She shouldn’t have touched him.
The lump in her throat eased. A thin film of self-control stretched like Saran Wrap over a big squirming ball of panic and grief that was all she was right now.
I’m worse than useless. I’ve never even taken a Tae Bo class, for God’s sake. Even Tasha knows how to take out someone’s knee. “That’s what dancers do when you’ve really pissed them off, Annie!”
“Don’t worry so much.” Josiah was himself again, impossibly calm. “Did you ever wonder why Eric didn’t suffer?”
She had to swallow twice. The newfound calm wasn’t quite numbness, and it was fragile. If she didn’t move too quickly or speak too loudly, she wouldn’t shatter. “What?”
“He obtained a top-clearance file on me. If I was the bad guy you think I am, I would have liquidated him. Him having that fucking file was a major breach of security that could have gotten me killed and did end up costing me almost everything. But I kept quiet about it. For your sake, I might add. I didn’t turn him in.” He turned right, toward the interstate. Morning sunlight fell between still more warehouses, made train tracks gleam and showed a thin layer of frost edging weeds and grass. “Besides, if Eric had the connections to get that file on me, he probably stumbled over something bigger than I can handle with just myself and superficial backup this time. I want you out of the way if this all goes south.”
Liquidated. Clearance. Breach of security. Superficial backup. I know he’s talking English, but I barely understand. She fastened on the first thing that occurred to her. “You would have killed Eric?”
“I seriously considered it.” He turned onto the freeway on-ramp, smoothly, under a green light. “But no, I wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Miles began to slip away under the car wheels. “You considered it?” What else did you “consider”?
“You want the truth? There it is. I thought about it. It would have been tremendously satisfying, in the short run. He destroyed the only thing I valued.” His eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror, back down to the road. Traffic was light this early in the morning, and he kept the car at a respectable two miles under the speed limit.
The heater blasted her with warm air, just like yesterday—or the day before. Time kept slipping away from her. The whole thing was a bad dream, a waking nightmare. If she could just wake up in her own bed…
Anna watched the white line at the edge of the road, unreeling in its smooth ribbon, and flinched when her humming brain served up the most recent horror.
Scratch-scratch. Like a cat scratching at a door.
“How did they get in the window?” She sounded childish even to herself, but there probably wasn’t a better time to ask. Her brain just wouldn’t let any of this rest, zigzagging from one hideous event to the next. “And the…the bodies. What happened to the bodies?” I heard what you said, but it doesn’t make any sense. None of this does.
Maybe she was going insane instead of dreaming. Was Josiah a figment of her imagination?
Well, maybe not. For one thing, he was just as irritatingly imperturbable as he’d ever been.
He was silent for a full thirty seconds. “I wish to God I knew.”
That seemed to finish everything up, and Anna stared at the files in her lap. What had Eric seen? What had he been pursuing?
He destroyed the only thing I valued. She turned the sentence over in her mind, examined it from every possible angle.
A horrible thought floated up past the thin new layer of calm, drifting into the forefront of her mind.
Was it possible that Josiah was involved somehow?
No, he seemed as baffled as she was. Then again, he’d lied to her before, lied so well she hadn’t suspected anything was amiss. Lied every time he touched her, every time he kissed her.
“We’ll stop for breakfast soon.” He hit the turn signal and changed lanes to avoid a wallowing semi. “Just relax. There’s nothing we can do right now.”
“Relax. Right. Sure.” She didn’t mean to sound sarcastic at all, just tired. Her back hurt, her ankle and face throbbed, and her heart hurt worst of all, a deep, drilling emptiness of grief rolling itself tighter and tighter, into a diamond ball. She stared out the window, the feeling of deadly, shock-induced unreality growing with every mile of familiar-strange freeway taking them north.
Chapter Thirteen
The cabin sat on a pristine scallop of lakefront property, its windows golden stars in the gathering dawn. Firs, pines, and the occasional bare-armed maple or aspen crowded close. Josiah braked to a stop on the rise, spotting the dark blue Jeep right where it should be, and waited until one of the lights in the upper window flickered. A slow count of five, then it flickered again.
He waited for a slow count of ten, shut his headlights off. Five more seconds, and he turned them back on and descended the ribbon of indifferent paving jolting down the hill, finally pulling the sedan in a tight circle and backing into the space left for him.
Anna, asleep almost since they’d hit the freeway, breathed softly next to him. He’d wanted to stop for something to eat, but she looked so peaceful he ended up simply driving, ignoring the gnawing in his stomach. Even now, with her head tilted back against the seat and her long dark hair mussed against gray cashmere, she looked so tranquil and exhausted he almost didn’t want to turn the car off.
But he did, and sat watching the flush of sleep in her unwounded cheek as her eyelashes fluttered. She woke with a small start, looking wildly around, and his hand shot out, fingers closing around her wrist. “Easy, relax. We just stopped.” I’m here. Comforting words stuck in his throat; he swallowed them.
She blinked owlishly, green eyes suddenly vivid and the bruise on her face a bit better. Rest did wonders for anyone. “Oh.” She glanced down at her lap, checking to make sure the files were still there. Her lashes momentarily veiled her eyes, and her hair fell forward over her shoulder, and he remembered what it was like to walk down a snowy downtown street with her on Christmas Eve, looking in deserted shop windows as they headed toward her brother’s apartment for dinner.
Anna next to him, and everything right with the world; he remembered her having a little too much wine, and he’d promised Eric he would get her home safely.
Counting on it, Wolfe, her brother had retorted, with an odd gleam in his green eyes that matched his sister’s. Just see that you do.
All the things he wanted to say to her climbed back up into his throat, fighting for free air. Trapped, they congealed, and he had to swallow twice before he could talk again. He let go of her wrist, one finger at a time. “How do you feel?”
“Shaky. Tired.” She gave him a shy, tentative smile. “I thought you said we were stopping for breakfast.”
An uncertain détente filled the space inside the car. “You needed sleep more. Stay here for a second, I want to check the house.”
She examined the surroundings, gray-rising dawnlight turning her into an ivory statuette. “Isn’t that the Jeep that they took? Your friends?”
Clever girl. “I don’t want any surprises. Watch in the mirror. If anyone other than me comes out that door, you turn the key and burn rubber out of here. Got it?”
She nodded, brushing her hair out of her eyes with a slight irritated movement that made his pulse speed up a notch. “Where am I supposed to go?”
It was a good question. “Over the state line to the next major city, and talk to the FBI. It’s worth a try.” It probably won’t do any good, but let’s not mention that. I have no intention of it ever becoming necessary.
Still, what he intended and what actually happened were sometimes wildly divergent, especially where Anna was concerned.
“Oh.” She rubbed delicately at her eyes as he glanced in the rearview mirror again, checking. “Okay.”
Fortunately, five minutes later he ushered her into the snug, cozy little cabin. Willie had started a fire, and it smelled of pine sap and frying bacon. “Breakfast,” Willie said s
martly, subtracting Anna from him with barely a nod. “Come along, liebchen, you made good time. There’s coffee; it’s not very good, but it’ll do. The garden is lovely, and the window looks right out onto the lake—” Her words faded to indistinct muttering as they went into the kitchen, the door closing quietly.
Hassan appeared at the foot of the stairs, shaking his head. “I did some phoning and Willie worked her magic on the laptop. I talked to Abramoff.” Hassan wasn’t pale, but he sounded like he should, by all rights, be pale. “Something weird is going on.”
Josiah stretched. First one side, then the other. His gaze slid over the interior of the cabin, checking for weak points, looking at cover. They would have to move the old comfortable hole-eaten gray couch and brace the rocking chair against the window. “Now you realize this?”
Hassan’s mobile mouth made a small moue of distaste, and he folded his arms—Willie must have packed that red flannel shirt for him. His shoulder holster held a very nice little Sig Sauer. “Don’t give me any shite, Yank. Abramoff says there’s not a whisper. Nobody looking for you, or for anyone connected to you. But get this, he did drop me a word about a little visit someone paid to Machen on the Lower East Side.”
“Machen.” He cast back through memory, found the face. “Thickset fellow. Knives. Hangs out with Holly’s crew.” Now there was someone he wouldn’t care to tangle with—Hollister the Fence might be getting older, but certainly not mellower.
“Yep. Some guy from the cop shop—they have a working relationship—comes to visit him, asking if anyone had been hiring mercenaries lately. Machen thinks about it, says no, nothing out of the ordinary. The cop tells him something big and quiet is going on, and to keep his head down. Just before he leaves, the cop says something weird.”
Interesting. Do they think maybe I hired a few professionals, or that Anna did? “What?”
“He asks Machen if he’s got any silver bullets and tells him to buy a crucifix. Then he laughs, and leaves. Machen thought it was weird enough to mention.”
Silver bullets. Crucifixes. Okay. “And Abramoff thought it was weird enough to tell you.” He met the younger man’s worried gaze, finally. “Anything else?”
“That isn’t enough? Well, here’s another one. I had Willie look up that building. The one in the pictures.” Hassan’s mouth turned down at the corners, a sure sign of trouble. “Guess who holds the deed?”
“Who?” This is beginning to get strange.
“The chief of police, our dear Lock-’em-Up Denton himself. Guess what else I found out?”
This isn’t the time for games, Hassan. But he took the bait. “You’ve been a busy boy. What?”
“Those interviewees? All of them? Missing. A few had reports on them, but not many. A couple just up and vanished. Here’s the kicker: Nobody knows Eric Caldwell’s dead yet. His editor’s not even listed as missing. The cops aren’t pursuing, either.”
That stopped Josiah for a full fifteen seconds, time he spent looking across the room at the merry, flickering orange dance of flame in the stone fireplace. Red checkered curtains, shabby furniture; all this place needed was dead animal heads on the walls. He hadn’t gone quite that far yet with the interior decorating. Hunting lost a lot of its savor once a man knew what it was like to be shot at. “Nothing about any of them?”
“And no missing-person’s report on your little lady, either, even though she’s been gone from work for a few days. This is all bollixed up, and badly.”
It does alter some things. “Look on the bright side. It gives us a certain latitude of action we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Hassan snorted. “Well, that’s comforting. When you say latitude of action all I hear is shite’s going to get messed up. This isn’t going to be another Cairo, is it?”
Josiah’s skin chilled all over, a brief cold caress. “Of course not. I’m not suicidal.” Not this time. “Besides, we’ve got a civilian to keep out of this, and Willie to think of. Anything else?”
That earned him a lopsided smile. Hassan was back where he was comfortable, gathering information and being cheeky. “Christ, you haven’t given me any time yet. We’ve been busy fighting off bodies that turn into a fucking Hoover commercial. You should be on your bloody knees thanking me for all I’ve done already.”
“I’ll send you a Christmas card.”
Hassan replied with a scathing and unrepeatable term in Russian, and Josiah laughed. The banter was so familiar, he almost wondered why he’d retired.
Then he heard a muffled burst of female laughter from the kitchen—Willie’s high and carefree, Anna’s half-guilty and surprised. It was good to hear her, but it reminded him of plenty of things he didn’t want to think about.
Number one on that list was bodies that turned into dust. Crucifixes. Silver bullets.
Enough. Just got to get through the day, then I want a drink. I need to think about this.
* * *
Willie kept Anna busy all day, cleaning the already-spotless cabin, making lunch, preparing dinner. The little domestic chores would calm both of them. Normalcy—or at least some approximation of it—was the best thing for Anna at the moment.
Hassan settled in a chair by the front window, watching the road, alternately humming a tuneless melody and leafing absently through his old, battered copy of the Koran. That was a little disturbing, but at least he wasn’t oiling his knives yet.
Josiah knew better than to think he’d forgotten about dust-exploding bodies, either.
He spent the day shoring up the outer defenses and alarms, trudging through muck and coming back in time for lunch and again for dinner. By the final time he scraped thick cold mud off his feet the light had failed completely. The wild darkness of countryside pressed thick against the windows of the little cabin, an almost-full moon mounting higher in the sky, its reflection rippling on the surface of the inky lake.
Dinner was almost a disaster. Josiah said little, Willie tried to keep the conversation going, and Hassan took his bowl to the window and settled down to watch, a high-powered rifle braced against his chair.
Anna tried to play the politeness game with Willie, but ended up eating only a few bites and staring into her soup, occasionally darting uncertain looks at Josiah.
Finally, however, it got the better of her.
“What are we going to do?” This she directed at Willie, who was pragmatically enjoying herself.
Willie had taken the opportunity to make her justifiably famous potato-and-leek soup, and was dipping her bread—store-bought, but she’d cheerfully remarked that sacrifices had to be made—with great relish. She glanced up, her hair back in its large, sleek chignon. The light was kind to her, smoothing out the pockmarks on her cheeks and forehead just like her makeup did. “Now we wait.”
Anna’s eyes glittered. She laid her spoon down, and her expression called Josiah out of a worried rethinking of the short list of people he wanted to contact in the next few days.
“Wait for what?” Anna sounded deceptively calm, but he’d heard that tone before and sighed internally.
“Wait for Josiah to decide it’s safe to move again. Wait for the next disaster. Wait for it to be safe enough for us to go back home.” Willie shrugged. “It’s the worst part about something like this.”
“I thought…” Anna bit her lip, continued. “I thought we would do something. Take the files somewhere. What’s in the files, anyway? What’s going on?”
“It’s probably safer if we don’t know.” Willie set her own spoon down, precisely. The tiny click was very loud in the stillness. “Really. The best thing to do is just…wait.”
“They didn’t wait to kill my brother.” Anna laid her hands flat on the table. “I can’t go home, I saw George get shot right in front of me, they broke all the windows in Josiah’s house, and we’re just supposed to wait?”
“Wait, and eat your dinner.” Willie nodded. “That’s it, exactly.”
Anna cast him an imploring look. Josiah shrugge
d. She wasn’t going to listen, but he told her anyway. “She’s right. Ninety-nine percent of any operation is the waiting. We need to be careful.”
It wasn’t anywhere close to what he wanted to tell her. I would do just about anything to fix this for you right this fucking instant, Anna girl. But I can’t, and I have to make sure we don’t have another nasty surprise. He found himself examining the shape of her mouth and dragged his gaze hastily up as her eyes slid away.
Her head dropped. She looked down at her bowl, and her shoulders trembled once. Her hair, freed from a messy ponytail, swept down to curtain her expression.
Christ, say something useful to her. Something comforting. “We’re going to give the situation some time to calm down. Then I’ll go in and call in a few favors. If all goes well we won’t even have to lift a finger; everything will be taken care of in the—”
“Excuse me.” She stood up, suddenly, the chair scraping against wood flooring. It was such a quick movement he almost twitched. “I don’t think I’m hungry. I’m sorry.”
“Anna—” He’d handled it badly, again.
She fled, stopping only to scoop up the original file and blindly stumbling up the stairs. He listened, marking each familiar squeak and groan, heard her slam the door to the upstairs bedroom.
“Civilian.” Hassan snorted, only mildly disparaging. He slurped a very large spoonful of soup for emphasis.
“Be kind.” Willie sighed, dunking a slice of wheat bread into her bowl. “It’s not every day a girl finds her brother dead and her life depending on punks.”
“Punks?” Hassan inquired mildly, arching an eyebrow. The combination living and dining room was so small he could deploy sarcasm or inquiry for maximum effect at short distance.
Josiah suppressed a small smile, despite his stomach turning in on itself.
Willie’s short chuffing sound of unwilling amusement was a balm. “Like you, Hassan. You’re a punk. Come on over and sit down.”
“Watching the road, woman.”
“Who’s going to come down the road? Nobody knows we’re here.” Willie was trying, bless her. Almost too hard.
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