“Did you hear what I said, you cocksucking man whore?” András’s voice sharpened with tension. “On the count of five, she loses a foot. One. Two. Three—”
Val let the guns drop. They clattered onto the tiles.
“Kick them out into the corridor,” András directed, pitching his voice over Rachel’s shrieks. “Then put out your hands.”
Val kicked the guns. They slid over the tiles with a clatter.
His hands were dripping blood. He held them out the door, fingers splayed wide, turning them to show that they were empty.
“Step out, and put them on top of your head.”
Val walked slowly out into the corridor, lifted his arms, placed his hands on his head.
András’s arm was clasped around Rachel’s waist, in a cruelly tight grip. Rachel kept struggling, undaunted.
Val wanted to applaud. The child did her mother proud. He stared at András, balancing like a tightrope walker suspended over a boiling lava pit. Blood trickled down his arm, slow and hot and ticklish.
Checkmate. Three steps back. Detached. Floating. Wait for it.
Rachel flailed, flopped, shrieked. András had to struggle to hold her. “Get down on your knees,” he growled. “Stay still, you little shit, or I’ll peel you like a grape.”
Val sank slowly to his knees. Waiting, watching for his opening. Widening out his senses, softening. Wait for it. Wait.
András adjusted his grip, lifting her higher. Rachel flung herself forward against his face, almost as if she were kissing him. Suddenly András yanked her away from his face and flung her to the ground. A red bite wound flamed on his cheek. Broken skin. Blood.
Now!
Val let the Walther PPK slide from the sleeve of his jacket and into his hand as Rachel skittered on hands and knees, and darted into the door he had broken through. András shot after her, bullets pumping out, screaming something unintelligible, his hand to his distorted, bleeding face.
Val opened fire with the Walther. Bam, bam, bam. Head, throat, chest.
András toppled across the threshhold, a look of stupid surprise on his face. There was a hole in the center of his forehead.
The sudden silence was disorienting. Val’s cool detachment evaporated the instant there was no desperate use for it. He began shaking convulsively. He almost fell. Caught himself.
He lurched to his feet, limped over to András. Kneeled by him to make sure he was dead. He prodded the man with his gun. The condition of András’s skull convinced him. There was very little left inside it. Good.
He blundered into the room, bumping painfully into various obstacles and trying to intuit where a light source might be. The darkness was so dense. The room appeared to be crowded with bulky furniture covered with canvas drop-cloths.
There might be no light source at all. Back in his time, entire wings of the old palace had been left to fall into decay just as they had been in the eighteenth century. No wiring, no modern plumbing.
“Rachel?” He got down to his knees with a grunt of pain, putting himself in the glow of twilight from the door so that she could see him, wherever she was. If she was alive. If András had not shot her.
“Rachel?” He tried to pitch his voice normally, but it rasped and quavered, barely recognizable. “It’s Val, remember? Your Mamma’s friend? It’s all right now. Come out to me.”
She did, to his astonishment. He heard a rustle, a squeak, and a tiny body scrabbled across the floor toward him. Rachel ran into him full on, knocking him onto his ass, and wound her arms around his neck. He grabbed her, held her, chest shaking uncontrollably. She was alive.
Ah, no. Not yet. Please. He could not fall apart. Not yet.
He picked her up, swaying dangerously. He didn’t have much time left. He had to find someone to care for her, to make the phone calls, the arrangements. He could not slide down into oblivion and leave Rachel alone in this slaughterhouse just because all his blood had drained out of his body.
That was no fucking excuse. He had promised Tamar.
He lurched out into the corridor, gasping for air.
“Mamma?” Rachel asked, her voice breathless.
His chest tightened around his heart like a fist. “I’m sorry. I don’t know about Mamma, baby,” he whispered. “We’ll see about Mamma.”
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, digging her fingers into the blood-soaked fabric of his coat. “Mamma. Mamma. Mamma. Mamma,” she repeated. Like a mantra. Blocking out the world with the magic word.
He envied her the trick.
He scooped up the guns and staggered back toward the Saints Salon, following his own trail of blood. He was not sure what the fuck to do now. He couldn’t show Rachel her mamma naked and covered in blood, not if the unspeakable had happened. Yet Tamar’s vibe dragged at him like a steel cable attached to his insides. Someone was reeling it mercilessly in.
He had a bad moment when he turned the corner outside the Saints Salon and saw the two men, but as soon as he focused his eyes, the shock of blond hair struck an instant chord of recognition.
Connor McCloud, Seth Mackey. Val was so relieved, he might even have wept. He didn’t care.
Connor hurried toward them, his face gray with strain. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” he muttered. “Rachel? Honey? You OK? Holy Jesus, Janos, what’s all this blood? Is she—”
“Not hers,” he said, exhausted. “She’s all right.”
Connor reached out. The little girl relinquished her grip on Val and transferred it willingly enough to the other man. “Mamma?” she asked.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Connor said helplessly.
Rachel began to sob. Val turned away from the sound, and shuffled like one of the living dead into the blood-drenched Saints Salon.
The place was cold and dark. Wind whispered through it. Davy and Sean were bent over Tamar’s still form, muttering to each other. A thermal blanket was thrown over her. Davy was pumping on her chest.
Val fell to his knees next to them, only dimly aware of the glass shards digging into his flesh. “How is she?”
“Alive,” Sean said. “I don’t know how, or for how long, considering the condition he’s in.” He indicated Georg’s gruesome corpse, bent backward in a contorted arc. The man’s mouth, nose and bulging eyes all streamed blood. “She must have taken the same poison he did.”
“She kissed him, and he died,” Val said.
“That’s what I figured.” Sean’s voice was grim. “She has a tongue stud in. Some kind of poison capsule. The chick is a fucking head case. She makes me tired.”
Val cupped her jaw, tried to open her mouth. Sean batted his hand away. “Don’t touch her, for Christ’s sake! Some of the stuff she uses goes right through the skin. We can’t even do mouth to mouth.”
“I don’t care about the poison,” Val said. “I will give her mouth to mouth.”
Davy gave him a steely glance. “Like hell you will. Things suck enough without you croaking on us, too. Try it and I’ll knock you out.”
It would hardly be necessary, Val thought, swaying. He caught himself against the floor as he stared down at Tamar’s still form.
Her face looked like a pale, delicate wax effigy.
“I must call someone,” he said, shaking himself. “Medics, doctors. For Rachel, too. Someone give me a cell phone. An ambulance—”
“Connor’s already on it,” Davy interrupted him. “The FBI liaison’s taking care of it. Everybody’s on their way. So, these bodies . . . uh, what the hell happened here? Did you waste them all?”
“No. Just a few of them,” he said vaguely. “Seven or eight, maybe. They mostly killed each other. What are you doing to her arm?”
“It’s broken,” Sean said roughly. “Those filthy pigfuckers had her hanging from a goddamn rope with a broken arm. I can’t do shit about her crazy poisons, but at least I can splint her arm.”
Glass crunched as Val thudded down onto his ass. He caught himself with a bloody hand. The dim room was fading aw
ay.
He struggled to stay awake, alert. He didn’t want to leave Tamar while she still breathed. What a waste of precious moments with her.
But he could not support the weight of consciousness any longer. He was collapsing under it. On his way down the long slippery slide.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, he’s shot, he heard one of them say in an exasperated tone, before he pitched face first into nothing.
Chapter 30
Cray’s Cove, five weeks later . . .
Val pulled his motorcycle to a stop at the road that led to Tamar’s house. It was different than the last time he had seen it. It was now a road, not a camouflaged deer track. The driveway was freshly asphalted. A plain whitewashed post boasted a large, shiny silver mailbox with STEELE stenciled on it in bold black letters. There was a plastic box for the Washingtonian and another box for the local paper.
It disoriented him. For a moment, he doubted his own bulletproof, iron-riveted memory, but just for a moment. He’d been intensely aware of the exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of Tamar’s physical presence on earth since he learned of her existence. He could not be mistaken about this. He gunned the motor again with a muttered curse.
He was just afraid, after these endless weeks of enigmatic silence. Afraid to speculate what the silence meant. So fucking afraid, he could barely eat. Or breathe, for that matter.
It was Tamar’s way to let a man sweat, but it seemed particularly cruel to him now, after lingering for weeks near death, to be left alone to doubt, to wonder. Should he reach out to her? Was it better to wait?
But he could not wait forever. It was killing him. He had to know.
And besides, he knew Tamar. She liked strength. Needed it. He had to be strong. Fear was weakening him, so he had to be fearless.
Hah. A stiff challenge. But he would try with everything he had.
Doubts nagged and stung him. She had never actually said that she loved him, except for that time that he remembered like a dream after she’d cuffed and drugged him at the agriturismo. And that may have been just a chemical fantasy. Questionable at every level.
He’d hoped that trying to save her and Rachel would have been a point in his favor but evidently not. She had ignored his very existence ever since.
He jerked to a stop at the electronic gate. There was a vidcam mounted above it. He buzzed the button and waited for a response.
This simple gate was nothing like the high-tech camouflaged facsimile of the falling-down barn that had stood here before. She’d ripped out all of her space age security, and put the plain, simple basics in their place. In other words, she’d lowered her defenses.
He wondered what that meant about her change in mood. He hoped it was good news for him. He was afraid to speculate.
No one was responding to his buzz, but he was going in anyway.
He was ready to face anything, even a loaded gun. Nothing could be worse than this blank emptiness. The boredom and pain of convalescence, then the intensive debriefing and subsequent negotiations with PSS. Then the quiet, endless days, one after the other, alone and dazed in his apartment in Rome. Slumped in a chair, staring at shadows moving on the wall for hours. Unable to eat, sleep, move.
Everything he tried to do felt like useless playacting, empty of all significance. No connection to anything that counted. How could there be? What counted had been ripped out of him.
What counted was walking around, living and breathing a half a world away from him. His heart, walking around outside his body. Ignoring him.
The intercom finally beeped. “Who is it?”
It was a female voice, but not Tamar’s. “Is this the home of Tamar Steele?” he asked.
A cautious pause, and someone said, “Who wants to know?”
“Valery Janos. Is she home?” He stepped up to the camera, stared into it, and let whoever was looking at the monitor inside get a good, long look.
The gate clicked and hummed open. He accelerated on through, and headed up the long, winding road that led up to the crest of a mountain that plunged steeply down to the Pacific Ocean. The hillside was dark with towering conifers and draped with a ragged mantle of mist. The broad, shining beach was lashed with surges of white foam. Dramatically beautiful, as befitted the home of a woman like Tamar.
The closer he got to her, the more his chest ached.
Had it just been his wishful fantasy projected onto her, that dawn interlude in the hotel room in San Vito? He had seen something in her eyes that had changed the nature of his existence. His soul had awakened, and so had his heart, his brain, and other parts he didn’t even know how to name. They had risen from a deathlike sleep, and now they would give him no peace.
Had it been real, that half-remembered “I love you”?
The garage was open when he pulled up. A young woman with a mop of curly red hair stood in the opening, holding a squirming baby in her arms. Margot McCloud. The name floated back to him. Davy’s wife. She was not smiling.
Val could politely initiate a conversation in ten different languages, but he just stood there, swallowing over the dry lump in his throat. “Is she here?” he asked when he could finally speak.
Margot jiggled her baby, studying him solemnly. “Yes. She’s working. In her studio.”
His stomach sank. “So she doesn’t know that I’m here yet?”
Margot shook her head. Her red curls floated and swirled in the air. “Not yet. She blasts music into her headphones when she works. Come on in.”
He followed her through a security room filled with cutting edge surveillance equipment and noticed that most of it was deactivated. Snarls of disconnected electrical wire were everywhere.
At the top of the stairs, he looked around, fascinated. Tamar’s living space was exactly as he would have expected. Minimalist, severe, and yet subtly opulent. The lines were clean, the grain in the blond wood paneling swirled voluptuously. There were incredible vistas outside each of the huge triangular windows. He had never seen it, but he felt as if he recognized it. Like her, it was uncompromising, stark, and beautiful.
He passed a room crowded with an uncharacteristic clutter of color: toys, books, mobiles, pictures. A small form hurled itself out the door and smacked into his legs.
“Val! Val!” Rachel crowed, clutching at his thigh.
He was gratified at the warmth of her welcome, and the sudden upwelling of tenderness he felt for the little girl took him by surprise. He picked her up and hid his face against her curly head for a few seconds, until the shaky, misty feeling passed. “Hello, little sweet,” he whispered.
A stocky older woman with a black and white bun stopped at the threshold, staring at him with wide-eyed curiosity. Had to be Rosalia.
“Rachel and I are old friends, Senhora,” he explained in Portuguese, kissing the top of Rachel’s head.
Rosalia was charmed. “Ah! So you are this Val that they tell me about, eh?” She shot Margot a delighted look and winked broadly. “Good, then! Go up and talk to her. She is too sad. She needs cheering up from a handsome young man like you.”
That remained to be seen, he reflected bleakly. He passed Rachel to Rosalia, soothing her protests with a promise to come back and play later. A promise he desperately hoped he would be able to keep.
“Come on. I’ll show you the way,” Margot said.
He followed Margot down the hallway, leaving Rachel’s loud squawks of disapproval behind. They climbed up a spiral staircase. The cells in his body were shaking apart in fear and dread, and he spoke just to distract himself from the feeling. “How has she been?”
Margot glanced back over her shoulder. “Hmm. Not great, in my book. You’d better ask her yourself. We’ve been taking turns, parking our butts here to keep an eye on her, and she hasn’t had the energy to kick us out yet. I think she’s working up to it, though.” Margot stopped in front of a carved wooden door, and gave him a speculative look over the flame-colored curls on her daughter’s head.
“Don
’t startle her if you can help it,” she advised. “She’s jumpy these days. Not sleeping much.”
“You mean, she might kill me by mistake?”
She smiled as she pulled open the door. “You said it, not me.”
Tamar was wearing headphones and bending over a jeweler’s bench, her back to them. She wore drawstring pants of undyed linen that hung low over her hips and a shrunken black T-shirt that did not cover her navel or conceal the deep, feminine curve of her hips. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung in a thick, loose mahogany braid.
She was lost in her work, swaying sinuously to music only she could hear. So thin. Her arms, so narrow. There were livid surgical scars on her right arm. The McClouds had told him about the surgeries to repair torn, mangled tissues, ripped tendons.
He stared at the scars, tight-lipped. His throat ached.
Margot cleared her throat. “I guess I’ll just leave you, then. You’ll want to talk to her in private, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it’s best,” he said. “That way, we don’t both have to die.”
Margot choked on a short burst of laughter. “Good luck.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
Val just stared. After weeks, his eyes were starved for the sight of her. Every perfect detail. The upright straightness of her back, the creamy texture of her skin, the perfect lines of her cheekbone, the way her plain work clothes draped and clung to her graceful curves.
He felt helpless, lost. He had no plan of action, just hunger, and incoherent longing. He could think of no way to get her attention without giving her an unpleasant adrenaline jolt, so he elected to wait. She had a sixth sense, just as he did. She would feel his gaze soon enough and turn around.
And he would know if life held any hope of happiness for him.
No. It was not a matter of hope, he told himself, resolute. It was a battle of wills. She could accept his love, or she could kill him. Killing him was the only way she would be able to get him out of her hair. Those were her options. It was very simple.
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