The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  There was no one else in the entryway, no one in the room off to the right. He’d expected the place to be crawling with Extremists. Was it possible . . . ?

  There was no sign of Amy or Eve. No bloodstains, no bodies, nothing. Just a nearly empty house with two tangos.

  The woman had her gun up and on them as the man shut the door. “Put the gun on the floor, and kick it over here,” she ordered Meg, who obeyed.

  The man shouldered his weapon, and at a nod from the woman, he pushed Meg onto the floor to search her.

  He wasn’t gentle and Meg cried out.

  Nils clenched his teeth. It took every ounce of willpower in him not to react. He was Osman Razeen right now. Meg wasn’t his lover, his friend, his life.

  The woman was looking at him, her eyes narrowed, and he shifted slightly, hiding his face even more while he let her see a glimpse of the cuffs on his wrists.

  “Where’s Amy?” Meg asked, and got a backhand across her mouth for the trouble.

  But she was tough. She’d come this far, and she wasn’t going to quit now. She struggled to sit up. “Where’s my daughter? I’ve done as you’ve asked. I’ve brought you Razeen. We had a deal and I’ve upheld my end of it!”

  “She’s dead,” the woman said harshly. “They’re both dead.”

  Oh, God, no.

  As Nils watched, Meg died. The life left her face, the fight left her body. She went completely still.

  He looked at her, willing her to look back at him. Willing her to move back and out of the way, or at least down flat onto the floor. He was going to shoot these motherfuckers and get Meg safely out of there, but he couldn’t start firing and hit them both—not with Meg right there in the kill zone.

  “Osman Razeen,” the woman said in a Kazbekistani dialect. “I sentence you to death.”

  She shifted her grip on her AK-47, split seconds from firing as Meg came back to life. She dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way.

  Nils had his weapon up and firing, shouting for support from the rest of the team.

  It was over in seconds. He’d pulled back and into the other room, shielding her with his body. If there were any other tangos in this building, they were going to come running at the sound of the gunfire.

  The door was smashed in with a crash, and Wolchonok and Muldoon were the first inside, checking the fallen Extremists—making sure neither was going to pop back up, shooting.

  Meg was crying and he dropped his weapon and held her tightly, crying for her, too. And for himself.

  Her daughter was dead, but she’d chosen life. He knew it would’ve been easier for her simply to give up. To let herself be killed, instead of living with the pain and loss.

  Nils knew she would never get over it. Not completely. But with his help and his love, she would get through it.

  “I’m here,” he told her. “Whatever you need, I’ll get it for you.”

  “Nilsson, report.” Lieutenant Paoletti’s voice came over the receiver in Nils’s ear.

  “I need Amy,” Meg cried.

  “Nilsson, dammit—”

  “He’s here, L.T.,” came the senior chief’s familiar growl. “Both he and Ms. Moore are here and alive. They’re sharing a, ahem, private moment.”

  Nils looked up to see Senior Chief Wolchonok standing in the doorway. “They killed them, Stan,” he told him quietly. “Both Amy and Eve.”

  Wolchonok swore. “L.T., we’ve got some bad news. The hostages are dead.”

  “Someone’s wrong,” Paoletti’s voice came back. “I’ve got Starrett in one of the backup vehicles saying he’s got Amy and Eve with him right now and they are very much alive. Hang on . . .”

  There was a buzz and a click and then a very sweet voice came loud and clear over the line. “Hello, Mommy?”

  Nils yanked the miniature receiver free, held it right up to Meg’s ear, leaning close so that he could hear, too.

  “Mommy, this is Amy. Nana and I are all right. Are you all right?”

  Meg gasped and looked up at Nils. “Oh, my God!”

  He switched on his microphone. Held it close to her mouth.

  “Amy?” she said. “Oh, my God!”

  “Mommy, we’re okay. Nana and I climbed out of the window and onto the roof and we ran and ran and I’m so hungry and I knew you would be so worried.”

  Meg laughed through her tears. “It’s Amy,” she told Nils.

  “Are you all right?” Amy asked again.

  Meg touched Nils’s face and smiled at him. “I am so totally all right, honey,” she told her daughter. “I am fabulously all right.”

  She kissed him and he got his very first taste of happily ever after.

  It was enough to convince him that he definitely wanted more.

  Twenty-five

  AMY SAT IN the camper next to Eve, eating a chicken salad sandwich that one of the FBI agents had packed for a snack.

  The child’s hands were filthy dirty, but there was nowhere to wash, and Eve was too hungry herself to care.

  First food, then Meg would arrive, then they’d be taken somewhere safe to wash and to sleep in the beautiful softness of a real bed.

  “What about Ralph?” Amy asked with her mouth full.

  Eve laughed. Ah, yes, they’d left poor Ralph standing there, on the dock. “He’d tried to be so casual,” she told Amy, “asking me if I’d come to get that annulment. As if I had traveled all that way and dressed up in my very best clothes to greet him as he set foot in England for the first time in five years because I wanted an annulment?”

  Amy laughed. “Boys are dumb.”

  “Boys sometimes are,” Eve agreed, “very dumb. I told him I had a box of over two thousand letters waiting for him, back in Ramsgate.”

  Letters she’d written to him over the past five years. Letters she’d written even though she didn’t know if he were alive or dead.

  She’d looked him in the eye then. She’d done this before, in France, but still, it hadn’t gotten any easier. “I love you,” she told him. “There never has been and never will be anyone else.”

  He started to cry. Right there on the dock, Ralph broke down and wept. He took a step toward her. Just one move in her direction was all she needed. She threw down her sign and launched herself at him, and into his arms.

  He wasn’t as fragile as he looked. He might’ve been thin, but his arms were still strong.

  “He kissed me,” Eve told Amy, “and kissed me and kissed me, right there for all the world to see. It was glorious and I knew that no matter how hard the past few years had been, the future was going to be wonderful.

  “He told me that I’d saved his life in Dunkirk. He said that his unit was finally captured, and the Germans who took them prisoner were ready to kill them right then and there. He was on the ground, on his knees, with a Nazi gun to his head when he started talking—about me.

  “He spoke in German, telling the man who was about to kill him all about this girl back in Ramsgate, an American girl named Eve whom he loved with all his heart. He told the German soldier that although it was probably hard to believe, this girl loved him, too, and that she’d be distraught at the news of his death. He told this German all about how we’d met, about Nicky getting sick, about the warm feeling in his heart whenever he saw me.

  “He told me that he was convinced that by talking about me that way, he’d forced the German to see him not as a nameless, soulless enemy soldier, but as a human being. As a man—who loved and was loved.”

  “It worked,” Amy said. “Because they let him live.”

  “That’s right.” Eve smiled, remembering how through the years Ralph had told her time and again of the way his stories of her light and life had served to entertain his captors—and to make him an individual in their eyes.

  “He asked me to marry him,” she told Amy. “Right there on the dock. I told him that I already had married him, that I’d never signed or sent back those annulment papers. But I told him, if he wanted me to, I�
��d marry him all over again.”

  “And he wanted to, right?” Amy said. “Because you got married again.”

  “We did.”

  The back door of the camper opened, and the strikingly beautiful FBI agent named Alyssa Locke stuck her head in. “Your mom just pulled up,” she said to Amy with a smile.

  Amy was up and out of the door in a flash.

  Eve sat for a moment, letting the little girl have some time alone with her mother, content to rest.

  And remember.

  “I’ll marry you again,” Eve told Ralph as she stood on the dock in his arms. “But what I won’t do is delay our wedding night another day longer.”

  He’d laughed at that, his laughter rich and warm. It wrapped around her, and she knew her words were a lie. She’d wait for him forever if she had to.

  Still. He was English, after all, and it was possible he’d need a bit of a push. “What are your plans?” she asked him. “Are you going to teach?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t thought much about it. I haven’t thought much beyond fresh eggs and a rare steak for years. And you, of course,” he added with a smile. “And not at all in that order.”

  She kissed him, long and sweet. “You always were a fabulous teacher.” She kissed him again, longer and a little less sweetly. “As a matter of fact, there’s something very specific I was hoping you could teach me tonight.”

  He shouted with laughter at that. But as he looked at her, the warmth in his eyes shifted to something potent. Something hot. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Count on it.”

  His kiss held a promise of something achingly wonderful.

  He pulled back to look into her eyes. “Promise me,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He laughed. “Now how do you know I’m not going to ask you to promise me something ridiculous?”

  “I don’t care. I’d promise you anything.”

  His smile softened as he touched her face. “I am the luckiest man on this planet. The war didn’t break your spirit, did it?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m not sure whether to be grateful or terrified about that,” he told her with a laugh. “Just . . . promise me that you’ll never withhold the truth from me again. Promise you’ll never again pretend to be something you’re not. Because you’re perfect, Eve, just the way you are. No more lies, all right?”

  “I promise,” she told him. She kissed him again, and he took possession of her mouth, slowly, deeply. It was exquisite.

  And so were the words he spoke when he pulled back to look into her eyes. “I’ll never leave you again,” Ralph told her. “From this moment, Eve, until the day that I die, I’ll be with you, right by your side.”

  Fifty-five years later, Eve sat in the camper all alone, remembering those promises they’d made.

  The door was still open a crack, and she could see outside, see the other vehicle that had pulled up, see Amy, held tightly in Meg’s arms.

  She’d delivered the child safely into her mother’s arms. She’d done it. Or rather, they’d done it. She and Ralph.

  Although he’d been gone from this world for these past two years, he’d been with her in spirit throughout this entire ordeal.

  Eve smiled and sent him a silent apology for pretending to have that limp that fooled her captors so successfully. Yes, she’d promised him all those years ago that she would no longer pretend to be something she wasn’t, but he would have to admit that there were times when pretending did have its usefulness.

  She could almost hear Ralph’s rich, warm laughter wrapping around her.

  Still filling her heart.

  Meg held Amy on her lap. Since she’d turned ten, she’d claimed to be too old for that. But not today. Today, she was parked there pretty darn permanently.

  Meg held her daughter close. Amy’s hair smelled like a bad mix of wet paper bags and soggy dog, but she didn’t care.

  She had a lifetime to get Amy clean.

  Eve sat next to her, holding her hand. “Thank you,” Meg kept telling her grandmother.

  She still couldn’t believe they’d gone out a second-story window.

  She still couldn’t believe that in a single heartbeat, her life had turned from tragic to perfect.

  She knew what Lazarus’s mother must’ve felt like.

  The door opened, and John came inside the van.

  Meg felt Amy shrink slightly. John was big, she realized. Tall and broad and . . . He smiled at her and her insides melted.

  “Amy, this is Lt. John Nilsson. Do you remember him from Kazbekistan?” Meg said. “He saved my life about twenty different times these past few days.”

  Eve was looking from her to John, and Meg knew she hadn’t missed the message he was sending her with his eyes. His love for her was written all over his face. He didn’t even try to hide it. Eve squeezed her hand and when Meg turned to look at her, she made big eyes and a completely approving face.

  Meg laughed. “John, this is Amy, and my grandmother, Eve Grayson.”

  John sat down, shining the warmth of his smile on them both. “I’m honored to meet you, Mrs. Grayson. You should be proud of what you did out there tonight.”

  “I am,” Eve said.

  John’s smile widened. “Well, good. The FBI’s going to be taking both you and Amy to a safe house where you can get cleaned up and where a doctor will come in and check you both out.” He turned to Amy. “This must’ve been pretty scary, huh?”

  “I do remember you,” she said. “Your hair was shorter. You’re a language specialist, right? Like Mom?”

  “Yeah,” John said. “Like your mom. I have a lot in common with her.”

  Amy smiled. “You colored with me. And you taught me to say shit in Kazbekistani.”

  Meg laughed. She had to feign outrage. “You did what?”

  “Oops.”

  “You also taught me to say—”

  “Thank you very much,” John said to Amy. “I clearly made a lasting impression. Wow.”

  “You did,” she told him, laughing at the face he made. “You always made me laugh, even when I didn’t feel much like laughing.”

  John looked up at Meg and the expression in his eyes was priceless. He’d been scared, she realized. This big, strong, capable man who didn’t know the meaning of the word quit, this man who’d gone fearlessly into battle for her today and had taken two lives to protect her, had been scared to death of meeting a ten-year-old girl.

  “We’re going to be seeing a lot of John from now on,” Meg told her daughter.

  “You and me, Amy,” John added, “we’re going to be really good friends. We have a lot in common, too, you know. Starting with the fact that we both love your mother.”

  Amy looked from John to Meg to Eve. And she smiled at her great-grandmother. “This is so cool.”

  “So of course I get down here after the action is over,” Jules complained.

  “You didn’t miss all that much,” Locke countered. As she watched, Sam and Lopez came out of the house with the forensics team, who were carrying one of the body bags out of the house.

  Jules watched, too, as the FBI team went back into the house. “How many are in there?”

  “Just two. Two others are in custody—they were picked up on the road. Mrs. Grayson says there were five that she knew about. One’s still at large.”

  The second body bag came out. Sam and Lopez were still standing next to the truck. As Locke watched, Sam turned away. He leaned down, alongside the wheel, and threw up.

  Holy cow.

  “I heard there’s some kind of bogus death threat,” Jules said, “that Meg Moore’s going to be under protection for a while.”

  “Just until the word gets out,” Locke told her partner.

  Lopez touched Sam briefly on the shoulder. Sam shook his head rather vehemently as he straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Locke turned away before he looked over and caught her watching. “We t
hink the threat was just a mind game. Just more psychological warfare. But the Extremists—and all of the other fringe groups in K-stan—are going to get a very explicit message,” she said. “They go near Meg Moore or her family, and they will be crushed. They stay away, and we use our embassy to open up lines of communication between them and their government.”

  “Ah,” Jules said. “The old threat combined with dangling a little of what they want most in front of them. That should do the trick.”

  Locke glanced back at the trucks. Sam was gone.

  “I heard from Max Bhagat that we’ve announced to the media that the so-called hostage situation at the K-stani embassy was just a training operation.” Jules laughed. “Everyone saves face—except CNN and all the other networks who’re made to look like fools for having reporters standing outside a training op for all these days.”

  Locke spotted him. Sam had moved over to the house, where he sat on the front steps, head in his hands.

  Who would’ve thought . . . ?

  “Excuse me for a sec,” she said to Jules.

  “Sure.”

  Locke approached Sam cautiously. Slowly. Carefully.

  He heard her coming, though, and he looked up. And laughed derisively. “Great, you saw that, huh? Perfect. Have at me, Alyssa. My night hasn’t been painful enough.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Fucking perfect,” he said. “I’m not sure which it was that did it to me—the thought of how close that little girl and her grandmother came to getting a bullet in their heads or catching a glimpse of the forensics guys shoveling pieces of a human being’s brain into one of those body bags. Either way, it still makes my stomach churn.”

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said. “For some of the things I said to you before, you know, back at the hotel.”

  He was surprised and working hard to hide it. He reached down onto the step beside him and picked up a dead twig that was lying there. “Some of the things,” he repeated, snapping the twig into two. “Only some?”

  She gave him the smallest of smiles. “That’s right. You know you were there dogging me.”