“I’m sorry.” Ari sighed. “I heard the CIA-hired attorney separated the children. He even refused to keep the nanny your parents had employed in case someone was able to trace her.”
“So that’s why my father didn’t tell you anything,” Cassidy said to Jake. “He suspected the information could put your life in danger.” And no doubt that was why her father had encouraged her away from Jake and toward college on the West Coast. Not because he’d disapproved of Jake—he’d simply wanted to keep his daughter safe. Cassidy understood and could forgive him for that. “But why would anyone think someone would come after the children?” she asked.
Ari spread his hands. “I’m not privy to the agency’s thinking.”
With the end of Ari’s explanation, Jake took out the pictures he’d hidden in a backpack. One by one, he handed them to Ari. He saved the one that created Burak’s suspicions for last. It was of two men, one handing the other an envelope. “Do you know either of these men?”
David gasped and pointed. “That’s Karporoff, a renowned Russian handler in the KGB. He died over twenty years ago, but his exploits are still studied at the academy.”
“And the man handing him the envelope?” Jake asked.
David shook his head. Ari looked closely at the picture. “He was in your mother’s cell. A traitor, from the looks of this picture.”
Cassidy frowned. “Maybe he was on our side. Couldn’t he have been a double agent, maybe handing fake material to Karporoff?”
Ari folded his arms across his chest. “If that were so, you wouldn’t be on the run.”
Jake stared at the face of his mother’s killer, his eyes bleak. “What’s his name?”
“Max O’Connor was what he went by back then, but in this business we change names as often as we move from country to country,” Ari told him matter-of-factly.
At least they now knew the reason they’d been pursued halfway around the world. Max O’Connor was a spy for the former KGB, and he still worked in the CIA. This photograph could brand him a traitor. Cassidy looked with distrust at David.
As if reading her thoughts, he held up his hands. “Hey, I wasn’t even born back then. I had no part in the operation.”
But David could be working for someone who knew all about the secret Mossad-CIA disaster. Cassidy didn’t know what to believe.
The waiter returned and took their drink orders. No one asked for alcohol, but the inefficient Joshua returned with a pitcher of beer.
Jake frowned. “That was supposed to be—”
Joshua flung the pitcher’s contents over the photographs and birth certificates and diaries on the table. Cassidy smelled an odd burning, like rotten eggs.
“It’s acid!” David yelled, and reached into his suit jacket, probably for a weapon.
As the papers sizzled away under the acid, Joshua lunged for Cassidy. Jake shoved himself between them.
Stunned, Cassidy stumbled back, realizing with dismay that Jake had offered himself as hostage in her place. Horror and terror overwhelmed her. She couldn’t lose him, not before she’d told him she loved him.
And she did love him. The warm emotion swelled inside her, warming her like the summer sun, chasing away the icy fear that kept her frozen, taking an edge off the panic. She’d lost her mother. She’d lost her father. She would not lose Jake, too.
But the waiter was holding a gun to Jake’s head.
She knew Jake had a gun in his front coat pocket, but he couldn’t reach it. Joshua held Jake motionless with one arm around his neck, the gun pressed to his temple with the other. Slowly the two men backed up the steps while the acid sizzled on the table.
“Let him go!” Cassidy walked toward Jake and the gunman. “The evidence is destroyed. You don’t need to kill anyone else.”
“Stay back!” Jake ordered her.
But Cassidy kept advancing, her arms outstretched. “Please,” she implored the gunman, “you can escape faster on your own.”
“I need a hostage.”
“Take me, instead. You wanted me.”
“No, Sunshine!” cried Jake.
“Well, here I am.” She still held out her arms, willing Joshua to listen to her.
A shot rang out. Jake and Joshua fell to the ground in a pool of blood. The acrid scent of burned gunpowder singed the air.
“No!” Cassidy screamed, her knees going so weak that she stumbled. Jake couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t lose him. Tears tightened her throat and sobs racked her as she half stumbled, half crawled toward Jake.
Then Ari was pulling her into his arms, trying to turn her away from the grisly scene. But she made herself watch as David tucked his gun into its holster and pulled a very dead Joshua off Jake.
Jake’s eyes were closed. Blood smeared his white shirt. David slapped Jake’s face.
Rage surged in Cassidy. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t hurt him any more! Someone call an ambulance!”
She broke away from Ari, took Jake’s head in her lap and smoothed back his hair, her vision blurry with tears. He was still so warm. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be gone.
When Jake opened his eyes, she was so startled she almost dropped his head from her lap. She let out a little screech of pleasure.
“You’re alive?” Joy flooded her as she ran her hands over his chest, searching for a wound and finding none.
“Easy on my head,” Jake murmured.
She ran her fingers over his nape and through his hair. She found no wound, no open cuts, not even a scratch, just one large knot.
David took a seat and patted his brow with a handkerchief. “He must have banged his head on the floor when Joshua fell on top of him.”
“You mean after you shot Joshua,” Ari corrected. The Israeli’s eyes narrowed. “That was a hell of a shot.”
“A hell of a chance you took with Jake’s life,” Cassidy said still unable to believe he was okay. He was alive. And with Joshua dead, they had the rest of their lives ahead of them.
Jake didn’t try to get up from the floor, keeping his head in her lap. “David saw an opportunity and took a shot. He may have saved my life.”
Ari frowned at the dead body and moved to examine Joshua. “Look at this.” Ari pulled a toupee off the man’s head. He also removed a glued-on mustache, and suddenly Cassidy recognized the waiter.
“He’s the man in the photograph handing the envelope to the spy. I knew he looked familiar. He was younger in the picture, but I’m sure he’s the same man.”
As Cassidy cleared up the loose ends, Ari nodded in understanding. “With Joshua dead and the evidence destroyed, you two will be safe to go back to your lives.”
Cassidy had no intention of going back to her old life, at least not the one where she lived alone.
Jake spoke to Ari, but he gazed directly into Cassidy’s eyes. “Hey, don’t rush us. A man could get comfortable right here.”
Cassidy continued smoothing his hair off his forehead. “Is that what you want? Comfort?”
Jake’s voice turned husky. “What I want…is you.”
“That could be arranged.” Cassidy smiled through tears of happiness. “I love you, Jake.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. I love you enough to quit working, stay home and raise your children.”
He shook his head. “I won’t let you quit lawyering on my account, but the kids sound like a great idea.”
“The best idea.”
“When we get home, I’m going to call my sisters and invite them to our wedding.”
“That’s a given. I like having a family. A big family. I want at least four kids,” she told him.
“You can have whatever you want,” he assured her. “As long as I get you.”
Epilogue
Deep in the bowels of a large government building in Washington, a message from Israel passed through the cipher machine. Stamped TOP SECRET, the paper was sealed in an envelope and passed on to a higher authority. Each person who touched the envelope s
igned his or her name to a voucher.
On the fifteenth floor, a man waited eagerly for the final messenger to depart before ripping open the sealed message and reading two terse sentences:
Files destroyed. Joshua dead.
That particular mission had been accomplished, but at a price. An old colleague had died, but the reader simply shrugged. Everyone was expendable. Everyone was replaceable.
With the originals destroyed, he’d bought himself some time. But he couldn’t rest. Not until the two copies Jake Cochran had made and sent to his sisters were also destroyed.
The sisters were proving remarkably resourceful, but they couldn’t compete with his resources, his technology. Jake’s sisters would be found, the copies destroyed.
If they dared stand in his way, he’d destroy them. Just like all the others…
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5080-5
THE HIDDEN YEARS
Copyright © 2001 by Susan Hope Kearney
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*The Sutton Babies
†Hide and Seek
The Hidden Years Page 19