Sam and David were bringing out platters of food from the kitchen to set on the table. Kateri could smell fish sauce and vegetables and fried rice. Her mouth watered, despite her fear.
“We decided to eat Vietnamese tonight again,” Mrs. O’Donnell said brightly to Kateri. “Where’s Alex?”
Kateri glanced in the boys’ bedroom. It was empty. “I thought he might be down here—” she started to say, but the agent waved a hand.
“My fault. Alex ran out to the store to get something for me,” he said lightly.
“He said not to hold dinner for him. He’ll be back soon. I have to tell you, I’m really impressed by your service here.”
Kateri turned to the hallway, and the agent added, “Kateri. He said you should wait here for him.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She hadn’t seen Alex leave the building, but of course, he could have gone out the side door to his own car and driven away after she had gone back into the lobby. She could see Alex doing that, trying to avoid her. After all, he had been avoiding the question of their relationship all summer.
The agent and Mrs. O’Donnell continued talking about Northern Virginia and favorite stores. Kateri stood in the doorway, feeling strangely ill at ease. The food was on the table; Sam and David were arguing over who got to sit on which cushion. Only Mr. O’Donnell looked a bit perturbed. Their eyes met, and Kateri felt her unease heighten. He thinks that something’s wrong too…
“Uh, I’m going to get something from my room,” she said, running down the hallway. “Be right back.”
“We’ll wait for you, dear!” Mrs. O’Donnell called.
In the lobby, Kateri plastered herself to the windows and craned her neck around, trying to see if Alex’s battered red car was still in its corner spot. But she 190 Alex O’Donnell and the Forty CyberThieves couldn’t tell. The van was still parked in front. She tried the lobby door. Still jammed.
Unconsciously she reached for the lobby phone, and thought, I bet there’s no dial tone. She was right. Something told her that if she had had her cellphone, it wouldn’t be working either.
Something is not right. Really not right.
Thinking that she had heard steps in the passage, she opened the door to the living quarters, hoping against hope to see Alex’s strong, confident form sauntering down the hallway. But it was empty.
From the living room came the sound of laughter and glassware. Mr. O’Donnell was pouring out drinks. She listened for Alex’s repartee, any words of greeting. No. He was not there.
But something else caught her eye. The weapons wall. It was bare. Every sword and weapon was gone from the hooks embedded in the Oriental curtain.
Only the two fans adorned each corner.
Now she was certain something was wrong.
But what could she do? Without Alex?
She returned to her hotel room, pacing madly about the space she had recently torn her belongings out of. In her haste to leave the O’Donnells, she had forgotten her picture of the Sacred Heart taped to the wall and her rosary, which still hung from the hotel wall lamp. Abstractedly she touched its beads, and searched the room again for some sort of answer.
She wandered towards the door, and glancing through the open bathroom door, realized she had completely forgotten to pack that room. Makeup, beauty products, and jewelry were scattered around. Plus something purple shimmering in the corner. Her ao dài was hanging from the towel rack. She had been trying to steam the wrinkles out of the silk. Alex’s gift to her.
Alex. The main reason why the cyberthieves had not destroyed the O’Donnells last time.
And now Alex was not here.
Coincidence?
Alex has just run out to the store for me…he said he’d be back. Not to hold dinner for him… Kateri, he asked you to wait here for him.
Suddenly deep, terrible certainty washed over her. It was a lie. Alex would not have told her to wait for him. Alex had told her she could leave. He didn’t expect her to be waiting for him. He thought she was gone. If he hadn’t returned, there was certainly another reason.
Was he dead? Already? Was it already too late?
She grabbed the ao dài. She wasn’t strong, or trained, or even very clever.
But she had one thing she could do. Something Alex had wanted her to do. She could do it now.
Quickly she unbuttoned the collar and pulled the dress from the hanger.
She didn’t have much time.
Wrenching himself back and forth, Alex tossed and turned in the chair, straining this way and that, trying to find some give. Sweat poured out of him, he was exhausted, but he couldn’t give up. He couldn’t.
The chair toppled and fell forward, his head smashing on the base of the nearby table. His eyes spun around, and he struggled to remain conscious, breathing through his nose. He couldn’t throw up again with his mouth gagged, or he’d suffocate.
Feeling all resolve draining from him, he slumped, his forehead against the carpet, and tried hard to focus, to find that center of trust in God that had always seen him through the worst battles before. But the tangled images in his imagination cut into that center, jabbed knives into his chest as he tried again and again to calm his breathing and his heart rate.
It was hopeless. He knew it. A meaningless battle against despair.
There was nothing he could do.
Timidly, Kateri stepped towards the dining room, holding one fan close to her face, the other fan cocked alluringly across her stomach. No one saw her yet.
Tears crept up into her eyes and she pushed them down. For a moment, she wavered.What am I doing? I’m no siren of the South East.
Speak for yourself. Alex’s voice. Alex’s hand, touching her cheek gently.
You’re so very beautiful.
She felt her earrings trembling on her earlobes and swallowed. Throwing a quick glance over her shoulder, catching the golden glimmer of an earring in her peripheral vision, she prayed to find that comforting masculine figure, sword in hand, watching her back—but no. She had demanded to leave, and he had let her go.
And now he was gone.
I call myself pro-life, but I didn’t mind hurting him, she thought bitterly . And then leaving him, with no explanation. I wasn’t kind or fair, not to him or to those he loved.
Yes, the very least she could do was defend the family she had mocked him for being loyal to.
The movement of her head had drawn Sam’s eye, and now he stared at her, his jaw dropped. “Yowza.”
“Ao dài,” David said, blinking. “Uh… Kateri? Is that you?”
Delicately, Kateri nodded her head, her hair heavy in its topknot, which she’d skewered with half a dozen bobby pins and a pencil. With small steps that her mother would have been proud of, she inched forward, making a graceful curtsy with the fans.
She could not have produced a more shocked audience. Mr. and Mrs.
O’Donnell stared, the young boys were statues, and Agent Furlow gave a long, low whistle.
“I would like to dance for you,” Kateri said. “In honor of our guest.”
“The fan dance?” Sam asked, as though he couldn’t believe it.
“The fan dance.”
“Awesome!”
“David,” Kateri inclined her head towards him. “I need some music.”
David scrambled to the stereo system. “Uh—anything in particular?”
“Something appropriate.”
“Put on the sound track to Kung Fu Panda,” Sam suggested. Kateri winced, but she knew it would have to do.
She waited for the music, and then gracefully swept forward, curling the fans. Unbidden, the dance came into her memory. She could almost hear her mother’s clapping hands and high-pitched commands. One step, two steps to the right, fan raised high. One step, two steps to the left, fan down. One step to the right, fan up, one step to the left, fan down. Turn around and curl the fans, and bow. Step again…
David pumped up the music, and Kateri leapt to and
fro with the music, sweeping around the table, around the guests, the folds of the ao dài trailing beautifully behind her. She was a butterfly, an angel, a silken gossamer siren, flitting right—flitting left. She had to get close… Back to the steps, the curling, the high and the low. Hop step right—and clap the fan—hop step left—and clap the fan. Nod and smile, lift the fan, smile, smile.
Agent Furlow was rubbing his nose, sliding his hand into his pocket where she knew he kept his gun. She fluttered in front of him, lowered her lashes, looked up at him with wide eyes. He gawked at her, withdrew his hand. She turned around, looked at him again, a wisp of a look, turned around, one more time—turn around, look at him and—the music was almost done—she turned around, flipped the fan and furled it, braced herself unconsciously, and leaned into his personal space. As though bowing over him, as though to hover on him with a butterfly’s kiss, she unfurled the fan with its hidden blades.
She set its metal razor edge at the base of his throat and held it. The music sank into silence.
“Remain still,” she said steadily. “Or you, sir, are dead.”
There were jagged intakes of breath all around the room. Agent Furlow’s blue eyes looked at her. He started to smile, and she pressed inward. He felt the sharp metal against his thorax and gasped. He swallowed, and remained still, his blue eyes twitching as they stared into hers. No one moved.
Mr. O’Donnell finally recovered his voice. “What are you doing, Kateri?” He sounded as though he were trying to talk her down from a ledge.
“Catching the last cyberthief,” Kateri said. “David and Sam, disarm and immobilize him, will you?”
She knew they only had seconds before the agent reacted. But Sam and David didn’t disappoint. They moved instantly to either side of the man and grabbed his arms, David tossing the gun to his dad. Mr. O’Donnell caught it, trained it on the agent, and cocked it.
“Make sure he doesn’t have another gun,” Sam urged. “That one was too obvious.”
Mr. O’Donnell said dubiously, “You’d better be right about this, Kateri: I believe there’s some kind of law against threatening a federal agent.”
“There sure is,” Agent Furlow said huskily, barely moving his lips.
“I’m willing to take the risk,” Kateri said. And she blinked, still holding the fan to the man’s throat. “First,” she said steadily, trying to control her voice. “He has to tell us where Alex really is.”
David handed his father the man’s wallet with his ID on the front. “Check to make sure he’s really a federal agent, Dad.”
His dad shrugged. “I’ve no doubt of that,” he said, opening the wallet.
Suddenly he started and picked up a golden charm that had tumbled out of it.
“But are you also a ninja?”
Agent Furlow didn’t say a thing, but his face darkened.
“You were the one I followed,” Mr. O’Donnell said, holding up the charm, of a tiny ninja with nunchucks. “You’re the one who asked me to join the forty cyberthieves.” He swallowed, and his voice grew stronger. “And I said no.”
“Your choice,” the agent said contemptuously. “Your fatal error.”
There was a gasp from David. “Look!” He had pulled something familiar from the man’s pocket: the red keycard that was the master key.
“Alex’s,” Mrs. O’Donnell said.
The tears were flowing out of Kateri’s eyes now. “Give that to me,” she said.
“Mr. O’Donnell, don’t let him move an inch, or I swear I’ll kill him. Everyone stay here.”
And she tore out of the apartment.
As she raced up one flight of stairs after another, swinging around the banisters so fast that she barreled into walls and tripped over her silk trousers.
If he’s dead—I want to be the first one to find him. It’s my fault. Please, God, no—
The topknot flopped into her face, and she pulled it out as she ripped through the last door and raced to the room at the end of the corridor, room 310, Agent Furlow’s room.
But even as she skidded to a stop, she heard the noise and knew someone was alive in that room. She grabbed the door handle and heard a tremendous crash, and breaking glass. In a terror, she slid the card to unlock the door, and threw the handle and the door open.
What greeted her eyes was a room that had been hit by a hurricane. The drapes were ripped, the covers off the bed, the mattress crazily leaning off the bed, furniture overturned, the television set shattered on the floor. And in the middle of it lay the hurricane, wrenching itself over to face his foe. A wild-eyed Alex, gagged and bound hand and foot to the remains of what had been a chair.
Kateri felt herself sliding down the open door as the silk gave way beneath her, and she staggered to her feet. She hurried over to him, knelt down, and carefully pulled the tape off of his mouth. “Alex. They’re okay. We’re all okay.
We caught him.”
With a gasp of relief, Alex sank back against the ruined frame of the chair.
“Thank God,” he said feebly. “I almost died here, trying to get to you.”
“It sure looks like it,” she said, surveying the wreckage, blinking. The devastated room bore testimony to Alex’s frenzied attempts to come to the rescue of his family. “I’m so sorry I left you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said gratefully. “I’m just glad you came back.” He twisted himself to his knees. “Want to pull that cord off of my leg? Thanks.”
Staggering to his feet, he lifted the remains of the chair on his arms and crashed them down on the bottom of the overturned table. The chair shattered, and he shrugged out of the pieces. “That helps.”
“Let me get your hands,” she urged, getting to her feet.
“Can’t. They’re cuffed. Furlow has the keys. Wait a second.”
He jackknifed himself in two, straining hard, and managed to pull his chained wrists over his seat and up to the back of his knees. For a moment he wriggled like a cat trying to get through a small hole, but in another moment he was back on his feet, his shackled wrists in front of him. “Much better.”
“We’d better tell your parents that you’re alive. I think your mom is about to have a heart attack—this time for sure,” Kateri said, grabbing him by the arms, but he twisted his wrists up and managed to grab hers.
“Wait a moment,” he said, breathing hard. “I just need to know one thing.
When you wouldn’t talk to me before, was it because you couldn’t tell me that you wanted to break up with me?” His green eyes bored into hers.
She couldn’t speak, but shook her head.
He cocked his head and looked at her carefully. “You didn’t want to break up with me?”
“No,” she managed to say through the tears that were spilling down her cheeks. “In fact, quite the opposite.”
He sank to his knees. “Oh thank God. Kateri, you don’t know how humiliated I feel right now. This is not at all how I was planning to propose to you. My plans involved something more like a surprise trip to the city, an exclusive restaurant and a ring with a rather large ruby. But if you can accept me now—I know it’ll be for real. And that’s what I really want from you. That’s what I’ve always wanted from you but never dared to hear. The truth. Kateri Maria Kovach, can you—could you—would you—marry me?”
“Alex O’Donnell,” she whispered, pushing back the hair that was straggling over his forehead, knowing that she was ready, at last, to leap off that cliff her mother had talked about. “I will.”
With a gigantic spring he jumped to his feet and threw his chained hands around her, pulling her to him and kissing her with less than his usual restraint.
Caught now, for good, she laughed at him, and spun around with him crazily in the rubble and shards of the ruined hotel room.
Alex was happy. His family was alive. His enemy was in the hands of the local police, who were delighted that another high-profile criminal had been nabbed in their precinct. (He suspected they were en
joying lording it over the FBI as well, but he couldn’t be sure.) And Kateri had agreed to marry him. Even if he was still sore and bruised again from his recent kidnapping, he didn’t have much to complain of.
“It doesn’t get better than this, does it?” he said, ruffling the fur of Link the cat, who was sitting on his chest while he lay on the futon. She purred in agreement.
He watched as Kateri, who was still wearing the silk dress he had gotten her, crossed the room spontaneously and hugged his dad. It occurred to him that he had never seen them show any affection towards one another. Most of the time, she had held Dad at arm’s length.
“Mr. O’Donnell, I’m sorry I doubted you,” Kateri said.
He grinned. “Welcome to the family.”
“Thanks,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “I think I’ll stay.”
David and Sam had jimmied open the closet, where Agent Furlow had locked up all the family’s weapons, and now the boys were restoring the swords and throwing stars to their places. But Alex noticed that they had moved the fans from the corners to the place of honor in the center.
From her wheelchair, Alex’s mom was busy in the kitchen, reheating the food from the feast that everyone had been too excited to eat. “We’d better check it for poison,” Sam had opined. But David had already eaten some of the casserole, and when he didn’t fall over frothing at the mouth for real (he did it a few times for effect), they agreed to eat it if Mom would microwave it again.
His father emerged from the bedroom with a curious pile of slabs. He set them down on the floor, and Alex finally recognized them as laptops. His laptop, his dad’s, his mom’s, his brothers’, even Kateri’s.
“I say we put these away for a while,” he said. “You kids can use the hotel computer for schoolwork if you need to, but I say we put away the recreational computers. What do you think? A family pact? We can get to know our future sister-and-daughter-in-law, go hiking, maybe camping—get to know the real world for a little bit. What do you say?”