The Descent From Truth (11 page)

An intriguing half-grin lit her face for a moment and was gone. “And after two days, we will return and get Frederick?”

Two days in which to talk sense into her. For now, he would extend the lie. “Maybe three. We’ll see how it goes.”

“How will we do it?”

“Pretty much the way I got you.”

Her eyes lit up. “We’ll just march in and take him?”

“It won’t be that simple. But essentially, yes.”

She sighed again and leaned on his shoulder. Moments later, she closed her eyes.

She trusts me, Alex thought. I beat her up, turned her and her kid over to her enemy, and still she trusts me. But maybe it isn’t so much trust as a lack of alternatives. She might even be playing me.

Looking down at her, he savored her profile for perhaps another five minutes. Then, trying to be inconspicuous, he leaned closer and inhaled her aroma.

Her eyes opened. She arched an eyebrow.

To cover his embarrassment, he asked the question that had dogged him since he’d learned she really was Frederick’s mom. “Mind telling me how you got into this mess?”

“I told you about my father working for rebel fighters. I helped him manage the supply depot. After his death, they paid me to continue. One day, people came asking questions and administering tests. Then Theo showed up and invited me to Lima for more tests. If I passed, he said, I would be offered a great honor. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“To have Koenig’s kid.”

“To accept artificial insemination, yes.” She seemed to wither under Alex’s stare. “Until his death, my father had kept me isolated from other people in Belén. With no friends, with a history of working for rebel forces, and with no national identity or even proof of my existence, there was no way to leave on my own.”

“So you agreed to the deal as a way to get to the big city?”

“I told him no. But that evening, the rebel commander visited my apartment and issued an ultimatum.
El Patrón
Faust was their principal source of financing, the fount of everything good. He must be accommodated. I would accept this opportunity, the commander said, or my association with the brigade would be terminated. As a mixed-race outcast without resources or connections, the only future I could expect was as a prostitute for rebel soldiers who could not afford a girl more to their liking.”

Shamed by the tone of censure he had used, Alex merely shook his head. “After Frederick was born, how did you end up taking care of him?”

“He was allergic to infant formula. Instead of giving me the promised documents and resources, Mr. Koenig insisted that I serve as a wet nurse until he found a substitute.” She paused, and her eyes took on a dreamy look. “From the moment I held that little body to my breast, felt him taking sustenance from my body, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.”

“Koenig’s wife didn’t mind Freddy’s birth mother hanging around?”

“She has no interest in him. Her first order to me was to keep him out of her sight.”

“Is that how you got hooked up with Faust? Both of you working for Koenig?”

Her dreamy expression evaporated. “He developed a . . . well, an interest in me before we left Belén. In Lima, after I was successfully inseminated, he simply took what he wanted.”

“He used force? Why didn’t you tell Koenig?”

“I never even saw Mr. Koenig until after I had Frederick. I did report Theo to the doctor who attended me. He advised me to be cooperative.”

“Cooperative. Did you take the advice?”

“Not at first. But Theo put a metal sleeve on my thumb. It had a screw that he tightened whenever I displeased him.” Her left hand caressed the deformed right thumb as if comforting it. “I learned to show enthusiasm.”

Alex wanted to comfort her but didn’t know how. And he wasn’t sure the effort would be welcomed. Could the Faust that he had known in the Army have committed such an atrocity? Single-mindedly ruthless in pursuit of battlefield goals, the man had never shown mercy to an enemy or a suspect. He would probably be equally focused on achieving his personal goals.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Alex said.

“It continued from shortly after I conceived until Frederick’s birth. Then I moved into servant’s quarters next to his nursery, and Theo had difficulty getting me alone. During our flight to America, however, he told me that Mr. Koenig felt no further need for my services. When we returned to Lima, I would be his once more.” She shuddered and burrowed against Alex’s chest.

Am I being conned? Alex wondered as he held her. She had demonstrated her acting talent on Black Oak Ridge by convincing him that she was a single mother stranded and lost with her child. After her first story fell through, he had proved his gullibility by swallowing the lie that she was nothing more than a nanny and nursemaid. What if he was falling for yet another scam, and none of this was what it seemed?

She shifted in his arms, mumbled something unintelligible, and settled back down. Her breathing became deep and rhythmic once more. She did not stir again until Alex nuzzled her hair with his lips. “This is where we bail out.”

Chapter 13

Tucked against Grand Mesa National Forest, the Bryson family’s cabin overlooked a stream that flowed too swiftly to freeze and ran so clear that Alex, standing at the water’s edge with Pia, saw trout swimming near the bottom. From his summers there as a child, he knew that even on the hottest day a few minutes in the creek left a bather with goose bumps. A mélange of childhood memories flooded through him, events that may have occurred years apart but occupied the same space in his head.

For the first decade of his life, the family had spent two weeks at the cabin every year. Shortly after Alex’s twelfth birthday, however, his father’s duty tours away from home became more frequent, the postings mysterious. His paternal grandfather retired from the Army that year, and his grandparents settled near Grand Junction. Alex and his mother moved in with them.

Shortly after Alex turned thirteen, a flash flood trapped his mother in her stalled car. She drowned. His father, away on one of his short-term assignments, missed her funeral. Alex rejected his grandfather’s explanation that the mission was covert and his father couldn’t be reached. When his father returned and suggested time together at the cabin, Alex declined.

That had been eighteen years ago. They saw each other periodically after that, until Alex sparked a major split by dropping out of college during his senior year and enlisting in the Army. Until now, he had never returned to the cabin.

Gaining entry was a simple matter of sliding a credit card between the door jamb and the old-fashioned latch bolt. The cabin was smaller than he remembered. He stared at family artifacts still there: A child’s casting rod and a toy crossbow, left behind because he had outgrown them. Dishes and kitchen utensils that accommodated his mother’s spare and eccentric approach to cooking. The wading boots his father had worn when they fished in the stream. The place seemed frozen in time, still living the last day of their final family vacation.

While Pia explored the cabin, Alex stood by the stream where, so many years before, his father had taught him to fish. Water rushing over rocks and gravel produced background music for ghost voices: his father’s, encouraging, coaching, and praising him as he pulled in his first trout; his mother’s, musically insistent, calling them to dinner; both, muted but discernible from the snug loft that had been his bed, as they snuggled before the fireplace and talked late into the night.

Another feminine voice beckoned now, different from his mother’s but equally musical. Pia had made coffee and asked if she should bring it down. He joined her at the cabin instead. Sitting on the porch steps, they sipped the coffee and looked down into the snow-blanketed valley.

“It is beautiful,” Pia said. “Awe-inspiring. You have not been here in a long time?”

“I was twelve the last time.”

“It looks as if animals have gotten inside.”

“Raccoons. They chew their way through the eaves.”

“It is a mess.” She sounded apologetic, as if the carnage were somehow her fault.

They finished their coffee and set to work cleaning the place, sweeping cobwebs from the walls and animal droppings from the floor. Alex used scrap lumber to patch the holes raccoons had made.

The sun dropped below the ridgeline before they had finished. By lamplight, they collaborated in cooking a hash of tinned meat, vegetables, and spices, mixed in a wok.

After dinner, Alex stood in the cabin’s tiny bathroom and studied his reflection in the mirror. His beard had come in thick and curly, but the shrapnel scar created a furrow down the left side of his face. Instead of camouflaging the disfigurement, maybe the beard called attention to it.

Anyway, it was time to quit hiding. He cut the beard with manicure scissors and shaved away the stubble with a safety razor that he found in the medicine cabinet. With his jaw fully visible for the first time in months, he inspected it in the mirror and ran his palm over smooth flesh. The sun had deeply tanned his face above the beard, and the contrast emphasized pale skin below. The pink scar looked angry against white flesh. Shaving had been a mistake.

Reluctant to shock Pia with his radical change of appearance, he spent a long time in the bathroom. Finally, he pushed open the door and stepped into the room with her.

Standing by the fire, she stared at him. “You have a kind face. You should let it be seen.” She stepped close and caressed his cheek. “Without the beard, your hair looks too long. We need to trim it.”

While he sat on a kitchen chair, she worked with a comb and the manicure scissors. She took a long time trimming and shaping until the hair rested neatly against his head with a side part. “All done.” She stepped back and surveyed her work. “No more shaggy mountain man.”

They spread their sleeping bags before the fireplace and stretched out side by side on their stomachs, watching the blaze. When the fire’s warmth prompted Alex to scoot back, Pia stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Let’s just remove some clothing.” She unbuttoned her shirt, unzipped her trousers, and stripped to her thermal long johns and socks. Alex did the same.

“You have told me that you campaigned with Theo when you were a soldier,” Pia said when they were once more stretched out on their stomachs before the fire. “Were you friends?”

“He was my commanding officer. We first met when I was fresh out of Special Forces training, and he taught me things about guerrilla fighting that I hadn’t learned there. I pretty much idolized him. I served under him again years later, in Peru. A relentless fighter, he didn’t always distinguish between combatants and civilians, and his interrogation techniques were . . . well, they were unorthodox.”

“You disapproved?”

“I tried not to judge. As company commander, he was responsible for the lives of a hundred soldiers. I figured I might act the same way if our positions were reversed.”

“He was charming when I first met him,” Pia said. “He began coming to my apartment in Belén while he waited for helicopter repairs. He invited me to use the sauna at his hotel, to have drinks on the rooftop deck. I tried to decline. He was polite but insistent.”

“The charm offensive didn’t last?”

“No.” She rubbed her deformed thumb. Alex couldn’t tell if it was a conscious act.

“When he began forcing you and the doctor wouldn’t help, why didn’t you call the cops?”

“From the time of my arrival in Lima, I was essentially a prisoner. Theo warned that I had no legal right to be there. If I was found out, he said, he would have me ferried out to sea by helicopter and dropped from a great height. By then, I had every reason to believe him.”

Alex fed more wood into the fire and squatted before the flame. He wanted to be told that this was an elaborate hoax, that his long-time mentor had not committed the atrocities Pia described. He wanted—what did it matter what he wanted? This woman had suffered abuse beyond his imagining, and he was obsessing about his needs?

Lying side by side, they stared into the flames. Alex’s mind grew sluggish. He let his eyes close.

“Alex?” Pia’s voice sounded as soft as dew falling on a spring morning.

He opened his eyes. “Thought you were asleep.”

“I cannot. I worry about Frederick’s safety. That so-called bodyguard might once again try to hurt him.”

“Not a chance. Not with Silver Hill’s security all over the place.”

“If he is that secure, how can we hope to take him away from them?”

“Because I know how they operate.” Alex wasn’t at all certain that they could take Frederick. He wasn’t convinced he should even try. But he couldn’t let her sense his reservations. “I know their habits, their weak spots.”

“You said I must learn survival skills. What kind of skills?”

“How to keep from freezing in a storm.” He rolled onto his side, facing her. “How to find your way if you get lost. And I’m going to teach you how to defend yourself.”

She twisted so they were face to face. “If they go back to Peru while I am mastering these new skills, I will never see my son again.”

“Remember, Faust said five days. He sounded certain.”

“That was before you showed them they do not own the world. What if Mr. Koenig sends Frederick back early as a precaution?”

“With all that firepower, they’re not going to worry about me. They might put on a couple of extra guards. But Faust will figure we’re hightailing it.”

“Hightailing?”

“Running.” Alex reminded himself that, even though her English vocabulary dwarfed his, she was ignorant of American slang. “Getting as far away as possible.”

“But we cannot be certain.”

“We have to work with probabilities. The likelihood that they’ll leave early is low. The probability of failure is high if we attack before you learn how to take care of yourself.”

She nodded and chewed her lower lip. Moonlight streaming through a window gave their space a silvery radiance punctuated with deep shadows. It brightened her eyes as she looked into his. “Do you understand why I lied when you found me in that snowstorm? Why I extended the lie the next day?”

“You were trying to protect Freddy.”

She slipped a hand under his shirt and splayed her fingers on his chest. “Then, you forgive me?”

“Nothing to forgive. I’d have done the same thing.”

“The other, my attempt to . . . to seduce you.” Her fingers circled idly as she spoke. “Do you despise me for that?”

Alex’s thoughts, his whole being, centered on those caressing fingers. “You were desperate.”

“It wasn’t entirely a sham. I was—I am—attracted to you.”

What did that mean? Did she feel an emotional tug anything like his? Probably not, since his feelings were manifested in a need to protect and comfort. He wanted to ask for clarification but, never eloquent, found himself near-mute. “Attracted?”

“Under all that hair, your face and head one big scraggly mop, I detected a gentle soul.” Her fingers began backcombing the hair on his chest. “Someone whose side I would like never to leave.”

He concentrated to control his breathing as she tugged gently on his chest hair and let it slip through her fingers. Cupping her chin, he kissed her, working his lips from her eyes across her nose and down to her mouth. The melding of their lips and the responsiveness of her tongue made the touch of their bodies more erotic. He palmed a breast, then slid his hand down to her belly.

Her tongue danced with his, and a hum of passion purred in her throat. Gasping, she wrenched her lips from his. “Please, I want you inside me.”

“You only want one part of me inside you.” He pulled the top of her long johns off over her head, worked the bottoms down and off. “I want all of you.” He sucked a hardened nipple into his mouth, tongue-lathed it for several moments, and began kissing his way down her body.

A steady keening erupted from her throat the moment he reached his objective. Within seconds, her stomach muscles convulsed. The keening grew louder, and her stomach heaved in a crescendo of contractions.

He slid back up her sweating torso and buried himself in her. Paying close attention to her reactions, he concentrated on what wrenched the most soulful moans of pleasure from her. Single-minded devotion to her satisfaction helped him rein in his excitement while he brought her to another climax.

In the aftermath of her quaking, trembling, and crying loss of control, she smiled up at him with tears streaming from her eyes and down across her temples. “Is it all right if I love you?”

Her expression, the tenderness in her voice, cost him his tenuous self-control. His explosive release felt almost painful. Realizing that he had collapsed utterly, that her torso—half the size of his—bore his entire weight, he muscled over onto his back and tugged at her until she lay half on him, her head resting on his shoulder. With one sleeping bag as a pallet, the other as cover, he held her long into the night, savoring the warmth of her body, the sound of her occasional sleep murmur, the regularity of her breathing.

* * *

Morning sun awakened Alex by peeking through the cabin’s east-facing window and splashing across his face. Moments later, Pia stirred. Her leg slid over his thigh and held him captive for a too-brief moment until she came fully awake and shifted away.

“Good morning,” she said, her breath misting in the frigid air.

“Good morning yourself.” He kissed her cheek, slid from under the cover, and dressed hurriedly. Embers still smoldered under the fireplace ashes. He blew on them until they glowed, then fed in wood shavings that he sliced from a split log. He sensed Pia’s presence and looked up.

Wearing her thermal long johns and socks, and with a sleeping bag wrapped around her shoulders, she crouched beside him and shivered. “How do people live in such a climate?” She pulled the bag more tightly around her. “The air is so cold it seems brittle.”

“You adjust.” The scar tissue on Alex’s face, drawn taut by the cold and itching miserably, became elastic in the fireplace’s basting heat. Forcing himself away from the comfort, he moved to the counter that separated the cooking area from the living space. “It’s like most things in life,” he said as he used the handle of his knife to break ice that had formed in their water bucket. “You persevere because you demand it of yourself.” He dumped coffee grounds and water into an old-fashioned percolator and positioned it over the fireplace flame. “Have us some caffeine in short order.”