Undercover (13 page)

“We're here to help you, Miss Gregory. We're part of a task force sent by the British and Israeli governments, the CIA, and your father.” But all she could do was scream and shake her head. She looked deranged, with wild hair and flashing eyes. Someone had given her a jacket to put on when she fought free of the asbestos blanket. She had come out of their tent naked and had no clothes.

“No…no…Take me back…you don't understand.” She pounded on one of them and pushed him away. “Take me back….”

“You're safe now, Ariana,” the second-in-command said gently, wondering what they had done to her in the past three months. She looked like they had driven her mad. But what they didn't know was that she had just watched her lover and the father of her unborn baby die.

“You killed Jorge!” She was screaming at them. “He's a holy man!” And then they understood, as she clutched the metal box to her chest with his journals and letters in it. It was all she had left. They saw then too that she had slight burns on her hands, and twenty minutes later, after flying over the forest, they set down in their camp, where the others were waiting for them. And the moment they saw Ariana come out of the helicopter, one of the British agents radioed Sam at the embassy, where he was waiting for news of her with her father. Robert had been taking nitroglycerin all night, and the stress of waiting to hear if she was alive was driving him over the edge.

“We've got her” was all the commander said. He didn't know more than that yet. “We'll have her back to you in a few hours. We need to assess what kind of shape she's in and if we need to take her to a hospital.” As soon as he signed off, Sam turned to Robert, and patted his hand with tears in his eyes.

“They have her. Your girl is coming home.” Robert burst into tears then, and hugged Sam as he sobbed.

“Oh my God, I thought she was dead.”

“She'll be home in a few hours. They're assessing her now.” But what Sam didn't know, and wouldn't have told Robert anyway, was that she was sobbing and distraught, and begging them to take her back, although she knew there was no point. She had seen Jorge killed by the falling tree. The man she loved and the father of her baby was dead. Jorge had been the first to die in the fire. And she stared at the men who had saved her with empty, broken eyes. One of them finally got her to put down the old metal box and helped her get into clothes. She looked like a madwoman, as they handed her water and she drank, her hair tangled around her head, her eyes looking at them as though she didn't understand. They could see that it was going to be a long way back for her to return to a normal life. They had seen it before, with people who had been kidnapped for long periods of time and been turned around by their captors until they no longer knew what they believed or who they were. They could tell that Jorge had done a good job on her.

The combined task force made a quiet decision, standing away from her, out of earshot, to take her to the hospital and not to the embassy. She was in no condition to go home. She was confused, distraught, and traumatized, she was hysterical, and nothing they said calmed her down. One of the CIA men on the scene called Sam at the embassy and let him know the plan, to admit her to a hospital that night. They had already made arrangements for it, in case she was hurt.

“Is she injured?” Sam asked quietly, after he left Robert for a moment.

“Physically, she looks fine, except for some minor burns on her hands,” the agent answered, sounding tense. “We have some serious Stockholm Syndrome going on here. She wants to go back. She fought us like a cat.”

“Shit. I don't think her father is expecting that. Maybe we can get her calm enough so he can see her.” He was worried about Robert. He had already been through too much.

“She wants to go back to Jorge. She thinks he's a holy man. And he's going to pass for a martyr now. He's dead. A burning tree hit him before we left. She says she's carrying his child. I don't know if that's true or not.”

“Wait till her father hears that. Let me know when you get to the hospital, and I'll bring him over for a few minutes.” But when Sam went back to him, Robert's face was gray, and he was clutching his chest.

“She's all right, Robert. She's safe. Try to calm down.”

“I think I'm having a heart attack,” he said, grimacing with pain.

Sam went to call an ambulance, and they came five minutes later. The paramedics confirmed what he had said. He had been through too much in the past three months. Sam rode in the ambulance with him, and they defibrillated him on the way in. He was in excruciating pain, and they rushed him to a cardiac ICU unit as soon as he came in. A doctor came out to talk to Sam, and told him that they wanted to do an angiogram but he wasn't strong enough to survive it. They were doing everything they could. It was touch and go for the next few hours while they waited for Ariana to arrive. They flew to Buenos Aires in the helicopter rather than take her by car, and then they drove her to the hospital from the airport, where Sam met them.

The man in charge looked grim. “She says she doesn't want to see her father, that he's an evil man.”

“Well, that's one piece of good news,” Sam said tersely. “He had a heart attack two hours ago, and he's in cardiac ICU. She can't see him anyway.”

There was a team of doctors waiting to assess Ariana's condition, and she cried piteously while they examined her. They took her box from her and promised to keep it safe when she screamed for it. She said she was having terrible pains, and the doctors noticed immediately that she was bleeding. A sonogram showed that she was having a miscarriage. They tried to explain it to her, and she only cried more. There was blood everywhere when they finally sedated her, and all she could do was mumble Jorge's name over and over again. They did a D & C on her that night when she was asleep. She had lost the fetus as soon as she came in, which everyone agreed was a mercy.

And they gave the metal box she'd been clutching to Sam, to send back to the embassy with one of the CIA men, to leave it for her there. The men who had come in with her had asked her what was in it, and she said Jorge's love letters to her. Sam opened the box and rifled through it—he never saw the journals under the letters—and approved the box being sent to the embassy for her. It was harmless, and he hoped she would throw it away one day. It was a souvenir of a terrible time.

Ariana was calmer in the morning when she woke up, and looked severely depressed. She remembered losing the baby the night before. They said she had been about six weeks pregnant, so it wasn't far along. And otherwise, physically, she was all right. They treated the burns on her hands, but they were only superficial. The main thing wrong with her was her mind. Sam and a psychiatrist tried to explain it to her as something that happened to people sometimes when they'd been kidnapped, that they begin to identify with their captors, and forget who they were and everything they believed in when they were taken hostage. Jorge had begun to seem like her protector and the only person she could trust.

“But what if he was right?” she said, after listening to them. “Think of all the poor people in the world. All he wanted to do was help them.”

“You don't help poor people by kidnapping innocent women and holding them prisoner in the forest, for twenty million dollars ransom,” Sam said clearly, looking her in the eye. She had said as much to Jorge herself in the beginning, and in time he had convinced her otherwise.

“He wanted to use that to feed the poor and liberate the oppressed,” Ariana answered softly, ready to defend him. In her mind, he had ceased to be her oppressor, when he became the man she loved, after they made love.

“That's certainly a noble cause,” Sam said quietly, “but he also had his men kill your driver, and Jorge and his men have killed people before. They're revolutionaries, Ariana. They want to overthrow the government and kill people like your father, who is a good man. He loves you, Ariana. Your father never hurt anyone. Jorge has hurt a lot of people.” Including her. He had twisted her thinking beyond recognition.

“He killed his father,” she said in a dead voice, “because he hurt Jorge's mother. He was protecting her.”

“That doesn't make it right,” Sam said sanely, and she looked as though a small light had gone on. She was remembering what Jorge had said. Sam knew she would be confused for a long time. “You're going to need time to think about all this. You can't do it all at once. The one thing I do know is how much your father loves you. He's been worried sick about you for three months.”

“Where is he?” Ariana suddenly looked frightened and concerned about him, as though she had just remembered who her father was.

Sam hesitated before he told her, but she had to know, even now, with her confused mind. “He had a heart attack last night. He's upstairs in cardiac ICU. They said he was resting comfortably this morning. He's been through a lot, and so have you,” Sam said sympathetically. No one was to blame for all that had happened except the men who had kidnapped her. Surely not Robert Gregory or his daughter, no matter how confused she was about it now.

“Can I see him?” Ariana asked, and Sam nodded, and a few minutes later they took her upstairs in a wheelchair, and she wheeled herself up to his bed. Robert looked terrible, but better than he had the night before. Sam had thought he might die before he got him to the hospital, and Robert wasn't out of the woods yet. They were considering an angiogram that morning, if he was up to it.

He smiled and tears ran down his cheeks the moment he saw Ariana's face. He gently smoothed her hair. “Thank God, you're all right.”

“I love you, Daddy,” she said, and sounded like a little girl.

“I love you too, sweetheart. I was so worried for you. I'm so sorry it happened. I'm sorry we ever came here. You were right. I've already sent in my letter of resignation. As soon as I get out of here, we'll go home.” She nodded, with tears in her eyes too. She was no longer sure where home was, in the forest with Jorge, here in Buenos Aires, or New York. She felt like Dorothy in
The
Wizard
of
Oz.
All she wanted to do was go home, wherever it was. And she remembered all too vividly that Jorge was dead. But she still had his journals and love letters in the aviator's box. And she believed that everything he'd written and felt for her was real. But she remembered now that she loved her father too.

“Just try to rest,” she told her father gently. “Don't worry about anything. I'm back.” Her body was anyway, but she knew her mind was lost.

“Thank God,” her father said, and closed his eyes. They had given him a sedative, and a few minutes later, he drifted off to sleep, grateful that she was safe and alive. Her return was the greatest gift of his life.

They did an angiogram on him that afternoon, and tried to do an angioplasty. Two of his arteries were blocked, but he started failing on the table, and his vital signs plummeted. They defibrillated him twice and brought him back, but there was nothing they could do. He wasn't strong enough to withstand the procedure, and he was fading fast when they brought him back to his room, where Ariana was waiting for him. He looked exhausted, and she kissed him gently on the cheek, and then sat next to him holding his hand. He stopped breathing a little while later, while she was watching him. She pressed the emergency button and a team ran in and tried to revive him. They tried for twenty minutes, while Ariana watched them, sobbing softly. She remembered now that her father was a good man, and not a bad one. And she knew just how much she loved him, and how much he had loved her.

But there was nothing they could do for him. His heart was too damaged, and he was too weak. They gave up their futile efforts to revive him, and left Ariana to sit with him for a while. In two days, she had lost two men she loved, and a baby. She had watched Jorge be killed the night before, and her father die from his months of worry about her. She felt as though she had killed him as she kissed him for the last time and left the room. Sam was waiting for her outside, and he took her to the embassy, where Eugenia was waiting to help her. The embassy was going to take care of the formalities of getting her father's body home. And Eugenia helped her pack everything she had in Buenos Aires. They had already emptied the
finca
after she'd been kidnapped.

President Armstrong called Ariana that night to tell her how sorry he was about her father, and how relieved he was that she had been rescued and was all right.

“At least he had the comfort of knowing you were alive and safe before he died, and seeing you again. That must have meant the world to him,” the president said, sounding deeply moved by everything that had happened. He promised to come to her father's funeral when they held it in New York, and two days later, Ariana boarded a plane to go home. Her father was on his way to New York in a casket on the same flight, and Ariana was still in shock. Embassy officials said she was too shaken up to talk to the press. She had called a few of her friends in Buenos Aires to say goodbye before she left, but she didn't have the time or heart to see any of them. She had thanked the British and Israeli ambassadors for their help in rescuing her, and two men who came as emissaries of the Argentine government to express their relief that she'd been rescued and extend their condolences about her father. Their visit was formal and brief. And she hugged Eugenia hard at the airport before she left. She had the box with Jorge's letters and journals in her carry-on and a bodyguard was traveling with her.

“Take care of yourself, Ariana,” Eugenia said as she held her, and Ariana nodded, as tears slid down her face. She had nothing to go home to. The father who had loved and shielded her all her life was gone. And the man who had kidnapped her and said he loved her and turned her mind and life upside down was dead too. She knew she needed help sorting it all out, but she had no one to turn to, and nothing solid to hang on to except herself now. She had been in Argentina for ten months, and everything was confused now. Who were the good people, and who were the bad people? And who was she in all of it? Because of her, both Jorge and her father had died, one while she was rescued, and the other because she'd been kidnapped and he had worried so much about her. And the shock of the fire and the rescue had killed her baby too. She was responsible for three people dying, and wondered if she could ever forgive herself. She felt guilty for all of it, as the plane left Buenos Aires and she flew back to New York. She wanted to forget everything that had happened, but she knew she never would.