Wade

by Jennifer Blake

“Yes,” she replied, though with little obedience in her tone. Turning back to Chloe, she thrust the package into her hands. Then she enveloped her in a swift hug that included the ritual kisses on the cheek of farewell. With the glint of tears in her eyes, she murmured softly, “Allah keep you, my friend. Live well and be happy.”

  “And you,” Chloe replied.

  Freshta looked at Wade. “Keep her safe.”

  Where the impulse came from, Wade wasn’t sure, but he lifted a hand to his heart and inclined his head in a gesture he’d seen many times in the Middle East but never thought to copy. It seemed right at the moment.

  Freshta smiled, for the brilliance of it shone behind her mesh screen. Then she turned in a whirl of cloth and ran for the truck that was rolling to a halt. Kemal helped her into the cab, probably for the sake of speed and because he wanted the window seat, since he slammed the door and draped an arm outside it. Then the truck pulled away. It picked up speed, grinding off with a clash of gears toward the Azad Pass and all that lay beyond.

  Wade looked at the woman beside him. She stared back, her gaze unreadable.

  So here he was, Wade Ethan Benedict, in the middle of a foreign country with no plan, no transportation, and no idea what to do next. He had about two-thirds of his normal strength, a single weapon with limited ammo, and he was stranded alone with a woman who considered him a liability and wanted desperately to be somewhere else. Night was coming on like a freight train, and the only shelter in sight was a crippled vehicle that, come good dark, was going to be a magnet for every thief and bandit in these hills.

  On top of all this, he had a strong suspicion that he’d lost it, gone over the edge to stare lunacy in its grinning face. Because the main thing he felt bubbling up inside him was not gloom or doubt or even worry, but an enveloping tide of pure, outrageous joy.

  God, but he was happy.

  9

  “What’s so funny?” Chloe demanded.

  “Nothing, nothing.” The smile that curved Wade’s lips vanished. He turned away from her, gazing around with an appraising stare at the darkening shapes of the rolling hills and the ever-present saw-toothed line of the Hindu Kush behind them.

  She wished that she’d been less waspish. It wasn’t his fault that everything had gone so terribly wrong, or that she felt forsaken. Of course, none of it would have happened if he had never come, or even if he’d left her alone when she’d asked.

  Freshta and Ayla were sure the chain of events that had been set in motion was fate’s hand at work. Chloe wished she could believe it. It seemed to her more like the hand of Wade Benedict.

  Abruptly he moved with a lanky stride to the rear of the station wagon. Opening the cargo hatch, he rummaged inside, taking out and stacking what he found on the ground. The first thing was a bag made of carpet scraps that clanked with the dull metallic sound made by tools or cooking equipment, or both. On this was stacked a prayer rug and a stained wool blanket. Rolling the last two items together, he handed her the bundle.

  Chloe took it automatically and tucked the video package that she still held into one end. Wrinkling her nose at the smell of goat and old cigarette smoke that clung to the wool and leather, she asked, “What is this?”

  “Camping gear.” He removed the five-gallon water jug that Kemal had used earlier, then closed the hatch door.

  “Camping,” she repeated in flat tones.

  “Call me chicken, but getting into a truck with some stranger on a deserted road at night, like your friend, just doesn’t seem too bright. I might chance it on my own, but not with a woman.”

  “I can take care of myself, thank you.”

  “Famous last words. And I’m in no shape to ride to the rescue like some hero in the movies, thank you very much. Good old Kemal carried survival gear, as most folks do that live in mountain country. We’ll camp for the night, and try for Peshawar in the morning.”

  “Let me guess, you were a Boy Scout?”

  “My brothers and I practically lived in the woods around our house when we were kids.”

  “This isn’t Louisiana.”

  “That just means there are no mosquitoes and we won’t be panting for air-conditioning.”

  The last was certainly true. The air had grown noticeably cooler since the sun dropped behind the mountains. “We could sleep in the station wagon,” she said with a troubled glance at the dust being chased across the road by the evening wind.

  “Yeah, but the bandits and strip thieves might disturb your beauty rest.”

  “Strip thieves?”

  “With car parts being scarce around here, I think you’ll find this heap a skeleton of its former self come daylight.”

  “You’re forgetting the nasty habit they have of cutting off the hands of thieves.”

  He gave her a judicious look. “First you have to catch the thief. And I’d say the prospect of losing a hand makes leaving witnesses out of the question. Do you really want to chance it?”

  Camping suddenly didn’t seem such a bad idea. “I suppose you’ve got the perfect site all picked out?”

  “Over there.” He tipped his head toward a stand of deodar cedars a fair distance away. The trees, ghostly in the fading light, clustered on a slope that was protected from the rear by a steep outcropping of rock but open on the remaining three sides.

  “All the comforts of home,” she said dryly. “Carry on, O Fearless Leader.”

  He picked up the water jug and the tool bag. With a hint of challenge in his eyes, he said, “After you.”

  If he thought she was going to argue with him, he was in for a surprise, Chloe thought. With a single speaking glance, she tucked the rolled blanket under one arm, picked up the skirt of her burqa and set out for the cedars.

  By the time night had fallen around them, they sat on either side of a small fire sipping tea. Wade had built a fire pit of stones and kindled the blaze inside the concealing ring. It was Chloe who found the matches to start it with, however, in the bag of tools and utensils. She also discovered the packet of tea, tin can used for boiling water and plastic cup. And it was she who laid out the prayer rug on one side of the fire and the blanket on the other.

  “Not exactly home,” Wade said in wry comment as he glanced at her across the flames, “but not too uncomfortable, either.”

  Firelight reflected in his eyes and glinted for an instant on the whiteness of his teeth as he smiled. Abruptly she was aware of just how big and masculine he was, how attractive, and how alone they were there under the cedars. He seemed more relaxed than at any time since they’d met, as he lounged across from her with one knee drawn up to support his wrist and the hot tin can of tea that he held between his thumb and forefinger. He’d regained his normal color, so his skin appeared sun-burnished, and the rough, windblown waves of his hair shone with vitality. He didn’t look at all like the man who had been lost in a feverish nightmare only the night before.

  Realizing she was staring, she looked away. Her gaze fell on the leather bag that lay beside her. “Would you like a snack? I found this with the other things.”

  “What is it?”

  “Walnuts, seeds, dried fruit and maybe bits of meat, the Hazara version of trail mix, though a good bit older as a tradition.”

  He held out his hand, and she poured half of what was in the bag into it. “Interesting,” he said as he stared down at it. Then he piled it carefully on the rug beside him. “Maybe later.”

  She wasn’t really hungry, either, but sorted out a piece of what she thought was apricot. It was hardly a gourmet treat since it had been sun-dried without benefit of sugar or preservatives, and had dark spots whose origins she didn’t want to speculate on. Still, she tore off a small piece with her teeth and began to chew it. The concentrated scent of apricot blended with the smells of burning cedar and wild sage from the mountain slopes, creating an incenselike fragrance.

  “I expect camping out when you were a kid was never quite like this,” she commented.

  An o
dd expression crossed his face, then was gone. “Not quite. For one thing, no girls were allowed. Not that any ever applied.”

  “No girls in your family?”

  “Not back then. Boys only, Adam and myself, Clay and Matt. The last two were twins.”

  “Were?”

  “Matt died, killed in an oil rig explosion.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was soft as she spoke, perhaps in response to the spasm of pain that had crossed his face.

  “It was a long time ago, over ten years. He has a daughter, a neat kid named Lainey. She had a kidney transplant a while back, but is doing fine so far. Clay gave her one of his, since he was the best donor match.”

  “That was…kind of him.”

  “Pure self-preservation, if you ask me. He loves that kid as if she was his own, would die tomorrow if anything happened to her. Doesn’t hurt that he feels the same about her mother.”

  “Meaning…”

  “He married the woman Matt loved, yeah. As twins, they always did have the same tastes in food, cars, women and so on. Stands to reason, I guess.”

  “What about your other brother?”

  “Adam? His wife’s psychic, reads his mind. It’s downright weird, or might be if he didn’t enjoy it so much.”

  “Enjoy?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  From the hint of a salacious twinkle in his eyes, she thought he was probably right. On the other hand, talking seemed more comfortable than silence. Searching for something to keep it going, she asked, “No other nephews and nieces?”

  “Not so far, but lots of baby cousins.”

  She sat listening as he went on to tell her of his cousins Kane, Luke and Roan and their wives and offspring. He spoke also of the town of Turn-Coupe, the people who lived there, the courthouse square with its Confederate and Vietnam Veterans Memorials side by side, the annual pirate’s day festival and the lake and its swamp areas. She paid attention to what he said, but most of all she listened to the rich timbre of his voice with its warm edging of nostalgia and affection. Whether he knew it or not, he loved his people and the place he had been born, and he missed them.

  “Why did you leave Turn-Coupe?” she asked when he finally fell quiet.

  He lifted a shoulder. “It’s a long story and not especially interesting. Besides, I’ve talked enough.”

  “What else do we have to do, after all. I’d like to hear it.”

  He met her gaze through the blue streamers of smoke that shifted between them. Their depths were dark, yet alive with rigorously suppressed inclinations. An odd shiver moved over her, while deep inside she felt the rise of something similar to anticipation. Her heartbeat accelerated, and her lips parted for a quick, sharp breath.

  He switched his gaze to his tea, swirling it in the tin can. His expression hardened, becoming distant.

  “Of course, if that’s too personal…” she began.

  His lips flattened for a second. Then he twitched a wide shoulder. “Not especially. It’s the usual family saga. Adam was the oldest son, the steady, hardworking one who did well in school and tried his best to please. Being the second son and middle child, I had to be different. I was the rebel, stubborn, touchy, a sore-headed pain in the…well, a pain. Our dad wasn’t an easy man. He was a perfectionist, with a highhanded conviction that there was only one way to be, one way to do things, and that was his way. The twins were younger and had each other, so were able to get by. All of us spent a lot of time in the woods and swamps, keeping out of his way. Didn’t always work. To say Dad and I butted heads would be an understatement. His best way of trying to make me see reason was with a belt. That was the main reason my mom left him when I was a teenager, I think, and the only person stunned by it was Dad. Instead of trying to work it out, he did his best to make the breakup her fault. And of course we all resented him for it, especially me.” He paused. “See, I told you it was boring.”

  “No, really it isn’t.” She was intrigued by that glimpse of what he’d been like before he’d developed the tough exterior that he’d worn when she’d first met him. It helped, too, to know that seemingly perfect families, as she’d somehow pictured the Benedicts when she’d stayed at their camp with her father, could have problems. The fact that his parents had been divorced as her own had been gave her a feeling of common ground. “So is that why you left, because you couldn’t get along with your dad?”

  “That was the biggest part of it. But I was sick to death of Turn-Coupe, too, and dying to see the world. I lived with my mom in New Orleans for a while, but didn’t get on too well with her friends—she’s an artist and seems to collect weird types the way some women collect china plates or figurines. I got an apartment, took a job tending bar at night, earned a degree. About the time I graduated, a recruiter came around offering premium salaries for engineers willing to live and work in the Middle East. So off I went.” He glanced at her. “You sure you want to hear this?”

  Instead of answering, she asked, “You didn’t join the military?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The way you act now and then. Well, and you had nightmares about some kind of plan or operation that went wrong. It sounded as if it might have a military connection though it was confusing because there was a woman involved.”

  “Jeez,” he whispered, raising his free hand to his face, rubbing it with a force that distorted his expression, for a second, into a mask of tragedy.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Hell, why not?” He expelled a short, hard breath. “Could be you have a right to know the quality of the protection you’re getting here.”

  She didn’t like the self-contempt she heard in his voice, or the force with which he flung the remains of his tea into the fire. Still, she wasn’t sure she could stop him now if she tried. She was silent, waiting for him to go on.

  “What I joined was the Diplomatic Security Service, a division dedicated to the protection of diplomatic personnel and their families abroad, with sometimes the occasional senator, congressman, head of a multinational corporation or heavy campaign contributor who takes a notion to visit foreign posts. I was recruited for that, too, on the basis of a little skirmish in Saudi Arabia between a diplomat’s teenage son and what I thought were a couple of pickpockets. They turned out to be terrorists, and I happened by in time to keep him from getting blown to bits in a car bomb attack. The kid made sure I got a formal thanks and an informal visit from the director of security at that time, a guy named Nathaniel Hedley.”

  She had a feeling that there’d been much more to the encounter than he was telling, but she let it go. “You had an oil-field position by then, I imagine,” she said. “Why did you agree?”

  “Ego, I suppose,” he answered with a twist of his neck, as if trying to relieve its stiffness. “I was young enough to be flattered by all the fuss and glamour, rubbing elbows with the moneyed folks and political movers and shakers. Then there was the high-flown language about a career dedicated to serving and protecting the men and women who furthered U.S. interests at home and abroad. I was a sucker for ideals, of one kind or another, back then. Of course, the briefing from veterans and the training I had to go through knocked a lot of that out of me, but it took a real mess to get rid of what was left.”

  She thought it was possible that some remained, or else why would he have ventured virtually alone into a country like Hazaristan at the behest of a friend? Why would he risk so much to carry out a mission that had been useless from the start?

  “What kind of mess?” She drank the rest of her tea and set the cup aside.

  “An ugly one,” he answered quietly. “A Texas oilman flew in to visit the ambassador and, not incidentally, get some kind of angle on an upcoming meeting of OPEC. He brought his wife with him, a former model that he sent to Switzerland every year for the latest nip, tuck and mud bath. Oh, and decked out in Paris and Italian originals that he set off with a tasteful dollar sign
made of diamonds pinned smack dab in the middle of her chest. I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure, that he was old enough to be her grandfather and she was his second, or maybe third, trophy bride. He was busy making more money, she was bored, and so she entertained herself by swimming in the nude and asking unattached men to dance. But it turned out that she’d had a former lover who was a lawyer draw up her prenuptial agreement, and if the rich old coot she’d married decided to throw her out, it was going to cost him ten million.”

  “Dollars?” Chloe couldn’t keep the amazement out of her voice.

  “Which had already been deposited in a Swiss bank account and needed only a divorce decree as a release. She liked to say, when she’d had one too many vodka and tonics, that she’d earned every penny.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Exactly. Maybe the old guy knew how she felt, or again maybe not. Who knows what goes through the mind of an old geezer like that, in the first stages of Alzheimer’s and with more money than God?”

  “And this oilman’s wife invited you to…dance?”

  “That’s all it was,” he said, raising his head and glaring at her as if he heard the doubt in her voice. “I don’t sleep with other men’s wives.”

  “No, of course not.” That didn’t mean the woman hadn’t asked, Chloe thought, or that she hadn’t taken her disappointment elsewhere.

  “Anyway, she was kidnapped, along with the vice consul, by Islamic terrorists. I was assigned to the find-and-rescue detail. We found her, all right, and op was set up with split-second timing. I went in, found her and the vice consul, almost had her out. Then something went wrong, the operation came apart and she…”

  He stopped abruptly, as if his throat had closed. To fill the space, Chloe said, “She was killed. Her name was Sylvie.”

  “Yeah. Was I yelling about it?”

  “Among other things. You…seemed to believe someone other than the terrorists killed her.”

  “Yeah. I think the old man hired those guys to take her, then paid one of ours to make sure she died during the rescue. I was supposed to die, too, but I fooled them. Not that it made any difference. Nothing I said mattered, since nobody was going to investigate. It was an unfortunate affair that ended in tragedy. The grieving widower took the body home, and that was that. Only he killed himself a week later.”