Moonrise (26 page)

“Easier to get lost,” she said.

“I broke three men out of there before they put me in to die,” he said. “I can find my way.” He backed away, staring at her. “You don’t need to come with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can find you a safe house. I still have a few friends, connections in the county. That’s
how I found the house in Derrymore. I can see that you’re safely settled before I go up there.”

“No way.”

“You’ll do as I tell you.”

“The hell I will.”

“Annie, we don’t need to fight this battle all over again. You agreed to abide by my rules—”

“I’m coming with you, James.” She waited for the argument. She waited for the cool, mocking anger, or the heated fury. She waited for reason, for threats, for flirtation, all designed to make her change her mind.

“All right,” he said abruptly. “You’ve come this far, you can come the rest of the way. But you’re not going to like it, Annie.”

“Like what? The ruins of a prison?”

“You aren’t going to like what we find there. The lost souls of hundreds of men who died for their cause. And the truth about your father.”

“I can handle the truth.”

His smile was cool and bitter. “Can you? We’ll see, Annie. We’ll see.”

A
nnie had never seen such a bleak, barren spot in her entire life. The rain had stopped just before sunset, and while the wind still whipped strongly across the landscape, the chill came from within.

She followed him up the overgrown road in the darkness, struggling to keep up with him. He’d hardly said a word to her during the entire day. He just kept moving them from place to place, from pub to pub, where he’d sit and drink mugs of tea and smoke cigarettes.

Until night had fallen, and he took her out into the gathering darkness, and they started toward the ruins at the top of the hill.

She stumbled on the rough ground, falling, but for once he seemed barely aware of her. He just kept going, over the torn-up road, sure-footed, driven, and she’d scrambled to her feet and run after him, struggling to keep up.

When she reached the top of the plateau she stopped, searching for him among the broken walls, the dark piles of rubble. He was moving swiftly, and she was forgotten. She paused, glancing back over her shoulder. If any of James’s enemies, her enemies, were still after them, he would be too far away, too caught up in his quest, to save her. She opened her mouth to call after him, then stifled the need, the fear. There was no one around them this time—she’d learned to trust her instincts well enough.

She started after him, at a slower pace, careful over the broken piles of brick and mortar. The wind was howling across the heath, and she thought of his words. Of the countless men who’d died in this prison before time and anger had torn it down. Of the ghosts who still haunted the ruins.

When she was young, she’d seen an old Walt Disney movie about Ireland, and there’d been a banshee, wailing, calling to the dead, riding in the sky like a fiend from hell. It had always terrified her, and now the vision came back. Banshees, warning of an oncoming death. Didn’t the wind sound like a wailing voice?

James had disappeared from sight, and the panic that she’d been keeping at bay swamped
her again. And then she saw him, bent down over the rubble, digging in the dirt.

When she reached him, he hadn’t moved. He knelt on the ground, with ruin all around him. And in his hand was a dark bundle wrapped in plastic.

It was at that moment that the moon rose, sending a chill, silvery glow over the landscape. He stared at the bundle in his hand, then slowly began to unwrap it.

“How did you know where to look?”

He barely seemed aware of her, and she wondered whether he even knew she was there. And then he spoke in a low, raw voice.
“May you die in Ireland.”
A tarnished silver frame lay in his hand, and a small black box fell to the ground beside it. He picked it up almost absently, and she realized it was a tiny tape recorder. “This is where my cell was, Annie. This is where I died. This is where I opened my eyes and saw your father looking down at me, and I thought he was the archangel Gabriel come to carry me to my eternal rest.” His voice was lightly mocking. “Little did I know he was Lucifer, the fallen one. The arch fiend.”

“James …”

He shrugged. “I’m not blaming him for who and what I was. That had already been written in stone.” He held up the tape player in the
moonlight. “Do you want to hear it, Annie? Your father’s voice from beyond the grave? His last words to his favorite disciple?”

She didn’t want to hear it. He’d warned her about the truth, and she’d told him she was willing. But now, when confronted by it, she was scared half to death. “Yes,” she said.

He clicked the machine on. Even after months the batteries still worked, and Win’s elegant voice came floating out over the barren, moon-swept landscape.
“James, dear boy,”
he said, and Annie wanted to weep,
“by this time I will be dead, and things will not have gone as smoothly as I would have hoped. I have no doubt that it will be you who finds the picture frame and all that it contains. Nor do I have any uncertainty as to who and what I saw in my last moments on earth. I have always loved you like a son. I couldn’t have asked for more.

“Annie must have come to you. I’d hoped there was no need, but you know what a careful man I am. A stickler for details. She’s in danger, and she’s come to you for help.

“Treat her as you did me. With gentleness and respect, with kind attention to her needs. It’s all I can ask of you. Don’t make it painful.

“The picture frame holds the answers. I know you suspected as much, but in certain ways, dear James, you were too good a man. You
didn’t want to face the full scope of what I was doing. There were others with me, others less squeamish, less distracted by morality. And you have a strange kind of decency, dear boy. An honor that is rare and troubling.

“See that the information gets back to Washington. They betrayed me, and I was willing to go peacefully. But if you are here, listening to this message, then things have gone wrong and I’m no longer willing. I want them to go down with me.

“See to it, will you, James? As you saw to me? Kill them. Without the tenderness you showed when you killed me.”

The tape hummed in silence for a few moments longer. And then James turned to look up at her in the moonlight. The knowledge was too much for her. She couldn’t even move.

The irony should have made her laugh, but she was beyond emotion. She’d run to James for help in finding the man who murdered her father. She’d run to his executioner, looking for help.

She’d gone to bed with him. Opened her heart, her soul, her body to him. He’d taken everything, as he’d warned her. And there was nothing left but an empty shell, waiting for him to finish with her.

“Ah, Annie,” he said very gently. “I warned you that you wouldn’t like the truth, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” A distant part of her was amazed she had any voice at all. He rose then, and flung the cassette recorder away from him with powerful force. It smashed against a pile of stone, shattering, the tape spilling out in the moonlight like ribbons of blood.

The wind howled around them, like the voice of a thousand banshees, and it whipped his long black hair into his face, obscuring the cool sorrow there. When he held out his hand to her she took it. There was no place she could run to.

There was a car parked on a narrow side street in the little town. He broke into it with as little fuss as someone using a key, jump-started the engine, and waited for her to get in beside him. He seemed to have no doubt that she would. She did.

“Put your seat belt on, Annie,” he said.

She wanted to laugh. He was going to kill her, as he’d killed her father. He would do it as Win requested, quickly, painlessly, but he would do it and not think twice about it.

She fastened the seat belt. Her emotions had gone into hibernation, into a dark, quiet spot where all was peaceful. She watched him drive, his merciless profile, and she felt a sudden, latent curiosity.

“Why have you waited so long?” she asked. “Why have you kept me with you?”

“Because you held the key to the answers. Even if you didn’t realize it.”

She nodded, accepting it as the truth. Even if she hadn’t heard that damning tape, her usefulness had come to an end. Dr. Death didn’t need to make a house call this time. The patient had presented herself.

He took her out into the countryside, into the darkness, and some faint spirit began to revive in her. “How are you going to do it?” she asked quietly.

He was silent for a long moment. “I hadn’t thought much about it.”

“Do you have a preferred method?” she persisted. “Do you shoot people in the back of the head and dump their bodies in a ditch? That would work well for me. By the time they found me and identified me, you’d be back in the States.”

“If they found you,” he pointed out.

“I hadn’t thought of that. There aren’t very many people to mourn me. My father kept me fairly isolated. I never really learned the gift of making close friends. I don’t suppose a great many people will realize I’m gone. Martin will notice. You’ll need to come up with an explanation for him.”

“Yes,” James said in an even voice. “Martin will notice.”

“You were very efficient with a knife last night,” she continued on, forcing herself. “I’d rather you didn’t use one, though. I expect that might take longer. Hurt more. And I don’t like blood.”

“Understood,” he said coolly. “No knife.”

“I wouldn’t care to be strangled either,” she added as an afterthought.

“I never developed much of a knack for that anyway. It tends to take too long.”

They might have been discussing recipes, or interest rates. Annie breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good. Er … James? No severed body parts, please. I have a horror of such things. I think I must have been beheaded in a past life.”

He glanced over at her. His large, elegant hands were draped casually over the small steering wheel of the stolen car. “And who were you, Annie? Mary Queen of Scots? Anne Boleyn?”

“No,” she said in a small voice. “I was just some poor lady-in-waiting who got caught up in other people’s Machiavellian plots.”

His mouth curved in a cool, ironic smile. “No severed body parts, then. Any other requests?”

“How did my father die? Did you push him down the stairs?”

He looked away from her, and his profile was bleak. And for a moment he said nothing, staring straight ahead as he drove.

The memory came back to him, swift and sure and as clear as yesterday. He’d pushed it away long enough, but there was no use trying to hide. He could look at the past with cool precision. Knowing he had done what had to be done. And would do it over again if he had to.

Win Sutherland had always lived well. The house in Georgetown was a testament to his good taste and his stringent demands. Each piece of furniture, each painting, each unused silver ashtray, was chosen with an eye to perfection, a complement to his rigorously controlled lifestyle. Everything in Win Sutherland’s life, from his crystal glassware to his friends to his only daughter, was a carefully planned accessory. His control had been velvet, inexorable, and it had even included the moment of his death.

James had obeyed the summons, as he always had. He’d seldom been able to say no to Win, and that night, of all nights, it would have been an impossibility. The Georgetown house was still and silent, most of the lights
off. Win was waiting for him in the cherry-paneled library, a snifter of excellent cognac in his hand, a small table set for two, complete with candlelight and sparkling Waterford.

Win was sitting by the fire, impeccably dressed in a cashmere blazer, his silver hair brushed back from his almost unlined face, and the look in his blue eyes was gentle and loving. “I knew I could count on you, my boy,” he’d greeted James. “Pour yourself a drink.”

James had done so, for the first time in the almost twenty years he’d known and loved Win Sutherland at a loss for words. He took the leather chair opposite him, stretching out, keeping his muscles relaxed, ready.

“We’ll eat in a little while. I had Rene make up a gnocchi for us before he left. Remember the first time we had gnocchi together? It was in Venice. We were looking for Arnoldo. We found him.”

“Yes,” James said. Arnoldo Catablanco had been his first kill outside the military. A vicious member of the Red Brigade, he’d been eluding Interpol for years. Win had led James to him. Win had watched as James broke his neck. And then together they’d gone out for Valpolicella and gnocchi.

“You should have been my son, James,” Win said meditatively, staring into his glass of brandy. “I wanted you for Annie, you know.
When she was younger, I thought it was the perfect answer. You could marry Annie, and I would have you both.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Oh, any number of things,” he’d said airily. “You would have been a little too much for her to handle. She was better off with Martin. Someone milder, more easily malleable.”

“You don’t think I’m easily malleable?” He allowed a trace of bitterness to creep into his voice. “I would have thought you’d consider me to be completely gullible.”

“Not you, my boy. I’ve never made the mistake of underestimating you. You were always my biggest challenge, my brightest star, my favorite child. If I could fool you, I could fool anyone. And I did.”

“And you did,” James said.

Win drained his brandy. “Let’s eat before it gets cold,” he said pleasantly, rising from his chair. “I’m planning to enjoy this meal immensely.”

The table was set for lovers, the ripe scent of roses mixing with the lingering aroma of fine food and wine. Win Sutherland had always been a master at manipulation. He kept the dinner conversation flowing, and James found himself touched, and laughing, as the years fell away and he was young and hopeful once more, and Win Sutherland blew into his
life and showed him how he could save the world and make his penance at the same time. And the price was so small. Just a soul that he’d already lost.