When the plane was in the air, Jonathon whispered to her, “When this is all over, you’ll never have to get on a plane again.”
“Just when I’m getting used to it.”
“Really?”
She glanced down at her white-knuckled grip on the arm rest. “No, not really. But I’ll make it.”
“How about I put in a comedy this time?” He gestured toward the television screen.
His father was reading a newspaper in a foreign language. She couldn’t identify what it was. Maybe the language of that country they were on their way to.
“You know it’s funny.” She projected her voice across the aisle to make it clear she was talking to him and he put the paper down with a smile.
“What’s funny?” he asked politely.
“No one has told me what to call you,” she said.
And that was true. No one had. Maybe in some side conversation, Jonathon’s mother had told him what his father’s name was, or maybe on their joint mission, Jonathon had become privy to it, but no one had told her.
“I don’t think we need to get on a first-names basis,” Jonathon interjected. “After tonight, you’ll never be seeing him again.”
“I’d still like to know what to call him,” she said gently.
“Well, my real name involves forty-two hereditary titles, most of which I’m afraid you would not be able to pronounce.” He turned to Jonathon. “They’re part of your name, too, by birthright.”
“Don’t do me any favors. Anyway, I just have my mother’s word for it that you’re my father. And her record on truth is questionable, to say the least.”
“You only have to look in a mirror to see I’m your father. But if you need DNA results, my father has them.”
“Your father?”
“The time you were kidnapped. That was him. He wanted to know if you were truly my son.” He shrugged, as if it was no matter. “He had the appropriate tests done then.”
“So, my grandfather kidnapped me?” Jonathon lay his head back against the headrest. “God, I have a fucked-up family!”
“He gave you back to your mother unharmed and planned to stay away…until the time came.”
“What time?”
“His death, of course. You’re his rightful heir. Or he thought you were until he found out I was still alive.”
“And that was your death bed visit,” Jonathon commented. “Like Donovan said. So, I guess you’ve been about as good a son all these years as you were a father.”
He shrugged. “You might not understand this, Jonathon. I didn’t understand it at first myself. I was not quite your age when I disappeared, and I didn’t take into account how my father would feel about my supposed death. The pain he must have suffered. But I didn’t want him to die without knowing the truth. So, yes, in order to see him, I came back into a world I had gladly left for good. The Agency, my country, everything.”
“What happened?” she asked. “Back then, I mean.”
He shook his head. “It was not just one thing. It was…all things. I took control very easily, from an early age, because I realized it was demanded of me.” He was looking at Veronica as he spoke, but she knew he must be focusing on Jonathon, willing him to open himself up to an explanation, at least part of one. To hear it, even if he wasn’t yet ready to forgive. “My father wanted me to be the next king. My mother wanted me to be a good American. My colleagues wanted me to fix a secret organization that was so twisted, there was little I could do. I tried my best, at least with the Agency, anyway, for many years, but I was sick of it. I just wanted to…to live. To escape. So, with Monica’s help, we pretended I was dead, and I did escape.”
“And left us behind in the fucked-up world, while you frolicked in your own little Shangri-La,” Jonathon taunted. “Thanks a lot.”
“Isn’t that what you want to do?” his father pointed out.
Jonathon did not respond.
“So, you and Monica were in love?” Veronica asked.
“I doubt that,” Jonathon muttered.
“How did you meet?” she pressed on, ignoring Jonathon’s cynicism.
The older man folded his legs, straightening a crease line in the pants he had changed into after takeoff. A crease line that did not need to be straightened. It was razor sharp in its precision. For someone who had lived on a desert island, or wherever he had been for the whole of Jonathon’s life—nobody had told her that, either—he looked very put together. Not a hair out of place. It was easy to see the truth of what he had claimed, that he took control easily.
“I had asked my staff for our very best agent to be assigned to guard my father, without his knowledge, of course, during a U.S. visit, primarily to see me. And they sent me this little pipsqueak of a redhead.”
Jonathon harrumphed. “I bet she set you straight.”
“She most certainly did, even though she was barely out of training at the time. I was flat on my back within two minutes of meeting her, and not in a good way. She’d overpowered me so quickly and effectively I was stunned.”
Veronica grinned and even Jonathon seemed on the verge of smiling. One edge of his very sexy mouth curled up. She had an overwhelming urge to tickle him, but held back.
“Of course, soon enough after that, she had rendered me helpless in other ways. So, yes, we were in love. Or at least I was in love. But Monica was full of ambition back then, dreams of doing good, accomplishing…things.”
“Doing good?” Jonathon seemed drawn to the conversation, however much he might have wanted to resist it. “Are you sure you’re talking about my mother?”
He addressed Jonathon. “Everything she has ever done has been because she thinks she has a responsibility to rid the world of evil, as if she were a superhero or something.”
“I think maybe she is,” Veronica offered.
“Maybe.” He chuckled, possibly remembering that redhead who had flattened him so long ago. Then he sighed. “But I was at a stage in my life where I was…hopeless, in the truest sense of the word. Without hope. I had given up dreams of doing anything, except perhaps taking a long swim or lying on a beach.”
“Sounds good,” Jonathon murmured before he remembered to resent it. “And you just left me and my mother in the crazy world you were so anxious to get away from.”
“I didn’t leave either of you. Not willingly. I begged Monica to go with me, but she refused and that was her choice.”
Jonathon said nothing, though she knew he must have wanted to shout ‘But you left me! Your son!’ His lips were tight, as they were when he was trying to keep from saying something. The older man’s mouth was tight, as well, and Veronica realized, even if Jonathon did not yet, that it hadn’t been his father’s choice to leave him at all.
“You didn’t know she was pregnant, did you?” Veronica asked.
“It happened a long time ago.” He picked up his newspaper again and snapped it open. After a minute, he said from behind it, “But if I had it to do over, knowing what I know, I would have dragged her with me, whatever it took.”
“As if you could have,” Jonathon grumbled, before he got up and turned on the television, presenting his back to the two of them. “You would have been dead for real if you had tried.”
Veronica went to slip into a seat across the aisle and saw his father was smiling behind the camouflage of the newspaper. She leaned forward to whisper, “So, what should I call you?”
He put down his paper again. “Well, my American name was…Jonathon.” Veronica’s Jonathon did not give any indication he heard. “But my nickname was Jack. So, why don’t you call me Jack?”
“Thank you. I will.” She extended her hand to shake his. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”
Jonathon turned the volume on the television up louder.
* * * *
Monica Vale pulled on her rubber gloves and sifted through the smoldering remains until she came upon a badly burnt corpse. No more than charred bones. She knelt down, looking at the
length of the femur bone. “This is him.”
“Christ, Monica. Come away. You don’t need to see that.” Agent O’Reilly pulled the small woman to her feet. To look at her, one would never know she was a trained assassin, the toughest agent he’d ever met. It was her greatest weapon, this contrast between her diminutive looks and her powerful, cold-blooded nature.
But she wasn’t as cold-blooded as Conley had thought her. When she’d emerged from her son’s hideaway, she’d brought Conley’s confession on tape, lugging his dead body behind her. She’d told the team waiting to charge the compound that she had never intended to go along with Conley, but had instead turned him in to the governmental commission that oversaw the Agency. They were the ones who she’d claimed had authorized her to go along with the plan in order to catch Conley. Whether the higher-ups had authorized her to kill Conley, O’Reilly didn’t know, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. On her word—since, uh, Conley was dead after all—they’d all headed into helicopters to get back to D.C. so that he and Monica could testify before the commission.
The only confusing thing to O’Reilly was that Conley had been babbling on the recorded confession about someone named Donovan telling him to do it.
“The man had obviously lost it,” Monica had commented after she’d shown him the recording.
O’Reilly had persisted, “But it sounded like you knew him. This Donovan.”
“Always play along with an unstable personality in the field, O’Reilly. Remember that.”
Odd, though, that after the commission had watched the confession, they had no questions about this Donovan. Almost as if the whole thing was perfunctory.
But O’Reilly never got a chance to question her further about it because when they came back to this place—this Shangri-La as Monica had termed it—to pick up her son and his charge, they had found it in flames. Some kind of bomb, forensics had said.
So here they were hours later sifting through the ashes until Monica Vale was confronting what remained of her son’s body without expression.
O’Reilly traded an uncertain look with Nabers, the other agent who was standing by the charred rubble.
“I told him it was stupid to have this place.” Monica jerked her chin at the ruins of what had once been a very lavish hideaway, little of which was left. “He ignored me. And it made him careless. And vulnerable. If he hadn’t been, he would have seen how Conley was positioning him. He would have known he was being set up. And he would have been careful enough to come with me when I exposed the truth, not stay behind to have his fun until it was his turn to testify.”
She handed the femur bone to O’Reilly, who took it gingerly and handed it to Nabers to place in an evidence bag. “He wouldn’t have been taken unaware in his juvenile little playhouse and blown to bits with his own charge before I could even get back to him. I suspected there may have been a specific reason Conley set Jonathon up, maybe someone else wanted him dead, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have given in to his impulse to stay here with Dr. Barrett while I went back to D.C. I should have known that wasn’t the end of it.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Monica. At least you got Conley. At least he didn’t succeed in smearing Jonathon’s name.”
“Little good it does my son now, though.” She walked away and said over her shoulder, “Try to find the woman’s body in this mess if you can. I’ll handle the DNA tests myself to verify so the Agency can get this closed.”
Nabers whistled softly as she walked back to the helicopter. “I’ve heard of her, but I’ve never worked with her. Was this guy really her son? He can’t have been for her to be, well, to be like that right now.”
“No, he was her son, all right. But she prides herself on being cold as ice. Always has been. And way too smart for anybody to read her.”
“Maybe he got out. Maybe she helped him.” It was an urban legend among agents that a fortunate few had not died in the line of duty, but just escaped into another life where the Agency and its many enemies couldn’t follow.
O’Reilly looked down at the burned remains. “No. If she’d been tearing her hair out and crying inconsolably, I may have suspected something like that. Because it would have had to be an act for her to lose it. But the way she’s keeping herself buttoned up so tight, no, this was Jonathon Vale. It’s sad for her, but the fact that she’s cool like that—that’s what we need for a change in this Agency. That’s why she’s taking over from Conley, and I’m sure she’ll be a hell of a lot better at it. But come on. Let’s do what she says and see if we can find evidence of a female in all this.”
O’Reilly had completely forgotten the truth of what he’d just told his partner.
Monica Vale was too smart to have anybody read her.
And her back was to him when she smiled slightly and climbed into the helicopter.
Chapter Twelve
#xa0;
Jonathon wanted to disappear. As soon as his mother had offered it, he’d known he did. He hated killing. He was getting too used to it—and he hated that even more. But it was true what he had told Veronica. There was no retirement plan with the Agency. Even if an agent tried to quit, there were follow-up psychological evaluations, a mandate that the Agency always knew where an ex-agent was and a hundred other restrictions. And of course, there was the ever-present fear that any family an ex-agent might start after they left would be vulnerable to being sucked back into the danger.
No, his mother was right. The only way to truly escape the Agency was to die. And he was willing to.
Not really of course. But as one of top agents in the world, or in her words, the top agent in the world, Monica knew a thing or two about disappearing. She sure as hell had been pretty good at making his father disappear. And she was going to make sure her son could follow suit, if he wanted to.
He looked at his watch, which adjusted to the time zone he was in, and calculated the time back at Shangri-La. His beloved hideaway should be destroyed by now, a necessary sacrifice, and Jonathon Vale should be dead to the world. Literally.
But no matter what Veronica said, how much it might seem like an adventure now, he couldn’t let her throw her life away by coming with him. He was going to let her off the hook as soon as this last thing was settled. His mother had made sure the unknown remains in the blast were pegged as him and Veronica, but that would be easy enough to correct. Mistakes made and so on and it hadn’t been Dr. Barrett. No harm done.
He had kept Veronica with him through this entire complicated sequence of events making things right, but that wasn’t because he was accepting her willingness to join him at the end of it. It was because he didn’t trust anyone to protect her until this was all settled.
But when it was, they both needed to confront some hard truths.
The temperature as they deplaned was more moderate than he had expected. Since the country of his father’s birth was in the mountains, he had thought it would be cold. But it felt as if it was in the 70s.
Not that he otherwise knew what to expect from this country in which they had just landed. He knew very little about it, despite his wide range of travels. He had never been here, unless it had been when he’d been kidnapped by his grandfather—he didn’t remember much about that episode since it had been overshadowed by Monica’s subsequent confession that she was a secret agent. But glancing at the newspaper Jack was reading on the plane, he realized that he did know the language. It was an obscure dialect that his mother had insisted he learn for some reason he could not comprehend at the time. Like so many inexplicable things she did, he’d just written it off as another of her quirks.
Now it made sense, though surely Monica had never meant for Jonathon to succeed his grandfather. Knowing his mother, she had probably given the old man that impression, or outright lied, in order to get him off her back.
He didn’t know what Jack was doing after this visit—he hadn’t wanted to chat with the guy, despite Veronica’s sweet efforts to br
eak the ice—but Jonathon sure as Hell would not be serving as a prince or king or whatever of this place. He had his ticket to disappear after this and he was going to take it.
Unfortunately, Jack insisted that he come to meet his grandfather before he did so. His mother needed his father’s cooperation in some other step of the plan—who the hell knew for which part? Maybe Jack had shown up with her at the Agency’s oversight commission to say ‘surprise, I’m alive and my replacement was a crook, but you should hire this little lady’. Maybe a past director’s word, even one they thought was dead, assuming they did since he wasn’t quite clear on those details, carried a lot of weight. The thought made Jonathon smile.
As they headed to the limousine on the tarmac, Jonathon heard the diplomat or guard or whoever was waiting at the open door of the car welcome ‘the princes’ back, in their native language.
The princes. Fuck! Bad enough he had to accept having a father at this late stage of the game, but to have him come with all this baggage! Jonathon should have known. Who else would Monica deign to have a child with but royalty?
The limousine sped along a winding highway, up and up until they were at the top of a mountain, with their destination at the pinnacle.
The limousine parked and Jonathon took it in.
He had carried out assignments in some pretty high-class establishments. Hearst Castle. The Prince’s Palace at Monaco. Even Versailles. But he had not been prepared for the luxury that greeted him at his own father’s ancestral chateau. The weathered stone mansion boasted more turrets and chimneys and two-story lead glass windows than he could count at first glance. A mile of lawn led from the front gate, manned by a flank of guards, up to an ornate gold door bigger than some suburban houses. A dozen servants in powder blue livery, like something from an eighteenth-century novel, lined the steps up to the chateau and bowed as Jonathon, Veronica and his father passed.
Jack seemed to take no notice of them and Jonathon tried to appear blasé, but Veronica’s mouth dropped open. She leaned up to whisper in his ear, “So this is just to meet your grandfather?”
Alone With an Escort Page 20