Force of Fire (The Kane Legacy) (6 page)

She’d been lying still, but
he’d known she wasn’t sleeping.

'Mark,' she said, removing his
palms from her breasts and taking them in her hands, 'is there something going
on we need to talk about?'

He pushed back against the
pillows and pulled her into the crook of his arm. She rested her chin against
the smooth bulge of his chest, waiting.

'It’s nothing really,' he said
in an odd way that didn’t sound at all convincing.

'I just thought maybe I’d
–'


He squeezed her to him. 'Just
got a lot on my mind, that’s all.'

'I know this new case has you
really tied up.' Tied up in knots, she meant, and she wanted to know why. He
seemed to be floating off somewhere. Camille had a sick feeling in the pit of
her stomach. 'Swear
it’s
just business?'

He didn’t answer.

'Mark?'

'Sorry. Can you repeat that?'

But she decided against it.
'It’s not important.'

She waited a moment, listening
to the sound of his steady breathing fill the room. His heart was pounding just
below her ear. She didn’t have to look into his eyes to know they were
Cappuccino brown. Every time he met her for lunch, her heart skipped a beat as
if she’d forgotten. But she’d memorized every detail. The way his square jaw
offset his handsome face, its youth only betrayed by his graying hair. He was
one of those few men in Washington who had aged well. Aged well, because he’d
taken care of himself.

She caught other women looking
from time to time. They’d turn away, but always too late. She knew she was
lucky to have him, should be grateful for what they had. But when he was like
this, she worried he was slipping away.

'How long this time?' she
asked, raising her head. She knew he probably couldn’t tell her, but hoped he’d
at least sound anxious to come home.

Instead, he looked at her with
lonely eyes, eyes that seemed to say she’d never make him whole. Then pulled
her trembling body onto the smoldering stone
of his own
.

Camille frowned at the memory
and leaned in toward the mirror to apply a burgundy swab of lipstick. She
stepped into her low black pumps and checked the length of her skirt one last
time. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she was getting too old to wear her
hems mid-thigh, even if she did have damn good legs.

Her mother was always dishing
out unsolicited advice on how to get a man. Not that she knew. Only one she’d
had left her twenty years ago. Put as many miles between a nagging woman and
her needy teenage daughter as he could fathom. Not that he’d ever been there
for them anyway. Not that her mother would have known the difference. All men
looked the same to her after a couple of dry martinis and, Camille was fairly
certain, they’d all tasted the same too.

When she returned her glance to
the mirror, Camille saw someone different there.
Someone a
bit too old trying to look young, someone whose marketable days were numbered.
Someone quite possibly destined to spend the rest of her days alone. Alone like
her mother, a poor excuse for an aging socialite in Washington.

And if there was anything
Camille was determined to be, it was unlike her mother. If she could only get
Mark’s attention long enough to show him all she had to offer, maybe he could
help her chart that destiny.

Ana rolled over in the dirt and
worked her way into a sitting position. Damn those bastards, she thought,
inching her way toward what she thought was the wall. It was difficult to
manouevre
with her hands still braced behind her, but at
least she could use her extended fingers to feel for the cold stubble of
concrete. There, she thought, pressing her weight against bound ankles. Her
sore shoulders made bruising contact with the wall as she lifted herself
slowly, steadily into a standing position.

That task accomplished, Ana
debated her next move. There was bound to be a door. Even if it had been locked
from the outside, it was worth a try. Maybe somebody had slipped up, forgotten
to turn the key. She knew it was a long shot, but at the moment it was all she
had.

Keeping the tips of her fingers
in contact with the wall, she scooted her way along its perimeter until she
came to a corner and then, maybe four empty feet later, another. At last,
halfway across the third wall she found it, catching her nail on a hinge. Damn.
There had to be a knob. Had to be knob somewhere. Ana felt desperately behind
her as far as her awkward arms would allow, but only met with the tempered
resistance of weathered wood. No knob.

Ana fell back against the door
in frustration. This is what it must be like to be a prisoner of war. But whose
battle was this?
And why her?
Why now? She felt a
fleeting urge to explode, a rare animalistic instinct to kick at something or
bite. She wanted to sink her teeth in, tear flesh. She wouldn’t even mind the
putrid taste of it as long as she could cause them pain.
Horrid,
insufferable pain.
But no pain could be as unbearable as the appalling
emptiness she felt right now.
A wicked, searing hollowness
that told her, as important as she’d always thought she was
,
her life meant nothing
.

Mark barely made the Miami
connection that allowed him to catch the lunchtime flight to Costa
Negra
. He arrived in La Concha at 2:00 p.m. local time.
Arrangements had been made for a taxi driver named Gustavo to meet him at the
gate. Short with burlap skin, Gustavo was a simple man with important
connections, not the least of which was his brother-in-law, Director of
Customs. He led Mark through a separate door where his computer and pistol were
briefly examined. The entire process took ten minutes.

Mark climbed into his cab,
screening the endless line of passengers who had accompanied him on his flight.
It would take each of them a good three to four hours to clear the baggage and
document checks. As with everywhere in the world, it was a matter of
who
you knew.

Beyond the clean facade of the
airport lay the desolate countryside. Gustavo smiled over his shoulder as he
wove through the brown and green hills. 'Dis your
feers
time
een
Costa
Negra
?'

Mark did his best to be
amiable, but he found it difficult to return the smile. Makeshift lean-tos
lined the highway, a virtual shantytown of third world depression. Barefoot
peasants loitered by the roadside, the more fortunate ones turning bony chickens
over flaming oil drums. And when Mark looked very carefully, as his eyes were
trained to do, he could detect the shimmering barrels of AK-47s peering out
from the sporadic patches of green dotting the dry, dusty knolls around them.

During his more than fifteen
years in Defense, Mark had traveled to many places. He was grateful now that
Costa
Negra
hadn’t been one of them. 'No,' he lied to
the cab driver, not wanting to encourage an extended conversation that might
divulge his reasons for being here. 'This is a return trip.'

Though it was sometimes a
necessary part of the job, Mark had never particularly liked the dishonesty. He
was a computer consultant from Bethesda, he told the little man, here to gather
site information. Well, it wasn’t a total untruth. And it was one with which
Mark could live, in the interest of his mission.

Mark checked into the hotel as
Systems Operations Manager Robert Taylor while Gustavo waited outside. He
requested room seventeen, the one in which Ana had stayed. Though he was
certain the room would have been swept clean by now, he still needed to be
there. Like a detective scrutinizing every detail, Mark needed to survey the
last place Ana had slept, had bathed, had looked into the mirror and felt
certain it was going to be a normal day.

He motioned for Gustavo to wait
and carried his luggage upstairs to the second floor. The old, wooden door to
room seventeen whined open. Despite the mid-day tropical heat, a sweeping chill
enveloped him as he entered and crossed to the rattan settee arranged opposite
the window. He dropped his suitcase in a chair,
then
sat to reset the combination on his booby-trapped computer before sliding it
between the mattress and box spring of the bed.

Ana sat with
her back to freedom’s door, nothing but darkness before her.
She was
tired but would never dream of sleeping. At least awake she could hear them
coming. Sleep was a panacea, a false pretense she lay under when the black
tranquillity
lulled her into believing she was safely back
in her 2nd Street bed. Safe as she could be when her rest was shattered by
nightmares, violent and vivid as lightning bolts tearing through a midnight
storm. Mark of a creative spirit, her psychology professor once said. Well, if
the price of creativity was tumultuous nights, the poets and the painters could
have it. Ana found
herself
thinking
br
iefly
of Scott, then willed
herself against it. No need for further punishment now. She wondered what Scott
would say were he aware of her situation. On one level he’d be horrified, sure.
But Ana questioned if he wouldn’t in some silent, sadistic way believe she was
getting everything she deserved. Noble Princess Ana, with her book of rules and
lofty expectations. The fallen elitist, her nose pushed into the earth.
Wouldn’t he relish the thought?

It was very sad. Very sad
indeed that he saw her that way. In nine plus years she had never known.
Although perhaps she had suspected on some subconscious level.

Ana felt a dizzying sensation
at the base of her skull as her head fell forward. The weak fish stew and stale
bread they had given her hadn’t been enough. And when was that anyway?
Yesterday? Earlier today?
She’d been drugged so many times
,
it was impossible to recall
.

She found the fact they were
feeding her at all a good sign. It meant that there was hope. Hope was what
POWs clung to when there was nothing else left. She knew this because of the
stories her father had read to her. When other children were being treated to
Hansel and Gretel or The House at Pooh Corner, Ana’s six-year-old mind was
filled with Reader’s Digest condensations of spy stories from World War II. Her
father had served in the war and one way or another had never quite gotten the
Army out of his system. She found herself fascinated by the tales of brave men
and how they’d survived their predicaments.
Men who had
triumphed over years, not months, of not just confinement but unspeakable
torture and lived to tell the tale.
'I just kept telling myself,' Ana
remembered one brave soldier saying, 'they may break my body, but they will
never break my spirit.' He ultimately had left the service
ni
a wheelchair, with several irreparably broken
bones, a few severed fingers and an honorable discharge. During his entire
ordeal he had never once divulged a precious U.S. Intelligence secret.

Ana heard the sharp crispness
of boots approaching down the hall and feared more than anything it would be
Carnova
. The tall one with no expression in his eyes
save
the vile vacancy of hate. Ana had once read that serial
killers had no empathy for their victims because they themselves were incapable
of feeling.

The footsteps stopped just
outside. She’d barely heard the light tinkle of keys when the round curve of
her spine rapidly gave way to the disappearing weight of the door.

Mark sat across from Tom Mooney
in the Ambassador's stark white office. In the courtyard beyond the double
doors, coconut palms danced in the sweltering breeze. It was four o'clock.

'So, Mr. Neal,' Mooney was
finishing, 'that's about all I can tell you.'

Mark noticed the sweat
dribbling down the Ambassador’s thick, red neck and pooling around his open
collar.

'If you don't mind, sir,' he
said, pulling the white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his
brow, 'I'd appreciate going over the chain of events one more time.'

Mooney looked up at him through
tired green eyes. His slick silver hair stuck firmly to the sides of his head.
He had already been through this story several times.

'Like I said, there was
something awfully fishy about this from the beginning. The cable Joe received
at his office was never sent to us here.'

'And that's not standard
practice?' Mark asked, removing his suit jacket and draping it over one knee.

'If there is
such a thing as standard practice with these damned insurgents.
No, Mr.
Neal, this was not standard practice. Generally all missives are directed to me
here.'

Mark scratched his chin and
rose to stretch his legs. He had taken in Mooney's previous testimony. Now he
was making sure he had it straight.

'When you bumped into Joe's
secretary at the restaurant, she mentioned this communiqué in passing.'

'Thought it was screwy. I mean,
how the devil could I have missed something so important?'

'So after dinner, you went back
to the office to re-check the message traffic.'

'There was no message.
Least, nothing regarding a planned attack on the northern highway.
Didn’t like the feel of it.'

'You thought the missive was a
set-up.'

'Damn straight, I did. Somebody
was trying to throw Joe off track, either by getting him to talk Miss Kane out
of her trip, which was unlikely given her head-strong reputation or – '