The Black Sheep and the English Rose (32 page)

“Rafe,” Finn said, levering up and across her to get it.

“He lives in the pool house?” she said, but he was already pushing the intercom button.

“What's up?”

“I am,” Rafe said. “And now you are. Get Reese and Julia. I figured it out.”

I
t was a very bleary-eyed group that reassembled in the makeshift lab. Mac entered with a young, pretty blonde who Felicity immediately assumed was Kate. He confirmed that by introducing her to the rest of them. “She can't stand being left out of the fun,” he explained.

“My white knight,” she said, smiling and leaning against him as he tucked her under his arm. She looked at the group. “Thank you for allowing me in. If there is any way I can contribute, I will.”

Felicity knew she ran a school on Dalton Downs property that helped children with severe disabilities increase their aptitude to communicate, among other things, by working with horses. She understood from Finn that they had all known each other as children and that Mac had recently reentered Kate's world when her life had been threatened. He was such a direct man, with great charisma, so it was interesting seeing how Kate softened his edges a bit. His teasing was clearly part of their natural banter and, Felicity was certain, under normal circumstances, was easily returned. “It's a pleasure,” she told Kate. “I'm glad you could join us. Julia and I were feeling a bit outnumbered.”

Kate shook her hand. “From what I hear, the two of you can more than hold your own. I mean that in a good way,” she added quickly. “I look forward to getting to know both of you better.”

Rafe entered, finally, with a dark-haired woman stepping in just behind him. “Hi,” she said. “I'm Elena and don't blame this on Rafe.” She bussed his cheek, then stepped past him and extended her hand to Felicity. “Not how I wanted to make first introductions, but I hate being left out of the fun.”

Everyone smiled or chuckled, and she looked around and said, “What?”

“I'll explain later,” Kate said.

Elena looked more shyly at Finn. “I don't know what Rafe has told you, but—”

Finn stepped forward and hugged her. “He's happier than I've ever seen him,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

Elena flushed and stepped back, then seemed to notice everyone was still staring and said, “Well, now that we've evened up the teams, we'll get out of your way.” She and Kate moved over beside Felicity and Finn, and Rafe motioned them over to the case, which they'd closed up again when they'd ceased their examinations earlier.

“It occurred to me that we'd checked out every micrometer of this thing, and the case it came in, but we neglected the rest.”

“The rest of what?” Finn asked.

“This.” He put on the table the portfolio that had traveled with the artifact.

“The documentation of the stone's provenance. But it's not that old. What does that have to do—”

“Old enough,” Julia said. “So, that's where he hid it.”

Felicity was already nodding.

“What British Intelligence was looking for is embedded in the documentation,” Rafe said. “It hit me that we never even looked at it, so I came back and took a page out to my office to run some checks before I got everybody up.” He glanced at Elena, and Felicity noted the immediate warmth that entered his gaze. “Well, the rest of everybody.”

She smiled back at him, clearly not remotely upset to be part of his world, even if it meant getting up before dawn. More than likely, seeing as she ran the stables, she was used to it anyway.

Felicity struggled not to look at Finn, to see if he was noticing, wondering if the two of them had the same obvious connection that the other pairs in the room shared. She knew they did, but…She shut that path down. She was tired and being foolish when she needed to be anything but. She didn't know where things would lead, or how they'd sort through them, but first they had to resolve this case. And resolve it in a way that put her, John, and Julia in the clear.

Rafe slid one of the sheets out and put it on a mat in the center table, then nodded to Mac, who turned out the lights.

A moment later he switched on a light wand that bathed the room in an eerie blue glow. Felicity wasn't the only one who audibly sucked in her breath when he waved the wand directly over the page. A series of letters and symbols popped up, all of it illegible to Felicity. But not to Julia.

“An old Greek code,” she murmured. “Are you sure this was his grandfather's and not his father's?”

“The stone was last passed down by Alexander's grandfather, directly to his grandson. But that doesn't mean that Alexander's father didn't have access to it while he was still at home. I haven't been able to decode more than the top corner and a few words in the first two lines, but the dateline says London, and it was written in the late seventies.”

“Isn't that right around the time that Alexander's father vanished?” Mac asked.

“Exactly when,” Rafe said.

Julia leaned farther over the page. “This is a message detailing…” She trailed off, but kept reading.

“What is it?” John asked quietly, when she lifted a hand to cover her mouth.

“It's a list,” she said, awed, and from the sounds of it, not in a good way. “Complete with details. Explicit details.” She looked up. “Of certain illegal activities some of our agents were involved in. Very…illegal. Trading in contraband, stealing priceless antiquities…even murder.” She became silent as she kept reading.

Felicity stepped up, but there was no hope she could make sense of anything on the page. “Does he name them?”

Julia nodded. “You'll recognize one of them.” She looked to John, then back to Felicity. “Thomas Wharton.”

Felicity's mouth dropped open. “As in, Director Wharton?”

“Who is that?” Finn asked. “Someone in your chain of command, I assume.”

John nodded, his expression tight. “Right at the very top of it. He runs the entire MI-8 Division. But he started out like the rest of us.”

“How was Capellas' father privy to this?”

Julia was still reading. “He was an agent, for his own country, but he worked in tandem with some of our guys and apparently got caught up in their black market schemes by accident, not realizing the tasks were unauthorized. When he figured it out, he wanted out. He left this detailed list while at home, but they'd threatened his family. So he took off. At the end of this…” She kept reading, then motioned to Rafe to put the next sheet down. “He says he was concerned for his own life, but couldn't bear to think of anything happening to his beloved son, after just losing his wife.”

Finn and Felicity naturally gravitated toward each other, and she slipped her arm around his waist, even as he was tugging her close with his arm around her shoulder. A quick glance up showed her that the other couples in the room had instinctively done much the same.
So
, she thought,
we are a bonded pair, just like them.
The confirmation gave her more comfort than it probably should have, but which she took, and refused to think beyond.

“So…what do we do now?” she asked.

Kate stepped forward. “I—my mother had a fairly wide range of contacts, garnered over the years, through several husbands.” Her smile was deprecating, but direct nonetheless. “She did unto herself for most of her life, and rarely unto others, unless it was poorly, but perhaps this will make up for that a bit.” She looked at Mac, then at the rest of them. “My brother still maintains contact with most of those people. I don't know if they'll talk to me, but I happen to know that a few of the men are currently fairly highly placed in the State Department. Hopefully they will remember me more fondly than my mother, but if I bring this to their attention, maybe they can use their leverage to—”

“Not to cast aspersions on your government,” Julia interrupted, “but how do we know we could trust these relative strangers with information so delicate that our lives could be at stake if it fell into the wrong hands? They already are at stake. What's here is very serious. So much so that I'm not surprised Director Wharton thought he might have to commit murder to cover it up. Which he's already tried once. And, according to these documents, it's a solution he's used before, long ago.”

“I agree,” Kate said. “What I was going to suggest was that maybe we could get them to see if they can find out what happened to Alexander's father.” She looked at Felicity and Finn. “Maybe he's still alive.”

“I seriously doubt if he's been successfully hiding all these years, he'd be willing to come forward now,” Finn said.

“What I don't understand is,” Mac said, “if he was so worried about his family, why leave the incriminating evidence with them?”

“No one knew he'd even made the list,” Julia said.

“Someone had to suspect, or they wouldn't have started looking for the stone.”

Finn shook his head. “I think I know what might have triggered it.” He looked up. “Me.”

Felicity's eyes widened. “How?”

“When I took on the case, I made contacts of my own, trying to get Theo more highly placed help to assist in his legal battle.”

“But how would MI-8 know any of that?”

Finn shrugged. “It's a pretty small world. And who knows who else is on that list that might care if it sees the light of day? Alexander's father worked for the Greek government. Maybe this list has agents from a number of other allied countries, ours included. It's possible they did know about it, or suspected its existence.”

“But as long as it stayed buried in a tiny Greek village, who cared, right?” Elena said.

“Until Theo wanted his stone back,” Mac finished.

“And, suddenly, someone had to make sure that didn't happen,” Felicity murmured.

“So,” Julia went on, “they pressure Alexander, probably threaten his family—”

“Again,” Finn put in. “But why have Reese sell it to the Russian? Why not just destroy the document?”

“Maybe they didn't know how he secreted it, just that he did. Maybe they couldn't risk actually destroying the artifact without someone knowing, or questioning its destruction. If it goes to Chesnokov, who is notorious for hoarding his little collection, it stays buried.”

“Or…Chesnokov was on the list, too,” John said. “He's in the right age range. A bit on the upper end, but…”

“So, maybe he set the fire,” Felicity said.

“Possible.”

She leaned more heavily into Finn's strength and warmth. “Then who knows how high this reaches? And how far reaching it goes?” She looked to John and Julia. “What do we do with it?”

“We decode all of it,” Rafe said decisively. “Or Julia does. We have to know who we're dealing with. We'll go through the names, do research, find out who's who.”

“Then we go public,” Finn said abruptly.

Everyone turned to him.

“You're smiling. Why are you smiling?” Mac asked warily. “He gets crazy ideas when he smiles like that.”

“We make the smallness of the modern day world and the new age of technology work for us.” He hugged Felicity closer. “We do what any self-respecting spy coming in from the cold does. We hold a press conference.”

“A
re you sure this is a good idea?”

Finn stood to the side of the helipad and watched the skies for the incoming chopper. He glanced down at Felicity. “No, but it's the best one we had. And it's kind of too late now. Besides, it will be up to them how they handle it. They deserve the chance to find out.”

She nodded, and tightened her arm around his waist. “I just hope they remain open-minded about everything.”

“Me, too. The fact that they all agreed to come here seems to be a good start.”

They both looked back down the hill, over to the house and beyond, at the sea of media trucks and news vans crowding the road into the farm, the yard, and every other available space they could inhabit.

“I'm surprised they're not in the trees,” he muttered, but was happy to see them as it meant his idea held merit. Everyone wanted to hear the news when the news was dirty laundry.

“I can't believe we put this together so quickly.”

It had been only seventy-two hours since Rafe had started to put the pieces together. But time was critical. The messages had stopped coming in to the agents' cell phones over thirty hours ago. Which meant they'd given up the diplomatic route. And who the hell knew what other means they might be willing to try. He didn't doubt they'd put together Finn's little press conference with their supposedly undercover case. Officials from his own government hadn't shown up, making any kind of noise about protecting national security, so he took that as a good sign.

Not that he'd asked anyone's permission in the first place.

As it turned out, the list Julia ended up with had included more than one highly placed official, both in and out of the spotlight. They'd thought about alerting the various government bodies affected by the coming fallout so they could be prepared, but none of them was willing to risk just what their version of “preparing” might entail. They had no way of knowing how complete a list Alexander's father had compiled, and who else might come out of the woodwork if word got out privately, before it got out ever-so-publicly.

The sound of helicopter blades drew his attention back to the skies. Once it had touched down, Finn and Felicity ducked and moved closer. A familiar-looking young man got out of the pilot's seat and sketched a quick salute to Finn.

“Thanks for helping us out, Sean.”

“Glad to be on board,” he responded, then opened the other door to allow his passengers out.

An older Greek man and an even older Greek woman debarked. The woman looked quite pale and uneasy. She made the sign of the cross on her chest, then turned to face Felicity and Finn.

“Greetings, Mrs. Capellas,” Finn said, taking her hand, then shaking Alexander's. “Thank you for coming all this way.”

“You are putting my family back together,” he said in very broken English. “For this, I would travel to the moon and back.”

“Sean, can you take them down to the house? Mac is there.”

He nodded, and the trio made slow progress toward the house.

“I hope the translator has gotten here,” Finn said. “I want them to feel as comfortable as possible, which is close to impossible in this circus. She's never even been out of her country before; this has to be bewildering to her.”

“She's stronger than she looks,” Felicity said, watching them leave. “It was her decision to accompany her grandson here. She'll be okay.”

Finn nodded, then looked back to the sky. “Come on, come on. One more to go.”

“When is Theo getting here?”

“He said he'd call from the airport. He wanted to drive in. I offered to send Sean, but—”

“How is it our limo driver knows how to fly helicopters, anyway?” Felicity asked, clearly bemused.

“Apparently he has all kinds of…specialized skills.”

“It was great of him to come out here.”

“I knew I could trust him.”

“He's agreed to stay on?”

Finn pulled her into his arms and kissed her on the forehead. “Yes. You can't have him.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then tipped up her chin. “Well, you can share. But there are conditions…”

“Conditions, hmm,” she said, pretending to mull that over.

They'd had precious few moments of complete privacy, and Finn was wondering if they ever would, or if they were simply doomed to live forever in the center of chaos.

The sound of another helicopter had them moving over to the second pad. “God, I hope I'm doing the right thing.”

Felicity hugged him. “They need to have the chance. You're right. What they do with it is up to them.”

The larger helicopter landed, and out of it stepped the Greek ambassador to the United States, the U.S. ambassadors to both Greece and the U.K…. and a very tired, very nervous looking Dmitri Capellas. Alexander's father.

Introductions were made, and Finn did his best to reassure the older man that he would be safe.

“So many cameras,” he said, and visibly shuddered. “I do not like spotlight.”

“Don't worry about that. The cameras are for us. Would you like to see your son? And your mother?”

His face brightened, and he looked terrified all at the same time. Tears made his eyes glassy. “They know?”

Finn nodded. “They're at the house. They just arrived.”

“My sainted mother…” Dmitri crossed himself, and Finn wondered if he knew just how like his mother's that mannerism was. “She flew in that?” He nodded to the smaller helicopter.

Finn smiled. “She's a pretty amazing woman, your mother. She's held your family together.”

Felicity stepped forward and put her hand on Dmitri's arm. “You'll be proud of them. They are proud of you.”

A single tear tracked down his heavily wrinkled cheek. It wasn't so much age, as stress and extended exposure to the sun, that had weathered him so badly. They'd found him on a small island in the Caribbean, working on a banana plantation. Finn hoped that his next plane ride would be taking him back home to Greece.

“Come,” Finn said, “let's go inside. If you need some time—”

“No,” Dmitri said quite adamantly. “I am nervous, yes, but there has been enough time. Too much time.” He shook his head and walked with his ambassador down the path. “Too much time,” he repeated.

Finn welcomed the other ambassadors and thanked them for coming. “I'm not sure we'll need you to say anything on camera, but your presence will go a long way.”

“You're stepping up to the plate and doing what's right and to hell with the rest,” the U.S. ambassador for Greece said gruffly. “We need more patriots willing to do that. I'm happy to be here.”

Felicity stepped up and spoke with the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., whom she knew personally from her work with the Foundation. Then, with Finn, they led the small contingent to the house. “What do you think is going to happen with the necklace and stone once this is over?” she whispered under her breath. “Theo still wants it, and Alexander wouldn't talk about it.”

“I don't know,” Finn said. “I'm hoping that the magnitude of what is about to happen here today puts their families' ancient histories into some kind of perspective and they come to an equitable solution.”

“Theo has the family Bible, and all the proof about how the Capellas ended up with the Roussos' family heirloom. So the Capellas can see it firsthand.”

“He does. We'll have to play it by ear on when or if we're going to pull that out.”

“But—”

They reached the house just then, and Rafe met them at the side door. He merely lifted a questioning eyebrow and glanced at the group behind Finn.

Finn lifted a shoulder as if to say, “Who knows.”

“We're all set to go live at five o'clock. Did I mention how much I hate the circus?”

“You did. Several times,” Finn said dryly. More seriously, he added, “Elena, is she okay? I know this is a little close to home with what she went through—”

“She's fine. More than fine. Is there anything else you need?”

“Just baby-sit the ambassadors—”

“I'll stay, too,” Felicity said. “A familiar accent won't hurt. Besides, they don't know how to act around me now that the word has spread about my clandestine activities. I can use that to my advantage.”

Finn smiled. “Oh, I'm sure you can. Then I'll leave you to it.” He turned to Dmitri. “Are you ready?”

He nodded decisively.

“Okay, then. Come with me.”

Felicity leaned up to give Finn a quick, reassuring kiss on the cheek, and she patted Dmitri on the shoulder, then turned a most charming smile toward the ambassadors. “Gentlemen, if you'll follow me, we have drinks and a light lunch waiting for you.”

Rafe leaned close to Finn as he passed. “I don't know how you managed it, but don't screw that up. She's the only woman I've met who can not only keep up with you, but probably surpass you.” He grinned. “I'm kind of liking that.”

“Careful, funny man.”

Rafe kept smiling, quite unrepentantly. “I'm bulletproof these days.”

Finn laughed. “Yeah, smug bastard.”

“Don't worry. You two will figure it out,” he said, then followed Felicity into the small salon they'd set up away from the madness.

He hadn't spoken to Rafe or Mac about his worries regarding his future with Felicity, but it didn't surprise him that they'd picked up on it. He smiled, and gestured for Dmitri to follow him. And prayed Rafe was right.

Two minutes later he encountered Sean outside the door to one of the other quiet rooms they'd set up. “Mac just got word that Theo changed his mind. He's getting a bit spooked now that it's almost time. So I'm going to get him. That okay?”

“More than okay.” He clapped Sean on the shoulder. “Thanks.”

Sean smiled and nodded at Dmitri, then excused himself.

Finn looked down at the shorter man, who was clearly bracing himself for what lay on the other side of the door.

“They both love you. And you love them,” Finn told him. “You can't go wrong with that foundation.”

He jerked his gaze up to Finn's, then nodded, rubbing his palms on his pants. Finn opened the door, and Dmitri walked in.

There were several other people in the room. Kate and someone Finn took to be the translator he'd hired to help them understand what everyone else was saying, particularly during the press conference. But from the almost instantaneous sobbing and hugging going on in the center of the room, he didn't think it was going to be immediately necessary.

Alexander looked over at him, then back at his father, tears streaming down his face. “Thank you,” he mouthed.

Finn nodded, and thought Theo probably didn't have much to worry about. Alexander had gotten his family back. Finn didn't think it would take much work to persuade him to give Theo back his.

Mac stuck his head in the door just then. “One hour to showtime.”

“We'll be set. Where are Julia and Reese?”

“Next door. The area around the tent we pitched to hold the damn thing is mobbed.”

“And the A team—”

“Security is in place. Don't worry. I got the best.”

“I've got plenty to worry about, but that's not on the list.”

Mac smiled, and smacked him on the shoulder. “Don't worry, man. I've seen the way she looks at you. You'll figure it out.”

Then he vanished, leaving Finn to wonder if he had a freaking neon sign blinking over his head.

He watched over the Capellas reunion for a few minutes longer, then left Kate to monitor that while he went back down to get Felicity. He wanted to go over things with her, Reese, and Julia one last time before they went in front of the cameras.

There were men and women stationed all up and down every hall, outside every window, every door, on the roof…which might have been security overkill, but considering the bombs they were going to drop today, he was happy to have every bit of protection they could get.

Felicity met him at the door to the salon. “It's ridiculous, because it's almost over, but I swear I've never been this nervous in my life.”

He rubbed her arms and pulled her out of the open doorway, into a guest bathroom across the hall. A security agent was already silently moving into place in front of it, even as he closed the door between them. Finn blocked Felicity from turning on the light, pulling her instead into his arms and kissing her more passionately than either of them had had the energy or privacy to do since they'd left San Francisco what felt like eons ago.

They were both a bit breathless when he finally lifted his head, but he was already crowding her back against the sink, and she was shifting so she could sit on it and pulling him between her legs, without either of them having said a word.