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“Chloe, my child, I hate to correct you but I spent more than ten years as an emergency room physician in Baltimore, and I know a gunshot wound when I see one.”
“It wasn’t—” And then it came to her, with an odd, sickening rush. The wound was on his left side. The fake gunshot had been taped to his right. “Oh, God,” she cried, trying to pull free of her parents. “You’re right! We have to find him….”
“It won’t do any good, sweetheart. He’s long gone. I’m sure he’ll go straight to the hospital….”
“He won’t. He’ll die. He wants to.” The moment she said the words she knew them to be true. He wanted to die, had been almost courting death, until she got in his way. And now that she was safely disposed of, there was nothing to stand in his way. “We have to find him, Daddy!”
“We have to catch our plane, Chloe. We promised.”
There was nothing she could do. He’d driven off, speeding on the icy roads, and there’d be no way to follow him, no way to find him. He would get help or he wouldn’t, but either way it was no longer any of her business. He was gone from her life, forever.
Breathe, he’d always told her. She took a deep, shaky breath, pulling his coat more tightly around her. She said nothing as her parents shepherded her through the back entrance of the hotel, over to the international departure lounge and onto the jet with surprising ease. They were in first class, but she was beyond noticing such luxuries. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes, refusing to surrender the coat to the solicitous flight attendant. She was past tears now, past feeling anything at all. She had blood on her hand—his blood, she realized now, n
ot phony blood. And she had no intention of washing it off. It was all she had left of him.
Stockholm Syndrome, she reminded herself. An aberration, or a legend, or maybe just a moment of utter insanity on her part. It didn’t matter, it was over. With a perfect kiss.
He shouldn’t have done that. She would have been better off if he’d just walked away. Then she would have never known how sweet it could be, that there was something besides the blood-quickening need of sex.
They were halfway over the Atlantic when she opened her eyes, to see both her parents watching her, identical, anxious expressions on their faces.
“I’m fine,” she said calmly, a complete lie. But her parents nodded, since their youngest child had spent most of her life being just fine. “Just one thing.”
“Yes, sweetheart?” her mother said, enough anxiety in her voice to prove that she wasn’t fooled.
“I don’t ever want to go to Stockholm.” And she closed her eyes again, shutting out the world.
21
It was April—warm, damp, full of new spring promise. Paris would be jammed with tourists. Next to August, April was the most crowded month of all. But Bastien was nowhere near Paris, and didn’t plan to be for a good long time.
He knew how to disappear, better than almost anyone. He’d had the best training in the world. And once he’d yanked the IV out of his arm and walked out of his hospital room in the private facility they’d stashed him in, he’d managed to vanish, even in his weakened condition, to a place where no one, not even the Committee, could find him.
It was the Committee he was most interested in avoiding. Anyone else would simply want to kill him, and he was still willing to face that with equanimity. The Committee didn’t want to let him go, and they didn’t take no for an answer. If he wouldn’t come back Thomason would once again order him killed, and in retrospect he was damned if he was going to be killed by his own people. He had too much pride to accept such an ignominious fate.
He’d spent time in a tiny village in the Italian Alps, waiting for the wound to heal. The bullet had nicked his liver, and for a while it had been hit or miss whether he’d make it, particularly since it had taken them a while to discover him, passed out in the BMW in back of the deserted house. They’d found him, and they’d found Maureen, but it had been too late to do anything for her.
But the Committee hadn’t been ready to allow their expensive investment to die, and he’d been brought back from death twice, fighting all the way. They weren’t going to let him go, and he stopped resisting, letting them work their medical magic on him until he was conscious enough to control the pain without their drugs. Drugs to stop the pain, drugs to keep him docile, drugs to convince him to do what they wanted. He didn’t need their drugs.
There’d been a guard stationed outside his room the entire time. Occasionally he’d been conscious enough to see them, though he had no idea whether they were there to protect him or imprison him. No one from the Committee had shown their face, and he wasn’t about to wait for Harry Thomason to appear and give him an ultimatum. He waited until he could walk a few steps, practicing when the nurses weren’t around, and then he pulled the IV out of his arm, knocked out his guard and stripped his clothes from him, taking off into the night.
The Italian Alps first, then on to Venice, a city he knew as intimately as most people knew their own home. No one could find him in the twists and turns of Venice, and he could stay lost there forever if he wanted to.
He didn’t. He was restless, recuperating slower than normal, and his nerves were jumpy, dangerously so. He’d put another section of his life behind him, just as he had so many times before. The wandering years with his mother and Aunt Celeste, the selfish years when he’d gone from one woman to the next, using them and then disappearing. And the deadly years, endless, eternal, employed by and under the control of the Committee, who believed that the end justified the means, no matter how monstrous.
And now he was back to wandering, alone this time. Moving from place to place, not stopping long enough to leave any trace. He left Venice after the madhouse of Carnivale, moving west. The Azores were warm and soothing, and he only thought of Chloe once, when the liquid sound of Portuguese ran over him and he wondered if that was one more language she’d managed to conquer.
She was alive, she was well, she was immured in the mountains of North Carolina, and that was all he needed to know. She no longer had to count on him for anything—for food and warmth and sex and life itself. By now the very thought of him would have her shaking in horror. If she thought of him at all.
He could only hope she didn’t. She’d been ill-prepared for those few days they’d spent together—death and violence weren’t the normal lot for young girls, especially American ones. If she hadn’t managed to put it all behind her he had no doubt that her efficient parents would drag her from therapist to therapist until she was cured. Cured of the memories. Cured of him.
He lay in the sun, letting his mind empty, letting his body heal. He wasn’t sure where he’d go next—Greece was out of the question, and the Far East wasn’t a wise idea. The Yakuza had not taken kindly to Otomi’s loss, and their intelligence network rivaled that of the Committee. Once he set foot in Japan or anywhere near he’d be found and eliminated, even among millions of people. And he found he was no longer courting death, though he hadn’t quite figured out why.
He wasn’t going to the States, that was one thing that was absolutely certain. America was a huge country, but if he set foot inside its massive borders he’d be aware of only one, dangerous thing. One woman. He wouldn’t do anything about it, but he would be unable to concentrate on anything else until he left again. Even Canada might be too close.
Switzerland might be a good choice, with its rigid neutrality. Or Scandinavia, maybe Sweden…
Christ, no! He was never going to be able to think of Stockholm again with anything other than…hell, he didn’t even know what he was thinking. His world was awash in her, contaminated by her. There was no place he could run that didn’t make him think of her. Maybe he did want to die after all.
