Before he could clearly see the soldier's features, Winter knew the young man was familiar to him. Even the uniform didn't mask the cocky stride, the set of his friend's shoulders. Greg Nations was not merely younger than he had been when Winter first met him at Glynco-he was altogether different. Only the eyes were the same. The jaw was rounder, the nose wider, the cheeks fuller, and even the ears angled at nearly ninety degrees from his skull.
“Greg?” Winter said. “I thought you were dead. They told me you were dead.”
Greg skirted him and kept going.
“Greg!” Winter yelled. “Greg, wait! Where you going?” His heart was breaking. Grief and a sense of overwhelming loss filled him. “Don't go! Talk to me! Please!”
Winter caught up to him in a few strides. He grabbed Greg's shoulder and turned him so they were face-to-face.
The soldier was no longer Greg Nations. The soldier was now Lieutenant Commander Fletcher Reed, but where his eyes should have been, there was smooth skin, eyes crudely drawn on with a dark marker pen.
Winter woke with a start in a real hospital bed. Sean was curled up in a chair beside him, watching him.
“Bad dream,” he said.
“Do you feel like listening?” she asked him.
“Of course,” he said truthfully. He wanted to hear everything she had to tell him.
108
“I would have told you about Sam,” Sean began, “but from the time I was old enough to understand, my mother drummed into me that I should never tell anybody he was my father. It was my first and best-kept secret.”
Sean studied Winter's face for a reaction, but he just nodded and smiled weakly. “I can understand why you might keep a thing like that to yourself.”
“It was because my mother was afraid that Sam's enemies might kidnap me to hurt him. He had a lot of enemies always looking for an edge. My mother met Sam while she was at Newcomb studying painting. She was in a club one night and he saw her. He pursued her and she thought he was exciting. One thing led to another and she got pregnant. She told me that Sam was her first experience and she didn't take the necessary precautions.”
“Good thing she didn't,” Winter said.
“Sam wanted her to marry him, but she knew it was impossible. She was a free spirit and knew he would have smothered her, plus there was the danger angle. She ran away and lived with her aunt in Boston and had me. Sam showed up at their doorstep and my mother said that he picked me up and cried from joy.
“My mother refused to return to New Orleans, but she agreed to let him support us and to form a trust for me, which he gladly did. It's grown over the years and it allowed me to have a nice life, paid for my education, and supports me still. Because Sam loved me, my mother agreed to let him be involved in my life.
“Sam spent Christmas and my birthdays in Boston with us, and I used to spend summers here in New Orleans with my mother. Sam's men all thought she was his mistress. That way we could stay in his house or at the lodge, and except for having to use different last names and lie about where we lived, it was fine. Bertran Stern, his lawyer, knew who we were, and we communicated through him.”
“I remember that on the porch that night, you told Angela and me your father taught you how to shoot guns.”
“That picture of me with the duck was taken one winter when my mother and I came down and he took me hunting the first time. I didn't like killing birds, but I did it for him. He made sure I was skilled in defending myself in every possible way.”
“I got a taste of that on the beach.”
Sean laughed. “You sure did. He made sure I learned karate, defensive-driving techniques, and a lot of other survival skills normal girls don't need to know.”
“If he was so protective, how could you have believed he was trying to kill you?”
“I never knew him that well, and it's sad that I didn't. My mother, a beautiful and vibrant woman, never dated another man. A few years ago she confessed to me that it was because she didn't want Sam to think for a moment that she would betray him in any way. She told me that the one unpardonable sin in Sam's eyes was betrayal. She said that he would kill anyone who betrayed him, and I knew she was totally serious. I knew from a hundred sources that Sam had killed friends and members of his own family who had crossed him. I didn't think about it until after those men came to Rook and you said Dylan was working for Sam. Then I assumed he thought I had betrayed him with Dylan. But I never told Dylan that Sam was my father. I planned to eventually, but the time never felt right.”
“Russo knew you were Sam's daughter.”
Sean nodded. “When I met Johnny, he was working at Sam's vending company and he was nice to me. At some point, Sam told Johnny that I was his daughter. I had Johnny's private number because in the last few years Sam used Johnny to communicate with my mother and me. Sam trusted Johnny, but he never should have trusted anybody from his own world.”
“You didn't ever mention Sam to Dylan?”
“The only way Dylan could have known about my connection to Sam was if someone who knew told him.”
“He worked for Sam. Maybe Sam told him.”
“Sam told me Dylan didn't work for him. He said he'd never met him and that he couldn't believe Dylan was bringing him down with lies. Sam assumed I had told Dylan about him and that Dylan lied about killing those people for Sam so he could get a deal with the government.
“If Dylan was killing Sam's enemies for someone, it could have been Johnny, because they would have had the same enemies. Sam was effectively out of the crime business, had no reason to kill anybody, but Johnny did. Maybe Johnny set it up so Dylan knew enough about me to get close to me.”
“I'm sure it was something like that,” Winter said.
“I knew what Sam was. One night when I was ten, I looked out a window at Sam's house and saw him knock a man to the ground and kick him until he was unconscious, while two of Sam's men watched. Sam was smiling like a lunatic the whole time he was beating that poor man.”
“That's terrible. I don't blame you for keeping your relationship secret.”
“I just want what I've always wanted-to live a normal life without ever again having to lie about anything to anyone.”
“You deserve that,” Winter told her.
109
McLean, Virginia
Ten o'clock in the morning found Fifteen in the basement of his house sitting on his sleek Italian leather couch, his feet on a matching ottoman. The cigarette smoke swarming around him caught the flickering light cast by his television set, which was showing a nine-ball championship between two female opponents. He knew that the Asian champion, his favorite, would win, because he had watched the tape at least a dozen times. Now, like never before, knowing the outcome of the contest was comforting.
His frown deepened as his eyes moved from the champion-to-be leaning over the pool table to make a shot on the three ball to the coffee table where an ashtray, piled high with butts and ash, kept company with a vase filled with an explosion of silk flowers. The table was also littered with newspapers detailing the explosion in Manhattan and the intelligence reports on the New Orleans fiasco.
Herman Hoffman had passed on to all of his people the belief that they were untouchable, because the organization had been designed to be both too valuable an asset to the government and too dangerous to screw with. Now that invulnerability was ancient history-a blood-splattered myth.
Since he had met with his liaison at the CIA two hours earlier, Fifteen had been sitting alone in his basement weighing his options, smoldering over the mistake he had made. He cringed at the memory of the smug, sawed-off CIA lackey who had passed on the CIA director's threats, knowing that Fifteen didn't dare do more than sit silently and take the man's insults, one by one, nodding all the while like a shell-shocked imbecile. A month ago no one would have dared confront him, much less dictate to him.