Force of Fire (The Kane Legacy) (26 page)

If only she'd talk to him. But
she had built so many fragile walls. And Albert knew better than to offend the
brittle barricade of his daughter's crystal house.

Mark and Cromwell had paired up
for the ride, with Joe assigned the seat behind them. He’d felt Joe bump
against his seat seconds ago, headed to the rest room or so Mark thought.

He’d turned when he’d heard her
voice, an angry whisper above the faint movie dialogue coming through the
scattered earphones.

Joe had taken the seat beside
her and they were engaged in heavy discussion. It had probably been true. There
had been something between them. Possibly was still. And all this time Mark
acting like a boy right out of school.

Mark picked up a magazine,
trying to distract himself. But it was useless.

Last night she had fallen into
his arms in a way he could never have planned. Never would have wanted to plan.
So much agony written in her eyes.
He’d been there to
hold her, shore her up against her tears, but hadn’t been able to offer
anything in the way of consolation. What does one say to a woman whose life has
just come down around her? Pick yourself up and move on?

Mark didn’t think so. He knew
too well how it felt to have outsiders tell you your time for grieving was
done.

He’d wanted so badly to carry
her away, tell her how much he understood. But she never would have believed
it. It would be forever, Mark realized, before Ana would believe anything any
man told her again.

Ana took the stairs to the
third floor and let herself into her modest, single room apartment. She’d asked
the super for a spare key, expecting an argument. He was surly and fifty and
generally reeked of gin. But he’d surprised her and given her the key without a
word.

When Ana walked into her small
bathroom and checked the mirror, she saw why. Her face was a grotesque
contortion,
a scarred lower lip with bruises surrounding her
cheekbones. She hadn’t cared to look in Santiago. Or even in Newark. In fact,
she’d gone to lengths to avoid it. She had enough horrors to contend with.

She ran the faucet, lightly
splashing water on her face. The dark spots were still tender.

She searched the medicine
cabinet for her
comb,
realizing most of her toiletries
were still in Costa
Negra
. She tried to do something
with her hair.

She wondered what people had
thought that night she’d paraded around Santiago with Mark Neal, her face a war
zone. She realized that in her mother’s hospital room she’d probably looked
more like one of the patients than a visitor and decided she didn’t care.

Her mother, thank God, was
going to pull through.

She hadn’t stayed long, just
long enough to know, then had left the rest in Emi’s hands.
Emi’s
capable hands.
Emi would see that her mother got back home, got to her
doctor’s appointments. Would serve as sentinel to guard against her father’s
intrusions.

She walked to the kitchen,
knowing she’d find nothing but water. Anything else would have to be stale.
Except for coffee. She reached for the grounds and made it the old-fashioned
way in a stovetop percolator. There was something more honest in its flavor
than the electric drip kind. And Ana was in the mood to be brutally frank.

The telephone rang and she
walked to pick it up on the second ring.

'Got a DHL package down here
with your name on it.' It was the super and he sounded drunk.

'Thanks, I’ll be right down.'

DHL was the express courier for
international deliveries. When she stepped into the lobby, her compact suitcase
was waiting under the line of brass mailboxes. She grabbed its handle and
hoisted it back upstairs, wondering who might have sent it.

The coffee was ready and she
poured herself a steaming cup. It wasn’t until she was seated at the table that
she noticed the short envelope taped to the side of her bag. She immediately
ripped open the seal. It was a simple lined sheet of yellow paper that had been
folded over four times.

The message was short and
sweet:
Forgive me, Joe.

Ana rolled over in bed and
rested her chin on the back of her overlapping hands. It was September, five
months since her horrific ordeal, almost a year since that first balmy October
night. They’d come full circle.

Joe was propped up against the
soft feather pillows, his arms folded casually behind his head. The light from
a cloud-occluded moon danced in through the window and cast shadows across his
broad, hairy chest.

The surf crashed outside.

Joe slid himself into a
reclining position beside her and rested his head on the shelf of his
outstretched arm. He looked into her eyes and it hurt because she could not
return what she saw there.

'What are you thinking?' he
asked, stroking her bare arm.

'About how impossible this
world is,' she said, snuggling up against him under the covers. 'Maybe if
things were different. If
Tarrona
had never
happened...'

Her voice trailed off, mingling
with the song of the water.

'We could start this whole
crazy thing over. Do it right from the start.'

But Ana knew they couldn't go
back and now her time in Costa
Negra
was ended. She’d
closed out the project office that morning.

'You're a good man. Some day
–' She hadn't meant it to sound like a kiss-off but it had. He deserved
better than that.

He shifted so that he could
bring both arms around her and pull her close.

'I don't want some day,' he
said.

But she did. Some day and then
some
.

Ana shut her eyes against the sting of
moisture gathering there. She wished there was a way. But any way she could
think of was just an illusion.

She pushed back the sheets and
pulled Joe to her.

He eased on top of her,
brushing her with his prickly warmth, pushing his fingers into the thick mass
of hair at the base of her scalp.

He cradled her head and
whispered something into the darkness but she reached out to stop him with her
searching kiss, knowing this would be their last time.

Mark stepped out of the small
Irish pub in Old Town onto King Street and headed east toward the river. He’d
gone in for a bowl of lamb stew but had come out feeling empty.

He meandered slowly down the
street, stepping out of the way of lovers huddling together. They walked arm in
arm or wrapped around each other in an indiscernible coil.

Mark pulled up the collar on
his leather bomber jacket to ward off the wind. Alexandria would get its first
frost tonight. That didn’t stop people from getting ice cream. The line at
Sam’s spilled out the door and he had to step into the street to get around
them. Sam was an old man with a wrinkled brow that spoke to years of hard work.
Still, he had a pleasant smile and always a kind word for each customer, a fact
that slowed his service as he pressed balls of frozen confection into cones.
'Sugar or cake?' he would ask, his eyes twinkling at the possibilities. He knew
the regulars by name. He never failed to ask the high school kids about their
classes, the grad students how their theses were coming along.

Mark’s parents had made it a
tradition to take him and Susan there on warm Saturday nights. He’d only been
inside once since his senior year of high school. Camille had insisted on a
sundae. He’d had a simple vanilla cone – the coldest ice cream of his
life.

Mark crossed the street,
keeping steady his course and ultimate destination. The gun shop to his left
had several reminders of its own. His Dad had taken him there as a young boy to
buy his first piece. He’d taught Mark how to carefully load and clean the
weapon.
And then, to fire it at the range in Springfield.
It was a Walther PP, compact enough for his small hand, steady enough to do the
job. He’d hit a bull’s-eye his first time out.

Mark kept walking, pulling the
zipper up under his collar until it met the end of its track. He’d been in
every shop and restaurant along this quaint little stretch and, though a
certain number of them had turned over, it was the stable places he preferred.
He frequented the establishments where he’d gotten to know the
maitre
d’, the pubs where the bartenders knew he took his
beer on tap and his coffee with a double dose of cream.

As Mark neared the bottom of
the hill, he saw the low flat waters of the Potomac
laid
out like a rippling black rug. He crossed over at the base of the street and
made his way to the little park snuggled up against the loading dock. The
riverboat was embarking on its moonlight cruise. Candles blurred interior
windows where couples sat
face to face
eating shrimp
and drinking Virginia wine.

There was only one bench open
to the water. Mark took it and sat watching the distant trill of the paddle
wheel spin its way across the Potomac toward the flickering lights of the
Wilson Bridge.

He leaned back and ran his
fingers through his stubby hair, heaving a sigh. Tomorrow was his birthday.
The big one.
Halfway through his life.
And Mark could think of only one thing he wanted.

The plane ride from Miami to
Washington was long and turbulent. Ana thought back to that interminable night
in Santiago. Every day of her kidnapping she had hungered for freedom, yet once
she had it, she’d never felt so utterly trapped.

Past is past, her father liked
to say. But there were some things, Ana knew, that just couldn't be undone.
Things like her mother's lymphoma that had come on shortly after her father's
supposed demise.

The burden of shuttling her
mother to and from the chemo sessions had fallen on Emi, the full-time mother
of three. It had been hard on her, evoked some tough choices.
Like the times when one of her children was sick and yet her mother
still had to be driven to therapy.
Emi had been steadfastly at her
mother's side, helped get her back on her feet.

Isabel seemed to improve for a
while. Ana and Emi were sure she'd lick this thing. But the scans showed that
very little progress had been made, despite the weeks of treatment.

'I'm sorry, girls,' Dr. Krause
told them, 'but when the will is weak, there's very little we can do, and your
mother has stopped fighting.'

Stopped fighting. And yet she'd
fought until the end of her horrific ordeal with those fascist bastards. For
the first forty-eight hours they weren't sure if she’d make it, she'd been so
weakened by the cancer. Her father had not left the bedside, had not let go of her
hand, even though she'd remained unconscious.

Ana had been tempted to
catapult him from the room, but she knew it wouldn't have been what her mother
wanted. So she’d let him stay until they received word her mother was going to
pull through, then had ejected him with her angry words. 'Look at her! Look
what you've done!'

The acceptance of guilt was in
her father's eyes.

'Costa
Negra
was one thing – but this – I'll never forgive you for this as long
as I live.'

Her sister had been standing in
the corner cradling the baby, trying to jostle her to sleep. She stepped
forward and added her barbs like blunt stones.

'Ana's right, you know. If it
weren’t for you...'

Their father shook his head in
sad resignation. 'The two of you will never understand. I had no choice.'

'Oh, you had a choice, father,'
Ana said, 'but you took the wrong fork in the road.'

Albert steered his blue
government sedan down the quiet Delaware
street
and
pulled into the drive of the large white house.
Emalita
had warned him not to come here. She and Ana had not forgiven him for his
transgressions.

Ana's words stung like darts in
the small fragile balloon of hope he had clung to for over four years. It was
over. At last, it was over, and now, because he had sacrificed his loyalty to
family for that of his country, he was destined to be alone.

Still, he owed them one last
try. His daughters were young and bitter for now, but perhaps they would soften
in time. For Isa, there was precious little time.

Albert turned his key in the
weathered lock of the door. The deadbolt glided easily as he grasped the
achingly familiar gold brass knob. Inside the foyer, nothing had changed.

He crossed to the back of the
wide curved staircase and passed through the door to his office. He stopped
cold at the sight of the brownish stain on the carpet where his chair had
stood.

Albert paused a long moment,
eyeing his desk and wiping his sweaty palms against the sides of his trousers.
The ink blotter had been removed. Another reminder. How many more reminders
would be in this house? Ana's words of a few months earlier came back like
cymbals clanking against the paneled office walls
.

'You're
of no use to us here. Why don't you just go back to the grave you made for
yourself?'
He felt himself losing control. It started with a quivering in
his fingertips and worked its way down to his increasingly unsteady knees. He
bent low at the foot of his desk and fumbled for the smallest key on his ring.
He unlocked the long drawer that sat at the base of the others and withdrew his
old service revolver.

Albert steadied the grip in his
hand, massaging the smooth underbelly of the barrel with a trembling
forefinger. He slipped the finger around the steel trigger, remembering...