Deception Island (14 page)

He bowed his head and stared at the open hands on his lap, turning them over and back, over and back, as if checking they were still connected to the rest of him. He pressed the palms together, as if in prayer, and brought them to his forehead. Presumably, his son's safety relied on the ransom being paid. That would no longer happen, so what now? Holly imagined a brown-skinned boy with large chocolate eyes, like his father. She bit her lip. The one thing she couldn't abide was the abuse of a child—and she could feel Jack's fear for his son as strongly as if it was sitting, churning, in her own stomach.

“I think we're both directing our anger at the wrong person.” Her voice came out husky. The fuel of her rage evaporated, taking her strength with it. She dropped on the seat beside him. “We're not the enemies here.” No response. Her scalp prickled. “Unless you're still planning to kill me.”

He looked straight ahead, at the sea.

“Oh, would you just hurry up and decide?”

“I can't kill you, I've told you that.”

“You probably should kill me.”

He swung his head around to meet her gaze. His calculating expression made her want to squirm, and not in a good way. “The fact you're suggesting it...that tells me you're more use to me if I keep you on my team.”

Okay, that sounded positive. “Who says I'm on your team?”

“What other team are you on? I don't see some guy with black face paint dropping from the sky to rescue you.”

“Fair point.” Humor was an encouraging development. She gestured at the laptop. “Is there anyone you can call, to help?”

“I've sent a message to a guy, but he hasn't picked it up yet.”

“
A
guy? As in,
one
?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You don't know this guy.”

“We could go to the authorities, tell them about your son.” Wow, Holly Ryan, suggesting they call the cops?

“Not yet. If Gabriel as much as smells a uniform, my son is lost to me—one of the many things he made clear when he started all this. I cannot risk it—he has too many contacts in too many corrupt bureaucracies. You must understand, this militia has operated underground for forty years, at least. Any authorities they can't evade they buy off or blackmail. Gabriel would find out, he'd know I betrayed him, and he'd run, taking my son with him. In the space of a day they could be anywhere in the world.” He dug his knuckles into his temples. “No. This is between me and him. I can still resolve this. I'll have to.”

“Gabriel?”

He dropped his head back and groaned in self-disgust. A slip.

“You might as well come clean. Who would I tell?”

He studied her grimly.

“I told you my story,” she continued. “Why don't you start with your name, and we'll ease on in from there?”

He stared a long minute. “Raphael,” he muttered, finally. “Rafe, now.”

Rafe. It suited him. Masculine and heroic, though he wasn't angelic in the slightest.

“And you're in the army—the French army.” She took his silence as confirmation. “So who's Gabriel? Hang on—Raphael and Gabriel? Are you brothers, with God-fearing parents?”

He shook his head, slowly, like the movement hurt. “No one remembers the names we were born with. We were in the same militia, many years ago, before I became a real soldier. Our commander beat our names out of our consciousness and gave us new ones. His little joke. Gabriel and I had grown up together in refugee camps, both orphans, the closest thing to family we each had. We vowed to protect each other, and we did, for years. Then one night all the orphaned and abandoned boys in that camp were rounded up and taken away, and forced to fight for the militia. Gabriel hid from them. He might have escaped, but he saw them drag me away and came to my aid.”

“Because of the vow.”

“Yes.”

“And you were both taken.”

“Yes.”

Crap. It took a lot to make her own childhood look rosy, but that... “So you were forced to fight. Like conscription.”

“Of a sort. But this wasn't a real army, with rules. There was no code of honor, no Geneva Convention, just the word of the commander at the top of the chain.”

“How old were you?”

“Nine.”

“Holy shit, really? I thought you were talking sixteen, eighteen. Nine? How can a nine-year-old be a soldier?”

“In some ways a nine-year-old makes a very effective soldier. Frighteningly effective. You don't question authority, you don't understand consequences—guilt, remorse. You're more malleable. Any scruples you might have are swiftly beaten out of you.”

“What did you have to do?”

“Whatever I was told to—intimidate, threaten...kill.”

Kill?
“How can a nine-year-old kill someone?”

“We were well drilled in the use of weapons.”

“No, I mean, not
how
—not in the practical sense. I mean, how could a
child
...”

He nodded, grimly. “I couldn't, at first. They threatened to execute me because I couldn't bring myself to be violent. But I found a way to switch off my conscience. I found I could will myself to fill up with the rage and the anger and the pain and the suffering and the loneliness and the fear, until something gave and I came out the other side, into a—”

“A trance,” she said. “Like just now.” She rubbed the back of her neck.

“Yes, like now. A trance. A place of refuge, from which I could do whatever was necessary to survive, however despicable. Where I could stop myself feeling anything. Just now, I felt that first warning that it was happening—I
saw
it—and I was still powerless to stop it. After all these years, I'd thought...” Leaning forward, he clasped his hands across his knees, and stared at them.

She wanted to grab them, link her fingers through his. She didn't. “What was it, that warning? What did you see?”

“When I was in the militia, my vision would go shaky, like everything was diving into everything else, and that was the last thing I'd know.” He rubbed a callus on his thumb, absentmindedly, it seemed. “That's what happened, with you. Next thing, you're unconscious at my feet and I feel like screaming. That hasn't happened to me in more than two decades. I didn't know it still could. I saw it coming and I couldn't override it.”

“That terrified you.”

“Yes.” It sounded like he was repenting, like in confession. Not that she'd know about that.

“That tells me you have a strong conscience, not a weak one.”

“Not strong enough, as you discovered.”

“Sometimes it's healthy to recognize your weaknesses, so you can at least begin to patch them—find that kill switch. It's when you're unaware of them that they bring you down.”

Like with Jasper—if she'd been aware that she was vulnerable to obsession, she might not have lost most of her twenties. Her path wouldn't have brought her to this predicament.

But suddenly, she didn't regret being here, with Jack—
Rafe.
It seemed right, somehow, that she'd wound up on this island with this man. She blinked, hard, reactivating her headache. What an insane thought.

They fell silent. She sneaked a glance at him. His brow was knitted, as he stared out to sea. The things he'd been through. He had to be the strongest man she'd met.

“How long were you a child soldier?” she said.

“Five years. I got out, eventually. It was during a firefight—I was separated from the others and was found by a group of Spanish aid workers. They had to hold me down to prevent me from going back in. I wouldn't leave Gabriel. They said they would look for him. I described him—he has disfiguring scars.” Rafe touched his nose. “They said they'd seen his body. And then the only thing I felt was relief, that I wouldn't have to be that monster anymore. They found me a place in an English missionary school, where I could be rehabilitated.”

“But he wasn't dead.”

“No.”

“So where is he now?”

He sighed, as if giving up a great effort. He was really letting her in. Only, instead of her chest filling with triumph at breaking through his walls, there was only...sadness, for the abandoned orphan he'd been, for the weight he must still carry. “No one knows, exactly. At some point he became the militia's commander. Six years ago I was stationed briefly in the Indian Ocean, brought in to help the French and American navies bust a human trafficking ring that was targeting former French colonies, among other countries. We'd intercepted comms of the traffickers talking in my native language. It's an ancient dialect, almost extinct after waves of invasion and genocide in my country. They called themselves a name that translates as the Lost Boys—also what the militia was called when I was a boy. It's a common enough nickname for child soldiers, but that plus my native language...”

“You think it was Gabriel?”

He linked his arms behind his neck and stared at the jetty. “No. I still believed he was dead, and they never used his name. But I wondered about others I'd fought with. One of the conversations I intercepted was about me—about ‘Raphael.' They'd spotted me and knew who I was—who I used to be. That was confirmation it was the same militia. I believe it was also how Gabriel tracked me down. We nearly got them once, but they were tipped off. All we found were the bodies, still warm. Twenty-six women and girls, the youngest barely ten, destined to be sold as sex slaves. The things they did to them, before they killed them...” His jaw tightened. “It bore the hallmarks of the militia.”

“They never got caught.”

“They're too well organized. Before the French navy lost interest, they called the militia
Les Pirates Fantômes
—the ghost pirates. If the authorities get too close, they vanish. Your kidnapping suggests they're involved in a lot more than we gave them credit for. I had wondered if they'd come for me one day—no one willingly leaves the Lost Boys. I...I didn't think they'd come for Theo, too, didn't think they could possibly know about him. They must be holding him somewhere near here, but I have no idea where, which is why I have no choice but to follow orders, for now.”

“Theo.” A regular kid with a regular name. “How old is he?”

“Nine.”

“Oh, man. The same age you were.” No wonder Rafe was haunted. Nine. Jesus.

“But he's much younger, in a lot of ways. I was old before my time. Theo—I've made sure he's stayed young.”

“Given him the childhood you never had.”
Breaking the cycle
, they called it in the States. Was there a time her father had wanted to save her from the childhood he'd had, instead of inflicting it on her?

Rafe rubbed his face. “This is getting us nowhere.”

Us. Including...her? “Does Gabriel want you to join him again?”

“Either that or he wants me dead. But first, I suspect, he wants revenge. He wants to break me. That's the way they operate. They force you to do the thing you think you'll never do, to turn you into one of them. In my day, they made you kill an innocent, preferably someone you loved. They need you to burn bridges with your former self, ensure your family no longer accepts you, ensure you can't live with yourself in your original form.” He fixed sunken eyes on her. “If I have to, I'll take Theo and go into hiding—for the rest of our lives, if necessary—after getting you to safety.”

“What did you have to do when you were taken from the refugee camp?”

“Kill Gabriel.”

“But you didn't, obviously.”

“No.” The word was twisted with disgust. Regret? “But I did find that place of darkness.”

“And now you have to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“He thinks you're capable of that—killing an innoc—” She cleared her throat. “Killing a relatively innocent woman?”

“I was, once.” His eyes widened, as if inspiration had caught him.

“You are speaking past tense, right?”

He swiveled, and grabbed her shoulder. “If they believe I've killed you, we'll have a chance.”

“I thought we established you weren't going to do that. Never strike a woman, remember?”

Life glittered back into his eyes. “I'm not killing anyone, not when you've already done it for us.”

“I'm not following.”

He jumped up and strode toward the shed. Okay, so he probably wasn't going to kill her. What would he do—let her go? What then? For six years, the only thing she dreamed about was freedom. Now, freedom seemed empty and lonely, and lacking in funds. Her past and her future were two scary gaping holes. Which left just the present. She had nothing and no one to live for, but one thought gnawed at her: somewhere nearby a child was in danger of growing up like she had—like Rafe had. Alone, unloved and vulnerable.

Right now, that at least was something to live for. And fight for.

Chapter 14

Rafe yanked open the door to the shed, blinking impatiently while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He tossed several ropes into a pile outside the door. No tarpaulins—the parachute would have to serve as a body bag. Laura—Holly—kept her distance, eyeing the haul. What else could he use?

“What are you going to do?” She looked ready to bolt. She really did think him capable of killing her—and why not, seeing as he'd nearly strangled her fifteen minutes ago. So much for all the years of turning himself inside out and endlessly reliving the hell for a parade of psychologists and psychiatrists and psychotherapists. After all that prodding and picking over his brain, after all their attempts to reprogram him, the dark place still beckoned. If Holly hadn't played dead and jolted him to his senses, she'd be dead for real. God knew what the next twenty-four hours would hold—whatever happened, he needed to keep a hold on his emotions.

“Ja—Rafe?”

Task at hand
. He'd been staring at a corrugated iron wall. “They want a body? I'll give them one.” He scanned the shelves, and riffled through some boxes. Duct tape. He lobbed it outside, onto the coil of ropes.

“Oh! The pirate. Right. Of course. I thought...” She closed her eyes for second, and huffed out a breath. Yep, she'd thought he was about to kill her. “You think we can fool them?”

“Bodies decompose quickly in this heat. The smell alone should be enough to deter them from looking too closely.” He tested three carabiners. Rust flaked off them and fluttered onto the packed-dirt floor, but they held—strong enough to take his weight in a cliff rappel. “If I wrap the body up tight, I'm guessing they won't feel the need to confirm it's the right one.”

Outside, he crouched over the ropes, separating out the strongest and longest to be his main and safety lines. He'd lower himself down and carry the body out around the shoreline. That way he wouldn't need Holly's help. He'd handled enough bodies to want to save her the trauma, princess or not. His jaw tightened.
Not
a princess. A stray like him.

“When will the militia come?”

He shook the dirt off a pair of gardening gloves. They'd do for protection against rope burn. The parachuting gloves were too thick.

“High tide tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “assuming they're sticking to the contingency plan. But I'm not taking chances. We'll get what we need from the villa and sleep rough tonight.”

“The contingency plan?”

“The fallback position if the ransom wasn't paid.”

She grunted. “Right. Get rid of the...evidence and get out of here. Will you go with them?”

“That'll be their plan. Even if Gabriel intends to have me killed, he'll want to be there to see it—perhaps to do it. That should buy me time.” Enough time to overcome the entire militia and rescue Theo—alone? He'd had some long-shot missions, but this had to be the most impossible—with the most at stake.

“You'll leave me here?”

“Yes. Hiding in the forest. You'll be safe here until I can come back and get you. If I don't come back... I'll leave instructions for my guy to get you. If neither of us comes within a couple of weeks, you'll have to assume I'm dead, and take the risk of showing yourself to the next honeymooners. It's that or live wild on the island.” She was chewing her lip, processing the instructions. Maybe he should have sounded more upbeat. “But I will come back for you.”

“I want to help.”

“Here.” He threw her the safety rope. “Untangle this. No knots, not even a kink.”

“I mean, help you get your son back.”

He strode into the shed. “This isn't your problem.”

“In my experience it's always useful to have another set of hands, another pair of eyes. Someone you can trust.”

“Trust? I don't even know who you are. No need to play mind games anymore,
princess
. As I say, I have a guy.”

“Who you haven't heard from.”

“I'm well aware of that.” He hauled out the Windsurfer's sail. It'd do as a shelter for a jungle camp. “You're on your side, I'm on mine. Best we keep it that way.”

“It's not about playing games, Rafe. I think we understand each other better than most people who've been acquainted a day and a half.”

Had it only been that long? Just hearing her say his real name injected a warmth into his veins that threatened to melt the ice around his heart. He needed the ice, to trap all those dangerous human emotions inside. The avalanche had very nearly released a few times in the past twenty-four hours. Christ, he'd messed up this mission. “I just tried to kill you. Why would you want to help me?”

“But you didn't. I don't believe you're capable of it.”

“I am capable of it, believe that. If you hadn't collapsed...” He screwed up his face. What was wrong with her? She should be running from him, not volunteering for duty. “I'm letting you go. What I did just then... These men wouldn't hesitate to finish the job. I have enough on my conscience without getting you hurt, or worse. You've been dragged far enough into problems not of your making. Go back to America—live. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that's all you need to worry about.”

She stared at the rope in her hands. After a minute, she began to unpick it, slowly but deftly. A change had come over her since he'd discovered she wasn't Laura. Relief, possibly, but something else, too. She'd let go of the act of playing the heiress, the spirit of defiance had broken, and she seemed...lost. He had to be careful—vulnerability never failed to fuel his protective instinct.

“Princess. I'm letting you go. You'll be safe from me, and from them. You can go back to America—your family, your job, your home, your Facebook page. Isn't that what you want—your freedom?” Wasn't that what anyone wanted from life? He wouldn't know. The freedom he sought was from a past that haunted him, and that would never come.

She blinked up at him, evidently lost in her own thoughts. “Freedom,” she repeated, as if the word was unfamiliar.

“You're worried the senator's people will come after you?”

She shook her head. “The world's a big place, and I'm good at hiding. If I stay quiet and out of sight, they'll have no reason to make my life difficult.” A wry, sad smile settled over her.

Don't ask. You don't want to get involved
. He collected his cache and strode down the track to the clearing. He took the steps to the villa in one leap, grabbed the parachute bag from beside the gaping doorway and ducked inside to get a couple of towels. Truth was, he itched to know more about her. Where did they make women with courage like hers? There was something very different about her—he'd sensed it from the start.

He shouldn't care.
He didn't
.

When he returned to the clearing, she was slumped at the picnic table, the rope between her teeth, tugging at a knot as if it was Jasper's balls she was tearing apart. Or Rafe's, more likely.

“All right, fine,” he said, walking up. “I speak English but I don't speak woman. You're going to have to spell out why you're looking as if being free is worse than being dead.”

“Oh, it's not worse,” she mumbled. “I like being alive, very much. God knows why. It's just...freedom's not something I'm used to. Family, a job, a home, a Facebook page. I don't have any of those things.”

He stuffed the duct tape, gloves and carabiners into the side pockets of the bag, and picked up the other rope. “How is that even possible? I'm guessing your real father's house isn't an option and this Jasper guy is out, but you can't have nothing—you're American.” Rafe knew what nothing was. He'd started with nothing half a dozen times before he turned twenty—the refugee camps, the militia, the missionary school, the Legion. But even he had a family now, and a job, and perhaps a home, if the barracks counted. “What's your story, Holly? Who are you?”

Her face screwed up, as if she was bracing for a reprimand. “I've been in prison for the last six years. I'd just been paroled when the senator's people approached me.”

He froze, the rope half coiled in his hands. Something snapped in his chest and came out as...a laugh.

“Why is that funny?”

“I'm not even sure.” The sound of his own laughter was as unfamiliar as the sensation. “All this time I've been thinking you were a pampered, beaten-up little princess and...
oh la vache
.” He shook his head. “What were you in jail for—murdering Jasper?”

She grimaced. “I wish. Try identity theft, criminal impersonation, fraud, grand larceny, cybercrime, conspiracy, counterfeiting, money laundering... I'm just your basic twenty-first-century bank robber.”

Ah. She was an expert at fooling people. That explained a lot. “Doesn't sound so basic. A balaclava and a shotgun would have been much simpler.”

“And more likely to cause collateral damage. I don't like to hurt people.”

“Oh, so you're a pacifist now. And those bruises you've given me...?”

“Self-defense, in the heat of the moment, if you remember. And each one deserved.”

“What about all your training?”

“To defend myself. Never to attack. Even in self-defense, I can only bring myself to hit back if there's no other choice, and if I don't have time to think about it. I know too well...” The parallel lines appeared between her eyes.

“...what it feels like, to be hurt,” he said. “That's why you couldn't shoot me back there, on the cliff. You gave yourself too much time to think.”

“That was part of it, yeah.” She studied him, her head angled. “You must hurt people, in your job. How do you deal with that, after the pain you've suffered?”

“Usually the people I hurt are threatening others, so it's in defense of the innocent. I try never to cause people pain. The most successful soldier manages a situation without violence.”

“But it's your job. What if you're ordered to hurt someone you don't want to hurt? That's got to happen, right?”

He winced. “Those moments are the worst. I don't—what's the English phrase?
Come off lightly
. None of us does.” In those moments he could feel the slide back to the devil he once was. Every time, it took all his presence of mind to stay focused.

Enough about him. As usual, she was digging too deep. “So if you didn't use shotguns, what did you use?”

She stayed silent half a minute, the rope slack in her hands, no doubt seeing his change in subject for what it was—a deflection. He grabbed the parachute and began folding it.

“We found more subtle ways to get around bank security,” she offered eventually, getting stuck back into the knots. “It wasn't about hoarding wads of cash. It was about changing numbers on computers, and preying on people's greed and gullibility. It's incredible how vulnerable greed can make people. I don't think we ever targeted anyone you'd call ‘innocent.' I hope not, anyway.”

“We?”

“Me and Jasper. He betrayed me, ratted me out to the Feds and took all the money.”

“Ah. True romance.”

“More like the film than the real thing. Though Jasper was no Christian Slater, it turned out.”

“Huh?”

“You need to watch more movies.”

“Life gives me all the drama I need.”

“Good point.”

“What happened to Jasper?”

“He got everything. I got worse than nothing.” She slammed the rope onto her thighs. “Fucking knot,” she whispered.

“Give it to me.” She relinquished the rope. He scooted up onto the bench beside her, drew her pocketknife from his shorts and eased it into the knot, just hard enough to loosen it, without fraying the fibers. “I see why you have an
issue
with trust.”

She leaned back, propping her elbows on the table. “The great, stupid irony is that he was one of the few people I ever allowed myself to trust. Turns out love can make people even more gullible than greed can.”

“Ah, love. It's a dangerous emotion, I am told. Possibly the most dangerous thing in the world.”

“You are
told
? Are you saying you have no firsthand experience?”

He shrugged.

“But your wife, your son.”

“Ah, my son. Wait until you have children—then you become truly vulnerable.”

“Like now, you mean.” She twisted to study him, squinting against the sun. “But you don't strike me as the kind of man who regrets becoming a father.”

“Never,” he growled. His protectiveness for Theo was a beam of light in the darkness of his soul. “Theo... His very existence makes up for my half life. If I do nothing else to make up for the pain I've caused so many people, at least I'll leave one good, innocent, pure thing behind.” He stabbed the knife into the table. And, by God, he'd keep Theo that way—if it wasn't too late. “But that kind of love—if that's what it is—it makes you weak. It opens you up to fear, and there's no more powerful driver than that. Fear can drive a man to do things he thought he wasn't capable of.”

“Like kidnap.” Her hand fluttered to her throat. “And worse.”

He ground the knife into the table. Whenever he thought of his son, of what Gabriel was doing, his chest churned like a lava pit—fear, anger and the instinct to protect swirling ever faster.

She swung around to straddle the bench, and rested her hand on his thigh. He knew this was some kind of sympathy, but she was entering the red zone. A touch like that could ignite the whole combustible cocktail. But looking into her eyes seemed to settle him, too, their coolness and sincerity offsetting the heat. He didn't dare let his gaze stray.

“I think I understand,” she whispered, her voice tight. “There was a time I would have done anything for Jasper. I hadn't really thought about it before, but you're right, it comes down to fear. My fear was that he'd stop wanting me around, and then I'd be back to having nothing and nobody to live for.” She stroked his leg, firing up the skin under his shorts. “I know it's different for you—I don't mean to compare it like that. A man like you—you don't have a choice whether or not you're going to love a child. And you can't walk away.”