The Rapids

by Carla Neggers

  “He wasn’t just covering his own butt and trying not to compromise an investigation. He was protecting you.”

  Maggie quickly shoved the papers and photos back into the envelope.

  Rob was still beside her. “That bothers you, doesn’t it? Having someone looking after you.”

  “It’s not what I’m used to, and look what happened—”

  “Kopac knew your father had been murdered. He went into this thing with his eyes wide open, Maggie,” Rob said softly. “Give him credit for that.”

  She reclasped the envelope. Tom had said he’d keep Janssen put for an hour—he must have planned to intercede if necessary, chat him up about the boat tour, or maybe Krispy Kremes. He’d given Maggie every opportunity to do her thing.

  She’d called in George Bremmerton and set Janssen’s arrest in motion.

  Because of Tom, Nick Janssen and Libby Smith both were in custody.

  Maggie didn’t need to read the explanation of what Tom had done that Saturday. He had his package of information to give to William Raleigh, but he’d stopped at Libby’s hotel just to reassure himself she wasn’t an innocent caught up in events out of her control.

  Maggie made herself focus on her surroundings. A young couple sat at a table in the sun, their bicycles nearby. Life in Den Bosch, back to normal. But it wasn’t as if people were pretending a murder hadn’t taken place there, or a notorious fugitive hadn’t had a safe house on its pretty shaded streets—it wasn’t callousness or denial that had the locals back on the Binnendieze.

  Maybe there was just a desire to get out on a pretty summer day.

  “I should have pushed for more answers months ago,” she said.

  Rob shook his head. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

  His words were without bitterness, but Maggie felt their impact in her gut, knew he wasn’t talking just about the past week. “You think you should have pushed harder to find out what was going on in the spring. That’s what haunts you. Your mother, your sister—Janssen hates them now because he didn’t get his pardon. Hell, Rob. You were almost killed yourself.”

  He didn’t answer, and looked at him across the table, taking in the blue-flecked gray eyes, the fair hair, the good looks. They could mislead, make people think he’d never suffered, he’d never had problems and obstacles—and that he wasn’t meant for the work he did.

  He pushed aside his coffee. “I tell myself that all we can do is get up in the morning and do the best we can.”

  “Are there days you believe it?”

  He smiled. “Some.”

  “Mistakes—” Maggie managed a quick smile. “I don’t like making mistakes.”

  She nibbled on the cookie that came with her coffee, realizing she was neither hungry nor not hungry. Her body didn’t know what time it was. And she could see her father, blue eyes crinkled as he laughed, as he promised her there’d be time—years and years—when he’d be in a rocking chair and they could spend all the time they wanted together.

  “Did you really take a cab over here?” she asked Rob suddenly.

  “What?”

  And she had him. She knew she did. “Come on, Dunnemore. Who gave you a ride?”

  He smiled mysteriously and got to his feet. “Let’s go offer up a prayer.”

  A prayer…

  St. John’s.

  William Raleigh.

  They found the old spook with his arms sprawled over the back of a middle pew in the massive cathedral. He was cleaned up, dressed in neat olive-green pants and a navy polo shirt. He’d put on a pair of loafers, although Rob thought they looked tight. The man had dedicated his life to public service, secret battles, putting his own life and even the lives of the people he cared about at risk. Rob had no intention of judging him. Raleigh had endured private losses that he could share with very few people.

  The death of Maggie’s father was one of those losses.

  She sat next to him, and Rob sat next to her. She still clutched Kopac’s envelope. “You and Rob were on the same flight back to Amsterdam?”

  “Coincidentally, yes.”

  “I doubt there’s much in your life that’s a coincidence.”

  He glanced at her, his eyes no longer as pain-racked. “Or yours.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me that several thousand milligrams of ibuprofen won’t cure. Libby’s probably wishing now that she’d killed me when she had the chance.”

  “She tried. She just didn’t want to use bullets.”

  “Apparently her father was a self-centered, incorrigible drunk. It’s a terrible way to grow up. He never got a grip on his alcoholism. But it’s not the reason she became a killer.”

  “Are rumors of your drinking problems fact or fiction?” Maggie asked without judgment.

  “A fiction, at least for the most part. But I knew how to play it. My own father was an alcoholic. He died in a bar fight when I was in my early twenties. There’s no question his drinking had an effect on me. I just refuse to use it as an excuse.”

  “Raleigh—”

  He smiled sideways at her. “William. Remember, it’s not Bill, Will or Willie. We were a very correct family, despite my father’s alcoholism. We all knew our lines. It’s strange,” he went on, turning away from Maggie. “No matter their failings, we always seem to say goodbye to our fathers too soon.”

  “My father’s death wasn’t your fault. Neither were his shortcomings as a father.”

  “I was on to Libby. I knew we had a new killer at work—someone both reckless and ruthless. Phil and I had tapped into the outer fringes of the Janssen network.”

  “Samkevich?”

  Raleigh smiled, obviously pleased. “Very good. Yes, Samkevich. He gave Libby her first jobs.”

  “How long had she been at work at that point?”

  “Months. No more than a year. Samkevich still was testing her.

  “What about Charlene Brooker?”

  He looked pained. “She was interested in Samkevich herself. She took the bit in her teeth after your father was killed. She focused on Samkevich and Janssen. I focused on our emerging assassin.” He paused, letting his arms drop from the back of the pew. “It was a difficult time. We had very little to go on. In essence, we were stumbling around in the dark.”

  Rob remembered that Captain Brooker had told everyone she was going to Amsterdam for a vacation, not to track Nick Janssen. But he was staying out of this conversation, sensing where it might lead.

  “How did Char Brooker end up in Ravenkill? Did she discover that my father had been there?”

  “I’m not positive, but I don’t think so. I didn’t know, either. It looks as if she’d discovered a connection between Libby and Vlad Samkevich and was checking it out—”

  “One doesn’t expect to find a paid killer in such a beautiful spot as Ravenkill, New York,” Maggie cut in. “She was there a month before she was killed. But it was Janssen who ordered her murder and hired one of his men to do the job—not Libby.”

  “Things must have unraveled quickly for Captain Brooker.” Raleigh sighed heavily, his regret palpable. “I wish I’d had half the instincts she or your father had.”

  But Philip Spencer and Charlene Brooker were dead, Rob thought; William Raleigh was in a Dutch cathedral, trying to learn to live with his mistakes.

  “American investigators have permission now to interview Janssen in prison,” Rob said. “He’s crying foul over Libby’s arrest. There’s no such thing as assassin-client privilege. But she’s not talking.”

  “She might as well talk,” Raleigh said. “Janssen will find a way to have her killed no matter what she does. Why not tell her story?”

  “Why not tell yours?” Maggie asked him quietly.

  He gave her a dry smile. “Write my memoirs in my retirement?”

  She smiled in return.

  “Nick Janssen wants to see where his mother was buried,” Raleigh went on. “She died last winter while he
was on the lam. He wants to put flowers on her grave. It’s something we can use.”

  Rob felt his stomach twist, and Maggie arched an eyebrow at her father’s friend. “We?”

  Raleigh shrugged. “The collective we’re-all-in-this-together we.”

  “Right,” she said dubiously.

  “You’re born to do this work, Maggie.” The old spook faced the front of the cathedral and didn’t look at her. “Your father knew it. Your mother knows it.”

  “My mother…” But Maggie didn’t go on.

  “She has more courage than you know. It takes courage to paint, to express yourself that way and put it out there for others to see and comment on. She found a way to live with who Phil was, who you are.”

  “She and my father were divorced.”

  “But he was still a part of her life.”

  Rob wondered if he should go for a walk, but Maggie seemed to sense his awkwardness—in restlessness—and took his hand. “I like my work in diplomatic security,” she said.

  “Rob likes his work in the Marshals Service.” Raleigh turned and looked across Maggie at him. “Don’t you, Rob?”

  “Yes.”

  Raleigh inhaled through his nose and rose stiffly, the lingering pain of his injuries obvious. However much he wanted to pretend otherwise, he had suffered at the hands of the assassin he’d chased for months. “It’s quite a cathedral, isn’t it? It makes me wonder what would be here today if people over the centuries hadn’t stepped up and done what they could.” He glanced down at Rob and Maggie. “You’ll find your way out of here?”

  “No problem,” Rob said. “You okay? Not going to collapse on us?”

  “Libby’s more efficient with her Beretta than with her baseball bat, but she still managed to bruise the hell out of me.” He withdrew a bottle of ibuprofen from his pants pocket and rattled it, smiling. “I’m due another dose. I’ll see you two around.”

  Rob would bet on it.

  Maggie watched Raleigh make his way out of the pew into the aisle. “He’ll go on awhile longer,” she said, “but it won’t be forever.”

  “I think a part of him wanted to die the other day.”

  “With his boots on.” But she shifted to Rob, her hand still on his. “I suppose you want a ride back to your hotel?”

  Suddenly he thought of her in his bed in his apartment in Brooklyn, pictured her in the early-morning light. “I don’t have a hotel.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Good.”

  A week after his escapade in Ravenkill, Ethan showed up in northern Virginia for fried apricot pies, prune cake or whatever Sarah Dunnemore might have cooked up. They’d shared a tough time in Night’s Landing in the spring, and he’d cut out on her when she’d been injured. Paramedics had been on their way, but Ethan had never felt entirely right about his conduct that day.

  Sarah forgave him and showed her around the historic Virginia house and her archaeological dig—which he figured out was an old dump—and served him pecan pie on her shaded porch.

  But he should have remembered she was on her way to being married to a marshal and was pals with the president, because he soon found himself in the back of a black sedan with tinted windows. Nate Winter and an unsmiling woman in a dark skirt and blazer were up front.

  They secretly escorted him into a windowless room in a nondescript government building somewhere in the suburbs.

  Presently, John Wesley Poe joined them.

  The unsmiling woman did the talking. “An American contractor has been kidnapped in Colombia by a team of Colombians and American mercenaries.”

  “And how is this my problem?” Ethan asked.

  “You can identify the kidnapped American.”

  He leaned back in his chair, aware of Poe and Winter studying him, as if this was a test. “Can’t you identify him?”

  “Actually,” the woman said, “no.”

  The other two registered no visible reaction to what the woman, who had yet to identify herself, had said. “What’s your name?” Ethan asked her.

  “I’m sorry. Mia O’Farrell. Dr. Mia O’Farrell.”

  She had long, straight dark hair pulled back off her face and probably wasn’t more than thirty-five. “Doctor of what?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “You made a point of telling me your name’s Dr. Mia O’Farrell. I figured it was for a reason.”

  She kept her gaze steady on him. “No reason.”

  “Sure there is. You’re trying to establish authority over me and get me to go fetch this American out of the clutches of whoever’s got him.

  “The American is important to us for reasons of national security,” she said, not withering under his scrutiny.

  “His name?”

  O’Farrell didn’t answer right away. Winter was staring at his hands, and Ethan knew if it was the marshal’s call to make, he’d give the name.

  But it was Poe, finally, who spoke. “This is a voluntary mission.”

  Ethan knew what that meant. “So its chances of success are slim to none.”

  Poe stood up and came around the table, clapping a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “It’s voluntary,” the president said, “but I could order you to do it. Technically, Major Brooker, I’m still your commander in chief.”

  Ethan scratched the side of his mouth. “Problems with my paperwork?”

  “Serious problems.”

  “I was never good with paperwork.”

  Winter almost smiled. Dr. O’Farrell didn’t come close.

  Poe squeezed Ethan’s shoulder. “I need an answer, Major.”

  Ethan thought of Juliet. Strange that he didn’t think of Char. He’d been a guilt-ridden, grieving widower for months. But he’d done the best he could by her memory. He’d pushed and prodded and hounded, and at last he had answers. Vlad Samkevich was dead. Nick Janssen and Libby Smith were in prison. And Char had been on to all of them.

  Now he had to find out who he was again.

  “Yes, Mr. President, I accept the mission.”

  Twenty-One

  Nate Winter and Sarah Dunnemore were married on a warm, overcast mid-September day in the sprawling yard of the Dunnemore family home in Night’s Landing, Tennessee.

  They were as beautiful and happy a couple as Maggie had ever seen, but a mosquito bit her and she thought she saw a snake.

  It was her first trip back to the States since Ravenkill, which all, somehow, was becoming less a raw, open wound. Libby Smith was out of the hospital and had been denied bail as she faced prosecution. The media coverage had died down. Maggie had attended the memorial service for Tom Kopac at the embassy in The Hague, meeting friends who knew him better than she had and missed him terribly. But they’d laughed about his love of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and they’d celebrated his life.

  She walked out onto the dock that jutted out into the Cumberland River and kicked off her shoes, the fuchsia-colored ones she’d bought with Sarah in New York. The heels caught in the dock’s many cracks and gaps.

  She heard laughter and storytelling up toward the porch. Tents had been set up, tables spread with cobblers and fried apricot pies and casseroles and fancy hors d’oeuvres. Maggie hoped she hadn’t been rude and stupid in accepting Nate and Sarah’s invitation. Rob had stayed in The Hague with her for five days. They’d gone bicycle riding and sightseeing, and they’d finally done the Binnendieze boat tour—and they’d gone back to the Rijksmuseum, where Nick Janssen had approached Rob’s mother back in April, trying to worm his way into her good graces.

  Maggie remembered with a rush of warmth how she and Rob had made love, but it didn’t change the difficult logistics of their long-distance relationship.

  Rob’s parents were intelligent and gracious, and Nate had whispered to Maggie his theory that Betsy and Stuart Dunnemore really were wizards, making her laugh. The Winters were there: Nate’s E.R. doctor sister, Antonia; his pregnant nature photographer sister, Carine; the crusty uncle who’d raised them after their parents had died
on Cold Ridge. Antonia had her senator husband and their baby with her, but Carine’s husband, an air force pararescueman, couldn’t be there, since he’d been deployed overseas since early summer. Taking his absence in stride, Carine had tried to get a picture of Maggie’s snake.

  Gus Winter, the uncle, came alone, too. There was talk that he’d been seeing an ex-hippie named Moon Solaire, but she’d moved on to northern Maine and that was pretty much over. He was in his early fifties, a Vietnam vet and a mountain climber with the same build as his marshal nephew.

  Maggie knew that Rob liked the Winters and was relieved his sister had married into such a tight-knit family. But Maggie had no trouble distinguishing the Cold Ridge Winters from the Night’s Landing Dunnemores.

  Juliet Longstreet didn’t attend the wedding but apparently had sent the newly married couple a gallon of pure Vermont maple syrup.

  Ethan Brooker had given them a song he’d written during his brief stay in Night’s Landing.

  John Wesley Poe joined Maggie on the dock. Secret Service agents were on the river, upstream and downstream. “You should dip your feet in the water,” he said. “It’s still warm this time of year.”

  “I don’t know. Snakes—”

  “The snakes will leave you alone.”

  “I like how you don’t deny they’re there.”

  “Well, they might be,” he said, laying on his middle Tennessee accent, “or they might not be. But they don’t have much interest in biting your feet. Trust me.”

  She had no idea what to say to him, but Rob, in his black tux, walked out onto the dock with them. Poe seemed to tense up, as if he might say or do something wrong, but Rob smiled at him. “Sarah’s thrilled you came. Thanks for making it happen.”

  “My pleasure. I know it’s a fuss to have me here—”

  “We wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

  It seemed to be enough for Poe. He relaxed, smiling at Maggie. “I’ll leave you two alone. There’s just one thing.” He paused, but any awkwardness was gone now. Turning to Rob, he spoke. “I’m told William Raleigh has excellent instincts.”