Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  There was, however, a safe. It was in the wall, in the bedroom, beneath a rather dull oil painting of a meadow. The safe didn’t have tumblers and a combination, but rather a lock that could be opened with a key.

  I set to work immediately, attempting to pick it.

  No, that’s not as crazy as it sounds. Remember, my father was a carpenter and he had taught me a thing or two about installing (and getting past) all sorts of locks.

  But this was not the kind of flimsy lock one could pop open using a hat pin. And I was still there, still trying rather futilely, some time later when I heard the sound of a key in the door to the suite.

  Hank was back.

  Early.

  Jones turned to find Molly awake and watching him reading by candlelight.

  “Good book, huh?” she said. That was all she said. She didn’t tease him about it, didn’t try to embarrass him. She didn’t even ask what the hell he was doing still wide awake at this time of night.

  “Yeah, actually, it’s not what I’d normally choose to read, but . . .” He shrugged.

  Molly stretched and reached out a hand to run her fingers through the hair on his chest. “Maybe you should think about writing your memoirs.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious. There’s got to be a reason a man changes his name, his entire identity . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s called survival of the smartest. If I don’t change who I am, I’m too stupid to live and deserve whatever they can throw at me.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Anyone’s who’s seen the wanted posters.” Jones kissed her. “Want to fly back to Iowa first class? I’m your ticket, baby. Just whisper my real name into the right set of ears and—”

  She sat up, all playfulness gone. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Hey, I was just kidding.”

  “Well, don’t kid. Not about that. I would never betray you. Never. And if you think otherwise . . .” She started looking for her clothes. Shit. He didn’t want her to go. “What time is it?”

  Jones’s watch was on a crate next to the bed. He leaned forward to check the time. “Oh-two eleven.”

  “I have to get back to the village.” She slipped out from the mosquito netting and found her panties, pulled them on. Her dress was nearby. She’d wrap it around herself and be out the door before he could stop her.

  “I double-crossed the biggest drug lord in Thailand.” Holy fuck, had he actually said that aloud? The look on her face told him, yes, he had.

  “Nang-Klao Chai?” she asked.

  “You heard of Chai, huh?”

  “Yes.” She came back in, under the netting. “Yes, I have.”

  She sat on the bed and gazed at him, eyes wide, waiting for him to tell her more.

  Jesus. Was he actually going to do this?

  “This story starts a long time ago. When I was a medic with . . . Well, never mind who I was with. U.S. Special Forces. That’s all you need to know,” he told her, and he knew from looking into her eyes that she knew damn well he was going to tell her about the scars on his back. “You want to hear it, you’ve got to promise to stay until dawn. Because I’m going to need about four hours of sex afterwards.”

  She didn’t crack a smile, didn’t assume he was kidding, didn’t hesitate. “I’ll stay as long as you need me to stay.”

  Great. But what was he going to do in a month, to keep her from leaving for good?

  “Chapter one,” he said. “In which I join the U.S. Army, train to become a medic, get accepted into an elite Special Forces unit, train my ass off even more, and get sent overseas on clandestine operations designed to help the U.S. fight the war against drugs. Which, by the way, I think we lost.

  “If we didn’t lose the war, we sure as hell lost the battle. I really don’t know what happened on that particular day. I’ve played it over and over in my head and there’s just too much chaos. We were ambushed. That I know. It was as if they knew who we were and where we were going. It was a blood bath. Everyone died, Molly.”

  She took his hand. “You mean, everyone but you.”

  He still wasn’t so sure of that. “Chapter two, in which I should have died, but didn’t. It was the most fucking stupid thing—I spent five months in the hospital, healing, just so they could beat the shit out of me when I got out. I went from the hospital to a prison that might as well have been on Jupiter for all I knew. It was in the jungle, in the mountains, but the only thing that mattered was that it was some ancient stone fortress, with walls three feet thick and windows—holes, really. Way up high in the cells—too small to slip through. I had no prayer of getting out of there.

  “Of course, I didn’t believe it. I started digging, chipping at the rock, doing whatever I had to do. It was . . . It was . . .”

  It was damp in those cells—during the rainy season the water had come up to his knees. He’d had to sleep sitting up or drown. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst was being so fucking alone. He’d tapped on the rock walls in morse code, but no one had ever answered. Never. His only contact with other prisoners had been the screams he’d heard in a language he didn’t completely comprehend. At least not at first. And his contact with the guards was limited to the expressionless men who led him in chains and at gunpoint to the room where they’d torture him.

  Interrogation, they’d called it. Questioning. Christ. Each time they’d start the same way. By seating him at a table. By talking to him as if he were a human being, with courtesy and respect. It fucking blew his mind each time they apologetically stuck needles under his fingernails or administered electric shocks to his gonads, or whipped the skin off his back. And if that’s all they did, that would be a good day.

  “Grady.” Molly had her arms around him, the soft coolness of her bare breasts against him. “You don’t have to tell me about it. I can guess what happened there. I’ve heard about conditions in those prisons, about the torture that goes on.”

  “It was bad,” he managed.

  “God, I’m so sorry. And so glad you made it out alive.”

  “They fed me on the days they took me out of my cell to torture me,” he told her. “I think I might have started to associate pleasure with serious pain. If you think I’m fucked up now, you should have seen me back then.”

  She pushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t think you’re, you know, fucked up.”

  “I am,” he told her. “Be warned.”

  “How long were you there?” she asked.

  “Three years, three months, twelve days. And all that time those fuckers didn’t break me because I believed that my country didn’t know I was still alive.” He’d believed it with his very soul. “I believed that all I had to do was somehow get word out to the rest of the world that I was there, that I was still breathing, and my teammates from special forces would come and kick down the prison walls and set me free.”

  Jones laughed and it sounded brittle to his ears. “But then Chai came in and he managed to do in twenty minutes what those fuckers hadn’t done in over three years. He showed me documentation that proved that the United States not only knew I was still alive, but also knew exactly where I was. He showed me memos from the Pentagon that proved I was sacrificed for politics. And that was it. I broke. He flipped me as easy as that. I cried like a baby and told him everything he wanted to know. Of course, by then it was old news, but he got it out of me. Shit, I wanted to tell him. I begged to tell him. I even offered to teach his men all the tricks we used. He promised me he’d get me out of there, and two months later, he did, on the condition that I work for him.

  “At that point, I would have followed him anywhere. I was with him for nearly two years, Molly.” He’d killed people for Chai. Worst of all, he’d done as he’d promised and taught SF fighting techniques to the men in Chai’s private army.

  “Chapter three, in which I find out Chai’s about to sell me back to the U.S., where I’ll be charged
with desertion and treason, and shit, I don’t know what all else.” He could remember the day, the minute, he found out about Chai’s betrayal.

  “I could have just walked away,” he told Molly. “I could have just disappeared into the jungle, but no.” He’d had to fuck the fuckers. He had to get back at Chai. And he did. He’d burned a warehouse filled with heroin, crippled Chai’s entire fleet of ships, and completely fucked up the organization’s computer systems—including their backup zip drives. “I trashed his organization, and set it up so that he would walk right into the authority’s hands. Of course, they managed to let him get away—fucking idiots.”

  “And now he’s after you,” Molly said.

  “It’s been years,” Jones told her. “He’s built himself back up again, and yeah, he seems intent on revenge to the tune of a five-million-dollar price on my head.”

  “Why do you stay here?”

  “Where would I go?” he asked.

  “Anywhere. Grady, my God!”

  “It’s not so easy. All of my papers—my passport—it’s forged. It’s fucking badly done, too. If I had like a shitload of money, I could maybe get my hands on a better passport and then . . .” Still, he couldn’t even think about going back to the United States. That was never going to happen in this lifetime. Besides . . . “Maybe I want him to catch me.”

  She was silent, just looking at him with those eyes.

  “That was a joke,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t really want him to catch me.” Chai would make that prison stay seem like a kiddy carnival.

  “Everyone you’ve ever trusted has let you down,” she said softly. “Haven’t they?”

  What could he say to that?

  “I won’t,” Molly told him. “I swear to God, Grady, I won’t.”

  When she looked at him like that, he could almost believe her.

  “Ken?”

  Ken took about seven seconds to decide whether or not to play possum there in the darkness of the blind. “Yeah.”

  “Were you asleep?” Savannah asked.

  “No.”

  “Can I tell you about something that happened today?”

  The nights that Ken had spent with Adele had been few and far between, and when they were together, they hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of talking. Janine, his last girlfriend, had often spent the night, but they hadn’t had a whole hell of a lot in common. She was a morning person, too, often falling asleep at 2200, so there hadn’t been too many pillow talks in the dark in that relationship, either.

  It was stupid. He was stupid. But it was something he’d always wanted. Someone who loved him, lying soft and warm beside him in the night, telling him about her day, sharing her secrets.

  Well, here he was. And here Savannah was, too. And at least he got the lying beside him part right.

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said. “Tell me what happened today. You mean, besides the ferocious tiger, right?”

  She laughed softly, shifting slightly in his arms. “No, this is . . . Well, while you were gone, I read half of my grandmother’s book. And guess what I found out?”

  “That . . . she was an alien from outer space?”

  Her laughter washed over him, warm and intimate in the darkness. “No.”

  “You asked me to guess,” he pointed out. “You told me she was like Wonder Woman, and maybe I need to check my favorite comic book reference Web site, but didn’t W-squared come from another planet?”

  “But that’s just it. Rose wasn’t Wonder Woman. She was like me, Kenny.”

  She sounded so excited by her discovery, he didn’t have the heart to zing her for slipping and calling him Kenny. Fuck me again, Kenny. How many times had he heard that? Adele had believed in getting right to the point. And the two things she’d wanted most from him were sex and for him to do her homework, write her term papers. And with the clarity of hindsight, he realized now that it was probably the other way around. She wanted him to do her homework, and his reward for doing it, like a trained seal, was the sex.

  Shit.

  He hadn’t wanted to go to Yale. And yet in a way, he had, through Adele. He’d graduated with honors, too. He’d gotten A’s on every paper he’d written, every assignment he’d completed for Adele.

  But those grades meant shit to him. He’d done it so that Adele would say “Fuck me again, Kenny.” Which, in his youth and stupidity, he’d heard as “I love you, Kenny.”

  “I’d always thought of her as this enormously driven, self-righteous and absolutely confident person,” Savannah was saying, talking about her grandmother, the FBI double agent, Rose. Man, talk about pressure to follow in some freaking giant footsteps. Grandma kicked Nazi ass. What can you do to top that?

  “I pictured her kind of like a female James Bond,” Savannah said.

  Ken pulled himself back to the present, forced himself to listen. This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? Someone to tell him things that mattered in the dark.

  “Cool and collected and always fearless,” she continued. “But she wasn’t. She was scared to death most of the time. She spends most of the book in tears. Uncertain. Terrified at heart.” She laughed softly. “Maybe not so different from me after all.”

  “That’s very cool,” Ken said. “But . . . You, like, haven’t read the book before this?”

  “I was avoiding it,” she admitted. “I mean, I grew up hearing all these stories, so I thought . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m not saying I’m exactly like her. I’m not half as strong. I mean, I’m not about to run off and join the FBI when we get out of here.”

  “When,” he said. “Good.”

  “What?”

  “You said when we get out of here. Instead of if. That’s good. You made up your mind that we’re going to make it. That’s important, you know.”

  “Yeah, now if I only had a pair of ruby slippers so I could click the heels together and—”

  “You don’t need ruby slippers,” Ken said. “You’ve got all you need to get back home. You’ve got yourself and you’ve got me.”

  “I think it’s more accurate to say that I’ve got you—and you’ve got the burden of me.” She was serious. He knew because her voice got very small. “I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you. I really am. I know that you don’t even particularly like me—”

  “You think I don’t like you? Why the hell wouldn’t I like you? And you’re way less of a burden than—okay—than I first thought. But Jesus, you’re incredibly intelligent—a real creative thinker. I’d rather be stuck in the jungle with you than, say, Jerry Leet, my swim buddy during BUD/S training, who couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag. He ran out on day one of hell week, by the way. I’m starting to think you would have made it all the way through.”

  She made a noise that was halfway between laughter and exasperation. “I didn’t say that so you would try to convince me—”

  “Yes, you’re far more comfortable when you’re completely in control, so the past few days have been something of a challenge for you and therefore for me, too, but—”

  “—that this hasn’t been anything short of awful for you.”

  “Awful? Are you kidding? Jesus Christ, other than the fact that you’re tense as shit, you don’t complain! You don’t think I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart?”

  “Kenny—”

  “ ‘Fuck me, Kenny,’ “ he corrected her. “If you’re going to call me Kenny just like Adele, you’ve got to say it exactly the way she did. And she never said Kenny without saying fuck me first.”

  That wasn’t quite the truth, but it succeeded in shutting Savannah up.

  “Here’s the deal,” he told her. “I do like you. Really. I’m not just shitting you because we’re in the middle of the jungle and there’s no one else to talk to. To be brutally honest, I didn’t like you at first. I didn’t like being used.”

  She started to make noise, but he just talked over her. “I still don’t like it,” he said, “but now t
hat I know you a little better, I can imagine where you were coming from. And I believe you—I do—when you say you didn’t plan for it to happen. Truth is, I’ve managed to work my way around to being flattered about the whole thing. You couldn’t resist me that night. Thank you. Maybe you’re lying, but I’ve decided that I’ll be a whole hell of a lot happier if I pretend that you’re not.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I thought at first you were really this cold bitch, but then I realized that when you get all quiet and uptight, you’re just freaking out about being out of control, about being, well, scared to death.”