What had he been like as a boy? A scamp? Overactive and mischievous? Probably not. He’d probably been quiet and serious. Though there was something in his face, thinking about him as a boy, something almost…familiar about him, which was ridiculous.
“After the accident, he was in a coma for three months. He never walked again. And for six years, he never once complained, even when he was in excruciating pain. He loved company, but no one came. His school friends came for a while, then they stopped coming. Toby was in a wheelchair, he had seizures, and that frightened people. No one wanted to see Toby, be reminded that he was what could happen to them. My best friend from high school once said to me that she didn’t understand why I didn’t put Toby in a h-home.”
Caroline looked up at the dark face an inch from hers, dark eyes boring into hers. While she’d been talking, he’d stepped up the tempo of the lovemaking, making the bed creak.
Caroline began the long free fall into climax, but somehow she couldn’t stop talking.
“Toby was so incredibly brave.” Tears filled her eyes as she watched him watching her. “He couldn’t walk and, at the end, h-he could barely move, but he always kept his spirits up. He kept my spirits up. I think the past two years, he knew he was dying, but he never said anything. I was so p-proud of him, I thought he was braver than any soldier who ever won a medal, and—and every time I brought a friend home, or a date, they always behaved as if Toby weren’t there. Or they’d talk too loud, as if he were brain-damaged. And always, they behaved as if I should be—sh-should be ash-ashamed of him when I—Oh God, Jack. Oh!”
Shaking wildly, Caroline started coming, in long liquid pulls, so strong even her stomach muscles clenched. It was as if the pleasure cracked her wide open. Even before her sheath stopped its convulsions, she buried her face against Jack’s neck and burst into tears.
There was no stopping them, she couldn’t fight them if her life depended on it. The hot sex and her climax had simply blown away any defenses she might have mustered and left her raw and vulnerable, open to her deepest sadness.
She wept until she could barely catch her breath, then wept some more. She wept out her grief and anger and fear. She wept for the long lonely nights in which she didn’t dare weep because Toby would see her swollen face in the morning and know. She wept for three wonderful lives cut so tragically short, leaving her on the other side of the wall between life and death.
And she wept because, at times, it had felt like she wasn’t on the living side of that wall, but on the other side. How many times had she felt so dead inside, it was a surprise to remember that she hadn’t died with them?
She wept until her throat was raw, until her chest ached with every shaking breath, until, finally, there were no more tears left to cry.
Throughout, Jack held her tightly, still inside her, but unmoving. He didn’t try to talk to her, perhaps realizing she was beyond words. And she’d heard all the words, anyway.
You have to let go of your mourning. You must get on with your life, Caroline. Grieving is a process, and you’re not processing your emotions at all.
It was true. At times, she felt mired in a deep black hole, a bottomless, airless well with only the faintest of lights at the top. The words other people spoke could barely reach her.
So he knew not to give her words. He gave her something better—the comfort of his body. With all the thousands and thousands of words her friends had offered, nobody had thought to hug her, to let her cry her fill in someone’s arms, as Jack was doing.
Finally, the tears stopped, and she lay still under him, trying to catch her breath. Slowly and so gently she wanted to weep, he withdrew from her and, still holding her tightly, turned them over. Now she was lying in his warm, tight clasp, her head on his shoulder. His very wet shoulder. She couldn’t control her muscles or her thoughts, as ravaged as if she’d been in a bad accident.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dazed.
He wiped her face with something. “I know about loss,” he said quietly. “Do you feel better?” He reached under her hair to massage her scalp.
“Yes, thank you,” Caroline said politely in a waterlogged voice, then stopped. She did feel better. It felt as if the crying jag had coughed up a ball of black bile that had been poisoning her system for a long, long time.
He wiped her face again. She gave a half laugh. “I can’t believe you came to bed with a handkerchief.”
“It’s not a handkerchief,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the sheet.”
Caroline blinked, appalled. “I’ve been crying and blowing my nose into my sheet?”
“That’s okay.” Oh God, how she loved his voice. So deep, so calm. If only it could be bottled and sold as a tranquilizer. Better than Prozac. “We can change the sheets.”
We. One small word and it meant so very much. We can change the sheets.
Caroline realized that it was the very first time since her parents’ death that someone acknowledged that she wasn’t alone with a problem. Friends and the occasional date—somehow they were always up for an evening out or a night at the theater, but she was always alone with her problems. This particular one was stupid and minor. She had plenty of sheets, but something in his voice told her he’d stand by her for more than sheets.
“You wouldn’t have run away from Toby,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.” His hand tightened in her hair. “I wouldn’t have.”
She lifted her head away from his shoulder to examine his face. “I wish I’d known you earlier.”
Something—some strong emotion—crossed his face. The grooves around his mouth deepened, and the skin across his cheekbones grew tight.
“I wish I’d been around earlier, too.”
Brighton Beach
Brighton Beach, a community of 150,000, is part of Brooklyn. Its nickname is “Little Odessa” because most of its inhabitants are Russian immigrants.
Deaver appreciated the irony because he’d met the man he was going to see in Big Odessa—the real thing. He’d first met Viktor “Drake” Drakovich in the late eighties, when everyone on the ground, with two eyes in their heads and working brains, knew the Soviet Union was going belly up.
The CIA hadn’t known—the CIA couldn’t find its ass with two hands and a stick—but anyone stationed east of the Elbe had known.
Drake at the time was the biggest arms dealer in the world, operating out of a nondescript high-rise in Odessa, supplying arms to the mujehaddin in Afghanistan as fast as he could funnel them in. Deaver’d been a young Special Forces soldier and had been tasked with supplying money to Drake, in briefcases containing half a million dollars at a time. He’d once calculated that the U.S. government had poured at least $10 million into Drake’s hands.
It was value for money, too. Drake was known for his quality goods. He had four former Russian soldiers who’d been armorers on his payroll, and when you bought weapons from Drake, you got exactly what you had paid for, in good working order, clean, oiled and ready to roll.
Drake’s career stopped on 9/11. Actually, it stopped on September 10, when he got word that Shah Achmed Masood had been killed.
Deaver had been in Odessa that day, the day the shortwave radio gave the news, and he watched, astonished, as Drake immediately started packing up his gear, quietly, emotionlessly. “Bad things are coming,” was his only answer when Deaver asked what was going on. “This business is over.”
A day later, Deaver realized that Drake was right. And Drake was right to stop supplying the Taliban because the full weight of the U.S. government would have stepped in to crush him. Drake was smart, and he knew where to pick his battles. A month later, he was based in Ostende, Belgium, supplying arms to Ashad Fatoy, the Congolese rebel leader, where Deaver’d crossed his path again. When he could, he threw work Drake’s way, and once he was able to warn him that agents of the Belgian Flemish state security agency, the Staatsveiligheid, were closing in on him.