To the Limit (Shadow Heroes Book 3)

by Virginia Kelly

  “He refused?” the general asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He does not compromise. I trained him well.”

  “Leave her here.”

  “You underestimate chivalry, Nicky,” the general said. The use of the nickname his family used caught Mary Beth by surprise. “Iglesias will have a difficult time shooting a woman.”

  Nick’s eyes flickered in reaction before he replied. “You don’t stand a chance.”

  “This is where you are wrong. There is always a chance.” He pulled back, dragging Mary Beth with him, always facing Nick. “With your left hand, throw aside your weapon and put your hands on your head,” he ordered.

  Nick pulled his holstered gun and tossed it to the floor. The general continued dragging her backward toward a door just past where Mark lay, the one that faced the river.

  “Walk to the door,” he told Nick.

  Nick didn’t hesitate. With his hands on his head, he passed the general, always facing him.

  “You will open the door with your left hand. Keep the other on your head. The moment you open it, put your hand back on your head and walk out. You may ask the Rangers to hold their fire.”

  “Let her tend to her brother. Take me instead,” Nick said from the doorway.

  “No, my best chance is with her.”

  “You use another woman.” Nick’s words were sharp. “You hide behind women.”

  The general flinched. Mary Beth knew he would shoot one or both of them. Moments dragged by.

  “Eres un caballero,” the general finally said. You are a gentleman. “Elena did well with you.”

  The admiration in his tone surprised Mary Beth.

  “She did well with your son. If you had not armed his enemies, he would be alive. Alive and shamed by what you have done.”

  “Ah. Daniel did have the ledger. I thought perhaps it was only Iglesias or General Ruiz who thought they could benefit.”

  “Iglesias is honorable. You hoped I would doubt Daniel. That in order to protect him, I would protect you.”

  “He hid the proof. He did not give it to Williams.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. He and Williams worked together. But you killed Daniel before they could use what they gathered. Iglesias has everything he needs. There is no escape.”

  The general’s arm tightened around Mary Beth. “You will not allow him to use what he has to shame me. It would hurt Elena.”

  “Elena is strong. She will be better off with you dead.”

  “The boy, Nicholas,” the general said. “He is my grandson. His mother is useless, but Elena will see to it that he is the Romero heir. He will have it all. He is my future.”

  “You, your name, will be dead.”

  A dark, heavy silence fell over the airless room.

  “But there is you, Nicolás,” the general said finally. “Because of you, I still win.”

  The last statement made no sense to Mary Beth. Her brain wasn’t working. Fear dominated every breath she took.

  “You will never get anything from me,” Nick said. “Iglesias won’t cover up for you. He owes you nothing.”

  “Let us see, then, shall we? Open the door.”

  Nick lowered his left hand to the doorknob. “Francisco, we’re coming out!”

  When Nick opened the door, Mary Beth’s heart nearly stopped. Rangers had lined up parallel to the door, all aiming rifles at Nick. In front stood Captain Iglesias. Beyond them lay the heavy growth along the embankment of the Río Hermoso.

  “Step outside, Nicholas.”

  “Last chance,” Nick said. “Let her go.”

  “Always the diplomat,” the general said. “Step out.”

  Nick walked forward. Mary Beth held her breath, expecting him to be shot with every step he took.

  “Stop,” the general said once Nick stood a few feet in front of the Rangers. “Turn around.”

  Nick stopped, turned and waited. The Rangers and the captain were slightly behind and to the left and right of him. The gun at Mary Beth’s neck slipped a little.

  “We have a dilemma,” the general said. “I must get to the river. Nick wants to protect you, Miss Williams. He knows I will pull the trigger if I am shot.” He walked toward Nick, pushing her along, gun at her neck. “What do you suppose he will do?”

  Mary Beth’s thoughts tripped through different scenarios. She could run. She could fall and hope the Rangers shot Vargas and not Nick. But either way, Vargas would shoot her.

  “Francisco?” Nick called, his gaze steady on the general, his hands on his head.

  Iglesias moved aside. “Let them pass,” he ordered his men. They lowered their rifles slightly but kept them on their shoulders.

  But Mary Beth knew that all it would take was one nervous soldier, one shot, and Vargas would pull the trigger.

  She and the general reached Nick. “As I told you, Nicky, chivalry,” the general said in a conversational tone. “Do not turn around.”

  The general pushed Mary Beth along and, as they passed Nick, then the Rangers, began backing toward the river, keeping her as a shield. Their shoes squished as they reached the soggy ground. Nick’s back became Mary Beth’s focal point. Finally, the river roared behind them.

  “You may turn around now, Nicolás.”

  ***

  Nick noted the exact position of each Ranger, of Iglesias. He turned toward the general and Mary Beth, and slowly walked forward. Vargas had backed to the overgrown weeds at the edge of the river. The crashing flow behind him would make it impossible for Iglesias and the Rangers to hear and react quickly to anything that was said. The general’s hold on Mary Beth had relaxed, but only slightly. The gun was still aimed at her neck.

  “Let her go,” Nick said, risking a few more steps. “She will only slow you down. This is a mistake.”

  “I do not make mistakes, Nicholas.”

  “Your greed was a mistake.”

  “Perhaps a flaw, not a mistake.” The general shrugged and pulled Mary Beth along as he took another step back toward the river. “Miss Williams,” he continued. “Nicolás has another gun. Did he tell you that our marksman’s abilities are equal? He is looking for an opportunity. We are much alike, Nicolás and I.”

  “Move away from her.”

  “Will you kill me? You claim to be a man of peace, of honor. There is no honor, no mercy in killing me.”

  “Just as you showed none for your son when you armed Primero de Mayo. Did you expect them to let him go when you betrayed them?”

  “You failed him with your negotiations,” Vargas sneered the last word.

  “I could have gotten him out,” Nick replied. “I would have.”

  The general’s grasp on Mary Beth loosened more, the gun at her neck slipped the tiniest bit. “You were going back in,” he said, surprise in his voice.

  All Nick needed was for Mary Beth to make a small move in the right direction. He waited.

  “You were going to kill them all and save him,” the general said, shifting his weight, but the gun was still pressed to her neck.

  Nick said nothing. The silence grew.

  “Your failure, then, Nicholas,” he said finally. “You should have done what I would have done with your talent, at your first opportunity. You could have killed them all the first time. Instead you negotiated failure. It was not fear for yourself. That is not something that is in you. You feared for Daniel. Your fear for him stopped you.”

  Nick heard the words but refused to allow them to affect him.

  “You are not a man who doubts himself. In that, you are like me. You let your love for him weaken you,” Antonio Vargas continued. “Emotion must never weaken you.” He straightened, the gun tight against Mary Beth’s neck. “But shooting me? You cannot heap such sin on your soul, Nicolás.”

  But he would. For Mary Beth, he would. The roar of the river filled the air.

  The general took a step back to the edge of the river. He pushed Mary Beth forward. She stumbled and fell
.

  Nick pulled the Glock from his back. In that instant, the crumbling riverbank broke lose. The general’s arms helicoptered once before he dropped into the raging river. Nick raced after him, gun at the ready.

  But the muddy waters of the Río Hermoso had swept him away.

  ***

  Mary Beth pushed herself onto her knees and looked toward the river. Watery brown spray flew up from where the bank had fallen in, taking with it the vegetation. Nick, his unfired gun held loosely in his right hand, stood staring down into the roiling waters that had swallowed General Vargas.

  She couldn’t describe her jumble of emotions. Confusion, relief were the only obvious ones. Questions she couldn’t sort out tumbled around in her mind.

  “Miss Williams?” Captain Iglesias said jogging up to her. The Rangers were already on the bank searching the river. “Are you hurt?” He helped her stand.

  “No. No, I’m not,” she replied, trembling in reaction. “My brother needs help.”

  “The American Special Forces are sending a helicopter which will arrive within minutes. They will take him to the hospital in Trujillo. My medic is doing what he can.”

  “May I ride with him?”

  “I will tell my men that they are to help you aboard the helicopter.” With a brief, stiff nod, he rushed away.

  Nick was still standing on the riverbank, as if all his strength had been used up. It probably had been. He’d spent what seemed like hours trying to find a way to save her.

  He hadn’t abandoned her.

  She had to understand, had to make sense of things. She reached him in a few steps. “You said Mark was expendable.”

  He turned sharply toward her. “I never said that. I—” He nodded, as if remembering. “You heard me talking to Carlos on the phone.”

  She wouldn’t help him, refused to help him come up with an excuse.

  “He was filling me in on what he’d learned. It was so bad, he didn’t want to say it, so I did. According to his contacts, Mark was expendable.”

  He’d saved her life, but did she dare believe him? Trust him? He’d told her all along he couldn’t give her honesty.

  There was something different about him now. A stillness. A quietness. Not sorrow, not defeat. Not anything she could name.

  “Do you know what their involvement in the counterfeiting was?”

  He turned back toward her again. “Mark didn’t tell you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know everything, but your brother and Daniel were investigating, not participating, in the counterfeiting. I found evidence Daniel left and gave it to Iglesias. It proves that Vargas was behind everything.”

  “So Mark and your cousin are innocent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they’ve been vindicated.”

  “Yes. But,” he said, “don’t say anything about this to Captain Iglesias, to anyone. Iglesias thinks your brother is an engineer, accidently misidentified as Juan Marcos. It’s best it stays that way until everything is sorted out officially.”

  “Officially? I don’t unders—” But the clap of helicopter blades made her stop. Nick shielded his eyes and looked up. They traced the path of an American Army helicopter as it circled above the compound and began landing.

  Mary Beth started to turn away, but she had one question she wanted answered. “The general seemed to know Alex was Daniel’s, but what did he mean when he said he still wins, that there is you?”

  Nick looked back at her, his face drawn. Even before he spoke, the expression in his eyes tore at her heart.

  “That monster was my father.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  He’d told her the truth and she’d left. Intellectually, Nick knew Mary Beth had run back because the helicopter had arrived to take her brother. He’d even told her to, unable to stand her scrutiny any longer.

  But as he stared into the Río Hermoso, as he watched more of the muddy bank tumble into the rushing waters taking bushes and trees with it, he found he couldn’t be pragmatic.

  He couldn’t be like the man who was more than likely dead.

  He wanted something besides the shock on her face.

  All along, he’d told himself that he couldn’t tell her the truth because it would hurt his family. He’d been lying to himself. She would have kept his secret, just as he knew she would keep the one about Alex.

  No, he hadn’t told her because he couldn’t stand to see that look on her face when she learned the truth about him. He’d been prepared to kill the man who’d fathered him. The man responsible for Daniel’s death.

  Now Nick had to see if it was really over. He had to find the general.

  Iglesias quickly organized a search party. A few Rangers walked while others drove on either side of the river searching for Vargas’ body. They might never find it. The Río Hermoso flowed into another larger river, a tributary of the Amazon, when it reached the town of Los Desamparados.

  The forsaken, as he’d told Mary Beth only days earlier. He’d tried to frighten her with the word, had tried to make her go back to the safety of her life. Yet he was the one who felt forsaken. Because she was gone.

  The blast of air from the helicopter as it left for the hospital pushed Nick into action. He borrowed a Jeep and drove along the riverbank, ahead of the search party on this side of the river. Once, he thought he saw something, but it turned out to be a tree bobbing in the churning waters. The river curved about three miles ahead, just before it passed by a small church. The bank there wasn’t eroded, but slopped out toward the rocky shallows of the shore. Eyes scanning the river, Nick slowed the Jeep to a crawl when he saw that something had washed up. He stopped the Jeep and got out.

  If the general was still alive, he’d go to trial. As his wife, Doña Elena would suffer. Better that he were dead.

  Nick walked slowly, deliberately, over the big rocks and boulders. Antonio Vargas lay on the water-smoothed stones, half in, half out of the river, facing skyward.

  He was battered, bruised, cut up.

  Dead.

  Nick didn’t touch him. He didn’t want to.

  Instead, he studied him, trying to see the man who was no longer there. He’d told Carlos he wouldn’t stop until the general burned in hell. He was surely there. Yet Nick felt no elation—only relief that no one else had died.

  That Mary Beth had not died.

  There was no physical resemblance between himself and this man. No one would ever have guessed they were related. Nick’s eyes came from Angela Crosby, who had been a blue-eyed blonde. The only physical attributes he’d inherited from the general were his black hair and his hand-eye coordination. Those reflexes that had given him a deadly ability.

  And there it stopped. Because everything else about him was due to the love of Elena Romero. And it was that side of him that wanted a future.

  “You found him,” Iglesias said, walking up.

  “Yes,” Nick replied. “It’s over.”

  ***

  Mark didn’t regained consciousness even as he was transferred from the helicopter. For Mary Beth, the endless hours in the military hospital in Trujillo became a nightmare of dread and waiting. A bullet and several fragments were taken from his shoulder and chest in a three hour operation. The other bullet had gone through Mark’s thigh without inflicting serious damage. But the doctors said he would need a great deal of rehabilitation to regain full mobility of his shoulder—rehabilitation better completed in the States.

  A distinguished looking man who introduced himself as Jonathan Ethridge from Mark’s company arrived and assured her Mark would be transferred home as soon as he was well enough. She started to ask him why the company had allowed Mark to assume another identity and participate in something so dangerous. But even though Mark had said she could trust this man, she remembered Nick’s admonition not to say anything to anyone about the fictitious Juan Marcos.

  Before leaving, Ethridge explained that two Special Forces soldiers would be p
osted outside Mark’s room. Protection, she guessed, but from whom? General Vargas was surely dead.

  From the hospital, she was able to contact her parents and inform them of Mark’s condition. Both immediately made plans to come to San Mateo, expecting to arrive within a day. An orderly brought a message saying that a Doña Elena had made arrangements for Mary Beth’s parents to get to the hospital quickly and that they would all have a place to stay.

  But Mary Beth didn’t hear one word from Nick.

  He’d finally told her the truth, and he’d pushed her away.

  Eight hours after leaving the Río Hermoso, Mark woke and managed to speak a few words, telling Mary Beth not to worry, he’d be okay. Typical Mark. Then he drifted into a drug-induced sleep.

  She spent the night in a chair beside his bed. Nurses came and went, checking on Mark every few hours. They urged her to leave, but she couldn’t bring herself to go until one of her parents could watch over him.

  As the first streaks of dawn brightened the eastern sky, she sipped hot coffee brought to her by a nurse’s assistant. Mark stirred, twisted slightly in the bed, and reached up to touch his heavily bandaged shoulder and chest. Mary Beth stood quickly and bent to hold his hand. He opened his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re in a hospital.”

  He nodded and through dry lips said, “Water.”

  She gave him a spoonful of ice chips. After that, he slept intermittently. Once she was sure that he would be okay, Mary Beth sat back and dozed.

  She woke when she heard his raspy voice. “Mary B., you okay?”

  Rushing to her feet, she bent over and kissed his forehead. “I’m great. How do you feel?”

  “Groggy,” he muttered. He touched the plastic oxygen tube at his nose. “What happened?”

  She told him about the standoff after he was shot and the very little she knew, leaving out only what she’d learned about Nick’s relationship to the general. “Elliot Smith is dead.”

  Eyes closed, Mark nodded and fell asleep again.

  An hour later he woke, sipped water and asked about his wounds. He listened, eyes, closed, then cursed.