Heart of a Hero (67 page)

A single shot rang out. Had he missed at this range? Impossible. Then she saw the lethal wound in the center of his forehead. He crumpled onto the pile of dead that all but blocked the door.

Dawn grabbed the only weapon she could reach in a hurry, a top-of-the-line H&K automatic. Then she turned and saw Eric, propped on one elbow, pistol still clutched in his hand. He collapsed as she crawled back to him.

The confiscated H&K was nearly empty, a couple of rounds left, and there was no time to dig through the dead to find another gun. Footsteps were pounding on the stairs again.

Quickly she sat back facing the threat, bracing the weapon on her knee, aiming directly at the doorway. “C’mon, you bastards. Do your worst,” she spat. She might go down, but she was taking somebody with her.

“Friendlies!” Eric shouted. She could hear the cost of that shout in the way he bit off the word with a groan.

Did she trust his instincts? Was that Mercier’s bunch clattering up the stairs? How could they have gotten here that fast? And how could he know who it was? If he was wrong and she waited an instant too long to pull the trigger, they were all dead.

For a split second, she considered firing anyway. But she waited. Eric would never gamble with their lives. Unless he was damned sure of himself, rock-positive, he wouldn’t have tried to stop her.

“Hold your fire!” someone on the inside called out. “Vinland? Senate? Moon?”

Dawn nearly collapsed with relief. “All clear!” she cried, tears running down her face, streaks of heat against her breeze-chilled cheeks. “We’re clear.” The last words rushed out on a sob that she caught and contained. Wouldn’t do to get caught crying like a little girl.

A huge shadow with accompanying noise descended to the roof as the chopper set down twenty feet away from her. Dawn put down the weapons and crawled rapidly back to Eric. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she murmured
as she pressed her lips to the side of his face and her palm on top of his hand that clutched the wound.

“I love you, Eric,” she added with feeling, knowing the sound was lost in the cacophony of sounds that surrounded them now. She just had to say it, though she knew he couldn’t hear her, that he was too out of it with pain to read it in her mind if his ability had returned. He wouldn’t die, and she had never been so glad of anything in her life.

Friendlies.
What a marvelous word, she thought. They would whisk Eric and Clay to a hospital. They would be safe. They would live.

As for her, she would go back to NSA and do what she did best, identifying and illustrating security leaks. Her one big international anti-terrorist mission was all but over.

Mercier himself lifted her away from Eric as two guys with a stretcher hurriedly checked him out and began to load him up. The men were loading Clay’s stretcher next, and another guy was assisting George toward the chopper. In a few moments, they would be gone. She had to go with Eric. “Wait!” she cried, but Mercier held her back. For a second, she struggled in protest, then realized she would only be in the way, and cooperated.

Eric’s boss tugged her toward the stairs leading down. “Shake it off, Moon. Come with me,” Mercier ordered in a loud voice.

After one last glance at the chopper, Dawn followed. She swallowed her tears and put on her agent’s face.

If she did nothing else today, she would make Eric proud of how she followed through with their mission. There would be a lengthy debriefing, a chore he wouldn’t be up to completing for some time. And there was still the flash drive to locate.

All she wanted right now was to get that over with and
find transportation to whatever medical facility was treating Eric. Before she went stateside again, she had to know he was recovering. Then she could say goodbye and get on with her life, such as it was.

Things would never be the same for her. Eric Vinland had turned her life upside down and inside out. She would always love him. Not that she intended to tell him so again.

If she did, that meant they would have to decide what to do about it. He might want them to be lovers for a while, she supposed. They were incredibly good together. But then it would end, and she didn’t think she could face that.

She had before with the others, but Eric was different. His leaving her, even though she knew he would try to let her down easy when the time came, would be the end for her. Better not to get any more involved, end it now and convince herself that everything she felt for him had been due to forced proximity and hyped by adrenaline.

But not before she saw him once more and made sure he would be all right. Would he? Had the wound been worse than she imagined? What if he died? A chill shot through her.

“This way,” Mercier directed as they reached the entrance to Quince’s ruined study where the grenade had gone off. Sean McCoy’s body lay covered with a blanket, as did the other terrorists’ remains. He guided her through the rubble into the hallway and into the lounge, which remained virtually unchanged from the last time she’d seen it.

Once there, he sat her down on the silk striped divan and brought her a drink. Scotch. She drank it and made a face. Wicked stuff, and she hated the taste.

“Now then,” he said gently. “We need to get to work.”

A question occurred to her, and Dawn figured she might not get another chance to ask it. “Did Eric get through to you?”

“Telepathically, you mean?” Mercier smiled. “As a matter of fact, no.”

“Then how…?”

He thumped the back of the divan near her shoulder. “What if I told you it was
you
who connected.”

Her?
Laughter welled up inside her and spilled out. Hysterical, unstoppable and totally inappropriate as it was, she couldn’t stop it. She almost hoped he would slap her so she would stop, but he didn’t.

Mercier let her laugh until she collapsed back against the divan with scotch spilled all over her lap and tears running down her face.

“Okay, now that you’ve got that out of your system…” He took the glass from her hand and set it aside. “Are you ready?”

Dawn sat up straight, wiped her face with her palms and composed herself.

“One of the bidders, a Russian, was under guard upstairs in one of the bedrooms,” she told Mercier. She took another sip of the scotch and grimaced. “The one who brought all these guys to the party was locked in the kitchen basement. His men set him free, I’m sure.”

“They’ll be rounded up, don’t worry,” Mercier assured her. “No one’s getting off this island without my say-so, depend on it.”

She knew he meant her, as well as the perps involved.

She allowed herself one last glance out the window, sending a brief, silent and fervent prayer winging after the helicopter that had long disappeared. It was all she could do for Eric now. That, and finish what they had begun together. He would demand that of her and be right to do so.

She nodded succinctly and met Mercier’s gaze with a steady one free of tears. “I’m ready.”

E
ric railed against the tests that kept him isolated at the unnamed medical facility in the Poconos. Mercier had ordered him flown here directly after emergency surgery in Athens.

“For the hundredth time, I tell you I can’t do it,” he almost shouted. God, he was weary of making the attempts. “I don’t want to do it. I’m sick of doing it, okay?”

“Not okay,” Dr. Blumfeld declared. “This should be elementary for you, Eric. It’s a simple guessing game. The subject in the other room is thinking one of these things,” he said, pushing the large cards with pictures closer to Eric’s side of the table. “You could do this with one hundred percent accuracy when you were five years old.”

“And now I can’t,” Eric informed him yet again. “Call Mercier again. I want out of here. If he wants to fire me, fine, but I need to leave.”

“You want to go and see that woman, don’t you? But she’s the one who did this, Eric. She took one of your senses from you. If she had blinded or deafened you, how would you feel then? This is even worse. Don’t you understand that?”

Eric stood, trying not to kick his chair backward in a fit of fury. If he acted crazy, they just might throw a straight-jacket on him and put him somewhere even more secure. He forced a sigh. “I need to sleep for a while. My shoulder hurts like the devil. Hey, maybe that’s interfering,” he suggested, sounding quite reasonable, he thought. “The pain, you know.” He rubbed the scar gently. It did still ache a little.

“Of course,” the doctor said. “We’ll try again tomorrow morning when you’re more alert.”

Sure they would, Eric thought, hiding his scowl. Damn the whole bunch of them. He was getting the hell out as soon as he could find a way. The trouble was, they expected him to try and were covering all possible exits. They wouldn’t shoot him, of course. He was too valuable a subject for that. But they would restrain him.

Obviously Jack didn’t realize the obsession these people had for ferreting out the intricacies of
gifts
like Eric’s or he would never have sent Eric here for evaluation. Or perhaps he did. Maybe Dawn wasn’t the only one who’d been betrayed by a superior.

The staff here were agents, too; even the docs were trained and badged. They weren’t bad people, only overly dedicated. All the agencies had reps present while the research went on. They’d been at it too long. Eric had been brought here time and again since he was a child, giving them more data and answers to their questions than most of their subjects did. Funny how he had never minded before.

Now all he could think of was leaving, forgetting all this,
finding Dawn and thanking her for putting his life in better perspective.

Well, he hoped to do more than thank her, he thought with an inner smile.

He entered his room, a pleasant place even if it was a bit clinical. They had attempted to make him as comfortable as possible so he would be content and perform. Like hell.

The window was barred. There were four locked, guarded doors between him and the outside of the building. A high wall topped with concertina wire surrounded the property. For his protection against enemy agents who might come looking for him, so Dr. Blumfeld had said in a hushed voice. Did they think he was still five?

“Psssst!”

Eric looked around. His door was closed.

“Psssst! Here!”

He leaned back and looked up, astounded. “Dawn?”

“Get me a screwdriver,” she whispered. “A flat-head. Mine broke.”

He laughed, not bothering to lower his voice. “Where the hell would I get a screwdriver? They won’t even let me have a dinner knife in this place. What are you doing here?”

“I came to bust you out. Or would you rather stay?”

“This is not a sanctioned insertion, I take it?”

“Are you kidding? Get me a damn screwdriver or neither one of us is going anywhere, and I don’t plan to live in this freakin’ maze of heating vents the rest of my life, okay?”

“Okay, hang on.” He looked around the room for something that might do. “Ah, here we go.” He lifted the thick folder Dr. Blumfeld had furnished of all Eric’s former test results. Doc had let him read it to give him his confidence back. The pages were punched and held together with a flat
metal clip and slide. He carefully removed it and tucked it up through the white painted vent.

He had tried the vents before, but they were securely screwed down from the inside where he couldn’t get to them. Bless her heart, she had come for him. Wonders would never cease where that woman was concerned.

“How’s your wound? Healed?”

“Fine,” he answered.

“Clay’s okay, too. I saw him last week. He told me where you were.”

“Good man.” Eric couldn’t see Dawn through the slanted slots, but he could hear her shuffling around, grunting a curse now and then. “I hope you’re quieter than this when you’re really working,” he said, unable to resist teasing her.

“Oh, shut up and push up on this thing, will you? Do I have to do everything?”

“Wind up one little mission by yourself and it goes straight to your head! How’d that turn out, by the way?” He bumped the vent with the heels of his hands and it popped out.

She peered down at him, grinning, her face streaked with dirt. “Good guys won, of course. Clay’s recovering nicely and getting lots of TLC from your buds at Sextant. George is facing a conspiracy charge, but he’s trying to cut some kind of deal by furnishing some of his brother’s contacts. Sean was scamming George about being his son, just like we figured.”

“I’m glad for George’s sake.”

“Yeah, he was, too. The radar info was on the flash drive I found in that drawer, by the way. It’s now secure. Boris is on his way back to the Russian authorities and Ali bought it in the firefight along with most of his troops. The
rest are in Uncle Sam’s custody. Nothing left for you to do, Sport, but play Houdini and disappear from here.”

She stuck out her hand and beckoned. “You coming or what?”

“Is Aristophanes Greek?” He dragged the desk chair over and climbed up on it, willing to follow her anywhere, the same way she had once followed him.

Moments later, she was leading him through the vents at a fast crawl. She hadn’t paused to kiss him hello. Or tell him why she had come to his rescue. If discovered, her career would be over. His probably was anyway, since he’d lost the skill that made him valuable to Sextant.

Eric didn’t care about that. What he had found was so much more than he’d ever had before. Dawn.

She had made him a normal person. Somehow, she had banished his enormous burden of carrying the dark secrets of others, of sometimes inadvertently invading the private thoughts of friends. His mind was his own now, the peace and quiet a blessed relief he had never expected and treasured above anything. Except Dawn.

“Did I ever tell you I love you, Moon?” he asked, huffing with exertion after six weeks of virtual inertia. He hurt, and the pain was exquisite.

“Not in so many words,” she answered, still crawling forward. “Pick up the pace, will you? We don’t have all day.”

“How do we get over the wall unnoticed?”

“Leave it to me,” she ordered. “We’re coming up on the laundry area behind the kitchen. Just trust me and do what I do.”