“He’s breathing,” Drew reported, at the same moment Jimmy shouted, “Get us the hell out of here. Chopper incoming!”
Sure enough, the aircraft swept in a slow arc and headed straight for the boat.
For a split second the future hovered between salvation and destruction. Then the men on the chopper opened fire.
“Down!” Drew shouted, though they were already scrambling for the scant cover available on the sturdy boat.
With Michael down, Drew took over the controls and sent the skiff hurtling in a series of evasive maneuvers, slewing the craft wildly from side to side and avoiding the first strafing run as the chopper passed overhead. The pilot corrected quickly, though, and lined up for another run. “There’s the Valiant!” Jimmy cried, pointing to a dot on the horizon.
The skiff hurtled in the direction of the coast guard ship with the helicopter right behind it, but the men on the chopper didn’t fire again. Instead, the aircraft began to wallow from side to side, as though it was having mechanical difficulties.
Or someone on board was putting up a hell of a fight.
“Almost in range of the Valiant’s launcher,” Drew called, still swerving the boat in a series of evasive runs. “One minute.”
It took a moment for that to penetrate. When it did, Sydney spun to the others. “They’re not going to shoot the chopper, are they? They can’t! They—”
She broke off when the door in the side of the helicopter slid open and a body pitched out and fell limply for twenty feet or so to the sea. Sydney screamed, and screamed again when the helicopter suddenly swerved in the sky, seeming to be coming for them again.
“Fire, damn it!” Drew shouted, though the approaching coast guard cutter was too far away for anyone to hear, and the rotor-thump drowned out the shout as the helicopter approached.
Then without warning, it swerved hard to the left, flipped up and over and began to autorotate, spinning like a flat disk as it hurtled back toward the island. The engines screamed and smoke began to pour from the open door.
Seconds later, it slammed into the cliff below the wrecked mansion, detonated in an orange-red fireball and crashed into the ocean.
Seconds after that, it was gone, marked only by a sooty smudge on the rocky cliff face.
Someone was moaning. It took Sydney a minute to realize it was her, and to feel the bite of pain where she’d dug her fingertips into the metal side of the boat, and broken two of her fingernails away. “No,” she said, “no, no, no.”
But the litany of denial didn’t bring the helicopter back up to the surface, and it didn’t make John suddenly appear, treading water and waving for a pickup.
The sea was eerily calm.
“He jumped,” Michael said, his voice ragged. He was bleeding from a cut on his head, but he was conscious and standing. “That had to be him. He got out before they hit.”
Drew sent the boat toward where the jumper had landed. The Valiant approached the same point from the other side, and all hands were on deck, scanning the water for a swimmer.
Or a body, Sydney thought as a big shiver crawled down her spine and made her stomach pitch. Please be there, she thought desperately. Please be okay. The chant repeated itself over and over again in her head, but she saw nothing. No swimmer. No body. Just water.
Tears blinded her and broke free, tracking down her cheeks. Michael moved up beside her along the railing, Jimmy and Drew stepping to her other side, so the four of them stood together, scanning the Atlantic for the leader of their team. For the man she loved.
“Ahoy the boat.”
For a second, Sydney didn’t think she’d actually heard the hail, which had come from the other side of the boat, the side away from where the body had fallen.
Then she heard it again. “Hello? Anyone up there?”
It was John’s voice.
Screaming his name, she flew to the other side of the boat, with the others right behind her. And there he was, treading water.
His eyes locked on her and a huge smile split his face. “You’re okay.”
“Yeah,” she said, grinning through her tears. “I am now.”
He held up a hand. “A little help here?”
Michael, Jimmy and Drew were only too happy to drag him aboard the skiff, and the team surrounded him with backslaps and congratulations, but his attention stayed fixed on Sydney, and all of his emotions were plain to see.
There was satisfaction of a job well done in bringing Tiberius to justice, one way or another. There was relief that it was over and they were both standing safely on the deck.
And there was love, shining clear as the sunlight, along with the question she hadn’t yet answered.
She answered it now as he crossed to her, opening her arms to him. “I love you.”
He whooped and swept her up in an embrace that might have been cold and wet from the seawater that still poured from him, but was warm where it counted—where their lips touched, and where their bodies melded together in a long, satisfying kiss.
She wrapped her arms around him, so this time, unlike the first time they’d washed up on a deck together just off Rocky Cliff Island, they shared the same blanket.
EPILOGUE
THE SIX MONTHS FOLLOWING Tiberius’s death were harder work than John had expected. He and his team had been forced to go in and dismantle certain pieces of his organization by force, and they’d been fighting a constant rearguard action to keep others from stepping into the leadership role.
Eventually someone would step up, he knew. Nature abhorred a vacuum. But the prospect didn’t bother him nearly as much as it had before, because he was coming to realize that was part of the game, too. It wasn’t just the moves leading up to checkmate that mattered, it was what the victor did after the game.
Before, he would’ve headed home for a few weeks of vacation and lasted only a few days before restlessness sent him back to the office.
Now, as he turned into the long drive leading to his house and rolled past the freshly clipped paddocks, where a pair of fat quarter horses dozed in the sun, tails swishing idly at the last of the season’s flies, he knew he’d be squeezing every last drop out of this vacation, because everything was different now.
These days, he had a reason to come home.
He found her in the kitchen, cooking an army’s worth of pasta and sauce with her usual combination of a scientist’s precision and risk-taker’s flare. When he wrapped his arms around her slim waist and pressed his lips into the curve of her neck, she leaned back into him for a moment, then turned in his arms to greet him with a proper kiss, one that had him thinking of turning down the burners and nipping upstairs.
“Company will be here in thirty,” she murmured against his lips as hers curved in a smile. “Hold that thought, okay?”
Knowing it would be better for the wait—and the time to explore the ever-changing, always-blinding heat between them—he kissed her nose and grinned. “We celebrating?”
He figured he already knew the answer from her smile.
“The accelerated approval came through today,” she confirmed. “We’ve got the go-ahead to start Celeste on the new treatment.” She reached past him to give the pasta a quick stir, which involved pressing her hips against his erection, wringing a groan from him.
“Congratulations.” He nibbled at her ear. “Temptress.”
Her eyes glazed and her breath started coming faster, in the little puffs of excitement he loved so much. “Thanks.” She tipped her head back and moaned a little as he moved to her throat and along the soft line of her jaw. “There’s no guarantee it’ll work, but all the early results are good. At a minimum, we should be able to stop the disease from progressing further. At best, she could get some of the feeling and strength back in her arms.” She turned her lips to his and drew him into a deep, searching kiss. When it ended, she whispered, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
In the aftermath of the op on Rocky Cliff Island, he’d gone to
bat for her, not just to keep her safe from prosecution, but to get her added on to a government-affiliated think tank investigating ways to make—and counteract—various types of bioweapons.
He smiled against her mouth, turning down the burner when the water boiled over. “I figured the U.S. of A. was far safer with you working for the government rather than against it.” He’d also made it a condition that the think tank had to support her side project of developing a cure for Singer’s syndrome.
Her bug wasn’t perfect yet, but it was getting there.
When her fingers went to his belt, he glanced at the kitchen clock. “Thirty minutes, you said?”
“Mmm.” She followed the direction of his gaze. “Twenty-five now, but it’s Celeste and Hugo. They’ll understand if dinner’s not done. And besides, I’m sure they can amuse themselves…or each other.” Her eyes glittered, no doubt at the thought of the relationship that had developed between her sister and the FBI agent who’d protected her during the dangers of earlier that year.
With that, she flicked off the burner beneath the boiling water and turned the sauce down to simmer.
Then, without a word, she held out a hand and they walked up the stairs together.
As they stepped into the bedroom, he leaned close and whispered, “I love you.”
She looked up at him, eyes gleaming. “I hope you know you’ve said that once or twice before.”
He smiled, swept her up in his arms and carried her to their bed. “Then I guess that means I finally found something worth repeating.”
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Document creation date: 13.11.2011
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