Echoes (31 page)

Vichy raised his hand, showing his companion that the driver of the Jeep had been injured, and Callie suddenly realized the other man was not Vichy's gendarme partner. This man was younger, with dark, slicked-back hair, sharp cheekbones, and a slim build, and he wore a pair of slacks and polo shirt rather than a uniform. He was almost pretty. Almost.

Could this be Henry Falcone himself? Both he and Vichy had machine guns slung over their shoulders, but Callie had traveled enough to know that was not unusual for police forces in countries other than the United States. And Vichy had seemed friendly enough with Mac. He'd even provided assistance with the DNA testing.

Again, Vichy called Mac's name, and Callie almost stepped out of hiding to tell him to stop, that he would get Mac killed. But her mistrust of that second man held her in place. Instead, as the sound of gunfire erupted within the cellar, she checked to be sure her own weapon still had bullets.

Vichy ran toward the cellar door. The other man remained with the vehicle. Just as Vichy reached the opening, Mac flew out, a silver briefcase in his hand. Callie had a split second to exult in the knowledge he'd made it before Vichy aimed his weapon at him. Mac lowered his head, dove for Vichy's legs, and the gendarme's weapon went flying. Without thought, Callie aimed at the other man and began firing from her hiding place.

The attack clearly came as a shock to him. He took a single step toward the men scrabbling on the ground, then retreated, climbed into the vehicle, and took off, tires shooting gravel in every direction. He'd be back, she was sure, and with reinforcements. Did the case contain the weapon Mac and Nash were determined to protect? She crept out, keeping her gun pointed at the two men rolling in the dirt, hoping she could get a clear shot at Vichy, and grabbed it.

The movement, or the sunlight reflecting off the metal, caught the men's attention. Freeing himself from Mac's hold momentarily, Vichy lunged at her. She backed away, but he grabbed her hand and tore the gun from her grip. Dismissing her as little danger, he turned to fire at Mac, who already had hold of him around the waist and was pulling him to the ground.

In desperation, Callie swung the briefcase at Vichy's head. It connected with a weird, hollow sound, at the same moment as the gun went off. The two men fell backward simultaneously, separating from one another. Callie spared a glance at Vichy to be certain he was unconscious, then stepped over his body to kneel beside Mac, who was cursing and attempting to sit up.

Blood poured down his left arm from a wound in the shoulder, soaking through the bandage she'd wrapped around his ribs. Callie pressed her hands desperately against the hole, but the blood kept pulsing out between her fingers.

“Harder,” Mac ordered through gritted teeth. “You have to press harder.”

Movement caught her eye, and she grabbed in panic for the gun only to relax when she registered Nash staggering out of the cellar. One side of his face had been scraped raw, and he was favoring his right leg, but when he saw Mac's condition he hurried toward them, dragging his shirt off over his head.

“Christ.” He took Callie's place, pressing his shirt to Mac's shoulder. “We have to get him out of here. Travis has
The Tramp
down at the dock, but this place isn't exactly accessible. And
The Tramp
, for all it's not huge, isn't a speedboat, either. Trey's in the air; I radioed him when I left the Lewis house, but I won't be happy until we're back in the US. We need to get this show on the road.” He slid an arm around Mac's chest and heaved him to his feet. Both of them swayed, and Callie was afraid they'd go right back down, but they steadied themselves.

“Grab the weapons,” Nash ordered. “And that.” He jerked his head at the metal briefcase. For the first time, Callie wondered just what kind of evil it contained that so many had to die for it. That so many were
willing
to die for it.

They made their way around the front of the hotel and past the pool to the path leading down to the beach. Callie kept watch behind them, becoming more concerned as she recognized the increasing density of the blood trail they were leaving. Still, no one followed. Almost to the sand, Nash paused, holding up a hand. A moment later, Callie heard voices.

“Friend or foe?”

Callie listened to the French, translating the parts she could catch. “Gendarmes. I'd say they're honest ones from their conversation, but that doesn't make them our friends.”

“No,” Nash agreed. “So we keep moving. Fast.” He started forward again.

When they stepped off the paved path onto the beach, Callie could see
The Tramp
anchored out about thirty feet from shore, but there was no sign of Travis. With the gendarmes so close, she didn't dare call out, but she didn't see how they could get Mac, who'd begun to sag heavily against Nash, out to the boat without help. Then Travis's head popped up from one of the small, sleek water-sports boats tied to the dock, and he waved them over.

They stumbled across the sand toward the dock, driven forward by the increasingly loud voices behind them.

“This will be faster,” Travis said as he helped them aboard and fiddled with some wires he'd pulled loose from the boat's dash. The engine choked, caught, and they pulled away from the dock as three gendarmes appeared on the beach. Shouting, the men ran toward them, weapons at the ready.

“Everybody down,” Travis shouted. He whipped the boat into a steep curve, sending up a huge wake.

Mac's face had gone gray. Callie and Nash pushed him to the floor and took up positions on either side of him, crouching as low as possible. A bullet
thunked
into the frail fiberglass side of the boat and Travis turned again, sending his passengers tumbling.

“We're almost out of range. If we'd been any closer, that would have come right through. But they're getting on the other boat. I didn't have time to scuttle it before you showed up.”

“I'm not killing cops,” Nash said. Callie raised her head and peered back at the beach. Several more gendarmes had joined their pursuers, and as she watched, four of them boarded the other speedboat at the dock.

“No worries,” said Travis, tapping his headset. “I'm on with Trey. He's only a couple minutes out. Take the wheel a sec.” Nash did, and Travis pulled a small electronic device from his pocket. The second speedboat fired up and pulled away from the dock. Just as it passed
The Tramp
, however, Travis pushed the button on the device he held and the larger vessel exploded, sending a shockwave through the water and capsizing the speedboat.

A grimly pleased smile transformed Travis's features, and he nodded in satisfaction before taking the wheel back from Nash. A moment later Callie heard the sound of helicopter rotors over the engine, and the Jayhawk appeared around a curve in the coastline.

“You're first!” Nash shouted over the noise. The rope ladder dropped.

“How are you going to get Mac up there?”

“Don't you worry; it's under control. Just get up there before the cavalry arrives from Marigot!”

Callie got. When she reached the top of the ladder, Joseph helped her into the aircraft, then turned around to steady the ladder again for Travis, who'd hoisted Mac into a fireman's carry and was carefully making his way up. Nash held the bottom, but the rope still swayed alarmingly, and Callie's stomach knotted. Only when Joseph was hauling Mac into the chopper did she realize she hadn't breathed since Travis had started his ascent.

Nash joined them, pulling the ladder up behind them as Trey headed out to sea.

She sat cross-legged on the floor of the chopper and positioned Mac with his head in her lap. The bleeding from his shoulder had slowed; the impromptu bandage was holding. Or maybe he just didn't have enough blood left inside him to force its way out. She stroked the hair away from his face.

“Don't you dare die on me, Aidan Macmillan Brody.” It was as close as she could come to saying the words welling inside her.
I need you. I love you. Please don't leave me. You promised.
None of them appropriate for this time and place.

His eyelids twitched. “Wouldn't dream of it.” The words slurred slightly but still brought hope. She turned to Nash.

“We need to get him to a hospital.”

“Screw the hospital.” Mac shifted and she could tell he was trying to get up. She held him down. He subsided but continued to argue. “The first thing we need to do is get that damned necklace bomb off you. For all we know, it has a timer built in.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Nash snapped, interrupting her incipient protest. “You'll both be taken into police custody the minute we land. No way around it. But this”—he tapped the silver briefcase—“should suffice as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I have to go up front and let Lexie know who to call to make arrangements. He stood, but Mac reached out and grabbed his leg.

“Get Boom-Boom to Puerto Rico to get that thing off Callie's neck.”

“It'll be quicker to let the local bomb techs handle it.”

“Right. Because San Juan sees so many sophisticated explosive devices.”

Nash nodded. “I'll see to it.”

“Try not to worry,” Callie said once he had moved off. “John wouldn't have let them put something on me that might accidentally blow up. He needed me alive.”

“Why? What did he plan to do with that operating-room setup?”

Callie shuddered, then tried to keep the remembered terror from her voice as she spoke. “From what he said, I'm pretty sure he recognized something was wrong with him. But he was crazy. Utterly insane. He believed he could use pieces of Mark Lewis's true children to correct the lack in himself.”

“Jesus.” Mac shifted position, and she resumed smoothing his brow, running her fingers through his thick, springy hair.

“It's over. You killed him, didn't you?” She'd known from the minute Mac had emerged from the cellar; he wouldn't leave her attacker alive. And although she didn't consider herself particularly bloodthirsty, she'd felt no guilt for the brief surge of satisfaction she'd felt.

“Yeah. But he died far too quickly.”

“He was insane, Mac. And, I suspect, miserable.” Amazing how forgiving she felt now the man was dead and no longer a threat.

***

“We're landing,” Nash said far sooner than Callie expected. Far sooner than she wanted. Mac needed help, but she wasn't ready to let him go. As if he heard her thoughts, he reached for her hand, drew it to his lips, and pressed a kiss into her palm.

“Don't worry, sugar, Seth's the best there is.” It took a minute for his meaning to penetrate.

“I'm not worried about me, Mac! You're the one who's been shot!”

“No problem. I'm hard to kill.” His voice, and his grin, had lost considerable strength, however, and she felt the press of tears behind her lids as she tried to return his smile.

“He is,” Travis assured her. He'd been so quiet since coming aboard she'd almost forgotten his presence. But then, she'd been focused on Mac.

The helicopter landed on the hospital's roof, and before the rotors even stopped moving, men swarmed around it. Men wearing scowls and suits, men with uniforms and guns, and men in scrubs.

They lifted Mac out first, placing him on a gurney. Medical personnel rushed him away, followed by police, while others kept Callie, Nash, Travis, and Trey in place. Once Mac had disappeared, a dark-suited man stepped forward and called Nash's name. Nash hopped out, conferred briefly with the stranger, and came back for Callie. And the suitcase.

“Trey, take her back to the airfield,” he ordered. “Travis, you can either go with him or stay here. You're both to give your names and cell numbers to the officers before you head out, and make yourselves available for questioning should the need arise, though I don't expect it will.”

“I'll stick around,” said Travis before Callie could beg him to do so. The police would want her and Nash—someone had to be at the hospital when Mac woke up.

***

Mac opened his eyes, winced at the light, and promptly shut them again. It was far from the first time he'd found himself in a hospital bed upon waking, but he couldn't remember another instance being quite as painful. And then his brain caught up with his vision, and he looked again to be sure he wasn't dreaming.

But there she was, curled into the chair beside his bed, feet tucked beneath her and her neck blessedly free of the bomb she'd worn when they'd wheeled him away from her. She'd showered while he slept, and her hair hung in a damp fall of curls over her shoulder. Someone had given her a pair of scrubs decorated with balloons so bright her fair skin turned ghostly in comparison.

Even the alarming outfit, however, couldn't leach the color from the bruises beneath her eyes or along her left cheekbone. A surge of impotent rage overwhelmed him; he'd gladly have gone back and killed the men who'd hurt her a second time.

She shifted in her seat and her lids fluttered. Gradually, her gaze focused. “You're awake!”

“Told you I was hard to kill.”

She rewarded his feeble attempt at humor with a brilliant smile. “I do believe you mentioned something to that effect.”

“Has anyone every told you you have a gorgeous neck?”

This elicited a full-on laugh. A more beautiful sound he'd never heard. “You're crazy.”

“I guess you met Seth?”

“Yes. He's very efficient. He took the bomb away to study. He said it was intriguing.”

“Naturally.” She obviously wanted to gloss over the incident, so Mac let it go. He'd watched the removal of a similar device from around the waist of a kidnapped executive in Atlanta. The man had almost collapsed in terror midway through the operation, though the bomb tech had kept up a reassuring drone of chatter designed to keep his mind off the possibilities.