“Anna, our government is closing in on Valdivia. I was afraid you’d been discovered, that perhaps your phone was tapped.”
After a moment, Anna sighed in disgruntled agreement. “How much does he know?” She jerked her head toward Rucker.
“Virtually nothing. He doesn’t know about your work, or why I’m here, or what’s happened over these past months. I figured that neither side could hurt him if he knew nothing.”
“Valdivia won’t see it that way.”
“Yes, he will. He needs my cooperation too much. Until this last mission, I was the only person who could work for him in the U.S. without suspicion. I’m still the safest bet he has.”
Rucker gripped the back of Dinah’s car seat and spoke roughly. “You’re through with this crap. We’re goin’ to South America and get our daughter, and I’m gonna hire a team of lawyers to keep you out of prison. You are through playin’ spy. I know you must have good reasons for doin’ it, but—”
Anna yelped. “He’s going to Surador with you?”
Dinah fumbled with the edge of her poncho and looked away. “Yes. I’ll explain later.” Rucker’s protectiveness made her eyes burn with bittersweet tears. He was willing to sacrifice everything for her even though he thought she was guilty of espionage against their country. For a deeply honorable man like Rucker, that decision must have been torture.
Anna’s voice was cutting. “You seem to forget that I have as much at stake in this mission as you do. You’re being selfish to take risks.”
Rucker interjected sharply, “You don’t have a daughter in Surador.”
The aging scientist laughed bitterly, but her lower lip trembled. “I most certainly do, you idiot.”
Rucker caught Dinah’s cautious expression. She grasped Anna’s arm and warned, “That’s enough. He doesn’t need to know.”
Rucker sank back on the seat, frowning. He had hoped that this mess would begin to make sense once they reached their destination. But Dinah had an ally in crime now, and he felt even more isolated.
Anna Scarborough’s house, like its owner, was unique and bizarre. It rose out of the side of a mountain like some sort of unnatural growth, a strange medieval design set in stone and log. It might have been the backwoods castle of a minor fiefdom run by a sorcerer.
The sorcerer stirred a banked fire in a massive stone fireplace. “Make yourself at home,” she snapped, and waved a hand toward a heavy, leather-upholstered couch. “I’ll bring herbal tea.” She bustled out of the room.
“I’d need a suit of armor and a lobotomy to feel at home here,” Rucker muttered under his breath.
Dinah pushed him down on the couch. “Don’t antagonize her. Please.”
He clenched his fists. “Back in Mount Pleasant she was a fascinatin’ old radical who loved a good debate. I admired that about her. But now she’s turned vicious. How in hell did you get involved with her?”
Dinah stroked his hair gently. “I can’t tell you that right now. Let’s just say that fate threw us together.”
“What did she mean about havin’ a daughter?” He could see that Dinah was debating the wisdom of telling him more. “At least tell me that,” he urged her.
She trembled. “All right. Anna’s daughter also has a doctorate in biology. Sara is about thirty years old. She’s doing research in Surador’s Amazon region.”
“So what does she have to do with Valdivia?”
Dinah shook her head sadly. Her hypnotic blue eyes begged him to stop. “No more.”
“What’s gonna happen to me if I learn more?”
Her answer was swift and grim. “Valdivia will find out and kill you.”
Shaken, Rucker got up and paced, his strides long and powerful. “How can you be sure of that?”
Anna Scarborough’s soft, cynical laugh interrupted them. She stood in the doorway, a copper teapot in one hand. Her dark eyes glittered at Rucker. “Because she’s seen him kill a man in cold blood. He made her watch.”
“Enough!” Dinah vaulted to her feet. She shuddered uncontrollably and hugged herself in an attempt to stop. Her teeth chattered even though her voice was firm. “I won’t t—talk about that. It’s taken me m—months to forget it. Rucker, please. It makes me sick to talk about it. All right?” She shook her head wildly. “No more. No—”
“Sssh, Dee. All right.” Rucker took a step toward her, his face white as he scanned her broken expression. He held out both hands. “Come here,” he whispered gruffly.
The distraught love in his voice sent her running into his arms. He held her in a tight embrace and she rested gratefully inside the circle of his strength.
Anna still observed them from the doorway. She sounded almost sympathetic as she said, “You two look ragged. I have a guest room where you can rest for a little while. I’ll bring you the tea when it’s ready.”
“Thank you,” Rucker told her sincerely.
Dinah frowned as they followed Anna down a winding hallway to a room full of ornate furniture and rich tapestries. She kept telling herself that there hadn’t been a devious undertone in the doctor’s voice.
Afternoon sunlight slanted through the bedroom’s narrow stained-glass windows. Dinah woke slowly, curled against Rucker with her head on his shoulder. Emotional exhaustion had taken its toll on them both.
After drinking the tea Anna offered they had fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the canopied bed. Dinah looked at Rucker’s peaceful face and felt a wave of devotion rise in her chest. The windows’ soft pastel shadows fell across his features, making him seem unreal, like some gallant knight from another time.
“I love you, Sir Sleeping Knight,” she whispered. Dinah kissed his forehead gently. “Wake up.”
He was strangely still, and his skin felt a little too warm to her lips. A small trill of alarm ran through her. “Rucker?”
There was no response, not even the flicker of his eyelashes. She shook him a little. His breathing was very deep and even. It never changed. Her voice rose desperately. “Rucker!”
She knelt beside him and took him by the shoulders. This time she put all her strength into shaking his big body. He was completely limp.
Dizzy with fear, Dinah leaped off the bed and ran to the room’s heavy wooden door. She hauled the massive door open and raced into the hallway, calling Anna’s name.
“Right here.”
Dinah whirled around. The grandmotherly scientist sat in a high-backed chair, her hands resting calmly on the lion heads carved into the arms. Dinah’s stomach churned. Anna had been waiting. She had expected this.
“What did you do to him?” Dinah demanded furiously, her voice lethal.
“Nothing harmful. His tea was drugged. He’ll sleep soundly for another ten hours or so and wake up with a nasty headache. I’ll give you some money, my car, and the package to deliver to Valdivia. By the time Rucker wakes up, you’ll be with Valdivia in New Orleans. It’s the only way. You know that.”
Dinah assessed her blankly for a moment. A grim sense of logic and duty finally reasserted itself. “You’re right,” she admitted in a dull voice.
“Hurry. Every minute counts. I’ve prepared everything for you to leave immediately.”
Dinah started toward the bedroom, then halted, her hands clenching rhythmically by her sides. “Tell him that I had nothing to do with drugging him,” she ordered. “Tell him that I’ll be back with our daughter. And tell him that I love him. Swear that you will.”
She whirled around and faced Anna fiercely. “Swear it,” she repeated.
“I swear. He’s a good man, and I understand why you love him.” The gray head nodded majestically. “You know that I have honor. Now go.”
Dinah staggered back into the bedroom and sat beside Rucker. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She spent several minutes caressing his face. She ran her hands over his body so that she could commit every inch of him to memory. From a chest at the end of the bed she got a light blanket and covered him with it.
Finally,
she held his head gently and kissed him on the lips. “Believe in me, sweetheart. Believe. I love you.”
She turned and ran from the room.
Anna took one last look at Rucker’s sleeping form and shut the door to the bedroom. She’d explain what she could when he woke, just as she’d promised Dinah. He mustn’t blame his wife.
Foolish man. But she had to give him credit for bravery. And he was certainly intelligent. He loved deeply and with great loyalty. All in all, she admired him. If this terrible situation weren’t wearing on her nerves, she wouldn’t have goaded him so badly.
The house was quiet. Evening was drawing around. Anna went into her laboratory and through it to the solarium where thousands of butterflies fluttered around her as if in greeting. She turned her face up to their feathery caresses and began to cry.
The shrill drone of her alarm system jerked her from the moment of weakness. Anna wiped her crinkled face and hurried through the house. She entered the medieval hall she called a living room and halted in shock.
A black-haired giant stood there, an automatic pistol hanging nonchalantly in his hand. Beside him stood a beautiful fair-haired man of only average height whose presence nevertheless seemed very overwhelming.
“Dr. Scarborough,” Jeopard Surprise said with a cold smile, “you’re under arrest.”
Nine
The headache was like the one in the old commercial, where tiny hammers beat a catchy rhythm. His was an unceasing, thumping rumba.
Rucker woke with the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets. He put a hand out on the bedcovers, searching for Dinah. Her cool, loving touch was the only thing short of brain removal that might help him.
“Hurts like the devil, I bet. The side effect is usually like that.”
“Move slow, Rucker. You’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
The unexpected male voices shocked him into awareness. He squinted in the dim light of a bedside lamp. Jeopard Surprise sat on the far corner of the bed, one arm resting on an updrawn knee. He was utterly sophisticated, yet casual. Redford playing Bond, Rucker thought woozily.
But the languid pose was so different from Jeopard’s usual formality that Rucker sensed deception. Jeopard was deliberately trying to put him at ease, to reassure him. A huge, oddly familiar man lounged against one of the bedposts, looking equally nonchalant.
Pain knifed through Rucker’s forehead when he sat up. He swayed, braced his arms beside him, and rasped, “What the hell is goin’ on? Where’s Dinah?”
The giant handed him a glass of water and two tablets. “She’s all right. Take these and your head won’t hurt quite as bad.”
Rucker swallowed the painkillers and looked around groggily. Night had fallen outside the colorful windows. He raised his wrist and blinked at his watch with fierce determination. “It’s three A.M.”
“Congratulations. Most men who wake up from a heavy dose of narcotics can’t remember their names for a while, much less tell time,” Jeopard said pleasantly.
Rucker drew his knees up and leaned on them for support. He knew that this turn of events was disastrous, but his thoughts were too sluggish to figure out why. “Where’s Dinah? What are you doin’ here? Where’s Anna Scarborough?”
Jeopard continued in the same cocktail-party voice. “Dr. Scarborough is under arrest. She’s been taken away for questioning.” He paused. “Dinah is on her way to meet Valdivia.”
Rucker raised his head slowly. Jeopard’s announcement cleared his pain as cleanly as if a scalpel had excised it. “No. I was supposed to go with her. We had an agreement.”
Jeopard gave the news to him bluntly, without blinking. “I doubt she ever intended to keep it. Drugging you was the easiest way to solve the problem.”
Rucker felt sick. Then his mouth curled in disgust. “She left me a note and you have it. Give it here.”
“Rucker, there’s no note. What would I gain by hiding it from you?”
Rucker jammed a hand through his hair. After a bitter moment his shoulders slumped. “All right. But my wife wouldn’t dope me. She’s not capable of that.”
“I’m sorry, friend, but that’s not the way it appears. We don’t have the details because Dr. Scarborough is staging a silent protest. She refuses to say a word about anything she or Dinah did. But you’ve been drugged, and your wife’s gone, and my men are following her. It’s time for you to wake up—in more ways than one.”
The implication washed over Rucker and a nauseating fist twisted in his stomach. He lurched up from the bed and staggered blindly toward the bathroom, clutching his midsection.
He refused to believe this. Fury supplanted shock. When he returned, bent halfway over, he jabbed a finger at Jeopard. “You cold bastard, you don’t love anybody so I don’t expect you to understand how my wife feels about me. Or how much I believe in her. Catching her and Valdivia is nothing but a damned job assignment to you.”
Jeopard’s lounging posture never changed, but his face tightened into a grim smile. “Oh? Valdivia killed my brother.”
Rucker gazed at him in speechless astonishment. Kyle. Jeopard’s brother. Millie’s brother. Kyle had worked with Jeopard in Navy intelligence and later as a free-lance government agent. Kyle was one of the most decent, likable men in the world.
“I thought he was on assignment somewhere in Asia,” Rucker finally managed.
Jeopard shook his head. “Kyle was in Surador about three months ago, investigating Valdivia. He learned that Dinah was living at one of Valdivia’s haciendas. Kyle smuggled a message to her and she offered to meet him. When she did, Valdivia got him.”
Jeopard paused, as if taking a moment to carefully suppress his emotions. “My information is sketchy, but as best I’ve been able to learn, Valdivia put him in a sealed courtyard with a pack of rottweilers.”
Rucker took a long breath. Dinah had watched a man die. Kyle Surprise. She was nervous around dogs now. He asked slowly, “Are you sayin’ that Dinah deliberately helped Valdivia set Kyle up?”
“It looks that way.” Jeopard was silent, as if a spell had just turned him into marble. “Everything I know about her is documented by indisputable evidence. Everything you know is based on what’s she’s told you over the past few days.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of regret. “You got vague assurances from a woman who once spent a year in prison and is faced with the prospects of going there again if I catch her.”
“Damn you.” Rucker groaned in bitter protest to Jeopard’s logic. He went to the bed and sank down weakly. Dinah was gone. She’d left him, tricked him, drugged him without the least hint of concern. Jeopard wasn’t lying about that.
“I’m on your side,” Jeopard told him finally, his voice strained. “I’m not the one you should hate. Try hating Valdivia.”
“That’s easy.”
“My men should be arresting him in a few hours. As soon as Dinah leads them to him.”
Rucker gasped for breath. The only pain inside him now was the pain of old wounds tearing open. Then bitterness seeped into the pain, fusing it into something unyielding and deadly. He had trusted her. Never again.
He rasped the words. “I have a daughter in Surador. At one of Valdivia’s plantations, I think.”
After a moment of stunned silence, Jeopard commented, “That’s news to me. But it’s possible.”
“Anna Scarborough’s daughter is workin’ with Valdivia.”
“We know. She’s a loose end we don’t intend to ignore.”
Rucker looked at him sharply. “As in ‘terminate with extreme prejudice?’ ”
“Relax, friend. I don’t kill people. I meant that we have locals working to find her. We suspect that she’s at one of Valdivia’s haciendas. Possibly the same one as your daughter.”
Rucker could think of little beyond his grief and anger. His dazed vision settled on the man beside Jeopard. Above a now clean-shaven jaw, black eyes gazed back at him.
“Lancaster.”
The dark head bowed
slightly in acknowledgment. “I had to make certain you got out of the mine.”
Rucker swiveled his gaze to Jeopard. “You tracked us all the way here. You let Dinah escape. She was right. I was carryin’ a transmitter. How?”
Jeopard nodded toward Rucker’s watch. “It was the only way I could find Dr. Scarborough.”
“And now your men will just follow Dinah back to … to where?”
“New Orleans. She’s probably there by now. As soon as she meets with Valdivia, we’ll arrest them both. And take the package she was to deliver.”
“What’s in the package?”
“A herbicide that Valdivia’s superiors are very interested in obtaining.”
“What do the Russians want with a weed killer?”
Jeopard’s voice was soft. “I think they want to destroy most of the plant life in the United States.”
Rucker absorbed the information and felt his last bit of faith drain away. Dinah was party to an evil he could hardly fathom. She must have been desperate to do anything, to say anything that would keep him off the track.
Rucker didn’t recognize his own voice. It was completely devoid of emotion. “So that’s what Dr. Scarborough’s been workin’ on. She and her daughter.”
“Looks that way. It has something to do with a virus carried by a certain species of South American butterfly. They concocted a synthetic form of the virus, at least a million times more potent than the original. Dinah is just their courier, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Just the courier.”
“Rucker?”
“Hmmm.”
“Well take you to see her tomorrow. She’ll be under isolation and heavy security, but I can pull strings.”
“I don’t want to see her. I just want to get my daughter out of Surador.”
“You’re glassy eyed and upset. See how you feel in the morning.”
“I’m not one damned bit upset.” Rucker held out a hand. “Steady as a rock.” He lay down, shut his eyes, and fumbled with the light blanket that had been covering him when he woke. How thoughtful. Dinah hadn’t wanted him to catch a chill.