“So what does this politician have to do with you?” Max asked Jones.
“Nusantara was one of Chai’s . . . I don’t know, business associates, I guess you would call him,” Jones said.
Molly made a raspberry sound. “Says here he’s bringing honesty and trustworthiness back to Indonesia. This whole thing is all about what a hero he is. Incorruptible. Hah. Heru, the hero of the people. Right.”
“If that’s the case,” Jones said, “I can understand why he’s looking for me. I have some serious dirt on him.”
“Such as?” Max asked, his focus seemingly still on that computer screen. “You mentioned . . . his mistress?”
Jones nodded. “She was barely sixteen. And pregnant. Chai gave her to me and told me to kill her.”
“Dear Lord,” Molly said.
“I didn’t, okay?” he told her sharply. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.’ ”
She looked as if she were going to cry. “I wasn’t—”
“I know,” he said. “Shit, I’m sorry.” He rubbed his forehead. Looked at Molly from beneath his hand. “There are . . . things I never told you. Things I deserve to be . . .” He stopped. Started again. “Just let me . . . try to . . .”
Molly nodded, her face pale. Without her default smile, the lines on her face seemed pronounced. She looked exhausted.
And for the first time since Molly had discovered that lump in her breast, Gina realized that her friend could well be dying.
It was obvious that Jones, however, had been unable to think about anything else from the moment he’d gotten the news that Molly needed a biopsy. It was also clear that he thought of her illness as some kind of cosmic payback. Punishment for his sins.
There was sure to be a sin or two in the story he was going to tell them now.
Ever since she’d first met Jones, Gina had suspected his reputation as a dangerous man was not entirely trumped up. Still, this was not going to be easy to hear.
And it was going to be even less easy for him to talk about. Especially with Molly already upset.
But as Jones sat there, struggling to find the words, Molly reached out and took his hand. “Just tell the story,” she said gently. “You know I love you. What’s past is past. I’m not going to judge you—no one here is. We’ve all made mistakes.”
Jones held her gaze for a long time. But then he nodded. “It was . . .” He took a deep breath, blew it out hard. “It was toward the end of my . . . association with Chai. I think this probably was the event that made him decide to jettison me. But it started, I think, when he noticed that I spent most of my time in the hospital. Saving lives. Not going out and . . .” He shook off the memory.
“I don’t know, maybe I thought I’d sufficiently paid him back for getting me out of that prison. I really don’t know what I was thinking. It was another . . . lifetime ago. But I’d definitely cut myself off from the, um, uglier aspects of his business. I’m pretty sure when this all happened, he was testing my loyalty.” Jones laughed. “Apparently I failed.
“See, at the time Nusantara was . . . I don’t know, mayor, I think,” Jones continued. “Or maybe governor of . . . I can’t even remember the island or town or whatever it was. It’s a blur. But it was definitely two-bit and poor as shit. Still, he was running for reelection, and the race was tight. So I guess he thought he’d play the hero card. He had a connection—”
“Nusantara?” Max clarified.
“Yeah,” Jones told him. “He was relatively tight with another one of the crime lords who operated on a neighboring island. This guy created a lot of chaos—he was heavy into pirating, which is a huge business here in Indonesia. Anyway, this was someone who was four or five tiers down from Chai. It was no skin off Chai’s nose if this lower-level thug went out in a blaze of glory.
“So Nusantara set the thug up. He paid some hired guns to come in and blow the crime lord away while the guy was having a meal out on his patio. Only, whoops. Guess who came over for lunch that day, probably to try to talk him into staying away from the local fishermen. It was Nusantara’s political opponent. Along with his wife and two young kids.”
“Oh, Lord,” Molly said.
“Yeah,” Jones agreed. “It was a bloodbath. No one survived. Nusantara had made sure he couldn’t be connected to the murders. He’d set up the gang he’d hired to do the shooting—these were not people who went quietly when apprehended by the police, so . . . They were all killed.
“He was home free. But when he found out there were children among the dead, he panicked. He made a phone call, which his mistress, Esma, overheard.
“He was squeamish about actually committing murder, which was lucky for Esma,” Jones continued. “He didn’t have a problem, though, farming out his various crimes. He came to Chai with the girl, told him he needed her vanished. Chai delegated the task to me.”
He paused. Cleared his throat. “If I told you I never took a life because Chai gave the order, I’d be lying,” Jones said quietly. He was looking at Molly. “I guess I always justified it—I was ridding the world of some bad people and . . . But this, I couldn’t do. Except I knew if
I
didn’t, someone else would. So I took advantage of semantics. The boss had told me to get rid of her, permanently. So that’s what I did.
“I borrowed a seaplane,” he said, “and I took Esma far from Chai’s base of operations. I brought her to a village on this tiny island—I spotted their church from the air. I landed and motored into this cove, and we hiked up into the hills and . . .
“I told the village leaders that she was a widow—and that I had killed her husband. I said I’d found out that she was pregnant with his child, and now I didn’t want her anymore. Instead of killing her, I was going to leave her with them. If I saw her again, I
would
kill her. And then I’d come back and kill all of them. I also told them if I came back and she was gone, I’d kill them all. I gave her some money, courtesy of Chai. Not a lot, but enough to give her a fresh start. I hiked back down to the plane, flew away and that was that.”
Jones laughed. “Well, not quite. I guess I thought because I was, you know, Chai’s favorite son—his pet American expat—I guess I thought that we’d both just have a good laugh about our differing definitions for ‘get rid of her.’ I told him that she was as good as dead. We’d never hear from her again.
“Long story short, Nusantara went apeshit. He wanted her dead, he wanted proof she was dead. I guess he was afraid she’d turn up again some day, with his illegitimate child in tow sporting accusations of murder.” Jones shook his head. “Turned out Chai needed Nusantara’s cooperation for a shipment of drugs that was going out. He needed the police to be far away from his drop point, so he had to keep Nusantara happy.
“Chai beat the shit out of me, which was . . . not completely unexpected. But I didn’t tell him where I’d taken the girl. Not because I’m a hero,” he said quietly, his words directed at Molly. “But because I’d antici-pated something like this. I’d made a point to fly in circles after I left the island. I had no idea which island it was. I mean, I knew the general area, but . . . I told them this. Both Chai and Nusantara. And I knew Nusantara, at least, didn’t believe me.
“It wasn’t long after that, that I found out Chai was setting me up. He was going to sell me back to the U.S. as a deserter, which after being left for three years in that prison was a bad joke, but . . . Anyway. There you have it. Heru Nusantara—hero of the people—has blood on his hands. He must be planning to run for something big. Prime minister, president? What do they have in Indonesia? I never really paid attention.”
“A president,” Molly said. She must’ve squeezed his hand—she was holding it that whole time, because he looked at her. He tried to smile, but his eyes were haunted.
“It’s like it was a whole different lifetime ago,” he said quietly. “I hate even thinking about it.” He exhaled hard, turned to Max. “So I guess Nusantara’s cleaning all the potential skeletons out of his closet. What do you think? Am I crazy, or . . .”
“I think,” Max said, still focused on that computer screen, “that Emilio recently sold information about the American Embassy in Jakarta, along with a crapload of weapons, to an extremely powerful al Qaeda operative who went missing back in 2001, from Afghanistan.” He looked up as he popped the diskette out of the computer, put the next one in. “Guess he’s not dead.”
“We have to tell someone,” Molly said.
“We could tell this colonel who’s coming,” Gina suggested.
Jones cleared his throat. “I
meant,
what do you think about—”
“I think you’ve figured out who wants you and why,” Max interrupted him. “So far I’ve found a pretty solid connection between Emilio and Nusantara,” he said. “Emilio was paid to distribute these fliers—which he didn’t do very well, did he? Guess how much the going rate was for that particular job?”
“This ought to be good,” Jones scoffed. “What, ten, twenty K?”
“How’s a half a million dollars, U.S.?” Max asked.
“Shee-yit,” Gina said. “Are you serious?” But then she understood. The money was really the first installment of a bounty for bringing Grady Morant to this island.
“Nusantara paid him that, directly?” Jones wanted to know.
“No,” Max said. “There was a third party. Someone by the name of . . . Ram Subandrio. Ring any bells?”
Jones sat back in his chair. “Oh yeah,” he said, and it was clear to Gina that the bells that were ringing weren’t playing a happy song. “Remember how we’re up Shit’s Creek without a paddle, what with this tank coming and all? Well, the canoe just overturned. My old ‘friend’ Ramelan Subandrio used to work for Chai. He found him in the same prison where he found me—except Subandrio was on the other end of the ol’ cattle prod.”
Jones wasn’t done. He dropped the final bomb, his voice grim. “And last I’d heard, he’d been made a colonel in some special branch of some kind of secret police.”
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO
Would you honestly tell me if you thought we were going to die tomorrow?” Gina asked as she and Max made dinner.
That is, if opening a can and giving them each a small portion of her old favorite, monkey stew, could be called
making dinner.
They were rationing both their food and water, which seemed a little crazy. Unless, of course, the threat of that approaching tank was just a bluff.
“I don’t think we’re going to die tomorrow. I think this colonel’s going to come, and I’m going to negotiate with him, and we’re going to settle this peacefully.” Max went over to the giant bag of dried dog food. He opened it, sifted through it, all the way to the bottom, no doubt to see if a radio was hidden inside. But as Gina watched, he sniffed it. He even crunched on a piece.
He smiled, no doubt at the expression on her face. Held out a handful.
She shook her head. “No, thanks.”
“It’s not bad.”
“I’ll wait until it’s a necessity,” she said, but she moved towards him, drawn by his lingering smile, by the warmth in his eyes.
The ever-changing light from the security camera monitors played across his face. Aside from the flickering candle on the table, it was the only light in the room.
He was obviously exhausted. And distracted by the contents of Emilio’s closets, still spread out on the kitchen floor. She knew he was seriously unhappy with their current predicament. Being under siege was, by nature, a lack-of-control situation, and she knew Max well enough to know he found this maddening.
Gina was certain that even if she could talk him into skipping dinner and finding a room with a door and bed, he’d only sleep for a short time. He’d be up, just sitting—gingerly, because sitting hurt him worse than he was letting on—and staring at all the utterly useless things they’d found in those closets and cabinets.
He would sit and try to figure out what he’d missed. Or how he could use these relatively random household items to build a radio.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question,” she told him.
“I answered it,” Max said, as she came close enough for him to take her in his arms, as he pulled her against him.
He was looking at her the way she’d always wanted him to look at her. As if he weren’t afraid to let her know that he loved her. It was wonderful—or it would have been, if only they weren’t surrounded by men with guns who wanted to kill them.
Gina looped her arms around his neck. She kissed him, unable to resist the temptation. His mouth was warm and sweet and no, she was not going to let him distract her this way.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “The question was, would you honestly
tell
me. It requires a simple answer—yes or no.”
He kissed her again—longer this time, lazily. As if the army outside didn’t scare him to death.
Of course, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it only pissed him off. Maybe she was the only one who was terrified. Maybe he’d never been in a situation like this before—he was usually the one on the other side of the megaphone.
“Maybe we should forget about dinner,” Gina said breathlessly, “and just find a room with a door.”
She pulled away, ready to drag him into the hall, but he didn’t release her. “Yes, I’d tell you,” he said, as if he knew that part of her urgency came from her fear that this was their last night together, their last night on earth. “I promise. And no, I honestly don’t think we’re going to die.”
“We, you and me?” she asked. “Or we, all of us, including Jones—Grady. You know, old multiple-name-man, my best friend’s husband?”
He gave her another smile, but it faded far too quickly. “Grady Morant is why we’re here,” he finally told her. Again, not quite an answer.
“He’s a good person,” Gina said. “He may have done some bad things—”
“Very bad things,” he agreed.
“He had some very bad things done to him first,” she pointed out. “He was left to die—to rot in that prison where some really nasty people tortured him. For three years, Max. Did you know—”
“Yes,” Max said, “I do know.”
Molly had told her a little—just a bit—about Jones’s ordeal. Beatings, torture—both physical and psychological. It made Gina’s skin crawl just to think about it.
“Do you think that excuses the fact that he then went to work for Chai?” Max asked her now.
Gina didn’t hesitate. Chai had gotten Jones out of there, made the torture end. “Yes, I do.”
Max nodded. “It’s an interesting ethical debate.”
“It’s not an ethical debate.” Gina pulled away from him, stepping over piles of newspapers as she went back to the counter where their plates of food were sitting. “It’s a man’s
life.
”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Believe it or not, I like him, too. Which is saying something, because I didn’t at first. I’m just not as sure as you are about the free pass for his previous life of crime.”
“Please don’t give him to the colonel and this Nusantara guy.” Gina scraped the food they’d set aside for Molly and Jones onto the two other plates. It was more than obvious that they weren’t coming down. And in this heat, the food wouldn’t keep. Since they’d unplugged it, the refrigerator was only slightly cooler than room temperature. “If he says they’ll kill him, they’ll definitely kill him.”
“He seems ready to make that sacrifice,” Max pointed out.
Gina handed him a plate and a fork. “He loves Molly.”
“That I believe,” Max said. “He’s willing to die for her.”
“That’s, like, butthead stupid,” Gina told him. “Dying
for
someone? You want to be a real hero? Figure out a way to save both the person you love
and
yourself. And then spend the rest of your life working your ass off to keep the relationship healthy. I mean, dying is easy. Living’s the real challenge.”
Max nodded, as they both ate the stew, right there, standing up. It was cold and a little greasy. “The dog food’s better,” he said, and she laughed.
“Yeah, I bet.” She licked her plate clean. “I was going to say, don’t ever die for me, but I changed my mind—I’m just going to say, don’t ever die.”
Max smiled. “I love you,” he told her, and this time he didn’t look quite so pained as he said it. As if he weren’t quite so appalled by the idea.
It was somewhat surreal.
“So what happened?” she asked him as he licked his plate clean, too. She hadn’t done it to be suggestive. It just seemed the best way to handle both the lack of food and water for cleaning. And yet when Max did it, all she could think about was . . . finding a room with a door. Green Bermuda shorts had never been so alluring. She cleared her throat. “I mean, between me leaving, and you deciding that you want to, you know, marry me. What changed?”
“I missed you,” he said.
Gina glanced at him as she wiped their plates and forks with a cloth. Her mother, the sterilization queen, would’ve been appalled, but then again, her mother had never been under siege. “That’s it? No near-death revelation, where Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Elvis pushed you away from the light and told you, in three-part harmony, to go find me? I mean . . . how
did
you find me?”
Max’s smile widened, and if she pretended not to see the current of tension that was wrapped around him, she might almost believe that he would be happy to stand there, forever, just gazing at her.
“Why did I think I could live without you?” he wondered aloud.
Those were words she’d never thought she’d hear outside of her dreams. Her heart skipped a beat, and his smile made her go into freefall. God, she just could not get used to the way he was letting himself look at her.
“Well, yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling you for years.” Gina crossed her arms, leaned back against the counter. From where she was standing, she had an excellent view of that kitchen table. That, plus Max’s smile and his plate licking and his eyes and his hands and his mouth and his green shorts and his everything made it impossible for her not to think about sex. And it would just be too embarrassing if Molly or Jones came down here to find them going at it again. “How
did
you find me? Did Jones call you, or . . . ?”
“No, actually.” Max leaned back against the counter, too, careful of his posterior, wincing slightly, but trying to hide it, of course. “I was . . . already in Hamburg.”
“That terrorist bombing,” Gina said. “I saw it on the news. The TV worked when we first got here—before the Army of Darkness out there shot down the sat-dish. That
was
why you were in Germany, right?”
“Sort of.” He paused for a very long time, then said, “They had your name on a casualty list of people killed in the attack.”
Gina stopped leaning back. “What?” she whispered, horrified.
“I went to Hamburg to identify your body,” Max told her in his dispassionately cool negotiator voice. But the look in his eyes, on his face was neither dispassionate nor cool. “It turned out this other woman had your passport. When you ditched it at the forgers, the terrorists responsible for the bombing picked it up and . . .”
Gina couldn’t breath. “I didn’t want Emilio to know which one of us was Molly,” she told him. She couldn’t believe this. “Max, my God, you actually thought I was dead?”
She saw the answer in his eyes as he nodded.
“It was a near-death revelation of a different kind. They had you out on this table and . . . I had to go into this room—a morgue, I guess, right at the airport and . . .” His voice shook. It actually shook. “Only it wasn’t you, so . . .”
But he’d thought it was. He’d been told . . . She moved toward him, and he pulled her into his arms. He just held her, tightly.
“For how long?” she whispered, and he understood.
“It was around twenty-four hours between the time I got the news and the time I found out it wasn’t you.” He forced a smile. “It was a very, very bad day.”
“I’m so sorry,” Gina said. But oh, God. “My parents?”
“They know you’re alive,” Max reassured her, touching her face, as if he still couldn’t quite believe she wasn’t dead.
She knew, somewhat, how he was feeling. She’d sat beside him, touching him, just content to be near him, for days on end in the hospital, after he’d almost died.
“Jules made sure they were kept informed as we went,” Max continued. “Until, you know, we lost cell phones.”
Jules.
It was obvious that Max was thinking about him, too. The muscle jumped in his jaw as he clenched his teeth.
“Gina,” he said, pulling back even farther, taking her hands. “I know you said you love me. All of me and . . . Just last night I was talking to Jules and I told him that I was afraid of hurting you. That I didn’t want you to . . . have to live in my life, in my world, with all my . . . bullshit and . . . I can’t promise you that it won’t be awful. I can only promise you that I’ll try. You accused me, once, of not trying and . . .” He nodded. “You were right. But you also always said that I . . . didn’t talk to you, and . . .”
“I was wrong about that,” she said softly, lacing their fingers together.
“I talked to you more than I ever talked to anyone,” Max admitted. “I’m not, you know, like Jules. He could really . . . go. Really get pretty intensely personal, pretty quickly. I was sitting there last night, thinking, thank God he’s gay—otherwise the two of you would’ve run away together, years ago. I just . . . There are some things I can’t talk about very easily. So if that’s what you want—”
Gina had to laugh. “When I met Jules,” she told Max, “I was already in love with you. It didn’t matter if he was gay or straight or whatever. I love you. What I want is
you.
And please stop talking about Jules as if he’s dead. We don’t know that.”
Maybe not, but Max strongly suspected it. Gina could see that in his eyes.
“I’ve loved you for a long time, too,” he admitted. “Probably since you asked me if I was the janitor.” He laughed softly, shaking his head.
“What? When did I . . . ?” She had no idea what he was talking about.
“It was one of the first things you said to me, over the radio, while you were on that hijacked plane,” Max told her. “I asked if you were okay, and you asked me if I was the airport janitor, because that was a really stupid question. Considering the circumstances.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do,” he said. “I remember thinking that you were the most incredibly courageous woman on the planet. To do what you did. To survive what you survived, and then still be able to make jokes and . . . To not be afraid to live.” He paused. To forgive me for letting it happen.”
“You
let
it happen about as much as I did,” Gina told him. Please God, don’t let him start with this again.
“I know. But that didn’t keep me from wanting a do-over. There were things I could have done differently during the hijacking. Not
should
have done—it was a crapshoot, I know that. I
knew
it.” He looked down at their hands, fingers intertwined. “I wasted so much time running what-if scenarios in my head. What if I’d done
this
differently, what if I’d done
that
instead . . .”
“If you’d done any of it differently,” Gina pointed out, “I might’ve been killed, instead of—”
“I know,” Max said again. “I do know that. I did know it. Logically, rationally—it all made sense. But I just couldn’t let it go.” There were actually tears in his eyes. “And then . . .” He forced the words out. “Then I was told you were dead. Killed by a terrorist bomb in Hamburg.”
He swallowed. “I think, before that, I was just waiting for you to come back. I think I expected—that I counted on—you having the sense and, and . . .
vision
I guess, to shove your way back into my life someday. And suddenly, a bomb went off, and someday was gone.
You
were gone. Forever.”
“Oh, Max,” she breathed.
“And none of it mattered anymore,” he whispered. “None of it. What I should have done four years ago, what I could have done . . . The only thing that mattered was what I
didn’t
do last year, when I had the chance. Which was tell you how much I loved you, and to admit that I wanted you in my life—if you were crazy enough to put up with me.”