And his response was also startled.
And wary.
He moved a few steps away and took out his phone. His shoulders were abruptly tense as he gazed down at the screen. “Excuse me. I seem to have a text.” He turned half away from her and pressed the access button.
But not far enough away from Margaret so that she couldn’t see his face when he read the text. He jerked back as if he’d been struck; a muscle jerked in his cheek.
Pain.
Sheer unadulterated agony.
Even in the light of the setting sun she could tell he was a shade paler.
Cambry stepped forward. “Lassiter?”
“Nothing. Reinforcement,” Lassiter said unevenly. “I should have been expecting it.” He thrust the phone at Cambry. “Juan Salva chose well.”
He turned and strode down the deck to the bridge.
Cambry looked down at the message and inhaled sharply. “Oh shit.” He strode after Lassiter and joined him on the bridge.
Margaret gazed after them in bewilderment.
Dear God, Lassiter’s expression. The pain, all mockery gone, just that agony that was tearing him apart.
That was tearing her apart.
No, back away.
It was probably nothing she could help.
Nothing that wouldn’t bring her back to the nightmare that had haunted her all these years.
It was his problem, not hers. Everyone had problems, and she couldn’t let herself try to solve this one.
Not this one.
She tried to turn and gaze out at the sunset instead of at Lassiter.
She couldn’t move.
She watched Lassiter half-shrug and then take his phone back and turn away from Neal Cambry. The shocked rawness was gone from his expression, but the pain was still there.
It isn’t easy to hide an emotion that strong, she thought. She knew from experience that you had to burrow your feelings down to some deep place far away and then let them heal.
“Sorry.” Cambry was coming back toward her. “Not a great text.”
“I’d have to be blind not to be able to see that.”
“No questions?”
“Not my business.”
“No?” He tilted his head. “Then why does your expression remind me a little of Lassiter’s?”
“I have no idea.” She still couldn’t take her gaze off Lassiter. “He probably needs you. You’re his friend, aren’t you? Why don’t you go back to him?”
“Because I wouldn’t be welcome. Lassiter has trouble sharing. Probably because he’s been alone so much in his life.”
As Margaret had been alone.
Don’t compare. Don’t identify.
Don’t keep looking at him.
Don’t wonder what would cause a man as tough as Lassiter to look as if he were being burned alive.
Tough. Cling to that word, that concept. He didn’t need her. No matter what she thought, he was strong enough to stand alone.
“What are you thinking?” Cambry asked curiously.
She finally managed to turn away from Lassiter to look back at the sunset. “Every day is a new day. I’m thinking you should forget about past experiences and go up there and try to help him,” she said jerkily.
He shook his head. “If he needs me, he knows where I am.” He hesitated. “Stay away from him right now, Margaret. He might not be very civilized for a little while.”
“Don’t worry, I have no reason to go anywhere near him.”
Not where the pain was, not where she might forget, not where she might make his agony her own.
She heard Cambry walk away from her, but her gaze never left the flame-streaked clouds of the horizon.
Don’t look at him.
Let him be nothing to you.
Oh God, don’t feel his pain.
* * *
The sun was down and it was almost dark when Margaret left the rail and strode up to the bridge.
“Lassiter.” She held his gaze as she climbed up the three steps and came to face him. “I want to see that text.”
“No, you don’t.” He was suddenly wary. “Has Cambry been talking?”
“No, you have him well trained. He wouldn’t violate your friendship.” She added jerkily, “And I made sure I didn’t ask him to do it. I was hoping to avoid this. Do you think I want it?”
“You’re angry.” He was looking at her appraisingly. “And I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I’m angry,” she said fiercely. “You’re strong, dammit. You shouldn’t be hurting like this. I shouldn’t have to deal with it. I stayed down there fighting it for almost a half hour and it didn’t do any good. I knew it wasn’t going to do any good.” She gazed up at him, her hands closing into fists. “Most of the time it doesn’t. Not when the pain is so bad. But I thought this time, when it could hurt me, too, that I had a chance.”
“Go away, Margaret,” he said wearily. “I’m not up to figuring out what you’re talking about right now.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said through clenched teeth. “You’ve seen to that. I have to stay until this over.” She was shaking. “You want to dangle me in front of Nicos? Go ahead. It might work. If I don’t think it will, I’ll think of something else.”
“What are you talking about?” His eyes were narrowed on her face. “My God, you’re shaking as if you have malaria. What’s happening to you?”
“I’m just telling you that you’ve won. Show me that text.”
He slowly held out the phone.
Margaret looked down at the screen. Not a written text. A photo of a man with a shock of gray hair chained to a wall. Whip strokes all over his legs and torso. His shirt pulled aside to display burn marks all over his chest. She stared at it for a moment, trying to overcome the waves of horror. “He looks like he’s a walking skeleton. Starvation as well as torture?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Eighteen months.”
“You care about him?”
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me,” she said through her teeth. “I have to hear it. Though I already know.”
“Yes.”
“Nicos?”
“Who else?”
“No one.” She couldn’t look at the photo any longer. It was tearing her apart. She handed the phone back to him. “That’s all I can take right now. I’ll ask you more questions when I’m able to function. Later.” She turned and headed toward the steps leading down to the deck. “You’ll get what you want. But it’s not going to be all your way, Lassiter. I won’t be a puppet. Not Nicos’s, not yours.”
“Margaret,” he called after her. “What the hell happened here?”
“I lost. You won.”
“How?” he asked roughly.
She didn’t answer. “You would have won a long time ago if you’d learned as much about me as you thought you had.” She jerked open the door and started to run downstairs to her cabin. Escape. Sanctuary. “You found out a lot, you guessed a lot more, but you never took that step farther down the road. You should have done that, Lassiter.…”
3:35 A.M.
Lassiter’s knock on her door was soft but firm. “May we talk now? I don’t believe either one of us has been sleeping. I thought I’d give you time to calm down a bit, but I have to know.”
“Come in.” She turned on the bedside lamp. “You’re right: I wasn’t sleeping. We might as well start.”
“Start what?”
“Nicos. What he’s doing to you. What he’s doing to that poor man.” She was managing to keep her voice steady. It was more than she would have been able to do two hours ago. “How we’re going to stop it.”
He stood there in the doorway, staring at her. “That’s what you said up on deck. Or something like it.” His lips tightened. “Along with some other things that made no sense to me at all. I can’t grasp this complete turnaround. After you went down, I talked to Cambry to see if I
could get a clue what happened with you. He said that when he talked to you earlier, you were still as determined as ever. What changed?”
She sat up in bed, tossed the cover aside, and tucked her legs beneath her nightshirt. “Nothing changed. Everything’s as it’s always been. You just didn’t realize it. And I didn’t have any idea that Juan Salva would do something to trigger it.”
“Don’t tell me that,” he said harshly. “Something changed. Stop the double-talk and tell me what it was. It’s been driving me crazy trying to figure it out. You said I screwed up. You said something about me not taking a step farther after I found out everything about you.”
Her lips curved in a ghost of a smile. “That would bother you. You’d hate to think the failure was yours. All that searching, all your hard work, and you missed the most important thing that would have given you everything.” She shrugged. “But don’t feel bad; it’s not too late.”
“What did I miss?” he asked through clenched teeth. “I have to know what the hell set you off and made you act as if you were—” He stopped. “Tell me.”
“Sure.” She smiled without mirth. “It’s my so-called gift that allows me to join, meld with animals. It comes with a side effect. Quite a reasonable and natural one when you come to think of it.” She met his eyes. “I’m very empathetic. I identify not only with an animal with whom I’m trying to join but sometimes with people. Almost certainly if there’s high emotion or intense mental pain involved. I can’t avoid it. I can’t dismiss it. It becomes a part of me. I have to accept it and then hope I can find a way to stop the pain.” She paused. “Your pain, Lassiter.”
“That’s crazy,” he said roughly. “Why should you be caught up with what I’m feeling? I can handle it myself. I don’t need anyone else. Hell, after everything I’ve done to you, there’s no way you can even give a damn what happens to me.”
“That’s why I wasn’t worried. At first, I was uneasy, even afraid, and definitely on edge around you. I knew that would keep me from identifying with you. But things have changed lately. I wasn’t afraid any longer. I … trusted you.” She moistened her lips. “But I would still have been all right if Salva hadn’t sent you that photo earlier. It was too powerful. It blew you out of the water. It blew me out of the water.”
“I could see that.” He was silent. “I still don’t see how it could do that to you. How does it work, Margaret?”
“I explained it to you as well as I could. At times I feel what other people are feeling. Not all the time, not every person. There has to be a certain amount of—I have to feel at ease with them. I have to be able to identify with their emotions. Look, it’s not as if I read their minds or anything like that. I just sometimes feel what they’re feeling if it’s particularly intense.”
“And how long have you known you could do this?”
She shrugged. “Much later than when I realized I was bonding with animals. I was maybe nine or ten. I wasn’t around very many people, so it didn’t really show itself. Like I said, this isn’t really like that; it’s just a kind of side effect.”
“Evidently not a comfortable one,” he said grimly. “Not for me, either. It’s not as if I couldn’t solve my own problems, Margaret.”
“And you’re resenting it. It hurts your pride. Too bad. You shouldn’t have started all this if you didn’t want to accept everything that went along with it. If it makes you feel better, usually I can’t tell what the hell you’re thinking. That’s why it came as such a shock when your damn feelings reached out and grabbed me. No way did I want that to happen. Didn’t you wonder why I didn’t dig harder into why you were going after Nicos? I tried not to ask questions. I didn’t want to know if there was a good reason why you had done all this. I wanted to focus only on the thought that you’d invaded my space and threatened me with a horror I’d left behind me. And yes, you’re tough. That’s what I kept telling myself when I was trying to convince myself that I had to ignore what was tearing you apart. You’re tough; you could handle it.” She wearily reached up to brush the hair back from her forehead. “It didn’t make any difference. It’s something ingrained in me. No, probably a part of my rather peculiar DNA. As long as I can sense that pain, I can’t close my eyes to it. It rips me to pieces. It won’t leave me alone. I have to try to stop it.” She straightened on the bed and met his eyes. “And I’m surprised that you’re worried about how and why when I’ve told you what’s most important to you. I’ll do whatever you want to keep Nicos from causing any more pain.”
He was silent a moment. “I’m surprised myself. I guess I was still in shock from the way you attacked me up on the bridge. You looked as if I’d crucified you. But you were definitely on the offensive.”
“I had to get it done quickly and get away from you. Crucified? Yes, that’s a good description.” She gestured to the chair beside the bed. “We should talk. I have to know everything now. You might as well sit down, instead of standing there glaring at me. None of this is my fault. And, for once, none of this particular portion of the mess is your fault, either. It’s just the way it has to be.”
“Then why do I feel guilty?”
“That’s your problem. It might have something to do with kidnapping me outside that tiger’s cage.”
He dropped down in the chair and studied her expression. “I’ve never seen you look like this. Hard…”
“Not really. I’m just trying to get through this and hold it all together. I won’t let myself be changed by anything you do to me or that Nicos does.”
He smiled crookedly. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t group us together.”
“I can see why, considering what he’s doing to that man in the photo.” She shuddered as she remembered that brutalized body. “A friend?”
He nodded. “Sean Patrick.” He was silent and then said, “More than a friend.”
“Patrick…” she repeated. Then she remembered. “He was the CIA agent who kept you out of prison when you were a teenager.”
“And was my mentor in those years when I was with the CIA. He even dropped in on me occasionally when I was doing my stretch in the Special Forces. From the day he came into my life, there wasn’t a time that I didn’t feel that he was there for me.”
When Margaret thought back on that conversation, she could see how Patrick had dropped in and out of Lassiter’s life, forming it, changing it. She had been so absorbed with Lassiter’s background that she hadn’t dwelt on that impact. “Sort of a father figure…”
“God no.” He grimaced. “Wrong, Margaret. Get off that track. First, my lovable uncle Bruce and now Patrick? I assure you that Patrick would be insulted. He was only in his thirties when he saved my ass with the CIA during that hacking brouhaha. We just liked each other and kind of hung out together when we got the chance.”
She blended the emotion he had felt on deck with that description and translated: “Your best friend.”
“If you need to put a label on it. He’s a great guy and I owe him. After I grew up a little, I realized what he was doing for me. I know how I would have turned out if he hadn’t been around.” He leaned back in the chair. “When I quit the CIA and opened my computer business, I thought I might be able to pay him back a little. I persuaded him to resign, too, and I made him vice president and executive director of international sales. He laughed at the title; he called it pompous. But he took the job.” He paused. “I think he’d gotten kind of used to looking out for me. Crazy, huh? It’s not as if I was that seventeen-year-old kid any longer.”
But Margaret could see why the closeness had developed between them. She did not know Sean Patrick, but he must have been the kind of man who had been able to overcome Lassiter’s wariness of trusting anyone. “Maybe not so crazy.”
“Anyway, I tried to give him a percentage of the business, but he wouldn’t take it. I wanted him in charge of the Silicon Valley office, but he refused that, too. He said that he’d been globetrotting too long to be stuck in an office.” br />
She could see where this was going. “International,” she repeated. “Nicos?”
“We were doing very well. Besides the office in Silicon Valley, two factories in Bangkok, three in Vancouver. We were planning on opening a new factory in Colombia. So Patrick went down to Bogotá to check out the area. It was located in a small seaport, and it turned out that Nicos had decided that he wanted to use it for running his contraband. He started using strong-arm tactics to keep us from getting a business license. He burned down a warehouse. Then he murdered one of Patrick’s construction engineers. Patrick went after Nicos and there was a confrontation. Patrick barely got away without being killed. I was on my way down there by that time and I told Patrick to back off and let me handle it. Nicos had paid off the local policía and I couldn’t get any help there. So I knew I’d have to do something else to keep Nicos from going after Patrick and his crew. I warned Nicos to back off and then started to research. I thought I’d found a way to hurt him enough that he’d rethink the situation.”
She could feel his pain start and she ignored it. She had to get to the end. “How did you hurt him?”
“Money is important to everyone. Particularly to scum like him. I hacked into one of his Grand Cayman bank accounts and eliminated it as if it had never existed.”
She knew the rage that would have ignited in Nicos. “And then what happened?”
“He went after Patrick and the construction crew immediately after he’d been told he’d lost some 3.5 million dollars. I’d told Patrick to pull everyone out of the construction camp and get out of Colombia before I went after Nicos. I’d timed it to give them plenty of leeway.” The pain was growing within him and she had to try to block it now. “But they were still at the private airport near Bogotá. They couldn’t get out because of weather, some freak tropical storm that prevented takeoff for over six hours.” He stopped and she knew he was having trouble going on. “A storm. Everything would have gone off like clockwork. They would have been safe. Son of a bitch. A storm.” He went on quickly, jerkily: “Nicos killed two men, took Patrick and another man prisoner. That was eighteen months ago.”