Betrayals (27 page)

It was all so clear to him now.

Aah, Maman, I’ve failed you again.

Beside him, Rebecca asked, “What happened to you after that night?”

Annette, he explained, had slipped into Saigon to make certain Tam and her baby didn’t get out. As South Vietnam had collapsed, her network had scattered, and, in any case, she was unwilling to delegate this particular nettling problem. Not until he had spotted her hired assassin going into Jared Sloan’s apartment had Jean-Paul realized she was even in the city. Knowing he was probably too late, he had raced after the Vietnamese, but already Tam was dead. Jean-Paul told him Annette had sent him as backup.

Afterward, Jean-Paul had gone after her.

“I didn’t know where she was,” he said, in a neutral tone that surprised him. “That gave her an advantage.”

She had shot him in the face and left him for dead in an alley.

Jean-Paul regained consciousness in a communist Saigon. All around him were
bo dois,
communist soldiers. His face was shattered, and his recovery, in hiding, was slow. It was eighteen months before he could escape with dozens of refugees in a fishing boat, a grueling experience for which even his years as a POW hadn’t prepared him.

He got as far as Honolulu before his body gave out again, to malnutrition, dehydration, infection. The next months he spent on the streets just trying to stay alive. How could he possibly take on Annette Reed? He saw her picture in a magazine, read about her in cast-off copies of the
Wall Street Journal.
She was untouchable.

You’ve survived, he’d told himself. Be glad of that.

Not until he’d seen the copy of
The Score
had he known Rebecca, Jared Sloan and Mai had gotten out alive. He could have found out but hadn’t. The picture was like a call to action. His final chance.

Stupidly, arrogantly, ridiculously, he had thought he could succeed this time in compelling Annette to give up the Jupiter Stones and to bring her to justice for the crimes she’d committed.

But Annette had never had the Jupiter Stones.

“I should have stayed in Honolulu,” he told Rebecca.

She smiled with tragic understanding. “Isn’t hindsight wonderful?”

As they drove on, she had her own gloomy thoughts to fight. She loved Jared. Nothing had changed after all. If anything happened to Mai…

“If you knew for certain you were doing the right thing,”
her grandfather had often said, “you wouldn’t be making a difficult choice.”

No crystal ball.

He had chosen silence in 1963. Twelve years later, Jean-Paul had chosen to risk his own life to keep Annette from adding to her body count. Jared had chosen to claim Mai as his own child and raise her.

Not easy choices, maybe not even the right choices—but they’d had to make a decision. And all choices, all decisions, had ramifications.

Was that something Annette understood? She had tried to kill Mai once already…
her own granddaughter.

“We’ll get Mai away from her,” Jean-Paul said, reading Rebecca’s thoughts. “Annette knows I was hesitating about going to Marblehead. She’s using Mai to lure me.”

“What do you think her strategy is?”

“To blame the last thirty years on your grandfather,” he replied calmly, “and to kill him and me.”

“But that’s crazy!”

He fastened his warm, soft eyes on her. “Think about it, Rebecca. Is it?”

T
he Winstons’ house on Marblehead Neck was much as Thomas remembered from his first visit there with Emily, before World War II, but he wasn’t the same man he’d been. As he stumbled on the slippery rocks and shivered in the biting ocean wind, he could see Annette as a little girl, climbing up to him, her hands filled with seaweed and periwinkles, her cheeks rosy and her eyes bright with triumph.

“Look, Uncle Thomas, look! Do you think I’ll find a mermaid, too?” she’d asked.

“Keep looking,” he’d said. “You never know.”

“I’m going to show Father.”

Minutes later, Thomas had seen John Winston angrily marching to the edge of the rocks with little Annette’s treasures and flinging them as far as he could, and her mother taking her sobbing daughter inside to wash her hands and change her dress, telling her there were no such thing as mermaids.

All more than a half century ago and yet, Thomas thought, clearer in his mind than anything that had happened last year.

Behind him on the rocks, Nguyen Kim commanded him to stop. Thomas was perfectly glad to oblige. He’d read somewhere that balance and the legs were the first to go as one aged, and from this billy-goat climb down to the water’s edge, he could attest to that theory’s veracity.

They had come to a relatively level area of barnacle-covered boulders and tide pools below the tide line, well out of view of the house. With the gathering storm, the tide was coming in high, with huge, frothy swells. Already Thomas could feel the icy spray of the roiling waves on his face. Had Annette, he wondered, made her plan according to the weather, or were the turbulent seas just another of her happy coincidences?

He turned around, and Kim pointed to a rock and ordered him to sit.

“Barnacles are sharp,” Thomas said.

Kim grinned. “Good.”

Annette’s Vietnamese bodyguard had met Thomas on the lawn and, without a great deal of fanfare, had revealed the gun tucked in his waistband and suggested Thomas lead the way down to the rocks.

Thomas had hoped the bastard would trip and accidentally shoot off his own balls.

He sat on the rock. The barnacles pricked his rear end, but it wasn’t that uncomfortable—preferable, he supposed, to a bullet in the head, although that might be next.

“I gather Annette doesn’t want me killed in her living room,” Thomas commented.

Not answering, Kim removed a length of rope from his back pants pocket.

Thomas stiffened his jaw so that his teeth wouldn’t chatter, but the cold had reached into his bones. “Afraid I’d come back and haunt the place, isn’t she?”

“Your hands,” Kim said.

With a resigned sigh, Thomas crossed his hands behind his back, and Kim immediately came round and whisked the rope around his wrists, Kim repeating the move with Thomas’s ankles, the knots tight enough that what little circulation he had to his extremities was immediately cut off. He’d always had an irrational fear of having to have a hand or foot lopped off, but supposed that’d be a luxury now.

“You always were efficient,” he said mildly.

Kim fastened his hard eyes on him. “I’ve only done what I had to do to survive.”

“And what, might I ask,” he said, unflinchingly meeting the Vietnamese’s gaze, “is so bloody important about your surviving?”

“You’re going to die today, old man.”

Thomas gave him a cool, appraising look. “As I should have twenty-six years ago?”

Not responding, Kim gave the ropes at his captive’s hands and feet a final tug and bounced back onto his feet.

“Nguyen Kim,” Thomas said, rolling the name around in his mind, as if he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether he recognized it or not. “Quang Tai’s friend, weren’t you?”

“I knew him.”

“Did you know you were signing his death certificate when you tipped off your Vietcong friends on Annette’s behalf?” Thomas’s gaze didn’t let up. “That was you, Kim. Tai trusted you. He told you my itinerary—and you, brave fellow, told the insurgents.”

Kim remained impassive. “I was doing a job,” he spat. “On your stomach!”

But Thomas wasn’t fast enough for Kim, who grabbed him by the shoulder and thrust him onto a huge, flat boulder. Thomas felt the sharp barnacles bite into his cheeks.

“You’re going to drown, old man,” Kim said.

His feet crunching on the barnacles, he hurried off, leaving Thomas trapped at the water’s edge, unable to do much beyond listening to the rhythmic sounds of the approaching tide.

Jared’s call to Sofi Mencini shook him. She had gone over to Mt. Vernon Street herself, but saw no sign of Annette, Rebecca, Mai, Thomas or Jean-Paul. “I’m worried, Jared,” Sofi had said.

“So am I.”

“David’s putting the stones in a safe at the store, but I’m calling the cops.”

Jared agreed. “I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

Through the hotel’s glass front doors, however, he saw Quentin climbing out of his white Porsche and smiling graciously at the uniformed attendants rushing to serve him.

Jared surged forward. An attendant moved to open the door, but not fast enough, and Jared banged through it, sensing the already suspicious eyes of the security guards on him. He didn’t care. He jumped in front of Quentin, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and smashed him up against his car.

“Where’s my daughter?”

Quentin squirmed in terror. “Jared…what’s wrong with you?”

“Answer me.”

“She’s with Mother. I thought—she said Thomas had called and you and he and Mother were all going to meet in Marblehead.”

Jared froze. “Your mother has Mai?”

The attendant with the keys said tentatively, “Mr. Reed, you want me to get security out here?”

“No, it’s all right,” Quentin managed to say, Jared’s grip on him already loosening. “What’s going on, Jared? I saw Mai myself. She’s fine. She looked a little tired, that’s all.”

“When did they leave?”

“A half hour ago, something like that. Jared, Mother’s not a monster. I know she said some pretty cruel things about Mai at first, but that’s over. They seemed to be getting along—” Quentin swallowed, white-faced. “Thomas didn’t invite you to Marblehead? You don’t know anything about it?”

“No.”

“Jared, is he going to hurt Mother and Mai? He’s an old man, and it just never occurred to me…”

Jared started for Rebecca’s car, but stopped abruptly and turned to Quentin, still sprawled against his Porsche. “Answer me this, Quentin. Did Tam come to you for help getting out of Saigon in 1975?”

“What? No, I never heard from her after I left. I know that was wrong, and I don’t blame you or her for what happened. I—I guess I was just stupid. I did really care about her, you know.”

Jared felt as if his entire world was on fire.
Tam didn’t go to Quentin for help, she went to Annette.
He stared at his cousin. “Then you don’t know.”

“What?”

Mai’s your daughter….

“Get in,” Jared said, pulling open the passenger door to Rebecca’s car. “We’ll talk on the way.”

A
ll in all, Annette thought as she followed Mai onto the rocky coastline of her Marblehead Neck house, it was a solid plan.

It would be difficult to blame everything on Jean-Paul. He’d suffered too much. He’d had to flee his country; he’d endured five years as a prisoner of war; he’d been shot in the face. He was a decidedly seedy character, but still peculiarly sympathetic, unable to elicit the kind of hatred a highbrow like Thomas Blackburn could.

For all his talk of suffering, had
Thomas
ever really suffered? Ha! He’d lost his pusillanimous son—who would have died in Southeast Asia sooner or later. His daughter-in-law had fled back to the swamps of Florida with her passel of children, but there wasn’t a Quentin among them. Had Thomas ever had to make the difficult choices to save a family member the way she had Quentin?

No, Thomas Blackburn wouldn’t stir up much sympathy.

With him, Gerard and Mai dead, Annette could cover her tracks and she’d be believed. There’d be no ravaged, white-haired Frenchman to counter her, no scrawny old Boston
Brahmin who’d known her for her entire life, no fourteen-year-old Amerasian girl who looked too much like a Reed to pass for half-Winston, half-Sloan for much longer.

She would explain the tragedy in simple terms.

In 1959, Thomas Blackburn, in desperate need of funds for his new business venture, stole jewels from people his young friend Annette Reed had mentioned or introduced to him during his weeks in and out of France. When he was about to be caught, he’d framed the popular race-car driver Jean-Paul Gerard for his crimes.

In 1963, Thomas had caused the deaths of the three men, and the horrible five-year imprisonment of Jean-Paul Gerard out of his own arrogance. Jean-Paul had come to France looking for vengeance and a particularly valuable collection of gems Thomas had stolen from the Baroness Gisela Majlath, the Empress Elisabeth’s Jupiter Stones. Thomas, however, had given the stones to Annette—presumably his way of paying favor to her for having accidentally led him to his rich victims. She’d thought the stones were just an amusing gift. It had never occurred to her that they might be the Jupiter Stones; indeed, aware of the dwindling Blackburn trust, Annette had assumed the stones had no real value beyond the sentimental.

In any case, Thomas had assumed he would no longer have to worry about the young Frenchman whose life he’d destroyed.

In 1975, he’d gotten the shock of his life. The daughter of his old friend Quang Tai had contacted him with an unpleasant ultimatum. She had discovered the Jupiter Stones among Annette’s things when she was a little girl back in 1959, finally realized their significance and put together that Thomas Blackburn had been
Le Chat.
She’d already realized he was responsible for her father’s death. Now she
could use what she knew to get something she wanted: a life in the United States. If Thomas didn’t cooperate and help her, she would expose him. She whipped herself up into a frenzy thinking she would succeed and, as a result, erroneously seduced herself into believing Quentin would look after her.

Thomas’s answer to Tam’s ultimatum came in the predawn hours of April 29, 1975.

Fourteen years later, Jean-Paul Gerard had tried once more to get hold of the Jupiter Stones, only Thomas put him onto Annette. An unsavory character to be sure, the Frenchman did, after all, have a bone to pick with her from his failed attempt to frame Quentin in 1974. So he’d come after her.

For reasons no one would ever know for certain—the main parties being dead—Thomas Blackburn had lured Jean-Paul Gerard and Annette Reed to Marblehead, each presumably, with a different story. Annette had gone so far as to take her nephew’s daughter, thinking it was to be a peaceful gathering.

How wrong she’d been.

Annette realized events not yet carried out might require her to adjust the ending to the sorrowful day, but her present rendition involved a relatively straightforward scenario: Thomas kills Jean-Paul, but given his advanced age, he slips and falls into the ocean, drowning. Mai also drowns. Thomas dupes Annette into letting him take the girl out to the rocks, where he ties her up in an effort to use her predicament to lure a suspicious Jean-Paul out into the open.

“Definitely not a bad plan,” Annette said to herself. If Rebecca or Jared tried to counter any of her facts, she’d just challenge their conclusions and demand to see their proof.
And there’d be no proof: Thomas, Jean-Paul and Mai would all be dead.

Of course, with them gone, Annette could always revise her story as necessary.

She would, of course, have made a valiant attempt at saving her grand-niece’s life.

The girl was getting tired. “Aunt Annette,” she said, “it’s raining awfully hard. Don’t you think we should just go back to the house?”

“No, no, it’s just around that pile of rocks over there. Trust me, Mai, there’s nothing quite like the Atlantic Ocean during a storm.”

“It’ll be safe?”

“Of course.”

Jean-Paul, where the devil are you?

Annette spotted Kim on the rocks down near the water and waved, and when he raised one hand in answer, she knew he had Thomas Blackburn.

Finally.

Mai didn’t see him. Annette directed her over the last pile of rocks, but the girl was obviously losing patience, and perhaps wondering what this stormy trip down to the ocean’s edge was all about.

“Wow—look at the waves.” Mai pointed, looking around at her father’s aunt, but Annette could tell she was just being polite. The girl added, “They really are incredible.”

They clambered over a large boulder, finally coming to the level, secluded area where Annette had suggested Kim take Thomas.

He was there, lying motionless on his stomach, his hands and feet tightly bound. His fingers were a ghastly white from the cold and lack of circulation. For a moment Annette thought he was dead, and she let out a sob, amazed at how
awful she felt. Then he moved, raising his head and looking around at her, his face smeared with blood from the sharp barnacles. The tide was rushing in, coming closer and closer with each fierce wave, and the cold, clear seawater was lapping at Thomas, seeping underneath him. If the waves didn’t take him, he’d die of exposure within hours.

Mai saw his bloody, skeletal face and screamed.

“It’s all right,” Annette said quietly. What an ending, she thought…but it wasn’t her fault. When people had left her alone, she hadn’t bothered a soul.

Kim jumped lightly from a rock, landing between her and Mai. He said something in Vietnamese to the girl, but she stared at him in mute terror.

“She doesn’t speak Vietnamese,” Annette said. “Let’s not prolong this, Kim. Deal with her as you have Thomas, if you please.”
I’ll have to tinker with my story to include their hands being tied,
she thought.
Even if Kim has a chance to unbind them before the end, there will be signs they were tied.

Mai’s eyes widened at Kim’s approach, and she edged back against the bank of rocks, away from the water.

“Mai,” Thomas yelled,
“run!”

She hesitated, not that it would have mattered if she’d bolted: Kim was extraordinarily fast. He seized the girl, and she began kicking and screaming, crying for her father to help her.

Annette couldn’t bear it.

Thomas saw her look of discomfort and grunted. “You’ve never had to be a party to your own handiwork, have you? Stay, Annette. Watch.”

“I don’t have to defend my actions to the likes of you.”

“You won’t get away with this, you know.”

She snorted and made herself laugh. “I already have.
You pride yourself on doing what you have to do to protect your family. Allow me that same pride.”

“This isn’t pride, Annette—this is desperation.”

Mai was screaming now, a gutsy thing to do in Kim’s heartless grip, and he smacked her hard across the side of the face and told her to shut up.

Annette had to look away.

“What kind of woman would murder her own granddaughter?” Thomas asked in a low voice.

“I’m protecting my son.”

“No, you’re not. You’re protecting yourself. You think Quentin’s weak, but he’s not. You’re the one who’s weak, Annette. Weak and insecure, frightened. I should have seen that thirty years ago, but my vision of you was always clouded by the misunderstood, unhappy child you’d been. I didn’t want to see the selfish, evil woman you’d become. Annette, think of what you’ve done. And all because you couldn’t admit to being a bored housewife who’d turned to stealing jewels from her friends.”

Annette shuddered. So he knew. The chilly wind and the rain had soaked her to the skin, but she paid no attention, trying to shut out Mai’s screams and Thomas’s smug look.

“You were
Le Chat,
” Thomas said. “Rebecca knows. I’m sure she’s told Jared by now, Quentin, the police. Annette, don’t compound what you’ve already done by adding more bodies to your conscience.”

“You have no right to judge me. I made a few mistakes—”

Even in his agony, Thomas’s eyes were clear and uncompromising, that riveting Blackburn blue that, Annette knew, would haunt her forever. “Mistakes, Annette? Benjamin, Stephen, Tai, Tam—mistakes? That was murder.”

A monstrous wave crashed ashore, spraying all of them
with icy froth as it rushed between the rocks and crevices and almost inundated Thomas. The frigid water swirled four inches deep around him, under him, and he gritted his teeth against the cold, his entire body quaking, until the surf receded.

Kim had finished with Mai and dumped her onto the wet, barnacle-covered rocks beside Thomas.

Annette went over to the sobbing girl and squatted down, stroking her shining, wet hair with one hand. “I’m sad this is the way things have turned out, Mai, but I want you to know I had no choice.”

“Don’t believe her, Mai,” Thomas said calmly. “She could have chosen the truth.”

Mai shook off Annette’s hand, called her a hateful bitch and flapped like a seal, managing to throw the older woman off balance. Annette went sprawling, landing on one knee. The barnacles cut right through her pants. Kim was beside her in an instant and offered to shoot Mai and Thomas both and be done with them.

“No, that’s all right,” Annette said, letting him help her back onto her feet. That was what she got for trying to be nice. “I don’t want any bloodshed while I’m around. Just let the tide do its work. Jean-Paul should be here soon. Do not underestimate him, do you hear?”

“Don’t worry,” Kim said.

She gave him a withering look. “Don’t patronize me. None of us would be here now if you hadn’t underestimated him in the first place. Do your job, Kim. You’ve been paid well enough for it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.”

And she about-faced, walking fast and never once looking back at the girl and the old man trussed up on the rocks, waiting for the tide.

“Get down.”

Jean-Paul didn’t wait for Rebecca to obey, but shoved her onto the floor of the truck as they came to a stop behind Annette’s Mercedes. The rain was coming in blinding sheets now. Jean-Paul shut the truck off. As it rattled into silence, he warned Rebecca to stay down.

“I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Mai’s safety,” he said. “Annette’s bodyguard is out on the rocks. I’m going to find out what he’s up to. You stay here until I get back, all right?”

“Jean-Paul—” She broke off, grabbing his hand, her eyes huge and strangely bright in the gloom of the early afternoon. “Be careful.”

“I will,
ma petite.
” He squeezed her hand gently. “And I’ll look after your grandfather if I can. I’ve resented him for many years, but that’s not important now. I can see I was wrong about him. I always thought he knew about me.”

“That you weren’t
Le Chat?
”

“That,” he said, “and that I’m his son.”

Rebecca stared at him, speechless.

Jean-Paul smiled. “You see why I care about you? Your father and I were brothers.”

Annette reveled in the softness of the grass under her feet after her treacherous climb in the drenching rain back up to the house, and she ducked in through the side door. She grabbed a towel from the bath off the kitchen and went upstairs to peel off her wet clothes before she came down with pneumonia.

You can pull this off—just don’t think about Thomas and Mai. You’re doing what you have to do. Be strong!

As she wrapped the towel around her head, she stood
naked in front of her bedroom window and saw a decrepit truck in the driveway. Rebecca’s, she thought with a fresh wave of panic. Before she could get hysterical at the prospect of having to include Rebecca Blackburn in her scheme, Annette saw Jean-Paul’s figure limping across the lawn.

Good…

She tugged open the drawer to her mother’s old tiger maple dresser and took out dry clothes, pulling the towel off her hair and wishing she could take time to blow-dry it. The warmth would feel wonderful after being out on the rocks. A long time ago—even before
Le Chat—
she had learned never to act out of desperation. That meant always having a contingency plan in case things began to unravel.

France was her contingency plan. Her personal jet was waiting at a private airport.

A feeling of calm came over her, and she began to hum as she got dressed.

The water never receded entirely now, and the cold had penetrated every fiber of Thomas’s being, until he could no longer rely upon his own sense of coherency. It was pure agony. Worse was having Mai next to him, in the same unholy predicament, sobbing for her father.

“Mai,” he said, coughing just to clear his head. “Mai, listen to me. We must use our ingenuity.”

She sniffled and fastened her dark, lovely eyes on him, her terror slicing at his very soul. “The tide’s coming in. We’ll drown.”

“Did you know when it’s training its SEALs the navy does something called drown-proofing?”

Tears streamed down her face, but she managed to shake her head.

“They do,” Thomas said. “They bind their hands and feet and toss the young men into the water and make them swim.”