The Wrong Hostage (8 page)

“Don’t tell me you believe everything you read in newspapers,” she said coolly.

“Touché. So you and Ted haven’t done the nasty recently?”

Grace came to her feet and got right in Faroe’s face. “My sex life is none of your business.”

“Ease up. I was just trying to figure out whether Ted was the jealous type.”

“Why do you care?”

Faroe stepped back from the porthole and told himself he couldn’t smell the woman-scent of her.

His body told him he was lying.

“If Ted was jealous, I’d have a good explanation for the dude up on the dock.” Faroe gave Grace the binoculars. “He’s got a pair just like these and he’s been trying for the last ten minutes to figure out what we’re doing down here.”

“He’s spying on us?” She stepped swiftly away from the porthole.

“Yeah. Now all we have to do is make sure it’s you he’s after, not me.”

O
CEANSIDE
S
UNDAY, 10:15 A.M.

G
RACE JUST STARED AT
Faroe. “You think somebody might be following me?”

“Use the binoculars,” Faroe said impatiently. “Do you recognize him?”

Reluctantly she went to the porthole again. He made room for her by moving aside. It wasn’t enough. She could sense the heat of his body and smell the coffee on his breath. She wanted to tell him to back up, to get out of her space, but she didn’t want him to know how much he affected her physically.

Silently she looked through the porthole toward the gangway that led up to the marina parking lot.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said after a few moments.

“He’s smarter than your average mutt,” Faroe said, his voice very close to her ear. “He’s using the phone booth as a blind.”

With her naked eye, she just made out the figure of a person inside the telephone booth at the head of the gangway. When she lifted the field glasses, she came face-to-face with a dark-haired man who was staring at her through his own binoculars.

Startled, heart racing, she jerked away from the porthole. Her back slammed against Faroe’s chest. She smelled his skin, yeasty, warm, familiar.

That hadn’t changed.

“Easy,” Faroe said. “He can’t see you behind the porthole glass.”

Grace drew a deep breath and inched forward until she could see the gangway again. When she lifted the binoculars, they felt like they weighed ten pounds. Her palms were sweaty. Grimly she focused on the man in the phone booth.

“I don’t know him,” she said. “And you can’t be sure he followed me. Given your line of work, you must have made a lot of enemies.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Your Honor. This is the real world, the one that lives beneath the nice legal world of reasonable doubts. The first thing you learn down here is to go with your best guess.”

“You think he’s after me.”

“The only person stepping on my shadow right now is Steele. So, yeah, I think this bogey is yours.” Faroe leaned over slightly, just enough to get a good whiff of her hair. It smelled clean and expensive and sexy. “Which means that he followed you here, which means that you’ve been under surveillance for an unknown amount of time. Not good,
amada
.”

Darling
.

Grace caught her breath. Maybe he called all his women
amada,
but Faroe was the only man who had ever used the endearment with her.

And he was too close.

She could feel his breath stirring her hair when he spoke. She lowered the glasses and tried to turn toward him, to force him out of her space.

He didn’t move. He stood there with a faint, irritating half smile on his face.

He knew.

She stepped sideways and held the glasses like a barrier between their bodies. “Why is it bad that I’m being followed?”

“Because now he knows there’s a connection between us.”

“He’s wrong,” she said instantly.

Faroe laughed. “He knows that you’re down here with me. That means we know each other. That’s all the string he needs. He pulls on that, runs the registration on my boat. That leads him to an overseas corporation in Aruba.”

Grace stood very still.

“Then, if he’s any good,” Faroe said, “the dude finds somebody in Aruba
to bribe. He gets the background of that Aruba corporation. That leads him to the lawyer I used to set up the firewall between me and the world. If the lawyer is as crooked as I think he is, he’ll sell my name the instant the price is right.”

“But—”

Faroe kept talking. “Before you can say ‘shuckey darn,’ the dude on the dock knows you’re talking out of school and hiring a pricey international troubleshooter to help you break your son out of his cozy prison.”

Horrified, Grace stared at Faroe. She wanted to argue, to say it couldn’t be that way.

She couldn’t have signed her son’s death warrant.

But the truth was there in Faroe’s eyes, Lane’s eyes accusing her, her heart beating too fast, her ears ringing, reality a tunnel of light closing down in front of her and darkness roaring around her.

With a muttered word, Faroe shoved Grace onto the banquette seating and forced her head down between her knees.

“You never struck me as the fainting type,” he said roughly. “Breathe, damn it. Living without oxygen is only for Hindu holy men.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, then another one, then another. Her ears stopped ringing, the world stopped wheeling, and light came back. She felt Faroe’s big hands, one holding her head between her knees and the other stroking her spine with a gentleness that was the opposite of his voice.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah? You could have fooled me. When was the last time you slept more than two hours?”

She shrugged.

“And food?” he asked. “Did you forget that, too?”

She swiped her hair back from her face with both hands. “I’m not hungry.”

“Adrenaline wipes out appetite, but it doesn’t wipe out the need for calories. It’s as basic as blood sugar. You burn, you eat to stoke the fire. You stop stoking, you get light-headed.”

He went to the galley refrigerator and came back with a can of Coke. He popped the tab and handed the sugary drink to her.

Grace looked at it.

“I know, I know,” he said before she could, “you’re the diet Coke type. Drink this anyway. Sugar has its uses.”

She took the can and drank a mouthful. Within seconds she felt her body respond. She took another mouthful and shivered, surprised by the physical sensation of sugar hitting her bloodstream.

“I guess…I haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday,” she said, thinking back.

“Toast and coffee?”

“Coffee, no toast. I was working late.”

Faroe went to the pantry and came back with a loaf of sourdough bread, a jar of peanut butter, a bread knife, and a table knife. He cut the loaf in half, then sliced one half horizontally. He spread on a thick layer of peanut butter and handed the open-faced sandwich to her.

“Peanut butter and Coke for breakfast,” Grace said. “Add a piece of cold pizza and you’re in Lane heaven.”

“Your kid has good instincts. Eat.”

“Yes, Mother.” Grace took a big gooey bite and had no choice but to shut up and chew.

Faroe went back to the porthole. The man was still in the booth. After a moment, Faroe turned away, pulled a stool out from beneath the chart table, and set it down in front of Grace.

“If we’re going to do this, you have to learn and learn fast,” he said. “First, you live like you’re onstage and it’s opening night. Somebody’s watching you all the time. You just have to figure out who it is and who the watcher is working for.”

Grace reached for the soda to help with the peanut butter clogging her mouth.

“Second, protect yourself because nobody else will,” Faroe said. “Take care of yourself for the same reason. You’re a high-octane woman and you’re under a lot of stress. It’s doubly important for you to eat.”

“Yes, Mother,” Grace mumbled, but there was more peanut butter than sarcasm in her voice.

“Listen up. This is the wrong time to be light-headed from lack of food. Most people, particularly most crooks, make dumb decisions about half
the time because they’re drunk or stoned or fucked up one way or another. Being hungry is no different.”

“Such talk, Mother.”

“Another little rule. Don’t let anything shock you. Expect the worst and you won’t have any rude surprises.”

The worst
.

Lane’s death
.

Grace froze.

“Breathe,” Faroe growled.

She forced herself to. “If I let myself expect the worst…” She couldn’t finish.

“Yeah,” he said. “If you let yourself expect the worst, you’d go postal and start doing really foolish things, instead of only marginally dumb ones.”

“Besides coming to you, what dumb thing have I done?”

“That was enough. Ask Steele for some other St. Kilda consultant. There’s too much baggage between you and me.”

Surprise showed in her eyes. “But you’re the only one I know well enough to trust. Why do you think I’m here? Do you think this is easy for me?”

“Easy or hard, it’s wrong. It was wrong even before I knew we were burned by the dude on the dock.”

“So he’s seen us together. So what?”

“I’ve lost the one advantage an operator has to have—secrecy. He’s going to be poking a proctoscope up my ass until he figures out who I really am.”

“Must you be so graphic?”

“Excuse the hell out of me, Your Honor.” The anger in Faroe’s voice vibrated inside the
TAZ
. “You’d better get used to the crude things in life because right now you’re lip deep in them and headed for a rude dunking.”

“You sound almost as angry as you did sixteen years ago.” Grace looked at the peanut butter and bread with a complete lack of interest. “That was when you told me to get the hell out of your sight and your life. Is that what you want? Again?”

“You’re a lawyer. You know how emotion clouds professional judgment.”

“I don’t know if I believe that anymore.” She took a deep breath. “I believe in blood ties. My child is in terrible danger, and the moment I realized that, the only person I could think of who might be able to help him was you. Joe Faroe. So I sucked it up and came to you. For Lane.”

Silence stretched while Faroe studied Grace. He didn’t doubt that she was telling the truth.

And his gut said she wasn’t telling all of it.

“Sixteen years ago, maybe it would have worked,” he said. “But I’m a different man and you’re a different woman. That’s why you need somebody else. We have too much baggage, the kind that really gets in the way.”

Grace watched him. Her eyes were huge, glittering with tears she wouldn’t allow to fall.

“I’ll call Steele myself,” Faroe said, his voice rough with all that he couldn’t say, shouldn’t think, and didn’t want to remember. “There are two men who are as good as I am at this bloody game. One of them could be here by dawn. You and St. Kilda can start over, without the baggage and without the burn.”

Grace’s eyes dropped to the leather shoulder bag she’d carried aboard.
My God, am I going to have to tell him?

“I’ve learned my lesson,” she said quietly. “I won’t move again without checking over my shoulder.”

Faroe let out a rush of breath. “Okay. Good. I’ll call Steele.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. You said in the shadow world, you have to trust your best guess. It’s you or nothing for Lane. It won’t be all that easy for anyone to track down your past. If you’re good at anything, it’s disappearing.”

“A really good operative with the right connections could peel my identity in a few days. A week, max.”

She looked at her watch. “Lane has twenty-six hours.”

“Shit.”

“I don’t blame you for being angry,” Grace said. “I don’t know why you quit St. Kilda, but I do know you must have had a good reason. And here I am dragging you back where you don’t want to go.”

A good reason
.

Faroe tried not to remember the feel of a friend-turned-enemy choking to death in his hands, his eyes pleading friendship and his knife still sliding off Faroe’s body armor.

It had been a near thing for Faroe. It had been a final thing for Bernardo.

Grace looked at Faroe and wondered what he was thinking that had turned his face into a death’s-head. Then he smiled, a smile so cold it made gooseflesh rise on her arms.

“Did Steele tell you?” Faroe asked.

“He said something about you being forced to kill a good man gone bad.”

Abruptly Faroe stood up and reached for a three-foot length of rope that hung from a hook above the chart table. The ceiling of the stateroom was just high enough that he could extend his arms above his head, one hand on either end of the rope. Slowly he rotated his arms behind his head and down his back. The tight muscles of his shoulders screamed in protest, then stretched slowly, releasing the tension that had built in them.

Grace watched with a fascination she didn’t bother to conceal. The Joe Faroe she’d known a long time ago had been whipcord thin and coiled like a spring, always ready for action. This new Joe Faroe was more muscular and yet more flexible.

He’d learned how to handle the destructive tension within himself.

For the first time, she allowed herself to hope. Just a little. Just enough so that her throat wasn’t locked tight against all the screams she’d swallowed.

He tossed the rope back on the table and looked at her with a quiet expression that said he’d made up his mind.

“You sure it’s me or no one?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Two on a tightrope is dangerous, especially when one is an amateur.”

Grace glanced again at the purse that held all the pictures of Lane she owned. She was both relieved and oddly sad that she hadn’t had to use them.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Whatever I say, whenever I say it.”

She told herself the words only had one meaning. She nodded tightly.

Faroe smiled. “Give me your cell phone.”

Without a word she went to her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and handed it to him.

If this was some kind of twisted test, she damn well was going to pass it.