The Last Refuge

TWELVE

‘I cornered Amy on the back staircase the other day and gave her a kiss. Unfortunately, I think Hannah caught us at it. I hooked up with Amy later in the garden and we took up where we left off. As long as Amy’s here, I think I’ll be able to hack it.’

Alex Mueller, dancing master

Less than five minutes later, I stood on the second-floor landing of the west wing listening to Michael (or was it Alex?) snore. It had been a long night for everyone. With every muscle in my body aching, screaming out for rest, I slipped into Amy’s room just across the hall from Michael’s and silently closed the door.

I positioned my candle on the narrow walnut table next to Amy’s bed, sat down and kicked off my shoes. I couldn’t wait to get out of my gown and the underlying stays that had not seemed quite so tight that morning – before losing the battle against Karen’s excellent food and Jack’s fine wine. I unhooked my stomacher, slipped out of my gown and let it fall to the floor. Twisting and squirming like Houdini escaping from a straight jacket, I managed to reach the ties on my stays and release myself from their tyranny, too. Last came the stockings. Almost before they had time to reach the floorboards, I had crawled under Amy’s coverlet.

I lay flat on my back, staring at shadows dancing on the ceiling. Damn, the bed was uncomfortable. I wasn’t as sensitive as The Princess and the Pea, but something was digging into my back.

I hopped out of bed and knelt on the floorboards, lifted the mattress off the rope webbing that supported it. Nothing was underneath. I untucked the sheet, moved the candlestick closer so I could examine the mattress ticking. Horsehair was poking out through a four-inch slit in the seam.

Eureka!

I eased my hand through the slit, feeling around gingerly in the stuffing until my hand encountered the object that had disturbed my royal slumber – Amy’s iPhone.

I extracted it from the stuffing, pushed the ‘on’ button. When the screen lit up, I could see that the battery indicator was a thin line of red – almost exhausted – and the signal strength indicator read NO SERVICE. ‘Bummer,’ I muttered, and returned the useless lump of metal, silicon chips and microprocessors to the mattress, tucking it well to one side where it wouldn’t bother me.

That done, I crawled back into bed and pulled Amy’s coverlet up to my chin. Using my thumb and forefinger, I reached over and pinched out the candle.

Immediately, the room was plunged into a darkness so absolute that I felt as if a black velvet bag had been drawn over my head. It was a moonless night, and no streetlamps – ancient or modern – shone into the room from the garden side of the house. The Naval Academy had even been persuaded to turn off the floodlights that usually illuminated the Chapel dome. After straining for a moment to distinguish something, anything – the bulk of a dresser, the outline of a chair – in the profound darkness of the room, I closed my eyes and fell instantly asleep.

Paul is wearing a midshipman’s uniform. We’re having a race, and I struggle to keep up. As Paul runs he glances over his shoulder, signals with his arm – C’mon Hannah! – laughing like a boy. He’s leading me… where? Suddenly, he flings up his arms and disappears. I follow, panting. Wait for me! Wait! Then I’m falling, falling into darkness, suffocating darkness.

I couldn’t breathe.

A hand was clamped over my mouth, pressing hard against my nose. I flailed against it. Oh my God, I’m being raped! Desperately, I tried to remember what I’d learned in self-defense class: Scream. Scream bloody murder. But I can’t scream, I can’t even breathe with his hand pressing down like that, hard then harder.

Relax, don’t fight. Not now. You need air.

‘Shhhh, shhhh,’ his breath, rancid with coffee, hot in my ear. ‘It’s me, Amy, it’s me. Please don’t scream.’

Beneath his hand, I nodded. Mumpf.

I gulped air as his hand slipped away, traced my arm and found my waist, circling it, drawing me closer.

I breathed into the dark, eyes straining to see. ‘Alex?’

He stiffened, his cheek, rough with bristles, pressed against mine, his erection hard against my back. ‘Who’s Alex?’

‘I…’ I began.

But he didn’t wait to hear. ‘Shhhh, shhhh.’ His mouth wet against my neck, his lips seeking mine. ‘Oh, God, Amy, God.’

‘I’m not Amy!’

He froze, then catapulted out of the bed as if I had morphed into a bolt of lightning. ‘Christ!’ Stumbling in the dark, feeling along the walls for the door.

‘Drew?’ I stammered, heart still thrashing. ‘It’s Drew, isn’t it?’

He paused, breathing hard.

I had no way to relight my candle, but what kind of SEAL doesn’t come prepared? ‘Do you have a flashlight?’

A barely audible rustle of cloth, a click, and a thin beam of light wavered across the floorboards, touched the foot of the bed, moved along the coverlet and found my face. I put up a hand to shield my eyes.

‘You’re the woman in the front bedroom.’ A fact, not a question. ‘Married to that flaming asshole.’

For a moment I was puzzled, then I realized he meant Jack Donovan, not Paul. ‘No, he’s supposed to be my brother-in-law.’ I wondered how long Drew had been watching me, and fought down the creepy feeling that crawled over me.

‘Where’s Amy?’ Where his wife was concerned, Drew had a one-track mind.

‘She’s asleep in my bedroom with the two children.’

‘I need to see her.’ The beam snaked across the floor, searching for the door.

‘Wait!’ I whispered. ‘If you show up suddenly like this, you’ll give her a heart attack. Amy believes that you’re dead.’

‘I sent her…’ Drew began, then clammed up.

‘She had an iPhone, but it was, uh, confiscated,’ I lied. I had promised not to rat Amy out, and even though Drew was her husband, I didn’t plan to make an exception. ‘No electricity in Paca House anyway,’ I said, pointing out the obvious.

Drew’s face, lit from beneath by the flashlight, stared back at me ghoulishly, like a creature out of Friday the Thirteenth. ‘Look, I’m sorry about what just happened here,’ he said contritely. ‘I didn’t know…’ He paused, as if considering how much to tell me. ‘I’ve been watching the house for days. I thought this was Amy’s room. Obviously I made a mistake.’

While he talked, I scooted into the corner at the head of the bed and drew my knees up to my chin, the coverlet along with them. If Drew was begging for forgiveness, he was standing on the wrong street corner.

‘Fuck. Why am I telling you this? I need to see Amy. Your room, then?’

The light flicked off.

I heard the door creak. ‘Drew! You can’t! Not if you don’t want to be seen by a couple of million people when Patriot House goes on the air.’

Another creak. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You picked a hell of a night to break in, Drew. George Washington is sleeping in Jack’s bedroom and they’ve got extra cameras set up everywhere. How did you get in, anyway?’ I asked, knowing as the words left my mouth how dumb it was to warn Drew about the cameras and to ask him such a question. SEALs knew one hundred ways to get in and a hundred-and-one ways to get out of any dangerous situation, without being seen.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Don’t answer that. But, you should understand that Amy is here because she really wants to be. She’s signed a contract. If she breaks the rules, she’ll forfeit fifteen thousand dollars as well as opening herself up to the possibility of a million-dollar lawsuit.’

‘She doesn’t need fifteen thousand dollars.’

‘I didn’t get that impression.’

‘Well, that’s crap. Amy’s getting my pay and benefits now, but soon she’ll receive a tax-free death gratuity of one hundred thousand, and there’s a four-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy, too. I’m married to a wealthy woman.’

A light bulb flicked on in my brain. ‘As long as you stay dead.’

Drew was quiet for so long that I was afraid he’d used his super stealth skills to slip silently out of the room. ‘Drew?’

‘I’m here.’ The straight-back chair next to Amy’s dresser groaned in protest as Drew sat down in it. ‘It’s better to be dead. Better for me, less embarrassing for the Navy.’

‘Why on earth would you say that?’

‘I screwed the pooch.’

Screwed the pooch. A term from the Mercury days of the U.S. space program. Like Gus Grissom, Drew must have screwed up, big time. ‘I understand, honestly. If it’s important that the Navy doesn’t find out Drew Cornell’s not a pile of ashes in Swosa, then I’m sure we can figure out a way for you to talk to your wife about it, if she wants to.’

‘What do you mean, “if she wants to?”’

I thought about Amy and Alex, but wisely kept my mouth shut. ‘Ten months is a long time, Drew. If you didn’t die on that helicopter in Swosa, where the hell have you been?’

‘Getting myself out of a sticky situation.’

‘Can you tell me about it?’

‘Why should I trust you?’

‘Because my Dad is retired Navy? Because my husband teaches at the Naval Academy? I know what it means to be a SEAL, Drew. Just to be selected for SEAL training is a major accomplishment, but to successfully complete the training, be sent on dangerous missions…’ I paused, choosing my words carefully. I needed Drew to trust me. ‘You’re DEVGRU,’ I said. ‘Elite among the elite, but the stress has to be enormous.’

Drew caught his breath. ‘DEVGRU,’ he repeated, then he laughed.

‘DEVGRU’s less of a mouthful than the Naval Special Warfare Development Group,’ I said, ‘but you gotta admit that the old name, Seal Team Six, sounds a hell of a lot sexier.’ I thought about Drew’s key role in the mission to extract a high-value target like Nazari from Swosa, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. ‘You’re Gold Squadron, right? It doesn’t get any more select than that.’

When Drew didn’t respond, I said, ‘Amy and I have become close over the past several weeks. She’s very proud of you, you know.’

Drew snorted. ‘In the early days, maybe. When I was everyone’s hero, quietly picking off Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea. Now? I’m shit under their shoes.’

‘Just a moment ago you said that it would be less embarrassing for the Navy if you stayed dead. I’m trying to work that one out. The mission to capture Nazari was fully-sanctioned by the U.S. government, right? That’s what they kept saying on CNN.’

‘Capture, not kill. They wanted Nazari trussed up and delivered to the ICC for crimes against humanity.’

‘ICC?’

‘The International Criminal Court in the Hague. In March of 2009 Nazari was indicted by the ICC on eighteen counts of genocide, torture and rape. He’d been a fugitive ever since.’

‘A monster,’ I said. ‘Not fit to breathe the same air as the rest of us.’

‘Yeah, but the brass thinks that I stepped over the line. We broke into the compound, cornered Nazari in an upstairs bedroom. The bastard was unarmed. We could’a taken him alive, easy. Just one sorry excuse for a human being hiding behind a curtain with his wife and children. He massacred millions of his own people, sure, I could deal with that, but when he grabbed one of his daughters and tried to use her as a human shield I looked the son of a bitch straight in the eye and said to myself, screw it, you’re a waste of space. You’ve forfeited your right to live. I double tapped him. End of story.’

‘But it wasn’t, was it? The end of the story, I mean.’

‘Fuck, no. All hell broke loose. Women crying, children screaming, guards popping up out of nowhere. We killed a bunch of guards on our way out, and I covered for my team as they ran to the chopper, but I missed the guy with the rocket launcher.’

‘We saw the explosion on CNN. Everyone assumed you were aboard, too.’

‘Sometimes I wish I had been.’

‘But it’s better to be alive, Drew, surely. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you if the Navy finds out you’re not dead?’

‘After being AWOL for almost a year? Let’s just say that I’m not planning on doing any time in Leavenworth.’

‘So, what happened next?’

‘After the explosion, I took out the guard, borrowed his clothing and got the hell out. It took me a while, but I’m here.’

‘How did you get out of Swosa with no passport, no money?’

‘It helps to be fluent in the language, and…’ He paused and we both heard the door across the hall creak open. There was a light tap on the door.

‘Amy? I heard voices. You OK in there?’

Alex.

I wasn’t sure I could imitate Amy’s Yankee twang, so I mumbled sleepily, ‘Fine. Just a nightmare. Sorry I woke you. G’night.’ I held my breath, fearful that Alex might decide to comfort Amy in person, but after a few seconds, the light pad of stocking feet confirmed that he’d returned to the room he shared with Michael.

As much as I wanted to hear the rest of Drew’s story, I knew it could be dangerous for everyone if he stuck around much longer. ‘We’re going to church at nine o’clock tomorrow,’ I whispered. ‘Amy and I will figure out a way for the two of you to talk.’

‘St Anne’s, you mean? On Church Circle?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘The restrooms are through the door to the right as you enter the narthex. Nobody should be using them during the service, so you can wait for Amy there.’

A slight creak of the chair, a whispered, ‘Thanks.’

For several minutes I remained huddled in my corner, arms wrapped around my knees, imagining I could still hear him breathing. ‘Drew?’

But Amy’s husband was gone. And I’d never even seen his face.