They had to protect Stacy at all costs.
Tiffany wanted Zack to leave the Teams so they could be safe, but Zack countered that the only way they could be safe was for men like Zack to keep doing the job men like Zack were already doing.
It was a cop-out, but he only realized this later. The truth was he loved what he did for a living; he had to keep feeding the beast, killing to assuage his overpowering rage, and home life hardly provided him the outlet he needed to do this.
He’d already accepted a job with the CIA; he would serve as a paramilitary operations officer, and he knew that the danger to his family would only grow with his new position.
In the end there was only one solution, approved by both Zack’s employers and, eventually, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The United States Federal Witness Protection Program.
He and Tiffany divorced, more amicably than their marriage had been, and then Tiffany and Stacy went into wit-pro, presumably never to be seen again by Zack.
Hightower left the Teams, joined the CIA, worked in the shadows for a decade, and endeavored daily to keep his former life, and the two people who had populated it, out of his thoughts.
He lost himself in his work, and then, almost as soon as he left the Agency, he began reaching out to people in the know in the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service.
He was older, slightly more mature, and though he knew he could never reunite with Tiffany and Stacy, he wanted to know that they were all right.
Eventually, a friend of a friend of a friend connected him with someone in the Marshals Service Witness Security Program, and he learned where his wife and daughter now were and, perhaps more importantly,whothey now were.
Zack did nothing with this information for two years, but now he was here in Boulder, watching a teenage kid go about her day.
It had taken him eleven years to find his daughter, and it had taken him a couple of years more to work up the courage to come and see her, just to take a look, but this week he had finally made contact with the little girl he’d last seen just after her second birthday.
The kid in the oversized sweatshirt and the baggy jeans across the street from him had no idea that the big man who came to her new job for coffee every day was her biological father.
And she never would, Zack was determined of that. This was clandestine contact, nothing more.
Stacy was now Andrea—Zack noted that her name tag said Andie—and Tiffany was now Jennifer, and he had learned that Jennifer had remarried three years after Zack went away.
Zack had no idea what Stacy knew about him, or if she knew anything at all. He had no idea what Tiffany’s husband knew, or ifheknew anything at all.
As for Zack, he had no real objective in this. Not really. He’d harbored a vague fantasy about whisking his wife and daughter away from the man who had taken them, but the truth was, no one had taken them.
Zack had given them up.
Furthermore, Tiffany—now Jennifer—had married a man named Peter Delaney. Zack dug into him and found out he was a respected deputy fire chief at Boulder Fire and Rescue, an avid downhill skier, and an enthusiastic churchgoer. Peter had adopted Andie, and then he and Jennifer had a baby girl named Katie. From what Zack could tell, Andie seemed to have an idyllic life, living in a nice part of a nice town with a nice family, working in a nice place with a boss who watched over her like a mother hen.
Andie’s life seemed perfect. Jennifer’s, too, from what he could tell.
Zack’s life, on the other hand, continued to be something of a motherfucking dumpster fire.
He’d left the Agency a few years earlier, then returned as a contract agent, doing deniable jobs for the deputy director for operations.
He’d been shot while taking part in a covert multinational raid into a Russian penal colony, and now his job was to recover enough to go back to work for a new shadow organization.
There was a neurosurgeon in a hospital in town who had once been a surgeon for the Teams, and even though Zack hadn’t known the man back then, he’d told Hanley he wanted to come to Boulder to see this doctor for his aftercare following his surgery because the man’s reputation was so good.
Hanley had bought the story, though Hanley suspected thatHightower, an avid hunter, actually wanted to come out west to convalesce in a duck blind with a shotgun in his lap.
The truth was, the only thing Zack had come to Colorado to hunt for was his past.
He’d been to Cara’s Bakehouse nine days in a row, had seen Andie six times, had spoken to her three. Today he hadn’t been able to help himself, and he’d engaged her in a longer conversation. He wanted to keep coming back, he wanted to ask her more about school, sports, boyfriends, plans, dreams…but due to the fact that he couldn’t just blurt out that he was her bio dad, any more conversation he had with Andie Delaney was going to make him look like a creep.
His leg hurt, his heart hurt, and his brain was fried.
The pastry in his hand broke apart, and he realized he’d been squeezing it.
