"Now I sort of regret having you trash the stern light. It really was a beautiful boat," Lee mused, as their destination was in sight.
The boat ride in from Büyükada had been uneventful, but Amanda still spent the fifteen-minute walk from the marina to their hotel expecting disaster at every turn. There was a steady stream of cars on the streets and the odd pedestrian passing them on the sidewalk. She was beyond grateful when the lobby lights of the Istasyon Park Hotel became visible. The CIA was supposed to be there.
They crossed the threshold of the Istasyon Park and the lobby was quiet. Other than the front desk clerk, the only other person there was reading a paper at a cluster of club chairs near the door. A smiling face appeared from behind the newsprint and Lee stopped in his tracks.
Amanda crowded at his back, her grip on his hand doubling. "Friend or foe?"
"Friend," Lee whispered, with a smile in his voice. "Agent Paul Mendoza. The best thing Alpine, Texas has ever offered to the U.S. intelligence service," Lee said, looking right at the man now standing in front of them. "Not that that's saying much."
"That may be true, Scarecrow, but I still managed with my feeble intellect and limited abilities to secure your domicile for the evening." A crushing handshake between the men turned into a hug.
Mendoza led them through the lobby to a more sheltered area by the elevators. He was a little taller than Amanda, clean cut, blue-black hair and eyelashes for days. The women must love him, Amanda imagined.
Lee gently pulled her up next to him. "Amanda King, this is Agent Paul Mendoza. Paul, this is my partner, Amanda King." Lee turned a conspiratorial gaze on Amanda. "Pablo cried on my shoulder all across Vietnam."
Amanda shook Mendoza's proffered hand. "You must have rubbed off on Lee. He cries on my shoulder all the time."
The existing smile on Paul's face spread from ear to ear. "Oh, I like you," he said, bestowing a kiss on the hand he was still holding. He turned to Lee. "She's lovely, Scarecrow. Why on earth is she wasting her time with you?"
"I ask myself all the time." Lee reclaimed her hand and laced their fingers together, taking a long look at his partner. She was smiling along with their banter, playing the part, but Lee knew it was a brittle fabrication. For a woman whose joy was easy and contagious, the smile she wore didn't reach her eyes and her grip was like iron.
"Can we move this party upstairs, Pablo?" Lee asked. "I need a shower and about 20 hours of sleep."
"Absolutely." Mendoza hit the up button. "We swept your room and I have a guy sitting on it. You're safe from everything but bedbugs. Just stay away from the windows."
The ride up to the third floor was quiet. Paul took the opportunity to take a really good look at Lee Stetson, and the woman beside him. While they had known one another since Vietnam, and talked on the phone once or twice a year lately, Paul hadn't actually laid eyes on Lee since sometime in 1982. If it was possible, the son of a gun was getting even more handsome with age.
Lee had always played his cards pretty close to the vest, but a couple of years of war had shaken loose many of the details about Lee's fractured youth. Paul identified strongly with Lee's experience of loss at an early age. Paul had been around just enough in the years right after Vietnam to witness how the Oz network had burned to the ground, and what that had cost Lee. Then Eric died, and Lee eschewed any discussion of working with a partner again. There had also been a rumor among their mutual acquaintances of a disastrous relationship with a woman while stationed in Rome. Taking all that together, and factoring in what Paul knew of Lee's nature, it would take a bunker buster to get past Lee's defenses.
But this lady, whomever she was to Lee, she was on the inside.
In the elevator Lee bumped her shoulder and Amanda bumped him back. Lee whispered something into the crown of her head that Paul couldn't hear. Amanda shook her head and Lee nodded and lifted their joined hands and rapped himself on the chest with their knuckles. Amanda mouthed the word STOP and Lee swallowed a laugh. It was like watching TV with the sound on mute. A whole conversation was taking place outside of Paul's hearing, three feet away.
Traveling under a married cover made tactical sense for a whole host of reasons. But they were in an elevator. And standing in an empty hallway while Mendoza unlocked the door. And inside that room, being introduced to Hank, the 26-year-old former army medic who was there to tend to their ills. And they were still attached. Physically, sure. And if Paul read them accurately, right down to the bone.
Lee wasted no time getting to his most immediate concern. "Priority one, Amanda has a gash running down her leg. We had to swim to a boat, there's no way it's not infected."
"May I have a look?" Hank asked, kneeling. Henry Porter, USMC, CIA, was at least an inch shorter than Amanda, cheerful, and built as wide as a Sherman tank.
Amanda let go of Lee's hand and gingerly tugged on the leg of her jeans. Lee's makeshift bandage was long gone in the water. The raw, angry, gash ran six inches down her shin to the top of her ankle.
"It's an awfully clean cut," Hank said. "How'd you get it?"
Amanda didn't answer right away. She could feel the gaze of all three men on her. Seconds ticked by. Lee had said it could wait until later, and he'd faithfully avoided the topic all afternoon and half of the night. An odd sense of detachment had settled over her in the intervening hours. She was so tired and falling apart seemed like so much effort. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lee's hand twitch, like he was tempted to reach for her, but thought better of it.
It was time.
Amanda stepped around Hank and over to the little table against the wall, where she started unloading the bag she still wore. She pitched her white shirt and the pashmina aside. She placed the knife, the pistol, and the wad of cash on the table.
Lee drew even with her and dropped the soggy wallet onto the table. "I really am sorry," Lee whispered.
She looked sideways at him. "Still not your fault."
She fanned out the money and turned to Mendoza. "Two men were waiting for us after we got off the ferry. They shot up the market and Lee got buried under a mountain of tourists who were trying to get away from the gunfire. I was a couple of aisles over, and they saw me, and chased me out of the back exit and about ten blocks. They split up to look for me, and I took this," she touched the knife, "off the man who cut me with it."
Hank let that settle on the room for a minute before asking, "He's dead?"
"Yes," Amanda rasped out.
"You want to elaborate on that?" Mendoza asked.
Amanda shot Lee an exasperated look. Not really.
Lee watched his partner's hands clench into fists, and realized Amanda was hemmed in with three idiots in front and the table at her back. He pushed Paul aside and pulled her into the middle of the room. Lee was about to let her go, give her space, when Amanda squeezed his hand and held fast. He ducked to look her in the eye, but she was stubbornly focused on the carpet. He abandoned his give her space plan and moved a half a step closer. "Tell me?"
Amanda nodded, and after studying the floor for a moment longer, made herself look Lee in the eye. "Right…so, I was running, and they were behind me. I thought I was at a cross street, and I turned right, but it was a bad call, it was fenced in. There was no time to backtrack, so I took the only cover I could find. I hid behind a trashcan, but he found me pretty easy. He had that knife in his hand and grabbed me by the arm and tried to make me go with him. But I…I couldn't do that. I threw a handful of dirt in his face, and gosh, he was furious." She laid a hand over her ribs and grimaced. "He kicked me in the ribs. I kept crawling backwards until I hit the wall, and he sort of dove in my direction and kept swinging at me with the knife. There was trash everywhere - boxes and broken shipping pallets and bags of garbage. I picked up a piece of wood and I…Lee, I hit him just as hard as I could. It turned out that there were nails in the board…and…"
She had managed to keep it together through the retelling. Still, there were tears streaming down her cheeks which Lee carefully brushed away with his free hand. At his touch, her eyes slammed shut. Amanda fought to keep her composure, taking a couple of deep breaths.
Lee glanced fleetingly at their companions. Paul and Hank possessed just enough good sense to remain absolutely, completely silent.
"There was…" She drew a line with her finger from her ear to her throat. "…a lot of blood. He lasted a minute, maybe two. I knew his partner was nearby, and I didn't have it in me to do… that… again." Amanda let go of Lee's hand and swiped at her eyes and nose. "I cleaned out the man's pockets, broke loose a couple of fence boards and ran."
"That is the textbook definition of righteous," Hank said matter-of-factly. "Can you have penicillin?"
Amanda blinked. "Uh, Lee's allergic, but I'm not. Can I get a shower first?"
"Go ahead," Hank agreed. "If you paddled around in the Marmara that way, there's no way ten minutes in the shower can make it any worse. Might help. Go ahead and I'll get ready for you."
Amanda grabbed a change of clothes out of her suitcase and headed to the privacy of the bathroom.
Once the door was closed, Mendoza wasted no time questioning Lee. "Who are they?"
Lee stepped over to the table and flipped open the wallet. "They're local. When I got free and ran after them, I saw one of them headed away from the alley where Amanda killed the big guy. Her footprints were in the dirt. She covered up the body with trash bags and escaped through a fence. I caught up with her in the courtyard of the apartments next door. We tried to get to a safe house in a mechanic's garage that belongs to Omar's cousin. It was being watched by the second shooter. We squatted in a hotel room until dark, made a brief call to our boss, got back to the wharf and stole a boat. You're up to date."
"Somebody paid these guys for their trouble in rubles," Hank said.
Lee nodded. "Someone was pretty confident we'd never find that out."
Paul picked up the wallet and looked at the ID. "The Russians have never wanted us here." He nodded in the direction of the bathroom, "Tell me about her."
Lee sank into a chair by the table and scrubbed his hands through his hair. He growled as he ran over the knot on his forehead.
Hank started unpacking his first aid kit while Lee talked.
"I brought her in about two and a half years ago. She started out doing paperwork and local milk runs. A year later we started using her for travel cover ops. On paper she's a fourth-level GSA with a confidential security clearance, but she's ended up neck deep in a heck of a lot more than that clearance would suggest. Most of the time she works enough overtime to be a full-time employee, but budget issues and that pedantic gas bag, Smith, are getting in the way. She's not qualled on firearms or hand-to-hand yet, but she's a quick thinker and finds a way to get things done anyway. When all else fails, she's blessed with a fair amount of luck."
"Thank God for that," Paul said, picking up the linen shirt Amanda had dumped on the floor. The right sleeve was torn through at the elbow and smeared with blood. "Melrose like her?"
"Billy would give her the keys to Fort Knox, the nuclear football, and Caspar Weinberger's liquor cabinet. Billy would adopt Amanda King."
Mendoza digested that for a moment. "Tell me about her."
If Lee didn't know Mendoza so well, he might have held back.
"She's a single mom who coaches little league. She purposefully drew two gunmen away from me and a market full of innocent people and when one of them tried to kill her, she eighty-sixed him with a piece of scrap lumber. She's never taken a life before. She has to go home to her widowed mother and two boys and pretend that didn't happen. She's saved my life several times over. Her instincts for people are utterly ridiculous, and her character is unimpeachable."
Mendoza ruminated on that quietly.
Hank, however, had questions. "She's divorced?"
"Yes," Lee answered.
"Her fault?"
Lee scowled. "No."
"And she's smart, and brave, and really pretty."
"Also, yes," Lee confirmed.
"Who in their right mind would leave her?"
"The biggest fathead idiot the Georgetown law school ever produced."