Shadowed Paradise (16 page)

Claire’s hand shook as she accepted the cup,
the dark brown liquid splashing into the saucer. “Have you heard
anything about Bob Jeffers?”

“
He’s going to be fine. Looks like
he’ll come out of this with nothing more than a
headache.”

“
You’ve told his wife?”

“
Yes. I had someone drive her to the
hospital.”

Claire murmured her thanks, and the wait
began.

Over the next several hours she spoke with
Jim three times. As always, he sounded confident, optimistic,
everything’s-going-to-be-fine. Why then did she feel such dread?
Perhaps because she’d finally recognized that Jim Langdon would
have taken the final tumbril ride to the guillotine certain that he
would be rescued.

There was, however, a different note to his
final call shortly after midnight. Claire doubted the agents
monitoring their conversation noticed the change in Jim’s tone, the
finality of his words, but when she hung up she was filled with a
sense of foreboding. Jim was going to break out of the safe house,
she was certain of it. No ransom message had come to the house in
Bedford, not a word to the roomful of waiting agents and their
masses of technical equipment. Yet a message must have been slipped
past Jim’s guards. He was going to run, do what had to be done.

She never dreamed how high a price he would
be asked to pay.

Doug Chalmers, whose attempt at sleep in one
of the mansion’s guest bedrooms was equally fitful, was waked
shortly after six in the morning by the insistent ringing of his
cell phone. “Shit!” he exploded as he listened. He was still
swearing long after he flipped his cell phone cover back in place,
wishing for something sturdy he could slam instead. What the
fucking hell did that idiot think he was doing dropping off a condo
balcony in the middle of the night? Did the kidnappers get to him?
Or was he simply on his way to his wife?

His fury and frustration tightly in check,
Chalmers knocked on Claire’s door. She was so calm when he gave her
the news, he wondered if she’d gone into shock. It was almost as if
she’d known. And yet he’d gone over the tapes of Claire’s
conversation with her husband the evening before three times and
heard no hint that Jim Langdon was planning to bolt. The man had
simply disappeared.

Claire, back at her post on the burgundy
leather couch in the game room, waited, stomach churning. Jamie and
Jim, both gone. What if she never saw them again?

Impossible!
She
wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept it.

The hours dragged by. The phone, when it
rang, never signaled anything more significant than another report
of failure. Between prayers, Claire cataloged every might-have-been
and should-have-been in her life, made solemn vows for the future,
begged God yet again for the deliverance of her loved ones

At eleven-thirty that morning there was news.
Jim Langdon had taken off from a small Westchester County airport
in InterBank’s Piper Mojave, just as he had many times before. The
mechanic on duty did not realize anyone was looking for Langdon
until he was long gone. A small plane, flying low, was literally
beneath the notice of Air Traffic Control. Jim Langdon could be
anywhere.

Claire lowered her head and smiled. Jim was
not simply intelligent. He was strong-willed and resilient. He was
going to get away. Disappear some place where no one could find
him. He would not testify. And Jamie would be returned to her.

Must be returned to her.

Fantasy, pure and
simple
. Claire never doubted what the hard-headed,
grim-faced agents were thinking. They’d lost their star witness and
the only way Jamie Langdon would be found, if ever, was as a small
lifeless corpse.

“
It was four in the afternoon when we
heard,” Claire said, her voice low and toneless as anguish swept
over her, as real as that terrible day two years earlier. “I could
tell the news was bad. Doug’s whole body sagged as he listened to
whoever was on the phone. I hoped he was just upset because Jim got
away, but of course . . . that wasn’t it. I suppose you read about
it. It made the headlines everywhere. Jim was spotted by two
different commercial pilots flying south, hugging the coastline.
They tried to get him on the radio, but he wouldn’t respond. By the
time he got to the Outer Banks off Hatteras they had a couple of
chase planes on him.” Claire’s voice faded, then struggled
on.

“
There were witnesses on the ground
too. Fishermen, some boaters. They said he went up to about two
thousand feet and simply dove straight in. They told me he didn’t
suffer, that he was killed instantly. I’ve always hoped they were
telling the truth.”

Jesus!
Brad
felt helpless. There was nothing he could say to take away the
pain. Whatever Jim Langdon’s sins, he’d died a hero for the sake of
his family. “And Jamie?” he prompted softly.

“
A miracle. No one ever figured out why
the kidnappers let him go. Doug said maybe even bad guys had to
admire Jim’s guts. Jamie was found walking through the Jersey
marshes, all alone. When he woke up that morning, the door of the
little shack they’d kept him in was open, and everyone was gone.
There was a big scene of course. Police, ambulances, swarms of the
media. Jamie was never able to tell them anything. The men wore ski
masks. But it’s easy to see why flashing lights and sirens, the
possibility of endless questions, terrify him. He tries hard, but
he still has nightmares. We both do.”

On the far side of the bay a large cruiser
headed north up the waterway, its running lights steady as it
passed through the quiet waters of the Intracoastal. Numbly, Brad
followed its progress, his mind seething with visions of what
Claire and Jamie had endured.

“
And after you had Jamie back,” Brad
said, “every government agency was on your case, trying to get you
to fill in the blanks your husband took with him.” It wasn’t a
question. He could picture it all quite clearly. He would have done
the same.

“
I gave Doug my diary,” Claire sighed.
“I was trying to be helpful, but suddenly the whole world wanted to
talk to me. I was a cipher, a
nothing
to InterBank, but they just kept at it.
They seemed to think if they asked the same question enough times,
I’d somehow conjure an answer out of thin air.”

“
That bad?” Brad asked
gently.

“
There were some who were brusque,”
Claire admitted, hugging her arms around her chest as a cool breeze
wafted across the deck, “but mostly it was simply endless. I’d
think it was over, and someone else would want to run names and
faces by me. One more agency jumping on the bandwagon with its own
axe to grind. I kept thinking that if I told them everything I
knew, if I really showed them I was cooperating, that would be it.
They’d soak it all up and go away. But they kept coming back with
questions and more questions.”

With an impatient gesture, Claire brushed
back a lock of hair that had fallen over one eye. “In the end there
were only a few convictions,” she said. “And, of course,
restitution. InterBank was almost like a pyramid scheme, you see.
So many ordinary people, innocent depositors, lost nearly
everything they had . . .”

Claire’s voice wavered. She gulped for air.
“I was so ashamed. Our only refuge was my family, and Florida was
about as far away as Jamie and I could get on no money.”

“
There were InterBank branches in
Florida too,” Brad said, trying to lighten her burden, keep her
from absorbing all the guilt. “Your husband didn’t create
InterBank’s way of doing business. He was just doing what InterBank
was doing worldwide. There was a trial here with a wholly different
cast of characters. It ended with some pretty stiff
sentences.”

“
I didn’t know,” Claire murmured. “For
a long time I couldn’t bring myself to read the newspapers or watch
television news. We bottled ourselves up, Jamie and I. I drove him
to school myself, picked him up. Other than that, we seldom went
farther than the grocery store. The Alphabets always came to the
house. About the only other people we saw were the prospective
buyers the real estate agents brought in. It’s odd, I suppose, but
I don’t remember being lonely. I was so . . . numb. I couldn’t
feel. Couldn’t think. I simply existed.”

The Yale bulldog, Handsome Dan, shook beneath
her fingers as Claire paused for a sip of beer. “I tried to be a
good mother,” she said. “I smiled for Jamie even when I thought my
face would crack. He was my only reality, my only hold on life.
Somehow, for his sake, I had to survive.”

“
Sometimes that’s all you can do.
Believe me, I know.” Brad enveloped her hand in his.

“
It was such a relief when they said we
could leave,” Claire admitted. “I realized what it must feel like
to be let out of prison.”

Prison
. Once
upon a time, not that long ago, Brad had reveled in the strange
dark world that destroyed Claire Langdon’s life. Leaving it was
like cutting out his heart, reducing the brilliance of a Van Gogh
to a matte of flat gray. But coming home to Golden Beach was better
than being tethered to a desk, forbidden to soar with the
eagles..

But after a while . . . after a while he
could look back and see the prison. A prison of duty and danger,
the challenge of pushing things to the edge. And maybe a bit
beyond.

It was addictive. And it could kill you.

There had been some damn good times. And
really bad ones. He’d done things that made Jim Langdon and
InterBank look like participants in a Sunday School picnic. Claire
Langdon wasn’t the only one with nightmares. A matched set—a
damaged matched set-—that’s what they were.

Back when he was new to the Dark Side,
Claire’s confession might have mattered. Back when his world came
in black and white, the good guys and the bad. Before he’d learned
the infinite shades of gray the hard way. He had, on occasion, even
discovered that black was white and white was black, and he himself
was one of the bad guys.

Now . . . now what he wanted was a world of
color. A world of vivid brilliance . . . and soft pastels. A world
of light and love and trust. A world of family. And if he wasn’t
very careful about what he said and did next, he could blow it
all.

Brad released Claire’s hand and
hunkered back into the cushions at one end of the couch. He crossed
his arms over his chest and stretched his long legs out in front of
him. After drawing in a deep breath, he let it out in a long-drawn,
carefully calculated sigh.
God, he had to
get this right
.

“
I should have guessed that Miss
Blueblood of Yale and Manhattan’s Upper East Side is too good for
Yevgeny Blukovsky’s little farm boy who only made it to University
of Miami on a football scholarship. How’d you keep your face
straight when I asked you out, Ms. Ivy League Langdon? What a joke,
Brad Blue attempting to play Big Man on Campus in the Florida
backwater of Golden Beach.”

Claire’s head came up with a snap. She gaped
at him. “Don’t be absurd!”

“
So what’s absurd?” he challenged.
“You’re upper crust and I’m the farm kid from sticksville. Damn
gracious of you to grant me a dinner for saving your life.
Noblesse oblige
and all that.” Brad
maintained his slouched position, the perfect portrait of a grown
man sulking.
Time to zero in for the
kill
. “I trust I made a convenient chauffeur for the
fireworks, madame, but now that I’ve served my usefulness, it’s
time to fade away. Leave the poor little rich girl to lick her
wounds and feel sorry for herself.”

He’d gone too far. Brad wished those last
words back as soon as he said them.

“
How
dare
you . . .?”

“
That’s just it,” Brad admitted
sorrowfully, “I don’t.” He bent forward, hung his head and examined
the sand still clinging to the toe of his sneaker.

He heard a sound.
Damn! Clumsy idiot, he’d made her cry
. But the
sound grew from choking into recognizable chuckles, admittedly
tainted by a suspicious wetness threatening her cheeks when he
swung his head to look at her.

“
You wretch!” Claire choked out. “You
ridiculous, miserable wretch. You know perfectly well that’s so
outrageous I can’t help but be distracted. How can I be sad when
you’re making me so damned angry?”

“
You think?”

“
Idiot,” Claire murmured. “Clever,
devious,
manipulative
idiot,”
she added more sharply. There ought to be law against men like
you.”

Leaning forward, Brad placed his index finger
under Claire’s chin. He studied the luminous azure eyes, the
tear-ravaged face, the wobbly smile. “We may have been on different
sides of the great divide, my girl, but it looks like we’re
survivors of the same alphabet mud puddle. Maybe we could try to
help each other out. If that’s okay with you?”

“
I’d like that,” she said at last, “but
trust is tough. I was so very naive, so stupid, that I’ve become a
cynic. I’d like a relationship, but when it comes right down to put
up or shut up, I’m terrified. I
want
. . . but I
can’t
.”

Brad cupped her face in his hands.
Warmth flooded through her.
Not
fair!
It wasn’t right that one man could wield such
power. One touch and the wall she had so carefully built around
herself began to crack. Like a bud opening into glorious flowering,
she felt a rush of sunlight, of long-dormant passion.