The Bride and the Mercenary

by Harper Allen

  “And the next five shots missed their target, too?” Her voice rose. “For God’s sake, Malone, that doesn’t make sense!”

  “He panicked. He’d just killed his partner, and he knew it. And from what Watkins said earlier, the shooter probably wasn’t convinced that you were part of this, so picking me off without taking out another innocent person wasn’t that easy. It could have happened that way, Lee.”

  “It didn’t happen that way, because if it did that would mean that you’re the Executioner, and you’re not!” Fear harshened her voice. “You know you’re incapable of doing the things he’s done!”

  “How do I know that, Lee?” His gaze seemed suddenly brilliant. “Except for the fact that I chose the most violent profession of all, I don’t know anything about the kind of man I am or what I’ve been capable of in the past. How do I know I didn’t cross over the line from soldier for hire to assassin?”

  “Because I know you couldn’t cross that line, dammit!” Her eyes blazing, she brought her face close to his. “If you can’t rely on your own memory of the man you used to be, rely on mine. I fell in love with you, Malone! I fell in love with you, and even if we only had two weeks together, I knew the kind of man you were. I knew you completely!”

  “Yeah, honey, I think you did. Even if you can’t admit it to yourself, I think you still do.” His voice was hoarse, and the brilliance had faded from his gaze. A muscle at the side of his jaw moved.

  “And that’s why just for a moment today you thought I’d gunned down an unarmed man,” he said softly. “Because some part of you has to know that I’m capable of everything they say I’ve done.”

  Malone stood. “No other explanation fits the facts, Lee. The best we’ve been able to come up with is that Watkins betrayed every oath he’d sworn to uphold as a government agent, and was taking orders from the Executioner himself without realizing it. I didn’t know the man well, but I don’t think he was that stupid. He’d been given hard proof that I was a killer who had to be taken out, no matter what.”

  “Hard proof from his unimpeachable source,” Ainslie said tightly. “That’s why my theory does fit. Whoever the Executioner is when he’s in his Dr. Jekyll mode, he has to be someone whose word is accepted unquestioningly.”

  “So who do you propose we focus on?” There was an edge to his tone. “The director of the Agency? Or hell, maybe Watkins was getting information from the Oval Office itself. That would fit all our half-baked—”

  “Stop it, Malone!” With no clear recollection of even having gotten off the bed, she was on her feet and facing him. “That’s crazy and you know it!”

  “No more crazy than anything else we’ve come up with simply because we refuse to accept the only sane explanation,” he said harshly. “I’ve been keeping my eyes closed just as tightly as you have, Lee, but today I finally saw how it was. Sure, I tried to convince myself that the shooter had to be the Executioner and that for some reason he wanted to postpone our deaths. But the truth was in your eyes at the moment of Watkins’s death. You knew I was capable of pulling that trigger, honey—and that washes away the one argument we had against me being the Executioner.”

  “You intend to turn yourself in.”

  It wasn’t a question, but she kept her gaze on him anyway, as if she still harbored some faint hope that he would refute her statement. When he didn’t, she turned away.

  “Who to, Malone, the Agency or the police?” She stood by the dresser, her back to him.

  “The police.” There was no hesitation in his answer. “I won’t risk anything happening to you, so you stay with Dare until it’s all over.”

  Lifting her head, she met his eyes in the mirror and nodded slowly. “I get it. This time I walk away from you, right? This way your conscience is clear, Malone, because you can tell yourself you didn’t walk out of my life a second time.”

  “I didn’t walk out on you the first time,” he said sharply. “Not intentionally, anyway. And you’re forgetting that I came back to—”

  “You didn’t come back to me!”

  Spinning abruptly around to face him, she flung the accusation at him, her voice high and tremulous. Malone’s expression was shuttered, and something inside of her flared out of control as she met that opaque green gaze.

  “You never came back! Someone who looked like you and sounded like you came back, but the man I loved walked out on me that night two years ago and never returned! You’re a complete stranger to me!”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Lee?” His tone was tight. “You know me better than anyone, dammit!”

  “No, I knew the man I loved and lost.” She shook her head in sharp denial. “He may not have revealed everything about his past to me, but he didn’t hide away his soul. The man who turned up yesterday calling himself Malone would rather send me away than let me know there’s a place inside him so dark and so terrible that from the first he’s believed himself capable of the worst crimes imaginable.”

  “You were the one who thought I’d killed Watkins. That’s what finally convinced me—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “I didn’t convince you, Malone! You’ve been convinced all along that you could be the Executioner—and some part of me knew there had to be a reason for you to believe that. Do you want to know what really happened today? Just for one moment, I let you convince me!”

  She took a step toward him. “So what is it you’re keeping from me, Malone? What do you know about yourself that’s too damning to reveal?”

  “Nothing.” His tone betrayed no emotion. “I told you, I barely remember anything about my past.”

  “I know what you’ve told me. I think you’re lying,” she said unevenly. “I think you do remember something. Is it to do with Joseph Mocamba?”

  “I just have the one memory about him.” His eyes met hers and she knew he was telling the truth. Then his gaze slid away again. “There’s nothing else.”

  He was only about a foot away from her, Ainslie thought, but he’d just put himself beyond her reach forever. “I was wrong,” she said, her voice low and intense. “I thought I threw roses onto an empty coffin. But whether your physical body was in there or not, I really did bury you that day, Malone. You really did die. You didn’t come back to me at all.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  She stared at him for a long moment, her vision blurring with unshed tears. “They’re going to kill you. The police will hand you over to the Agency, and you’ll never be heard of again. The Executioner will see to that. And even if they do hold another funeral for you, I won’t be there at the graveside. This time you’ll go down into the darkness alone. But that’s the way you want it, isn’t it?”

  She turned away and walked over to the desk. She picked up her shoulder bag and the jacket she’d discarded, and went past him to the door.

  Then she paused and turned back to him, the tears no longer in her eyes but silvery tracks on her cheeks. “You were a mercenary, so you must know the legend that Sully once told me—the one about the wild geese. Do you believe it, Seamus?”

  He blinked. “That when mercenaries die, their souls take on the form of wild geese and they’re doomed to fly for all eternity?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t believe that. I never did.”

  “Neither do I.” She attempted a shaky smile. “I wish I did. I’d rather think of you up there with them, than where you’re really going.”

  “And where’s that, Lee?”

  His tone was less remote than it had been, but his eyes were still unreadable. Ainslie looked at him in faint surprise.

  “Why, hell, of course,” she said simply. “That’s where you think you deserve to go. That’s where you’ve been for the last two years, Seamus, but this time you’re going to make it permanent.”

  She put her hand lightly on his sleeve, and felt his muscles tense under her touch. Rising up on her tiptoes, she brushed her lips against the immobile corner of his mouth, and then stepped back, her anguished
gaze fixed on his.

  “At least the wild geese seek redemption, however futile their search is.” Her words were leaden. “But you believe you’re beyond it, Malone. Even I can’t convince you otherwise.”

  She turned back to the door. She put her hand on the knob, pushed it open, and felt the night air rush to meet her.

  “They buried me alive, Lee.”

  His words were low, as if some part of him hoped she wouldn’t hear him, but as she froze to stillness he went on in the same flat tone.

  “The rest of my reconnaissance party was killed in the ambush, but I was just wounded. The government forces caught me the next day, and they decided to make an example of me. So they buried me alive.”

  The hair on the back of her neck rose. Very slowly she turned to face him, icy horror washing over her.

  “What did you say?”

  “They built a wooden box just big enough for me to stand in.” A muscle at the side of his jaw jumped. “They put me in it, and five of them lowered it into a hole they’d dug in the ground. Then they filled the hole up again and left me there to die. They wanted it to be slow, Lee. They’d inserted a length of pipe that ran from the box and up through six feet of packed earth as a breathing tube.”

  Carefully, Ainslie shut the door behind her. She stood in front of him, her stricken gaze on his face.

  The eyes that stared back at her were dark and empty, as if the man behind them had gone away a long time ago, leaving only a hollow shell behind. When he spoke again, the illusion was complete. His voice was dead and mechanical.

  “Except I didn’t die.” One corner of his mouth jerked up in a parody of a smile. “I spent the whole of the first day trying to get my hands free from the ropes they’d bound them with. After my wrists started bleeding, it got easier.”

  “Malone, don’t.” The cry was wrenched from her. “You don’t have to—”

  “When my hands were finally free, I took off my belt and started scraping away at the wood of the box with the buckle.” If he’d heard her interruption, he gave no sign. “They’d used scrap lumber, so the real problem wasn’t in breaking through. It was in making sure that when I finally did, the earth above didn’t fall in and suffocate me. In my dreams the last couple of years that’s always how it ends—in complete darkness, trying to take one more breath, and not being able to.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “But as I said, that’s not how it turned out in reality. Leaving the pipe there was their mistake, because if I hadn’t had that as a guide I wouldn’t have known which way to dig. It was my lifeline. Even after the delirium took hold, I kept digging up alongside it, even though by then I’d forgotten where I was or what I was doing. Sometime after that I got to the surface. After resting up for a day, I went hunting for the men who’d buried me.”

  This time when he smiled she saw the brief gleam of his teeth. His eyes were shadowed.

  “The details don’t matter. The unit they’d been in had been given harvest furlough to bring in the crops, so they’d all gone back to their villages. But one by one I found them. And one by one I killed them.” He shrugged. The movement seemed stiff and unnatural. “By that time I was drifting in and out of delirium from the fever I’d contracted, but sometimes my mind would clear and I would wonder what I was becoming. I told myself that they were soldiers, and the enemy that I’d been hired to fight, so what I was doing was no more than I did every day of my professional life. But I knew it wasn’t.”

  “But what kind of men were they, to have done what they did to you?” Ainslie said through dry lips.

  “Like I said, they were soldiers.” He shook his head. “Their unit was known for its atrocities on the area’s civilians, which was why the rebels I was fighting with had tried to wipe them out in the first place. But what they were doesn’t change anything.”

  Ainslie wondered if he’d considered whether the future innocent victims of the men he’d killed would have agreed with him—women and children whose lives had been spared because Malone had eliminated at least some members of a death squad. But even as she opened her mouth to speak, he went on, as if he wanted only to get the story over with.

  “By the time I found the last of the five, the word had gotten out that a ghost was stalking anyone who’d had anything to do with burying the Americano, so he knew I was coming for him. He was standing sentry duty his first night back with his unit when I came out of the jungle and let him see my face.”

  Malone frowned. “I knew his death would end it all. But as I stood there in front of him, the fever left me as suddenly as if I’d just woken up from a nightmare, and I knew I couldn’t kill him. So I told him it was over between us. I’d taken only a couple of steps away from him when he shot me. The bullet took me high on my left shoulder blade.”

  “The scar I kissed.” Her voice was hoarse. “That’s how you got it. What happened then?”

  “My shot was better than his had been. I got back to the rebel encampment, and I was flown home to the States to recuperate.”

  He didn’t elaborate, but Ainslie’s imagination filled in the details. Racked by some jungle illness and with a bullet-shattered shoulder, it had been a miracle that he’d survived at all, she thought faintly. But he’d paid a heavy price for survival.

  “I had a few bad nights when I dreamed I was in the jungle again, but gradually I learned how to stop thinking about it.” For the first time since he’d started speaking, his eyes focused on hers. “Eight years later I got shot again in that alleyway and the nightmares returned, although the memory of what had caused them didn’t come back until yesterday, along with the one about Joseph Mocamba. His assassination came a year or two after the incident in the jungle, Lee—and about a year before Chris Stewart was killed. Do you see a pattern here?”

  “I know the pattern you think you see,” she said evenly. “You think that what happened to you at the hands of those five butchers turned you into the same kind of man that they were. You think that’s when you stopped being just a soldier, and became the Executioner. I don’t buy it, Malone.”

  She stared at him unwaveringly. “You weren’t in your right mind when you hunted them down—how could you have been, after what you’d endured? Yes, you crossed a line. But you were driven to it.”

  “Maybe I was,” he said softly. “But Lee, I don’t think I ever crossed back. I was in the right place at the right time for two of the Executioner’s assassinations we know about—the one in the Balkans and the murder of Mocamba. The only reason I don’t know about the others is because of my memory loss.”

  “But you weren’t the only one in the right place at the right time at that airport in the Balkans,” Ainslie said slowly. “Didn’t you tell me that your driver gave a statement to the police, too, corroborating what you’d told them?”

  “He gave a statement, sure.” Malone shook his head dismissively. “What the hell does that prove?”

  “Nothing, conclusively.” Her voice took on an edge of cautious excitement. “But even if you have doubts about everything else, Stewart’s is the one murder you can’t suspect yourself of committing. There was another man at that airport who knew him, and you’ve got an independent witness who saw them together. Besides, if you killed him, why would you have insisted on stopping the next morning, when there was every chance that the police might detain you?”

  For a moment hope flared behind his eyes. It disappeared, and his gaze became shuttered again. “So I didn’t kill Stewart. We’ve tossed around the theory that his murder was related to the assassination somehow, but that’s all it ever was—a theory. He met a friend, they had a falling out and he just happened to be killed on the same night that the country’s leader was shot.”

  His jaw tightened. “You wanted to know why I believed I was capable of doing the things I’ve been accused of. Now that you do, Lee, the best thing for you is to just walk away.”

  As if he couldn’t help himself, he reached out and tucked a stray s
trand of hair behind her ear. “Tell yourself what you told me, honey,” he said hoarsely. “Tell yourself that Seamus Malone left you two years ago, and he never came back. It won’t really be a lie.”

  Taking a deep breath, he let his hand drop to his side. “I’m going to go through with this, Lee. It’s the only way.”

  He started to turn away from her, and for a moment Ainslie felt paralyzed with despair. The Executioner had won. He’d studied this particular anthill and then had given it the kick that had destroyed not only Malone’s life but hers and had led to the deaths of two decent men in the bargain. If Paul had been right about him, right now he was standing back in the shadows, watching as the events he’d set in motion played themselves out to a tragic finish.

  Hot fury rose up in her, consuming the defeated hopelessness like an advancing fire. She threw back her slumped shoulders and grabbed Malone’s sleeve before he could take another step, almost throwing him off balance.

  He glanced at her in quick inquiry. “What is it—”

  “You’re taking a dive,” she said flatly, her eyes narrowing as she stared at him. “I may not know much about being a mercenary, Malone, but I was a boxer long enough to recognize when a fighter deliberately throws in the towel. You’re right. I guess I didn’t know the real Seamus Malone—I didn’t figure any payoff would be enough to make you go down and stay down. It looks like I was wrong.”

  “Payoff?” His smile was strained. “Come on, Lee, no one’s paying me off here and you know it.” He attempted to pull away from her, but she didn’t let go of his jacket.

  “I don’t know what else you’d call it.” She held his gaze. “You’ve got a deal going with the Executioner. You take the fall for him and he’ll give you what you want. Of course, your deal is going to cost the lives of the thousands he’ll go on to destroy, but what does that matter? By the time he sets up his next assassination, you’ll be beyond feeling any guilt. That’s the payoff.”