No Rules (5 page)

“He left us,” she summarized.

“That’s the version you tell people? I know better, Jess.”

Fury rose so fast she wouldn’t have been surprised if she gave off sparks. “You don’t know anything about it. Maybe he lied to make himself look better, but I was there. My father said good-bye and walked out of our lives forever. He promised he’d stay in my life, but I never saw him again until he showed up in Houston, demented and out of touch with reality.”

Donovan gave her a quick glance as if checking to see whether she really believed what she’d said. “He didn’t lie. He wanted to remain part of your life.”

“Good intentions don’t count.” The bitterness was still there, squeezing her ribs and sitting like a rock in her stomach. “It didn’t take him long to decide I wasn’t that important.”

“You really don’t know? He never changed his mind, Jessie. Jess,” he corrected quickly, holding up a hand to forestall her rebuke. “Sorry, it’s habit. Wally always referred to you that way and…” He glanced at her outraged expression, probably not understanding the complex feelings behind it any more than she did, then looked away. “Never mind. I know he tried to keep in contact because he did it through Omega’s headquarters here in Chicago. That way no trace of you was associated with his house in Michigan where he lived and worked. The letters and gifts he sent all came from our office, and that’s where they were returned when you refused them.”

“What…what letters and gifts?”

“The boxes you sent back every Christmas and every June, which I assume must be your birthday. You didn’t know what was in them?”

Her birthday was June ninth. A sinking feeling hit her square in the gut. “I never saw any boxes.”

His sharp glance seemed to assess her honesty. “I know you answered the letters. I never saw what was in them, but they had your name on the return address.”

She shook her head, which only increased her dazed, light-headed feeling. “I didn’t…I don’t know anything about the replies he got. I never got any letters.”

But they both knew who had to have sent them. She stared out the window, refusing to say anything bad about her mother, but determined to have a long talk with her if Mom was ever again coherent on the subject of her father.

Donovan’s look was part skepticism, part pity. “The point is, he wanted to see you, but your mother wouldn’t let him.”

“She told me he refused to come to Houston.” She said it with sullen resignation, knowing he would refute it.

“Then she’s the one who lied. He missed you and talked about you frequently. Losing his family was a hurt he never got over.”

She wanted to doubt him, but it was becoming harder. Quietly, she gave him the only defense she could come up with. “There are two sides to every story, Donovan.” And it was her own fault that she’d never realized how slanted her mother’s side was. She should have. Instead, she’d used her mother’s claims of her father’s indifference to support her own hurt feelings, heaping blame onto him for not caring. Blame it appeared he hadn’t deserved.

“Yeah, speaking of two sides…there was more to that story of the hostages than you heard. There was a fourth hostage you never knew about.”

“What? No there wasn’t.” This part she was sure of, because she’d been with her mother for the whole thing.

“He was an undercover CIA operative who’d been posing as an archeologist.”

“Sure he was. And there’s an alien space ship at Area 51, and a secret sound stage in Hollywood where they faked the moon landing.”

He smiled, as if amused by her cynicism. “Didn’t you ever wonder how two history professors escaped from a heavily armed group of political terrorists?”

“No, because they didn’t. The State Department negotiated their release.”

“The State Department didn’t even know who had them. The group that took them made no demands. Their goal was strictly to terrorize. After the first hostage was killed, it was obvious they meant to kill them all, one by one. The CIA was working from the outside, and the captured operative was able to prepare your dad and Evan for what to expect and watch for. Because of him, they were able to take advantage of the distraction when it came. They took their guards by surprise and escaped.”

She nearly rolled her eyes. “I think my father would have mentioned that kind of heroics. Plus every major media outlet covered it, and no one said anything about a fourth hostage.”

“And goodness, we all know the government has never kept information from the press.”

She frowned in annoyance. His stupid story shouldn’t bother her, but as Dr. Epstein often reminded her, part of her was stuck at the age of twelve, unwilling to accept that her father had changed. Daddy’s girl still mourned his loss. But to think that he’d lied to them from the moment he’d come home from Iran? “I don’t believe you.” She’d meant to say it with more conviction, but was having a hard time finding any. “But even if I did, what’s your point?”

“That you don’t know everything you think you do about your father.”

“Big deal.” Sarcasm, on the other hand, came easily. “I didn’t even see him for the last fifteen years of his life, so of course I don’t know him.” And whether he’d loved her or not, whether he wanted to see her or not, her father had obviously begun keeping secrets after his time as a hostage. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t be here right now. Possibly many secrets. Donovan, a complete stranger, knew them, and she didn’t. It was like being rejected by her father all over again.

“Being held hostage, and escaping the way they did, with no help from the State Department, changed him,” Donovan said. “Changed his priorities.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder, and it tore our family apart.”

“Actually, it didn’t. Forming the Omega Group is what tore your family apart.”

He contradicted her so calmly that she wondered if he even realized the jealousy that ripped through her every time he claimed to know more about her family, about her father, than she did. Fifteen years later she was still working on getting over the rejection she’d felt when he left. Even if that rejection had been a lie invented by her mentally ill mother, realizing that Donovan might have replaced her in her father’s affections was another slap in the face. She sat stiffly, fists clenched, as he went on.

“After their experience, Wally and Evan devoted their lives to seeing that an organization existed that could rescue hostages when our government couldn’t, or wouldn’t. They recruited people with special skills and developed a training program. Your mother couldn’t stand knowing he would put himself back into dangerous situations on purpose, and they argued. She refused to live in constant fear, but he wouldn’t abandon the idea. According to Wally, that’s what drove them apart.”

He paused—the perfect opportunity to rip him a new one for being an arrogant ass. Except what he’d said knocked all the righteous indignation clean out of her mind, replacing it with disbelief. “Are you saying
my father
trained people to rescue hostages?” She pictured the meek, slightly rounded professor of linguistics and ancient history that she remembered. Walter Shikovski as Chuck Norris? “You’re crazy.”

“Actually, the CIA operative who helped them escape is the one who did the training. Still does. They recruited him for their new organization. He saw the need for it, the same as they did, and wanted to be part of it.”

She wanted to scoff at the whole thing, but it explained too many things. It was obvious that Donovan believed it, at least. “There’s a need for an organization that just rescues hostages?”

“Too much of a need, in all parts of the world. Most of our clients are corporations who’ve had employees taken and held for ransom. If companies pay the kidnappers, they only encourage more opportunistic groups to take hostages. So when governments can’t persuade these groups to release their captives, the corporations turn to the Omega Group.”

“And you save the hostages.”

His mouth flattened into a line, as if holding back something he didn’t want to admit. “Most of the time.”

She didn’t want to ask about the other times. Escaping from terrorists, rescuing hostages—it was like discovering you were playing a bit part in an action-adventure movie. She turned away, staring out the window, trying to absorb it all.

For the first time she noticed that they’d left the lighted city streets and were driving through a semirural area of expensive homes on large parcels of land, most of them dark now except for yard lights and the ghostly glow of dim nightlights from distant bedrooms and bathrooms. The dream homes of successful urban professionals. It roused a mild curiosity about their destination, but not as much as the facts he’d planted in her mind.

“So what was my father’s role in Omega? Did he run it?” It was hard to imagine the quiet, bookish professor she remembered arranging to rescue hostages from terrorists.

“No. Evan became the hands-on director of operations. Your father’s role was to do what he always did, teach linguistics and travel to the Middle East as often as possible, ostensibly to do research and field work. In actuality, he was Omega’s point man in that part of the world. Wally was fluent in several languages and knew the cultures intimately. He had contacts, informers, and access to areas that are usually off-limits to Americans. Because of his insights, we often knew ahead of time what groups were apt to become a problem, and where they operated. He was…” Donovan searched for the proper word before shrugging in defeat. “Invaluable.”

She could only stare. As far-fetched as it sounded, no one could make this up and have it mesh so well with the facts. For the past fifteen-plus years, her father had led a double life. A dangerous one.

And in the ultimate betrayal, he’d brought the violence of his world directly to her.

“You said he wanted to keep me safe,” she accused. “But now someone is trying to kill me, and I don’t even know why.”

His face looked strained, a muscle jumping as he ground his teeth. “It was the one thing Wally didn’t foresee—that you would come for his funeral.” He clenched his jaw over it as he turned into a driveway lined with ground level lights. She barely glanced at the gate that swung open onto the shadowy tree-lined drive, or the large, well-lit house at the end of it. Her attention was riveted on Donovan.

“He was careful to keep you a secret so no one could use you against him, and he succeeded, right through covering his tracks when he made that detour to Houston. He must have known his cover was blown, but he was still a few steps ahead of them, and they didn’t follow him there. I don’t think they knew about you until you showed up in Nipagonee Rapids.”

“Why did he involve me at all?”

“I don’t know yet, and it bothers me, but part of it has to be because you were safe.” He stopped under a portico beside the house, put the car in park, and turned to face her. “He probably knew they were going to catch up with him—his location was never a secret. A large part of his cover was to look ordinary and harmless, with nothing to hide, and he would have stuck with it. He knew they’d question him, search his house, his office at the university, and find nothing. It must have looked like a dead end until you showed up and they realized there was another place he could have left the information.”

“Except he didn’t,” she said, her voice rising in desperation.

“Trust me, he did. You’re the key, and they know it. So do I.”

Frustration built almost to tears. She didn’t want to be anyone’s key to anything. Didn’t want to be the target of fanatics with knives. Didn’t want to have the fate of some hostage depending on her ability to remember some trivial comment from her father.

Oh God, what hostage? Fear stabbed her chest, as sharp as a blade. “Why was my father’s information so important? What hostages are at stake, and why can’t the people who are holding them just move them to a different location to keep them hidden?”

“We don’t know.” Lines creased his forehead, perhaps some of the same frustration she felt. “Whatever information he had, it was more than just the location of the hostages.”

Hostages who were barely real to her, but who must be living in far more fear than she was. “Who are they?” she asked, dreading the answer because then they would be real. Real people, depending on her for the information that could save their lives.

“You don’t need to worry about that part, Jess.”

“I need to know.”

He studied her several seconds before deciding. “Two members of an archeological team in Luxor. Grad students, a man and a woman.”

She hadn’t known what to expect. Maybe journalists. Or aid workers or missionaries—those people often went wherever they saw a need, regardless of risk. They were do-gooders who went into war-torn areas and hotbeds of extremism if they thought they could help innocent people, and the Middle East had plenty of those at the moment. But archeology students? In Luxor, Egypt, where the ancient tombs of pharaohs drew archeologists from around the world?

“Egypt has a good relationship with foreign universities. They’d never allow terrorists to threaten that.”

“They didn’t
allow
it, Jess. Terrorists don’t ask permission. I’m sure the Ministry of State for Antiquities is as upset as anyone.”

The chaos of it and the lack of logic added to her distress. “It makes no sense to kidnap students. Universities can’t afford to pay ransom fees.”

His mouth twitched at the corner as if he didn’t like what he was about to say. “No one has asked for a ransom.”