New Growth (Spook Hills Trilogy Book 2) (37 page)

Nicola popped open the clasp on the small red box with
gilded inlay.
 
She murmured in
appreciation as she viewed the diamond.
 
“Exquisite.
 
Your Callie has an
old-fashioned sweetness to her.
 
You must
honor the kindness in her heart.
 
You
have our permission to tell Ivy and Callie.”

“You sure?
 
The more people
you know, the higher the risk of a leak that you are alive and living abroad.”

“You deserve to be happy.
 
You have saved each of us.
 
You
allowed us to make new lives here in Spain.
 
Yes, you may tell them.
 
I thought
this might
happen,
and we typed up our
own addendum.”
 

Nicola slid four signed copies out of her briefcase.
 
“Sign these and the agreement is
complete.
 
We are authorizing you to tell
Ivy and Callie the truth of what happened that day.”

“I hope she will listen and think it through.
 
Not sure she is ready to commit herself to
me,” Mathew said.

“She will need to resolve her emotions around our
deception.
 
I’m afraid we asked too much
of you.”

Maxim had been sitting listening to the exchange and looking
thoughtful.
 
Quietly and in an unsure
voice, he asked, “If you do marry, where would you honeymoon?”

“I want to take Callie on a tour of the wineries here in
France, going first to the great champagne houses, over to the
Loire
, down into Burgundy, then through the
Languedoc
region with stops along the way and
into Provence.
 
Wines are our
future.
 
S
he
works with her uncle at his winery as his general manager.”

“If all that works out, perhaps you will sail the
Mediterranean with me for a few days after your journey?
 
By that time, I should own a sailboat
suitable for casual touring.”

“Wow!
 
That would be a
fantastic way to end our honeymoon.
 
If
Callie relents, I’ll talk
to
her about
it,” Mathew said.
 
“I’m sure she would
love to spend time with you both again.”

“And you, Moll.
 
When
will your time be?” asked Nicola.

“Zoinks!” Moll said, his voice rising in surprise.
 
“Still searching.
 
Need the right squeeze to trip the light
fantastic, you know?”

“When you do, I will make the same offer,” Cruze said.

“I’d be over the top to sail the Med with you.”

“The loss of my brothers created a hole in my heart I will
carry the rest of my life.
 
Even so, I
gained brothers in spirit.”
 
Maxim
pronounced the words in
a stout
tone,
making Mathew feel the truth in them.

“I now have what I never enjoyed before,” Nicola said.
 
“Men in my life who give me friendship.
 
How is handsome, gentle Brian?
 
Will we ever hear from him again?”

“Brian-boy is like up to his eyeballs on two projects with
our other guy, Terry,” Moll replied.
 
“He’s cuddling up to a
banko
-client
who wants us to expand into the United Kingdom.
 
While we are on this jaunt, he’s researching the 411 on what we need to
conduct business there.
 

“Been a bonus year for us.
 
Like
we went from couldn’t get a
call back from prospects to leasing office space, hiring a bunch of dudes and
expanding to London of all the rad places in just twelve months.
 
Blows the mind!
 
We need to chill the rest of this year, Brian
most of all.”

“Give him my best wishes for his holidays,” Nicola said,
ducking her head to hide a small smile.

“Wait a moment.
 
The
old smoothie assembled a little present for you,” Moll said.
 
He reached down and dug around in his
briefcase, taking out a white envelope with a little red ribbon tied around it.

Annetta appeared puzzled by Brian’s offering.
 
She teased the bow off and opened the sealed
wrapper, taking out a holiday card with a watercolor of Hyde Park in the
snow.
 
Inside
she
found an Adobe access code and a gift certificate for a year of
the Cloud software suite, including all their animation programs.
 
She passed it around the table.
 
Inside Brian wrote:

“To help start your
dream of producing a good guy/bad guy animation film.
 
May you enjoy a Happy Christmas and a
promising New Year.
 
With fond memories,
Brian.”

“I told Brian I wanted to one day produce an action
series, perhaps
an animated comic book with
heroes, anti-heroes and vanquished souls having characteristics of both,”
Nicola said.
 
“How kind of him to think
of me.
 
I am touched.”
 

Losing her equable demeanor, Nicola blushed, surprised and
self-conscious.

Mathew brought out a wrapped box for Maxim, containing a
thick book of images of Chihuly glass sea forms.
 
Maxim carefully undid the wrappings and took
the volume into his hands, caressing the cover image with reverence.
 

“This I will treasure.”
 
He spoke with
a broad
smile Mathew
guessed Maxim had almost forgotten how to use.

They spent the luncheon on more general topics.
 
Maxim talked about his work with glass and
about how he hoped to market a line of his designs.
 
He changed as he spoke of his fused glass
studio, losing any remaining hardness from his life in the drug world and
becoming a wistful artist and caring craftsman.

While odd to be close to these two renegades, the
experiences they had gone through together gave them bonds strong enough to
transcend time, distance and even changes of persona.
 
Mathew sighed in satisfaction.
 
Even though two notorious criminals sat with
him at the table, forty more, along with their henchmen and gangs, were incarcerated
and awaiting trial because of their cooperation.
 
Additional persons of interest continued to
be under investigation.
 
Nicola and
Maxim, as they now called themselves, had paid for their
liberty.
 
H
e
wished them well in their new lives.
 
The
Foundations they had established will benefit children for many years, making
him proud to be entrusted as a guardian of those funds.
 
Setting the money aside spoke well of the
cousins' hearts.

Callie reclined on the bed alone in her hotel room on a
wet English afternoon.
 
Susannah went to
a performance of
The Nutcracker
with
Rick and Sassy, but she begged off with a headache.
 
With Moll and Mathew taking the train over
from Paris later that day,
Callie
would
see Mathew at dinner.
 
She
still failed to reconcile herself to his
role in what transpired at the cemetery in Albuquerque.
 

When a rat-tat-tat on the door interrupted her
thoughts, s
he opened it thinking housekeeping
needed to come into the room.
 
Instead
Steve asked her to tea downstairs.
 
While she was unhappy with him for his part
in the trickery, she found his actions easier to pardon than Mathew’s.
 
Grabbing a rose-colored cashmere shawl and
her room key, she followed the big man to the antique hotel elevator and rode
in silence with him to the ground floor.
 
They walked to the back part of the spacious lounge, where Steve had
already ordered tea and sandwiches for three.
 
Steve explained that Ivy would join them after she freshened up.

“Callie, I know you are upset with Mathew for not telling
you about our scenario, the one we gave the ominous number 13.13,” Steve said
in his direct way.

She nodded but stayed quiet, unsure she wanted to discuss
this topic with Steve.
 
He would defend
Mathew as his friend.
 
To be fair to
Steve, he had helped her with finding a way to put her life with John Henry
into compartments in her past.
 
Steve
deserved the courtesy from her to hear him out.

“Two things to understand,” Steve said.
 
“First, even though Mathew made an excellent
FBI agent, the best I know, he didn’t run any
significant
operations.
 
Certain aspects of this case
made the sting both delicate and complicated.
 
We didn’t know all the players or who we needed to convince of the
Fuentes’ deaths.
 
Second, you and Mathew
share less history than
Ivy
and I do.
 
The night before, I asked her to trust me but
did not explain why.

“We take confidentiality at the FBI very seriously.
 
However, I have certain additional
information that I have now been authorized to release to you.”

Callie stared at him with distrust.
 
What could Steve possibly tell her to make
her feel any different about killing the cousins?

“Julio, aka Annetta, and Cruze are not dead, Callie.
 
They are alive and well and living under new
identities somewhere in Europe.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Steve pulled a piece of paper out of the inside
pocket
of his jacket.
 
“Here, read this.
 
It was signed at a lunch in Paris today.
 
Mathew and Moll were there with the Fuentes
cousins.”

Callie held out a shaking hand, took the document and forced
herself to focus on the words.

“This can’t be real.
 
You just want me to forgive Mathew.”

Steve nodded, pulled out his cell phone and brought up a
contact.
 
He handed the phone to
Callie.
 
“Here, call Annetta on this
line.
 
She goes by the name of Nicola
now.
 
Ask her something that you might
know that neither
Mathew nor I would
be
privy to.”

Callie stared at the phone in her hand, afraid to believe
the truth of what Steve was telling her.
 
She thought back to her conversation with Annetta on the plane back from
London.
 
Annetta had revealed that above
all things, she loved to eat lobster claws,
particularly
the little segment in the arm, just below the claw itself.
 
Callie dialed.
 

“Hello?” Callie heard that distinctive moderated middle tone
that Annetta used.

“What is your very favorite food?” Callie asked.

“That very
tender,
sweet bite of lobster in the joint of its big arm, right below the claw,”
Annetta said with a soft laugh.
 

“Annetta, you are alive!” Callie said, still hesitant to
believe.

“Yes, so is Cruze.
 
I
am so sorry for what we put you through.
 
We had to make our deaths convincingly final.
 
Please do not blame Mathew or Steve.
 
This was what we needed.
 
They carried it out at our request.”

“And you are safe?”

“So far.
 
We will always
be wary, but so far all is well.”

They talked for a few more
minutes,
and then Callie handed the phone back to Steve.
 
He spoke quietly to Annetta, wish her a Merry Christmas and put the cell
phone back in his pocket.

“The Fuentes needed the circumstances to be credible to the
FBI, the DEA, Gerkasky the Warthog and those drug dealers who busted
in,
” Steve said. “The news had to spread in the
underworld that Cruze Fuentes and the man known only as Julio were dead.
 
Their real
fates
have become
arcana
imperii
or state
secrets.
 
We took
DNA samples from each of them.
 
I
t
is officially on file and linked to the dead brothers/cousins, Cristo and
Eduardo.”

“Ivy and I could have acted our parts if you had told us,”
Callie said.
 
“What you did was cruel.”

“First, we did not expect you to be there.
 
We thought you were
at home.”

“Lenny knew.
 
Why
didn’t he say anything?”

“Part of being a federal agent is the discipline to keep our
plans and maneuvers clandestine.
 
This is
how we are trained and how we operate.
 
Mathew ran the operation as he did because he
wanted to ensure the Fuentes could escape to the second halves of their
lives.
 
Provided they lived up to the
deal we struck, we owed them a decent prospect for their safety.
 
The world must believe they are dead.
 
Otherwise, they will be hunted down by the
villains from their pasts, by foreign governments where they operated, and even
by the DEA or FBI.
 
Mathew set up the
ultimate
witness protection program.
 
When they turned state’s evidence for
us,
we became legally and morally obligated to
shelter them.”