“I’m working on it. I’m working on it.”
Gavallan looked to his left and right, exhaling loudly. He was doing his best to think clearly, to come up with a plan that would get him out from under the FBI’s thumb. Sometime during the last two days, his world had been turned upside down, and he was still trying to right it. Graf Byrnes’s midnight call, Ray Luca’s murder, Cate’s miraculous last-second appearance, and a couple of sucker punches to boot—it had all left him feeling as beat-up as a secondhand catcher’s mit.
At two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, eyes glued to the rearview mirror, his stomach in knots that at any moment the police car on his tail would hit the siren and pull him over, Jett Gavallan’s emotional reserves had run dry. Grief, hope, worry—all were tapped out, and the only thing he was capable of feeling now was dread. For Graf. For himself and his company. For the whole damned world.
Inclining his head out the window, he caught a glance of himself in the mirror. He looked tired, a lined veteran of too many corporate campaigns. Thirty-eight going on sixty. Yet it wasn’t the fatigue that surprised him, but the hunted look in his eyes. He appeared weak. Defeated. Once a warrior, he had been softened by a decade behind a desk, where nerve was a cocktail of figures and formulas, and risk measured in dollars, not lives.
And Graf? a fighting voice asked him. How’s he faring right about now? He wouldn’t be too thrilled to learn you’re feeling a little long in the tooth. Get this through your head: You don’t have a choice whether you’re tired or not, whether you think you’re up to it. Someone else is depending on you. You have an obligation. A duty.
The word galvanized him as no other could have, and he remembered a saying that Graf Byrnes had taught him at the Academy, words rich with sacrifice and the blood of history.
“A man can never do more than his duty. He should never wish to do less.”
They had left the commercial center of Palm Beach and ventured into the northern residential district, where homes lay hidden behind twenty-foot stands of eugenias and gardeners needed cherry pickers to prune the trees. Parked along the curb, battered pickups loaded with lawn mowers and leaf blowers kept company with polished Rolls-Royces whose signature winged hood ornaments had been removed lest they inspire thieving minds. Gavallan wanted to make a U-turn and head for one of the bridges that led to the mainland, but he was fearful any move might be viewed as flight and make the cop want to pull him over.
“Jett!”
The police cruiser had turned on its strobes and hit them twice with its high beams. A moment later, the siren’s shrill attack pierced the air.
Gavallan laid a hand on Cate’s arm, swiveling in his seat to look over his shoulder. The police officer was waving them to the side. Running was out of the question. Palm Beach was an island. Three bridges linked it to the mainland and there would be a roadblock on every one before they could make it halfway across.
“Pull over,” he said. “Up ahead by those hedges.”
Cate edged the car to the side of the road, but a few seconds later she still hadn’t slowed. He saw her looking at him uncertainly, her lips half moving; then suddenly, she spat out, “Jett, I have a gun in the car.”
“What?”
“In the glove compartment. It was for protection. I was afraid of Kirov.”
Opening the glove box, he lifted the pistol—a snub-nosed.38 police special—and took out the rental papers. “My God,” he said, swallowing hard. “You mean business, don’t you.” Once the police found the gun, no amount of smooth talking would set them free. “Same goes as before. Pull over. We cooperate. ‘Yes sir. No sir.’ Whatever you do, don’t tell them who I am. There’s no way they can have a picture of me by now. We’re tourists from California and we’ll wing the rest. Somehow, we’ll talk our way out of this.”
He didn’t believe it for a second.
Cate steered the Explorer off the road, braking gently as she brought the car to a halt beneath a cluster of coconut palms. But as her tires sunk into the sandy shoulder, a strange and wonderful thing happened. Instead of following them onto the embankment, the police car pulled into the center of the road and shot past, its V-8 engine growling magnificently. In a moment all that was visible was a pair of taillights flashing back and forth like the blinking eyes of a railroad crossing guard back home in the Rio Grande Valley.
Cate looked at Jett, and he looked right back at her. He was staring into her eyes, marveling at their depth, wondering, as he often had, if he would ever really know her. He continued to her nose, her lips, the swell of her neck.
I loved you, he said to her silently.
A cicada’s electric crescendo filled the car. It died down, and then there was only the surf rushing onto the white sand beach and the melancholy drone of a single-engine plane flying high above.
“We’re free,” she said, in a whisper.
“For now.” Gavallan dropped his eyes, uncomfortable with his feelings for her, wanting to trust her, to lower his guard, knowing it wasn’t possible. “Let’s not press our luck. Let’s get off this island. Better yet, let’s get out of this state.” He looked at his watch. “If Dodson makes good on his offer, the FBI will be checking outgoing flights up and down the coast within the hour; they probably already are. If they know I’m in Florida, we can count on their knowing how I got here and how I planned to go home.”
Cate fished in the side compartment for a map. “There’s an executive airport in Boca Raton,” she said, spreading a multicolor canvas on her lap. “I flew in once with the guys from Redmond to cover one of Microsoft’s confabs. It’s got a runway long enough for business jets and a few hangars. Think we can charter a plane?”
“‘We’? Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you.”
“But I’m not going home. And I’m not going to be responsible for you.”
“No one’s asking you to be. I’m thirty, Jett. Last time I checked that qualified as an adult. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it you who needed looking after about an hour ago?”
Gavallan knew it was more than a question of responsibility. It was a question of trust. Cate had become an unknown commodity. Yes, she had saved his life. Even so, her presence made him antsy, aware that he was in the middle of something bigger than himself, something gray and menacing whose borders he might never discover.
“Look, you’ve won,” he said. “Mercury’s not going to come to market. Go home. And thanks. Thanks for saving my butt back there. I mean it. But that’s it. This is where it ends.”
“And Graf?”
“He’s my problem.”
“Your problem? You think you can sit there and call me uncaring, brand me with the responsibility of ten people’s deaths and expect me just to forget it? I know Grafton Byrnes too. Remember? I’m proud to say that I count him as a friend. You want to be responsible for him? Fine. But you didn’t know Ray Luca. And you didn’t know Alexei Kalugin. Those two are mine, whether I like it or not. No matter what might happen to Kirov, I have to live with the fact that I was responsible—at least in some way—for getting them killed. You can’t just pawn me off. You said it yourself: I’m in this even deeper than you are. Longer, anyway.” She spent a moment studying the map. A quizzical expression skirted her features. “By the way, what do you have in mind—I mean if you’re not going home, that is? Are you planning on chartering a jet to Moscow, driving up to Kirov’s house, banging on his door, and asking him to give you Graf back? Do you have any idea how well-protected a man like Kirov is? He’s an oligarch, for Christ’s sake. The man has his own private army. The second they know you’re in Moscow, they’ll whisk you off the streets and stuff you in the same hole where they’ve put Graf. If they don’t just shoot you on sight, that is. Right about now, I’d say you rank number one on Kirov’s ‘Most Wanted’ list.”