Against the Wall

by Lyn Stone

  Chapter 14

  Solange felt the tremors in her body increase. She figured she was probably dying. Her eyes would not open. No energy left.

  "No!" someone exclaimed. She wanted to argue, but perhaps she was wrong. She couldn't seem to care.

  Who would miss her? Father? She smiled at that. Yes, he would wonder who would take his suits for dry cleaning and bring them home again. Who would pay Marie for cleaning their house, cooking their meals? Who would wake him in time to go to bed at a decent hour when he fell asleep in his chair?

  Someone else should have been doing that for years, she thought dreamily. Marie herself would do it for nothing extra. A ring, perhaps.

  Solange longed to fly free, see what came next. Her head ached, pulsed so fiercely she could hardly hold a thought. Poison had invaded her system and it was shutting down, failing her. She wished she were stronger, but all her fight was gone.

  She kept waiting for the rush, the expulsion of her life force. Would she wing up to the ceiling as one patient said he had done briefly before coming back? Would she see the ones who tended her hovering over her lifeless body?

  Someone squeezed her hand. It seemed she could feel the very whorls on the pads of his fingers as they pressed against her palm. Painful, but sweet. Jacques? Would he be here or had he gone already? She forced out a whisper. "Jacques?"

  "Here, Solange. I'm here."

  His breath touched her cheek. A good warmth.

  "Solange, the fever is less. Two whole degrees in the past hour."

  But it was not the fever that killed. The heart was the thing. Solange concentrated, trying to feel the beat within her chest. Too weak, she supposed, feeling nothing.

  "Don't give up," his voice pleaded. Not like Jacques. He did not plead. Not that man. He demanded. "Don't you give up, Solange!" Ah, yes, there it was, the order. Firm. Comforting. Something predictable in all this. He would never change.

  Shivers shook her violently. "Cold," she cried, hoping for more cover, something...

  "Sweat. It's breaking," someone said. She tried to nod.

  "Pressure's dropping." She knew that. All her senses turned inward now, she coasted on her knowledge, tried to focus. But reason slipped away, just out of reach.

  "Code...!" someone cried, a harsh sound, one she recalled too well. Jacques's hand tore away from hers, leaving her fingers, her hand, bereft.

  There was a scurry of activity. She could hear the clink of metal, a commotion, but it faded into nothing.

  A jolt shook her hard as if she'd been yanked through a force field. A thousand pricks of energy shot through her, touching every cell. She heard a rapid, then steady, blip that was so familiar.

  "She's back." Someone sounded relieved. Solange only felt disgruntled and uncomfortable, her body still tingling with the shock.

  The hand was holding hers again. Jacques's hand. She clung.

  When she woke again, Solange managed to open her eyes enough to see through a tangle of lashes. She felt fairly lucid, remembered where she had been brought by the helicopter and why. She noted the location had not changed. She also noticed she had company.

  The large, tanned hands she loved still encompassed one of hers. Near their joined hands, Jacques rested his head against the shiny metal railing of the bed. She wanted to touch his hair, to feel her fingers slide through it as she had when they made love.

  She wanted to make love again, she realized, and would have laughed at herself if she could have summoned the strength. All she could manage was a soft sound, something between a cough and a groan.

  His head came up immediately and his eyes met hers. "You're awake. Thank God." Despite the fatigued look on his face, his smile looked euphoric.

  She tried to smile back.

  "You're going to make it, Solange. Temp's down, pressure's up, heart's steady. I knew you wouldn't give up. I told them how strong you really are."

  She watched, fascinated, as a tear slowly tracked down and got caught in the stubble on his cheek.

  "How...long?" Her voice sounded hollow, far away when she spoke.

  "Sixty-eight hours since the onset," he told her. "They say seventy-two's the magic number, I know, but you're already home free. Everything looks great. You look great." He glanced at the door. "Your father's here. He'll need to see you awake."

  Instead of leaving as she expected he would, Jacques raised a cord and pushed the buzzer. "Send in Dr. Mi-cheaux's father, please."

  Not a request, but another command. Solange's shaky smile widened. Father wouldn't like that summons. He was Dr. Micheaux, not Dr. Micheaux's father.

  Jacques was probably running the hospital by now. How she would miss him when he left to go home to America. That would be soon, she supposed. The mission must be completely over by now, everything settled, all danger abolished.

  She wanted to ask, but that would wait. Her father had come in to stand just behind Jacques. He looked rather shell shocked. Then she remembered his accident. His thick silver hair had lost its gleam and for once in his life, appeared unkempt. How much smaller he seemed to her than when she had last seen him. She tried to smile.

  "Papa," she managed. "How is your head?"

  He was still a handsome man, just shy of sixty, his regular features hardly lined by the years. However, the carefully composed expression he usually wore, the one that concealed all emotion, vanished. His face seemed to age and crumple as she watched. Tears streaked down his face. "My sweet angel," he rasped.

  Solange cut her gaze to Jacques to see his reaction. He had moved to one side to allow her father to come closer, but he still held her hand. He seemed to notice that, too, and gently put it, palm down on the bed.

  "I suppose I should go," he said with a halfhearted shrug.

  "Goodbye, Jacques," she said. Though her lips moved, she heard no sound emerge. As farewells went, she would have wished for a little more. At least a kiss. He once said that he loved her.

  Her father took Jacques's place at her side, but Solange had lost the heart for attempting conversation. She had lost her heart altogether. It was walking out the door with Jacques Mercier and going with him wherever he went. And he didn't even know.

  Holly joined him as he came out into the corridor. "You look like hell."

  He grinned at her. "Yeah, but I feel great. Did you see? She was smiling. Her eyes were open and she was smiling."

  "Yeah, you can relax now. She's out of the woods. Why don't you grab a shower and a quick nap?"

  Jack immediately sensed something was wrong. "Spill it, Holly. What's up?"

  She rolled her eyes and expelled a sharp sigh. "How do you do that? A body would think you're psychic or something."

  "Yeah, but we know better, don't we? Tell me what's wrong." He walked with her to the deserted sitting area adjacent to the nurses' station. She plunked down wearily and patted the chair beside her. Jack took it, waiting expectantly.

  "Belclair's gone."

  "Gone?" Jack repeated in disbelief. His mind couldn't seem to grasp that they had lost something akin to the size of a small rogue elephant.

  She nodded. "We had to turn him over to the French. Don't ask me why they risked moving him, but they were transferring him to another facility. The guards who were transporting him are missing. The ambulance attendant is dead. Shot twice at close range."

  "Damn." Jack rubbed the back of his neck where the muscles were beginning to scream. "Assemble the team. We need a game plan. Meantime, where can I go to get my head on straight?"

  "Got a room for you just down the hall. I think it has everything you'll need."

  Not everything, Jack thought. More than anything, he needed to stay close to Solange, but that was going to be impossible until Belclair was apprehended.

  His whole concept of the enemy had changed since beginning this mission. They were no longer a faceless entity. They had become people with different agendas and personalities. Some were shallow like Chari, some dedicated, some inherently evil and
others, the hired guards, simply sucked into the venture by chance.

  He seemed to be relating to everyone differently than before. No more herding people into categories. Friends or enemies, that simply was not working anymore.

  Jack's team remained a cohesive unit where the job was concerned, but he had to admit that each had established a bond with him that had nothing to do with the work. If anything happened to any one of them, he would have lost someone unique. His wall of objectivity had serious breaches.

  As director of Sextant, Jack had to assume control of the mission again and focus his full attention and energy on that. Technically the team had done the job they'd been brought here to do, but Belclair had escaped the French. While that was not the fault of Sextant, they could hardly leave that string dangling. It was more like a fuse that could lead to explosions just as deadly as those originally planned.

  An hour later Jack, Holly, Eric, Joe and Will were gathered in one of the hospital conference rooms. He was standing at the head of the table, slightly embarrassed about how out-of-touch-he had been for the past three days. However, he knew if he had it to do over, he wouldn't change a thing. Solange had needed him. She had almost paid the ultimate price for this mission. He only wished he could have done more for her.

  He would dedicate this effort to her. Get the job done. Make the world a little safer for Solange. "Okay, what have we got so far?"

  "Belclair was the catalyst," Holly offered. She looked to Eric for his report.

  "The three—Belclair, Piers Malfleur and Chari—were all natives of Tournade. While growing up, they were apparently treated as outcasts by the locals," Eric stated, looking at his notes. "Belclair, because he was so ungainly, a real egghead and all-round geek. By the way, that description is compliments of their esteemed peer, Tournade's current mayor."

  "How did we miss finding this connection before?" Jack asked, careful to include himself in what amounted to an accusation.

  "Malfleur changed his name when he left for Paris. His father was a convicted murderer, his mother a barmaid with plenty of extracurricular activities. Piers took a lot of flak about that when he was a kid. Made him an outcast. Belclair we didn't know about until Solange gave us his name. We had identified Piers when he was seen in the village, but thought he was just someone Chari had hired from local talent."

  "And Chari? Racial conflict?"

  Eric cocked one eyebrow and looked over his glasses at them. "He was the outlander, the only kid in town of Middle-Eastern descent. Nobody but the girl he eventually married accepted him, and her family was not keen on the match."

  "So the three banded together," Jack said. "So much for motive."

  Holly held up a finger.

  "Something to add regarding that?" Jack asked.

  "Their motives diverged," Holly said. "Chari was in it for the money. Piers wanted Tournade wiped out, right down to the last person. Considering all that stuff Solange found in the SUV, he was planning to poison as many as possible at the festival, then wreak some serious havoc afterward. But our little doc took his vehicle and then put a period to his existence." She smiled. "Is she cool or what?"

  Jack nodded, shoving the swell of remembered terror aside to deal with later. "What about Belclair? He's the one we need a fix on right now."

  Eric turned to Corda. "Joe and Martine did the background on him."

  Joe had the floor. "Belclair has a greedy streak, too, but he has an ax to grind with humanity. Nobody anywhere ever liked him. We couldn't find a soul in any of his schools, among any of the people who had ever known him who would have spit on him if he was on fire."

  "Well, somebody did, and we had better find him pretty damn quick. He's the one with the power to reconstruct this nightmare," Jack said. "Any leads at all?"

  Will spoke up. "Solange is our best bet, Jack. She worked with him in the lab."

  Jack was already shaking his head. "She's not up to it yet."

  "Don't deny her this, Jack," Holly said, employing that motherly tone of hers. "Solange has been as dedicated to this as any one of us. If you leave her out of it now, she's gonna be so pissed."

  Jack shot her a warning look and she held her hands, palms up, as if backing off. As if she would.

  "All I'm saying is let's give the girl a chance to offer her input." Her eyes narrowed. "And allow one of us do it, okay?"

  Jack considered what she said. His protective instincts toward Solange warred with what he knew must be done. "I'll talk to her."

  Holly scoffed. "Yeah, I can hear that now. 'Sweetie pie, you know anything? Didn't think so, okay, rest now.'"

  "Not funny," Jack grumbled, but he felt a laugh threaten. Holly knew him too well. "Okay, I'll let Eric interview her. He might pick up what's running through her head that she's too exhausted to say." He looked at each of them. "Anything else? No? Okay, let's roll."

  They marched in force back to the wing where Solange lay recovering from her trauma. Jack hated to disturb her, but he knew Holly was right. When they reached the corridor outside her room, he almost had to restrain himself from rushing inside. Instead he watched Eric do so.

  "You coining in to watch?" Holly asked as she and the rest filed into the observation room.

  He shook his head. "No, it's better if I don't. Maybe I shouldn't see her again until this is taken care of." He smiled, knowing he must look a little sheepish. "She sort of screws up my focus."

  Holly feigned surprise. "Really? Now I never would have noticed that if you hadn't told me, boss."

  Eric exited the room almost immediately. "Her old man ran me out. He's scary as hell for a little guy. She's sedated, anyway. Sound asleep. We'll have to wait until morning."

  "That's all right. It would take some time for Belclair to assemble a lab and recreate any of the toxin, and all that he made before has been accounted for, right?"

  "Roger that," Eric said with a succinct nod. "And the waters have tested okay downstream from the bridge, too. They think that it dispersed enough that it's no longer a danger."

  Only it hadn't dispersed quite quickly enough, Jack thought, grinding his teeth. Solange had either gotten it there or Belclair had infected her on purpose back at the lab. They might never know for sure. The important thing was that she was recovering. His relief was almost debilitating.

  Jack left the others and retired to the room down the hall that Holly had arranged for him, stretched out on the bed and covered his eyes with his arm to block out the light from the window.

  Damn, but he was too tired to think straight. The fate of thousands might rest on their apprehension of Belclair, and he was just too exhausted to perform.

  How had this happened? How had he let himself get so wrapped around the axle about Solange that he had to let someone else take the lead in the investigation?

  He was too involved and he knew it. She was the most serious breach in what he had termed his wall of objectivity. He could not for the life of him imagine a category in his life where Solange Micheaux would comfortably fit. One of his lovers? She was that, but she was also much, much more.

  He worried that he had bottled up his deep feelings for people for so long that now they had all broken free and converged on this one woman. But why now? Why, on this intensely critical mission, had Solange's well-being zoomed to first on his list of priorities?

  He needed to get a grip on reality here, repeat his first rule: expect collateral damage and get over it.

  That just seemed like heartless justification for failure now.

  Never once had he put one person above the job. Not even Maribeth. Of course, she had always shared his views about that. He wished he could apologize to her, tell her how much he regretted that he had not put her first when he should have. But she wouldn't understand, even if he could say that to her. She had never thought of him first, either. It probably had never occurred to her, just as it hadn't to him. Until now.

  Would Solange think that way? She was a doctor, sworn to save lives, dedicat
ed to humanity. Small doubt that her job would be of primary importance to her. And it should be. How could he expect anything else?

  His thoughts raveled at the edges and finally disintegrated altogether as a dreamless sleep overtook him.

  It was a new day, a new chance at life. Solange couldn't help but be happy about that. However, the situation with regard to Jacques's mission was dire. Belclair was missing.

  "A field," she told Eric after he had explained about Belclair's escape. "He mentioned that the type of flower he was using for the extract grows near Tournade. Cultivated, I would think." She watched him make a note.

  She really felt so much better this morning it was amazing. Already she was sitting up halfway, propped against pillows. One of the sisters had combed her hair and given her chipped ice to crunch. The doctor had promised she could try to walk a bit later in the day. And tomorrow she would have food.

  The greatest evidence that she was improving rapidly was this visitor. Eric Vinland, the one to whom she had • passed the handkerchief with the information. Her contact. Now consulting with her about Belclair.

  She was still involved with Jacques's mission. It bothered her a little that he was not the one asking her these questions, but at least he would know she was helping.

  "It will be a local crop of genquist," she went on to explain. "You must find and watch the field. If Belclair plans to make more of the toxin, he will have to have that. I do not believe he has any other source."

  "Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant," Eric said. "Now then, what do the plants look like?"

  She watched him prepare to write down her description, his pen poised over the small writing pad. "I have no idea. Find a botanist."

  He laughed and clicked the pen, tucking it away in his pocket. "I'll bring you a sprig when we find it."

  "No, thank you, I believe I have had enough."

  He winked and shook his finger at her. "Sense of humor. I like that. Okay, I'm out of here now. You get well, Doc."