The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Some people actually wash their clothes,” Sam felt compelled to point out.

  “Yeah, well, the world’s full of danger, isn’t it?”

  “Where’s Meg’s husband?” Nils asked the team’s executive officer, Lt. Jazz Jacquette, as he began sifting through the piles of faxed information. “Is he out of the country again? Any details on whether he’s been notified?”

  Jazz shook his head. “There’s no husband.”

  “Yeah, there is, XO. His name is Daniel Moore and he—”

  “He’s dead.”

  Nils felt himself go very, very still. “Excuse me?”

  “It says it right here.” Jazz pulled a page free and handed it to him. “Daniel Moore was killed in a car accident in Paris over eighteen months ago. Margaret Moore’s a widow.”

  Nils looked at the report, saw the words, but they still didn’t make sense.

  Meg’s husband had been killed. Eighteen months ago. Eighteen fucking months ago. And she’d never contacted him. She’d never bothered to let him know.

  Nils had to sit down, suddenly feeling every one of the past forty-four hours he’d been awake.

  Didn’t she think he would care?

  Didn’t she think he’d want to know?

  Christ, he’d spent the past five minutes working to convince Sam and WildCard that he and Meg had just been friends. He’d been spinning hard, lying his ass off. Yes, they’d been friends, but they’d been way more than friends, too. What he shared with Meg Moore had transcended mere friendship.

  Or so Nils had believed.

  But Meg hadn’t called him when Daniel died.

  Maybe he and Meg weren’t friends. And maybe what he’d said to Sam and WildCard had been wrong—for an entirely different reason. Maybe Meg was the one who didn’t consider him her friend. Maybe he was just some officer in the Navy she’d wasted some time with briefly back in the summer of 1998.

  Maybe she didn’t think of him at all—at least not until she found herself in the Kazbekistani men’s room, holding three men at gunpoint.

  Nils still couldn’t believe it. Meg Moore holding three men at gunpoint.

  He went to work, reading every word of every fax. They had three hours before the transport touched down in DC, four before they arrived at the K-stani embassy.

  He willed the plane to move faster, dying to get there and find out why the hell Meg was doing this. Dying to find out why, after all this time, she’d asked for him by name.

  Still dying to see her again.

  Four

  IT HAD BEEN Meg’s first encounter with U.S. Navy SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters.

  She and Daniel were both officers in the U.S. Foreign Service, working and living inside the protective walls of the American embassy in Kazabek, Kazbekistan.

  It had been the day after Christmas 1997. The day after Meg had found out about Daniel’s second affair.

  At least she thought it was his second, although, knowing Daniel, he could well have had many others between number one and number two. To rephrase, it was the second affair that she had found out about.

  She’d been numb with anger and hurt, and when a team of three Navy SEALs burst through the hallowed gates of the American embassy in possession of the man the K-stani government claimed was their public enemy number one, she’d welcomed the intrusion.

  She’d been the only staff member who had.

  There’d been such an uproar, she’d gone into the lobby to see if she could help and had found the three SEALs—one of them injured—and their “guest,” a man known only as Abdelaziz. They were tending to their wounded man right there, on the cold marble floor.

  All four men were dressed in the ragged garb that most lower-class K-stani civilians wore. It was part Western—jeans and faded T-shirts that read “Just Do It” or “Hard Rock Cafe”—and part traditional—greatcoats and woolen hats that kept out the winter’s chill.

  Their faces were smudged with dirt and blood, and the man who’d been injured was shivering from the cold.

  “What on earth are you doing still in the hall?” Meg asked. It wasn’t hard to tell which one of them was in charge—it was the tall one with the light brown eyes. Had to be. She read “leader” in his face, in the set of his shoulders, in his every move. She looked around at the small crowd that had gathered. “These men need medical assistance and you’re standing here . . . ?”

  She spotted Laney by the stairway, her mouth hanging open, file clutched to her ample chest. “Get a doctor,” Meg ordered her assistant, then turned back to the brown-eyed man.

  “It would be appreciated if we could be moved—perhaps upstairs, to an inner room with no windows like these?” He spoke with a lilting Kazbekistani accent as he gestured toward the tall windows that faced the street. “I realize it’s understood that this embassy is a sanctuary, but I’m a target right now. It wouldn’t take much more than a high-powered rifle and a little lack of either respect or understanding to take me out.”

  The brown-eyed man wasn’t in charge. He was Abdelaziz—the man behind this uproar.

  “Where’s the ambassador?” she asked the wide-eyed junior staffers. “Where’s the administrative officer?”

  “Out at the front entrance,” Chris Chenko volunteered, “telling the Kazbekistani Army officers just how big a mistake it would be for them to roll through the gates with their tanks and storm the embassy.”

  Oh, dear God. “How about the PAO or IO?” she asked, hoping for somebody, anybody, even though she already knew the answer.

  “Everyone’s out front, Mrs. Moore,” she was told.

  Abdelaziz was watching her, and she gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Okay, let’s get you upstairs. We can use my office temporarily.” She looked back at the wounded man. “Do you need help carrying him?”

  One of the SEALs—a young man with a nasty scrape on his cheek that had bled down into the collar of his shirt—shook his head. “No, ma’am, we’ve got him.” He had a drawl reminiscent of James Garner’s Maverick, and eyes the color of a Texas sky.

  Meg swiftly led the way up the stairs, Abdelaziz on her heels.

  “Thank you,” he said, and meant it.

  She glanced back at him. “I can’t believe they just left you in the lobby.”

  “There’s a somewhat . . . tense situation out there. And the government’s not the only one who’s after me.”

  “The way I’ve heard it is the government thinks you’re a terrorist, and the terrorists think you’re working for the government.” Meg opened the door to her office and stepped back to let him in. “Which is it, Mr. Abdelaziz?”

  “The truth is never as clear as we’d like it to be,” he said cryptically, flashing her a smile.

  He had beautiful teeth, an incredible smile. In combination with his too-warm eyes, the effect was impressive. Abdelaziz was an outrageously handsome man.

  An outrageously handsome young man. Probably about the same age as her little sister, Bonnie—about twenty-three or four.

  Much younger than Meg.

  Although, ever since discovering Daniel’s infidelity, purely by accident, from a fax she wasn’t supposed to see—it wasn’t as if Daniel had wrapped up the truth and left it as a gift for her under their straggly little Christmas tree—Meg had felt about a million years old.

  Her great-uncle Andrew who was pushing ninety-seven looked younger than she felt today.

  The doctor arrived, and Meg locked her file cabinets and stepped back, out of her office, to give the men their privacy.

  To her surprise, Abdelaziz followed, closing the door behind him.

  “The SEALs trust you to wander about on your own?” she asked.

  “I’m not wandering—I just stepped outside to thank you again.”

  “Please stay with them,” Meg said, “until we know for sure how this situation is going to be handled. And please don’t take this personally, but I’m going to put a guard outside the door. Some people seem co
nvinced you’re a terrorist. There are children in this compound, and—”

  “You don’t have to explain or apologize.”

  “I’ll call the kitchen for food and get you something hot to eat,” she told him briskly. “I’ll send for some towels and clean clothes, too—you could all use a shower. There’s a bathroom in the basement, next to the workout room. When you’re ready, I’ll have a guard escort you downstairs.”

  He moved back, away from her. “I’m sorry. We must smell terrible. The past few days have been filled with . . . challenges—some more malodorous than others.”

  “I can’t imagine where you’ve been or what you must’ve been doing.” She paused. “Or who you really are.”

  He was even more attractive when he laughed. She wished her sister Bonnie were here to meet this man, and then, in flash, she realized she wished nothing of the sort. She wished she were Bonnie. Fresh out of college and just starting out. Free to allow herself to be charmed, even for just a moment, even by a dangerous man.

  “It’s best if you don’t try to imagine anything.” He gestured to the closed office door. “I should go back and . . .”

  “Good idea,” she said. “I’ll get that food.” But first the guards. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “You’ve already been more than kind, Mrs. Moore.” If he’d been clean, he would’ve bowed and kissed her hand—Meg had no doubt of that. As it was, he just gazed at her with those disconcertingly luminous light brown eyes. “The safe haven of your office is sincerely appreciated. As is your kind offer of food and a shower. I am most grateful.”

  Such Kazbekistani dignity and formality coming from this ragged and bloody young man made Meg smile. “It’s my pleasure.”

  “The pleasure is mine, fy siwgwr aur.” He’d slipped into another language but it wasn’t Russian or even one of the lesser known K-stani dialects, either.

  Fy siwgwr aur was . . . Welsh? Yes, it was a term of endearment that translated clumsily into “my golden sugar.” For a moment, Meg was convinced she was losing it—that the stress of the past few days was getting to her. But he continued on, still speaking in Welsh, of all odd things. “Yours is the most beautiful smile I’ve seen in all my life. It makes me forget I haven’t slept in four days.”

  Meg couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe this ragged Kazbekistani was speaking Welsh, couldn’t believe he actually meant those honeyed words. Beautiful smile. My golden sugar. Good grief.

  Unless maybe he was the kind of man who had a good nose for sniffing out lonely, pathetic women. Maybe her current unhappiness was etched on her face. Or perhaps he was one of two or three million Kazbekistanis who knew about Daniel’s affair with Leilee. Why not? It wouldn’t surprise Meg one bit to find out she’d been the last person in all of K-stan to know what a total, lying bastard she’d married.

  “You don’t see it at all when you look into a mirror, do you?” he asked her softly, still in near perfect, lyrical Welsh. “You don’t have any idea what you look like, of the power of your smile. Would you smile for me, I wonder, if I . . .”

  The words were ones she didn’t know, but their meaning was more than clear. Shockingly clear.

  This was ridiculous. What could he possible be thinking? He was barely out of diapers and she was an ancient and jaded thirty-one. And that was completely ignoring the fact that she was married. Although she suspected Abdelaziz wouldn’t want anything longer than a single night of passion.

  And maybe, like Daniel, he just didn’t find marriage to be that big a deterrent to casual sex.

  “I want to see you smile when I—”

  “Oh, please,” Meg interrupted him, unable to listen to another ridiculous word. “Just go back in with the SEALs, sugar.”

  He stared at her.

  “I’ll cut you some slack for the lack of sleep. And you’re young, so maybe four days without sex has done something weird to your brain as well, but believe me, I do know what I look like, thank you very much.”

  She looked like exactly what she was—the still somewhat pretty mother of a seven-year-old. And maybe that was part of her problem with Daniel. Maybe when he looked at her beside him in his mirror, he didn’t like what he saw anymore.

  Or maybe he was just a lying, cheating son of a bitch for whom fidelity wasn’t part of his working vocabulary.

  “You speak Welsh?” Abdelaziz choked out, startled back into English. Apparently she’d shocked the hell out of him.

  “Yes,” she answered in that language. “That seems like a little detail you might want to check in advance next time you start waxing poetic, Romeo.”

  “No one speaks Welsh. At least no one in Kazbekistan does.”

  “I do. And so do you, apparently.” She had to laugh at the improbability of that. “How on earth did you—”

  “My mother was Welsh.” He had the good grace to be embarrassed, his too-handsome face actually flushing beneath all that mud and grime as he realized all that he’d said to her. “I’m really sorry, ma’am. It wasn’t my intention to offend you. I never would have said any of that if I knew you could understand.”

  “Oh, so it’s okay to say such things to a woman if she can’t understand?”

  He was so young. And so terribly embarrassed. Still, he had guts. He didn’t run away, escaping back into the sanctuary of her office. He stood firmly in front of her, forcing himself to look her directly in the eye. “I apologize. And I beg you not to let my despicable behavior reflect upon your treatment of my men—the other men.”

  “Why don’t you go inside,” she said gently, “and let the doctor check you out? I’ll get some food and some clean clothes—and I’ll also find some rooms with beds so you and your friends can get some sleep. And tomorrow we can all start over.”

  He bowed, and wisely, he went into her office without uttering another word.

  In the end, it was her files that were moved out of her office rather than the refugee and three SEALs.

  When it was clear they were determined to stay put, Meg made arrangements for cots to be moved in. And when she stopped by in the morning to transfer some files from her computer’s hard drive onto a disk, Abdelaziz was fast asleep, spread-eagle on the floor.

  He lay there as if completely boneless, in complete abandon.

  It was the way a child might sleep.

  Or a man who hadn’t slept for four days straight.

  Still, he stirred before she finished with the computer, lifting his head and pushing himself wearily up onto his hands and knees, off the floor. “Report,” he said.

  Sam, the SEAL with the Texas drawl, was awake, sitting up with his weapon held loosely in his arms. “The team commander is still asleep. I gave Mrs. Moore permission to get some information she needed from her computer.”

  Abdelaziz lifted his head and looked directly at her. It was obvious that he’d been unaware that she was in the room until Sam had given him warning. He leapt to his feet—she’d never seen a man move that fast before—raking his fingers back through his sleep-mussed hair and straightening his clothes.

  “As far as I know,” Sam continued, “there’s been no change in the political wind. Unless Mrs. Moore has some news she wants to share. Of course, she may not be feeling too kindly toward us, since she’s going on day two without her office.”

  “The only rooms available were on the top floor, which is a far more vulnerable position than here on the second floor.” Abdelaziz’s smile was rueful. “Here I go, about to apologize to you. Again. I’m sorry for any inconvenience we’ve caused you, but I needed to sleep and I wouldn’t have slept up there.”

  “As long as you don’t mind me coming in to use the computer, it’s not that big an inconvenience,” she lied.

  His smile said he knew better. And he was still embarrassed about yesterday, as well. As he should be. “Have you heard anything from the front line?” he asked.

  Meg hesitated, not sure what to tell him. The K-stani government had threa
tened to kick all the Americans—ambassador, staff, and civilians—out of their country if Abdelaziz wasn’t surrendered to them within the next twenty-four hours. The American oil companies couldn’t afford to be kicked out, so they’d added their voices to the ongoing shouting match.

  The general feeling of the embassy staff—including her husband Daniel—was to placate the Kazbekistani government and secure their shaky position in this oil-rich paradise by giving up Abdelaziz.

  Which would be virtually the same as putting a gun to the man’s head and pulling the trigger. If they gave him up, he would be executed.

  But probably tortured horribly first.

  Abdelaziz read her silence correctly. “The news is that good, is it?”

  “The ambassador doesn’t have much to go on,” she told him, “since you’ve refused to answer his questions. How can he vouch for your innocence when the government accuses you of all these terrible crimes?”

  “What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” he murmured.

  “That might be true in America, but we’re not in America.”

  As she watched, he crossed the room and looked down at the wounded man, the leader of the SEALs, Ensign John Nilsson.

  “Is he all right?” she asked quietly. There was a sheen of sweat on Nilsson’s forehead and his eyes were closed. He was sleeping, but only fitfully.

  “He should be in a hospital,” Sam said tightly.

  Abdelaziz nodded in agreement. “We’re going to do whatever we have to, to medevac him out of here.”

  “Anything short of turning yourself over to the Kazbekistani government,” she corrected him.

  “Yes, that probably wouldn’t be a very good idea.”

  Sam snorted. “Probably?”

  Abdelaziz turned and gave Sam a long, measured look.

  Meg remembered that look later that day, when she received word that the ambassador had arranged for a chopper to fly the Navy SEALs to an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. She was in the middle of translating some desperately needed document, vital for the ongoing negotiations, when she was told of their departure.