Dangerous Secrets (20 page)

Clearly, the business deal or whatever it was, was taking longer than usual. Should she phone?

Start as you mean to go on.
Charity had no intention of being a clinging, cloying wife, so she decided against it.

Ten o’clock. This was…odd. Nick was a courteous man. He knew perfectly well she was waiting for him, had been for five hours. It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t let her know he’d be late. Even if he was immersed in business, a quick phone call wouldn’t be out of place. Or he could have someone call her, a secretary or something.

Eleven o’clock. Charity finally broke down and called his cell phone, but only got a recorded message that the party she was dialing couldn’t be reached and to try again later.

Many of the candles were guttering, some had died. She’d overdone it. The fragrance of all those scented candles vied with the sharp scents of food and made her slightly nauseous. Something roiled in her stomach and she felt bile and the white wine start to come up. By a miracle she avoided vomiting but it was touch and go.

That would teach her to drink wine on an empty stomach.

By midnight she was pacing in a tight circle, thoughts racing, fists clenching and unclenching. She’d just picked up the phone to start calling local hospitals when the front doorbell rang.

It couldn’t be Nick. He had the key. Peeking through the living room curtains she saw a police car parked at the curb, lights flashing. She rushed to the door and found a highway patrolman on her porch. Not too tall, dark hair cut military-short. He looked about twelve and was nervously holding a big Smoky hat, twisting it in his hands.

“Ms. Charity Prewitt?”

“Yes?” Her hand went to her throat. Charity stared at him, wide-eyed. “Actually, Mrs. Nicholas Ames. What is it officer?”

He swallowed. “I’m sorry to have to inform you, ma’am, that there’s been accident.”

She could barely take in his words. “An…accident?”

He blinked and gulped. “Yes, ma’am. A Lexus drove off the cliff this afternoon, broke right through the guardrail. On Hillside Drive. The vehicle was…destroyed. We found the engine block number and the car was registered to a Mr. Nicholas Ames. Our computer system tells us you’d married Mr. Ames this morning. Is that correct?”

Charity stared at him, his words barely making sense. “I’m sorry?”

Ill at ease, the officer looked down at a notepad in his hand. “Did you marry a Mr. Nicholas Ames this morning, ma’am?”

“Yes, I—” Her throat was scratchy. She tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry. This couldn’t be happening. Nick was smart and strong. Surely he got out of the car before—“Yes, we married this morning. Is—is my husband, is he—?” The words wouldn’t come. Her throat simply closed up tight and all Charity could do was stare at him.

For an answer, the officer dug into his jacket pocket and held something out to her in the palm of his hand. Her knees buckled and she had to cling to the door-jamb for support.

“I’m really sorry to have to give you bad news, ma’am,” the officer said sorrowfully. “This was found in the car. There was nothing else left that could give us an identity. Do you recognize it?”

On his rough palm, the claddagh ring gleamed in the bright light of the porch lamp.

Parker’s Ridge
November 28

I buried my husband today.

Charity Prewitt Ames hugged her cold knees with her cold arms and shivered.

Husband. He’d been her husband for what? Five hours? Maybe six?

It wasn’t very long to be a bride. And now her husband was in the stone-cold ground and Charity wished she could follow him.

The phone rang. And rang and rang. Charity Prewitt Ames couldn’t pick up. She hadn’t answered the phone since the funeral. She didn’t want condolences, she didn’t want any gentle inquiries into how she was feeling. Everyone wanted to know if she needed something.

Why yes, yes she did need something, thank you.

Her huband back, alive.

Condolences were words. Mere words. They wouldn’t bring her husband back. Short of Nick back, there wasn’t anything anyone could give her that would make any difference whatsoever.

Uncle Franklin and Aunt Vera, bless them, stayed away because she told them she wanted to be alone. She loved them, but she couldn’t face them right now. Even knowing that Aunt Vera was probably hallucinating, out of control, and Uncle Franklin was dealing with it alone, she simply couldn’t face her aunt’s needs right now.

She couldn’t face anything right now. The only thing she could do was curl up on the couch in an aching ball of grief and sorrow. There was nothing in her to give to anyone.

Everything in her was crushed, broken. She could almost feel her rib cage caving in, sucked in by the collapse of her heart. Every cell in her body was rejecting the idea of Nick in the stony, frozen ground. A collection of charred bones in the place of her handsome, vital husband. She’d spent the past three days vomiting the notion out of her body. But however much she emptied her stomach, the reality didn’t change

The phone rang again. She counted ten rings before whoever it was hung up again without leaving a message. The cordless was nearby—all she had to do was stretch out her hand and grasp the cold plastic, punch the button to turn it on.

She’d listen to some tinny voice, tuning in and out. She’d absorb only the odd word or two.
Terrible
.
Shocked.
All the usual words.
Sorry
would definitely be in there.

There were proper answers to give. Little murmurs to say that she was bearing up, grief passes with time, thank you for calling.

The few times she’d answered the phone before the funeral, though, the words wouldn’t—
couldn’t
come out. They simply remained in her throat, like hot little knives, slicing her to bits.

The phone rang again.

Her hand stayed where it was.

The house was cold. She hated the cold. In winter, her heating bills were atrocious because she liked her house toasty warm. The fire was lit almost every evening, well into spring.

But now it was cold. She hadn’t had the energy to turn the heat on or light the fire after the funeral. She hadn’t had the energy to do anything but collapse on the couch in a miserable huddle.

The last time she’d sat on this couch, she’d been in Nick’s arms.

The cruelty of losing someone so suddenly, particularly a man as vital as Nick, was that it was impossible to take in the fact that he was dead. Not long ago, she’d been lying along her couch, Nick on top of her, kissing her neck, her breasts.

She grabbed one of the big couch pillows and buried her face in it.

It still smelled like him, like Nick. She could smell wood smoke from the blazing fire he’d built, his shampoo and soap and something that was simply…him.

If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine him back, the man who’d become her lover and then, crazily, her husband in the short space of a week.

Her husband.

Now gone.

Midnight, November 28
Sixty miles south of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada

The Vor had said the ocean journey would take about a week and he’d been right. Of course.

Arkady was a scientist. The rigor of science, the fact that the laws governing this world were knowable through reason, had kept him from going insane in the Gulag. But if the Vor woke up one day and said that the sun was going to rise in the west, why then Arkady would get up in the morning and look to the west for the sun.

He was up on the deck, his first taste of fresh air in a week. They’d called him an hour ago, as he knew they would. A quiet knock on the steel bulkhead to let him know they were approaching their destination.

Now they were approaching land. The coastline was dark, visible only because it was darker than the surrounding ocean reflecting the light of the crescent moon. This part of the coast was as deserted as Siberia. No one to see them come, no one to see them go.

Arkady breathed deeply. The air smelled of nothing but pine trees for a thousand miles, with no hint of industry. Man’s hand here was light. Just as it was in Siberia. The earth would be better off if mankind were to simply disappear.

Arkady believed that with all that remained of his soul.

The captain was good at his job. The ship had doused its lights, but he put into a narrow inlet as if driving into a parking lot. Arkady looked overboard and was surprised to see a long jetty. There were no other boats, nothing else at all, actually, just this lone, long jetty stretching out to sea.

Waiting on the shore was a truck. Anonymous, a little battered and mud spattered. The license plates were smeared with mud. Arkady had no doubt that the heart of the truck, its engine, was top of the line.

He climbed down the ladder and waited quietly as two crew members brought up the container and offloaded it to a four-wheel hand truck. They worked smoothly and quickly, maneuvering in the darkness as if it were noon.

Arkady watched as they placed the container in a special compartment in the back of the truck. Until they opened the partition, there had been no sign of the secret compartment. Suspicious border guards would have to actually measure the inside and outside dimensions to discover it. Arkady had never been to North America, but he understood that, however heightened security might be at airports, road border controls between the United States and Canada were light.

There was barely enough space for a comfortable chair and six liters of mineral water. Arkady wouldn’t be as comfortable as he’d been up until now, but it would only be for a little while. And he’d survived worse, much worse.

They would get through. The Vor had thought of everything.

For a second, in the freezing midnight Canadian cold, on a clear night, with the Milky Way a cloudy rope across the sky, Arkady felt at one with the universe.

Arkady had one last phone call to make. The truck driver told him that though there was light snow in Vermont, the roads were clear. They should be in Parker’s Ridge tomorrow in the late afternoon, in about eighteen hours. He hauled out his last untraceable cell phone, the red one.

As always, Arkady thrilled to hear the Vor’s voice when he answered.

“Our good luck with the weather is holding.” He looked up at the inky winter sky. “Brilliant sunshine, warm winds. Weather forecasts say that the weather will hold for about eighteen hours.”

“Excellent news, my friend. See you soon, then.”

The red cell phone met the same end as the others. The SIM card was buried underneath a juniper bush, the rest of the phone crushed beneath his boot heel and tossed into the Atlantic.

Arkady watched as the ripples the plastic made edged their way outward, then subsided gently.

The last stage of a chain of events that would change the world.

The captain and his crew had already boarded the ship, which was turning to head back out to sea. The captain and his crew had been efficient carriers. Arkady would report this back to the Vor. There would be many other trips. The captain would retire a very rich man.

Arkady was left with the truck driver. He awaited his orders.

“We depart now,” Arkady said quietly in English, and he nodded.

With one last look at the night sky, Arkady climbed into the secret compartment and waited to be sealed up with his lethal cargo.

November 29
Harlan’s Motel, thirty miles from Parker’s Ridge

Finally, morning came. The dull gray sunlight seeping through the cracked blinds of the motel room didn’t flatter
the room any. It highlighted the stains and worn patches in the carpet, the cracks in the plasterboard walls, the thin film of dust everywhere.

It was a miserable little motel room, the most anonymous, cheap one he could find. Though Nicholas Ames’s photo had been briefly on the news all day four days ago, the man who checked into Harlan’s Motel looked nothing like the sleek businessman on the TV screens with his barbered face, styled hair, eight-hundred-dollar suits, and cashmere overcoats.

Nick Ireland hadn’t shaved or showered or combed his hair for days. So when a tall man in black jeans, black turtleneck sweater, and cheap black parka, tousle-haired and with black stubble on his face, checked into the motel, the pimply teenager manning the desk barely put down his skin magazine to look at him.

Nick registered as Barney Rubble.

That was a provocation, just as remaining within a thirty-mile radius of Parker’s Ridge was a provocation. He’d promised he’d drive back to D.C. yesterday. Today the boss was waiting to debrief him.

If his partners knew he was still here, they’d probably shoot him. If his boss back in Washington knew, he’d fire him.

Yesterday, he’d been ready to go back. Some stupid sentimental thing, some strange compulsion, had led him to stay on for the funeral, and Di Stefano had chewed his ass out for it.

He’d seen the funeral, seen Charity one last time, had climbed down from the mountainside and gotten into his SUV. Well, the hit man’s SUV, slated for forensics once Nick hit D.C.

And Nick had had every intention of heading out.

It was 4:00 p.m. by the time the funeral was over. He
shouldn’t have gone at all, because he had over a ten-hour drive to get home. Or eight if he wanted to drive his frustration off.

Either way, he had a long night of driving in front of him.

And yet he got as far as the turnoff that would take him straight down into Burlington, and then pulled off the road and sat in the SUV, engine idling, for a quarter of an hour. The very few vehicles out on this gelid day, with its promise of more snow toward evening, hissed by. No one paid him any attention whatsoever, which was as it should be.

He was dead, after all.

He sat and sat, knowing that each minute spent here just made his long trip even longer. Knowing that he was forfeiting even a short nap before having to haul his sorry ass down to headquarters to be debriefed.

And though his foot was on the accelerator and his hand on the gearshift and all it would take was about four pounds of pressure from his foot to shoot on to the road to Burlington, he couldn’t do it. He spent a fucking hour at that fucking intersection until finally, angry and frustrated, he turned the SUV around and drove to the most anonymous motel he could find, where he could be miserable for only forty-five dollars a night.

In his Delta days, Nick had lived rough. He’d once spent seventy days in Afghanistan sleeping on the ground and crapping in a pit he’d dug himself. This room was somehow worse.

He’d tried to ignore the pubes in the shower stall and the faint smell of sewer coming from the drain. He’d started drying himself with the thin towel then stopped when he saw brown streaks.

Still damp, he’d padded back into the room and sat down, naked and damp, on the side of the bed.

Jesus only knew how many traveling salesmen had jerked off on the bedspread. He needed something to sterilize the germs. Luckily he’d stopped off at a 7-Eleven to buy it. A bottle of whiskey, five bucks, pure rotgut. Just what he needed tonight.

He uncapped the bottle and looked for a glass. The one he found was stained and chipped. With a shrug, he simply tipped the bottle up and took a big slug. It burned all the way down, so he took another.

Bad shit was coming down. Nick was the world’s greatest expert on bad shit. He had a sixth sense for it, and right now his Bad-Shit-O-Meter was way, way over into the red zone. And Charity was right in the middle of it, whatever was going to happen.

He took another swig, a long one this time.

Charity, in danger. The thought made his skin crawl, burned his throat, squeezed his chest until he thought he’d choke.

Nick tipped the bottle up, chugged. But there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to drown out the image of Charity hurt, wounded or—
God!
—dead.

Charity, with her pale, delicate skin. She’d once told him that her family had lived in Parker’s Ridge for over two hundred years. Nick believed it, absolutely. It would take at least two hundred years of breeding to get that perfect skin—smooth as porcelain, except no porcelain on earth had that pearly sheen. Every time he touched her, he was scared shitless he’d bruise her. After a while, after he touched her gingerly, she’d laugh and put his hand on her breast. Or pull it down between her legs.

Nick lay back on the filthy bedspread, naked, half drunk from the bad whiskey and the good memories.

Charity was soft all over, but she was softest between her legs, with the sweetest little cunt he’d ever fucked.

Nick groaned, looked down at himself through slitted eyes. He was hard as a pike, with nowhere to go with it.

This was new for him. He rarely beat the meat. He didn’t have to. When he was on a mission he was too busy trying to save his ass to think about sex. And when he wasn’t on a mission, well, half the world was female, after all, most with all the right plumbing. Lop off the under eighteens and over fifties, then lop off the dogs and you were still left with a world full of women to fuck.

Right now, for instance, he could be in bed with the waitress in the dingy diner where he’d eaten a cheeseburger. Or the checkout girl where he’d bought the whiskey.

He could have more or less any woman he wanted. He could dress and drive down to the tavern he’d seen five miles down the road. Half an hour after walking through the doors, he’d have company for the night, guaranteed.