But she hadn’t died, Decker realized in horror. In the weeks and months to come, McKittrick must have gone looking for her. Had she and McKittrick gotten together? Had she convinced him that she wasn’t his enemy, that the Agency had used him worse than she had? Had she been directing this?
“Run!” Decker screamed. “Get behind the Dumpster!” Hearing Esperanza racing next to him, he urged Beth ahead of him and suddenly felt himself being lifted off his feet by a force of air that had the impact of a giant fist. The burst of light and the roar that enveloped him were as if the heart of the electrical storm had condensed and struck him. He was weightless, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel until with shocking immediacy he slammed onto the wet pavement behind the Dumpster. He rolled onto Beth to shield her from the wreckage falling around them. Something glanced off his shoulder, making him wince. Something banged near his head. Glass shattered all around him.
Then the shock wave had passed, and he was conscious of the painful ringing in his ears, of the rain, of people shouting from nearby buildings, of Beth moving under him. She coughed, and he feared that he might be smothering her. Dazed, he gathered the strength to roll off her, hardly aware of the chunks of cinder block that lay around them.
“Are you hurt?”
“My leg.”
Hands shaking, he checked it. The light from a fire in the remnants of the motel rooms showed him a thick shard of wood projecting from her right thigh. He pulled it out, alarmed by how much blood pulsed from the wound. “A tourniquet. You need a—” He tugged off his belt and cinched it around the flesh above the jagged hole in her leg.
Someone groaned. A shadow moved behind the Dumpster. Slowly, a figure sat up, and Decker shook with relief, knowing that Esperanza was still alive.
“Decker!”
The voice didn't come from Esperanza. The ringing in Decker’s ears was so great that he had trouble identifying the direction from which the voice shouted.
“Decker!”
Then Decker understood, and he stared past the reflection of flames on the pools of water in the parking lot. In the street out front, McKittrick’s Pontiac idled. Prevented by wreckage from entering the lot, the car was positioned so the driver’s window faced the motel. McKittrick must have followed Decker back to town. His features contorted with rage, he leaned out the open window, holding up a detonator, screaming, “I could have set it off when you were inside! But that would have been too easy! I’m just getting started! Keep looking behind you! One night, when you least expect it, we’ll blow you and your bitch apart!”
In the distance, a siren wailed. McKittrick raised something else, and Decker had just enough strength to roll with Beth toward the protection of the Dumpster before McKittrick fired an automatic weapon, bullets slamming against the metal container. Behind the bin, Esperanza pulled out a pistol and shot back. The next thing, Decker heard tires squealing on wet pavement, and McKittrick’s Pontiac roared away.
2
A second siren joined the first.
“We have to get out of here,” Esperanza said.
“Help me with Beth.”
Each man took an arm, lifting her, struggling to hurry with her into the darkness at the back of the motel. A crowd had begun to gather. Decker brushed past two men who ran from an apartment building behind the motel.
“What happened?” one of them shouted.
“A propane tank blew up!” Decker told him.
“Do you need help?”
“No! We’re taking this woman to a hospital! Look for other survivors!” Holding Beth, Decker couldn’t help feeling her wince with each hurried step he took.
In the murky alley on the opposite side of the motel, he and Esperanza paused just before they reached the street, waiting while several people raced past toward the fire. Immediately they carried Beth unseen along the street toward where the Oldsmobile was parked.
“Drive!” Decker said. “I’ll stay in the back with her!”
Slamming his door, Esperanza turned the ignition key. On the rear seat, Decker steadied Beth to keep her from rolling onto the floor. The Oldsmobile sped away.
“How is she?” Esperanza asked.
“The tourniquet has the bleeding stopped, but I’ve got to release it. She’ll get gangrene if blood doesn’t circulate through her leg.” Alarmed by a spurt of blood when he loosened the belt, Decker quickly reached into his travel bag on the floor in the back and grabbed a shirt, shoving it against the wound, creating a pressure bandage. He leaned close to Beth where she lay on the backseat. “Are you sick to your stomach? Are you seeing double?”
“Dizzy.”
“Hang on. We’ll get you to a doctor.”
“Where?” Esperanza asked.
“Back in Manhattan. We were headed west when we came into Closter. Take the next left turn and the next left turn after that.”
“To go east. Back to the interstate,” Esperanza said.
“Yes. And then south.” Decker stroked Beth’s cheek. “Don’t be afraid. I’m here. I’ll take care of you. You’re going to be all right.”
Beth squeezed his hand. “McKittrick’s insane.”
“Worse than in Rome,” Decker said.
“Rome?” Esperanza frowned back at him. “What are you talking about?”
Decker hesitated. He had been determined to stay quiet about Rome. But Beth and Esperanza had nearly been killed because of what had happened there. They had a right to know the truth. Their lives might depend on it. So he told them ... about the twenty-three dead Americans ... about Renata, McKittrick, and that rainy courtyard where Renata had been shot.
“She’s a terrorist?” Esperanza said.
“McKittrick fell in love with her,” Decker explained. “After the operation in Rome went to hell, he refused to believe she had tricked him. I think he went after her to make her tell him the truth, but she convinced him she really did love him, and now she’s using him again. To get at me. To get her hands on the money Giordano gave him.”
“She hates you.” Beth hardly managed the strength to speak. “All she could talk about was getting even. She’s obsessed with making you suffer.”
“Take it easy. Don’t try to talk.”
“No. This is important. Listen. She kept ranting to McKittrick about something you did to her brothers. What did you do?”
“Brothers?” Decker jerked his head back. Again he suffered the nightmarish memory of what had happened in that courtyard in Rome.
As wreckage from Renata's bomb had cascaded, a movement to Decker's left had made him turn. A thin, dark-haired man in his early twenties, one of Renata's brothers, rose from behind garbage cans. The man hadn't been prepared for Renata to detonate the bomb so soon. Although he had a pistol, he didn't aim at Decker—his attention was totally distracted by a scream on the other side of the courtyard. With dismay, the young man saw one of his brothers swatting at flames on his clothes and in his hair, which had been ignited by the falling, burning wreckage.
Decker shot them both.
“It’s a blood feud,” Decker said, appalled. A wave of nausea swept through him as he understood that Renata hated him even more than McKittrick did. Decker imagined them reinforcing each other’s malice, feeding off it, becoming more obsessed with paying him back. But how to get even? They must have debated it endlessly. What revenge would be the most satisfying? They could have just gunned me down in a drive-by shooting, Decker thought. The trouble is, merely killing me wouldn’t have been good enough. They wanted to make me afraid. They wanted to make me suffer.
But Decker wasn’t only thinking this. Beth’s shocked expression made him realize that he was saying it out loud. He couldn’t stop himself. His anguished thoughts kept pouring out. “Nothing would have happened in Santa Fe if McKittrick and Renata hadn’t been fixated on me. McKittrick had been forced out of the CIA, but the official story was, he quit. On paper, he looked impressive enough for the U.S. Marshals Service to accept him. He’d been k
eeping track of where I was living. When you were assigned to him and when he found out the house next to mine was for sale, the plan came together.”
Decker braced himself. His ordeal of saving Beth had been aimed toward this moment, and now the moment had come. He couldn’t put off the question any longer. He had to know. “Were you aware of my background when you first met me?” Her eyes still shut, Beth didn’t answer. Her chest heaved, agitated.
“Before you came to my office, did McKittrick tell you I’d worked for the CIA? Did he instruct you to play up to me, to do your best to make me feel close to you so I’d want to spend all my spare time with you and, in effect, be your next-door-neighbor bodyguard?”
Beth remained silent, breathing with difficulty.
“That would have been their revenge,” Decker said. “To manipulate me into falling in love with you, then to betray you to the mob. By destroying your life, they hoped to destroy mine. And the mob would pay them for their pleasure.”
“I see lights,” Esperanza interrupted, steering swiftly around a corner. “That’s the interstate ahead.”
“I have to know, Beth. Did McKittrick tell you to try to make me fall in love with you?”
She still didn’t answer. How could he make her tell him the truth? Unexpectedly, as they reached the interstate, the glare of passing headlights spilled into the backseat, showing Decker that Beth hadn’t closed her eyes because she was trying to avoid his gaze. Her body was limp, her breathing now shallow. She had passed out.
3
It was 3:00 A.M. when Esperanza, following Decker’s directions, sped to a stop at a brownstone on Manhattan’s West Eighty-second Street. That late at night, the affluent neighborhood was quiet, the rainy street deserted. No one was around to see Decker and Esperanza carry Beth from the car and into the brownstone’s vestibule. Worried by her increasing weakness, Decker pressed the intercom button for apartment 8. As he anticipated, instead of having to push the button several times and wait for a sleepy voice to ask what he wanted, he received an immediate response. The person upstairs had been alerted by an emergency phone call Decker had made from a service station along the interstate. A buzzer sounded, the signal that the lock on the vestibule’s inner door had been electronically released.
Decker and Esperanza hurried through, found the elevator waiting for them, and went up to the fourth floor, frustrated by the elevator’s slow rise. The moment the elevator’s door opened, a man wearing rumpled clothes that made him look as if he had dressed quickly hurried from an apartment and helped to carry Beth inside. The man was tall and exceedingly thin, with a high forehead and a salt-and-pepper mustache. Decker heard a noise behind him and turned, to see a heavyset woman with gray hair and a worried look shut and lock the door behind them.
The man directed Decker and Esperanza to the left, into a brightly lit kitchen, where a plastic sheet had been spread across the table, other sheets on the floor. Surgical instruments were laid out on a protected counter. Water boiled on the stove. The woman, who wore hospital greens, blurted to Decker, “Wash your hands.”
Decker obeyed, crowding with the man and the woman at the sink, using a bottle of bitter-smelling liquid to disinfect his hands. The woman helped the man put on a surgical mask, a Plexiglas face shield, and latex gloves, then gestured for Decker to help her put on a mask, shield, and gloves. Without pausing, the woman used scissors to cut Beth’s bloodstained slacks, exposing her right leg all the way up to her underwear. Now that the pressure bandage was removed, the jagged hole spurted blood.
“When did this happen?” The doctor pressed a gloved finger against the flesh next to the wound. The bleeding stopped.
“Forty minutes ago,” Decker said. Rainwater dripped from him onto the plastic sheet on the floor.
“How soon did you restrict the flow of blood?”
“Almost immediately.”
“You saved her life.”
While the woman used surgical sponges to wipe blood from the wound, the doctor swabbed alcohol onto Beth’s injured leg, then gave her an injection. But despite what the doctor explained was a painkiller, Beth moaned when the doctor used surgical tweezers to examine the interior of the wound and determine if there was any debris inside.
“I can’t be certain. This will have to be quick and crude, just to get the bleeding stopped. She needs an X ray. Intravenous fluids. Possibly microsurgery if the femoral artery was nicked.” The doctor gave Beth another injection, this time of what he explained was an antibiotic. “But she’ll need more antibiotics on a regular schedule after she leaves here.”
The woman swabbed the wound with a brownish disinfectant while the doctor peered close to the wound, studying it with spectacles, one lens of which had a small additional lens that he swiveled into place. As soon as the woman finished disinfecting the area around the wound, she put a finger where the doctor had been applying pressure, allowing him to begin suturing.
“You shouldn’t have called me,” the doctor complained to Decker as he worked.
“I didn’t have a choice.” Decker studied Beth, whose face, moist with rain and sweat, was the gray of porridge.
“But you’re not with the organization any longer,” the doctor said.
“I didn’t know you had heard.”
“Evidently. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have presumed to contact me.”
“I meant what I said. I didn’t have a choice. Besides, if you knew I wasn’t sanctioned, you didn’t have to agree to help me.” Decker held Beth’s hand. Her fingers clutched his as if she was drowning.
“In that respect, I'm the one who didn’t have a choice.” The doctor continued suturing. “As you so vividly told me on the phone, you intended to cause trouble in this building if I didn’t help.”
“I doubt the neighbors would have approved of your side-line.”
The woman peered up angrily from where she assisted. “You contaminated our home. You know where the clinic is. You could have—”
“There wasn’t time,” Decker said. “You once treated me here.”
“That was an exception.”
“I know of other exceptions you made. For a generous fee. I assume that’s another reason you agreed to help.”
The doctor frowned up from the sutures he applied. “What generous fee did you have in mind?”
“In my travel bag, I have an eighteen-karat gold chain, a gold bracelet, a jade ring, and a dozen gold coins.”
“Not money?” The doctor frowned harder.
“They’re worth around twelve thousand dollars. Put them in a sock for when times get tough. Believe me, they come in handy if you have to leave the country in a hurry and you can’t trust going to a bank.”
“That hasn’t been a problem of ours.”
“To date,” Decker said. “I suggest you do the best job you can on this woman.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You must have misunderstood. I was cheering you on.” The doctor frowned even more severely, then concentrated on applying more sutures. “Under the circumstances, my fee for this procedure is twenty thousand dollars.”
“What?”
“I consider the items you mentioned only a down payment.” The doctor straightened, no longer working. “Is my fee a problem?”
Decker stared at the half-closed hole in Beth’s leg. “No.”
“I thought not.” The doctor resumed working. “Where are the items?”
“Over here. In my travel bag.” Decker turned toward where he had dropped it when he helped carry Beth into the kitchen. “And what about the remaining amount?”
“You’ll get it.”
“How can I be certain?”
“You have my word. If that isn’t good enough—”
Esperanza interrupted the tension. “Look, I feel useless just standing here. There must be something I can do to help.”
“The blood in the hallway and the elevator,” the woman said. “The neighbors will call the police if they see it.
Clean it up.”
Her peremptory tone suggested that she thought she was speaking to an Hispanic servant, but although Esperanza’s dark eyes flashed, he only responded, “What can I use?”
“Under the sink, there’s a bucket, rags, and disinfectant. Make sure you wear rubber gloves.”
As Esperanza gathered the materials and left, the woman applied a blood-pressure cuff to Beth’s left arm. She studied the gauge. Air stopped hissing from the cuff.
“What are the numbers?” Decker asked.
“A hundred over sixty.”
Normal was 120 over 80. “Low, but not in the danger zone.”
The woman nodded. “She’s very lucky.”
“Yeah, you can see how lucky she looks.”
“You don’t look so good yourself.”
The phone rang, its jangle so intrusive that Decker, the doctor, and his wife tensed, staring at it. It was mounted to the wall, next to the Sub-Zero refrigerator. It rang again. “Who’d be calling at this hour?”
“I have a patient in intensive care.” The doctor continued working. “I left instructions for the hospital to phone me if the patient’s condition worsened. When you called, that’s what I thought it would be about.” He held up his blood-smeared gloves and gestured toward those on his wife. “But I can’t answer the phone with these.”
It rang again.
“And I don’t want you to stop what you’re doing.” Decker picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Awfully predictable, Decker.”
Hearing McKittrick’s smug voice, Decker stopped breathing. He clutched the phone with knuckle-whitening force.