Rules of Re-engagement

by Loreth Anne White

  “Like you destroyed mine?”

  “Hurting Olivia will solve nothing, Jack! Leave her out of this, dammit!”

  Jack watched the clock tick down another minute. “You have less than fifteen minutes to make up your mind, Samuel. Does she live—or die?”

  Killinger glared at him. Tension pulsed in his neck. The clock ticked down to fourteen minutes. Then thirteen. Jack didn’t blink.

  Killinger spun round suddenly, depressed a button on the console. “Bring my daughter to me. At once.”

  The men faced each other, waiting for the woman they both loved to arrive. The clock ticked to twelve minutes.

  On the monitors behind Killinger, Jack could see Elliot moving toward the microphones. All the news channels now had variations of the same shot. His mouth went dry. Tension squeezed his throat. But still he didn’t blink. In eleven minutes the world could change.

  Unless he stopped it.

  The door flew open. Olivia burst through it, then froze. “Dad! Jack?”

  Jack spoke first, his heart thudding. “Come here, Olivia.”

  She hesitated, her eyes fixed on her father, her face a storm of emotions. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “Just come here now.” She moved to his side as he kept his eyes trained on her father. “You now have less than ten minutes to save your daughter’s life, Samuel. Stop those bombs, or I press the button and detonate that cuff on your daughter’s wrist. Then you can watch her die.”

  “Jack!” Olivia gasped.

  His chest clenched. He tried to swallow, refusing to look at her. He couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t be able to press the button if he did.

  The clock ticked—eight minutes.

  “She’ll start to bleed internally almost immediately. Without an antidote, death will come in less than twelve hours.”

  A strange noise escaped Olivia’s throat.

  Something hot flashed in Killinger’s face and his fist balled. “I told you, I can’t stop this! The bombs are programmed to go. There’s nothing I can do now.”

  Six minutes.

  In all the television screens, Elliot was now at the podium, in front of a bank of microphones. Cameras zoomed in on his face.

  A bead of perspiration trickled slowly down Jack’s temple. Killinger didn’t move. Silence pulsed heavily.

  Four minutes.

  “Dad…” Olivia pleaded in a hoarse whisper. “Please, Dad, for God’s sake, don’t let him do this! Please, Dad, stop the attack! Stop this thing. Please!”

  Killinger’s mouth flattened, his eyes hardened. No one moved.

  Three minutes.

  Two minutes.

  The clock now began to count down the seconds—1:59, 1:58, 1:57…

  Jack turned, looked into Olivia’s eyes and for a nanosecond, he almost faltered. “Trust me,” he whispered.

  And he hit the button.

  Chapter 14

  23:59 Romeo. Caribbean Sea.

  Monday, October 13.

  Olivia gasped as the needle exploded into her wrist. She stared in shock as a small dark trickle of blood dribbled down her hand.

  And then all hell broke loose. The FDS team burst through the door and surrounded Killinger. The choppers could be heard approaching, buzzing low over the ship. There were gunshots up on deck, women screaming. Then there was the strange and sudden hush of the Genevieve’s engines being cut.

  On the bank of plasma screens, the president was speaking into the microphones. “On this day it gives me great…”

  And in Jack’s ear, he could hear McDonough’s voice. “The medics have landed, they’re on their way down to the stateroom.” Jack crouched down, popped the hidden compartment in his shoe and released the syringe. “Tell them to wait outside, McDonough,” he said as cracked the vial and filled the syringe, “until I give word.” He tested the syringe with a squirt of serum and then stood, one eye on the television monitors, his torso damp with perspiration, his heart pounding.

  Blood was already trickling from Olivia’s nose. Killinger fought Jack’s men, trying desperately to get to his daughter as they restrained him.

  Jack held up the syringe. “The antidote,” he said loudly.

  Killinger stilled.

  All went quiet in the room.

  “If she gets this within half an hour, she will make a full recovery. If not, she will die. This, Samuel, is your last chance.”

  Olivia choked, put her hand to her mouth. It came away dark with blood. Terror filled her eyes. “You lied to me, Jack,” she whispered hoarsely. “I…trusted you…” She coughed again.

  Jack could feel the muscle in his jaw pulsing. The president’s words filled the room. “I am here tonight because…” Elliot was stalling, thought Jack, hoping the FDS would still come through. This was it. Now or never. The future of the nation, the world hung on this moment. The seconds ticked down to twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…

  He waited for one more beat, then spun on his heels and made for the door, his heart thumping so hard he could barely breathe, barely hear, his body drenched with sweat.

  “Wait!”

  Jack stilled, turned slowly.

  Killinger looked suddenly smaller, crumpled, defeated. Old. “I’ll do it.” He picked up the phone, punched in a code and hit a number. Then he hit a quick-dial button. “Call off the speech, at once. Yes…I am sure. Now!” He replaced the receiver, inhaled deeply, turned to face Jack. “Save my daughter’s life, give her the antidote.”

  But Jack waited, his eyes fixed on the screens, every muscle in his body strung wire tense. The clock ticked past midnight.

  The screens showed a White House aide moving up to the podium, whispering in the president’s ear. John Elliot’s body slumped with momentary relief. He closed his eyes for a second, his tension evident in the way his hands gripped the sides of the podium. Then he looked up, right into the cameras, right into Killinger’s stateroom, the image repeated over and over and over in the bank of screens. He smiled—a tired smile, but still a smile.

  Jack’s heart swooped.

  “Fellow citizens, tonight is a night that will go down in history. Tonight, because of a few brave men, I am able to stand before you and tell you that this country has avoided a terrorist attack of catastrophic proportions, an attack that…”

  Emotion exploded into Jack’s eyes. He spun round, dropped to his knees, took Olivia’s arm. Her eyes were closed, her skin deathly pale and cold. He quickly tapped her vein and injected the antidote into her arm. “Get the medics in here, now!” he yelled as he fed the serum carefully into her system.

  The door crashed open. The medics made for Olivia with a stretcher. Jack stroked her hand. “Olivia, you’re going to be fine. Trust me.”

  She refused to open her eyes. “Leave me alone, please,” she whispered faintly. “I never want to see you again.”

  “Livie—”

  She turned her face away from him, and the medics took her…and they took Jack’s heart with them.

  Jack gritted his teeth, clenched his fists and closed his eyes tight. “Get that bastard the hell out of my sight,” he growled, without looking at Killinger. “Notify the authorities. Hand him over.”

  He pinched the bridge of nose as his men took Samuel Killinger.

  He’d saved a nation. But he’d lost the woman he loved.

  For the second time.

  Jack made his way woodenly up to the top deck, stepped into the sea air and dragged both hands over his hair. He watched the spinning blades of the helicopter as they gathered speed, ready to evacuate Olivia to the nearest hospital.

  In the back of his mind he heard a gunshot below deck. He paid no attention. He knew his men were in control. His job was done. It was over—in more ways than one.

  He watched the chopper rise. And he wondered if it had been worth it.

  McDonough came up behind him. “Sauvage, we have a problem.”

  Jack registered the use of his French name in some distant part of his
brain. “What is it?” he said, watching the pulsing lights of the chopper grow smaller and smaller in the night sky.

  “It’s the albino—he took Killinger out. He was in the hold…he went for Killinger before anyone realized what was happening. He had a knife.”

  “Killinger’s dead?” Jack felt nothing, just hollow.

  “Yes.”

  “The albino?”

  “Our men shot him. They’re both gone. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s better that way,” he said as the lights of the helicopter were swallowed completely by the darkness of the Caribbean night.

  McDonough watched them disappear, too. “We did it, Sauvage,” he said quietly. “A mission impossible. We saved the bloody nation.”

  “We didn’t save the president. He’s going to die.”

  “You did your job, Jacques. We did our best—”

  “It’s Jack.”

  McDonough hesitated. “Sorry, mate. Force of habit.”

  Jack nodded, his eyes fixed on the black sky where Olivia’s chopper had disappeared from sight.

  McDonough hit him on the shoulder. “No one ever said sacrifice was easy, mon ami.”

  12:05 Romeo Manhattan.

  Wednesday, December 24.

  Olivia stood at her window, watching snow fall softly over New York—big fat fairy-tale flakes, drifting slowly, swirling, settling fast on the cold streets, blanketing the city for Christmas Eve. The television was on in the background and President Michael J. Taylor was giving a speech.

  A deep sadness filled her heart. It would be the first Christmas that she would spend truly alone. No family at all.

  She hugged her arms over her stomach. She’d lost a lot of weight. She was still tired. She’d attended her father’s funeral, and she’d attended President Elliot’s funeral—one man buried a hero, the other a villain. Her eyes burned at the thought of her father. But no more tears would come.

  Grayson was being detained, his trial pending, the media going berserk over it all. She herself had been subjected to weeks of interrogation by countless agencies and bureaucracies. And through it all, Jack had been…nowhere.

  He’d used her in the most devastating way. Even his marriage proposal had been a tool to buy her absolute faith in him so that she would betray her father.

  Now they were both gone—Jack and her dad.

  She had no one.

  She needed to find the strength to stand on her own again. Totally on her own. She had to think about going back to work again. She’d taken enough time off.

  She glanced at the television, the emotion in Taylor’s voice suddenly snaring her attention. She moved closer to the television set, turned it up, watched. He was rallying the nation in the wake of the death of a beloved man. He was talking about overcoming the cancers of the past, about meeting challenges head-on, about healing and forgiving, about the work ahead in the New Year.

  Olivia turned again to look at the snow. It was getting thick now, and the world looked clean. She smiled sadly. Mother Nature was doing her bit, cleaning up the world, making it beautiful before it segued into a New Year. A new time. A new era for this country.

  She inhaled deeply. Jack had done his bit to get them this far.

  What would you do, Olivia? One life to save millions?

  His words echoed through her mind, words spoken in this very apartment. She reached up, felt for the Saint Catherine’s pendant around her neck. She held it, thinking about the dreams, the goals, the ideals they had once shared, so many years ago.

  They were all still there at the root of it all, she thought—all those same beliefs. If she had been Jack, if she had been faced with this mission, this conflict, she wouldn’t have had a choice, either.

  She could see that now, with hindsight, that Jack had consistently been true to himself, to his morals. If anyone had been constant at all, in all these years, it had been Jack.

  She should be proud of what he did. And she was. It just hurt so bad. She knew she’d said she never wanted to see him again—but it still hurt that he hadn’t come back, that he hadn’t been there to support her through all the stuff she’d had to go through.

  She fingered the pendant. What should she expect?

  But Taylor was right. It was time to forgive, to move on, to look ahead to the new challenges, even if she had to do that alone now. She was a fighter, and she wasn’t going to go down. Not after what she’d been through.

  Her cell phone chimed. She reached for it, answered, watching the mesmerizing swirl of flakes.

  It was Harvey. He wanted her to come in to the office to join them all for an early Christmas Eve gathering before everyone headed home.

  “Starts at three-thirty,” he said.

  “Harvey, I don’t think so. I…I’m not in the mood.”

  “We have eggnog.”

  “Yeah? Now I’m really not coming.”

  He laughed, then his voice turned serious. “Olivia, you need to get out. Who else are you going to spend Christmas Eve with?”

  “I…I have friends.”

  “Yeah? And we’re all here, waiting for you.”

  She glanced at Taylor’s image on the screen.

  Time to move on.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  Harvey hung up and grinned broadly. “She’s coming.”

  Jack grasped his shoulder. “Thank you, mate, I owe you.”

  “Hey, I’m doing this for her, not you.”

  Jack nodded. “Still, I owe you, and I never forget a favor.”

  Olivia saw him standing in the early dusk under the United Nations flag of peace, snow over his big black coat, a tangle of wilting pink and white flowers in his gloved hands.

  She froze in her tracks. Part of her almost turned and ran. From what, she wasn’t sure—fear that he’d come to say goodbye, farewell?

  She swallowed, braced, walked slowly toward him, the snow soft under her boots.

  “So Harvey set me up?” she said as she neared him.

  “Olivia,” he whispered. “Damn, it’s good to see you.”

  “Where have you been, Jack?”

  “Tying up loose ends with Elliot before he died. Debriefings. Getting to know President Taylor, bringing him up to speed with what happened. Dealing with the CIA, the Feds. Everyone’s trying to clean house. It’ll take some time.”

  She nodded. “I see.”

  Jack hesitated. “I also wanted to give you time, Olivia.”

  “For what?”

  “To hate me. To grieve. To think. Assimilate. I didn’t want to pressure you. You needed to work this out without me around. I think if I had stayed, you might have hated me forever. I don’t want you to hate me, Olivia.”

  She swallowed against the tight pain in her throat. “Your FDS profiler might know an awful lot about psychology, but you sure as hell know nothing, Jack.”

  He raised his hand to touch her, but she backed away, afraid of connecting with him. Afraid that if she did, she’d lose herself in him, get hurt all over again.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia. I…I’m doing the best I know how.”

  She stared at him, the flowers, the vulnerability in his eyes.

  “Why did you get Harvey to call, Jack?” she asked quietly.

  “I was afraid you might not speak to me.”

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “Tonight.”

  She looked down at her feet. “Was anything about us true?”

  “Everything was true, Olivia. Not once has there been anything false about my feelings for you.”

  She scuffed her boot in the snow. “You lied to me, Jack. You could have trusted me. I believed in you. I picked my side. I found the courage within myself to defy my father, and I would not have let you down.” She looked up, met his eyes. “But you just couldn’t find it within yourself to trust me, could you?”

  She turned, took two steps away, her heart racing, then she whirled back to face him. “I could have pulled
that charade off. But you thought I was too weak. You just had to inject a live pathogen into my system.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “I did trust you, Olivia. But the cuff was still necessary. Your fear had to be real. Samuel Killinger was not a man you could bluff easily. If your fear had not been real, if that pathogen had not been real, he would not have stopped those bombs. We would not be standing here.” His eyes pierced hers. “I never intended to hurt you, Olivia, ever. I would never have let it go too far.”

  She looked at the delicate long-stemmed and frothy flowers hanging limp over his powerful arms. “What do you want, Jack?”

  “I want you to find it in your heart to forgive me, Olivia. Can you try to understand what I was dealing with?”

  She looked down at her feet again, and she kicked the tip of her boot gently into the deepening snow, conscious of the strange hush over the city, the surreal purple-white light. “Maybe you need to forgive yourself, Jack. Maybe some things cannot be understood.”

  “A wise man told you that once, right?”

  She glanced up, almost smiled. “Yes. A wise man who drove a white Lamborghini. He also said, ‘It’s what happens next that matters.’”

  “This wise man have a French accent?”

  This time she did smile. “Yeah, he did.”

  “Did he also just happen to mention that you don’t get a third chance?”

  “Not…exactly.”

  “Livie, we won’t get a third chance. We have to get it right this time.” He paused. “Do you remember what I said? I told you that no matter what happened, I never wanted to lose you again. I meant it. I still mean it.”

  She paused. “Why did you come here, Jack? To say goodbye? Because—”

  He held out the armful of sad flowers. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get these?”

  She frowned in confusion. “No, I don’t, but they sure don’t look happy.”

  “They’re cosmos, Olivia. They grow in my garden, and they bloom all summer long.”

  “You have a garden?”

  He grinned sheepishly, his mouth so sexily crooked. “I do now. I bought a house earlier this month. And yes, it has a garden.” His eyes brightened as he spoke. “It overlooks the Atlantic—you can walk right down onto the beach, and you can watch the sunset from the porch. It’s summer there now, and the cosmos are blooming all along the bottom fence.”