Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 05]

by Under the Wire

  And as he went back to work under the hood, Lily clung to the promise of a minor but meaningful shift in the wind between them.

  Manny steered the jeep around a rut as they bounced down the winding reservoir road. So far, the tape was holding on the radiator hose. So far. According to the map, the next town was just a mile or two over the next ridge.

  Town. Hell. More likely a village—one of a few remote little settlements dotting the mountain road. He didn’t hold out a lot of hope that they’d find a replacement hose there—or a fuel pump, as theirs, he suspected, was in the throes of a long, gasping death.

  The jeep was a piece of shit. He’d known it when he’d bought it, but since it was the only piece of shit on the lot and there’d been no time to look for another, he’d had to take a chance.

  Time was king now if they were going to find Adam alive.

  Manny gave Lily credit for keeping it together in the face of that very obvious fact. She was smart. She knew the score. And yet she kept her head.

  While he was losing his.

  Over her.

  Christ.

  He drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel, resisting the urge to glance over at her. Lost the battle.

  Even in the mountains and this close to the reservoir, the temperature must be pushing one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity closing in on 90 percent. The wind whipping over the windshield and funneling around the open jeep was hot, wet, and scented of the rain that would most likely arrive midmorning out of the blue and then dissipate as quickly as it came before retooling for an afternoon shower.

  This part of Sri Lanka was much like Nicaragua that way. It made him think of home. Of family. Of loss.

  As the jeep rumbled down the road, the wind licked his hair wildly, played rough with Lily’s, tugging stray wisps and slapping them across her face even though she’d twisted the mass of it into a thick, lush knot and tucked it up under a ball cap.

  Despite the protection of the cap’s brim, the sun had painted her cheeks and nose pink. She was hot and tired and her white camp shirt was wilted. Yet even with the weight of the world on her shoulders and the sweat of the day beating her down, she was beautiful.

  She should look fragile. But she was solid and steady and…

  Jesus Christ, he wanted to hate her.

  Needed to hate her.

  Had hated her for so long now.

  But he was damn weary of the battle.

  Was he falling under her spell again? Was that why he wanted to smile for her instead of snarl? Walk toward her instead of away?

  Cristo.

  He didn’t know what was happening. He just knew that one way or another, he needed to clear the air. He couldn’t breathe anymore with the way things were between them.

  Swearing under his breath, he jerked the wheel hard left and pulled over to the side of the road. Gravel peppered the underbelly of the vehicle when he slammed the brake into the floorboard; dust plumed around them.

  Beside him, Lily braced one hand on the roll bar, the other on the dash. Her eyes were wide, her mouth poised on the brink of screaming.

  But she didn’t. Because she was Lily. Strong. Brave. True.

  How he wanted to believe that she had been true.

  The jeep rocked to a stop and she turned her dark eyes on him. She must have read something in his face, because she didn’t rail at him. Didn’t demand to know what the hell he was doing. She simply sat and waited.

  “I have something to say,” he said at long last—because, Jesus, he’d turned into a cur dog of a coward all of a sudden.

  Her wary looks shot an RPG of guilt dead center through his heart.

  “I’ve been an ass,” he said, staring at the dusty, bug-streaked windshield because he couldn’t look her in the eye.

  He’d been a boy when he’d faced off against the Sandinistas. A Special Forces soldier when he’d battled the ruthless drug cartel in Ecuador, the Taliban in Afghanistan. Boston had been rife with its own brand of terrorists. And yet he didn’t have it in him to face this one small woman.

  Beside him, she was very quiet. He was sure she wanted to put a punctuation mark on the “ass” part of his admission, but to her credit, she didn’t.

  She quietly said, “Tell me why. Tell me all of it.”

  He dragged a hand over his lower face, realized he was squirming, and sucked it up.

  “When they came for me that night,” he began, needing to work this through as much for his benefit as for hers, “they said it was you. They told me that it was you who told Poveda.”

  “They lied,” she said with a quiet conviction that made him want to believe.

  He gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. Only realized he was pushing it toward the dash when his biceps started to burn.

  He loosened his hold. Finally worked up the courage to look at her. She stared straight ahead, her hands clutched together in her lap; a single, silent tear trickled slowly down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away with the back of her hand, as if making it disappear would erase what she probably considered a show of weakness.

  “It no longer matters,” he said, realizing it was true.

  Her head whipped to the side to meet his gaze, her dark eyes puzzled and a little wary. “No longer matters? How can it no longer matter? What changed, Manny? What changed after all these years that it no longer matters?”

  What had changed was that after seventeen years of hate and belief in Lily Campora’s betrayal, he was ready to let it go. Needed to let it go.

  On a hot, dusty road thousands of miles from home, in a broken-down jeep, on a life-and-death search for a boy who didn’t have time for a “man” to come to terms with his new reality, Manny was suddenly ready to forgive her.

  Maybe he was just tired of hating her. Maybe, like the boy he’d been then, he was so dazzled by her now, it was simply easier to forgive her.

  “You came back into my life again. That’s what’s changed.” He wasn’t sure of much else, but that, at least, was the God’s honest truth.

  Silence, as weighty as the worry over their son, crowded into the open jeep with them.

  “So…this isn’t about believing me? It’s about accepting? Forgiving?”

  His silence was her answer.

  She shook her head and he could see the frustration in her eyes along with the heat of anger. Anger that transitioned to sorrow. “Well, I’m sorry. That’s not good enough,” she said after a long moment. Her eyes looked as sad as she sounded. “Not nearly good enough.”

  He worked his jaw, as angry, suddenly, as she was miserable. “What else do you want from me?”

  She pinned him with a look of tempered steel. “I want you to believe me. Why is that such a hard thing for you to do?”

  “And why is it so hard for you to just admit it?” he shot back. “Christ, Lily. I told you things I’d never told another living soul. Not even my family knew for certain that I fought for the Contras. No one but you had access to Poveda. No one but you could have turned me in.”

  “And what was my reason for doing this?” she demanded, her anger matching his. “What was my reason?”

  He jerked his gaze away from her burning black eyes; he didn’t want to see her reaction when he threw the truth in her face. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. I know what was going on. I know that Poveda was your lover.”

  CHAPTER 14

  If Manny had said, “I know you are an alien,” Lily couldn’t have been more stunned. It took her a moment to find her voice.

  “My lover? You think Poveda was my lover? For God’s sake, Manny, why would you think that? After all we’d done together? All we’d been to each other? Granted, we were only together for a week, but we shared everything. Did you really not know me? Did you not have even a clue who I was?”

  “I didn’t then,” he said quietly, and a muscle in his jaw worked. “I only figured it out later.”

  She actually laughed. “Well then, by all means, enlight
en me. Who was I?”

  He had the balls to actually try to be patient. “You were a woman with a hatred for men,” he said with a grim conclusiveness that stunned her.

  “Hatred? What are you talking about?”

  “Your ex-husband. Men before him.” He lifted a hand. “You told me. They all let you down.”

  “God, Manny.” Unbelievable. “That made me disappointed, not deceitful.”

  “And distrustful. You did not trust my love for you. You never trusted it.”

  Now, as it had then, she could see that it hurt him.

  “Because you were a boy,” she pointed out, still reeling over his conclusions. “You couldn’t have known your heart.”

  “Yes. I was a boy. Who was easily fooled.”

  She didn’t even know what to say anymore. It was all so preposterous. But somehow she needed to make him see that.

  “So let me see if I’m following this. Because I hated men, I fooled you into loving me? And the reason I did this was because in my deep hatred for men, I wanted to—what? Make you pay for being one of them?”

  His jaw tightened. A building breeze sent dust skittering down the side of the road.

  “And in my quest to wreak havoc on mankind,” she continued, unable to stem the sarcasm, “I pried secrets out of you, then told them to my ‘lover,’ General Poveda, who I hated, but, vindictive bitch that I was, used those secrets to bring you down. Does that about sum it up?”

  But for the wind rattling through the trees she was met with more silence.

  “Manny. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?” She lifted a hand, let it drop in frustration. “I could maybe understand a boy rationalizing such a load of crap. But you’re a man now. An intelligent man. With a man’s experience. A man’s head, for God’s sake. A man’s heart. Can you look at me and honestly think I could have done such a heinous, horrible thing?”

  She watched his sullen profile. Watched the muscles in his neck work when he swallowed. Watched, heart in her throat, when he finally turned to her. His dark eyes were bleak, penetrating, and bored straight into her soul.

  “When I look at you, Liliana…I can only think of having you.”

  Silence rang in the wake of his hushed confession. A small dust devil skittered around the open jeep, spinning pine needles and leaves with the fine soil at the side of the road before it rose and twirled away.

  “And if I can have you,” he continued as if the admission sliced scars in his soul, “then nothing else matters.”

  She was still reeling over the stunning shock of his statement when he turned the key, shifted into gear, and, spraying gravel like a wake from an outboard motor, tore out onto the highway.

  Jaffna Peninsula

  Dallas knew he had company even before he heard the single warning shot from the Kalashnikov.

  “What took you so long, boys?” he muttered under his breath, and, stopping in the middle of the road, raised his hands to either side of his head.

  He was hot, he was dry, and he’d been walking this parched, dusty road since the pilot had reluctantly set down on a pocked airstrip a few miles out of Jaffna an hour ago. The terrain was flat and empty but for bomb craters in the fields and burned-out shells of vehicles littering the roadside.

  Dallas was in the middle of what looked like a war zone. In truth it had been a war zone and in all likelihood would be again. Such was the way of life in Sri Lanka.

  He wasn’t surprised when two AK-47-wielding Tigers appeared on the path in front of him. Four others closed in on all sides, rifles locked and loaded.

  None of them looked older than sixteen. And he knew of only one thing that would keep their testosterone-charged fingers from squeezing a few rounds into the American trespasser.

  Just like he’d known they would come. Had counted on the cadre of rebel forces to be curious about the single-engine airplane that had landed, then taken off, all in a matter of minutes.

  “Take me to Ponnambalam Ramanathan,” he said in Tamil.

  As Dallas had hoped, just the mention of their revered leader’s name drew exaggerated looks of curiosity.

  “Take me now,” he repeated more forcefully, “and may your God have mercy on your souls if you put a bullet in the man Ponnambalam Ramanathan calls brother.”

  As they motioned for him with their guns to start walking, Dallas prayed that Ramanathan was still alive and, if he was, that he wasn’t still pissed about that little matter of a “bungled” arms deal in Afghanistan three years ago.

  Manny’s SAT phone rang just as he pulled up to a gas pump in Marassana. On the map, it wasn’t more than a tiny ink dot. In reality, “tiny” was an exaggeration. The main street was narrow. On either side were houses made of brown mud walls topped with thatch roofs. Surrounding and towering over the houses were green gardens and greener trees.

  A peddler, the back of his bicycle full of toys, napped in the shade of a banyan tree, its gnarled roots worn bone gray and smooth by centuries of human traffic. A dog sat on its haunches beside the bicycle, vigorously scratching its ribs. Other than that, not much life stirred.

  “Ortega,” Manny said into the receiver as he surveyed a roadside fruit stand, what appeared to be a tourist information center, and this single petrol pump. Overhead, the sky had turned gunmetal dark.

  “We’ve got a lead on something solid.” Ethan was all business on the other end of the line.

  “Go.” Manny listened without another word, aware of Lily’s dark eyes, anxious and intent, as she waited to hear not only if it was Dallas or Ethan, but also what he had to say.

  Manny waited until Ethan finished before filling him in on their location.

  “Wait a sec.” Manny could hear Ethan relaying the information to Darcy. “She says that according to her map, you’re half a day from there if you stick to the highways. A couple of hours if you go off road.”

  Manny motioned for Lily to hand him the map. When she held it out to him, he spread it open over the steering wheel and got a fix on the coordinates Ethan had given him.

  “Okay. Got it. I’ll be back in touch.”

  “Watch your six, man. We’re heading your way. Can’t be more than three hours behind you. Don’t do anything until we get there.”

  “Roger that.”

  Manny disconnected.

  “What?” Lily hitched herself sideways in the passenger seat and searched his eyes.

  She hadn’t had much to say to him since he’d made his little confession. In fact, they’d ridden in silence until now.

  “Darcy and Ethan took a chance on meeting with a local politician in Kandy,” he said, understanding Lily’s focus was all on Adam now. “She played the diplomacy card, conveniently forgetting to mention that her position in the State Department was inactive and her last post was Manila, not Colombo.

  “The offshoot was she got a meeting with a city councilwoman who was sympathetic to your situation and, swearing she’d deny it if asked, slipped Darcy the name and cell number of a covert operative who has extensive, real-time intel on Tiger activity in this area.

  “Long story short,” he said after handing her the map and pinpointing the location Ethan had given him for her, “they’ve been in contact with the operative and he gave them a fix on the biggest known Tiger camp in the area.”

  Lily checked the location on the map, brows furrowed in impatience. “That’s hours from here.”

  “We can take a chance,” he said, “and cut across country. If this piece of shit holds up we can cut the time in half.”

  “Then that’s what we do,” she said adamantly.

  Manny wasn’t nearly as certain as she was. He jumped out of the jeep, opened up the hood. The tape was still holding on the hose. He checked the oil—two quarts low—then headed inside the small station hoping there’d be something other than bottled water, rice, and curry for sale.

  “Aah-yu-boh-wahn?” Hello?

  The place smelled of incense and curry and gas and wasn’t muc
h bigger than a phone booth lined with tar-paper, with a very few auto supplies and bottled water. A small, wrinkled man who seemed to perfectly fit the confines of the aged wooden structure popped up from behind a counter where it appeared he’d been taking a morning nap.

  “Aah-yu-boh-wahn,” he greeted Manny with a sheepish grin that revealed widely split front teeth. As was the custom, he gave Manny a courteous bow.

  Manny also bowed. “Thel?” Oil?

  There was much head shaking and several attempts before Manny conveyed that he was looking for motor oil, not cooking or lamp oil.

  Finally, with two quarts in hand, he returned to the jeep. “Why don’t you buy some of that fruit while we’ve got the chance at something fresh?” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and handed Lily some bills.

  While he added the oil and refilled the radiator, she headed for the fruit stand. The wind whipped up; a few splatters of rain hit the dust around her feet as Manny watched her walk away.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the no-nonsense jut of her chin. The slight sway of her slim hips that even her baggy shirt and pants couldn’t conceal.

  When I look at you, Liliana…I can only think of having you. And if I can have you, then nothing else matters.

  He dusted off his hands, walked inside, and paid for the oil and gas, still burned with himself over what he’d admitted to her. What he’d admitted to himself.

  And no matter that he tried to ignore them, her words packed even more punch. He heard them over and over in his head.

  I could maybe understand a boy rationalizing such a load of crap. But you’re a man now. An intelligent man. With a man’s experience. A man’s head, for God’s sake. A man’s heart. Can you look at me and honestly think I could have done such a heinous, horrible thing?

  Standing in the open doorway of the petrol station, he tipped back a bottle of water, all the while watching Lily finish up her purchases beneath a sudden downpour.