More Than Gold (Capitol Chronicles Book 3)

by Shirley Hailstock

  Morgan knew he thought she was reliving the experience, not just telling him what happened. She was. She was back in the prison, twelve years earlier, twelve years younger, with twelve years less experience. She was nineteen years old, more afraid than she'd ever been facing down a knife on a corner in the murder capital of the world.

  " 'What you're looking for is in there,' he said. 'You've got three minutes.' He slapped an envelope into my hand and released me. I went to the door he pointed toward and found a man lying on a bed. He'd been beaten. Blood had crusted on his face and legs. His clothes were torn and ragged and he looked older than time. His hair was matted and thin and his skin had a gray tinge in the weak light. I didn't even try to get him to walk. I stuffed the envelope in my suit, grabbed his arm and heaved his weight over my shoulder."

  "What happened to the guard?"

  "I don't know. He wasn't there when I looked in the hall again. The other prisoners woke and started making noise. I didn't stop to find out why. I headed for the little room. The hall looked a mile away. The weight on my shoulder wasn't that heavy, but it slowed me down. Suddenly bright lights flared and sirens went off. Guards burst through a door at the end of the hall, cutting off my escape route. I immediately changed direction and headed for the other end. There was a door that would lead to the roof. I needed to get there. That's where the helicopter was to pick us up. So far I hadn't heard it. I wouldn't let myself think it wasn't coming. I had to be positive. So I willed it to be there. All I had to do was reach it. The noise of the guards' feet sounded fast. Lewiston grew heavier, but I kept going. A bullet whizzed past my left ear. I didn't know what it was. I just thought this was a lesson they hadn't taught me. They'd given me sharpshooting and hand-to-hand combat training, but they'd fallen short in the area of bullets coming close to the body. I shifted Lewiston, but kept going. My one thought was reaching that door. Lewiston was dead weight, holding me back, and for all I knew he could already be dead."

  A second bullet hit the wall next to her. Concrete chips flew into her face. She didn't bother trying to brush them away. She pushed at the door, praying it wasn't locked. It wasn't. It should have been. She thanked whoever had been there for her. Maybe the helicopter would be on the roof when she got there.

  If she got there.

  She swung through the door, reversed and swung the lock into place. It wasn't a fancy lock. In fact, it was medieval. The prison didn't call for sturdy locks anywhere but on the cells. This was a simple board that folded down into a wooden slot, like the locks on western movie forts. She remembered the Indians always broke through those doors, and she understood her time was growing shorter and shorter.

  "You got him out.'' Jack interrupted her thoughts. She turned to him and nodded. Then she continued her story.

  "We made it to the roof with only a bullet in Lewiston's sleeve. One grazed my arm, but only burned the fabric of my suit. I didn't even know it until I was changing clothes much later and discovered the hole and a small drop of blood. There was no helicopter. I listened but could hear nothing other than the guards behind me."

  "How did you get down?"

  She turned and stared at him. "Don't you get it, Jack? We weren't supposed to get down. I was sent there to cause an escape attempt. We were both supposed to be killed."

  "You don't know that."

  "Don't I?" Her gaze never wavered. She knew it as sure as she knew her name. "I was there. There was no escape route. Hart wasn't where he was supposed to be. The guards were coming from both directions. There was no helicopter. The man was practically dead and I had to carry him. If ever a setup was designed for failure, this was it."

  She stopped and took a deep breath. Her heart hammered in her chest.

  "Morgan, they would never have let you die in there. They'd have gotten you out."

  "Jack, you're a smart man. Look at who I was. I had nothing, no parents, no one concerned about me. I'd been on the streets, a vagrant, someone lost in the system, non-productive, hardcore unemployed. All the labels fit me. And they had a man in a foreign jail who had secrets in his head. They needed to get him out or kill him. If one or both of us died in the process, the mission would be accomplished. It didn't matter the outcome. If he got out, that would make them heroes on a worldwide scale. If he died, he'd be one of the honored dead. No one would ever know my involvement. I was expendable."

  "If what you say is true, why didn't they just have the guard kill Lewiston? You said there were already dead men there. What would another dead body mean?''

  "That would mean someone at the prison was playing his hand. It would look better if an escape attempt took place. Then he could be shot while attempting to leave. And what would a nobody from the streets of D.C. mean? The government would deny everything."

  "But you're here now."

  "That is true."

  "How did you get off the roof?'' He went back to the Korean story.

  "I used the rope." She stopped to focus it in her mind. "I don't know where it came from. I'm sure it hadn't been there long. It was already set up. It looked like something used in a circus. It was stretched taut and there was a roller or pulley-type mechanism that I could hold onto and slide to the ground."

  Jack frowned.

  "I think the guard, the man who caught me, was an agent. He must have set the rope up. It was a special kind of cord, probably nylon, the kind circus acts use. It stretched from the roof to a point outside the prison fence. At first I didn't know what to do with it. The guards were getting closer. I couldn't scale it hand over hand to the ground. There wasn't time to harness Lewiston and send him alone, then go after him. And I didn't know who would be on the other end. Lewiston couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds. I slipped the harness over him and jumped into it with him. The guards broke through to the roof just as I started the flight downward."

  Morgan was fully in the present now. She no longer felt as if she was on the roof of the prison in the dark of night with bullets that could pierce her body and cut her life short.

  "I knew we were going to fall hard. It hadn't rained in the week I'd been in Seoul. The ground would be hard, packed. We'd be lucky if we were killed. If we only broke our legs the prison guards would be on us in seconds." Her voice was flatter now. "Lights were flashing and sirens sounded loud and close. Just before we reached the ground, the agent I'd made contact with earlier broke our fall. As he cut the harness, separating Lewiston from me, two cars came from nowhere. A man, whose face I couldn't see, jumped out of one of them and took Lewiston. He got into one car while I was pushed into the second one. It couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds from the time we got to the ground until we were speeding away from the prison."

  Morgan finished. She felt drained, tired, in need of sleep. She slipped into a chair and hung her head. It had been so long ago, yet it had been yesterday. She'd never ended that night. She still lived it over and over in her dreams and in her fear of someone coming to take back what she had.

  For a long time neither of them spoke. Morgan didn't have the energy to wonder what he was thinking, what he thought of her story. Did he believe her? She didn't think so. Jack was one of them. He worked with the kind of men who'd sent her into that prison, that valley of death, and who never thought she would emerge.

  "It's funny," she laughed without humor.

  "What?" he asked.

  "The very men who sent me to that prison are the ones I'm running to now for help."

  He didn't say anything in reply.

  "Am I going to survive, Jack? Or is this another staged play that has only one inevitable end?"

  Jack stood up and came to her. She was exhausted. Her voice was even tired. She could hear it slow to a near slur. Jack took her arm, pulling her up from the chair with ease. Silently he led her to her bedroom. Morgan was suddenly tired. She sat on the bed while he went to the bathroom. She heard the water running. He came back with a glass of water. Morgan drank greedily as if she needed to replenis
h the liquid in her body from her feet up, as if she'd expended all the energy to run the prison hall, scale the stairs and zipline down the rope to the ground.

  "Lie back," Jack said, taking the empty glass.

  She obeyed. "Do you know who he was, Jack?"

  "Who?"

  "The other man. The guard who set up the rope?"

  Jack shook his head. "You should rest now." He turned to leave.

  "Who was the other man, Jack?"

  He stopped and looked at her.

  "The man who cut me out of the harness. The one who took Hart Lewiston and was so careful to keep his face bidden. Was that you, Jack?"

  He stared at her for a long time. She didn't think he'd tell her. She could see the man's shadow in her mind, but not clearly enough to put form to it. Yet there was a familiarity about him, some non-visible imprint that told her she knew him on some level.

  Morgan had never thought about that man until tonight. He'd simply been a savior, a nameless agent there to get her and Lewiston to safety as fast as possible. Hart Lewiston needed to go to an airstrip to get him out of the country. She, on the other hand, had a date with a crowd in the Olympic Pavilion. The two cars separated and Morgan didn't dwell on anything else about him except her report that later told her he was safely away from Korean soil.

  "It was you, wasn't it, Jack?" she asked again.

  "Yes," he whispered and closed the door.

  ***

  Jack went straight to the minibar and broke the seal. He grabbed a one-shot bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and upended it. It was an incredible story. If Jack hadn't been there for part of it, he might not believe it. He felt sick. Had they really done what Morgan believed? Had they set her up to fail? And had he been an unwitting party to the deception? If she hadn't come out of that prison he was there to get her out. If she were killed trying to get Lewiston out he wouldn't have been able to get in.

  The lights and sirens had his heart in his mouth when they suddenly lit up the prison yard and surrounding area. It was then he saw the rope. He didn't know how it had come to be there, and it wasn't until Morgan was swinging her legs over the fence that he understood its reason.

  The plan was for Morgan to get to the roof and the helicopter would pick them up and take them to a point between the arena and the airport. Morgan would be taken off the helicopter and Lewiston would be taken to a ship offshore. She would go back to the arena and complete her competition.

  Jack assumed something had happened to the helicopter. It wasn't unusual for things to change during an operation. When the lights came on and the sirens sounded, guns would have been trained on the sky. Landing a helicopter would have been suicide. The rope and the cars were backup as was the guard inside. If he wasn't an agent, they'd bribed him to make sure the roof door was unlocked.

  Morgan had to be wrong. If she had been found in the prison, even if she and Lewiston had been dead, it would have been a serious embarrassment to the United States. Jack wonder what the truth was.

  He shook his head. She had to be wrong, but somewhere in Jack's gut he knew part of her story was real.

  CHAPTER7

  The bed was comfortable, a peach-colored comforter over standard white sheets, covering a firm mattress, but Morgan couldn't find a place which complemented her body. She'd turned over more than once, punching the pillows up then flopping down on them. It wasn't her body, however, that was the problem. It was her mind. It was active, too active and that was affecting her ability to find comfort.

  She'd told her story to Jack. Almost all of it. There were two items she left out. The ring. And the papers. A gold ring with a heavy crest and some papers written in Korean. That's what they were after. What they wanted and were willing to kill her and anyone in her path to get. They'd already killed one person trying to get to her. Would they get to Jack? The thought almost cramped her stomach. She doubled up, folding her arms over her abdomen and drawing her knees to her chest. She'd lived all these years remembering him, thinking of him swimming in some pool. She'd relived his kiss, fantasized his arms around her countless times, but she'd never put him in her nightmare of escape. This had been a solitary run, one in which she alone made her way to safety. And now she had his safety on her mind.

  She flipped over again. Opening her eyes, she saw the bathroom in the darkened room. That was why she couldn't sleep. What happened there? What she refused to admit or discuss with Jack. It was on her mind. He was on her mind, keeping her awake. Jack had kissed her, devastated her with his mouth. That was going through her mind, repeating over and over to the rapid beating of her heart. He'd been right about her, pegged her as surely as if she were a child caught stealing.

  He was the bad boy of her mind, but she was the bad girl too. What set her apart was she looked like the debutante. Her adoptive mother had worked hard to smooth some of her rough edges, teaching her manners and how to choose the right clothes, taking her to ballets and concerts at the Kennedy Center. And she was the phenom of the school too. She'd racked up trophies for gymnastics since she started in the sport at thirteen.

  Everything was going for her, popularity, good grades, friends, a loving mother, but she was attracted to the dangerous guys, the hard bodies who were often in trouble and whom she could deal with on their level, yet she shied away from them, thinking that life on the street would rear up and snatch her back to it. She hated life on the street, but feared she could be there again.

  Jack was like the bad boys. He was the ultimate dangerous one because he had her heart. He'd discovered her secret attraction for him in Seoul and he'd used that against her tonight. And she had been powerless to stop him. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted it from the moment she discovered it was him pinning her to the floor of her hallway. She watched him, stared at him when he wasn't looking, just as she'd done to the guys in her school. She only looked at them when they weren't looking at her. She rarely initiated conversation when they were near, and often refused dates when asked.

  Jack was the epitome of the bad boy, all of them rolled into one. But with him she couldn't refuse. She couldn't not talk to him. She couldn't not remember his kiss—either the one in Seoul or the one in the bathroom.

  Morgan sat up and pushed her feet to the floor. Why had he shown up right now? She'd planned to escape on her own if the need arose. She would get to Washington, contact Jacob Winston as she'd been instructed and take matters from there. She could have done it too. She was sure she would have made it, but now she had no car and she had Jack. They, whoever they were, had to know he was with her. After the helicopter incident, there was no doubt that someone would have gone over the house and found some clue to his identity. He'd already called Washington and that had resulted in the two of them coming close to being killed. Jack's quick thinking had saved them. But if Jack had never shown up, where would she be now? He'd known to keep silent and stay put when they were in the tree and he'd saved her at her house and at Michelle's "cabin" in the woods. She never would have thought of the water hose.

  Morgan stared at the rumpled bed. She gave up trying to get to sleep. She wished they'd taken an efficiency. She'd have a kitchen and she could cook something. She liked to cook, but they were on the ninth floor of a hotel. She could do nothing except return to the living room and confront Jack.

  ". . . we don't believe she's dead and we're going to find her." Morgan stopped in her tracks when she saw Jan. The face of Janine Acres, her former teammate, filled the television screen. "Morgan is a very self-sufficient woman. Since the police admit they haven't found a body we can only assume she wasn't in the house and that she's somewhere alone." This came from Alicia Tremaine. Morgan hadn't seen Allie in years. She hadn't changed. She was still beautiful and poised and in control. She played the same kind of character on her television program. Morgan stiffened when the film of her came on the screen. It was the same clip they used of her every time the Olympics came around. There she stood, twelve years earlier, wearing a red, white and
blue leotard, crushing roses to her chest, tears spilling down her face like Niagara Falls as she sang The Star Spangled Banner.

  "What are they doing?" Morgan whispered to herself. She took a step toward the television as if she could stop the action. Jack turned to look at her. "No," she said, the sound coming from low in her throat. "They don't understand."

  She went to Jack. "You've got to do something. They don't know what they're doing."

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "They'll be killed. Anyone that has anything to do with me, they won't hesitate to kill them. They haven't an inkling of what's headed their way." She stared at Jack, pleading with him. She needed his help. He could do something, call someone, get help for Janine and Alicia. "We have to go back there," she said, more to herself than Jack. "We have to find them and let them know I'm alive. They have to stop looking for me."

  ***

  Jacob heard his wife, Marianne, laughing. He stared through the window, watching her and his three-year-old daughter, Krysta, splashing in the pool outside their Rock Creek Park home. For a moment he thought of joining them. The cool water would be refreshing on his skin. His heart swelled when he looked at Marianne and grew even larger when Krysta was included in the picture.

  Jacob had met Marianne because of his job as Director of WITSEC, and he often thought with a smile of how much he had changed since she became part of his life. And how protecting one woman had led to such happiness for him.

  He could always look at the tangible Marianne and see the intangible need to help someone else. He supposed that was one of the reasons Morgan Kirkwood intrigued him. Jacob had left the file Forrest Washington had given him in his office, but he'd brought the CD home.

  Returning to his computer, which was constantly on, he reviewed the CD of Morgan Kirkwood's early life for the third time that day. There was nothing confidential about the contents. The paperwork, back in his office, detailed her interview and training with the CIA prior to the Korean Olympics. It gave in-depth information on her biological parents, her life on the street, her adoption, her adoptive mother's death from cancer, and Morgan's career as a gymnast.