Esperanza glanced at his watch. “We’d better head to the gate.”
Uneasy about showing themselves, they left the alcove and started through the crowd, each man flanking Beth to make sure no one jostled against her as she used her crutches. Not that she looked unsteady. Although she hadn’t been given much opportunity to practice with the crutches, her natural physical abilities had made it possible for her to develop a confident stride.
Decker felt a surge of admiration for her. She looked determined, oblivious to her pain, ready to do whatever was necessary.
And what about you? Decker asked himself. You’ve been through a hell of a lot. Are you ready?
For anything.
But he wasn’t being entirely truthful with himself. Now that the immediate practical details had been taken care of, he didn’t have anything to distract him from his emotions. He couldn’t adjust to the reality that Beth was next to him. He had a squirming sensation of incompleteness if he wasn’t with her. Even the brief time he had been away to buy the plane tickets had been exceedingly uncomfortable for him.
Ready for anything? he repeated to himself as he walked with Beth and Esperanza toward the line at the security checkpoint. Not quite everything. Fm not ready for Beth to be hurt again. I’m not ready to learn that she still might be lying to me about her feelings for me. I’m not ready to discover that I’ve been a fool.
At the security checkpoint, he hung back, letting Esperanza and Beth go through a minute before he did in case the ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills in his carry-on looked suspicious to the guard checking the X-ray monitor. If Decker was asked to open the bag, he would have a hard time explaining to the authorities how he had acquired a million dollars. The security officers would immediately assume that the money had something to do with drugs, and he didn’t want Beth or Esperanza to appear to be associated with him. The X-ray monitor showed the outlines of nonmetallic objects as well as metal ones, so to make the bills look less obvious, Decker had removed the rubber bands around the stacks and jumbled them in the large bag, adding a dirty shirt, a notepad and pen, a toilet kit, a deck of cards, a newspaper, and a paperback novel. With luck, the X-ray guard wouldn’t pay any attention to the visual chaos once he satisfied himself that the bag did not contain a weapon.
A woman ahead of Decker set her purse on the monitor’s conveyor belt, then stepped through the metal detector with no trouble. His pulse rate increasing, Decker took her place, setting the heavy bag onto the belt. The X-ray guard looked strangely at him. Ignoring the attention he received, Decker put his diver’s watch and his car keys into a basket that a uniformed woman in charge of the metal detector took from him. Decker wasn’t worried that the metal detector would find a weapon on him—he and Esperanza had taken care to disassemble their handguns and drop them into a sewer before they set out toward the airport. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to take the chance of any metal object, no matter how innocent, setting off the detector and drawing further attention to him.
“What happened to your face?” the female guard asked.
“Car accident.” Decker stepped through the metal detector.
The machine remained silent.
“Looks painful,” the guard said.
“It could have been worse.” Decker took his watch and car keys. “The drunk who ran the red light and hit me went to the morgue.”
“Lucky. You’d better take care.”
“Believe me, I’m trying.” Decker walked toward the conveyor belt that led from the X-ray monitor. But his chest tightened when he saw that the belt wasn’t moving. The guard in charge of the monitor had stopped the conveyor while he took a solemn look at the fuzzy image of what was in Decker’s carry-on.
Decker waited, a traveler who had a plane to catch but who was trying to be reasonable about security, even though there obviously couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with that carry-on.
The guard scowled, looking closer at the monitor.
Decker heard pounding behind his ears.
With a shrug, the guard pressed a button that reengaged the conveyor belt. The carry-on emerged from the machine.
“Your face makes me sore just to look at it,” the guard said.
“It feels even worse than it looks.” Decker picked up the million dollars and walked with other passengers along the concourse.
He stopped at a pay phone, asked the information operator for the airport’s number, then pressed buttons for the number he was given. “Airport security, please.”
Pause. Click. “Security,” a smooth-voiced man said.
“Check your parking area for a Pontiac, this year’s make, dark blue.” Decker gave the license number. “Have you got all that? Did you write it down?”
“Yes, but—”
“You’ll find explosives in the trunk.”
“What?”
“Not connected to a detonator. The car is safe, but you’d better be careful all the same.”
“Who—”
“This isn’t a threat to the airport. It’s just that I find myself with a lot of C-four on my hands, and I can’t think of a safer way to surrender it.”
“But—”
“Have a nice day.” Decker broke the connection. Before leaving the Pontiac in the parking area, he had rubbed a soapy washcloth over any sections where they might have left fingerprints. Normally, he would have left the car where street kids would soon steal it, but he didn’t want them screwing around with the explosives. By the time the Pontiac and the C-four were found, he would be on his way to Denver.
He walked swiftly toward the gate, where Beth and Esperanza waited anxiously for him.
“You took so long, I got worried,” Beth said.
Decker noticed the glance she directed toward his carry-on. Is the money what she really cares about? he wondered. “I was beginning to feel a little tense myself.”
“They’ve already started boarding,” Esperanza said. “My seat number was called. I’d better get moving.”
Decker nodded. He had spent so much time with Esperanza the past few days that he felt odd being separated from him. “See you in Denver.”
“Right.”
As Esperanza followed passengers down the Jetway, Beth gave Decker an affectionate smile. “We’ve never traveled together. This will be the start of a whole lot of new experiences for us.”
“As long as they’re better than what happened since Friday night.” Decker tried to make it sound like a joke.
“Anything would be better.”
“Let’s hope.” But what if it gets even worse? Decker wondered.
Beth glanced toward the check-in counter. “They’re calling our seat numbers.”
“Let’s go. I’m sure you can use a rest from those crutches.” Heading back to Santa Fe, am I doing the right thing? Decker brooded. Am I absolutely sure this is going to work?
At the Jetway, a United agent took Beth’s ticket. “Do you need assistance boarding the aircraft?”
“My friend will help me.” Beth looked fondly toward Decker.
“We’ll be fine,” Decker told the agent, and surrendered his boarding pass. He followed Beth into the confinement of the Jetway. It’s not too late to change the plan, he warned himself.
But he felt carried along by the line of passengers. Two minutes later, they were in their seats midway along the aircraft. A flight attendant took Beth’s crutches and stored them in the plane’s garment-bag compartment. Decker and Beth fastened their seat belts. The million dollars was stowed at his feet.
I can still change my mind, he thought. Maybe Beth was right. Maybe the south of France is where we ought to be going.
But something he and Beth had talked about at the motel kept coming back to him. He had asked Beth if she was willing to stay with him, knowing that she would be putting her life in danger, that Renata would try to use her to get at him. For the rest of Beth’s time with Decker, she would always be looking over her shoulder. Beth’s answer had been
, “Without you, I’d have nothing to look ahead to.”
Let’s find out if she means it, Decker thought. I want to settle this now.
The 737 pulled away from the terminal, taxiing toward the runway. Beth clasped his hand.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.
Decker gently squeezed her fingers. “More than you can ever know, I missed you.”
“Wrong,” Beth said. Engines whined outside their window. “What you did these last few days—I have a very definite idea of what you feel for me.” Beth snuggled against him as the 737 took off.
4
By the time the jet leveled off at 32,000 feet, Decker was surprised to find that he was having trouble making small talk with her, the first time this had happened in their relationship. Their chitchat sounded hollow compared with the substantive matters he wanted to discuss with her but couldn’t because of the risk that passengers around them would overhear. He was grateful when the flight attendant brought breakfast, a cheese and mushroom omelette, which he devoured. In part, he was ravenous, his appetite having kicked in. But in part, also, he wanted to use the food as a distraction from the need to keep up conversation. After the meal, refusing coffee, he apologized for being exhausted.
“Don’t feel you have to entertain me,” Beth said. “You earned a rest. Take a nap. In fact, I think I’ll join you.”
She tilted her seat back just as he did, then leaned her head against his shoulder.
Decker crossed his arms and closed his eyes. But sleep did not come readily. His emotions continued to divide him. The intensity of the long ordeal he had been through left him restless, his body exhausted but his nerves on edge, as if he was having withdrawal symptoms from a physical dependence on the rush of adrenaline. These sensations reminded him of the way he had once felt after his missions for the military and the Agency. Action could be addictive. In his youth, he had craved it. The high of surviving a mission had made ordinary life unacceptable, producing an eagerness to go on other missions, to overcome fear in order to replicate the euphoria of coming back alive. Eventually, he had recognized the self-destructiveness of this dependency. When he had settled in Santa Fe, he had been convinced that peace was all he wanted.
As a consequence, he was puzzled by his eagerness to pursue his conflict with Renata. Granted, from one point of view, it didn’t make sense to prolong the tension of waiting for her to attack him. If he could control the circumstances under which Renata came after him, he would be hunting her as much as she would be hunting him. The sooner he confronted her, the better. But from another point of view, his eagerness troubled him, making him worry that he was becoming what he used to be.
5
“We’re not exactly sneaking back into New Mexico. How do we know Renata won’t be in the concourse, watching whoever gets off this flight?” Esperanza asked. He had joined Decker and Beth, who remained in their seats, waiting for the other passengers to disembark at the Albuquerque airport. No one was near them. They could speak without fear of being overheard.
“That’s not the way she would handle it,” Decker said. “In an airport as small as this, someone hanging around day after day, doing nothing but watch incoming flights, would attract the attention of a security officer.”
“But Renata wouldn’t have to do it by herself. She could hire someone to watch with her. They could take shifts,” Esperanza said.
“That part I agree with. She probably does have help by now. When she was using McKittrick”—Decker glanced toward Beth, wondering if she had used him just as Renata had used McKittrick—“Renata would have kept her friends at a distance, to prevent McKittrick from getting jealous. But once McKittrick was out of the picture, she would have brought in the rest of her terrorist group from Rome.” Decker lifted his carry-on from the compartment at his feet. “A million dollars is worth the effort. Oh, they’re here all right, and they’re taking turns, but they’re not watching the incoming flights.”
“Then what are they doing?”
A flight attendant interrupted, bringing Beth her crutches. Beth thanked the woman, and the three of them started forward.
“I’ll explain when we’re by ourselves.” Decker turned to Beth. “Those stitches will have to be looked at. The first thing we’ll do is get you to a doctor.” He shook his head. “No, I’m wrong. The first thing we have to do is rent a car.”
“Rent?” Esperanza asked. “But you left your Jeep Cherokee in the airport’s parking garage.”
“Where it’s going to stay for a while,” Decker said. He waited until there was no one around them on the Jetway before he told Esperanza, “Your badge and your service pistol are locked in my car. Can you do without them for another day?”
“The sooner I get them back, the better. Why can’t we use your car?” Immediately Esperanza answered his own question. “Renata knows your Jeep. You think she might have rigged it with explosives?”
“And risk blowing up the million dollars in this bag? I don’t think so. As much as she wants revenge, it has to be sweet. It’s no good if it costs her—certainly not this much. My car will be perfectly safe... except for the homing device she’ll have planted on it.”
6
Midday sunlight blazed as Decker drove the rented gray Buick Skylark from the Avis lot next to the Albuquerque airport. He steered along the curved road past the four-story parking garage, then glanced at the two large metal silhouettes of racehorses on the lawn in front of the airport, remembering the misgivings with which he had first seen those horses more than a year ago when he had begun his pilgrimage to Santa Fe. Now, after his longest time away from Santa Fe since then, he was returning, and his emotions were much more complex.
He steered around another curve, reached a wide grass-divided thoroughfare that led to and from the airport, and pointed toward a fourteen-story glass and stucco Best Western hotel on the right side of the road, silhouetted against the Sandia Mountains. “Somewhere in that hotel, Renata or one of her friends is watching a homing-device receiver, waiting for a needle to move and warn them my car is leaving the parking garage. Whoever it is will hurry down to a car that’s positioned for an easy exit from the hotel’s parking area. My car will be followed as it passes the hotel. The person in the car will have a cellular phone and pass the word to the rest of the group, some of whom will have no doubt set up shop in Santa Fe. The person following me will take for granted that conversations on cellular phones can be overheard by the wrong people, so the conversation will be in code, at regular intervals, all the way behind me to Santa Fe. Once I get to where I’m going, they’ll move quickly to get their hands on me. There’s no reason for them to wait. After all, I won’t have had time to set up any defenses. Immediate action will be their best tactic. If I’m carrying the money, they won’t have to torture me for information about where I put the million. But they’ll torture me, anyhow. For the pleasure of it. Or rather, Renata will do the torturing. I don’t know where she’ll want to start first—my balls or my throat. Probably the former, because if she goes for my throat, which I’m sure is what she would really like to do, to get even for what I did to her, I won’t be able to give her the satisfaction of hearing me scream.”
Beth was in the backseat, her injured leg stretched out. Esperanza sat in front. They looked at Decker as if the strain of what he had been through was affecting his behavior. “You make it sound too vivid,” Beth said.
“And what makes you so sure about the homing device and the Best Western hotel?” Esperanza asked.
“Because that’s the way I would do it,” Decker said. “Why not the Airport Inn or the Village Inn or one of these other motels farther down?”
“Too small. Too hard for someone not to attract attention. Whoever’s watching the homing-device receiver will want to be inconspicuous.”
“If you’re that certain, I can ask the Albuquerque police to check the rooms in the Best Western.”
“Without a search warrant? And without th
e police tipping their hand? Whoever’s watching the receiver will have a look-out, someone outside the hotel checking to see if police arrive. Renata and her friends would disappear. I’d lose my best chance of anticipating them.”
“You’re worrying me,” Beth said.
“Why?” Decker steered from the airport thoroughfare and headed down Gibson, approaching the ramp onto Interstate 25.
“You’re different. You sound as if you welcome the challenge, as if you’re enjoying this.”
“Maybe I’m reverting.”
“What?”
“If you and I are going to survive this, I have to revert. I don’t have another choice. I have to become what I used to be—before I arrived in Santa Fe. That’s why McKittrick picked me to be your next-door-neighbor, isn’t it?” Decker asked. “That’s why you moved in next to me. Because of what I used to be.”
7
As the rented Buick crested La Bajada hill and Santa Fe was suddenly spread out before him, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains hulking in the background, Decker felt no surge of excitement, no delight in having returned. Instead, what he felt was an unexpected emptiness. So much had happened to him since he had left. The flat-roofed, clay-colored Hispanic-pueblo structures of Santa Fe seemed as exotic as ever. The round-edged adobe-style homes seemed to glow warmly, the September afternoon amazingly clear and brilliant, no smog, visibility for hundreds of miles, the land of the dancing sun.
But Decker felt apart from it all, remote. He didn’t have a sense of coming home. He was merely revisiting a place where he happened to live. The detachment reminded him of when he had worked for the Agency and returned from assignments to his apartment in Virginia. It was the same detachment that he had felt so many times before, in London, Paris, and Athens, in Brussels, Berlin, and Cairo, the last time in Rome—because on all his missions, wherever he had traveled, he had not dared to identify with his surroundings for fear that he would let down his guard. If he was going to survive, he couldn’t permit distractions. From that point of view, he had come home.
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