“Get Allie and take her to the other car. I’ll be right with you.”
“I’m doing no such thing,” Cait said. “You’re planning to steal that car and—”
Alec’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, scaring her every bit as much as he’d intended. The man with the chuckle, the acquaintance with the well-remembered smile disappeared. In his place was a determined professional agent.
“Stealing is the very least of our worries right now. Get Allie and strap her in the back seat of the car.”
Cait wanted to argue, to whip herself—and him—into that place where anger could take precedence over fear, pain and memories, but she couldn’t because he was right. Theft was a mere bagatelle to murder. Her murder.
She opened her mouth to explain, needing to say she was sorry for acting so foolish, but he’d already released her and slipped from the car. Her knees shaking and her hands trembling, she did as he asked, carrying her sleeping daughter in her car seat across the pavement to the car he’d selected for them.
The black-with-a-teal-pinstripe older model sedan was a luxury car with every convenience, including, no doubt, climate control. And the owners had kept it immaculately clean. Her own back seat was littered with bits of cookie, scraps of torn paper and a small collection of abandoned toys, though she’d only been making payments on the vehicle for four months.
She silently vowed to the unknown owners not to damage the car as she strapped the runners of Allie’s car seat into place. Once that was done, she quickly and quietly locked and shut the back door before slipping into the front seat to wait for Alec.
In the back seat, Allie sucked in her cheeks and gave a soft mew] that made Cait whirl around to check her— shush her—irrationally afraid the owners of the car might hear this faint baby sound—but Allie quickly settled back into that boneless sleep of the very young.
Alec joined them seconds later, nearly making Cait scream when the interior lights of the car flashed on. A sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead, not from exertion, she thought, but more likely from anxiety and from exposure to the cold predawn air.
He reached for the keys in the ignition and Cait suddenly understood what Alec had been looking for in his window peeking: a car that some owner had carelessly left for them to steal. And the plate switching was to add to the confusion sure to abound when the owner discovered the car missing.
Cait waited for the owners of the car to fly out of the motel. But no lights came on, no one in a robe and slippers screamed at them to stop. They exited the parking lot and took off down the Lee Highway in the direction of Vienna, Reston, Sterling, or historical towns beyond, places Cait couldn’t even begin to name right then.
She didn’t care where they were going this time; she was too busy feeling relieved they were in a different car. No one would be searching for them in a black sedan with Virginia plates.
She glanced in the back seat at her sleeping daughter. As confusingly in tune with her thoughts as ever, Alec asked, “She’s still asleep?”
“Out cold,” Cait replied, turning back around.
They drove in silence for several minutes, then Alec cleared his throat. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t respond at first. There wasn’t any answer but a lie to give him. High-speed chases, guns, people popping back from the grave, stealing cars, those things didn’t mix with mortgage payments, diaper bags and cutting teeth. The latter had been the sum total of her past couple of years. The fact that she designed software about the former seemed totally irrelevant.
“Not even close,” she answered truthfully, then gave him a measure of reassurance. “But I do feel better in this car. Thanks.”
He grinned, but refrained from uttering a deadly I-told-you-so. “No one was following us, and I didn’t see anybody link up, so I think we’re all right for the time being.”
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We hole up somewhere.”
“Do you have a plan?”
He flicked her a glance. “Yeah. Not the best, maybe, but a plan.”
“Well?”
A flush stained his cheeks. “It doesn’t sound like much. Yet. I want to go public with what I’ve found. Once the press gets wind of this, really gets involved, our chances go up.”
“Then shouldn’t we go to the authorities?”
“The FBI is pretty high on the authority food chain,” he said. “We go to the police, and the FBI will be called in. While I’m busy explaining what I’m doing alive, Jack’ll be escorting you into a car. No dice.”
“So we call the newspapers.”
“And television. I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d be trying to get on the news.”
“We just phone them up?”
“And leak pieces of the documents I found.”
“Connecting this Jack to the incident two years ago.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
Cait stared at him. “Is that one of those ‘Don’t worry your pretty head about that, little lady’ cracks?”
He glanced at her, a crooked, rather sad smile on his lips. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.
“Then you meant you don’t know what’ll happen. You could still be in danger.”
“But you and Allie will be safe.”
His inclusion of Allie, his completely natural way of saying his daughter’s name, brought tears to Cait’s eyes.
“Cait...?”
“Mmm?”
“Did you really cry for months and months?”
His question sliced cleanly through her heart. Her hands curled into fists in her lap. He couldn’t really expect her to talk about something so emotional while they were driving about in a stolen car, with people trying to trace their whereabouts so they could kill them. At the same time, she knew she couldn’t lie to him.
“Is the daytime sky blue?” she asked. And surprising herself, she smiled, however much it felt bittersweet.
He shot her a quick look. He wasn’t smiling at all. “Most of the time,” he said slowly.
“Well, there you go.”
What she’d intended as a light dodge of his question hung between them, solid, flat, concrete evidence of pain. For she had cried. But with the words out, she now felt she didn’t know if she’d cried for the loss of Alec or the toss of the dream they’d created in those three days.
Alec lifted his hand from the wheel of the car and gestured, but didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he said, “I didn’t know. I wish I’d been there for you.”
“Me, too.”
“Is it too late for us, Cait?”
She wanted to cry. “I can’t answer that, Alec. Maybe because it’s too unreal right now. Too soon, maybe.”
She sluiced sideways, facing him, needing to see his face, as if by reading his expression she could plumb his thoughts. “What happened to you? What really happened, I mean?”
“One of the bullets nicked a main artery. Luckily for me, it lodged there, acting like a finger in the dike.”
“You were shot three times.”
“Another shattered my collarbone.” He touched the base of his Adam’s apple, unconsciously letting Cait know how very close he’d come to never being able to tell this story, how closely the lie had come to proving true. “The doctors tell me a third ripped the living daylights out of my right shoulder ligament. Plus there was the little matter of a skull fracture from Vandever’s multiple gun-butt-to-the-head tricks.”
She thought about the twenty-one-gun salute at his funeral, the one that made her jump as she stood alongside seeming thousands of armed police. Why hadn’t she been able to feel his continued existence? Something in her should have known.
So many lies. So many damaging, hurtful lies. “And you—?” he asked.
“I lived,” she said.
He gave the ghost of a smile. “I know that now. But..
. I heard you screaming, then the two shots...then nothing.”
Cait could hear in his rough tone and see by the telltale muscle in his jaw how terribly her screams, the gunshots, had impacted on him, probably as much as seeing the bullets striking him had done to her. She studied his grim face, could tell he’d relived that day every bit as much as she had. Oddly, the realization that he’d been marred by that day steadied her somewhat.
Cait had told no one what she knew about that morning. She’d clung to the “unconscious” story with such tenacity she’d almost come to believe it herself. But Alec wasn’t some faceless Senate subcommittee flunky taking a deposition. Nor was he an irritating television reporter. He was the father of her child.
“After they shot you,” she told him, “they dragged me out of the room. I was screaming and kicking, trying to break free, to get back to you.”
Alec’s jaw flexed once, and he brought the car back into the left lane with a white-knuckled hand.
“I was terrified and mad at the same time, do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“They were arguing with each other, but I didn’t hear what about. Then the weirdest thing happened. The man holding me held his gun up in the air and fired it twice. Almost right in my ear. That was why I stopped screaming, Alec.”
Alec swallowed heavily, then nodded.
“He told the others to think for a second. That the FBI was right outside. Then the man that shot you said, ‘We were set up.’ The little guy—the one who took us to the bathroom?—he put his gun on the floor and said, ‘This wasn’t part of the plan. I’m not dying for this shit.’”
“And the other one was still holding you?”
“Yes.”
“Is he the one who knocked you out?”
“I was never unconscious, Alec.”
“What!”
“He pushed me to the floor against a wall and told me if I knew what was good for me, I’d play dead. And if I didn’t get killed, act like I knew nothing.”
“But you saw everything, didn’t you, Cait?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Cait’s hands were clenched so tightly in her lap that she couldn’t feel them. “The four who had held us hostage put down their guns and stepped away from them. They had their hands up. The front doors burst open and the SWAT team, or whatever it was, ran into the room. A man in a suit followed them. I had my eyes mostly closed and was trying very hard to look like I’d been knocked out or had fainted.”
Alec gave her a look that conveyed admiration, but his face was pale and his lips were grimly held together.
“Then the man in the suit told one of the SWAT team guys to look for you. One of them came over to me and felt for my pulse. ‘She’s alive,’ he said. ‘But pulse rate is thready.’ I swear to God I almost giggled. Sometimes I have nightmares that I did.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t.”
“I know. Anyway, the guy moved away from me and after a little while I risked opening my eyes a bit. And when the one who went to find you let out a shout, some of the others ran out to join him. I thought they were going to bring out your dead body. I was almost sick. Then the man in the suit ordered the terrorists killed.”
“Just like that? And the men obeyed him?”
“Yes.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Then they fired a few rounds from the terrorists’ guns and put them in their hands or near their bodies. Then somebody carried you out in a body bag.”
“Cait, do you realize what you’re saying?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do”
“And you’ve been living with this all this time.”
“I was there, Alec. I saw it.”
“That terrorist did you one hell of a favor, telling you to play dead.”
“The biggest. But I’ve never understood why.”
“You weren’t part of the original plan. Maybe he thought he’d still manage to walk out of there if he had a living witness. Who knows? We might never find out why.”
After a few seconds’ pause, he said, “It doesn’t make sense.”
She stared at him as if he’d just spoken in Japanese. “None of any of this makes sense!”
Alec was frowning. “But logic still has a place—”
“Logic?” she interrupted, grateful to feel anger, for anger burned away all fear, lent strength and could mask her confusion about Alec. “It doesn’t make sense that I thought you were dead. It doesn’t make sense that the FBI would stage such an elaborate funeral and lie to the whole country! It doesn’t make sense that somebody would tell you I died!”
“Or that I wouldn’t know you’d gotten pregnant.”
“Oh, now there, you’re wrong. That makes perfect sense. That’s probably the only thing that does. You thought I was dead. Most dead women I’ve heard about don’t usually spend nine months gestating in their coffins!”
Cait hadn’t realized she’d raised her voice until Alec snorted. She sank back against the passenger seat, shocked at her outburst.
Alec’s low, rumbling and utterly infectious chuckle brought her back in a hurry. “I haven’t heard about that many, either,” he said, grinning broadly.
He’d done that with her two years ago, pushed every button to help her defy fear. But it wasn’t working now. She didn’t have just herself to worry about; she had Allie. Denial, grasping alternative realities to avoid a situation, even simple delusions were only truly possible when one could be selfish, and the moment Allie had arrived in the world, selfishness had been tossed out the proverbial window.
Nonetheless, humor served as a mask to fear and could work to defuse the tension between her and Alec. As long as it didn’t spark the chemistry that seemed to crackle between them, it would be a worthwhile tool to employ.
“Besides,” she said, forcing her tone to a light banter, “you make it sound like a disease. Gotten pregnant. In fact, the whole way of speaking about pregnancy makes it sound like something you catch.”
But Alec wasn’t led away from his subject, nor did he smile as he said, “I can’t believe, though, that I didn’t somehow feel I was a father.”
This was uncannily like her own reaction to his living, and allowed her to see both sentiments for what they were: a sense of misplaced guilt at not having somehow magically “known” the other was kicking about somewhere in the world.
“I’m still blown away,” he said.
“At least this time it’s only figuratively.”
He chuckled. She found she’d said the words just to hear that lovely rich rumble. It took her back and at the same time gave her some material for a possible bridge to the present. But as she’d feared, the sound of his laugh made her long to touch him, ache to lay her head against his chest and feel that low growl vibrate against her cheek.
“Cait?”
She made some sound, turning her face away from him so he wouldn’t see her rising blush, her raw vulnerability. This night held too many dangerous twists and turns, and wanting Alec MacLaine seemed the most dangerous of all.
“Would we have made it, if we’d been together after the debacle two years ago?”
That question had been her constant companion for two years. When she rocked Allie back to sleep in the middle of the night, she’d found herself snared by it. When driving to her Metro stop, it would sneak into the car and plague her.
Would we have made it, if... ?
The question held beautiful answers only as long as he hadn’t been alive to contradict them. He sat beside her now, asking the one question he should never have had to ask. To Cait, in the uncertainty of the dawn’s activities, in light of his very presence, there was only one answer possible.
“We did survive it, Alec. We’re alive. We’re driving a sleeping baby across state lines in a stolen car, but we both made it out of that closet alive.”
“So, where do we go from here?”
Cait didn’t know if they w
ere good words or not, but at the moment he spoke them, the first rays of morning light poked over the horizon. She knew exactly what he meant, but she couldn’t address the future, their future, because in her heart she knew that addressing a future meant giving up the fantasies she’d so carefully nurtured.
She deliberately chose to act as if she misunderstood. “You’re driving the stolen car, sweetheart. That decision is entirely yours.”
“You’re an accessory,” he quipped back.
“You make me sound like a purse or a pair of shoes.”
“You don’t look it.”
If he’d been looking at her, the words might have stolen her breath; as it was, she could maintain her light, masking badinage. “I guess they would have a hard time prosecuting you,” she said.
He chuckled again. “There’s some truth to that.”
She found she was grateful that he so easily followed her thinking. She half grinned. “I can see the headlines. Dead Man Steals Salesman’s Car.”
Alec actually laughed out loud. Cait choked back her own gurgle of hysterical response. For a moment she wondered how she could laugh at such a time, then reflected that it was small wonder that she hadn’t succumbed to gales of laughter before. Fear could override all other emotions, but it couldn’t be sustained for too terribly long by anyone even moderately healthy. Anger had helped, it had overridden the sharper, deadlier elements. But humor... humor was the gift of the gods.
Whether whistling in the dark or cracking punchy jokes in the dawn light, they were gracefully shrinking the night’s fears to a more manageable size. Like the sharp, biting comments in the Skylark earlier, this humor was a bridge between them, an olive branch and a safety net at the same time. It had been this way between them two years ago.
And at that time, the brief bursts of humor and sharp retorts had turned to passion. That memory utterly sobered Cait.
As if reading her thoughts, Alec suggested they pull in to a motel in Sterling, a town only a few miles up the road. Cait pressed against the door, staring out at the frost-covered dawn countryside, not seeing a single white weed stalk or the crystalline bare oaks. All she could see was a paint-spattered drop cloth spread over a king-size bed in a Sterling motel room.
Code Name: Daddy Page 9
