The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Surveillance of the men’s room would continue across the street at the makeshift FBI headquarters in the K-stani embassy. To the K-stani officials and anyone else there that might be listening in, it would appear as if the FBI and SEALs were continuing with their plan to sit and wait. To try to starve Meg out.

  Meanwhile, over here at Troubleshooter Central, this new, secret team of SEALs and FBI agents were hard at work, devising a method of getting Nils into that men’s room undetected so he could talk to Meg.

  The plan was for Nils to deliver the handcuffs Meg had demanded, and somehow communicate to her that he would be coming back again, very soon, but not through the bathroom door this time.

  The plan was then to jam the surveillance coming into the FBI’s HQ over at the embassy—to replace the actual video and audio from the bathroom with a digital version of a tape loop.

  The K-stani officials at the embassy would continue to see Meg and her hostages sitting in silence—the footage from the tape. They wouldn’t have a clue that in reality, Lieutenant Paoletti’s Troubleshooter squad would be covertly gaining access to that embassy men’s room from the room directly above it. They’d be dropping in, so to speak, on Meg Moore and her captives. And Nils would be able to talk to her and get the complete, nonspeculative version of her story. He’d find out who exactly had taken Amy, and what were their demands.

  Somewhere in the room a pager went off, and everyone checked their belts.

  Locke herself nearly jumped out of her seat. On her recommendation, Jules Cassidy had been called in to assist, and she could feel his eyes on her now, from his seat in front of the other video monitor, across the room.

  She glanced at him and shook her head, no. It wasn’t her pager. She’d heard nothing from her sister all day. Which was just as good. If she got a page now, telling her to come to the hospital, she wasn’t in a position to get up and go. Not without kissing her career good-bye.

  “It’s mine,” Senior Chief Wolchonok called out. “It’s a heads up code from Lieutenant Paoletti. Johnny’s getting ready to go in.”

  As Locke watched on the video screen—surveillance footage pirated from the same signal being watched by the FBI and K-stani officials across the street—Meg lifted her head and glanced toward the door. She refreshed her grip on her handgun, aiming it at her hostages.

  “Come in slowly.” Her voice was remarkably natural-sounding over the speakers. This was one expensive setup that Paoletti had managed to conjure at such short notice.

  “Lieutenant Nilsson is coming into the room,” Locke announced.

  Starrett pushed himself up off the couch and came around to look over her shoulder.

  Locke kept her eyes on the screen. “Would you mind putting on a shirt?”

  “Actually, I would,” he said in that infuriating Texas drawl. “This is my room and I’m still taking a break.”

  “I don’t have any trouble with it,” Jules commented blandly.

  Locke had to work to keep a smile from slipping out as Starrett turned abruptly and went into the other room to get a shirt. Thanks, she mouthed to Jules, who blew her a kiss.

  On the video monitor, Nils was cuffing Meg’s hostages to the sinks. This was good. After he left, they’d get about fifteen minutes of footage of all of them sitting there. WildCard would make that digital loop from that video, and then they’d be on to phase two.

  “They’ve been asking me a lot of questions.” Nils’s voice came over the speakers as she sensed Starrett’s overwhelmingly large presence behind her again. At least now he was dressed. “About us. I mean, no one can quite believe we didn’t have some kind of hot affair three years ago.”

  “Oh, God.” Meg shook her head. “I’m so sorry if I’ve gotten you into trouble.”

  “You haven’t.”

  On the surface, they were having a simple conversation, but Locke—because she knew what to look for—could see that Meg and Nils were having an entirely different conversation with their eyes.

  But were the hidden messages they were sending about this current situation? Or did it have more to do with the real truth about what went down between them three years ago? Locke smiled. She was one of the people who didn’t quite believe Nils and Meg Moore had been “just friends.”

  Look at the way he looked at her.

  Of course, maybe that was just friendship she could see in his eyes, and she, Locke, was the twisted one. Maybe she’d lived so long with men calling her sweet thing, she could no longer recognize genuine friendship between a man and a woman.

  She glanced across the room at Jules. Unless, of course, the man was blatantly gay.

  “I always hoped I’d see you again,” Nils said, “but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking of something more along the lines of a phone call. Like, ‘How are you, John, how about we get together for dinner?’ ” He looked directly into Meg’s eyes. “And then I’d say, ‘Great, I’ll see you at eighteen hundred hours—at six o’clock sharp. We’ll go out for drinks first and you can tell me all about how Amy’s doing in school.’ ”

  Understand what I’m telling you, Meg. You’re going to see me at six o’clock.

  She was wearing a watch, and as he gazed at her, she glanced at it. He knew it was just past 1640. She wasn’t going to have to wait too long.

  She was trying to hide her relief, and he also knew she’d received his message.

  Christ, she looked exhausted.

  “Are you sure you can’t tell me what this is all about?” Nils asked again because the K-stani officials watching would have expected him to ask again.

  She shook her head.

  “I know you’re upset because I didn’t bring a dead bolt with the handcuffs,” he said, feeding her the excuse she needed.

  “Yeah, I told you to bring a dead bolt, but you didn’t, so . . . I’m not going to talk to you.” Thank you, Meg told him with her eyes.

  You’re welcome. “Would you believe me if I told you we haven’t been able to locate a Home Depot store?”

  John Nilsson wasn’t a religious man, but right now he was praying that this would work out. God, what were the chances that Amy Moore was even still alive? Slim to none, if it really were the Extremists who’d taken her.

  “No.” Meg was looking at him hungrily, as if he were her lifeline. “No dead bolt, no explanation. In fact, I think you better go. Find out what’s keeping my helicopter.”

  She didn’t want him to leave. In fact, her lip actually trembled.

  Nils went out the door before he did something really stupid—like promise her everything was going to be okay.

  “In 1938, I lived in Hollywood, California,” Eve told Amy and the Bear. Unlike her story of the part she’d played in the evacuation at Dunkirk, this was a tale she’d never told anyone before. Not her own daughter, Elizabeth, not her granddaughters, Meg, Bonnie, or Kiley, either.

  Oh, she’d told them the vague facts, sure, but never the details. Even now, she held some of it back.

  Her childhood hadn’t been a particularly happy one. Her mother, a screen actress, had gotten a divorce from her father, a well-known film director, when her little brother Nick was only three years old. Eve had been eight at the time. Eight going on thirty. Good thing, because from that moment on, she was Nick’s . . . what did they call it today?

  Primary caregiver.

  Her beautiful mother was irresponsible. The fan magazines called her wild and said that she had a childlike quality—a description that always made Eve roll her eyes.

  Not that Eve and Nick didn’t love her. Because they did. They adored her. And she adored them—whenever she happened to stumble across them.

  In 1938, when Eve had just turned fifteen and Nick was ten, things went even further downhill, fast.

  Both her mother and father were killed in a plane crash. Their divorce had been a friendly one, and they were working together on a movie when tragedy struck.

  Eve and Nick went to live with Emily, their
father’s second wife and now widow, who gave them plenty of room to grieve as she went on about her life.

  Which, in February of 1939, included getting remarried to James Hertford, a well-known and extremely wealthy English playwright.

  Eve and Nick were dragged along and tossed onto James’s seaside estate in Ramsgate, in southeast England, while Em and James dashed about Europe on their honeymoon.

  When they returned, they enrolled both Eve and Nick in the best English boarding schools James’s money could buy.

  It was hell. The worst of it was being separated from her little brother. He hated his school—because it was there that something Eve had helped him hide for years was finally revealed.

  Nick couldn’t read.

  Once it was known, everyone assumed his inability to decipher words came from neglect, but Eve knew better. She’d tried and tried for years to teach him to read, but to no avail.

  He was miserable at the school. He was made to feel stupid, called lazy and careless—while none of those things were true. He ran away more times than Eve could count, and she knew she had to get him out of there before he disappeared for good.

  She finagled her own escape from her school—no big deal, she simply slipped out the window and called the headmistress from the phone in the bookshop in town. She pretended to be her own American stepmother, asking the school to put Eve on the next train to London.

  Which, of course, they did.

  She’d been hoarding the spending money that James and Emily sent in extremely generous wads, and made a quick detour in London’s fashion district. In a blink of an eye—and the lightening of her purse by quite a few English pounds—gone was the schoolgirl. In her place was a beautiful young sophisticate.

  Thanks to a very mature figure, a great deal of poise and acting ability—all gifts from her late mother—and some carefully applied makeup, Eve could easily look much older than she was. In fact, during her brief stay at Ramsgate, Eve had told the estates’ caretakers that she was twenty—and the middle-aged couple had swallowed it whole.

  Dressed to the nines, Eve breezed into the headmaster’s office at her brother’s school and withdrew him.

  They, of course, were only too glad to see him go.

  Free at last, and reading in the paper that James and his new bride were in London for the opening of his newest play, Eve and Nick returned to the estate in Ramsgate to regroup.

  They didn’t have enough funds to buy passage on an oceanliner back to the United States. Nick wanted to steal the silver, but Eve flatly refused. They may have been orphans and down on their luck, but they weren’t thieves. And it might take a while, but she’d get a job. She looked twenty. She could earn the money they needed. How hard could it be?

  Her master plan was foiled when Emily and James came rushing back to Ramsgate. Who knew they’d actually bother to visit Eve and Nicky at school?

  And instead of sending them back, James—a decent guy for an Englishman—put them under the supervision of his Ramsgate caretakers for the rest of the spring and the coming summer. However, Nick had to spend at least part of the time studying with a special tutor James was hiring.

  Eve agreed to the deal, despite the fact that she dreaded the arrival of the tutor. He’d be dreary and old, with bad skin and teeth, big bushy eyebrows, and a long skinny face. He’d talk in that stupid accent with long, slow, drawn out vowels, taking so endlessly long to make his point that Eve would long to grab him by his pencil neck and shake him. He’d smell like mothballs and lye and the passed gas of the kidney pie he’d had for dinner last night and the night before.

  And, Eve vowed, the first time he called Nick stupid would be the last.

  By then, she’d have gotten a job in town and earned the money she needed to get them back to California. Please, heavenly Father . . .

  But there were no jobs in town. There were no jobs, period. England was in the throes of a depression as bad as—or worse than—the one going on back in the States.

  One day, when Eve had been unable to get a job, when she was driving back from Ramsgate—James kept three different cars in the garage of his estate and she saw no reason not to use them at her leisure despite her lack of driver’s license—as she was pulling up to the main house, she first encountered her brother’s new tutor.

  He had just ridden up on his bicycle and had accepted a drink from Mr. Johnson, the caretaker.

  At first she’d thought he was a traveler passing through, a young man on break from college, biking his way across the English countryside, stopping for a drink, or—even more likely—to ask if he could camp for the night in the nearby woods.

  “You can sleep up by the orchard if you promise not to light a fire,” Eve said to him as she slid out from the car’s expensive leather seats.

  The young man laughed—his grin was infectious and his eyes actually twinkled—and she realized he was older than she’d first thought by about five years. “Do you always greet strangers with non sequiturs?”

  She looked at his bicycle—old but well-kept; his clothes—that of a traveler, jacket off and sleeves rolled up to beat the heat, one pant leg tucked into his sock to keep it from getting caught on the bike’s chain; his face—damp with perspiration but still strikingly attractive, framed above his very English and somewhat patrician forehead and long elegant nose by thick, dark, wavy hair; his eyes—hazel, with long, dark lashes, and still dancing with amusement.

  “Of course, you’re pretty enough to get away with just about anything, aren’t you?” he added.

  “Aren’t you looking for a place to spend the night?” she asked.

  Something shifted in those hazel eyes as they skimmed her from the hat that went perfectly with her eggshell-colored suit, all the way down her silk-stocking-clad legs to her matching pumps. She’d seen that look in a man’s eyes plenty of times before and knew what it meant.

  If she were her mother, she’d pull her shoulders back a little bit, throwing out her breasts, showing off her female attributes. But Eve was tired and her feet hurt. It had been a long, disappointing day and the last thing she needed was some stupid college boy drooling on her, no matter how pretty his eyes were.

  She reached up to pull her hat pins free. She couldn’t wait to get back to her room so she could change into her blue jeans, her cowboy boots, and one of her father’s old shirts. She’d find Nicky and they’d take a walk over to the beach and . . .

  “Actually, no,” the young man said. Despite the heat, he rolled down his sleeves and slipped his arms into his jacket, the perfect gentleman. “I’m here to see young Nicolas Linden. I’m his new tutor, Ralph Grayson.” He wiped his hand on his pants before holding it out to her. “I was told he had an older sister, but I’m afraid they didn’t mention your name.”

  This was Nick’s tutor.

  His name was spelled Ralph, but he pronounced it the crazy English way—Rafe.

  He had a poet’s or maybe a piano player’s hands, with long, graceful fingers. They should have been cool and otherworldly, but they weren’t. He was hot to the touch.

  “I’m Eve,” she told him.

  “Eve,” he murmured, still holding onto her, his eyes at least as hot as his hand. “Delightful.”

  And Eve knew in a flash that she held the ultimate power. Ralph Grayson had no clue he was casting lustful looks at a fifteen-year-old girl. All she needed was for him to say or do something completely inappropriate—one kiss was all it would take—and she’d control him. Then if he upset Nicky—which he would invariably do—she’d whisper the truth about how old she really was into his ear and tell him she’d keep their little nasty secret, provided he resign immediately.

  And then, poof, like magic, he’d be gone.

  She pulled back her shoulders and gave him her mother’s million dollar smile. “The pleasure’s completely mine, Ralph. May I call you Ralph?”

  “Absolutely. I have to confess, I was looking forward to working with your brother and to spendi
ng the summer near the seaside, but now I’m completely ecstatic.”

  Cripes, he shoveled it on pretty thick. Eve pulled her hand free. “Why don’t we go inside? I’ll get Nick and a pitcher of lemonade.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  Or maybe he was just stupidly enthusiastic about everything.

  “This house is gorgeous,” he proclaimed as they went inside. “Do you know its history?”

  She shook her head, and he regaled her with the duke of this and the lord of that all the way to the sitting room.

  “Nicky likes plays,” she interrupted him midsentence as he was saying something about visits to this estate a million years earlier from someone named Prinny. “Our mother was an actress.”

  The tutor nodded, suddenly serious. “Thank you,” he said, as if she’d presented him with the royal jewels. “Anything else I should know that might help?”

  “He hates tutors.”

  The smile was back. “I assumed as much.”

  “I’ll send him right in,” she said, and hurried out of the room. Why had she told him even that much, instead of leaving him to face Nick’s evil eye on his own?

  She found her brother in the kitchen, telling one of his ridiculous tall tales to a giggling Mrs. Johnson. They were waiting for a chocolate cake to finish baking.

  “Your tutor’s arrived,” she told him, hating the surly, almost hunted-animal look that came into his eyes at the news. “He’s not old and smelly like we thought, Nick. He’s young and he seems nice.” She gave him a hug, whispering into his ear, “And if you don’t like him, I’ll make him leave, I promise.”

  Hope bloomed, banishing the desperate animal, and Nicky nodded. There wasn’t much in this world that he could count on, but Eve had never broken a promise to him yet. Unlike their mother, she’d never made him a promise she couldn’t keep.

  “He’s in the sitting room,” she told him now. “Go and meet him. I’ll be there in a sec with lemonade.”

  Mrs. Johnson helped her find a tray, and Eve carried the pitcher and three glasses carefully back down the long hallway.