Authors: Penny McCall
“And yet here we are,” Aubrey said.
“Here you are,” Waters echoed. “How did you put it together?
Jack traded a look with Aubrey.“It was a collaboration.”
“Then it’s true?” Tom surveyed everyone’s face, saving Waters for last. “All of it?”
“There’s no point in denying it,” Jack said. “It’ll take some time to dig out all the proof, but we’ll do it.”
Waters sat forward, focusing on Jack. “You’ll ruin a dozen members of Congress in the process.”
“Not my problem.”
“You’ve spent the last week with the problem, and now you’ve brought it here,” Waters said, switching his gaze to Aubrey.
“Typical megalomaniac,” she said. “You do all the illegal stuff and blame it on everyone else.”
“Not everyone. You and your damn photographic memory. It puts you on all the party lists and the parties bring you into contact with God knows who in the government. Not to mention your job at the Library of Congress.”
“I worked in the map room. Mostly I came into contact with tourists.”
“But you had superiors and some of those superiors have been working there so long they personally checked in Thomas Jefferson’s original donation. They know people.”
“And you were afraid I’d tell them what? I didn’t know anything about you.”
“Tom was stupid enough to take you along on his . . . errands for me. If you figured out what he was actually doing, or if you mentioned it to the wrong person, I knew I’d be finished.”
“If you had just left me alone, I wouldn’t have had a clue what you were doing. And I never would have met Jack. He’s the one who put it all together.”
Waters ignored her, aiming the tirade in Tom’s direction next. “And you,” he said, “it’s as much your fault as hers. You should have married her like I told you to. If you’d married her, Corona would never have had to be brought into this.”
“You told Tom to marry me just to cover your ass?” Aubrey demanded.
“It’s not like he would have seen it as a hardship.” Although Waters clearly would have, judging from the dismissive look he ran over Aubrey. “Tom obviously thought you were attractive. And you’d be a political asset. Tom has aspirations, you know. You keep yourself presentable, and you don’t have any family to embarrass him. And even your memory would work in his favor. He’s not the brightest bulb. If he actually managed to get elected to something, you could double as an aide in social situations.”
“And I thought you were obnoxious,” Aubrey said to Jack.
“I asked her to marry me,” Tom said. “She turned me down.”
“You should have found a way to convince her.”
“She doesn’t love me, and I’m not so sure I ever loved her.”
Waters waved that aside. “What does love matter? Once you fathered a couple of children, you could have discreet affairs.”
“Wow,” Aubrey said, “all this flattery is likely to go to my head.”
“Sarcasm is such an unattractive character trait,” Waters said. “Librarians are supposed to be quiet and unobtrusive.”
“Kind of missed the mark there,” Jack said to Waters. “She’s about as quiet and unobtrusive as a nuclear warhead.”
“Yeah,” Aubrey said, “never underestimate a librarian.” Waters ignored her. “When she refused Tom’s offer, I began to think she might be a threat to me,” he said to Jack. “I needed a way to get rid of her. Who better than someone with a ready supply of employees who specialize in death? If Corona took out a contract on her, it wouldn’t matter who actually killed her, he’d be held responsible.
“You, Mr. Mitchell, were the only fly in the ointment. You have a great deal of knowledge about Corona’s organization.”
Not enough, Jack thought. He hadn’t known where Corona lived, and there’d been a few bad moments before he’d managed to focus on getting to Miami and dealing with what he found there.
“That’s where Horace came in. He figured you’d go Rambo instead of working within the system.”
“And when Doris’s murder was pinned on you,” Horace said, “the cops would run around trying to find you, and that would keep you too busy to find the real mole and trace him back to the congressman.”
“Corona would take out Miss Sullivan and I would go back to running my tidy little side business,” Waters concluded.
“You didn’t count on the two of us hooking up,” Jack said.
“No. And I’ll wager you didn’t count on Horace being here tonight.”
“Was it greed?” Tom asked out of the blue. Throughout most of the conversation, he’d stood by the door mumbling to himself, trying to reconcile the man he’d put up on pedestal with the criminal Waters was turning out to be. “I believed in you,” he said to Waters. “A lot of people believed in you, your staff, the voters, and you let everyone down. Did you do it for money?”
Waters planted both hands on his desk and got to his feet. “I helped people.” Either he was a hell of an actor, or he truly bought into what he was saying. “It took me about five minutes of being a junior congressman to realize it would be years before I had enough influence to do any of the things I wanted to do. I needed power, Tom, and I found a way to get it.”
“And what if the secrets you found out got into the wrong hands?”
“The information is harmless to national security,” Waters told Tom. “It’s only embarrassing to whomever it concerns.”
“And Doris? What was she, a means to an end?”
“Doris was an opportunist. She didn’t care about anyone but herself.”
“So she wasn’t a big loss?” Tom demanded. “What about Aubrey? How were you going to justify her death?”
Waters chose not to answer that.
“So you’ll shut down the operation now, right?”
“Absolutely,” Waters said.
“He might actually mean that,” Jack said, “but either way he can’t leave a bunch of witnesses wandering around.”
Right on cue Horace pulled a gun.
“Nobody’s getting shot today,” a man said, stepping in from the hallway.
“About damn time,” Jack said to him. “We were running out of things to talk about.”
“Mike Kovaleski,” the man said, offering Aubrey his hand.
She took it, watching four other men stream into the room behind him. They took Horace’s gun, handcuffed him for the murder of Doris Landowski, and read him his rights while they quick-stepped him out the door.
Waters was back in his chair, but he wasn’t looking worried or nauseous or concerned in any way. He was looking smug.
Jack held out his hand, Mike took it, gripping Jack’s arm with his other hand. “Uh, Jack . . .”
“What’s going on?”
“Please, allow me,” Waters said. “You see, Mr. Mitchell, I called my attorney before you arrived. He’s already been in touch with the FBI.”
“You gave up the real mole in return for immunity,” Jack said. He was scarily calm.
Mike must have caught it, too, because he jerked his head and two guys ranged themselves between Jack and Waters. “He’s telling the truth, Jack, but he also had to turn over all the information on his marks.”
“I wasn’t boasting when I claimed I could cripple Congress,” Waters said.
“So nothing happens to him?”
“He’ll be resigning his seat for health issues,” Mike said. He held up a hand, listened to his earpiece for a minute. “D.C.’s finest are here. I gotta go outside and start the jurisdiction dance.”
Waters leaned back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach.
“Are you going to let him get away with that?” Aubrey asked Jack.
“He thinks he’s won, but he’s lost just about everything.”
“Until I get a job in the private sector,” Waters said, “probably making more in one year than you’ll make your entire life.”
Jack looked at him. His expression was deadpan, but something in his eyes leeched the humor from Waters’s face. “Good luck with the job hunt,” he said.
Jack took Aubrey by the arm and walked her out the study door.
“That’s it?” Aubrey demanded.“‘Good luck with the job hunt?’”
“You’ve been nagging me about self-control since the day we met, and now you’re mad that I actually have some?”
“This is the wrong time for self-control.”
“Too late now,” Jack said.
“Can I go back in there and hit him?” She turned around and tried to put her fist where Waters’s mouth was, but there were two agents behind her. They caught her by the armpits and hauled her outside to a waiting car.
She looked for Jack, but he was gone.
And she didn’t even get to say good-bye.
By the end of the third day of debriefing, Aubrey figured they had enough for a novel. Carefully edited.
That was the problem. They knew she was leaving something out, so they kept questioning her.
What they hadn’t counted on was her stubbornness. She could repeat her revised version of the last two weeks word for word, time after time. She had a damn good memory and she was prepared to use it.
What she hadn’t counted on was the FBI’s tactics. They wouldn’t let her leave the room, and the room consisted of a bed, a bathroom, and a television. There was room service, but they only brought food. And books. They let her have as many books as she wanted, but even books weren’t helping. Nothing put Jack out of her mind.
Aubrey hadn’t heard from him since they’d parted ways at Waters’s brownstone. She understood his silence. She’d been nothing more than a means to an end for him, and now that the end had come, she meant nothing to him, period. It made perfect sense from an intellectual standpoint. But the heartbreak was excruciating. The only way she survived it was to turn it into anger, and the only place to work off her anger was on the debriefers. All in all it was going pretty well. She managed not to think about Jack for minutes at a time now.
When the phone rang, she pounced on it. It was somebody from the FBI; they were the only ones who knew where she was. But even talking to the FBI was better than spending more time alone with her own thoughts.
“Aubrey.”
Or maybe not. “Jack,” she said, or tried to. Nothing came out of her mouth, but there was plenty going inside her, physical, emotional, and hormonal.
“You there?” he said.
Aubrey nodded her head and managed something noncommittal, encouraging him to talk while she coaxed her heart down out of her throat. Better to concentrate on what he was saying, because eventually he was sure to say something irritating or insulting.
“Say something, Aubrey.”
“There are three words I never expected you to say to me.” And they weren’t even the right three words, and the fact that she was still hoping he’d say them brought the anger back full force. She had just begun to convince herself Jack was gone from her life for good, and with all of six words he’d dumped her right back into the black hole of heartache. “Why are you calling?”
“You don’t sound happy to hear from me.”
“No. I’m happy. Really.”
There was silence from the other end of the phone, a Jack-rolling-his-eyes kind of silence, then, “I hear you’ve been giving the debriefers a hard time.”
“They started it by locking me up,” she said, “and now they’re underestimating me. They keep asking me the same questions even though they know they’ll get the same answers. It’s pretty insulting, actually.”
“You’re trying to out-stubborn them.”
“I’m not trying, I’m succeeding.”
“They’ll let you go when you tell them what they want to know,” Jack said.
“I told them everything except . . . you know. Did you—”
“No.”
“Then they’ve gotten everything out of me they’re going to get.”
“There’s no reason to keep you locked up then, is there? So why haven’t you broken out?”
There’s a good question, Aubrey thought. If Jack had tried to keep her in a hotel room against her will for a week, she’d have found a way out. Because she had a place to go. And now she didn’t.
Okay, there was her house, but the house had a mortgage and continual renovations meant she had no real savings to speak of. On top of which there was a car loan, but no car, and she’d maxed out her credit cards.
Going back to work didn’t seem like such a treat, either. Going back to work seemed like a slow death, one boring day after another, stretching out ahead of her until she was a dried-out old crone with a head full of useless knowledge and a life devoid of people.
She had no real friends, no family, just an empty house that didn’t seem so critical to her existence anymore. And it was all Jack’s fault. Jack hadn’t blown up her house, but he’d blown up her life, and now she didn’t know what she wanted or where she belonged.
Of course without Jack she’d belong in a cemetery—
“Did you see the news last week?”
“There was a lot of news last week, Jack,” she said, grateful he’d changed the subject even if she didn’t like the new one much more than the last.
“Waters is dead,” Jack said. “A tragic accident.”
“You don’t buy that.” Neither did she. “I’d suspect Danny and Carlo, if we hadn’t lost them before we got to Georgetown.”
There was no response, but Aubrey had learned to read Jack’s silences. “What aren’t you telling me, Jack?”
“I might have mentioned some of the more unique aspects of your backpack to Danny on the plane.”
Aubrey opened her mouth, but nothing came out. No wonder he’d been so calm in the face of the congressman’s smugness. Waters had been a dead man already, marked in the same manner and using the same tool he’d planned for Aubrey. She didn’t know how to feel about that.
“What if I told you that information was the price of our lives?” Jack said.
Now she knew how to feel about it. “So . . . how sure are you that Danny and Carlo aren’t hanging around, waiting for me to get out of here?”
“A man in Corona’s position has to stick to some basic rules. If he doesn’t punish or reward the same behavior the same way every time, the people who work for him won’t do what he wants them to do.”
“Which means he’ll keep his word to us.”
“As long as we keep our word to him.”
“So he gets off scot-free?”
“I’m not on the case anymore, but I filled in my replacement on what I learned about Corona.”
Meaning his location.
“It wasn’t much, but it brought us a little closer,” Jack said. “Corona’s time is coming.”
Aubrey digested that for a moment, realized it didn’t change a whole lot for her. And it wasn’t the only loose end left. “Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“My backpack is here, right in this room with me.”
“I know.”
And he’d chosen not to visit her.
“It’s better this way,” he said. “You always wanted to go back to your life. Once the bureau’s done with you, it’ll be safe for you to go home, and if there’s any trouble with your job at the Library of Congress, Mike will handle it for you. It’ll be like you never left town and we never met.”
“And that’s what you always wanted.”
“Aubrey . . .”
She waited until she couldn’t stand the silence anymore, then said, “Good-bye, Jack.” She put the phone carefully in the cradle, sat carefully back in the chair, and stared out the window at the bright, sunny sky.
After a moment, or an hour, she picked up a book from one of the stacks scattered throughout the room and opened the front cover. And to hell with Jack Mitchell.
Jack had spent the first few days after Waters’s town house being debriefed himself. Like Aubrey, his verbal account had included a little creative rewriting of the sequence of events. He might not have her memory, but he knew how to give a report so that it only included what he wanted it to include. The agents who interviewed him were no less aware of his prevarication, but they had to balance their desire for the truth with the chances of breaking Jack down. They sent him on vacation instead.
That would have been punishment enough, but then he had to go and call Aubrey. She was a woman who remembered every word she heard but rarely believed them the first time around, so he’d wanted to make sure she wasn’t thinking . . . anything where he was concerned. He’d wanted it to be final, and “Good-bye, Jack” was as final as it got.
So why did her last two words keep replaying over and over in his head? Why did every other thought revolve around her and even the memory of her more irritating moments make him smile?
Because he was thinking too much, and there was only one remedy for that.
He walked into Mike’s office two days after he’d called Aubrey, less than a week after the showdown at Congressman Waters’s town house and nearly a month after he’d been labeled a mole. Mike was behind his desk, and for a moment Jack got caught up in the overall normalcy of being in the shabby, cluttered little room again. Aubrey was history, he was righteous with the bureau, and Mike would send him on a new assignment. His world made sense again.
“You’re supposed to be on vacation,” Mike said by way of greeting.
Jack snorted, dropping into a chair. “I took two and a half days off.” And that had been enough. After he called Aubrey, he’d left his apartment and just walked, aimlessly, mindlessly, letting his feet pick the direction. He’d wound up in front of the Library of Congress—and he didn’t think it was his feet that took him there.
It was a traitorous lump of muscle in his chest that didn’t realize what kind of life he led. He spent most of his time under cover, in mortal danger, trying to bring down the worst of the worst. There was no room in his life for a wife and, Christ!, kids? And even if he were fool enough to think he could adjust his life to include a family, it would only divide his attention because he’d be constantly worried that somebody would discover his weakness; he had that much in common with Pablo Corona. Except the people Jack went up against wouldn’t scruple to use someone he loved against him.
No, best to bottle up his feelings and move on. And Aubrey would do the same. Jack knew she was in love with him. She’d gotten better at hiding her feelings, but hell, he’d spent nearly two weeks, twenty-four hours a day exposed to her, and there’d been that one day, in the motel room, when it hadn’t been just sex for her. It had been love. True, she’d shot him a half hour later, but he wasn’t holding that against her. Being in love made him want to shoot something, too. Hence the urgency to get back to work.
And Aubrey would go back to the library, settle down with some Calvin Klein-wearing, power-hungry political aide or junior congressman, and host parties where she entertained his cronies with her memory tricks. And if that made Jack regret that Waters wasn’t the only congressman he’d put out of commission, well, he’d never had a very high opinion of politicians to begin with.
“Vacation’s over,” he said to Mike, “I need a new assignment.”
“It’s not that simple,” Mike said. “The men upstairs weren’t too happy with the way you dealt with Corona. And the men on the hill aren’t too happy with Congressman Waters’s fate. Bad enough that you went rogue, dragged a material witness all over the country, and then came back here to confront a United States congressman—and that congressman turned up dead less than forty-eight hours later.”
“Not by me. I was being debriefed.”
“Yeah, your whereabouts are carefully documented.” But Mike’s tone indicated a pretty high level of suspicion about the possibility of Jack’s indirect involvement.
“With Waters dead there’s no way the country will be bogged down in scandal and hearings and all that political bullshit.”
“That political bullshit keeps you in a job. And since we’re talking about jobs, did you know Aubrey Sullivan quit hers?”
That stopped Jack for a beat or two. She loved that job. “Why’d she quit?”
Mike shrugged. “Maybe you should ask her that question.”
“I’m not planning to talk to her anytime soon.” Wake up in a cold sweat over, fantasize about, and think of constantly, but not talk to. He’d made that mistake once, and once was enough.
“You can’t talk to her anyway. She’s still being debriefed.”
“What?” Jack came halfway out of his chair before he realized he was outraged over the thought of Aubrey being held prisoner by a bunch of FBI suits and there was nothing he could do about it. “Why? With her memory, the story should have taken a couple of hours at most.”
“Way I hear it, they don’t think she’s telling them everything.” True, Jack thought, but they weren’t going to get it out of her by keeping her locked up. If there was one thing Aubrey hated more than anything else, it was somebody making her decisions for her. Jack had learned that the hard way . . .
Shit.
He sat back in his chair, scrubbed a hand over his face, but the truth wouldn’t go away. He was a jackass, a chest-thumping, stubborn, Neanderthal of a jackass. Before he met Aubrey that had worked for him. Before he met Aubrey he’d been able to make a decision, act on it, and never look back. Now . . . man, had she done a number on him. He’d been so sure walking away from her was the right thing to do, and then he had to go and think about it and think about it until he realized that from Aubrey’s side what he’d done was take away her choice. She really hated when he did that.
So maybe it was time she had some options. “Y’know, Mike,” he said, “the bureau tried to recruit Aubrey right out of college.”
“Really?” Mike mulled that over for a second or two. “Seems to me a woman with a photographic memory would be great at analysis.”