He bent to nuzzle her neck. “I know,” he whispered against her skin. “I saw the pictures. You look just like her.”
Caroline smiled. She’d been told that often enough. It pleased her.
“Dad loved to show her off. He loved pampering her, buying her expensive gifts, it made him happy. And I think Mom loved making a nice home for him. Toby and I would catch them kissing when they thought we weren’t looking. I’m glad they died together. That’s what they would have wanted.” She tightened her hands on Jack’s biceps and looked deeply into his eyes. “You know, after—after the accident, no one would let me talk about my parents. No one wanted to hear me grieve, and no one wanted to hear me reminisce. I’ve heard every possible permutation of ‘find some closure’ that exists. It was as if talking about them was somehow…in bad taste. I could just see it in people’s eyes, they’d listen impatiently, then change the subject as soon as they decently could. All I wanted to do was—was remember them, and no one would let me.”
“And Toby? What was he like?”
This was without a doubt the weirdest conversation Caroline had ever had. He’d started moving in her again, the movements slow and heated. Her entire lower body was taken up with the sex. But then he was engaging her head, too. They were having two conversations at once. Heated sex below the waist, their bodies talking to each other loud and clear, and a deep conversation above the neck.
“Toby. Before the accident, Toby was a real little boy, you know? A scamp. He was always getting into trouble and getting out of it because he had this big wide grin, and you just melted. You forgave him everything, until his next trick. I even forgave him the frog in the bed that nearly gave me a heart attack.” Caroline watched Jack’s face as he listened to her. No one had ever listened to her so intently before, completely focused on her.
What had he been like as a boy? A scamp? Overactive and mischievous? Probably not. He’d probably been quiet and serious. Though there was something in his face, thinking about him as a boy, something almost…familiar about him, which was ridiculous.
“After the accident, he was in a coma for three months. He never walked again. And for six years, he never once complained, even when he was in excruciating pain. He loved company, but no one came. His school friends came for a while, then they stopped coming. Toby was in a wheelchair, he had seizures, and that frightened people. No one wanted to see Toby, be reminded that he was what could happen to them. My best friend from high school once said to me that she didn’t understand why I didn’t put Toby in a h-home.”
Caroline looked up at the dark face an inch from hers, dark eyes boring into hers. While she’d been talking, he’d stepped up the tempo of the lovemaking, making the bed creak.
Caroline began the long free fall into climax, but somehow she couldn’t stop talking.
“Toby was so incredibly brave.” Tears filled her eyes as she watched him watching her. “He couldn’t walk and, at the end, h-he could barely move, but he always kept his spirits up. He kept my spirits up. I think the past two years, he knew he was dying, but he never said anything. I was so p-proud of him, I thought he was braver than any soldier who ever won a medal, and—and every time I brought a friend home, or a date, they always behaved as if Toby weren’t there. Or they’d talk too loud, as if he were brain-damaged. And always, they behaved as if I should be—sh-should be ash-ashamed of him when I—Oh God, Jack. Oh!”
Shaking wildly, Caroline started coming, in long liquid pulls, so strong even her stomach muscles clenched. It was as if the pleasure cracked her wide open. Even before her sheath stopped its convulsions, she buried her face against Jack’s neck and burst into tears.
There was no stopping them, she couldn’t fight them if her life depended on it. The hot sex and her climax had simply blown away any defenses she might have mustered and left her raw and vulnerable, open to her deepest sadness.
She wept until she could barely catch her breath, then wept some more. She wept out her grief and anger and fear. She wept for the long lonely nights in which she didn’t dare weep because Toby would see her swollen face in the morning and know. She wept for three wonderful lives cut so tragically short, leaving her on the other side of the wall between life and death.
And she wept because, at times, it had felt like she wasn’t on the living side of that wall, but on the other side. How many times had she felt so dead inside, it was a surprise to remember that she hadn’t died with them?
She wept until her throat was raw, until her chest ached with every shaking breath, until, finally, there were no more tears left to cry.
Throughout, Jack held her tightly, still inside her, but unmoving. He didn’t try to talk to her, perhaps realizing she was beyond words. And she’d heard all the words, anyway.
You have to let go of your mourning. You must get on with your life, Caroline. Grieving is a process, and you’re not processing your emotions at all.
It was true. At times, she felt mired in a deep black hole, a bottomless, airless well with only the faintest of lights at the top. The words other people spoke could barely reach her.
So he knew not to give her words. He gave her something better—the comfort of his body. With all the thousands and thousands of words her friends had offered, nobody had thought to hug her, to let her cry her fill in someone’s arms, as Jack was doing.
Finally, the tears stopped, and she lay still under him, trying to catch her breath. Slowly and so gently she wanted to weep, he withdrew from her and, still holding her tightly, turned them over. Now she was lying in his warm, tight clasp, her head on his shoulder. His very wet shoulder. She couldn’t control her muscles or her thoughts, as ravaged as if she’d been in a bad accident.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dazed.
He wiped her face with something. “I know about loss,” he said quietly. “Do you feel better?” He reached under her hair to massage her scalp.
“Yes, thank you,” Caroline said politely in a waterlogged voice, then stopped. She did feel better. It felt as if the crying jag had coughed up a ball of black bile that had been poisoning her system for a long, long time.
He wiped her face again. She gave a half laugh. “I can’t believe you came to bed with a handkerchief.”
“It’s not a handkerchief,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the sheet.”
Caroline blinked, appalled. “I’ve been crying and blowing my nose into my sheet?”
“That’s okay.” Oh God, how she loved his voice. So deep, so calm. If only it could be bottled and sold as a tranquilizer. Better than Prozac. “We can change the sheets.”
We. One small word and it meant so very much. We can change the sheets.
Caroline realized that it was the very first time since her parents’ death that someone acknowledged that she wasn’t alone with a problem. Friends and the occasional date—somehow they were always up for an evening out or a night at the theater, but she was always alone with her problems. This particular one was stupid and minor. She had plenty of sheets, but something in his voice told her he’d stand by her for more than sheets.
“You wouldn’t have run away from Toby,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.” His hand tightened in her hair. “I wouldn’t have.”
She lifted her head away from his shoulder to examine his face. “I wish I’d known you earlier.”
Something—some strong emotion—crossed his face. The grooves around his mouth deepened, and the skin across his cheekbones grew tight.
“I wish I’d been around earlier, too.”
Brighton Beach
Brighton Beach, a community of 150,000, is part of Brooklyn. Its nickname is “Little Odessa” because most of its inhabitants are Russian immigrants.
Deaver appreciated the irony because he’d met the man he was going to see in Big Odessa—the real thing. He’d first met Viktor “Drake” Drakovich in the late eighties, when everyone on the ground, with two eyes in their heads and working brains, k
new the Soviet Union was going belly up.
The CIA hadn’t known—the CIA couldn’t find its ass with two hands and a stick—but anyone stationed east of the Elbe had known.
Drake at the time was the biggest arms dealer in the world, operating out of a nondescript high-rise in Odessa, supplying arms to the mujehaddin in Afghanistan as fast as he could funnel them in. Deaver’d been a young Special Forces soldier and had been tasked with supplying money to Drake, in briefcases containing half a million dollars at a time. He’d once calculated that the U.S. government had poured at least $10 million into Drake’s hands.
It was value for money, too. Drake was known for his quality goods. He had four former Russian soldiers who’d been armorers on his payroll, and when you bought weapons from Drake, you got exactly what you had paid for, in good working order, clean, oiled and ready to roll.
Drake’s career stopped on 9/11. Actually, it stopped on September 10, when he got word that Shah Achmed Masood had been killed.
Deaver had been in Odessa that day, the day the shortwave radio gave the news, and he watched, astonished, as Drake immediately started packing up his gear, quietly, emotionlessly. “Bad things are coming,” was his only answer when Deaver asked what was going on. “This business is over.”
A day later, Deaver realized that Drake was right. And Drake was right to stop supplying the Taliban because the full weight of the U.S. government would have stepped in to crush him. Drake was smart, and he knew where to pick his battles. A month later, he was based in Ostende, Belgium, supplying arms to Ashad Fatoy, the Congolese rebel leader, where Deaver’d crossed his path again. When he could, he threw work Drake’s way, and once he was able to warn him that agents of the Belgian Flemish state security agency, the Staatsveiligheid, were closing in on him.
Since the tenth of September, Deaver had kept tabs on Drake, knowing he would always land on his feet, knowing he’d need him one day. That day had come.
“Here,” he told the cab driver, thrust what the meter showed and a five-dollar tip over the seat and got out. It was early in the afternoon, but the sky was so sullen with snow, it was as dark as evening. Inside a minute, Deaver had disappeared from the cab driver’s sight.
Five minutes and two city blocks later, he was ringing a bell in an anonymous high-rise, not unlike the building Drake had lived in in Odessa.
It didn’t matter what name was on the bell, he knew which button to press. The top one. Drake arranged little booby traps on the lower floors that would slow down any assault troops on their way up, and the roof was a helipad. It was his MO, and it hadn’t changed, in Odessa, in Ostende, in Lagos and now in Brighton Beach.
A security camera swiveled on its pivot when he rang the bell and Deaver raised two fingers to his brow in ironic salute. Drake had three levels of security, and it took a quarter of an hour to pass through the scrutiny of two very large, very efficient guards in full combat gear outside the nondescript door on the tenth floor. Frisked quickly and impersonally, Deaver was ushered into a large foyer, where he waited for a few minutes, certain that he was being subjected to a full-body scan.
Drake had a lot of enemies and there had been at least five assassination attempts, that Deaver knew of. None of them had even come close. Drake was a very hard man to kill.
Deaver was okay with the security measures and the body scan—he was clean. He’d be crazy to come armed with anything larger than a toothpick into Drake’s presence. So he waited patiently while whatever security protocol Drake had worked itself out.
Finally, another big, silent bodyguard motioned to him to follow, and they walked down a long corridor, stopping outside another nondescript door. The bodyguard knocked, then ushered Deaver over the threshold.
“Dear friend,” Drake’s deep voice said from the darkness, “please enter.” His English was excellent, as were his French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Arabic. Drake believed in doing his own negotiating, and to do that, he had to speak the lingo.
Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Drake was of average height, but he was immensely strong. He was a master of several martial arts, but more than that, he was an uncannily effective street fighter. His hands were the largest Deaver had ever seen, with knuckles the size of airplane bolts with a quarter of an inch of tough callus on the edges. His feet were lethal weapons, too, almost yellow from calluses. Deaver had seen him punch a man in the face with such ferocity that he did almost as much damage as a bullet would have. He’d seen Drake destroy a punching bag with one blow from his foot.
He was dangerous as hell, but he had his own crazy moral code. Drake had never been known to go back on his word, but by the same token you never went back on your word with him. If he became your enemy, you might as well start planning your funeral.
Drake was standing, pointing at a comfortable armchair.
The entire room was built for the comfort of a man. Despite the nondescript building and the barren walls and corridors, in here it was luxurious. Deep leather armchairs, thick luxurious carpets, a sideboard filled with bottles of expensive spirits, a humidor full of cigars.
Legend said that the cigars came in monthly shipments directly from Fidel himself, as a thank-you for something Drake would never talk about.
The room had the look, the smell and the feel of money and power.
Deaver sat, unzipping his jacket with a sigh, knowing he could relax completely for the first time since Obuja. He was definitely safe here. The layers of security, the quiet whump the door had made closing which meant it was blast proof, the deep, quiet luxury of the room—oh yes, he was in safe hands. They’d spent the better part of twenty years technically on opposites sides, but Deaver was on Drake’s side now, and he liked what he saw.
A cut-crystal glass half-filled with an amber liquid was at his elbow. He sipped, appreciating the aged, single-malt whiskey.
“So,” he said finally, putting the empty glass down on the side table and turning to Drake. “You’re Stateside now. Is that going to be permanent?”
Drake shrugged. “Yes, I’m in the belly of the beast, now,” he replied mildly. “We’ll see how it works out. So far I have no complaints. What can I do for you?”
Deaver didn’t presume that any more small talk would be appreciated. Drake looked relaxed, but he ran an empire worth more than many third-world countries and he was a hands-on manager. His time was very precious. Time to cut to the chase.
Deaver leaned forward. “First off, I need a laptop to do Internet research on. A used one will do, I’ll have to throw it away. But make sure it’s got a hard disk with enough RAM to do some serious searching. No fingerprints, and I guarantee I’ll purge the search history before tossing it.”
Drake nodded. “I have one here.”
Okay, first problem over. “Second, I need a new identity that will keep me for a while, until I finish my business. It might take a week, it might take a month. But not much more than that. I’m tracking someone down, and when I find him, I’m relocating permanently OUTCONUS. To Monte Carlo, I was thinking. So I’ll need a passport for later. Not U.S. And the identity has to be a little deeper. I’ll need a birth certificate that will withstand at least a casual scrutiny.”
Drake inclined his head gravely. “Consider it done. One of the guards will take you to my specialist. He has everything. He’ll set you up with a new identity that will withstand a casual check, and more. And he’ll get you a Maltese passport. Malta’s a member of the EU. With the passport and enough money deposited in a Monte Carlo bank, you can get a permanent permis de sejour. Keep your nose clean for ten years, and you’ll get citizenship.”
Now Deaver knew where the passports had gone. The Maltese embassy in Zagreb had reported 190 blank passports stolen, a fortune’s worth. So they’d gone into Drake’s hands. It was good to know.
Now came the hard part. “That’s not all. I’ll need FBI credentials and a number and someone sitting at the other end of that number ready to verify that I’m a Special Agent.” r />
Drake nodded. “For how long?”
Deaver’s jaw muscles jumped. “For as long as it takes. And I’m going to need some firepower, but I’ll need it where I’m going. I want to fly clean.”
Drake provided an essential service. He not only got you the weapons you wanted, “cold”—untraceable—and in perfect working order, but he could get them to you at a time and place of your choosing. Drake’s network spanned the world, and he could provide just about any weapon short of a nuclear warhead more or less anywhere. It saved trying to smuggle weapons onto aircraft, and it saved trying to track down local suppliers, particularly if you wanted to hit the ground running.
Drake sipped his whiskey and spoke calmly. “Tell me what you need and where.”
Deaver ticked them off. “A Beretta 92 with three clips and shoulder rig and a Kel-Tec P–32 for backup with three magazines, an M40 rifle with a 10X scope, carrying case and four boxes of ammo. They all need to be cold guns.”
“Of course,” Drake said, the even temper slightly ruffled. His reputation was on the line. “And where do you need them?”
The 20-million-dollar question. “I don’t know yet. When I do, I’ll let you know immediately. How much is this going to cost me?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Drake said promptly, and Deaver barely kept from wincing. It would almost wipe him out. Finding that fucker Prescott became urgent. And when he did find him, Deaver was going to make sure he died slowly and badly, for all the trouble he’d put him through.
“Done. Give me a bank account number and I’ll e-mail the request through immediately. The bank’s open twenty-four/ seven. You’ll have your money within twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Drake said, his voice gentle. “I trust you.”
He could, too. Even though Deaver would be left with less than ten thousand dollars in his bank account, welshing on the deal didn’t even cross his mind. The last person who’d cheated Drake had choked on his own dick, which had been cut off and encased in the intestines that had spilled out from his slashed-open gut. No, Drake could trust him.