by Nancy Gideon
The man grew even paler. Perspiration trickled down to his starched collar. “I’m just here to accept an award and turn a book deal if I’m lucky.”
“Then why did Chet want me to look you up?”
That notion brought a glaze of fear to his eyes. Rightfully so. “Allen’s crazy. You know that as well as I do. Who knows what goes on in his mind?”
“You do, Doc. Or at least, you did. What did you put in there while you were poking around where you didn’t belong? What did you do to push him over the edge? How did you just cut out that part of him that had a conscience? What did you do to make him into the kind of man who could put a bullet in his best friend without blinking an eye? You took away his soul. What do you think that kind of information would do to your prospective book deal? What kind of humanitarian makes it easier for a man to commit murder? I thought we went to war back in the forties to stop that sort of thing.”
Frye’s shoulders squared with indignation, righteous or not. “I did nothing wrong. I only tried to ease the mental suffering of men in combat. I’m not responsible for Chet Allen. Or for you. Now, I think I’d like the both of you to leave before I call hotel security.” He pushed himself up off the edge of his bed, but he was hardly an imposing figure when standing next to McGee, the fierce killing machine he’d helped create. His ego gave him the bravado needed to hold his ground. But it was McGee’s choice to back down, to back away from this man who’d chopped a hole in his past and left him to wander through that void alone.
“We’re not finished, Doc.”
Frye suddenly shifted tactics, becoming all compassion and concern. “Come see me, McGee. Officially. I can help you. I can give you the same kind of peace of mind that D’Angelo found. I can make it so you can be…”
“What? Whole again? So I can forget what I did, who I was, and who was responsible? So I can let you off the hook? Help me what?”
“Put an end to the pain I see in your eyes.”
Tag stepped back, momentarily taken off guard by that intuitive statement.
“We have unfinished business,” Frye continued, his tone silken and convincing. “That’s why I needed to see you one last time before you went stateside. That’s why you’re so confused now.”
“I’m fine,” Tag hissed through gritted teeth. “I don’t need any more of your help. But I will find out the truth.”
With that dire vow, he stalked from the room. As Barbara started to follow, Frye caught her arm. His voice was low with urgency.
“Make sure he comes to see me. He needs someone to put the pieces back together for him. All he has are fragments now. The post-traumatic stress disorder is causing high anxiety levels. It’s that hyperarousal and avoidance behavior that makes this idea of a conspiracy believable. If someone else is responsible, he can remain in that numb state indefinitely. He needs help, whether he’ll admit it or not. Until he gets it, he’s in a fight or flight mode. And he could be…dangerous. Dangerous to himself and those around him.”
Barbara’s disbelief was plain. “Tag McGee would never harm anyone.”
“Maybe not the man you knew. He’s not that man anymore, Mrs. D’Angelo. He’s what we made him. Him and Allen both.” He pressed his card into her hand. “Call me. Set up an appointment. My office staff will be expecting you and will give you priority. Just please, do it soon. Please take me seriously.”
She remembered looking into Chet Allen’s emotionless eyes while he smiled at the thought of her death.
Oh, she took it seriously, all right.
And she nodded, pocketing the card.
She expected him to be waiting for her outside Frye’s room, but he wasn’t. Nor had Tag returned to her suite. The corners were quiet, the shadows deep. She undressed quickly without the lights and then barricaded herself in the bathroom with her chaotic thoughts.
The stinging heat of the shower couldn’t warm her.
He’s what we made him. Him and Allen both.
What did that mean? What the hell did that mean? That she was in the middle of a tug-of-war between two deadly madmen? Two men so mentally damaged and out of control that their own government handlers would seek to destroy them? Or was it the knowledge they carried that made them so dangerous? How much of the perceived threat was real and how much imagined?
She turned off the spray and stood shivering in the heavy mist of steam that clouded the bathroom the way this whole situation shrouded her emotions.
How was she going to get her family out of this quagmire alive?
Struggling to rein in the hysteria that raced beneath the surface of her hard-won calm, she towel dried her hair with shaking hands and avoided her reflection in the all-seeing mirror where she was just a vague shape without substance. Like Taggert McGee.
What did she really know about the man he’d become? More than thirty years had passed. Thirty years. During that time, Robert had built himself a prestigious career in the law just as Chet had established a reputation by circumventing it. What had Tag been doing? What deadly game drew them here, these two skilled assassins and the memory of her husband, making her and her loved ones disposable pawns? How could someone as ill-equipped as society arm candy hold her own, let alone prevail? Yet she would have to if she wanted back that new life she’d just begun to enjoy.
Belting her robe about her waist, she stepped out into the dark bedroom, pulling up short with the brightness from the bathroom spotlighting her. A deer in headlights. For a moment, she stood frozen, her heart hammering within her chest until she realized that the figure standing just out of the reach of the light was not Chet Allen. But in that fleeting instance of doubt, all her fears, all her inner terrors must have been displayed upon her face because Tag McGee spoke to her quietly, with an undertow of melancholy pulling on every word.
“You know I would never hurt you, Barbara.”
The pain of his long-ago abandonment lanced through her with an unexpected savagery. She couldn’t respond.
“I’m not like Chet,” he continued with a determined forcefulness, as if his one mission in life was to make her believe that. “You know I never could be. You know me better than anyone else. You remember who I was, what was important to me.”
She heard herself reply in a leaden voice, “That was a long time ago.”
“But you still remember, don’t you?” He sounded almost desperate for that assurance and suddenly she wished she could see his expression, to read what was in his eyes. “You remember who I was and what we were to each other.”
“Yes.” Barely a whisper. How could she forget? The anguish of those emotions was as fresh as yesterday.
“I need you to tell me,” was his startling request. “Because I don’t remember.” He ran an unsteady hand through thinning hair. “I mean I do, but it’s like a dream, like it might not really have happened, or that it happened to someone else and I was just watching.”
She was too stunned to react. At her hesitation, he came forward, into the cool gleam of the fluorescents. The angles of his face were all dramatic highs and lows, his pale eyes fired with a haunted intensity. She was mesmerized by him, the same way a silly young girl had been.
“The last clear memory I have is of you.”
Still, she didn’t know what to say, so he continued in that low, tortured tone.
“I have thirty years of shadows in my mind. The image of you at that bus station is the last thing that stands out as real. The rest is like a fog I’ve been wandering through, not really knowing where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing. Sometimes, I’m not sure…”
She took an involuntary step back. That defensive response woke him from his pensive speech. He laughed, a soft, slightly embarrassed apology.
“I’m sorry to sound so Twilight Zone. I’m scaring you.” His voice lowered and he glanced briefly away. “I’m scaring myself. It’s just that I didn’t realize how strange things have been until just now. It feels like I’ve been sleepwalking through the years without even
knowing it. Now I’m awake and wondering where I’ve been.”
“Where have you been?” Her request was hesitant enough to make him shake his head and smile.
“I know where I’ve been. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression here. I’m not Looney Tunes or anything like that.” But his voice faded out for a moment, as if he were questioning the validity of that claim.
“Where have you been?” she asked again, more assertively because suddenly, it was very important that she know. She wanted that answer, not just because of this situation but because she needed to know how he’d filled those years she’d hoped to share with him. To know that what had been more important to him than her and the child he’d never acknowledged. That need to know wedged up into her throat on razor-sharp points, refusing to go up or down. He owed her that much honesty.
“When I left the service, I just wanted to get away from everything and everybody. To someplace quiet, someplace…”
Safe. Safe was what he meant to say but didn’t because he wasn’t sure why that word had come to mind. And because Barbara was already looking at him as if he were some kind of wacko who’d just slipped the buckles of his restraints. He didn’t want to give her any further reason for alarm. He needed her to believe in him just now. That wouldn’t happen if he unburdened all his ghosts upon her. How could a delicate, sheltered woman like Barbara Calvin D’Angelo understand, let alone cope with, the horrors that crept through his past in nightmares that woke him on the edge of a scream with disturbing frequency? How could he explain what he’d experienced, the numb sort of limbo he’d drifted through, without rightfully losing her trust? How could he get her to believe it wasn’t PTSD, the way Frye insinuated? It was something else. Something worse. He took a stabilizing breath and tried again.
“I needed peace, Barbara. I needed a place where I didn’t have to think or feel or remember.” But that was the funny thing. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember any of those years he’d escaped, not with any certainty. Then the greater truth. “I needed a place to heal.”
And he’d needed a place to hide. From the confusing unknowns that stalked the perimeters of his mind like silent sentinels. From the fear that he hadn’t come back as the decorated hero everyone thought him to be, but as something else altogether.
“And you couldn’t come to your friends to help you with that?”
Hurt vibrated through her quiet accusation.
“No.”
There was no kind way to put it. And there was no way to tell her the truth. That he couldn’t stand the thought, let alone the sight, of her and his best friend living out the dreams he’d held of their future.
“So where did you go?”
Grateful to escape her previous question unscathed, he told her, “Odd jobs. Traveling around.” Hard to get a lock on. “Eventually, I took a job as a forest ranger on Isle Royale up in Lake Superior. I’ve been there these past seven years.”
And in the wilds on that nearly deserted island, afloat on cold, unforgiving waters, living alone, without pressures, without demands, he’d existed simply, day to day. He didn’t have to face reminders of the ugliness of a war that had left untold and unimagined scars on his two best friends, one lost to inner demons unleashed within the jungles and the other to the woman he’d loved but apparently wasn’t good enough to keep. At least, until he slept at night.
Barbara frowned, her quick mind picking up on a flaw in his reasoning. “How could they not find you if you were living in a national park? Wouldn’t the government have records of you being an employee?”
“If that was the name I’d given them, yes.”
“You’re living under an assumed identity?” Suspicion and a hint of fear colored that question.
“After the official conflict was over, I was still there, working for the government, Barbara. You get to know people. You get to call in favors. I called in a big one. Once I got discharged, I told a buddy of mine that I wanted to disappear and he made it happen.”
I know a guy who knows a guy. She could hear Jack Chaney casually explaining away his web of deadly contacts spun between the cracks of military intrigue.
“So how did Chet find you?”
“I gave him an emergency number, a way to contact me indirectly in case he needed me.”
That sentiment burned within her breast. In case Chet needed him. But no such consideration for her or their child. If Robert knew his whereabouts, he’d never told her. Taggert McGee had been an off-limits subject between them. Just the way she and Tessa must have been an out-of-mind, out-of-heart sort of thing for Tag. The irony of Chet forcing this awkward reunion returned with renewed bitterness.
“Why now? Why wait all these years to reach out and touch you?” She spoke with a flat, almost disinterested tone that had McGee’s brows furrowing slightly. “Why are you suddenly such a danger that someone would threaten my family just so he could take you out?” She realized that sounded as if she was irritated at being drawn into this scheme for his demise, but she preferred that to his knowing how deeply his disregard wounded her.
He didn’t miss the nuances in that question. His features tightened. His voice chilled. “I regret that. I really do. I would never have involved you or Rob’s daughter. And I promise, I’ll let no harm come to either of you. I owe that to Rob.”
To Robert? What about what he owed to her? For all the pain of broken promises, all the anguished nights alone, all the fruitless trips to the P.O. box hoping for letters that never came. For leaving her when she’d been desperate and afraid and needed him most, forcing her to make the only choice available to protect her family and her unborn child?
Then a single unexpected fact threaded through the fabric of her indignant pain.
He’d said Robert’s daughter. As if he didn’t know Tessa was his child.
As if he didn’t recognize that a huge wave of uncertainty and disbelief had just swept her legs out from under her, Tag continued, “Something’s going on, right here, right now. And there’s a reason Chet doesn’t want me to miss out on it. If he’d wanted me dead, he’d have taken me out the second I stepped off that plane. No. There’s more. Something I’m not getting. Something to do with Frye and why or what I can’t remember.”
“Why don’t you take the doctor up on his offer? Maybe he can unlock your memories.”
He waved off her faintly offered suggestion. “I don’t think Frye wants to unlock anything. I think he’d prefer to have whatever’s in here,” he tapped his temple, “remain there. What’s he so afraid of? That I’ll ruin a book deal? If anything, that kind of controversy would make him a talk-show must-have. There’s more at stake. Something they’d kill to protect.”
“Who?”
“Them that makes the rules,” he quoted grimly.
“Who made the rules, Tag? Chet said you’d know.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. Either I never knew or Frye made sure I wouldn’t remember.” He paused, noticing the weary way Barbara was rubbing her eyes. “It’s late and you’re tired.” She started to protest but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was too chewed up inside to go much further himself. And he was on the verge of letting her see just how slender the thread of his control was.
“It’s been a long day,” he said at last, “and we’re not going to solve this thing tonight. I’ve got a few ideas to follow up on tomorrow, so we might as well get some sleep before Chet deals us another card. Probably another joker.” She didn’t laugh. Come to think of it, he didn’t think it was particularly funny, either.
As her glance darted toward the smooth surface of the king-size bed, he solved that dilemma with a firm, “I’ll take the chair.”
As McGee rechecked the locks on the door, Barbara went to toss the damp towel in the bathroom and quickly, as nervous as a newlywed, donned the simple silk gown she’d brought to sleep in. Only at the time, she hadn’t imagined she’d be sleeping with Taggert McGee. Well, not exactly
with him… Her fingers trembled as she brushed out her hair. A fluster of emotions shook through her insides.
Sleeping with Tag McGee. Oh, how she remembered what he must have found all too easy to forget. How good, how right, they’d been together.
He’d levered out of his boots and dragged the coverlet off the bed before dropping into the armchair near the window. Without a word to her, he cocooned himself in the quilted folds of the bedspread the way he’d once nestled into her embrace and was asleep in the span of a heartbeat.
Leaving her standing there garbed in sexy pink silk and equally slippery doubts.
Finally, she moved to the big bed and slid beneath the sheets. She lay on her back for long, torturous minutes, her head and heart filled with the hush of Tag’s even breaths. So long ago, a young girl had been mesmerized by those same sonorous sounds and by the man who uttered them.
How wildly, willfully she had loved him.
And then that single, shocking notion returned.
How could it be possible?
How could he not know that Tessa was his child?
Chapter 6
How could he not know?
Barbara lay in the darkness while that single question battered at her soul.
She’d discovered the unplanned pregnancy a month after the three of them left for boot camp. Maybe she’d suspected before, but she kept telling herself that it was just her upset over seeing them leave—seeing him leave—that had her system all out of whack. When a clinic test in another suburb confirmed it, she was shocked, afraid, but not truly devastated. How could she reject this piece of Taggert McGee that she carried within her body’s embrace? They loved one another. She had no doubt that he would do the right thing without regret. They’d just be starting their family a bit sooner than planned.
It would be difficult. She wasn’t sure she could count upon her parents’ support. Her father was a respected circuit court judge and he’d seen far too many of Tag’s relatives before his bench to think the youngest son would ever amount to anything. It didn’t matter what she said or what Tag did to prove otherwise. Her mother, a child psychologist, should have taken Tag’s side, having seen the investigative reports of abuse and neglect that always ended with the children placed back in the unstable McGee home. An unbonded child never learns how to return love, Claudia Calvin predicted and wrote him off as a bad risk.
