Each step across the frost-covered parking lot macadam seemed to underscore his confusion. He wanted to tell Cait he believed they had a chance together and he wanted to hear her answer that she’d be with him forever. He wanted her to nestle in his arms and promise to marry him, be his wife, his love, the mother of his children.
In the sharp, crisp air, he found himself gulping in deep breaths as if he’d been drowning and only just now popped to the surface before going back down again. He’d almost done the unforgivable. He’d almost asked her for a commitment, something he had no right to do, no matter how much her aunt might urge it or his own desire might crave it.
He’d come close to asking earlier that morning, holding her sated, warm body pressed against his, feeling the rightness of their union, feeling at that moment, in the wake of their loving, that a future was sane and possible.
But they were in danger. Desperate, life-threatening danger. Trouble that had begun more than two years ago and that had reportedly claimed both their lives once already waited for them. What kind of a man would seek a commitment from a woman when he couldn’t even promise her something as simple as a tomorrow?
Hell, he couldn’t even truly say he’d given her a past. He’d had to ask her to tell him about his own daughter. Hours was all they had shared, then and now. Mere hours. How could he possibly dream of asking her for a future he couldn’t even define based on a few stolen hours out of a lifetime?
Hours that haunted him still. Haunted her. Because so many things had been left unsaid and undone between them. And those nebulous “things” needed time to unfold.
He couldn’t promise anything, because it could all be snatched from them at a moment’s notice, at the whine of a silencer, the thunder of an unexpected car veering out from a dark alley.
Restless, eager to escape his thoughts and seeking some hope of the danger’s end, he bought a newspaper at the motel’s front desk and flicked through the sections until he found the classifieds. These he snapped open, scanning the Personals column searching for a message from Jack.
About halfway down the third column, nestled between a plea for a single white male of no specific age, appearance or profession but needing to be a Capricorn, and a demand for a freethinking married partner into sadomasochism, he found what he was looking for. He read it through twice before refolding the newspaper and leaving the front office. And if his steps felt no lighter, he at least felt the promise of action finally about to be undertaken.
Cait glanced up at him as he opened the motel room door, letting in a blast of fresh, ice-cold air. Her lovely face, only half hidden by the laptop screen, seemed to have more color than it had had only moments before and her chin was set in a determined oval.
He found he was grateful for her absorption with the computer. He didn’t want to look into her eyes and let her know that the future was already here, that the moment of confrontation was at hand; it was now or never. He shut the door and drove the dead bolt into place. He felt it was a lock on a door within his heart, a lock he’d never wanted back and now couldn’t afford to lose.
“Is the message you were looking for in the paper?” she asked absently. He could have kissed her.
“Yes,” he said, and pulled the classified section free of the paper.
“I suppose it’s in code.”
He smiled, but knew it was forced. “Naturally,” he said. He read the ad aloud. “J.K. seeks willing partner in safe, protected relationship. Big free-for-all. Send immediate response to Box 1792, Vienna, Virginia. Presents and securities waiting after 10:00 p.m. Tuesday for your reply.”
“Well, either your friend has a twisted sense of humor or there’s a great deal hidden in that message,” Cait said, peering at him over the laptop screen. “Translation, please.”
“Jack’s offering me a safe house for you. He’s warning me that at least one of our other friends is still in the picture and is gunning for me. The box number is the address, the word box is the house number—you know, like the alphabet on the telephone—and the 1792 is either Columbus Drive or Ocean. Maybe Blue. It’s in Vienna, at any rate. That shouldn’t be hard to look up.”
“And the presents and securities?” Cait asked, not looking at him now as she typed a few keys and he saw the computer screen flash as the information shifted.
Knowing Cait’s dislike for guns, he hated telling her, but he’d sworn only that afternoon that he wasn’t going anywhere with a lie between them. A thousand other unresolved things, yes, things like dreams, hopes and wishes. But no lies. “Presents means weapons,” he said.
“And securities?” she asked.
“His promise to back me up.”
“His promise,” she repeated.
“That’s all a man can really be judged by,” Alec said slowly. She looked up and met his gaze. “His word.” He didn’t know why he’d laden the words with such meaning; he himself hadn’t made her any promises, hadn’t given his word.
She flushed slightly but didn’t look away. “I see.”
“I hope you do,” he replied, meaning himself, the things he’d said with his touch, his kisses, promises left unspoken.
Cait nodded as if she’d agreed with him about something, then looked back down at the laptop. She scanned the screen before her then flipped to another document.
“This is a man who essentially lied to you,” she said, and typed a series of keys. The computer clinked and made a whirring noise. “He didn’t let you know I was alive or that you had a daughter.” She looked up at him.
“I have to believe he had a good reason,” Alec responded, but staring into her eyes, he honestly couldn’t think of a single one to excuse the magnitude of Jack’s omissions.
“Well,” Cait said, leaning back in the motel’s desk chair and lifting her hands to flex her fingers then cup them behind her head, “I happen to agree with you.” She flashed a brilliant smile at him. “Jack’s not a bad guy. And I can prove it.”
“What?” He felt a shock of adrenaline course through him, both from the smile and the glint of mischief he saw in her eyes. Would she never fail to take the wind out of his sails?
“You said something this afternoon about years of knowing someone having to count for something.”
“Right...”
“He was counting on you believing that when he slipped you that coded message on the news the other day and the one in the paper today, right? I mean, he knew enough about you to know you always watch the news, and if you saw him, you would very likely still trust him.”
Alec nodded. He couldn’t figure out where she was going, but knew instinctively it was worth the tantalizing wait.
He realized she wasn’t doing this researching to alleviate her own fears, but to substantiate his faith in Jack. He felt about two times stronger than he had just seconds before.
“We’ve got plenty of time, then,” she said.
“For what?”
“I’m assuming the time mentioned in the ad means Jack won’t be there until ten, right?”
“Right,” Alec said. “But what —?”
Cait held up her hand, interrupting him. “I’ve almost got it,” she said.
“What are you working on?” he asked, crossing to stand behind her.
“Not yet.”
“At least give me a hint,” he said.
“Munchhausen syndrome,” she muttered. “By proxy.”
“What’s that?”
“Baron Münchhausen was a man who ran around half the world about the time of the French Revolution telling the most outrageous stories. According to him, he single-handedly saved the day in every major battle from France to Africa.”
Cait’s fingers flew across the keyboard and the screen flashed with incomprehensible programming language.
“What does he have to do with the price of eggs?” Alec asked.
“They named a mental disorder after him. Münchhausen syndrome—in superlay terms—is where you have to be the center of
attention in regard to a medical problem, even if you have to poison yourself to get noticed. And then there’s Münchhausen syndrome by proxy.”
“You give someone else attention?” Alec asked, interested despite himself.
“Not quite,” Cait said, still rapidly typing in something. “Almost.” She leaned back in her chair and turned her gamine face all but upside down to look at him. “I got to thinking about this after going through all your information.”
“When?” Alec asked.
She actually had the audacity to tilt her head back to flash him a saucy smile. It landed somewhere beneath the belt. She went back to the screen, leaving him feeling sucker punched.
“I was also thinking about something your friend Jack said during that interview in front of my garage. Scattered among all the lies and cryptograms, I mean.”
“What?” Alec asked, his shoulders stiffening up. “What did he say?”
Cait glanced up at him, literally beaming. How dared she sound so cheerful, look so happy? She was in the gravest danger a person could possibly be. “He said some informed source told the FBI that you might be responsible, in some part, for the tragic incident at the WHO.”
Alec felt the frown on his forehead. “I’m sorry, Cait, I’m not—”
She interrupted him. “Then he said you might be the ‘engineer’ behind the incident.”
Alec felt a wash of goose bumps crawl up his arms. “Oh, my God,” he muttered. “Fred.” He leaned across Cait to view what she’d called up on the screen. Frederick Masters’s personnel records, records he himself had stolen ages ago. “I didn’t even catch it.”
He realized he’d had this information all along but it had taken Cait to glean the message in Jack’s impromptu warning. “Fred Masters holds two degrees from Princeton. One in law, like most of us in the FBI, and the other in engineering. ”
“Okay,” Cait said. “So Jack was trying to tell you Fred was our man. Now look at this.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard and a chart appeared on the screen.
“What’s this?” Alec asked. He’d never seen it before.
“Something I threw together after I found out Fred had that engineering degree,” Cait told him as she thumbed the laptop’s mouse button and sent the cursor streaking to the first gray-and-white column. “These are dates when the FBI was involved in an incident involving White Separatists, Aryan Nation groups, or right-wing cultists.”
“And these?” Alec pointed to a darker gray column with letters neatly cataloged.
“Initials.”
“Initials,” he repeated slowly. And saw them. Jack’s, Fred’s, Jorge’s, even his own. A few others from alternate divisions were included, as well. “These are the FBI agents in charge of the operations?” he asked. At her nod, he pointed to the last column. “And this?”
“Our engineer,” Cait said, leaning back in the chair and smiling broadly. Discounting her smile, Alec found he liked the way she said “our,” as if they were a team. A real team. Maybe the notion of a commitment wasn’t so very farfetched after all.
She said, “If you’ll notice, each time an incident happened, at least one month prior to that incident Fred Masters suffered a sharp reduction of personal funds.”
“How did you do this?” he asked.
“Well, I just seem to have a head for data.”
“If you ever want a job with the FBI...” he said.
She flashed another of her mischievous grins at him. “Well, I do suspect there’s going to be a vacancy there sometime very soon. Of course, with you coming back from the dead—”
He dropped his hands to her shoulders and shook her slightly. Playfully. And was stunned to realize how natural it felt to joke with her, play with her, all the while discussing the man who wanted him dead. Then, like a bolt of lightning, he understood what else she was implying with her quip about a vacancy. She implied a future. And realized he’d done the same. If you ever want a job...
People couldn’t just drift in the dark, uncertain present. It was only human nature to plan, to dream. To hope in the face of insurmountable odds. His hands tightened on her shoulders and he leaned down and pressed his lips against her temple.
She smiled a little and leaned into his kiss. And pressed another key on the laptop keyboard. The screen cleared and a message appeared asking them to wait. “You need to upgrade your memory,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” he said, but he wasn’t talking about the computer. She shot him a glance he couldn’t read at all, but it served to wipe the grin right off his lips.
“What does that Münchhausen syndrome by proxy have to do with Fred Masters?” Alec asked.
“It’s the motive, Alec. I know I’m right. It’s not technically Münchhausen by proxy—I’m just using that as an example of what I think he’s doing, okay? Münchhausen by proxy is an unusual disorder, albeit clinically researched. They’ve found the disorder in the primary or secondary caretaker of a child—usually the mother, and more often than not a mother who is a nurse or is in some way connected with the medical field. The mother actively and purposefully harms her own child. It’s child abuse, of course, but not the usual run-of-the-mill beating or yelling. She might try smothering, or injecting them with something that causes a severe but fairly shortterm reaction—hives, arrested breathing, something like that.”
Alec couldn’t help his involuntary protest.
“I know,” Cait said, and he knew she was thinking about Allie. “But unfortunately, it happens. After the child nearly dies at home, the mother calls an ambulance or in some other dramatic fashion manages to get the child to the hospital where everyone can see the child’s in dire trouble, but even the best doctors can’t come up with a precise diagnosis. The mother’s unswerving devotion, dogmatic persistence and loving, tender care seem to be the only things that save the day and finally, they go home. Only to have the child get sick again. And again.”
Alec thought he understood what it was Cait was leading to, much as it sickened him to acknowledge it. He thought of the many times he’d eaten dinner at the Masters’s home, of Fred’s staunch loyalty to the bureau. And of Fred’s often repeated conviction that something had to be done to wake the country up to the bureau’s importance.
“Fred Masters is like the mother,” Cait said. “The FBI, his child. Don’t you see? I think he’s actually creating incidents around the country, incidents that shock the nation at their violence, their complete lack of respect for peace officers, for human life. And then he quells the riots and the furor and saves the day. He’s like a psychotic fireman who, incidentally, is also the arsonist who started the fire.”
“The motive,” Alec said. And he knew she was right. It fit, and it fit perfectly. “I never would have seen it in a million years,” he said.
Her smile faltered a little. “No, because he was your friend. And you trust your friends, Alec. You don’t look for the bad in your friends.”
“I’m an FBI agent. That’s ninety-nine percent of what we do.”
“But only when you’re searching for bad guys. Here you were looking for dirt on someone you cared about. You don’t have it in you to look for the bad in the people you love.”
He felt as if the world skipped a full beat in its rotation, throwing him off balance. What was she trying to tell him? “Are you giving me a hard time?” he asked, forcing a grin to his lips.
“No,” she said seriously, starkly honest. “Someday I want you to teach Allie how to look at life the way you do.”
He felt as if she’d just given him the softest little push off the tallest peak in the Grand Canyon. He would undoubtedly understand the ramifications of what she had said about the time he hit bottom.
Chapter 15
Tuesday, November 13, 9:45 p.m. EST
The tension in the stolen car seemed to bounce off the windows. Strangely, after all the other unusually anxious moments they’d spent together, this tension wasn’t born of the past but of the future.
Their future.
Alec hadn’t said more than three words since getting in the car. And his stiff silence precluded any conversation from her. Not that Cait had anything to say. She’d not said it all in the motel room in Sterling before they had taken Allie to Aunt Margaret for safekeeping. And she’d not said it yesterday afternoon before loosing the floodgates of Alec’s emotions. And her own.
And she’d managed not to say it all a thousand empty nights before that. All those unspoken words and unrevealed thoughts flayed her now, taunted her for her cowardice.
She felt oddly dissociated, as if part of her wasn’t in this car, but still back in those motet rooms, rooms that had become the only home she and Alec had ever shared, or still further back than that, in that dreadful closet two years ago. She and Alec had faced death together once already in their unusual relationship. They’d both lost and won that time, though the winning had been blackened with lies and pain.
Motel rooms and cars that didn’t belong to them, a closet in a building neither of them had worked in. Two years of mourning. And, aside from passion, the only real thing, the best thing they had in common had been secreted to North Carolina to be with her great-aunt for safekeeping. Everything about their togetherness was wrong, false, based on fear. And yet, when he touched her she could feel the raw honesty in his caresses. And when he kissed her she felt completely whole, as if part of her had been missing until now.
She thought about her conviction that they couldn’t talk about a future because there wasn’t any to talk about. She knew now she’d been dodging the truth. Short of being diagnosed with a terminal illness whose course was already run, everyone had a future. It was only as far away as a dream, as a thought, as a word.
With the single exception of Allie, she’d spent the entire past two years of her life avoiding anything to do with the concept of a future. In some dimly understood manner she’d known if she embraced a future, she’d have to relinquish the past. And letting go of the past meant letting go of her memories of Alec, letting go of the fantasies, the pretty illusions, the dreams.
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