Girl of Vengeance (2 page)

Rachel smiled up at the nurse, even as Carrie flinched.

A second nurse entered the room. Expertly, the two of them began moving around Rachel, laying out towels and other equipment. The second nurse positioned a catheter next to a tiny needle, still in a sealed plastic wrap.

Melissa said, “Get a 25 gauge, please.” She began to swaddle the baby, leaving her right arm out.

The second nurse nodded. Melissa said, “This is Jodi. She’s one of our NICU nurses.”

Jodi smiled and took out a needle, slightly smaller than the one she’d previously placed on the table. A set of tubes stretched across the room, and various kinds of equipment were lined up. Both women wore gloves.

“Mom, we’re connecting monitors to watch her pulse and respiration and other vitals right now. Then we’ll start the lines. She’s going to cry a little bit at first, I don’t want you to panic.”

Carrie nodded and squeezed Sarah’s hand again. She was breathing too quickly and closed her eyes for a second, trying to force calm.

It wasn’t working. The second nurse, Jodi, held a pacifier with some liquid, and Rachel happily sucked on it as Melissa taped a board to Rachel’s arm and attached the various monitors and sensors. Then she wiped a brown fluid on Rachel’s upper arm.

In a low voice, concentrating, Melissa said, “Start the line.”

Jodi ripped open the plastic packaging on the smaller needle. Carefully, her face pinched in concentration, she pushed the needle into Rachel’s arm.

Rachel let out a choked cry, then a full-throated scream. Carrie flinched as the baby began to struggle inside the swaddling as her face turned bright red. The screaming got louder and Jodi shook her head, just once, negatively.

“Try again,” Melissa said, her voice quiet.

Jodi nodded and pulled the needle back.
Oh, God. She missed.
Rachel’s mouth was wide open, screaming as loud as Carrie had ever heard her. She sniffed and squeezed Sarah’s hand tighter. But she refused to close her eyes or look away from her daughter. She was stronger than that. She’d watched helplessly as her husband drifted away into death. She could be there for her daughter.

After preparing a new needle, Jodi pushed it in again as Melissa held Rachel down with one hand and dripped fluid from the pacifier with the other.

“Got it,” she whispered. She expertly inserted the plastic catheter. Rachel screamed louder, and Carrie’s vision blurred as tears rolled down her face.

Carrie struggled to hold back a sob.

Jodi attached a tube to the catheter.

“Ativan,” Melissa said. She looked up at Carrie. “Mom, that’s the pain killer. It will help pretty quickly.”

Jodi inserted a hypodermic into the line. Rachel continued to cry, her tiny mouth and eyes wide open. Tears rolled down Carrie’s face, mirroring the one on her daughter’s.

Damn it, why couldn’t you be here, Ray?
For the millionth time, she cried out inside,
Why?

Dylan Paris still felt a little woozy, a sharp pain stabbing his forehead as he walked between two Royal Marines. They wore sharp uniforms—form fitting navy blue suits with white belts, rank insignia on the shoulder just like U.S. Marines (though upside down to Dylan’s eyes), and white leather-brimmed officer’s caps with a red band. Unfamiliar insignia graced the collars and belts, and they wore medals on their chest rather than ribbons. Despite the finery, they wore serviceable sidearms, mean-looking Glock 17 pistols with a dull black finish. These guys were for real. And they were pissed.

At Dylan.

It was all right. He was alive, and by the fact that he was now being escorted into the Embassy for an interview with Prince George-Phillip, he guessed he’d successfully distracted the Marines long enough for Andrea to make it over the wall. His hands were zip-tied behind his back, and his head hurt, but he was pretty sure she’d made it.

Mission accomplished.

The Marines didn’t take him toward the main Embassy building, a modern three-story glass and brick structure which dominated the grounds. Instead, he followed them (or rather, was frogmarched in between them) toward the three-story brick building he recognized from the satellite photos as the VIP residence. His heart was pounding. What if Andrea was hurt?

At the sound of a roaring engine, Dylan glanced over his shoulder. The fluorescent green Oldsmobile he’d bought from Mendoza now had a Royal Marine behind the wheel. It was moving into the Embassy compound. He turned back to their destination.

The temperature dropped rapidly when they stepped into a large, dimly lit foyer inside the building. Dylan’s eyes scanned the room, noting the three other exits and the broad staircase, which circled around the left side of the room. The floors were highly polished and sported a twenty-foot wide Persian carpet, which probably cost more than Dylan’s lifetime income.

The first Marine said, “Stay here,” and the second grabbed Dylan’s arm. The first then walked away, his heels clicking on the marble floor.

That was the first chink in their armor. Real soldiers didn’t click their heels; they wore combat boots. Dylan continued to scan the room, noting escape routes along with more prosaic details like the crown molding. A moment later Clicking Heels came back down the hall and announced in stentorian tones, “His Highness The Prince will see you now.” The guards then took him by both arms and guided him down the hall to a scene that looked nothing like he expected.

Prince George-Phillip he recognized instantly. For the one thing, the family resemblance was startling. He was at least six feet six inches—Ray Sherman’s height. Tall and lanky, with thick eyebrows and a hawk nose, but otherwise with facial features similar to both Carrie and Andrea. His eyes, deep blue-green, were watering slightly.

“This is your accomplice, then?”

Andrea, who stood several feet away, nodded. Beside her, a girl—maybe six or seven years old—stood holding Andrea’s hand. The girl looked just like Andrea. Then she spoke in a wary voice. “Yes.”

“Remove the restraints, please,” the Prince said to the guards. “Please have Gertrude set up coffee and drinks and lunch. In the sunroom. Jane will be joining us—”

One of the Marines spoke rapidly. “Your Highness, I must insist—”

“You’ll insist on nothing. I realize their entry was unconventional, but here they are.” Without another word, Prince George-Phillip dismissed the Royal Marines and approached Dylan.  “I’m George-Phillip. And you are?”

“Dylan Paris, um … sir. I’m Andrea’s brother-in-law.”

The heel clicker produced a pair of scissors and cut the zip tie. Dylan immediately brought his hands in front of him and rubbed his wrists. Then he shook the hand Prince George-Phillip extended.

Andrea spoke immediately. “You acknowledge you’re my father, and you expect us to be able to just sit down for a cozy lunch?” Her voice was a high tension wire, ready to break at any moment.

“No, Andrea. But I’d like a chance to get to know you and for you to get to know me.”

Her expression remained blank, guarded. She nodded once. Dylan breathed a sigh of relief. He guessed he understood her hesitation. After sixteen years of being rejected by the person she
thought
was her father, it was no wonder she was gun shy about opening up to this remote man she’d never heard of until yesterday.

“Dylan,” Andrea said. Her eyes were wide and her jaw was clenched as she spoke the words, and her vocal inflection strange. She was on the verge of hysteria. “Did you know I have another sister? Who I’ve never met? Jane, meet my friend Dylan.”

Her eyes watered, and mouth closed, she released a low rumbling growl in the back of her throat in an effort to suppress her tears. George-Phillip looked at her aghast, as if he’d never seen a woman cry before and had no idea what to do.

Maybe he didn’t. Dylan looked at him, met George-Phillip’s eyes, and then jerked his head toward Andrea, trying to mentally send the command,
Hug her, damn it.

Dylan didn’t know if George-Phillip got the message from his bad miming, or if his human instincts had suddenly clicked in, but regardless of the cause, the Prince moved toward Andrea with his arms out and a sympathetic expression on his face.

“There, there,” George-Phillip said. He rested his hands on Andrea’s shoulders. “There’s no need to cry. This is one of the happiest moments of my life. I want it to be the same for you.”

Andrea began to shake, violently, and she sobbed, unable to contain the tears. George-Phillip pulled her to him and put his arms around her. Andrea stayed still, arms at her sides, but she couldn’t contain her crying. She sobbed, loudly, the pent up terrible grief of a lifetime of hurt. George-Phillip murmured some meaningless sounds, and Jane put her arms around Andrea’s right leg.

“Why are you sad?” Jane asked.

That just caused Andrea to sob more. Finally, she managed to compose a meaningful sound, a single word that rang out in the room with far more weight than he would have guessed possible.

“Why?”

After she said the word, she pushed back against the Prince’s chest, forcing him to release her. Fiercely, she wiped her face with the sleeve of the George Mason University sweatshirt they had bought—what … two days ago? Dylan couldn’t keep track any more.

“Andrea … my daughter.” As he said the word
daughter
, Prince George-Phillips eyebrows seemed to do a solo dance, rising high up on his forehead. Hard to imagine, Dylan thought, that a man with no poker face at all could survive as the Chief of Intelligence of a large country.

George-Phillip continued. “Are you asking why I’m your father? Or why you never knew about it?”

“All of it,” Andrea demanded. “I want to know everything. I want to know why I was dumped off in another country and never knew either of my parents. I want to know why … why…”

She paused, trying to compose her face, then said, “I want to know why I was left to believe I wasn’t worth loving.”

George-Phillip looked somber. Dylan was usually a pretty good judge of people. There was no question in his mind that the Prince was sincere. Men didn’t get that close to crying unless they were devastated.

“I’m so very sorry, Andrea. It breaks my heart that you didn’t grow up feeling loved.”

“You already broke mine,” she responded.

George-Phillip sagged. “Indeed. And Carrie’s, I suppose.”

“My mother would never have been…” She whispered, “…beaten and raped if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Carrie. It was
your
fault.”

“That happened first nine months before Julia was born,” he replied in a sad voice.

Andrea closed her eyes. “They met in Spain. When she was eighteen. You’re telling me he forced her then?”

George-Phillip sighed and said, “I’m deeply sorry to be telling you this, Andrea. It happened when she was sixteen. And her father died a few weeks later.”

“I don’t … why did she marry him?”

“She was forced, Andrea. By her priest and her mother. Those days, things were different, especially in Spain.”

Andrea shook her head forcefully. “No.
Abuelita
? Not possible. She would never force her daughter to marry a rapist.” She hissed the next word. “
Never.”

Dylan hoped Andrea wouldn’t piss off Prince George-Phillip to the point where they were forced to leave. He didn’t know what kind of legal limbo they were in—would they be arrested the moment they left the Embassy? For that matter, the police probably didn’t know where they were.

He didn’t think George-Phillip would do that. But neither of them really knew him, did they? And he
was
the head of the British intelligence agency. You didn’t get to that kind of high-level position without the ability to make some cold-hearted decisions.

Prince George-Phillip remained patient. He said, “I know there is much you don’t know, Andrea, and much that you have every right to be angry about. I’d like to tell you as much as possible, if you’ll let me.”

With a quick, firm nod, she said, “Yes. Fine. And I am hungry. Wrestling with your guards is a lot of work.”

“Come, then. Both of you. Jane, go wash your hands, and you may join us in the sunroom.”

Prince George-Phillip showed them where they could clean up—the
water-closet
, he called it—and a few minutes later Andrea, George-Phillip, Dylan and Jane were sitting at a cozy table in a room dominated by large windows on three sides. Surrounding the sunroom was grass, leading off to the trees and the row of houses on the other side of the fence.

With a wry smile, George-Phillip said, “We’ll have to do an audit of security here,” he said. “If you’d been an assassin I would have been done for.”

Dylan thought the Prince was right, of course. Even though Dylan had distracted the Marines, a sixteen-year-old should never have made it into the building.

A woman wearing a knee-length double-breasted tunic poured tea for all of them. There was no sugar in sight, unfortunately.

“Summer sausage rolls, Your Highness, with mini sandwiches and custard kisses.”

Jane’s face lit up at the last and she reached for the pastry.

George-Phillip blocked her hand with his. “Have a sandwich or two first, Jane.”