A Man Overboard (22 page)

Jack held his tongue. Should he tell her the truth?

She began sobbing, and though Jack wanted to reassure her by taking her hand, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet.

“He didn’t know about you,” she cried. “And I couldn’t tell him. It was all I could do to get the rings off in time. If he knew about you, he’d kill you. Or me. So I pretended that I was glad to see him and kept asking when he thought it would be safe for me to come back to him, that I couldn’t stand being without him. It made me sick to say, and I could’ve killed my mother. I had to…” She tried keeping pace with the storm of tears, her hands swiping them away as they descended, but some slipped through and dropped to the floor at their feet.

“Joseph…” It was the only word Jack could get out.

She shook her head. “It was right around the time I got pregnant, and…” She swore. “I wasn’t sure. I had a test taken after he was born. I had to know. I mean, I didn’t want to know, just in case, but…” She looked up and offered a pathetic attempt at a smile. “He’s your son, Jack.” And then she let out a noise that was one part laughter and one part crying.

The weight of the world flew off him so fast, that Jack felt like a feather in a twister when he released the breath he’d been holding. He smiled and made his own contribution to the puddle of tears between them. “I would’ve loved him like he was my own, anyway,” he said, embracing her again.

“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

“When we were on the boat, you said that you were drunk when Joseph was conceived.”

“I did?” Shaking her head, she insisted, “I must’ve been confused. I
was
drunk with him. It was the only way I could do it. But for Joseph’s sake, I had to make myself believe that…” She looked desperately into his eyes, begging him to believe her. “Please, I was confused. You’re his father. I’ll show you the test results.”

“What about the books and letters you kept hidden in your closet?”

“You found them?”

“Well, the guy that came to burn down the house found them…”

“They burned down our house?” she shouted.

Some of the cops turned their heads toward them. “Later. Why keep them?”

“What do you mean later? Did they burn down our house?”

He looked around. “Shhh. Yeah. What about the letters?”

It took her a moment to get her mind off the house. “I had to keep them in case he ever showed up. I needed to be able to convince him that I was waiting for him. At least until I could figure something else out.”

“And what were the books?”

“Just stupid novels we liked. Before I knew who he really was, we kind of had this hobby…”

“Finding novels with Soviet plots?”

She nodded. “It was stupid.” Then she looked at him, her face warming as if she’d just realized he was alive and not simply part of her imagination. “I can’t believe you’re actually here. I thought you drowned. I tried to stop them, but they dragged me out of the room. I was screaming for you to wake up.”

“What about the suicide note?”

“They made me. Vadim’s men. After they threw you overboard, they told me who they were, that they were taking me back to Vadim. He knew about you and Joseph, and he wasn’t too happy. They said they’d kill Joseph if I didn’t go along with them.”

The skin across Jack’s brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Did she not know about the CIA’s involvement in all this? He wondered if Johnson and Viktoriya could have been wrong. But there was no way Vadim had the resources to pull this off on his own. Which meant that Stacey didn’t know what the CIA was setting Vadim up for. He guessed no one would ever know. “You convinced him that Joseph was his?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think he ever really believed it. He wanted to, though. I told him I didn’t love you, that I was just using you. I said I was so scared the SVR was going to find me that I needed to disappear, take on a new identity while I waited for him to figure something out. Not sure he really believed that, either.”

She fell silent, and Jack could almost see the images flashing through her mind. Images of her first husband’s head exploding as she put a few bullets in it. Images of her mother with a steak knife sticking out of her eye. Images of Joseph bleeding all over the place.

“Do you know that you don’t really have cancer?”

She didn’t say anything, but Jack could tell she stopped breathing.

“It was part of the plot to get us on the cruise.”

“They
doctored
the mammogram?”

“It was someone else’s.” He’d tell her about Timonen later. “You’re healthy. No cancer.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips as she let it sink in.

“You wanna get some coffee?” There were still a few things they had to go over, like her father and her mother, but another detective had just walked in, and Jack didn’t want to talk to him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold them off much longer, but he only needed a few more minutes.

“Yeah.” She took his hand and let him pull her up.

They walked in silence to the cafeteria, Stacey wrapping her arms around her chest self-consciously the whole way. Because she’d been naked from using her dress as a tourniquet when the medics arrived, she had grabbed the first T-shirt and pair of jeans she found. The shirt, it turned out, didn’t do much in the way of concealing what was beneath it, not without the normal undergarments. Jack had offered her his coat, but as Donny had so eloquently put it, he smelled like pickled diarrhea.

When they reached the vending machine, they got two cups of coffee and sat at a table in a secluded section of the room. Jack told her everything he’d been through, including everything Viktoriya had told him. He figured she’d find out from the FBI eventually, anyway.”

Disbelief stunned her motionless in the chair. “My mother was KGB?”

Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry. Is this too much right now? You’ve had a lot of curve balls thrown at you in the last two hours. I don’t want to overload you.”

She wiped a tear away and just leaned back, obviously trying to examine the last five years with this knowledge as its decoder. “Seriously?”

“I think she blamed herself for what happened at the hotel. I’m sure she planned on following her orders before you were ever put in a compromising position.”

She frowned. “Is that what you call it?”

Jack smiled. It was a good sign to see a hint of wit peeking through the pain. “But she never got an opportunity, and you were screwed.”

She managed to laugh and reached across the table, hitting him on the arm.

“Ouch! Watch it. Your other husband beat the living crap out of me, remember?”

“You’re not angry at me?”

He shrugged. “I’m not jumping for joy, but…” He touched the stitches above his right eye. “It is a better explanation than I expected. For a few minutes, I thought that maybe you wanted to get rid of me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Just a few…
tiny
minutes.”

She folded her arms on the table, growing serious. “Jack—”

He cut her off. “Listen, I’m just glad that I didn’t lose you. Whatever happened before is irrelevant. That little cheating on your husband with your husband thing… You did what you had to do to protect us. I’ll get over it.” Though saying it made him think about it, and thinking about it didn’t make his voice all that convincing.

“What if I told you I didn’t remember any of it? Or that he was terrible?”

“Would it be true?”

“How do I know? I was wasted the whole time.”

They smiled, took a sip of coffee, and stared down at the table for a while.

“I’m so sorry about Donny and Ivan,” she said.

Jack was, too, but again, the full realization of those losses was still busy forming out at sea. When it struck, it would be one brutal tempest, but for now he was too distracted by all the excitement and at having Stacey and Joseph back. He would deal with losing his friends in its proper time. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.

She thought about it for a second, hooking a piece of hair behind an ear. “Yeah.” She squinted. “What’re we going to do? We don’t have a house, right?”

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll figure it out once all this settles down. We’ll be fine.”

She thought about all he’d told her. “What about the CIA? Do you think they’ll still try and…”

“Nah. The smartest thing for them to do is just leave it alone. The FBI might dig around and get close, but not close enough to make anyone sweat. I think if we keep quiet, if we let the FBI draw its own conclusions, then we’ll be okay. The CIA won’t want to bring unnecessary attention to this thing.”

“There you are!”

The deep voice sounded from behind them, making them turn their heads. Joseph’s doctor was walking briskly toward them, a small smile on his face. “You can see him now,” he said once he was beside them.

Jack and Stacey jumped to their feet, hands locked together, and followed after the doctor. There was a lot they didn’t know, and a lot they would probably never find out, and while there were aspects of the story that didn’t make much sense to Jack, he was through thinking about it for now. All that mattered right now was Joseph—
his
son.

When they entered the recovery room, Joseph opened his eyes and smiled the most precious and heart-melting smile his parents had ever seen. His neck was wrapped, and he had some wires connecting him to machines, but other than that, he looked great.

“Hi, Mommy,” he whispered. “Hi, Daddy.” He lifted his hand and gave a tired wave.

They both sat down on the bed’s edge and did their best to refrain from drowning him beneath hugs and kisses.

Laying a hand on his tiny chest, Jack smiled. “Hey, buddy. You okay?”

He tried nodding his head, but the wrappings made it impossible. “Yeah.” Then he looked to his mother. “Is everything gonna be okay now?”

“Everything is gonna be okay now,” she said.

28

The new Saab rolled to a stop before a wall of raked leaves that had been built at the top of the driveway. Jack stepped out of the car and was welcomed back to his new home by a brisk October 17th wind that pulled at his suit jacket and ruffled his hair. Red-orange leaves snapped from the swaying branches above and whipped past him on the wings of some invisible current to nowhere while dead leaves from the raked piles were summoned upward like smoke from an altar, twisting inside an eerie vortex that provoked thoughts of some time-traveling person from the future suddenly appearing naked in his front yard. But why a body-building robot with an Austrian accent would show up at
his
house—no doubt on a mission to cut down the family tree belonging to some future Resistance warrior destined to lead humanity to victory in the coming mechanical apocalypse—would be a complete mystery. Though he supposed it could be a Russian assassin finally coming after his family, using some secret teleporting technology. But that wouldn’t make sense. Why would the Kremlin send an agent across the world to take them out now? The CIA, then? Or maybe the swirling leaves weren’t indicative of a physical arrival but only a psychic one. A psychic assassin. He knew the government had them…

He turned his attention away from the leaves and looked up into the sky, satisfied that there wasn’t a black hole forming in the clouds above his house. He would hate to have to move again. Jogging to the front door, he looked across the street before going in and could see the zipping clouds in the late-afternoon sky racing across the surface of the Delaware. It was strange being on this side of it now, the Jersey side. It hadn’t been an easy sell on Stacey, not with New Jersey seemingly right in the middle of the vaccination war, but all other considerations made perfect sense. Besides, Jack had argued, when armed CDC troops began hauling kids away and summarily executing “irresponsible” parents on their doorsteps, they would be the first ones to make the swim across the river and back into the parental freedom of Pennsylvania.

“Joseph?” Jack called, closing the door on his Jerry imagination.

No answer.

“Mary?”

Mary was the babysitter, and the reason she was here today was because Stacey’s company was running a huge event at Waterfront Park tonight. Some kind of Live Aid thing meant to raise awareness of the worldwide water crisis. A couple of actors, a Major League athlete, the entire cast of the Trenton Thunder, some politicians, and an author who’d written a book on the subject were all scheduled to speak between performances by some of the biggest names in music.

“Joseph! Mary!” He walked into the kitchen and tossed his keys onto the counter. He found a piece of notebook paper sitting on the kitchen table, big red letters scribbled across it.

Hey, Mr. Green. I talked to Mrs. Green and she said it was okay to take Joseph to see the four o’ clock showing of that new Disney movie. Hope that’s ok. Your phone wasn’t on, so I left a message. —M

“Crap,” Jack muttered, and he dug his cell out of his pocket. He’d forgotten to turn it back on after a meeting. When the screen lit up, it announced five missed calls. Two were from Mary, one was from Stacey, one was from someone at work, and one came from a blocked number. Three voicemails were waiting for him, and he listened to them while looking through the refrigerator for something to eat. His meeting had gone through lunch, and he was starving.

“Hi, Mr. Green, it’s Mary. I’ve been trying to reach you, but I guess your phone’s off. I called Mrs. Green and asked if I could take Joseph to see Frankenweenie at four o’ clock. She said it was okay as long as I promise to leave if he gets scared. So, I guess we’ll be back around sixish. Bye!”

“End of message. To save this message, please—”

Jack deleted it.

“Next new message…
”

He took out some lunchmeat and tossed it on the table.

“Hi, Jack. Things are pretty insane today…”

There was a long pause, and for a second, Jack thought the phone had shut off.

“—just know that I love you, okay? I miss you. Hey, maybe when I get home tonight…”