by Anne Stuart
“Well done, lads,” a voice said. It wasn’t O’Banion’s voice, and Maggie wondered if their informant was lying dead in that pub. Randall’s body still held her immobile against the wall, and the two of them scarcely breathed.
“You want to see if anyone’s left?” another voice questioned. A woman’s voice.
“No need. We’ve been thorough enough. I think we’d better move fast. The villagers know well enough to stay behind closed doors, but we don’t want to risk running into any witnesses.”
“What about the Americans? Shouldn’t we make sure … ?” Again the woman’s voice, cool and businesslike.
“Faith, don’t worry, Maeve. They swallowed Flynn’s tale, hook, line, and sinker. They’re there, all right. And Flynn’s on his way to Beirut by now. It’s been a good night’s work. Stop looking for trouble.” They were moving away then, six or seven dark-clothed strangers on a walk in the damp night air. Their voices drifted away, then back, bouncing off the fog, and then faded away entirely.
Slowly, slowly Randall lifted his hand from her mouth. His body kept her pressed against the wall, and in truth, she was glad of it. For the moment she didn’t think her legs would support her.
“I couldn’t let you scream, Maggie,” he said, his voice low and grim. “You couldn’t have saved them, and they would have killed us too.”
“So instead we had to watch. It’s a hell of a choice, Randall,” she said quietly.
A bleak smile lit his face. “Be glad you didn’t have to make it.”
She nodded. He was warm in the chilly winter air. He was a few inches taller than she was, and broader, and his body covered hers, protecting her from the wind. She could feel his thighs pressed against her trembling legs, the bones of his hips, the warmth of his torso and strength of his arms around her. She knew she should push him away, but she didn’t have the strength. She used her mouth instead.
“You want to let go of me now?” she said. Her voice didn’t come out the way she’d planned it. Not terse and laconic, it sounded almost wistful.
“Not just yet,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment, and she could feel the tremor of pain and something else shiver over him. “Give me a minute.”
She stood very still. And then she sighed, dropping her forehead against his shoulder, and slid her arms around him. And they stood there, for countless moments, with the smell of death all around them in the fog-shrouded night.
“Do you think they’re all right?” Holly kept her voice casual as she toyed with the glass of whiskey. She was lying stretched out on one uncomfortable sofa in the deserted common room of the dingy, second-rate hotel Maggie had deliberately chosen, and one slender, high-heeled foot was dangling over the armrest. Her toenails were painted a pinky-lavender, a perfect match for her silk caftan, and Ian Andrews glowered at them every ten minutes. It was now almost two o’clock in the morning. The two of them had been sitting there in monosyllabic discomfort since they finished an amazingly horrible dinner at ten-thirty, which made it … twenty-one glares, she computed triumphantly. Or was it two hundred and ten … ? What the hell. She drained her whiskey.
“How should I know?” Ian demanded, pacing back to the front window. He’d been as restless as a caged tiger the entire evening, storming from the window to the doorway, perching for a moment on the other sofa, then moving back and forth. He’d taken two hours on one game of patience, drank more than his share of the bottle of Irish whiskey, and in general been a less than charming companion.
Holly sighed. “Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
“They should.”
“What do you think happened to them?”
“Maybe they got caught.”
“Reassuring, aren’t you?” she drawled.
“I’m not here for your reassurance. If you want someone to hold your hand you’ll have to look elsewhere.” He stalked back across the room and threw himself down on the sofa again. His strong body knocked the table, the cards slid to the floor, and his own glass of whiskey took a dive toward his lap. He caught it deftly enough, cursing, and glared at Holly. Number twenty-two, she thought. They were coming more frequently now. At this rate, even if Randall and Maggie made it back safely they might return to discover their accomplices’ bodies, locked in a death struggle.
“What are you grinning at?” he demanded.
Holly let her aquamarine eyes sweep over him with insolent cheer. “Just trying to figure out the best way to murder you,” she said sweetly.
He didn’t even blink. “Plenty have tried.”
She believed him and suddenly her amusement fled. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
He didn’t bother to look at her, or doubtless it would have been glare twenty-three. He stared down at his glass of whiskey, contemplating it as if it held the secrets of the universe. For a moment she didn’t think he was going to answer her, and she couldn’t blame him. As usual she’d been astonishingly tactless.
He lifted his head, his green eyes meeting hers. “Yes.”
Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, she thought. “How many?”
He could have thrown his half-full glass of whiskey at her, and she wouldn’t have blamed him. She had no right to ask him these questions, but the alternative was to worry about Maggie, and she couldn’t spend another minute doing that without going crazy.
He didn’t throw the glass, he drained it and set it down on the table in front of him. “I’ve been a soldier. I’ve been in wars. People lose count.”
“Do they?”
“Does it turn you on, lady?” he countered roughly. “Do you get all hot and bothered hearing about blood and death and violence? I’d be more than happy to tie you up and beat you if that’s your fancy. Just don’t expect me to screw you afterward.”
“You’re a pig, Ian.”
“So I’ve been told.” Dead silence reigned in the room, an uncomfortable silence. There was a sullen peat fire in the blackened hearth, and the hiss and spit seemed unnaturally loud. Ian was staring into that fire, unmoving. “Seven,” he said.
For once Holly stopped her unruly tongue. It was too alien a concept, the deliberate ending of seven lives, and she simply sat there, trying to absorb it.
“And it’s going to be eight,” he added.
Holly raised her head. “I hope you don’t mean me?” she said lightly.
“No. I don’t kill women, either for duty or pleasure.” He shrugged. “Timothy Seamus Flynn is going to be number eight.”
“What about a trial? What about innocent until proven guilty?”
“That’s an American concept. The first chance I get I’m going to kill Flynn,” he said.
“Unless he gets you first.”
“I’m going to have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“And if you fail?”
He smiled suddenly. It was fatalistic, ironic, and absolutely devastating. Holly just stared at him, momentarily besotted. “Then you, dear lady, are going to have to kill him for me.”
“This sounds like a fascinating conversation,” Randall drawled from the open doorway. “Are we allowed to interrupt?”
“Maggie!” Holly leapt off the couch and flew across the room, enfolding her sister in an enthusiastic embrace. “What the hell took you so long? Ian and I nearly murdered each other.”
“Don’t!” Maggie said, shuddering.
Holly drew back, her beringed hands still clasping Maggie’s shoulders beneath the thick green cape, and her eyes were searching. “What happened? You look like holy hell. Did you find Flynn?”
Randall reached over and removed Holly’s hands, so deftly that she barely noticed. “Why don’t you get your sister a drink? It’s been a long, cold night and she could use one. We both could.”
Holly hesitated, torn. Then she nodded, turning toward the much-depleted Irish whiskey and splashing a generous amount in two glasses. She presented them without a word, noting with concern that Maggie used two hands to hold her own gla
ss.
“So?” Ian said finally. “Did you see O’Banion?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we found Flynn himself,” Randall said. “What does O’Banion look like?”
Ian’s cursing was sharp and fluent. “Damn his soul to hell. Rory O’Banion’s a great bear of a man, six and a half feet tall, red hair, red beard, black eyes.”
“And Flynn?”
“Medium height, medium build, reddish hair,” Ian supplied.
“A charming smile?” Maggie questioned. “Blue eyes that would put Paul Newman to shame?”
“That’s Flynn!” Ian said. “Where is he now?” Andrews was already halfway to the door.
“On his way to Beirut,” Randall said.
Maggie took another healthy swallow, and a trace of color returned to her pale face. “He set us up, the bastard. He knew exactly who we were, and he had us walking right into a trap.”
“What sort of trap?”
“A group of them opened fire on a pub that catered to British soldiers. We were supposed to be in there too, waiting for O’Banion, or Flynn, or whoever he was,” Maggie said. “They didn’t bother to check, but no one was left alive. They were very thorough.” She shuddered and drained her glass.
“Who were they?” Ian demanded, his voice cold and hard.
“IRA, I presume. They were working with Flynn, whoever they were. There were six or seven of them, including a woman.”
“Woman?” Ian echoed hoarsely.
“The leader called her Maeve.”
“I don’t believe it,” Holly said.
“Believe it,” Ian said bitterly. “Women can be very deadly, and Maeve O’Connor is one of the worst. Flynn saw to that.”
The three of them turned to stare at him. “You want to explain that, Andrews?” Randall inquired suddenly, his voice deceptively gentle.
“If I thought it would be of any use I would,” he replied. “But it won’t help you in the least, and it’s my business. So we’re heading for Beirut, are we? The whole bloody bunch of us?”
“The whole bloody bunch of us,” Holly verified. “Got any objections?”
“A thousand,” he said. “But I know none of you will listen. When do we fly out?”
“There’s a flight back to London first thing tomorrow,” said Randall. “I suggest we catch it and work from there. In the meantime we’d better get what sleep we can. I sure as hell hope you don’t snore, Andrews.”
“I’m sure he does,” Holly muttered under her breath to Maggie.
Ian raised his head, his piercing gaze stabbing into hers. “You’ll die wondering,” he said.
“Thank the Lord for small favors,” she said devoutly.
“Amen,” said Ian.
Maggie huddled down in the narrow bed, shivering. It seemed as if she’d never get warm again—the cold had penetrated to the very marrow of her bones.
She looked over at her sister’s sleeping figure in the twin bed. It had taken Holly close to forty-five minutes to properly clean and cream her flawless complexion, to brush and floss her perfect teeth, to arrange her flowing midnight hair so that the hard pillow the little hotel offered did no damage to the rippling curls. Maggie hadn’t minded. As long as Holly puttered around, humming under her breath, cursing Ian when she discovered she only had seven suitcases out of her original twelve, the longer Maggie could have the dubious protection of the light.
Not for anything would she confess to her sister that she was afraid of the dark. There were many reasons she couldn’t tell her, one of which was habit. She was used to being considered the strong one. She didn’t want to admit to an irrational weakness at a time when Holly needed to count on that strength.
But most important of all, she didn’t want to tell Holly that the reason she feared the dark went back to a black night when she was sixteen years old and her stepfather had decided to forcibly initiate his infatuated stepdaughter into the joys of womanhood. Deke Robinson had been a drunken, uncaring bastard, but his daughter Holly had loved him, and there was no need to tarnish his memory any more than his own flamboyant acts had already.
But Holly’s beauty ritual had finally been completed, her cursing and humming had faded into silence, and she climbed into her own bed with a sigh, pulling the covers up around her silk-clad shoulders. Maggie had lain there, tense, waiting for her to extinguish the light, steeling herself against the darkness where banshees wailed over the bloody bodies that filled a shattered pub not ten miles away.
“Good night, Maggie,” she’d said, and curled up, leaving the dim light burning.
“Now this is more like it,” Holly said, her eyes sparkling in the blinding sunlight as she surveyed the bombed and pitted tarmac of the Beirut airport. The blackened carcasses of half a dozen bombed-out airplanes littered the runways. Not that it mattered—very few commercial flights flew in and out of Beirut nowadays. The one working runway could handle the traffic.
“More like what?” Maggie said. “It looks like a war zone.”
“Exactly. Everything’s been so damned civilized the last couple of days. I might as well have been on a modeling assignment.”
Ian turned to her with his omnipresent glare. “Lady,” he said in awful tones, “haven’t you been paying attention? There are seventeen dead in a pub in Northern Ireland. Twenty-five dead in a bombed-out gambling club in London. This isn’t some damned fantasy, this is for real.”
Holly’s bright look faded. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I wasn’t thinking …”
“We can’t afford to have you not thinking,” he snapped. “It’s bad enough having you tagging along—at least keep your mouth shut if you can’t keep your brain active.”
“You rotten little pig,” Holly began amiably.
“Stop it, you two,” Maggie said, and there was a note of steel in her voice that silenced the two combatants. “Or you can both go back where you came from. How many times do I have to tell you that we can’t afford to waste our energies fighting among ourselves?”
Randall slid an arm around her waist, and she stiffened, glaring up at him. “How many times, Maggie dear?” he said softly.
She didn’t hesitate, pulling herself out of his unresisting arms. “Common civility is as far as we need to go,” she replied. “What next?”
“I’m going to see a man,” Ian announced. “Alone.”
“What man?” Maggie asked. “Don’t tell me you got his name from your wonderful informant. We keep walking into traps, Ian. Don’t you think it’s time to share the wealth, let us know who keeps giving you this magnificent information that almost gets us killed?”
“No.”
“Come on, Ian, don’t be a drag,” Holly said. “You owe us that much.”
“Lady, I owe you nothing. I’d be doing a hell of a lot better if I were on my own, without the three of you tagging after me.”
“You’d be dead in a pub in Northern Ireland,” Randall said flatly.
“Or Flynn would.”
Randall shrugged. “Maybe. Do what you have to do. We’ll be waiting. We might even tell you where.”
“Does Beirut have any hotels still standing?” Maggie asked.
“Not many,” Randall said. “And we’re not going there. We’ll be staying with a friend of mine in the Hosni section of Beirut. It’s on the outskirts of the city, as far away from the fighting as anyone could manage. At least it was a couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple of weeks ago?” Maggie echoed.
“Where do you think I’ve been for the last four months?”
“I hadn’t even thought about it,” Maggie lied.
“If I’d been in the States I would have been around you.”
“Not if I could help it.”
“Children, children,” Holly mocked. “I thought we weren’t going to fight any more?”
Randall’s mouth was a grim line. “Must be the air. I’ll draw you a map, Ian. You can find us if you try.”
Maggie sat down on the narrow, sagging b
ed that was nothing more than a cot. The cracked plaster walls were dark and waterstained, the tiny room wasn’t much bigger than her bathroom in New York, but for the moment it was away from Randall’s increasingly intrusive presence, and for that she was more than grateful. Even Holly’s idle chatter was driving her to the edge of madness, and the silence in the small room was heaven.
She coughed, trying to clear her lungs of the dust that lingered in the bright, dry air. It had been a hell of a drive. Randall’s friend Mabib had been waiting for them, his battered Peugeot barely running, and their journey through the destroyed city had been slow and depressing. Through the rubble and desolation Maggie could see the traces of what had once been the loveliest city in the Middle East, and she sank back against the ripped cushions of the car and shut her eyes, half listening to the desultory conversation between the men in the front seat.
“I hadn’t expected to see you so soon, my friend,” Mabib had said.
“I hadn’t expected to be back so soon,” Randall had answered. “I’d hoped to see you on more peaceful ground.”
“We don’t often get what we hope for. Where did your friend disappear to?”
“He wouldn’t say. We’re looking for a man, Mabib. An Irishman, medium height, medium build, reddish hair, blue eyes.”
“Flynn,” said Mabib.
“You know him?”
“I know of him. I had word that he arrived last night, and right now he’s somewhere outside the city, at one of the training camps. The terrorists of this world are an odd bunch, my friend. They wander the world like nomads, always finding a home at the trouble spots. Flynn’s on some crazy sort of sabbatical, teaching some of our more bloodthirsty patriots.”
“Can you help me find him?”
Mabib had shrugged. “Who knows? I will ask around. Your friend might not help matters. It would be better if you left it to me.”
“We’ll do that.”
Maggie had opened her mouth from the backseat to protest, then shut it again, not saying a word when they arrived at the sturdy little house that, despite damage, was still standing. She’d been quiet, almost apathetic when Mabib had led her to her room, and she sat there on her bed, wondering where her energy and pride had fled. She could only be grateful she had a room to herself, even one so tiny. The house itself was so small she was surprised she’d been allotted a private room. Thank heavens for small favors, she thought with a weary sigh, sinking back on the bed.