As I did, time became a blur. Prayers, love, fire flashed through me. A father fighting to save his daughter, fighting to get to shore in time.
Then I was at the surface and swimming toward the bank, stroking as powerfully as I could.
Then I was at the shoreline and stumbling up the bank, pulling her onto the grass and positioning her on her back so I could begin resuscitation breaths.
Come on, Tessa. Please. Breathe.
I started rescue breaths and thought of what I’d done earlier in the week with Basque. Pulling him from the water. Saving his life.
Now I regretted it.
You should have left him dead! You caused this!
She wasn’t moving.
Come on, Tessa!
So much death this week, so much suffering, so much pain.
I prayed for her, that this time there would be a happy ending, begged God to save her.
But she didn’t move.
I went back and forth from rescue breaths to chest compressions.
“You’re gonna be okay, Tessa.” I was pressing on her chest and the words became a prayer. “You’re gonna be okay.”
While we live, let us live.
Let us live.
Let us—
All at once, her body lurched. She coughed and gagged, spit out a mouthful of water. Breathed, breathed, lived.
Turning her on her side to help her clear her mouth of water, I supported her and swept the strands of wet hair from her eyes. She drew in a deep breath. Then another.
“I knew you’d come,” she managed to say.
“Shh. You’re safe. It’s over.”
She nodded, kept trying to catch her breath.
I said, “I love you.”
“You too.”
She leaned heavily against my arms and I lowered her softly back against the ground.
“Is he dead?” she whispered.
“Yes. And I’m proud of you. You lit him on fire?”
“Perfume.” She took a moment to breathe. “I was out of coffee creamer.”
86
FBI Director Margaret Wellington spread out the papers in front of her and stared at them, thinking about what all this would mean.
They hadn’t found Basque’s body.
Metro PD was still searching the river.
The dead FBI Police officer whom Basque had stolen the uniform from was also missing his body armor. No one knew if Basque had been wearing it when Agent Bowers shot him, but Margaret wasn’t about to label the case closed until they found Richard Basque’s body.
As the search went on, they were finally getting some answers about Corey’s death.
Corporal Tyree, the man whom Valkyrie had been torturing belowdeck on the yacht, was in intensive care, but he was conscious and told them what they needed to know about the drug production and the suicides he and the red-haired woman, who was really named Vanessa Juliusson, had overseen.
Tyree was facing a long list of felonies and capital murder charges but he almost seemed relieved. Maybe prison for him was a freedom of sorts from the life Valkyrie had entwined him in. He claimed that — apart from the pills on the semi at the distribution warehouse — there were no other tainted drugs in the supply chain.
But Margaret wasn’t going to take any chances.
Earlier in the day, PTPharmaceuticals had agreed to the full recall of Calydrole. National health warnings went out over the airwaves, online, through texts and tweets and Facebook, and they were just hoping and praying that no additional tainted versions of Calydrole had made it into the hands of consumers.
Following up on the demolished SUV’s diplomatic tags, Angela Knight and Lacey found out who the Chechens were. Margaret contacted the CIA to have their people look into whatever activities the men might have been plotting with Valkyrie, and they found plans on a laptop in Alhazur Daudov’s house for a coordinated attack against schools in Moscow. Classes were canceled indefinitely until the authorities could guarantee the children would be safe returning to school.
That afternoon, Margaret had visited prison to speak with the partner of the man she suspected had been the one filming her while she slept last summer.
The visit had been fruitless and she’d decided it was the last time she was going to pursue this matter. There are some questions, after all, that we never get answers to. Some doors remain locked forever, and that’s life. If we’re ever going to have the courage to face tomorrow, sometimes we have to acknowledge that and it has to be okay.
She was ready to move on. She’d at least gotten the answers she’d sought about her brother’s death. There was some resolution in that, some peace.
The DVD of her asleep in her bedroom sat on her desk next to the framed photo of her and her brother when they were children, and now she picked it up.
She decided two things: (1) she was going to remove the locks on the inside of her bedroom door when she got home and (2) she was going to fill out the papers here on her desk.
Life is for living, for moving on, for letting the past lie behind us.
She put down the picture, smashed the DVD on the edge of her desk, and brushed the shattered pieces into her wastebasket.
Then she filled out the forms that she needed to submit to create an exploratory committee to run for Virginia’s soon-to-be-open first-district congressional seat.
We were at the Hawkins house. Tony and Ralph had just finished a game of the latest version of “Call of Duty.” Ralph won and was smiling broadly, but Tony winked at me as he walked past and I knew what had gone down.
Brin and Tessa were in the kitchen cleaning up supper. I went to check on Lien-hua in the basement, then we all met outside on the back porch.
Metro PD was still searching the river for Basque, and for now, that was all that could be done. Relief that Tessa was okay and that Lien-hua was recovering was paramount in my mind, not the possibility that Basque was still out there.
If he was, I would deal with it.
I would get back to the chase. Tomorrow.
We would be prudent, yes. We would be careful, yes. We would keep up the search, keep up our guard, but I wasn’t going to let the question of whether or not he was alive control my life or destroy my family. If I ever saw him again I would take care of him, I had no doubt about that anymore. No remorse. No regret. No hesitation. I knew what I was capable of, and call it justice or call it revenge, I was ready to enact it as soon as I had the chance.
Life isn’t always perfect.
And justice doesn’t always have clean hands — sometimes she has to get them dirty to do the right thing.
Now, as the sun began dipping down past the edge of the tree line, we were all quiet. Even Ralph and Tony seemed entranced by the sunset.
“So you really set his hair on fire?” Tony asked Tessa.
“Yup. Burned really good too.” She gave me a slightly mischievous look. “Good thing I’ve been smoking or I wouldn’t have had that lighter with me.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
She told Tony, “By the way, don’t start smoking just so you can make a flamethrower out of a perfume bottle someday.”
“What else besides perfume would work?”
“We’re not making flamethrowers,” Brin told him firmly, “out of anything.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Ralph winked at him, and I had a feeling they would be spending a little father-son time later discussing alternate techniques.
Lien-hua’s eyes were on the striking sunset.
I made an offer to Tessa. “Tell you what, if you make it until graduation without smoking, I’ll buy you a cake.”