Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She was always saying things like “at nine o’clock” and “radar.” Even though I’d told her again and again that the life of a double agent in New York City wasn’t all that exciting, she didn’t believe me. One of these days I vowed I’d show her the paperwork—the endless encryption of messages with ridiculous codes, the endless searching through classified ads in the New York Times for messages that contained phrases such as “Grandmother’s favorite dog missing” or “Attic room to let”—and let her see firsthand what I spent most of my time doing—waiting for contact. Aside from the threat of being found out, it could be pretty dull.

  Except, of course, when I was out Nazi hunting.

  “Don’t count on it,” I told Evelyn, not bothering to lower my voice, since my retort worked equally well both for her true comment and any potential threat to boil my underwear or slit my throat. I turned to see exactly what her idea of a “Euro-God” was this week.

  And nearly dropped my champagne flute.

  It was Heinrich von Hopf. Right here in Manhattan.

  Needless to say, he wasn’t wearing his SS uniform.

  Rose stopped reading, silently counted to five, then said, “May I take a short break?”

  The microphone from the engineering booth clicked on and Delvin’s voice came through her headphones. “Absolutely, Miz H. Can we get you some coffee?”

  Rose stretched as she stood up from the desk. Old bones, old muscles, old aches and pains. There was actually one twinge in her hip that she’d had longer than the engineer, Delvin Parker, had been alive. Way longer than his assistant, a baby-faced, fresh-mouthed, smart-assed boy named Akeem, who swore he was twenty-five but didn’t look a day over sixteen.

  “Actually, one of the reasons I could use a break is because I’ve already had a little too much coffee.” She set the headphones down next to the computer screen and headed for the door.

  Akeem beat her there, coming from the other side. He pushed open both sets of soundproof doors that isolated the recording studio from the mixing booth and propped them open. “This shit you’re reading—this Nazi spy story—is it all true?”

  She had to laugh. “Here’s a hot tip, child.” She knew it made him squirm when she called him that. “When you’re speaking to an author, you might think of a more flattering word to use to describe her book.”

  He followed her into the hallway. “I didn’t say it was bad shit. Matter of fact, it’s good shit. Usually I fall asleep.”

  “Ah,” Rose said dryly. “Quite an endorsement.”

  “Yeah, it is. Did it really happen like this, or did you jack up the action to make the Times list?”

  She stopped outside of the ladies’ room door. “What do you think?”

  He looked into her eyes for several long moments. She liked that about him. Too often today young people didn’t take the time to look at the person to whom they were speaking. And forget about young people, the entire world tended to ignore the elderly altogether. But not Akeem.

  He grinned. “I think you’re a crazy woman now. I think you probably were worse when you were twenty-two. I think you dialed it down, instead. I think you left out all those games of strip poker, and all those times you streaked through Times Square—so as not to embarrass your uppercrust family.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Okay, don’t admit it. But answer me this—you ever meet Hitler when you were in Berlin?”

  “Why don’t you read the book and find out?”

  “I did read the book. I read it the night after your first recording session. Like I said, it’s good shit. But I figure if you ever met Hitler, he woulda hit on you. You know, Ach du liebe, vat a hot goil. Vant to join me for some Nazi nookie?”

  “Yes, that was the first thing I noticed about Adolf Hitler,” Rose said. “That he had a heavy Jewish accent, just like a Catskills comedian.” She shook her head. “No, dear, I never met him. I tried my best to keep from being noticed by the Obergruppenfuehreren—the upper level Nazi leaders. And if you’ve read the book, you know that I was not alone in Berlin.”

  “Yeah, that occurred to me.”

  “Rose. There you are. How are you?”

  She turned to see a man at the end of the hall, in a perfectly tailored, very dapper dark suit. He was better dressed than most FBI agents, but she’d been with the bureau long enough to know one when she saw one.

  But good heavens, was it . . . ?

  “George Faulkner,” he identified himself as he moved closer.

  It was. Anson Faulkner’s boy, George. Except he wasn’t a boy anymore. Lord, how the years—decades—flew by.

  She could tell from his face that this wasn’t a social call.

  “Oh, yeah,” Akeem said. “I’m supposed to tell you, Rosie—suit here wants a word with you if you’ve got a sec.”

  Rose’s heart was already pounding and her damned eighty-year-old knees felt weak. A visit, not a phone call. That wasn’t good. She forced herself to stand tall, to face whatever was coming with her head held high. “Who’s dead?”

  “No one’s dead, ma’am.” George pointed to the ladies’ room door. “Were you on your way in or out? Because this can certainly wait a few minutes.”

  No one was dead. Thank God. Still . . . “Have you come to tell me I’ve won the lottery?” Rose asked.

  George, like his father, was an exceptionally handsome, almost pretty man. They both had the kind of face in which lines of stress and strain—both mental and physical—stood out. And somehow, in a way that was entirely unfair to women everywhere, those lines only made them better looking. If he were a woman, he would look haggard and hideous. But George managed to look attractively exhausted. “I wish. But, no.”

  She turned to dismiss Akeem. “Please excuse us.”

  “Oh,” he said, backing toward the studio door. “Right. Except . . . Are you sure? You know this guy, right?”

  “Yes. I need to speak to him privately,” Rose told the young man. “Now, please.”

  George waited until the door closed. “This may be nothing—”

  “Alex or Karl?” This had to be about one of her sons. Her daughters were too smart to get into any kind of real trouble.

  “Alexander. He went to Jakarta on a business trip,” George told her.

  “He travels to Jakarta all the time.”

  “This time, he failed to appear for a scheduled conference call with his office in Malaysia. Bob Heath, his personal assistant back in Kuala Lumpur, called the U.S. Consulate in Indonesia after—over the following two days—he failed to reach Alex at his hotel. Because of who Alex is—”

  “My son.”

  “Yes. Because of that, the State Department was given the heads up for a possible abduction.”

  Oh, Alex . . . “He’s diabetic, you know. He needs insulin shots every day.”

  George got out a small leather-bound pad and made a note. “I didn’t know.”

  Still, it had been only two days. “He might’ve met someone,” Rose said. “Gone off on a spontaneous holiday without letting anyone know. It wouldn’t be the first time.” Or the last.

  “Absolutely,” George said.

  “But you don’t think so. Why else would you be here?”

  “I’m here,” he told her, “because I love you. Because of all the times you went out on a limb for Dad. Because someone made a decision not to notify you about this, and I believe—with your service record—you have the right to know.”

  Rose knew that George was going to get into serious trouble for telling her this.

  “It may be nothing. They might’ve already found Alex,” he continued.

  “Or they might not have. Who’s heading the investigation?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Our local guys in Jakarta will find out if Alex is missing or if he’s missing. If it is an abduction . . .”

  “Max Bhagat will get it.” Rose was certain. “Do you know him?”

  George exhaled a burst of air tha
t might’ve been a laugh. “I assume you mean, do I know of him? Yes. It’s kind of hard to miss him. The man has his own page on the Urban Legend Web site, right next to Superman’s. But I’ve never met him. I mean, other than in my dreams.”

  “If Alex is missing, you’ll be assigned to Max’s unit,” Rose decided.

  George laughed. “I appreciate the thought, ma’am, but . . .”

  She looked at him sharply. “You don’t think I can do it?”

  He shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure I want you to—”

  “You don’t think I’m doing this for you, do you?” Rose asked him. “I’m doing this for me. If Alex is missing, I want to know exactly what’s going on. I want you in the thick of it.”

  “When my boss finds out that you found out about all this from me . . .” George shook his head. “Let’s just say that I’m not going to get a promotion. Certainly not a transfer into the top counterterrorist team in the country.”

  “I found out about this from Bob Heath,” Rose informed him. “Alex’s assistant. Go home, George, because after I call Bob, I’m going to call you for the details. It would be nice if you had some new ones to tell me. Oh, and start packing. You’ll be going to Jakarta via Washington.”

  George sighed. “Rose.” He was trying hard to be diplomatic. “It’s just that, well, I happen to know that Bhagat handpicks his team.”

  “He’ll be told to handpick you.”

  He laughed in exasperation.

  “You don’t think I can do it,” she said. She took her cell phone from her purse. “Just watch me.”

  A week ago, Savannah had gone out to dinner for the third and final time with Vladamir Modovsky, an actual Romanian count, a man accessorized with a title and a real crumbling castle.

  He also had a mortgage that was coming due, but that wasn’t to be spoken of—certainly not in public, definitely not with Vlad-of-the-big-white-teeth. And in private, in phone conversations with her mother, the subject was either ignored or heavily glossed over. There was no doubt about it—old Vlad was Priscilla’s latest favorite candidate for the role of Savannah’s husband-to-be.

  Savannah had been out with him three different times—which was three times too many in her opinion—enough for her to feel as if she’d given him a fair shot.

  Each time, they’d been followed by paparazzi. Most of the photographers were from eastern European newspapers. Only one of the photos had shown up in an American rag, and in the back pages, thank God.

  Vlad had actually enjoyed the attention. He played to it, throwing kisses to the photographers.

  Savannah had gritted her teeth and gone home after that last dinner—Vlad’s third and final strike—and left a message on her mother’s answering machine, telling her that under no condition—not even as a favor to the President of the United States—would Savannah go out with him again.

  Of course, her mother was out of town and unlikely to receive the message for another week and a half.

  “Are your parents still alive?” she asked Ken, over a second glass of wine. Unlike big-toothed Vlad, he didn’t have a clue that he was dining with the daughter of one of the richest men in America. He had absolutely no idea that, as an only child, she stood to inherit an enormous fortune, that she already had more money in her personal bank accounts than most people earned in a lifetime.

  His interest in her was genuine.

  Well, okay, sure. Ken’s interest in her was based on sex. He wanted to sleep with her. She knew that. Still, even if that was his sole motive in gazing into her eyes as if he’d be content to sit there talking all night, it was refreshing.

  The light from the candle he’d lit when the sun had gone down flickered over the planes of his face, making his dark eyes even darker. Mysterious. “My dad died of a massive stroke about four years ago,” he told her quietly.

  Oh, God. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well . . . thanks, I guess. He was . . .” He shook his head, flashed his smile. “My mother’s still alive. Still lives in New Haven.”

  New Haven. Home of Yale University, her alma mater.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Mary. Dad was John. How’s that for keeping it simple?”

  “Mine are Priscilla and Karl.” She rested her chin in her hand as she looked at him across the table. “Do you ever think of your mom by her first name?”

  He laughed. “No. Not really.”

  “I do. My mother can be . . . kind of like a human steamroller. It helps me remember this is my life and that I don’t have to live it on her terms if I think of her as Priscilla.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “I’ve had a little experience in trying to live life on someone else’s terms. I had this girlfriend who—” He stopped short, taking a long slug of his beer.

  “Who what?” she asked, fascinated, knowing he was talking about Adele. He had to be.

  He looked at her dead on, the flame from the candlelight reflecting in his eyes, making them seem twice as warm. “Nah, I don’t want to talk about her. She doesn’t matter anymore. She doesn’t have anything to do with me, and she certainly doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  Oh, God. Savannah leaned forward. “What’s the one thing you’ve done that you regret the most?”

  This was how she was going to do it, how she was going to tell him the truth. She would get him to bare his soul and then she’d bare her own. It had come to her a few minutes ago. It was something Rose would have done, something right out of the story of her grandmother’s life.

  “Jeez, it’s kind of hard to narrow ’em all down to just one.” Ken leaned forward, too. “Right now I’m really regretting that when I said we should talk all night, I forgot that I’ve got to be on base for training at 0430.”

  Savannah tried not to be distracted by the fact that he’d reached across the table and taken her hand, that he was playing with her fingers, that he was looking at her as if, were the table not between them, he would kiss her again. “I’m talking about . . .” She had to clear her throat. “About serious regrets.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been more serious in my life.” But then he smiled. “You know, you still have this big streak of grease on your neck.”

  She froze. Oh, God. “I do?”

  “Yeah. Right under your left ear.”

  Savannah pulled her hand free. “You let me sit here all through dinner with . . . ?” She pushed back her chair, ready to run for the bathroom and the soap, but he stood, too.

  “Hey, Van,” he said, catching her. “Whoa. I didn’t tell you so you’d run away. I just . . .”

  At close proximity, she could see that he was probably as nervous as she was. That he wanted to kiss her as much as she wanted to kiss him.

  “You’re so beautiful, it scares me a little,” he said softly, “because I don’t really get what you’re doing here with someone like me. All during dinner, I was having these real freak-out moments, you know? But then you turn your head to the right and there’s that grease under your left ear, and I think, well, okay. This is all right. I think, she’s here because she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, because she’s not afraid to get up to her neck in things, because she’s willing to take chances, to go for it, to get real.”

  Savannah gazed up at him, unable to respond.

  People usually saw her quietness as timidity, her politeness as conservativeness. But when Kenny looked at her, he actually saw someone strong.

  And instead of running for the bathroom, she kissed him.

  It was quite possible that she was never going to wash her neck again.

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  Three

  Slow down. Slow. Down.

  But, great holy God, when Savannah slipped her hands up underneath his T-shirt, when she kissed him just as eagerly as he was kissing her, slowing it down was the last thing Ken wanted to do.

  No, the sensation of
her cool fingers against the heat of his bare back was not one that would normally evoke feelings of caution and deliberation.

  She was pressed full against him, and sweet mother, the idea of taking a step back from that . . . Well, he’d have to be a saint or a madman, and he was neither.

  “Savannah,” he managed to say. “I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”