Payback (8 page)

“No!”

Faith turned and raced toward the water. “NO!” she shouted to the sky. “I refuse to believe it. Do you hear me?” She’d lost her parents, her sister, her career and now her home. She needed to believe that whatever happened to Toby could be reversed. “You will not destroy my brother. You. Will. Not!”

But the pressure inside her chest said that fate could, and would hurt Toby, because Faith’s wishes didn’t matter. Unable to stand the thought, she sprinted down the beach, ignoring Mark’s shouts behind her.

She couldn’t bear another loss. She just couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough.

So she ran.

Chapter Five

M
ark cursed himself for an insensitive lout as he watched Faith sprint down the beach. He should have thought more carefully about whether to reveal the side effects of Kaufmann’s program. But he’d been so blindsided by the new experience of trusting another person enough to confide in them, that he’d failed to consider that a caring woman like Faith wouldn’t want to know that her brother might be programmed to kill her.

Keeping an eye on Faith, Mark gathered the debris from their lunch and tossed it in a trashcan. Then he headed down the beach toward her. At least he hadn’t gone into specifics about the program. He hadn’t told her what he’d witnessed in Ivanov’s lab and the strange effect seeing those men had had on his conscience.

Even worse, he’d just received confirmation that Kaufmann indeed had an accelerated program in place. Normally, a subject would take many weeks to transition into the optimal level required for inclusion on a Kerberos team. But if his latest information was correct, the accelerated program required only two weeks.

Which meant that Toby might not have the time they needed to save him.

For perhaps the first time since his mother and stepfather died, Mark cared about another person’s feelings. He hated knowing that Faith was hurting over Toby’s situation.

Up ahead, Faith dropped to her knees. Her head and shoulders curled forward and it looked like she’d buried her fists in the sand.

Mark slowed as he approached her. “Faith.”

She exploded up out of her crouch. Sand sailed toward his head and he realized she’d thrown it at him. “You’ve known this was a likely scenario since I met you and yet you said nothing. You let me… Let me…”

Mark grabbed her hands as they aimed for his face. “You said you suspected that Toby had been captured and put into the program. How was I supposed to know that you had no clue what that meant? If I’d realized your ignorance, I would have saved you this emotional pain.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t lose hope. Not yet. I can’t prove Jamieson had anything to do with your brother’s disappearance. Toby might have been killed in an accident someplace so remote that his body hasn’t been found yet. He might have been captured or killed by enemies he made while conducting another investigation.”

Faith’s tear-stained, grief ravaged face tore something loose inside of him. Mark couldn’t stand it any more. He pulled her against his chest and held her as she cried.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, clutching hold of Mark’s shirt. “I knew it was possible he’d been changed. Just not to the extent that you mentioned. I can’t…I can’t bear the idea that he might be trapped inside his mind, forced to act against his beliefs.”

Mark’s chin settled on the top of her head. “I can’t promise you that you’ll get back the brother you once knew,” he said. “But I will promise that I’ll do everything possible to find him.”

Her arms tightened around him. “Please. He’s my only remaining family. I can’t lose him. I just can’t.”

“I understand. After my father died, I didn’t want to be out of sight of my mother.”

Faith pushed away from him and swiped her hand over her face to dry her tears. “How old were you?”

Mark shook his head. “Not here.” Glancing around, he guided Faith toward a patch of sand sheltered by a fall of rocks. He removed his jacket and laid it down, then sat with his back against the rocks and Faith cradled against his chest. A remote part of his brain marveled at how he’d lowered himself to the sand without protest, when a few months ago he would have turned up his nose at sitting on anything less than a beach chair on top of a blanket. But the newly awakened part of him enjoyed putting Faith’s comfort first.

Once they were settled, he asked, “So, what do you want to know?”

I
f Faith’s life got any weirder, she’d start to wonder if she’d been cast in a movie without realizing it. In the space of an hour she’d ricocheted from fury and grief over seeing her house burn, to agonizing fear upon realizing Toby might be forever altered, to this aching tenderness over the gentle way Mark was treating her. The man might be a cold hearted bastard in his job, but he’d been nothing but considerate with her.

“Tell me about your family,” she finally said. “Did Jamieson truly order your father killed? Is that really why you’re working against him?”

Mark exhaled loudly. His cheek pressed against hers as he stared at the waves crashing against the shore. “It’s…complicated. The short answer is yes. And no.”

Faith laced her fingers with his and crossed both their arms over her middle. Then she turned her head and placed a soft kiss on his jaw.

Mark’s lips lifted into a half-smile. “My father was a judge in Boston, but his father was from Sicily. Part of the mafioso before he immigrated to America. My father was proud that he’d broken family tradition and was clean his entire life. He taught me not only to obey the law, but to love and respect it.”

He tightened his clasp on her fingers. “But when I was five, my father was kidnapped, tortured, and then dumped on our front lawn.” Mark cleared his throat and Faith braced herself. “He died in my arms.”

Faith pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Mark, I’m so sorry.”

“Everyone assumed it was retaliation for my father’s work, but no one was ever arrested for the crime.”

Faith heard the pain of the little boy in Mark’s voice and snuggled closer to him, drawing soothing circles on the backs of his hands with her thumbs.

“My mother was Russian and had never really fit into Boston society. She wanted to be with her family again, so three years later, we moved to Moscow. At first, all was well. We lived in relative comfort. Then the patriarch of the family died and his successor didn’t get along with my mother. Later, I learned that under his guidance, one of Mother’s cousins had taken control of the money that came from her widow benefits and my father’s life insurance policy. He used the money to try and recoup the family’s losses from bad investments. Instead, he lost Mother’s money, too. But at the time, all I knew was that there was a huge fight and they threw us out. Mother and I ended up in a substandard apartment in the poorest section of town, barely able to afford the rent from the meager funds she had left.

“Because she’d been raised in high society, and my father’s job had ensured that she didn’t have to work, my mother didn’t have any marketable skills. She couldn’t find a job and we soon ran out of money. I went out onto the streets and quickly learned how to beg or steal enough so that we could buy food and keep up with the rent.”

Faith bit her lip to keep back her cry of protest.

“I didn’t care who I hurt or wronged, as long as my mother had food and shelter. Every lesson my father had taught me went down the drain. Survival was everything.”

“How long were you on the streets?”

He shrugged. “On and off for about three years.”

This time she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “Oh, Mark!”

“It wasn’t so bad. I soon earned a reputation. The other kids were afraid of me and that afforded me some protection.”

“Didn’t your mother worry about you? Wasn’t there anyone in your family who could have helped you?”

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mother was severely depressed. Her focus was turned so completely inward that…” He coughed, then fell silent.

“What?”

“I’m not sure she always remembered that she had a son.”

Her throat too tight to speak, Faith repositioned herself so that she sat inside the protection of Mark’s arm, with her head on his shoulder. Then she pressed a kiss over his heart, moved deeply by the trust he showed by revealing his childhood to her. Now she understood why he’d developed such a callous attitude. Why he didn’t think of the potential pain his actions caused others. Mark’s emotional scars, whether or not he admitted to them, ran deep.

She also understood why he was so fastidious. It was a reaction to the time he’d spent on the streets. She could picture him as a grubby boy in threadbare clothes, scowling fiercely as he fought to earn enough money to keep him and his mother alive.

“My mother eventually came out of her grieving period and took more responsibility for her life,” Mark said. “She managed to land a job as a hostess in a tea house, but she barely made enough to pay for food and our room. However, she enrolled me in school, which I hated. I didn’t want to leave her.” He hesitated.

“You were afraid that you’d come home and find out that something had happened to her?”

“Yes.” Mark took a deep breath. “But she insisted, so I went to school. Then, a few months later, she met my stepfather.”

At the affection she heard in Mark’s voice, the hard, tight knot in Faith’s chest unwound.

“Talk about a fairytale romance. Sergei was a millionaire who owned an import-export business. He met my mother when he took a client to tea in the place where she worked. According to him, it was love at first sight. Before I knew it, they were married and the three of us were living in his palatial apartment. He even launched an investigation into the theft of Mother’s money, and eventually won back some of her funds.”

Faith smiled at the way he said the words with such fierce satisfaction.

“My stepfather took me under his wing. Trained me to succeed in business. He pointed out that the tricks I’d developed in order to survive on the street could be used to read and manipulate people in business deals. He taught me who was important to know and who it was mandatory to please. Most of all, he told me that it was possible to be a successful businessman, even in Moscow, and adhere to a code of honor.”

Mark’s fingers teased at the edges of Faith’s black wig and she wished she could rip the damn thing off and show him the real her. But she had to be smarter than that. Even here on this isolated section of beach she feared detection.

“I didn’t always listen to my stepfather,” Mark continued. “Trusting people didn’t come easily to me. I still considered myself in a fight for survival. Particularly once I was shipped off to boarding school, where I was picked on for being an American, even though by then I’d lived almost a third of my life in Russia. Still, I worked hard and rose to the top of my class. All the while studying my fellow students for behaviors I could mimic or weaknesses I could exploit in order to increase my status.”

Faith shook her head, her cheek rubbing against his chest. “I bet the other kids were scared of you. A badass straight off the streets. Did you bloody a lot of noses?”

Mark gave what she was coming to realize was an uncharacteristic snort. “Perhaps a few.” The satisfaction in his tone spoke to the tally being much more than a few. “I did have a lot of catching up to do, having missed so many years of school. But I eventually achieved parity with my peers. And my experience there is what led me to seek employment with the CIA.”

“How so? I can’t imagine the CIA recruiting in Russian boarding schools.”

Mark shifted position, so that Faith fit more snugly against him. “You’re right. It was nothing so direct as that. I didn’t get approached by the CIA until I was back in the United States, majoring in business at Harvard. But while reading
Crime and Punishment
in high school, I became obsessed with the idea of finding and killing the men who’d kidnapped and tortured my father to death. To do that, I needed strength. Skills. Power.”

“Men? But I thought you said Jamieson ordered the hit?”

Mark’s hand clenched in her hair, then relaxed. “As I mentioned, the initial conclusion everyone made was that the hit had been ordered by a mob boss in retaliation for a unfavorable verdict handed down by my father. However, no one was ever arrested for the murder. After I’d been with the CIA for several years, I uncovered the names of those responsible for kidnapping and torturing my father, and I…uh…”

“You killed them, didn’t you?”

Mark’s body tensed underneath her. The silence stretched out. Finally, he said, “Yes. That’s the kind of man I am, Faith.”

She ran her hand lightly down his chest. “That’s okay. I… I’ve been to that mental place where I was so angry and so hurt that I contemplated murder. But I still don’t see the connection to Jamieson.”

“I always assumed that the mobsters I killed were the only ones involved. Then Jamieson told me he had proof that the man who’d hired the mobsters to torture and kill my father was still alive. Bringing him Nevsky’s microchip became the price for that information. And for my admission into Kerberos.”

“So…you gave him the microchip?”

Mark’s chest rose under her cheek. “No. It turned out that Nevsky had a daughter that no one knew about. He arranged to have the microchip implanted in her abdomen during an appendectomy. The chip then received updates via a high powered radio receiver.”

Faith flinched. “Oh. My. God. His daughter agreed to this?”

“No. She didn’t even know her father. Her mother had run from Dr. Nevsky when their daughter was still an infant. Unfortunately, we learned that the microchip was booby trapped. Anyone who tried to remove it without knowing how to disable the trap would release a poison that would kill the woman.”

Faith craned her neck to peer up at him, her stomach dropping. There was something in his voice. “Were you in love with her?”

Mark’s body tensed. “I…um…” He swallowed heavily, but she had to give him credit. He met her eyes. “I thought I was.”

Faith bit her lip and glanced away, but he put his finger under her chin and turned her face so she was forced to meet his gaze. “Faith, what I felt for Susana Dias—”