“What did you find?” Tracie asked.
“Those three big guys are still out cold,” Heath assured her.
“Is Jonas awake?”
“He must be. He wasn’t in the room.”
Tracie felt her heart tap-dancing with fear against her ribs. “Where could he be?”
“Anywhere. He could be sneaking up on us this very minute. If we’re at the surface, he could escape through another hatch, pop out a life raft and disappear. Anything is possible.”
“We can’t let him get away.” Tracie looked over the myriad instruments that covered the walls and even the ceiling of the small room. “You think you can drive this thing?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Get us into port as fast as you can. I’m going to try to contact somebody on shore. They need to be on the lookout for Jonas.”
While Heath did his thing at the periscope, Tracie frantically started trying instruments. She found a microphone behind a hidden panel, but when she spoke into it, she only heard her own voice blaring back at her. “Intercom,” she concluded, slamming it shut again.
Finally she tried a smaller screen, which proved to be equipped with the same touch screen capabilities as the larger one on the wall. “Yes!” she announced after a couple of clicks, “we’ve got Internet access. Must be a satellite connection.”
“What are you going to do?” Heath asked. “E-mail the Coast Guard for help?”
“Too slow,” she clucked at him as she typed in their call for help. “Instant messaging.” A moment later, their SOS was sent, and she closed her eyes, praying it would reach help in time.
“Tracie,” Heath’s fingers brushed her hand and she nearly jumped. “What?”
“I’ve got us parked in the docking bay next to the Coast Guard building. I’m going to open the hatch.”
“And?” She wondered what the intense look he gave her was all about.
“There’s some possibility, if Jonas hopped out another hatch, that he could be lying in wait for us the second we open this one.”
FOURTEEN
Tracie swallowed hard, immediately recognizing the danger they were in. She linked her fingers around Heath’s. “Let’s pray.”
They bent their heads together, and while Heath begged for God’s protection, Tracie felt her heart melting toward him. She knew she’d fallen in love with her Coast Guard partner, and had to remind herself that the man in front of her was essentially a stranger. She’d fallen in love with his act, not a real man.
When he whispered “Amen,” and looked at her with smoldering eyes, Tracie had to force herself to turn away and look up the ladder to the main hatch, telling herself there was nothing real behind his facade. She took a step toward the ladder. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Heath didn’t let go of her fingers, but instead gently tugged her back.
“What?” she asked.
“Me first,” he insisted.
“Fine.” She looked at him patiently, waiting, far more aware of him than she wanted to be. The fine smile lines around his eyes were too familiar to her, the hint of a dimple on his cheek, the curvature of his jaw line were all indelibly imprinted in her heart. And yet, she knew the man before her was actually a stranger. She didn’t even know where his cover story ended and the real Heath began. She doubted she’d ever get to meet the real Heath.
It hadn’t escaped her attention that once they stepped out of the submarine, they’d have no reason to ever see each other again. Heath would no doubt go back to his real job at the FBI. She’d stay in the Coast Guard. The thought made her feel cold.
For a long time, he made no move, but only gazed back at her. Finally he let out a sigh. “Are you going to hate me forever?”
“I’m tired. My feet hurt, I’m cold, I just want out of here. I want done with this.”
He reached for her, smoothing back an errant strand of hair and tucking it behind her ear. “I owe you an explanation.”
His expression was too intense. She closed her eyes against it. “Not right now. Let’s just get out of here before something else goes wrong.”
“I don’t want to leave things like this between us.”
His voice was gentle, almost pleading, and far too similar to what she’d heard when he’d first wriggled his way past her defenses and into her heart. She steeled her resolve against him. Popping her eyes open, she glared at him. “There’s nothing you can say that’s going to fix it. So either you climb up that ladder, or I’ll go first.”
Heath didn’t protest any longer, but showed her how to release the hatch once he was poised to look out. If the coast was clear, he’d climb out and she’d be free to ascend after him. If anything looked amiss, he’d pull the lid down—hopefully before Jonas could get off a shot.
Tracie waited patiently while he poked his head up.
“See anything?” she asked as his feet moved another step upward.
“Come on up,” he called down to her.
Tracie clambered up the rungs and poked her head out. The rosy glow of dawn cut through the eastern foggy haze, and the first thing she saw was the welcome sight of land, the Coast Guard building, and her fellow crewmen standing on the dock, their faces slack-jawed.
Then Tracie turned around and saw what they were gaping at.
The six hydraulic missile doors on the rear end of the sub stood open. Instead of armaments, the compartments were each heaped with sparkling diamonds.
“Oh,” Tracie could hardly fathom how many gems there must be inside the compartments. Thousands upon thousands—millions, even.
“Tell me those aren’t real,” Jim called from the dockside.
“Depends on what you consider real, my friend,” Heath called back. At the sound of his voice, Tracie turned to him and realized he was waiting with his arm outstretched, ready to help her up. She tentatively took his hand and stepped into the sunlight.
“Any word on Jonas?”
Heath shook his head. “I need to get some men down there and look for him.”
Tracie instinctively placed her hand on his arm as if to restrain him, but caught herself before she asked him not to go. She told herself she didn’t need to be concerned for his safety. He was only doing his job. Besides, she couldn’t allow herself to care for him any more.
Tracie hurried down off the sub. “Jake,” she called, turning to the Officer in Charge. “We’ve captured four men on board. Three of them are handcuffed in the crew’s quarters. The fourth is at large on the ship, unless he snuck out through an escape hatch before we discovered he was missing.”
“I’m on it,” Jake replied with a nod. “What’s he look like?”
“You’ve met him once before. Jonas Goldman, a.k.a. Jonas Vaughn—” she paused, watching Jake’s face “—a.k.a. Jonas Blaine.”
Recognition dawned on her superior officer’s features. “He was on the sub.” Jake turned and looked at the Requiem. “He was on that sub, the day…” His voice faded.
Tracie nodded solemnly. “Jonas killed my father. Don’t let him get away.”
Jake nodded and quickly began issuing instructions to his men, who met Heath just as he was disembarking the sub. Tracie realized she must look ridiculous in her rumpled dress, with Heath’s tuxedo jacket hanging off her shoulders. Worse than that, she felt exhausted. But at the same time, she wasn’t about to leave until she was sure Jonas had been caught.
She watched as Heath led a group of men back down the hatch. After several agonizing minutes, four Coast Guardsmen emerged with three thugs cuffed between them.
Jonas didn’t come out. Neither did Jake or Heath.
Tracie fidgeted, pulling the blanket tight against the winter cold, her eyes trained on the sub, scanning it for any sign of movement, any indication that would tell her what was going on inside. The sea monster sat silent, unmoving.
Where was Heath? What was happening to him? She told herself she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter to her what happened to him, that the man insi
de the submarine was a stranger to her, and her concern for him was no more than she would feel for any other human being. He was no one special.
Then she heard a muffled shout from inside, and a moment later Jim’s head popped up the hatch. “Medics! We need medical assistance!”
Tracie rushed forward, but her fellow crewmen had already stowed the other thugs inside their vehicles, and they rushed past her and poured down the hatch. A short while later they led Jonas out. She watched as they escorted her father’s killer away. “Lord, please, please,” she begged under her breath, her prayer more heartfelt cry than conscious thought. She hesitated on the edge of the dock, itching to climb back down in the sub and find out what was going on, but at the same time, certain she’d only be in the way.
Wailing sirens announced the arrival of the paramedic team. Tracie stepped to the side as the medics in their bright orange jumpsuits hurried over. For a few long minutes, they clambered up and down. Then, finally, a man popped out and reached down as another lifted up the end of a stretcher. Jake.
His face was ashen, but he appeared to be conscious. The crowd of men around him made it difficult for Tracie to assess his injuries. Though she felt concern for the man who’d once been her father’s best friend, it looked as though he’d be okay. But what had become of Heath?
After helping the men secure Jake to the stretcher, Heath stood back and waited for them to lift him up the hatch. It was tricky work, especially since they didn’t want to jostle him. Finally the sub was empty, and he followed the last man up the ladder.
The dock swarmed with officers, medics, and curious bystanders who were being kept at bay by a strand of hastily installed crime scene tape. Still, it wasn’t difficult for him to spot Tracie. She was the only person standing still, her eyes glued to the spot where he emerged. For one heart-warming moment, he thought he saw relief cross her features. Then she turned her back on him and hurried away.
Tracie slept more than thirty hours over the next two days. When she wasn’t asleep, the guys from the Coast Guard kept her updated on all that had happened. Trevor and his father were awaiting trial alongside Mark Smith, a.k.a. Mark Anderson, as well as Jonas and the twenty other men they’d nabbed in relationship to the case. Martina, Oleg and Olaf were on leave pending an investigation of their relationship to Jonas. They’d already turned in the transmitted recording of Jonas’s confession, which indicated they were likely innocent of any intentional conspiracy, but had simply been following orders.
Jake quickly bounced back from the bullet that had grazed his leg, though the Coasties speculated it might take him a little longer to get over all the fuss his men had made when they’d discovered he was wounded.
While she was recuperating at her parents’ house, Tracie found an old home video of her father’s birthday party the night before the sub had disappeared halfway around the world, and watched as Jake sang “Happy Birthday” to her father, along with Jim, and even Joe Cooper, who’d been a hunting pal of her dad’s long before he’d married Malcolm’s widow. So she didn’t have to feel even the slightest residual suspicion toward the men in her life whose first initial was the letter J.
Gunnar came home with a pronounced limp and quickly claimed Heath’s tuxedo jacket as his new favorite blanket. Tracie tried to tell herself she didn’t care if he took it, but when he laid his head on the jacket, looked up at her with sad eyes and whimpered mournfully, she couldn’t help but pat him on the head and whisper, “I miss him, too. But he was never really who we thought he was.”
A week passed. Two weeks. Tracie went back to work, but now that her father’s killer had been caught, she felt as though her mission had been accomplished. Still, she wasn’t sure what she would do if she gave up working for the Coast Guard. All her training, all her life’s ambitions from the time her father died had been focused on becoming a Coastie. She didn’t know anything else.
Part of her wondered what Heath was up to, but she heard nothing from him or about him. Whatever emotions she’d felt toward him obviously couldn’t have been love. She didn’t even know the real Heath Gerlach, and he obviously wasn’t coming back.
That didn’t make it any easier for her to forget him.
The more she thought about him, the angrier she felt. He’d emotionally manipulated her and used her to learn whatever information he was after. She didn’t know if anything they’d shared between them had been real. Even when she thought about the discussions they’d shared about faith, she felt foolish knowing she’d spoken from the heart, while all the while he’d been investigating her. When she’d started hoping they might have a future together, he’d only been trying to get the assignment over with.
After all she’d been through, it wasn’t Trevor’s cruelty or the Requiem’s long subversive presence that left her crying on her pillow at night. Her greatest pain came from thinking about Heath. She couldn’t seem to get over her love for him.
Her greatest solace was teaching the self-defense class at the rec center. Tracie asked the staff about adding more courses. The manager agreed that her class was popular, but since the Northwoods experienced a significant population drop every winter, she suggested waiting until summer before adding another class.
Which left Tracie standing alone after class the next Tuesday night, practicing her moves on a padded dummy. As she completed a complex series of kicks, she heard a coughing sound behind her. At first she just assumed it was one of the ladies from her class stopping by to say good-night after a swim or a cool-down on the treadmill.
But when she turned around, she saw the man she’d just envisioned herself attacking. “Heath?”
“Hey—”
She cut him off immediately. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d—”
She cut him off again. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you.”
He advanced toward her slowly. “But I was hoping—”
“Don’t,” she insisted, her eyes firmly on him. It was one thing to work out her anger on the dummy. It was another thing entirely to face the man, smile crinkles, dimple and all.
He continued moving toward her. “Tracie, I really need—”
She couldn’t let him continue. “I’m warning you, Heath, now is really not a good time.”
“Then when is a good time?” He paused.
“Never.” She stared him down, wishing the skipping in her heart was entirely from anger, and not just the unnerving way her heart had always leapt at the sight of him.
“Then it seems now is just as good a time as any.” He took another step toward her.
Setting her face in a scowl, she came at him as though to kick him. When he covered his ribs to block her, she dropped her fake, and released her back fist on his jaw.
His eyes brightened. “I suppose I deserved that.”
She faked again, this time as though to deliver another back fist, but the moment he drew his hands up, she kicked him in the ribs.
Surprise and a hint of a smile showed on his face, and he raised his arms in a blocking stance. “You want to play?” he asked.
“I’m not playing,” she shot back, punctuating each word with a reverse punch in his gut.
“You’re mad at me,” he stated flatly, unaffected by what she considered to be some pretty powerful blows—and he wasn’t even wearing body armor. His impassivity only irritated her more. She threw a round kick toward his head.
He blocked it. “You have every reason to be mad at me.” He blocked the next two kicks she sent toward him, then dropped his arms. “You know what? Fine. Get it out of your system.”
Tracie narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Kick me. Hit me. Whatever. I don’t blame you for being angry at me. I’m angry at me for what I did.”
For a moment, she relaxed her guard, but when he moved to step closer to her, she planted a few more punches in his midsection. “Why did you come back?” she asked, pummeling him.
“
Because I love you.”
Her foot flew fast toward his head, but he caught it in his hand.
She tried to wiggle her sneaker from his grip, and nearly lost her balance as she stood on one foot, glaring at him. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” he said simply, and let go of her shoe.
“No, you don’t!” she insisted, coming at him with both fists, thumping his ribs until she sagged against him, weak and out of breath.
He supported her arms and looked her full in the face. “I love you.”
“No, you don’t.” She twisted free and swept one leg behind him, knocking him down on one knee.
He looked up at her but didn’t move to stand. “Have you finally got me where you want me?”
With a disgusted grumble, Tracie turned and stomped away.
Heath stood and trotted after her. “I brought you something.”
She ignored him and kept walking toward the front doors.
“It’s out here.” Heath tugged at her arm.
She followed quietly at a distance, hardly believing he’d really come back, completely unsure how to respond to his claims of love after all the emotional upheaval she’d been through.
He stepped outside, where the gentle snow fell in swirling crystalline array, coating the street and the sidewalk like so many diamonds. He strode to his truck. She was surprised to see it was the same vehicle he’d driven while undercover. Perhaps not everything she’d known about him had been false. He pulled a large silver case from the passenger side and popped it open.
“Behold, the newest line of tools in the Gerlach family—the diamond series.”
She looked down and blinked at the sparkling tools, each studded with diamonds above the grips on the handles.
He extended the open case toward her. “It’s for you.”
Though she wished she could pretend to be ambivalent toward him, her curiosity got the better of her. She reached out a tentative hand. “Are these,” she ran one finger along a line of gems, “are these what I think they are?”
Troubled Waters Page 18