“Yeah, I was about as much use to you as an imaginary friend.”
Gina smiled, remembering how mad she used to get when he’d said things like that to her.
Okay, my imaginary friend. What do I do now
? She’d already checked the entire room, making sure there were no hidden doors behind the furniture or beneath the wall-to-wall carpeting. The air conditioning vents were too small to use to escape. The walls were solid—painted concrete.
The ceiling looked like plasterboard. She’d tried digging at it with the can opener, but didn’t succeed at doing more than getting plaster dust in her hair. She’d need a saw to cut through it, and even then, it would take some serious time. Emilio or Crowbar Guy would notice the hole, and they’d be back to square one.
Or worse. Tied up.
She really didn’t want to spend the rest of her life tied up.
Gina sat down on the edge of the tub, closed her eyes, and tried to conjure up Max. What would he tell her, if she had him on the phone or—better yet—in the room with her?
“Find out want they really want. The key to any negotiation is knowing not what the opposition says they want, but what they
really
want.” If he were here, he’d be leaning against the counter, a picture of relaxed casualness.
What a joke. Of all the people she’d met in the world, Max was the most tightly wound. He was the most private, too, playing all of his cards close to his vest.
“Sometimes,” he’d told her once, when they were talking—but not about the things that truly mattered, like where they were going in their relationship, or how they truly felt, deep in their hearts, “it’s an even bigger challenge, because some people don’t know what they really want.”
He’d told her that he’d negotiated hostage situations where the hostage taker gave him a whole list of demands. Money, a helicopter to escape, a letter explaining his position printed in the newspaper, a pardon from the governor, and on and on. In truth, he’d just wanted someone to listen to him—really listen.
Max had also negotiated some situations where the hostage-taker was intent upon committing suicide by SWAT team. Not that the fool ever would have admitted it.
What Emilio wanted, however, seemed pretty cut and dried.
They have my wife.
Gina needed to find out who
they
were.
Who
had his wife, and why did they want Leslie/Dave/Grady in exchange for her?
Maybe she should sit down with Emilio and tell him about Max. Explain that he was a little tied up right now, but in a week or two he’d come here, and he and his FBI team would find and rescue Emilio’s wife and—
And they’d all live happily ever after. Get a clue,
her reflection seemed to mock her from the mirror over the sink. As Gina gazed at herself, she had a sudden clear image of her face, swollen and bruised.
The way she’d looked for weeks after being raped and beaten. She’d tried to talk to her captors while she’d been held hostage on that air-plane. She’d thought she’d established a rapport with at least one of them. Brother, had she been wrong about that.
She hadn’t understood what they’d truly wanted—that death was their prize. That
her
death was a given, even while they talked and joked and laughed with her. That she was already dead in their eyes.
It was a miracle that she’d made it out of there alive. A miracle orchestrated by Max and his entire task force. A miracle he saw as a failure.
His
failure.
They have my wife,
Emilio’s voice echoed.
Don’t believe him,
her swollen, bruised image scoffed.
Haven’t you learned anything?
But what if Emilio was telling the truth?
Open your eyes. Look around you. A windowless room. Locks on the outside of the door. This is not something that Emilio threw together for this particular occasion. What does he
really
want?
“What does he really want?” Max’s voice echoed. “Sometimes
he
doesn’t even know.”
There was only one gun. Two men, one gun. If there ever was a time to fight their way out, it was now.
Don’t forget the crowbar,
her battered image reminded her.
You’ve been hit with the butt of a rifle. Can you imagine being hit with a crowbar? Besides, they’ve treated you decently up to now. If you attack them, you open the door to violence. God knows what they’ll do to you. Although Crowbar Guy looked like he had a few ideas.
No, he did not. It was her fear that had imagined whatever salaciousness she was remembering now. Crowbar Guy’s face had been blank.
Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that,
her own face mocked her, with its nearly swollen-shut eye.
So what are you going to do? Hit Emilio with the back cover to the toilet tank, smash his head in? Grab his gun, shoot Crowbar Guy . . . You’ve seen dead bodies, one of them quite recently, as a matter of fact. Are you really prepared to kill? Look at you. Your hands are shaking just thinking about it. Or maybe you won’t get the gun. Maybe you’ll miss his head, and he’ll have the gun, and he’ll shoot you instead. Maybe that’s what
you
really want, because then it’ll just be over. Maybe what you want is suicide-by-Emilio—
“No.”
Gina stood up, turned on the faucet, rinsed her face with cold water.
She was a survivor, not a victim, and certainly not a quitter. She was going to survive this, too. She just had to figure out how.
“What does Emilio really want?” Max’s voice said again. “Sometimes he doesn’t even know. Sometimes he can’t admit it, even to himself . . .”
Gina grabbed a towel, drying her face.
What did you really want
? she would’ve asked him, if only he were truly standing in front of her.
From me, I mean.
“What did
you
really want from me?” In a move that was typical Max, he would turn the question around on her.
Honesty,
she’d tell him.
“Really.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Yes, really. I wanted you to talk to me. Really talk. You know, Max, all the years we’ve known each other, I can count on my fingers the times you told me about yourself—your childhood, for example. And even then? I had to drag it out of you.
Her imaginary Max smiled at her—the way he’d sometimes smile at her. As if he knew the punchline to some cosmic joke, and he was just waiting for her to catch up, catch on. “I am who I am—but apparently I’m not who you want me to be, am I?”
“Oh, blame me,” Gina said crossly now. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it?” He gazed at her with that calm lack of expression. Amazing. Even when he was imaginary, he could infuriate her. But then he dropped the bomb. “You’re the one who left me.”
“What?” Gina said. “Oh, perfect. Go away. Of course you’re going to say that, because you’re not really you, you’re me.” She was just imagining him, so of course her overinflated sense of guilt would play into it.
Yes, she’d left him. Because he shut her out. She’d left him because there was only so long a rational person could continue battering her head against an unmoving wall. She’d left him because she’d wanted more.
Except now all she could think about were the conversations they’d had where she’d asked about Max’s family. His sister—plagued with depression, attempted suicide so often the sight of an ambulance in his driveway became almost commonplace. God, how awful must
that
have been to live with? His parents—always angry, always frightened, always fighting. His brilliant grandfather, a mentor and good friend—no longer able to communicate thanks to a devastating stroke. His best friend’s brother—dead in Vietnam. His own brother, his one remaining ally, closest to him in age, but never a good student—escaped into the army the minute he turned eighteen, leaving him in a house that was dark with despair.
As for Max? How had he coped? Certainly not merely by watching Elvis movies.
“I got straight As.”
She’d always thought it was a dodge, when he’d told her that. A comment that kept him from discussing his real feelings.
And yet . . . “You got straight As because your grades were one of the few things you were able to control, right?” she said to him now.
Imaginary Max gazed back at her impassively. “If that’s what you want to think . . .”
“You tried to be perfect,” she accused him. “But no one’s perfect. And even if you’re perfect, there are still things that you can’t control. So you fail, and when you do, it drives you nuts, and you beat yourself up and blame yourself—even though it’s not your fault.”
She was his biggest failure. His words. He’d helped save an entire planeful of people, but he’d failed to keep her safe from that vicious attack. He wouldn’t forgive himself for that.
It didn’t matter that he’d failed for reasons not under his control. It didn’t matter that, according to most people’s definitions, he
hadn’t
failed. Gina was alive—how could that be a failure?
It didn’t make sense.
But it didn’t have to. Because his reaction wasn’t logical.
It was pure, raw emotion.
Here she’d thought he was hiding his true feelings from her, but all this time, he had been waving them, right in her face.
And no wonder he’d fought his attraction to her for all those years.
Whether or not he was right was moot. It really only mattered what he thought, what he felt. And, according to him, every time he was in the same room as Gina, he had to face the emotional pain of that devastating failure. He had to face that horrible self-blame.
“I can’t give you what you want.” How many times had Max said those words to her?
What if he’d been right?
What if he couldn’t give her what she wanted, because she couldn’t give him what
he’d
wanted—a chance to let the pain of his perceived failings fade into the past.
“You
left
me,”
he said now, again—her imaginary friend Max, still so accusatory.
“Yeah, but you didn’t come after me,” she told him. Told herself. Trying not to cry.
He hadn’t come then, and he wasn’t going to come now.
A soft knock made her jump. “Are you all right in there?” Molly’s voice. She was finally awake.
Gina wiped her eyes then reached right through the place where Imaginary Max had been leaning and opened the bathroom door.
Molly was still pale, but she looked much better. At the very least, she was standing.
“Are
you
all right?” Gina asked her.
“Still a little shaky,” Molly admitted. “Do you mind if I take a shower?”
She was too polite to ask who Gina had been talking to. Not when it was obvious with a quick glance around the tiny bathroom that she was quite alone.
“Of course not.” Gina pulled their nearly dried clothes down from the bar that held the shower curtain. “Emilio—Gun Guy—brought canned food. After you shower, you need to eat something, and then we need to talk about getting out of here.”
C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
P
ULAU
M
EDA
, I
NDONESIA
J
UNE
24, 2005
P
RESENT
D
AY
Jules could tell that the waiting was driving Max crazy.
Crazier, that is, than usual.
Truth was, his former boss was seriously hurting. Jules had been around long enough to recognize burnout when he saw it. Of course, true to form, Max Bhagat didn’t burn out quietly.
No, he was going down with full fireworks.
The fact that he’d gone twelve rounds with Grady Morant was one of those wildly waving red flags.
Even Max himself had noticed it.
I almost lost it,
he’d admitted to Jules.
Dude. Ya think?
And that
almost
was seriously in dispute.
That, plus the refusal to sleep, the hundred-mile stare, the complete transformation from a well-dressed FBI team leader to this ripe-smelling terrorist look-alike . . . True, the jeans and sneaks were Jules’ contribution. But the GQ almost-beard and seriously grungy hat hair were all Max.
And yes, over the past few days their access to soap and water had been nonexistent, while their exposure to stifling heat had been unavoidable. But yikes.
Getting from Jakarta to the eastern part of Indonesia had been a hellish series of hops from island to island via plane. And all legs of the journey had taken far longer than any of them had hoped. The very last segment, a boat ride in the darkness from Kupang to this remote island in the middle of nowhere, had been particularly unbelievable.
Then, of course, there’d been the hike up the mountain through the jungle—also in the pitch blackness of night—to this CIA surveillance post which just so happened to be right in Emilio Testa’s neighborhood.
It was a modest corner apartment with windows looking out onto a central open square—which had, from the looks of it, been a marketplace during more prosperous times.
Apparently, back in the 1970s, Meda Island had been quite the tourist spot. It had had plenty of tony resorts as well as vacation houses—luxurious second homes to wealthy Europeans who had lots of frequent-flyer miles to kill. But Meda’s proximity to East Timor’s civil unrest—going on for decades now—brought new meaning to the travel bureau’s promise of a unique, unforgettable vacation, and the richie rich peoples had stopped coming.
The less well-to-do folks who moved in to all those deserted elegant homes didn’t have a problem with East Timor’s violence going on virtually in their backyard. They were the types whose businesses weren’t quite kosher—who not only thrived in the area’s new lawlessness, but ramped it up to a whole new level.
This CIA apartment that they were currently occupying had been set up about a year ago to perform surveillance on a local baddie believed to have al Qaeda ties.
He was just one of the happy, friendly people in Mr. Testa’s neighborhood, living two houses down from Mr. T himself.
Coincidence, much? God only knew. Although if Testa
did
have terrorist ties, it would make it that much easier for Jules to say yes after they captured him, when Max asked if he could throttle him.
Right now, however, all throttling was on hold. Max may have been seething with impatience, but Jules was glad for this necessary down time. And grateful that they had a home base that included a roof.
“Why don’t you take a break, too?” Jules asked Max, sitting next to him, in front of the window. They’d confirmed that Testa’s house, where Gina and Molly were being held, had no backdoor or even rear or side windows. Nestled up against the mountainside at the other end of that open square, there was only one way in or out—through the front.
If
this was the right apartment.
If
Jules’s CIA contact, a man with the sole moniker of Benny, had gotten his info about Emilio Testa right.
Benny had missed their rendezvous at the dock in Jakarta, which was a giant pain in Jules’s ass because the agent was supposed to provide them with a CIA smorgasbord of techno-toys. Listening devices. Infrared goggles. A variety of microphones and minicams.
And Benny hadn’t answered his cell phone, so they’d boarded the seaplane sans equipment.
Which had sparked another argument between the members of his illustrious, nonofficial, 50 percent criminal, 50 percent psycho dream team.
Max now glanced back into the dimness of the CIA apartment, to where Jones was stretched out on the couch.
Mr. Most Wanted had already spent several hours wandering the neighborhood, getting to know the lay of the land.
“I don’t think I could sleep,” Max admitted to Jules. “I took a nap on the flight to Kupang . . .”
“For about forty minutes,” Jules pointed out. “And FYI, that was hours ago.”
Max just shook his head. “I just can’t . . .”
He looked out the window at the walls of that building across the dusty open market square, and Jules knew that Max would have sold his soul to the devil for X-ray vision, for just a glimpse of Gina, alive and unharmed.
The windows were all mirrored, otherwise Max would have been over there, climbing the side of the building like Spiderman, trying to look inside.
Please God, let Gina and Molly still be alive.
“Maybe you should just lie down and at least
try
to—” Rest, he was going to say, again, but Max cut him off.
“No.”
Instead of getting him to relax, Jules had incited that jumping muscle in the jaw thing. Damn it. “Sweetie, you’re killing me.”
He didn’t know how to help. If Max were anyone else, Jules would sit with him for a while, looking out at the night, and then start to talk. About nothing too heavy at first. Warming up to get into the hard stuff.
Although, maybe, if he tried that now, the man would either open up—Ha, ha, ha! Riotous laughter. Like
that
would ever happen—or he’d stand up and move outside of talking range, which would put him away from the window with nothing to look at, at which point he might close his eyes for a while.
It was certainly worth a try.
Of course there were other possibilities. Max
could
put Jules into a chokehold until he passed out.
So okay. Start talking. Although why bother with inconsequential chitchat, designed to make Max relax? And weren’t those words—
Max
and
relax
—two that had never before been used together in a sentence?
It wasn’t going to happen, so it made sense to just jump right in.
Although, what was the best way to tell a friend that the choices he’d made were among the stupidest of all time, and that he was, in short, a complete dumbfuck?
Max was not oblivious to Jules’s internal hemming and hawing. “If you have something you need to say, for the love of God, just say it. Don’t sit there making all those weird noises.”
What? “What noises? I’m not making weird noises.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “You are.”
“Like what? Like . . . ?” He held out his hands, inviting Max to demonstrate.
“Like . . .” Max sighed heavily. “Like . . .” He made a
tsk
ing sound with his tongue.
Jules laughed. “Those aren’t
weird
noises. Weird noises are like,
whup-whup-whup-whup
”—he imitated sounds from a Three Stooges movie—“or
Vrrrrrr.
”
“Sometimes I really have to work to remind myself that you’re one of the Bureau’s best agents,” Max said. “You have something to say to me, Cassidy, say it. Or shut the fuck up.”
“All right,” Jules said. “I will.” He took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Okay, see, I, well, I love you. Very, very much, and . . .” Where to go from here . . . ?
Except, his plain-spoken words earned him not just a glance but Max’s sudden full and complete attention. Which was a little alarming.
But it was the genuine concern in Max’s eyes that truly caught Jules off-guard.
Max actually thought . . . Jules laughed his surprise. “Oh! No, not like
that.
I meant it, you know, in a totally platonic, non-gay way.”
Jules saw comprehension and relief on Max’s face. The man
was
tired if he was letting such basic emotions show.
“Sorry.” Max even smiled. “I just . . .” He let out a burst of air. “I mean, talk about making things even more complicated . . .”
It was amazing. Max hadn’t recoiled in horror at the idea. His concern had been for Jules, about potentially hurting his tender feelings. And even now, he wasn’t trying to turn it all into a bad joke.
And he claimed they weren’t friends.
Jules felt his throat tighten. “You can’t know,” he told his friend quietly, “how much I appreciate your acceptance and respect.”
“My father was born in India,” Max told him, “in 1930. His mother was white—American. His father was not just Indian, but lower caste. The intolerance he experienced both there and later, even in America, made him a . . . very bitter, very hard, very, very unhappy man.” He glanced at Jules again. “I know personality plays into it, and maybe you’re just stronger than he was, but . . . People get knocked down all the time. They can either stay there, wallow in it, or . . . Do what you’ve done—what you do. So yeah. I respect you more than
you
know.”
Holy shit.
Weeping was probably a bad idea, so Jules grabbed onto the alternative. He made a joke. “I wasn’t aware that you even had a father. I mean, rumors going around the office have you arriving via flying saucer—”
“I would prefer not to listen to aimless chatter all night long,” Max interrupted him. “So if you’ve made your point . . . ?”
Ouch.
“Okay,” Jules said. “I’m so not going to wallow in that. Because I
do
have a point. See, I said what I said because I thought I’d take the talk-to-an-eight-year-old approach with you. You know, tell you how much I love you and how great you are in part one of the speech—”
“Speech.” Max echoed.
“Because part two is heavily loaded with the silent-but-implied ‘you are such a freaking idiot.’ ”
“Ah, Christ,” Max muttered.
“So, I love you,” Jules said again, “in a totally buddy-movie way, and I just want to say that I also really love working for you, and I hope to God you’ll come back so I can work for you again. See, I love the fact that you’re my leader not because you were appointed by some suit, but because you earned every square inch of that gorgeous corner office. I love you because you’re not just smart, you’re open-minded—you’re willing to talk to people who have a different point of view, and when they speak, you’re willing to listen. Like right now, for instance. You’re listening, right?”
“No.”
“Liar.” Jules kept going. “You know, the fact that so many people would sell their grandmother to become a part of your team is not an accident. Sir, you’re beyond special—and your little speech to me before just clinched it. You scare us to death because we’re afraid we won’t be able to live up to your high standards. But your back is so strong, you always somehow manage to carry us with you even when we falter.
“Some people don’t see that; they don’t really get you—all they know is they would charge into hell without hesitation if you gave the order to go. But see, what
I
know is that you’d be right there, out in front—they’d have to run to keep up with you. You never flinch. You never hesitate. You never rest.”
Max’s unflinching gaze never left that house.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Jules asked him quietly, “if you let yourself peel that giant
S
off your shirt and take a nap? If you let yourself spend an hour, an evening, screw it, a whole weekend doing nothing more than breathing and taking enjoyment from living in the moment? What’s going to happen, Max, if—after this is over—you give yourself permission to actually enjoy Gina’s company? To sit with her arms around you and let yourself be happy. You don’t have to be happy forever—just for that short amount of time.”
Max didn’t say anything.
So Jules went on. “And then maybe you could let yourself be happy again the next weekend. Not too happy,” he added quickly. “We wouldn’t want that. But just happy in a small way, because this amazing woman is part of your life, because she makes you smile and probably fucks like a dream and yeah—see? You
are
listening. Don’t kill me, I was just making sure you hadn’t checked out.”
Max was giving him that look. “Are you done?”
“Oh, sweetie, we have nowhere to go and hours til dawn. I’m just getting started.”
Shit,
Max said with his body language. But he didn’t stand up and walk away. He just sat there.
Across the street, nothing moved. And then it still didn’t move. But once again, Max was back to watching it not move.
Jules let the silence go for an entire minute and a half. “Just in case I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, “I believe with all my heart that you deserve—completely—whatever happiness you can grab. I don’t know what damage your father did to you but—”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Max interrupted. “You know, what you said. Just go home from work and . . .”
Holy shit, Max was actually talking. About this. Or at least he had been talking. Jules waited for more, but Max just shook his head.
“You know what happens when you work your ass off?” Jules finally asked, and then answered the question for him. “There’s no ass there the next time. So then you have to work off some other vital body part. You have to give yourself time to regrow, recharge. When was the last time you took a vacation? Was it nineteen ninety-one or ninety-two?”
“You know damn well that I took a really long vacation just—”
“No, sir, you did not. Hospitalization and recovery from a near-fatal gunshot wound is
not
a vacation,” Jules blasted him. “Didn’t you spend any of that time in ICU considering exactly
why
you made that stupid mistake that resulted in a bullet in your chest? Might it have been severe fatigue caused by asslessness, caused by working said ass off too many 24/7’s in a row?”