“How dare you?” Hershel shot back quietly, intensely. “You don’t even know Annebet, and you assume because she’s not Jewish and because her family has to labor for a living that she’s less than we are. Well, she’s not. She’s more. She’s so much more. And I pity you for not being able to see that.”
“I forbid you to see her again!”
“Or you’ll do what?” Hershel asked. “Write me out of your will? Fair enough. Consider it done. I don’t want your money. I have better things to do than sit around counting something that doesn’t really exist.”
Hershel pulled open the door. He didn’t slam it behind him. He shut it instead with a much more final-sounding click. He took the stairs up to his bedroom calmly. If Helga didn’t know him as well as she did, she wouldn’t have guessed that he was furious.
She followed him up and into his room, watching as he started to pack, throwing his leather bag onto his bed and taking all of his undergarments from his drawer, putting them inside.
“I can’t believe he still thinks I’m—” Hershel cut himself off.
“What?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Are you really leaving?” Her heart was in her throat. “If you go back to Copenhagen, how will I know you’re safe?”
Hershel sat down on his bed, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. He sighed, looking at his suitcase. “Annebet told me she’s not going back to university this term—I think the Gunvalds’are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. If I leave, I won’t be able to see her again.” He looked at Helga. “I’m dying to see her again.”
“What does it mean—get laid?”
“You heard that, huh, mouse? Terrific.” He stood up, dumped the contents of his bag back into his drawer.
“You’re not going to tell me?” she asked, relief clogging her throat. He wasn’t leaving.
“No.”
“Are you sure? I suppose I could always ask Poppi . . .”
He laughed at that—as she’d hoped he would—some of the tension leaving his face. But he didn’t tell her.
It didn’t matter. She’d ask Marte. Marte knew everything.
Helga turned to leave, but Hershel stopped her.
“Does Annebet . . . Has she ever . . . mentioned me?”
Helga shook her head. “I haven’t seen her since the day in the barn, and today in the store.”
He looked so disappointed. “But Marte says Annebet looks at you like she wants to kiss you,” she continued.
Her brother’s face lit up. “Yeah?”
“Mrs. Shuler? Mr. Bhagat is ready to see you, ma’am.”
Helga blinked.
An earnest young man stood in front of her. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. Okay. Twenty-five. He just looked twelve.
Helga flipped through her notepad, skimming the words written there in her own familiar handwriting.
Hijacked plane. One hundred twenty passengers. Terrorists from the People’s Party. Demanding release of prisoners, one in Israel. Max Bhagat—FBI negotiator.
I know your secret, in Desmond’s bold hand.
Merde. When had he written that?
She rose to her feet and followed the young man into the other room.
“They haven’t contacted us again,” Max Bhagat was saying. “Not since they spoke to the tower in Kazabek before they landed. We’ve tried to raise them a number of times, but they’re not talking.”
Stan stood near the door to this room in the airport terminal that had been set up as the negotiators’headquarters. The building overlooked runway two, where the hijacked plane was parked.
This room had no windows, but just down the hallway was a waiting area with a floor-to-ceiling view of the 747. And, of course, the negotiators’room had banks of video screens, upon which were broadcast images of the plane from every imaginable angle, courtesy of the cameras put into place by the SEALs in Jazz Jacquette’s surveillance squad.
They were out there right now, four men hidden on their bellies in the swampy grass surrounding runway two. Two teams of two on two-hour shifts, rotating out every hour.
“They haven’t pulled the window shades,” Bhagat continued, “so we’ve got a pretty clear look into the cabin. There appears to be only five terrorists—”
“I wouldn’t set that into stone just yet,” Lieutenant Jacquette interrupted. “Wait until we get the minicams and mikes into place in the body of the plane. I have a three-man team all set to move in after 0200.”
The SEALs in Jazz’s squad would approach the aircraft from its blind side—the rear—and work their way forward, staying beneath it. It would take time, moving slowly so as to make no noise, but they’d gain access to the luggage compartment and thread miniaturized cameras and microphones up into the passenger compartment and the cockpit of the plane.
Stan tried to stay focused, tried not to let his thoughts slip to Teri and Muldoon, who had surely finished dinner, even if they’d lingered over coffee. They were probably both in bed by now.
Maybe even together.
God damn it.
He was tired and cranky.
So what if Teri had hit it off so well with Muldoon that she had invited him back to her room? So what if he were there right now, skimming his hands and mouth across her naked body? So what if he were pushing himself inside of her as she clung to him, eyes closed and head thrown back, sweat glistening on her perfect breasts?
Ah, Christ. Stan wanted to double over from the longing and envy that gripped him. Instead he pushed it away, forcing himself to stand tall, to stand strong.
It would be great if Muldoon and Teri hooked up. He knew that was true. Because then Teri would be Muldoon’s problem. Stan could stop thinking about her once and for all. He could stop trying to figure out how the hell to help her deal with not just the big threats in her life, but the day-to-day ones as well.
Stan could be her friend, period, the end. No obligations, no responsibilities, no temptation. Yeah, all temptation would be gone. Because no way in hell would he mess around with Mike Muldoon’s girlfriend. No way. He could want her so badly he was bleeding from the ears, but he wouldn’t touch her if she were involved with Mike.
Lieutenant Paoletti and Max Bhagat were deep in a conversation about timing and best and worst case scenarios—nothing Stan didn’t already know. Still, he needed to pay attention, so he tried to wake himself up by standing a little straighter and resolutely pushing the last of the images of Teri Howe getting it on with Mike Muldoon out of his head.
Mrs. Shuler, the envoy from Israel, was watching him—apparently he wasn’t the only one whose attention had wandered. She gave him a smile and a nod before they both focused on Max Bhagat.
But then the conversation and the meeting was over. And Stan followed Paoletti to the door. If he were lucky, he’d encounter no more emergencies between this building and his hotel room pillow.
Please, God, let him get just an hour of sleep tonight. . . .
But Mrs. Shuler intercepted him, turning to greet him with a handshake in the hallway.
The Israeli envoy was a small, pleasantly round woman in her midsixties with soft gray hair that curled around a still-youthful face.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Senior Chief,” she told him in an accent that reminded him sharply, sweetly of his mother’s laughter-filled voice. “I know you must be even more tired than I am. But I did want to meet you and introduce myself. When I was a little girl, back in Denmark, I was friends with your mother.”
Stan had to laugh. “No kidding?”
Mrs. Shuler nodded, warmth in her eyes. “Marte and her family—the Gunvalds—helped save my life when the Germans rounded up the Danish Jews in 1943.”
No shit? “She never talked about Denmark,” Stan admitted. “At least not to me, not in any depth. I mean, I knew her parents died there when she was pretty young, right after the war. And family legend has it that her older sister
, Annebet, hocked an important piece of jewelry, some kind of heirloom, I think it was, to buy them passage on a ship to New York, but other than that . . .”
“My brother’s ring.” Mrs. Shuler suddenly had to reach for the wall to hold herself up.
Stan took her elbow, afraid she was going to do a half gainer right on her face, this woman who had known his mother, who had known the grandparents he himself had never met. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
She looked at him with eyes that were no longer filled with energy and light, but instead were confused and frightened.
“Ah, Helga, there you are.” Her assistant, the tall black former operator, breezed down the hall toward them. “I see you’ve met Senior Chief Wolchonok—Marte Gunvald’s son. I’m sure there’ll be a more opportune time to talk after this situation has been properly dealt with.”
“Marte’s son,” Mrs. Shuler repeated, looking at Stan, her face now showing every single day of her sixty-something years of life.
“Is that okay with you, Senior Chief?” the assistant said. “Maybe you can share a flight back to London with Mrs. Shuler.”
“I’d like that,” Stan said. “You know, my sister’s name is Helga.”
Mrs. Shuler’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know,” she said.
And then she was gone. Whisked back into the negotiators’room.
Stan opened the door to his hotel room, peeling off his shirt and T-shirt and unfastening his pants as he went inside.
It was as freaking hot in there as it was out in the hallway. Hot and close. His vivid imagination conjured up the fragrant scent of the curried noodles and vegetables he’d ordered for dinner, back about a million years ago.
His stomach rumbled.
It was some realistic hallucination, because it overpowered the stench of his own clothes. He smelled like fatigue and nonstop stress, armpits and old feet. Tired, aching, stinky old feet.
He slapped on the light and sat down in one of the room’s tattered easy chairs to take his boots off. His left boot was off and in his hands before he saw it.
Dinner—main course covered with a metal plate warmer—had been laid out on the small table in the corner of the room.
And—holy shit!—Teri Howe was curled up in the middle of his bed, fast asleep.
He was wearing only his briefs. His pants were down around his knees, his T-shirt and shirt back by the door where he’d dropped them.
His fingers fumbled, and his boot hit the floor with a thump, and Teri sprang awake. It was remarkable to watch, at least for the part of him that wasn’t completely horrified by coming face-to-face with her in his current state of undress.
One instant she was sound asleep, and the next she was on her feet, back against the wall, staring at him, eyes wide, as if he were some flasher who’d dropped his pants in the park.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone.”
He stood to pull up and zip his pants—his turn to move fast. But then he was standing there, without a shirt on, his belt undone. As she edged even farther away from him, he quickly sat back down. Getting his shirt was a priority, but he’d have to walk past her to do it, and the last thing he wanted to appear was threatening to her in any way, especially when she was still off balance from sleep and on the verge of being extremely spooked.
As he watched, she looked around the room and got her bearings.
“Oh, my God,” she said as breathlessly as if she’d just run five miles. “I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. I just . . . I heard that you had to go to a meeting, that you didn’t get any dinner, so I ordered room service, only they wouldn’t bring it here if someone wasn’t in the room, so I found Duke—Chief Jefferson—who has a master key, and he let me in so I could wait for it, only after the food arrived I couldn’t leave because I couldn’t get the door to lock behind me and I didn’t want to leave the room unlocked with your seabag in here.”
She finally inhaled as she pointed to his duffel bag lying on the floor by the door, where he’d left it when he’d first been assigned this room.
“I’m so sorry, Senior Chief,” she said again, as if she’d committed some cardinal sin.
She’d ordered him dinner. Stan didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had ordered him dinner. He was always the man in charge of making sure everyone else had everything they needed, and his own needs often went ignored. He cleared his throat. “I’m, um, going to put my shirt back on, okay?”
“You don’t have to. It’s hot in here and you don’t . . . have to . . .” Teri watched as he crossed the room and picked up his T-shirt, as he turned it right-side out and pulled it over his head.
“Did I say thank you yet?” Stan asked.
She shook her head.
“Thank you.”
“I probably broke all kinds of rules, being in here like this.” She was embarrassed as hell and looked as if she were ready to bolt from the room. “It really wasn’t my intention to be in your room when you got back, like some kind of . . . of . . . weird stalker or something.”
“Actually, the situation did have a Goldilocks and the three bears feel to it.” He tried to make his voice light as he jammed his foot back into his boot. “Only you brought the porridge with you and your hair is dark brown. By the way, to get the door to lock, you need to pull up on the knob, let the latch click into place. So how was the karaoke? Did you get up and sing?”
She laughed—a short burst of surprised air. “Me?”
Stan felt far more in control with most of his clothes back on. “Not your style, huh?”
He crossed to the table and lifted the metal lid to find a fragrant mountain of vegetables, noodles, and chunks of tofu. Thank you, Jesus and Teri. He touched it with his finger and found that it was still faintly warm. Life was good.
“To get up in front of a bunch of people I work with and make a total fool of myself?” She laughed again. “No, thanks.”
Stan glanced up at her. “Want some?”
She shook her head, her shoulders more relaxed now. “I had dinner.”
With Mike Muldoon. Yeah, he knew. And yet she was here in Stan’s room now.
If he hadn’t seen her holding Muldoon’s hand in the restaurant, he’d be wildly imagining a night filled with more than a good meal, a shower, and a few hours of deep, dreamless sleep. And okay, he had a very vivid imagination and it was going wild. But because he’d seen her with Muldoon, he knew reality was going to be very different from all he was imagining.
Still, he let himself enjoy the thought of Teri, stretched out naked on his bed, all long legs and full breasts and soft skin.
Oh, yeah.
As far as fantasies went, it was a good one.
She glanced toward the door. “I should go.”
Stan put the lid back on both his libido and his dinner. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
She laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t need to walk me—”
“There,” he interrupted her. “That’s the attitude you need. Instead of shrinking when someone bigger than you so much as looks at you—”
“I don’t shrink.”
She was only pretending to stand her ground. Stan gave her two seconds to fold. “You wanna bet?”
“I don’t.” Her gaze shifted and she was done. “I mean, I try not to—”
“I’ve been watching you for a while, Teri.” He moved so that she had to look at him. “Your body language is all about retreating when you should be holding your ground.”
She looked down at the floor. He would’ve had to lie down to put himself into her line of sight. Or touch her, tugging her chin up so that she was forced to look into his eyes.
He did neither.
“Out in the parking lot,” he said as gently as he could, “with Joel Hogan . . . You froze. I saw it. I kept waiting for you to whale him one, but you didn’t. And when Starrett told me about Admi
ral Tucker—”
“Oh, God.” She sank down onto his bed, eyes closed, defeated. “You must think I’m such a loser.”
Stan sat down next to her, making sure there was a good three feet between them. “I think you’re one of the best helo pilots I’ve ever worked with. I think you’re an extremely beautiful woman—for whom that’s probably been more of a curse than a blessing.” He also thought she’d probably been sexually abused as a child, but Christ, how the hell did you ask someone about that? “And I think all you need to do is to learn how to be a little less nonconfrontational when it comes to unwanted attention from men.”
Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge Page 14