Without a Trace (19 page)

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” she murmured. “The longer this goes on, the less real it seems. When it first started, I thought I knew exactly what had to be done. Now I’m not sure of anything.”

“Just let me do the thinking.”

A man in a grimy white robe stumbled in front of them. He only had time to gesture toward Gillian and mutter something in a drunken slur before Trace had the switchblade out. Gillian saw the sun glint off steel as Trace issued a quiet warning. Still grinning, the man lifted both hands palms up and teetered out of the way again.

“Don’t look back,” Trace ordered as he pulled Gillian along with him.

“Did he want money?”

He’d stopped believing anyone could be that naive. She was good for him, he thought. Too damn good. “For starters,” he said simply.

“This is an awful place.”

“There are worse.”

She looked at him then as the beat of her heart began to calm again. “You know how to walk here, how to talk here, but that doesn’t make you like that man back in that shack.”

“We both make a living.”

They skirted around the walls and went into the shopping district. “You know, I think you’d like me to believe you were like him. That would be more comfortable for you.”

“Maybe. We’ll get some coffee, hang around here long enough for the tails to pick us up again.”

“Trace.” Though it shamed her, she felt safe again away from the sights and smells of the slums. “Is it just me, or do you fight off anyone who gets too close?”

He didn’t know how to answer her. Worse, he wasn’t sure he could afford to dig too deeply for the real answer. “Seems to me we were pretty close last night.”

She met his look levelly, her eyes clear and serene. “Yes, we were, and you still haven’t dealt with it.”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind, Doc.” He pulled out a chair at a small café and sat down. After a moment’s hesitation, Gillian joined him.

“So have I. More than I bargained for.” She let him order coffee and hoped that before long she would be back in her room, where she could pull down the shades, close her eyes and block out the morning, if only for a little while. “I have another question.”

“Sweetheart, I’ve never known you not to.”

She put a hand on his before he could light a cigarette. “That man, Bakir, he didn’t know you as Cabot.”

“No, I used him in an operation a few years back.”

“He’s an agent?”

Trace laughed but waited until their coffee was served before speaking again. “No, Doc, he’s a snake. But reptiles have their uses.”

“He knows who you are. Why would he deliver the shipment instead of simply keeping the money you’ve given him and telling Husad who and where you are?”

“Because he knows that if Husad didn’t manage to kill me, I’d come back and slit his throat.” Trace lifted his coffee. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that the first tail had picked them up again. “Bad business risk.”

Gillian stared at her coffee. It was black and thick. She knew that if she drank it, it would take the chill from her skin, but she didn’t pick up the cup. “I was raised to respect life,” she said quietly. “All life. So much of the work I’ve done has been to try to make life better, easier. I can’t deny that science has had too much to do with destruction, but the goal has always been to preserve and advance. I’ve never in my life hurt anyone intentionally. It’s not that I’m such a saint, but more, I think, that I’ve never had to make that choice.”

She wrapped both hands around her cup but still didn’t pick it up as she lifted her gaze to Trace’s. “When Captain Addison asked me what I would do if Husad took me, I was telling the truth. I know in my heart that I could take a life. And it frightens me.”

“You’re not going to find yourself in the position where you have to put that to the test.” He put a hand over
hers briefly, because no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep himself from offering comfort.

“I hope not, because I know not only what I would do, but that I could live with it afterward. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that we’re not so different, you and I.”

He looked away from her, because the need to believe she was right was too sharp. “Don’t bet on it.”

“I already have,” she murmured, and drank her coffee.

Gillian told herself that the move to Sefrou was bringing her another step closer to Flynn. He was close now. She could look out at the unfamiliar streets and mountains and almost feel how close.

It was a rare thing now for her to allow herself more than a few moments alone. Alone she would think too clearly of what had happened, what could be happening, to her brother and niece. The fear that she was too late, or would ultimately be too late, was a dark secret she kept buried inside her heart.

She didn’t spend her nights weeping. The emotional release of tears wouldn’t help Flynn. There were the nightmares, the sometimes hideous, often violent dreams she pulled herself out of on almost a nightly basis. Thus far she had been able to bring herself out of the nightmares without causing a disturbance that woke Trace. At least she could be grateful for that. She didn’t want him to know she was weak enough to be frightened into cold chills by dreams. He had to think of her as strong and capable. Otherwise, he might change his mind about letting her play any part in freeing Flynn.

Strange how well she had come to know him. Gillian watched a small compact car wind through the streets below while the silence of her hotel room hung around her. It was at times like this, when she was alone, that she worked hardest to concentrate on the practical aspects of Flynn’s release. When that didn’t work, she concentrated instead on Trace. Who he was, what made him tick, what secrets he kept locked in his heart.

She had come to understand him, though he told her little with words. More than once she had imagined them meeting socially in New York, under normal, even pedestrian, circumstances. A dinner date, a show, a cocktail party. She knew they would have become lovers wherever they’d met, but she also knew that under other circumstances it would have happened slowly and with more caution.

Destiny. She had never really thought about her own before Trace. Now she believed, as he did, that some
things were meant to be.
They
were meant to be. She wondered how long he would continue to fight his feelings, the feelings she sensed in him whenever he held her. Words of affection wouldn’t come easily from a man who’d deliberately shut those doors in his life. She was certain the reason for that had to do with his family.

If there was one thing Gillian was accustomed to, it was reticent males. She could be patient until he opened up to her. And she was optimistic enough not to doubt that he would.

She was so in love. She leaned on the windowsill with a sigh. All her life she’d waited for this feeling, the one that made the heart pound and the brain giddy, the one that made everything seem more vivid. True, she’d never expected to experience love for the first time in the midst of the biggest crisis of her life. But, crisis or not, the feeling was there, big and bold and beautiful.

Gillian knew she would have to wait to share it. There’d come a time when she could speak of it freely, laugh and steep herself in the feelings between them. She hadn’t waited all her life to fall in love only to be denied the pleasure of expressing it. But she could wait.

One day, when Flynn and Caitlin were safe, when the violence, the fear, the intrigue, were nothing more than a vague memory, she would have her time with Trace. A lifetime. She couldn’t afford to doubt that. What had happened in the past few weeks had taught her that happiness had to be grabbed with both hands and treasured with a full heart.

Yes, she would bide her time and accept her destiny.

But how she wished he’d come back. How she hated being left alone.

Gillian understood he had a role to play and a job to do. Neither Cabot’s mistress nor Dr. Gillian Fitzpatrick had a place in the morning meeting between Flynn and his ISS contact in eastern Morocco. The ISS agent would see that André Cabot received his supply of arms, just as Bakir would see that Il Gatto received his.

She could only wait while the man she loved armed himself and stepped into the hornet’s nest.

Because her nerves were building quickly, Gillian searched for something to do. She had already unpacked and rearranged her belongings three times. Trace’s case was open, but his clothes were jumbled inside. He’d taken out only what he needed that morning. For lack of something better to do, Gillian began to shake out,
refold and put away his clothes.

She found she could enjoy the small task, smoothing out a shirt, wondering where he’d bought it, how he looked wearing it. She could draw in his scent from his rumpled garments. His taste in clothes was certainly eclectic. There was everything from denim to silk, from bargain basement to Savile Row.

How many men did he carry around in this case? she wondered as she folded a T-shirt that was thin to the point of transparency at the shoulders. She wondered if he ever had to stop and think, to bring back to the front of his mind who he really was.

Then she found the flute, wrapped carefully in felt beneath a tailored shirt of satin piqué. It was polished but had the look of something old and well used. Experimentally Gillian lifted it to her lips and blew. The note came clear and sweet and had her smiling.

He came from a family that made its living making music. He hadn’t left that behind, not completely, no matter how hard he pretended he had. She imagined he played when he was alone and lonely in some foreign place. Perhaps it reminded him of the home he claimed not to have, of the family he’d chosen not to see for years.

She placed her fingers over the holes, then lifted two at random, enjoying the sound that came when she blew into the mouthpiece. She’d always had an affection for music, though her father had considered the study of chemicals more important than the piano lessons she’d once hoped for. She wondered if someday Trace would teach her to play a real melody, something sentimental, from the country she’d left behind.

She set the flute on the bed, but didn’t rewrap it. There were books in the case, as well, Yeats and Shaw and Wilde. Gillian picked one and leafed through familiar passages. A man who described himself in such harsh terms carried Yeats along with a weapon. She’d sensed that contradictory combination long before she’d seen evidence it existed; indeed, she’d fallen in love with the many sides of the enigma that was Trace O’Hurley.

Nerves forgotten, fears banked, she set the books on the table beside the bed. She was humming to herself as she put the last of the shirts away. When she started to close the case, she noticed a notebook tucked in one of the side pockets. Without thinking, she drew it out and set it on the edge of the dresser. She put the case in the
closet beside hers, fussed to be sure the trousers were hung by the crease, then wandered back toward the window. As she passed the dresser, she knocked the notebook to the floor. The words and musical notes caught her eye as she bent to pick it up.

The sun rises, the sun sets, but I wait for the dream.

The nights are too long to be alone.

Days pass without sweetness in sunlight that streams.

The nights are too dark to be far from home.

Enchanted, she sat on the bed to read. Her hand went to the flute and rested there.

*   *   *

It had been a few years since Trace had worked with Breintz. They’d put together a tidy little job in Sri Lanka five or six years before, and then, in the way of people in their business, they’d lost touch. Outwardly Breintz had changed. His hair had thinned; his face had widened. There were folds of wrinkles under his eyes that gave him a lazy basset hound look. He sported a sapphire stud in his ear and wore the robe of the desert people.

After an hour’s discussion, Trace was reassured. However much Breintz’s appearance had changed, inside he was still the same sharp-witted agent Trace’d worked with in the past.

“It was decided against using the usual routes for the shipment.” Breintz’s clipped English had a controlled musicality Trace had always found agreeable. “It would be too possible for another terrorist group to trace it, or even for an overenthusiastic customs official to cause problems. In this I have used my contacts. The shipment comes by private plane to an airstrip a few miles east of here. Those who need to be paid off have been.”

Trace nodded. In the dim rear booth of the nearly empty restaurant he indulged in one of Breintz’s Turkish cigarettes. Over the scent of rich smoke he could smell meat—some sort of sausage—grilling. “And once the
shipment arrives, I move accordingly. The whole thing should be over in a week.”

“If the gods permit.”

“Still superstitious?”

Breintz’s lips curved, more in patience than in humor. “We all hold on to what works.” Breintz let out smoke in three puffs, watching the rings form and vanish. “I don’t believe in advice, but in information. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will pass on this information, though you are likely aware already. I am in my fourth year of association with terrorists in this small, beleaguered part of the world. Some are fanatically religious, some politically ambitious, some simply blinded by anger. Such things, when accompanied by a disregard for human life, are dangerous and, as we have too often found, not easily controllable. There is a reason, old friend, why none of the more established revolutionary organizations recognize Hammer. Religion, politics and anger become unpalatable even to the radical when they are driven by madness. Husad is a madman—a clever and magnetic one, but a madman. If he discovers your deception, he will kill you in any of several unpleasant ways. If he does not discover your deception, he will still kill you.”

Trace drew again on the Turkish cigarette. “You’re right; I’m already aware. I’m going to get the scientist and the kid out. Then I’m going to kill Husad.”

“Assassination attempts have failed before, to the disappointment of many.”

“This one won’t.”