He moved even more heavily against her but came up against a barrier. Her hand. For a second, his mind balked. She didn’t want this? But her mouth was open beneath his, her tongue stroking his.
So, what…?
The sound finally penetrated, at the exact instant Claire’s hand pushed hard against his shoulder.
Someone was talking. Whispering, actually. A loud, hissing whisper. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t Claire.
None of that computed.
They were alone in the building.
With what remained of his brain cells, Dan realized that something was wrong. He lifted his head and nearly moaned at what he saw. Claire’s normally pale skin was deep pink, overheated. Big silvery-blue eyes wide and unfocused. Mouth wet and puffy from his. The very picture of a beautiful, aroused woman. The most gorgeous thing he’d ever seen in his life. For a second, he couldn’t imagine why on earth he’d lifted his mouth from hers. He could have stayed there for a million years.
“Claire! Qu’est-ce que tu fais? Viens ici! Vite!”
Dan was normally on top of everything, but this stumped him for almost a second. He wasn’t talking and she wasn’t talking. So someone else was talking. In French, yet.
It was as if he’d been on another world, transported far away. But now this world, with its vicious dangers, with a rebel army right outside his doorstep, with the safety of an Embassy in his hands, came rushing right back in. For a second, Dan was deeply ashamed that he had allowed himself to be distracted even for the space of a kiss.
Then he looked at Claire, so beautiful, softness and light and grace, and he forgave himself. A man would have to be dead not to give in to that temptation. Even a soldier. Even a Marine, though Marines had duty flowing in their veins instead of blood.
“Claire!” the voice hissed again, and Dan swivelled his head towards the door at the same time as Claire did.
Another beautiful woman.
Christ, it was raining beautiful dames today. Narrow face, fine features, skin so black it was almost blue, long, narrow hand holding open the door. A Foreign National, one of the ten Makongans working in the Embassy, the core staff that remained to keep the Embassy going while the Americans rotated in and out.
Dan did a quick search inside his head and came up with a name. Marie. Marie Diur. Claire’s best friend, or so scuttlebutt had it.
Marie was ignoring him, beckoning to Claire. Claire leaned forward, away from his hand and stood up lithely.
Whatever this was about, Dan wanted to be part of it. He stood, too, rifle in one hand, the other on the butt of his Browning.
A burst of French from Marie and Claire turned to him, eyes troubled. “She says for you to stay here.”
Dan balked. Both of them should be staying here, in Post One, the safest place in the Embassy. If there was to be a shoot-out, this was the best place to hole up.
And how the hell had Marie Diur gotten in anyway, with the Embassy surrounded by crazed, drunken rebel troops? He opened his mouth but before he could say anything, Claire placed a finger against his lips.
“Please, Dan,” she said softly. “I know Marie. She wants to tell me something and she wants just me. Please, stay here and I’ll be right back.”
Dan’s back teeth ground so hard it was a miracle enamel didn’t shoot out his ears. “Listen, Claire. The situation’s volatile and dangerous. I don’t need to tell you that. I don’t want you out of my sight. And now that your friend’s here, I don’t want her going back outside, either.”
She looked at him and back at Marie, who was impatiently signalling for Claire to come immediately. “She needs to talk to me. I won’t be long.” She patted his chest. “Please,” she said softly, soberly. “Just a few minutes.”
He didn’t say anything, and she took it as consent.
Claire crossed the room to Marie. They put their heads together, two beautiful women at the two ends of the color spectrum, speaking quietly and quickly in French. The soft liquid sounds carried, though he couldn’t understand a word of it. Claire finally nodded and turned to him, holding up her index finger in a universal sign—one minute.
Dan watched grimly as the two women disappeared, the huge wooden door of the room Post One was in closing gently behind them. This wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. Goddamn it, he was giving them one minute and then he was going out to get them.
The radio crackled.
“Gunny, you there?” Marine House. Ward. He was using encryption which scrambled his voice at one end, to be reconstituted on Dan’s end. Ward’s normal bass sounded like Daffy Duck on helium.
Dan switched on the mike. “Yeah. Give me a sitrep. You’ve got eyes on the ground.” Marine House stood flush with the street and they’d have a better view of what was going on than what he could see from inside the Embassy.
The crackle of static, then Ward’s voice came back on, high-pitched and distorted. Dan could hear faint shots outside echoing through the Marine House radio.
“—not much of anything. It’s like they’re just happy to be riding around, shooting at random. We’re observing the same jeeps of soldiers circling around and around, so there might be fewer of them than we thought.” Ward conferred briefly with Buchan. “Yeah, we’re thinking maybe not more than five hundred troops. Maybe less, even. So far, they haven’t paid us any attention at all. It’s hard to know what plans they have, if any. But a hundred to one—those aren’t bad odds.”
Ward was right. Dan knew that the Red Army numbered in the tens of thousands. If the entire Army was flooding into Laka, they were goners. But they could handle five hundred. Five hundred illiterate, superstitious troops, boys who’d been kidnapped from their villages so young they were sometimes shorter than the rifles they carried. Kept drunk or drugged and brainwashed into thinking that their red shirts made them magically invulnerable to bullets.
No match at all. Dan would bet on the odds of a hundred to one, no question. He and his men were elite troops, well-trained and well-armed.
“Okay. Keep watch and let me know if you think new troops are arriving.”
“Roger that.”
Dan thumbed the ‘off’ button, then looked at his watch, frowning. Almost ten minutes had gone by. Claire had promised to come back in a minute. Ten minutes was not one. A lot of very bad things could happen in ten minutes.
Protocol dictated that he remain at Post One during an emergency, but the hell with it. An emergency hadn’t been officially declared. Not yet, anyway. Wherever Claire was, he wanted her back with him, right by his side where she’d be safe. As safe as he could make her, anyway. Marie Diur, too
Cracking the door open, Dan looked both ways. As always near the equator, night was falling fast. No one had bothered to turn on the hallway lights, so the big hallway was cloaked in shadows.
Dan slipped through the door, and walked quietly through the rooms. The waiting room, the consular section, the back offices. He made the rounds of the ground floor perimeter. He knew how to move with stealth, and he knew how to clear rooms. Ten minutes later, he’d checked the entire ground floor and had seen… nothing. No other consular officers, no rebel army troops. No Marie Diur. Above all, no Claire Day.
He stopped and listened. Like most Marines, his senses were keen. His hearing was especially sharp. He held his breath in his lungs so it wouldn’t interfere, and sent his senses outwards.
The Embassy was an old building, built by a French timber baron in the late 19th century. It had been built like a Paris townhouse, but in the Equator, wood and stucco aren’t as eternal as in the City of Lights. It required constant upkeep, and on the best of days, the entire building moaned and groaned and squeaked.
Right now, though, it was utterly and completely silent. The only sounds were those filtering in from the rebel soldiers carousing outside along the Avenue de la Liberté, shouts of drunken male jubilation, crazed machine gun bursts, revving engines.
Inside the Embassy, silence.
Dan r
aced up to the second floor, cleared the rooms, then checked the third floor, essentially storage space.
Only the basement was left, with the locked armory only he and his second-in-command Ward had the code for, the secure room, which was locked and the supplies room, ditto.
No sign of Claire.
The Embassy building was charming, an architectural jewel, but it was also small. Everyone worked in close proximity, everyone knew everyone else’s business. You could hear phone conversations in the room next door. As long as there were people in the building, the only places that were silent were Post One, the sound-proofed situation room, the secure room where Claire worked, and the armory, deep underground.
Even if Claire knew the codes, she wouldn’t have taken Marie into rooms off-limits to FSN staff. It was a rule no one ever broke.
If Claire and Marie were anywhere in the building, he should be hearing them. Even whispers carried.
There were no whispers, no footfalls, no sounds at all.
Dan had spent most of his adult life training to sharpen his senses. He took a moment to put himself in hunting mode—attuning his eyes to the semi-darkness, sharpening his hearing even more, Browning out, safety off. Remington on a sling against his back. Ready for trouble.
By the time he’d finished casing the Embassy, top to bottom, he was sweating.
Claire had disappeared.
Christ.
Dan didn’t know Marie Diur at all. Suppose she was secretly a supporter of the Red Army? Suppose she’d lured Claire into their hands?
The Red Army was made up of crazed scumbags, but the government army wasn’t much better. The Makongan Army had plenty of enemies. If the Diur family had suffered at the government’s hands, they might well have thrown in with the rebels.
Claire in RA hands was something he couldn’t even think about without going crazy. They were brutal beyond belief. God, how could he have let Claire go? He’d lost his head for just a second, and it might have cost her her life.
She and Marie hadn’t been insane enough to go outside, had they? Or even outside the Embassy compound? Did Marie know of some secret entrance? Dan glanced outside the windows at the swiftly gathering dusk. This was the moment when the duty officer switched on the powerful outside lights, illuminating every inch of ground between the walls of the Embassy and the gate. Now there was only darkness.
Listening carefully, Dan cracked open the door that led from the back office used by the consular staff to the motor pool. A huge modern garage, housing Embassy cars had been added to the big back garden, with a concrete shed attached to the back. The garage was modular and had been recently extended to house shipments of anti-AIDS drugs donated by one of those rich-guy foundations.
There was a big truck there now, full of drugs.
The heat was still intense, the coming of night was bringing no freshness at all. If anything, the heat became more oppressive. He took a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes.
Dan unslung his rifle and brought it up to his shoulder, starting to slow his breathing and his heartbeat in case he needed to shoot. Kicking open the door of the shed, he quartered the room. Nothing. After a minute, he lowered the rifle, frowning, and closed the door of the shed.
A whisper! Definitely the sound of a woman’s voice. Soldiers are taught not to whisper in the field. A whisper carries much further than a low murmur. A woman’s voice, with its higher pitch, carried even farther than a man’s.
And now… another woman answering.
Claire. That was Claire’s voice. He’d recognize it anywhere. She was outside, when she should be back in the Embassy where he could protect her.
He moved forward and… never completed the step towards Claire because a giant fist raised him ten feet off the ground and slammed him back against the concrete wall of the shed at a hundred miles an hour.
In the split second before he lost consciousness, while a fireball of light and heat filled the universe, he thought—Claire.
Claire was in the middle of the conflagration and was already dead.
He’d lost her the moment he’d found her.
And then the world went black.
CHAPTER 2
SAFETY HARBOR, FLORIDA, ONE YEAR LATER
Claire Day opened the front door of her father’s home and walked in slowly, wearily.
Actually, it wasn’t her father’s home anymore, it was her home now. Her father was gone, dead of a heart attack. Dead, some said, of a broken heart.
Because of her.
She’d just spent a long couple of hours at the cemetery, bringing her father flowers. It was her closest human contact since her father had died three months ago—talking to his headstone.
She told him her grief, how much she missed him, how sorry she was that the fact she’d nearly died in the Embassy bombing in Laka had broken his heart.
He listened, she was sure of that. Wherever he was, he was listening to her. He always had. He’d been a strong, loving presence in her life while her mother was alive, and he’d been a frightened, loving presence afterwards.
Maybe he even forgave her.
It had been cold and windy in the cemetery, and she was chilled to the bone. Luckily, she kept the heat on in the house, day and night, unusual in these sunny parts.
Her heating bills were atrocious, but it was the only way she could stay warm. She was always cold these days, her hands and feet pale and bloodless.
She blew into her hands and rubbed them. It was what her mother had done when she was a child, coming in from playing in the snow in Boston. A motherly ritual that she’d taken for granted as a well-loved little girl—a sweater kept warm on the radiator, hot chocolate ready for the microwave, and a brisk rub of her hands. Her mother had been a gifted amateur pianist and her hands had been beautiful—long and delicate.
If Claire closed her eyes, she could still see her chubby child’s hands being chafed by her mother’s warm, elegant, womanly ones.
There was no one to rub Claire’s hands now. No one in the entire world. No one to rub her hands, put an arm around her shoulders, give her a hug.
She couldn’t remember the last human being who had touched her. Maybe the Gramercys at her father’s funeral. They’d hugged her, briefly. But then Mr. Gramercy had managed to insinuate that she’d killed her father by wilfully going off on her adventures.
Her knees had nearly buckled at the venom in his voice and at the stab of guilt that had penetrated straight to her heart.
He might be right. If she hadn’t wanted to spread her wings and fly, she would probably be somewhere teaching French literature, perhaps translating novels from the French in her spare time, an intact human being.
No memory loss, no dizzy spells, no screaming nightmares.
No dead father.
Wiped out, Claire sat down on the couch, hugging herself for warmth, too tired to make it up to her bedroom on the second floor and change into warm, comfortable house clothes.
She was always exhausted after she went out. The outside world was simply too much for her. She planned her outings carefully, going out only when necessary to do some shopping or to take care of some errand or to visit her father’s grave. Inevitably she’d come home shaking and spent.
That was her life now, and had been since she’d come out of her coma nine months ago. Physical and mental weakness, a constant feeling of sliding into a deep, black hole, a huge wall of glass between her and the rest of humanity. Those were her daily companions.
The nightmares were her nightly companions.
Claire rested her head against the back of the couch, suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and weakness. Making it upstairs to change felt like a huge challenge—Hilary conquering Mt. Everest.
The big ormolu clock on the hearth mantelpiece struck seven. Way too early to go to bed.
She knew from bitter experience that if she gave in to her desire for oblivion too early, she’d just wake up in a nest of sweaty sheets and blankets around
midnight, unable to sleep until morning, when she’d get up exhausted and dizzy and unready to face the day. And she also knew from bitter experience that sleeping pills weren’t the way to go. They only made the situation worse, befogging her mind without letting her rest.
No, better to stay awake until, say, ten, and then hope for sleep. Sleep.
She nearly laughed at the longing coursing through her body. God, a full night’s sleep. Once, she’d longed for travel and adventure, intellectual excitement. Meeting new people from different cultures. A sense of successfully making her way in this world.
Now she longed for one night’s sleep. Without nightmares.
The horrors visited her almost nightly. The nightmares all had the same flavour, which as far as she knew was highly unusual. Claire had read more or less every book Amazon could deliver to her doorstep on sleep disorders, and had started thinking of ordering the ones on mental disorders to see if she could find her particular one.
Her nightmares were constant. Sticky heat, the sound of gunshots, evil men coming after her. She’d try to run but find herself unable to move her limbs, which was a classic. There would be whispers, just out of hearing range. Whispers she couldn’t understand, whispers of something terrible. A sense of heart-pounding danger, imminent menace.
A shot, a woman on the ground in a pool of her own blood.
Sometimes, though, rarely, in the middle of the nightmares, when she felt her entire body encased in an Iron Maiden of fear of unstoppable evil, there would be someone else.
A man. His face was sometimes nebulous, sometimes clear, but only for a second. Not too tall, but with immensely broad shoulders, brown-haired, vigilant, and tough.
She could never make out the color of his eyes, though that didn’t matter. What mattered was that when he was in her head during the nightmare, the sharp-edged terror she felt abated a little. In the midst of monsters, he provided a sense of safety.
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