The Touch of Fire

by Linda Howard

  Mr. Davis examined Rafe’s face carefully, before Atwater could introduce him, and then held out his hand. “Ah, yes, Captain McCay. How have you been, sir? It has been several years since last I saw you, I believe early in ’65.”

  The phenomenal memory didn’t take Rafe by surprise. He forced himself to shake the ex-president’s hand. “I am well, sir.” He introduced Annie, who also shook hands with Mr. Davis. The ex-president’s hand was thin and dry, and she held it a moment longer than necessary. Mr. Davis’s extraordinarily fine eyes looked thoughtful, and he glanced at their clasped hands.

  Rafe’s eyelids lowered as he felt a surge of ridiculous jealousy. Had Annie been sending a message with her touch? Mr. Davis’s expression had visibly softened.

  “Marshal Atwater didn’t give me your name when he requested this meeting. Please, won’t you sit down? Would you care for something to drink before dinner?”

  “No, thank you,” Rafe said. “Marshal Atwater didn’t tell you who I am because of the chance that my name might have been overheard. I’m wanted for murder, sir, and the reason is these papers.”

  Annie watched the thin, ascetic face of the ex-president as Rafe told him everything that had happened in the past four years. It was the most intelligent face she had ever seen, with a high, wide forehead and a certain nobility that transcended the flesh. He had been labeled a traitor to the nation by northern newspapers and she supposed she had to consider him so, but she could also see how he had been chosen to lead the government of the breakaway states. There was a certain frailty about him, no doubt caused by two years of imprisonment, and a sadness deep in those fine eyes.

  When Rafe had finished Mr. Davis didn’t speak, but held out his thin hand. Rafe gave him the documents. He leafed through them in silence for several minutes, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He looked unutterably weary.

  “I had thought these destroyed,” he said after a moment. “Would that they had been; Mr. Tilghman would still be alive, and your own life wouldn’t have been ruined.”

  “Disclosure wouldn’t make Vanderbilt’s life very comfortable, either.”

  “No, I can see that it wouldn’t.”

  “Vanderbilt was stupid,” Rafe said. “Surely he foresaw that these documents could be used against him, to obtain money.”

  “I would not have done so,” Mr. Davis said. “They must be used, however, to obtain justice for you.”

  “Why did you do it?” Rafe suddenly asked, bitterness apparent in his tone. “Why did you take the money, knowing it was useless? Why prolong the war?”

  “I had wondered if you’d read my private notes.” Mr. Davis sighed. “My job, sir, was to keep the Confederacy alive. The thoughts I put down in my private notes were my deepest fears, yet there was always the chance that the North would have grown tired of war and demanded an end to it. So long as the Confederacy existed, I served it. It was not a complicated decision, though it is one I bitterly regret. If foresight were as sharp as hindsight, think what tragedies could have been avoided. Hindsight is, unfortunately, a useless commodity, good only for regrets.”

  “My father and brother died the last year of the war,” Rafe said.

  “Ah.” Mr. Davis’s eyes darkened with sorrow. “You have just cause for your anger. I apologize to you, sir, and offer you my sincere condolences, though I am certain you don’t desire them. If I may make amends to you in any way, I will do so.”

  Atwater broke in. “You can help us think of a way to get those murder charges dropped. Just revealing Vanderbilt as a traitor won’t do it.”

  “No, I can see that it wouldn’t,” Mr. Davis said. “Let me think on it.”

  “You must go back to New York,” he said the next day. “Contact Mr. J. P. Morgan; he’s a banker. I have written a letter to him.” He passed the folded letter to Rafe. “Take the relevant documents pertaining to Mr. Vanderbilt’s donations to the Confederacy to the meeting with you. I would like to keep the remaining documents, if you don’t mind.”

  Rafe glanced down at the letter. “What’s in it?” he asked bluntly.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt has a great deal of money, Captain McCay. The only way to fight him is with more money. Mr. Morgan can do this. He is a young man of rather stringent morals, but an extremely astute businessman. He is building a banking empire that can, I believe, contain Mr. Vanderbilt’s influence. I have outlined the situation to Mr. Morgan and asked for his assistance, which I have reason to believe he will give.”

  Annie sighed when Rafe told her they had to go to New York. “Do you think the baby will be born on a train somewhere?” she asked whimsically. “Or perhaps on a steamboat?”

  He kissed her and stroked her stomach. He hadn’t been a very good husband so far, dragging her all over the country just at the time when she most needed peace and quiet. “I love you,” he said.

  She jerked back to stare at him, her dark eyes widening with shock. Her heart leaped and she put a hand to her chest. “What?” she whispered.

  Rafe cleared his throat. He hadn’t planned to say what he had, the words had come out all by themselves. He hadn’t realized how naked and vulnerable that short sentence would make him feel, or how uncertain of himself. She had married him, but she hadn’t had a lot of choice, since she was having a baby. “I love you,” he said again, and held his breath.

  She was pale, but a radiant smile broke over her face. “I—I didn’t know,” she whispered. She flung herself into his arms, clinging as if she would never let go.

  The constriction in his chest eased, and he could breathe again. He carried her to the bed and placed her on it, then stretched out beside her. “You can say the words, too, you know,” he prompted. “You never have.”

  The smile grew even more radiant. “I love you.”

  There were no extravagant declarations, no analysis, just the simple words, and they were the right ones for both of them. They lay together for a long time, absorbing each other’s nearness. He smiled as his chin rested on top of her head. He should have known, that very first time when he had forced her to lie down on the blanket and share her body heat with him on a cold night, and he had wanted her then despite his illness, that she would come to mean more to him than anything else in his life ever had or ever would.

  A week later the three of them sat in J. P. Morgan’s richly paneled office in New York City, the place where it all had started for Rafe, four years before. Morgan tapped the letter from Jefferson Davis in his hand, thinking how curiosity could motivate men to do unusual things. It had been obvious to Morgan from the start that these people wanted a favor from him and he usually refused to see such people, but his secretary had said they had a letter from Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, and sheer curiosity had led him to grant an interview. Why would Mr. Davis write to him? He had never met the man, had strongly disapproved of Southern politics, but Mr. Davis’s reputation was intriguing. J. P. Morgan was a man who held integrity to be the most important virtue.

  The banker listened to Marshal Atwater outline the circumstances, and only then did he open the letter from Jefferson Davis. He was thirty-four years old, Rafe’s age, but already laying the groundwork for a banking empire that he fully intended to control. He was the son of a banker, and understood the subtleties of the business from top to bottom. He even looked like a banker, his form already showing signs of a prosperous stoutness. His intensity shown in his eyes.

  “This is incredible,” he finally said, laying the letter aside and picking up the documents to study them. He looked at Rafe with the sort of wary respect one gives a dangerous animal. “You’ve managed to elude what amounts to an army for four years. I think you must be a formidable man in your own right, Mr. McCay.”

  “We all have our special battlegrounds, Mr. Morgan. Yours are in boardrooms.”

  “Mr. Davis thinks the boardroom is the way to control Mr. Vanderbilt. I think he is right; money is the one thing Mr. Vanderbilt understands, the
one thing he respects. I will be honored to assist you, Mr. McCay. The evidence here is . . . sickening. I trust you will be able to evade the hunters for another few days?”

  It took J. P. Morgan eight days to arrange the kind of backing he needed, but he didn’t intend to make a move without it. The way to win battles was not to fight them until you had the weapons needed to win. J. P. Morgan had those weapons when he made an appointment to meet with Vanderbilt, and he already had the idea of another battle forming in his mind, one that would take years to win, but these papers had given him the edge he needed.

  Annie was almost ill with tension. Everything hinged on this meeting; the next half hour would decide if she and Rafe could ever live a normal life or would forever be on the run. Rafe had wanted her to remain behind, but she had too much at stake to be able to do so and in the end he relented, perhaps realizing that the apprehension of waiting would be worse on her than knowing what was happening.

  Rafe’s pistol rested comfortably in the small of his back. On the way into Commodore Vanderbilt’s office, he noted every employee, every room. Atwater did the same. “Do you see that Winslow feller?” he hissed, and Rafe shook his head.

  Vanderbilt’s office was luxuriously furnished, in a far more elaborate style than J. P. Morgan’s. The banker’s office was intended to convey prosperity and trust; Cornelius Vanderbilt’s was intended to showcase his wealth. There was a silk carpet on the floor and a crystal chandelier overhead; the chairs were of the finest leather, the paneling of the richest mahogany. Annie had almost expected to see a cruelly leering devil sitting in the big chair behind the enormous desk, but instead it was occupied by a white-haired old man, growing increasingly frail with age. Only his eyes still hinted of the ruthlessness he had used in building his empire.

  Mr. Vanderbilt had looked in surprise at the four people who had entered his office, for he had been under the impression that he would be seeing only Mr. Morgan, a banker of sufficient power that he had deigned to receive him. Nevertheless he offered them the amenities of a host before the conversation turned to business. It always turned to business, and for what other reason would a banker have requested an appointment with him? It was a matter of pride to him that Mr. Morgan had come to him, rather than expecting that he visit the banker’s offices. It revealed exactly who had the most power. He took out his watch and glanced at it, a hint that his time was valuable.

  Mr. Morgan noticed the action. “We won’t use much of your time, sir. May I introduce U.S. Marshal Noah Atwater, and Mr. and Mrs. Rafferty McCay.”

  A federal marshal? Vanderbilt scrutinized the older man, a rather unprepossessing individual. He dismissed him as unimportant. “Yes, yes, get on with it,” he said impatiently.

  All four of them had been watching him closely, and Annie was bewildered by his total lack of response to Rafe’s name. Surely a man who had spent a sizable fortune trying to find someone and kill him would remember his quarry’s name.

  Silently Mr. Morgan placed the documents on Vanderbilt’s desk. These were not the originals, but faithful copies. What mattered was that the Commodore knew they had the information.

  Vanderbilt picked up the first page with a slightly bored manner. It took him only a few seconds to realize what he was reading and his gaze jumped back to Mr. Morgan, then to Atwater. He sat up very straight. “I see. How much do you want?”

  “This isn’t blackmail,” Mr. Morgan said. “At least not for money. Am I correct in assuming that you didn’t recognize Mr. McCay’s name?”

  “Of course not,” Vanderbilt snapped. “Why should I?”

  “Because you’ve been trying to have him killed for four years.”

  “I’ve never heard of him. Why should I want to have him killed? And what does he have to do with these papers?”

  Mr. Morgan studied the older man for a moment. Vanderbilt hadn’t even made an effort to deny the information contained in those papers. “You’re a traitor,” he said softly. “This information would have you in front of a firing squad.”

  “I’m a businessman. I make a profit. This”—he indicated the papers—“was a paltry sum compared to the profits it generated. The North was in no danger of losing the war, Mr. Morgan.”

  Vanderbilt’s reasoning made Rafe tense; he wanted very much to slam his fist into the man’s face.

  Very concisely, Mr. Morgan related the events of four years ago. Vanderbilt’s eyes flicked to Rafe, then to Atwater again. Annie realized that he expected to be arrested. When Mr. Morgan had finished, Vanderbilt said impatiently, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t have anything to do with all that.”

  “You didn’t know that the papers had survived, and that young Mr. Tilghman knew where they were?”

  Vanderbilt glared at him. “Winslow informed me of that, yes. I told him to take care of it. I assumed he had, as that was the last I heard of it.”

  “Winslow. That would be Parker Winslow, I take it?”

  “Yes. He’s my assistant.”

  “We’d like to speak with him, please.”

  Vanderbilt rang a bell, and his secretary opened the door. “Fetch Winslow,” the Commodore barked, and the man withdrew.

  The door opened some five minutes later. The inhabitants of the room had been sitting in thick silence, waiting for the new arrival. Rafe deliberately didn’t turn around when he heard footsteps approaching. He pictured Winslow as he had been four years ago: slim, impeccably groomed, his blond hair just going gray. The perfect businessman. Who would ever have thought Parker Winslow was a murderer?

  “You sent for me, sir?”

  “I did. Do you know any of these gentlemen, Winslow?”

  Rafe looked up just as Parker Winslow’s bored gaze touched him. The other man looked startled, then afraid. “McCay,” he said.

  “You killed Tench Tilghman, didn’t you?” Atwater asked softly, leaning forward as all his hunting instincts were awakened. “So he could never dig up those papers. You tried to kill McCay too, but when that failed you made it look as if McCay had killed him. It would have been a perfect plan, yessir, perfect, except McCay escaped. The men you hired couldn’t catch him. You put a bounty on his head, and kept raisin’ it until every bounty hunter in the country was after him, and they still couldn’t catch him.”

  “Winslow, you’re a goddamned idiot,” Vanderbilt snapped.

  Parker Winslow looked wildly around the room, then back to his employer. “You told me to take care of it.”

  “I wanted you to get those papers, you stupid son of a bitch, not commit murder!”

  Rafe was smiling as he came out of his chair. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. The Commodore shrank from it; J. P. Morgan was shocked by it. Parker Winslow was frankly terrified. Atwater settled back in his chair, content to watch.

  At first Winslow tried to evade the punishing fists, then he tried to fight back. Both were futile efforts. Calmly, deliberately, Rafe broke the man’s nose and knocked out his teeth, shut both of his eyes, then began working on his ribs. Each blow was as precise as a surgeon’s scapel. The sound of ribs cracking was audible to everyone in the room. The secretary had opened the door at the first sound of a body thumping to the floor, then hastily closed it again at Vanderbilt’s barked order.

  Rafe stopped only when Winslow was lying unconscious on the floor. Annie got to her feet, and Rafe whirled with the savage grace of a predator. “No,” he said flatly. “You aren’t going to help him.”

  “Of course I’m not,” Annie agreed, reaching for her husband’s fists and holding them in her own. She lifted them to her lips and kissed the bruised knuckles. There were limits to her oath as a physician, she had found. It hadn’t been very civilized of her, but she had enjoyed every blow Rafe had landed. Rafe shivered at her touch and his eyes darkened.

  Winslow began to moan, but after an appalled look at him not even Mr. Morgan paid him any attention. “I don’t suppose this settled the matter,” Vanderbilt said. “I repeat my original q
uestion: how much?”

  J. P. Morgan’s demands were short. Any further action against Rafferty McCay would result in the Confederate papers being made public, and the Commodore would face a charge of treason. The cooperation of the banks in any future Vanderbilt enterprise depended on McCay’s name being cleared of all charges, immediately. Whether the Commodore had had any knowledge of Parker Winslow’s actions was irrelevant; it was Vanderbilt money that had been behind it, and his own dishonorable actions that had precipitated it. In return, the papers would remain private, in a location unknown to Vanderbilt. Any action taken against any of the people in the room would result in immediate disclosure.

  Vanderbilt’s eyes were hooded as he listened to the demands and conditions. He was boxed in and he knew it. “All right,” he said abruptly. “The charges will be dropped within twenty-four hours.”

  “There’s also the problem of getting the word out to the men Winslow has hunting Mr. McCay.”

  “It will be taken care of.”

  “By you, personally.”

  Vanderbilt hesitated, then nodded. “Anything else?”

  Mr. Morgan considered the question. “Yes, I believe there is. I don’t think it would be unreasonable for some sort of restitution to be made to Mr. McCay. A hundred thousand dollars, in fact, seems very reasonable.”

  “A hundred thousand!” Vanderbilt glared at the younger man.

  “As opposed to a firing squad.”

  Behind them, Atwater chuckled. The sound was loud in the silence of the room.

  Vanderbilt swelled with impotent fury. “Very well,” he finally said.

  “He didn’t have any regret or shame at all for betraying his country,” Annie said. She couldn’t understand someone like that. “All he cared about was his profit.”

  “That’s his god,” Rafe said. He still felt dazed. It had been not quite one day, but J. P. Morgan had called at the hotel less than an hour before with the news that Vanderbilt had made good on his promise and that the murder charges against him had been dropped. Mr. Morgan suggested that they remain in New York for a time so the word would have time to spread. He had also said that a hundred thousand dollars had been deposited in Rafe’s name, at his own bank, of course.