Blush

by Suzanne Forster

  Unfortunately Jack also had a dark talent for trouble. By the age of twelve he'd already done time in the California

  Youth Authority for assault, vandalism, and wanton destruction of personal property. A quiet, cerebral loner in a rough neighborhood, he was constantly beset by packs of young toughs who challenged his courage and savaged his male pride. When he finally lashed out, it was with full force of his genius. He struck at the toughs' most prized possessions, their cars, blowing them sky-high one-by-one with a touch of his remote, and then he took their ringleader hostage, holding him until he'd brought the entire pack to their knees.

  He did two years for his acts of retribution, but Jack's prodigious talent did not go unnoticed, even in stir. The standard AM/FM radio receiver he modified to pick up secret military satellite signals quickly brought him to the attention of the school officials. That summer he was whisked away to a special camp for the technologically gifted in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

  When he said his good-byes to his mother and father and rode away in the black sedan that came for him, it was the last time he was to see his parents or step foot in their home, except as a somewhat reticent visitor during the Christmas holidays and for two-week breaks during the summer. Having been assured that Jack would receive the best and most progressive curricula available, the family had given their consent and were secretly relieved that the federal government had taken over responsibility for their bewildering son's education and upbringing.

  The Feds did just that, including the full complement of intelligence training and several years of, the formidable Israeli philosophy of self-defense. Jack was exposed to anything and everything that would stimulate his impressive mental and physical gifts, and when finally he'd graduated from one intensive program after another, and his maturing body cried out for another kind of stimulation, they conspired to provide him with the perfect cover—a home in the suburbs, complete with a lovely wheat-haired, blue-eyed helpmate named Maggie.

  Maggie didn't actually come with the real estate, but she was hired to care for it, and for him, and their relationship quickly progressed from business to personal. They were quietly married, and their baby girl, Haley, who was conceived on their honeymoon, arrived exactly nine months later.

  Marriage and fatherhood were the closest Jack had ever come to a normal existence, and if he didn't fully understand how to love a wife and child, at least he loved the feeling of being with them, at least he knew the profound pleasure of making his baby daughter smile. And finally he had some inkling of his own parents' simple pleasures.

  All might have been well if not for his increasingly disturbing awareness that his life was not his own. The hardwiring in his brain was too valuable to be left to its own devices, according to his employers, and the classified nature of his work forced him into an existence totally apart from his family. Maggie had no idea that her systems-analyst husband was actually a high-tech counterespionage specialist who designed security for the Pentagon and other secret agencies within the industrial-military complex. She knew nothing of the man they called The Magician.

  The marriage convinced Jack that he had to extricate himself from covert government service. Pressure was put on him to stay, but he left the agency and took a "civilian" job with U. S. Customs and Excise Investigations Unit, designing security for the safe transport and storage of art and antiquities.

  His life took a turn toward normalcy, but it was then that disaster struck. He was approached by thugs who'd heard of the "magic" he could do, which told Jack his cover had been blown. They tried to bribe him to conspire in the theft of a priceless Van Gogh still life. When he refused, they abducted his baby daughter.

  Maggie was contacted by the thugs and told that Haley wouldn't be killed if she could convince her husband to cooperate. She begged Jack, she pleaded, breaking down in sobs, but he was convinced he could trap the men without giving in to their demands. With the help of the Customs Department, he set up an elaborate sting operation... which failed tragically.

  "Fucking fools!" the thugs had shrieked over the phone. They'd not only sidestepped the trap, they'd sought revenge.

  Jack could still hear his baby daughter's screams. The thugs hadn't sent the obscene audiotape of her death to him. The police found it on the seat next to Maggie's dead body when they pulled the car out of the ravine she'd plummeted into. They'd called her death an accident, but Jack knew the kidnappers' bloodlust hadn't been satisfied. He believed they'd tampered with the car's brakes. He needed to believe that because then he knew who to hate. And he knew what to do. But in his heart he feared Maggie had committed suicide, and that the entire tragedy was his responsibility.

  Either way the guilt crushed him. Black rage drove him to alcohol, but ultimately it was his need for justice that drove him underground. He had no idea who'd compromised him, and he trusted no one, least of all law enforcement. To catch the thugs, he became one of them, haunting the streets, the bars, and one night, in a blur of booze and despair, he beat a man nearly to death that he'd mistaken for one of the kidnappers.

  "Guilty as charged on all accounts, " the judge had pronounced during sentencing. "The prisoner is sentenced to a period of not less than twelve months on each count and remanded to the custody of the federal marshall. "

  Three counts. Aggravated assault and battery, malicious mischief, and resisting arrest. Thirty-six months. It was a death sentence. Jack barely got out of Folsom alive. Someone was determined to kill him, and the last attempt left him savagely scarred. With a gun smuggled in by a bribed guard, the assassin pumped five bullets into Jack, shattering his face as well as his body. Later Jack learned the inmate, who was doing time for art smuggling, had been a driver for the wealthy Featherstone family before his arrest.

  Reconstructive surgery did more than just repair the damage to Jack's face, it allowed him to take on an entirely new identity. The Magician did a vanishing act. He lived and worked in the shadows, operating from a garage- apartment in Venice with a narrow, back-alley entrance and a lack of neighbors to notice his comings and goings. To finance his search for the thugs, he designed security systems for shady types with legitimate business fronts—import-export dealers, art brokers, and gallery owners who traded in black-market goods, and who had no idea what they were dealing with in him.

  But his primary focus was elsewhere. If prison had done nothing else, it had given him new direction. He'd been involved in deep background research on the Featherstone family when the kidnapping job came along. It had seemed like a sign at the time, his first break.

  Now he knew what it was—a death knell for his mission.

  He'd been back from the desert for twenty-four hours, and he had exactly zip to show for it. He'd slept away twelve of those hours and screwed away the other twelve. The furor about Gus had made it impossible to move ahead with his plans. The Featherstone mansion was swarming with media and law enforcement types, and until the place cooled off, he had no choice but to lay low. But that wasn't the only reason he was stalled out.

  Sweat dropped from his forehead and splashed against the newsprint at his feet as he rammed his fist one last time into the punching bag he'd hung from a beam in the garage ceiling. The workouts were his outlet. They had kept him sane, but now they were getting increasingly brutal, as if some part of his nervous system had sniffed blood and gone on the attack. terrorists kidnap retailing heiress!

  The newspaper lying on the garage floor trumpeted the news of Gus's abduction. The frenzy hadn't surprised him. What had was the media's claim that she'd been snatched by a group of Panamanian rebels protesting Western capitalistic exploitation. The Featherstone family ran a retailing empire that used dirt-cheap Third-World labor, and the terrorists were claiming the family had made their fortune off the backs of the poor.

  Jack pulled off his T-shirt, mopped his dripping face, then sent the shirt flying with a flick of his wrist. It landed on his blinking computer screen, nearly covering the grid t
hat displayed a simulated floorplan of the Featherstone mansion. The worktables that flanked his computer were weighed down with his electronic equipment, all very precisely arranged. Despite everything, he had retained that much of his legendary discipline, the need for meticulous order.

  "Terrorists?" He stooped to pick up the paper.

  He couldn't get what had happened the night before out of his head—the way he'd been ambushed, the bastard who'd done it, his face, his voice. It had been preying on his mind all day. He wanted to kill a smarmy reporter on the news that morning for describing the kidnapping and then doing a retrospective of Gus's modeling career as if she were already dead. The woman had ended ominously, reporting how often the hostages of these particular terrorists were sacrificed.

  Sacrificed? Panamanian terrorists?

  The guy who'd come to the cabin hadn't sounded Hispanic.

  He dropped the paper and rose, hating the helpless feeling that had lodged in his throat. Several of his hand-carved castles decorated the stack of empty equipment crates he'd piled against the back wall of the garage. They were the only aesthetic touch in drab surroundings that consisted mostly of worn vinyl furniture and card tables of equipment. Now he had to fight the urge to go destroy them. He wanted to smash them to dust. Every minute of the day he had to fight that urge.

  This wasn't about her, he told himself. It was about him screwing up. Again. Magician, my ass, he thought. Circus clown was more like it. The last time he'd let himself be ambushed, the two people in the world he cared about most had ended up dead. He'd promised himself that would never happen again. That's what was bothering him now.

  It wasn't about her.

  The TV was flickering silently across the room. An old Sylvania console with rabbit ears, it had come with the place, and it was the only piece of furniture Jack wouldn't have wanted to part with. He'd replaced the guts, wired it for cable, and rigged a remote, but the reception was still lousy. Now as he glanced at it, he saw Gus's face flash onto the screen. He'd been seeing her with regularity since he got back, but this wasn't her image. It was her.

  He picked up the remote and hit the Mute Button.

  "I'm just so g-grateful to be free," she said brokenly. Lightbulbs flashed around her as she spoke into a cluster of microphones. She looked as if she'd been through hell. Her face was gaunt and filthy, with scratches raking her jaw. Her lip was split as if someone had hit her, and her hair was dull and tangled. Her fingers shook visibly as she touched the mikes.

  Jack's hand fisted over the remote as he watched her struggle to answer the questions the reporters were hurling at her. The bastard that took her must have beaten her up. Rage surged inside Jack, making it hard for him to breathe. There was nothing he loathed more than sadistic psychos who terrorized their victims and used them for bait.

  "I was b-blindfolded most of the time," she explained. "I never saw any of them, but they threatened me constantly. They said they'd kill me if my family didn't stop exploiting the labor in Latin American plants. They said they were going to ask a ransom to compensate workers who were being taken advantage of. "

  The reporters began to shove and shout again. "Is your family guilty of exploiting workers?" one of them yelled over the din.

  "Are you employing illegals here in this country?" another called out.

  Gus gripped the sides of the podium as if for support. She stared out at the crowd, seeming bewildered by their questions and the possibility that they were somehow turning against her. "I don't know the answer to those questions, " she tried to explain. "But I'm going to find out. "

  A man next to her gripped her arm protectively, and Gus shot him a quick glance, her chin trembling with emotion.

  Jack moved closer to the set, studying the man through the fuzzy reception. His face was familiar, but Jack couldn't place him. Jack had researched the Featherstones, and he would have recognized one of the immediate family members. This man was probably a family friend. Maybe an attorney or a doctor.

  "Ms. Featherstone! Oh, Gusss!" someone bellowed. "How did you escape the terrorists?"

  She seemed relieved by the question and even managed a faint smile. "If I hadn't been doing my nails when the kidnapper surprised me, I wouldn't be here today. It's true, " she said at the scattered laughter. "I had a pair of manicure scissors hidden in my hand when he taped my wrists. He covered me with a tarp, but I cut my wrists free and threw the tarp over their heads—there were two of them, the kidnapper and a driver—"

  "Didn't they hold you for thirty-six hours?" a woman reporter interrupted. "And is it true you jumped off a freeway overpass to escape them?"

  Gus closed her eyes briefly and nodded, as if summoning strength. "The second night they decided to move me to another hideout, " she said. "That's when I escaped. The driver was blinded by the tarp, and I got out the back of the van. We were on a freeway overpass, and I knew I couldn't outrun them, so I jumped. Luckily I landed in an ice plant bed. "

  "You're a hero, Gus!" the woman trumpeted. "How does it feel?"

  The camera panned in for a close-up of Gus as she reacted to that question. Her soft violet eyes glittered with sudden tears and even more bewilderment. "I wasn't thinking about being a hero, " she told them. Her voice cracked and she could barely talk for the hoarseness. "I just wanted to s-survive. "

  The crowd began to applaud, a smattering here and there until finally everyone was clapping. Gus hardly seemed to know what to do, but the man next to her was visibly pleased. He leaned toward Gus and whispered something in her ear.

  He was almost smug, Jack thought.

  Jack knelt in front of the set, searching the man's features. He was probably in his mid-thirties and handsome in a trendy, men's magazine sort of way—the Armani jacket and T-shirt look of the Hollywood ad-man. But it was the movement of his mouth as he spoke to Gus that caught Jack's interest, his profile, his thick, dark hair and eyes.

  The remote slipped from Jack's hand and hit the cement floor with a thunk. He sprang up and stepped back, getting his bearings. He knew who Gus Featherstone's protector was. The camera's close-up on her had included him, too, and when he'd turned toward her and whispered in her ear, the birthmark hidden in the thick of his eyebrow had been visible.

  He was the man who'd taken her from the shack.

  Jack peered at the set, sorting out what he knew and didn't know, mentally searching for all possible scenarios just as he'd programmed his computer to do. The man who'd taken her was also the one who'd set up the kidnapping. He'd been furious that Jack hadn't followed directions and had threatened to kill him if he told anyone what had happened.

  Gus's image vanished from the screen and a reporter appeared. The woman gushed with genuine excitement about Gus's "miraculous and courageous escape. " She threw out statistics, expounding on how few hostages ever escaped captivity on their own, including POWs who'd been specially trained in the military.

  She made an impressive case for Gus's heroism, even to Jack, who'd become somewhat cynical about such concepts. But Jack was beginning to smell a scam. In fact, the whole thing stunk out loud, and so did her story. There were too many inconsistencies. She was kidnapped by two men who held her for thirty-six hours before moving her to another hideout? She'd been with him for that thirty-six hours.

  He didn't like what he was thinking, but he didn't know what else to think. Gus Featherstone had faked her own kidnapping. It wasn't that preposterous. He could imagine several payoffs. It would be an interesting publicity stunt to further her modeling career, if that's what she wanted. Collecting her own ransom would have been an ingenious way to get access to her trust fund money. Either motive would explain why she had no real fear of him, certainly nothing close to the terror a kidnap victim would normally have felt. She'd been more frightened of the rattler than of him.

  "We're told there's a celebration in the works, " the female reporter confided, breaking into Jack's concentration as she shared some gossipy tidbits about Gus's personal life
.

  "A gala party and fundraiser will be thrown this weekend at the Ritz-Carlton to celebrate Ms. Featherstone's courageous escape and safe return. The tickets will be pricey, but proceeds will go to the WomenPride Fashion Show, a charity event to raise funds to retrain disenfranchised women. "

  Another shot of Gus and her male friend flashed onto the screen. The man had slipped an arm around Gus's waist and was leading her away from the microphones. They were whispering together, and Gus was smiling, but it was the telltale sparkle in her eyes as she inadvertently glanced at the camera that made Jack suck in a breath.

  Jesus! She'd done it. The whole thing was a scam.

  "But the best news about Gus Featherstone," the reporter continued, "is that wedding bells may be in her near future. Sources tell us she'll make an announcement at the party that will reveal the mystery man in her life. " The woman laughed delightedly. "Let's see, how much were those tickets? I just might have to go to this party. "

  You and me both, lady, Jack thought grimly. But Jack had no intention of buying tickets. He was going to crash.

  Chapter 11

  "It was the hippest, hottest charity event of the sea-son, but the crowd panted for Gus Featherstone!" The LA. Times society page columnist hurriedly scribbled notes for her review of the star-studded charity fashion show on a cocktail napkin so as not to miss a moment of the action.

  Seated at tables nearer the runway, the West Coast correspondent for Elle magazine called in her raves on a cellular phone not much larger than the palm of her hand, while a fledgling Vogue reporter gave a giddily breathless interview to one of several network camera crews who were stationed around the room, covering the splashy event.

  Even a grunge-garbed MTV video jockey was on hand.