The Impossible Alliance (17 page)

He'd been too busy honing his other skills.

“Danke.”

She flushed as she spilled a third of the water over Abel's hand in her distraction. “I'm sorry. Please, let me—”

The old man tsked. But his eyes twinkled once again as he wiped his gnarled fingers on the edge of his wife's thermal blanket. “Still thinking of your husband, eh?” She couldn't help but respond to that weary, whiskered grin.

“How did you guess?”

He returned her genuine smile and patted the empty wooden chair beside his. “Because I think of my wife often, too.”

Alex passed the plastic cup of pills to the old man, sighing as she slipped into the vacant chair. She could use the break. It was late, almost 9:00 p.m., and she was exhausted. Abel glanced at the antique ring Orloff had lent her.

“The rubies are small, but beautiful.”

“You know gems?”

He shrugged. “It was a hobby of mine. I taught science and math here in Rajalla years ago.” Though he lowered his voice to a near whisper, her new hearing aid had no trouble picking it up. “Before DeBruzkya's time.”

Intrigued, she slipped the ring from her finger and passed it over, accepting the small cup of pills so that the old man could concentrate on angling the ring against the light shining from the line of flickering fluorescent bulbs running the length of the ceiling.

He smiled as he glanced back. “Small, yes. But as I said, very beautiful. Very dark. I have seen only one stone darker. But that one was as large as these are small.”

“It must have been expensive, too.”

He surprised her by shaking his head. “Free.” He chuckled at her disbelief, clapping his hand and the ring against this chest as his laugh mutated into a hacking cough. She passed the cup of water back, waiting as he drained it.
“Danke.”

“You're welcome. Even if you are pulling my leg.”

He swung his gaze, rheumy once again, to her work boots. “Pulling your—ah, a joke. But I am not teasing. It was enormous. Eighty-five and one-half carats.” Abel paused his whispered confession long enough to wave her closer, waiting as she scooted her chair flush with his. His voice was beneath a whisper as he continued, “I found it in the Hartz forest two months ago, amid the rocks beside the river.”

She couldn't help it, she smiled.

Either the man really was pulling her leg or one of the more debilitating effects of old age had unfortunately already set in. Rubies, as gorgeous as they were, were simply crystals formed from the mineral aluminum oxide. They owed their color to the presence of chromium. The more chromium in the aluminum oxide, the darker the red and, of course, the more precious the gem. If he'd taught science here in Rajalla, he would know that. He would also know that rubies had never been found in Rebelia. A ruby as blood-red as the one he'd described would have come from the metamorphosed limestones in Myanmar or the placer deposits in Sri Lanka. And none of those finds had ever produced quality crystals in excess of eighty carats.

“You don't believe me.”

“It's not that I don't—”

“It was already cut.”

She blinked. “Really.”

That did change things. Perhaps.
If
he was telling the truth. “Someone misplaced a piece of jewelry that large?”

“A brooch. Antique. The ruby was oval and set in white gold, much like your wedding ring.” He shrugged. “I was
attempting to fish in the river, but my line landed on the opposite shore, catching a rock, instead. I waded across.” He flashed his yellowing teeth. “It was my last hook.”

It was a wonderful story. But it was still a whopper. “I'll bet you can afford as many hooks as you like now.” She couldn't help but stare at the old man's meticulously darned sweater, the painfully thin shoulders beneath. He sure as heck couldn't afford adequate food or new clothing. For himself or his wife.

“It was stolen.”

Alex froze as her stomach bottomed out. She forced herself to count to ten. Then slowly, carefully, she swept her gaze around the triage bay. Jared and Roman Orloff had returned from surgery and were now examining a patient at the far end of the room. She didn't dare alert them. She didn't dare breathe. All she could do was whisper one word. One name.

“DeBruzkya?”

“One of his men.”

Sweet Mother in Heaven.

The dizziness from days past slammed back into her, but it had nothing to do with her coma or the whack she'd taken to her skull. It had to do with one-hundred-percent blinding excitement. The blistering rush of pure adrenaline flooding every square inch of her body. The thunder of blood pounding through her heart, hammering through her head, coursing through every blessed one of her veins. She sucked in her breath and forced out the next whisper, the next prayer.

“Does this stone have…a name?”

He shifted his gaze across the bay. By the time he pulled it back, the rheumy blue was careful, wary. “Why would it?”

He hadn't said no. Hadn't denied it. If anything, he appeared to be waiting to see if
she
knew. She sucked in the next breath and pushed out the next plea. “Tell me what happened. Everything that happened.”

He might be an old man marking the increasingly labored breathing of his dying wife, but he was a scientist. She didn't doubt that anymore. Not given the light now shining within those faded eyes. The blue seemed to deepen, darken before her very gaze as his shoulders straightened. His spine locked.

“I lied. The stone was not stolen from me. But it would have been. So I traded it.” He glanced about the triage bay. His voice was still soft, but proud. Defiant. “By then, I knew what it was. Still, I traded it. I willingly exchanged it for this room and for this cot. For that cup of pills you hold in your hand. For the clean water I drank. For the right to replace that water so I can give it to my wife to aid those pills in their journey down her throat. In their journey to free her from the pain. It was the stone or her. I chose her.”

She already knew the answers to her next questions. She asked, anyway. “Why are you telling me? Why now?”

“Because she is dying. My Elsa will last another day. Perhaps two. If I am very lucky, three. That is all. And then I will no longer care. Someone must know. I bequeath the knowledge to you and your husband.”

“Why?”

Abel Braun glanced across the room, to the tiny cot that a woefully stitched-together Mikhail had already been transferred out of this afternoon. “Because you care.”

“Dr. Orloff cares.”

“He does. But he also has too many others to worry about. The knowledge must leave this place. He will not. The stone must be located and destroyed.” He knitted the gnarled fingers of his right hand into those of her left and clamped down as he nodded. “It killed my wife. Yes, she would have died, anyway. But not so soon. Not so very painfully. And even though she was becoming little more than the shell of the woman I married, she was still my wife. I pinned the brooch to her sweater myself and within days she was ill, then dying. She wore it only
once
.”

Alex gasped.

He squeezed harder. “Yes, I am dying, too. Do not concern yourself with me. I have nothing left. Instead, you must find the man who took it before he learns how to use it. I met him only twice. He accompanied DeBruzkya on one of his hospital tours. I knew he could help me help her. God forgive me, I offered it to him. Find the man, and then you find the stone.”

She couldn't move. Hell, she couldn't think.

But she had to. Jared had finished with his post-op patients. A glance at her watch told her it was nearing 10 p.m. Well past time for them to head back to Orloff's for the night. There, she could safely fill Jared in on what she'd just learned. She should go, grab his attention. But she was also loath to leave Abel Braun beside his wife with nothing to do but time his heartbeats against her increasingly labored breaths.

The old man reached out and patted her hand. “Go. I shall be fine.”

She nodded and traded the pill cup, now crushed, for the antique wedding band. “I'm so sorry.”

Abel offered up another of those resigned shrugs, retrieving one of the pills from the squashed cup as she stood. “It does not matter. I will keep the morphine, but Elsa is past any assistance the Reminyl could have given. Please return the tablet to the desk and inform the nurse. Someone else may need it.” He pushed the cup, the second pill still inside, into her hand before she could turn.

Reminyl?

She couldn't help it, she stepped back.

She shouldn't ask, dammit. She'd already asked too much of this man. Fate had already asked. Stolen. But when she sought out Jared's broad shoulders as she had so many times during the morning, afternoon and evening, and saw the utter weariness in them—the sobering futility in his eyes as he scanned cot upon cot filled with their fresh crop of mangled bodies and the constant, quietly weeping res
ignation beside them—when he finally met her gaze and struggled so hard to produce a simple smile, she knew she had to ask. She had to know.

“Abel, may I ask what was wrong with your wife? Before you gave her the stone? Why did she take the Reminyl?” She waited as the old man pulled his lingering gaze from his wife's slumbering face to smile sadly into hers. Prayed.

“The Reminyl was for her Alzheimer's.”

S
he knew. Jared swallowed the acid that had been slowly but surely eating away at the lining of his stomach and his throat for the past thirty minutes. Ever since the moment he'd glanced across that triage bay, desperately needing the solace those soft, green, eyes could provide, only to discover that blinding horror and gut-wrenching pity, had finally replaced it.

Alex
knew.

Naturally he hadn't confronted her while they were in the triage bay. Nor did he when they reached the main doors of the hospital, as he settled her jacket on her shoulders and pulled her close—for their armed audience, of course—while they waited for their cab. Nor did he dare to broach the subject while in the rear of that cab, just stared straight ahead into the dark. Hell, he didn't even pause in front of Orloff's house, lock his hand to the top of that rusted, wrought-iron gate and demand she come clean. No, he waited until they opened the door, shut it firmly and carefully picked their way up those polished
wooden steps to reach the cloying privacy of the cramped guest room at the end of the hall. The moment she closed the door behind her, he spoke.

“He told you.”

She didn't deny it. He hadn't expected her to. But neither did she have the decency to face him. She stood at the door with her back to him, instead, dragging that gray jacket down her arms. She went on to waste another fifteen agonizing seconds as she zipped up the jacket and shook out the sleeves before folding one over the other. Only then did she pull herself up to her full height and turn.

“Of course he told me. Why shouldn't he? I asked.”

Maybe it was the lingering horror, the pity. The complete calm. The quiet determination in her face. He didn't know. All he knew was that he just snapped.

“Why shouldn't he? Because I asked him not to tell anyone, that's why! Christ, I damned near begged. I still can't believe I trusted him—again—but that's my problem, not yours. I just want to know one thing. How the hell did you get it out of him when he swore on his wife's grave he'd never tell? Hell, maybe you are screwing the man. Maybe you just decided it was prudent to lie about it. God knows you're lying about everything else.”

When she didn't answer, when she just stood there, as if rocked to her core with that damned phony innocence locking in to every single bloodless inch of her face, he threw up his hands and stalked across the room, stopping when he reached the narrow, shuttered window between the nightstand and the bed. He spun around in time to catch the silent working of her throat. He watched, still seething, as those full lips parted, quivered, then pressed back together.

Several moments passed before they parted again. A shallow breath bled out.
“Sam knows?”

Oh, she was good. Better than good.

He tore the zipper to his jacket open and yanked the sleeves down his arms. Unlike her, he balled up the coat
and flung it at the foot of the bed. “Give it up, lady. Why else does the man have you skulking around behind my back?”

Her throat worked again, this time not quite silently. “Wh-what are you talking about?”

“This morning? The mysterious package handoff? Orloff's office? The locked door?” He shoved his hands beneath his bloodstained sweater as he stalked across the room to her. When she held her ground, he hauled the crumpled sheet of paper from the pocket of his jeans and slammed it up against the wall, six inches from the deceptively soft curls at her right ear. Satisfaction seared through him as she flinched.

But a moment later she was back to cool. Composed.

“What's that?”

“Take a look.”

She refused to release his gaze long enough to glance at anything. The mood he was in, he didn't blame her.

“It's the goddamn manifest.”

Another swallow. Again, not quite silent. She followed it with another quick working of that slender throat. “How…how did you get that?”

“How else,
Agent
Morrow? I lifted it. From your bag.”

“It's not what you think.”

The hell it wasn't. He flattened the sheet against the wall and jerked his chin toward the top. “Take a good look at the header block, honey. You told me you got that blood and those supplies from a friend. I sensed then you were lying. But stupid, doubting me, I chalked up the instinct to the Alzheimer's. Figured maybe I needed to up the Reminyl level in my blood so it could rack my neuroconnections in tighter and stop up the slowly leaking sieve I've got for a brain. But you didn't get that blood from a friend, or the supplies. This manifest proves it. Want to know why?”

Nothing. Not even the quiet working of her throat. Just that damned deceptive mist in her eyes.

Determined to ignore it, he flicked his gaze to the man
ifest. To the string of words that'd been branded into his memory from the moment he spotted them. “It says here the supplies were donated by Endlich Medical, Inc. Perhaps you'd care to tell me how you're friends with a company that doesn't even exist—except on paper? Endlich Medical is a goddamned phony shell, Dr. Morrow. Much like that rubber chest I cracked open out in the middle of the Hartz forest. A
dummy
corporation. Or am I the dummy? Am I just having another charming
senior moment
courtesy of my blisteringly premature case of early-onset Alzheimer's?”

She finally opened her mouth.

He heard the air pull down into her lungs, felt her soft, shallow exhale. Smelled the tantalizingly sweet scent of her warm breath as it swirled up between them. He promptly purged each and every one of the unwelcome memories from his brain.

“The man who set Endlich Medical up is—”

“ARIES director Samuel Hatch. You know, our boss? That guy you're not sleeping with? The same guy who didn't tell you about the Alzheimer's. The guy who doesn't have you slinking around behind my back, making sure the marbles in my head don't drop out one by one and roll into the gutter before I can stoop over and scoop them up, much less finish my final mission. The same guy who's—”

“My uncle.”

He tore his gaze from the crumpled manifest and plunged it straight into her tortured stare. She was telling the truth. He didn't need another four milligrams of Reminyl to prop up his gradually disintegrating brain. He didn't need forty. He could see it in her eyes.

Just like that his fury evaporated. He searched for it vainly, desperate to grab on to so much as a trailing wisp. To have something to hold on to as he tried to acclimate himself to this sudden spinning sensation in his head. To the absolutely incredible knowledge. Samuel Hatch was her uncle?

She nodded slowly. “Yes, he's my uncle. And he never told me about you, I swear. I did call him today. To fill him in on the information I'd unearthed about Greg Krazner. I was lying to myself. I really called to ask about another name I ran a check on. A woman by the name of Janice. Sam didn't say a word. Hell, he practically hung up on me for the first time in my life. I'm guessing now that you were never involved with a twenty-eight-year-old, curvaceous translator who specializes in Russian.”

He blinked.

She shrugged. “Thought not. Then I'm also guessing that the woman I overheard you speaking to three months ago is a fifty-six-year-old scientist by the name of Janice Errington. And I'm betting Janice is a bit more than your run-of-the-mill scientist, too. Maybe even a doctor?”

“Geneticist.”

She nodded. “Makes sense. Now. So does that phone call I overheard in my uncle's guest room. While we're on the subject, let me make it clear one more time. Sam told me
nothing.
I ran across a note in Orloff's office listing your infection, Cipro, and another drug called Reminyl. I'm guessing now that Orloff was checking drug interactions for you. I may never have connected the Reminyl if it hadn't been for Abel.”

She seemed to think he knew what she was referring to. Christ. Had he forgotten something critical already? Maybe he did need to increase his dosage, because he had no idea.

“Abel Braun? Elsa?”

He shook his head. Her stomach roiled.

“The couple you lay next to for over an hour in that cot this morning while red blood cells drained into your arm?”

Relief flooded him. He flushed. “I didn't catch their names.”

He hadn't even asked. The social lapse had been deliberate, too. Why ask for someone's name when you were just going to end up forgetting it? Forgetting them. Only, once the old man had dropped his cryptic warning, he'd
realized he was going to have to let the guy in. At least far enough to get the rest of the story out. But the old man had nodded off before he could ask. And then he'd spotted Orloff leaving. With that package.

“What was in the box?”

The second her throat began to work, however subtly, silently, he knew it was coming.

The lie.

“Jared, that box was private. Personal.”

Yeah, that's what he'd thought. He pushed off the wall and stepped back. Away from her. The contents of that box were personal, all right. He didn't doubt her for a second. Sam had probably mailed her a personal bar of soap so she could have it on hand in case she needed to clean up after his very private, very dirty laundry.

She grabbed his arm. “Wait—”

He held up his hands. “It's okay. You keep your secrets. It's a good move. A smart one, too. It's not like I wouldn't have a fifty-fifty shot at blabbing your business all over the world before I forgot it, anyway, whether I meant to or not.”

He never should have said it. Much less let her know he felt it. Because here came the pity.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

He'd pulled some pretty ballsy stunts in his career. Pulled off some damned daring missions. Gone in to rescue folks his buddies had told him could never be rescued—and brought them out alive. He'd stared death itself in the eye more times than he cared to remember and had always come out the winner. But right now he knew that deep down, he was nothing more than a goddam, sniveling coward.

He proved it to the both of them as he turned away, slinking across that all-too-tiny room. He didn't stop until he was staring directly into a set of wooden slats, trapped on the wrong side of that suffocatingly narrow window.

He heard her cross the room, as well, felt her stop behind
him. He knew exactly what she wanted. More. She'd begged him to open up in that cabin. Well, he just had. He'd said more in the past five minutes than he'd said in days, than he'd said in years, and they both knew it. He also knew he had nothing left to give. Not to her. He couldn't risk it.

“Jared?”

He flinched. A moment later he was forced to close his eyes as those strong, capable hands reached out and tentatively cupped his taut shoulders. The same hands that had spread blankets, distributed pills, changed bedpans, mopped puddles of blood and far, far worse from the floor today. Hands that'd worked beside him and then with him to keep the life from seeping out of yet another child and then been willing to learn how to stitch the gaping wound left behind because there were no more pairs of hands left around to help.

Those same hands threaded into his hair, smoothed it, their subtle caress causing his breath to hitch somewhere in the middle of his throat, then stop up his lungs altogether. He cursed his decision to pull the ponytail out in the cab. Aching scalp be damned. Anything would have been preferable to the heightened sensation the loose hairs were picking up on and then magnifying before shooting down into his groin.

Lord, was he a bastard of the first degree. That he could even think about sex right now.

But the truth of it was, he'd thought about it a lot lately. Mostly about how much he missed it. About how much he wanted to have it…with her. Hell, he wasn't kidding anyone. He didn't want to have sex with the woman standing six inches behind him. He wanted to make love to her.

All night long. Over and over again.

He wanted to memorize every inch of that long, lean body. Every dip, every curve. He wanted to memorize her scent and her taste. The sensation of those agile fingers as they slid over him. He wanted to soak up the sounds she
uttered as he kissed her. Every moan, every gasp, every sigh. He wanted to stare into those soft green eyes and watch as the passion slowly clouded into the mist. And then he wanted to watch her as she came apart in his arms.

He'd give anything to remember it. To remember her.

Hell, he still wasn't even sure how it had happened, much less why. He just knew it had. He knew in his heart and in his soul that he'd sacrifice every word he'd ever read, every memory he'd ever formed, if he could just guarantee that he'd remember the woman standing quietly behind him now. But he couldn't.

And eventually he wouldn't.

 

Alex stared at the man's back as the last of the fantasy came crashing down around her. Jared Sullivan was dying all right, but it wasn't from Alzheimer's. At least, not just yet. Right now he was dying from the most insidious disease of all. Loneliness. She should know. She recognized the symptoms all too well. Even as she waited for him to turn, she knew he'd never do it on his own. She'd have to force him. Maybe even beg. She didn't care. All she cared about was figuring out a way to staunch his pain. She sucked up her pride and did it.

“Please.”

To her surprise, he actually turned.

She almost wished he hadn't. The anger and accusations had been bad enough, but she'd understood them. She also refused to let them get to her, to let him get to her. But how could she ignore the agony? The absolute devastation?

His eyes.

They were dark, almost black with pain and self-doubt and, yes, even fear. To see that in this man, knowing what he'd done in his life, knowing what he'd done for
her
—

Oh, God. She couldn't even finish the thought. All she could do was feel.