Alistair Chambers's urbane laughter was just about enough to send him over the edge.
"Better watch it, Chambers," Ryder said, waving his crutch aloft. "This could be a lethal weapon.'
The older man folded his slim, impeccably tailored frame into a chair close to the couch.
"Courting danger is my forte," he said, his voice revealing his British origin. "I am ever fearless." He handed Ryder a glass of Scotch.
The drink warmed its way down Ryder's throat and mellowed his mood despite himself. "What you are," he said, "is a royal pain in the –"
"Save your American vulgarisms for someone else," Alistair broke in. "I am impervious to such blatant ploys for sympathy."
"I don't want sympathy. I want my freedom."
Alistair made a show of looking around the elegantly appointed apartment. Except for the stacks of notes on the desk and the mass of electronic equipment locked away in the two spare bedrooms, the place was straight out of Architectural Digest. "I see no bars at the windows, my boy, and no shackles upon your wrists."
Ryder pointed toward the heavy cast on his right leg. "Who needs shackles when the prisoner has a fractured femur?"
"Six weeks ago you didn't know what a femur was."
"Six weeks ago I didn't need to know what a femur was."
"This is right and just punishment for carousing on that godforsaken mountain in Vermont. A more sensible man would have amused himself with diversions of a different nature."
Ryder drained his drink and put the glass down on the windowsill behind him. "Like that blonde I saw you with after the Summit meeting?" The state of Vermont had recently played host to a US-USSR summit meeting on combating global terrorism, a topic with which both men were well-versed.
Alistair arched one supremely elegant brow. "Dare I mention the brunette who signed your cast with a rather interesting, if physiologically unlikely, proposition?"
"That proposition was in Hebrew," Ryder said. "Isn't there one damned language you can't read?"
"I can decipher double entendres in eighteen modern languages plus Latin and Greek. One never knows when such knowledge will prove useful."
Ryder stretched and yawned theatrically. "Isn't it time you went back to the hotel?"
Alistair crossed his left leg over his right and settled back in his chair. "Would you be trying to rid yourself of my company, my boy? And here I was about to ask you to have dinner with me at O'Shaughnessy's."
O'Shaughnessy's, in Boston, was one of the more popular watering holes of the cloak-and-dagger set and an easy hop in the organization's private jet.
Heavy-duty bribery was hard for Ryder to ignore when he'd been staring at the same four walls all day, but he'd make a valiant attempt. He turned on the television with the remote control. The theme music from General Hospital filled the room. If that didn't drive Alistair – good-natured snob that he was – out of the apartment, nothing would.
To Ryder's dismay, Alistair seemed oblivious to the barrage of diaper and soap powder commercials that followed the opening credits. The older man took a long sip of his own drink then fixed Ryder with one of his patented upper-crust looks.
"Your plebeian pursuits won't drive me away, Ryder, try as you might. I enjoy General Hospital."
Ryder zapped through the stations until he reached MTV. He grinned as Alistair winced at the onslaught of heavy-metal music. "Do I see you heading for the door, Chambers?"
Alistair rose from his chair and turned off the TV. He then grabbed the remote from Ryder and stashed it in the pocket of his Harris tweed blazer.
"Rudeness in one as brilliant as you can be overlooked occasionally," Alistair said. "But I wouldn't push the boundaries of my largesse."
Ryder sighed and leaned his head against the back of the couch. "Leave me alone, Alistair," he said finally. "I just want out."
The older man walked over to the bar. "And that, dear boy, is the rub." Ryder watched as he poured two more jiggers of Scotch into heavy Baccarat tumblers. "We simply cannot afford to let you go."
"No one is irreplaceable. You can do better."
"Would that we could," Alistair said, handing him a glass. "God knows my life would be simpler with a less demanding resident genius. The fact remains, however, that you are still the best there is."
"I'm burned out."
"Hence this wonderful apartment I've presented you with." Alistair spread his arms wide. "Your personal refuge while you recover your enthusiasm."
Ryder wasn't certain his enthusiasm was recoverable.
The prestigious old Carillon Arms with its vaulted ceilings and marble floors was a Manhattan status symbol. The building was going co-op, and apartments were at a premium since few vacancies existed. Many of the tenants had been there forty or fifty years and, thanks to New York City laws, were protected from eviction but not, unfortunately, from harassment by landlords eager to turn a whopping profit. Some of the stories of harassment Rosie Callahan, a longtime resident, had told Ryder belied the tasteful Carillon exterior.
But then Ryder knew all about false exteriors. You couldn't be in his line of work and not know that things were rarely as they seemed.
Alistair, and the organization, had been exceedingly generous in acquiring one of the pricey apartments for Ryder as a get-well present – a get-well present that came with more than a few strings attached.
"You don't play fair, Chambers." He glared over at his friend and mentor.
"I know. That's the simple beauty of my strategy."
"If I didn't have this damned cast on my leg you'd be in big trouble."
Alistair strengthened the left cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt. "I tremble even as I think of your wrath."
Ryder's normal good humor was beginning to surface despite himself. "You know what you can do with your British reserve?"
Alistair's blue eyes twinkled. "I already have, my boy. Many times."
Ryder motioned toward the opulent apartment with its cavernous hall and many bedrooms. "You realize even this won't change my mind, don't you?" I'm through. Out. Officially retired." Never mind the fact that he'd been spending his idle hours working on a prototype for a device to detect plastic explosives. Chambers didn't need to know everything.
Alistair finished his second Scotch and put the glass down on the highly polished end table. "You're on a leave of absence."
"The hell I am."
"You always say that." Alistair's stiff-upper-lip demeanor usually amused Ryder. Today it made him crazy. "After each and every job, you say that. I just ignore you."
"You'd better stop ignoring me." Ryder's voice was filled with not-so-righteous anger. "I didn't bargain on a busted leg as part of the deal."
"Oh, come now. You sound as if you were injured in the line of duty. I have no sympathy for a man who breaks his leg getting off a ski lift."
Ryder chose to ignore the dig.
"You are but thirty-four, Ryder. Certainly you have a few good years left."
Ryder considered the work he'd been doing the past fifteen years. "It's a miracle I made it this far. Why press my luck?"
"Because you'd go slowly mad if you stayed home counting your money." Alistair stood up and walked over to the window overlooking Central Park. "Because it's in your blood just as it's in mine, and you'll never be free of it."
"You always were an optimistic sort." He tried to ignore the uneasy feeling the other man's words brought to life. Memories of the colleagues lost over the years to madmen and geniuses were the most powerful tool in Alistair's arsenal. "I'll check into the Betty Ford Clinic. Maybe they can find a cure."
"There is no cure," Alistair said. "Danger is addictive. Once you get a taste of it, you're hooked."
"I can give it up."
Alistair's expression as a painful mixture of affection and disbelief. "We all want to," he said. "Damned few of us can pull it off."
For the second time in as many days, Ryder thought of Valerie Parker and the life he might have had with her if his ambitio
n hadn't come first, last and always. She was now someone's wife and someone's mother, contentedly hidden away in English suburbia, with Ryder O'Neal a distant, unhappy memory.
And yet lately Valerie had been popping into his head at odd hours, causing Ryder, never an introspective man, to take a step backward into his past and face the fact that in this one thing, he had failed and failed badly.
He carried no torch for her; in fact, he wondered if he'd ever really loved her at all. Certainly no man who loved could ever have been so callous, so unfeeling as he had been years ago.
No. Valerie was now a symbol for something that went far beyond his shortcomings of the heart; she represented the part of Ryder that had been ignored during his fifteen years of duty with PAX.
"Does that invitation to O'Shaughnessy's still hold?" he asked.
"All it takes is one phone call and we're off."
Ryder grabbed for his crutches and pulled himself up from the couch.
"Then make the call," Ryder said, "and let's get the hell out of here."
He'd had a glimpse into his future and he didn't like what he saw.
Not one damned bit.
#
On the ninth floor of the Carillon, it was the present that was the problem.
"For heaven's sake, Holland, will you put that stuff down?" Joanna Stratton grabbed the tube of undereye concealer from her best friend and stashed it in the pocket of her grey trousers. "You've used enough to camouflage the Sixth Fleet."
"The Sixth Fleet, maybe, but not these circles under my eyes." Holland pulled another tube of cover-up cream out of Joanna's enormous makeup kit. "I'm bringing in the reinforcements."
Joanna watched Holland add a third layer of Alabaster 1A. "Who's supposed to be the expert around here anyway? I thought the idea was to look natural." She groaned as Holland blended the light concealer with the darker foundation. "You should have told me you were auditioning for the Kabuki theater."
"I'll ignore the insult if you'll tell me how to cover the dark circles so I don't end up looking like a raccoon." Holland pointed toward the life mask Joanna had done of her a few days ago. "Even that thing had circles under the eyes."
Joanna pulled the makeup kit away from her friend. "Sorry, pal. Trade secret."
"Do you accept bribes?"
"Only if they include dinner at Tavern on the Green and my own Porsche."
"Europe must have agreed with you, darling. Gone only three months and you've become positively autocratic."
"And you've become positively neurotic." Joanna moved aside Holland's life mask and one of Rosie Callahan, her next-door neighbor, and perched on the windowsill next to her mother's antique rolltop desk. Cynthia was in Greece getting to know the latest man in her life and Joanna was availing herself of her mother's rare generosity and vacationing at her Manhattan apartment.
"What on earth is the matter with you?" Joanna asked. "You've been acting strange all morning."
"It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" Holland leaned forward to check the faint laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. "I'm forty-two years old and I'm beginning to look it."
Joanna, a professional makeup artist of some renown, understood beauty and its relationship to aging the way few others did. It was her business to understand the subtle pulls and tugs made by gravity and time and how best to hide them.
When she looked at Holland, she saw a beautiful woman who looked exactly what she was: a woman, not a girl.
"What's wrong with being forty-two?" She named forty-something actresses whose careers were definitely in high gear.
"They're the exception, honey, not the rule. It's a tough world out there, and the older you get, the tougher it gets to survive."
"No wonder you've been troweling on the makeup like camouflage paint. You're preparing for war."
"Laugh all you want. Ten years from now you won't think it's so funny." Holland waved a wand of mascara in her direction. "Just don't come crying to me when you find your first laugh line."
Thirty-two-year-old Joanna bent down so the uncompromising morning sun caught her full face. She pointed toward a few fine lines at the outer corners of her blue-green eyes and the faintest of creases on her forehead.
"Battle scars." She watched Holland's face, "I've had them since I was nineteen." They were vivid reminders of exactly what could happen to a woman when she let herself believe in happily-ever-after.
"You're gorgeous," Holland said matter-of-factly. "You can afford to have a wrinkle or two. It's the rest of us mere mortals who have a problem." She smoothed the furrows on her forehead with an index finger. "Don't you have any potions in your bag of tricks that could make me look ten years younger?"
"Actually I'm looking for a way to add wrinkles."
Holland's expression was priceless. "I'm calling Bellevue."
"You surprise me, Holland. I thought you'd call Saks for industrial strength face cream."
"Be serious. Wrinkles are no laughing matter."
"I am serious. Benny Ryan wants me to do some special effects for a commercial he's shooting next week." Although Joanna was technically on a sabbatical, that didn't keep the offers from pouring in. Saying no hadn't been a problem until Benny's call came in the day before. Disguising a young man as his older self was too fascinating a proposal to ignore.
When it came to disguises, Joanna Stratton was in her element. The more successful she became at creating masks for others, the better the mask she created for herself. In fact, some of her best work was seen every day in the smooth and lovely face she presented to the world.
The struggle to piece her life together after the sudden, violent end of her teenage marriage didn't show. The years of study and apprenticeship, the insecurity and loneliness that were her birthright the same as her beauty – none of these were visible. Not even to her closest friend.
The nomadic life of a free-lance theatrical makeup artist – disguises, a specialty – suited Joanna perfectly. By never staying too long in one place she never ran the risk of growing seriously attached to anything or anyone.
And if lately she'd begun to feel the need for something more tugging and pulling at her coat strings – well, she had only to look at her much-married mother to know how slim her own chances really were for the little cottage with the white picket fence.
It made a hell of a lot more sense for a woman to buy her own little cottage than to wait for Prince Charming to come along and make a down payment. These days, Prince Charmings were in short supply.
The mention of a job possibility had caused Holland to sit up straighter. "Anything in it for me?"
Joanna shook off her pensive thoughts. "Only if you want to play a man who ages fifty years waiting in line for a bank teller."
"Forget it."
"Not even for your art?"
"Not even if it comes with a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar." Holland shuddered. "Why would you want to take on such a depressing job?"
"I think it's intriguing," Joanna countered. "I've spent the last ten years making septuagenarians look like teenagers. Why not see if it works the other way around?"
"You're perverse."
"Maybe, but think what fun I'll have." Holland reached for her concealer again and Joanna grabbed it from her. "I could show you how you'll look thirty years from now."
"Bite your tongue!"
"Why this sudden panic over a few laugh lines? You weren't like this when I saw you back in October."
"I wasn't forty-two in October."
"I doubt if your social life has suffered because of it." Holland always had a string of eligible and not-so-eligible men vying for her favors.
"Well, I haven't joined the Sisters of the Celibate Poor, if that's what you mean."
Joanna ignored the jab at her own currently dull social life. "Level with me, Holland."
Holland sighed. "I need more sleep, more makeup, and a hell of a lot more guts to make it against the competition these days, Jo, both on and off the stage." She tur
ned slightly and looked out the window. "And it's scaring the hell out of me."
Joanna was quiet.
She'd spent the past few months in Europe doing the makeup for three top American stars who were filming a miniseries in between temper tantrums and anxiety attacks.
America's insane devotion to youth and perfection had turned three supremely gifted adults into neurotics. However, the fear in Holland's eyes was something else again. It wasn't a performer's fear; it was a woman's fear. A fear Joanna had seen in her mother's eyes, a fear that went deeper than the bone.
"When's the audition?"
"Tomorrow morning." Holland turned the magnifying mirror facedown. "Can you perform a miracle?"
"Let me look at you."
Joanna studied Holland's flawless cheekbones, clear green eyes, and thick auburn hair. Laugh lines or not laugh lines, Holland was a classically beautiful woman and was destined to remain so well into old age.
But Joanna knew that was the last thing her friend wanted to hear and the last thing she would believe.
"I don't know," Joanna said with a smile. "It'll be a tough job."
"I'm shameless," Holland said, "You make me beautiful and I'll take you to lunch."
"Tavern?"
Holland winced. "Would you settle for Jake's on the East Side?"
"You're buying?"
"I'm buying. Miracles don't come cheap."
"You're in luck," Joanna said, reaching for the Pure Beige 004. "Miracles just happen to be my specialty."
Chapter Two
Jake's turned out to be a marvelous art-deco-style restaurant that made Joanna forget all about Tavern on the Green. She and Holland had a great lunch, then the two women said goodbye at the corner of East 41 st and Second Avenue and Joanna took a cab back to the Carillon.
On her way to the elevator, Joanna remembered she hadn't checked for mail in two days so she doubled back toward the mail room off the main lobby. Swinging open the door, she bumped smack into Stanley Holt, the superintendent of the Carillon Arms, who was crouched down beneath the long row of shiny brass mailboxes with his tool kit by his side.
Honeymoon Hotel Page 20
