The Last Refuge (16 page)

‘Never mind,' I said. ‘Don't answer that. But, you should understand that Amy is here because she really wants to be. She's signed a contract. If she breaks the rules, she'll forfeit fifteen thousand dollars as well as opening herself up to the possibility of a million-dollar lawsuit.'

‘She doesn't need fifteen thousand dollars.'

‘I didn't get that impression.'

‘Well, that's crap. Amy's getting my pay and benefits now, but soon she'll receive a tax-free death gratuity of one hundred thousand, and there's a four-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy, too. I'm married to a wealthy woman.'

A light bulb flicked on in my brain. ‘As long as you stay dead.'

Drew was quiet for so long that I was afraid he'd used his super stealth skills to slip silently out of the room. ‘Drew?'

‘I'm here.' The straight-back chair next to Amy's dresser groaned in protest as Drew sat down in it. ‘It's better to be dead. Better for me, less embarrassing for the Navy.'

‘Why on earth would you say that?'

‘I screwed the pooch.'

Screwed the pooch
. A term from the Mercury days of the U.S. space program. Like Gus Grissom, Drew must have screwed up, big time. ‘I understand, honestly. If it's important that the Navy doesn't find out Drew Cornell's not a pile of ashes in Swosa, then I'm sure we can figure out a way for you to talk to your wife about it, if she wants to.'

‘What do you mean, “if she wants to?”'

I thought about Amy and Alex, but wisely kept my mouth shut. ‘Ten months is a long time, Drew. If you didn't die on that helicopter in Swosa, where the hell have you been?'

‘Getting myself out of a sticky situation.'

‘Can you tell me about it?'

‘Why should I trust you?'

‘Because my Dad is retired Navy? Because my husband teaches at the Naval Academy? I
know
what it means to be a SEAL, Drew. Just to be selected for SEAL training is a major accomplishment, but to successfully complete the training, be sent on dangerous missions . . .' I paused, choosing my words carefully. I needed Drew to trust me. ‘You're DEVGRU,' I said. ‘Elite among the elite, but the stress has to be enormous.'

Drew caught his breath. ‘DEVGRU,' he repeated, then he laughed.

‘DEVGRU's less of a mouthful than the Naval Special Warfare Development Group,' I said, ‘but you gotta admit that the old name, Seal Team Six, sounds a hell of a lot sexier.' I thought about Drew's key role in the mission to extract a high-value target like Nazari from Swosa, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. ‘You're Gold Squadron, right? It doesn't get any more select than that.'

When Drew didn't respond, I said, ‘Amy and I have become close over the past several weeks. She's very proud of you, you know.'

Drew snorted. ‘In the early days, maybe. When I was everyone's hero, quietly picking off Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea. Now? I'm shit under their shoes.'

‘Just a moment ago you said that it would be less embarrassing for the Navy if you stayed dead. I'm trying to work that one out. The mission to capture Nazari was fully-sanctioned by the U.S. government, right? That's what they kept saying on CNN.'

‘Capture, not kill. They wanted Nazari trussed up and delivered to the ICC for crimes against humanity.'

‘ICC?'

‘The International Criminal Court in the Hague. In March of 2009 Nazari was indicted by the ICC on eighteen counts of genocide, torture and rape. He'd been a fugitive ever since.'

‘A monster,' I said. ‘Not fit to breathe the same air as the rest of us.'

‘Yeah, but the brass thinks that I stepped over the line. We broke into the compound, cornered Nazari in an upstairs bedroom. The bastard was unarmed. We could'a taken him alive, easy. Just one sorry excuse for a human being hiding behind a curtain with his wife and children. He massacred millions of his own people, sure, I could deal with that, but when he grabbed one of his daughters and tried to use her as a human shield I looked the son of a bitch straight in the eye and said to myself, screw it, you're a waste of space. You've forfeited your right to live. I double tapped him. End of story.'

‘But it wasn't, was it? The end of the story, I mean.'

‘Fuck, no. All hell broke loose. Women crying, children screaming, guards popping up out of nowhere. We killed a bunch of guards on our way out, and I covered for my team as they ran to the chopper, but I missed the guy with the rocket launcher.'

‘We saw the explosion on CNN. Everyone assumed you were aboard, too.'

‘Sometimes I wish I had been.'

‘But it's better to be alive, Drew, surely. What's the worst thing that can happen to you if the Navy finds out you're not dead?'

‘After being AWOL for almost a year? Let's just say that I'm not planning on doing any time in Leavenworth.'

‘So, what happened next?'

‘After the explosion, I took out the guard, borrowed his clothing and got the hell out. It took me a while, but I'm here.'

‘How did you get out of Swosa with no passport, no money?'

‘It helps to be fluent in the language, and . . .' He paused and we both heard the door across the hall creak open. There was a light tap on the door.

‘Amy? I heard voices. You OK in there?'

Alex.

I wasn't sure I could imitate Amy's Yankee twang, so I mumbled sleepily, ‘Fine. Just a nightmare. Sorry I woke you. G'night.' I held my breath, fearful that Alex might decide to comfort Amy in person, but after a few seconds, the light pad of stocking feet confirmed that he'd returned to the room he shared with Michael.

As much as I wanted to hear the rest of Drew's story, I knew it could be dangerous for everyone if he stuck around much longer. ‘We're going to church at nine o'clock tomorrow,' I whispered. ‘Amy and I will figure out a way for the two of you to talk.'

‘St Anne's, you mean? On Church Circle?'

‘Yes,' I said, thinking fast. ‘The restrooms are through the door to the right as you enter the narthex. Nobody should be using them during the service, so you can wait for Amy there.'

A slight creak of the chair, a whispered, ‘Thanks.'

For several minutes I remained huddled in my corner, arms wrapped around my knees, imagining I could still hear him breathing. ‘Drew?'

But Amy's husband was gone. And I'd never even seen his face.

‘I've never been a morning person, so waking up at 5:30 a.m. to start cooking breakfast for a whole houseful of people is a real chore. It's getting so I don't mind eating porridge, but the next time one of the cameramen sashays into my kitchen with an Egg McMuffin, I'm going to kill him.
'

Karen Gibbs, cook

A
fter Drew left, I couldn't get back to sleep. I lay in bed with my heart pounding, trying to calm it.
Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat.
But my heart still pulsed hot in my ears like a piston.

I lay shivering in bed until dawn's pale light began to filter in, giving shape to the room's spare furnishings. I got up, pulled Amy's robe off the hook on the back of the door, wrapped it around my shift. Leaving my ball gown lying in a heap on the floor, I crept from Amy's room, tiptoed into the hall and down the stairs, through the hyphen into the main house where the occasional wine glass abandoned on a window sill or on the steps of the Chippendale staircase were reminders of the excesses of the previous evening.

On the second floor I paused, smiled demurely at the camera. So what if future viewers thought Hannah'd been bed-hopping? It might even juice up their ratings.

When I let myself into my room a few seconds later, everyone was still asleep, but sometime during the night, Amy had awakened and pulled the bedcovers over Gabe and tucked him in.

I approached the bed and shook Amy gently by the shoulder. ‘Amy,' I whispered. ‘Wake up.'

There was no response, so I shook her again until she stirred.

One eye opened. ‘What?' As if suddenly realizing who she was and who she was supposed to be, she propped herself up on one elbow and said, ‘Oh, Hannah, I'm sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?'

‘Dawn. Sunday,' I said. I needed Amy wide awake before I told her about Drew. ‘We need to talk, but not here.' As Amy climbed out of bed and began tugging at her corset, smoothing her rumbled clothing, I slipped out of her robe and began rummaging in the half-light through the chest at the foot of my bed, coming up with one of my everyday gowns, a simple linen frock – could have been blue, could have been black – that laced up the front.

‘In the kitchen?' Amy asked, sounding worried.

‘No. Meet me inside the summer house. There are no cameras there. And go quietly. I'll join you in a few minutes.'

In the garden, dew glistened like cobwebs on the grass. To save my shoes, I kept to the terraced walkway that bisected the garden and led straight down to the two-story summer house that had been William Paca's pride and joy. A statue of the god Mercury balanced on tiptoe at the peak of its octagonal roof.

I crossed the Chippendale bridge that spanned the fish pond and found Amy sitting on a bench inside the folly. I sat down next to her and took her hand.

‘It's bad news, isn't it?' she said.

I squeezed her hand. ‘Honestly, Amy, I don't know. You'll have to be the judge of that.' I'm not one of those break-it-to-'em-gently kind of people. Best to dive right in, get it over with. ‘Drew's alive.'

Amy covered her mouth with both hands and screamed into them. She turned to face me, eyes wide and dry. ‘No, no.'

‘It's true. Last night I slept in your room, and sometime in the middle of the night, Drew broke in. He expected to find
you
there, of course.'

‘Why didn't he . . .' Amy fumbled for the words.

I finished the sentence for her. ‘Why didn't he simply knock on the front door, say, hey, it's me, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated?'

She nodded.

‘Drew believes it's important that he stay dead for a while, but he wants to see you very much.'

‘I don't understand. The helicopter . . .'

‘I'm not sure I understand either, Amy, not entirely. Drew will have to explain. He knows that we're going to church this morning, and is going to wait in the restroom. During the service, we'll have to figure out a way to get the two of you together for a talk.'

Amy didn't look happy at the prospect of seeing her husband again, which puzzled me until she said, ‘But, I don't want to leave the show.'

‘Why would you have to?'

‘You don't know Drew.'

That was true. I didn't even know what her husband looked like, since carrying wallet-sized photographs of loved ones in our handbags had been forbidden, too. And nobody had any Hans Holbein miniatures, either. But I figured if Drew had been trained to extract a foreign dictator from his armed compound in a foreign country, surely he could extract his wife from a historic home in Annapolis, Maryland. There must be something holding him back. ‘You'll need to talk to him, Amy. Then you can decide what you need to do.'

Jack Donovan was out of sorts at breakfast Sunday morning. Not long before dawn, George Washington (Founding Father informed us) had been whisked away. Not the way he had come – on horseback – but in a black limo, in order to make an early morning flight from BWI to New Orleans, where he would be shooting an episode of
Treme
.

Jack took Washington's desertion as a personal insult. ‘Inconsiderate,' he sputtered as he stood at the buffet heaping smoked bluefish on his plate. ‘Especially when we went to all the trouble preparing this spread.'

We? What do you mean, we?
Jack's sole contribution to the breakfast feast spread out before him had been the bluefish itself, a ten-pound beauty given to him by one of his Middleton Tavern cronies at their last meeting. Karen – who had smoked the fish, scrambled the eggs, pickled the herring, sliced the ham and balled the melon that Jack was busily tucking into – Karen was the only individual with any claim to being put out, in my opinion. Or possibly French Fry, who stood behind Jack's chair at that particular moment, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.

I had to smile. At least we would be attending St Anne's that morning, a
real
church, rather than experiencing the torture of sitting through one of Jack Donovan's bowdlerized versions of Morning Prayer. As I slathered butter and a glop of Karen's strawberry jam over my bread, I remembered a previous Sunday when gusts of wind had hurled sheets of rain furiously against the windowpanes. Jack had pronounced the day too unspeakably foul to consider going out in it, and ordered Amy to pass the word that our presence was required in the parlor, where we found Jack, balancing the
Book of Common Prayer
on his open hands. When all had assembled, even little Dex, Jack – heeding the admonition to ‘read with a loud voice' – had stumbled over the
hasts
and
doeths
all the way to the end of the Apostle's Creed where, good Baptist that he was, he skipped over the troublesome bit about the ‘holy Catholick Church.' I had been amused rather than annoyed when Jack refused to pray for ‘the King's majesty' or to ‘bless the royal family,' but fully half his captive congregation seethed in silent anger and for all I knew were seething still when – for some reason known only to Jack – the New Testament scripture lesson was taken from Luke 17, verses 7–10, the Parable of the Dutiful Servants.
Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.
'