Breaking Point

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Whoa,” Molly said. “Wait. You lost me there.”

  Gina sat up, a mix of earnestness, horror, and amusement on her pretty face. “I didn’t tell you this, but after I first spoke to Lucy’s sister—we were in the shower tent so no one would see us—I let her leave first and then I waited, like, a minute, thinking we shouldn’t be seen leaving the tent together. And before I could go, he came in.”

  He. “Leslie Pollard?” Molly clarified.

  Gina nodded. “I freaked when I saw him coming, and it’s stupid, I know, but I hid. And I should have just waited until I heard the shower go on, but God, maybe he wouldn’t have pulled the curtain, because he obviously thought he was in there alone . . .”

  Molly started to laugh. “Oh my.”

  “Yeah,” Gina said. “Oh my. So I decide to run for it, only he’s not in one of the changing booths, he’s over by the bench, you know?”

  Molly nodded. The bench in the main part of the room.

  “In only his underwear,” Gina finished, with a roll of her eyes. “Oh, my God.”

  “Really?” Molly asked. Apparently Jones was taking his change of identity very seriously. He hated wearing underwear of any kind, but obviously he thought it wouldn’t be in character for Leslie Pollard to go commando. “Boxers or briefs?”

  Gina gave her a look, but she was starting to laugh now, too, thank goodness. “Briefs. Very brief briefs.” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, my God, Molly, he was . . . I think he showers at noon because he knows no one else will be in there, so he can, you know, have an intimate visit with Mr. Hand.”

  Oh, dear.

  “And now I know, and he knows I know, and he also probably thinks I lurk in the men’s shower,” Gina continued. “And the fact that he actually came to tea tonight, instead of hiding from me, in his tent, forever, means . . . something awful, don’t you think? Did I mention he has, like, an incredible body?”

  Molly shook her head. Oh dear. “No.”

  “Yes,” Gina said just a little too grimly, considering the topic. “Who would’ve guessed that underneath those awful shirts he’s a total god? And maybe that’s what’s freaking me out the most.”

  “You mean because . . . you’re attracted to him?” Molly asked.

  “No!” Gina said. “God! Because I’m not. I felt nothing. I’m standing there and he’s . . . You know how I said he reminds me of Hugh Grant?”

  Molly nodded, too relieved to speak.

  “Well, I got the wrong Hugh. This guy is built like Hugh Jackman. And beneath the hats and sunblock and glasses, he’s actually got cheekbones and a jaw line, too. I’m talking total hottie. And, yes, I can definitely appreciate that on one level, but . . .” She glanced over at the desk, at her digital camera. She’d gotten it out of her trunk earlier today.

  Which, Molly had learned, meant that she’d spent some time this afternoon looking at her saved pictures.

  Which included at least a few of Max.

  Molly’s relief over not having to deal with the complications of Gina having a crush on Leslie felt a whole lot less good. She wished someone would just go ahead and steal Gina’s camera already. Maybe that would help her move on. “Honey, you don’t have to have a reason for not being attracted to Leslie Pollard,” she said, reaching for Gina’s hands. “Sooner or later, you’ll meet someone and it’ll feel right and . . .”

  Gina sighed. “I know. I just . . .” She rolled her eyes again. “Aside from the fact that Leslie’s only interested in me because he thinks I’m a pervert, I think he’s . . . Well, he’s here, right? With AAI. So he’s got to be nice. Dull, but nice. And I don’t want to hurt his feelings. So just . . . Don’t invite him for tea again, please? Keep him out of our tent. I think if I avoid him for a while, he’ll get the message that I’m not interested.”

  Don’t invite him for tea? Not a chance.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Gina mused, “seeing someone like Leslie in a completely different, unexpected light. Like, you don’t look at him and think, ‘Wow, he must look great naked.’ I mean, what else don’t we know about him? Do you think he’s one of those guys who’s got a name for his penis? Or maybe he’s got a pierced tongue, or—”

  “What if you’re mistaken?” Molly asked. “What if it’s not you he’s interested in?”

  “What?” And wasn’t that an expression of total incomprehension on Gina’s face.

  Apparently the thought that Leslie Pollard might’ve come to tea because of Molly, not Gina, hadn’t thrown the palest of shadows across the younger woman’s mind.

  That stung, and Molly’s temper sparked. “Do you think I’m too old for him?” she asked, her voice just a little too sharp.

  “You? And . . . Leslie?” Gina’s surprise slipped out, but she quickly realized how insulting she sounded and immediately began to backpedal. “Of course not you’re not too old. I mean, you’re not old. I mean, yeah, you’re probably older than he is. And he’s probably younger than you think—I thought he was older, too, but now after, you know . . . I’m guessing he’s in his early thirties at most.”

  She was just digging herself in deeper, and she knew it. “Which isn’t too young for you,” she continued. “I just . . . I didn’t think you were . . . I mean . . . You’re in mourning,” she added, but—smart woman—she thought about what she’d just said. And then, as she looked down at Molly’s red-polished toenails and then back up into her eyes, it was suddenly quite apparent to her that Molly wasn’t in mourning. Not really. “Oh, my God.” Full realization dawned. “Leslie is—”

  “Shhh—don’t say it,” Molly stopped her.

  Gina stared at her, eyes enormous in her face. “Oh, shit. I’m right?”

  Oh, damn.

  “I am,” Gina breathed. “God. Another secret that you were, what? Just never going to tell me?” Her anger morphed almost instantly into joy. “Oh, Mol, you suck and I’m going to be so mad at you later, I promise, but this is wonderful! I’m so happy for you—I think I’m going to hyperventilate!” Gina hugged her. “Did you know he was coming? Did he write or—”

  Molly shook her head.

  “He just showed up?” Gina was working to keep her voice low. “Oh my God! Did you totally shit monkeys?”

  Molly nodded, tears in her eyes. “Gorillas. Gina, you can’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t. I swear.”

  “I wanted to tell you, but he’s the one who . . . He had such a high price on his head, he’s afraid people are still going to be looking for him.”

  “People?” Gina asked.

  “People connected to the man who put the price on his head,” Molly explained. “Maybe even bounty hunters, I don’t know. All I know is he’s determined to take this really slowly. He’s afraid if word gets out that I’m suddenly all hot and heavy with some new man in camp, that’ll raise a red flag. And he’s right. People gossip and . . .” She shook her head. “As much as I want to, I’m not going to be sneaking over to his tent in the near future. He’s says there’s no such thing as discreet—that we need to wait months before we can even, I don’t know, hold hands . . .”

  “My God.”

  “He says he won’t even come to tea that often, because it could draw attention to me.”

  “Not necessarily,” Gina said. “People see what they expect to see—especially if we give them a little help. I’ll invite him to tea. I’ll sit next to him at dinner—then you can join us, right? I’ll write some letters—to Pammy in the Nairobi office. And didn’t you tell me Electra was going to Sri Lanka? I’ll write to her, too. I have met the most fascinating man . . . Then, in a coupla months, I’ll dump him, and you can catch him on the rebound. You slut.”

  Molly started to laugh, hope dawning. “Could this really work?”

  “You bet your ass, it could,” Gina said. “Now. The million-dollar question. Does Jones—”

  “Leslie. That’s his name now.”

  “Right. Does he know that you can’t leave this camp w
ithout some kind of armed guard, because if you did, you might be hunted down and killed? And that’s a direct quote, thank you, Lucy’s sister.”

  “Oh, come on,” Molly said. “That’s an exaggeration, and you know it.” And she’d actually thought the million-dollar question would have to do with penis names. It figured Gina would come up with a question that made her even more uncomfortable.

  Gina persisted. “Does he know?”

  “You know he doesn’t,” Molly countered. “And no, I’m not going to tell him. Not right away. He’s going to be unhappy enough when he finds out you know who he is. Gina, he said he’d leave if I didn’t play by his rules.”

  “Well, okay then,” Gina said, sitting cross-legged on her bed. “I won’t tell him either. If you let me help Lucy, too.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  HAMBURG, GERMANY

  JUNE 21, 2005

  PRESENT DAY

  Gina’s brother Victor called Jules back after he stopped crying. Vic had made up some ridiculous excuse for why he’d had to hang up—his call waiting was beeping—but Jules didn’t buy it for one second. What’s that you say? My sister, whom we’d been told died in a horrible terrorist bombing may not be dead after all? Whoops, I have to take this call, it’s the library. That book I wanted has finally come in . . .

  All-righty then.

  “It’s definitely not Gina?” Victor asked him now.

  “It’s definitely not.” Jules told him what he’d just told Max. “It’s not a case of her body being misplaced, either. She’s not in the morgue. And so far all the DNA testing has come back negative.” He took a deep breath. “Which doesn’t mean she’s not dead.”

  He’d been saying that a lot lately, Little Johnny Doom, spreading gloom and despair as he oozed—well, was driven, actually—through the streets of Hamburg.

  His driver was tall and blond with a cute accent, but alas, he was about as gay as a November day in Schenectady. He wove his way through the crowded city with ease, taking Jules over to the blast site at Max’s request.

  Jules would have preferred joining his boss over at Gina’s hotel. He wasn’t sure what good surveying the damage was going to do. But it was not his to ask why. It was his to do or die, stick a needle in his eye. Or however that went.

  But, unless Max thought he might find something of Gina’s in the rubble—her shoe or that ring she used to wear—his going there seemed pointless.

  Almost as if Max were finding him busywork to do, to keep him away from the hotel.

  And there—aha!—was the point, Jules realized. Max wanted privacy as he went through Gina’s things, as he faced the fact that letting her leave in the first place had been one mondo stupidass freakadelic mistake.

  “This is awesome,” Victor was saying, completely ignoring Jules’s gloomy words of warning.

  “It doesn’t mean,” he started again, but Vic cut him off.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That she’s not dead. I got that. But we don’t need any glass-half-empty bullshit right now. Can you stick to the facts that you do know for sure?”

  But Victor didn’t want all the facts—he only wanted the ones that were positive and hopeful.

  Hope, Jules knew, could be a wonderful thing—in manageable doses. But if it grew too large, if it overshadowed reality, if all bad news was ignored in order to support the theory that Gina was still alive, well, it could prove to be very messy when the truth finally did rear its ugly head.

  “Gina’s passport was in the possession of a young woman we now believe to be a terrorist,” Jules repeated the news he’d just shared with Max. In his opinion, it wasn’t particularly good news. In fact, it was very un-good. It meant that although Gina probably hadn’t died in the blast, it was likely that she’d died several days earlier. But if he said it cheerfully enough, maybe Victor wouldn’t catch on. “This woman had it in a security pocket that she wore underneath her blouse,” he continued.

  Eyewitnesses put the woman he and Max had found in Gina’s coffin leaving a Volkswagen Jetta and running into a pastry shop moments before the car exploded.

  This was a detail Jules had told Max, but couldn’t yet share with Gina’s family. He also couldn’t share the fact that there had been a ticket bought in Gina’s name for a flight to New York—one way—scheduled for the same day that the bomb had gone off.

  In FBI-speak, that was called a Big Freaking Clue. As in, hello, if someone had just paid a bazillion euros for a plane ticket to New York, it seemed crazy to then go and blow oneself up in an out-of-the-way Hamburg cafe.

  Still, they didn’t know for absolute sure that Gina herself hadn’t bought that ticket. Which was one of the reasons why Jules needed to talk to her brother.

  “Last time Gina spoke to you she didn’t mention anything about coming home, did she?” Jules asked Victor now. “You know, for a quick visit?”

  “No.”

  “She wouldn’t, like, want to surprise you,” he persisted. “You don’t have a grandmother or someone with a birthday, or maybe a family reunion? Wedding? Funeral? You know, something that everyone thought she was going to have to miss, but then . . . ?”

  “No. We didn’t even know she was in fucking Germany,” Vic answered flatly. “Last we heard, she was staying in Kenya an extra nine months.” He paused. “Is it possible she’s still in Africa? That her passport was stolen or copied or something?”

  “No. We finally spoke to Ben Soldano, the head of Gina’s AAI camp.” Jules had already thought of that. “She and a friend—a woman named Molly Anderson—left Kenya last Thursday.”

  “You sure this guy’s telling the truth?”

  “Considering they were on the passenger manifest for a Lufthansa flight into Hamburg—not to mention the fact that Soldano is a priest and God really doesn’t like it when priests lie—Holy shit!” Jules stared out the car window as a bus roared past with both Adam and Robin’s face on the side—part of a giant advertisement for the movie American Hero. Der Amerikanische Held. Ab Donnerstag. Manche Kriege führst Du in Dir—which had to be a translation of the movie’s tag line, The War is Within. “Jesus!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Jules said. “Sorry.” He’d thought he’d be safe here, that Hollywood movies about World War II wouldn’t be particularly well received in Germany.

  Color him one very deep shade of wrong.

  “What?” Vic persisted. “You can’t just go holy shit and Jesus and then nothing.”

  “It’s not about Gina.” Jules laughed. “Really, Victor, you don’t want to know.”

  “Fuck you, douchebag—tell me what just happened.”

  Okay. “An ex-lover and his . . . new boyfriend are both actors in a movie that’s apparently getting worldwide distribution,” Jules told him, even though it wasn’t quite true. Robin had only slept with Adam that once—he’d been experimenting, or so the allegedly straight actor had claimed. But no way was Jules going to attempt to explain that to Victor. “I see their picture—movie ads—wherever I go. Here I am, in fucking Germany—” he used Victor’s adjective “—and I still can’t get away from them.”

  Silence.

  “You still there?” Jules asked. “Or did my use of the words ex-lover and his cause a massive heart attack?”

  “No,” Victor said. “I just . . . it must suck, is all. Is it . . . Tom Cruise?”

  Jules laughed. Why did the entire straight and vaguely homophobic male population of America think that Tom Cruise was gay? Was it because they found him attractive and that frightened them? “No, sweetie. His name is Adam. You wouldn’t know him—this is his first real movie.” But apparently, from the amount of buzz American Hero was getting, it wasn’t going to be his last.

  “I’d hate it if one of my exes were, like, on some billboard.” Victor actually sounded sympathetic. “I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I mean, on top of . . . I just . . . I know how much you care about Gina.”

  It was weird hearing t
hose sensitive words from the mouth of the man who’d once asked him if the gay thing was just a scam to meet chicks. Vic had actually used that word—chicks. Who talked like that? Although this was also the gentleman who’d asked if didn’t Jules think it was creepy, a guy as old as Max dipping his wick in someone as young as Gina?

  Well, yeah, it was really creepy when Vic put it like that. Especially since it was his sister he was talking about.

  Ew.

  “Thanks, but an ex on a billboard is nothing compared to what your family is going through,” Jules said as the driver took a corner onto a street that was actually cobblestone. The buildings in this part of town looked like something out of a fairytale. “Hey, did Gina ever mention anyone named Leslie Pollard? From England? He showed up at the AAI camp in Kenya about four months ago . . . ?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Vic said, “but I’ll ask Leo and Bobby. And Ma. She and Geenie aren’t as close as they used to be. You know. Before the, uh, hijacking. Lester, you said his name was . . . ?”

  “Leslie,” Jules corrected.

  “Dude, that’s a girl’s name.”

  “Actually,” Jules said, “it’s not. Well, it’s both.”

  “Yeah, but what kind of parents name their son Leslie?” Vic asked. “Jesus, just fuckin’ tattoo I am a fag on the poor asshole’s forehead and send him off to school to be killed.”

  Jules cleared his throat. So much for sensitivity.

  “I’m just saying,” Victor said. “No offense.”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t offensive at all.”

  “You know it’s true. I mean, come on.”

  “That actually makes it more offensive,” Jules pointed out as his driver pulled up to the curb. He was going to have to walk the rest of the way to the blast site. “Wait for me, please,” he ordered the driver as he got out of the car. He didn’t expect to be here long.

  Victor tactfully, if not exactly eloquently, changed the subject as Jules flashed his badge to the armed guard standing next to big concrete barriers that would . . . what? Prevent another suicide bomber from driving his car into the wreckage?