Hero Under Cover

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Pete kept his face expressionless, afraid that the flash of jealousy he’d felt at the sound of York’s voice would still somehow show. Jealousy? Man, what the hell was he doing feeling jealous? He had no right. No right at all. So just stop it, he ordered himself.

  He cleared his throat. “What other messages are on there?” he asked, motioning toward the answering machine with his head.

  Annie started the tape rolling again.

  Another message was from the Westchester Archaeological Society, asking if Dr. Morrow had any free time in the next few months to come and give a lecture at one of the group’s monthly meetings.

  “Free time,” Annie laughed. “If they only knew…”

  There were four hang-ups in a row, then a voice spoke.

  “I am calling on behalf of Stands Against the Storm.” Annie looked sharply up at Pete. He hadn’t moved a muscle, but he was instantly a picture of intensity, his dark eyes burning into hers as they both listened. The voice belonged to a man and was accentless and soft.

  “You must surrender the death mask,” he said, almost mildly. “Return it to the Navaho people. It is for your own good that I tell you this. The evil spirit within the mask will awaken if you disturb it. Do not touch it, do not hold it—or be ready to face the spirit’s wrath. Your life as you know it will crumble. Await further instructions.”

  There was a click, and the answering machine beeped twice, signaling that there were no more messages, and shut off.

  Annie sat so still at her desk that Pete could hear the wall clock ticking as its second hand jerked around the dial. But as if her energy couldn’t be contained, she stood up suddenly, pushing past him out of the room and down the hallway. He followed her into the lab, where she switched on the bright overhead lights and crossed directly to the big safe.

  It only took several quick spins to the combination lock, and the heavy door swung open. Without a word, Annie took out the heavy crate from England and carried it to the wide lab counter. She set it down and got a hammer from one of the cabinet drawers.

  Pete didn’t ask what she was doing—he already knew.

  “You know,” Annie said evenly, “this thing is such a pain in the butt, and I haven’t even taken a good look at it yet.”

  She used the forked end of the hammer to pry the top of the crate up and off.

  The crate was filled with large foam peanuts. Annie dug through them, finding the top of the heavy artifact about six inches down. She pulled it out, careful to keep the foam chips in the box.

  The death mask had been wrapped in layers of bubble pack. She peeled them back to find the artifact surrounded by a soft cloth. Carefully she unwrapped it, setting it on the counter on top of that same piece of fabric.

  It was amazing. The gleaming, golden face of Stands Against the Storm sat in front of her, every wrinkle, every sagging muscle in the old man’s face recorded forever by the casting that had been done shortly after his death. His eyes were closed, and he looked so tired, so sad. Annie wondered what his eyes had been like, wondered if he’d had eyes like Pete’s—dark and burning with intensity and life.

  Annie glanced up at Pete. “Curses, shmurses,” she said, and picked the death mask up, holding the cool metal in her hands. Nothing happened. She wasn’t immediately struck by lightning or attacked by a flock of screaming evil spirits. And as far as her life crumbling…well, it couldn’t really get that much worse. Could it?

  She carried the death mask to the other side of the lab, to a big magnifying glass that was clamped to the counter with an accordion-like arm. She turned on another, even brighter, light and held the artifact under the glass, looking at it closely.

  Pete pulled up a stool and watched.

  Annie examined the casting marks, moving slowly across the piece for several long minutes. Finally she looked up at Pete.

  “Is it real?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer at first. Instead, she brought the artifact up to her mouth and licked it. She grinned at the way his eyebrows moved upward. “Well, it’s real gold, at the very least,” she said.

  “You can tell that by tasting it?”

  Annie nodded. “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t seem too scientific,” he said. “All these high-tech instruments in this lab, and you end up using your tongue.”

  “That was just a preliminary test,” she said. “I’ll get a full metal content when I have more time. But I think the final outcome is going to have to be decided by carbon dating.”

  “Why?” asked Pete, watching her.

  She had put the death mask down on the counter, and now she gathered her long hair away from her face, pulling it easily into a ponytail and using a rubber band to hold it back. She was wearing her worn-out jeans and a red sweater that was textured, designed to be touched. Pete hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and tried to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “Well, it certainly passes a quick inspection,” Annie said. “The casting marks all look comparable to what was being done in England in the nineteenth century. But without written records—you know, receipts or bills of sale, something to document it—the only way to be sure it wasn’t cast last month in Liverpool is to carbon-date it.”

  Pete leaned in for a closer look. “So, how long will that test take?”

  She turned and found herself nearly nose to nose with him. Up close, his eyes were beautiful. They were exquisitely shaped and surrounded by thick, black lashes. But his expression was so closed, so guarded, he might have been a statue. He didn’t seem to notice that he had long since invaded her personal space, that he was sitting at a distance more appropriate for an embrace than a conversation.

  She swallowed, moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “Even if I start the tests now, it will probably be weeks before I get the results. I have to contract out for carbon dating.”

  There was a flash of relief in his dark eyes, and Annie’s heart leapt. He was glad. He wanted to stick around for a while. More than ever, she wanted him to kiss her. Kiss me, she thought, staring into his eyes, hoping he could read her mind.

  But he didn’t move.

  She was going to have to do it, she realized. She was going to have to kiss him. She looked away, gathering her courage. The worst he could do was laugh at her, right? So she should just do it—

  Pete straightened up, pushing his stool back, out of range.

  Damn, Annie thought. The moment had passed. What was wrong with her? she wondered. Wasn’t she making her interest in him obvious enough? Or maybe it was Pete, she thought glumly. Maybe he had a reason to fight the attraction that sparked between them every time they were together in a room. Maybe he was in love with someone else. Shoot, maybe he was married….

  She sat at the lab counter for a long time, pretending to study the death mask, but in truth thinking long and hard about Peter Taylor.

  ANNIE TURNED OFF THE LIGHT on her bedside table, determined to follow the resolution she had made while she was brushing her teeth in the bathroom just a few moments ago. She was not going to chase this man. She had let him know—subtly, of course, but Pete Taylor was a smart man—that she was interested in him. It had been up to him to do something about it. Or not.

  Obviously, he’d chosen “or not.”

  Well, okay. That was fine. She was a grown-up; she could deal with that.

  But it wouldn’t do her any good to lie in the dark, talking to him until the early hours of the morning. It wouldn’t do her any good at all to share more secrets with him. And it certainly wouldn’t do her any good to fall in love with him.

  She lay in the dark, in silence, hoping that it wasn’t already too late.

  Minutes passed. Long, endless minutes, during which she tried to organize and prioritize the work she had to do tomorrow. Then she tried to think of all the songs she knew that started with the word I. “I Think I Love You,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “I Had the Craziest Dream,” “I Do,” “I’m Dreaming of a White
Christmas”—no, that was the first line, not the name of the song.

  She gave up. “Taylor, are you awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  On the other side of the room, Pete closed his eyes briefly. Annie had been quiet for so long, he had been afraid that she had broken her pattern and was already asleep.

  “Do you think that guy on the phone meant he’s going to call again and tell me to bring the death mask someplace, when he said, ‘Await further instructions’?”

  Pete knew exactly which guy she was talking about. “Probably,” he said. “But first I think he and his buddies are going to try to scare you badly enough so you won’t want to get the police involved.”

  “The police are already involved,” Annie said. “What do these guys think I’m going to do? Simply hand them a piece of gold that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars? And that’s ignoring any possible historical value. Even if I do hand it over, then what? I call up Ben Sullivan and say, ‘Oops. Lost your artifact. Sorry’?”

  “I know you’re not about to do that,” Pete said. “But these people don’t know you. They don’t realize you don’t scare easily.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me, either, Taylor.” Annie’s voice was soft. “Sometimes I think I’m scared of everything.”

  “It’s one thing to be scared,” he said, “and another thing entirely to let it affect you.”

  “Like my fear of bats,” Annie said wryly.

  “Obviously you’ve dealt with that pretty damn well,” he said, “since I’m the only one who knows about it.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of anything, Taylor?” Annie asked.

  Pete stared at the outline of the windows for a long time before he answered. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I get afraid when the line between right and wrong isn’t clear. Lately it seems it never is. It’s been scaring the hell out of me.”

  There was silence for a moment, then he laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I’m also afraid I haven’t lived up to the name my grandfather gave me.”

  Pete hadn’t wanted to go to Vietnam and had seriously considered losing himself up in the Rocky Mountains, much in the way his ancestors had when they’d received orders from the federal government that they hadn’t liked.

  But he obeyed the draft, and he went to Vietnam. At first he wondered what the hell someone named Man Speaking Peace was doing stalking through a foreign jungle with an automatic weapon in his hands and camouflage gear on his back. But it didn’t take him long to realize that he was good at staying alive, and especially good at keeping the men around him alive, too. And somehow, when the real war was over and the American troops were shipping out of Saigon, he’d remained behind, part of the exclusive force assigned to locate and rescue the massive numbers of POWs and MIAs still in the jungles.

  Ever since the summer that he was drafted, when he was barely eighteen years old, not even old enough to drink in Colorado, he’d always carried at least one gun. He felt it now, a hard lump, tucked under his bedroll where he could reach it easily if he needed it.

  “A man of peace needs no weapon,” he could remember his grandfather telling him. “Only a conscience, a will and a voice loud enough to carry.”

  “Man Speaking Peace.” Annie’s voice cut into his thoughts. “Why were you named that?”

  He was silent for so long, she thought maybe he wasn’t going to answer.

  “I haven’t thought about any of this in a really long time,” Pete finally said. “I’m not sure I want to….”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I was just—I shouldn’t have—”

  “I was thirteen years old,” he said, interrupting her. “It was the summer that my aunt died—my mother’s sister. It really messed my cousins up. They came to stay with us at the ranch. There were five of them—Jack was the oldest, he was twelve. Then there was Wil, Thomas, Eddie and Chris, who was just a baby really. He couldn’t have been more than five. He missed his mother something fierce. They all did, but Chris was the only one who would cry. He would cry, and Tom would taunt him, saying boys didn’t cry, only babies cried. Then Jack would beat the hell out of Tom, and soon they’d all be fighting.

  “Well, I spent all of July being a mediator, keeping the peace between those five boys. I was older than them, and they looked up to me. But more often than not, as soon as my back was turned, wham, someone would end up with a fist in his eye.

  “After a few weeks, I began to realize that there was a pattern to when little Chris would cry about his mother. He usually cried first thing in the morning, and at a certain time in the afternoon—about one o’clock, I think it was—because that was the time his mom had set aside a half an hour every day to read to him and play with him—with just him, giving him her full attention, while the other boys were off at school.

  “So I started distracting him. I’d be the one to wake him up in the morning, and I’d keep him so busy, he’d never really notice the emptiness. And I did the same thing in the afternoon, and his bouts of crying happened less and less often.”

  Annie listened, realizing she was almost holding her breath. Pete had never spoken at such length in the entire time she’d known him, and certainly never about himself, about his childhood.

  “Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said about the fighting,” he said, with a low laugh. “Even when Chris’s crying stopped, the older boys found other reasons to set themselves off. I couldn’t figure out what had gotten into them. They’d never fought before—not like this.”

  He paused. Don’t stop, Annie thought. She could picture him as a thirteen-year-old boy, tall and serious, with those same intense, dark eyes. “So what happened?” she asked softly.

  “I went and talked to my grandfather,” Pete said. “I asked him why my cousins were fighting. He told me it was their way of grieving for their mother. Well, I thought about that for a couple of days. But after I watched Wil give Jack a broken nose, and after Jack damn near broke Tom’s arm, I decided that those boys needed to find a different way to deal with their mother’s death.

  “I took the whole pack of them out on a hike, up into the mountains, to a place I knew about where you could see down into the whole valley,” Pete said quietly. “It was like heaven up there. You could look out across my father’s ranch, at the fields laid out like squares on a patchwork quilt. Everything was alive and growing. There were so many different shades of green, and the sky was so blue, it hurt to look at it.

  “We sat down on some rocks, and the boys were quiet for once, just taking it all in,” he said. “I sat there, thinking about my aunt Peg, their mother. I thought about her, and it didn’t take me long to start to cry. So I sat there, with tears running down my face, and one by one those boys noticed I was crying. They were shocked, really shocked, because, as Tom was so fond of pointing out, boys weren’t supposed to cry.

  “Wil asked me why I was crying, and I told him it was because I missed his mother. I told them that sometimes even men had to cry, and if it was okay for a man to cry, then it was surely okay for a boy to cry. And they believed me, you know, because I was older than them. Soon Chris started in—it never took much to set him off—but then Tom broke down, and Wil and Eddie, and finally even Jack was crying. We all just sat there and cried for about an hour. Then I told them that this place that we had climbed to was my special place, but that they could use it whenever they needed it.

  “We went back down that mountain, and from that day on almost all the fighting stopped,” Pete said. “It was at the end of that summer my grandfather gave me the name Hastin Naat’aanni, Man Speaking Peace. It was the name of a great Navaho leader, back more than a hundred years ago.”

  He had been so proud, so young and full of hopes and dreams. Pete didn’t have to wonder what had happened, what had changed him. He knew damn well. Vietnam.

  “That’s a great story,” Annie said, her voice soft in the darkness. “Thanks for telling me. Your grandfather sounds like he was really cool.”
>
  “Yeah,” Pete said, closing his eyes, remembering. “He was a full Navaho. He must’ve been in his sixties back then, but he still had long, black hair that he kept out of his face with a headband. He was a silversmith and he traveled all the time, selling his jewelry at fairs and rodeos. When he was visiting, he’d set up a workshop in the barn. He didn’t want me to go.”

  “Go where?”

  To Vietnam. His eyes snapped open. Oh, man, what was he doing? Had he actually forgotten who he was, why he was here? Peter Taylor hadn’t gone to Vietnam. “To New York University,” he said, glad he had a ready answer.

  “Why did you go?” she asked, her voice slipping through the dark of the room as if it were something he could reach out and touch.

  “I had to,” he said simply.

  “You didn’t have to,” she said. “Nobody has to do something if he doesn’t want to.”

  “Not true,” he said. “There are some things that you have no choice about.”

  He had to get back on track, Pete thought. They had to stop talking about him, and focus the conversation on her. He had to get her talking about Athens, about England and about the people she had met with there. But how?

  “Annie.”

  She closed her eyes, loving the way he said her name, and knowing that she shouldn’t. “Mmm-hmm?”

  “If you ever find yourself in any kind of trouble,” he said slowly, searching for the right words to say, “I hope that you’ll come to me and let me help you.”

  The room was suddenly silent. The little sounds Annie made—all the restless movement, the whisper of sheets, even the sound of her breathing—all stopped. Fifteen seconds, twenty seconds, the silence stretched on and on….

  “Taylor, I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say,” Annie finally said. “Why don’t you do me a favor and just say it?”

  Pete laughed, unable to hold it in. Man, this woman was too much…. “Okay,” he said. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re somehow involved with this art robbery thing, and you’re in too deep, I wish you would tell me, because I can help you.”