by Gabby Grant
“Then why?” she asked, forcing the question from her swelling throat. “Why, Joe?”
He slipped his arms around her lower back and pulled her to him, as memory, sight and sound fled to Costa Negra- and the purposeful pounding of Pacific waves.
“Why haven’t you gone on?” Ana asked, as he steadied his embrace and looked deep in her eyes, his eyes mirroring her question. “Or, have you...?”
Wind rustled outside, recalling the reckless rhythm of the sea, the spiraling magic of a tropical moon...
“I could never go on, Ana,” Joe said, his voice a coarse whisper. “Never forget you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Ana felt her world flash hot and her knees grow weak as his breath drew nearer.
“Ana,” Joe said, sliding one hand into her hair, inclining his head in toward hers, “you’re not the sort of woman a man easily forgets.”
No, but what sort of woman was she? Ana wondered, dizzied by the wine and the white-hot flash of his impending flesh. An idiot? A cheat? Someone to whom sacred vows meant nothing?
“Joe,” she said, her lower lip trembling, “we can’t...”
But then the warmth of his mouth closed in, reminding her not only that they could, but that they had- and would again.
Ana felt herself falling backwards off a cliff- to a forgotten place and time, as approaching lips magnetized...his bristling moustache tickled and teased, recalling other unspeakable pleasures.
He kissed her chastely at first, beckoning each bittersweet memory with the increasing pressure of his lips.
Ana made a half-hearted attempt to pull away but, sensing her ambiguity, Joe clamped her to him, deepening his kiss with the fervent forgotten passion of all their yesterdays.
Flames licked the curve of her spine where Joe’s fingers traced and followed, working their way over her shoulders and back up into her hair, his heat and his hunger apparent in the rock hard press of his body.
And Ana’s body remembered and responded in kind, molding itself to his steady frame, wild, wet kisses flaring from her lips. Lips that sizzled and tingled and burned like a pine forest ablaze as his firm commanding mouth moved in again and again, trailing hot tickling kisses from her lips, to her neck, to her earlobes...then back again to her mouth, where her breath baited and begged.
Hands traveled and caressed, each crying out, both searching. They were lost, lost to each other. Lost to a moment so great that past and present fused in one scorching hue and there was nothing left but melting flesh between them...
Until, Ana stepped outside herself and saw, with a terror, what she was doing.
A gush of winter wind rocketed against the building, sending the small windows of the cabin rattling in their casings.
“No!” Ana said, breaking free of his ravaging lips and pressing back on his shoulders. What had happened to her? Was she really in such a state that Mark meant nothing? That everything he had done- that the two of them had shared and sacrificed for each other- could be swept away in one reckless embrace?
Joe dropped his arms to her waist, dumbfounded. Or maybe horrified more aptly described the look on his face, as his color plummeted and his eyes went hazy brown.
“Oh God, Ana I never meant-”
Ana bit into her lip, feeling her own eyes sting, catching herself on a truth much too terrible to bear. She’d almost slipped over. Right over the edge- with Joe...
“Oh God,” Joe repeated, flushed. “God, god...”
“You’d better the hell be praying for redemption, McFadden!” Mark shouted from the doorway. “Because you’re about to meet your maker!”
Joe released Ana just as Mark lunged in his direction.
“You sick bastard!” Mark screeched, flying across the room and flipping McFadden against the counter.
“Hey!” Joe gasped, deflecting Mark’s fists with upheld hands.
Ana looked frantically toward the crying baby in the doorway and saw it was Isabel, cradled to the chest of a tall blonde with short wavy hair.
“Asshole!” Mark shouted, slamming McFadden’s frame across the room and ramming it into the sofa after the two tumbled over an end table, spilling and shattering a ginger jar lamp.
Isabel wailed and Ana raced to her.
“Here,” the woman said, handing over the distraught baby. “Go to Mama, Isabel.”
Ana pulled Isa to her, as furniture crashed and curses rumbled in the center of the room.
“My God, if you’ll just listen-” Joe wailed between pummels.
“Listen?” Mark scoffed, grabbing McFadden by the skin at the scruff of his neck.
Joe grimaced and Carolyn ran toward them.
“I oughta take that sorry tongue of yours and cram it down your throat!”
“Sir!” Carolyn said, trying to press between them. But with Mark pinning McFadden to the floor, it was impossible.
Though Joe had taken a bruising, he hadn’t returned one punch and now was paying the price in what appeared a near loss of consciousness.
“For God’s sake!” Ana said, rushing over and holding the baby up out of the fray. “Mark!”
But Mark was intent on McFadden. So intent that it scared the life out of Ana. “Mark!”
“Da-da,” Isabel chortled.
Mark blinked hard and swung his head around the room, looking first to Isabel, then Ana, then the woman who’d come with him. “Christ,” he said, dropping Joe onto the carpet like a hot potato. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Mark stood on shaky knees and wiped off his jeans.
Then a bullet cut the air.
CHAPTER 23
Joe sat bolt upright and stared at the blonde, taking her face in fully for the first time. “Carolyn?”
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said as another bullet pinged and Ana kicked the door shut with her heel.
“Mr. Smith!” a voice called through a bull horn, “we know you are in there!”
Joe scrambled to his feet and held his finger to his lips, silencing the others.
Ana cupped her hand over Isabel’s mouth, as the baby threatened to squeal.
Neal, who was nearest the window, pressed his back to the wall, then cautiously tilted his head around and peered out. “Chinese,” he hissed at Joe.
Joe smiled tightly at Carolyn. “Guess I’m in demand.”
“Mr. Smith!” the horn bellowed anew. “Ten seconds. Either you come out or we come in with machine guns firing!”
Joe looked around the room. “Were you followed?” he asked Neal.
“Negative,” Mark answered.
Joe looked to Carolyn for verification, but she didn’t dissent. Carolyn Walker, Jesu Cristo, of all the fricking times. And here he was about to run out on her again.
Joe looked down at his watch and cursed. They’d tracked him, just like that bastard out back. “We’ve got a guest in the boat house,” Joe told Neal.
“What guest?” Ana asked, feeling a slight tremble take hold of her knees.
Mark raised his brow.
“He’ll need a paramedic, just as soon as you can call.”
“Ten!” the bullhorn began.
Ana shot Joe a panicked look and steadied the baby against her.
“Nine!”
There was only one other way out of here but, with Sun-tzu’s men in hot pursuit, they’d never all make it, especially with a baby.
“Eight!”
Joe dug his fist into his jeans and pulled out a key ring. “Here,” he said, tossing the keys at Mark, “back of the cabin. Ana,” he said, “around the back of the lake...”
Ana gripped the baby’s head to her neck for dear life.
“Seven!”
“There’s a path,” Joe continued, just beyond that sprig of pines. Leads to my jeep. As far as they know, I’m here alone.”
Carolyn, who’d been busily searching the back of the cabin, came to him. “There’s no back door.”
“Six!”
“Bedroom window,” Joe mouthed, as car doors popped open an
d footfalls sounded on the path to the house. “Go!”
“You’re pressing my patience, Mr. Smith. Five!”
Mark herded Ana and Isabel into the bedroom and turned for Carolyn, who stood, waiting for Joe.
“Four!”
“Go, dammit. Go!” he told her.
A tear glistened in her eye.
“Three!”
Mark, who’d already helped Ana and the baby out the window, returned and took Carolyn by the elbow. “Major...” he said.
“Two!”
“Sorry about Panama,” Joe mouthed, as Neal pulled her away.
“One!”
“Alright, already!” Joe shouted, throwing back the cabin door. “I know how to count.”
***
Albert Kane dismissed the team and sent them home for the night. As soon as Mark returned, they could tackle this new development. The body in the Orange County morgue had been identified as one Chinese mafia operative Hay Long. He was purported to work in a dark capacity for Chinese intelligence, but irrefutable verification was hard to come by.
Kane was starting to see a pattern, a pattern most definitely based on his own unique plan. Now if he could only decipher who’d gotten hold of it and why. If the Chinese were in on it, then that could possibly implicate Kane’s old buddy Au Yang. But Au Yang had been dead for a couple of years, or at least supposedly out of official operation. Still, even if he were alive, Albert felt sure Tom’s old pal could never become embroiled in such a heinous scheme.
The fact that neither Albert nor Mark had received further specific threats regarding Ana had to mean she was no longer their ace in the hole. For if the enemy still held that card, Albert was certain they would have played it by now. And Mark and Albert would have seen more graphic proof of the terrorists’ displeasure at their noncompliance in resignation than some silly red-herring coat. No, the perpetrators of Volcano would have seen to it Kane and Neal knew the direct consequence of their wavering by providing proof- gruesome and verifiable. After each murderous assault, they’d always sent photographic evidence: sometimes by fax, others as graphic j-peg files attached to blank-bodied e-mails. But always, there’d been irrefutable evidence the terrorists meant to make good on their threats against those who failed to cooperate.
Maria’d been sequestered in confinement at the DIPAC as a temporary measure while Mark weighed whether or not to turn her over to the police. In either case, Mark’s judgement had been to wait until the DOS had the larger problem more under control, before subjecting Maria’s case to the media feeding frenzy that would likely ensue the moment her situation went public and she exercised her civilian rights in obtaining counsel.
Albert wasn’t even convinced Mark would press charges. He had so much on his plate and an unexplained soft spot for the nanny besides. Were the situations reversed, Kane wasn’t so sure he’d exhibit so much leniency, but Mark seemed certain she’d operated out of ignorance and fear, not malice.
But they still had that very important missing link: the identity of the person to whom Maria had been feeding information. If only she’d had a way to tell them or had somehow been able to recall more information, Mark and Albert would be farther along in solving their problem now.
***
Maria sat weeping in the DIPAC isolation unit. She’d never seen Mr. Neal like that. He hadn’t been angry; it had been much worse. The senor had been completely devoid of emotion. It had been as if Maria meant nothing. That all her dedicated service had been washed away in one weak moment.
Okay, it was several. Several weak moments.
Maria dug her fist into her jumper pocket and fingered her rosary.
It was not like she’d done it on purpose, she thought, lightly rubbing the smooth beads. As God was her witness, Maria never would have done anything intentional to hurt little Isabelita.
It was the man, that evil man who’d threatened to hurt her Pepe if she refused to cooperate. More sinister, was his offer to provide funds for Pepe’s medical care if she did. It all seemed so harmless at first. Maria hadn’t known why they’d wanted the information, but it had seemed harmless enough at the time.
Harmless, and yet now she could see where it had led. The baby was in so much danger the authorities wouldn’t even tell Maria where they’d taken her.
Maria withdrew the rosary and pressed it to her tear-stained cheeks, knowing she’d probably never see her Isabelita again. And now Pepe, without the money for his surgery, would leave her as well.
Maria stared at the gray empty walls, thinking their purpose must be to drive her insane. There was nothing here, nada en absoluto, but Maria’s nagging guilt and the big hole in her heart not a soul in the world could fill.
Maria startled and cast her eye to the opposite end of the room as she heard a rattle from beyond the reinforced door. She shifted on the narrow cot and tucked her rosary away, thinking that just maybe her prayers had been answered. That, just maybe, God had sent someone to help her.
But, when the door swung forward and a man entered the room, Maria found herself staring into straight into the eyes of the devil.
***
Baby Isabel was sleeping and the wall of silence between Mark and Ana in the front seat provided the perfect backdrop for Carolyn’s raging thoughts. Joe McFadden. After all this time, a man Carolyn had been virtually certain she’d never see again. Not that she hadn’t hoped to see him, dreamt of seeing him those first several weeks- make that months- after his assignment in Panama City had ended.
He’d been a young Marine Lieutenant, barely out of school, cock-sure and handsome in a devilish way that had turned every woman’s head. The danger was he’d known it, known it and reveled in the fact, Carolyn’d suspected. Joe had never felt about Carolyn the way she’d felt about him.
Carolyn thwarted an uncomfortable burning inside that told her, even after all this time, she still felt it. In that split second realization of who he was in the cabin, an old ghost had resurged within her. That phantom feeling of what she’d had and could have been to Joe, if he’d only let her. But Joe, Carolyn later convinced herself, had never seen the relationship as more than a passing fling. Officer McFadden was not the sort to settle down, raise a family. And the fact that he hadn’t, to this day, only confirmed Carolyn’s earlier suspicions. Though it was technically an abuse of her power, Carolyn had managed to keep unofficial tabs on Joe’s whereabouts these past few years.
Enough time had gone by to temporarily close the wounds when she and one Mark Neal had been assigned to the newly-organized DIPAC. And then, once Mark’s new wife Ana Kane had joined him at the Center, the occasional banter began. A periodic reference, a hinted allusion to a man both Mark and Ana knew, someone who’d helped them accomplish something big in Spain. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to square the picture of the man Mark and Ana described with the Joe McFadden Carolyn had remembered in Panama. And then, when her DOS research revealed he’d gone to work for the Company, everything else fell into place.
Carolyn just never imagined the place where Joe would wind up with Ana would happen to be the very same safe house in which she’d been instructed to guard Mark’s infant daughter Isabel. But it was a small world, she supposed. Particularly where covert operations were concerned.
Carolyn studied the man in the front seat, wondering what was crossing his mind, not sure she wanted to even guess at the sort of conversation he would later engage in with his wife. The wife about whom he’d been worried sick- and whom he’d found in another man’s arms.
And then, there was Joe to be concerned about. Joe who’d sacrificed himself to the Chinese to save the rest of them. But the Joe Carolyn recalled from Panama City was not a selfless man. And, judging by the way he’d appeared ready to take advantage of the situation with Ana, not much had changed. He would never have gone with the Chinese had he believed himself to be in real danger. Or, would he?
Carolyn shifted uneasily in her seat and stared out into the fading light. Eveni
ng was crawling across the mountains, stretching purple-black blankets across darkening vales. Soon, even their peaks would be covered in ebony sheaths and Joe’s all-terrain Jeep would depart these unmarked back roads for the better-known bypass to the city.
Carolyn aimlessly twisted a wavy lock around her finger, hoping she was right. Reversing her prayers of all these years, and besieging the heavens that- despite her earlier wishes-Joe McFadden hadn’t changed. Let him still be the same vain, out-for-his-own-ass Joe, Carolyn begged of her unseen God. For, if he was still all those things, Carolyn could more easily convince herself he wasn’t really in danger.
But if he had changed. Changed in the least from the self-centered, unabashed man Carolyn once knew, then Carolyn prayed sincerely God would help Joe McFadden in the hands of the men who had taken him.
***
Incensed, Tom Mooney looked down at the cowering woman and slammed a fist against the concrete wall. “You still haven’t answered my question, senora.”
“I told you, senor,” Maria began in rapid Spanish, which Tom followed with great ease. “I know nothing. You were the one, the one who requested all the information. I have no idea why!”
Tom knew she was lying and, what’s more, was certain she was a fricking Commie.
“Do you have children, Ms. Gonzales?”
“Por favor, senor, no mis hijos...” she pleaded, ramming her hand in her pocket.
“Where are they?” Tom demanded in a booming voice. “In Cuba?”
Maria’s face crumbled at the memory of her disappeared daughter. At the rumors of renewed revolution in her parent’s homeland. “No, senor,” she told him with a weepy shake of her head.
“But you’re Cuban, yes?” Tom asked her in Spanish.
Maria nodded and sobbed into the hand that clutched a rosary.
“What are you plotting?” Tom demanded grabbing her by the shoulders. “Tell me! Tell me now!”
