“But all your plans center on this house,” he told her. “Do you realize how much money it will take to bring it up to code? You’ll spend more than the house is worth.” Garth shook his head and looked more at JJ and Davy than at Bronwyn. “I hate to be the naysayer, but from what I’ve seen of the house, it’s one gift horse she should have looked in the mouth. In fact, rather than a horse, I suspect it was an elephant, a white one. Someone has taken a healthy tax write-off for a property there was no way they’d ever sell.”
Chapter 21
Hence, to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“I’ve decided to catch your ghost,” Garth told Bronwyn when she opened the screen door wider to let him into the kitchen. JJ and Doc had left after the lunch of takeout barbecue.
Since then, Bronwyn had showered, and as Garth entered, he made brushing by her into an opportunity to inhale the spicy, floral, feminine smell of her hair. It hung in a straight deep-red curtain to her shoulders. She’d changed into a short skirt the color of ripe apricots that showed off her smooth legs and a white, sleeveless girly thing that tied with a ribbon just under her darling little breasts.
After raiding a back room at the airstrip for the equipment he was going to need, Garth had showered, too. And figured shaving again couldn’t hurt. And he’d changed into chinos and a crayon-red, crisp, polished-cotton shirt.
Bronwyn rolled her eyes. “Don’t start with the ghost again.”
“Kidding. I’m talking about finding a rational explanation. If you knew what was causing it, you’d feel better, right?”
Garth had wrestled with himself. Davy had told him to rescue her. This was the best idea he could come up with. But if he had any sense, he’d do what he could to make the ghostly presence worse. After all, it was in his best interest for her to be uncomfortable in the house. When he returned to operating as a SEAL, she would have to move sooner or later to wherever he was stationed.
He thanked his lucky socks he’d found her the very day she moved in, before anything was set in stone. If she’d been here several years, spent thousands renovating the house, and had a thriving practice and lots of friendships, persuading her to relocate would have been more difficult, maybe even impossible. He didn’t want her decision to join her life to his to be painful, so it only made sense to keep her from getting in too deep.
Still, he wanted to eradicate the strained expression that darkened her eyes every time the subject of a ghost came up—and somehow, making her feel better mattered more.
She shrugged, then smiled. Unconvincingly. “I guess. I really just want it to go away, but my next choice would be finding an explanation.”
“The webcam for the baby’s room gave me the idea. We can do like the TV show Ghost Hunters. I can mount closed-circuit cameras around the house.”
She emitted something between a groan and a chuckle. “First, because of you, I was in a spy thriller. Now, you want to make my life imitate reality TV. If that isn’t proof this is bizarre, nothing can be.”
Garth tried not to let that hurt, but it did. Still, he looked for another means of persuading her. “Where’s Julia?”
“Upstairs napping in her new crib. She’ll be waking up soon.”
“And you’re keeping an eye on her with the webcam?”
Bronwyn pointed to the open laptop. “Even as we speak.”
“That proves my point. Surveillance gives you freedom and peace of mind. Look, I hate to see you on edge. I want to get to the bottom of what’s happening. I want you to feel better.”
Bronwyn tilted her head, an arrested look in her eyes. After an agonizing pause, she said, “That’s sweet.” She indicated the box of equipment he had set on the table. “What have you got?”
“I also brought a FLIR—an infrared camera. Basically it’s a camera that sees heat.”
“I’m familiar with them. They’re used to make medical diagnoses.” She grinned. “Do you honestly think ghosts have a heat signature?”
He felt the smile on his face widen. Damn. He did like a smart woman. And thinking that he might be helping her relax a little and see the humor in the whole situation put a smile in his heart too. “That remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure rats or other varmints do.”
“Rats?”
“Rats, raccoons, squirrels, bats, birds. They could be living in the walls.”
“Oh. All those could be in the house? Maybe I’d rather have a ghost.”
“Don’t worry. If I find them, I’ll get them out.”
Again the head tilt. “Okay. You really think something is going on?”
“Something is. You’re not imagining it. I also have a Trifield gauss meter for measuring electromagnetic energy.”
She nodded. “Good idea. There’s so much to do, I hadn’t thought of checking the house for electronic pollution—but I should. High EMFs can cause illness. They’ve been implicated in leukemia in children. But what does it have to do…?”
“A high EMF can also cause creepy feelings, feelings of paranoia—like you’re being watched. It can make you jumpy, so that an ordinary noise like a window rattling seems ominous.”
“That would explain feeling like something is going on when it really isn’t.”
“But some paranormal investigators theorize a correlation between the presence of EMF fields and paranormal activity.”
Bronwyn’s eyes danced. “So a high EMF could make me just think I had a ghost, and it could also make a ghost more likely to manifest? Talk about circular logic.”
“I’m not making up these theories. I’m just reporting them.” Smiling into her eyes, he tucked a wisp of dark red hair behind her ear. She let him. It wasn’t hot monkey sex, but it was progress.
A little breathless, Bronwyn pointed to another device. “What’s that?”
“RF—radio frequency—detector. Might as well cover all the bases.”
The RF detector was also useful in locating bugs of the electronic kind, but he didn’t tell her that. Whoever had put Julia on that plane had an insider’s knowledge of spy craft. It might be too soon for someone to come looking for Julia, but he wanted to be prepared if, sooner or later, someone did. If Bronwyn’s house was under electronic surveillance, he wanted to know about it.
Chapter 22
Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“Come along, Mildred. The baby’s down for the night.” Bronwyn called the dog from the door of the baby’s room.
Mildred cocked one ear and looked from Bronwyn to the crib.
“Yes, you have to.” Mildred’s fascination with the baby hadn’t eased at all through the day. Bronwyn trusted Mildred, but she couldn’t let Mildred get the idea that Julia was her baby.
Mildred sighed and got to her feet, her toenails clicking on the bare floorboards.
“Good dog. Let’s go downstairs. We’ll find Garth.”
Dusk had deepened while they were putting Julia to bed. The bottom stairs disappeared into a pool of darkness. Having friends around today—filling the old place with bustle and laughter, R&B music on the radio, deep male voices, and hammering—had lightened the atmosphere and made it feel more normal, more like any old house in need of some updating. She also was reassured by the glowing red eye of the closed-circuit camera Garth had mounted in the hall ceiling this afternoon so that any noises on the staircase or at the front door could be studied.
Cameras had also been set up in her bedroom and other places that seemed to be what Garth called active. He had been right that she would feel more secure once the cameras were instal
led. But what helped the most, she had to admit, was that he was here.
When she reached the lower hall, she could see him through the open front door, perched on the porch railing. Despite the easy way he sat, one arm over a drawn-up knee, face blank as if he thought of nothing at all—just a man sitting on the porch railing in the twilight—she wasn’t fooled.
He was doing what she had seen Troy do. Behind his mask, his consciousness was sweeping the area as automatically and as relentlessly as a beam from a lighthouse. He was like a lion whose laziness would disappear in a burst of powerful movement when prey came into range.
Yes, she realized, use of a mask was what was the same about the two men. And also what was different. Troy had been better at it—at animating the mask—which had made it not so obvious. In outward personality, Troy had resembled David more than Garth. He had showed the world a face of good-humored ease.
Garth presented the world a mask of frozen fierceness that hid his sensitivity to the needs of those around him. Anyone who only watched Garth’s face wouldn’t know how responsible he felt for everyone. In that regard, he really reminded her more of JJ than of Troy. The insight surprised her so much, her heart skipped a beat.
In deciding to make the move to North Carolina, she had accepted that if Troy hadn’t died, her relationship with him would have ended. His undercover police work had been his life, and she was fundamentally an afterthought to be squeezed in when there was time. She wouldn’t have wanted that long term. She had stayed in the relationship as long as she did because it distracted her from how unhappy she was at the hospital.
Her friendship with JJ had already stood the test of time and of separations, and she knew she would love JJ as long as she lived.
She detoured to the kitchen to pick up her laptop. Somewhere upstairs, in one of the bedrooms she had just left, it sounded like something heavy hit the floor and rolled.
Mildred looked at her, shaggy eyebrows lifted.
Bronwyn opened the laptop. In her crib, Julia slept undisturbed, her hands in loose fists beside her dandelion-fluff head. As Bronwyn watched, Julia brought one fist to her mouth and sucked on her thumb for a second or two. Then the thumb slowly slid away as her mouth went slack again.
“I haven’t heard anything else, have you?” Bronwyn asked the dog. “No? In that case, since the baby is okay, I don’t think we will dash up there to investigate. We’ll just wait and see if the camera caught anything.”
Mildred seemed okay with that. She bumped the screen open with her nose and went outside.
Bronwyn paused with her hand on the slat of the old wooden door, thinking about the man she was going outside to confront. Another thing that was different was that Troy had always kept her separate from his undercover operations. He rarely talked about them even after the fact. When they were going on, she might not even see him for a week or two. Whatever was going on here, she was as much in the middle of it as Garth was.
Outside, she set the open laptop on a built-in ledge where they could both watch Julia on the screen. Then she leaned her shoulder against a pillar that, like everything else, needed painting but seemed sturdy enough.
“We need to talk,” she said. “While Julia napped this afternoon, I researched North Carolina law about child abandonment. We can’t play finders, keepers with a child.”
His expression didn’t change at all. “What does the law say?”
“Essentially, if you find a child, your first duty is to see to its safety, and second, to report it to authorities. But you can’t just keep her. That’s concealment and conspiracy to further a kidnapping. A felony. We’re no longer talking about failure to report neglect—which in North Carolina doesn’t even have a penalty. This is a felony.
“At the very least, my medical license is on the line. I could go to jail for a long, long time. I only have your word that she won’t be safe with the police and that what we’re doing is necessary to her well-being. Tell me the truth about how and where you found the baby, and why you think she’s in danger.”
His blue gaze didn’t waver. “There’s a lot I can’t tell you. It really comes down to do you trust me.”
“No. It comes down to, do you trust me. You have to give me something that makes your actions comprehensible, or I’ll have to act on my own.”
“There’s not much I can say.”
“I’m willing to believe that you’re trying to protect Julia. I’m not asking you to breach national security. I’ve kind of figured out some hush-hush things are going on out at the airstrip, but you told me you’re not a SEAL anymore, right? Just tell me as much as you can.”
Chapter 23
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. Kill one, terrify a thousand.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Talking to people who weren’t read in to an operation was bad, but permissible under certain circumstances, as long as these people had a high enough security clearance—which both Davy and his ex-SEAL friend Clay did. Most SEALs might think Garth was behaving stupidly, but they would not be revolted by his actions so far. However, what no SEAL could condone, no matter the circumstances, was a security breach.
Bronwyn had no clearance at all. Breaching security was something Garth had never done—had never even thought of doing.
And yet he was thinking of it. He allowed no tension to creep into the relaxed composure with which he leaned against the pillar. He let no flicker of self-doubt show in his face. But the older, emotional parts of the brain were not so easily controlled. His heart pounded. His thigh, where his palm rested so easy looking, was wet with sweat from his hand.
In taking Julia, no way could he claim he was acting on orders or even that he was independently pursuing an operation’s objectives. He was already off the reservation. Nevertheless, until this moment, he had continued to live within the code of silence. He could rationalize what he was doing, or he could admit the truth: he wanted to tell her. Bronwyn stood to lose her license, but she was willing to risk it to protect a child. He owed her some explanations. He was going rogue.
He picked up the laptop. “Let’s go down and sit on the dock, okay?” He’d swept the house for bugs, but just in case there was a directional mic trained on them, the twenty-foot drop to the river would make it hard for anyone to listen in without being visible themselves. “Get a sweater. It’ll be cooler by the water.”
A lane had been cut through the sandy bank to get boat trailers down to the water. It was deeply gullied in places and choked with saplings but still imprinted with car tracks. Mildred raced ahead of them and dashed back, delighted to have company on a ramble.
At the bottom of the bluff, the trees gave way to a narrow beach of grayish sand. After the dark of the woods, it seemed almost bright down there. Near the horizon, the sky was a lemony color.
The short wooden dock had been there a long time. Here and there, gray tatters of rope looped the pilings. Some of the boards were spongy, a few missing. The dock would hold them, though. Garth set the laptop on a fish-cleaning platform.
Bronwyn kicked off her flip-flops. “This is the first time I’ve come down to the river since I got here. There’s always something else to do, isn’t there?” She sat down on the end of the dock and let her legs dangle over the water. “It’s so quiet, I almost feel like I ought to whisper.”
He let himself down beside her. She looked at him expectantly.
“Okay. I’m going to tell you as much as I can, but I can’t tell you where the plane came from. And I can’t tell you who was on the plane—or why.”
“But the outfit you work for—is it legal? I mean, they’re not bringing drugs or some contraband into the country?”
“No drugs. It’s legal.” Mostly. And for the parts that weren’t strictly legal, such as avoiding
customs, at least it had the blessing of persons high in the government.
“All right. I won’t ask any more. Here’s my real question. You said you think someone put Julia on the plane to try to save her. I don’t understand. If they wanted to save her, why would they put her in such danger? She’s a baby. She couldn’t take care of herself. I want to believe you, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
Putting in all the details he had previously glossed over, he described the flight that had been delayed and had almost cut it too close to a thunderstorm, and how he’d found the box containing the baby after the pilot and passengers had left. He had to conclude that someone with a desperate need to get their child out of the country had put the baby aboard the plane.
Bronwyn’s clear, russet eyes had lost all their sparkle as he spoke. “Why would someone be so desperate?” she asked.
“In the annals of terrorism, there is a long history of adults who disagreed with a regime being ‘disappeared’ in the dark of night and their children, now orphans, taken. The children are then sold in black-market adoptions. An adoptable baby is worth a lot of money. The army of El Salvador paid its own way with black-market trade in children.”
“Paid for itself? But that would mean…”
“Right. Thousands of children were stolen. The military regime of El Salvador was supported by the U.S. government. There’s no way the CIA didn’t know what was happening. These days, a healthy white infant, pretty, would go for fifty thousand, easy.”
“But you don’t think Julia was stolen?”
“There would be easier, surer ways to bring a baby into the country if the motive was purely profit. But her parents might have been afraid that they, and anyone who tried to help them, were in imminent danger. The fear that Julia would be killed, too, may have been the reason she was hidden on the plane.”
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