Tell Me No Lies (47 page)

"No. It would be worse. Every time you read about crop failure and famine in China for lack of Western fertilizer, or Chinese children dying for lack of Western immunization, or whole villages wiped out by storms that could have been tracked by Western weather satellites, you would have asked yourself if you could have prevented it. You would have felt individually responsible for every death, every maimed life."

"How did you know?" Lindsay asked, her voice tight. "I didn't even know it myself until I saw the charioteer's eyes."

"In some ways we're a lot like each other," Catlin said, turning away again, folding clothes, packing them.

"I wanted to warn you, but I didn't know what I was going to do until I did it." Lindsay laughed oddly. "And I haven't even thanked you."

"For what?"

"Saving my life."

"I don't think – "

"I do," she said rapidly, cutting off his words. "Mrs. Zhu would have killed me and never looked back. I think Yi would have, too. And even – Wu. You were right again, Catlin. You were the only one who would take a bullet for me."

"It's over now," he said. "You don't have to worry about it anymore."

Catlin pulled a suit coat from the closet. Methodically he transferred the coat to a special hanger, folded the cloth and wedged it into the luggage.

"Are you angry?" Lindsay asked hoarsely. "Did you want me to say that the charioteer was real?"

Catlin looked up quickly, pinning Lindsay with his glance, wanting her to be very sure of the truth of his answer. "It wasn't my decision to make, but no, I'm not angry. You did what you thought was right despite the cost to you. If it matters," he added bluntly, "I think you're one hell of a woman."

"If it matters?" Lindsay shook her head as though she couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Catlin, don't you know that I love you?"

There was an instant of silence, of stillness, and then he resumed packing.

"No, I don't," Catlin said matter-of-factly. "And neither do you."

Suddenly he wadded up the shirt he was packing and fired it into the suitcase. In two tightly leashed strides he was beside the bed.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you all along, but you didn't want to hear me," he said. His voice was deep, gritty. "So listen to me now, honey cat. Listen hard. None of this is real. You've been living on an adrenaline roller coaster, and what you have right now is a bad case of emotional whiplash."

"No!"

"Yes," Catlin countered softly, taking Lindsay's chin in his hand. "I've never lied to you. I'm not going to start now. But I'm going to tell you a lot of things you'd rather not know. Listen to them. Listen to the truth."

Catlin looked into Lindsay's shocked, dark eyes and cursed silently. He didn't want to do this, but it came with the assignment he had accepted. He was here to protect her. He wasn't here to pay off Chen Yi at the cost of Lindsay's future.

Gently Catlin released her, savoring the warmth and softness of her skin even as he turned away from her.

"When I was in high school in a small town in Montana," he said, picking up the wadded shirt, "I was as wild as a northern wind. I was ready to stand the world on its ear and shake it until everything I ever wanted fell out into my hands." Beneath the black mustache, Catlin's mouth shifted into a hard smile. "I didn't want to be a cowhand like my uncle or a rule-bound ex-soldier like my dad, and I sure as hell didn't want to make cheese in France with my mother's people. I wanted freedom and adventure. Adrenaline."

Lindsay watched Catlin's face, his hands, the smooth coordination of his body. She listened, too, hearing answers to questions she had wanted to ask since the first time Catlin had appeared in her office: Who is he? Where did he come from?

"I graduated from high school, signed up for smoke jumper's school and married the girl next door all in one summer." Catlin looked at Lindsay, saw the intensity and the surprise on her face. "You know what smoke jumpers are?" he asked, ignoring the more obvious questions brought up by the fact of his marriage.

Lindsay shook her head, afraid to speak, to break the flow of words ending Catlin's long silence about his past.

"They're the crazy bastards who parachute out of airplanes to fight forest fires in places so rough and remote that there are no roads, no trails, nothing to mark the way but black columns of smoke boiling into the summer sky," explained Catlin. "You jump out with your ax, shovel, sleeping bag and emergency rations. When the fire is dead, you hack your way out to the nearest road over country that even the Indians never used. Usually you spend more time getting home than you did fighting fires."

"That sounds – dangerous."

Catlin smiled slightly, "That was its appeal for me. That and leaving the world a better place than I found it." He laughed once, softly, shaking his head. It had been a long tune since he had thought about his life as a wild kid. "But I didn't fight fires after I graduated. It turned out that the skills I learned in smoke-jumping school were just what Air America needed."

"Air America?"

"The CIA's civilian airline in Asia," Catlin explained. "They needed kickers and loadmasters for all the supplies they were dropping back in the highlands of Vietnam. So one year Air America came to the smoke-jumping school in Montana and recruited damn near the whole graduating class. My class." He went to the closet, grabbed a handful of clothes and returned to the suitcase, talking as he packed. "I was barely eighteen. In two weeks I was kicking loads out the open door of a DC-3 flying the nap of some of the wildest country I'd ever seen."

For a moment Catlin stood without moving, his arms overflowing with clothes, his eyes looking back into the past.

"I'd been a kicker for about three months," he continued, "when I heard my boss trying to understand what some very excited French planter was saying about guerrilla movements over what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. My mother was French, so understanding the planter was no problem for me. In five minutes I picked the planter clean of information. My boss was surprised, but not stupid. He had me jerked out of the air and into a liaison job the next day."

Catlin looked at the clothes in his hands as though he didn't recognize them.

"Did you like it?" Lindsay asked softly when the silence stretched.

"Liaison?" asked Catlin.

She nodded.

"You mean, did I miss the thrill of nearly getting bucked off a DC-3 without benefit of parachute?" Catlin asked wryly. "Yeah. I missed it. Like I said, I was young. But I was learning other things, some of them as dangerous in their own way as jumping without a chute. One of them was the Vietnamese language. The other was Chinese. I soaked them up the same way I had French. I couldn't believe it when the Caucasians around me simply didn't hear the differences in the two languages." He shrugged and resumed folding clothes. "To Americans, the ethnic Chinese businessman was the same as the Vietnamese peasant. To this day most Americans don't realize how much of the economic power in Vietnam was in the hands of the ethnic Chinese."

Methodically, Catlin added another shirt to his suitcase.

"I had a different boss by then, but he was no slower than the first. He recognized the fact that I had a gift for languages. I was jerked out of liaison and dropped into a CIA language school. I didn't fight it. I had discovered that I loved languages almost as much as I loved adrenaline. Besides," he added with a sardonic twist to his mouth, "the school wasn't limited to intellectual pursuits. They taught me some things that were a hell of a lot more lethal than words. I had a gift for them, too."

Lindsay remembered the explosive moments of violence, Catlin moving with a speed and skill that were unexpected, stunning. Yet that same lethal body could move with exquisite grace to the requirements of tai chi chuan and touch her with consuming sensuality as a lover, teaching her things about herself that she had never known.

"I stayed in Asia," said Catlin, "and I learned. Somewhere along the way to my twenty-first birthday I lost my wife. We were too young, separated by too much distance and different experiences, and I was too fascinated by Asia to go back home and patch it all together. So one day I opened up a 'Dear John' letter and found that Susie was having another man's baby. I felt betrayed, furious. I blamed her for everything." He smiled crookedly. "Like I said. I was young. Really young."

"Why don't you be generous?" Lindsay suggested ironically. "Share a little of the blame with Susie. Other girls sent their husbands off to war and managed to be faithful through all the years of waiting."

Catlin gave Lindsay an amused glance. "They must have had more going for them than habit. That was all Susie and I had. Asia broke the habit." He shrugged. "It was a long time ago. Last I heard, Susie was happily married and had enough kids to start her own baseball team. I don't blame her any longer. She taught me something very valuable."

Lindsay waited motionlessly, sensing that she wasn't going to like what she heard next.

"I said I felt betrayed and furious, and I did – for maybe a day." Catlin's clear amber glance held Lindsay as surely as though his hand were still beneath her chin. "You see, I was already hooked on the shadow life. The other life, the real one, just didn't seem real anymore. The highs and lows and the sheer excitement of what I was doing in Asia were all-consuming. There was no perspective. Undercover life does that to you."

"As you said – you were young," Lindsay said evenly. "Lack of perspective isn't unusual when you're under twenty-one."

He smiled sadly, understanding what she was trying to say. She wasn't twenty-one; undercover life hadn't caused her to lose her emotional perspective.

"It's not that easy, Lindsay-love," Catlin said softly. "It's not that easy at all."

For the space of several breaths he looked at her, memorizing her as she sat on the bed, her face intent, her eyes the haunted color of deepest twilight. He didn't permit himself to think about how much he wanted her, because he didn't trust himself not to take what she would have given him. But the double game was over. The last lie had been spoken. If he went to her now, she would hate both of them in a few weeks or a few months, when the adrenaline wore off and the other world was real again. He knew that. She didn't. Not yet. That was what he had to teach her before he left.

"Susie taught me something," Catlin said gently, relentlessly, "but it was Mei who taught me the most. Mei was extraordinary – delicate, exotic, skilled, and by far the most sensual woman I'd ever known. She was also an adrenaline junkie, a whore for Lee Tran, a double agent, my lover, and an assassin who had killed nine men. I was to be her tenth. I was the best man she'd ever had in bed, so she put off killing me on the excuse that the information she could get from me was worth more to Lee Tran than my death."

Lindsay went pale, remembering the vicious outpouring of Cantonese and English in Wu's office when Catlin had come very close to killing Lee Tran. She understood why now. It didn't comfort her in the least.

"By the time Mei came to me," Catlin said, "I was so far into the double life that I believed all people were liars, killers, whores, cheats and thieves. It was a necessary belief. It reminded me never to turn my back, never to pull my punch, never to care about anyone but myself. There were two ways to survive the parts of Asia I lived and worked in," he continued. "Vast money or sheer ruthlessness. The CIA didn't use its appropriations to make its officers vastly rich, but we survived just the same. Physically, that is. Mentally – " He shrugged. "Some burned out. Some burned up."

"You didn't do either." Lindsay's voice was taut, certain.

"No. I just believed I'd finally found love. I ignored all the little signs that Mei was both more and less than she seemed, and I kept ignoring them until the instant I was staring down the barrel of her gun and seeing my own death coming at me."

Lindsay wanted to look away from Catlin's eyes because it hurt too much to know the kind of hell he had lived in. Yet she met his eyes without flinching, knowing that in the end he had come out of hell holding the seeds of a better life in his hands. He was like the scarred bronze bowl he had given her – the quality of the original creation had transcended the battering of existence.

"In the end, Mei couldn't kill you, could she?" asked Lindsay, her smile both sad and bitter.

For a moment Catlin looked surprised, then he smiled gently and shook his head. "True emotions are nourished by the mind, not the body. Mei wasn't like you. She didn't have the ability to love or to hate. Her only responses were in her flesh. She would have killed me if it hadn't been for a man called Chen Tiang Shi. He took the bullets meant for me. He died killing her."

Lindsay shuddered. "And now you don't believe in love, because you loved the wrong woman."

Catlin hesitated, tempted to take the out Lindsay was offering him. Then he put away the temptation, knowing that he couldn't take the easy way with her. He had promised her the truth, and she had more than earned it. Only the truth would protect her – and him – from the adrenaline-generated response she believed was love.

"Not quite," Catlin said, his voice both sad and gentle. "I learned that while you're living undercover, you not only can't afford emotions, you can't trust them, either. Adrenaline pervades everything, heightens everything, makes each instant seem unique, extraordinary. Each drink you take is the best. Each meal you eat is the finest. Each time you make love is the hottest."

"But – "

"But nothing, honey cat. I'm the tour guide, remember?" Catlin continued ruthlessly, not giving her a chance to speak. "After a while the adrenaline high wears off and you lose the ability to feel anything at all. Then you know what adrenaline is and is not. It isn't love, Lindsay. Learning that takes time, though. Years, in my case. And more years coming out of it at the other end. You haven't had that kind of time. You still think that what adrenaline makes you feel is heightened reality. It isn't. It's the most subtle and dangerous lie of all."