The Bliss Factor

by Penny McCall

  “After which you would have taken off, making it impossible for me to protect you.”

  Rae buried both hands in her hair, a wordless sound of frustration bursting out of her. “Why do men think it’s all right to lie to a woman for her own good?” she said, drilling a finger into his chest. “Did it ever occur to you that telling me the truth, treating me like an adult, trustingme to understand the situation and just deal with it would be the right course of action? And sure, I took off, but maybe that was because you, all of you,” she corrected, including her parents, “were deciding what I should do and how I should do it. Time,” she said as she poked him again, “for a new program. You worry about your mission and let me worry about me.”

  “We can’t stop worrying just because you want us to,” Annie pointed out, but quietly.

  “Fine,” Rae shot back, “worry all you want. Just keep it to yourself.” She spun away from Conn, unfolded the map, and slapped it on the picnic table.

  “I checked out a few places already,” she said as he and her parents came over, each of them pinning down a corner against the brisk wind. “And before you give me hell, Mom and Dad, Conn and I came back that first day because I thought we might be able to figure out who was giving him trouble and resolve the problem. Clearly that was naïve on my part, but I had no idea you were involved in a federal crime.”

  “But some of these people will recognize you,” Annie said.

  “That was more than ten years ago, and anyway I made sure to steer clear of the ones I know.”

  “Good thinking,” Conn said with just a hint of sarcasm, his voice carefully modulated otherwise. “Who have you already talked to?”

  Rae met his eyes and saw the anger seething just under the surface. He didn’t appreciate being put in his place, well, too damn bad. She’d been manipulated by all three of them; she had a right to make her position clear, and if it offended him, so what? He didn’t plan to stick around, so it wasn’t like his resentment would be a problem for long.

  “I went to this place first,” she said, pointing to Earth Enchanted, “Onyx Chalcedony. Paranoid but harmless. I’d be surprised if she’s involved.”

  “That would be our take as well,” Nelson said. “Onyx is afraid of her own shadow. Too twitchy to bring into an operation like this.”

  Since everyone seemed to be in agreement, Rae moved on. “Next place was Paper Moon.”

  “Hans Lockner. Nasty little stinker of a man who frequently drinks himself into a stupor, picks fights with other men, and makes lewd suggestions to women.”

  “Thanks for the character assessment, Mom,” Rae said, “but I’m pretty sure he isn’t involved since he offered to, uh, show me the back room.”

  Conn’s hand fisted on his corner of the map.

  Rae chose not to read into his reaction, for her own peace of mind. She’d already let him go; no point in getting her hopes up now. “If he was printing money back there he wouldn’t be so quick to extend invitations. And I doubt he can get his mind out of his codpiece long enough to do anything as tricky as printing money right under everyone’s noses. Besides, there’s no way he could keep a secret like this, especially when it’s something he could use to score with women. Counterfeiting is pretty sexy.” She held up a hand when her parents exchanged a look and the temperature seemed to go up a couple of degrees. “Pretend I didn’t say that.

  “In any event, the last place I checked out was called Mettle Works. Cornelia Ferdic. Not exactly corporate America, but she was probably the most normal of the three.”

  “She does some pretty amazing work in metal,” Nelson said.

  “I could see her as the engraver,” Conn said, “which is why her booth isn’t already crossed off. I ruled out all the proprietors who had established home bases and didn’t travel with the group, and then I went booth by booth, ruling out the ones with the wrong skills until I was left with a half-dozen possibilities. Jewelers who make their own designs, and anyone else who works with metals and might have the skill to engrave the plates. Under other circumstances I would have included the armorer.

  “Then there’s the printer,” he continued. “Most counterfeit money nowadays is made using sophisticated computer equipment and color copiers, but the best bills are still printed the old-fashioned way, on a printing press. I’m no expert, but the Secret Service said the bills appearing on the Renaissance circuit are press bills.”

  “There are quite a few booths that sell paper goods,” Nelson put in, “horoscopes, posters of castles and dragons, Celtic symbols, and the meaning of names.”

  “Only a few of them actually print their own wares, and since the bills are being distributed on site, it makes sense that the printer will also be doing the aging, so we look for someone with the capability of washing the bills.”

  “We?”

  “You want to help, Rae, the first step is to search the rest of the circled booths and the campsites of whoever runs them, identify the conspirators, and get our hands on the plates. I need a face-to-face with one of the Stooges. Harry or Joe would be my first choices, since my money is on Kemp not knowing anything. We get the plates, they’ll have to come after us.”

  “Us?” Nelson repeated.

  “We’re all in play.”

  “We can’t all be together all the time,” Rae pointed out. “It will be faster if we split up.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “You said we could trust you to handle the truth. The truth is you’re a liability, Rae. Your parents should be safe until the operation is completely shut down. Harry and his friends can use you to hold the rest of us hostage. That means you stick with me or I call Trip and put you in protective custody.”

  Rae didn’t have a choice, and she knew it, so she had to settle for silent and cranky. If her glare had any effect on Conn he didn’t show it.

  “You take the engravers,” he said to Nelson and Annie. “Don’t get confrontational. Keep the conversation light and see if you can get a feel for whether or not they’re involved, without letting them know what you’re doing.”

  “Rae would probably tell you I’m a master at manipulation,” Annie said.

  She might have yesterday; today she just wanted them to be safe.

  It must have showed on her face, because Annie said, “We know these people pretty well. Nelson and I will get to the bottom of this.”

  “Nope. No getting to the bottom of anything,” Conn said. “If you think you know who made the plates call me before you take it any further.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Mom. Conn is the expert. You need to listen to him.”

  “We all need to listen to him,” Nelson said. But he wasn’t looking at his wife.

  Rae got the message, loud and clear. “I’m going with him, aren’t I?”

  Nobody had a response to that.

  “It’s just past lunchtime,” Conn said. “Everyone should be at their booths.”

  He took off. Rae felt no need to keep up. She hugged her parents, then headed in the direction Conn had gone. He was waiting for her a little way up the path. She passed him and kept walking.

  “How long are you going to stay mad at me?” he asked, falling into step with her.

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “You’re mad at somebody.”

  He had that right. “Let’s leave the postmortem on our . . . relationship for another time,” like never, “and concentrate on finding the plates.”

  “So you can be rid of me?”

  Rae rounded on him, stopping dead in the middle of the path. “Are we going to pretend that’s not part of your agenda?”

  She had him there, she could see it on his face, but she couldn’t say there was any satisfaction in it. He’d used her, he’d used her parents, and when it was all over he’d walk away with a clean conscience because he was going to make sure they were still alive, even if it meant jail time for a few harmless people who’d been dragged into
breaking the law against their will.

  It pissed her off. All of it, including the part where Conn didn’t give a damn about mitigating circumstances. Especially that part. But when he skirted her and the gawkers, and set off down the path again, she swallowed her resentment and went with him. So what if it hurt like hell to be anywhere near him? So what if she felt like a fool for trusting him, and for falling in love with him? Her parents needed her to help close down the counterfeiting ring, and she’d be damned if she let them down.

  THIS OP HAD GONE FROM BAD TO WORSE, CONN thought, working his way around a mountain of frustration only to come up against a wall of failure. At least it felt like failure. He and Rae had spent the rest of the day going from booth to booth with nothing to show for it. No more booths—at least no more questionable ones since they’d eliminated all the circled ones on his map, one way or another, and come up empty-handed. No plates. Annie and Nelson had laid the groundwork with the potential engravers, they said, but they couldn’t say for sure who it was yet.

  That left the campsites, but by the time they were done with the booths it had been too late for that. The re-enactors had been closing up shop and wandering back to their campsites, and since it was Saturday night, with another long workday on tap for Sunday, they were in for the night. Quiet evening meal, no celebrating, turning in early.

  Conn might have given that a try—turning in early—except there was no one else to keep an eye on Rae and her parents. And he never slept much anyway.

  He was heading back from another circuit of the camp when a shadow slipped out of the Bliss’s Airstream. He reacted without thinking, two steps bringing him up behind the shadow, one arm went around the shoulders and over the mouth, the other secured the target’s right arm. He realized almost immediately it was Rae. He didn’t let her go. “What are you doing out here?”

  She lashed out with her left fist, connected with his thigh, and said a sulky, “Ouch,” rubbing at her right arm when Conn released her.

  Conn, on the other hand, fisted his hand around the heat where her lips had touched his skin. But that was an impulse, a reaction, and a foolish indulgence when there were possibly armed assailants in the vicinity. “You were supposed to stay with your parents. I don’t think Harry and his henchmen will bother them.” Which was the only reason he’d felt secure enough to leave for even the brief time it took to check the campsite.

  “My dad is a buzz saw when he sleeps. I don’t know how my mom stands it.”

  Love, Conn thought, then took a big mental step back from that precipice. His life was about violence, about bad people doing bad things, and the sometimes bad things he had to do to stop them. If there was an emotional angle, it would be greed, or fanaticism or just plain selfishness on the part of his adversary. For his side of it, there was righting a wrong, the satisfaction of putting one more criminal in a place where they couldn’t hurt anyone, except other criminals.

  Now here he was thinking about love—hell, not just love, the kind of love that lasted a lifetime and made allowances for annoying habits. He could have faced the reason for his sudden shift in outlook, especially since it was standing not three feet away. Admitting Rae had gotten to him wouldn’t be doing either of them any favors. If he admitted that, he’d start thinking about possibilities and what-ifs. He’d start thinking about tomorrow and the rest of his life, and making changes. Problem was, you couldn’t change your past.

  He wouldn’t even be considering it if not for this idiotic operation. A few months with the Renaissance fanatics, not to mention a good blow to the head, and he was going soft. Next thing he knew he’d be wearing tie-dye and flashing everyone the peace sign and—

  “Did you hear that?” Rae asked him, her voice low.

  —completely losing his edge. Conn walked a few steps off so she wasn’t jamming his senses, but he didn’t hear anything . . . at least anything unusual. There was a radio playing somewhere, muffled, a slight wind rattled tree branches and swirled the dead leaves on the ground, the faint whoosh of traffic drifted to him from Dixie Highway.

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard someone call out, but it was faint.”

  “Direction?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Conn argued with himself for a few seconds, then decided it would be stupid to go racing off into the darkness with no idea where to look or what he was looking for, and a better than even chance it might be someone trying to distract him long enough to get to Rae.

  “It was probably nothing,” she said.

  “Maybe. I can’t go campsite to campsite asking questions.”

  “No, you’d only alarm everyone. Besides, these people don’t exactly keep regular hours. It was probably just one of the night owls.” But she rubbed her arms and looked over her shoulder, clearly uneasy.

  “You should get some rest,” Conn said. “I think this thing is going to come to a head soon, tomorrow, the next day, definitely not long now.”

  “What about you? You can’t stay up all night. I know it’s your job, but you won’t be any good to anyone if you’re exhausted.”

  “My job.” He blew out a breath. Maybe it was the darkness that made it easier to speak, maybe the exhaustion. He was definitely tired of keeping it bottled up inside him, and he needed Rae to know the truth. Maybe if he told her the truth she’d establish the distance he was having so much trouble keeping. “Let me tell you about my job.

  “My unit’s last long-term assignment was in the early days of Afghanistan, before the country was secured. After that we went wherever they sent us, always short missions, always a different place, always ugly.”

  “The nightmares.”

  He flashed her a look and said, “Yeah,” on an outrush of breath. “It was . . .”

  Classified, Rae thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to be sarcastic, not when he looked so torn up. His face was all hard planes and angles, and there was a bitterness in his voice, a bleakness in his eyes that the darkness couldn’t hide.

  “It doesn’t matter where it happened. In my nightmares it was all jumbled up, different ops, different places. Maybe if I’d seen it the same way, time after time, I would have gotten the real memory back sooner. But it always played out the same way.”

  She kept her eyes off his face, trying to filter what he said without getting dragged into the emotion in his voice. He might just be playing a part, she reminded herself. It could be merely another layer of lies to support his undercover activities, the same as his role at the Renaissance faire. But if he was acting, he was doing a damn good job. Those nightmares hadn’t been scripted. How could they be? Nobody was good enough to fake that kind of torment while in a deep sleep.

  “We infiltrated this village,” he was saying, “middle of nowhere, dead of night, supposed to be a terrorist haven. We figured it would be mostly men, maybe a few women living and working like poor farmers as a front for one of the guerrilla cells. But there was this kid, maybe ten years old. He came out of a shack, waving his arms and shouting.

  “The fight was full-on already, guns, grenades, one of the enemy combatants had a rocket launcher. I couldn’t hear what the kid was shouting, but I’ve never seen anyone so terrified. All I can figure is there must have been chemicals or gas stored in that shack.” His jaw clenched, just once, before he continued. “There was no way I was going to be heard over the radio, so I broke cover and went for the nearest guy in my unit, just as the shack exploded.”

  Conn passed a hand over his side. He must not have realized he was doing it because when she said, “Those aren’t bullet wounds,” he dropped his hand, his face going set and hard.

  “Shrapnel. Barely missed my heart, they told me. We didn’t lose one single man that night. The kid wasn’t so lucky.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, then, “I passed five yards in front of him.”

  “You made a choice.”

  “Yeah.”

  And a child had died. How did she n
ot feel sorry for him now? And how would feeling sorry for him change anything about her situation, or her parents? Or his, for that matter?

  “I’m sorry, Conn. I wish there was something else I could say.”

  “There isn’t anything else to say. It happened, I’ve moved on.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she said, stung at the dismissal in his voice. He dropped a bomb like that and expected her to . . . what? Take it in stride? Act like it was no big deal that she knew he walked around with that kind of weight on his conscience? Not hardly. “Maybe you’re getting from day to day, but you haven’t put it behind you.”

  “It can’t be changed.”

  “No, but it can’t be ignored, either. You’ve been doing that and look where it’s gotten you.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Take it out, look at it, feel it, Conn, until you can believe that you did what you had to do and forgive yourself. Yes, the actions of your unit had an unbelievably terrible outcome, but how many lives did you save that day. How many have you saved since? You’ve taken criminals off the streets, drug dealers who might still be walking around free to hurt other kids if not for you.”

  He looked at her finally, and it was devastating. The emptiness in his eyes made hers fill with tears. Of sympathy, yes, but there was frustration and anger, too.

  “His death is on the hands of the people who put him in that village. People who knew he’d be in danger and didn’t care. You can feel guilty about it the rest of your life, Conn, but that just makes it about you, not him. Just like this conversation is about you.”

  “If you can’t handle this—”

  “You don’t want me to handle it. You want me to walk away? Fine, I’ll walk away, but I don’t know why it matters when you’re already gone.”

  chapter 25

  “WE’RE NOT ACTUALLY GONNA TORTURE THIS guy, are we?”

  “Until he cries like a baby,” Harry said, pulling Joe aside. “We went to a lot of trouble to get our hands on this guy.” Hell, they’d almost been caught. Twice. Larkin had been wandering the camp, and they’d nearly run right into him when they were wrestling Hans Lockner out to the car. And if the Blissfield woman hadn’t shown up to distract him, Larkin would probably have stumbled across them while they were tossing Hans’s place. Joe understood stealth, his problem was attention span. He’d made a lot of noise in between reminders. “We let him stew down here all night, and he’s still not talking. It’s time to get serious.”