Nils had known this was coming. He’d figured she’d try to ditch him before dawn, and dawn was on its way. In less than an hour now, the sky was going to start turning light.
He’d done some war gaming in preparation—which was really just a fancy way of playing what if. But he’d run a bunch of different scenarios in his head. If Meg did X, then he’d respond with A. If Meg did Y, he’d do B.
And if Meg tried to ditch him in the middle of nowhere, he’d do his damnedest to control the situation. To make sure she dumped him near enough to a place where he could get his hands on a car. He could hot-wire damn near anything and be in pursuit of her—without her knowing—in a matter of minutes.
If he were in control of the situation.
He’d also prepared by taking a nap. While the five minutes he’d caught by the side of the road had helped a little, he’d needed several hours of sleep in a row to erase the ringing in his ears and the radio voices in his head, to make him sharp enough to deal with this or any other situation.
And so had Meg. She was exhausted, too.
She’d been desperate to keep moving south, but he’d convinced her that getting killed in a car accident wouldn’t do Amy and her grandmother a damn bit of good.
So he’d slept, right there in the driver’s seat, in the shade of a rest area, for three blessed, revitalizing hours.
Nils had awakened to find Meg fast asleep, too, draped across the parking brake, her head in his lap, her handgun on the floor in front of her.
“Don’t do this,” he said to her now.
“Go right at the end of the ramp,” she ordered.
That would take them away from the bright lights of the truck stop and gas stations that were next to the highway. But Nils saw a small sign that indicated the town center was to the right. Five miles.
Where there was a town, there were cars.
He made note of the odometer setting as he quickly took the turn, praying that Meg hadn’t seen that sign.
She turned and looked at him now. “I’m sorry, John. This is as far as you can go.”
“Meg, please, you’ve got to trust me.” Nils knew that on some level she trusted him enough to move toward him in her sleep. Surely that was a start.
Now that they were here, actually playing out the scenario in which she kicked him out of the car, he didn’t want to play along. He didn’t want to do it this way.
Christ, maybe he should just overpower her. Take her gun. Tie her up and take her, kicking and screaming, to the authorities. She’d probably be charged with some major felonies, but, damn it, at least she’d be alive.
The moment he stepped out of this car, the moment he left her alone, things could go wrong in a dozen different ways.
Razeen could wake up.
Nils might not find a car in enough time.
Even if he did, even if everything worked perfectly, he could lose Meg. Catching up to her with the kind of head start she was going to have wasn’t going to be easy.
He drove as quickly as he could, wanting to get as close to the town as possible before she ordered him to stop the car and get out.
“Why should I trust you,” Meg countered, “when you’ve never trusted me?”
Huh? Nils looked at her. She was serious. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “When have I ever not trusted you? In Kazbekistan—”
“You trusted me not to blow the whistle on Abdelaziz’s escape. Big deal.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
“You know what I remember most clearly?” Meg said. “Out of all the things we did, all the conversations we had, both in K-stan and in Washington—there was only once that you actually told me anything real about yourself. It was when we talked about the Vietnam Wall. Do you remember that day?”
“Yes.” He’d never forget it. He’d kissed her, right there on the lawn of the Mall, failing her test.
“You told me that your father and your uncle both served in Vietnam. You told me their lives had been changed by the experience—and that your life had been changed by it, too. You told me more about yourself in those few sentences than you’d told me in weeks of nonstop conversation.”
“How can you say that?” he countered. “I told you my entire life’s story—”
“Except the part about your father serving in Vietnam—oh, you also took some liberties with the part where your mother died. That was pretty different in the version you told me in DC. Which is it, John? Did she die recently, or did she die when you were seven—or was it six years old?”
“Seven,” he told her.
“So you either lied three years ago, or you’ve managed to remember the details of the lie you told me today.”
“I altered the truth three years ago because I didn’t want your pity,” he told her. “I don’t want anyone’s pity. That’s all I had after she died. Goddamned pity.”
“So you lied about your mother. Or—excuse me—you altered the truth. How about the rest of what you told me?” she asked. “What other truths did you alter? What other secrets about yourself have you kept hidden?”
He laughed. “Don’t be melodramatic. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know what else you want me to tell you. My life was boring. I grew up on eastern Long Island. Big deal. I went to a private high school, got into Yale, joined the Navy. There’s nothing to hide.”
Meg was looking at him with those eyes that seemed to see into his soul. She didn’t say a word, she just sadly shook her head.
“What?” Nils could see the faintest glimmer of lights flash through the trees, off to the right. Meg didn’t see it because she was looking at him, but the town was out there, just to the north. He pulled to the side of the road on the pretense that he wanted to give her his full attention. Taking the car out of gear, he pulled up the parking brake and shifted in his seat, subjecting himself to the full brunt of her accusing eyes. “What?”
“You described this near idyllic childhood—except your father went to Vietnam, and came back a different person. What did you say about him during that one time the truth leaked out? That even though he hadn’t died, he’d lost his life over there. Yeah, John, that’s what you said. Your life couldn’t have been this episode of Father Knows Best that you pretend it was. Oh, and throw in the fact that your mother died when you were seven. Seven—you were still a baby. And your poor father—here’s a man who’s back from a terrible war, probably just barely keeping it together, and I’m supposed to believe that his wife dies and your life is perfect?”
This was so not the time to lose his cool, but Nils felt a flare of anger. “What do you want to hear, Meg? You want me to tell you that my father drank too much some of the time? So what? Four billion other people’s fathers drank too goddamn much. It’s nothing new. It’s no big deal.”
She wouldn’t back down. “I don’t believe you. I see these flashes of this incredibly sensitive man peeking out through this, this . . . slightly bored, macho facade you’ve put up. I don’t believe you weren’t affected by—”
“When he didn’t drink, he was perfect, okay? That’s the way I want to remember him. That’s the part of my life that I tell people about. I say what I say, and if they choose to interpret it a certain way—”
“But what about the people who ask for the real story?” she implored him.
“No one asks.”
“I asked. More than once. But you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”
Nils didn’t know what to say to that. Because she was right. He rubbed his forehead, trying to banish the worst damned headache of his life.
“You’re not the only one who lied,” Meg continued softly. “Three years ago, in DC, you asked me if I loved you, and I didn’t answer. I lied by omission.”
He looked at her. Was she saying . . . ?
“It wasn’t just about sex that night,” she told him. “It was more than that, and it would’ve been beautiful, and in the end, that was why I let you go. I was afraid that if you d
id stay the night, I’d have to face everything I was feeling.”
Nils’s heart was in his throat. “Meg—”
“Let me finish. Please. I need to tell you this.” She drew in a deep breath. “I’ve thought about it a lot since then.” She laughed shakily. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve analyzed it to death, trying to figure out exactly why I let you leave. The best I’ve come up with is that even when I first met Daniel, uncertainty and, well, fear, I guess, was a part of what I felt for him. I loved him, but I was always afraid—afraid he was going to leave me, afraid I wouldn’t live up to his expectations. You name it, I was afraid of it. Then later, when I found out he’d been unfaithful so many times . . .”
She shook her head. “It became a different kind of fear. Fear he was cheating on me again, fear that it was right there under my nose but I didn’t see it, fear that the entire rest of the world knew but wasn’t telling me. Fear that it was somehow my fault. That I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“I hear you say things like that and I want to kill him all over again. How could you think—”
“This isn’t about Daniel and me,” she interrupted. “This is about you and me.”
That shut him up.
“I had to explain about Daniel, because before I met you, love meant being afraid. But with you . . .”
She laughed again, and again it sounded so sad. “You had no expectations, John. You just . . . liked me. I knew you weren’t telling me the truth about a lot of things, but I never doubted that you liked me. I could see it in everything you did and said, and I loved the way that made me feel. I knew you weren’t perfect—in a lot of ways you’re frighteningly similar to Daniel. All those secrets and deceptions. But when it came to our friendship, you had no ulterior motives and that was so refreshing. You know, that’s why it shook me so badly when you admitted you sought me out in DC to try to get revenge on Daniel.”
“I told you that wasn’t really what I—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “And I believed you—because I had this solid sense that you liked me. You liked me exactly the way I was. You didn’t want to change me, you didn’t disapprove of me. You were just so sweet and so wonderfully okay with me.”
Sweet? “Meg—”
“Just listen, all right?” She looked down at her hands in her lap, at the weapon she still held. “In the end that’s why I let you go,” she told him softly. “I’d fallen in love with you, and I was afraid that making love to you and admitting to myself how much I did love you—I couldn’t have slept with you if I didn’t. I was afraid making love to you would be such a . . . I don’t know, a joyful, wonderful thing, I guess. Everything I felt for you was so clean and sweet and pure. So untainted. I was afraid of letting myself love you even for only one night—and I had no expectations that you truly wanted anything more than that, honestly. But I was afraid that after experiencing that, it would be torture to go back to the fear and disappointment that came with loving Daniel.”
She’d loved him. Nils couldn’t keep his mouth shut a second longer. “Jesus, Meg, didn’t you know that I wanted you to leave him? I didn’t want just one night with you. I wanted—”
“All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t leave Daniel.”
“Why the hell not?”
She looked up at him, looked him straight in the eye. “Because of Amy. My daughter wanted me to try again, John. She didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew. And I’d promised her I’d try. Before she went to England, I promised her I’d give Daniel another chance. She wanted her father back. And I wanted that for her, too.”
“So you sacrificed your own happiness—”
“Yes and no,” she told him. “I sacrificed you. I sacrificed something that I wasn’t sure was real. I sacrificed a chance. A promise of something that might’ve been wonderful.”
“It would have been. Jesus, I’ve always regretted leaving that night. And now . . .”
“Would you have married me?” she asked him. “Or did you just want to sleep with me, John?”
He shook his head. Marriage. Jesus. The idea still scared him. “I don’t know. I wanted more than a one-night stand, I do know that.”
She gave him a small smile for his honesty. “That was a moot question anyway. If I had slept with you, it really wouldn’t have changed anything. I wasn’t going to leave him. That wasn’t an option. And I did love him, too. Please don’t misunderstand that.”
Nils didn’t misunderstand. But he couldn’t believe her. He felt sick. Maybe if he’d been honest with her, if he’d given her what she’d wanted and told her the truth about who he was and where he’d come from, maybe if he’d allowed himself to admit both to her and to himself that he was crazy in love with her . . . Maybe that would have changed everything.
“Even if you’d told me you loved me,” she said, as if she could follow his thoughts, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. I went back to Daniel for Amy.”
For Amy. He’d lost her because of Amy three years ago, and now here it was, happening all over again. Still, he understood. If it had been anything else, he’d argue, try to talk sense into her, try to change her mind. But a mother’s love for a child went beyond sense and logic.
Nils didn’t say anything. He just watched her, knowing what was coming, powerless to change it.
“You better believe that if I could give you up for Amy’s sake three years ago, I would do anything to save her now.” Meg shifted slightly so that she was facing the backseat. “Including kill Osman Razeen. Including . . .” She shook her head.
She held her weapon now with both hands, aimed directly at Razeen’s forehead. “So leave the keys, John, and get out of the car.”
Nils didn’t move. “No,” he said. He laughed. “You can’t tell me you love me and then kick me out of the car. That’s just . . . it’s not fair.”
“Loved,” she corrected him tightly. “Past tense. That was three years ago.”
But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—meet his gaze.
“You know, most of the time, you still lie worth shit,” he told her.
She said it again, louder this time. “Get out of the car, John. I’m not taking you any farther.”
“I need to come with you,” he told her. She wanted the truth? He would give it to her, stark, bare bones. “I need you to let me help you. Because I love you, too. Not past tense, present tense—at least as much as you still love me.”
Meg didn’t say a word, but he knew she wasn’t buying any of it.
“Please,” he said, “if you stop and think it through, you’ll realize that you do need me—now more than ever. Don’t sacrifice me again, Meg.”
There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t sacrifice you? Damn right I won’t sacrifice you. That’s why I’m doing this my way. And yes, that’s probably going to get me killed. But as long as there’s a chance that I can save Amy . . .” She drew in a deep breath. “But I won’t risk your life, too. No way. So get out of the car, or I’m blowing Razeen to hell when I count to three. One.”
She looked at him, and time hung as he gazed into her eyes and saw the truth. If he tried to call her bluff, she was going to kill Osman Razeen. Not just to save Amy, but to save him, too. Because despite what she said, she loved him still.
“Two.” Her voice shook. “Damn you—don’t make me do this!”
Nils got out of the car.
Meg slipped behind the wheel and pulled away before she would have reached three. She did a yooie, tires screaming on the asphalt as she headed back toward the highway.
And Nils took off at a dead run, bare feet be damned, heading for the glimmer of lights he’d seen just beyond the thicket of trees.
Light.
It was growing stronger, streaming in through the uncurtained windows, penetrating her closed eyes and sending a knifelike shaft of pain directly into her brain.
It was dawn.
Locke kept her eyes tightly shut against both the light and the pain,
aware of the fact that her head was drumming nauseatingly, and that her brain felt as if it were sloshing around loose inside her skull.
What had she done?
Her mouth felt as if she’d spent the night gagged, but there was nothing in it now but her own tongue.
Her own tongue. Not . . . someone else’s . . .
The world seemed to shift, and a vivid memory of Sam Starrett, gloriously naked, kissing her, sweeping his tongue into her eager mouth, as he thrust, hard, into her as she spread her legs wide for him, up on . . . the kitchen table . . . ?
Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero Page 33
