The Unsung Hero (18 page)
Christ, he had to get out of here.
Because that wasn’t going to happen. Not tomorrow night, not ever.
Even if she wanted it, he was in no position right now to begin anything with a woman like Kelly Ashton. He’d spent his entire life avoiding women like her—the sweet, the innocent, the nice women who deserved lasting, committed relationships with gentle, caring men—and Kelly was their queen.
But, sweet God, he wanted her. He’d always wanted her, even when it was illegal to want her. Back then, it was easy. If he had touched her the way he’d wanted to touch her, he’d go to jail. It was bad enough that he’d kissed her. He’d banished himself for that, forcing himself to face the hurt in her eyes as he left without any real explanation. Afraid to be alone with her, he’d written a note. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.” He’d said nothing about her being too young, nothing about his fear that he’d be swept away by passion if he so much as faced her again.
He could still hear her whisper, “Meet me later tonight. In the tree house,” when he closed his eyes.
He’d wanted to. God, he had wanted Kelly more than he’d ever wanted anyone or anything. But his passion had terrified him. He’d taken only the time to scribble that note and put it where she’d find it before he’d taken off on his motorcycle, riding hard and fast until he’d run out of gas, until he’d stranded himself far from home.
Until there was no possible way he could make it back to Baldwin’s Bridge that night, to meet Kelly in her tree house.
But he was back in Baldwin’s Bridge now. And she wasn’t too young any longer. No, now the risks were far less well-defined, and mostly emotional.
But they were no less dangerous, because it was Kelly’s heart he’d be risking.
As Tom waited for the printer to spit out the second of his pictures of the Merchant, he glanced around Kelly’s room, trying to ignore the underwear.
Her bed was unmade. It was a colorful jumble of flowery sheets, an antique four poster complete with a blue canopy that matched the window curtains. It looked comfortable and cool, and he longed to crawl in, to soothe his aching head by closing his eyes and sinking back among her sweetly fragranced pillows.
Like a reverse Goldilocks and the three bears, he’d be there when she got home and . . .
Well, there you go. If he ended up getting kicked out of the Navy, he had a future writing scripts for porno flicks.
Jesus, what was wrong with him that he should be completely unable to stop fantasizing about Kelly this way? And the truly stupid part was that she wasn’t just some low-wattage babe he’d spotted in some trashy bar. The truth was that he respected Kelly. He admired her. She was brilliant and bright.
Back when they were both in high school, he’d loved to talk to her, to watch her brain work. She wasn’t afraid to disagree with him, although always politely, of course. She was one of the nicest, sweetest, kindest people on the face of the earth.
His instincts should have been to protect her, to revere her, to worship her from afar. To hold her in esteem, as she deserved to be—the way he did his grandmother, Mother Teresa, and Julie Andrews.
Sunlight streamed in through the curtains, through the French doors that opened onto a narrow balcony. It was pretty enough to look at, but completely idiotic when it came to Kelly’s personal safety. Any fool could climb up to the balcony in half a second. And the locks on the French doors were bush league. A four-year-old could have kicked them in.
Tom made a mental note to go back to Home Depot, get some proper locks. Dead bolts. After all, he wasn’t going to be in town forever.
Surely she knew. So why, then, had she asked him to dinner?
She was still attracted to him. He’d have to be a fool not to see it. But if he was a bad candidate for a love affair this morning, this afternoon he was even worse.
The fear that had grabbed him when he’d seen the Merchant at the Home Depot had lodged in his chest, solid and unmoving. What if he was crazy? What if he started seeing terrorists everywhere he went? What if, because of this, he really did have to leave the Navy?
Now, more than ever, he had to keep Kelly at arm’s length.
But now, more than ever, Tom wanted to lose himself in the sweet comfort of her arms.
God, he wanted her. And if she wanted him, how the hell was he going to keep turning her down?
The printer fell silent, and Tom shut down Kelly’s computer. As he crossed to the door, he had to shake another piece of silk and lace from his foot. Cursing, he took the pictures he’d printed out into the hallway, down the stairs, and into the dining room, only to find Charles and Joe smack in the middle of another argument.
“You’re wrong,” Charles said hotly. “That’s too obvious.”
“Keep it simple, stupid,” Joe countered.
Charles glared. “Who are you calling stupid?”
Pain knifed behind Tom’s left eye and his stomach churned. “Mother of God,” he ground out, and they turned to look at him. “I leave you alone for thirty minutes and you’re back at it. If you can’t get along without fighting, I don’t want your help.” He gazed sternly at his uncle. “I expected better from you,” he told Joe. “I mean, come on. Calling him names? . . .”
“Names?” Joe looked from Tom to Charles, clearly confused.
“Stupid, stupid,” Charles reminded him.
Dawn broke. “No,” Joe said. “It’s that expression. Tommy, you say it all the time. KISS simple. KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. I wasn’t . . .” He started to chuckle. “You thought I was calling Charles . . .” He looked at Charles, sitting at the table, taking a grim hit from his oxygen tank. “You thought it, too. I could call you a lot of things, Ashton, but I’d never call you stupid.”
Charles looked mollified. “Well, thank you. I think.”
“We were trying to figure out the best place near the hotel for a terrorist to leave a car bomb,” Joe told Tom.
Tom saw that, indeed, they’d spread out a huge map of the town on the dining room table.
Joe put one finger down on the map, directly on top of the circular drive that graced the front of the hotel. “I thought this Merchant fellow would just pull right up to the front doors, but Charles thought that would be too obvious.” He looked at his friend. “You went with us once, to take out the train tracks the Germans were using to send reinforcements and supplies to the front line. The Nazis were expecting sabotage. They expected us to sneak to some secluded part of the track, in the night. Do you remember what we did?”
Charles didn’t answer.
“We went in near the town, near the German barracks,” Joe reminded him. “They never expected us to come so close, so the tracks weren’t guarded there. It was Cybele’s idea—”
“Of course I remember,” Charles cut him off, suddenly looking every minute of his age. “You know I remember. God damn it!”
“Was this back in ’44?” Tom asked. He honestly wanted to know, but even more than that, he wanted to keep them talking. Who was this Cybele?
They both would have been impossibly young. Joe something ridiculous, like twenty, Charles barely twenty-four.
When Tom was twenty-four, he’d just finished BUD/S, the SEAL training program. He’d just been assigned to his first team, and he’d taken part in some dangerous covert operations almost right away. But he’d been trained. Extensively and exhaustively, for years. He was strong and fit, both physically and psychologically. He was prepared to deal with damn near anything.
And despite all his massive preparation, there had been times down through the years when he’d been scared shitless.
Joe and Charles had had a few short months, at best, of boot camp before they were tossed into the fray. Fate had dealt them a hand requiring them to fight a very personal war from deep within enemy territory—one of the very things Tom had been trained so extensively to do.
But they’d had no training in covert operations, no experience—not much more than an intense conviction that what they were doing was right and necessary.
Tom had grown up knowing Joe and Charles had fought in the Second World War, but he’d never known exactly what that meant before this. Sabotaging German trains. Going in close to the German barracks. Cybele . . .
Of course, he wasn’t likely to find out any more details, since both were silent, neither of them answering his questions, Joe looking at him as if he’d said what he’d said only because he’d forgotten Tom was standing there.
His uncle sat down on the other side of the table as if he were suddenly feeling as ancient and ill as Charles.
“You want me to leave so you can keep talking about this?” Tom asked them quietly.
“No.” They spoke in unison, both vehemently.
“I’ve made a few phone calls,” Charles said, clearing his throat repeatedly, changing the subject. “I figured we’d need a few more computers if we were going to catch this terrorist. I ordered three. We can use the east wing for our HQ. I ordered more phone lines, too. I had to pay out my butt to get them to come on Friday. And that was the absolute earliest they could get here.”
“Whoa.” Tom was dizzy now for an entirely new reason. “Before you start spending any money, you need to know—”
“That your superiors don’t believe this man you saw is really the Merchant?” Charles fixed him with a gaze that was laser-beam sharp.
“There is that little problem,” Tom agreed.
“Figured as much. It does sound crazy. A terrorist planning to blow up a New England seaside resort? What drugs are you on?”
“Which is why you shouldn’t be so quick to spend your money,” Tom countered.
“It’s my money,” Charles said crankily. “I’ll spend it however I damn please. It’s not like I’m going to be able to use it in a few months, so I might as well use it now.”
Tom sat at the table, wishing his legs didn’t feel so weak, pressing his left eyebrow with his thumb. Christ, his head hurt.
“What I have to do,” Tom told them, “is make my story sound less crazy. Tracking down this guy or finding this bomb I’m pretty sure he’s making would help.”
“A photo of him,” Charles suggested. He reached for the telephone. “I’ll get us some cameras.”
Tom stopped him, gently moving the telephone out of the old man’s reach.
“A photo won’t necessarily help.” He slid the two pictures he’d printed off Kelly’s computer toward the old men.
“That’s him, huh?” Charles asked, fumbling for the reading glasses he kept in his shirt pocket. “The Merchant?”
“I’m pretty sure this was the man I saw,” Tom told them. “But he doesn’t look much like this anymore.”
“He wouldn’t,” Joe commented. “Considering half the world is after him.”
“The changes he’s made to his face are subtle but it really does the trick,” Tom admitted.
“Any identifying marks?” Joe asked. “Something that would give him away?”
“Nothing that he wouldn’t have already changed. However, the extremist group he’s associated with in the past all wore the same tattoo,” Tom told him. “A stylized eye on the back of their right hands.” He drew the circular symbol of power and omnipotence for them on the back of one of the pictures. “It’s relatively small—no larger than a quarter, probably more like the size of a nickel. The Merchant I knew wouldn’t have had that removed, but now, who knows. If he’s still got it, he probably wears a Band-Aid to conceal it.”
“So we should look for a man about your height,” Charles clarified, “graying hair, bad skin, with a Band-Aid or a tattooed eyeball on the back of his right hand.”
Charles was really getting into this. In fact, ever since Tom had shown them the pictures of the Merchant, the old man hadn’t looked quite such a deadly shade of pale. While he didn’t quite have color in his cheeks, it had been several minutes since he’d needed his oxygen tank, since he’d had one of his coughing spells.
Still, Tom couldn’t keep from smiling, imagining Charles wandering up and down the streets of Baldwin’s Bridge with his walker and his oxygen tank, glaring at every passerby, searching for a man with a Band-Aid on the back on his right hand.
“What we need to do is get this Merchant’s fingerprints.” Charles declared. “They’ll believe you then.”
“Provided NAVINTEL or the CIA has a record of his fingerprints on file, getting a match would probably solve our problems,” Tom said cautiously. “But before we can get his prints, we’ve got to find the man. We’re going to need more than just three pairs of eyes for that. My XO, Lieutenant Jacquette, is coming into town Friday afternoon, along with Ensign Starrett and Lieutenant Locke.”
There had been email from Jazz. The rest of the men in the SO squad were tied down, but he and Sam Starrett could and would get leave. They would rent a car from Logan and drive out to Baldwin’s Bridge, ETA 1500 hours. Oh yeah, Alyssa Locke would be with them, too, God help them all.
“They can stay here,” Charles decided. “We’ve got plenty of room.”
“It would probably be a good idea to check with Kelly first,” Joe suggested.
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