Kitabı oku: «Point Of No Return», sayfa 3

Normalcy. A country in crisis craved it, perhaps.

She understood. Whenever she’d come home from a mission, especially a rescue, she’d dive into her routine—yoga, health food, Bible study on base and weekly phone calls home.

She hadn’t had a real routine since she’d left the military. Which was why, perhaps, she was always living in crisis mode, pushing herself, never finding her default rhythm.

In a way, the foreign aromas made her feel more at home than anything had in the two years she’d spent in Seattle.

She turned onto George Balanchine Street and spotted the embassy set off from the road, wire fencing cordoning off Little America from the rest of the world. A guard station flanked a gate at the end of the rectangular fencing. A driveway beyond led to an enormous white building—austere in relation to the rich architecture of the Tbilisi streetscape. Of course, Americans had to be different, stand apart, resist blending in.

She hoped, however, just this once, her nephew hadn’t listened to her advice and had done exactly that—not blended in. It would be a thousand times easier to find him if he’d left a conspicuous trail.

And as for this runaway girl…well, Mae hoped she was worth it.

The light changed and she stepped out to cross.

Something grabbed at the canvas bag slung across her body, jerking her back.

On instinct, she whirled around to slam her fist on the hand holding her bag. Didn’t even think when she followed with a side kick to the shins.

She finished with a stiff arm chop to the neck.

The pickpocket didn’t run. Didn’t, in fact, even flinch. He just blocked her chop, his grip iron on her bag, dark eyes on hers, his voice just above a growl. “Calm down and stop hitting me.”

Then he released her bag. Mae tripped back, words stuck in her throat.

Chet?

He looked good, too. Dark curly hair, a little shorter than she remembered. Rumpled in a gray snap-button denim shirt rolled up just above the elbows. And a messenger bag slung across his chest. He stared at her with those piercing blue eyes that seemed to be able, in this moment, to stun her into silence. Chet Stryker. The man who’d told her that she couldn’t ever be on his team. That she couldn’t keep up.

That he didn’t want her in his life.

He had her off balance—that was why she let him drag her back toward the shadowy enclave between two doors. She was still reeling when he pushed her against the wall, bracketed her between his arms, and said tightly, “Can’t you listen to anything I say?”

And then, because it felt right, because he deserved it, because all her adrenaline suddenly peaked, she hit him again.

Square in the chest. “Apparently not.”

THREE

“Why do you always have to make things so difficult?” Chet rubbed his chest where Mae had boxed him. The first two punches he’d taken—after all, he had pounced on her like a bandit, but he’d been trying to keep her from igniting an international incident. The last thing he needed was to alert the local militia to his presence in the country.

The third punch, however, hurt more than it should have. Especially since Mae had looked him square in the face, full recognition in those beautiful green eyes, right before she walloped him.

Although he probably deserved that one, too. Not just for stomping on her hopes of flying for Stryker International, but also for walking out of her life.

Or perhaps for letting her believe that he could make room for her in his heart.

Okay, she still took up way too much room in his heart, but she didn’t have to know that. No, that wouldn’t be safe for anyone.

Mae stalked down the street, ten feet ahead of him, fists tight, as if she might be trying not to hit him again. He’d vote for that. In fact, he should probably be ecstatic that she was heading in the opposite direction of the embassy, that she’d bought his reasoning that the government would only send them packing stateside. Unfortunately, he’d expected—no, hoped was more accurate—that she’d actually be happy to see him. That her eyes would light up, and maybe she’d throw her arms around him.

He’d been jostled around the cargo hold of the C-130 harder than he’d thought.

She looked better than the image his imagination had conjured up. Her auburn hair had grown, and she wore it in a sloppy, curly, tantalizing ponytail. Despite trying to hide her figure inside a pair of baggy cargo pants, a green T-shirt and a canvas jacket, she took his breath away. She still looked like she had the day he’d met her—about ready to bullet a group of disrespectful teenage boys with gooey tortilla wraps.

They’d deserved it. He would have helped her, even. Something about her—the spark in her eye, the pride in her jaw, the way she turned away, hiding her pain—stirred his respect. Of course, he knew the story—thanks to his pal David Curtiss, one of Mae’s college buddies—of how she’d risked her life for her friend Roman and rescued him from a Siberian gulag, and just what it had netted her.

No pension. No job. Stripped of her very identity as a soldier.

Seeing her pain had made him suddenly long to make it all better. To make her smile.

Just another person he’d managed to disappoint.

At least he hadn’t gotten her killed.

Yet.

Unfortunately, it might be easier to reason with a rhinoceros than with Mae when she was in this kind of mood.

He dashed to catch up and was on her heel when she whirled. He plowed right into her and had to grab her to keep them both from going over.

She shook out of his grip. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Glared him into a pile of ash.

“Still not using our words, are we?” Chet stepped back and held up his hands. “Okay, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’m here to help you find your nephew. And the runaway princess.”

For the first time, her expression flickered. He leaped on it.

“Yep, I said princess. From a Caucasian tribe. Did you know she’s pledged to be married in a few days, and guess who ran off with the bride?”

Mae’s expression drained and she rolled her eyes—or perhaps looked heavenward for help. Which he was all for, at the moment.

“The bottom line is, your nephew is in big trouble, and I’m here to find him.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a plane ticket. “Alone. You’re headed back to the states, Mae.”

Before you get killed.

“In your wildest dreams, pal.” Mae turned on her heel.

Well, uh, yes, actually. Because in his nightmares she stuck around to get tortured and killed by Akif Bashim.

He grabbed her wrist. “I’ll drag you to the airport if I have to.”

She snapped her wrist away. “I never thought I’d actually be glad to say this, but…you’re not my boss.”

He flinched a little at that. “No, but I do know this country and what happens when people get caught in the crossfire. Which, if you didn’t happen to notice, is exactly what’s happening in that little hot spot of the world Josh and his girlfriend seem to have gone walk-about in. So, yes, honey, you’re leaving.”

Mae, as if deaf, kept walking.

“Oh, nice, Mae.”

She ignored him. And where exactly was she going? He sped up behind her, matching her long strides. “I thought you might be glad to see me—after all, you called me.”

She stomped along in silence.

“C’mon, Mae, listen to me. I am on your side here, believe it or not. It’ll be better for Josh if you go and let me track him down. I can travel faster, and I know the language and—”

She stopped.

He skidded to a halt and took a step back. “What?”

Her stare could probably leave blisters. “You want me to leave so I won’t get in the way, is that it? It’s too risky to work with me, so you’ll just kick me to the curb?”

He opened his mouth, ready to refute her, but of course nothing came out. Because, as usual, she’d bulls-eyed it. He lifted a shoulder in a rueful shrug.

She shook her head, as if dispelling some inner voice, and stared at him a long time. Oh, Mae, why do you make this all so hard? Why couldn’t she be the kind of woman who didn’t have to be on the front lines of trouble? The one who’d let him take her out for ice cream? The girl he’d envisioned on the other end of his emails? The one he’d known for a crazy, romantic week in Seattle?

Or maybe he hadn’t known her at all.

She finally spoke, her words losing some of their heat, yet still stiff with anger. “If you knew anything about me, anything at all, Chet, you would know that I will not just go home and leave Josh here. I’m not built that way. I don’t know what’s going on with him—why he did this, or who this princess is—” She added air quotes, as if he couldn’t catch her tone.

“She’s the daughter of a warlord.”

“Perfect. For all I know, he’s being held against his will. But I made a promise to my sister. And I keep my promises.”

Right. He did know that about her.

“So, you go ahead and do whatever you need to do. Find the princess, save the world. Whatever. But you need to stay out of my way. Yasna?”

He hated it when she spoke Russian. It only reminded him that she had friends and experiences that didn’t fit into the neat, safe world he wanted her to live in. Worse, as she met his eyes, unblinking, he saw that the anger had vanished, only to be replaced by something more frightening.

Resolve.

And when she turned and stalked out again for parts unknown, all he could do was follow.

Wasn’t this just swell? He had four days to find a runaway princess, talk her into helping save the world by marrying a man twice her age, and stop a love-struck teenager from starting an international incident, all while trying to keep up with—forget ahead of—the woman he most wanted to protect in the world.

He’d felt more comfortable in his Snow White costume.

“Just tell me where you’re—we’re—going, please.”

“The market,” she said without looking at him.

The market. Okay. He cataloged the changes in Tbilisi as he followed her down the street. The smell—dust, car exhaust, the slightest whiff of grilled lamb—all seemed familiar. He didn’t recognize, however, the red and blue vendor kiosks selling ice cream and candy, the electric beat of European bands banging from boom boxes. Traffic hummed and horns blared, motors coughing out black smoke from Russian-made vehicles—Ladas and Zhigulis, he supposed—but also Japanese imports and even German Volkswagens. It all evidenced a new capitalism, not the Georgia he’d remembered.

Of course, when he’d been sneaking around Georgia, it had been in the hills, back when the Russians occupied the offices in the ornate buildings in downtown Tbilisi, back when his government decided that a little revolutionary thinking might help take down communism. His stomach churned as he pondered the fact that the seeds he’d sown over two decades ago still wreaked havoc in the country today. Back then, he’d believed he was arming freedom. Oh, hindsight.

A woman, her head covered, holding her toddler daughter in her lap as she sat on the grimy sidewalk, held out a hand to him as he passed by. He couldn’t meet her eyes as he dropped a lari into her grip. Just ten feet away, yet another woman, this one much younger, huddled under her veils in the alcove of a Soviet-era building peering at him with huge brown eyes.

Carissa.

He inhaled so sharply that Mae glanced at him.

Of course it wasn’t Carissa. Couldn’t be. But memory had sharp claws and it knew how to make him bleed.

If not cost him his life, this time around.

Maybe he should have called Wick and the rest of Stryker International instead of packing his duffel and hopping on a transport without so much as a check-in. His team would show up at the office and read the hastily scrawled, “Off on a private trip. Be back soon.” And since he hadn’t taken a day off since he’d started Stryker International, those cryptic words would have the opposite of the intended effect, igniting speculation, if not an all-out manhunt. Starting with a phone call to his partner, Vicktor Shubnikov.

With some more rotten luck, Vicktor would mention it to his wife, Gracie, who would immediately think of her former roomie, Mae, and probably follow up with a phone call to Seattle. To which she’d get no answer.

How long, really, would it take his team to figure out he’d headed to Georgia, scrounge up a plane and stir an already-simmering mess to full boil?

Clearly, Chet had needed more coffee and a few moments to think before running off after trouble.

Trouble who seemed to be outdistancing him de spite his near run. Sheesh, Mae had long legs. “Slow down.”

“Keep up.”

She cut through the crowd and down the stairs of a metro entrance. He nearly tripped over yet another woman wrapped in a blanket selling walnuts, then followed Mae through the glass doors into the station. Political posters or advertisements for upcoming events, concerts and theater productions, even an ad for cigarettes papered the walls, their tattered edges ruffling against the rush of outside air. The subway rumbled beneath their feet, its hum muted.

She stopped, just for a moment, reading a sign, then consulted a map she had wadded in her hand.

“The market is located on—”

“I know where it is,” she snapped.

Good grief. He brushed past her, headed toward the red line.

He heard her following and smiled.

She said nothing as they took the escalator down, boarded the metro and rode it to their stop. He recognized it now—the smells, the familiar fatigued, gray-eyed expressions of the passengers, the rattle of the metro as it snaked beneath the crust of Tbilisi. He’d met Carissa on a subway, had planned it that way—a “chance” meeting. Remembering made him tighten his grip on the steel overhead bar. Mae looked out the window, away from him.

He couldn’t remember how much of his past he’d shared with Mae. Enough, clearly, for her to know he had contacts here. Maybe not enough to tell her how much he regretted them.

At the time, email had seemed a much safer way to reveal his heart without giving too much of it away.

He startled when a hand gripped his arm. Mae gazed up at him, a strange look in her eyes. Something not unlike…pity?

“Nothing is going to happen to me. We’ll get Josh and get out. It’ll be fine, I promise.”

So maybe he had told her—at least parts of it.

But he couldn’t reply. Because he knew better than anyone that it was a promise she couldn’t keep.

It was something about the look in his eyes, the way he gripped the overhead bar, his knuckles nearly white. The way he’d gasped seeing the homeless woman. Being back in Georgia seemed to cause Chet actual pain.

Mae let his arm go, but the answer to the question she’d asked him so long ago now flashed in his eyes.

“Have you ever lost someone you cared about?”

The question probably had come too quickly for both of them, but his leave had flown by and he’d been heading back to D.C. within days. They’d crammed everything they could into one short week of vacation. It had felt like a wartime romance, and she’d begun to fall for the man. Or at least, what she knew of him. He tuned his rental car radio to classical, he used the hotel gym, he opened car doors and bought her dinner and rescued her from the mess her life had become. With Chet she didn’t feel like a failure, the one left standing alone with the broken pieces. Chet made her see possibility. Made her feel…worthwhile.

Valuable.

A shadow had crossed his face when she’d asked the question, even in the late-afternoon dimness of the coffee shop as the rain poured down upon Seattle. A shadow that had tightened her stomach as his hand reached for the platinum chain around his neck.

“Yes. Once, a small lifetime ago. She died. I was on a mission, and she got caught in the crossfire.” He said it while staring into his macchiato, turning the cup quietly.

She let a tick of time pass, waiting for more until finally she just covered his hand with hers.

She put the rest together later, over time, reading between the lines of his letters. He’d been working undercover in Georgia while it was still under Russian influence, before the civil war between Ossetia and Georgia. He’d been captured, his men had to rescue him, there’d been casualties. From David, she’d learned that Chet blamed himself.

Seeing him now in the subway, steeling himself against what could only be a flood of memories, still wearing that mysterious chain, her frustration drained. Of course he wanted to send her home. He feared the worst. He had to—it was built into him.

Chet looked down at her, as if measuring her words.

Then he took her hand and enclosed it in his own.

So maybe he did miss her, just a little.

Mae still couldn’t believe he’d come all the way to Tbilisi. She hated the feelings that knowledge sparked, the thrill that had her heart thrumming in overdrive.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have hit him…that last time.

The subway stopped and he released her hand. “This is us.”

She followed the crowd off the subway, a tight clutch on her bag. A real pickpocket would have a heyday with the American dollars she’d kept unchanged to use in barter.

“Let’s see if we can track down some transportation,” she said as they emerged a block away from the market.

“Please tell me that food is included in your agenda,” Chet said. She glanced at him—he did look a little pale.

“We’ll grab a shashlik on the way.”

“You’re worse than David.”

She smiled at that. David, Chet’s undercover teammate back when they both served Uncle Sam, had a reputation for job first, food and fun second. Although hanging out with him at Moscow University could easily be counted one of the happiest times in her life.

“Hey, he’s my hero, so don’t be dissin’ him.”

“He’s my hero, too. Just has a problem with the fact that the humans around him have to eat,” Chet said, touching her elbow as they entered the market.

The odor of grilled meats, rotting fruits, truck exhaust and garbage spiced the air. Rock music pulsed from ancient bookshelf speakers bracketing kiosks selling pirated CDs; between the beats rose the noise of horns, dogs barking, customers bartering.

Vendors, Caucasian men wearing dark pants and leather jackets or wool-wrapped babushkas, perched behind stacks of potatoes or apples, bins of walnuts, and trays of hochapuri, and haggled with customers, making change out of black fanny packs. They passed a group of men, hunched on the ground, watching passersby and drinking dark Turkish beer.

Mae kept her bag in front of her, wrapping an arm around it.

She stopped in front of a vendor wiping vegetable oil on a skewer of char-darkened lamb. “Two, please,” she said in Russian, holding out a lari.

The man wiped his hands on his crusty apron, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around one end of the cheap aluminum skewer. He handed her one and Chet the other.

Mae took her skewer. “Now you aren’t the only one who has ever bought lunch.”

Chet pried one of the meat chunks off the skewer. “I like buying lunch. But thanks.”

They threaded their way past piles of unnamed red meat, whole chickens with their legs poking into the air, plastic bags filled with flour or kasha, burlap sacks of rice, piles of fresh herbs, garlic, radishes, carrots and rutabagas. She didn’t meet the eyes of the numerous leather-coated men standing sentry, smoking away their days as market mafia.

Chet kept his mouth shut as he walked behind her, his profile low.

She located the trucks in the back of the market, their tailgates open as the men from the outlying villages sold fresh eggs and dairy products—milk and creamy white chunks of cheese.

She studied her choices—rounded older men with teeth rotted from black chew, younger guys, wearing the black garb of their urban peers. One teen, however, stood out to her, a boy of about seventeen, wearing a ratty brown sweater and fraying tennis shoes splattered with mud. He unloaded eggs from the back of a green pickup, the sides shuttered with rickety fencing.

He greeted her with wary dark eyes as she approached.

“Dobri deen,” she said softly, the Russian for “good afternoon” rolling off her tongue easily. Although the official language was Georgian now, fifteen years ago, under Communist rule, the schools all taught Russian.

Beside her, Chet scanned the other merchants like a Doberman.

The boy nodded his response.

“We’re looking for a ride to Burmansk. Are you going there?”

He regarded her for a moment, then hopped down from his truck. His eyes darted beyond her, then back again. “Maybe.”

“Maybe” was always a good answer. She lowered her voice. “I have dollars. And we need to leave soon.”

Chet tensed beside her. She heard his slow intake of breath. She didn’t move, keeping her gaze on the boy. He tightened his lips, darted another look around, then nodded. “I have to finish unloading.”

“We’ll get supplies and meet back here in an hour,” Chet said, sounding nearly native with half-Arabic, half-Slavic tones.

The boy looked at him with surprise, as if he’d just materialized there. Fear ringed his eyes.

So maybe Chet would come in handy, just in case a village boy considered ulterior motives.

They scoured the market for food, blankets and equipment. Chet turned all business, bartering prices down, adding to their supplies things she hadn’t considered—matches, cups, rain ponchos, a medical kit.

“Are we going camping?”

“You never know what’s out there, and what we might find,” Chet said as he added a can of sardines to his pack.

She dearly hoped it would be Josh and his new girlfriend.

And that, no matter what they found, she wouldn’t be losing her heart along the way.