The car leapt backward and lunged toward the painfully slow garage door. With a squeal of tires and a scream of seeming protest, the Skylark slammed into the garage door.
Cait couldn’t hold her cry when the garage door scraped against the car roof with a sickening screech. The door, set to spring away from blockage, but prevented from immediate response by the car’s impact, wailed its own groan of protest and ground sideways, wrenching bolts from stays and shuddering violently across the top of the car. It jerked to the right a nanosecond before it would have shattered the windshield.
Alec continued his fierce depression of the accelerator and the Skylark shot out of the garage and down the slight incline of Cait’s driveway.
“Hold on,” Alec said when they reached the street. He suddenly jerked the emergency brake to an upright position while still jamming his foot on the accelerator. Cait gripped the seat with frantic desperation as the car tires screamed and the Skylark skidded sideways, whirling in a sickening 180-degree turn.
Alec released the emergency brake, if not his pressure on the floor pedal, and the car leapt forward with a defiant growl that tore up the pavement. Cait thought she heard someone shouting, but it might have been her own throaty cries of fear.
Allie giggled in the back seat, blissfully unaware of the danger, and called out, “ ’Gin!”
“What does she want?” Alec yelled, still gunning the motor to capacity, forcing the car to speed through the quiet neighborhood as if furious demons were hot in pursuit.
“She wants to do it again,” Cait said weakly.
Alec didn’t respond for several seconds, his concentration on their escape. His face was tinted pale green in the wash of light from the dashboard.
Then, shocking her, stunning her anew on this dawn of impossible events, Alec chuckled. “That’s my girl.”
Chapter 7
Saturday, November 10, 4:25 a.m. EST
G-force held Cait pinned to the passenger seat of the speeding Skylark. Her garage door was destroyed, her new car surely needed thousands of dollars worth of repair, and she and her baby were careening through the night with a man she’d seen shot and killed two years before.
She shivered and was certain it had little to do with the temperature. They were heading into who could even guess what further danger, someone within the FBI wanting to kill her—kill her—and her stupid brain seemed only capable of focusing on one thing: Alec MacLaine was really alive.
He drove the car through the nearly silent streets of Bethesda at a speed Cait would never have considered even in an emergency situation, but somehow he exuded an air of calm, his skill with the wheel uncanny and sure.
His eyes continually flicked from the street ahead to the rearview mirror as he whisked the car from side street to side street, taking them deeper into a seeming maze of endless sleeping neighborhoods.
Cait recognized Takoma Park, Maryland, then a few sharp turns later realized they’d crossed into D.C. A few cars, driven by tired, slow drivers, scuttled out of the way as Alec forced the car through Adam’s Morgan, ritzy Kalorama, down California, up, over and down into the narrow streets of Georgetown.
The normally bustling, jostling pocket of the District noted for specialty boutiques, exclusive restaurants, highclass hospitals and universities was lit by the arc lights that lent the entire city of D.C. a golden glow, making the brick streets glisten as if wet. Like the rest of the world, Georgetown slept, but Cait had the feeling the sleep wasn’t easy, and that any moment another car would whip in front of them and the small prestigious section of the District would wake and eat them alive.
Down M Street, and over Key Bridge, then with a final sharp turn, Alec took them onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The normally lovely highway seemed ominous now; tall, leafless trees seemed to meet over the top of the car, forming a spiderwebbed tunnel.
Alec had finally slowed the car to a reasonable. rate, one still far exceeding the speed limit, but which allowed Cait to check on Allie without being catapulted on top of her. He turned on the heater as she pulled the blanket from the baby’s head.
She had to smile, however shakily, at the sight of Allie’s sleeping form, her dark lashes shadowing her cheek, her right forefinger imperfectly dangling from her lax lips.
“She okay?” Alec asked.
“Asleep,” Cait answered, turning back around.
“Asleep?” He shifted slightly to look at his daughter in the rearview mirror. “I’ll be damned.”
During the race out of the house, the giddying turns through the city, Cait had clung to the base of her seat, thinking of nothing but escape. Now, on the smooth and empty stretch of predawn, Saturday-morning parkway, she became all too aware of Alec sitting inches from her, close enough she had to shift her knees to avoid brushing his. The Skylark had seemed large when she bought it, spacious enough for her and Allie at any rate. Now it seemed too small, dwarfed by Alec’s personality.
They rode silently, neither of them speaking. But the silence wasn’t comfortable, the distance between them as distinct and crystal dear as if each day of the missing two years sat in the car with them, every one of them demanding attention.
Stranger Man, as Allie had called him, and he’d repeated, had come back for her. But it wasn’t as simple as the words seemed to imply. He hadn’t shown up on her doorstep after two years prepared to sweep her into his arms and carry her away into the night, though ironically, he’d done both.
She had no doubts that his fear for her safety was real; the look of stark fear on his otherwise composed features had compelled her to go with him. And she didn’t hold any reservations about her safety with him. Of all things, she couldn’t question that.
In her fantasy, her thousands of dreams about Alec, she’d known for certain that what they had found in that dark closet would have survived for eternity, that they would have endured the trials and tribulations of life in the modern world, the world outside their narrow prison cell. Now she saw how thoroughly she’d bought into her own delusions.
The man who easily sped her car through the night— despite clenched jaw and white knuckles—was the same man who had grinned. crookedly at his newly discovered daughter. This man, a walking, breathing dichotomy was the reality. A federal agent who had faked his own death. A mystery man. A stranger.
Sneaking a glance at him now, his face reflected in the eerie green light on the windshield, seeing the blue eyes so like Allie’s—and yet unlike them, too, for his were focused, driven, haunted, whereas Allie’s were guileless, open, trusting—she fought the urge to simply tell him to stop the car and let them out of this nightmare.
But where could she take her baby? Aunt Margaret, certainly, but once there, who could they possibly trust? How would she know that someone else wouldn’t come knocking on her door a week from now, a month, a year...carrying a gun packed with bullets marked for her and Allie?
She could only stay where she was, go along with this wild escapade that might save her life, speeding through the night with her one-time lover.
Without turning to look at her, Alec broke the silence that hovered between them like a palpable presence. “I suppose I should tell you that my badge was retired.”
She gaped at him. He was cracking a joke?
“I don’t even know you, do I?” she slowly asked, interrupting him. “I thought I did, when we were together back then. I thought I knew everything.”
“You did,” he said. And she heard the sorrow in his voice. The regret.
“No, I didn’t even know what you did for a living. Isn’t that odd, Alec? We spent three days together. We even made a child together. I suppose, in some cosmic sense, we even died together. And I never asked what you did for a living.”
“It didn’t seem important then.”
Cait felt strangely disconnected, as if they were talking about other people, a time that had happened to someone else. “No. I suppose it didn’t.”
“I never lied
to you, Cait.”
She turned her face to the window and stared out at the November darkness. Silhouettes of pale-barked, leafless trees and the flickers of frost on the thick underbrush created the illusion that vast forests stretched on either side of the parkway. But Cait knew it wasn’t true; it was only a disguise. Entire cities stretched beyond the black thicket of trees and brush. Whole towns were hidden in the dense Virginia woods.
Like Alec, she thought. Disguises within masks. A lover hidden in the agent, an agent hidden in the man.
“No?” she asked softly.
“I didn’t lie, Cait.”
So softly she felt him have to lean toward her to hear, she said, “You didn’t tell me you were with the FBI. You let me believe you were dead. You let the whole world believe that.”
She turned away from her contemplation of the dark forest. He’d straightened and was staring out the windshield with a hard, almost angry concentration.
“I know those weren’t lies per se,” she added. “But I feel lied to, onetheless.”
He drew a sharp breath and held it. Finally he exhaled it in a low whoosh. Without looking her way he said, “I told you, Cait, I thought you were dead. Nothing on this earth mattered to me after that.”
Cait felt the truth of his words strike her like a blow. Whatever else had happened, this was raw and unvarnished honesty. That it cost him to tell her she didn’t doubt; it cost her to hear the vein of deep pain scoring his carefully neutral voice.
She found she’d felt more comfortable with the careening, high-speed escape from her house than she did this brusque, brutal clarification.
In the past two years, especially in the months before Allie was born, she’d found a measure of comfort in believing that Alec would have told her everything sooner or later. She’d told herself they were meant to be together in every sense of the word. In time, in the nurturing environment of the love that surely would have developed, he would have revealed all.
But he’d died. And all revelations had been forced to wait until now.
Nothing on this earth mattered after that.
Not for him, perhaps, but for her, everything that mattered had happened since. Allie’s birth, her first tooth, the night her fever rose to 102 degrees and scared Cait half to death. She’d been recognized in a field where many played and few were paid.
Then Cait understood: he could tell her the raw and hurtful truth because it was as buried in the past as he’d thought her. As she’d thought him.
The time for dreams and promises was gone. All the truths and pretty words in the world wouldn’t give them back their unique harmony. They were only acquaintances now, people who had known each other once during a stressful time. They might not have been buried in graves somewhere, but the magic had been put in a box and covered up with two years of dirt.
“Caitie—”
Caitie? No one but Alec had ever called her that, and then only once, in the height of a desperate passion. A passion she strongly wished was as buried as the magic and as deeply as she’d thought Alec had been.
“Cait,” she corrected, though the memory made her flush with heat, with unresolved emotion. With unfulfilled life.
“Cait. I can’t apologize enough.”
“I don’t want your apologies, Alec.” She felt like crying, but tears never seemed so remote. She turned in her seat to face him even though he wasn’t looking at her. “I want explanations. I want information. I’m a computer programmer, remember? Give me something I can link together with something else. I need to make some kind of sense out of all this.”
What she needed was not to face the painful reality of their shattered beginning. But if they could talk about the mundane, the factual, the nitty-gritty details of how they came to be in this car whizzing through the November predawn, then maybe she could quell the memories of his touch, his taste... the feel of his heart pounding against her chest.
“So do I,” he muttered, making her wonder if he wasn’t thinking along the same lines as she.
“I have a right to know everything. No lies. No half lies. I have a baby in the back seat and I’m... scared to death.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “God, Cait, I’m sor—”
“Don’t apologize, Alec. Just clue me in,” she snapped, then, appalled at the sharp silence in the car, added, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me—”
“I do,” he interrupted. “And you have every right to be upset.”
After a long, breath-steadying moment, she clearly, carefully said, “Don’t patronize me, Alec. Of all things, I don’t deserve that.”
“You’re right. You don’t.” He stared straight ahead for a seemingly endless time.
She read the signs announcing the parkway’s funneling into the beltway and waited until Alec aimed them to the Virginia exit before bringing up the commonplace. “Where are we going?”
His answer wasn’t satisfactory. “I don’t know yet. We have to get off the beltway soon, then ditch the car.”
He said it so casually—ditch the car. He didn’t know how many months she’d juggled her budget to be able to afford the Skylark. He didn’t know how many times she’d driven to the car lot to simply sit in her old battered Ford and covet it. He didn’t know about so much. “Oh, well,” she said, as if resigned to the inevitable.
“It needs a new paint job now. Might as well get rid of it.”
He gave a snort that could have been laughter. She smiled, and was amazed to find she could.
“Was the man who showed up at my house... Jack?... one of your friends?”
“Until this last week, I would have said he’s one of the best men I know.”
“But something changed your mind.”
“Yes.”
“What was that?”
Alec looked as if he were staring into the past, not at the highway. “He knew I was there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I heard him calling my name as we left.”
“As you demolished my garage.”
He smiled and her throat tightened with an ache she couldn’t define. She was coming to terms with the simple fact that they were essentially strangers now, so why should the mere sight of his smile make her heart race and tears sting her eyes?
“You said ‘until last week.’ What happened then? What did you discover, I mean?”
“I came across a document that I was never meant to see. That’s how I found out the terrorists that held us hostage were hired by someone in my own division.”
Cait digested this rancid revelation. Suddenly the fear the quick repartee had masked was revealed again. “Hired to kill you.”
“I think so, yes. At least, that’s what the memo said. Until tonight, I had three names. Suspects, if you want. Now I know it was Jack.”
“Your good friend.”
“My good friend.”
“Alec...?”
He glanced at her. His expression was flat, slightly dull, as if he’d been pushed beyond his endurance and was operating on autopilot.
“Who is he? Jack, I mean. I know he’s FBI and was your friend, but specifically, who is he and why would he want you dead?”
“Jack King,” he said slowly, as if the name burned his tongue. He clicked on the turn signal and edged the car into the left-hand exit lane to Reston, Virginia. “I’ve known him for fifteen years. We’ve taken bullets for each other.”
“You make it sound like you shared a pizza.”
He shot her a look.
She’d deliberately tried to make him smile, to lighten his sense of despair at such a betrayal of fifteen years of friendship. Cait could see that for Alec, knowing his friend was involved was knowing a world of hurt.
Cait sighed with relief when Alec pulled in to one of the huge motel parking lots off Route 7, but her nerves tightened when he told her to stay in the car and wait for him.
“Why?” she asked. “What’s going on now?”
“Not
hing much. Just sit tight.”
“Why?” she repeated.
He flashed her a grin. “We’re stealing a car.”
chapter 8
Saturday, November 10, 5:40 a.m. EST
Cait watched in mild horror as Alec crept behind the parked cars belonging to the motel patrons, who slept unaware in their cozy rooms. He knelt at a dust-covered two-door and, using some apparently magic tool extracted from a pocket, removed the license plates from both front and back of the car. Tucking these under one arm, he prowled among the parked vehicles.
Cait slid down in the front seat of the Skylark, torn between reluctant admiration at Alec’s resourcefulness and the guilt-by-association surety they’d be caught and hauled into jail, a definitively ignominious coda to the night’s activities. While Alec peered in the driver’s windows of several other cars, Cait willed every motel door to stay firmly shut, all lights to remain out.
When Alec hunched over and softly pried open the door of a midsize sedan, Cait understood with blinding clarity that if someone did come barreling out of their motel room door, demanding he cease and desist, she wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of what to do.
She released her breath only when he shut the door again, but her relief was short-lived; he removed the plates of that car, as well. Before rising from his crouch, he installed the stolen plates on the sedan. With the extra set of plates beneath his arm, he raced back to where Cait was waiting and slid behind the wheel of her car.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered sharply.
“Stalling for time,” he said. Too calmly. “We can’t afford to be traced.”
She’d known the trouble was serious, had fled with him in the middle of the night, every instinct a-jangle. But somehow, perhaps still dwelling in that fantasy state she’d lived in for the past two years, she’d falsely assumed that all would be well once they’d abandoned her well-lit house. Her heart beat at a too rapid, too uncomfortable pace, but she didn’t say anything as Alec quietly steered the Skylark to an empty slot in front of a motel room and turned the car off.
Code Name: Daddy Page 8
