She was glad she’d kept quiet. Despite it all, he was a guy just doing his job. Still, she was in no mood to let him know that.
“And you call yourself a dull guy,” Meg spat, “Oh, that’s right, that was your cover. Dull banker. Believe me, Jake Bernstein, after this is over and I’ve got Grandma back home, safe and sound, I never want to see you again!”
He said nothing. Just let out a long huff and drank his beer. His shoulders slumped and he hunched over the glass. For a second, she almost felt sorry for him.
For a second.
****
Jake paid the cabbie with Euros. Once inside the hotel, still lugging the small cardboard box, he turned to Meg and lowered his voice.
“Come to my room.”
She whirled on him, anger rising again. After the shock at the cathedral rectory, the frantic run to the library, the police questioning and then the confrontation in the pub with an indignant Mike McCoy, Junior, Jake expected her to sleep with him!
“Don’t even think it, pal!”
He stumbled a little, placed a hand on her shoulder for support. His face blanched and he was grimacing again. Blinking a lot, too, as if he were struggling to stay awake.
“Not that…help…need your help. Not a rock, Meg. A bullet. My leg…it’s bleeding again.”
Meg’s heart skipped a beat. He looked like he was about to faint. Grabbing him around the waist, she helped him walk to the elevators. A couple from the motor coach looked over from their cozy group of four and waved. Their faces showed concern when they saw Jake lurch to the side.
“A little too much Guinness,” she explained tightly. They rode up to their floor, Meg still holding onto him as firmly as she could. Jake was listing from side to side, closing his eyes against the waves of pain.
“You have a First-Aid kit?” he choked out.
“A small one. Jake, let me call a doctor.”
“No, too many questions. Get it. Bring it.” He opened his room with the card key and she helped him ease down on the bed.
“First, let’s see how bad it is.” Meg unsnapped and unzipped his dark trousers, tugged them off while he lay spread-eagle on his back. The paper towels he’d used to stanch the blood were soaked through, reddened and soggy. His right leg was sodden with blood. Even his sock and white briefs. Her heart thudded and her stomach lurched. God, there was too much blood. She felt sick, ready to throw up again. She swallowed it down.
“Dammit, Jake, you should’ve said something!” She dumped the sodden paper towels in the trashcan, hurried to the bathroom and pulled the hotel towels off their bars. Rushed back to the bed, she wound one of the white bath towels tightly around his right leg, covering the jagged wound. “Hold it tight if you can.”
She hoped the pressure would diminish the loss of blood. Then she pulled his socks and briefs off and threw them in the bathtub.
“I think,” he rasped, “the fleshy part got it. Bullet went through, thank God. Didn’t hurt much until the pub. It could’ve been a lot worse.” Both legs were quivering. Meg stared, frowning. What did that mean? Jake glanced down at his leg. “Adrenaline…” His head slumped back.
Passed out cold. His head lolled to the side. Still wearing his leather jacket and sweater, his arms were flung open. He was naked from the waist down. With another damp towel, she wiped the blood off his bare skin but the wound kept seeping blood. She ran and grabbed another towel to wind tightly around his leg.
She needed to stop the blood. The wound needed stitches! Indecision froze her and she stood there, staring at him.
Like a little boy with tousled dark hair, he lay there looking helpless. It struck her, deep inside, tugged at her. He trusted her with his life. This big, tough FBI dude was lying there, half naked, as vulnerable as a baby. He trusted her to do the right thing. He’d said he was crazy about her.
How did she feel about that? Slowly, the emotion flooded her. Omigod, she was falling in love with the guy. Meg frowned. Well, how stupid was that! “Dammit to hell, Jake Bernstein! You are nothing but trouble!” Meg grabbed his card key and shot out the door, mumbling, “Anything with testicles and tires, always trouble.”
In her room, Grandma was asleep—thank God! It would be the devil to try and explain away the evening’s events. Meg rummaged through her grandmother’s suitcase, found the traveling First-Aid kit, grabbed it, then paused to look around. A bottle of sleeping pills was on her grandmother’s side of their shared nightstand. Also, a bottle of painkillers for her grandmother’s rheumatoid arthritis.
Meg went over, tapped out four pink painkiller capsules, enough to last Jake through the night and maybe tomorrow. Another small bottle by a glass of water contained Gran’s white sleeping pills. Jake wouldn’t need the sleeping pills, not after their forced run and the pint of ale he’d drunk while talking to Mike McCoy, Junior. Still, she tapped out two sleeping pills, just in case.
There was a lot to think about. In her jacket pocket was a folded Quit Claim Deed, written in both the Irish and English languages. She’d promised Young Mike she’d have her grandmother look it over and sign it, giving him full title to The Muckross Stag. What did her grandmother need with half ownership of an Irish pub, anyway? Especially since she really had no legal or moral claim.
There was no doubt in Meg’s mind that her grandmother was not Mary McCoy.
Who she really was, Meg was not going there now.
A paperback book, one of the historical romances her grandmother loved to read, was resting beside the bottles of pills. There was something sticking out of it, a brochure of some kind. Meg sensed something was out of the ordinary and she opened it, perused it quickly. It was in English, French and German.
The title was “Blood and Honour”, the last word spelled in the British way. Obviously a political tract of some kind, it made references to the National Socialist League, the British First Party and the NPD, whoever they were. She didn’t have time to read any more and replaced it inside her grandmother’s book.
She harked back to Irish man’s words: “Could be skinheads. There’s a bunch in Dublin.”
Skinheads. The woman said something about the Celtic Wolves being white supremacists? Did this brochure about “Blood and Honour” have anything to do with those thugs? Why would her grandmother have such a brochure?
Again, she couldn’t ignore the hard knot in her chest and the sinking, sick feeling in her stomach.
There wasn’t time to solve this riddle.
Jake needed help.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Use the butterfly bandages. Don’t forget, the Neosporin first.”
He was conscious. Meg swatted his hand away and growled. “I’m a coach, Jake. I know first-aid. Here, take this sleeping pill.”
“I don’t need—”
“Okay, okay, don’t take it.”
Finally, the painkillers taking effect, he eased back down, surrendering to her ministrations. He was too weak to do anything else and Meg appeared too anxious to argue with him.
She was a pissed-off woman and he was feeling no pain. Literally. Damn, that drug was strong. And Meg’s grandmother took these painkillers every day. No wonder the old woman’s mind was muddled. No wonder she’d forgotten her cover story. Sixty-five years and God-knew-how-many painkillers and other pharmaceuticals later, Mary Snider—or whoever-the-hell she was—was as confused as the Mad Hatter.
He wondered if Mary Snider would be declared incompetent to stand trial. Drug addiction—no, her best bet for a defense was dementia. Ow! He’d felt that one! He tried not to wince as Meg poured tincture of iodine into the wound.
“Sonuvabitch!” he ground out through clenched jaws.
She then pinched the jagged edges of his thigh flesh together, put one part of the butterfly bandage on one side of the wound, then the other part on the other side. The two bloody gashes—entrance and exit wounds—needed three butterfly bandages each to close. She stanched a little more blood with a washcloth, then cleaned a
round the areas, doing a thorough job.
“If this doesn’t work, Jake, I’m calling a doctor whether you like it or not,” said Meg.
Jake began to breathe more deeply, now that the worst was over. The painkillers were sending him to Neverland. Good thing that ricocheted bullet hadn’t hit the bone—or that’d be the end of this assignment, he thought. Her measured voice, sounding breathy with emotion, penetrated his mental fog.
“I think we’re both jocks at heart. But, Jake, that doesn’t mean I can’t figure things out. We have a lot in common but a lot that’s different, too. You say you’re crazy about me. I care about you…but things are not that simple. You know it and I know it.”
He knew Meg was talking just to take his mind off the pain. Although she’d lost it at the cathedral, she was holding it together now. His admiration for her leaped a couple of notches.
“I like that about you. You’re a smart jock.” I like everything about you.
“What?” Her angry tone had softened a little.
He rose up on his elbows and glanced around him. His clothes were puddled on the floor next to his jacket, sweater and undershirt. The rest of it were God knows where. There he was, bare-chested and showing his junk. He didn’t give a rat’s ass. Meg had seen him naked, had enjoyed his body last night. One night…he wondered if there’d be any more.
Maybe that was all he was going to have with her. One night of hot lovemaking, total bliss. From the frown on her lovely face, he’d been lucky to get that much.
“You’re—” He was having trouble forming the words. You’re what I’ve been waiting for all my life. He plopped back down.
“If it becomes infected, Jake, so help me. I washed it with that iodine solution, but if it gets worse, you’re going to the hospital. Let your MI5 friends take over this fucking assignment of yours.”
Whoa, she was royally pissed off. With him, this job, everything. With MI5. Which reminded him. He glanced at his watch. Time to check in. But with Meg here, he couldn’t.
He hadn’t seen either of the MI5 surveillance team in the hotel lobby. Then again, he’d had such tunnel vision from the pain and weakness, it wasn’t surprising. At this point, the main objective of MI5 was to keep Mary Snider from bolting and disappearing. Major Temple was tolerating his presence just to keep the FBI, DOJ, and DOD—not to mention the U.S. Navy and Pentagon chiefs—off his back.
That was his fucking job—keep all the agencies satisfied. Here he was, about to destroy Meg’s grandmother’s life and here Meg was, helping him. She was finishing up, her pretty, blue eyes clouded over with worry, and not just over him, he suspected. There was something on her mind.
“Thanks, I owe you big time,” he muttered. Their gazes met.
“Jake, what’s Blood and Honour?”
Taken aback by her non sequitur, Jake was silent for a moment. Then he connected the dots.
“Skinheads. It’s a neo-Nazi, white supremacist organization. Began in California, of all places. It’s spread into Great Britain, Ireland, Germany.”
“Oh.” She continued to frown.
“Blood and Honour’s banned in Germany,” he went on, “but not Britain. The group’s linked to one of the political parties there, the NDP. National Democratic Party. They preach a right-wing, fascist ideology that’s gaining fans. It’s probably a backlash to all the immigration from the Middle East and African countries. England’s changing and a lot of people don’t like it.” He took a breath and let it out. “Basically, they’re fascist scum.”
“I see.” She covered the butterfly bandages with a gauzy strip that she wound tightly around his thigh two times. Pinning the edge to the wrap, she looked up. “How do you feel?”
“Okay, I’m getting fuzzy-headed but hanging in there. Blood and Honor, where did you learn about them?” A second’s pause. “What that Irishman said, about skinheads coming down from Dublin?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders. Jake noted she’d taken the time to shed her jacket in her hotel room; she’d had time to discover something else.
“Their magazine, Meg. It’d make your blood boil. It’s all anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-nonwhite immigration, anti-homosexuality. They produce videos promoting a revival of Nazism, ethnic cleansing, keeping the U.S., Europe, and the U.K. white. They use neo-Nazi symbols—the swastika and Sig Runes. But they’re clever. They never use the term, Nazi. In some places, they call themselves the November 9th Society, or N9S. The date of Kristallnacht in 1936, when Jewish synagogues in Germany were trashed, Jewish men, women, children killed in the street.”
He watched Meg take a deep, shuddering breath, then slowly shake her head.
“There’s a department of FBI’s division of Investigation that keeps tabs on domestic terrorists. This group qualifies. They’re banned in Germany but not in the U.S. or U.K. This bunch has gone underground in Europe. We know who…who their leaders are in the U.S., but not elsewhere.” His head was fogging up. It was becoming more and more difficult to piece his sentences together. “I know B and H, Meg. This is my area of expertise—counter-terrorism. I collect NSA, DOJ and DOD intercepts, analyze them and write reports. This—this, uh, bunch likes to use old WWII Nazis as poster boys for their, their recruitment campaigns.”
Meg flinched, then was silent for a long moment. “I don’t understand, Jake. Something’s happening to my grandmother.”
He locked stares with her. His left hand clasped one of hers, the one remaining on his thigh. For Meg’s sake, he softened his voice. “You know she’s not Mary McCoy. She has no real connection to this place. Not to Killarney or Ireland. Never had. Give me time so I can find out who she really is. Don’t you want to know the truth? Before she lawyers up and puts on a dementia defense?”
He had been too blunt with her. She pulled her hand away and stood up. Her eyes ran over his naked body, then surveyed his face. No doubt at all, they still had the hots for each other. If he could, he would’ve willed her to stay. Meg, however, had her own mind and resolve. She looked away, her face clouded and crinkled with indecision, pain, confusion.
“I’m afraid. Of the truth.”
He had no answer to that; only she knew her own inner strength. Anger returned to her eyes. A moment later, she was gone.
Forcing aside his feelings, Jake focused on the tour’s itinerary for the next few days. Tomorrow morning, they would visit the Ring of Kerry. He pictured it in his mind: Panoramas of sea, cliffs, mountains, and islands. Lunch somewhere on the Ring, then off to the north for a visit to the National Stud Farm near Kildare. Something about a stallion valued at millions of Euros and his harem of thoroughbred mares. Arriving in Dublin by evening.
Dublin. Jake was certain Meg would be hustling her grandmother on a plane for Dallas when they got to Dublin. He had one more day to uncover the truth about Mary Snider and here he was, laid up with a bullet wound.
Dammit to hell!
Meg was closing ranks around Mary Snider, protecting her grandmother from MI5’s inevitable arrest. He couldn’t blame her.
And now it seemed that the old woman had a new team of bodyguards—ruthless ones. Soldiers of the neo-Nazi organization, Blood and Honour. What a great American export, Jake groused silently; American white supremacy joining forces with British and Irish crackpots. He’d heard about the Celtic Wolves and their recruitment and training camps. What was their motto? White Pride, Worldwide. Their emblem was a version of the Celtic cross—the Christian cross overlapping a circle.
Like crosshairs on a rifle scope.
Meg had seen something in her grandmother’s possessions that bore the Blood and Honour name. He was sure of it. Maybe her grandmother hadn’t abandoned all that WWII Nazi propaganda in her past. Maybe deep in Mary Snider’s heart, she was still a Nazi. As a young woman, she’d been fully indoctrinated with the vile philosophy of Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Party. Jake had certainly seen a glimpse of it one morning over breakfast.
Some people changed.
Some didn’t.
He thought back: 1945. Germany defeated. Hitler, dead. Mary Snider, saved from exposure and certain execution by her marriage to an American, reinvented herself. Took her wartime cover and made it permanent. But who was she really? Had sixty years in the States changed her? She’d raised two children, then rescued two grandchildren and raised them as her own. Had spent at least fifty years with one man, an American who was probably as different from her German lover as a man could be. She avoided the horrors of wartime Germany and postwar deprivation.
One lucky Nazi spy.
So what was her real name? Was her family in Germany still alive? Had Horst Eberhard, alias Thomas McCoy, managed to survive the war somehow? Or did the cessation of his letters to Mary McCoy mean his death? If he’d survived, where was he now? Was he using another alias?
On this tour so far, Mary Snider was spending a lot of time with the wealthy LeBlancs. Maybe they weren’t just cozy, motor coach pals, after all. It surely wouldn’t be the first time that wealthy patrons had become involved with extremist causes.
Drowsy, the full effects of the painkillers finally kicking in, he nonetheless heaved himself up from the bed, went over to the carry-on and pulled out his laptop and the secure cell phone.
His vision began to blur. He rubbed his eyelids. His head felt disembodied, light and floating; the rest of his body weighed a ton. His leg began to bleed again.
No use…no use trying to do this tonight. He put the laptop and phone back before falling on the bed, his legs feeling like they were encased in cement blocks. The heavy cement spread to his head and he closed his eyes. The specter of facing Major Temple’s wrath in the morning reared its ugly head. He’d be furious when Jake failed to check in.
Tough shit.
Chapter Thirty-Two
He plugged the laptop in and while waiting, drank thirstily from the bottle of water Meg had brought him the night before. His thigh pulsed with renewed pain; his head felt sluggish. And he was starving. They never did get food at the pub the night before. They’d been too rattled from being shot at and then there was the discussion with Mike McCoy, Junior.
A Bodyguard of Lies Page 25