“But it wasn’t until later, after I figured out someone had faked Sarah’s letter and confronted my boss, Mo, about it, that I learned Jared wasn’t really dead and that they had brought me to England to help find him.” I watch Ari’s face as he tries to put it all together. “Sounds crazy, I know.”
“Actually, it explains a lot. I mean the things you did, that you had to go through . . . ” He clears his throat. “You’re an impressive woman, Jordan.”
I drop my eyes, feeling the heat rise from my neck to my cheeks. Then I start to gather the breakfast dishes.
“I can do that,” he says as I reach for his plate. His hand brushes mine.
Neither of us moves for several seconds. Our hands remain close, still touching. I look up and am caught off guard by the nakedness of the desire in his eyes. He turns away, then carries the dishes from the deck.
A few minutes later Ari returns, his expression serious. “What is it?” I ask.
He hesitates, and I can tell from the conflicted expression on his face that he’s debating how much to say. “I just got a message from the boatman at the Trieste harbor, who I paid off well, saying that another yacht set out shortly after we did on the same course.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But they were asking questions that seemed to suggest they were looking for someone.”
“You’re thinking it could be Santini’s men?”
“It’s a possibility. They could have been following us since Vienna, or perhaps they saw us leave the Contis and are trailing us to see if we will lead them to Nicole. I’d like to pull in to shore until they pass by, just to be safe. There’s a cove not too far from here where we can wait without being seen.”
My heart sinks. Stopping will slow us down, worsen our chances of getting to Nicole. “We made good time overnight,” Ari says, seeming to read my thoughts.
“But we need to get to Nicole as soon as possible,” I protest, strains of our disagreement in Vienna returning.
“Better to lose some time now rather than not make it at all. We can make up time on the water. Trust me, okay?” He seems to be talking about something larger than our travel schedule.
I hesitate, considering. “Okay.”
Ninety minutes later we near a rocky cove, surrounded on three sides by tall, rugged cliffs. Ari pulls us in along a jetty that juts out from one side of the enclave. He drops anchor, then pulls out a pair of binoculars, scanning the still-clear skyline behind us.
“Do you see anything?”
“No.” He takes off his shirt. Watching his body, desire rises up in me anew.
“What are you doing?” I ask as he opens a wooden box on the deck and pulls out a mask and snorkel.
“Just a quick dip while we wait.” He dives into the water, moves with sure, easy strokes. I start to protest that the last thing we have time for is a swim. But he’s right; there’s nothing to do but wait. “Are you coming in? The water’s perfect.” His voice is easy, giving no indication of our conversation a moment earlier.
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I reply, hearing the weakness in my own excuse.
“There’s no one around for miles and I promise I won’t look.” He turns away, as if to prove his point. “There’s another mask in the chest.”
I pull out the snorkel, strip down to my underwear and bra, grateful that they are the newer set I purchased after leaving London. Walking to the edge of the boat, I peer down uncertainly at the calm, transparent blue. Then I climb over the side and slip into the water, still clinging to the ladder. Something flutters beneath the surface a few feet away. Flailing, I try to recall the nature programs I’ve seen to determine whether this is a shark-prone area.
Hands, warm and strong, envelop my waist from behind. “Easy,” Ari says, steadying me. He lowers his face beneath the water, turning in the direction of the splash, then lifts his head and removes the mask. “It’s just fish. Sharks aren’t prevalent in this area at this time of year. Of course, you shouldn’t panic in that situation; it just makes things worse.”
“Sorry,” I say when we have drifted in silence for several minutes. “I’ve never liked the ocean. In fact, it terrifies me.” I look away. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Not at all. We all have our fears. I can’t stand heights.” I study his face to see if he is making a joke, mocking me. It seems hard to believe he is afraid of anything. Then, remembering his discomfort when the plane took off the other morning, I know that he is serious.
Ari reaches around and lifts the chain from my neck that holds the ring. “Are you going to give it back?”
I pause, considering the question for the first time. “I don’t know. I suppose.”
“It’s all very Lord of the Rings,” he remarks. Puzzled, I turn to look at him. “You’ve read it, yes?”
“Sort of.” My mind reels back to a night at college shortly before Jared and I first kissed. We were sitting in the college bar, talking with some of the other members of our crew, when Jared began animatedly describing a Tolkien retrospective he had seen when visiting Oxford the previous year.
“You like Tolkien?” I asked, surprised that someone as serious as Jared could be so passionate about a fantasy tale.
“Adore. The epic hero’s journey, the creation of a whole other world . . . and, well, it’s just a great story,” he concluded somewhat sheepishly. “Have you read it?” I shook my head. “Really?” His expression was incredulous.
The next day a dog-eared paperback copy of The Hobbit appeared in my college mailbox. Reading the story, I was swept away. Later when we were together, Jared began reading to me almost every night a chapter from The Lord of the Rings, beneath the small pool of light cast by his desk lamp. Remembering now, I can almost hear the scratch of his finger on the pages and smell the musty paper. Even in those final dark days the worry would melt from his face and his eyes would begin to dance as he recounted the elves and dwarves of Middle-earth, bringing that strange world to life for me as I drifted off to sleep.
Our reading pace slowed as his late nights of research intensified, and we knew we would not have time to finish before it was time for me to move back to America. So we talked of reading the remaining chapters simultaneously from a distance, an act of transatlantic communion. We made it almost halfway through the second book together before he disappeared.
What had happened to the books? I wonder now. They had not been in the trunk of belongings Chris had taken from Jared’s mother’s house in our search for clues.
“Anyway,” Ari says, interrupting my thoughts. “I just meant your quest to find Jared, coupled with the ring. It’s like you’re carrying it back to Mordor to drop it in the Cracks of Doom like that hobbit.”
“Frodo.” Did he ever make it, I wonder, to destroy the ring and complete his quest? Unable to bear the pain, I stopped reading the day Jared disappeared. I never finished the books, avoiding the movies in more recent years and leaving the tale as incomplete as my own.
I relax slightly, leaning back against Ari and allowing him to carry me away from the boat in the gentle current. Looking up at the cloudless blue sky, I can almost forget why we are here. A feeling rises in me, warm and unfamiliar. It is more than just attraction, I realize. With Ari I feel safe, understood.
I stiffen. What am I doing? I don’t know him, what his motives are, whether or not I can trust him. I started to open up with Sebastian when I was in London and it almost got me killed. Anyway, I’m here for Jared, I remind myself. He’s alive and even if he is married, this is no time to go falling for someone else. I need to concentrate, finish what I set out to do.
“What is it?” Ari asks, noticing.
I pull away. “This,” I say, gesturing between us. “I don’t know, it’s just the timing . . . this business with Jared.”
“Jared.” He frowns. “Yes, of course.”
“I just can’t get involved, not until I find him, get the answers I’m searching f
or.”
“Even though he has a wife?”
“Even then. I didn’t plan on this.” A hurt look crosses his face. “Ari . . . ” I reach for his hand but he pulls it away.
“Forget it,” he says, his voice gruff. “Let’s just go find Nicole.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He turns away. “It’s for the best, you know?”
Now it is my turn to be confused. “I don’t understand.”
He stares hard at the water, moving his hands beneath the surface in circles. “You shouldn’t get close to me. Everyone who does winds up hurt, or dead.”
I am taken aback by the familiarity of his words. I thought the same thing about myself not long ago. My colleague Eric had been killed when our mission in Liberia went wrong. Jared was dead, or so I thought. And then in England people around me started dying: Sophie, Vance, and nearly Chris and Sarah as well. Now looking back, I know that it had nothing to do with me. Jared is alive and Eric died in the line of duty, an unfortunate consequence of the coup. The attacks on the others were beyond my control. No, I understand now that these tragic events were not my fault, but Ari still believes it about himself.
“That’s not true,” I say finally.
“Actually, it is.” His tone is matter-of-fact, but his eyes are hollow. “The day Yael and Avi were killed, they were coming to see me at the base. It was my birthday and they wanted to see me, but I told them I was too busy and that I couldn’t get leave to come home . . . ” His voice cracks slightly. “They were on their way to surprise me when they drove over the ordnance.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
But he continues, seeming not to hear me. “It isn’t just them. My partner was killed during a raid that should have been straightforward. And then . . . ” His breath catches.
I watch him expectantly. “Then what?”
“When I was in the army, we were ordered to shell a facility in a small town near Beirut. It was an ammunition depot, or so we were told. But the intelligence was bad, and it wound up being a makeshift school. Dozens of children were killed—” He breaks off.
I raise a dripping hand from the water and place it on his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known.”
“My gut told me something wasn’t right. I should have tried to stop it. And afterward, we could have helped, but we were ordered to retreat.” His eyes grow haunted as he remembers the children, not much older than his own daughter.
I understand now his earlier defensiveness about the collateral damage of war. “Have you ever told anyone about this?”
“No. I would have told my wife, but I was too ashamed. And not long after I came back she was gone. She and Yael being killed so soon after—it seemed like punishment for what I had done.” His face is haggard, a man aged in a moment by his memories.
“It’s a horrible thing, but it wasn’t your fault. You aren’t cursed and—”
Suddenly Ari grabs me around the waist. “Shhh!” he says, cutting me off, his voice urgent. He pulls me close to the boat, jerking his head in the other direction. In the distance, beyond the entrance to the cove, I see a yacht about a half mile to the east. It is the first craft we have seen since clearing the Italian coastline yesterday.
Ari drops low in the water so that only his nose and eyes are exposed, a human crocodile. I follow his lead silently, trying to breathe and not panic against the sense of submersion that has always terrified me so.
Beneath the surface, Ari squeezes my hand. Minutes later, when the other boat has disappeared past the entrance to the cove, he rises in the water again. “They’re gone.” He releases me.
I take deep gulps of air through my mouth, my heart pounding. “Were those Santini’s men?”
“Maybe. Hard to tell from this distance.”
A chill runs down my spine. “Do you think they saw us?”
“If they had, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it.” His eyes shift back and forth, calculating. “We should go.” Still holding me, he starts swimming toward the boat.
I start up the ladder of the boat, feeling his eyes on me. The brisk air hits my wet skin, making me shiver. Ari steps onto the deck, then picks up a towel and wraps it around me. I clutch the edges, grateful for the soft cloth, warmed by the sun. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I reply, trying not to let my teeth chatter.
“Good. Why don’t you go wash up? I’m going to go reset our course.”
I make my way toward the bathroom, rinse off in the tiny shower. The boat begins to sway more roughly, telling me we have left the cove and reentered the open water. A few minutes later I step out and dry myself, dressing in the soft white T-shirt Ari left for me and my jeans, which are still warm from lying on the deck. I pick up the necklace chain bearing the engagement ring from the sink and start to put it around my neck. Then, remembering my conversation with Ari, I stop again—it seems wrong somehow, out of place here. Running my finger over the engraving one more time, I take it off and tuck it carefully into my bag.
Back on deck, I see Ari on the bridge, plotting our new course. “May I?” I ask, climbing the stairs to the bridge, taking in the impressive array of gauges on the display before him.
“Sure.” He does not look up. “There’s no sign of the boat, so I think we should be in the clear. But we’ve got other problems.” He points to a computer screen projecting a map, with a mass of brightly colored reds and purples just to the left of us. “There’s a storm coming in from the west.” He looks up and I follow his gaze beyond the stern of the yacht, but the sky is a cloudless blue.
“What should we do? Can we go back to the cove?”
He shakes his head. “We could get stuck there for hours and you were right, we need to get to Nicole before Santini’s men.” The concession, I can tell, is not easy for him to give. “We’ve got no choice but to try to outrun the storm.”
Try. My stomach clenches.
“You should go back downstairs, do whatever you need to do before things get rough.” He turns abruptly to the controls once more.
I climb down to the deck and stare out across the horizon, wondering how far ahead Santini’s men have gotten, whether or not we will beat the storm.
Then from behind me comes a loud clicking sound. I look up. Ari is checking the chamber of his pistol, making sure it is fully loaded, and I know then that it’s not just the storm he’s worried about. Despite his bravado and reassurances, the prospect of encountering Santini’s men scares him as much as it does me.
chapter THIRTEEN
HOW’S IT LOOKING?” I ask Ari as he comes into the stateroom. I stand up, starting toward him. Two hours earlier we left the cove, setting out again on the open sea. At first the weather seemed unchanged, other than a strong breeze that blew the ocean into whitecaps all around us like a frothy meringue. But the sky blackened swiftly and as thick raindrops began to fall, I took cover below.
Before he can answer, the boat sharply jerks to the left and I lurch in that direction. Then it rolls to the right, sending me flailing backward. “Easy.” Ari is at my side immediately, moving across the rocking cabin with experienced, certain feet and catching me by the elbow to steady me. “It’s all right. Just the sea kicking up ahead of the storm.”
But his serious expression says otherwise. “You mean it’s going to get worse?” I ask.
He nods grimly. “I’ve checked on the radio and the storm is a lot stronger than forecasted when we left Trieste.” I wonder now if he regrets our decision to travel by boat, whether he would have chosen another means, had he known.
As if on cue, the boat pitches to the right again. “It’s getting close,” Ari says, looking upward. He puts both hands on my shoulders and pushes me down to the bed. “Stay here,” he instructs. “Don’t get up, no matter what.” He races across the cabin and charges up the stairs.
Above, I hear heavy footsteps, followed by a creaking sound as the entire boat seems to groan. Then there is silence for
what seems like an eternity, broken only by the fierce howling of the wind. What’s happening?
Waves lap up against the tiny cabin windows. Instantly, it is as if I am submerged, my childhood nightmares about the ocean come to life. Breathe, I command myself, forcing the panic down. Ari knows what he is doing. Everything will be fine.
But the storm is growing more violent, tossing the boat in all directions. Ari’s bag flies from the shelf onto the floor, contents scattering. In the kitchen a jar slams against something and shatters. I cling to the headboard, trying in vain not to think of the scary lost-at-sea-in-a-storm movies I’ve seen. My stomach rolls.
From the deck comes a loud banging sound, followed by a scream. Ari! Heedless of his earlier warning, I let go of the bed and cross the cabin, holding on to the wall and trying not to fall as the boat lurches to and fro.
As I reach the deck, I am thrown backward by a wall of wind. Frantically, I grasp at the railing and fight my way up. “Ari!” I call, scanning the bridge and not seeing him. The sky is as dark as night and great waves of rain lash the deck.
I run to the side of the boat, clinging to the rail. “Ari!” I cry again, my voice lost in the roar of the wind. There is no sign of him in the wild surf.
“Jordan!” Ari’s voice comes unseen from above. Struggling to maintain my balance, I make my way to the ladder, climb to the bridge in time to see Ari pulling himself into the chair.
In the distance, lightning shoots straight downward, breaking the surface.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. I slipped, bumped my head.” His expression is suddenly angry. “I told you to stay downstairs. Couldn’t you have trusted me enough to listen for once?”
“But I thought—”
Another bolt of lightning crackles, closer this time. “We need to get inside.” He climbs down first, then reaches back to help me. The wind is stronger now, every step a struggle as we fight our way to the cabin.