Jack swung the door open. She jumped into the passenger seat and he took off. Shots rang out as they ascended straight up. Jack worked the controls, expertly getting them away from the bullets that sounded more like popping corn than the elements of death. Morgan strapped herself in, then hunched in the seat, expecting one of the pellets to burn through the cushioning and into her back any second now. It took moments, but felt like hours, before they were out of range.
"They can't hit us now," Jack said. "Not without a rocket launcher."
She let out a breath and slumped forward, closing her eyes and trying desperately to abate the fear that lodged in every cell of her body.
"Are you all right?" Jack asked.
She looked at him. "I'm fine," she panted, completely out of breath. She'd only been this scared one other time in her life and it was for the same reason--bullets bent on killing her. "My leg burns a little." She reached down. Her hand touched something wet. She pulled it back. Blood covered her palm.
"I've been shot."
CHAPTER 8
"Jan, will you stop that? It's getting on my nerves." Allie snapped at her friend. Allie sat on the bed in the two-room safe house playing solitaire. She was as bored and frustrated at being cooped up as Jan, but she was more used to waiting. Her profession often called for the hurry-up-and-wait method of working. Jan's however, was made up of constant activity. When Jan wasn't teaching, she was stretching or creating routines, going over the new or changed rules of the Olympic committee, doing books or ordering new equipment. Twenty-four hours a day her life was filled with activity.
"Stop doing what?"
"Pacing. That constant walking up and down. If you have to do it, go in the other room."
"I don't want to go in the other room. I don't want to talk to Agent Burton or Agent Tilden." She'd steadfastly refused to call them by their first names. "It's been two days. They virtually snatch us off the street, bring us here to the middle of nowhere, tell us Morgan is alive and that they're protecting us for our own good. Well I don't believe it for a second."
Allie got up and walked to the window. There were no bars on it, but they were so far away from anything that running was a useless endeavor. Allie hated being confined, but Jan was paranoid about it.
"Why don't we go for a walk or a run. We could both use the exercise."
"You know they'll follow us."
"Yes, but it will get us out of here." Allie hated rooms where the only place to sit was on the bed. She liked sleeping in beds, but sitting on them for long periods was uncomfortable.
She opened the door. The two men in the other room came instantly to their feet.
"We're going for a walk," she announced in her official actress-playing-goddess voice. Neither of them contradicted her. They reached for their jackets, which covered the gun harnesses each wore. Jan and Allie both had on T-shirts and shorts, clothes from the suitcases the agents had acquired when they checked them out of their hotel rooms and, according to Jan, imprisoned them here.
The foursome left the building. It was a beautiful ranch house in the shade of huge trees. The air outside was warm and comfortable.
"Has there been anything more from Morgan?" Jan turned suddenly and spoke directly to Max Tilden.
"No, ma'am."
"When do you expect to hear something? I mean don't you agents have to check in regularly?"
"I can't say when we'll hear anything. And yes, we do check in regularly." His voice was startled and formal. Jan loved that she could get on their nerves. She was usually a very nice person, but they'd taken her freedom and she was irritated by it.
Jan cursed to herself and walked away. Agent Burton followed her. She took off in a jog. He had to run to keep up with her and Jan knew he looked silly jogging in a suit and tie.
"She isn't always like this," Allie explained. "She's just a little. . .concerned."
"I understand. Your friend is in good hands. Jack Temple is the best. He won't let anything happen to her."
Allie smiled quickly, using every ounce of her acting ability not to let on that the name set off church bells in her brain.
She turned to continue walking, and so Agent Burton didn't have a full view of her face.
Temple! That was his name. Jack Temple! She had once known a Jack Temple and so had Morgan. It couldn't be the same man. Morgan had been attracted to him, although she thought no one knew it. Allie and Jan knew it, but neither spoke of it to Morgan. They'd learned the boundaries of their friendship and unless Morgan brought up his name, neither Jan nor Allie would introduce it. Yet they had discussed him without Morgan. Allie shook her head. Jack Temple was a swim coach in Seoul and now he was an agent protecting Morgan.
This couldn't be the same guy. But suppose it was? A sneaky smile crossed her face and Allie took off jogging.
***
There is always more blood than the wound calls for, Jack told himself as he looked at the widening stain on Morgan's leg. She might only have been grazed, but she could have a hole in her leg. Jack's hand shook on the stick he held controlling the chopper. The bird dipped slightly before he compensated. He had to land.
Morgan suddenly unstrapped her belt. With bloody hands, she pulled her shoes off and undid the zipper to her pants.
"What are you doing?'' Jack shouted over the noise. Morgan hadn't put on her earphones. She lifted herself from the seat and started pulling at her jeans.
"Taking off my pants."
"Why?"
"I need something to stop the blood and I need to know how bad it is." She continued to struggle in the confined space. "God, it hurts." She bit her bottom lip, holding herself still for a moment.
Jack tried to concentrate. "How much pain are you in?"
"It burns." She frowned, pulling the word out, making it two syllables.
Morgan peeled her jeans over lace panties. On the outside she might be all practical with black jeans and T-shirts, but underneath, hidden from everyone's view, burned the hot pink lace of the real Morgan. Jack turned his attention back to the operation of the whirlybird. Moments later he asked, "How are you?"
"I think it's only a flesh wound." She pulled her leg up, twisting it into a position that should have hurt, but he'd seen evidence of her flexibility before. He remembered her climbing both the rope in her basement and the tree not far from her house.
She went to press the denim into her leg. "Don't do that." Jack stopped her. "There's a first-aid kit somewhere." Morgan looked behind him and found it. She had to twist her body to reach it. Her breasts grazed his shoulder. Jack could have been an intake valve if the amount of air he took into his lungs was any evidence of the blatant desire that seized him when Morgan's body touched his. "You should find something in there to clean it with," he suggested, unable to keep from glancing at the long length of creamy legs that stretched the small length of the cabin. She smelled wonderful and Jack took a breath trying to hold onto the soft scent. She took a sterile gauze from the white metal case and cleaned the wound. Accidentally she brushed it across her leg. Pain seized her suck her teeth.
"What's wrong?" Jack asked. She could hear the concern in his voice.
"Nothing." She spoke through clenched teeth, but continued cleaning the wound until she could see the skin. It wasn't as bad as she thought. The bullet had ripped the skin, but it had not lodged in her leg. "I'll be all right," she said.
"It didn't penetrate?"
"It's a flesh wound, but it stings like the devil." She'd had a flesh wound before. That one had barely ripped the fabric of her shirt. This one would leave a scar.
"Wrap it with one of those gauze bandages and take a couple of the pain killers."
Morgan did as she was told, swallowing two of the pills without water. She put her bloodstained pants back on, strapped her belt and put on the earphones. The sound of the rotors was muffled and she could hear Jack clearly.
"This isn't the first time you've dealt with a gunshot wound, is it?"
She glanced at him, then went back to scanning the ground below them. "No," she said in monosyllable.
"Have you been shot before?"
She had. At least the clothing she was wearing had been burned by a bullet. Her arm had stung, and a layer of skin had been removed.
"It was one of my friends." She hesitated. "I'd been on the streets a while when it happened. Before I learned not to make friends. You know people out there, but you don't know them. We have our own code, an etiquette of life without boundaries." She spoke as if she was still one of them. "If anyone comes looking for you, nobody knows your name and nobody has ever seen you before. If you get sick or hurt, we'll all pull together to do what we can, but when we see you again, we won't even acknowledge familiarity. I had friends before this. We were the same, rejects of society, people no one wanted. Her name was Jean."
She stopped, remembering the young face of her friend. Often dirty, but always smiling, Jean should have been a him or a nurse. All she wanted to do was help people. The fact that they would smack her aside didn't seem to penetrate her young mind.
"What happened to her?" Jack asked.
"She died." Morgan didn't want to remember the night Jean died. She didn't want to talk about it, but Jack pushed on.
"How did she die?"
"She went for a catsup."
"Wrong timing?" Jack understood.
"Wrong timing," she confirmed. "We hadn't had anything to eat the whole day. We were hungry and had gone out to scavenge garbage cans. It was dark and late and children our ages should have been home snug in their beds." She delivered the last line with sarcasm. "We came down an alley and saw a couple arguing on the street. The man held a McDonald's bag in his hand. The woman suddenly walked off and the man threw the bag down in anger. When he stalked off, we ran and grabbed the bag. It was full and something fell out before we got back. When we opened it we gorged ourselves fast, eating with both hands, stuffing food into our mouths. We ate like it was our last meal, and it was since we didn't know where the next one would come from."
Each time Jack thought of her eating other people's garbage, his heart hurt. How could anyone let a child stay on the street?
"When our stomachs were full we started to joke. Jean said she wanted some catsup for her fries. We'd dropped it on the sidewalk as we ran away. She got up and shouted she'd go get it. I stayed where I was. A moment later I heard the shots. Someone screamed. I screamed. I got up and started running for the end of the alley. I got to the street. Jean hobbled toward me. She had a bullet in her leg. Blood ran into her shoes. She collapsed on me. I wanted to run for help, but she stopped me. I tore her clothes away, looking for the wound. The bullet had gone right through her leg. She refused to let me call the policemen who were arriving only a few yards away from us. She said they would send her home, call her father and he'd kill her or do something worse. So I tried to stop the bleeding."
Jack noticed her chin trembling. He'd never seen her do that before. Even when he knew she was scared, she always held her emotions so tightly there was no outward show of what was going on inside her. She must have really loved Jean.
"I got her back to our place. That's what we called it, 'our place.' It was a bunch of rags we spread out each night and slept on in a back alley in Southeast." Morgan stopped, taking a long breath. Jack knew she was fighting emotion, but it wasn't evident in the voice that continued. "Jean was delirious for three days. I was so scared I didn't know what to do. She got worse and worse each day. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer. No matter how bad it was for her at home, I had to tell someone, get her some help." Morgan stopped and swallowed. "I left her, went to the social worker, Sharon Peters, who'd been nice to me. I told her about Jean. She came immediately, calling a doctor from her car and telling him to meet us at our place with an ambulance."
Jack saw Morgan's eyes glistening, but there was no sign of tears in her voice.
"It was too late when we got back. Jean was already dead."
***
Morgan remained quiet after she finished her story. She hadn't relived that story in decades. Yet she felt as if it was always with her, that just as easily she could have been the one to go for the catsup and end up dead in that dark alley with no one to care.
After Jean died, Morgan never lived on the streets again. Sharon Peters took her home with her and Morgan stayed there until Sharon died of cancer just before Morgan's eighteenth birthday. Before she had the meeting in the big conference room at the CIA.
At Jean's funeral, her father stood by her casket and cried. He looked grieved and tired. Morgan should have felt sorry for him. What she felt was anger. People shook his hand and said kind words in soft tones. Morgan glared. She knew it was all an act. Behind closed doors, out of sight of the world, he'd abused his daughter. Jean hated him. She would rather die in a dirty alley, taking her chances on the mean streets and back alleys of a world that no child should ever see, than stay in his warm, comfortable home in Richmond, Virginia.
Sharon Peters had taken her to the funeral and afterward returned her to her own house. She bought her new clothes and let her sit for hours in a bathtub full of sweet-smelling bubbles. She'd fed her huge meals and given her pocket money. Morgan accepted it all, squirreling it away for the day when she was back on the streets.
Losing Jean had left Morgan feeling empty and guilty. She'd waited too long. She should have gone for help sooner. She shouldn't have taken Jean all the way back to their place. It was her fault. Sharon understood her feelings, even though Morgan hadn't said them out loud. Sharon spent time with her. She took days off from her job to make sure Morgan was all right. She hugged her a lot and told her stories. Morgan resisted her love. She tried to hold herself aloof, but Jean was gone and there was no one. With her defenses at a low point, she let it happen. She let Sharon take her into a kind of life that would never really be hers. People like her lived on the streets and it was only a matter of time before she would be back there.
But she let Sharon hug her and hold her and she let her guard down for a moment before she'd quickly pushed it back in place. She knew it was unwise to begin to like someone who wasn't part of her street world. Eventually, they would throw you back to the sea of the unwanted. But Morgan didn't run away from Sharon's house. She was scared. Sharon voiced her feelings for her.
She knew Morgan thought it could so easily have been her they buried instead of her friend. Then Sharon told her she would keep her safe, always protect her. She could live with her for as long as she liked, having food and a clean place to sleep. She could go to school and make friends. It was a foreign world, but one that Morgan longed for as much as she wanted to be one of the girls in the pretty jeans she'd seen in the torn newspapers she slept on at "her place."
She stayed and Sharon kept her word.
***
Jack should pity Morgan. Her life was so different from the way his had been. She'd had nothing, but somehow she didn't ask for pity. She accepted what had happened to her. She didn't wear it on her sleeve or force the world to pay for it. She accepted what she had to and went on.
He'd spent most of his adult life in jungles, serving the government, going where he was sent and doing his job with quiet and unobserved efficiency. But he had a choice. At any time he could have left the jungle and returned to his quiet suburban home. Morgan's jungle was without end.
Jack checked the fuel gauge. He needed to find a place to set down. They'd used this as long as they could. It wasn't like he could have it refueled and continue on. He checked the ground. The land below was green and hilly. He wondered where they were. Morgan had thrown his concentration out the window by just being close to him. She didn't have to do anything. When she undressed in the small area and he discovered there was nothing seriously wrong with her, his mind had gone straight to her shapely legs and not to the airspace in front of them.
The story of her friend had taken something out of her. Jack glanced to his side, checking to make sure
she was all right. She looked tired. They needed to find a place for her to rest, although if he mentioned resting, she'd protest that she was fine and didn't need to rest. Jack wondered how long she'd been living so close to the edge as she was now. From what he could tell, it had been since that night in Seoul. That was longer than anyone should have to. He knew some agents who could exist on half that amount of time.
He'd been flying low, but then radar didn't usually track helicopters anyway. But with all the navigational and computerized equipment onboard, not to mention the gunwales, this bird was strictly military. It wasn't new, however. More like salvage, something the government moth-balled or sold. So why would a military aircraft from a foreign government be trying to kill an American gymnastics champion twelve years out of the field?
Jack thought Morgan was beginning to trust him. She'd told him more about her life than he figured she'd ever told anyone else, except maybe her adoptive mother. He was glad she told him. It made him understand her need to survive. Underlying everything about her, he could tell she thought her entire life was a temporary situation. That no matter the notoriety or how solid a place she stood, everything would be yanked from her and she'd be back on the streets. It had to be her greatest fear, that "place'' where Jean died, where life was ignored by people who had adequate food and clothing and where no one wanted to acknowledge these were people.
Jack wanted to take her in his arms and let her know she would never be one of them again. She'd gotten out of that and there was nothing that could pull her back into it. But he knew you couldn't tell people these things. The fear was inside them, ingrained from the hard knocks of experience. They had to let it go like an unwanted emotion. It had to come from the inside. No one else could make it go away. But he'd be there—
He stopped.
He wasn't going to be there. When they got to Washington, when this was over, Morgan would get a new life. True, she would never have to worry about the basic necessities of life, but he wouldn't be part of her existence.
More Than Gold (Capitol Chronicles Book 3) Page 14