Carla Neggers - Betrayals

Jean-Paul regained consciousness in a communist Saigon. All around him were bo dois, communist soldiers. His face was shattered, and his recovery, in hiding, was slow. It was eighteen months before he could escape with dozens of refugees in a fishing boat, a grueling experience for which even his years as a POW hadn’t prepared him.

He got as far as Honolulu before his body gave out again, to malnutrition, dehydration, infection. The next months he spent on the streets just trying to stay alive. How could he possibly take on Annette Reed? He saw her picture in a magazine, read about her in cast-off copies of the Wall Street Journal. She was untouchable.

You’ve survived, he’d told himself. Be glad of that.

Not until he’d seen the copy of The Score had he known Rebecca, Jared Sloan and Mai had gotten out alive. He could have found out but hadn’t. The picture was like a call to action. His final chance.

Stupidly, arrogantly, ridiculously, he had thought he could succeed this time in compelling Annette to give up the Jupiter Stones and to bring her to justice for the crimes she’d committed.

But Annette had never had the Jupiter Stones.

“I should have stayed in Honolulu,” he told Rebecca.

She smiled with tragic understanding. “Isn’t hindsight wonderful?”

As they drove on, she had her own gloomy thoughts to fight. She loved Jared. Nothing had changed after all. If anything happened to Mai…

“If you knew for certain you were doing the right thing,” her grandfather had often said, “you wouldn’t be making a difficult choice.”

No crystal ball.

He had chosen silence in 1963. Twelve years later, Jean-Paul had chosen to risk his own life to keep Annette from adding to her body count. Jared had chosen to claim Mai as his own child and raise her.

Not easy choices, maybe not even the right choices-but they’d had to make a decision. And all choices, all decisions, had ramifications.

Was that something Annette understood? She had tried to kill Mai once already…her own granddaughter.

“We’ll get Mai away from her,” Jean-Paul said, reading Rebecca’s thoughts. “Annette knows I was hesitating about going to Marblehead. She’s using Mai to lure me.”

“What do you think her strategy is?”

“To blame the last thirty years on your grandfather,” he replied calmly, “and to kill him and me.”

“But that’s crazy!”

He fastened his warm, soft eyes on her. “Think about it, Rebecca. Is it?”

The Winstons’ house on Marblehead Neck was much as Thomas remembered from his first visit there with Emily, before World War II, but he wasn’t the same man he’d been. As he stumbled on the slippery rocks and shivered in the biting ocean wind, he could see Annette as a little girl, climbing up to him, her hands filled with seaweed and periwinkles, her cheeks rosy and her eyes bright with triumph.

“Look, Uncle Thomas, look! Do you think I’ll find a mermaid, too?” she’d asked.

“Keep looking,” he’d said. “You never know.”

“I’m going to show Father.”

Minutes later, Thomas had seen John Winston angrily marching to the edge of the rocks with little Annette’s treasures and flinging them as far as he could, and her mother taking her sobbing daughter inside to wash her hands and change her dress, telling her there were no such thing as mermaids.

All more than a half century ago and yet, Thomas thought, clearer in his mind than anything that had happened last year.

Behind him on the rocks, Nguyen Kim commanded him to stop. Thomas was perfectly glad to oblige. He’d read somewhere that balance and the legs were the first to go as one aged, and from this billy-goat climb down to the water’s edge, he could attest to that theory’s veracity.

They had come to a relatively level area of barnacle-covered boulders and tide pools below the tide line, well out of view of the house. With the gathering storm, the tide was coming in high, with huge, frothy swells. Already Thomas could feel the icy spray of the roiling waves on his face. Had Annette, he wondered, made her plan according to the weather, or were the turbulent seas just another of her happy coincidences?

He turned around, and Kim pointed to a rock and ordered him to sit.

“Barnacles are sharp,” Thomas said.

Kim grinned. “Good.”

Annette’s Vietnamese bodyguard had met Thomas on the lawn and, without a great deal of fanfare, had revealed the gun tucked in his waistband and suggested Thomas lead the way down to the rocks.

Thomas had hoped the bastard would trip and accidentally shoot off his own balls.

He sat on the rock. The barnacles pricked his rear end, but it wasn’t that uncomfortable-preferable, he supposed, to a bullet in the head, although that might be next.

“I gather Annette doesn’t want me killed in her living room,” Thomas commented.

Not answering, Kim removed a length of rope from his back pants pocket.

Thomas stiffened his jaw so that his teeth wouldn’t chatter, but the cold had reached into his bones. “Afraid I’d come back and haunt the place, isn’t she?”

“Your hands,” Kim said.

With a resigned sigh, Thomas crossed his hands behind his back, and Kim immediately came round and whisked the rope around his wrists, Kim repeating the move with Thomas’s ankles, the knots tight enough that what little circulation he had to his extremities was immediately cut off. He’d always had an irrational fear of having to have a hand or foot lopped off, but supposed that’d be a luxury now.

“You always were efficient,” he said mildly.

Kim fastened his hard eyes on him. “I’ve only done what I had to do to survive.”

“And what, might I ask,” he said, unflinchingly meeting the Vietnamese’s gaze, “is so bloody important about your surviving?”

“You’re going to die today, old man.”

Thomas gave him a cool, appraising look. “As I should have twenty-six years ago?”

Not responding, Kim gave the ropes at his captive’s hands and feet a final tug and bounced back onto his feet.

“Nguyen Kim,” Thomas said, rolling the name around in his mind, as if he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether he recognized it or not. “Quang Tai’s friend, weren’t you?”

“I knew him.”

“Did you know you were signing his death certificate when you tipped off your Vietcong friends on Annette’s behalf?” Thomas’s gaze didn’t let up. “That was you, Kim. Tai trusted you. He told you my itinerary-and you, brave fellow, told the insurgents.”

Kim remained impassive. “I was doing a job,” he spat. “On your stomach!”

But Thomas wasn’t fast enough for Kim, who grabbed him by the shoulder and thrust him onto a huge, flat boulder. Thomas felt the sharp barnacles bite into his cheeks.

“You’re going to drown, old man,” Kim said.

His feet crunching on the barnacles, he hurried off, leaving Thomas trapped at the water’s edge, unable to do much beyond listening to the rhythmic sounds of the approaching tide.

Jared’s call to Sofi Mencini shook him. She had gone over to Mt. Vernon Street herself, but saw no sign of Annette, Rebecca, Mai, Thomas or Jean-Paul. “I’m worried, Jared,” Sofi had said.

“So am I.”

“David’s putting the stones in a safe at the store, but I’m calling the cops.”

Jared agreed. “I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

Through the hotel’s glass front doors, however, he saw Quentin climbing out of his white Porsche and smiling graciously at the uniformed attendants rushing to serve him.

Jared surged forward. An attendant moved to open the door, but not fast enough, and Jared banged through it, sensing the already suspicious eyes of the security guards on him. He didn’t care. He jumped in front of Quentin, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and smashed him up against his car.