Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (15 page)

But Hans was too stricken by what he’d just witnessed to question that remark. If the explosions had been powerful enough to create a percussion wave, it would have hit him no harder than the reality of what he’d just done, or contributed to. It was the blueprints he’d obtained—at great cost—from a contractor working on the building’s recent renovations that
had
made this possible. He looked to see if there’d been any obvious casualties, any bodies strewn on the ground. This attack, like the one on Inauguration Day, wasn’t meant to kill or maim great numbers. “Just a few, like Liesl Bower,” Ivan had told him. Now, Hans closed his eyes in self-loathing, wishing he’d never met Ivan Volynski. That he’d never been party to the attempted murder of that innocent woman.

Hans took a small step forward, but Volynski stood and pulled him back. “We cannot stay here now,” he said, as the mechanical screams of incoming emergency vehicles mixed with the shrieks of fleeing tourists. “Leave quickly,” he ordered, raising the scarf higher on his face, “and look for Sonya’s signal in the usual place tomorrow morning. If she signals yes, we will pick you up on the river. You know where.” He turned and hurried in the opposite direction from the escalating chaos.

Hans watched Volynski sidestep a knot of terrified bystanders watching the Supreme Court spectacle from a safe distance, or so they must have thought. Hans gaped at them. They weren’t safe. Not anywhere.

He had to get out of there. If it was true what Ivan had said about the guilty lingering to watch, and if the authorities might act on that, surely he would be questioned. He couldn’t let that happen. But neither could he move from that spot. Not out of some perverse thrill at watching his crime unfold. No, it was paralyzing fright like he’d never known before, not even when his attackers had cornered him and his brother in the alleys and waved their bats and lead pipes at them. Because his brother had known no English, the German he wailed only fueled the zealots’ rage.

The sound of a helicopter drew Hans back from the long-ago alleys. He looked up to see it close in on the court building, hovering over emergency personnel as they cleared the street for a landing site.

Instead of retreating, Hans shuffled forward in a daze, unable to stop himself. Something had caught his eye, and he no longer cared who noticed him. He’d seen a young woman drop to her knees beside a small body. A child.

Hans pushed his way through a growing crowd that the police were trying to disperse. But he kept moving until he stopped before the young mother now cradling her injured son.
How old is he?
Hans screamed
silently
.
Could he be nine? Can he speak English? Does this gash in his head and the blood running down his face mean he will die?

Did I do this? Did I kill this child?

Hans fell to his knees before the unconscious boy and sobbed, rocking back and forth on his heels, his face buried in his hands.

Then something happened that wasn’t possible. Not here. Not to him. But it did.

The young woman lifted one hand from her child and reached for Hans. She firmly gripped his chin and raised his face to hers. “Pray for my child!” she pleaded with anguished eyes. “God will answer you if you pray.”

Hans lurched back, staring incredulously at her. Him, pray? Was she insane? He had done this! God should strike him dead!

His eyes trailed to the boy, and he saw his brother’s face. Without a word, Hans staggered to his feet and ran.

Chapter 17

H
er forehead pressed against the tiny window, Cass looked down at the foamy mat of the Atlantic. As the jet gradually descended toward Charleston, she wondered what reception she’d get from Liesl Bower. A strange girl comes to her door on a Saturday morning and tells her that it was she, not the president, they wanted to kill. Why shouldn’t the celebrity pianist slam the door and call the police? She probably would. Then what? Cass would have to reveal her evidence? Implicate her mother?

Maybe Jordan was right. “Can’t you just call her anonymously?” he’d reasoned. “Detach yourself from it?”

She remembered her answer. “I’ve been detached since I was nineteen years old. Nothing good has come from it.” And that was the moment—late last night in her apartment—when Cass told him about Rachel. When she’d finished, she said, “If I can stop a death instead of causing one, I’m going to do it the best way I know how. And that’s not long-distance. Or anonymously.”

After he heard Rachel’s story, including Cass’s drunken tryst with Adam Rinehart, Jordan had enfolded her in his arms and let her cry. When she’d finished, he released her gently, wrapped her in a blanket on the sofa, and kissed her forehead. The only thing he’d said before he left was, “It’s time to heal.”

But Cass believed her wound would never heal.
There’s no one to forgive me
, she thought, watching a tanker bob like a bathtub toy far below her.
No one should
. She glanced at Jordan, dozing in the seat beside her. Even after the story she’d told him last night, he remained at her side. There was something so selfless and unconditional about that, and she didn’t understand it. She could only welcome it as one gulping oxygen after a painful ascent through drowning waters.

Her hand slipped lightly over his, and he stirred. “We’re almost there,” she whispered. Her heart swelled with affection for him, and she smiled.

Straightening in his seat, he looked closely at her, then rubbed his eyes and yawned. He glanced back at her and said, “It’s a good thing I’m here.”

She nodded agreement and was about to comment on his amazing devotion to her when he added, “You’ve got something blue stuck between your teeth.” He pointed at her mouth. “Probably a blueberry from your muffin.” He looked away and she could see his cheeks bunch with amusement.

“And this is the kind of help I can expect from you today?” she said, pulling a mirror from her bag and finding no such intrusion between her teeth. Then she looked out the window and grinned.

“See,” Jordan said, leaning forward to catch her expression. “It worked. Now we can die with smiles on our faces.”

Cass sighed and finally relaxed against her seat. Ten minutes later, they were on the ground at barely eight o’clock.

“I still can’t believe you got that guy in the Juilliard office to give you her home address,” Jordan said as they deplaned with only one backpack apiece.

“He would have flunked chemistry in high school if I hadn’t helped him almost every day after class,” she answered, trying to match Jordan’s long stride.

“So the debt is paid?”

“He assured me it was. They could fire him for that.” After all other attempts to find Liesl Bower’s home address had failed, Cass remembered
that
the pianist occasionally taught music workshops at the Juilliard School in New York. “By the way, have you logged her address into your handheld?”

“Yeah.” Jordan pulled out his mobile GPS as they navigated the busy corridor. “Tidewater Lane. Looks like it’s in the South of Broad district, which, I understand, is the epicenter of Charleston aristocracy.” He steered her into a café. “Let’s get some hot brew and food before we go any farther.”

They took a seat and ordered. Cass looked around the crowded restaurant, then back at Jordan, who was watching an overhead television screen behind her. “I only spoke to her a couple of times in passing that day at the Carnegie. I wonder what Liesl Bower’s really like.”

Jordan glanced at her. “You mean on a normal day when no one’s trying to blow her up?” He shifted his attention back to the television.

Cass stared at the empty tabletop. “This is nuts,” she said in a raspy whisper, not wanting anyone else to hear. “How do we tell her what we know without revealing
how
we know it. She’s going to want evidence, and I can’t give it to her. I can’t do that to Mom.”

She waited for Jordan to turn his attention to her. But something on the screen had already captured it. “Jordan, you’re not listening to—”

“Cass, look!” he pointed over her head.

Before she could turn in her seat, she heard, “The bombing of the Supreme Court Building in Washington earlier this morning …” Cass jumped to her feet and spun toward the screen as the on-scene reporter continued.

“Explosives apparently buried in the side yards detonated about fifteen seconds before the bomb that gutted the basement where maintenance storage, the garage, and the high court’s mail-handling facility are located. Two people were killed, a mail-room clerk and a security guard. Only a few bystanders were injured by the exterior blasts, one of them a young boy with a critical head wound. Authorities attribute the few casualties to the early-morning hour, the extreme cold, and to the fact that the building is closed on weekends.”

Cass turned fiery eyes toward Jordan, remembering his words last
night
in Hans’s study.
Why would he have blueprints of the U.S. Supreme Court Building?

Why would he have a diagram of the inauguration platform and the blast pattern centered on Liesl Bower’s piano? Cass’s whole body went rigid, and she struggled to bend her mind around what was happening.

“Jordan,” she said, leaning close to his ear. “This isn’t going to stop.”

Chapter 18

T
he old house on Tidewater Lane had been prepped for a day like no other. A wedding day. The caterer, florist, grounds crew, and a string ensemble of Liesl Bower’s music students from the College of Charleston would arrive at intervals throughout the day.

But only one person was up when the bell on the sidewalk door rang early that morning. Ian O’Brien trudged down the porch steps in flannel pajamas barely concealed by a woman’s pink chenille bathrobe, the quickest thing he could grab on his dash from the kitchen. “Gonna wake up the whole house,” he grumbled to himself while scratching his gray beard. He opened the door fronting on the sidewalk and glared at the three men who, at first sight of Ian, seemed to forget why they were there.

“Let me guess,” Ian said, eyeing the truck at the curb. “You’re the yard crew, right?”

While two of the men stared openmouthed at the pink robe, the third didn’t miss the appropriate beat. “And you must be the lady of the house.”

As the three men struggled to contain themselves, Ian stepped out in front of them, standing taller and at least fifteen pounds heavier than any of them. The men eyed him carefully. “If you hadn’t shown up at the crack of dawn,” Ian growled, “I wouldn’t be standing out here looking like a ninny trying to make you stop ringing this bell.” He looked them square
in
the eyes. “Now, don’t you think it’s a little early to be running power tools out here? I got a house full of folks up there trying to sleep, not to mention the neighbors.”

The one who’d spoken earlier cleared his throat and pulled a piece of paper from his pants pocket. “Sorry, sir,” he said, avoiding Ian’s scowl, “but our instructions are to clean up the yards and bring all those potted palms we got there in the truck into the house.” He scratched his head. “Guess we could do the quiet part first.”

“And which part is that?”

“Well, we can rake without a lot of noise, don’t you think, fellas?” he asked, turning to his coworkers. “I mean, we don’t have to chant or anything like that.”

As they all nodded agreeably, something unspoken tugging at the corners of their mouths, Cade O’Brien emerged from his ground-floor apartment. “What’s going on, Pop?” he asked, blinking hard. “And, uh, want to tell me why you’re wearing Liesl’s robe?”

The three men couldn’t take any more. One by one, they shuffled off toward the truck to retrieve their tools, their shoulders heaving. “Shh!” one whispered, looking quickly back at Ian.

“Come on in, Pop. They just don’t appreciate your feminine side like I do.” Cade laughed all the way up the steps to the main door of the house. It was one of Charleston’s iconic single houses. From the front entrance on the sidewalk level, an open-air stairway led to the second-level porch and formal entrance to the living quarters. The stately three-story dwelling had been the Bower family home since the early 1900s.

“Now that’s enough!” Ian stomped up behind him.

“Why were you upstairs anyway, Pop?”

“I just came up to start breakfast for everybody when those guys started punching that doorbell. And by the way, it’s ten degrees warmer up here. We’ve got to do something about the damp cold in that apartment of yours. I don’t know if I can take another winter down there.” They quietly shut the front door behind them and went straight to the kitchen, closing up the two entrances to it as well.

“You don’t have to,” Cade said in a low voice, focused tightly now on Ian. “After tonight, you’re moving up here with me and Liesl.” He grinned with unabashed pleasure.

“Nothing doing,” Ian said too loudly, and Cade shushed him. In a gale-force whisper, Ian added, “There’s already too many people up here. Her dad, her grandmother, and that caregiver woman who talks a blue streak. She’s got that long braid wrapped so tight around her head, it’s interfering with the on-off switch.”

Ian poured coffee for Cade, who moved to a chair at the kitchen table and looked wistfully out the window, unfazed by his grandfather’s rumblings. “This is my wedding day, Pop.”

Ian clapped a hand on Cade’s shoulder, handed him a mug, and settled into a chair next to him, his voice finding its moderate tone. “‘And God saw that it was good,’” Ian quoted from the first chapter of Genesis.