Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I won’t,” Savannah said.

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her good-bye. Right in front of her parents and Rose. It was not an “I’m kissing you in front of your parents” peck. It was an “as soon as we can find some privacy I’m taking off your clothes” kind of kiss.

  “Later, babe,” he said, and was gone.

  “My . . . goodness gracious,” Savannah’s mother murmured.

  “I like him,” Rose announced.

  Savannah laughed. “I do, too.”

  “What’s this reward he’s already picked out?” her father asked suspiciously.

  “Me, Daddy,” she said. “He wants me.”

  The floor was cool.

  Jones floated in a place where there was only the cool floor, the darkness, and the pain.

  He’d been here before, and he’d swore he’d die before he came back.

  Why had he come back?

  Molly.

  She’d been standing right there, right in front of him, and yet he hadn’t said it. He’d had the chance, but he’d choked. Still, maybe she knew. “I love you,” he whispered. He had no problem saying it now, even though his lips were battered and split. “I love you, Molly.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not Molly,” a voice said quietly from the darkness. “I’m Lieutenant Sam Starrett, U.S. Navy SEALs, and I’m here with my friend and hospital corpsman, Petty Officer Jay Lopez, to get you out and bring you home.”

  His first thought was that they came for him. After all these years, they finally came for him.

  But then he realized with a sickening certainty that he couldn’t go.

  “If you take me, they’ll go after Molly.”

  “We’re a step ahead of you, sir,” said the voice with its trace of a Texas drawl. “She and all of the other missionaries have already been taken to safety. You can put her out of your mind right now, Mr. Jones, and concentrate on helping us get you out of this shithole.”

  “Your right leg’s broken, sir,” said another voice. “I’m going to put on a temporary splint. I’m working with night vision glass, so even though it might seem dark in here to you, I can see what I’m doing quite clearly. I’m going to give you some morphine—”

  “No!”

  “All right, but I need you to stay still and not cry out. Do you understand me, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a sharp flare of white hot pain that then slowly subsided, leaving just the dull roar from the rest of his bruised and battered body.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Starrett said.

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  Twenty

  Alyssa left the press conference and went out into the hotel lobby for some air.

  What a pain in the ass it must be to be a von Hopf and have to hold a press conference every time some bad personal shit reared its ugly head. A son kidnapped. A daughter missing. Okay, maybe those were news stories, but still. There were reporters in there asking Priscilla von Hopf about an alleged fender bender she had in the Lord & Taylor parking lot during a recent business trip to Natick, Massachusetts. That wasn’t anyone’s business.

  The lobby wasn’t that much more of a fun place to be right now, Alyssa realized. The SEALs—with the exception of WildCard Karmody—were checking out and going wheels up this afternoon.

  They’d brought the man known only by his obvious alias of Jones back late last night, and spent the morning in debriefings.

  Jones, yeah right. That was really his name.

  But Max had given her a direct order not to dig into records of missing military personnel, so she’d spent the night reading. She was supposed to be Savannah von Hopf’s FBI escort, but Savannah didn’t leave her hotel room. Not once. She went in at five in the afternoon, and didn’t emerge until ten-thirty this morning. With WildCard Karmody, who was actually a good-looking guy when he bothered to smile.

  He was smiling a lot this morning. Thank God Alyssa had their room checked for hidden cameras. A video like the one she was imagining would have played on the Internet until the end of time.

  Alyssa started to hide behind a potted fern as Sam Starrett came out of the elevators and crossed the lobby.

  But there was no need. He didn’t even look at her. He just walked his long legs out the door, toward a group of his teammates who were waiting on the sidewalk.

  He didn’t look back, didn’t even glance at her through the window. He just got into the hotel’s airport shuttle and drove away.

  “Hi.”

  Alyssa turned to see Max standing behind her. “Hi.”

  “Ready to go home?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Are we on the same flight?”

  “I don’t think so,” Alyssa said. “I’m not going back until tomorrow morning. Alex won’t be released from the hospital until then, so . . .”

  “Ten thirty-five flight to Hong Kong?” Max asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “We are on the same flight.”

  There was a ripple of laughter from the press conference, and Alyssa glanced toward the slightly open door. “I better get back inside.”

  “Why rush? They’re not going anywhere,” Max said. “Besides, Jules is in there, right? Any bad guys come in, he’ll kick ass.”

  Alyssa narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re not making fun of my partner, are you?”

  “No, I’m serious. He’s great.”

  “You’re not just saying that so I’ll have dinner with you?”

  “No, I’m . . . No. Of course not. I haven’t asked you to have dinner with me, have I?”

  “No.”

  Max shrugged. “See?”

  “How come you haven’t asked me?” God, had those words really come out of her mouth. What was she doing?

  Max got very still. “Are you asking me to ask you to have dinner?”

  “If I wanted to have dinner with you, don’t you think I’d ask you myself?”

  Max looked at her hard. “You want me to be honest?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I don’t think you know what you want.”

  Alyssa laughed. “You are so wrong about that.”

  “Besides Starrett,” he said. “You can’t have him, Alyssa. So now what are you going to do? Be miserable for the rest of your life?”

  She turned toward the conference room. “I have to go.”

  “Have dinner with me tonight.”

  Alyssa stopped. Didn’t turn back around. “What time?”

  Max drew in a deep breath and then let it out in a rush. “Six. Meet me out front. We’ll leave the hotel, maybe see a little something of Jakarta while we’re at it.”

  She looked at him. “I’d like that.”

  He smiled at her, and she smiled back, aware that for the first time in a long time, she actually felt like smiling.

  Jones left the hospital on crutches.

  He’d spent the night and most of the morning pretending to swallow but then spitting out his pain meds because he knew if he didn’t get out of here soon, someone would find him.

  Five million dollars was a very big motivator. And it didn’t matter that this was supposed to be some safe house type hospital facility. He would be found.

  Jayakatong would be searching for him particularly vigilantly. He was going to be triple pissed when he found out that the bounty on Grady Morant’s head was five million dead or alive.

  Jones had slept very little last night. Ironically the only time he’d actually fallen asleep was when Molly came to see him. He couldn’t face her—what he’d done was unforgivable. So he pretended to be asleep, and while she was holding his hand, he’d actually drifted off.

  But he’d awakened as she was leaving, as she’d whispered to the nurse that she’d be back again in the afternoon.

  So early this morning he’d gotten on his clothes and he’d walked out.

  For a place that was supposed
to be so secure, it had been laughably easy to leave.

  He took a bus to the harbor, and stood in line to buy passage on a boat heading for Malaysia. It was then, while he was digging in his pockets for his roll of cash, that he found it.

  A letter. From Molly.

  It started out all business. She gave him her mother’s address and phone number in Iowa, as well as that of her daughter.

  “You can always find me by calling my mother or my daughter,” she wrote. And then she got down to it, direct and to the point as only Molly could be.

  “I want to tell you to turn around and come back,” she wrote. “Come back to me, because I already miss you desperately. Yes, Dave, you are missed.” Her words made his chest ache more than the hellishly persistent throbbing in his leg. “But I know that if you left it’s because you know you’re not safe here, and I want you to be safe more than I want you by my side.

  “I know you think you’re probably saving me by leaving. I know you probably left because you were afraid that when Chai came for you, the innocent people here would be hurt or killed—that I would be hurt or killed.

  “You probably think we’ll both be better off by your leaving. The man who took the money and put the woman and her friends in mortal danger. The woman who betrayed him. Two human beings who made very human mistakes.

  “You did take the money. And I did betray you. I won’t pretend otherwise. They pointed a gun at Billy and I told them who you were. I didn’t trust what I knew deep in my heart—that you were going to bring that money back.

  “I’ve already forgiven you. I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me. I know you’re capable of it, because when you returned the money it proved that I was right about you all along. Oh, honey, I know you’re no angel, not by any means, but you’re a good man with a good heart.

  “I know that I once promised all I wanted from you was friendship, but see, you’re not the only one who knows how to lie. I love you. I love all of you—even your scars and your mistakes—and I hope someday you’ll forgive both me and yourself enough to find me again.

  “And even if you don’t,” Molly wrote in her loopy handwriting, “even if we never meet again, take extra care of yourself. Because you are loved.”

  “Where are you going?” the ticket clerk asked as Jones moved to the counter.

  “I don’t know,” he said. And for the first time in a long time, he honestly didn’t know. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to drift, to tell the man to put him on the next boat out of the harbor, regardless of its destination.

  The clerk took it upon himself to describe all the various shitholes that his company sailed to, making them sound like heaven.

  Jones ignored the man as he memorized the phone numbers Molly had given him. He folded the letter carefully, putting it into his deepest pocket. He knew where heaven was. Heaven was Molly—who loved him—and she sure as hell wasn’t going to Malaysia or Thailand.

  He cut the clerk off midsentence. “You got anything heading for Africa?”

  “Of course.”

  Jones put his money on the counter. “That’s where I want to go.”

  Ken slipped into the back of the room. This press conference thing was a completely new experience for him, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  Savannah didn’t look all too comfortable sitting up there with her parents and grandmother, in front of a roomful of reporters. She was wearing a dress that was a little too tailored and high-necked for his taste, but she’d managed to do her hair in a style that was a compromise between scary and wild. It was cute, he decided. Although five minutes alone with him, and he’d mess it up, guaranteed.

  He caught her eye, and she smiled.

  Oh ho, he knew what that smile meant. She was thinking about the same thing he was. He sent a similar smile right back to her.

  “Savannah,” one of the reporters asked, and she looked away from him. “Is there any truth to the rumors about your engagement with Count Vladamir Modovsky of Romania?”

  She leaned forward to speak into the microphone, the perfect little princess. “Absolutely not.”

  “Can you tell us a little bit about your ordeal on Parwati Island?”

  “It wasn’t entirely an ordeal,” she said, avoiding the question like a pro.

  “Who exactly were you with when you were abducted?” a reporter asked. “The airline has stated that you weren’t traveling alone.”

  “That’s right,” Savannah said, the queen of cool. “I was with a friend.” She called on the next reporter.

  “A male friend, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Can you tell us who he is, what he does for a living—”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Is he an intimate friend?”

  Savannah looked at him across the room, a very clear message in her eyes. Are you sure you want to be a part of this for the rest of your life?

  “Yes,” Ken said, answering both Savannah and the reporter’s question as he headed toward the front of the room. “Yes, he’s a very intimate friend. In fact, he’s her fiancé.”

  Rose was grinning at him. Priscilla looked as if she were going to have a cow for about two seconds and then she quickly hid her reaction behind a carefully pasted-on smile. Karl was talking to his broker on his cell phone, and Savannah . . . she was just shaking her head.

  “You are so in for it now,” she said as he came up onto the little stage.

  “Watch me work,” he said. “I’m a chief in the U.S. Navy. I can handle anything.”

  The questions were flying so fast he couldn’t hear above the din. “One at a time,” he shouted.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ken Karmody.”

  “How did you and Savannah meet?”

  “Technically, we met back while Savannah was going to Yale. And then we met again when she had a flat tire in front of my house. But we really didn’t meet meet until we were stranded in the jungle on Parwati. Needless to say, as we got to know each other, neither of us voted the other off the island.”

  The crowd laughed.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Karmody?”

  “That’s Chief Karmody. I’m employed by my Uncle Sam’s Navy.”

  “Why would Savannah von Hopf want to marry you, an enlisted sailor?”

  That was one hell of a question. “Well, she told me she either wanted to marry a prince, or a guy with a frog tattooed on his butt. I’ll let you guess which one I am.”

  There was more laughter, but Ken leaned in to the microphone. “Seriously,” he said. “She’s marrying me because she knows that on a scale from one to ten, I love her an eleven. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I have a few more days of liberty and we have plane tickets. You’ll understand if I don’t tell you where we’re heading.”

  Rose stood up. “I must leave as well. I’m due to visit Alex in the hospital. He’s doing much better and will be released in the morning. I’m hoping to convince him and his longtime companion and personal assistant to pay me an extended visit in New York.” There Alex, I’ve outed you. It’s about time.

  Savannah paused at the door to look back at her and give her a thumbs up.

  Yes, my dear, I’ll be hoping to spend a lot more time with you in the near future, too.

  Savannah smiled as if she could read Rose’s mind.

  Rose followed her granddaughter and her fiancé out into the lobby. Alyssa Locke joined her, ready to accompany her to the hospital.

  Just as she’d suspected, the two lovers didn’t make it very far before Ken pulled Savannah into an alcove and kissed her.

  Such passion, especially for two o’clock in the afternoon. But what else could be expected from a man whose love was an eleven on a scale from one to ten?

  Rose watched Savannah and Ken slip into an elevator. They were in each other’s arms again before the doors had fully closed.

  Her granddaughter was infinitely l
ucky. Rose knew this firsthand. She’d had a husband who had loved her an eleven, too.

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