He didn't stand up. He didn't even try. He just sat there, looking up at Tess, with his relief solid in his eyes. Of course, there was wariness mixed in there, too. He knew that she was angry.
No, angry was too simple a word for this emotion she was feeling.
“Where, exactly,” she asked him, miraculously able to keep her voice from shaking, “were you going to go? Barely able to walk, let alone run?”
“I can run,” he told her.
“For what?” she scoffed. “Five steps?”
“It took two Navy SEALs to get me down here.”
“Alyssa's not a SEAL.”
“Well, she should be. She's tougher than any SEAL I've ever met. She kicked my ass.”
“Thank God. And lucky for me,” Tess said sharply, “there were two people on guard, so you didn't go … where, Jimmy?”
She knew where. She just wanted to hear him say it—that his intention was to sacrifice himself, so that this dire threat would vanish. God damn it. Her mouth trembled—she couldn't stop it, but she pressed her lips tightly together so that it wouldn't be as obvious.
He looked as if he might start to cry, too—but she knew better. He wouldn't let himself. Not in here, with the lights on. Not so that she could see. He would lock everything inside, the way he always did, the way she knew he'd already done with that terrible, soul-wrenching news about the three dead innocents, all named John Wilson.
“I wanted to make sure you were safe,” he admitted, and she noted the careful wording. Not I wanted to find you.
“Which I wouldn't have been, the moment you'd set foot outside this house and virtually announced to the world that, yes, you are still alive. Unless you were thinking you could buy my safety …”
He looked away.
“Right now they're just guessing,” she told him, this time unable to keep her voice from shaking. “But they're doing a damn good job. They found us, by the way, in San Diego.”
She could practically hear the sound of his surprise and fear as his head snapped up.
“Yeah,” Tess said. “The dead John Wilsons saved our lives—Jules's and mine. Alyssa called a code red at the news and pulled us in, so we weren't at the motel when they blew it up. Whoever the hell they are.”
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “Are you all right?”
Tess nodded. “Decker and Tracy were lucky, too. They got knocked around and Deck hit his head. But they're secure. Lindsey's going to go pick them up. We'll work out a way to get them back here.”
“Tracy Shapiro?” he asked.
“She somehow figured out you were still alive. Deck thought it would be a good idea to contain her, so he was bringing her back here.” Tess left the door wide open as she came to sit several feet away from him, leaning back, as he was, against the wall. She gestured toward the hallway. “If you're going to go, you should just do it now.”
His gaze flicked from her face to the door to the row of monitors that nearly covered one entire wall of the room. She glanced up at it, too. There was movement on only a few of the screens—those showing the big main living room from three different utilitarian angles.
Jules was sitting on the couch, looking as if he'd been hit by an emotional bus. He'd taken the news about the three dead John Wilsons extremely hard. He'd barely said a word to anyone in the helicopter—instead retreating to that uncommunicative, stony-faced place where so many men in the SpecWar world went, rather than deal honestly with their anger and grief.
Robin was now sitting close to him, one arm around his shoulders, his other hand on Jules's knee, while Sam stood and Alyssa sat across from them. Alyssa was leaning forward, talking intently—the microphones weren't on, so they couldn't hear what she was saying. Whatever she was telling Jules, he just kept shaking his head. No.
“No one's going to stop you,” Tess told Jimmy. “This isn't going to work—none of it will—if we have to hold you here against your will.”
“I know that.” He nodded, unable to hold her gaze, still watching the monitors, where Robin now put both arms around Jules, who made no move to embrace him in return—locked as he was in the tough-guy land of numbness. But then, in the solid warmth of Robin's arms, he crumpled.
Tess saw Jules's anguished expression for only a split second before he grabbed hold of Robin and buried his face against the taller man's neck and shoulder. But it was such an exact representation of what they all were feeling, she almost started to cry, too.
There was movement then from another monitor—Sam and Alyssa had gone into the hallway, heading purposefully toward the little room where Ash was fast asleep in his crib.
“I just…,” Jimmy started.
Tess waited. She always did. Because hope sprang eternal. And every now and then, like the other night when he talked about his dream, he actually threw her a crumb.
Except it wasn't like that. Not really. He didn't withhold intentionally. He was who he was, and Tess had known that going into this relationship. She knew from the start that it wasn't going to be easy, but she'd never dreamed it would be this hard. Still, it was what it was, too. And she?
She loved this man. Completely. She told him that now. It was so simple, those three little words, and so absolute—her voice clear in the stillness of the basement room.
Jimmy stood up, and for one split second she actually thought he was going to do it—he was going to walk out the door.
But he only moved over to the panel that controlled the monitors, where he turned off the switches that shut down the cameras in the living room, granting Jules and Robin privacy.
And there he stood, just staring at the other monitors, scanning the ones that showed the quiet peacefulness of the night out along the driveway and down by the gate and the fence that surrounded this property.
“I think it's safe to assume,” Tess told Jimmy, “that at this point? They know you're alive. And we've all been marked for removal. Deck and me, at least. Probably Jules, too.”
He nodded without turning to face her, as the silence stretched on.
It was only when she mentally started gathering herself up—to go upstairs and put some food in her too-empty stomach, to rinse off the dirt from the road—that Jimmy spoke.
“I can't imagine … how fucked up you've got to be,” he said haltingly, with his back still to Tess, “to intentionally hit a kid.”
At first his words didn't make sense. Her first thought was that Jimmy had somehow hurt little Ashton in his struggle with Sam and Alyssa. But then he turned to face her, and she realized from the look in his eyes that he was using the verb to hit as a synonym for to delete. Which was the accepted Agency euphemism for to kill.
As if hitting a kid wasn't bad enough in the common-usage sense of the word.
“The seven-year-old John Wilson,” she realized. Was he really talking to her about this?
Jimmy nodded. “You've got to be … beyond evil … A psychopath. Two John Wilsons would have done the trick. Two would have caught our attention. The third, the child … That was… beyond twisted. It was sick.”
“This isn't your fault,” she said. “You understand that, right? If you really had died, they would've gone after the doctor who signed your death certificate. They would have found him and tortured him and killed him, too.”
“They know how to hurt me,” he spoke over her. “Whoever they are, they know things about me, about—” He stopped, but it wasn't to fall into one of his excruciatingly long silences. It was to start over. “It was right after I started working for the Agency. Before I was partnered with Decker. Before I even met him. Way before 9/11. It was a black op and I was in the field. Right place, right time—and I was tapped to delete a terrorist we'd been hunting for years. The Merchant. You know him.”
It wasn't a question, but Tess nodded. Everyone in the counterterror-ist community knew of the man known as the Merchant. He'd been ruthless in the attacks he'd planned against the West. He was notorious for bombing schools and hospitals. H
e'd also expanded upon the concept of the human shield—always surrounding himself with children. He didn't climb into a truck or SUV unless it was packed with kids.
Sure, most of them were there because their parents were his supporters, but that didn't make the idea of using a surgical strike to take out his vehicle any less unpleasant.
Jimmy painfully, carefully lowered himself down again on the floor. “Our intel came from a reliable source. We knew the Merchant was in Turkey, in a little town in the mountains near Armenia. I was … nearby. In range. It was purely coincidental, but… I was in place.”
Tess knew what was coming. “Oh, God, Jimmy.”
He glanced at her only briefly, his face twisted in a grimace. “I fucking hate thinking about this shit. What's done is done, and I can't change it.”
Intentionally hit a kid, he'd said. “Whatever you did,” she told him, “it wasn't the same as—”
“It was worse,” he told her, his eyes dark with self-loathing. “What I did was worse. I was set up to take the shot. I had maybe forty seconds while the target walked along a footbridge—it was the only way in or out of this church that was on an island, surrounded on all sides by a river. I knew he'd be wearing body armor, and I knew he'd have children with him, so I'm ready to take a head shot, which is hard enough for me under normal conditions.”
Tess nodded. She knew that much about him, at least. The sniper rifle had never been Jimmy's weapon of choice.
His silence stretched on as he stared at the floor between his feet, his gaze unfocused, his mind both miles and years away. God only knew what he was really seeing, thinking, feeling. …
Tess tried to bring him back, tried to help. “I know you didn't kill him.” The Merchant hadn't been taken out until August of 2000— ironically, it was Alyssa Locke who'd fired the sniper shot that had ended his miserable life.
Jimmy looked up at her, his mouth grim, his eyes rimmed in red. “No,” he agreed. “I didn't. But I should've.”
“What happened?” she asked, as gently as she could.
And this time, although he didn't answer right away, he held her gaze. And when he finally spoke, his words surprised her. “Sam told me I should say. … that I should tell you … that this is… hard for me.” He whispered the last words, but then laughed his disgust. “Christ, that's an understatement.”
“You talked to Sam about…” She couldn't keep her disbelief from her voice. It seemed so unlikely, so unlike Jimmy to talk to anyone about anything.
But he nodded. “He talked to me. At me. He told me that… I'm going to…” He choked the words out. “Lose you—”
“He's wrong,” she interrupted him. “Look at me, Jimmy. I'm right here. I'm right here.”
He turned away—but not before she saw the sudden sheen of tears that filled his eyes.
Tess spoke through the lump that ached in her throat. “It's okay if you don't want to tell me. It really is. But if you think our enemy knows how to hurt you, then you need to tell someone. Jules or … Sam. It's okay, Jimmy, if it's easier for you to talk to Sam—”
“What are the odds?” he asked.
She didn't understand. “What do you mean?”
“You risk so much, for such crazy odds,” he told her. “I look at that scar on your hand and … You reached for that gun, but… what were the odds that you'd get shot in the hand instead of in your head?”
He was talking about that awful day, just a few short months ago, that they'd both been shot when a squad of heavily armed men had surrounded them and the people they'd been guarding.
They'd been distracted right before the attack—arguing about Jimmy's refusal to talk to her, to ask for help. She'd told him that day that she could handle his silence, but what she couldn't deal with was his lies.
Yet at the same time, on a certain level—when she stepped back and looked at it objectively—she understood. When Jimmy had worked for the Agency, his job had been to lie, and to lie both well and often. His very life had depended upon it.
So it made sense that, even years after his split from that organization, he should still struggle to be forthcoming.
Tess had been telling him that, two months ago. She'd told him that she was willing to cut him some slack, but that this grace period was not going to last forever. There would come a time—and it was fast approaching—that his lying would end their relationship.
Which was when their attackers had opened fire, hitting first Tess and then Jimmy. His injury had been far worse than hers. And he was right. She had been willing to risk anything to save him. So she'd reached for a gun.
She now shook her head. “They shot me in the hand because they wanted hostages—”
“But you didn't know that at the time. You could've been killed. You should have been killed.”
“I thought you were going to die.” She brought it down to the bottom line. “You were bleeding, you were unconscious—”
“So you thought you might as well die, too?” He honestly didn't understand.
Tess pushed herself to her feet. “I thought that I could save you,” she said. “I thought if I could just get that gun, then maybe—”
“A .22.” He interrupted her. “It was a .22-caliber handgun, and you were surrounded by… Was it one or two dozen men with submachine guns? Damnit, I know you're not an idiot, Tess—”
“We were surrounded,” she reminded him. “And you were dying. So, yes, I took what I thought was our only chance.”
“A chance doesn't involve miraculous divine intervention,” he pointed out. “It has better odds than one in, Christ, seven trillion!”
She knew that, yet she'd reached for that weapon anyway—and had gotten a bullet through her hand. Seconds later, she'd been knocked unconscious by a really ugly man who jammed the butt of his rifle against her head. Oh yeah, and then she was dragged off as a hostage.
Left for dead, Jimmy had roused and rallied and, even though he was bleeding badly, he'd tried to connect a severed phone line to call for help.
Not for himself, but for her.
“I wasn't going to let you die without a fight,” she told him, her voice shaking as she moved closer, getting right in his face. “You know before … ? When I said that you should just walk out of here—if you're so intent on leaving? I was bluffing. If you'd actually gone, I would have grabbed you and tied you down. Because I am not giving up on you—on us. Not without a fight. To hell with the odds.”
“If I go,” he told her quietly, “it'll be because it's the only way—”
“No.” Tess cut him off. “The only way we're going to get through this is together. All of us. You already tried to do this alone, and you failed, Jimmy. It's time to go after these sons of bitches as a team.”
“And if we still fail … ?” he whispered.
“We won't.” She was absolute. “Not a chance.”
He took her hand, looking down at her scar, brushing it almost tenderly with his thumb. “Such crazy odds,” he said again.
“Maybe not,” Tess told him. “Alyssa's convinced we're closer to finding them than we think.” She squeezed his hand, desperate for him to believe that this battle they were fighting wasn't hopeless. “They hurt us with the John Wilsons. And yes, it was sheer luck that got us out of that motel. But we're not going to let this second chance go to waste. We're going to figure out who these people are. And then we're going to get them.”
“And live happily ever after,” he said.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Never,” he said. “No. It just seems like more crazy odds.”
Tess searched his eyes, but all she could see was resignation and despair.
“Do you love me?” she asked him.
Jimmy didn't answer right away, and when he did, his voice was a whisper. “With all my heart.”
“Then we fight,” she told him. “Together. As a team. Regardless of the odds.”
Jimmy pulled her close and kissed her. His mouth was so sweet, so
familiar. As she melted into it, into him, she was aware of how long it had been since he'd kissed her like this—and since she'd kissed him back with equal passion.
God, it had been months since her desire for him hadn't been trumped by her worry over his injury and her frustration over his reticence and lies.
When he ended the kiss, the tears were back in his eyes.
“The Merchant,” he said. “The botched assassination. Whoever it was who killed that kid yesterday? I'm certain that he knows about it.”
“I'll tell Jules and Alyssa,” Tess promised.
“There's more,” Jimmy told her, but it was clear that he didn't know where or how to begin.
Tess tugged him over to the sofa, and he gingerly lowered himself down. She sat beside him, still holding his hand.
As his silence stretched on.
“I'll recap what I know,” Tess suggested quietly. “Correct me if I'm wrong, okay?”
Jimmy nodded.
“You got called to Turkey where the Merchant was visiting a church on an island,” she told him. “You were out there, alone, in position to take him out via sniper rifle, and you knew it was going to have to be done with a single shot to the head.”
It was the help he'd needed, because he spoke. “I wasn't out there alone. I was connected by radio headset to a situation room, probably deep in the Agency's main HQ.”
“What?” Tess was stunned. And indignant. That had made the op at least ten times more dangerous for him. Field operatives kept radio silence because radio waves could be intercepted—and traced.
“I was new,” he said. “Untested. They still didn't trust me.”
“Did they ever?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jimmy told her. “I think they did. Although trust is probably the wrong … Let's just say that they got to a point where they could bank on my patterns of behavior.”
“Who was there?” she asked. “In the sitch room?”
“My contact was Doug Brendon,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“Yup.”
This was long before Brendon was appointed head of the entire Agency.
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