Dangerous Secrets (33 page)

‶
Who are you?″

‶
I′m your
protector.′′

‶
In Seoul. . .″

‶
There and then.″

‶
Now?″

‶
Now I′m here to find out
who is trying to kill you,″ he paused.
‶
And why.″

Morgan looked up at him, her heart in her eyes.
She didn′t try to conceal her feelings or her doubt.

‶
Protector, Morgan.″ His
voice was low, sensual and inviting. She felt it almost with a tangible quality
as if he′d woven the words and draped them over her shoulders.
‶
I
never had a wish or an order for anything other than that. I would never do
anything but keep you safe.″

He took her arm and led her to the picnic
table. She sat on the top with her feet on the bench. For a while, neither of
them spoke. Then Morgan linked her hands and looked at the trees along the back
of the picnic area.

‶
I didn′t intend to
sing,″ she began.
‶
There was so much going on, in my head and in the
arena. The arena looked like a wave of color, people screaming and cheering. I
tried to find someone I knew in the crowd, but there was no one and everyone.
People smiled at me, shouted my name, waved American flags.″ She paused.
‶
I
was so glad I was an American. I could go home, back to a place where life on
the streets was better than life in that hole. I could return to a place where
I′d never have to remember the prison I′d seen, the horribly
emaciated men with things growing off their bodies that shouldn′t be
there, people without teeth and with blood crusted in places where they should
have faces. When the music began I don′t know what happened. My chest
filled with a fear I′d never known, not when I was on the prison ledge
and not when I was running through the streets. I didn′t understand any
of it. Then I heard the music. I remembered insignificant things like being in
grammar school in a play we did. It taught us to learn the anthem. And the
voice came. At first I didn′t even know it was mine. I thought it was all
inside my head until the crowd went wild. Everyone was on their feet and I
didn′t know why. I thought the prison guards had come or the police and
they were heading for me. I thought of running, hiding, doing anything to get
out of the limelight, but it wasn′t to be. Coming down from that center
block threw me into a horde of reporters, coaches, well-wishers. They herded me
away to an interview room. Everyone wanted to know how I felt. What made me
sing. I was used to thinking fast, coming up with lies to get out of any
situation, but I was in over my head and I had no place to go.″

She stopped, remembering what came next. She
was coming apart. Every question someone asked took a huge effort to answer.
She looked for help. He was in the room, against the back wall. Jack stared
directly at her. Her eyes darted toward him. He nodded only slightly, but it
was enough to give her an anchor. She took a deep breath and got back on track.
She answered questions, coming up with lies to support her when needed.
Thankfully most of the time she could answer with the truth. She called on her
teammates, sitting next to her, giving them most of the credit, saying she only
did what they had all come to Seoul to do—win! It was the truth for her team,
but for her it was a lie.

She smiled at the cameras, held her hands up
clasped in the hands of other team members, but she was crumbling inside. Her
eyes were bright and she blinked rapidly to hold back the tears. She needed to
get out of the room. The air was heavy and she felt it pressing against her.
When her coach finally called an end to the interview, she left at the back of
the line. Midway down the hall a hand came out and clapped over her mouth.
Another went around her waist and she was dragged backward into a dark closet.

‶
It′s me. Jack.″ He
spoke in the darkness and her struggles stopped. She recognized his voice
although they′d exchanged no more than a dozen words in their entire time
together. He turned her into his arms.
‶
Let it out,″ he
whispered.
‶
We′re
alone.″ Morgan clung to him as if he were her lifeline. Tears she
couldn′t stop poured from her eyes, wetting his shirt and soaking through
to the dark skin beneath it. She cried for everything in her life, her mother,
her adoptive mother, the man in the prison, her team, her lies, even the
bullies she′d fought on the streets. She didn′t know how long she
stood there, enfolded in Jack′s arms, drawing his strength or why no one
came looking for her. She only remembered cradling herself against his strong
body, feeling his soft kiss on her hair and forgetting everything and everyone
else in the world.

***

For a while, after she stopped speaking, Jack
didn′t say anything. They sat in silence looking at the trees. The
answers weren′t out there. Only the two people sitting here, not looking
at each other, had the answers. He noticed she stopped without mentioning the
two of them. He wondered if she was thinking about it. He wondered what she
felt in that closet when she cried on his shoulder. He thought of it more often
than he cared to admit. Holding her, letting her cry against him, being there
when she needed someone. He often wondered in the intervening years who it was
she needed, who was the man whose shoulder she used to tell her joys and
sorrows. But he′d always cut the thought and think of something else. It
made him angry to think of her with another man. He knew there had been others.

It was an irrational anger. She wasn′t
his. They weren′t lovers. They were barely friends. More like two people
who′d met due to circumstance. It bothered him that she thought
he′d returned as her assassin. He′d never hurt her. He
couldn′t.

‶
Tell me about the
escape.″ Jack pulled his thoughts away from the past, his voice gruffer
than he intended. She tied him in knots and it showed.

‶
It was supposed to be easy.
I′d studied the floor plans, knew every detail down to the last
window.″

‶
I don′t mean that
part.″

‶
You already know that part,
right?″

He nodded. He knew the details of what went
down. He wanted to know what else she had taken or what she knew, what would
cause someone to try to kill her twelve years later.

‶
What did you leave Seoul
with?″

‶
The clothes on my back and a
gold medal.″

‶
And that′s all?″

‶
That′s all.″

She didn′t hesitate. This was a sign of
the truth, but she was lying. She was good. She′d had plenty of practice
at survival training on the streets and he′d seen it firsthand.

‶
What about information?″

‶
The clothes on my back,″
she repeated succinctly as if she were speaking to a retarded child.

Jack stood up and faced her. Morgan stared at
her hands. He said nothing until she looked at him. When she did he placed his
hands on the tabletop on either side of her, trapping her within his space.

‶
If you only left with the items
you mentioned, why was your house rigged with explosives? Why did you have an
escape plan in place? Why were you so prepared for something to happen, so much
so that you′d practiced it until you could do it in your sleep? You had a
car waiting, one that could hold its own against a military Humvee. And
I′m not going to even mention the access to a closed military base. Why
had every contingency been planned with unerring detail if all you left Korea
with were the clothes on your back and a gold medal?″

Jack′s face was close enough to hers for
him to see the pores in her skin and the tiny dark specks across her nose, but
her eyes were steady and calm, cold even.

‶
I was a girl scout,″ she
answered, her voice holding as much ice as the coldness in her eyes.
‶
Always
be prepared.″

‶
You were never a girl scout.
You were a streetwise kid on the fast track to jail or a nameless bullet from a
drive-by shooting until your social worker adopted you and channeled that idle
energy onto a beam and a bar.″

Morgan pushed his hands away from her sides.
Jack took a step back.
‶
You think you know me, don′t you? You
don′t know the half of it. Where did you grow up, in some pretty little
house with a picket fence, or in a shore town where the tourists come each summer
and where you can always find a girl on the beach?″ She took a long
breath.
‶
Well
life isn′t like that for all of us.″

‶
No, it′s not. And you
don′t have to tell me I don′t know you. I know everything.″

‶
You wish you did.″

‶
I know everything about you. I
probably know more about you than your own parents. After you left Seoul you
spent a brief time in D.C., being debriefed I′d guess. Then you moved to
St. Charles and virtually disappeared. You never changed your name, but
it′s not that unusual. There′s no man in your life now. You have
plenty of friends, women friends, but you′re not gay. The last man you
had a sexual relationship with was named Orren Sheridan. You went out with him
for six months, had sex two to three times a week and always ate ice cream
afterward. You gained eight pounds during that interlude. Lost ten when it was
over. Would you like me to tell you the color and flavor condom he
preferred?″

***

Morgan leapt off the table and turned her back
to Jack. Rage boiled inside her like a nuclear reactor on full, gathering
strength as its core went from superheated to rocketing meltdown. A dark river
of fury hidden in her core, down under her soul, a muddy bed of anger that ran
red and flashed through layers of logic and restraint, erupted with orgasmic
force. Morgan found this mountain inside herself. A deep, wide vessel, molten,
bubbly, white-hot with a hunger that fed through her organs as it fought with
little or no resistance to get to the surface.

Her eyes burned and blood poured into her face,
searing her with its heat. She knew it had to be a dark countenance of horror
displayed there. She felt invaded, exposed, naked. Jack had ripped away
everything she held closed up in her heart, stripping her of the carefully
constructed camouflage, leaving her bare for the world to see and gawk at, held
up to the multitudes to be criticized and stoned. She hated him for it, but she
couldn′t deny it.

There was something she could do, however. She
turned back to face Jack. She could prove to him and to herself that she
wasn′t that streetwise nobody, because that nobody would have retaliated
with her fists, that nobody would have extracted a pound of flesh for the
insult. And Jack deserved to be hit, flattened, but she had choices. Her
adoptive mother had told her that. Whatever she was, whatever decisions she
made, were one of a set of choices. She wouldn′t deny that it would feel
especially good to ram her fist down Jack′s throat, but she would make
the civilized choice.

She turned and walked away.

***

‶
Damn!″ Jack kicked the
ground. What was it about her that got his juices working? They couldn′t
have a decent conversation without it escalating to the ground zero point of a
nuclear explosion. Jack sat on the table, his feet in the same position as
Morgan′s had been. He needed to calm down before returning to the car. He
rested his elbows on his knees and closed his eyes.

Morgan′s face rose in his mind, not the
face of the woman in the car, the one who hated him, but the nineteen-year-old
in Korea. The woman who had come to the practice pool and knotted his stomach
into Gordian knots. He′d created this monster and
he
had to get it under control, but first he had to get himself
under control. He had emotions. He′d tried to hide them, had done so
successfully for the past twelve years, but Morgan had the ability to unravel
him with no more than a look. He couldn′t blame her if she hated him for
the rest of his life. He hadn′t intended to blurt that part out about
Orren Sheridan. He hadn′t intended to betray anything he knew, but he
couldn′t keep it in. She got to the core of him, made him angry. She
didn′t do what he expected and while one part of him admired her for it,
the other wanted her to conform. But if she conformed, she wouldn′t be the
same person.

This had to be the contradiction his father had
told him about. He could use some advice now. Since he′d set foot on U.S.
soil, nothing had worked as he expected it would. He hadn′t resigned. He
was in the middle of nowhere with a woman he couldn′t get a straight
answer out of and he still didn′t know what was going on. Each time he
asked her a question his mind either went south or he stumbled over their past.
If only he could tell her the truth.

Jack stood and turned toward the car. Morgan
sat in the passenger seat, her back straight enough to contain fused vertebrae.
She stared straight ahead. He climbed into the driver′s seat. For a
moment they sat in silence, looking at the same scenery, but somehow he knew
her mind wasn′t on grass and trees.

‶
I apologize,″ he said.
‶
I
never meant to say that.″

‶
It′s all right,″
Morgan answered, her voice flat, unemotional.
‶
You shouldn′t even know
the things you know.″

‶
It seems we′re making a
really bad start here. We can′t start over.″

‶
Yeah, too many bullets flying
through the air.″

Jack laughed. He wasn′t sure if she meant
to be funny, but he wanted to lighten the air in the car, which had taken on
the solidity of raw honey. He glanced at her and hoped to see a slight smile,
even the shadow of one would be welcome, but she still sat rock-solid straight
and stared through the glass.