Married To A Stranger

by Connie Bennett

  “You’ve no idea.”

  “When this is all over, will I still have a career?”

  Vernandas waffled his hand in the air. “Who can say? A great deal depends on whether or not the Raven succeeds in his attempt to assassinate the President— and whether you can disprove any involvement naturally. I take it you haven’t had any luck with your memory.”

  “Nothing worth writing home about.”

  “That’s a shame.” Vernandas bent and unsnapped the locks on his briefcase. “I’ve brought you something Jake asked for. He thought this might stir up some memories of your parents. It comes from your Paris apartment.”

  He handed her a thick photograph album, snapped his briefcase closed and started moving toward the door. Jenn moved with him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Save your gratitude for Jake,” Vernandas advised her. “If he’d had his way, you’d have been given that album weeks ago while you were still in the hospital.” He stopped at the door and turned to Jenn, irritation showing clearly on his face. “You know, Jennifer, if the Raven’s assassination threat turns out to be genuine, and God forbid, he succeeds in even getting close to killing the President, you’re not the only one who’s going to be in hot water. When Jake made the decision to deviate from my plan for this operation, he did so knowing he was risking his career. By putting your protection ahead of the interests of national security, he may very well have traded your life for the President’s, and believe me, if the President dies, neither one of you will walk away from this scot-free!”

  He opened the door. “Have a nice day, Ms. Lambert.” He walked out and closed the door firmly behind him.

  Jenn just stood there a moment, digesting the rebuke. If he thought she needed to be-reminded that she was in big trouble, he was sadly mistaken, but she hadn’t considered any of this from Adam’s point of view. Twenty-four hours ago, she would’ve run after Vernandas and told him how little Adam’s precarious position meant to her. Now she couldn’t do that. For better or worse she was coming to accept that he wasn’t the villain she wanted to believe he was.

  Of course, accepting that meant more of the walls she’d erected to protect her tangled emotions would come tumbling down, and she was in no shape this morning to inspect the remaining walls too closely. Instead, she started for the balcony, flipping open the cover of the photo album as she moved.

  The first picture nearly knocked her to her knees.

  It was her parent’s wedding photograph—her beautiful mother in a white satin gown was smiling up at her father. They looked so happy, so in love, so alive, that it brought tears to Jenn’s eyes. She sank to the floor and sat cross-legged, studying every familiar detail of the picture. She flipped to another page and saw a studio portrait of her parents, but in this one her father was smiling lovingly at the swaddled-in-pink baby in his arms.

  Another page, and a picture of her mother laughing at the antics of a toddler who’d stuck her hands in her birthday cake…then Jenn at age seven dressed in black jodhpurs and a red velvet coat, mounted on Toby…Jenn at eleven learning to shoot…Jenn posing with her parents and the first trophy she’d ever won…

  Jenn turned page after page, absorbing her life—not just the static images of it, but the full, ripe, rich memories that were all she had left of her parents. They came at her so fast that the emotions they evoked overwhelmed her, but by the time she reached the last page she remembered being Jenn Lambert. She remembered the excitement of waiting for her parents to pick her up from the Wharton School for Girls so that they could spend Christmas vacation together; she remembered the hideous pain she’d felt when the somber headmistress had told her that her parents’ plane had crashed with no survivors.

  She remembered feeling numb as she’d watched television footage of the investigation into the cause of the crash; how she’d felt when she learned that terrorists were the cause of her pain…Jenn remembered everything, right up to the moment she’d made the decision to do something about the rage that had festered in her during the years after the bombing.

  There were no more pictures to solidify her memories, but she remembered flashes of other things, too-grueling physical training in guerrilla warfare, linguistics lessons, survival skills, martial arts, weapons proficiency—everything the Agency had made her learn so that she could hunt down the monsters who had murdered her parents. She even remembered her moment of vindication when the terrorist who’d planned the bombing had been executed.

  The only thing that didn’t accompany the flood of memories was a sense of completion. She had sought revenge; she had gotten revenge. Justice had been done. But it hadn’t brought her parents back. It hadn’t filled the emptiness. It hadn’t reduced the burning need to do more, so she’d kept going, believing that surely more revenge, more justice would eventually fill the void and make her whole.

  It hadn’t happened that way, though. Despite the huge gaps remaining in her memory, Jenn knew the void had still been there the day she lost her memory—and it had certainly been there the day she’d awakened in the hospital. In fact, the only time she couldn’t remember feeling that awful, inescapable black hole of loneliness was when she’d allowed herself to trust Jake Carmichael; when she’d let him in, and found herself falling in love.

  No matter what Jake’s motives had been, he’d given Jenn something precious, something…

  Motives.

  The word hit Jenn like a ton of bricks. More memories came flooding back, too quickly to absorb all at once. She remembered the colors and the smells of the bazaar in Al’Khatar. She remembered a man brushing past her, nearly dislodging the veil of her habbiah as he hurried out of Majhid Al’Enaza’s shop.

  Jenn remembered entering the shop and seeing Majhid on the floor, blood pooling around him, then, exactly as she’d seen it in her dream, she saw herself kneeling beside Majhid, believing he was dead, but then finding a weak pulse. When his eyes had opened, they were glassy and he had known he was dying, but he used his last ounce of strength to remove one of the scarab rings from a chubby finger and press it into Jenn’s hands. He murmured some words…

  “Damn it!” Jenn exclaimed, coming to her feet. She still couldn’t remember the words! Majhid had spoken to her in Arabic, his voice broken, the sounds garbled. Jenn knew that even at the time she’d heard them she hadn’t really understood what he was trying to tell her, but now she couldn’t remember the words at all.

  But she could remember the face. Not Majhid’s, but the face of the man who’d arrogantly brushed her aside as he’d left the shop. The face of the man who had killed Majhid Al’Enaza. The face of the Raven:

  Jenn almost laughed at the irony, when she remembered how she’d felt at the time—as though she’d never forget that face. But she had forgotten it, though not until after she’d left Majhid’s shop and began searching for him in the bazaar; not until after she’d found him and trailed him to a small house in the heart of Al’Khatar just off the marketplace.

  What followed had been three grueling days without sleep, keeping the Raven under surveillance, not daring to let him out of her sight even long enough to make contact with her station chief. She still didn’t remember how she’d gotten from Turuq to Charleston, but at least she knew now that she wasn’t a traitor and that she hadn’t killed Majhid Al’Enaza. More importantly, she had a clear memory of the Raven’s face. If she ever saw him again…

  “Oh, my God,” she murmured. She had seen him! And recently, here at Bride’s Bay.

  But where? When? She’d done nothing but study faces for the past four days. Had he been in the crowd on the golf course yesterday? At the reception? In the dining room? On the beach?

  What had he been wearing? Something blue? she thought.

  No, it was his eyes that were blue now; not brown, the way they’d been in Turuq. But he’d been wearing brown…or tan…or…

  “Think, Jennifer! Think!” she exclaimed, pacing furiously as she tried to put all the pieces t
ogether.

  Brown or tan…or khaki. Like the uniforms worn by all of the resort’s housekeeping and maintenance staff.

  The Raven was working at the hotel!

  Jenn dashed to the computer on the balcony. In less than a minute she had the employee file up and running. She confined the parameters of her search to men only in the two departments that wore khaki uniforms, and she started scrolling quickly, viewing one face after another until she found the one she needed.

  “Yes!” she shouted as she ran through the sitting room, pausing only long enough to snatch her purse from the table by the door. “I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN JENN BURST through the door of the Secret Service command post, every agent in the room jumped to his feet and three of them pulled out their guns.

  Jenn paid no attention. “Where’s Jake Carmichael?”

  One of the agents moved toward her. “Mrs. Hope-well, if you’d kindly—”

  “Jake Carmichael! Where is he? Or Adam Hope-well!” she said, reverting to the name they knew him by. “Where is he? Where’s Dan Luther?”

  “They’re not here,” the agent told her. “And I’m going to have to ask you to leave right now.”

  “But I know who the Raven is!” Jenn insisted, yanking away from him when he tried to take her by the arm to escort her out the door. “He’s working downstairs in the laundry!”

  The agent grabbed her arm more forcefully this time. “Please, Mrs. Hopewell. Return to your room and I’ll have Agent Luther come talk to you as soon—”

  “I am not returning to my room, and I’m not waiting on anyone!” Jenn said hotly. The agent tried to maneuver her toward the door, but he seriously underestimated her determination—and her skills. It was more instinct than planning that had Jenn jabbing the agent in the stomach with her elbow and reversing their positions so that in the blink of an eye she had his arm twisted behind him and his throat in a choke-hold.

  The reaction of his confederates was swift and certain. Ten guns came up this time, cocked and ready to fire. Jenn immediately released the agent, and two more closed in and grabbed her.

  “Damn it, why won’t you listen to me? Get Luther up here! Didn’t you hear the briefing? Don’t you know about the Raven? He’s here! I’ve seen him!”

  “What the hell is going on?” Tom Graves demanded as he hurried into the room. He’d seen Jenn Lambert running down the corridor on his monitor and figured something important was up. He certainly hadn’t expected to find weapons drawn, Jenn being forcibly subdued, or one agent massaging his throat and another one reaching for a pair of handcuffs.

  “Tom, make them let me go,” Jenn begged him. “I remembered the Raven! He’s here. He’s an employee!”

  “That’s impossible,” Tom said. “All of our employees have been thoroughly screened.”

  “Even the new ones like Karl Olander?”

  Tom looked at her in disbelief. Maybe the Secret Service agents had good reason to be holding on to her, after all. “Are you suggesting that Karl Olander is the Raven?”

  “Yes!”

  He shook his head. “Not possible. Olander applied for a job here three months ago. His background was thoroughly—”

  “So what?” Jenn exclaimed. “Do you think the Raven started planning this operation yesterday? He’s had months to establish a credible identity here in the U.S.!”

  Tom’s certainty began to waver just a bit. “But the man he replaced had a stroke,” he said, realizing that his argument was ridiculous even as he said it. There were any number of difficult-to-detect poisons that could cause a heart attack or a stroke like the one fifty-nine-year-old Roger Blaknee had suffered.

  Jenn didn’t bother making the same argument Tom had just thought of. “Look, can we argue about how he accomplished this later? Find Olander now! Take him into custody. Put him in handcuffs and then start asking questions! Just get him up here before he goes after the President!”

  Tom looked at the agent who was still rubbing his throat. “She’s right. We’ve got nothing to lose by interrogating Olander. And if he’s the Raven, he may not want to come quietly.”

  The agent nodded and moved to the nearest phone. “I’ll track down Luther and mobilize Tac Team Three.” He pointed at the two agents who were holding Jenn. “You can release her, but don’t let her out of your sight.”

  Jenn breathed a sigh of relief when the agents let her go. Tom Graves ushered her to an out-of-the-way spot where they could watch and listen as Agent Pettigrew ordered a tactical strike force to move downstairs and take Karl Olander into custody as quickly and quietly as possible.

  They waited nervously as the team moved into position, reporting their progress at every juncture. Jenn couldn’t have said whether two minutes or twenty passed as she listened anxiously to Tac Team Three deploying their men around the laundry room, but they had just sent men inside when Dan Luther finally came into the command post with Jake Carmichael and Anthony Vernandas right behind.

  Luther and Vernandas went immediately to the command console and Jake made a beeline for Jenn. “What’s going on? What are you doing here? Luther got a call saying someone had spotted the Raven.”

  Jenn nodded. “I did. Last Saturday as I was coming out of the clubhouse. He stepped right in front of me and I ran into him. I guess he wanted to see if I recognized him.”

  It took a second for that to sink in. “You remembered him? Your memory is back?” Adam asked, excitement catching fire in his eyes.

  Jenn nodded. “Some of it. Vernandas brought me a photo album you had sent over from my apartment in Paris. My brain feels a little like Swiss cheese right now, but things are coming back—”

  She was interrupted by Luther, who was shouting into his transmitter microphone. “Then spread out and find him! Mobilize now! And get that supervisor up here immediately! I want to talk to him.”

  “What’s going on?” Adam asked him.

  The room was in chaos and the laser printer near the door was already spitting out reprints of Olander’s employee photograph. “Olander wasn’t in the laundry,” Luther explained. “No one has seen him since he finished distributing linens to the housekeeping stations in this part of the hotel and then refurbished his carts to do the same in the south wing.”

  “When was that?”

  “About forty minutes ago.”

  Jenn looked at Adam. “Isn’t that about when the President left for the clubhouse?”

  It was Luther who answered, “Pretty close. Yes.” He shook his head. “Jeez,” he muttered, reaching for his microphone again so that he could call the team of agents who were watching the President tee off. “Tac One, this is Command. Tighten the perimeter around the President! Repeat, tighten the perimeter! We have a missing employee who may be the assassin known as the Raven. I’ll have photographs of him down to you in five minutes, but be on the lookout for…”

  Jenn listened in astonishment as Luther rattled off a description of Olander. “You’re not going to bring the President in?” she asked incredulously as soon as he signed off.

  “Not until we have a better idea what’s going on. Tac One will close in on the President very subtly. The size of his escort will double so quietly that no one will notice—not even the President.”

  Jenn shook her head. “This is nuts. I can’t just stand here. I’ve got to do something.”

  Luther fixed her with his most intimidating glare. “You stay out of this,” he commanded, then transferred his glare to Jake. “And that goes for you, too. This is our job, and we do it very well.”

  “But the Raven is out there somewhere. He’s going after the President now! It’s happening even as we speak,” Jenn argued hotly, totally unintimidated. “I’m not going to stand here and do nothing!”

  “What do you think you can do that seventy-five Secret Service agents, four fully manned Coast Guard cutters, and three missile-loaded air force Huey helicopters can’t do?” Luthe
r asked.

  “I can work the crowd again,” she snapped right back at him. “The Raven may have put on another disguise that would make it difficult—even impossible—for your men to recognize him.”

  Luther lost a little of his self-righteous steam. “But you think you could?”

  “Yes! I’ve seen him disguised as an Arab merchant and a Swedish laundry man. I’ve got a better chance of recognizing him than anyone else. I’m not staying here!” She looked at the man beside her for support. “Jake?”

  “She’s right, Luther.” Adam grabbed her hand and started for the door. “Come on, let’s go. We’ll work the crowd together,” he said, snatching a handful of copies of Olander’s face off the printer as they passed it.

  “Carmichael!”

  Adam stopped and turned to Anthony Vernandas, who tossed him a radio receiver that had been lying on the console. “Keep your head down and stay tuned to what’s happening up here. Both of you.”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks.”

  Jenn and Adam dashed downstairs, where very tense resort-staff members were trying to pretend everything was normal when they knew otherwise. With the help of Shad Teach, Adam commandeered one of the resort’s Land Rovers and totally ignored the island’s thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit as they headed toward the clubhouse with Adam firing question after question at Jenn about what she remembered and what she didn’t.

  “Public telephones are scarcer than hen’s teeth in Turuq, Jake,” she said in answer to one particularly thorny question about why she hadn’t checked in. “I couldn’t abandon my surveillance just to go find one once I’d tracked the Raven to the house. As it was, I almost lost him early the next morning when a car came for him. He had two suitcases with him and he was wearing a business suit, so I took my best guess and hurried to the airport.

  “Fortunately he was there,” she went on. “But by then, the women who saw me in Majhid’s shop had given my description to the police and I was afraid it was only a matter of time before they identified me. I did what I could to alter my appearance, switched to one of my backup IDs, and when I was sure I knew what plane the Raven was boarding, I bought a ticket under the name Madeline Hopewell. I spent the next forty-eight hours sleeping on airplanes and staying as close to the Raven as I dared without giving myself away.”