The Seven Year Itch Read online

  The

  Seven

  Year Itch

  The FBI Series

  A J.J. McCall Novel

  S.D. Skye

  Frankie V Books

  An Imprint of LadyLit Press

  The Seven Year Itch A J.J. McCall Novel (Book 1)

  Frankie V Books

  An Imprint of LadyLit Press

  Cheltenham, MD 20623

  Copyright © 2012 by S.D. Skye

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  February 2011

  First Edition

  Dedicated to

  William Jr.

  William Jr.

  And in loving memory of

  Francine Vanetta

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you God. Thank you God. Thank you God. Through whatever challenges I endure, and there have been many, You keep giving me another story to tell and another day to write it. I will be forever grateful for this gift You’ve given me, and I will tell every story You put in my heart as long as I have breath to breathe.

  Thank you to the men and women of the FBI who lay their lives on the line for this country every day. The United States is safer today than ever because of what you do.

  Thanks to my beautiful son, William, who is always so supportive on the days I’m stuck in the writing cave. He’s the reason I live. He’s the reason I breathe. He’s the reason I am.

  To my Dad, William, who brought me through one of the most difficult years of my life. Without his love and support, I couldn’t have brought J.J. McCall this far.

  To my dear friends and beta readers Lisa, Carey, Becky, and Jos-Renee, thank you for suffering through my early drafts. It’s because of you that this is finally ready for prime time.

  Thanks to my cousin and graphic designer RheQuan Robinson for the fantastic book cover. He nailed it on the first try. Thank you to my cousin Kim for having the good sense to marry him.

  Thanks to my Facebook readers who helped name one of series’ characters—Grayson “Six” Chance—Keleigh Crigler Hadley (Grayson), Anya Rhamnusia Guillino (Six), Jounay Thomas-Ross (Chance).

  And to anyone I’ve forgotten, my apologies, but my heart says thanks.

  Prologue

  Thousands of ants marched mercilessly beneath unreachable layers of her skin. The sensation of the slow and steady crawl permeated her. Every hair. Every pore. So deep inside her flesh that no ointment or salve could bring relief.

  These were the markings of her “gift.” The phenomenon, her blessing, her curse.

  She discovered “the gift” at age seven, moments after her mother suggested she ask Santa for her favorite doll—a lie Naomi had told a thousand times before. But, for the first time in J.J.’s life, the tall tale sparked an unexpected reaction.

  It started as a modest sensation, an irritation, just on the tip of her nose. Nothing a few scratches couldn’t cure.

  They didn’t.

  Instead, the prickly tingles rushed through J.J, her earlobes, the back of her neck. They escalated from a mild discomfort to a full-on itch fest, up and down both arms and into her kneecaps. J.J.’s arms couldn’t reach the nooks and crannies where her skin crawled. She shimmied and shook, dug her nails deep into her hide. Whelped skin blanketed her body, and Naomi’s guilt swelled. Her lie had triggered it, the physiological meltdown that sent her poor daughter into a scratching frenzy.

  The “Itch” stemmed from a spiteful con artist’s generational curse. Great-grandmother called it the Evil Eye. It had been cast upon Naomi’s mother Genevieve as a child by a dusty old Creole Jadoo magic worker, Delia Doucette. She was a bronze-skinned out-of-towner, the wife of a Spanish prisoner jailed a few miles away in Baton Rouge on trumped up Jim Crow charges. At least that’s how the scam went—the same scam that bilked hundreds of African Americans out of scarce financial resources in the early 1900s. The prisoner promised them Spanish gold, riches beyond belief, for the equivalent of bail. Two days’ wages. Ten dollars. A small price to pay for wealth, freedom. After an hour of Delia’s begging and pleading and crying, Genevieve’s mother pulled the crumpled money from her bosom despite her misgivings.

  Then Genevieve unleashed a cry, a shrieking wail. She instantly became inconsolable.

  And her mother took her baby’s sobs as a sign to hold tight the ten dollars she’d nearly thrown away.

  Changed her mind on intuition and a cry.

  The swindle failed and Delia grew incensed. The nerve of Genevieve’s mother to suggest, on a child’s tears, that this downright upstanding woman had lied. When ordered from the house, Delia slithered to the door, but not before glancing at the baby girl, the spoiler, with a cold, contempt-filled, shadowy gaze—the Evil Eye.

  She hissed, “He does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. May you and your children always know the truth!”

  Genevieve’s mother had been told about it. The Eye. She’d never seen it before, didn’t really believe it existed, not until that moment. But she acted quickly, spitting on Genevieve’s face to ward off the curse’s effect. It was too little or too late. And evil’s intent was soon evident, as the truth did not show itself as the pleasantness of tickle or a smile rather the irritation of an itch. The deed had been done.

  And four generations later...

  “Ma! It won’t stop. What’s wrong with me?” J.J. whined. Her mother’s gentle hand soothed her, smoothed cream into her inflamed cocoa-colored limbs. J.J. twisted and turned, and searched for bug bites, anything that would explain the source of her affliction. She found none. Before long she grew panicked, hyperventilated until her mother offered the long awaited explanation.

  “You can stop looking because you won’t find the source of your problem by checking your arms,” Naomi said to her dear Jasmine. “The problem is not on your skin it’s in your genes!”

  Naomi hoped J.J. would be different than she and her sister, older when the time came to reveal the truth. The task of explaining might be easier. How would she tell her seven-year-old daughter such a fantastical tale? That she’s a lie detector, like her mother, aunt, and grandmother before her?

  The concept was difficult for J.J. to understand at that age. At any age, really. And for the first few, she refused it—her gift. Wouldn’t acknowledge it. Thought it made her strange, different, weird, and abnormal at a time when she wanted to be the same, like everyone else. The older she grew, the more defiant she became. She later attributed the revelation to a new source…her mother. Naomi was, in J.J.’s mind, a few marbles short of a full bag.

  Whatever she believed or denied, the truth was indisputable. The burrowing beneath her skin occurred regularly, without fail, each and every time someone lied to her. Her off-putting verbal outbursts in reaction to the intense and sudden onsets were such that she could not control her response, and no one within a ten-mile radius could ignore them. So, for her entire adult life, she pawned her strange behavior on a condition, a “thing,” sometimes even Tourette’s Syndrome, anything to get her through the moment.

  Naomi offered many nuggets of wisdom regarding her gift befo
re she died. The most important was never to reveal it to anyone, not even her father. She reasoned that if people knew J.J. could detect lies, they would never be themselves, always designing their own personal truths rather than revealing the one that existed within. Some may even try to manipulate her gift for their own selfish, less-than-righteous ends. By keeping “the itch” a secret she would always know friend from foe.

  But no advice was more valuable than her final words.

  “Jasmine, baby,” she said, her voice frail and wispy, moments before she succumbed to a fatal gunshot wound. “Your gift can tell you a lot about other people. But it can’t tell you when you’re lying to yourself. I pray God grants you the serenity and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  J.J. heard her mother final words. Whether she listened was another question indeed.

  Chapter 1

  “[Swine traitors] can take their 30 pieces of silver, but it will stick in their throats.” ~ Vladimir Putin

  Monday Morning in Moscow…

  Mikhail Polyakov was murdered in a Solntsevskaya-owned cottage located in Lobnya, a small village just outside Moscow. It was a Russian organized crime death chamber. A hulking Mafioso known only as Maskov hovered over his mangled corpse. The ax in his massive hand dripped with the blood of a traitor. He would not live to betray his country another day. In the safe house basement, he lay on the concrete floor. A pool of crimson surrounded him, and his flesh had been gashed and hacked beyond visual recognition; death’s stench thickened the air. In order to serve its only noble purpose, his right hand, which bore a crescent-shaped birthmark, was left untouched.

  A sliver of light shone through an undersized window revealing the wicked grin that parted the executioner’s cigarette blackened lips. Colonel Anatoliy Golikov. A Russian intelligence officer, he was a member of a cadre of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service—SVR officers—from the First Department. His professional mission had been recruiting people who sold U.S. secrets, but his personal mission was to kill anyone who betrayed the Motherland.

  His skinny eyes, slight frame, and borderline gaunt face colored him weak, but his iron-fisted will and suffocating persona made him a man few crossed. Even fewer had lived to brag about it if they had. The son of a former hardline KGB General who executed Russians spying for the West, he’d filled his father’s sadistic shoes well. Left nothing in his wake except a trail of dead American sins against Russia.

  Golikov compelled his two most reliable henchmen to observe the murder of their comrade. The gruesome killing would serve as a message to them and make them more effective purveyors of the one they’d soon deliver to their colleagues posted to Russian Embassies in the United States—spy for the Americans and your life will come to an abrupt and grim end.

  Golikov circled the body at a measured pace, rage ebbing beneath his nerveless exterior. He teetered on the edge of insanity. “We should feed him to the sharks, Maskov. A fitting end for traitorous pig, wouldn’t you say?”

  Maskov nodded as Golikov eyed his cohorts, his unnerving intensity intended to strike fear and warn. “Comrade Vasiliy, your passports are up-to-date, yes?”

  Vasiliy nodded. “Mine and that of Comrade Igor.” Of the SVR counterintelligence officers working under Golikov, he’d achieved the higher rank—Captain.

  “Good. Both of you are traveling to Washington. The Center has authorized funding for two temporary assignments and they have given me the authority to recall Comrade Viktor Plotnikov.”

  “Comrade Plotnikov?” Vasiliy said, his surprise obvious.

  “Yes, we suspect Viktor may be providing our communications codes to the Americans. Aleksandr Dmitriyev, chief of the counterintelligence operations line, will see him to the airport and my friend here and I will interrogate him accordingly when he returns,” Golikov said, nodding to gesture Maskov. “While I hope we’ve found the last of J.J. McCall’s traitors, I must take active measures to neutralize any who may remain. You are my most reliable officers. I trust you to carry out this mission.” His gaze shifted between the two.

  Vasiliy and Igor both nodded, their respect for Golikov borne from fear rather than admiration. “For how long? My wife, she—”

  “180 days minimum. But I’ll extend it as long as necessary to clean out the riff-raff,” Golikov replied, his expression affirming there would be no negotiation. “I would go myself but Washington is not the only residency with this problem.”

  “Yes,” Vasiliy said. He and Igor both appeared anxious to leave. “Will that be all, Comrade Golikov? We should be getting back to the Center.”

  “Not quite,” Golikov said, his every move, every expression, spilled with evil. “Please, have a seat. I need you to pay a visit to the U.S. Embassy. We have a gift for the new Chief of Station.” He turned to the murderer for hire. “Maskov? Will you do the honor?”

  Maskov lifted the ax blade above his head and slammed it to the ground, slashing through the wrist bone like butter, his force strong enough to sever the appendage with one blow. Igor and Vasiliy cringed, and pressed their eyelids together. They turned away as Maskov lifted the hand from the unforgiving concrete floor. He placed the appendage in a steel ice-filled box specially designed to leave its contents undetected by embassy security measures. After sealing the lid, he put the container inside slightly larger cardboard box, sealed it, and addressed it to the Moscow station chief care of the security officer.

  “Deliver this to Agent McCall’s boyfriend. I’m certain he will convey the sad news of that pig Polyakov’s death. Perhaps next time she’ll think twice about recruiting our people. Suka!” Golikov cursed.

  • • •

  Telephone rings cut through a brief silence as a herd of suit-clad diplomats shuffled through the consulate section. It was lunch time at the American Embassy in Moscow. The station security officer, Grayson “Six” Chance, glanced at his watch as his stomach rumbled. His gut told him he’d miss lunch again, and the phone rang in just time to confirm Grayson’s suspicions.

  “Siiiiix,” the duty officer said, the tone in his voice teasing. Grayson’s nickname was the source of several running jokes. His IQ. The number of times it took him to pass his last lifestyle polygraph exam. The number of women he bedded the night before. But his skin was thick and his temperament easy. “We’ve got an ID on the hand. You might want to get up here,” the officer continued.

  The light at the end of the tunnel dimmed. He’d planned to serve out the final two days of his sentence hunkered down in a corner and working in solitude until time to hop his flight to Dulles Airport. Golikov’s thugs had decimated his hopes.

  “Give me two minutes.” Six typed the last two sentences of his final after action report. When the meeting ended, he’d let the administrative officer clean it up. After grabbing a pen and notebook, he made his way to the stairwell, preferred to take the steps up to the secure area.

  His anxiety swelled with each step. He needed to tie up the last of his administrative loose ends in order to return stateside. For months, his every thought centered on J.J McCall. Why hadn’t he realized sooner? She meant more to him than he knew. Six had grown to appreciate her uncanny knack for calling him on his BS. And he knew he was full of it. Unlike the others, she never let him get away with his tricks and posed an irresistible challenge. Now she’d severed him from her life.

  No woman had ever made him feel that way, simultaneous apprehension and lust. He’d built barriers to maintain his cover and conceal his heart. But J.J. cut through it all, straight to his core, his truth. She’d slipped beneath his cloak and dagger to see him for whom he really was. And she loved him in spite of it. He’d become a man on a mission. He wanted it back again, the life he’d lost, the love he’d sacrificed to advance his career and serve too many years overseas. He’d served his country as a clandestine case officer, then a security officer in his latter tours. Now he was just one flight away. For the first time in over a decade, he looked forward to returning to Langley.

&nbsp
; Fifteen years of service to his country, twenty years of bachelorhood and Six’s life still had no real meaning. His thick, well-toned, six-three frame helped keep his sex tank full, but he had no wife, no kids, nothing to show for his near forty years on Earth, nothing except an over-sized house, fast car, and a couple dozen commendations for jobs exceptionally well done. The bumper-to-bumper beltway traffic, Starbuck-induced morning highs, meetings in tight conference rooms filled with dull academics, and a daily grind filled with writing cable after cable would consume his days. But what a small price to pay for nights with J.J.

  Granted, getting her to reinvest trust in him wouldn’t be an easy feat. The debacle, his sloppy exit from her life, had left a wide gulf between them. But nothing worth having ever was easy and Six was up for the challenge.

  Four flights of steps and a few paces through the main corridor, the one connecting the State Department’s political and economic sections to the “Company’s” section, and he had arrived at his destination. He badged into the secure space and headed for the conference room. Upon entering, his eyes locked on two reports sitting on the table in front of the seat left open for him. He turned to the duty officer, whose face wrenched in knowing discomfort. Six knew from his expression the stakes were higher than anticipated. Even the new boss had stopped by to check on the progress of the investigation.

  “Six, come in and have a seat,” said Mark Levin, the new CIA Station Chief. He’d arrived three months prior and had been in crisis mode from day one.

  Six gripped the chair back, pulled it from beneath the table. He positioned himself beside the station chief. The sound of shuffling papers disrupted the silence. On edge, he waited for one of them to break the bad news.