He sat back again. Despite the warmth of the wine cellar he now had the chills. He was running a fever and as often happened to the patient whose temperature rises rapidly, he’d begun to feel as if he were freezing.
He held the towel to his face. He felt as if he might throw up.
He put a hand to his leg and touched the outlines of his wound. It was hot, burning with infection once again, swollen and painful to the touch.
What had he done?
In a vain, desperate effort to hear his wife’s voice again, he’d stopped taking the medications Danielle had been giving him. The sickness had brought his wife to him once, or so he’d thought: the sickness and the stone, the conduit through time. But as he’d become well, her face had vanished; her voice no longer touched his mind. It was like waking from a dream and wishing only to go back to sleep and find it somehow. And McCarter could not bring himself to let that happen.
In response he’d shunned the antibiotics in hopes of seeing her again. But the only result was a growing fever and a cloudy mind just when they all needed it to be sharp.
CHAPTER 58
At the celebration, Father Domingo made a great fuss over Hawker and Danielle. The women of the town found it hard to believe Danielle could be happy in her thirties without having a husband. They insisted she dance with a few of the men, and then, realizing she had come with Hawker, they made it a point to get them dancing and drinking as much as possible.
By midnight the celebration had begun to wind down and Hawker and Danielle found themselves alone in an alleyway outside the guesthouse.
They leaned against the building and looked at each other.
Hawker found himself both captivated by her and concerned. The events of recent days flashed through his head and, strangely, Arnold Moore’s arrival in Africa settled in his mind.
“A peso for your thoughts,” Danielle asked.
He hesitated. “Just thinking about something Moore said to me in Africa,” he told her.
“And what might that be?”
“By the pricking in my thumbs,” he said, “something wicked this way comes.”
“Bradbury?”
He shook his head. “It’s from Macbeth, actually.”
“Shakespeare?” She smiled. “You surprise me.”
“I know a thing or two.”
“So it would seem,” she said. “You feel like Macbeth?”
“The witches said those words to him, after he became a traitor and murdered the king,” Hawker said.
“You’re not a traitor or a murderer,” she said, “and Arnold Moore certainly doesn’t think so.”
He guessed that she was right. Certainly Moore had hired him to save the thing he valued most in this world, Danielle. “There are those who would disagree,” he said to her, “but even that’s not what I’m getting at. Macbeth was a loyal soldier, a general who crushes the king’s enemies until the witches stir up his ambition and ego by telling him that he would soon become king himself. The question is, would he have done anything had they just kept their damned mouths shut?”
She guessed his line of thought. “You’re thinking about the stones and us, and the parchment Father Domingo had. Afraid we’re doing the witch’s bidding?”
“I don’t believe in destiny,” he said. “But people can be manipulated into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t.”
She took a deep breath and looked into his eyes. “Fate and destiny don’t have to be an evil thing. Where would I be, if you hadn’t come into my life?”
He studied her. So much in his world was darkness, but somehow she was like the light. The flickering glow from the fire bathed her face, laying shadows and mystery across her skin. A strand of dark hair had fallen across her eyes.
Hawker reached out to put it back behind her ear. He didn’t pull his hand away, and she didn’t ask him to. Instead he ran the tips of his fingers down the side of her face, softly brushing her cheek. She turned toward it, then looked back up at him as he leaned in and kissed her.
She kissed him back, pressing her lips into his. He could taste the wine on her tongue, feel the warmth of her breath in his mouth.
They kissed hard, then parted, looking into each other’s eyes for a second. He laced his fingers through her hair, placing his hand behind her neck, and cradled the back of her head. She closed her eyes and moved toward him again.
In a moment they were sitting on a stone bench with no backrest, facing each other, their legs straddling the bench. They were hidden in an alcove in a quiet alleyway. She kissed him again and rubbed her face against his, the soft skin of her cheek moving across his, the smell of her hair and the perfume of the night around them adding to the intoxication.
Holding her mesmerized him. It wasn’t as if he’d been waiting for her; there’d been plenty of women in various places. They had been comfort on hard nights, a chance to forget the hell that life sometimes was. But this was different. It felt like breathing again after drowning, a chance to rediscover what made life worth living.
He pulled her close, his fingers tracing the smooth curve of her neck, sliding down to the top of her back, to the top button on her dress. He opened it.
She traced a finger across his chest, leaning in and kissing him again. His hand slid down the side of her neck, across her shoulder, and down the smooth skin of her back. And then he stopped.
He pulled back.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, looking at him. Her hair was a mess, her eyes half open.
He moved his hand to her back, just above her bra strap. But the movement was different, clinical, searching.
She seemed amused. “Having some trouble back there, sailor?”
“Have you had surgery recently?” he asked.
“No,” she said, slightly aggravated. “Why?”
“Because you have a fresh scar, between your shoulder blade and your spine. And there’s something solid underneath the skin.”
A minute later they were back in the guest room. Danielle slid the top half of the cotton dress past her shoulders and leaned forward in front of the light. Suddenly she remembered the pain in her back after regaining consciousness in Hong Kong. She remembered the bright room that she’d thought had been an interrogation room.
Could it have been an operating room? Could they have implanted something in her?
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m guessing it’s some kind of tracking device,” he said. “Probably short range, but able to be picked up by remote sensors, like LoJack.”
Now it made sense. Of course they had given her boots back; of course they’d allowed her to escape. They knew what she was looking for and they realized she would find it more quickly than they would. Kang wanted her loose. He probably wanted Yuri with her, because of what he could do.
“This is how they found us on the water,” she said.
“Probably,” he said.
“And you thought you heard a plane earlier,” she said.
“It could have been anything.”
“But you know it’s not,” she said.
She stood up holding the dress against her chest to prevent it from falling.
She turned, trying to see the scar in the mirror, but it was in a place that was almost impossible to reach or even to see clearly. That had been done on purpose, so she’d never know it was there.
“How deep is it?” she asked, thinking she would have felt a lot more discomfort if they had cut into the underlying muscle.
She felt his fingers pressing for the edges. “It’s just under the skin.”
“Subcutaneous,” she said. That made things easier.
“What do you want me to do?”
She looked dead at him. “I want you to get a knife and cut the damn thing out of me.”
“Are you insane?” he asked. “Does this seem like a sterile environment to you?”