Tess Gerritsen: Double Impact

Tanner stopped next to a long black SUV and opened the rear passenger door. “We’ll-”

The tip of a gun barrel suddenly pressed against his temple.

Ami gasped.

Tanner froze.

Fran had taken a position, her legs spread wide, her gun held in firing position and aimed directly at the interloper.

Michal Arad.

“Let her go,” Michal said harshly, his weapon cocked and ready to fire.

“I thought you were dead,” Tanner argued, a frown creasing his brow as he attempted to reason the situation.

“Obviously you were wrong,” Michal countered hotly. “Now, let her go.”

“You don’t understand,” Tanner hastened to explain, “we’re taking her to her child.”

“Drop the weapon, Arad,” Fran suggested. “Don’t make me do something we’ll both regret.”

He looked at Fran then. “This has nothing to do with you. It is between him-” he jerked his head toward Tanner “-and me.”

Fran shrugged and lowered her weapon. “You’re right.”

Tanner gaped at her. “What the hell-”

“Let her go,” Michal repeated, halting whatever Tanner intended to rant.

“They used him,” Fran reminded Tanner. “He didn’t deserve a termination order and you know it.” She said the last with more ferocity than Ami had heard her use before.

Tanner had known Michal wasn’t a bad guy? Shock radiated through Ami all over again. That meant the CIA knew…

Clearly recognizing when he was outnumbered, Tanner released her. Ami went immediately to Michal. She thrust her arms around him and held him close, determined to hear for herself the steady beat of his heart.

“Before you die,” Michal said to Tanner, “you will tell Ami all that you and your people did to her.”

Fran leaned against a nearby car. “Might as well get comfortable. This is going to take a while.”

Too thankful for Michal’s safety to care one iota about the rest of the conversation, Ami clung to him, sending up silent prayers of gratitude.

“Tell her,” Michal ordered savagely.

Startled by the savagery in Michal’s tone, Ami shifted her attention to him and then to Tanner. Anticipation spiked. He was finally going to tell her the truth. She could see the defeat in his eyes.

Her disbelief growing with every sentence he strung together, Ami listened as Tanner described her innocuous life as a med school student. The loss of her mother and the long-standing, deep-seated dislike for her father. Then, visibly reluctant, he told her the rest. The way her cover as Jamie Dalton had been initiated. The whole crazy scheme. Down to the fact that he had known she was alive all along, had been the one to rescue her.

When at last he’d finished, Ami did the only thing she could. She slapped him hard. Wanted the sting to go on and on until the quake shook loose some sense of compassion in him.

What he’d done had been wrong.

But it was over now. If what he’d told her was true and he’d brought her baby back to her, she could forgive him most anything.

“Where’s my child?” she demanded, ready to do him bodily harm yet again.

To his credit, he didn’t step back. He took it like a man. “Get in.” He tossed a challenging glare in Michal’s direction. “You, too. I’ll take you both to Nicholas.”

Michal inclined his head toward Fran. “She will take us to my son. The only place you’re going is to hell.” He tightened his grip around his weapon.

“Wait!” Ami pulled back and peered up at Michal. “He only followed orders. Killing him won’t make any of this right.” Her voice grew even more pleading then. “I just want to see my baby.”

“Besides,” Tanner put in, “the two of you need me.”

Michal made a sound of disbelief. “And how have you reached that ridiculous conclusion?”

“I can sink your files. As far as the CIA will be concerned, neither of you will ever have existed. Only a handful of people will know and even they won’t be able to prove it.”

Michal didn’t bother to tell him that Ron Doamiass had already taken similar steps within the Mossad. Michal owed him a great deal. A debt he would never be able to repay. As far as the world knew, Michal Arad was dead. Ron had risked his career as well as his life to set up that very scenario. That it was witnessed and survived by two of Michal’s men had been the pivotal strategy.

Yet, on some level, Michal knew that Tanner spoke the truth. The history of Michal and Ami would be best served if it no longer existed in any government agency.

“Who will ensure that you-” he glanced at the attractive older woman who had allowed him to make his case without interference “-and you keep this secret?”

“What was your name again?” Fran quipped.

“Your son is waiting,” Tanner reminded him, uncertainty as to his own fate hovering in his expression.

A single beat passed before Michal lowered his weapon.

Tanner’s relief was palpable.

In less than half an hour Tanner drove into the parking lot of a small dry-cleaning business. He looked from Michal in the front passenger seat to Ami in the back, her hand already rested on the door latch. “Fran will go in and bring him out.”

When Michal would have protested, Tanner reminded him, “We don’t need any more people than absolutely necessary to see you alive at this point.”

Seeing the reasonableness in his assertion, Michal allowed the woman to emerge from the SUV and go into the rundown shop.

Two minutes later she opened the rear passenger-side door and handed Ami a large bundle of squirming arms and legs.

Michal’s heart seized.

This was his son.

Her smile trembling on her lips, Ami pulled back the soft blanket and revealed the child’s expectant face. Michal’s breath evacuated his lungs in one blast.

This was his son. His every feature was just as Ami had described-a mirror image of his father.

“Michal.” Ami turned toward him and offered the child to him over the console between the seats. “Meet Nicholas, your son.”

Michal took the child in his arms, his heart swelling with equal parts pride and love. The child wiggled and squirmed, but did not pout up and cry. Awe paralyzed Michal’s ability to speak or to even think.

But words were not necessary.

He had all that he had ever wanted within his reach.

SIX MONTHS AFTER holding his son for the first time, Michal had settled his family in a small, quiet village in a country where terrorism was an unfamiliar term rather than an everyday affair. A curiously sheltered environment where time seemed to have stopped at a better place.

Ami pressed a kiss to the top of Nicholas’s head as he scrambled down from her lap to play with his father on the beach.

She laughed and clapped at their antics as they rolled and wrestled on the warm sand, the ocean lapping nearby.

Though months had passed, Michal knew that she still struggled with some aspects of the past she had not been able to fully recall. The steps that had been taken to erase her memory had left some parts irretrievable. But she was coping, one day at a time.

Tanner had been true to his word, as, of course, Ron had been. Not a single shred of evidence existed supporting Michal’s or Ami’s cases.

With new names and a low-profile life, there was no reason to ever suspect anyone would learn the truth.

Their son kept them busy by day and making love filled their nights. Michal could not be happier.

His life was at long last complete.

Ami watched the two men in her life frolic on the beach. She loved both of them more than any words she knew could convey. Still, she tried every day to get the message across in all that she said and did. She had learned firsthand that life was not to be taken for granted.