Black Ice (21 page)

She wasn’t going to argue with him—the traffic was taking too much of her concentration. The snow had melted, then turned to ice, and the BMW had too much power. She was sure that they’d survived a hail of bullets only to die ignominiously in a fender bender, but for now she didn’t care. She was with him. And she knew it wasn’t going to be for long.

He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a cell phone, punching in a number. The conversation was terse and uninformative, and when he shut down the connection he simply said, “Take the next left.”

She wasn’t going to argue, not now. He looked pale, exhausted, for the first time almost human. Vulnerable, a thought that terrified her. Not for her own sake, but his. “Are you okay?” she said. “They didn’t shoot you, did they?”

His cool smile was little comfort. “Don’t you re
member that device you strapped to me? It scorched me when it went off. I think I’ll manage to survive.”

“But if…”

“Hush,” he said softly. “For a few minutes, just hush.”

She did as he asked, a greater sacrifice than he would ever realize. She turned on the car radio, only to hear police reports of a terrorist incident at the Hotel Denis. At least eleven dead, five wounded, and others were being sought. She switched the station, finding French gangsta rap, and she turned it off. She wasn’t in the mood for posturing violence. Not after the real thing.

“Take another left up here,” Bastien said suddenly. She had no idea where they were. It was dark, and they were heading out of town in a direction she didn’t recognize. There was a roaring noise overhead, and she suddenly realized they must be near the airport. He’d directed her via a circuitous route, but there was no mistaking where they were.

He wasn’t directing her to any of the public areas, the parking areas, or the departure gates. Instead they drove on, past the main terminals to the row of airport hotels. “Drive around the back,” he said, when they reached the Hilton, and she dutifully did so. At least he was taking her to a hotel before he sent her away. If one more night with him was all she was going to have she’d take it and be grateful.

“Pull up over there,” he said, pointing toward a delivery entrance.

“There’s no place to park.”

“Just do as I say.”

She had neither the energy nor the desire to argue with him. She pulled up to the curb and put the car in Neutral, pulling up the parking brake. “Now what?”

“You can get out now,” he said, reaching over and turning off the car. He had blood on his hand as well. She could only hope it was the same fake blood that stained his shirt, not someone else’s.

She opened the door and slid out. The snow had been scraped from the roadway, but there was still a thin coating of frozen slush beneath her slender evening sandals, and she was freezing. Her dress was ruined—it had been drenched in whiskey and dumped in snow, and the wind whipped through the night air, swirling the loose snow around her.

She saw the two figures materialize out of the darkness, and for a wild moment she wondered whether he’d simply brought her out here to have someone else kill her, when she realized the people approaching her were more than familiar. They were her parents.

She let out a shriek, running across the snow-packed tarmac to fling herself in their arms. For a moment all she could do was cling to them, trying to catch her breath, the feel of them suddenly real and safe in a crazy world of guns and blood.

“What are you doing here?” she babbled, once
she caught her breath. “How did you know where to find me?”

“Your friend was able to track us down,” her father said. “We heard about Sylvia, and we were already headed to France when he called us. We were supposed to meet up with you at a hotel, but our plane got delayed.”

She turned to look back. Bastien had approached them, staying just a ways back, watching them without expression. “You told them to come to the hotel when you knew what was going to happen? They could have been killed!”

He shrugged, a little stiffly. “The point was to keep you alive. I didn’t particularly care what it cost.”

“You son of a…”

“Hush, now, Chloe,” her mother said. “He saved your life.”

James Underwood released Chloe and held out his hand to Bastien. “I just want to thank you for looking after our daughter. She can be quite a handful sometimes.”

“She was the least of my worries,” Bastien said in his calm, even voice.

“Do you want me to look at the wound of yours? I don’t know if Chloe told you but we’re both doctors….”

“I’m fine.” He dismissed it. “But you should leave. Take her out of France and don’t let her back for at least ten years. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea not to let her out of your sight for at least five.”

“Easier said than done,” her father muttered.

She could see Bastien’s faint smile in the lamplight. Without another word he turned away, moving back to the car, and she stood, shivering, frozen from more than the cold, certain he was going to walk away without another word.

He opened the car door, then hesitated. He reached into the back and pulled something out, then approached her, carrying it over his arm.

She was shaking, but for some reason her mother and father had stepped back, away from her.

“Why are you limping?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light as he came up to her.

“I twisted my ankle when we jumped.” He held his black cashmere coat in his arms, and he put it around her shoulders, wrapping her in the warmth and scent of it, pulling it around her. “Do as your parents tell you to do,” he said. “Let them take care of you.”

“I never was particularly obedient.”

He smiled then, a brief, honest, heartbreaking smile. “I know. Do it for me.”

She was too exhausted to fight him. She simply nodded, waiting for him to release his hold on the coat he’d pulled around her.

“I’m going to kiss you, Chloe,” he said in a quiet voice. “Just a simple kiss goodbye. And then you can forget all about me. Stockholm Syndrome is nothing more than a myth. Go home and find someone to love.”

She didn’t bother trying to explain. She simply stood there as he cupped her face in his hands, warm, strong hands that had protected her, killed for her. His lips were whisper-soft against hers, just a touch. He kissed her eyelids, her nose, her brow, her cheeks with the tears streaming down them, he kissed her mouth again, a slow, deep, gentle kiss that held all the promise of what they would never have. It was the kiss of a man in love, and for a moment she simply floated, lost in the perfect beauty of his mouth on hers.

He released her. “Breathe, Chloe,” he whispered. For the final time. And then he was gone, the BMW disappearing into the Paris night before she could do more than catch the coat as it fell from her shoulders.

“Where in the world did you happen to find such an interesting young man?” Her mother had come up to her, putting her arm around her. “You were always so traditional when it came to your boyfriends.”

Boyfriend, Chloe thought dazedly. The last word she’d spoken out loud before the chaos and death had begun. “He found me,” she said. Her voice sounded odd, strained.

“A good thing,” her father said. “It seems as if he managed to get you out of a very dangerous situation. I just wish he’d let me look at that gunshot wound.”

“He wasn’t really shot,” Chloe said. “It was just a fake we…he set up earlier this evening. Fake blood and a tiny explosive device to simulate being shot.”

“Chloe, my child, I hate to correct you but I spent more than ten years as an emergency room physician in Baltimore, and I know a gunshot wound when I see one.”

“It wasn’t—” And then it came to her, with an odd, sickening rush. The wound was on his left side. The fake gunshot had been taped to his right. “Oh, God,” she cried, trying to pull free of her parents. “You’re right! We have to find him….”

“It won’t do any good, sweetheart. He’s long gone. I’m sure he’ll go straight to the hospital….”

“He won’t. He’ll die. He wants to.” The moment she said the words she knew them to be true. He wanted to die, had been almost courting death, until she got in his way. And now that she was safely disposed of, there was nothing to stand in his way. “We have to find him, Daddy!”

“We have to catch our plane, Chloe. We promised.”

There was nothing she could do. He’d driven off, speeding on the icy roads, and there’d be no way to follow him, no way to find him. He would get help or he wouldn’t, but either way it was no longer any of her business. He was gone from her life, forever.

Breathe, he’d always told her. She took a deep, shaky breath, pulling his coat more tightly around her. She said nothing as her parents shepherded her through the back entrance of the hotel, over to the international departure lounge and onto the jet with surprising ease.
They were in first class, but she was beyond noticing such luxuries. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes, refusing to surrender the coat to the solicitous flight attendant. She was past tears now, past feeling anything at all. She had blood on her hand—his blood, she realized now, not phony blood. And she had no intention of washing it off. It was all she had left of him.

Stockholm Syndrome, she reminded herself. An aberration, or a legend, or maybe just a moment of utter insanity on her part. It didn’t matter, it was over. With a perfect kiss.

He shouldn’t have done that. She would have been better off if he’d just walked away. Then she would have never known how sweet it could be, that there was something besides the blood-quickening need of sex.

They were halfway over the Atlantic when she opened her eyes, to see both her parents watching her, identical, anxious expressions on their faces.

“I’m fine,” she said calmly, a complete lie. But her parents nodded, since their youngest child had spent most of her life being just fine. “Just one thing.”

“Yes, sweetheart?” her mother said, enough anxiety in her voice to prove that she wasn’t fooled.

“I don’t ever want to go to Stockholm.” And she closed her eyes again, shutting out the world.

I
t was April—warm, damp, full of new spring promise. Paris would be jammed with tourists. Next to August, April was the most crowded month of all. But Bastien was nowhere near Paris, and didn’t plan to be for a good long time.

He knew how to disappear, better than almost anyone. He’d had the best training in the world. And once he’d yanked the IV out of his arm and walked out of his hospital room in the private facility they’d stashed him in, he’d managed to vanish, even in his weakened condition, to a place where no one, not even the Committee, could find him.

It was the Committee he was most interested in avoiding. Anyone else would simply want to kill him, and he was still willing to face that with equanimity. The Committee didn’t want to let him go, and they didn’t take no for an answer. If he wouldn’t come back Thomason would once again order him killed,
and in retrospect he was damned if he was going to be killed by his own people. He had too much pride to accept such an ignominious fate.

He’d spent time in a tiny village in the Italian Alps, waiting for the wound to heal. The bullet had nicked his liver, and for a while it had been hit or miss whether he’d make it, particularly since it had taken them a while to discover him, passed out in the BMW in back of the deserted house. They’d found him, and they’d found Maureen, but it had been too late to do anything for her.

But the Committee hadn’t been ready to allow their expensive investment to die, and he’d been brought back from death twice, fighting all the way. They weren’t going to let him go, and he stopped resisting, letting them work their medical magic on him until he was conscious enough to control the pain without their drugs. Drugs to stop the pain, drugs to keep him docile, drugs to convince him to do what they wanted. He didn’t need their drugs.

There’d been a guard stationed outside his room the entire time. Occasionally he’d been conscious enough to see them, though he had no idea whether they were there to protect him or imprison him. No one from the Committee had shown their face, and he wasn’t about to wait for Harry Thomason to appear and give him an ultimatum. He waited until he could walk a few steps, practicing when the nurses weren’t around, and then he
pulled the IV out of his arm, knocked out his guard and stripped his clothes from him, taking off into the night.

The Italian Alps first, then on to Venice, a city he knew as intimately as most people knew their own home. No one could find him in the twists and turns of Venice, and he could stay lost there forever if he wanted to.

He didn’t. He was restless, recuperating slower than normal, and his nerves were jumpy, dangerously so. He’d put another section of his life behind him, just as he had so many times before. The wandering years with his mother and Aunt Celeste, the selfish years when he’d gone from one woman to the next, using them and then disappearing. And the deadly years, endless, eternal, employed by and under the control of the Committee, who believed that the end justified the means, no matter how monstrous.

And now he was back to wandering, alone this time. Moving from place to place, not stopping long enough to leave any trace. He left Venice after the madhouse of Carnivale, moving west. The Azores were warm and soothing, and he only thought of Chloe once, when the liquid sound of Portuguese ran over him and he wondered if that was one more language she’d managed to conquer.

She was alive, she was well, she was immured in the mountains of North Carolina, and that was all he needed to know. She no longer had to count on him for
anything—for food and warmth and sex and life itself. By now the very thought of him would have her shaking in horror. If she thought of him at all.

He could only hope she didn’t. She’d been ill-prepared for those few days they’d spent together—death and violence weren’t the normal lot for young girls, especially American ones. If she hadn’t managed to put it all behind her he had no doubt that her efficient parents would drag her from therapist to therapist until she was cured. Cured of the memories. Cured of him.

He lay in the sun, letting his mind empty, letting his body heal. He wasn’t sure where he’d go next—Greece was out of the question, and the Far East wasn’t a wise idea. The Yakuza had not taken kindly to Otomi’s loss, and their intelligence network rivaled that of the Committee. Once he set foot in Japan or anywhere near he’d be found and eliminated, even among millions of people. And he found he was no longer courting death, though he hadn’t quite figured out why.

He wasn’t going to the States, that was one thing that was absolutely certain. America was a huge country, but if he set foot inside its massive borders he’d be aware of only one, dangerous thing. One woman. He wouldn’t do anything about it, but he would be unable to concentrate on anything else until he left again. Even Canada might be too close.

Switzerland might be a good choice, with its rigid neutrality. Or Scandinavia, maybe Sweden…

Christ, no! He was never going to be able to think of Stockholm again with anything other than…hell, he didn’t even know what he was thinking. His world was awash in her, contaminated by her. There was no place he could run that didn’t make him think of her. Maybe he did want to die after all.

Or maybe it was just part of his penance.

He was drinking too much, but what else could he do as he lay out in the sun trying not to think? Drinking and smoking, sleeping with the pretty waitress when he was drunk enough to forget. It was a good life, he told himself, settling his sunglasses on his nose and closing his eyes to the bright Portuguese sun. Maybe he could just stay that way forever.

His sun was blotted out, and he waited, patiently, for it to reappear. And then he opened his eyes to see Jensen standing beside his chaise.

He looked very different from the last time Bastien had seen him, across the room at the Hotel Denis where he’d been attending to Ricetti. His brown hair was longer and deep black, he was dressed in designer denim, and although his eyes were covered with sunglasses Bastien had no doubt they were some color other than his natural blue.

“Are you here to kill me?” he inquired lazily, not moving from his chaise. “It’s a pretty public place, and
I’d hate to see you get caught. We’ve always gotten along well—why don’t you wait until I’m back in my room or alone on a deserted street?”

“You’re being melodramatic,” Jensen said, taking the chaise next to him. There was no visible sign of a gun, but Bastien wasn’t fooled. No operative would go out unarmed. There were too many unknown, unseen enemies. “If I wanted to kill you I would have done it back in Paris, when Thomason ordered me to, instead of letting you go.”

Bastien smiled faintly. “I thought it would be you. What made you change your mind?”

“Thomason is an asshole. He’s not going to be around forever, and you were too valuable a commodity to simply flush away.”

Bastien smiled faintly. “Sorry, Jensen. My services are no longer available. Go ahead and flush.”

Jensen shook his head. “I only kill when I’m paid to,” he said. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

“If it’s not to kill me then I suppose it’s to talk me back into the fold. And you’re wasting your time. Tell Thomason he can go fuck himself.”

“Thomason doesn’t know I’m here, and he wouldn’t be very happy if he did.”

Bastien lifted his sunglasses to peer at his companion. “Then who sent you?”

“You and I weren’t the only Committee members at the meetings.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. Like who else was on our payroll.”

Jensen shook his head. “That’s need-to-know information, and as long as you’re out of the fold then that knowledge is too dangerous to spread around.”

“Fine,” Bastien said, pulling his sunglasses back down again. “I’m not coming back, and you can tell them that. You can either kill me or go away.”

“I’m not here to bring you back, I’m here to warn you.”

“I don’t need warnings, Jensen. I’ve managed to keep myself alive for this long, I can continue as long as I’m in the mood to.”

“Not you, Bastien. We both know you’re always in danger. It’s your little American. We think they’ve found her.”

Spring came early to the mountains of North Carolina, but Chloe was in no mood to notice. Her parents pampered her, her brothers and sister hovered, her nieces and nephews delighted her, but the raw, torn place inside her was still bleeding. Every time she thought it had scarred over something would remind her, and she’d start shaking again.

Maureen, when she fell in the snow, the knife flying out of her hand, the blood soaking into the heavy drifts of white. Sylvia, her eyes wide and staring at the death that had taken her. The tangle of bodies, the sounds of
screams, the smell of blood at the Hotel Denis. She’d remember, and she’d start shaking, and there was no one there to remind her to breathe.

They were all dead—she’d been able to ascertain that much. The police had broken in on the scene just moments after she and Bastien had jumped from the balcony, and those who survived the bloodbath died in the hospital shortly thereafter. Convenient that no one was left to tell the truth. Monique had died on the scene, shot in the face, Bastien had told her. The baron had succumbed a day or two later, and the rest of them were already gone.

The one thing she didn’t think about was Bastien. For all she knew he was dead—he’d been careless and courting it long enough, and he’d been shot. Then again, he was someone who didn’t die easily. Maybe he was off on a new assignment, or maybe…

Anyway, she wasn’t going to think about him. He was in the dark, mixed-up past, and there was no way she could make sense of it, no matter how hard she tried. So she let go, moving through her days in a calm, even state of mind, while her parents looked on with worried eyes.

They were beginning to relax by mid-April. She’d signed up for courses at the university. Chinese would be enough of a challenge to keep her mind totally occupied, and she would start doing some volunteer work at the hospital in a week or so. By the fall she’d be ready
to find a real job, even move out on her own despite her parents’ protests. She was healing, and she refused to even consider what she was healing from. She only knew it took time.

For now she was safe. The Underwoods owned two hundred acres on the side of a small mountain, and their sprawling house was casual, comfortable and nicely isolated. The old farmhouse had been renovated, added on to, torn down and fixed up for a hundred or so years, and its current state was rambling, cluttered and completely cozy. Her mother made no pretensions at being neat, and while a weekly housekeeper kept the place clean, order was a lost cause. All the Underwoods had too many interests. Books and projects, fishing rods and sewing machines, microscopes and telescopes and seven working computers pretty much took up any available space.

Even the guest house wasn’t immune, mainly because Chloe was doing her best to keep her mind busy. She read constantly—television was too ephemeral to keep her mind occupied. She knitted, she played Tetris on her Game Boy with single-minded concentration whenever she had to be in a public place. It even went with her into the bathroom. The little blocks falling into place gave her a Zen-like sense of security, and she played till her hands went numb.

She was cheerful, calm and pleasant, and her parents were almost deceived into thinking she was well on her
way to being healed. Chloe knew it was going to take longer, but there was no rush. As long as she had her parents’ place to hide in she could take all the time she needed.

“I think you should come with us,” her mother said, shoving a pile of papers to one side of the breakfast counter and setting down a tall glass of orange juice. “You’ve been isolating too much.”

“I haven’t been isolating,” she said calmly, taking the orange juice that she didn’t want, knowing an argument would be futile. “I’m just…on vacation. If I’m in the way I can always—”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” It was hard to annoy her easygoing mother, but Chloe was the one most likely to manage. “There’s always room for you here, as well as the entire family. Why do you think we built the guest house? In fact, you know I wish you’d stay in the main house. I’d feel more comfortable knowing you were under the same roof.”

Chloe drank her orange juice, saying nothing. She knew that was one of the things that worried her family the most, her unnatural quiet, but there was nothing she could do about it. Idle chatter was totally beyond her at that point, even if it meant reassuring her mother.

“I know this conference is going to be a total bore for anyone not in the medical profession, but your brothers and sister will be there, as well as their fami
lies. It’s being held in a charming resort on the coast, and I know you’d have a lovely time….”

“Not yet,” she said, her voice so quiet her mother had to lean forward to hear her. “You go on and have fun. I’ll be fine here. You haven’t gone anywhere since I came back, and I know how you like to travel. Trust me, it’s perfectly safe. No one’s going to bother me, and I’ll just enjoy a few days’ solitude.”

“You’ve been enjoying too much solitude.” She turned to her husband who’d just entered the kitchen. “James, talk her into coming with us!”

James shook his head. “Leave the girl alone, Claire. She’ll be fine. She’s just tired of having us hanging around all the time. A few days of quiet will be the best thing for her. Right, Chloe?”