Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Fiancée?” Evelyn looked at me and laughed. “Since when have you had a fiancée? Really, Rose, what stories have you been telling this poor man?”

  The jig was up, as all the famous gangsters used to say, at least in the movies. I’d been caught in a bald-faced lie. I glanced at Heinrich, and I’m sure my guilt was all over my face.

  He grimly took my hand. “Why don’t we dance?”

  Dancing with Heinrich von Hopf was only slightly higher on my list of things I wanted to do than having him push me off the balcony.

  But I let him lead me into the other room and on to the dance floor. And then there I was. In his arms again. The band was playing a slow song, and he held me inappropriately close.

  It was all I could do not to run away. Or weep. He smelled so good, so familiar. Even after all that time. Even though our time together had been so short.

  “Why did you lie and tell me you were getting married?” he spoke to me very softly, and in German, right in my ear.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t answer. It was the most hideous torture to have his body pressed so close to mine—to want something, someone, that I knew I shouldn’t, couldn’t want.

  And yet I did. Oh, how I longed for him to kiss me, longed to run my fingers through the softness of his hair.

  It was then that I realized I loved him still. It terrified me. How could I love a Nazi?

  “Was it because of him?” he demanded. “Is that when you started—” He used a phrase of German that I had never heard before. “Besides the obvious, what did he offer you that I couldn’t?”

  I had absolutely no idea who or what he was talking about and I stared at him.

  “Jon,” he clarified angrily. “Did you end things with me because you wanted to be with him?”

  He was serious, and I continued to stare up at him in total surprise.

  He must have thought I still didn’t understand, because he said again, “I’m speaking of Jon Fielding. Your lover?”

  Something must’ve flickered in my eyes. Or some expression must have crossed my face, because his eyes narrowed as he looked at me.

  “Or the man you want people to believe is your lover,” he added softly. “Perhaps because it’s essential for your cover?”

  “No,” I said. “Jon is my . . .” But I couldn’t say it. I had become an expert liar over the past few years, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get that one past Heinrich. Instead I tried to laugh. “Essential for my cover? I don’t know what you’re talking a—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, pulling me even more closely to him, so closely, I could feel his heart beating. “It’s all right. Rose, don’t you know we’re both on the same side?”

  Yes, but everyone thought I was on their side. So which side did that put him on? Again, I saw him in my mind’s eye, dressed in that Nazi uniform. Could I really have any doubt?

  “How long has Fielding been helping you?” Heinrich asked me.

  I shook my head. “Please, we must not talk of this. Not here. Not anywhere. Not at all.”

  “You’re right, of course. Forgive me.”

  We danced in silence as I prayed for the song to end. But the band segued right into another slow number. And Heinrich didn’t release me. He just kept right on dancing.

  My mind was going a million miles an hour. He believed we were on the same side. That gave me a certain amount of power and control, since I knew that we weren’t. I also didn’t have to worry about him throwing me off the balcony any longer—unless of course, he was lying, too. In which case I was the one with a serious disadvantage.

  I looked up at him, directly into his eyes.

  And I found him looking at me with such naked desire, I knew at last that one thing he’d told me in Berlin hadn’t been a lie. He really had wanted me.

  And if I actually had found the courage to ask him up to my hotel room that night all those years ago, he would have gone not just because it was his duty as a good Nazi, but because he wanted to.

  That had haunted me for years—the thought of how close I’d come to giving myself to a man who would have seen loving me as just another chore for the Fatherland.

  “Why did you lie to me?” he whispered again. “Why did you tell me you were to be married when it wasn’t true?”

  As I gazed up at him, I knew what I had to do. I had to make sure he would keep me with him for every minute that was possible of the two weeks he’d be in New York. I had to gain access to his room at the Waldorf-Astoria, search for whatever information he might have hidden there. I had to be with him, glued to his side while he met with his various contacts in the area. I would get one of those miniaturized cameras from the FBI office and take pictures, make lists of names. And then, when those two weeks were up, not only would the FBI apprehend Charlemagne, we would have uncovered much of the upper level of the Nazi network in New York as well.

  The thought of Heinrich being brought into custody and facing charges of espionage, facing a death sentence, made my stomach hurt.

  I didn’t think I could actually do it. But the alternative would be equal to treason. And I knew I couldn’t do that, either.

  Still, before I did anything at all, I had to ensure that I would be with Heinrich for these next two weeks.

  Around the clock, if possible.

  My virtue flashed before my eyes, but I took a deep breath.

  And I told him the truth.

  “I lied because I was in love with you.”

  He exhaled as if I’d punched him in the stomach, and tears actually came to his eyes.

  “But I don’t understand,” he said. “You knew I loved you, too. I couldn’t have been more straightforward in my letters.”

  “I couldn’t believe you were serious.”

  “Oh, I was. Utterly.”

  “It seemed . . . impossible,” I told him. “We’re so . . . different.”

  He shook his head. “We’re exactly the same.”

  I didn’t have to force my voice to tremble or my own eyes to grow moist. Was it possible he truly had fallen in love with me in Berlin? “I meant, we came from such different worlds. And, you—you were on the other side of the ocean.”

  “Not anymore.”

  His eyes held such a mix of hope and desire, it made me ache. Did he really feel all that, or was it just part of his game? I knew the desire was real. Even as inexperienced as I was, he was holding me far too close for me to be unaware of his physical reaction to me.

  And then I whispered the truth that not only threatened to undo me, but that I believed virtually guaranteed that he would try to take me to his hotel room with him tonight.

  “I still love you.”

  Heinrich smiled at me. It was the strangest smile I’d ever seen. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Before everyone wonders why I’m weeping.”

  He pulled me off the dance floor and grabbed our coats. We were in the elevator heading down before I realized he was serious. He dropped our coats onto the floor and took me in his arms. “Say it again,” he breathed. “Please, darling . . .”

  I knew what he wanted to hear. I touched his face, marveling at the tears that hung in his eyes, ready to escape. “I love you. I think I’ll always love you.”

  “I thought I’d lost you forever,” he whispered as those tears rolled down his beautiful face. And then he kissed me.

  He was not the only one who cried.

  Alyssa closed Rose’s book as the plane began its descent into LAX.

  I thought I’d lost you forever.

  Oh, God. She knew what that felt like. To lose someone. Forever.

  She closed her eyes, but then all she could see was Sam Starrett. Sitting in her kitchen. Telling her he was going to marry someone named Mary Lou, whom he’d gotten pregnant four months earlier. Telling her that he loved her, but he had to do the right thing.

  Telling her he was going to work to make it a real marriage. That, even if Alyssa had been willing to share him wit
h this other woman, he wasn’t willing—no matter how badly he still wanted her—to make his marriage vow a lie.

  Alyssa knew that it had damn near killed him, but Sam had walked out of her apartment that day. Out of her life.

  And she had lost him forever.

  Just like Hank had believed he’d lost Rose.

  Only unlike Rose, Sam had married Mary Lou.

  “You okay?” Jules asked.

  Alyssa nodded. “Yeah, I just . . . got an eyelash or something in my eye.”

  God, what was that smell?

  Savannah couldn’t believe it as Ken set down the sack he’d made from his undershirt and filled with dynamite, and untangled himself from the vines he’d used to strap the attaché case onto his back.

  They were stopping here? In the land of stink?

  “May we please go a little farther before we take a break?” she asked as politely as possible. She’d asked him about ten minutes ago if they could stop and share her granola bar, but hungry as she was, there was no way she was going to eat anything surrounded by this incredible stench.

  “There’s something we have to do before we go any farther,” he told her. “Before we take any kind of break.”

  “Do we have to do it right here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “we do. You’re going to hate this, but . . . You need to take off your clothes.”

  Polite. Just be endlessly polite. She couldn’t let him get to her even though she suspected he was purposely baiting her now. She would not lose her temper again.

  “No, thank you.” She even managed to smile. “I’d rather not.”

  “Yeah, well, here’s the deal,” he said. “You smell like the perfume counter at Lord and Taylor’s.”

  She had to laugh at that one. “I know what I smell like and it’s more like a men’s locker room after a football game.”

  “Yeah, you got a little of that funk, too, but the perfume still cuts through.”

  “So . . . what? You want me to wash in the river? It’s hot enough out. I’ll go in in my clothes.”

  Ken shook his head. “We’ve got to ditch your clothes anyway. The key to hiding is blending in. In case you didn’t notice, yellow doesn’t exactly blend in this particular environment. If someone comes looking for us . . . No, when someone comes looking for us, we’re going to be at a serious disadvantage with you dressed the way you are.”

  Her clothes had to go. . . ? It was hard not to get defensive about that one.

  “My underwear’s yellow, too,” she told him. “I guess I better just walk around naked, huh?”

  “As thrilling for me as that would be, your skin’s a little too pale, and we don’t have time for you to get an all-over tan,” Ken told her with his usual charm. “You’re going to have to wear my pants and shirt.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So you’re going to be the one to go naked.”

  “Boxers and sandals, baby,” he said. He smiled at her. “Do you think you can stand it? You know, manage to control yourself around me?”

  Savannah held out her hand. “Just give me your clothes and go away while I change.”

  “Yeah, well, not so fast there, Roadrunner. We’ve got to do a little perfume removal first.”

  She didn’t like the look of his smile. He was enjoying himself a little too much.

  “What?” she asked. “I need to wash in the river, but first you need to teach me the secret Navy SEAL method for keeping the piranhas at bay?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No piranhas or . . . ?”

  “No river—well, not exactly.” He sat down on the attaché case as if he didn’t particularly mind the fact that it held enough dynamite to blow him into millions of little pieces. “See, here’s the thing about perfume. It’s oil based and it doesn’t just rinse off when you jump in a river. So what we—you—have to do is mask the scent.”

  Mask the scent. She knew where he was going with this. And, oh no. No way.

  “What you smell,” Kenny told her with just a little too much glee, “is nature in action. This part of the jungle probably flooded last time the river rose, and something happened to trap the water—maybe a tree fell, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that water didn’t recede, and as a result of that, all the native flora, i.e., the plants and trees and shit, in this part of the jungle, have drowned.

  “What you smell, honey, is rot. It’s that same unmistakable aroma you get when you leave a dozen roses sitting in a vase of water four weeks after they’ve died. I’m sure you do that all the time.”

  He was being sarcastic. He knew quite well that she never let anything sit four weeks.

  But Savannah shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. There’s got to be another way.”

  “The other way,” Ken told her, dead serious now, his mouth grim and all amusement completely gone from his eyes, “is called death. The other way is me going to a whole hell of a lot of trouble to hide us, only to have some asshole with an AK-47 catch a whiff of Chanel Number Sixty-Nine or whatever that stuff is that you’re wearing, and turn both of us into hamburger with a twitch of his trigger finger. Or maybe we’ll be found by someone who doesn’t like to waste ammo—he’ll use his machete on us instead. He’ll kill me first, figuring I’m most likely to fight back.

  “You he’ll probably keep alive a little bit longer.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but he wasn’t finished.

  “No, I’m not going to leave you,” he told her, somehow reading her mind. “Learn this now, Savannah. Pay close attention—read my lips—because here it comes. Until we are both safe and on a plane heading for home, whatever happens to you is going to happen to me, too. So. Tell me. Are we going to live or are we going to die?”

  Ken actually felt sorry for her.

  Savannah didn’t say a word as she stood in her underwear and coated herself with stagnant water and rotting plant slime. She didn’t curse, didn’t complain, didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound.

  She just silently did what he’d told her to do.

  He buried her skirt and blouse in the mud, slipped out of his shirt and pants and hung them over a branch where she’d be sure to see them. The less time she spent in only her underwear, the better.

  As far as his underwear went . . .

  He’d lucked out. He was wearing one of the pairs of boxers Janine had given him last year as kind of a joke—boxers in every different camouflage print. These were urban patterned. They weren’t perfect for the jungle, but they were better than the light tan desert print. And way better than his usual utilitarian white.

  “Don’t forget your hair,” Ken called to Savannah.

  “I don’t have perfume in my hair,” she called back tightly.

  “Yeah, actually,” he said. “You do. What do you do—spritz a whole lot into the air and then walk through it?” That was the way Adele had put on perfume. It had seemed like a waste to Ken. And it got perfume on anything and anyone within range. He’d learned to duck and run for cover or guys would look at him funny when he got back to base.

  She reached up and gingerly started sliming her hair. “When can I rinse this out?” Her voice shook only slightly.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’ll have to play it by ear.”

  She turned to look at him, apparently forgetting her attempt to keep her back to him at all times, particularly while wearing only her underwear. Which was, indeed, gloriously yellow and much too skimpy.

  “Do you even know that this is going to work?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you lying?”

  “Just a little,” he lied, just to see if maybe that would get a rise out of her.

  And, yes. It certainly did.

  “You son of a bitch!” She was holding a handful of slime and stank and she just hauled back and threw it at him. It hit him directly in the chest. Whack.

  “Good throw,” he said admiringly. He’d done it. He’d ac
tually made her angry enough to lose her cool. But still no tears. She was incredibly tough for a cream puff.

  She was livid. “If you just made me put that . . . that . . . dreck on myself just so you could get your jollies . . . You are such an asshole, Kenny!”

  Her next shot would have hit him square in the forehead, but he saw it coming and moved slightly to the side. Close, but no cigar. Still, what an arm.