Breaking Point (29 page)

“I don’t know.” Molly shook her head. “It takes days to get the results.” She wiped her tears from her face as she tried to smile at him. “I felt the baby move. Gina and I were at dinner, in Hamburg, and I felt him.”

The baby. Jones knew he was supposed to say something, but he couldn’t lie.

“It was so exciting,” she continued. “The waiter gave us free dessert, to celebrate.”

And God knows he couldn’t tell her the truth. He pulled her close—gently—so that she wouldn’t see his face, know what he was thinking.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered instead. “About all of this.”

“I am, too.” When she pulled back from him, she had on her school teacher face. “You shouldn’t be here,” she scolded.

“Yeah, well, neither should you.”

“Although, I don’t even know where
here
is,” Molly admitted.

“Eastern Indonesia,” he told her. “We’re pretty close to East Timor.”

“Of course we are,” she said. “Of all the lawless islands out there, we’re near the one that’s the most lawless.”

Across the garage, Jules was still working both his and Max’s phones, and keeping an eye on the street. What were they doing inside the house?

Molly answered his unspoken question. “They’re coming—they just have to figure out a way to do it so that Emilio doesn’t feel threatened. I think he’s afraid of you.”

“Smart guy.”

“I’m supposed to remind you that you’re the target and tell you that you should keep your head down. I’m supposed to sit with you in the back seat of the car,” she said, “and, I don’t know, distract you, I guess, with my wifely skills. So that you don’t shoot Emilio. Or something.”

Molly had on her “But Face,” that certain expression that she wore when she was on the verge of disagreeing.

Gina could do a pretty mean “But Face” but Molly was the undisputed queen. It involved eyebrows that were slightly raised, eyes opened wide, breath drawn in—the better to pronounce that slightly percussive B-sound. Her mouth would curl slightly up at the edges, either in appreciation of the argument that was on the verge of starting—for her, arguing was so much fun—or in bemused exasperation.

Right now it was all exasperation.

He pulled her into his arms again and kissed the
but
out of her. “I love you,” he said. “Let’s get in the car and speed this along. I want to get out of here.”

She lowered her voice, glancing across the garage, over at Jules. “You
should
get out of here. Right now.”

Jones shook his head. “I’m not leaving without you, babe.”

“You have to.” She was dead serious. “We’re going to the embassy in Dili. If you come along—”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m not leaving until I know you’re safe. It’s a long way to Dili from here.” He pulled her into the car with him.

“But they’ll lock you up if—” she said.

“Probably,” Jones told her. “But only after we’re on our way back to the States.” He kissed her again. “I gambled, Mol, and we lost.”

“Gambled?” She didn’t understand.

“By trying to get a passport that would let me go home. It was Kraus,” he told her. “I still don’t know who’s behind all this, or what they want, but I do know that Gretta Kraus sold me out.”

Molly nodded. “Emilio found us there, at her workshop.”

“I know,” he said grimly. “I saw the footage from a security camera. That was a terrorist cell that came in shooting and nearly killed you, by the way. Goddamn it.”

“Lord,” she said. “That was unbelievable. I didn’t know what was happening at first and . . .”

“Unbelievable,” Jones corrected her, “is when someone opens fire in a church or a shopping mall. When it’s in the studio of a professional forger, where criminals go to reinvent themselves, it’s a little less unbelievable. You shouldn’t have been there.”

But it was just as he’d suspected. She’d been worried about him.

“I wanted to warn you,” Molly said. “I knew we were being followed. We spotted Emilio in the hallway outside our hotel room when we came back from church. I was afraid that—”

“I would have taken care of myself.” He wanted to shake her. “You should have gone straight to the embassy.”

“But that was the one place I was absolutely certain you
wouldn’t
be,” she retorted.

“How did you even find the studio?” He’d purposely not given her Kraus’s address.

“We went to a . . . less than upscale establishment—it was part pawn shop, part brothel, I think. We just pretended we needed passports to get to New York.”

Jesus. He could only imagine the kind of dive it was. Just the thought of it made him want to . . . What was it Gina always said? Shit monkeys. Although, if it had been Jones trying to make contact with Gretta Kraus, it would’ve taken a week and a half, and way more than one visit to one crappy whorehouse.

“We walked in,” Molly told him, “using fake accents,
Excuse please to help . . .
big puppy-dog eyes . . .” She demonstrated. “Plus a hacking cough to make sure no one got too close. I didn’t even need to show any cleavage.”

Jesus.
He, too, had a facial expression that he found himself wearing occasionally. It was called “What-the-Fuck Face.”

But the story wasn’t over. “Gina stuck her jacket under her shirt,” Molly was telling him, “and pretended she was pregnant, too. That was our character motivation—our reason for wanting to go to America. So our babies could be born there, right?”

She was so damned pleased with herself for having
character motivation
when she went into a brothel that was no doubt filled with the worst examples of humankind that the world had to offer. Thieves. Pimps and slavers. Drug users, pushers, killers, rapists . . .

“She just said
No speak English
and
Sprech’ kein Deutsch
and pretended to start to cry whenever anyone looked in her direction,” Molly finished her story. “She was brilliant.” It was her turn to kiss him. “Please go,” she said. “Let’s plan to meet somewhere after this is all over. After I go home and do the hospital thing.”

Do the hospital thing. Like ridding her body of cancer was going to be a walk in the park. And like it had a guaranteed happy ending.

But Molly was determined. “Somewhere like Perth or Taiwan or maybe Kuala Lampur—we could help with the tsunami cleanup. They still need volunteers.”

“I can’t,” Jones told her.

“Of course you can—”

“No,” he said. “Even if you could convince me that you were safe from here on in, I wouldn’t leave. I sold my soul to the devil to find you, Mol.”

She didn’t understand.

“I made a deal with Max,” he explained. “Me for you and Gina. Unlike some people, at least he doesn’t want me dead.”

It was a bad attempt at a joke, and of course she didn’t laugh.

But she stopped asking him to run away, as if she truly believed that he was a man of honor, a man who kept his word.

Over on the other side of the garage, Jules was arguing with Max over the phone.

“No,” he was saying. “
I
will.” Pause. “No. I’m doing it. Someone’s got to stay with Gina and Molly and—”

They were having a testosterone-off. Apparently there was a dangerous job that needed to be done by a hero.

Man of honor that he was, Jones stayed right there in the car, his arms around his wife.

Jules made an exasperated noise. “No.
I’m
in charge, so zip it so I can tell you how this is going to go down.”

The gay guy had balls.

“We’ll get a lawyer,” Molly told Jones, bringing him back to the yawning black hole of uncertainty that was their future.

“Yeah,” he said, forcing a smile as he gazed into her eyes, praying that she wouldn’t see the terror that gripped him every time he thought of losing her.

But even if they walked, right now, through a portal that led directly to her mother’s home in Iowa, there was still a chance he’d have to bury Molly in the next few years.

Jones raised his voice, calling to Jules. “We need to get moving. What’s taking so long?”

Jules got another busy signal, and finally gave up trying to call the embassy, pocketing his cell phone.

It was time to go.

He checked his weapons, wishing for the eight hundredth time that he had more ammo.

His consolation prize was a hat. A battered fedora that looked as if it had blown off of Humphrey Bogart during the filming of
Key Largo.
Sucked up into the atmosphere during the movie’s hurricane, it had ended up here, on the other side of the world, sixty years later.

On his head.

Even though it had been enshrined in a closet inside the house, it kind of smelled as if it had spent about three of those decades at the bottom of a birdcage.

Yesirree. It was almost as fun to wear as the brown leather flight jacket.

Which really wasn’t fair to the flight jacket. It was a gorgeously cared-for antique that didn’t smell at all. And it definitely worked for him, in terms of some of his flyboy fantasies. But the day had turned into a scorcher. It was just shy of a bazillion degrees in the shade.

He needed mittens or perhaps a wool scarf to properly accessorize his impending heat stroke.

“Today, playing the role of Indiana Jones, aka Grady Morant, is Jules Cassidy,” he said, as he slipped his arms into the sleeves.

Was anyone really going to be fooled by this? Jones was so much taller than he was.

But really, the big money question was, was anyone out there watching so that they
could
be fooled?

Emilio Testa was convinced there was.

He believed that if he were seen driving away from his house, holding another man at gunpoint, then whoever was watching would assume he had Grady Morant in his custody.

Theory number two—the first being that there were indeed people watching—was that said watchers would immediately leap into their own vehicles and follow Emilio. And if they were intercepted? Whoopsie, no Grady Morant in
this
car—only Jules.

Meanwhile, Jones and the others could leave in the Impala, unnoticed.

Theory number three was that a car the size of a battlecruiser could actually go unnoticed, but okay.

The agreed-upon plan had them taking two cars, with the same final destination—the dock down at the harbor.

Jules and Emilio, heading out first, would meet a soon-to-be-arriving seaplane, owned by a man Emilio swore could be trusted. He’d fly them over to the American Embassy in Dili, East Timor.

The plan had the others hanging back, waiting for Jules to call with the all-clear.

Provided, of course, that all was clear.

There was still a significant amount of mistrust on both ends. For example, despite Emilio’s insistence that they were all on the same side now, he’d refused to surrender his weapon.

And Jules didn’t like being a downer, but there were some rather squishy, unexplained spots in E’s drama-laden story of kidnapping and murder.

Such as, what about the fact that Jules, Max, and Morant had all entered the house via the open garage door a solid fifteen minutes ago? After that white van had vanished with a watcher-awakening squeal of tires on the potholed road?

Emilio’s response had been to leap upon this point and use it as an argument for their immediate departure.

Okay. But hey, what
about
that white van? Who were the people driving it, and where did they go in such a rush?

Emilio told them that his assistant, Anton, was taking Emilio’s daughter-in-law and grandson to safety.

Okay, except the CIA report had Emilio getting married only ten years ago. That was some precocious son—married, with a child, at age nine?

Pointing out the holes in Emilio’s story wasn’t going to speed things along, so Jules kept that comment to himself.

Negotiating with an armed gunman was more about the end than the means, and separating Molly and Gina from Emilio and his deadly weapon was their priority here.

Jules was still a little foggy on exactly who the “they” were—both they-the-watchers and they-to-whom-the-watchers-were-reporting, but it didn’t matter at this point.

Emilio had referred to a contact he had with a man named Ram, but it wasn’t quite clear whether this Ram had taken over for Chai, the recently deceased drug lord who’d had it in for Grady Morant, or whether Ram was working for the Indonesian government.

Of course, on this particular island, it was entirely possible he was doing both.

It would, no doubt, all get sorted out if and when they reached the sanctuary of the American Embassy.

Although yes, just to spice things up, Jules still hadn’t made contact with the East Timor embassy in Dili. He’d called the diplo-folks in Jakarta, too, as well as the CIA office there, but all he got were relentless busy signals. Yashi, too, added to the festive international goatfuck atmosphere by failing to pick up from his desk back in D.C.

Whoo-hoo.

But finally, Gina emerged from the house. Emilio was holding tightly to her arm, his weapon pressed against her back. Max was several steps behind them, looking as if he were about to give birth to a pricker bush.

The E-meister looked much as he had in the video footage. Trim. Well-groomed. Even up close, he didn’t look a day over fifty-five. Well, okay, his neck looked sixty. His cologne was nice, but it was applied a tad too heavily.

The man knew exactly how to ensure cooperation—by maintaining the least possible distance between the barrel of his handgun and his hostage—currently Gina.

If Emilio’s finger tightened on that trigger, there was no chance at all that he would miss.

“Thank you for doing this,” Gina said to Jules.

Yeah, like he would even consider letting Max go with Emilio.

And it wasn’t just because Emilio was armed and dangerous and Max was no longer an agent of the U.S. Government.

Jules had listened in on nearly every word exchanged while they’d been back there together, and it was more than obvious that Max had yet to pull Gina into his arms and do his imitation of the Han Solo and Princess Leia big-moment kiss from
The Empire Strikes Back.

Maybe when Jules and the E-man walked out of the garage and climbed into that ancient Escort—which turned out to be part of the Testa fleet—Max would take the opportunity to plant a big, wet one on this woman that he still so obviously adored.