Shades of Gray (8 page)

The stress Andres was placing on his jeep made the engine roar like a tortured thing. Only the seat belt he had automatically fastened kept Andres in place as they hit the worst of the road and the jeep defied the laws of gravity in its bouncing, jarring attempts to become airborne.

He heard Durant cursing steadily beside him, heard the grunts and muffled exclamations of the machine gunner behind him who was holding on grimly to his gun. But Andres was oblivious to everything but urgency and fear.

And then they topped a rise, and in the instant before the jeep plunged downward into a hollow,
he saw Teo. The young soldier was no more than fifty yards ahead of them and going at a reckless clip, his jeep bouncing and slewing wildly.

“Andres, for God’s sake!”

He barely heard Durant, concentrating on squeezing the last possible ounce of speed from his laboring engine. With an iron will and sheer determination he held the jeep on the road when it should have gone off, and at a speed that was nothing short of suicidal. After a sharp incline the road ended temporarily to become the beach, turning back inland nearly a mile farther down the coast. Andres never slowed. The last bend before they plummeted down onto the beach nearly finished them, the engine screaming shrilly when all four wheels left the ground. Then they were on the beach, level and smooth, and Teo was no more than twenty yards ahead of them.

Andres’s feeling of triumph was short-lived.

Ahead of Teo’s jeep, far down the beach where the road began again, was a small band of heavily armed soldiers. Lucio’s soldiers. Whether or not they recognized Teo and knew he was
bringing them a prize was unclear, but they instantly fanned out, dropped for cover in the rocks by the road, and opened fire.

Andres’s machine gunner, well trained, immediately brought his own gun to bear on the soldiers, and the staccato chatter of his gun rose above the laboring scream of the jeep’s engine. Andres barked out a harsh command to stop the gunner, sickly aware that the angle was deadly, that the soldiers in the rocks weren’t high enough above them to make shooting past Teo’s speeding jeep a safe exercise.

The angle was indeed deadly. The soldiers, aiming toward Andres’s jeep and the one behind, couldn’t possibly keep Teo out of the line of fire. And it was inevitable that at least some of those men, few of whom were expertly trained or skilled marksmen, would hit the closer jeep.

Teo’s vehicle slewed furiously until it pointed toward the sea, rose up on two wheels, and shuddered violently. Then it flipped over with a grinding crash and rolled over several times, finally coming to rest in gouged-out sand, its wheels spinning futilely in the air.

Andres felt something tear loose inside him, some sound, some part of himself. The jeep slid jerkily as he locked the brakes, not even aware that Morales and his men had sped past, guns firing at the band of soldiers hurriedly withdrawing from the beach. He was aware of nothing, not time or motion or events.

He would be told later that his seat belt had been wrenched cleanly from its floorboard bolts, that he had left the jeep and approached the wreck with such inhuman speed that his men afterward swore that his feet never had touched the sand. And he could never explain later, even to himself, what guided him away from the wreck when he had seen nothing thrown from it. But something guided him, or called to him, because he found Sara yards from the overturned jeep.

She was a limp, tarp-wrapped bundle hidden behind a jagged rock that rose from the sand. She didn’t move when he dropped to the sand and muttered her name, or when he worked with awkward haste to untie the ropes that kept the tarp around her.

She didn’t move when he threw open the tarp, when a hoarse cry broke from him like something dark and dreadful on the wind.

Her head hurt terribly, and her whole body felt sore and bruised. She thought she smelled jasmine but decided it was a dream. The voice was a dream, too, a dream slightly out of focus, because that wasn’t his voice. His was a deep and commanding voice, sometimes gentle, sometimes hard, but it was never like this, broken and afraid and holding such pain. Never like this. So it wasn’t his, of course.

She listened, idly, to the voice. The words it was saying were halting, as if half forgotten or long denied, Spanish words with an old, old cadence despite the erratic pauses. Her head hurt so much that she didn’t try to translate with her uncertain Spanish, yet the meaning of the words seeped into her mind without volition and with surprising clarity. Praying. The voice was praying, and it wasn’t accustomed to praying at all.

Floating, hurting, she nonetheless felt powerfully moved to look at the face the voice belonged to, because it was curiously familiar—yet unfamiliar. She tried to open her eyes, failing at first. But then there was a lightening of the darkness, and the scent of jasmine grew stronger. With an enormous driving effort she forced her eyes to open.

Her room. Her room in Andres’s house, and that was why the jasmine. Her bed beneath her, blessedly soft against bruised flesh. And how had she bruised herself? Her head hurt.

The voice was more distinct, and she forced her aching head to turn, with agonizing slowness, until she could see him. There was something wrong with what she saw, and she was fretful because she felt she should understand why it was wrong. He was … he was kneeling. By her bed. He was holding her hand in both of his, his head bent over her, shoulders bowed, his familiar voice broken and hurting in an unfamiliar way, saying old words in a half-forgotten prayer.

And it was wrong because … because a devil
with no soul couldn’t shed tears, even in an awkward, unpracticed way.

She felt a new pain, somewhere deeper inside her, and tried to tell him not to do that, not to hurt her like that. But her voice wouldn’t come. Then he looked up, his ashen face tracked by tears, his black eyes so anguished that she would have cried out against such suffering if she could have.

For an eternal moment their eyes locked, and Sara felt a sudden easing of something, a curious sense of acceptance. Something that had bothered her terribly slipped away, even as she felt her eyes closing, even as she mustered her last strength to respond to his gentle grasp by tightening her fingers slightly. And she thought to herself as she heard his voice fade away that words of love in Spanish were wonderful to take into dreams.

Her lovely dreams were disturbed at some point by voices, one of them steady and competent, the other rough and urgent. Something
painful was done to her head, and she cried out half consciously. The rough voice, softened and hushed now, soothed her gently until the pain eased.

“Aftereffects of the chloroform. Shock. Bruises. Eight stitches in the head wound. And scalp wounds always bleed a great deal. A concussion, certainly.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Wake her up at least once every hour, just to be sure. If you can’t get her to respond, call me immediately.”

“Dammit! Will she be all right?”

Sara lost the conversation at that point, drifting away from it disinterestedly. She was vaguely aware of time passing. His voice called her now and then, and she always managed to rouse herself enough to murmur his name, though her eyes refused to open again for a long time.

A soft knock at the door half woke her some undetermined time later, voices reaching her clearly despite the lowered tones.

“Teo was killed, shot. Impossible to tell if it
was our guns or theirs. We’ve recovered his body, Andres. Do you wish—”

“Send him back to his family.” Andres’s voice was flat and hard. “Not in uniform. Not even a dead traitor may go home wearing the uniform he betrayed.” There was a slight pause, and then Andres added in the same tone, “Make certain everyone knows, Vincente.”

“Very well, Andres.”

Sara drifted away again, troubled by what she had heard.

It was night when she saw the room again, the lamps turned low and everything silent. And Andres was standing by the French doors leading out onto the balcony. Awakened by the throbbing of her head, she lay and watched him, as still and silent as he was himself. Someone had dressed her in the green gown, and she decided not to ask who had done that. She thought she knew, anyway. She watched him.

He looked so tired, she thought, so drawn. He had pulled back the filmy curtains with one hand
and seemed to be looking out through the doors, but his gaze was blind.

She remembered, then, two strangely vivid scenes, one seen and heard, the second only heard. In the first, Andres as he had been beside her bed; in the second, his flat, hard order that had sent a dead soldier home stripped of his uniform and all honor.

“Andres?”

He turned instantly, crossing to her bed, his eyes anxious but his expression masked by control. “Sara, how do you feel?” His voice, too, was controlled.

She watched as he sat carefully on the edge of her bed. “I feel sore. And tired. What happened?”

“One of—of my soldiers seems to have been in Lucio’s pay.” Andres’s voice was low. “He took you out in the back of a jeep, hidden in a tarp. We followed. During the chase some of Lucio’s soldiers opened fire down on the beach. Teo was shot, the jeep overturned. You were thrown out. You had been injured, struck on the head either during the wreck or earlier—”

“It must have been during the wreck.” She wasn’t surprised that in Andres’s voice and in his mind there could be the faintest question, the inescapable idea that she might well have had a hand in her own apparent kidnapping. “He told me you wanted me at the house, and it wasn’t until we’d nearly reached the cars that I wondered why you would have called me there. That’s when he—chloroform, I suppose.”

“Yes. Some was found in the wreckage of the jeep.”

He had accepted her explanation instantly, she realized, and with a relief strong enough to penetrate through his control and show briefly on his lean face. She thought of that young soldier. “You sent … Teo … back to his family. Without his uniform.”

“You heard that.” It wasn’t a question. His eyes shuttered themselves. “Yes, I did. He was a traitor, Sara.”

The harshness of that disturbed her, but not as strongly as she had expected it to. She just wanted to make it
fit
, make it somehow a part of
her unfocused image of him. “And if … if it had been my idea? If I’d asked Teo to get me out of here? Would he still be a traitor?”

“Yes,” Andres said flatly. “A traitor to
me
, Sara.”

She thought about that, wishing absently that her head would stop pounding. Was Andres’s action a harsh one under the circumstances? The leader of a revolution-torn country had to be certain of his army, yes; and treachery couldn’t be condoned or forgiven. In Andres’s world his action made sense.

“Sara, I’m sorry. I believed I could protect you here.”

She looked at him, at the masklike face and shuttered eyes. His voice, she thought, gave him away, and she wondered if, with her, it always would. It was a curiously comforting thought. “You couldn’t have known,” she said finally.

He shifted a little, not quite a shrug, not quite a denial. “Perhaps. Sara, if you ever—if it ever comes to a point that you feel desperate to get
away from me, tell me, please. If Lucio was ever to get his hands on you, I—”

“I won’t run away again.” Her voice was steady, certain. “I promise you that, Andres.”

Doubt flickered behind the shutters. “No?”

She felt a smile curve her lips. “No. It doesn’t seem to—to accomplish much, does it? As you said, nothing ended when I ran away before. It just stopped for a while. I’ve realized that I can’t live like that. Neither of us can live like that.”

He looked at her for a moment, and she thought he was undecided, although his face revealed nothing. Then, slowly, he said, “Have you made up your mind about us, then?”

Again his voice gave him away, and she didn’t need to see braced shoulders to know he was half prepared for an answer that would be a blow.

She tried to find words, in her own uncertainty, to tell him what she felt. “Can you make up your mind about a hurricane? No. It just … exists. Either you run, or else board up all the windows and ride it out.”

He smiled a little, not with amusement but with understanding. “Have you boarded up the windows?”

“I can’t run this time.” Clinging to the emotional safety of analogy, she said slowly, “And I don’t know what will be left standing when it’s over. Maybe I’ll find out that I’m not tough enough to ride out the storm. But I have to find out. We both have to find out.”

“Can I make it easier for you?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.” She drew one arm from beneath the covers and put out her hand to him, feeling the warmth of his long fingers closing instantly around hers. A little unsteadily she said, “Don’t muffle the thunder, Andres. Don’t cloak the lightning. I can’t hide from any of it—even if you want me to.”

A
NDRES LOOKED DOWN
at the hand he held and, after a long moment, softly quoted, “ ‘God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her.’ Is that what you mean?”