Page 4 of Once a Hero

And yet, in all that time, Jake never could get up close and personal with Molyneux until that day in the boat.

Even before he had recovered from his wounds, Jake received the news about his suspension based on entirely frivolous reasons, including turning renegade and arranging a meeting with an informant without proper backups.

Jake supposed that made it all better and hid the fact that Molyneux’s people could stab his neck with a needle under the noses of all the FBI agents in the coffee shop that day.

Someday he’d have enough evidence to get his paycheck back.

Meanwhile, he had to keep working on taking down Molyneux, even if the entire Bureau had given up on her. Jake was thankful that when the FBI door slammed in his face, that God opened another door for him.

Helen said that Earl and Hugo were her most trusted investigators at Hu Knows, Inc. Hugo was still in Brussels and on another case. Earl had gone to Athens, Greece, for a company meeting with Helen Hu, who hadn’t left Europe since her marriage to Reuben Costa.

Since Earl was taking their corporate jet back to Savannah, Helen had suggested that Jake fly home with him. Halfway over the Atlantic, Earl asked to be on the project. The airplane refueled in Atlanta, and off the duo went across the country.

Jake welcomed Earl’s help. After all, he needed all the assistance he could get without involving any of his friends still in the Bureau.

Yes, he knew about the FBI mole. However, he didn’t think it was going affect this situation.

Would it?

Chapter Two

Beatrice Glynn blamed jet lag for keeping her awake at three in the morning on the west coast—six in the morning in Charleston, where she would have been just waking up to the first cup of coffee that her brother made for her every morning whenever she went to see him.

Instead here she was, waiting for the Ghost of Christmas Past to appear at the next table in the uncrowded brand new twenty-four-hour café overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Beatrice wondered how her brother was doing these couple of days she had been away, flying back and forth between Europe and North America. He had told her never to call whenever she was out and about, hunting for treasures connected to the Amber Room.

Her brother was even more paranoid than she.

Yeah, Benjamin was just as paranoid as Dad when he had been alive. Dad would still be alive had Molyneux not killed him a few years after Dad obtained asylum in the United States and ended up in the witness protection program as a single father of two kids.

Beatrice was eight years old when Dad died without a body to bury.

She found out later that Dad hadn’t been a hero she had thought he was. While nurturing a career as a treasure hunter, in reality Dad was a thief and a partner in crime of Molyneux. Of course, it was all hearsay.

Truth be told, Beatrice hardly remembered the lost years. She was only five years old when she was whisked to the USA and told they would have new names. No longer the Wright family, they would henceforth be the Glynn family. Benjamin was ten, and his story about the event grew more intense and sinister over the years.

I can’t blame him.

Beatrice suspected that if she had been ten years old watching her own father be executed, she could be traumatized the rest of her life too. In spite of their loving foster parents, the emotional trauma would remain.

No wonder Benjamin was a recluse now and hadn’t left the house for as long as Beatrice could remember. He worked from home, had groceries delivered to him, and stayed away from public.

As for Beatrice, she had taken the opposite direction. Whether she favored her father or a mother she never knew was beside the matter. The point was that she realized she couldn’t be hiding away in a mansion, however nice it was, forever.

Someone had to bring the fight back to Molyneux.

Both she and her brother lived with the fact that any day now, Molyneux would come after them to finish the job she started thirty years prior.

And when she came, Beatrice would be waiting for her.

In fact, rather than let Molyneux find her way to the Glynn siblings, Beatrice was determined to set a trap for the queen rat.

And it had everything to do with the Amber Room.

Ever since she graduated with a doctorate degree in history, with concentration in World War II, Beatrice had set her mind on a race to find the remaining panels of the lost Amber Room before Molyneux did. Then she could dangle the artifact in front of the terrorist and somehow deliver him to the authorities.

How exactly would she do that last part?

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