The Blue Zone

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Kate listened to the whoosh of a late-night car driving in the rain on the street. The glow of the streetlamp outside her bedroom window had never seemed quite so bright. Her eyes were open. The clock on the table next to her bed read 3:10 A.M.

She couldn’t sleep.

Mercado’s question kept reverberating in her head. “The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”

How could she deny it any longer?

Her father had been part of the Mercados. It had been his family, not just his brotherhood but his family-his real family-from birth. Fraternidad. His own father had been the head of it. He had kept this concealed from those he loved. If he ever really did love us. Now he was free to go after his brother for betraying him. Kate’s mother was dead. Her brother and sister were in hiding.

This kind of truth didn’t set anyone free.

Her mind kept coming back to the picture of the dark European-looking woman holding her infant son. Kate’s grandmother. They had come here from Colombia, not Spain. “For years, he has been my protector,” Mercado had said of her grandfather. The grandfather she thought had died in Spain decades ago. Now he had died. The old commitments were gone. It had sent her father on a journey of vengeance and reprisal, so vile, so unbelievable, that every time she thought about it, it felt like a fist in her abdomen. Their family had been sacrificed so her father could get inside the program.

Where his brother had been in hiding for twenty years.

Kate turned away from the window. What was it Margaret Seymour had told them? “I’m sort of a specialist in the Mercados.”

They had the same case agent.

Mercado’s story was true, Kate understood, no matter how it hurt to accept it. No matter how it made the past twenty years of their lives seem like a flimsy façade.

She saw it in his face. He knew about Rosa. He knew Kate’s true name. He had the matching half of the broken sun. Her father was alive. It no longer made Kate feel elated; it made her feel sick. She knew that it all had to be true.

We’re your family, Ben, not them. You have to choose.

Now she knew the meaning of those words. Su deber. His duty. What hurt as much as anything was that he had been lying to her all these years. To them all.

Kate sat up, her nightshirt cold with sweat. Next to her, Greg stirred. She didn’t know anymore what was right to do. Take everything she knew to Cavetti. The haunting picture she’d found-Ben and Mercado. What Howard had divulged. How her father had brought himself down. All that the old man had told her in the park.

Why?

WITSEC had never played straight with her. All along, they’d been protecting Mercado. All along, they knew his secret.

It was her father they were desperate to find.

At some point Kate drifted off to sleep-brief, fitful. She had a dream. Her father was in the gazebo where she first told him she wouldn’t be coming into the program. He seemed so distant there, so beaten. So small. His touch was tremulous and afraid.

When he turned to her, there was a malevolent glimmer in his eyes.

Kate’s eyes flashed open. The clock read 4:20. Her pillow was drenched with sweat. Her heart was beating like mad.

She had misjudged it, his reaction.

All along, Kate had thought it was simply shame pouring out. That was why he couldn’t look at her. A shame he’d never had to bear before. But that wasn’t what was on his face.

It was the face of the man from her flashback on the train. A nightmare from her childhood. Someone she’d never seen before. With his hand gripping her mother’s arm. A foreign glimmer in his eye.

His fist raised!

Who shot up our house that night? Kate suddenly asked herself. Who killed Mom? Did Kate really want to walk through that gate?

Why are you in that picture, Dad?

Across the bed, Greg reached in the darkness, fumbling for her.

She wrapped herself in his arms and nestled close to him. He murmured, “Is everything all right?”

She shook her head in tears on the pillow. “No.”

She didn’t know what to trust anymore. “You’ll always be there for me, Greg? Right? I can always trust you.”

“Of course you can, pooch.” He tightened his arms around her.

“No, I need to hear you say it, Greg. I know it’s dumb, but just this once, please.…”

“You can trust me, Kate,” he said softly.

She closed her eyes.

“Whatever happens, baby, you always have me.”