Double Impact: Never Say DieNo Way Back

by Tess Gerritsen

  Jason turned back to the man in the richly tailored suit, the one who seemed to be in charge. “Sir, you will ask your men to release this woman. Her name is Ami Donovan. She’s a nurse at this hospital. I don’t know what you think is going on here, but whatever it is, you’re wrong.”

  The man merely looked at Jason for several seconds, then shifted his attention back to Ami. “You are a nurse in this facility?”

  Ami struggled to keep from trembling. Who did he think she was? She had the white uniform and the damned ID. Couldn’t he see that she was a member of the hospital staff? “Yes,” she said shakily. “Kathi and I came in to check Mr. Olment’s vitals.”

  The man said something in that foreign language again and the two guards released her and returned to their posts outside the door. She exhaled the breath she hadn’t even been aware she’d been holding. This was beyond crazy. She rubbed her bruised arms and her knees almost buckled.

  Jason bracketed a protective arm around her as if sensing her waning ability to stay vertical. “Would you like to explain what happened?” he asked the man who continued to stare suspiciously at Ami.

  “I have obviously made a mistake,” the man said stiffly, his attention now focused on Jason. “You must excuse me.” He turned that unapologetic gaze back to Ami. “I won’t make the same mistake again.”

  Fear sliced straight through her. Every instinct warned her that his words were more threat than apology. But how could that be? She didn’t know this man. Why would he threaten her?

  Jason extended his free hand. “My name is Jason Stanford. I’m chief of hospital security.”

  After a hesitation that lasted far too long for comfort, the man accepted Jason’s hand. “I am Amos Amin. I am head of Mr. Olment’s security,” he returned in a tone that sounded forced, clipped.

  “If you have any problems, Mr. Amin, you should let me know first.” There was no question what Jason meant by his statement. He would not tolerate Amin or any member of his security crossing the line he’d just drawn. Jason squeezed Ami’s shoulders. “You ladies through in here?”

  “Yes,” Kathi said, her voice sounding almost as shaky as Ami felt.

  Ami nodded, dredging up a smile for Jason. As she left the room, she felt Amin’s gaze on her back like a dagger poised to thrust deep. Who the hell was this man? Who was Olment? And why in God’s name did they think they knew her?

  Kathi and Ami exchanged unsteady goodbyes at the nurses’ station. She didn’t miss the strange looks the other two nurses stole in her direction. Ami forced herself to go on, immensely grateful that Jason walked with her to the elevator. Her mind reeled with conflicting emotions. She felt scared, angry, and extremely…anxious. Her entire being wanted to deny the episode that had just taken place.

  “Do you have a clue what that was all about?” Jason asked as he depressed the call button.

  She shook her head, her body literally humming with emotion and a kind of dread she couldn’t quite comprehend. It was as if she should know something that she didn’t. She folded her arms over her middle and tried to warm herself. She was cold. Cold and scared.

  “I must remind them of someone they know,” she said finally, then choked out a humorless sound. “On a Wanted poster, obviously.”

  Jason laughed at that. “It sure looks that way. Maybe you should avoid this floor until these guys are out of here. I’ll see what I can find out about them. I don’t know why I wasn’t informed of their presence in the first place. I swear, by the time the official word gets to me the guy will probably have been released.” The elevator doors slid open and Jason ushered her into the waiting car.

  “I think you’re right,” Ami agreed without reservation. “I’ll just stay in the ER until they go back to their homeland.”

  As the elevator bumped into downward motion, Ami closed her eyes and tried to gather her composure. Going to that room had been a huge error in judgment. What were the odds that two men from the same foreign country would think they knew her? She had a very bad feeling that she wouldn’t like the answer.

  Ami and Jason parted ways on the first floor. She hurried to the ER, ten minutes late rather than ten minutes early. Had it only been twenty minutes? It felt like a lifetime since she’d gotten on that elevator headed for Olment’s room. And worst of all, she had more questions now than she’d had when she got out of bed this morning. Her little adventure hadn’t proven anything at all.

  Well, maybe it had proven something…that she didn’t ever need to take a trip to the Middle East.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AN HOUR BEFORE her ER shift ended, Ami finally took a break. She hadn’t had a moment to worry about the past or the Israelis on the fourth floor, though, apparently word of the incident had spread like a plague through the hospital. Lunch had come and gone in a flash of sutures and EKGs. The day after the full moon was proving to be worse than the day before.

  The one moment of quiet she’d had, she’d used to call home, only to get the machine. She told herself not to worry, that Mrs. Perry had probably taken Nicholas for a stroll. But it was raining outside. Ami then rationalized that just because it was raining downtown didn’t mean it was in her ’burb outside of town. Still feeling uneasy, she’d called Robert and was told that he would be out of the office all day. He never went to work without saying goodbye…and now he was unavailable. This was just too weird. The whole day had been the pits, starting with the incident on the fourth floor and going downhill from there.

  A cup of coffee in her hand, Ami sat on the well-worn couch in the nurses’ lounge, closed her eyes and leaned her head back. It felt so good just to sit. And the quiet. Oh, that was heavenly. Jane and Lonnie had made a cafeteria run. The doctor on call was poring over reports in the tiny room designated as the on-call physician’s private sanctuary. The triage nurse was holding the fort at the front desk.

  All Ami needed was five minutes of quiet and this cup of coffee. She took a deep swallow and moaned her satisfaction. No one made coffee like Jane did.

  The squeak of the door echoed in the quiet and Ami reluctantly opened her eyes expecting to find the triage nurse with word that another onslaught of patients had arrived. To her surprise, a stranger—a man wearing a travel-wrinkled suit—entered the lounge and closed the door behind him. He was tall, she noted. Black hair…nice tan. Ami was pretty sure he wasn’t on staff here, which meant he was probably lost.

  Annoyed at the intrusion, she sat up a little straighter. Maybe he was here with a patient. A father or brother or son. She supposed in his distress he could think this was a public lounge.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  He just looked at her.

  Ami stood, trepidation belatedly setting in. “If you’re looking for the cafeteria, it’s on the opposite end of the building. This is the nurses’ lounge.” When he continued to stand there staring a hole through her, she added a bit more firmly, “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he murmured, disbelief evident in his voice as well as his expression as he sagged against the door behind him.

  Ami had the sudden almost overwhelming urge for fight or flight. Another of those feelings she couldn’t quite place or name welled inside her.

  He pushed off from the door and moved toward her. She backed up a step, only to be halted by the couch she’d vacated seconds ago.

  “My name is Jack Tanner.” Ami’s breath caught as he reached into his inside jacket pocket. He smiled as if he understood. “Don’t worry, it’s just my ID.” He flipped open a black leather credentials case. “Miss Donovan, I’m from the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Ami blinked. The CIA? Yeah, right. She understood now. This was a joke. She was going to kill Lonnie. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d ragged her all day about the Israeli guys. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve had—”

  “Like I told you,” he cut in smoothly, moving a few steps closer, “I’m Jack Tanner from the CIA. I just need a
few minutes of your time.”

  He was serious and still holding his ID in plain sight. Ami stared at the credentials now. Tanner, Jack. Central Intelligence Agency. This guy was for real. She shook her head in confusion. Why would anyone from the CIA want to talk to her? The answer that reverberated through her made her go cold. Her hands shaking, she placed her coffee cup on the table before she dropped it.

  “I don’t understand,” she offered, then blinked, her vision all at once cloudy. The floor seemed to shift beneath her feet, making her feel unsteady. She took a deep breath to counter the wave of dizziness. Her blood sugar level must have bottomed out, she reasoned. Lunch. She shouldn’t have skipped lunch, but there hadn’t been time. “Why would you want to speak with me?” she eventually managed to ask.

  “May I?” He gestured to the chair directly across the coffee table from her.

  She moistened her lips and tried to think of a reason to say no but found none. “Sure,” she relented.

  He sat, his gaze steady on her. “I’d like you to join me, if you will.”

  Ami eased back down onto the couch, still feeling a bit unsteady. She wasn’t sure why she did as he asked. Maybe, deep down, she was afraid not to. He was CIA, after all.

  “Miss Donovan, you were in the ER when Natan Olment was brought in?”

  “Yes.” He was here about the Israeli guys. Relief, so profound she could barely hold herself upright, rushed through her. He was investigating the assassination attempt. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  “I understand that Mr. Olment reacted as if he knew you somehow?” Tanner went on.

  Uneasiness stirred again. “Well, yes. It was kind of odd. But the…doctor said that his reaction was probably trauma-induced hallucinations.” Well, Robert had said it and he was a doctor.

  Tanner nodded. “And then this morning another gentleman, Mr. Amos Amin, also reacted oddly to your presence?”

  Ami swallowed. Her throat felt viciously dry. Where was he going with this? What did it have to do with the assassination attempt? And how the hell did he know about it? “Yes, he did. We had to call Security.”

  “Have you considered why these two incidents occurred?”

  “No,” she lied. “I don’t have any idea.”

  Tanner lowered his gaze, staring at the floor for a time. Ami found that move far more unnerving than if he’d continued that relentless stare directly into her eyes.

  When he at last met her gaze again, he asked, “You really don’t know me, do you?”

  She did not know him. She didn’t know either of the men on the fourth floor. This had to be some sort of bizarre mistake. She shook her head. At least she thought she did. She wasn’t sure the movement was much more than a pathetic twitch.

  Tanner reached into his pocket once more. This time he pulled out a couple of photographs. He laid them on the table in front of her. “Do you know the woman in these pictures?”

  Don’t look! Don’t look! a little voice deep inside her cried. A part of her was certain that if she looked, something very bad would happen. She sucked in a ragged breath and tried to calm herself. Why was she so afraid? They were only pictures. The knot of fear twisted in her stomach. She had to look, didn’t she? She forced away the questions whirling in her head and stared down at the pictures. The inner trembling she’d been restraining for hours erupted inside her. Her hands shook with the force of it.

  In the photographs was a woman, a couple of years younger maybe, but she looked exactly like Ami. Exactly. Down to the unruly ponytail in which she wore her hair.

  “It’s not me,” she breathed, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. She felt the color leech out of her face. This had to be some sort of joke. It couldn’t be real. “It’s someone else. Someone who looks like me. A mistake,” she insisted.

  “Miss Donovan,” Tanner said quietly, “I’m afraid there is no mistake. For two years we’ve thought you were dead.”

  Two years. She’d been found wandering in the park two years ago. For all intents and purposes, her life began two years ago. “No.” She shook her head again, harder this time. She had to make him see that he was wrong. His last statement abruptly reverberated in her ears. “‘We’?”

  “The CIA,” he explained.

  “It’s not me,” she repeated. She’d never even met anyone in the CIA—at least not until today.

  “Your real name is Jamie Dalton. You were born in Baltimore, Maryland.”

  She didn’t want to hear this but she couldn’t seem to think of the right words to make him go away. This couldn’t be real. Maybe she was hallucinating.

  “I don’t know a Jamie Dalton,” she told him flatly, and yet she rolled the name around in her mind to see if it stirred a response. Jamie. It didn’t feel wrong, but it couldn’t be right. No, she denied. She wasn’t the Jamie he was talking about. She couldn’t be. She was Ami Donovan now. Her past was gone.

  “You were a second-year medical student when we met.” He averted his gaze briefly as if it pained him to remember. “Your father was Jamison Dalton, a politically connected man who knew his way around the wealthy and the powerful in this country. His ability to pull together financing made him a strategic player in the success of a new, top-secret antiterrorism force. The private sector had been secretly helping certain elements of the government, of which I’m not at liberty to discuss, put together this joint force. Your father was assassinated by someone who wanted that effort to fail.”

  Tanner was silent for a moment, allowing her to absorb what he’d said so far. She understood his words, yet every fiber of her being rejected it as truth. This simply could not be.

  “You were devastated by his death. It was when I was investigating his murder that I first saw you. I couldn’t believe my eyes. You were the exact double of Amira Peres.”

  When Ami frowned, he hastened to explain, “Yael Peres was the man responsible for your father’s death. We—the CIA—approached you about helping us bring him down. You agreed. We would never have been able to get close to him without your help. He was too good at hiding his wrongdoing…too well thought of in his home country, which he rarely left.”

  Whoa! She couldn’t listen to any more of this. It was too, too much. Ami held up a hand for him to stop right there. “Mr. Tanner—”

  “Jack,” he interrupted. “You called me Jack…before.”

  She tried to read what exactly he meant by that statement but this was all far too confusing. It couldn’t be real. “Jack, I don’t know this Jamie Dalton. And I don’t know you. There has to be some kind of mix-up.”

  “You have a birthmark on your left hip. It’s shaped like a star. And you absolutely hate strawberries.”

  Ice slid slowly through her veins. How could he know those things? He…he couldn’t know her. She didn’t know him. None of this felt right. She didn’t want to be Jamie Dalton.

  “It took me six weeks to get you ready,” he continued. “We worked together day and night.” He pressed her with that deep brown gaze, urging her to remember.

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember you.” He flinched. Had they…? No. No. That couldn’t be. This was crazy.

  “You went undercover as Peres’s estranged daughter. You were under for three months. I lost contact with you that last month. And then we lost you. We…” His voice trailed off and silence hung between them for three endless beats. “We thought the Israelis had executed you.”

  Enough! “Why would they want to execute me?” she demanded, ready to march out of this room and call Security to take this nutcase away. This was the craziest story she’d ever heard. It sounded like a movie, not someone’s life. Certainly not hers. She lived on Piedmont Street in a nice little home with perfect neighbors with the perfect man who loved her and whom she’d foolishly refused to marry.

  “You set up Peres. He was a highly respected man and a personal friend of the Israeli prime minister’s.”

  “Set him up?” Ami shook her head. “I don’t know wha
t you’re talking about.”

  “You made sure he was in the right place at the right time and your lover killed him.”

  Ami lunged to her feet, her sluggish self-protective instincts charging into high gear. “You, Mr. Tanner, are either mistaken or totally insane. I am not a killer or an undercover agent. I’m just an ER nurse whose break time is over.” She smoothed her sweating palms over her smock. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Tanner stood, blocking her path when she would have walked away. He reached into his pocket yet again and brought out another photograph. “This man is Michal Arad. He’s the single most vicious freelance terrorist in the world today. You were his lover for those three months. You talked him into taking down Peres.”

  Ami stared at the dark man in the picture. His long black hair was fastened at his nape. Sunglasses shielded his eyes, but nothing could hide the power that emanated from him even in a slightly out-of-focus, worn photograph. Something moved in a distant corner of her heart…something she couldn’t name and didn’t want to feel.

  “This is the only photograph we have of him. He’s elusive as well as vicious. But during the Peres mission he took the bait just like a lovesick puppy.”

  Ami’s gaze shifted upward to Tanner. She had been the bait, if all he said was true. But it couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t let it be true. “I don’t know this man and I don’t know you.” She stepped around him and headed for the door.

  “Miss Donovan…Jamie—”

  She turned to find him two steps behind her. “I’m going to summon Security,” she warned. “If I were you, I’d find my way to the nearest exit.”

  “I can understand how all this must sound to you. But you have to believe me. Your life depends upon it.”

  “And how is that?” she snapped, her nerves jangling and raw. This was beyond insane. None of this could be true. He surely didn’t expect her to believe this ridiculous nonsense.