Ghosts That Haunt—9
There finally came a time when she woke up and knew she was, for lack of a better word, sober. Mariah looked around in the dim light and identified her location as hospital, but she couldn't at first think what had brought her there. She remembered the training exercise but little else. As she came more fully awake, she remembered her failure in command, and then she recognized the throbbing pain in her back and chest for what it was. She had been shot. She remembered asking Faraday to come down, she remembered removing her vest, and she remembered hitting the pavement.
The pain grew, and she finally gave in and hit the call button for the nurse. It didn't take long for one to arrive, and she told the woman in yellow scrubs she hurt—a lot. The nurse asked her a series of questions, and then she left to get a doctor. That took a little longer, and Mariah wished they would hurry.
When the doctor came, he was a tall, thin, colorless man who made Mariah inexplicably think of a mortician. Mariah submitted to questions, lame jokes, and an examination. She was told she was very lucky, and as she listened to the doctor explain the damage the bullet had done, she was relieved that ISI kept a good medical team on hand during exercises. She was sternly told how very close to bleeding to death she had come. He so intimidated her with his lecture she nearly promised to bleed slower next time. The doctor had the nurse administer a painkiller. He told Mariah that over the next several days they would wean her off the narcotics and on to other drugs and see how she did. She nodded.
Alone once more, she tried to sort through the weird dreams, tried to figure out what was real and what was not. She was pretty sure her parents had been real. She thought Emma was as well. John had to be a complete hallucination, no matter how much she might wish otherwise.
She stayed awake, listened to the sounds of the hospital, and thought. She heard steps enter the room and turned her head to see her father. She wondered if he would yell at her yet. He bent and kissed her forehead before taking the chair beside her bed. "When I got here a little while ago," he said, "they told me you were finally alert."
Mariah gave him a slight smile. "You can tell Digger Cobb that you sure as hell do hear the shot that hits you."
Her father laughed. "Tell him yourself," he offered with a grin, "though I believe he always maintained it was the one that killed you that you wouldn't hear." She watched her father's face blanch, sober, but then he regrouped. "You didn't follow rules, Mariah, and that nearly killed you. What possessed you to remove your vest?"
He wasn't yelling, she reminded herself. "I was sweltering out there on the pavement, covered head to foot in heavy black and several pounds of gear, in full sun, on a nearly record heat day. The exercise was over, and I took it off to get a little relief."
"You had a hostile sniper, fully armed and in position, and you took your vest off."
She closed her eyes a minute. As she frequently did, she wondered how much of this was boss and how much was father. "He shouldn't have had live ammo, Dad."
"Shouldn't have, but did," he said, his brows drawn down. "Mariah, all he had to do was come down. He was going to finish second, and Thompson didn't want the anti-terrorist slot. It was Faraday's for the asking. You made two errors serious enough to knock you out of the top slot—and those were before you failed to follow procedure and removed your vest." Her father breathed in deeply and then slowly released it. "He charged favoritism, and there's evidence you did get some."
There was no point in challenging that, so she didn't. She had been aware that at least one instructor was making things easy on her, but that had meant he had had to loosen standards for them all.
"On the other hand," he continued, "there's also some evidence you faced some prejudice for the same reason." She nodded. "There will be an investigation, and, unfortunately, it's going to be much broader than just the shooting."
Mariah closed her eyes. Her father had narrowly escaped Gray Laurance's whispering campaign, and now she might be the final straw that brought him down. "Will I need to resign?" she asked.
He snorted. "Probably not," he conceded, "and before you go to the dark place, neither will I. I initiated no contact with anyone on the Institute's staff other than to issue the order for the independent evaluator. As soon as the first complaints came in, I redirected any accusations related to you to another administrator for resolution. I'll be cleared, but you are going to have to answer some questions."
Nodding, she said, "Then we should probably stop talking now."
Her father agreed and then told her, "I've told Diane you won't be going back to Los Angeles for a while. She's agreed to make sure that your cover job is held until we know how this will be resolved and until we know you're up to it."
Mariah nodded again. When he covered her hand with his, she turned her hand to grip his. "I assume Faraday was arrested?"
"As soon as he hit street level," her father said, and then he tilted his head. "Why?"
"I've been lying here thinking about it. It doesn't make sense, Dad," she said. "As you said, I made two mistakes." She stopped, frowned, tried to figure out what they were, but couldn't. "I assume someone will tell me what those were?" At his nod, she continued, "He had to have known that, so why shoot me? He didn't like me, but I don't think he hated me. Not only that, but by shooting me on the training ground, surrounded by a number of ISI operatives—not to mention the Director General—he guaranteed he lost the one thing he wanted, and he got caught."
Her father sat back and studied her. "Mariah, who else could it have been?"
She had no answer for that, and she admitted as much. "I just find it hard to believe he was that stupid." She looked up at her father. "The one thing I would never call Faraday is stupid, Dad. Arrogant, yes. Ambitious, definitely. Cunning, no question. If he did this, then he didn't think it through enough to realize that after weeks of confrontation with me, he was going to be the number one suspect even if he hadn't been on the roof when it happened."
"Have you considered that he didn't plan it, that it was a crime of opportunity?" She mulled that over. "Maybe he didn't think about it until you took the vest off, Mariah."
Perhaps that was so, she acknowledged, but she figured Faraday would have loved one more chance to taunt her. She suspected he would have enjoyed poking her over her failure. "I don't think he'd take his resentment out that way, Dad. He was always smart enough to step back from taking that last step over the line with me."
"When they interview you, tell them that," he said, but Mariah could tell her father wasn't convinced.
After he was gone, she thought about it more, considered what she knew of Faraday, and she still reached the same conclusion: she simply didn't believe he would jeopardize his career by trying to kill her. From what the doctor had told her, whoever shot her had been trying to kill her—not hurt her, not scare her.
Her mother and Emma came after she finished a breakfast she largely didn't eat, and Mariah was glad to see the both of them. Her sister grinned and said, "Guess you're going to live, so I can't have all those cool clothes of yours, not to mention all the serious jewelry."
Mariah started to laugh, but it hurt too much. "You're a good five inches taller than I am, Em. What on earth makes you think my clothes would fit you?"
Her sister grinned. "I notice you didn't mention the jewelry."
"You're going to make me laugh," Mariah said, "and that's going to make me hemorrhage." Emma's face paled. "Kidding," Mariah told her, though she wasn't entirely sure.
She explained to her mother what the doctor had told her when she woke up in the early hours. Her mother told her she had heard that from her father. "Did I imagine talking to you?" she asked.
Emma looked startled, but her mother was the one who said, "We got here while you were still in surgery, Mariah. Emma and I—your father, too—were in and out when you woke."
Mariah didn't think she imagined the looks passing between her mother and sister. "I thought John was here," she said, "but I must have imagined him because that's impossible."
There was an oppressive silence, and Emma looked like she was about to confess a crime. Her mother looked shocked. "What makes you think you imagined him?"
She frowned at her mother's question. "He's gone, Mum. Beckman wouldn't call him home for me even if I died."
"Mariah—" her mother began, but a nurse came in to take her vital signs and check on her. She asked the woman if she had to continue lying flat, and the nurse helped elevate her a little.
When the nurse left, they moved on to other subjects. It wasn't until much later that she wondered what her mother had intended to say.
Mariah dozed the rest of the morning, roused for lunch, then impatiently listened to daytime talk shows. If she had to endure television, she wished there were more channels from which to choose. Finally, in frustration, she found a news channel she largely ignored. When Emma turned up in her doorway, Mariah was relieved to see the Chapters bag in her sister's hand, and she was even more glad to see the three books and two magazines inside. Her sister didn't stay long, told Mariah she had to get back to school.
Over the next few days, she slept, ate when they brought her food, and read. When her parents visited, she talked to them. The day she was finally released, she went to her father's house where she was coddled for a couple more days by her father and his housekeeper, Mrs. Munson. Her third day out of the hospital, she was driven to ISI where she sat in a conference room and answered questions about her training courses and instructors, and then, after a break, they asked her about her shooting. She repeated what she had told her father—that she wasn't convinced Faraday was the shooter. When asked, though, she had to admit she didn't know who else might have done it.
As they were about to finish, one of the panel asked her a question that threw her off balance. She was tired after nearly four hours of questions, so when she was asked how well she knew the independent evaluator who had been brought in for the training exercise, she was baffled. Finally, she admitted she didn't know who had done the evaluation.
No one told her, either, she noted.
She was mending quickly, though she still had some pain now and then. She was trying to go without the painkillers as much as possible, but she almost always gave in and took them to get to sleep at night. She was cleared to return to Los Angeles, but a part of Mariah wished they would keep her in Canada. She didn't much feel like going back to an empty apartment and people she couldn't really talk to, people for whom she had to pretend. Her father waited while she packed her things at her apartment. There was a whiskey glass in the sink, which she knew she hadn't put there, and when she went into her bedroom, she had the feeling someone had been there despite the fact nothing seemed out of place. She shook it off as paranoia, her imagination, and figured her mother, maybe Emma, had been there.
Her father nagged her on the way to the airport. She partially tuned out his list of do's and don'ts, especially since they echoed those from her doctor. He then handed her a packet, and she looked inside to find her weapon and the contact information for a doctor on NSA stationary. A separate memo from Beckman gave her the cover story to explain her extended absence and injuries—she had been mugged while visiting John. Mariah noted there was nothing about whether or not she should admit to having been shot.
It was an uncomfortable flight, even though she made it in her father's plane. She been startled that he had Isobel Gerrard go with her. Mrs. Gerrard was a legendary operative, supposedly retired now. She was the textbook, Mariah knew, and she was a friend of her father's. Mariah tried not to think about what that might mean. Still, it was nice to have someone to talk to when she couldn't sleep.
When they were airborne, Mrs. Gerrard turned to face Mariah. "V. H. needs a little more information, Mariah, and this was the only way he could get it and do so without the appearance of meddling in an inquiry about his daughter."
She relaxed a bit, drew breath, and tried to hide the twinge of pain that set off. Intercepting Mrs. Gerrard's expectant look, she nodded. For the next couple of hours, she answered questions about Faraday. She talked about what had happened during the six weeks at the Institute—and she talked about her own assessment of the instructors and their treatment of her. She talked about the prep for the training exercise, about the exercise itself, and about what little she could remember about being shot. When asked, she told the other woman why she thought it wasn't Faraday.
At the end of it, Mrs. Gerrard looked at her gravely. "Mariah, they've reviewed the video recordings again and again, V. H. included. They interviewed the independent evaluator. Everyone is certain the shot came from Faraday."
She closed her eyes. "They matched the bullet to his gun?" she asked.
When the whine of the engines continued to be the only noise, Mariah opened her eyes once more. Mrs. Gerrard looked troubled. "They never found the bullet, Mariah, but his rifle had been fired, and there was live ammunition in it. Your injuries were consistent with a bullet of that caliber fired from above."
"Why does no one ask the obvious question?" Mariah asked softly.
Mrs. Gerrard looked taken aback, and Mariah waited for her to figure it out. "What is the obvious question?"
"He's Canada's top sniper, one of the world's best. I was just standing there—I wasn't fidgeting or moving. Why am I not dead?" Mrs. Gerrard's mouth opened and then closed. She frowned, and then repeated the movements. Mariah watched her thoughts chase across her face, realized the other woman was so startled she wasn't wearing what Mariah used to call Operative Face, that bland, smooth, emotionless mask they all used when they had to hide something but the mind was racing out of control. She sighed. "If he wanted me dead, he should have taken the head shot. I wasn't wearing my helmet. Why wait until I removed my vest? Even if he decided to shoot me in the chest, he's killed enough men that way to know where to shoot. So why not the head shot, and why miss?"
"Faraday didn't miss, Mariah."
"I'm alive," Mariah reminded her. "Working from the apparent theory of the crime, by definition, he missed."
She was tired again, and she decided to leave Mrs. Gerrard to think through the implications of those questions and slid away into sleep.
When, Mariah woke, the plane was about to land. They were entering a smaller airport in the greater Los Angeles area, one frequented by businessmen, she was told. She had not removed her seatbelt, so she waited. When they were on the ground and the plane stopped, Mrs. Gerrard handed her the sling she had taken off when they boarded, and Mariah handed it right back. The older woman told her, "You are supposed to be a mugging victim. This gives you a reason to favor your right side, and by limiting your movement, maybe you'll keep from pulling anything loose before you're fully healed." Mariah had pulled stitches loose three times already trying to do things she shouldn't have attempted yet. "Your father suggested putting the arm and your upper body in a cast, but that seemed unnecessary."
They dealt with customs, and Mariah wondered about her firearm—not to mention whatever weaponry Isobel Gerrard had on her—but they weren't checked too thoroughly. She had the answer as to why when she looked up from where the pilot unloaded her luggage and saw Sarah Walker approach. Mrs. Gerrard stepped forward, moved to kiss Mariah's cheek, but whispered instead, "No one knows what really happened—your father's orders." She nodded when the other woman stepped back and boarded the plane.
"I'll take that," Walker said smoothly when Mariah bent to pick up her bag. Since she was hurting again, she let the CIA officer get it. She followed Walker to her Porsche and eased into the passenger seat while the other woman stashed her case. When they were underway, the other woman asked casually, "Training, huh?"
Mariah nodded.
She was grateful when Walker chattered about her own refresher training mishaps. Mariah knew the tactic for what it was—girl talk leading to Mariah sharing why she was late returning to Los Angeles and wearing a sling. She closed her eyes, feigned sleep.
When she was safely inside her apartment, she noticed someone had been in and dusted at least. She wondered, despite not really being hungry, if there was anything edible in the apartment, but she assumed if they had come in and cleaned, they had probably stocked the fridge. She opened the door to an unopened bottle of milk, a new carton of eggs, fresh vegetables and other proof that if there had been any science projects growing, a hazmat team had dealt with them. She took a reusable water bottle from a cabinet, filled it with ice, then ran tap water into it before screwing the lid on it. She was about to go upstairs when Beckman's voice called her from the living room.
She stepped back to face the monitor. "You look like hell," Beckman said tartly.
"Nice to know I look as good as I feel," Mariah snapped right back.
The General was obviously taken aback, but not for long. "Your father sent me your updated medical report, Miss Adderly." Mariah waited, sure a response from her was not necessary. "Your wound was serious enough I am willing to relieve you of duty until you are more fully healed."
"I could have stayed in Canada if that was necessary," Mariah said evenly.
"True," the General said. "If you feel up to the doing the cover job, Miss Adderly, go right ahead. We'll leave the government work for a while longer, though."
The woman didn't wait to see what Mariah's response might be. Of course she hadn't been doing any real "government work" before her father had sent her for further training, so that would make little difference to Mariah's existence in Los Angeles. It did, though, beg the question of why she had been brought back.
When she returned to the Buy More, she spent a lot of time explaining the sling, and she wished she had just left it off. Emmett Milbarge, especially, went after the details. Mariah tried deflection, but he kept circling around it. He was suspicious, and by the end of her first day back, she was tempted to just remove her shirt and let him see the wound simply to have him finally shut up. He'd probably pass out, was her cranky conclusion, and she entertained it for just that reason. On her second day, Chuck put her on the desk and on the phone. She fielded a call from a customer checking on a laptop she had brought in for repair. Mariah put her on hold and pulled the work order noting the work had been done, but since it was Jeff, she knew to check before confirming that with the customer. She headed for the cage.
As she walked back—Jeff had, for once, actually done his job—she was deep in thought. Nerd Herd work didn't always challenge the brain, so she had lots of time to think through other issues. What occupied her thoughts most of the time was her shooting.
She wasn't sure why she dwelled on the nagging thought that even though it was apparent Faraday did it, she was uncomfortable with the idea. Perhaps it was because, as her father suggested on the phone the night before, she just didn't want to think about having an enemy who hated her that much. Mariah had had enemies since she was a child. The idea no longer got to her as badly as it once had; however, she continued to pick at the questions she had asked Isobel Gerrard while she walked back to the desk.
Because it was early on a Tuesday morning and Emmett Milbarge wouldn't be in for another hour, much of the Buy More staff was using the lack of customers and an assistant manager to indulge in the games they preferred to work. This morning it seemed to be a strange version of football. Mariah ignored them as best she could, but when she sprawled in the floor, hit by one of the green shirts trying to catch a lateral pass, she lay there a minute, felt wetness spread from the wound in her lower chest, and tried to assess how bad it was. The green shirt reached down to help her up, gave her a goofy smile, and said, "If you'd been facing the other way, you'd have seen it coming."
Mariah paled, and Chuck came up and asked if she was okay. "I need to go to Castle," she said softly.
Before he could answer, Morgan walked up and said, "Mariah, you're bleeding." He pointed at her right side.
She moved the sling out of the way, and saw red seeping through the bandages and her shirt. Chuck said, "You need to go to a doctor."
Mariah handed the work order to Morgan with instructions for the waiting customer, and Chuck hustled her out of the store and across to the Orange Orange. Sarah Walker took one look at them and turned the sign to closed. "I need to call my father," Mariah said as they went down the stairs.
"You need to have that looked at first," Walker returned.
Knowing she needed Walker's cooperation, she let the other woman take her to the sick bay and help her off with the sling. She unknotted her tie and removed her blouse. Walker removed the soaked bandages and shot a startled look at her when she saw the sizable exit wound. "I'll call the doctor after I talk to my father. For now, let's just get it cleaned and covered."
Thankfully, Walker did as she asked and offered to call a doctor to meet them there. Mariah agreed and slipped back into the bloody shirt. Chuck was seated at the table in the main room when they came back. Walker gestured at the equipment. "Could I have some privacy?" Walker's look was a definite no. "It's an internal ISI matter." Walker looked no more convinced. "Fine," Mariah finally sighed.
When he answered, her father immediately asked what was wrong. Mariah told him she was fine. When he asked why she was calling, she baldly said, "I was facing the wrong way."
He frowned. "Honey, are you sure you're okay?"
The skepticism was unmistakable. "Dad, I was facing the building where Faraday was. The entry wound is in my back. I was facing the wrong way." She ignored the stares from Chuck and Walker and kept her gaze locked on her father's image. "Either ISI has gotten very sloppy, or no one bothered to do a real investigation here because they thought they knew what happened."
"Mariah, he had motive."
"Dad, he had motive and opportunity, but, as I told you, he isn't stupid, and now I know he didn't do this—couldn't have done this unless you've developed ammunition that swings around to sneak up behind someone."
His face was grim. "You're bleeding. What happened?"
Mariah looked down automatically, irritated by that and his deflection. "Accident on the cover job." She breathed in and then asked for what she hadn't before. "I want the recordings of the training exercise."
"Can't do that." She was about to argue when he added, "If you're right, they will reopen the investigation. You need to tell your story without anyone being able to say you were coached or in any way assisted with your testimony."
She grimaced. "So, once more, sucks to be me."
That made her father laugh. "Sucks to be the boss's daughter."
Mariah knew her father would have found a way to get them regardless if he were the one with the seeping wound and certain the official story was wrong. Walker murmured that the doctor was there, and her father said his goodbyes. While Walker went to let the doctor in, Mariah asked for Chuck's phone; hers was in her bag at the Buy More. He gave her a funny look, but he handed it over.
She knew the number by heart, having been exiled there for years, and Dave's rumbled, mechanical greeting was oddly comforting. Greetings out of the way, she got right to the point: "Who archives footage of training exercises at the Institute?"
"We do," Dave answered. "Why?"
"You do specifically, or ISI in general does?" With Dave, it paid to clarify.
"ISI in general does."
"Which office?" Walker would be back any second, and the doctor would make her hang up to deal with the bleeding.
"Personnel," he said. "Why?"
"I need to see the footage from my exercise, Dave," she said. Prevaricating wouldn't get her anywhere, and Dave tended to sometimes reveal things he shouldn't.
"You won't get it," he said.
"Why not?"
"Everyone's talking about it, Mariah. That guy who shot you was a top recruit. They had high hopes for him, and the Anti-Terrorist Team is really angry they didn't get to hire him. Travers got the job instead, and the head of the team told Campbell he's not going to work out." Dave sucked in a deep breath. "But that's not why you won't get the recordings."
Mariah made a mental note to find out about Travers, but it was the last sentence that caught her attention. "Really?"
"It's getting more discussion than the fact you were shot."
"What is?"
"Hold on a sec," he said, and she heard a muffled conversation. "Gotta go, Mariah. Your dad's on his way down."
That meant her father had figured out she was going to pursue the recordings, and he was going to head Dave off. She wondered how quickly he would get to personnel. "Thanks, Dave."
While the CIA doctor stitched her up again, she thought it through. She didn't know who Travers was, which meant he was in one of the other courses at the Institute or had been hired from within ISI. She'd talk to Mona. It was that last, aborted bit of conversation with Dave, though, about which Mariah was inordinately curious. What had happened after she was shot to cause that kind of gossip?
The doctor told her she had pulled the exit wound open. Mariah nearly called him Dr. Obvious, but she realized she would simply be venting her frustration on him. He eyed her over his glasses a moment and asked, "How are you still alive?"
The bullet had made a large hole coming out, and that made it harder to heal. It didn't help that Mariah was right handed and tended to do things she really shouldn't, so she kept pulling it open. "Lucky, I guess," she returned.
Walker went to Large Mart to buy her a clean shirt. As they waited for her return, Chuck eyed Mariah across the table and said, "So you got shot?"
She nodded. Mrs. Gerrard had told her no one was to know what really happened, but she figured all bets were off, so she told Chuck the bare-bones facts about her shooting. "I don't remember all that much," she confessed and thought about her hallucinations about John, "but the drugs were pretty good."
"They usually are," Walker said, breezing in.
Mariah gave her a little grin. "It's the part after they quit giving them to you that's unpleasant." The doctor she'd just seen had given her more when he finished patching her up, so she wasn't feeling much pain at the moment.
She knew Chuck would tell Walker, and she knew the other woman was intelligent enough to figure most of it out on her own, so she wasn't that surprised when Beckman called that night. She was surprised that it was, apparently, only to check on her and ask if she needed to take more time off. Frankly, the General's call only increased Mariah's suspicions. There was no real reason for her to remain in Los Angeles, and yet the woman hadn't released her. Her father had to know she was largely shut out of the Intersect project, so he had no incentive for keeping her there, either. John, ostensibly the reason for her assignment, was gone, apparently permanently. It was maddening, and she was tired of waiting for something to do. She considered how she might force the issue.
In the meantime, Mariah took it easy and kept her eyes open to avoid anything else that might set her recovery back. She worked at the Buy More and rested when she got home. Ellie was frazzled and on a work schedule that meant she only saw Chuck's sister as they passed on their way to work or home. Mariah was relieved by that since Ellie would otherwise insist on seeing her injuries, and she knew the other woman would recognize a gunshot. She was even more relieved that Kavanaugh was keeping his distance.
While she gutted a desktop's CPU one afternoon, her phone rang. The number was masked. She almost ignored it, especially since she didn't give her number out to people she didn't know. She reached for it, though, since it might have to do with the ongoing investigation into her shooting.
"I thought I'd take the prettiest girl I know to dinner tonight," she heard Paul Patterson rumble in her ear.
Suddenly, she was smiling, something she couldn't remember doing in quite some time. "I'm sure she'll enjoy it," she told him easily.
His snort carried through the phone's microphone. "That would be you, Mariah," he chided. "I'm in town, and I thought since young John's safely out of the way, I'd ask you to keep me company."
Under other circumstances, she would have likely said no, but she could use the company as well, and she thought it would be nice to sit with someone who would keep the conversation light. She accepted, and he suggested a nice, quiet little restaurant with which she was familiar. She told him that was fine, and he told her what time he would pick her up.
He wore a suit when she opened the door to him. She had expected his uniform, for some reason, but she had to admit the well-cut dark suit looked good on him. Dinner was enjoyable. Paul set out to be charming, but she had a feeling his sharp gaze caught several things she would rather he didn't. He told her he was going off to England for a coalition training exercise, and Mariah thought briefly about her own mishap. He seemed to expect her to ask questions, but she didn't. She had worked in this business long enough to know there were things she couldn't be told, and she suspected American military maneuvers were one of those things. When they reached the dessert stage, he leaned back and asked her, "Have you heard from John?"
She pushed a bit of her tiramisu around her plate. "Not recently," she said.
His look was grave when she met his eyes. "Mariah, may I ask you something personal?"
The danger signals were going off in her head. She didn't answer.
"John's been like a son to me," he said. "My wife and I had no children of our own, and because of the respect I have for his father, I watched over John when he first joined the Corps. He's a good officer, but he still has a lot to learn about how to handle his personal life."
There was no question there, and Mariah had already figured the last part of that out.
"Do you love him?" he asked her.
She set her fork down carefully and folded her hands in her lap. She stared at the chocolate on the top of what was left of her dessert. She knew the answer, but she was reluctant to tell him. She knew he talked to John, and she didn't want to say anything Paul might repeat to him. Unfortunately, her thoughts slid to the baby, to the miscarriage, and she felt the tears well. "I don't think we should talk about John," she said quietly.
Paul, thankfully, moved on, mentioned he had seen her father briefly when he was in Washington recently. Mariah's head shot up at that, unaware her father had made the trip. She didn't ask, though. He asked if she would like a drink, and even though she knew she shouldn't because of the medication she still took, she agreed. They moved from the restaurant to the bar.
They continued to talk. Paul told her about his late wife, and she laughed when he told her funny stories about the other woman. It was clear he had loved her, and Mariah found herself envying the woman. "You know," he leaned in and said as she studied the bourbon in her glass, "it wasn't easy being married to me, but she and I made it work."
She lifted her glass, knew he expected her to say something, but his statement made her think of John, and she wondered if John missed her as she missed him. Her hallucination had said he did, but that had been a comforting image conjured by the drugs. "I'm sure you miss her," she said quietly.
Paul reached out and covered her hand on the bar. "Mariah, John—"
"Please don't." She looked at him then, miserable. "He's not coming back, Paul."
The General sat back, his hand still over hers, and gave her a puzzled look. "I'm sure you're mistaken."
She shook her head slowly. "All his things were removed from the apartment shortly after he left. I've only heard from him once—well, twice—and he didn't really have much to say for himself." Other than he missed her, she amended silently. She had reread that e-mail several times, but she remained convinced her father had told John enough he had felt honor-bound to contact her.
"Mariah, listen to me," he said urgently. "I saw the way John looks at you."
She closed her eyes. Why did everyone say that to her?
"He hasn't looked at a woman in that way in more than twenty years," he told her when she finally opened her eyes and met his. She thought fleetingly of Ilsa, but Paul continued, "He nearly blew an operation when he thought you were in jeopardy. John has always been about the job, so much so I often worried about him. He put you first, my dear, and that simply isn't like him."
"It was a cover," she blurted.
Paul gave her a gentle smile. "No, Mariah, it isn't." He cradled her hand in both of his. "I know it started that way," and she widened her eyes, wondered who had told him that, "but you and I both know it's real."
Mariah stared at him. "He doesn't love me, Paul," she told him quietly. "He likes me, he likes sleeping with me, but he doesn't love me." He was about to protest, but she stopped him. "I went into this with my eyes open. What you've seen is John being possessive. I'm his, and he doesn't share. I'm flattered you think he cares, but even I know I can't come first, that the job has to be his first priority." She grimaced then. "Not that it matters now. He's gone, reassigned, and if he does come back, I'll be sent back to Canada."
"Are you sure?" he asked, and when she nodded, he squeezed her hand. "Will you be offended if I disagree?"
Her smile felt tight, but she said, "No."
Later, as he escorted her to her door, he asked, "What happened?" She turned to face him, puzzled. "You've favored your right side all night."
"Classified," she said quietly.
He snorted. "You either got beaten up or were shot. Since I don't see any bruises, my money's on the latter."
She didn't confirm or deny, and he wore a knowing look when she finally looked at him. She unlocked the door and invited him in, but he declined. He put his hands on her upper arms and said, "I know you don't believe me, Mariah, but John loves you. I'd stake my life on it. Promise me you'll give him a chance."
What would it hurt? It wasn't as if she was likely to see John privately again, and if she did, she seriously doubted they would have a heart-to-heart about their sexual relationship. She nodded, and Paul leaned in and kissed her cheek before saying good night to her.