she decides to focus her energy on annihilating the toxic American president back home. Still plagued by self-doubt, events quickly overwhelm her. To unravel the evidence, she must join a cabal of international oligarchs, all of whom would kill to stay at the top.
Can Pia and Jacob expose the president before competing factions dismantle the nation’s balance of power and destroy the USA?
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Chapter 1:
A voice in a dream said, “Do you remember who shot you?”
Someone tugged me, leading me through a murky world. When the gray globs in my vision thinned, I recognized my sister. She was kneading my right hand and said something underwater. I blinked. Tubes hung down around me, metal rails on either side. A rack of machines with flashing lights towered over my shoulder. On my left stood a man in a white lab coat with the educated gaze of a doctor.
My eyes meandered back to Joyce.
Something was wrong. My sister ran the biggest organic farm in Iowa. She didn’t hang around Bethesda, Maryland holding hands with her little brother. Last time we spoke, it ended sharp and bitter. Some kind of rivalry that didn’t matter anymore. Joyce kept talking. It sounded like, this time better work. She aimed her words and a mean glare at the doctor.
Noises sharpened a little and came in crisper.
She turned to me, “Do you remember who shot you?”
I looked around for my best friend and constant companion: Mercury, winged messenger of the Roman gods. My divine protector and occasional savior—when he wasn’t too busy chasing goddesses—was not in the room.
A bad sign.
I pushed up on my elbows and tried to speak but only burped out a squawk. The doc put a hand on my chest and pushed me back down as black stars swirled around me. I took another nap. It felt like one of many. My dream state reverted to an oddly familiar sight: I was looking down from the ceiling at my twisted body lying on the floor of a dark and shabby room. Flies. Threadbare carpet. A voice said, Don’t go to Tremé. In a blink, I was looking up at my twisted body lying on a water-stained ceiling surrounded by a pool of black ink.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” The doc’s pen light swung away from my eye.
“Christmas. Maybe?” I heard myself say. “Miguel brought—”
“Hell.” My sister’s voice came from the other side of the room. “You said this would work.”
“Amnesia is a mysterious thing.” The doctor’s voice was silky, understanding, patient. “He’s responding this time. He can talk. Let’s count that as a blessing.”
“Amnesia?” I asked.
“Due to the blood loss.” Doc sounded as if we’d had this conversation before.
I glanced around, hoping to see Mercury. I needed someone to tell me what was going down. As gods go, he was a pain in the ass and a bad influence, but he made house calls. Which is more than I could say for the other deities I’d prayed to. Like any soldier who’d rounded out eight tours of combat duty, I’d prayed to every god I’d heard of and some that were mere possibilities. When a thousand Taliban rounds whiz past your ears, you’re not so picky about which one is the One True God. Call ’em all. See who answers.
“Let’s start with solid ground,” the doctor said. “Do you remember leaving the Army three years—”
“Pick it up, Doc. Something recent.” Joyce leaned into my line of sight. “Mardi Gras? Do you remember that?”
My mind spun off. New Orleans. Congo Square. The place where slaves spent the Sabbath in the late 1700s beating out their ancestral rhythms and working out new ones that, over time, evolved into jazz. I asked, “Tremé?”
“What’s trem-MAY?” She pushed the pronunciation the way farmers will.
“Neighborhood. Due west of the French Quarter.” I was short of breath. “Where you played trumpet that time when—”
“Mom and Dad took us to Preservation Hall.” She snapped her fingers. “Yeah. That was a great trip. What the hell were you doing there?”
“I was there?”
“Slowly bleeding out in a seedy motel.” She squinted at me. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
The doc put a cup with a bendy straw in front of me. I took a sip while I thought about it. “Tania gave me socks for Christmas. I re-gifted them to Miguel—”
“I mean after that.” She closed in with each word, as if she were leading the Spanish Inquisition and would order the rack tightened one more notch if I didn’t answer right. “Do you remember your physical therapy? Rehab? Anything we talked about yesterday?”
I had no idea what today was much less yesterday, but I wanted to make her happy. My brain reeled through every moment in time. A couple new things came into focus. I sorted them for approximate dates and came up with my best recollection. “Ms. Sabel made me take her to the Epiphany service at National Cathedral. She cried the whole time.”
My sister reared back. “Fuck!”
The doctor inhaled as if he’d been smacked.
“Sorry, Doc.” She fisted her hips and turned to the window. “A hundred farm hands work for me. If you don’t throw an f-bomb every few minutes they’ll think you’re weak. So, this is all we’re going to get out of your voodoo experiments, huh? Yeah. I’m taking him home.”
“Home-home?” I asked. “Or my home?”
“Your shack in Bethesda for now. But we talked, it’s been decided—you’re coming back to the farm. I need you to run the business side. Besides, if you don’t give up this ridiculous job of slaughtering people, you’re going to wind up dead. Not that I care. You can do what you want, but you’re killing Mom with this,” she flopped a hand at the beeping hardware, “getting shot all the time. So.”
The farm. The family. The homestead outside of Donnellson, Iowa where generations of Stearnes had been born, lived, and died without getting any farther away than Keokuk. But it was home. A warm place that smelt of cookies and bacon and meatloaf and dust in the attic. It was keggers behind Grafton’s barn on Saturday night and breakfast at Agatha’s Diner out on the highway Sunday morning. And the hayseeds I’d left behind when I joined the Army. I’d seen Paris, Nairobi, Tokyo since then. Going home was like going to hell. It was predictable, and I probably deserved it, but I really didn’t want to go.
“What happened to Dan Sweeny?” I asked. “I thought your genius-fiancé was going to—”
“Don’t make this about me.” She shook a finger at me. “Let’s keep focused on you and filling in that gap in your memory. There’s a cop with a name I can’t pronounce asking questions all the time. Get him squared away, then you can be my farm manager. Get up. Let’s get you home. We can talk there.”
She pulled the sheet back and tossed a pair of pants and a shirt my way.
Doc slapped a bottle of pills on my chest. “Twice a day, every twelve hours. Like clockwork.”
I read all sixteen syllables on the label. None of them meant anything to me. “What are they for?”
He looked across my chest at my sister. She met his gaze and gave a slow shake, no.
“Your recovery.” Doc patted my shoulder. “Take them all. Don’t miss even one.”
I grabbed Joyce’s forearm and yanked. “I’m not crazy.”
“No one said you were.” She gave me that condescending big-sister look. “They help your brain with your … amnesia.”
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