Girl of Rage (5 page)

As he finished saying the words, he leaned back and whispered in her ear, “You okay, babe?”

She shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest.

I want to make it clear, you are not under criminal investigation at this time.

Which meant nothing. It meant they didn’t have anything yet, or they were on a fishing expedition, or they thought she’d done something and might confess. The whole thing reminded her all too vividly of the incredibly painful ordeal her sister Carrie had gone through less than a year before. Investigation at NIH. Husband court-martialed by the Army.

For a second, a flash of shame passed through her. She remembered shying away from Ray when she first heard the news. On trial for war crimes. For killing a little boy. For a few minutes, she’d let herself believe the crappy news she saw in the papers and on CNN.

Oh, Carrie.
She wished she’d been better to her sister. She wished
the world
had been better to her sister.

Finally she answered, “I don’t want to talk about it here, Crank. Let’s get to the plane. I need to know where everyone is.”

“All right, babe,” he said in a low, deeply concerned voice. “I’ll make the calls. You just … relax.”

She could hear the worry in his tone. And she knew it was her own fault in a way. Julia didn’t fall apart. Julia didn’t freak out. She didn’t panic or get hung up on anything and maybe sometimes she just
needed
to. Because right now, all she could think of was her sisters, wondering whether they were okay. Without thought, she found herself dialing her phone.

“Babe, it’s almost three in the morning back east,” Crank said.

“What about Jessica? Where is she?”

He shook his head. “Carrie texted earlier. Jessica called this afternoon. She’s out there somewhere.”

“Damn it, Crank.”

He put his hands on both sides of her face and leaned close. “Julia. Calm. Okay? It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”

“I know you can’t fix it all from this cab. We’ll fix this, Julia. Okay? But we can’t do it,
right now, right here.
”

She swallowed and nodded. Of course he was right. But that didn’t make it any easier.

Alex. May 2. 3:42 am.

I’m with Andrea. We’re safe for now. I’ll be in touch. Dylan.

That was all she had. She didn’t know where he was. She didn’t know if he was hurt. She didn’t know if he was
drinking.
She didn’t know if something horrible had happened. All she knew was he was with her sixteen-year-old sister, and that they were safe.
For now.

Alex had messaged Dylan back at least a hundred times through the night. But no luck. She’d gotten desperate enough that while they were still being questioned at the State Department, she’d shown his text message to her questioners. That had started a flurry of activity, which resulted in absolutely nothing that she could tell.

Sometimes Alex Paris thought she was going to explode from the stress. It seemed like nothing she did made things easier. She’d forgiven Dylan. She’d forgiven herself. She’d done everything she could to protect herself and make herself stronger. She’d stood by him when he struggled with the physical therapy. She’d stood by him when he was drowning in post-traumatic stress. And after a long fight, it had seemed things were getting better. That life was getting better. It had seemed that she was going to get her happily ever after, after all.

But real life didn’t work that way, did it?

It didn’t. Because shit happened. Best friends showed up with the news that people you loved were criminals. Best friends got killed, leaving behind young widows and unborn children.
Ray
had been killed, leaving a gaping wound in her sister
and
in her husband, and it wasn’t fair, because there was nothing Alex could do to heal either one of them. She’d spent the last nine months holding their hands and watching them cry, and watching her husband fall to pieces.

Because that’s what Dylan had done. No question. When Ray died, he took part of Dylan with him. In some ways, he’d taken the best part of Dylan. The honorable part, the part who would never lie to his wife. When Ray left, he left behind a shell of Dylan, a Dylan who looked the same and sometimes acted the same, but was actually hollow.

Sometimes Alex felt like it was
her
husband who died, not Carrie’s.

That’s exactly how she’d felt when they’d gone out. Was it only eight hours ago? It felt like a lifetime. His last words to her had been,
I’m just exhausted, Alex. I miss Ray and I’m tired and sick and just … please. Go without me tonight, okay? I’ll be fine.

So she did. She went out with Carrie and Sarah and the baby. While she was having dinner, armed gunmen had gone after Andrea and Dylan.
Why?
The questioning had been pointed. Did she know about the drugs? Did she know about the money? Both had been found in the condo. Did Dylan have something to do with it? Did she know where he had gone? Where Andrea had gone?

Nothing they said made sense. None of it.

It was nearly two in the morning before the DSS agents had brought them in an armored SUV to a nondescript ranch house in northern Virginia. They could have been anywhere in America. Drab brick. Scuffed hardwood floors. Sliding glass doors to a dark backyard. Well-stocked guest rooms, clean and impersonal. One of the rooms had a crib and was fully stocked with diapers, bottles, powdered formula, zinc oxide, and a hundred other possible needs for Rachel. Someone had been thorough.

The only thing the house didn’t have was safety. It was in the middle of nowhere. It was a
safe house.
It merely underscored the fact that someone had tried their best to kill Andrea and Dylan tonight, and that neither of them had surfaced since, except for that one, cryptic text message. Alex already knew every inch of the bare bedroom she’d been impersonally assigned. Roughly 120 square feet. A closet with a sliding panel door. Crappy carpet. Crappy windows, frosted to make her invisible to snipers, she supposed. A queen-sized bed that was far more comfortable than her and Dylan’s second-hand bed in New York, but not nearly as welcoming.

It was cold. And she missed her husband.

But missing Dylan was nothing new, was it? She’d had plenty of practice at that.

So Alex lay in bed, watching her phone, waiting to hear from the man she loved. Waiting to hear from the man she knew was fighting to keep his head above water but wouldn’t reach out to her for help. Waiting to hear from the man who she’d have done anything for. She didn’t cry. Alex Paris was all out of tears. Now she just lay there, waiting. Waiting, and wishing.

In the nearby rooms, she knew her sister Carrie slept, baby Rachel in her crib. At the opposite end of the hall, Sarah. None of the three of them were in good shape, but Sarah, in particular, seemed shaky. She hadn’t talked at all in the last couple of hours before they reached the safe house, only answering questions in monotone with as few words as possible.

They’d been in the safe house for two hours almost, but Alex hadn’t slept. Instead, she lay there in the bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing she could go back in time and change everything. Her wishing was futile. Frustrating.

She felt like she’d spent most of her relationship with Dylan separated. When they met and fell in love, they’d lived thousands of miles from each other, and that distance had almost killed them. She went to college; Dylan went into the Army. Only through a series of improbable coincidences and near miracles did they have a chance to become a couple again.

Then Ray had to go and die.

She knew it was irrational. It wasn’t Ray’s fault. It’s not like he committed suicide. He was
murdered.
But irrational or not, she was angry with him. She was angry with fate, or God, or whatever it was about the universe that allowed her husband’s best friend to die under those circumstances, leaving behind little more than a messy pile of survivor guilt.

Alex sighed. She was wasting her time, rethinking about the same things over and over again. She was exhausted and stressed and worried and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She rolled over, staring at the wall. Pale moonlight shone through. She could see the vague shadows of the trees in the frosted glass, swaying and rolling in the wind, the raindrops rattling against the gutters. It must be blowing like crazy, because occasionally the window rapped slightly in its frame.

Dylan and Andrea were out in that.

Somewhere.

Meredith Collins. May 2. 4:30 am.

Meredith Collins lay in her cold bed alone, staring at the ceiling, listening to the drumming of the rain outside and the echo of her own breath against walls which were too far away in an empty room.

It was half an hour before Leslie usually rose for the day, and he’d already been out of bed for half an hour. It hardly mattered—she knew he hadn’t slept. For a week or more, he’d been short with her, he’d been late nearly every night, and he’d spent long hours locked away in his office on the phone.

She sighed.
Poor Leslie.
He’d spent decades working his way up, enduring dangerous tours in places like Afghanistan and Indonesia. He’d devoted his life to his country, to the safety of others, and now he’d finally reached the pinnacle of his career. And instead of being able to relax, instead of being able to slow down and give orders, he’d become more stressed, more overworked, more—
cold
.

It wasn’t fair. Logically she knew that high office meant a lot of pressure. More pressure than ever before, because now not only did he have to do a good job, but he had to navigate the political waters of the White House with a fickle, inexperienced President and a Congress which had a vendetta against the federal government itself. It wasn’t enough to be good in that environment. You had to be perfect.

But knowing that intellectually wasn’t enough to ease her heart. It wasn’t enough to stop her from worrying as she watched her husband age before her very eyes.

She slid out of the bed. It was early, but she could at least get some coffee going and prepare to greet the day with some semblance of calm.

The truth was, she rarely knew what to do with her days anymore. Susan, their eldest, had graduated from Princeton and gone on to the FBI—she was now at the academy at Quantico and reportedly doing well. Woodrow and Franklin, the twins, were undergraduates at Columbia.

Since the twins had gone to college, her days were frightfully empty. Quiet. Leslie was gone from 5:30 in the morning until late in the evening sometimes, and their house had been too big even for a family of five, much more so for the two of them. Even when he was home, he wasn’t really here anymore. She sometimes filled her days with friends in her bridge club, and served on the board of the McLean Women’s Club, but when she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she unbearably lonely.

She padded down the hall in her bare feet, passing his office on her way to the kitchen. Unusually, the door was cracked. Leslie had soundproofed his office when the children were very young, and out of habit, he always closed the door.

She paused just for a second, her feet faltering, when she overheard Leslie say words that shook her to the core.

“I don’t really care, Danny. I want them found, and I want them dead. No more fuckups. Andrea Thompson and Dylan Paris need to turn up in the Potomac. Am I clear?”

She stopped, her feet buried in the thick plush carpet.

Andrea Thompson.
Wasn’t that—Richard Thompson’s daughter? She’d been kidnapped earlier in the week; it had been all over the news. What would Leslie have to do with that? It didn’t make any sense. Even though she never got involved in his work, even though she’d never asked questions or wondered or doubted, she found herself paralyzed in the hallway, listening.

“Yeah, I know,” he was saying. “But don’t worry about that. The Justice Department’s going to be holding a press conference this morning. Richard Thompson is going down. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.”