At least, that was what they had believed until the frighteningly active terrorist grapevine picked up on the news and contacted Buckingham Palace with the threat to blow up Castle Dunellen and its inhabitants if the royal couple ventured to Cornwall without first arranging the release of certain political prisoners held in English jails.
Scotland Yard was doing its best to track down the would-be terrorists who were believed to be a faction of an antiroyalist group of left-wing extremists with ties to the Middle East, but it was up to Ryder to come up with a foolproof plan to protect the young couple and their children while they were on St. Margaret. To this end, he had been brought to Cornwall twice in one week to work on the system in different "safe" locations.
As if the pressure inherent in that job weren't enough, he was finding it more and more difficult to separate his professional and personal lives. Leaving Joanna in New York when the first summons came from Scotland Yard had been difficult enough; leaving her again five days later had been nearly impossible. He knew he was hurting her but the one thing he couldn't do was let her go.
"Again?" Joanna had said when he broke the news of his second trip.
He made a face. "Afraid so."
"Another wayward husband, I suppose?"
"Something like that."
She pushed the covers aside and reached for her robe on the chair next to the bed. "I'll be leaving so you can pack."
He grabbed her wrist. "Joanna, I don't think you understand."
She laughed low in her throat. "Oh, I understand, Ryder. Duty calls. The whirlwind life of a computer whiz or detective or whatever the hell you are."
The expression in her beautiful eyes tore at his heart. "I don't want to leave you, Jo. You must know that."
She arched a dark brow. "Must I? You do it often enough."
"I wish I could stay."
She turned to face him, her breasts barely covered by the light cashmere robe. "Then do it," she said, challenging him. "Let Alistair take care of whatever has to be done."
"It's not that easy."
"I didn't think so." That look of caution he'd thought banished forever returned to her lovely ace. "Go," she said. "Do whatever it is you have to do."
He drew her into his arms but her body was all sharp angles against his. The yielding softness of moments before was gone.
"You're making this harder than it has to be, Joanna," he whispered against her ear. "I'm not like your husband. I won't hurt you." This was love as he'd never experienced it before and never would again.
"Then stay," she said, her tone fierce. "Prove it to me, Ryder. Prove it to me by staying."
But he couldn't stay. He had promises to keep both to PAX and to himself, and until those commitments had been fulfilled, all he could offer her was less than the best he could be.
Of course, he could explain none of this to Joanna, who had accepted his departure with a calm anger that unnerved the hell out of him. The look on her face when she said goodbye to him at the door was the look of a woman who'd had her worst suspicions confirmed.
He wasn't entirely sure she was wrong.
"The chopper's ready to fly us back to Heathrow."
Alistair's voice called Ryder back from his thoughts. Ryder looked up from the intricate maze of wiring in front of him. Alistair, his face ruddy and damp from the seaswept wind outside the cottage, was sitting opposite him at the table.
"When did you get here?"
"About five minutes ago." The older man shrugged out of his waterproof parka and reached for the carafe of coffee on the table. "Your powers of concentration are phenomenal, my boy. Is the work that compelling?"
"No. It's not." Ryder was feeling too emotionally vulnerable to hide behind a flip remark.
Alistair leaned forward, his blue eyes reflecting his concern. "Anything I can do to help? I may not be a genius, but I've been known to handle a few difficulties in my time."
For fifteen years Alistair Chambers had been friend and mentor and associate. Ryder had always known that he was the son Alistair and Sarah had wanted but never had and the burden of that privilege rested lightly across his shoulders. Today, as he sat there wondering what in hell he was going to do about Joanna, he felt the need to turn to Alistair as a son turned to a father.
As Ryder would have turned to his own father had he ever been lucky enough to know him.
He took a deep breath. "I'm in love with Joanna Stratton."
Alistair nodded. "I thought so."
"You don't look surprised."
"I'm not."
"Have I been that obvious?"
"Afraid so," Alistair said. "Even geniuses can't run from love forever."
"It's an impossible situation," Ryder said. "I thought I could have it all."
"And you're not certain of that any longer?"
"You were right, Chambers. We all have to make compromises." He dragged his hands through his hair. "In this business, a personal life is the first to go."
Alistair said nothing but the look of compassion in his eyes told Ryder everything.
"How did you and Sarah make it work?" Ryder asked, leaning forward once again. Alistair was one of the founders of PAX and Ryder knew his association with the organization predated his marriage. "Why could you marry a civilian and make it work when the rest of us can't even cope with much more than one-night stands?"
"Are you telling me you don't know?"
Ryder stared at him, confused. "Don't know what? You had a secret Haitian love potion that kept her yours forever?"
The unflappable Alistair Chambers looked decidedly flapped as he shifted position in his chair. "Sarah wasn't a civilian, Ryder. She was part of PAX."
Ryder's mind went totally blank as he stared across the table at the older man. "She was what?"
"Sarah was part of PAX."
Ryder leaned back until his chair was balanced on two legs. "Good try. You had me going there."
But the expression on Alistair's face didn't waver. "I'm not joking, Ryder."
He thought of Sarah McBride Chambers, the beautiful Irishwoman Alistair had adored until the day she died.
"Sarah was a housewife," Ryder said.
"Sarah was a cryptographer," Alistair countered, his eyes never leaving Ryder's. "The most brilliant cryptographer the West has ever produced."
Ryder felt as if the ground beneath him suddenly tilted. "She never traveled. She almost never left your apartments in London."
Alistair smiled fondly. "She never had to. All the equipment she needed to break the most sophisticated of codes was stored in her head."
"I always wondered how you explained your absences to Sarah."
"I never had to. She usually knew what was happening before I did."
A wave of envy washed over Ryder. "You lucky bastard," he said quietly. "You managed to have it all."
"For a while." Alistair's smile faded. "For a while I really did."
"Want to tell me why all the operatives I meet are men?"
"The luck of the draw," Alistair said. "Most of the covers are as foolproof as Sarah's. You'd never know a PAX operative if he or she didn't want you to know."
"Is Joanna an operative?" A one-in-a-million shot, but he had to ask.
"Afraid not. She's exactly what you know her to be, Ryder, and nothing more."
"That's what I was afraid of."
Joanna was the woman he loved.
And the woman he was going to lose.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryder poured himself two fingers of Scotch and stared out at Central Park. Twilight tinged the tops of the trees with dusky blue, softening the big city reality of the scene. He stood there and watched it grow dark.
In a little while he was supposed to pick up Joanna for an evening out in the company of Alistair and Holland. It had seemed a good idea at the time, the four of them going out for dinner and dancing at a trendy downtown night spot.
Now he thought the idea stank.
The only th
ing that did appeal to him was downing a few more glasses of Scotch in rapid succession until he got rip-roaring drunk.
But, try as he might, he couldn't avoid the one basic truth he'd been dodging for days. He had no business being there in New York.
The situation in Cornwall was getting hotter by the second. If he had any brains he would be back there measuring and plotting and planning the different security systems he intended to put into play during the visit of the prince and princess of Wales to the Cornish coast next week.
Even the unconfirmed rumor that the royals might be moving their trip up three days did nothing to goad him into action.
Right or wrong, the need to be near Joanna was greater than anything else in his life. For the first time in his career he had lost his concentration, his timing, the elusive edge that kept him the best in the business.
Today the best in the business was having a hell of a time keeping his head above water, and it had damned little to do with Cornwall or the royal family or PAX.
He hadn't been back in Joanna's arms for more than five minutes before he realized something had changed. Where before she'd been feisty and passionate both, now only the passion remained. The high spirits had turned to something more distant, more melancholy.
Something that was making him nervous as hell.
Just that afternoon he'd been picking out a high-brow version of Chopsticks on her mother's piano when Joanna received a phone call. Normally he wasn't the eavesdropping type – except professionally – but he'd allowed himself to pause in his mock concerto long enough to hear that it was Benny Ryan and to know she was on the verge of making a serious career move.
A move that didn't include him.
Gut instincts honed by years in a dangerous business told him that this was going to be the night she said goodbye. He wasn't a fool, and he knew that in a few short weeks they'd traveled farther than most couples traveled in a lifetime. They'd worked together; they'd faced danger; they'd loved in a way he'd never know again.
The next step was something lasting, a commitment to equal the powerful love and longing that tore at his heart. It was what he wanted; it was what she deserved.
It was the one thing he couldn't do.
The indicator on the SS543 information retriever sounded a series of three rapid tones, which signaled an urgent message too classified to go through regular channels. It meant checking the data base, scrambling the codes, then mixing the headline of that days New York Times through his computer in order simply to come up with the access code necessary to begin the decoding process.
Three more tones filled the room, followed by four more, louder this time. He was due on Joanna's doorstep in less than five minutes. Retrieving the message would take at least an hour.
Something inside him broke free, and he picked up a bookend from the shelf over the fireplace and hurled it at the expensive hunk of machinery across the room. The sound of the crash made him feel terrific.
To hell with PAX.
If it was so damned important, let them contact Alistair. There would be other nights for Alistair and Holland but for Ryder and Joanna there was only tonight.
And he'd be damned if he'd let any force in heaven or hell take that night away from them.
#
Finality was in the air.
Joanna could feel it in her bones. Even their lovemaking, wonderful though it was, carried within it the essence of goodbye.
It was only a matter of who said it first, and Joanna had decided that she would be the one.
And tonight would be the night.
They were doubling with Alistair and Holland and dining at an inn down near Princeton, New Jersey, where Holland was filming a small part on a new nighttime soap about sex and academia. Holland was as excited as a high school girl about the evening and, for her sake, Joanna was going to go along with their plans.
There would be plenty of time when they got home to tell Ryder of her decision.
She yanked her favorite dress from the closet and held it up to herself before the mirror. It was a simple sheath made extraordinary by the thousands of tiny black and silver beads painstakingly sewn to every square inch of fabric. It shimmered like moonlight in a midnight sky.
The perfect dress for saying goodbye.
Not that Ryder didn't see it coming, though. She was certain he'd been waiting for this. In fact, he would probably welcome it. The need for goodbye had been in his eyes every moment since he returned from whatever secret place he'd been.
Where he'd been brash and outspoken before, he was calm and cool now. Where energy had crackled from every pore, a strange lassitude remained.
Something had happened while he was away, something profound. Something he wasn't about to share with Joanna, no matter how much he said he loved her, no matter how badly she wanted to believe.
She slipped the dress over her head, then fumbled behind her for the zipper.
So this, then, was it. She'd made up her mind and at least took a measure of comfort from the fact that the decision this time was hers and hers alone.
Her work for Benny Ryan on the bank commercial had been a rousing success and had attracted the attention of an independent producer who wanted Joanna to travel to Tahiti, all expenses paid, on an eight-week location shoot for Vogue magazine, which was about to venture into the murky waters of video.
When they'd worked together on nailing Stanley Holt, she'd had a taste of how wonderful teaming up with Ryder could be. They'd been true partners, equals, their talents and weaknesses dovetailing so perfectly that they functioned liked a precision instrument. But that partnership had disappeared the second they had the goods on Stanley.
What they had now was a pale imitation of what they'd shared, and she'd rather do without than be reminded of what could have been.
The doorbell rang and she slipped on her shoes and took one final look at herself in the mirror before she went to let him in.
Yes, she would tell Ryder tonight and, with any luck, she'd be on a Tahiti-bound plane tomorrow before he had a chance to see her cry.
#
If it hadn't been for Alistair and his continental gift of gab, Ryder doubted if he and Joanna would have made it to the corner of West 71st Street before the subject of goodbye came up. Alistair was telling her about his experience with the queen mother at a charity auction in Surry and Joanna was laughing for the first time in days.
It was a good story, but Ryder was hard put to get his concentration back on target. Each time he tried to interject an anecdote, the damned receiver in his earlobe blasted him with a tone that made his fillings vibrate. It was a miracle Joanna hadn't heard it.
If Alistair knew about a possible emergency, he was being pretty damned cool about it. Ryder decided to do the same. One night in fifteen years wasn't a hell of a lot to ask.
The Rolls was easing its way over the Outerbridge Crossing that led from Staten Island to New Jersey. Alistair had rapped on the window separating the driver from the passenger compartment and was giving instructions on where to pick up Holland. Joanna was looking down at her manicure. The car was silent save for the low purr of the engine.
Of course, that was when PAX decided to signal with an ear-splitting blast that probably sent dogs in the tristate area out into their front yards to howl at the moon.
Joanna's head popped up. "What was that?"
He tried to look innocent. "What was what?"
Another ear splitter.
"That noise."
"I didn't hear anything."
She leaned closer to him. "You'd have to be deaf not to – there it is again! Ryder, what's going on?"
He shrugged. "Probably a foghorn in the distance," he said, pointing to the river they were crossing. "You hear them all the time."
They eased off the Outerbridge and headed toward the New Jersey Turnpike south to Princeton.
The words "Code 33" made his mandible rattle.
"Is something wrong, Joanna?"
Alistair turned back to both of them.
"I think I'm going crazy," she said with an apologetic laugh. "First I was hearing foghorns; now I'm hearing voices."
Alistair's sharp blue eyes zeroed in on Ryder. "Are you hearing voices, as well, O'Neal?"
You know damn well I am. Ryder hadn't known Alistair was quite this accomplished an actor. "You haven't heard any?" he asked, trying to keep his tone of voice light and breezy. "You usually hear them first." Joanna's eyes were wide with curiosity. He looked over at her. "Chambers is the one with the good imagination."
Alistair, however, didn't laugh. "Sometimes I get back reception on my radio," he said, never taking his eyes from Ryder. "That's when I rely on Ryder for my information."
Ice formed in the pit of Ryder's stomach. "You haven't heard today's news?" This couldn't be happening. In fifteen years, Alistair had always been the first to know everything.
Joanna's attention swiveled from Ryder to Alistair, then back to Ryder again. She looked as if she'd rather take her chances hitchhiking on the Turnpike than spend another second in the Rolls.
He didn't blame her.
"Is there something I should know?" Alistair asked, the epitome of urbane calm. Only Ryder was aware of the power beneath the smile. "Perhaps the headline of The New York Times?"
Before Ryder had a chance to answer, all hell broke loose.
#
Joanna was fiddling with the cellular telephone mounted on the side wall of the Rolls-Royce and trying to ignore the tension between the two men when it happened.
A deep rhythmic alarm filled the air. There was no doubt that it originated right there in the limo. She turned to Ryder. His face had drained of color. Alistair punched a series of buttons on the console near the bar, and the driver smoothly steered across three lanes of traffic onto the shoulder of the Turnpike, then rolled to a stop.
Before she could form a coherent question, a voice filled the car, booming out from the speakers on both rear doors.
Playing for Time Page 18
