Dark of Night (34 page)

“Good,” she fired back, “because right now I've got your blood under my fingernails again, and I could use a good laugh.”

Ah, God.

“He went to Kazabek,” WildCard told her, shrugging as he met Dave's eyes in the rearview mirror. “I didn't make you any promises and, even sitting
up here? This conversation is excruciating. I'm just speeding things along.”

Dave was incredulous as he turned to Tom, who was sighing heavily and shaking his head at the younger SEAL. “You
told
Karmody … ?”

“Yeah,” WildCard said, “he told me.
You
can say that your trip was irrelevant and assume it had absolutely nothing to do with your taking a knife to the gut in Boston. But Tommy's not about to assume anything— which is why he runs TS Inc., while
you
work for
him.”

Dave could feel Sophia staring at him in stunned horror. “I'm not laughing,” she whispered.

Yeah, he couldn't help but notice that.

“You went to
Kazabek?”
she continued, getting louder as she went on. “By
choice?”

“Yes,” he copped to it. “I did. And it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with Anise Turiano.”

“Unless whoever you pissed off over in K-stan is using the Turiano thing to smack you down, after you did whatever you did to piss 'em off,” WildCard suggested helpfully from the front seat.

“I didn't piss anyone off,” Dave said, as Sophia stared at him as if she couldn't recognize him and was trying to figure out where on earth they'd previously met.

“That you know of,” WildCard interjected, which was when Dave lost it.

“Will you
shut
the fuck
up?!”

“I'm pretty sure he said what we were all thinking,” Tom turned around to say, that edge back in his usually mild voice. “Before I brought the chief into a potentially dangerous situation, I had to be upfront with him about all possible threats, and face it, Malkoff, we don't know enough about this situation to assume anything. You know as well as I do that when we take on a case—”

“This isn't a case,” Dave interrupted him. “You're not taking on anything other than providing protection for Sophia.”

“And
you,” Tom countered. “I want to know who might try to kick down your hotel room door. I want to know all theories, all possibilities. I want to hear about your crazy cousin who hasn't spoken to you since your grandmother died and left you her favorite rocking chair. You
don't
get to assume
anything
when we're standing between you and the bullets, and you damn well know it.”

“I am
not
a client,” Dave said hotly, “and you're not going to be protecting me. I'll stay far away from you, so that—”

“Intelligence,” Sophia interrupted, repeating the word he'd used. “You went back to Kazabek because of…
me?”

Her words stopped the argument dead, as both Tom and the SEAL chief tried to become invisible in the front seat.

Dave didn't answer her—he couldn't figure out how to explain without saying things that he knew she wouldn't want said in front of an audience. But as another mile sped by, he knew she was capable of waiting forever for his answer, so he finally said, “I thought it would be easier—for you. To talk about some of the abuse that you lived through. I thought if I knew … If I could find out what happened to you, then … So, I …”

“Oh, my God,” Sophia breathed, her eyes filled with horror. “I was wrong. What I said to you before. My secrets
could
have gotten you killed.”

“No,” he said, even though everyone in the car knew that he was lying. “Soph, no. I was never in danger.”

“This could be my fault,” she whispered, stricken. “One of Bashir's nephews, looking for payback …”

“No, Sophia—”

“You don't know that,” she said. “Oh, my God. Ken, please, pull over! Please! Right now! I'm going to be sick!”

J
immy was sitting on the floor of the panic room when Tess unlocked the door.

His shirt was torn—as was one of the knees of his jeans. His lip was swollen and his cheek looked as if he were going to develop a terrible bruise.

He didn't stand up. He didn't even try. He just sat there, looking up at Tess, with his relief solid in his eyes. Of course, there was wariness mixed in there, too. He knew that she was angry.

No,
angry
was too simple a word for this emotion she was feeling.

“Where, exactly,” she asked him, miraculously able to keep her voice from shaking, “were you going to go? Barely able to walk, let alone run?”

“I can run,” he told her.

“For what?” she scoffed. “Five steps?”

“It took two Navy SEALs to get me down here.”

“Alyssa's not a SEAL.”

“Well, she should be. She's tougher than any SEAL I've ever met. She kicked my ass.”

“Thank God. And lucky for me,” Tess said sharply, “there were
two
people on guard, so you didn't go … where, Jimmy?”

She knew where. She just wanted to hear him say it—that his intention was to sacrifice himself, so that this dire threat would vanish. God damn it. Her mouth trembled—she couldn't stop it, but she pressed her lips tightly together so that it wouldn't be as obvious.

He looked as if he might start to cry, too—but she knew better. He wouldn't let himself. Not in here, with the lights on. Not so that she could see. He would lock everything inside, the way he always did, the way she knew he'd already done with that terrible, soul-wrenching news about the three dead innocents, all named John Wilson.

“I wanted to make sure you were safe,” he admitted, and she noted the careful wording. Not
I wanted to find you.

“Which I wouldn't have been, the moment you'd set foot outside this house and virtually announced to the world that, yes, you are still alive. Unless you were thinking you could
buy
my safety …”

He looked away.

“Right now they're just guessing,” she told him, this time unable to keep her voice from shaking. “But they're doing a damn good job. They found us, by the way, in San Diego.”

She could practically hear the sound of his surprise and fear as his head snapped up.

“Yeah,” Tess said. “The dead John Wilsons saved our lives—Jules's and mine. Alyssa called a code red at the news and pulled us in, so we weren't at the motel when they blew it up. Whoever the hell
they
are.”

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “Are you all right?”

Tess nodded. “Decker and Tracy were lucky, too. They got knocked around and Deck hit his head. But they're secure. Lindsey's going to go pick them up. We'll work out a way to get them back here.”

“Tracy
Shapiro?”
he asked.

“She somehow figured out you were still alive. Deck thought it would be a good idea to contain her, so he was bringing her back here.” Tess left the door wide open as she came to sit several feet away from him, leaning back, as he was, against the wall. She gestured toward the hallway. “If you're going to go, you should just do it now.”

His gaze flicked from her face to the door to the row of monitors that nearly covered one entire wall of the room. She glanced up at it, too. There was movement on only a few of the screens—those showing the big main living room from three different utilitarian angles.

Jules was sitting on the couch, looking as if he'd been hit by an emotional bus. He'd taken the news about the three dead John Wilsons extremely hard. He'd barely said a word to anyone in the helicopter—instead retreating to that uncommunicative, stony-faced place where so many
men in the SpecWar world went, rather than deal honestly with their anger and grief.

Robin was now sitting close to him, one arm around his shoulders, his other hand on Jules's knee, while Sam stood and Alyssa sat across from them. Alyssa was leaning forward, talking intently—the microphones weren't on, so they couldn't hear what she was saying. Whatever she was telling Jules, he just kept shaking his head. No.

“No one's going to stop you,” Tess told Jimmy. “This isn't going to work—none of it will—if we have to hold you here against your will.”

“I know that.” He nodded, unable to hold her gaze, still watching the monitors, where Robin now put both arms around Jules, who made no move to embrace him in return—locked as he was in the tough-guy land of numbness. But then, in the solid warmth of Robin's arms, he crumpled.

Tess saw Jules's anguished expression for only a split second before he grabbed hold of Robin and buried his face against the taller man's neck and shoulder. But it was such an exact representation of what they all were feeling, she almost started to cry, too.

There was movement then from another monitor—Sam and Alyssa had gone into the hallway, heading purposefully toward the little room where Ash was fast asleep in his crib.

“I just…,” Jimmy started.

Tess waited. She always did. Because hope sprang eternal. And every now and then, like the other night when he talked about his dream, he actually threw her a crumb.

Except it wasn't like that. Not really. He didn't withhold intentionally. He was who he was, and Tess had known that going into this relationship. She knew from the start that it wasn't going to be easy, but she'd never dreamed it would be this hard. Still, it was what it was, too. And she?

She loved this man. Completely. She told him that now. It was so simple, those three little words, and so absolute—her voice clear in the stillness of the basement room.

Jimmy stood up, and for one split second she actually thought he was going to do it—he was going to walk out the door.

But he only moved over to the panel that controlled the monitors, where he turned off the switches that shut down the cameras in the living room, granting Jules and Robin privacy.

And there he stood, just staring at the other monitors, scanning the
ones that showed the quiet peacefulness of the night out along the driveway and down by the gate and the fence that surrounded this property.

“I think it's safe to assume,” Tess told Jimmy, “that at this point? They know you're alive. And we've
all
been marked for removal. Deck and me, at least. Probably Jules, too.”

He nodded without turning to face her, as the silence stretched on.

It was only when she mentally started gathering herself up—to go upstairs and put some food in her too-empty stomach, to rinse off the dirt from the road—that Jimmy spoke.

“I can't imagine … how fucked up you've got to be,” he said haltingly, with his back still to Tess, “to intentionally hit a kid.”

At first his words didn't make sense. Her first thought was that Jimmy had somehow hurt little Ashton in his struggle with Sam and Alyssa. But then he turned to face her, and she realized from the look in his eyes that he was using the verb
to hit
as a synonym for
to delete.
Which was the accepted Agency euphemism for
to kill.

As if hitting a kid wasn't bad enough in the common-usage sense of the word.

“The seven-year-old John Wilson,” she realized. Was he really talking to her about this?

Jimmy nodded. “You've got to be … beyond evil … A psychopath. Two John Wilsons would have done the trick. Two would have caught our attention. The third, the child … That was… beyond twisted. It was sick.”

“This isn't your fault,” she said. “You understand that, right? If you really had died, they would've gone after the doctor who signed your death certificate. They would have found him and tortured him and killed him, too.”

“They know how to hurt me,” he spoke over her. “Whoever they are, they know things about me, about—” He stopped, but it wasn't to fall into one of his excruciatingly long silences. It was to start over. “It was right after I started working for the Agency. Before I was partnered with Decker. Before I even met him. Way before 9/11. It was a black op and I was in the field. Right place, right time—and I was tapped to delete a terrorist we'd been hunting for years. The Merchant. You know him.”

It wasn't a question, but Tess nodded. Everyone in the counterterror-ist community knew of the man known as the Merchant. He'd been ruthless
in the attacks he'd planned against the West. He was notorious for bombing schools and hospitals. He'd also expanded upon the concept of the human shield—always surrounding himself with children. He didn't climb into a truck or SUV unless it was packed with kids.

Sure, most of them were there because their parents were his supporters, but that didn't make the idea of using a surgical strike to take out his vehicle any less unpleasant.

Jimmy painfully, carefully lowered himself down again on the floor. “Our intel came from a reliable source. We knew the Merchant was in Turkey, in a little town in the mountains near Armenia. I was … nearby. In range. It was purely coincidental, but… I was in place.”

Tess knew what was coming. “Oh, God, Jimmy.”

He glanced at her only briefly, his face twisted in a grimace. “I fucking hate thinking about this shit. What's done is done, and I can't change it.”

Intentionally
hit a kid, he'd said. “Whatever you did,” she told him, “it wasn't the same as—”

“It was worse,” he told her, his eyes dark with self-loathing. “What I did was worse. I was set up to take the shot. I had maybe forty seconds while the target walked along a footbridge—it was the only way in or out of this church that was on an island, surrounded on all sides by a river. I knew he'd be wearing body armor, and I knew he'd have children with him, so I'm ready to take a head shot, which is hard enough for me under normal conditions.”

Tess nodded. She knew that much about him, at least. The sniper rifle had never been Jimmy's weapon of choice.

His silence stretched on as he stared at the floor between his feet, his gaze unfocused, his mind both miles and years away. God only knew what he was really seeing, thinking, feeling. …

Tess tried to bring him back, tried to help. “I know you didn't kill him.” The Merchant hadn't been taken out until August of 2000— ironically, it was Alyssa Locke who'd fired the sniper shot that had ended his miserable life.