Return to Tomorrow (5 page)

Rachel lifted her eyes, drawn to the midnight darkness of his, even though she didn't want to be. His face was still a mask, guarding his thoughts and feelings, but he did nothing to avoid her searching gaze. “You really mean that, don't you?”

“The Acharya is a good man. This is a holy place, an ancient place. The spirits are quiet here. You've sensed that, haven't you? You've spent enough time in Southeast Asia to know what I'm talking about. This place should be left to sleep in peace.”

“I understand.” Her words were no more than a whisper on the night wind. “I don't think you have to worry about Bart ever finding his way back here.”

“No.” He brushed his hand through his hair. “Not Harrison Bartley, but I think you could, Rachel McKendrick Phillips.” Again, the ghost of a smile tugged at the edge of his mouth.

“Possibly.” Rachel smiled, too. She didn't want to go but she knew she must. “It's getting late. I should go back to my room.”

He nodded. “You've got a long day ahead of you. Good night.” He inclined his head in a gesture of dismissal.

Rachel didn't go, surprising herself as much as him. Instead, she held out her hand. “I want to thank you for
what you tried to do for me. Micah told me that you were waiting to guide us out two years ago. I was too ill to make the rendezvous.”

He took her hand, equally formal. “I regret that very much.”

“So do I.” She owed this stranger a great deal, Rachel realized. It was through his contacts, his risks, that word of her living with the Hlông had finally come to Micah's ears. “Good night….” She hesitated as she slipped her hand free of the hard, warm strength of his grip. She didn't want to call him Mr. Jackson again. She was equally reluctant to address him as Tiger.
She wanted to know his given name.
The urgency of the thought surprised her as much as the little rush of pleasure along her nerve endings when he answered her unspoken request.

“My name is Brett,” he said simply, “and pleasant dreams, Rachel Phillips.”

 

“S
HE'S SOME LADY, THAT ONE
.” Billy Todd materialized out of the shadows at the top of the griffin staircase twenty minutes after Rachel left the parapet. Brett didn't answer his friend right away. He didn't need to. Billy already knew Rachel Phillips interested him more than was good for him. Standing in the light of the gibbous moon, watching the breeze play with her hair, feeling the ghosts of the ages whispering around her, he'd found her more alluring than ever. Small, indomitable, courageous, she was just the kind of woman a man dreams of finding all his life long.

“I came back to tell you I've made arrangements to leave the jeep at the Akha village north of Chiang Rai.
The ponies will be ready by day after tomorrow. We should have word if Khen Sa will see us by the morning after that.”

“I'm getting very anxious to speak with our warlord friend.” Brett's voice was hard.

“It's not going to be our silver-tongued arguments that'll sway the bastard. It's goin' to be the gold you've got stashed away down there.” Billy cocked his head in the general direction of Brett's sleeping cell. “Do you think it's enough to persuade the general to our way of thinking?”

“It's going to have to be.” Brett shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants. “I doubt if I can persuade our backers to come up with any more.”

Billy chuckled but the sound held no mirth. “A million dollars in gold. This is going to be one hell of a coup if we bring it off. We'll be real, live, goddamn heroes.” He slapped his palm against the stone. It rang like a pistol shot, startling a few red and green parrots from their roost in the trees alongside the temple wall.

Brett watched the birds wheel off into the deeper cover at the edge of the clearing. His voice was grim. “If we live long enough to be around for the end.”

 

T
HE SUN WAS UP
but still couldn't be seen above the tops of the hills surrounding the temple. Rachel wished she had a sweater to block out the early morning chill. A parrot flew across the path ahead of them. Harrison Bartley jumped in alarm and stumbled over a tree root. He swore long and loudly, not bothering to apologize to Rachel or anyone else for his bad temper. The three young monks the Acharya had designated to help them
free the stuck Land Rover paid no attention to his words, walking sedately ahead along the steep trail. Neither did Rachel, for she had too many other things on her mind.

Or to be accurate, she had only one other thing on her mind. Brett Jackson. She wondered if Harrison Bartley had any idea they'd spent the night in the notorious gunrunner's stronghold? Perhaps he did but there was nothing he could do about it until he returned to Bangkok. He was an ambitious man. Locating Tiger Jackson's base of operations would be a real feather in his cap. Unfortunately for Bartley, he didn't have the skills to lead the authorities back to this place. It never occurred to the pompous young man that she might be able to do so. She said nothing to enlighten him. However much she deplored Brett Jackson's occupation, she was disinclined to see him caged and cowed.

There was a great deal more to the man than met the eye. She had no doubt he was as dangerous as Simon's contacts had led him to believe. But he also must have retained at least some of the qualities that had made him Micah's friend. Her mind told her he was ruthless and beyond the pale. Her heart told her he was also loyal, responsible and caring. She had realized that when he talked with such reverence of the past and the holiness of the temple lost once more in the encircling jungle.

He fascinated her. She was honest enough to admit that. The feeling was strong enough to overcome her usual reluctance even to be alone with a man. The first faint stirrings of interest had escalated during the remainder of the long, sleepless night. For a time she'd stared upward at the darkness, trying to put a name to
the restlessness she felt inside. When she had, it surprised her even more, banishing any thought of sleep.

The fluttering ache deep within her body and her brain wasn't only curiosity about a man who was intelligent, compelling and completely sure of himself. It was something primitive and feminine and long missing from her life.

It was desire.

A
N OLD-FASHIONED, ELECTRIC
fan on Dr. Reynard's desk stirred the warm, muggy air in slow, eddying swirls. Rachel plucked at the thin, white cotton of her shirt, pulling it away from her body, telling herself she should be grateful to be working in an area of the camp that had electricity at all, instead of wishing for air conditioning.

Dr. Reynard went on talking. He was young, dedicated and idealistic. The seventeen pregnant Hlông women, sitting on the floor, listened politely as Rachel translated his lecture on hygiene. None of them spoke English. They had never heard of prenatal multiple vitamin tablets or the benefits of a regimen of light aerobic exercises in strengthening the muscles used in childbirth. They came to the lectures because she asked them to.

Dr. Reynard paused for her to catch up. He walked past the screen set up at the front of the room. His shadow cut through a still photograph of a smiling young mother holding her newborn son. There was a gasp of fear from one or two of the mothers-to-be.

“Doctor, please don't do that,” Rachel pleaded, breaking into English.

“I'm sorry,” he said contritely. “I forgot. Don't walk in front of the projector. Cutting off the light to the woman's
image might do her actual physical harm. It's so hard to remember all the taboos.”

“We can only do our best. For these women, every living thing is ruled by its
phi
spirit. And most inanimate objects have a spirit, as well.” She raised her hands and soothed the women as best she could in a language that had no words for slide projector, multiple vitamins or aerobics. She reminded them in the sharp-edged, singsong intonation of their own tongue that Dr. Reynard was only a man, a foreign man at that, an unbeliever. The spirits, she assured them, would take that into consideration and would not be offended by his ignorance.

The women, dressed in baggy black skirts and blouses, their hair piled high on their heads but lacking the intricate threading of silver and gold they would have used to adorn themselves in their mountain villages, tittered and smiled behind their hands. Dr. Reynard looked offended, then smiled sheepishly.

“You've been here only a few days longer than I, yet you know so much.” He made a temple of his fingers, bowed to the static figure on the screen, bowed slightly to the women sitting on the floor and walked over to his desk.

Rachel knew she should explain her past…some of it, at least…to the young man, but now wasn't the best time.

She wondered if any time would ever be the best time.

She finished translating the doctor's lecture in a few quick sentences. Most of the women sitting silent on the floor would choose to deliver their babies in their huts, with the attendance of a wise woman from their old
village, if at all possible. They would bring the babies, later, to be examined. They would allow them to be immunized because they knew how powerful the foreign unbelievers' magic was. They might even send for her, and Dr. Reynard if there were complications for mother or child, but they wouldn't come to the infirmary to labor and give birth for any other reason. Jean-Luc Reynard had been in Camp Six for only a little over three weeks. He didn't understand the Hlông or the other hill people in the camp. But he would learn.

Now that the lecture was over, the women came forward shyly to bid farewell. They knew she had lived among them, in a village in Laos. She had been one of them, yet not one of them. She knew the customs and duties of a Hlông woman, yet she moved among the foreign males, her own kind, with assurance. They trusted her, yet they were in awe of her. In return, Rachel envied them their sense of belonging, their certainty of their place in their own world. She also knew how fragile that sense of place was, how completely disrupted it would be when they left the border camp for new homes in the west.

“Mail call.” Father Dolph's tall, gangly frame filled the doorway, blocking out the sunlight. “Letters from the States,” he called, brandishing a batch of various size envelopes above his head. The Hlông women bowed slightly as they filed by; none of them, even with their elaborate and upswept hairdos, came above his shoulder. “Valentines, if I don't miss my guess.”

Sometimes, if Rachel closed her eyes, she could hear Father Pieter's voice transposed over his nephew's. He had been a few years older than Father Dolph was now,
perhaps fifty-five, when she first met him, but the two men looked very much alike. And their personalities were similar, jolly, good-natured, fearless, devoted to their church and their flocks. Only Father Pieter's flock had been an orphanage in Saigon and Father Dolph's consisted of ten thousand refugees crowded into a tiny valley in the hills of northern Thailand.

“Valentines? And only a week late.” Rachel held out her hands for the inch-thick stack of envelopes.

“Here are two for you, Reynard.” Father Dolph handed over two white envelopes. Jean-Luc tried not to appear too eager to read his, a letter from his fiancée in Paris, Rachel surmised from a quick glimpse of the feminine handwriting on the envelope.

“Enjoy your letters,” Father Dolph said, preparing to leave the building as quickly as he'd entered. He was always on the move, always between one task and another. “Rachel, could I see you in my office in about an hour?”

She looked up from a comic Valentine note from the twins and smiled. “Of course. I believe Dr. Reynard won't be needing me anymore this afternoon.” She glanced in his direction to make sure of his reply. He nodded absently, too engrossed in his letter to pay much attention to anything else.

“Yes. Yes. Thank you for your help with the lecture.”

Father Dolph shrugged and crossed his hands over his heart. “Love,” he sighed, and laughed. Rachel laughed, too, but she didn't think it was funny. Love. Once, long ago, so long ago it seemed like a dream, she'd been in love with a young naval aviator. She'd met Kyle Phillips
in Saigon while on leave from the field hospital where she'd been stationed twenty-five miles northeast of the city. He had swept her off her feet. They were married when Rachel finished her second tour of duty. The marriage lasted only a month before Kyle died in the wreckage of his jet fighter when it crash-landed on a carrier in heavy seas. Eight months later she'd returned to Vietnam, as a civilian nurse. When Saigon fell…the life she'd planned for herself after the war altered beyond imagining.

“One hour, Rachel, don't forget.” Father Dolph's tone was emphatic.

“I'll be there.” Rachel surfaced through layers of old memories to answer the priest's request. “I promise.” She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes against the sunlight behind his back. “Unless you want me to come with you now.”

Father Dolph grinned. “I don't want to take you away from your letters.”

Rachel laughed and even Dr. Reynard looked up at the sound, lilting, sweet, with a hint of lingering sadness that would never go away. “Yes, you do. Come on, what's up?”

“Come with me, I'll show you. Jean-Luc, I'll be back.” He waved one long hand in the doctor's general direction. The doctor nodded absently and went back to his letter.

“Young love.” Father Dolph shook his head.

“What do you want to see me about, Father?” Rachel asked, changing the subject. She knew she'd never find love again. She'd known that for a long time, yet at
night she sometimes dreamed, now, of a tall, blond man silhouetted against a jungle moon.

“I have someone I want you to meet.” Father dodged a flock of chickens being chased across the path by three young boys, one of them hardly more than a baby and naked as the day he was born.

“I hope it's someone who types better than I,” Rachel answered, making herself think of the stack of paperwork on her desk and not of the man in her dreams.

“I'm afraid not.” Father Dolph looked momentarily taken aback. “I'm sorry. I forgot you asked for someone to help you who could type.”

Rachel bowed courteously to an old woman working among the vegetable plants in front of her hut. The camp was crowded, more a small city in size and population than a temporary home for war-weary refugees. The woven mat-walled and thatch-roofed huts had an air of permanence about them. That was because many of the residents had been there for years, caught between the twin pincers of Western governments with too-small immigration quotas and the unstable and dangerous political situation in their homeland.

“It doesn't matter.” Rachel brushed aside his apology. “Does she speak Thai?” Try as she might, Rachel couldn't keep a note of entreaty out of her voice. She was so busy, with so many women and children to care for that the thought of another well-meaning but unprepared volunteer to deal with was more than she could accept at the moment.

“She speaks Thai. And better yet, she speaks Hlông.” Father Dolph looked down from his eight-inch advantage
in height and smiled crookedly, almost like a boy. “The problem…”

“I knew there would be one,” Rachel grinned, overcoming her momentary loss of optimism. Father Dolph was notorious for trying to find comfortable niches for square pegs. The miracle was, with the ten thousand souls under his care, he managed to make so many of the square pegs fit.

“She doesn't speak English.”

“Oh, dear.” Rachel knew her Thai was adequate but not fluent by any stretch of the imagination. The Hlông dialect, like those of other hill tribes, was simply not structured for dealing with technology…or bureaucracy.

“Ahnle is a lovely child.”

“She is Hlông?” Rachel asked.

Father Dolph nodded, pausing in his long strides to sign a requisition form shoved under his nose by one of the staff members who had hailed him as they passed the camp offices. “She's a niece to the village headman. Her brother is a trader. He taught her Thai.”

So the girl came from one of the less isolated villages. That was good. She would be less apt to jump at every shadow, be mistrustful of every instrument and procedure she didn't understand.

“Here we are,” Father Dolph announced unnecessarily as they turned a corner and mounted the three rickety wooden steps to the sheet-metal building that housed the administrative offices of the camp. “I told Ahnle to wait. I thought I might be able to talk you into coming with me.”

A straggling hibiscus tree stood sentinel in the dusty,
fenced-off courtyard. Aside from a few stunted willows bordering the stream that ran along the compound's northern perimeter, the hibiscus was the only tree in camp. The rest had long ago been cut down to provide wood for cook fires and to warm the chilly winter nights.

A young girl, dressed in a white blouse and black sarong-style skirt, was seated in a straight-backed chair in front of Father Dolph's desk. Her hands were folded in her lap, her head bowed in a polite attempt not to stare openly at a stranger. She stood and made the traditional
wai
, a gesture of greeting, fingers steepled in front of her as she bent her head. Father Dolph and Rachel returned the greeting.

“Ahnle,” Father Dolph said in his Dutch-accented Thai. “This is Rachel. You will help her with her work.”

Ahnle nodded and bowed more deeply still.

“May you always dwell within the spirit gate,” Rachel said in Hlông. It was a formal greeting. Living within the protection of the wooden archway that guarded each Hlông village was of great importance to the tribal people.

“May your grandchildren walk beneath it as your ancestors did,” Ahnle replied, equally formal.

“Welcome.” Rachel decided she might as well start Ahnle's English lessons, then and there. She smiled and the girl smiled also.

“I've already had Ahnle put her things in the spare room in your hut. I hope that's okay with you.” Father Dolph spoke in English, also. Ahnle waited politely, her dark, almond-shaped eyes downcast.

“Yes, of course. I feel guilty with a cottage all to myself when everyone else is so crowded.” Rachel smiled and accepted the slim folder of papers Father Dolph handed her from the top of a pile on his desk.

“Here are Ahnle's papers. She's been in the camp about a year so she knows her way around.”

“Do you have family in the camp, Ahnle?” Rachel asked in Thai so that Father Dolph could understand.

“No.” The answer was soft-spoken, polite, but wary. Ahnle looked at Father Dolph from the corner of her eye, then back down at the wooden floor.

“She is estranged from her relatives. Her brother has gone back into the mountains,” he said.

“Into Laos?” Rachel felt a small ripple of fear crawl across her skin. Less than two years ago she had made that journey with her brother, Micah, in reverse, a nightmare trek of pain and illness that had ended in her recapture by the Vietnamese.

“He wanted to return to their village before the rainy season begins.”

“Or more likely, to bring out the opium harvest.”

“We don't know that.” Father Dolph's voice was stern.

The Hlông village where Rachel had spent so many years had had its poppy fields, also, but the soil was too poor, the village too isolated to make the opium salable on the open market. It was the only medication the villagers had. It had made Father Pieter's last pain-filled weeks more comfortable. She had thanked God and the
phi
spirits for its availability. Yet, in the wrong hands, it became a weapon of great evil and destruction. A
fleeting image of Lonnie Smalley's drug-ravaged face crossed her mind's eye.

“It's the most likely explanation.” Rachel switched back to Thai. “Ahnle, why did your brother leave you behind?” It was unusual for a Hlông maiden to be left without benefit of a male family member to protect her. Ahnle looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, of marriageable age, which made it odder, still, that she should be unchaperoned.

Ahnle did not answer. She bowed her head but not before Rachel saw the gleam of tears in her dark eyes. She felt a jolt of sudden sympathy and the beginnings of understanding. She looked at Father Dolph with a question in her eyes.