White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (6 page)

An unofficial meeting with her father
was a good first step.

Nick looked at her and raised his brows
the smallest amount. This request matched what he had
predicted.

She nodded and looked at Jerry. “We need
to collect our luggage first,” she pointed out.

“No need, ma’am,” Jerry said. “We’ve
already cleared your luggage. It’s waiting in the car.” He moved
back and to one side and waved toward the exit, while one of the
others in his team spoke into their wrist microphone.

The carousel clanked and groaned as it
started up and there were scattered cheers from the passengers
waiting around it.

Olivia sighed and moved in the direction
Jerry was indicating and Nick moved up alongside. “It’ll save on
cab fare,” he said philosophically, making her smile.

But her thoughts were running ahead to
the meeting with her father and her smile faded quickly.

Carmen had no idea what prompted her to
do it, but after breakfast she sat back on her sleeping bag and
pulled out the laptop once more. Garrett was nowhere to be seen and
she figured he was sleeping off the mescal. He had been most of the
way through the bottle and she had no doubt he had finished it
after she had left. That was a lot of alcohol, especially Vistarian
mescal. He wouldn’t be up until noon. That left her free and clear
for a few hours yet.

Remembering the way Garrett had sneaked
up on her the last time she had used the laptop, this time she put
her back against the wall and angled herself so that she could see
both directions of approach just by looking up over the laptop.

Then she went surfing. The first thing
she did was type Garrett’s full name into Google and hit
‘enter’.

There were a lot of results for Garrett
Blackburn that led to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and the other
social networks. It was hard to imagine Garrett hanging out on any
of them. He just wasn’t that sort of human being.

On the next page there were half a dozen
entries linking to Harvard Medical School. They were dated about
the right time Garrett would have completed his medical degree and
if he had gone straight into pre-med out of high school, then he
was slightly older than she had first thought. She clicked on one
of the links, but it was a simple listing of med students for that
year. She shut down the tab and went back to Google.

On the third page, she came across an
entry that didn’t seem to be related to him at all. It was from the
English
Times
newspaper. “Bodies of Mother and Daughter
Found Outside Baghdad.”

Her heart squeezed painfully, as she
moused down to the link and clicked on it.

The news article was short, but she
didn’t need any more detail. There was enough in the three
paragraphs to tell the whole story. An American doctor working for
the WHO, called Garrett Edward Blackburn, had been pulled from his
home in the middle of the night by Iraqi soldiers, who believed he
was distributing black market drugs and food to locals. They took
his wife and daughter, too, and while attempting to make Garrett
talk, the soldiers had killed his family.

In front of him.

Garrett was turned loose three days
later and stumbled into the American Embassy, his feet and body raw
from the caning and clubbing he had suffered. That had been four
weeks before the bodies of his wife and daughter had been found
outside Baghdad.

The article summarized the horror in
neat Times Roman and concluded that the bodies were being flown
back to the United States.

“Who are you talking to now?” Garrett
asked.

Carmen barely held in her yelp of
surprise. She dropped the lid on the laptop. “I’m just clearing the
cache and stuff. I forgot to do it last time.”

Garrett didn’t look any the worse for
his dive into the bottle last night. His gray eyes narrowed and he
bent and snatched the laptop from her, sliding it out from under
her hands. She couldn’t try to grab it back. That would make her
look as guilty as she was.

So she got to her feet, knowing there
was nothing she could do to halt this. She felt beyond guilty now.
There was a churning in her gut and her heart was racing sickly. It
didn’t help that she couldn’t get the image out of her mind of
Garrett lying bloodied and beaten on some concrete floor somewhere,
watching while his daughter…

She pushed the image away, as Garrett
opened the laptop and waited for the image to reform on the
screen.

His face darkened. “How dare you,” he
breathed. But there wasn’t just anger there. There was pain in his
eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Carmen said truthfully. “I
know that doesn’t excuse it, but I am. I had no idea—”

“For a reason!” he shouted. “I didn’t
fucking tell you,
that’s
why you didn’t know!”

Heads were turning.

Carmen held up her hand and wasn’t
surprised to see it trembling. “I don’t know anything about you at
all. Nothing. I wanted to know more about the man who gives the
orders around here.”

“No one else wants to know,” he pointed
out. “Everyone except you is content to mind their own
business.”

His vitriol sparked her own anger. Guilt
pushed her into firing back. “I wanted to know how you live with
yourself, Garrett. How can you practice medicine all night, save
lives and ease suffering? How do you even live with the knowledge
that every day you’re out there, a gun in your hand, breaking your
Hippocratic Oath?”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” he cried.
“You’re losing sleep over
my
ethics?”

She bit her lip. She had braced herself
for anger, but this white hot fury was more than she had expected.
“Look, Garrett—”

“No,
you
listen,” he snapped.
“Stay out of my life. Do what you’re told. Be a good soldier, or
get the fuck out of my camp. Got it?”

She was trembling. It would be so much
easier just to say ‘yes’. But she swallowed and made herself speak
the truth. “You shouldn’t be fighting.”

There was a vein throbbing in his temple
and his jaw rippled. His gaze wouldn’t let her go and it seemed
like his eyes were dark with anger and a whole slew of emotions she
couldn’t name. Why had she ever thought him to be cold and
emotionless?

“I don’t understand,” she added. “You’re
a smart man. You’ve got a heart. You feel. How do you live with
yourself when you’re killing people like you do?”

He gave her a smile that had no humor in
it. “It’s called prophylactic medicine, Escobedo. Look it up on
your precious computer, if you don’t know what that means.” He
shoved the laptop into her hands.

She watched him stride back to the door
that led to the hospital rooms and her trembling seemed to grow
worse now it was over. She sank back down onto her sleeping bag,
deliberately not looking at everyone who was staring at her. She
didn’t open the laptop again, but sat with her hand resting on the
cover. She knew what prophylactic medicine meant. It was
preventative medicine. Garrett justified how he spent his days by
telling himself he was preventing needless deaths of Loyalists at
the hands of the Insurrectos.

It was such a weak argument. Did Garrett
cling to it because he
wanted
to fight?

Her hand on the laptop reminded her of
the
Times
article.

Perhaps he did want to fight, after
all.

Cristián surprised Daniel by hugging him
hard and when he stepped back, he was grinning hugely. “Danny, I
can’t believe it.”

“Daniel, you snot-nosed kid,” Daniel
growled, although he felt like he wanted to grin like an idiot,
too. “Damn, you’ve gotten tall while I wasn’t looking.”

“I was fourteen, last time you looked,”
Cristián pointed out. He waved toward the stairs that led up to the
main floor of the house. “Mom is in the kitchen. Come and say
hello.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned and
climbed the stairs three at a time. Cristián had the long legs that
the whole Peña family seemed blessed with.

Daniel eased the heavy pack off his
shoulders, then shrugged off the flak jacket. He transferred the
Glock to his thigh pocket and removed the holster, too. Isabela
Peña didn’t like guns in her kitchen, but he wouldn’t leave it
anywhere he couldn’t reach it.

The smile kept threatening to break out.
Just standing in the front hallway of this house was bringing back
vivid memories of living here. Fighting with Duardo. Teasing the
girls. Giving Cristián a hard time whenever the opportunity arose,
which wasn’t often because Cristián had always been smarter than
everyone else, even at ten years old.

Daniel climbed the stairs and when the
third one creaked as it always had, his heart squeezed painfully in
remembrance.

Isabela was waiting at the top of the
stairs and she wrapped her arms around him, her eyes glittering
with tears. “We thought you were dead,” she said brokenly.

“Just one of my nine lives,” Daniel told
her. She was as tall and as slender as he remembered, but the gray
in her hair was new. Had he contributed to that? He cut the thought
off quickly, as Olivia’s voice whispered in his memory.
You’re
not the terrible person you think you are.

Olivia. His wife. He paused for a
fraction of a second to savor the fact. While hiking to Pascuallita
from the coast where the boat had dropped him off, even when he’d
had to deal with a pair of Insurrectos he’d come across, the memory
of Olivia, her warmth, the scent of her hair, and that she had
committed to him irrevocably kept him warm and his inner core
bubbling with what he had only in hindsight recognized as pure
happiness.

Daniel held Isabela at arm’s length. “It
is so very good to be here,” he told her truthfully.

Isabela gave him a tremulous smile and
dashed her hand across her eyes. She sniffed. “Say hello to
everyone else,” she said and lifted her chin, indicating something
behind him.

Daniel turned and was almost knocked off
his feet as Pía Isabela slammed into him. Her arms went around his
neck. “Daniel! You’re really here!”

Trini Juanita stood back, but she was
smiling and her cheeks were wet. Daniel held his arm out and she
stepped into it, just like that, with no hesitation or distaste. He
pressed his cheek against the top of her head and his heart
hurt.

This was happiness, too, he
realized.

He caught Cristián’s gaze over the top
of the two girls’ heads. Cristián was smiling, too, but as Daniel’s
gaze met his, his smile faded.

“Dinner!” Isabela declared from behind
him and Daniel’s stomach rumbled.

They sat at the table for many hours,
not because the meal lasted that long, but because there was so
much to catch up on. When Isabela pulled yet another bottle of
mescal from the cupboard and cracked the seal, Daniel realized how
late it was. He also realized with a jolt of surprise that he had
been doing most of the talking.

He hadn’t realized how cut off from
affairs Pascuallita—and most of Vistaria—was. Cristián’s Facebook
group gave them nominal information. Even though communication was
two-way, using the open code the group provided, Duardo and Téra
had been spare in personal news. Daniel understood that
instinctively. Every code could be broken, given enough time and
information. If the group’s wrestling fan code was broken, then
anything of a personal nature that Téra and Duardo shared would
lead the Insurrectos directly back to this rambling old house.

So Duardo’s marriage was a surprise to
them, although it seemed to Daniel it wasn’t the staggering shock
to them that it had been to him. He found himself relating the
meeting between him and Duardo on the beach at Baha Coralina five
nights ago, when Duardo had laid him flat on his back.

He also found himself laughing when he
realized that the women in the room were disappointed he couldn’t
report on the wedding itself, as he hadn’t been there, but their
disappointment evaporated when he told them Minnie was
pregnant.

“I suppose you’re still playing the
field, Daniel,” Isabela said, pouring him another glassful of
mescal.

“Not anymore,” Daniel said.

Everyone looked at him.

“You’ve found someone,” Isabela said
quietly. “I’m so pleased.”

“Who is she?” Cristián asked and sipped
his tea. He hadn’t touched the mescal at all.

“My wife,” Daniel said and his pride in
being able to say that swelled in his chest.

This time, the surprise in the room was
unanimous.

Then all three women broke out in cries
of protest and delight, demanding details, details!

Daniel told them everything he could
about Olivia, except for those areas that must remain covert for
now, but everyone knew about the diplomatic hostages that Serrano
had been holding at the White Sands, because Mexican and US TV had
been reporting on it since the news broke. It was becoming easier
and easier to share things about himself. No one seemed to be in a
hurry to shut him up, either. They were absorbing everything he
told them with rapt attention.

“And the wedding?” Trini prompted.

“Yesterday,” Daniel told them.

Isabela looked horrified. “You married
her and left her at the altar to come here?”

“There was no altar to leave her at.
Besides, Olivia is probably in Washington by now. Nicolás Escobedo
made her Ambassador to the United States five minutes after I
kissed her. She is busier than me.”

Isabela patted his hand. “I’m so happy
that you’re so happy, Danny.”

He winced at the nickname, then let it
go. “Me, too,” he said and drank up.

Cristián sipped his tea with a
thoughtful expression.

After the girls yawned mightily and
slowly wended their way upstairs and Isabela kissed his cheek and
went to bed herself, Daniel pulled the bottle of mescal closer and
poured himself another. He tapped the dregs out of one of the
girls’ glasses and poured a second shot, which he pushed across to
Cristián.