by Kim Baldwin
Chapter Sixteen
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jack arrived at Southside Johnny’s fifteen minutes early to check the bar and possible exits, something she always did when visiting a place for the first time, let alone to see someone she didn’t trust. She sat at the bar and played with the car keys as she waited. She had no reason to feel this nervous. It wasn’t like Pierce and his posse were coming to kill her, at least not this time. But the idea of being alone with this man, who professed to being her father, both terrified and aggravated her.
She’d made a very successful career of hating Pierce but because of stupid genetics was now made to feel obligated to see him. If she didn’t love Cass so much, she’d have never agreed to this appointment.
Although that explained the aggravation, it did nothing to help her understand where the fear was coming from. It wasn’t like she had to accept him or believe anything he had to say, so why did she feel like she was about to fail some test?
“Glad you could make it,” Pierce said from beside her.
Jack didn’t turn to look at him. “I said I’d be here.”
Pierce sat on a bar stool next to her. “Is this okay?” he asked tentatively.
“None of this is okay, but we’re here now.” Jack took a sip of Black Label.
“What can I get you, sir?” the bartender asked.
“Orange juice.” Pierce turned to Jack. “I stopped drinking.”
“Oh, good. I don’t have to worry about that,” she replied, her voice dripping sarcasm.
“So should you.”
“I stopped two years ago,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I can’t have one now and then.”
“As long as you’ve got it under control.”
“Really?” Jack turned to glare at him. “Are we going to discuss my drinking habits? Don’t you think it’s a little too late to play the concerned card?”
“It was just advice.” Pierce looked away.
“Not looking for it.”
“So how’s life at home?” he casually asked.
Jack relaxed and sat back. If she was going to get through this ordeal, she might as well try to keep it friendly. “Like I said. It’s fine when Cass is there, but this part-time gig doesn’t cut it.”
“Would it be enough if it were full-time?”
“No,” Jack replied honestly. “Maybe I need more time to deal with the fact that I’m no longer Phantom, or Silent Death, or whatever the hell else they’ve baptized me.” The former was her op name, the latter the name she’d been known by when she’d left the EOO and taken jobs for the underworld.
“I won’t argue with Silent Death.” Pierce took a sip.
“But you’re okay with Phantom.”
“Phantom had a cause,” he replied.
“So did the other.”
“Silent Death killed for money, regardless of who or what.”
“So did Phantom.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “Phantom fought for those who couldn’t, gave voice to those who weren’t allowed to have one.”
“But killed, nevertheless.”
Pierce took another sip. “I won’t deny that.” He put his glass down and took his time centering it on the cocktail napkin. “Killing is terrible even when someone deserves it. You never get over it. I know I haven’t.” He took another sip. “I still have nightmares of the first time I pulled a trigger. I was twenty-one and thought I could singlehandedly save the world. All those years of training and studying and finally, there I was, in the field and ready to do anything to please the organization that had raised me.”
“Indoctrinated you,” Jack said.
“Yes, that too.” Pierce frowned. “It was 1971 in Italy, covert CIA-NATO Operation Gladio. It was a Cold War action intended to prevent Soviet infiltration and expansion.”
“A stay-behind.”
“Indeed. Secret armies were set up all across Europe, but some of them went rogue. Conducted assassinations, bombings, even coups, and made them look like the communists were responsible to stir up anti-leftist sentiment. The rest of us kept to our directive, though we had significant latitude to do whatever it took to prevent attacks by pro-communist groups.”
Pierce took another sip of his juice. “Anyway, two of us were on the lookout for a Red Brigades attack in downtown Palermo that we’d gotten intel about. They planned to destabilize the government through bombings, kidnappings, you name it. We were hiding in the shadows a few feet away from this upscale club when a car stopped and dropped off a child, no more than twelve years old, in front of the door. Of course, we found it strange and called it in. They got back to us that Emilio Colombo—at the time, the prime minister—was inside the nightclub with his wife and friends.”
Pierce went quiet for several seconds. “The child never moved, even when the doorman tried to shoo him away. We stood there, until finally, at two a.m., Colombo came out. The boy waited for the doorman to send for the prime minister’s car and then opened his sweater. Phil and I saw it right away; the boy had a bomb strapped to him. Phil got in front of me and lifted his M16 to take the shot. I waited. The boy was getting closer. Take it, I said, but Phil just stood there, his hands shaking.”
Pierce signaled the barman. “Give me one of those.” He pointed to Jack’s Johnnie Walker and downed the drink as soon as it was poured.
Jack had never seen Pierce this undone. “You don’t have to—”
“I have to. I have to tell someone.”
Jack nodded. She understood the feeling of redemption all too well, even if all it provided was a false sense of self-forgiveness.
“Phil wouldn’t take the shot,” Pierce said. “Said he wasn’t sure. But the boy was less than five feet away from Colombo, so I took it for him. It was the first time I’d shot and killed anyone. Shot to the head.” Pierce made a gun with his hand. “Bam. Just like that, a child was dead.” He looked away and stopped talking.
“It’s rough,” Jack finally replied. “Killing a kid is the worst. But you didn’t have a choice. You did what you had to. He was a suicide bomber, and who knows how many he’d already killed, or would have, if you hadn’t stopped him.” Jack was running out of consolations. “It happens. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.”
“As it turned out, what we saw shining in the dark and thought was a bomb was in fact dark plastic wrap. The boy was concealing flowers he apparently intended to give to the PM.” Pierce wiped his eyes.
“Fuck.” Jack was on the edge of her stool and didn’t know how she’d gotten there. “That’s…” She leaned back, at a loss for words. “I’m sorry.”
“That was my first mission. I was twenty-one the first time I killed.”
“Why tell me?” Jack asked. “Why now?”
“I’ve made mistakes,” he replied. “Mistakes I’ve never learned to live with, killing the boy being one of them. But there are three things I don’t regret.”
“I—”
“One being the organization. I regret what happened that night in Italy and always will, but I do not regret having spent my whole life trying to make up for that, because in my pursuit for redemption I have saved so many innocent lives.”
“You would have never killed him if it wasn’t for the organization,” Jack pointed out.
“The EOO didn’t make me pull the trigger. My ego and eagerness to prove myself did.”
“But they put you in the position to have to make that mistake.”
“They gave me the expertise to know and do better. The mistake was mine.”
“Either way, you wouldn’t have had to deal with that otherwise.”
“Maybe not. Then again…you know, better than I do, what happens to orphans who don’t get adopted. And back then it was worse. Very few people adopted, and even fewer were willing to foster-parent. I would’ve ended up on the street at eighteen with nothing but a bitter attitude and a chip on my shoulder. What kind of future do you think I’d have had then?”
> “You’ll never know.”
“How do you think you would’ve turned out?”
Jack shrugged. “I wasn’t an easy kid,” she replied honestly.
“No, you weren’t. Like me and…Celeste, you were born for trouble.”
“She did what she had to.” Jack didn’t want to hear anything negative about her mother. Despite their geographical distance, she’d become quite close to Celeste during the nearly two years that had elapsed since she’d found her in Sainte-Maxime, France.
“My point.” Pierce wiped his forehead although the bar was quite cool. “I took you from her to give you a future where you didn’t have to face prostitutes and pimps, drugs and thugs. I couldn’t risk you becoming like them. You were better than that, and you were my daughter.”
“So, facing terrorists and drug lords is preferable?”
“Of course not. But at least I taught you to fight them, not join them.”
“I…” Jack wanted to argue but couldn’t come up with anything other than, “I just wanted to have a normal life.” She sighed. “That’s all.”
“No one has a normal life. Everyone faces shit, regardless of who their parent is or how they grew up. You had an organization backing you, friends—some who turned into sisters—a great education and all kinds of activities, the best health care, and…everything.”
“But a family.”
“We are a family. All of us here are tied together. Bound to each other by secrets and solidarity. We give our lives for each other and never ask why. That sounds like a hell of a family to me.”
“You never told me you were my father.”
“That was my mistake. I kept waiting for the right time, but…”
“It never came.”
He shook his head. “It did. Plenty of times. I simply found excuses to not see it.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid. I feared we’d get too close, that I’d have someone to lose. I dreamed of and feared your arms around me, calling me Daddy.” Pierce took off his jacket. “I figured as long as I kept you at a distance, I’d be able to cope with leaving you behind if something happened to me.”
Strangely enough, Jack could understand that, because it was her biggest fear with Cass.
“But I was wrong, and that’s one more blunder on my pile of mistakes.”
“Not that simple, is it?” she asked.
“When is it ever?”
Jack downed the rest of her scotch. “What are the other two?”
Pierce looked at her. “The other two things I don’t regret?”
Jack nodded.
“Breaking the rules to be with the woman I fell in love with more than forty-five years ago.”
“Did she know?” Jack asked. “Back then, I mean?”
“She had no idea until five years ago.”
“What a waste of time.” Joanne Grant obviously had much to do with Pierce’s softening in recent years. When he’d taken Jack back to their home to recover from the torture TQ had put her through, she’d seen firsthand how devoted they were to each other.
“Yes,” Pierce said. “But they’ve been the best five years of my life, and that’s got to count for something. At least I get to feel loved before I die.”
“Yeah.” Jack thought about Cassady. “Being loved is…everything.” She checked her watch. “I have to meet Cass in five minutes.” She was actually disappointed to leave.
“I understand.”
“Maybe…maybe we can do this again.”
Pierce’s face lit up. “I’d very much like that, Jaclyn.”
Jack smiled back. “So.” She got up. “I guess…”
“The third thing I don’t regret is you,” he said quietly. “Watching you grow up, play, fall asleep, being with you even if you didn’t know it are the happiest memories of my life.”
Jack tried to hold back the tears that sprang to her eyes. “I…I have to go.” She plucked at the barstool’s upholstery.
Pierce cleared his throat. “Of course.”
“Okay.” Jack held out her hand.
Pierce took it and held it in both of his. “One last thing.”
Jack raised her eyebrows.
“TQ.”
Jack froze. “What about her?”
“I have one of our own, Switch, on assignment in Greece to recover a stolen icon. Turns out TQ’s behind it.”
“So?”
“Allegro is Switch’s backup. She overheard TQ say she wasn’t through with you. That it was only a matter of time before she got ‘the one that got away.’ She mentioned you by name.”
“Where in Greece?” Jack asked.
“That’s not important,” he replied. “I’m only telling you because you need to watch your back.”
“Where?” she repeated, more forcefully.
“I do not want you to do anything stupid. That woman is crazy.”
“Where, Pierce?”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “Last seen in Thessaloniki.”
Jack pulled her hand away.
“Jaclyn, please. Don’t go looking for trouble.”
“No worries.” Jack smiled. “We should do this again.”
“How about next week?”
“I’ll call you.”
Chapter Seventeen
Fira, Santorini Island, Greece
Next day
Ariadne managed to successfully avoid any contact or confrontation with Alex on the boat ride from the yacht to Fira. Alex had kept as far away from her as possible on the Zodiac, and Ariadne had avoided any direct eye contact. It was as though both felt too uncomfortable with the previous night’s revelation to want to acknowledge it. Ariadne had kept her word and hadn’t told anyone, not even Melina, who’d talked her head off about what she intended to do tonight to get Alex in bed.
Once ashore, they all checked into the Aressana, an ultra-modern five-star spa hotel with luxury suites, to leave their overnight luggage and change for the club. Ariadne and the other women had adjacent rooms, and her father had booked Alex one as well, down the hall from Ariadne’s.
Ariadne had chosen one of her black cocktail dresses, suitable for a warm summer evening and one of the more elegantly provocative ones in her collection. The form-fitting minidress had a strapless bodice that cut a low V in front to expose cleavage, and a see-through mesh panel in back that dipped almost to her ass. She’d just finished putting on her earrings when Melina knocked on her door.
“Time’s a wasting,” she said from the hall.
Ariadne opened the door. “You look great.”
Melina had opted for a deep shade of red, guaranteed to draw attention, for her look for the evening. The halter-style dress had a narrow V that plunged nearly to her navel, the two sides held together only by a thin gold chain. The innermost portion of each breast was visible, the nipples barely covered. “Don’t I always?”
“True,” Ariadne said.
“And you look completely edible.” Melina caressed her shoulder. “Love the earrings.”
Jo and Natasa appeared at her door as well.
“Figures.” Natasa frowned.
“What now?’ Melina asked.
“You all look great and I feel like a wet mop.” Natasa was as fashionably elegant as her friends in her loose, caftan-style black dress, but her choice covered far more of her figure than the others’. It fell to just above her knees and concealed her bodice entirely.
“But you look wonderful,” Ariadne said, to fix her obvious unstable mood.
“I’m fat, ugly, and we’re all gonna die, so what does it all matter?” Natasa sulked.
“Period?” Melina asked.
“Yeah, so careful what you say.” Jo stepped back to put some space between her and Natasa. “She could go off any second.”
“Too bad.” Melina straightened her dress. “The club is going to be full of hot, warm bodies.”
Natasa sighed ruefully. “And I, as usual, will be on the sideline.”
> “There’s always the porn channel,” Melina said.
“Screw y—”
“Ready, ladies?” Alex came to stand behind the others, facing Ariadne.
Ariadne’s friends turned to look.
Alex wore faded, low-slung jeans and a tight black V-neck T-shirt that showed off her slender, yet athletic build and well-defined arms. Ariadne had seen her practically naked the night before but had been too shocked to register her body well. Alex’s hair was still moist and deliberately tousled, instead of the tight male style she kept during work. She looked dangerous, naughty, and for Christ’s sake, gorgeous.
They all stared at Alex for what seemed like forever, until Melina finally said, “You look delicious.” She dropped her gaze to Alex’s crotch. “Simply irresistible.”
Melina’s insinuations had started to get on Ariadne’s nerves, and not in a benign way. “Careful what you wish for, Melina,” Ariadne said, and Alex looked at her. “You might not know what to do with it, if you get it.” She deliberately looked at Alex’s crotch, too.
“You do know who you’re talking to, right?” Melina replied, and laughed.
Alex checked her watch. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said, and headed toward the gate to the street, where the car she’d hired was waiting.
How could Alex stand to lie to all these people? And how dare she lead so many people on? Melina was obsessively in lust, Jo wanted to blow her mind and then Alex, Natasa was convinced she could persuade Alex to quit shaving, and never mind her father, who sincerely seemed to like the new employee, especially after yesterday. Right now, Ariadne was finding it impossible to remember why she’d agreed to help this fraud.
*
The Koo Club maintained its distinction as the trendiest bar on Santorini through its exotic cocktails, great service, well-muscled, hunky bartenders, exceptional DJs, and a layout designed to appeal to any type of patron. The indoor space offered a two-story ceiling with ornate arches, crystal chandeliers, and disco balls strung over a bar that ran the length of the room, so those getting drinks could watch the action on the massive dance floor, built to accommodate three hundred partygoers.
