The ambassador sighed.
“Oh, they’re floating a wonderful story about him being a nature freak who likes to collect botany samples. And they’ve got a second aide who claims he saw Tarini fire the gun. Karinolov claims Tarini stalked the man because of a dispute over politics. But face facts, Austin. He’s a hit man sent from Karinolov’s mission and Karinolov knows the guy must have found her. He is already demanding that she be turned over to him personally or to the ambassador in Washington. That means deportation.”
“Will the State Department hand her over?”
“You bet they will. She’s still a Byleukrainian citizen, Austin, and officially is a member of Karinolov’s staff. There’s no reason to protect her. She has gotten herself into a real jam now.”
“The woman is trouble,” Austin said in wonder and frustration. “Dad, if she’d just done as I told her, none of this would have happened. Karinolov’s men might have still tried something, but you would have taken care of it. She’s trouble, through and through.”
“She might be trouble, son. But she’s your trouble. And I think she’s alive. Out there somewhere. The dead man’s gun never fired.”
“She’s a survivor, Dad. If she managed to get out from under that goon, she’ll make it.”
“She’ll need your help. Find her, son, and bring her back here. We can hide her. Go through the back pathway. It’s the only way she’s going to be safe. Nobody else can give her sanctuary.”
Austin felt a saltiness in his eyes and couldn’t speak. But inside, he felt the promise he made.
He would find her.
“All right, Dad. I will.”
Ambassador Smith deftly turned the conversation to an analysis of the disaster at hand. Karinolov had sent the liaison officer to kill Tarini—he must have kept a very good tail on Tarini and Austin when they drove up from New York or maybe Karinolov found out about the Smith farm from other sources.
In any event, Tarini had killed in self-defense and now was out there, somewhere in the cold Connecticut night.
If she wasn’t at the bottom of the even colder river.
The two men agreed that the ambassador would do everything in his power to keep the investigating officers on the property—preferably in the sitting room with teacups and saucers in hand—and the ambassador would issue a brief, completely uninformative statement to the reporters who were converging outside the farmhouse.
His father reviewed directions on how to slip unnoticed up the back pathway to the house, cautioning Austin twice that Tarini wouldn’t be safer anywhere else on earth.
As the two men finished talking, the ambassador pleaded with his son to be careful. Austin asked his father to convey his love to his mother, he hung up and headed back to Connecticut.
He flipped on the car radio, turning the dial until he got an all-news station. The details were beginning to be made public.
Tarini couldn’t get far. If he didn’t find her, and fast, he would have failed her, as he had failed Vlad.
Where was she? he demanded of himself as he sped along the highway.
The body had been found a half mile from the river town of Farmdale. She must have gone there. But there had been blood everywhere—how had she managed to get more than a block into town without attracting a lot of attention? And where would she go from Farmdale? Wouldn’t somebody have turned her in?
He mulled over the possibilities, knowing they were the same possibilities that a hundred officers were now considering.
Bus stations would be searched, cabdrivers interviewed, train schedules checked, beat cops sent door-to-door to ask questions, and roadblocks would be set up on anything wider than a bike path. Tarini had to know that she couldn’t just walk away.
And then he gasped. Of course she knew she couldn’t walk. Not east toward Farmdale. She wasn’t an idiot. In fact, she was the smartest woman he knew.
Tarini had an iron will that would motivate her to do whatever was necessary to survive, he was certain of it.
Austin pulled over to the shoulder and turned off the engine. Where was she? he asked himself again.
Anybody in her shoes would have headed for the town—but that would have been lunacy, like walking into the police station and holding her hands out to be cuffed. No, he decided, she didn’t go there.
She did something more complicated. What was it? He had to get into her mind. Even if he thought she was a lying, no-good, devious, manipulative woman.
When he was finished thinking, he switched on the ignition and headed away from his family’s farm. Away from Farmdale, away from the dragnet. He’d find her upriver, west, far from where her pursuers would flounder. Of that he was sure.
As he drove, he realized he had found an unbearable tenderness toward her. He loved her. Oh, how it cost him to admit it—even to himself—but he loved her. He just hoped he could shake that feeling later, after he got her out of this disaster.
But something much more urgent consumed him.
How had Karinolov known where to find her?
Chapter Eleven
“Tarini? Tarini, it’s me, Austin. Come out. It’s safe. I’m not even angry about your running away.” All right, maybe just a little, Austin thought. But he didn’t have time for anger or even annoyance.
Seven times he’d parked the car in bramble and brush—and had searched and then given up, driving farther and farther north.
Calling for her in a voice he knew grew increasingly tense with only the ducks to squawk and complain at his intrusion, he searched for anything that would tell him she had passed this way.
But there was nothing. No footprints, no drops of blood on the underbrush, no telltale threads snagged from her clothes by the thorny bushes.
Nothing.
He had either misjudged her flight or she was profoundly talented at covering her trail.
And though his love for her made him ardently hope the second conclusion was possible, he was reluctantly forced to acknowledge that the first conclusion—that he had misjudged—was correct.
Maybe she was already in the hands of the authorities, back many miles. Maybe she was already on her way to Byleukrainia—without his ever having had a chance to say goodbye. Maybe she had drowned in the muddy river and her body was floating toward the ocean…
She couldn’t possibly have come this far, he thought, calculating that Tarini would have had to cover four miles an hour through the underbrush and forest and muddy shores, all without leaving a single hint of her passing.
A pro—a very skilled one—might be able to do it, but a pregnant woman in a pair of sneakers? What had he been thinking?
“Tarini?”
He stood in the silence of the woods. Nothing. A hum from the highway a half mile off, the gentle lap of the water on the shore. He wondered about his bright idea of trying to think like her. She wasn’t here. He hadn’t known her, hadn’t been able to get into her head at all.
And maybe he had never really known her. Or how she thought Maybe he had never been as close to her as he remembered.
Shouldn’t be surprising—that’s how most of his intimacies with women had been—physical, hot, pleasurable for both parties, but not intimate.
But he had thought his relationship with Tarini was different. It wasn’t.
And he should have learned his lesson the day she dumped him. He should have known when she put his best friend’s ring on her finger. Why couldn’t he have learned his lesson?
After Tarini, he should have forgotten her, moved as far away from her as the planet allowed, found himself a nice blonde who was more… cooperative.
But, of course, Tarini had his child.
And also his heart.
“Listen, Tarini, I’m sorry about locking you up,” he said aloud, pleading with the fates one more time that he find her. “You can’t go running right into danger anymore. You can’t just think of yourself. You have the baby to consider, and that baby—”
He heard a rustle
in the trees that wasn’t squirrel or deer. He pulled his hand back to his shoulder holster as he suddenly alerted—could it be possible that Tarini’s attackers were out there?
Karinolov had one man down, but he could have sent others. They’d be fools to do anything with the Connecticut state trooper, the ATF, the FBI and the State Department covering them. But then again, some—if not all—of Karinolov’s men would be covered by diplomatic immunity.
And Karinolov regarded his diplomatic immunity as some kind of open-season hunting license.
He heard a twig snap, and he whipped his head around and saw a glimpse of white under a jagged ledge of rock. The thin shoulders. The blue-black hair.
And the blood. Streaks of it all over her shirt, her jeans and the jacket he had given her.
He charged into the brush.
“Tarini!”
She crouched partially hidden under the ledge. He tugged at her, and a wild, convulsive shudder ran through her body as he pulled her into his arms. The blood was dry. He shoved his hands up under her shirt, feeling the clammy, but mercifully unbroken skin. She hadn’t been shot.
But she was in shock.
He yanked off his jacket and wrapped it around her.
“It’s all right, Tarini, I’m getting you out of here.”
She started to cry—big rushing sobs.
“It’s all right to cry,” he said soothingly, though it looked as if she already knew that. “It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot. It’s all right to just plain be scared.”
“I killed a man,” she said through her tears.
“I know,” he murmured, drinking in the feel of her in his arms. She was alive! And the joy of it crowded out every other emotion. Even the sensible ones like fear of Karinolov and uncertainty about his next move. “I know you killed him, Tarini, but you had to do it. It’ll be all right.”
She pushed his comforting arms away.
“Austin, I’m a pro,” she reminded him, roughly swiping the tears from her cheeks. “And I’ve been in wartime conditions. I didn’t want to kill him. But it was him or me.”
He looked at her with stunned admiration. Then he noticed that she held her leg at a funny angle. And her lips were dangerously blue.
“Tarini, we have to get you out of here.”
Austin eased her fully out of the ledge and held her to him, hoping the heat from his body would help bring her out of her violent shaking. He pulled back her chilly fingers from their grip on his jacket He rubbed and blew at each precious digit to warm them. She talked tough, but she was clearly in shock—and had held herself together only with the last ounce of her strength.
If he took her anywhere—to any hospital or clinic or even a private doctor—he’d be signing her death warrant. The police would be alerted and authorities would be all over her in minutes. She’d be deported and he would have failed her.
Austin would have to pull her out of this on his own.
“Come on, Tarini, just walk to the clearing and I’ll carry you the rest of the way,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “Just a little farther to the car…”
“Austin, something happened out there.”
“Hey, Tarini, I know. And you acted like a pro.”
“No, something else. I had this moment, when the baby moved. I realized what was important about my life and I knew what I had to do. Saving that baby’s life gave me the strength to defend myself when I thought it was all over.”
He eased her along the rough, rocky embankment If he could just get her to the clearing, he could carry her the rest of the way to the car.
He had to keep her focused, but still, as she talked, he felt the strong connection with her. This was his baby she was talking about.
“What were you saying?”
“The baby moved,” Tarini said, stumbling in front of him. He held his hands out to steady her. “The baby moved inside of me and then I realized that all my life I had been running away from my destiny, away from being pregnant, away from my womanliness, away from trusting any man. Away from trusting even you, Austin, even you. And when our baby moved inside of me, it changed me. It gave me all the strength I needed.”
“Here, watch your feet. What in blazes are you talking about? Start from the top.”
“I always wanted to deny my pregnancy,” she said.
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she had denied her pregnancy to him more than to herself, but he didn’t. The bitterness within him was gone. Besides, he had a life to save, a job to do. And Austin Smith had never let anger get in the way of doing his job.
“I wanted to believe being pregnant, being a woman, made no difference in my life,” she continued. “But it does. I am a woman who has a tiny life inside her.”
“You’re safe now,” he said gently.
“I know. But I shouldn’t have been in that position. I shouldn’t have put myself in that position.”
He would have explained each and every action that she had taken which had put her in danger, but he stopped himself. In fact, she was in that position because he had locked her up. And Tarini with a lock on her was an escape waiting to happen.
In the last hours, he had learned a lot about her— understood her even more than when he entered her in the most intimate way. He knew her now. Never lock her up because it was the surest way to make her run.
He picked her up and carried her the rest of the way to Bob’s car, gently placing her in the front seat. In the trunk, he found a nubby wool blanket, and wrapped it around Tarini’s lap. She was still shaking, but she was better. He slid into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. The first blast of air from the vents was cold, but quickly changed to tepid and then finally to warm. As the air in the car shook off its early spring chill, Tarini stopped shivering.
“Do you want to touch it?” she asked softly.
He looked at her—her face, illuminated only by the lights on the dash, gave away nothing.
“Touch what?” he asked cautiously.
“Your baby.”
He gulped.
A theoretical baby was one thing—a daydream of football lessons he’d give in five years or of graduations he’d attend two decades from now, a battle with Tarini for honor and duty and doing the right thing. A theoretical baby was his name, his genetic mark, his family’s heritage being passed on for another generation.
But a real baby—that was a another story. So near, so close, so incredible.
He realized he had been like Tarini—regarding this pregnancy as not making any fundamental changes in his life-style. Now, thinking of his hand on her stomach, he knew this baby would change everything about him.
He didn’t know what to say.
She said it for him, taking his hand in her cold, trembling one. She lifted her T-shirt to let him touch the soft flesh beneath. Her stomach was hard, barely curved, and Austin wondered if Tarini hadn’t just attributed a mystical experience to some simple indigestion.
They sat in silence for several moments. And then he thought he felt a movement in the flesh beneath his touch.
“Is that it?” he asked, openmouthed with wonder. “Is that our baby?”
“Yes. That’s our baby.”
He wanted to stay there, but he knew she was still in shock and he had to get her someplace warmer than Bob’s car. Besides, eventually the authorities were going to head in their direction.
He took his hand back reluctantly and put the car in reverse.
“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Vladimir,” he said as he eased the car back onto the dirt road.
He knew that was the one thing—perhaps the only thing—they could agree on.
Chapter Twelve
They drove on side streets and back roads, and listened grimly to the updated news reports, which were uniformly depressing. She was a fugitive. If caught, she was going back to Byleukrainia. The dead liaison officer was some kind of war hero, according to the Byleukrainian government, and his death must be
avenged.
But there was worse news. Byleukrainia had confirmed that Vlad was being held in prison. His crime? Being a Romanov, enemy of the people, although there were trumped-up charges of corruption and fraud so outrageous that no one but a true believer in the military government would credit them.
Unconfirmed reports asserted that Vlad’s trial was being held at this very moment. There was no doubt as to the outcome. Rioting, killing, fires and looting had broken out in the Byleukrainian capital as Vlad’s supporters erupted in fury and frustration.
Austin worried for his friend. But he was even more concerned with events nearer to home.
“Was it your mother or your sister who told Karinolov where we were?”
Tarini bristled. “Neither,” she said crisply. “My mother would never speak to Karinolov and doesn’t know where your parents live. She’d also have sense enough not to tell Tanya where I was headed.”
“Then how did Karinolov know?”
“Bob.”
“No way. He didn’t even want to know where we were going. Remember? He specifically told me not to tell him so that he couldn’t be forced by Karinolov to disclose our location. Bob’s completely trustworthy.”
“Maybe it was your father,” Tarini ventured. “It’s not unheard of for a diplomat to work as a spy. Even for a country that’s not his own. Maybe he did it for money—after all, you have a pretty nice farm there considering he worked for the diplomatic corps all his life.”
“Don’t you dare accuse my father!” Austin said with indignation.
But, in the back of his mind, he wondered. His father had no allegiance to the Byleukrainian people, and if he thought Karinolov was the father of her child, he would have no interest in protecting Tarini, either.
“I still don’t trust your sister. Tanya is under Karinolov’s spell,” he said at last.
“I don’t trust her, either, but I know she wouldn’t do anything to harm me.”
“Let’s agree to disagree on who’s helping Karinolov,” Austin said shortly, hoping she was wrong about the retired ambassador. “All I know is that Karinolov knew we were at my parents’ house.”
His Kind Of Trouble Page 11