Girl of Vengeance (25 page)

“Bear,” she said, walking forward with a half smile.

He smiled at her. “You remember me,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

“A long time, but how could I forget the man who protected my family and my daughters?”

“You’re still as lovely as always,” he responded.

Adelina said, “Jessica, this is Bear Wyden. He headed our security detail in Belgium in the nineties. It must have been nearly twenty years ago.”

“Almost exactly,” he responded. “This is Anthony Walker. He’s a friend of Julia’s, and a reporter for
T
he
Washington Post.
”

Adelina’s eyes widened. “A reporter? Friends with Julia? I find that … surprising.”

“Friends may be an overstatement,” Anthony said. “But we’ve been working together. Julia’s come around to the idea that it’s time to shed some public light on what’s been happening to your family.”

Adelina’s eyes darted back and forth between the two men. Then she said, “You have my undivided attention. I never expected you to pop up out of the woodwork. What brings you to Canada, exactly?”

Bear said, “I know you were away, so you may not know the extent of the details. But when your daughter Andrea arrived in the United States last Monday, I was assigned to investigate her kidnapping. I’m still with Diplomatic Security, of course. I assigned a protective detail to guard your daughters, but they were attacked again on Friday night. I’ve been doing everything I can to track down those responsible for the attacks. Our best lead was Nick Larsden, the man who shot at you and your daughter as you were trying to cross the border.”

“Was?” she asked nervously. “He’s not free, is he?”

“No, ma’am. He’s dead.”

Adelina blanched.

He went on, “Someone in the jail knifed him. We don’t know who, or whether it was for hire or just a bizarre coincidence. Anthony and I interviewed him early this morning, but we didn’t get a chance to finish.”

“Why not?”

Bear looked at Anthony, as if to ask Anthony’s opinion. Should he tell her the truth? Anthony raised an eyebrow. That was the opposite of helpful. He turned back to Adelina and laid his cards on the table.

“We’re not here in any official capacity, Adelina. Secretary Perry
officially
relieved me of duty a couple days ago.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And unofficially?”

“Unofficially, he’s very suspicious of … the entire situation. So when the IRS and the special counsel took over the investigation, he cut me loose to find out what I could find out.”

She nodded slowly then said, “That sounds like him. I appreciate your candor.”

“You know the Secretary?”

“Of course,” she said. “He and Chuck Rainsley are very close friends. And I was once friends with Brianna Rainsley. So we came into contact with each other a great deal in the 1980s.”

Bear and Anthony looked at each other. Well, that verified one question. But they still had plenty more. “All right,” Bear said. “Will you talk with us?”

“I’ll be happy to. On the record or off. If Anthony here wants to print my story in
T
he
Washington Post
I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Anthony grinned. “I’d
love
to get your story.”

“In the meantime,” Bear said, “I’ve got a number of very specific questions I’m hoping you could help us with.”

She nodded. “Please, go ahead.”

“Would you rather talk in private somewhere?” He nodded meaningfully toward Jessica.

Adelina looked at her daughter. Something unspoken passed between them, then Adelina looked back at Bear. “It’s fine. We can talk in front of Jessica.”

Bear raised his eyebrows. “All right. I’d like to start with Nick Larsden. Have you heard of him before? Had any encounter with him?”

“No.” Her tone was flat as she answered the question.

Anthony said, “Mrs. Thompson … I was with Julia when she broke into your husband’s office. I saw the police report. And … I saw the diary.”

Adelina winced. Then she said, “Then you know what he did to me.”

Anthony nodded. “It’s true?” he asked.

“Yes. I was sixteen when he raped me the first time.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone who went by the name of Oz?” Anthony asked.

Adelina froze at the name. Her eyes widened and her skin went pale. “Oz?” she asked.

Oz.

Of course. Why hadn’t she realized it before? The name sent chills down her spine.

Jessica looked at her, as did the two men, and it was obvious they could see her reaction.

She sighed and said, “Yes, I’ve heard the name. How did it come up?”

Anthony and Bear looked at each other, then Bear said, “Nick Larsden said he was hired by someone named Oz.”

Adelina swayed on her feet, then said, “I need to sit.” She stumbled across the room to one of the chairs and fell into her seat. Anthony and Bear followed her in, taking the two wooden visitor chairs.

“Mrs. Thompson? What can you tell us?”

The first time she’d heard the voice, she hadn’t known he went by that name. It was just a voice. A guttural, mean sounding voice. It sounded as if the owner of that voice just wanted to reach out and
shake
someone. It was a voice you didn’t want to cross. And back then, Adelina had already been terrified every minute of every day. She didn’t need any more fears. But she got them anyway.

It happened in 1984. A few days before, she’d manipulated Richard into losing his temper. Into
raping
her. Her purpose, of course, was to have a plausible date when she could have become pregnant, because the two of them hadn’t touched each other since the move to Washington.

She’d never felt so dirty. Not even the first time he’d done it. Because this time it was to conceal a lie. A lie she was responsible for. And no matter the reason, no matter how horrible he was, she felt in her heart that she was the one who was wrong. She was the one who was defiled. She was the one who God would judge.

She’d already decided that she wouldn’t see George-Phillip again. She
couldn’t.
She loved him like she’d never loved anybody. Every time she thought of him, her heart ached—her whole body ached. But if she continued to see him, it would still be in secret. It would still be dirty. And eventually, she knew, Richard would find out the truth. And then he would kill her, or the baby she had inside of her.

She’d already decided, but then came Oz.

It was almost two in the morning when it happened. Richard had flown to London for a meeting, and she and Julia were blessedly alone in the condominium. When the phone rang, the bell was harsh in the darkness.

She stumbled out of bed to the kitchen grasping for the phone, her heart suddenly racing. No one called at two in the morning. Certainly not Richard. It had to be something awful. Had something happened to Luis? Had that bastard finally followed through on his threats and done something to her baby brother?

“Hello? Thompson residence,” she gasped into the phone.

“Mrs. Thompson,” a voice said. A voice that sounded like the gravel at the end of a long dirt road. Irish accent.

“Who is this?”

“A friend,” came the reply. “We have a mutual friend. The Prince is returning to Washington, Adelina. Stay away from him. Do you understand me? You stay away from him, or you’ll suffer for it.”

Rage flooded through her. It didn’t matter that she’d made the decision to say goodbye. Suddenly awake and alert, she spit into the phone, “Who is this?”

“You heard my warning, Adelina. Stay away from him. Don’t answer his calls. Don’t see him. Or you and I will have a personal problem.”

Angry beyond words, Adelina said, “And what exactly does a personal problem entail?”

“Why don’t you check young Julia’s bedroom to find out?”

Adelina threw the phone at the floor and ran for Julia’s room, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. She screamed silently as she went down on the floor. She scrambled back to her feet, down the hall, opened Julia’s door, and snatched her daughter out of the Snuffleupagus toddler bed Richard had bought for her a few weeks before. Immediately Julia began wailing, startled out of a deep sleep in the middle of the night.

Adelina switched on the light and checked Julia for injuries and marks of any kind, even as the girl screamed, her hair tangled in her face.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, holding Julia to her.

Then her eyes fell on the wall.

A large sheet of white poster board was pinned to the wall … directly above the toddler bed. A crude, hand drawn representation of Snuffleupagus, Julia’s favorite Sesame Street character, had been drawn on the poster board.

A red letter X was scrawled across the creature’s chest. In red letters beneath the children’s show character were words, printed in large block letters. The message said:

HEED MY WARNING. OZ.

Now, as Adelina told the story to Anthony and Bear, the full weight of the fear swept over her again and she began to shake. “Whoever Oz is … he, or someone who worked for him, was
inside the condo
and put that poster board up, then left, before calling me. They could have killed us. Or taken Julia. Anything. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop them.”

“What did you do?” Bear asked.

“The only thing I could do. I broke it off with George-Phillip. I gave him no explanation—I didn’t even give him the opportunity to talk about it. I broke his heart.”

To her left, sitting in the bed, Jessica listened with wide eyes. Adelina hadn’t told her about Oz yet, or why she’d broken it off with George-Phillip. Now her daughter sat there with tears freely running down her face.

Bear asked, “Did you ever hear from him again?”

“Once,” Adelina said. “In November 1996. I was pregnant with Andrea at the time.”

“What happened?” Bear asked.

“The last time I saw George-Phillip was at an Embassy dinner. For several months we’d been secretly seeing each other. He would … he would sneak into the compound with false identification in the middle of the day and we’d go off together. I kept fooling myself that it would be all right, that somehow we wouldn’t be found out, that somehow I could protect my daughters and still have him. But then two things happened.”

The first, of course, was when she missed her period. They had been careful to use contraception despite Adelina’s religious qualms, but due to the heavy medication she was taking already, her doctor had flat out refused to prescribe birth control.

She knew. Her last pregnancy with the twins had been extremely difficult and she knew exactly what morning sickness felt like. For three weeks she’d been nauseous, but she’d pushed that to the side, wanting to ignore it, wanting it to be anything but what it was. But when she missed her period, there was no way to ignore it. She bought a home pregnancy test and the result was positive.

Adelina was pregnant and it was impossible that the baby was Richard’s. She would sooner die than kill her own baby, and she had no desire to touch Richard ever again. He had no desire for her.

For a week after she discovered the pregnancy, she was paralyzed. She didn’t return George-Phillip’s phone calls. She thought, she wrote in her journal, and she prayed. Useless prayers, she’d believed at the time. But she couldn’t hide forever, and a few days later the US Embassy hosted a dinner for the officers of the Australian and British Embassies. Such affairs were common, and as wife of the Ambassador, she had no excuse for not attending.

Protocol placed her at her husband’s left hand, directly across from George-Phillip, who sat to Richard’s right. Through the meal she barely spoke, keeping her eyes on her plate.

At one point Richard said in a tone only she would identify as deeply sarcastic, “Not feeling well, darling?”

She simply shook her head. He leaned over and gripped her arm and she flinched.

“Your job is to entertain our guests, Adelina,” he whispered.

She attempted a smile, then stood up and said, “Excuse me.”

She hid in the restrooms, but of course that didn’t last lone. Before long, she was circulating in the room, attempting unsuccessfully to make conversation. After escaping from a conversation with the Australian Consul-General, she heard George-Phillip’s voice behind her.

“Hello, Adelina, how are you?”

His voice made her heart sink. For days she’d been debating what and how much to tell him. She looked at him and felt her eyes water. She wanted so badly to collapse into his arms, to sink into his love. She wanted so badly to run away with him.

“You haven’t called,” he said. His eyebrows were sunken close to his eyes in consternation.

She wanted to make an excuse. She wanted to tell him … she’d been busy, she’d been taking care of the kids, she’d been washing her hair. Instead, she blurted out in a whisper, “I’m pregnant.”

His Adam’s apple bounced in his throat as he swallowed. “Is the baby mine?”

“Of course. I’d never touch him unless he forced me.”

He looked so sad her heart broke. “Adelina, you
must
leave him. He’s destroying you and your children.”

She thought about the photos she’d received every year on Luis’s birthday. Photos taken surreptitiously. Luis at school. Luis eating ice cream. Luis at his first job waiting tables. His eighteenth birthday party. Every single year. Richard wanted to remind her. And then, of course, there was the man he sent from London all those years before.
Oz.
If Richard’s goal had been to cow and terrify her, he had succeeded.

“You don’t know what you’re asking. If you did, you wouldn’t say that. I’d lose my children. I’d lose everything.” Anxiety twisted through her as Richard approached from behind George-Phillip.

“Of course, I enjoyed the show very much! I’m hoping we can take Julia to it, you know she loves music.”

Richard casually clapped a hand on George-Phillip’s shoulder. His voice was jovial, suspecting nothing. “I didn’t get to tell you at dinner, Your Highness, how much a pleasure it is to see you again.”

“And you, Ambassador,” George-Phillip said.

He smiled, an insincere diplomatic smile. Adelina knew what his
real
smiles looked like. And she was terrified she’d never see that smile again.