“This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.”
He didn’t sound convinced.
“Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She is pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but . . .” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but, Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort.
It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer.
Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth.
“So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.”
It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion—across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there.
And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.
When Molly came out of the bathroom, Gina was taking apart the metal bed-frame, unfastening the nuts and bolts with her bare fingers.
“We’ll only have one chance for this,” she said, handing Molly an ungainly length of metal, complete with bed leg and little wheel on the end. It was L-shaped the long way, designed to hold the bed’s box spring, which made it hard to grip comfortably. “We have to be ready for ’em. You should definitely put your clothes on. They’re still damp, but we have to be prepared to run.”
“These people have guns,” Molly pointed out. She tried to hold the piece of metal up like a baseball bat, over her shoulder, ready to swing. It was heavy, but was it really heavy enough to knock a grown man unconscious?
“Gun, singular,” Gina said.
“We don’t know that.” The mattress was leaning up against the wall, so Molly pulled out one of the pair of chairs that were tucked under a small table, over in the corner.
“Last time Emilio came in here, his gun was nowhere in sight. You know, he may not have ammunition,” Gina, who had never had the not-very-fun experience of being shot by a gun, informed her. “He never fired his weapon, even when we were being shot at.”
“Or he might have lots and lots of ammunition.” Molly sank down into the chair, still wobbly-legged. Truth was, he’d only need two bullets to end three lives.
“But maybe not.” Gina was determined. “If he doesn’t, it’s only our fear holding us here.”
“That and the angry little man in the hall with the crowbar,” Molly reminded her.
Gina hesitated. “You thought he was angry?”
“Either that or badly constipated.” While she was showering—carefully, and only small portions of herself at a time, thanks to that biopsy—Gina had filled her in on both the world events and the more local newsflash that the mysterious “they” who wanted Grady Morant had kidnapped Emilio’s wife, creating a full-fledged chain of pain.
“Get dressed,” Gina ordered her again, definitely one-track. “Seriously, Mol, get your sneakers on, too. As soon as you’re ready, I’m going to open that door. For all we know, Crowbar Guy isn’t even out there anymore. If he is . . .” She hefted her own length of metal, complete with castor.
“I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” Molly told her as she pulled on her damp pants. “I’m still really dizzy. And queasy. And bashing people over the head isn’t really my thing.”
“You should have something to eat.” Gina started for the cans of food.
Oh, urp. “No, actually, please, I shouldn’t,” Molly said.
“We better take it with us,” Gina decided. She took one of the pillowcases off the bed, loaded the canned goods inside. “I know you don’t like the idea of hurting anyone, but the alternatives—”
“I know what the alternatives are,” Molly told her friend as she tied the laces to her sneakers. Jones—dead. Or worse. The two of them, including her baby—dead. Or worse. “And I’ll bash if I have to. You better believe it. What I meant was I’m probably not very good at it.” She sat down again. “You still haven’t convinced me, though, that we stand a prayer of a chance against that gun.”
“Shhh!” Gina said, holding up her hand.
There were voices in the hallway. Oh, Lord.
“We should run for the garage—it was straight down the hall, to the left,” Gina instructed her, moving closer to the door, metal bed frame segment held up over her head, in prime bashing position.
Oh, Lord.
“Honey, please can’t we try something else first?” Molly said as quickly as possible, moving to back her up, but not quite sure where to stand. The idea was to bash the person coming through that door, not Gina. And, likewise, not get bashed by Gina in return. “Like, pretending to be really sick? Pretending one of us needs to go to the hospital? Maybe Emilio’ll—”
“He’s not just going to let us go,” Gina said. “You’re crazy if you think—”
“We should talk to him at least,” Molly said.
“Shhh,” Gina said again.
What was that noise out in the hall? It sounded like some kind of animal or . . .
A very young child?
The door opened and a little boy—he couldn’t have been more than two years old—stood teetering on the threshold.
“Don’t!” Molly shouted at Gina.
But Gina was not about to hit a toddler. In fact, she stepped in front of Molly, ready to block her blow.
Emilio appeared then. He took one look at them—Molly still had that piece of metal raised over her head—and scooped the child into his arms.
Although it was hard to tell if his goal was to protect the boy or use him as a shield.
“I see you’ve been busy,” he said to them in his charming accent. “May I introduce to you my grandson, Danjuma? I thank you both most humbly for not hurting him.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
With the dawn came movement out on the street.
Max sat back from the window and watched as people hurried to work or the market. Children came out to play in the dusty square.
When Jules’s cell phone rang, Grady Morant—who wanted to be called Jones—got to his feet.
Like most operators Max had known through the years, Jones could go from asleep to completely alert in a heartbeat.
Of course, Max never had to worry about that. His solution was simply never to sleep.
At least he hadn’t slept since Gina had left.
“We got another e-mail,” Jules announced, phone to his ear. “It’s Yashi,” he told Max. “Joe Hirabayashi,” he told Jones. “Teammate back in D.C.” Back to Max. “I’ve had him watching that e-mail account, trying to trace . . . Yeah, Yash, go ahead. Wait, wait—you’re breaking up . . .” He turned, walking closer to the window. “That’s better. Go.”
Max and Jones were left standing there, staring at each other.
“You really should get some rest,” Jones said. “I heard you go out last night. After I got back. Did you sleep at all?”
Max just gazed at him. “It’s probably better if you limit what you say over the next few days to yes, sir and no, sir.”
“Fuck off.” Jones’s laughter was closer to bared teeth than true amusement. “You think you know me, asshole?” He stepped clo
ser, lowered his voice, obviously aware that Jules was constantly monitoring the pair of them. “You think you have any idea who I am, and what I’m capable of?”
Max didn’t move. “You’re capable of putting two innocent women in danger, simply by association. What’s your next stupid human trick going to be?”
“I’m ready to go,” Jones said. “Right now. I’m rested—I’m ready to go in there and get them out. I came to you for help, but since you obviously can’t deliver, I’m just going to—”
“That’s a brilliant plan.” Max blocked his path. “Walk across the street, kick down the door and . . . What? How do you get off this island?”
“There’s an airstrip, about three miles up the road,” Jones told him. “I guess you didn’t make it that far. Lot of money on this island, in case you haven’t noticed that either.”
“So you help yourself to a plane and go . . . where?” Max asked.
“Does it really matter?”
“Considering your wife needs treatment for her cancer . . . You might want to work that little detail in somewhere.”
Jones bristled. “You think I’ve forgotten that for one second?”
“I think you’ve forgotten,” Max told him, “that whoever wants to find you had enough money to transport Gina and Molly here—without their passports—all the way from Germany. You really think they’re not going to invest, heavily, in tracking you down? Dream on.”
“There are ways to keep her safe,” Jones said. “There’s always a way.”
“Like, what? Like taking her to the American Embassy? There’s one in Dili,” Max told him. “She’ll be safe there—except you won’t. So what’ll you do? Drop her off? Great, she’ll be safe while she’s within their walls. But the second she steps out of that building—like, to get into a car to be driven to the airport for a flight home?—she’s a target again. How are you going to keep her safe then? You going to trust her life to some embassy guards? Maybe a few extra nineteen-year-old Marines?”
“So I won’t take her to the embassy,” Jones said.
“Ah. You’d rather have her be at risk—”
“You goddamn know I didn’t want any of this to happen, you know I don’t want her to be at risk. But guess what? She is. She would have been, sitting at home in Iowa with her mother. I did everything right,” Jones told him. “I made goddamn sure she was safe before I went to Kenya. I waited years so she’d be safe. But shit, my mistake—I didn’t factor in the possibility of her getting sick. And then she fucking wouldn’t go to Iowa without me. She refused to leave—and believe me, I tried everything. I told her I was going to disappear, because then she’d be free to go, but she said she’d wait there for me—at the camp. That if I wanted to ensure that she didn’t get state-of-the-art medical treatment, that was the way to do it and . . .”
Jones’s anger temporarily spent, the emotion in his eyes made him look desperate and vulnerable. “I love her,” he told Max quietly. “I took a gamble, trusting Kraus. If I could, I’d go back and do it over, differently. The story of my life, you know?”
Max did know.
Years ago, back when Jones was Grady Morant, his unit had gotten ambushed in an ongoing silent war that the United States was waging against a powerful Southeast Asian druglord.
His entire team had been wiped out. At least that was what the official reports Max had seen all said.
Apparently Morant’s body had been found. Or—more accurately—some body parts had been recovered along with his dog tags. But there wasn’t enough of him left to verify his identity via fingerprints or dental records.
Rumors started, as rumors tended to do with the lack of identifiable physical remains for a soldier listed as KIA, but they were all written off as wishful thinking.
When the rumors persisted, rumors of an American being moved from prison to prison, there’d been a halfhearted investigation. It had cost too much time and too much money though, and eventually had been dropped. Results: inconclusive.
It wasn’t until recently, until DNA testing was established, that proof came to light that the body buried in Grady Morant’s grave was not, in fact, Grady Morant.
It was about that same time that stories of Chai’s new first lieutenant, allegedly an American and former Special Forces soldier, started circulating.
Grady Morant hadn’t died in that ambush. Instead, he’d spent years in a hellhole of a prison in Southeast Asia, tortured by his captors. Praying that someone would find him, that someone would come for him and bring him back home.
A few years ago, Max had felt sorry for Morant. It was clear, after meeting him, that those years in prison had been very real. He hadn’t sold out his unit, as everyone had assumed after hearing he was working for Chai. He wasn’t a deserter—on the contrary, his country had deserted him.
Life sucked.
But in Max’s eyes, all the bad shit in the world didn’t excuse what Morant did when the very drug lord he’d been fighting had finally come to his rescue and set him free.
Max would’ve rather died. He would’ve rather rotted in that prison than go to work for the enemy.
And here this piece of shit loser—at the very least a liar, smuggler, and thief—had found happiness. He’d found love. Molly Anderson had actually married the son of a bitch.
Okay, yeah, sure—life had thrown another suckbomb at them. But Max had absolutely no doubt whatsoever—once they got Gina and Molly safely home—that Molly would win her battle with cancer and live a long happy life.
As Mrs. Loser Morant or Pollard or Jones or Smith or whatever new alias he picked out for himself.
Shit, with his luck, Jones would probably go to trial for his various crimes, and get off on some technicality.
While Max lived on in misery.
While somewhere, hundreds of miles away from his personal hell, Gina raised a dead man’s baby.
“Life doesn’t give do-overs,” Max told Jones now.
“No,” the man agreed. “Just second chances.”
“Okay,” Jules said, coming back to join them, snapping his phone shut. “Here’s the deal. Our guy sent another e-mail. He wants a phone number so he can contact us and give us further instructions. Yashi’s setting up a number that Emilio won’t be able to trace back to us. The call will get forwarded to my cell.” He looked at Max. “I know you want to speak to Gina, but there’s no way to ask for that. We want the kidnapper thinking Jones is alone. And we don’t want to make too many demands—not at this point. After we get Testa on the phone—”
“I know,” Max said.
“I did ask Yash to make sure the last four digits of the fictional number is the same as your personal cell phone. I wanted Gina to know—if she somehow sees it—that we’re out here. It’s a long shot, but . . .” Jules shrugged.
“Thank you,” Max said.
“Yashi’s also calling the Jakarta CIA office,” Jules reported. “See if we can’t track down ol’ Benny. Either way, I’m trying to get that surveillance equipment.”
“How about military assistance?” Jones asked.
Jules shook his head. “Everyone in this area’s on standby. Terrorist threat level’s still high, and our case continues to be mega-low priority. I know this is driving you nuts, sweetie, but we’ve just got to sit and wait.”
Molly pretended to faint.
Gina wanted to applaud, it was done with such perfect timing, but Emilio didn’t leap to assist her. Instead, his squirming grandson still in his arms, he stepped back, well out of whacking range, barking out a command in what sounded like Italian.
Tiny Angry Crowbar Guy came into the room. He stopped short at the sight of the Molly doing her Swan Lake finale imitation. But then he quickly hopped to it, helping Gina put the mattress back down on the floor. The entire time, however, he eyed her makeshift weapon, now leaning against the wall.
As Gina rearranged the sheets and blankets, the vertically challenged man showed his stuff by effortlessly lifting Molly
into his arms and carrying her to the bed.
Molly secured her spot in the race for the Best Actress Oscar by making the journey without shrieking or even opening her eyes.
In fact, it wasn’t until she was on the bed, Gina leaning over her, that her eyelids even started to flutter.
Bravo.
Emilio was again shouting down the hall, and a dark-haired woman appeared, head down and shy, handing him several bottles of water before she again vanished.
“She needs to go to the hospital,” Gina told Emilio, because they might as well try Molly’s idea now that fighting their way out was no longer an option.
He gave the bottles of water to Crowbar Guy, who angrily held them out to Gina. She took them, mostly so that he wouldn’t end up throwing them at her.
God, he scared her.
“As you can see,” Emilio told her, “these, like the food, are sealed.”
Gina opened one bottle, helped Molly sit up, helped her take a sip.
“She’s burning up,” she lied to Emilio, although, damn, Molly’s skin did feel warm. As a matter of fact, she was showing signs of dehydration. “Are you okay?” she asked Molly, suddenly realizing that her entire Meryl Streep-worthy performance hadn’t been a performance at all.
Molly was pulling away from the water with a grimace, pushing away Gina’s hand. “Bathroom,” she said, and Gina helped her up and into the tiny tiled room as quickly as humanly possible.
Urp. She closed the door on Molly’s intimate conversation with the toilet, letting her very real concern for her friend color her voice. “She’s been doing this for hours.” Another lie, but why not? “She’s severely dehydrated, with a high fever. Last time she was this sick, she started having seizures.”
Emilio looked shaken at that news, although his dismay was probably also an act.
“She needs to go to the hospital,” Gina said again.
Emilio shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“Are you really prepared for her to die?”
From the bathroom came the sound of running water. Gina opened the door a crack, peeked in. Molly was at the sink, splashing water onto her face. Now was not the time for her to emerge, saying what she usually said after her rare bouts of morning sickness, “Wow, I feel so much better now.”
Breaking Point Page 27
