Renfro’s eyes narrowed in a knowing look. “Think about where you are.”
Garth looked around the unimpressive office. “Coastal Air?”
“And you were recruited by Operation TANGENT—weren’t you?”
Whoa! Renfro knew the secret name of the black-ops organization that sold Coastal Air’s services to the intelligence community. Garth said nothing, but he was fairly sure his eyes had given away his shock.
“Uh-huh.” Renfro nodded wisely. “Now don’t give me any details. Just tell me how you happened to be free when TANGENT came calling. Bottom line.”
“Bottom line? Bad intel.”
Renfro drained his paper cup and tossed it into the trash can. With his scary yet knowing eyes fixed on Garth, he settled back. “Listen carefully. I don’t know who owns U.S. Security, but U.S. Security owns Coastal Air. And another division of U.S. Security, Rache-Carlyle, collects intel in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“My friend, there are over four thousand corporately owned intelligence contractors being paid by the U.S. government. Nobody knows how much is being paid to whom, or for what services, because the contracts will never see the light of day. But there’s one piece of information everybody knows: On Capitol Hill, an intelligence contractor’s best friend is retired Admiral Jonas Stephenson.”
Stephenson was very much an éminence grise, a shadowy figure who always seemed to be associated with power. Although retired, he “consulted” with the Pentagon and was understood to have a finger in a lot of pies without having any title himself. In some quarters, it was speculated that he was at the top of a gray-ops outfit. Garth wasn’t in any position to know.
Renfro was implying that Stephenson had had a hand in producing the false intel that had almost led to Garth’s entire platoon being killed—and also had pulled the strings to get Garth placed where he could talk to no one. And, though Renfro carefully hadn’t said so, Stephenson was the one who had hired Renfro.
Out of the blue, as it often did, the memory of Garth’s near-death experience intruded. As always, it was as fresh and as vivid as if it had just happened.
In that space beyond worlds and beyond worldly ambition, he had known that he didn’t like his Darth Vader mask and that the mask had been on the verge of becoming his personality.
All SEALs didn’t become Darth Vaders. He didn’t have the introspective skills to understand why it had been necessary for him, and he didn’t think it mattered now, anyway. The important thing was that he had questioned if the SEAL he had become was the SEAL he wanted to be.
What he had not questioned was whether being a SEAL and being a man were the same things. And of course they weren’t. Now he asked himself could he ever be the man he wanted to be while at the same time being a SEAL.
At every turn, ever since Afghanistan, his life had seemed to go off track, and nothing he did seemed to fix it. Now he saw it had gone off track even earlier. In the near-death experience, he had recognized the truth about himself, but he had not been able to bring the lesson back with him until now.
Bronwyn had made it abundantly clear that though she loved him, the life she could build with a SEAL was not a life she wanted.
Oddly enough, Renfro had offered him the other piece of the equation in his cynical summation: “You know what I mean. You know how it is when you operate—you do what you need to do. As much as possible you try to work for our team, but there’s not always a lot of difference between the good guys and the bad guys. It’s not that often that your conscience is completely clear, you know?”
When he’d looked at all he’d done the last couple of weeks, ever since he found Julia, he hadn’t had any trouble telling if he was one of the good guys or the bad. He had known, even though he’d had very little idea which team he was on, or if he was on any team at all. And deep in his heart or his soul or wherever conscience resided, his was clear.
Bronwyn, on the other hand, had never had a moment of doubt. Whenever she saw the morally right thing, she did it—but not in rote obedience to some moral precept. Instead, she always set her path by her personal moral compass.
The doorway, the possibility of being the man he wanted to be, lay with Bronwyn. She had told him once, “I came here looking for the place I fit. I wanted a place that was mine. I think I’ve found it. I want to sink my roots deep.” He could live and thrive anywhere, therefore wherever she needed to be, there he wanted to be also.
He had thought tonight’s wedding-do would be about trying to make the connections that would take him back to being a SEAL.
Now his mission objective changed.
He thought for a minute. He had intuited for a long time that something stalked him just outside his vision, like a cat waiting for the opportunity to strike. Well, he knew where the tiger was, and he would no longer wait for it to choose its moment. He was going to poke it.
He opened his phone and selected MacMurtry’s number.
When MacMurtry answered, he said, “I need for you to deliver a message to Admiral Stephenson for me. Tell him, ‘The bananas arrived as scheduled, and payment is due.’”
Chapter 40
“I’ve already told David, he and his cronies can’t disappear to some table in a corner.” JJ addressed Bronwyn over the drying lights in the nail salon. JJ had decreed she and Bronwyn would have a spa day to get ready for the big event that night. Inevitably her main topic was her plans and preparations for the evening.
“They can talk to each other in a way they can’t to anyone else,” she explained to Bronwyn. “It’s just the way they are. Don’t let that make you feel shut out.”
Bronwyn couldn’t look at JJ or she might cry, and she couldn’t use her hands until her nail polish dried. “Oh, I don’t anticipate a problem along those lines. We won’t be together.”
Shocked out of her preoccupation, JJ’s brows came together. “What do you mean? I thought you guys had been getting together in every known position and a few that are believed impossible for humans.”
Continuing to avoid JJ’s eyes, Bronwyn shrugged. “I probably won’t turn down sex with him—I’m not an idiot—but I’m not going to try any sort of committed relationship.”
“Are you still focusing on Troy? You’ve got to let him go.”
With a safer topic, Bronwyn could, at last, meet JJ’s eyes. “I have. He’s gone. He was wonderful. I loved him dearly, and a part of me will always love him, but he’s gone.”
“Then what’s the hang-up?”
Bronwyn took a deep breath. “I’m not hanging back because I’m afraid I won’t find anyone like him. I’m hanging back because I’m afraid I have.”
“You are an idiot. You let go of the love and kept the grief.”
Bronwyn hadn’t expected an attack. It dried any incipient tears right up. “What?”
“You’re letting the fact that he died be the defining moment of the relationship.”
“I’m really not, JJ. But when he died, I had to face how little relationship there had been. I would have seen it sooner or later. But because he died, I had to look at it sooner. I’m not going down that path again.”
“You’ve come to the wrong conclusion. He was a good man. You could have done a lot worse, but he wasn’t right for you.”
Bronwyn looked up in surprise. “You never said that.”
“What was I going to say? You loved him, and it would probably have been enough. But you would have forever been the one to take care of him. He wouldn’t have taken care of you. He didn’t really see you. He helped you keep your knowledge of who you are buried.”
“What do you mean?” Bronwyn asked, but she was afraid she knew.
“When you touch people, you heal them.”
Oh, God. Not again. “No, I don’t. I can give you a long list of people I haven’t healed, and their address these days is the cemetery.”
JJ rolled her luminous green eyes. “I know you’re not Jesus. You don’t have uncanny powers or anything. But you do heal them. Granddaddy is always better for a week or two after you see him.”
“Lucas has heart failure. There are good days and bad days. Good weeks and bad weeks. JJ, don’t start hoping I can—Sooner or later, his heart will give out.”
“I don’t care if you make him live longer—and neither does he. But you make the life he has better. That’s why I wanted you here.”
“JJ, I want to be here for you and for him, but you’re making up expectations—”
“Oh, for goodness sake!” JJ risked her manicure to throw up her hands. “I know what I see.” She smashed her spread fingers flat under the lights and glared at Bronwyn. “I thought you were done with hiding out. With hanging back. You know what the real trouble with Troy was?”
“Yeah. He was an undercover cop, an adrenaline junkie, and it killed him.”
“All true, but not what I’m talking about. He wouldn’t have brought you a baby to care for. He wouldn’t have thought of caring for her. He would have dropped her off at a hospital. He would have said, ‘Shit happens,’ and forgotten about her. And do you want to know the real reason he would have done that?”
“I don’t think I do, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“It would be because a mere baby’s concerns aren’t part of his game. And neither were yours. He didn’t want you to be special.”
It was the truth. She couldn’t see Troy doing any of the things Garth had done. Troy had helped her hide, had given her the distraction she had needed to enable her to stay one more day in the ER.
The problem with Garth was that he wasn’t like Troy. He didn’t want to take her away from herself. He was determined to accept all of her. Including the parts she’d rejected. No one in the world could be less woo-woo, less airy-fairy, speak less New Age babble than he, and yet he had calmly accepted the way she was.
He didn’t settle, ever, for what she would give him, what she would show the world. His was a strength she could depend on. With him, she didn’t have to watch out, lest she throw him a curve ball. She hadn’t had to watch out with Troy; Troy wouldn’t have seen a curve ball.
And JJ, with a long-term friend’s insight, had recognized how deeply the question was mired in whether Bronwyn would acknowledge to herself that she was a healer.
While some doctors acknowledged the validity of forms of healing besides allopathic medicine, most didn’t think of themselves as healers. Somehow, healing had become the opposite of science. But healing was another one of those things over which Bronwyn had no control.
She could do much to assist the body, to create the conditions that would support healing, but ultimately, what she had said to Garth was right. Healing was something that took place within the body—outside the doctor’s ability to cause it.
She knew she had little or no ability to direct whatever people sensed as “healing,” so she had, once again, resisted seeing what she couldn’t control. She smiled a little at her own intransigence.
Choosing to have a relationship with Garth would offer her a thousand daily opportunities to see what was beyond her control—even if he left all thoughts of a military or secretive career behind. As JJ had once observed, the trouble with alpha men is that you can’t control them. They are controlled internally by what they value.
His calm but not blind acceptance of who she was, if she accepted it herself, would be a bulwark against straying into the irrational, which was ultimately what she feared.
The fear, she recognized, was not really hers. She had inherited it from her parents. All their worshiping of the god of science had not stopped them from seeing in her what “science” couldn’t explain and, because they couldn’t understand it, fearing it.
SEALs, at least the ones she had gotten to know, didn’t fear the unknown. Instead they met the unknown as a challenge, as an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to increase in strength. And when she looked within herself, she found she didn’t fear the unknown, either.
She had already set about freeing herself from some of the limitations with which her parents had enclosed her. Now, she loosed this one.
She didn’t know whether she could build a relationship with Garth, but she now gratefully accepted all he had already given her.
Chapter 41
“This is quite a bash you and JJ are putting on,” Garth remarked to Davy, sitting to his left while he glanced around the huge, elegant ballroom with its ceiling several stories high and elaborate stonework balconies. With one foot, Garth pushed out the empty chair beside him and propped his leg on it. His thigh ached deep in the bone. The swim today hadn’t done it any good.
“Yeah, but we can’t stay here long. JJ said we couldn’t all get in a corner and talk to each other.”
“Are you saying you’re pussy-whipped?” Do-Lord asked, a taunting smile hovering around his lips as he sat on Davy’s other side.
“Hell, yeah, I am!” Davy smiled his slightly off-center smile. “As often as I can talk JJ into it. When you’re ready for a little something extra, there’s nothing like a pussy-whip.”
Do-Lord nodded. “Right answer. Me, too. And Emmie said we can’t hang out until the party is winding down.”
“Lauren’s going to come looking for me, too,” Lon admitted from across the table. “So talk fast, Lieutenant. Give us a sit-rep.”
Garth quickly filled them in on all that had happened, concluding with the story of Renfro’s surfacing.
The men whistled silently. “So how are things going with Bronwyn?”
Garth told them about her categorical refusal to consider life as a SEAL’s wife.
Lon snorted. “You know, the problem you’ve got is that you fell in love with Bronwyn at second sight. A decision that sweeping, based on no evidence at all except a feeling, either gives you nowhere to go, because you think you don’t get to choose your path, or makes you look like an idiot. Which I am beginning to think you are. Bronwyn at least is attempting to be the doctor she wants to be. You recognize that you’re not the SEAL you want to be, but you accept it as the price of doing business.”
“Not anymore I don’t. Do-Lord, how did you decide it was time to get out?”
Do-Lord steepled his fingers, preparing his answer. “For all the push-the-edge stuff we do,” he said at last, speaking to the whole table, “there’s a line, you know? It might be a line the navy has drawn for you, or it might have been given you by your religion, or it may just be a line you’ve set for yourself…”
All the men nodded.
“But there is a line,” Do-Lord reiterated with the skill of the natural orator. “A line you have to stay inside. As long as you stay inside it, you’re true to yourself, and you’re still connected—you know? You’re still on the inside. But when you cross that line…” he trailed off.
Garth nodded. He knew how that had felt, not to be connected to himself on the inside.
Do-Lord looked at them all, his hazel eyes unflinching in his rough-hewn face. “I crossed the line,” he said simply. “Nobody died, but they would have if Emmie hadn’t made me see what I was doing.”
Garth nodded again. “I didn’t exactly cross the line. What I was doing was rubbing the line thinner and thinner until I had a hard time knowing which side I was on. But here’s the thing that confuses me. I really thought I was supposed to be a SEAL—it was my calling—and that if I could get into the right place, I could do some good, make a difference, make SEALs more effective against terrorism.”
Do-Lord gave him a knowing smile. “Come on, Lieutenant, sir. You’ve studied your history of war. In Iraq we are fighting the same war in the same place as has been fought for the last 4,000 years. Baghdad is where Daniel was thrown into the fiery furnace. In Afghanistan, few invading armies have succeeded, and none has held onto
its victory for long.” He spread his large-knuckled hands on the white tablecloth.
“Just as there are and always have been an infinite array of people needing healing, so there are and have always been terrorist wars, and there always are the fertile breeding grounds of hatred, lust for power, and greed for them to spawn in. What to do about it? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Or even one answer that will fit one person for a whole lifetime.”
“That’s true,” Davy spoke up. “Remember how I said I never wanted anything except to be a SEAL?”
Garth smiled fondly. “Yeah, and you were a damn pain in the ass about it, too.”
“I’m asking for a medical discharge.”
There were protests around the table. “I thought you were okay.”
“I am. For most purposes. But the hyper-focus thing—it’s not there anymore. And occasionally I lose my balance. You saw it at Bronwyn’s house that day. I want to stop and smell the flowers. When you’re operating, you can’t let your attention be taken by the beauty of a sunset or how pretty your wife looked in the shower or your worry about your brother’s repeated bouts of pneumonia.”
“Do you think the problem is a result of your head injury?” Garth asked.
“It might be. I’m claiming it is anyway.” Davy grinned conspiratorially but then became serious. “I’m not going to let any shortcoming of mine endanger other SEALs. If I can’t do the job one hundred percent, I want out.”
Garth sensed something unsaid and asked, “What else?”
“I ask myself—well, what if the problem of blocking out distractions is that I really want to stop and smell the flowers? And I also ask myself, how many brain cells am I willing to lose? Now that I’m able to read again, I’ve done some research on trauma sufficient to cause unconsciousness.
“The person might seem all right after a couple of days to a couple of months, but they have some scarring. With every loss of consciousness, the damage is cumulative. Add that to the natural aging process and exposure to toxic substances, and you get early onset Alzheimer’s and other dementias. They are more common in special operators.
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