Accomplice

by Kristi Lea

  Chapter 24

  Jessica woke to the rhythmic beeping of a heart rate monitor and smelled the familiar scent of hospital soap, like roses steeped in bleach. Her stomach clenched as the memories of Charles in his last hours washed over her. How he faded before her eyes. How quiet the room had sounded with all of his equipment off. No more heartbeat. No more IV. No more Charles.

  She blinked. The beeping and soap smell were still there, and there was a strange pressure in her left arm. An IV. She was the one in the hospital. Dimly she noticed the rhythm of the beeping speed up as she mentally counted her limbs, her fingers. Beneath a scratchy white sheet, she appeared whole, though her head pounded worse than the day after a tequila bender.

  Noah sat nearby in a recliner. Stubble roughened his cheeks and his eyes were rimmed in black. At the sight of him, she exhaled. Memories of the past few days flooded back, of the terror she experienced at the thought of losing her own life or costing him his. She gulped and pushed herself upright and the needle jabbing in her arm brought her back to her senses.

  The worst of the nightmare was over.

  “You don’t look so good.” Her words came out in a croak.

  He quirked a half smile and stood to grab something off a nearby tray. “Here. Drink.”

  Jess accepted a Styrofoam cup full of water and sipped it, letting the cool water dampen her sticky lips and tongue. She tried taking a bigger swallow, and the cold nearly burned her throat.

  “Slow down, there’s more where that came from. You have a few nasty bruises and the doctor said you were dehydrated. But otherwise, you’re okay.” Noah stood so close, his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides, fingers clenching and unclenching.

  She looked up, slowly. His shoes and jeans looked spotlessly clean, as did the white t-shirt underneath a Chico State sweatshirt. Above that, he looked haggard and drawn. His brown eyes had a haunted look and his hair stood up at odd angles as though he had slept on it funny. She glanced at the recliner. “How long have we been here? Where are we, exactly?”

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “County Hospital. You’ve been out a little over forty-eight hours.”

  She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything else, he knelt next to her and took her hand. His fingertips were cold, but his lips were warm and soft as he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. His raked his eyes over her as though they were trying to memorize every detail. “I know you have a lot of questions, but those will have to wait. I promised that I would let them talk to you as soon as you woke up. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have let me sit with you.”

  Jessica’s stomach clenched as the door to her room opened and in walked a nurse trailed by Tony, wearing his customary linen suit jacket. Noah let go of her fingers and stood. Jess looked from her bodyguard to Noah and back again as the men exchanged formal nods. The tension in the room was palpable.

  The nurse busied himself clicking buttons on the heart monitor and IV pump, then swiped a thermometer over Jessica’s forehead. He made a few notations in the charting computer but said very little before he hurried out, followed closely by Noah.

  Jess watched him leave with his shoulders held stiff and square. He didn’t glance backwards as the door closed softly behind him. “Tony, why are you here?”

  Tony reached into his suit pocket and withdrew a slim leather wallet.

  Jessica felt the blood drain out her face as she glanced at the badge inside. CIA.

  “I think it’s time we both had a long talk, Mrs. Kingsbury.”

  ***

  Noah paced the hallway between Jessica’s room and the nurse’s station. The rooms were all empty except for hers and a plainclothes CIA agent stood guard at the shuttered doors that connected the wing to the rest of the hospital.

  “How long is this going to take?”

  The guard gave him a sympathetic look, but only shrugged. Noah sat down on a wood-framed couch and ran his fingers through his hair.

  After what felt like hours, the door opened and the guard admitted a thin man wearing delicate rimmed glasses and a sour expression. The man looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until Noah heard his name that he remembered. Leon Norrell. Jessica’s lawyer. And her husband’s before that. Norrell didn’t spare a glance for Noah as he strode straight to Jessica’s door.

  Noah flipped through months-old magazines. He counted tiles on the floor. He crumpled up the subscription cards that he ripped out of the old magazines and practiced making baskets with a nearby trashcan. He earned himself dirty looks from the nurse at the station, and more indifference from the guards.

  “Grayson.”

  The word jarred Noah out of a doze after he’d finally stopped fidgeting so darned much that his body remembered how little sleep it had the previous week. It was Tony, barking from the door to Jessica’s room.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get in here now.” Tony held the door to Jessica’s room, and shut it firmly after him, leaving the three of them alone in the room. Norrell must have left while Noah slept.

  “Noah, Tony told me everything that happened. Thank you. You risked your life to save me.” She kept her eyes glued to the sheet that covered her lap.

  “It’s nothing.” He started to take a step forward, to take one of Jessica’s hands. Tony’s arm smacked him in the chest and held him still.

  “It’s not nothing. And I made sure I told them…”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. Still, Jessica plucked at the damned sheet and wouldn’t look up his way. “Told them what?”

  “About everything that happened in Tennessee. I made a bargain,” she started again. Again, her words sort of lost volume at the end.

  A knot formed in the pit of Noah’s gut. “What kind of a bargain? I already gave my statement, Jessica. All of it. I told them that I was the one who never turned you in. Made you think that you were under FBI protection when you weren’t. There was no warrant out for you. You did nothing wrong. If anyone needs to be making bargains here, it’s me.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  Noah clenched his hands into fists. He did understand. If it weren’t for his own selfishness, she never would have left LA. She never would have been kidnapped. Never would have been in any danger. "The whole mess is my fault. If I had not screwed up the investigation, then—“

  She held up one hand to silence him. “Please. I have to say something. Your investigation was right all along. I am guilty of blackmail and extortion and money laundering and probably more charges that I don’t even know how to pronounce.”

  Noah’s heart clenched as Jessica’s words poured out.

  “Senator Wilson was sleeping with a man from our catering staff. Arturo. I know because I helped arrange for them to meet. I suggested to my husband that we photograph them and use it for blackmail. The senator was married to someone I cared about. Tallie Wilson was a high school guidance counselor before she got married. My counselor. She was always kind to me. And that slime lied to her. That was the worst part for me—not that he lied to the public or to the press. But that he cheated on her.

  “When she figured out that something was wrong, she came to me and begged me to save his reputation. So we took photos of me and the Senator and leaked them to the press to make it look like he was screwing me.”

  Noah nodded, aggravated. “You told me all this.”

  “But what I didn’t tell you was that the blackmail kept going after that. He paid us in jewelry and gems and bits of gold and other precious metals. I smuggled them out of the country in my luggage when I went on vacation. I would have a jeweler make fake replicas in cheaper metals and cubic zirconia.”

  Noah leaned back against the concrete wall behind him as she spoke. Her words echoed in his brain as he pictured the stacks of paper clippings, the press releases, the paparazzi chasing her through Paris, the Caribbean, South Africa. “Your husband put you up to it.”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t trick me, if that
’s what you were hoping to hear. I knew full well what I was doing. And who I was doing it to. It wasn’t just Wilson. There are plenty of powerful men who have dirty little secrets they’d rather not reveal. And Charles and I found out as many of those secrets as we could.”

  “Mrs. Kingsbury has offered us a plea bargain,” said Tony quietly. “No charges will be filed against you, Noah. I can’t stop any internal investigations, but given what we know of Cutlass’s involvement, your name will be cleared soon enough.”

  Noah grunted in response. He stared at Jess. His Jess. The woman he’d held in his arms. Laughed with. Loved. How much of that had been a show, too? He directed his next words to Tony instead. “A confession is hardly enough for a plea bargain. What kind of deal can you possibly make with her now?”

  “Let her finish.”

  Noah crossed his arms over his chest and waited. His gut felt like ice and he dreaded what she could possibly have left to say.

  “Senator Wilson was doing more than sleeping with a man. The recordings that Charles and I got of the two of them together show them exchanging more than body fluids. He was selling state secrets to Cuba. Arturo was a spy.”

  Noah’s eyes snapped to Jess. For the first time since he walked into the room, she met his gaze levelly. Her eyes begged him for understanding.

  “We have both halves of the necklace now. The one that Brandon stole from my house and the one that I had given Tallie for safekeeping. I know the password. This was my deal, Noah. I am turning over the evidence against Wilson.”

  “And make yourself a target for the rest of your life.” He shook his head. “No wonder you tried to run. You’d be better off in prison than with some Cuban spy trying to get revenge.”

  Tony cleared his throat. “We have offered Mrs. Kingsbury protective custody, at least until after the trial. We promise to keep her safe.”

  “So that’s it, then. You are running away after all?”

  She backed away from his look and nodded. “That’s all I ever wanted. A new life somewhere far away from here. Somewhere I can just be a normal person with a normal life.”

  Somewhere far away. Far away from him.

  Chapter 25

  This was the last day of her life.

  Jess rubbed her bare arms as a chill breeze wafted from a duct on the ceiling. Tony had told her that the air conditioning was kept extra cold to compensate for all of the computers. She wrapped shaky fingers around a chipped mug of hot black coffee, which she had poured for the warmth on her hands rather than to drink.

  The small meeting room where she waited, deep within the CIA office, was windowless and beige. The drab office chairs surrounding a plastic laminate conference table looked like a cheap dining room set. It was an odd counterpoint to the vast array of high-tech computing equipment in the next room.

  It was just another wait. Her life had been full of them. Waiting for adulthood. Waiting for her big break. Waiting through Charles’s illness. Waiting for the nightmare to be over. Then waiting for five days to leave protective custody at the hospital, only to sit and wait for two more at the CIA office while they extracted data and analyzed photos and video recordings from her necklace. The last wait was the hardest. This time, she was waiting for the end of her world, both hoping it would come quickly and dreading the big unknown yet to come.

  Her suitcase stood in one corner of the room, containing a few changes of clothes, a minimum of toiletries, and a few hundred bucks cash. Maybe this trip into anonymity would go smoother than her last attempt.

  The door to the meeting room opened, and Tony walked in. His frame filled most of the doorway, but couldn’t block the hum of the machinery behind him. He closed the door behind him, and did something she had rarely seen him do. He smiled. It was a boyish grin for a man of his size and made him look far kinder than his normal clench-jawed grimace.

  “We got what we needed, Mrs. Kingsbury,” he said softly.

  She quirked her lips at his formality. “You don’t work for me, Tony. Call me Jessica. Or whatever my new name is going to be.”

  He pulled out a chair and sat down across from her, opening a large envelope. “Keep your new identity between yourself and the Federal Marshalls office. They will know how to find you if we need you before the trial.”

  She nodded. She had heard all of the rules and procedures already.

  “I brought you the photos that you had asked for.” He pushed a small USB drive across the table. “The drive is empty, except for the pictures of your paintings, just like you asked. Just don’t go loading them onto the web, okay?”

  She smiled and clutched it tightly. She wasn’t supposed to take anything from her former life with her, but she had asked Tony for that small favor. She knew there was no chance she could bring half a dozen oversized canvases with her. But she wanted snapshots of her own paintings—the ones the FBI still had in their evidence room.

  “What is so important about those, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Jessica’s fingers stiffened around the drive, and she summoned a smile. “Sentimental value. They are all of places that Charles and I had traveled.”

  He returned her smile with the same blank face that he customarily wore. She used to think of it as impassive. Given how long he had concealed his undercover assignment, it struck her how much of her personal life he had hidden behind that indifferent facade. Thankfully, he didn’t ask any more questions about the pictures.

  A knock sounded at the door. Tony spoke in hushed tones to one of the officers from the computer room while Jessica stowed the flash drive in a travel wallet that she wore wrapped around her waist. It also held a very small amount of cash. This time, she would take no chance of getting separated from her valuables.

  The two men gave her a glance and then Tony shook the other man’s hand. “It is done. Officers are on their way to arrest Wilson now. Let’s get you out of town.”

  They traveled the maze of hallways to an underground parking garage where the woman from the Marshall’s office, Officer Minnie, waited with a very homey-looking SUV. As she opened the rear door for the suitcase, Jessica looked wistfully at the window sticker. It was a line of stick figures in various heights, clearly meant to represent a family. Mother, Father, three children, and a dog.

  She hefted the suitcase in and slammed the door shut with just the tiniest hitch to her breath.

  “Do you mind if I ride along? I cleared it with Minnie and Tony.” Noah’s voice washed over her like silk.

  Jess whirled. His own bruises had faded the past week, and he was freshly shaved. His eyes were bright but uncertain. Something welled in her, some combination of hope and sadness that chipped away at the detachment she had built around herself this past week.

  “Just as far as your first stop. Then I’ll head home. Only if you want me to.” His words sounded rushed, anxious.

  Jessica looked from Noah to Tony to Minnie to the pair of armed guards behind Tony. It was Minnie who spoke, who gave her permission. “It’s a little unorthodox, but I understand. After today, there can’t be any contact with people from your former life. Sometimes it helps to make that last goodbye.”

  “I would like that.” Jessica said. The words “last goodbye,” whispered through her mind as she climbed silently into the passenger seat of the SUV. To her surprise, Noah took the keys and sat behind the wheel, setting out both a cell phone and what looked like a walkie-talkie on the dashboard. “Minnie will follow in another unmarked car, in sight. And in constant contact.”

  Jessica just nodded again and sat quietly as the tiny parade emerged from what turned out to be the parking garage beneath a high-rise apartment building that obviously connected to the CIA’s underground labyrinth of an office.

  They headed north on 101, Minnie trailing behind them in a dusty Civic. Santa Barbara was long behind them before either of them attempted to speak.

  “They say it could be years before this thing gets brought to trial,” said Noah.
r />   “Mmm.”

  “Just find somewhere out of the spotlight. Don’t try to be a star, and you’ll be safe.”

  Jess huffed, irritation building in her chest. “Is that what you think of me? I have some kind of complex where I’m constantly seeking attention?”

  “No, I just….” He let the words trail away into an awkward silence.

  “You just what?”

  “Call me if there’s a problem, okay? I don’t care what it is. I don’t care where you are. I will be there. Jessica, I…”

  She leveled her gaze on his profile. He gripped the steering wheel like a life raft and kept his eyes glued to the road as she continued. “Because you’re the one with the complex. You have to be the hero everywhere you go. Always trying to save people, even when they aren’t worth saving.”

  “Never say that.” He ripped his eyes from the twisty coastal highway just long enough to pin her with an angry stare. “Never say you aren’t worth saving. Your smile, your laugh, your art…If I had these past few weeks to do over, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  She opened her mouth then closed it to bite down a tart reply.

  ***

  The setting sun glittered over the Pacific Ocean as they headed north up the coast. Reds and gold, pink and amber. Traffic wasn’t heavy, but the steady stream of trucks and tourists on the coastal highway had separated Noah from Minnie and her Civic. Their planned rest stop was maybe an hour ahead: a nondescript exit with a hotel, a diner, and a gas station. They would rendezvous there.

  Noah’s phone rang, piercing the silence that had fallen over them. Noah glanced at the number. It was Thompson from the LAPD. He made a silencing gesture to Jessica, then put it on speakerphone. “What’s up lieutenant?”

  “Sorry to bother you Noah. I have a heads up for you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I can’t give details. But tonight’s pickup didn’t go as planned. Be careful out there.”

  The words sent a shiver down Noah’s spine, and he tightened his grip on the wheel. The cars ahead of him all had on brake lights, and he slowed down too.