Runaway (23 page)

The plane closed up not long after they were seated. They were in a two across section, far back in coach. Jan put Catherine’s bag in the overhead bin after squeezing other people’s coats and shopping bags out of the way. When she settled in her aisle seat she saw Catherine looking intently at her.

“We have so much to talk about.”

“You get right to things, don’t you?” Jan wedged her laptop bag under the seat in front of her and buckled in. “Don’t you think we should talk about work first?”

“Certainly. Here’s how I see it. We’re going to Idaho. If you have a plan, I’m fine with it. If you’d like me to consult on a plan, I’m fine with that too.”

“Peet and I worked up a plan.”

“That’s fine then.”

They were quiet for a bit while the flight attendants squawked over the PA system and they got underway.

“How upset are you about what happened at the hotel?”

“I don’t know if upset is the word I’d use,” Jan said.

“It was ugly and I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

“Had you just told your girlfriend about me? Is that why she acted that way?”

Catherine sat with her back to the window, angled toward Jan. She looked like she’d lost some of her calm and most of her confidence. “Part of what I wanted to say to you today is that I’m not going to lie about anything. I hadn’t told Ellen about you before you came to the hotel. She simply leapt to the conclusion that I had an out of town lover. I don’t know how she could have possibly got wind of that, but we did have a nasty argument on the phone the other day. Any time I make noises about the relationship being at an end, she accuses me of having a lover.”

“Was that such a leap? You’ve had other lovers since you’ve been together.”

Catherine kept her eye contact. “I did take a lover once and Ellen found out about it. All I can say is that it’s not like it’s a regular habit. It was still wrong to do, but I’m not a player, Jan.”

Jan had interviewed many witnesses over the years and she thought she was a pretty good judge of when someone was lying and when they were being sincere. She thought Catherine was being candid with her, but knew also that she wanted to believe that. Catherine had been a spy, after all, one who’d fooled harder cases than herself.

“When Ellen first found out that I’d slept with someone else, it seemed like the final blow to a relationship that was cracked straight through. Instead of breaking us apart, we stayed together, but rather more in the way that prisoners are kept together in a cell than anything approaching a loving relationship. I felt too guilty to leave her and she felt too angry to let me go.”

“It sounds awful.” Jan found this totally believable, having had a glimpse of Ellen’s venom.

“Still, none of that has anything to do with you, and I am so sorry you’ve been dragged into it.”

“But didn’t you drag me into it when you decided to sleep with me?”

Catherine looked pained. “I dragged you into it when I realized that I felt something for you. Felt a lot for you, almost right away. Then I knew it could be a mess.”

Jan did not like sitting on a high horse. She was extremely vulnerable up there, having no claim to any higher moral ground than Catherine. How many women had she slept with herself whom she didn’t really feel anything for or know anything about?

“So you knew you felt something for me before we slept together that first night?”

“Let’s just say that at that point I knew I was really, really attracted to you. By the end of the night, I knew it could be something more.”

The drinks cart rattled down the aisle and stopped in front of them. Catherine ordered a Bloody Mary, Jan a Coke. When it moved on, Catherine continued.

“I know that you’re probably more than a little wary of me, and I don’t blame you. But Ellen and I are over. We talked well into the night and it seems, at least for right now, that she’s accepted that. It will take awhile for everything to get sorted out.”

She looked at Jan for some kind of response.

“I don’t really know what to say.”

“The only thing I need to know from you is whether I’m crazy to think there may be something between us. Am I imagining that?”

The self-assured woman who strode through the airport minutes before now looked like a very uncertain girl, and Jan realized that the vulnerability wasn’t all on her side. She wanted to wrap Catherine in her arms and reassure her. Instead, she reached for Catherine’s hand.

“No, you didn’t imagine it.”

They sat quietly side-by-side, hands together, and then their arms pressing against each other, trying to push into each other’s space as much as possible. Jan felt the charge racing through her body, now familiar from each time she’d been in Catherine’s presence.

“Do you feel it right now?” Catherine said.

“Yes.”

They stayed that way, their bodies humming like an electrical plant, until the flight attendant stopped by with her open garbage bag and they tossed their drinks into it. Catherine collected herself.

“While we’re on the plane, and I can’t run away from you or any of this, I want to tell you everything,” she said. “I want to tell you my worst bits so you can decide if you want to stay and see where this goes.”

Jan doubted Catherine was going to tell her anything that could trump shooting your own father. But she was curious.

“You don’t have to tell me anything. I’m not interested in your past,” Jan said. But she was lying. She was interested in everything about her.

“You will be when I tell you this, because there are certain things I think I have to be honest about if I have a chance of really having you in my life, really knowing me for exactly who I am. What I’m not interested in is anything less than that.”

She looked at Jan, as if for permission to continue. It was Hobson’s choice for her. If she said she didn’t want to know, then it was as if she were saying she really didn’t want to be truly close to Catherine. If she listened to whatever confession she was about to make, withholding her own secret was the worst kind of lying, and she didn’t want to start out that way with her. She nodded at Catherine to continue.

“You remember I told you I worked for years at MI6, the British security force.”

“Kind of like our CIA.”

“Kind of. The Brits have a very long history of spying; we’re quite keen on it. My father was an intelligence officer before going into medicine, and I’d wanted to join up from a very early age. And somehow, I made it happen.

“For ten years, everything was fantastic. I had great assignments, great working partnerships. It wasn’t all high-wire excitement. A lot is boring analytical work, interrupted by moments of terror. But I was well suited for it.

“Then the war in Iraq happened. MI6 and our military intelligence were very active there, both in tracking and sorting intelligence and in the specific mission of finding Saddam Hussein. I can’t tell you all that much about our operations, but it’s just the one day, the one moment you need to know about.”

Jan couldn’t imagine where she was going with this. But she could see Catherine had taken on an almost robotic quality as she recited her facts.

“My partner, Adam, and I had been working to identify individuals who may have known where Saddam was. We got as far as finding some blokes who might know the men who knew where he was. It’s all a matter of inches, really, and this was one of the first solid leads we had.

“Adam and I went out late at night to track this guy, and we caught up with him on the outskirts of Basrah. He was alone, coming out of a house, and even though there was a curfew on, he didn’t seem the least concerned about breaking it. We circled around him and managed to slip him into an alley without much fuss. Adam was putting restraints on him as we were going to take him in for interrogation. I covered, but I didn’t do a good job of it. Suddenly, three men were on top of us, screaming at the top of their lungs. Adam and I fought like the devil, but this is the only salient thing about it. One of our attackers took hold of my arm, my gun hand. I don’t remember clearly—I think he had me in a choke hold. I just remember struggling as he wrapped his hand around mine and pulled the trigger. And Adam went down.

“I would have gone down next, of course. And there were bad moments afterward when I thought it would have been better if I had. But a British patrol came round, drawn by the noise, and our attackers and the target scrambled. So I was safe, and Adam was dead.”

Jan took Catherine’s hand back into her own.

“It must have been terrifying,” she said. Really, what do you say when someone tells you a story like that? She had no reference point. She was trying to imagine herself in the same situation and couldn’t even get a picture in her head. How would she feel if Peet had been shot under the same circumstances?

“I suppose, but we’re well trained to handle situations more chaotic than that. I failed, and my partner died. I left MI6 shortly after that.”

“But you loved it, or at least that’s what I heard you say.”

“You can love something and then it can go incredibly sour. In a heartbeat. There was an investigation afterward, a friendly fire sort of thing. They didn’t find anything they could charge me with, or even suspend me over. But it didn’t matter. I was finished. You can’t shoot your own partner and ever expect to work in the field again.”

“Is that when you joined Global Security?”

“Yes. Ellen had been after me for a long time to take a private position. She was thrilled.”

“But you were not.”

Catherine looked sad, her loss fresh again. “I hate it, to be honest. And that’s what I want to be—completely honest. The first interesting thing that’s happened to me in six years with this company is coming to Chicago and meeting you, but that’s not really job related, is it?”

“I hope not.”

“Does this change your mind about anything?” Catherine looked at her nervously. “You’re the first person I’ve told that story to. Ellen thinks I left the agency to please her.”

“I’m glad you shared it.”

Catherine snuggled closer to Jan and leaned against her shoulder. Jan tried to open her mouth to say she had something to share also, but it remained clamped shut. She hated herself for it.

*

The night fell quickly on their first day on the ranch. Maddy sat around a fire ring that had been built behind the cabins, near the vegetable gardens. She nursed some kindling underneath a couple of split logs she’d found behind one of the cabins, feeling anxious for the flames to grow and cast off some of the impenetrable darkness all around her. She found the quiet and the darkness spooky, so unlike her suburban landscape that her imagination started to run wild, mostly along the lines of a horror film, something her brother may have watched.

She saw a flashlight coming from the buildings and heard Kristi whistling. She whistled a lot, which was mostly annoying, but right now the most welcome sound Maddy could think of. Flames started to lick around the logs and take hold just as Kristi reached the fire ring. Tommy walked silently behind her.

“Look, you’re a regular Girl Scout,” Kristi said. She turned off the flashlight and sat on one of the large flat rocks circling the fire.

Maddy shrugged. “I got sent to camp every summer,” she said. “When you finally get old enough, just about the time you swear you’ll kill yourself if you get sent to summer camp again, they start teaching you some useful things. Like how to start a fire.”

“Anything else that’s useful to us out here?” Tommy asked.

Maddy thought about it for a minute. “Maybe. I can get back in a canoe or kayak if I fall out, and shoot a bow and arrow pretty well. I think if a deer stands absolutely still exactly twenty-five feet away from me and wears a bull’s-eye, I can put some food on the table.”

“None of us have any business being out here, from what I can tell,” Tommy said. “I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing with ourselves. All I’ve done since we got here today is wander around and stare at things.”

“Hell, Tommy. It’s just the first day. We’ll get things sorted out. I know one thing we’ll be doing and that’s splitting a shit load of logs. Every damn building here is heated with wood, and it’s already cold out,” Kristi said.

They all stared at the fire, their winter coats on. Maddy kept poking away with a stick. She hadn’t seen David since dinner when he disappeared down in the storage room and shut the door behind him. He’d been holed up in there most of the day since their arrival.

“What was David like in high school?” Maddy asked.

“He was exactly like he is today,” Kristi said. “Smarter than what’s good for him and always in charge. We got up to a bunch of shit back then, didn’t we, Tommy?”

“Yeah. David came up with a lot of ideas, and he wanted to try everything, even if he knew it was stupid.”

“How about if you thought his ideas were stupid? Would you go along with David?” Maddy asked.

Kristi was quiet for a moment. Tommy just looked at the fire. “I guess I didn’t ever think his ideas were stupid.”

“Me neither,” Tommy said.

“I just hope someone knows what they’re doing. We are totally on our own here,” Maddy said.

“But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Kristi said.

“Well, yeah. But I don’t want to die out here, either.”

Maddy shifted around on her rock, poking at the fire. She felt nervous, a little afraid of the dark and the woods. It made her cranky. Kristi moved over and put her arm around her.

“Don’t worry, Maddy. I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s going to be great. We have this beautiful place all to ourselves. We’ll figure out what to do.”

Maddy saw another flashlight pierce the darkness. She wanted to call out to see who it was, but she didn’t want to seem scared in front of the others. Diane came up to the fire ring and turned her flashlight off.

“Hey, what’s up?” she said. She was cheery, as she usually was. She had taken charge in the kitchen and gotten a meal put together from goods in the storeroom, then dove right in to do the dishes after they were done eating. She was on task. Maddy envied her.