At the mercy of a treacherous sea...

Claire Britten’s training never prepared her for this—the forensic psychology curriculum didn’t cover plane crashes. Or how to help fellow survivors cope, seven frightened people huddled in two small rafts awaiting a rescue that may never come. Especially when three of them are your ex-husband, your young daughter—and the man you love, Nick Markwood, whose pursuit by a criminal mastermind forced you all to run in the first place.

When the bedraggled crew finally reaches dry land, they are still far from safe. Nick tries to secure transport to their witness-protection placement, urging everyone to stick to the identities laid out for them. They don’t need any complications. But when danger follows them to their supposed safe haven, Claire and Nick no longer know who is helping or harming them. Racked by doubt and mistrust, still hunted, they must band together—or fall.

Praise for the novels of Karen Harper

“The thrilling finish takes a twist that most readers won’t see coming. While intrigue is the main driver of the story, the able, well-researched plotting and sympathetic characters will keep romance readers along for the ride.”

—Publishers Weekly on Broken Bonds

“Haunting suspense, tender romance and an evocative look at the complexities of Amish life—Dark Angel is simply riveting!”

—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author

“A compelling story... Intricate and fascinating details of Amish life.”

—Tami Hoag, New York Times bestselling author, on Dark Road Home

“Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end...of this thrilling tale.”

—Booklist on Fall from Pride (starred review)

“Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country in a lively and endearing first installment of the Amish Home Valley series.”

—Publishers Weekly on Fall from Pride

“A tale guaranteed to bring shivers to the spine, Down River will delight Harper’s current fans and earn her many more.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Well-researched and rich in detail... With its tantalizing buildup and well-developed characters, this offering is certain to earn Harper high marks.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dark Angel, winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award

Falling Darkness

Karen Harper

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I would like to thank Mary Ann and Dr. Roy Manning and Lee Ann and Jim Parsons for their friendship to us and for helpful background information for this novel.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Author’s Note

Copyright

1

2014

After their airplane skidded over the water and sank, their two life rafts tied together seemed so small in the vast, dark sea. Claire held her four-year-old daughter, Lexi, close to keep her warm and calm, though she was neither of those things herself. The child had gone silent, no more screams or sobs. Claire’s husband Nick’s arm around them felt like a band of iron, a moving one, since he too was shaking from the cold and shock.

Her ex-husband, Jace—Lexi’s father—was the third person in their raft. He’d been the pilot of the borrowed private plane that had nearly plunged all seven of them beneath the surface to drown. So far, only Lexi’s nanny, Nita, in the next raft had been seasick, though they were all sick at heart and scared to death. Nita was praying aloud and, no doubt, the others were doing so silently.

“Where are we, really?” Lexi asked. “Near a beach at home?”

Her teeth chattering, Claire told her, “Not quite, but off the coast of Florida.” She didn’t add they were in the wide Straits of Florida but much closer to dangerous, forbidden Cuba.

The sea, so rough at first that their little rubber islands had slid from trough to trough, seemed to be calming now. Breaks in the clouds revealed a scattering of stars that looked like they were dancing and a crooked sliver of moon like a sharp, tilted smile.

“Nobody’s gonna find us til mornin’.” Bronco, their family bodyguard, spoke up from the other raft. The big, bold man was trying to be strong, but his voice quavered too.

Nita, who had been moaning, began to cry again, though she was sheltered in the other raft between her cousin Hector, called Heck, Nick’s tech genius, and Bronco, who had his arms around her.

Heck said, “Yeah, well, we’re valuable to the FBI, so they’ll have their net out for us. Just hope someone else doesn’t, and they tampered with the plane. You-know-who has a long arm—and an army of spies.”

“That can’t be,” Nick said. “Before we took off, Jace checked the plane and Bronco guarded it. It had to be a malfunction, not sabotage.”

Bronco said, “But you know, boss, the plane was parked by that dark Key West field. I didn’t tell you, but some guy came up and asked me how much it cost. Took my eyes off the plane to get rid of him, head him back to the terminal.”

“I did all the checkups,” Jace told them, “but that was before I hit the john when all of you were still in the terminal. I still can’t believe it. And since the FBI arranged for that plane, who knows if we can trust them? Maybe you-know-who got to them too, or at least to that contact guy Patterson. I don’t trust anyone anymore—except you, Lexi,” he added and rubbed the child’s back.

“And you trust Mommy and Nick too!” she insisted.

“Listen up, all of you.” Nick took over the conversation again, like them, raising his voice to be heard over the wind and waves. “So far our adversary’s dealt in torment, not total annihilation.”

Lexi stirred against Claire. “What’s nilation?”

“Don’t worry about that, or anything,” Claire whispered to her. Nick was evidently using big words so Lexi wouldn’t catch on to the deadly mess they were in whether they were rescued from the water or were onshore.

They had fled Florida with the help of the Federal Witness Protection Program, WITSEC, to stay safe until the US government could locate and extradite Nick’s nemesis, a powerful international businessman with a long reach. The FBI wanted their hands on Clayton Ames as badly as Nick did, but Ames made a habit of living abroad and moving around. When it came to catching, extraditing and prosecuting the man who was now among the US government’s most wanted, Claire knew Nick wished he was a vigilante or hit man instead of a criminal lawyer who could only accuse and testify.

“Okay, enough about all that for now,” Nick said. “Whoever rescues us, the new identification papers I have for all of us in this waterproof pouch are what we will have to go by. Lexi, we are going to have new, pretend names for a while, but it’s a secret only the seven of us can share. I was telling you on the plane that we are going to live in a new place for a while, and we need to learn these names and the story of where we came from.”

“Is it like a game?”

“Yes, but a very serious, important game.”

“Like life,” Jace muttered. Then he said louder, “That box I had strapped to my wrist has some drinking water, some medical supplies and a few rations. Semper paratus, semper fi. Listen up, everybody. You’re with a former navy pilot who has never crashed before but has training for it. We’re going to be rescued, but meanwhile, we need to keep our heads up and work together. Like Claire said when we first made it into the rafts, we’ll be okay.”

Tears stung Claire’s eyes and not just from the saltwater spray. The only two men she’d ever loved were with her: Jace, her ex, who had claimed he still loved her when he’d helped her out of the sinking plane and into the raft; and Nick, who had taken her life and love by storm. They had been forced by his nemesis, Clayton Ames, to marry, but she had come to not only desire but love Nick. Thank God the three of them were getting along in this desperate flight. But to live all together as the WITSEC program had planned? That scared her almost as much as this shifting, sliding, endless sea.

* * *

As dawn broke, raising their hopes they would be spotted, Jace passed around the water canteen again so they could each take a drink as a chaser after a tasteless biscuit. Nick saw that Jace had put the dry jacket he had loaned him around Lexi. Jace looked like a Viking at sea, ruddy and blond compared to Nick’s dark hair dusted with silver.

The two men’s gazes met. They’d been at loggerheads over Claire, so Nick hoped they could work together to be rescued. But their hideout plans for that had been for Northern Michigan, not on a rubber raft in the middle of the Straits of Florida.

Nick looked away and hit his fist hard on his knee. He’d left his prosperous Naples, Florida, law firm of Markwood, Benton and Chase in the hands of the other partners. He’d used the cover story he was leaving immediately for Belgium to assist an important government figure with legal advice. He’d told them he was taking his family and a small support staff with him and asked them to cover his cases.

True, they were used to his going off to work on his private South Shores project, for which he advised and sometimes defended people shattered by suicides that could be murders. But his lies haunted him, since he wasn’t allowed to trust anyone but this group with the knowledge of his part in the Witness Protection Program, which was run under the aegis of the FBI.

Hell, he thought, forget the desertion of his friends and his law firm being the worst that could happen. Not only had their plane crashed, but he’d just seen a fin—more than one—slice through a wave near them. Sharks! Who knew how long they’d been so close in the dark. And Jace had fallen into the water getting them off the plane.

A shark—that was the way he’d always thought of the man he was certain had not only ruined his father financially, but had murdered him too and made it look like a cowardly suicide. Clayton Ames, a deadly, devouring shark.

“Jace!” Nick hissed, and the man’s eyes flew open.

What? Jace mouthed. Nick pointed at the circling fins and read Jace’s lips as he cursed silently. There were at least three sharks near them.

Nick noted Heck had seen them too. His right-hand man had mentioned these waters were full of them, a threat to Cubans fleeing the island, though it hadn’t stopped the influx to the States. The refugees included Heck’s and Nita’s Cuban parents years ago, looking for a better life for their families. It was what he wanted for his new family. Maybe he should have stuck it out in Naples, though Ames knew they were all there. He had to be stopped, and the US government’s help was the best way.

“Time for the name game,” Jace whispered. “Let’s not focus on new dangers.”

“Hard not to,” Claire put in, as she’d seen them too.

Nick wondered how she had stayed so calm. Despite her disease of narcolepsy, the woman had guts and stamina. He’d seen that up close and personal in the two murder/suicide cases they’d worked together. He also saw now that, though her eyes were wide on the fins, she quickly shifted Lexi lower between her spread legs rather than on her lap so that the girl could not see the sharks. Now, if only everyone else would keep their mouths shut...

“Let’s not talk at all about things we see here,” Claire called out, “but instead learn our new names and identities. That way, when we get ashore, we can just get some help before we all head to Michigan—to Mackinac Island, with all the horses, remember, Lexi?”

“I’m going to find one I like to ride.”

“Right,” Nick said, opening the seal on the plastic pouch he wore under his shirt like a wide belt. He’d kept their newly created passports, credit cards and quite a lot of cash in mostly big bills dry. He pulled out what he’d thought of as his cheat sheet with the names he and Rob Patterson, their FBI contact, had come up with for everyone.

“Okay,” he said, giving his stepdaughter a one-armed hug, “we will start with Lexi. Our family’s new last name—you, Lexi, your mom and me—is Randal. Oh, yeah, Jace’s too.” He spelled Randal and let her repeat it. He tried to ignore Jace’s scowl. As supportive as he was being, since he was on Ames’s hit list too, Nick knew Jace was thoroughly teed off that he had to act the part of Nick’s brother and Lexi’s uncle.

“And your first name, Miss Randal,” Nick went on to Lexi, “is Megan, but you can be called Meggie if you want. It’s up to you.”

For a moment he figured she was going to say she wanted to keep her own name or take her best friend and cousin’s name Jilly, but she said, “Meggie is more like me.”

“Good!” he said. “Did everybody hear that? This is Meggie Randal. Her mother’s name is Jenna Randal, mine is Jack Randal, and Jace is Seth Randal, my brother and Le—Meggie’s uncle.”

They all went around and said their new names: Heck was now Roberto, called Berto, Ochoa; Nita was his cousin, Lorena Ochoa; and Bronco Gates was Cody Carson.

Bronco piped up. “Suits me. Nothin’ much suits me but glad I’m here to help all you and ’specially Lorena Ochoa, here,” he said, giving Nita’s shoulders a squeeze. “Glad to make your ’quaintance, Senorita Lorena.”

Heck rolled his eyes and shook his head over that. He knew Bronco had eyes for Nita, and that obviously annoyed him. No, he must be looking at the sharks again, staring off a ways at the horizon.

But was Jace nuts? He was getting to his knees in the raft, rocking it more than the waves did.

“Seth,” Nick said. “What?”

“To the south. Is that a boat?” he asked, pointing.

Everyone sat up and craned to look. It was, even though the silhouette was small. It was slow moving but seemed to be coming straight for them.

“We need to make a flag, a banner that shows up against the sea and sky.”

“I’m wearing something bright,” Nita said. “My skirt.” Without a moment’s hesitation, she wriggled out of it as Heck twisted around to look at the boat again and Bronco stripped off his jacket to cover her panties and bare legs.

“Everyone sit tight!” Jace ordered. “I’m the only one who stands.”

Nick tried to brace Jace’s legs as he got up and stood shakily. Using his arm as a flagpole, he waved the bright pink skirt until they were certain the small vessel turned even more their way. Unfortunately, the sharks were still circling, and the ramshackle craft looked like it was coming from the direction of Cuba, where it was rumored Ames might be living all cozy with the Castro brothers. So, Nick thought, as desperate as they were, with all the deceit and treachery they’d faced already, would the boat bring friend or foe?

2

Claire prayed silently that the boat would be American, but, as it came closer from the south, she knew better. It was all wood, with peeling green-and-white paint, draped with fishing nets, old and battered, maybe twenty-five feet long, so unlike the solid, sleeker fishing boats she’d seen going out of Naples or Miami. Held up by four poles, a makeshift canvas canopy flapped over the back half of the boat. The hand-painted name on the prow read Alfredito, and the flag that flapped above the stern had blue and white stripes and a single white star in a red triangle.

“Cuban,” Nick said over the loud but uneven sound of the motor. “But not an official boat and with only one man. I think we’re safe, but can we get him to take us north, not south? I have some cash. Heck, you do the talking. Maybe he doesn’t even speak English.”

Claire knew some Spanish but only caught a quick word or two in the shouted, rapid-fire exchange between the fisherman—if that was what he was—and Heck. She’d learned not to trust anyone but those closest to her since she’d worked two cases with Nick and had seen Clayton Ames up close and personal.

Finally, using broad gestures, just as the boatman had, Heck turned back to them to translate. Claire knew the fact that Nita had taken it all in and was crying was not a good sign.

Heck told them, “He is Hernando Hermez, called Nando, out of Cuba, but not Havana. He say—he says—no way his boat can reach Los Estados Unidos. That not allowed, against the law. He is from a small fishing village called Costa Blanca about forty miles west of Havana. He comes here to this spot, pretty far out, once a year on the date he lose—I mean, he lost—his son Alfredito. He fell in where sharks eating their catch in a net, but Nando not start fishing yet today. He like to kill them all, maybe same ones as these.”

“Mommy, are there sharks in the water? That kind with the really big, sharp teeth?”

Claire hugged Lexi harder. “Shh, it’s all right. They can’t get us.” But that reminded Claire that Lexi had seen too much killing. She prayed this Nando would take them aboard. Even that rattletrap of a boat and a small, Spanish-speaking fishing village or a prison cell—even facing Ames again if he did live in Cuba now—had to be better than this. She tried never to hate anyone, but she hated Ames and silently vowed again, despite their desperation, that she would help Nick and Jace bring him to justice someday.

Heck’s voice interrupted her frenzied fears. “These sharks are killers, Nando keeps saying, so he says we be careful if we come on board.”

“No kidding,” Jace muttered, then spoke in a louder voice just as Nick was about to say something. “Tell Nando I’ll try to get aboard first to help the others—Lexi first and the women after her.”

Claire wished that didn’t remind her of that old cry of “women and children first” when a ship was sinking. But surely that boat could hold them all, get them off the water, and then they could find a way not to go home but to hide out. But how to contact the FBI in Castro-controlled Cuba? Fidel was supposedly retired, but his brother Raul was in charge now. There were rumors that the US and Cuba might make peace someday soon, but it hadn’t happened yet. President Obama had even shaken hands with Raul at a foreign conference, but Cuba was still a hostile Communist nation.

Heck and Nando talked more in Spanish. “He say, maybe Jesu Christo and the Virgin Mary, they give to him your lives in place of his lost son, his only son, Alfredito. He will take us to his house, give us food, place to sleep. Then we go to Havana, pay someone to take us home, not get seen or caught, he says.”

“Not be seen? Fat chance of that,” Nick muttered. “We’ll have to do everything undercover—somehow.” He said louder, “Tell him we are grateful to him and to the Lord for bringing us together on this great sea. Everyone, tell him gracias.”

A little chorus followed with Lexi chiming in. “Nita,” the child called out to her nanny, “I remembered what you taught me, but I can’t tell his other words. Nada.”

“You will, my Lex—my Meggie,” Nita called to her. “You will.”

The boat gently bumped against the nearest life raft, the one holding Heck, Bronco and Nita. But Jace was determined to be the first aboard, in case there was a problem climbing up the side where Nando was now dangling a rope he’d tied to one of the posts of the canopy.

Jace put one leg over, then rolled into the other raft and secured both of them to the side of the boat near the stern. Oh, Claire thought, so that was what the single rope was for. She had been scared they must climb that to get on board the fishing boat.

Nando secured the heavy, hand-knotted rope net on the side of the boat. Jace, of course, went up it easily, shook Nando’s hand, then leaned over the side. Nick was on the move, coaxing Lexi from Claire’s arms and handing her into the other raft to Bronco. Both rafts tilted and rocked.

“Close your eyes, sweetheart,” Nick whispered to Lexi and shot a quick “trust me” look back at Claire. Her arms felt not only stiff and sore but so empty now. “Claire,” Nick said, when she made a move toward the other raft too, “stay put. As they say, don’t rock the boat. I’ll be back for you.”

Lexi wrapped her arms so tightly around Nick’s neck that his face went red, but he didn’t tell her to let go. Claire gripped her hands together, praying, trusting. When Nick passed Lexi to Bronco, who stood with Heck’s help and passed her up to Jace, Claire slid across the slippery inside of the raft to be closer.

“Let go of me, honey,” Bronco told Lexi as he lifted her up. “Your daddy—Uncle Seth, I mean—he got you.”

And he did. Claire burst into silent tears of relief as the men handed Nita up to Jace and then, thank God, it was her turn. Not only did she want to be with Lexi, but it had suddenly seemed she was so terrifyingly small in the raft by herself, as if it was just her and the vast sea and sky.

Dragging her big purse with her essential narcolepsy meds, she rolled into the other raft. Nick helped her to her knees over to the rope ladder. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she stood, rocking a bit on legs that were cramping, and he gave her a boost up. When Jace grabbed her wrists, Nick let go. It was, she thought, just the opposite of what had happened in her life with these men. Jace had left her; Nick had grabbed for her.

Her stomach scraped hard against the side and top of the boat as Jace hauled her in. If she was newly pregnant, she thought, that could do her in. She wasn’t sure but had missed her period. Still, with all the upheaval in her life, that didn’t mean a baby, and she hadn’t mentioned anything to Nick yet.

“Got you,” Jace said as Lexi left Nita’s embrace to hurl herself against Claire. Lexi hugged her hard before Nando urged them away to sit on the deck, leaning against what must be a bait box because it smelled bad.

Quickly, the three men followed up over the side, Nick last.

Nick told Heck, “Ask him if he’s going to cut the rafts loose or drag them. They might give our presence away when he puts in.”

“Forgot to tell you, boss,” Heck said. “He asked if he can have the rafts. If we don’t need them again, he can sell them on the black market for Cubans who want to escape. He say with rumors of a deal between US and Cuba, more people are leaving since they think the dry-foot-on-land-you-can-stay in US policy might end. You know, if a Cuban refugee makes it to dry land in the US, he gets to stay, but not if he’s caught at sea. He says—”

Nick cut in, “Tell him he can have the rafts but never to say where he got them. Why isn’t he heading toward shore?”

“He want to curse the sharks one more time. Even if El Senor—the Lord God—made them killers, he curses them for killing his son. He has a daughter but he has to fish alone now since his father died last month.”

“Tell him I am sorry his father died and his son too. I understand.”

Heck spoke at length to Nando, who nodded as he opened the box next to the seated women and took out a plastic pail of bait that now smelled even more horrible. Nita, looking green in the gills again, almost gagged, and Lexi buried her nose against Claire’s shoulder.

Nick asked Heck, “He’s not going to fish for these sharks, is he?”

“No, boss. He says he’s going to poison them.”

* * *

On the way toward the northern coastline of Cuba, Nando shared the bread and black beans with anyone who wanted some, which, Nick saw, only Heck and Bronco did. His own stomach was twisted so tight he would have heaved them up, and they were rocking again on the way in. Bronco was still tending to the seasick Nita. The big bruiser had fallen hard for her, and—when she wasn’t hacking over the side—she seemed to return the feeling. Heck had been upset at first, wanting to protect the young widow who was his cousin. But since he’d lost his laptop and cell phone in the plane crash, he seemed to be mourning the loss of all that. They all had bigger things to protect now, Nick thought, namely their lives.

With Heck translating, Nick had convinced Nando to let them off the boat at a more private location than his village fishing dock. They had directions of where to find the Hermez home, which sounded like it was a little ways out of the village. Unlike in Havana and other Cuban cities, Nando claimed, government men and informants were scarce in the area of fishing villages and farms with vast tobacco and sugarcane fields that used to be owned by rich Cubans before la revolucion.

Heck had whispered to Nick, “Everything was different before the revolution. Maybe if we go to Havana I can see my grandfather’s hotel and hacienda. I always dreamed I could see it someday, even if I never get any of it back.”

Nick had only nodded. Jace had overheard that and told Nick, “We’d better make it clear this is not some damned sightseeing vacation. One wrong move, and we’re staring at bare walls and bars. Same for you with your vendetta against Ames. If he’s here, no way you—or we—can go after him or let him know we’re here. Most we could do is tip off our contact where their number one most wanted is—when and if we get back to the US.”

“I know. First things first. We’re off the plane, off the rafts. Now, all we’ve got to do is get all of us out of Cuba and to an island in Northern Michigan, damn it.”

“Look—shoreline. I’ve flown over this big island more than once but never wanted to put down like some of my pilot buddies have. I know a guy claimed engine trouble so he could make an emergency landing in Havana just to say he’d seen the place.”

“Yeah, well, you had real engine trouble, and we still need to find out why.”

“It could have been mechanical. Then too, I’ve known pilots who have crashed their own planes for their own reasons. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I wasn’t looking at you like that. I just want you to swear you can live with the idea of Claire being married to me and you passing as my brother and Lexi’s uncle.”

“I have to live with it, don’t I? One wrong move here or even in WITSEC protection, if we get that far, and I—we—won’t be living at all, not if Ames and who knows who else has his way.”

Nick nodded, and they shook hands. He could only trust and pray that Jace would continue to be helpful and protective, because, on top of everything else, he feared Jace wanted Claire and Lexi back.

* * *

The shoreline, Jace noted, as he looked through Nando’s beat-up pair of binoculars, was hardly how he’d pictured Cuba. On the one narrow, rutted road he could see two horse-drawn wagons instead of the 1950s vintage American cars he’d seen in photos. No palms but pines clinging to the hills and shadowing the short cliff hovering over pristine, deserted beaches. And red soil with rows and rows of tobacco plants waving in the breeze as far as the eye could see.

“Bonita, no?” Nando asked him with a proud grin, as if he owned every acre of the scenery. “Costa Blanca!” he said, pointing at the shoreline with a distant dock and cluster of small, tile-roofed houses on a gentle slope of hill. He pointed higher up, more to the west. “Mi casa,” he said and Jace nodded.

“Berto!” Jace called out, using Heck’s WITSEC name. “Be sure he’s going to let us out away from the dock and village.”

“Oh, yeah, he knows,” Heck said and rattled off more Spanish to Nando, who kept nodding. “He says, with us, his house will be crowded, some must sleep on the floor. His daughter, Gina, she comes home this weekend from university in Havana where she studies to be a doctor, very smart.”

“Then they will be a wealthy family someday,” Jace said.

Heck translated, then answered. “No, that’s why he wants to sell the rafts, even though he have to hide them for now. Doctors in Cuba, they only make as much money as someone lays bricks or sells T-shirts on the street.”

Claire’s voice came from behind him where she had stood up to stretch and flex the cramps in her legs. Lexi was sleeping on the deck with her head on Claire’s purse for a pillow, covered with a coat. His ex-wife, whom he’d discovered too damn late he still loved and wanted—much of the divorce was his stupid fault—was frowning at the nearing shoreline.

“Communist country, Jace,” she said. “We’re about to see what that really means.”

“If Ames is here, it doesn’t mean he makes as much as a bricklayer or street vendor. He may be helping to fund the Castro kingdom and somehow making big bucks here, I know it.”

Heck spit over the side of the boat and said, “The Castros ruined everything. Took my grandfather’s lands, his house, his money—my family, my heritage. Took a lot of lives, firing squads their favorite way. But we’re not gonna get caught. He’s not gonna take nothing else from us—maybe the other way ’round.”

Jace turned to him. “Just don’t do anything to screw this up—this secret mission we didn’t ask for but have to handle. Getting in and getting out of here, together, everyone in one piece.”

“’Course not. I’m gonna want out of here, fast as you. ’Specially ’cause I hear this place is locked up tight for social media, email, online research, all that I need to do my work. And what’s out there is monitored and controlled. Coupla dry-foot escapees told me that not long ago.”

“Great, just great,” Nick groused as he came to stand beside them. “With the internet off-limits or monitored, we’re going to have to use something like passenger pigeons to contact the FBI so they don’t think we’re dead, so they can help us get out of here.”

“We’re as good as back in the Dark Ages here,” Jace said. “Outnumbered and outranked, but we won’t be outthought or outfought. We got this far and we’ll make it in and out.”

“Just remember what Lincoln said during our own country’s terrible war,” Nick said, bouncing a fist off both Jace’s and Heck’s shoulders. “We have to hang together, or we’ll hang separately.”

As if they’d made a vow, both men nodded solemnly. Claire did too as she moved to stand between Jace and Nick. Suddenly, Nando spewed out behind them what sounded like an order.

“He says,” Heck told them, “he sees the place where he can drop us off and where we can hide the rafts for him. But we’ll have to wade a ways and wait for a couple of hours before we walk to his house.”

“Dry land sounds good—wading for it, dragging rafts or not,” Claire said.

“Piece of cake,” Jace added with a sarcastic snort. “All of this.”

“You can say that because you’ve been in combat,” Claire told him.

Nick said, “Nothing may be what it seems here, just like other things we’ve been through. To quote another wise man, ‘All for one and one for all,’ so let’s remember that—live by that until we all get out of here.”

3

In a small, lovely inlet edged by a narrow band of blinding white sand, the rescued party sloshed ashore in the late afternoon. Since the crystal clear water where Nando let them out was waist deep, Jace carried Lexi. Nick and Bronco tugged the two orange rafts in to shore, hoping they could find a spot in the lush greenery to deflate and hide them until Nando could find buyers.

It was the least that they could do for him, Nick thought. He didn’t want to tip off the man or his family that he had a lot of cash on him. It was obvious that money was tight on the island, at least for average people. He’d heard things had been tough after Castro’s 1950s revolution and got worse when the old USSR then Venezuela and China abandoned supporting Cuba. Evidently, Raul Castro had finally eased up restrictions on some small, private businesses. And, of course, if international billionaires like Clayton Ames were here, all cozy with the Castros while most Cubans had it hard, well, that was obscene.

“Strange, but this scary place seems like paradise,” Claire said to him, her voice shaky. “It’s so beautiful and serene, but evil lurked in Eden and led people astray.”

“We’ll be careful,” he assured her, but he was on edge too. Surely, if Ames was in Cuba, he would not have hired that rickety boat to come out to bring them into his latest realm, using Nando so they wouldn’t suspect a trap. But he put nothing past his father’s murderer, a master manipulator with long arms.

Nick flinched as a brown pelican dived so close it splashed them when it scooped up the unsuspecting fish in its bill, swallowed it whole and wagged its tail in delight. Yeah, even this Eden had its dangers.

Waiting for dusk, when they would head for Nando’s house, they hunkered down in a patch of sun as their clothes dried stiff and salty against their skin. At least they weren’t cold now. When Lexi kept asking to play in the sand, things almost seemed normal. They didn’t want to be spotted, but finally they let her, over on the side of the little inlet, partly hidden by the cliff. Claire was with her. Would Lexi’s light hair and Claire’s red tresses draw attention? Obviously, some non-Cubans lived here, surely redheads, but his wife was a striking woman. Thank God, they had Heck and Nita to act as translators and buffers.

As if he’d read his mind, Heck said, “’Cording to what Nando said, we’re going to have to go into Havana to get to the internet. How else we gonna tell Patterson we’re not lost? Surprise! We are here, come get us—somehow.”

“I know,” Nick said. “We could try the British Embassy, where I read there’s a so-called American desk upon request. But some of us would stand out like sore thumbs there, and we need to stick together. The Brits might not believe us, and we’d have to go through red tape, declare who we really are to get American help. Then there’s Gitmo.”

“Guantanamo? The US prison for terrorist enemies here?”

“Everything’s up in the air right now, a long shot. At least there would be Americans there, officers and soldiers who go back and forth to the States. Let’s just take this one step—one very careful step—at a time.”

* * *

When the shadows grew long, Nick and Jace decided it was time to hike to the road above the beach and head for Nando’s house. Claire and Nita walked with Lexi between them up the curving path since they couldn’t get around the cliff to the thin stretch of shore under Nando’s home.

“Look at that red soil with all this tobacco,” Heck said.

Lexi piped up. “I thought tobacco was bad for people, Mommy.”

“Cuban cigars are famous, and a lot of people like them,” Claire said only. She was exhausted. She’d taken one of her earlier meds with a gulp of water from Nando’s canteen. She hoped she’d warded off the chance of a narcoleptic nightmare, but she feared falling asleep in the middle of a step or word. All she needed was a psychotic bad dream now when reality was so awful.

“Hate to admit it, but this is real pretty land,” Jace said. “I see patches of tomatoes and what might be coffee besides the tobacco. I could use a good cup of java right now.”

“It’s the Castros and their cronies who are bad,” Heck put in, “not Cuba or its people—most of them, I mean.”

They found Nando’s house just where he’d said they would. It looked like a kind of stucco with a slightly slanted, orange tile roof, but many of the tiles were cracked or broken. Nando stood in the door watching for them. Beside him stood a short woman, her long white hair in the setting sun such a contrast to Nando’s salt-and-pepper look. His skin was much bronzer than hers.

“Maybe his mother live here too,” Heck said. “Generations, the old ones, at least, stick together, even if he said his daughter lives in Havana, goes to university.”

Though no other houses or people on the road were in sight on this western edge of the village, Nando quickly herded them inside. Despite the warm breeze and fingers of red setting sunlight stretching through the glassless windows and door before Nando closed it behind them, Claire shivered.

Inside, standing in the small, central room with its table and few chairs, Nando introduced them—with Heck’s help—to Carlita, his wife, not his mother. Nando whispered something to Heck, who in turn told them in a hushed voice, “Her hair go white real fast when the sharks take their only son.”

Claire bit her lower lip and blinked back tears. Lexi had been abducted once and that had been a near-death experience for her. As different as she was from this woman, Claire immediately sympathized with her. Their names even seemed an echo of each other. Yet they were so far from home—wherever that was now—and so far from safety.

* * *

Sleeping on a tile floor with only a piece of canvas under him didn’t bother Jace. In Iraq, he’d been through worse, even though pilots were usually housed in the best of the worst places. His stomach was full of fish, black beans and rice, though he sure could have used a beer or something stronger than some sugary drink called guarapo, made from sugarcane juice. The coffee, though, had been home-ground, hot and strong.

With the other men, he’d sat outside after dark on the small back patio, hearing the sound of the sea. The patio was eroding from sea salt air and age, but just a few steps away served as a urinal for the men while the women used a chamber pot inside. Nita, who didn’t speak much but to Claire, Lexi and Carlita, had told them that it was Carlita’s dream to have a toilet with running water and a drinking spigot someday soon, just like the ones in the village that had better pipes. At least they had running water from a cistern in the small kitchen. But the stunning view out the back of the little place—wasn’t that worth something?

Jace shifted onto his side. Bronco, lying next to him, looked like he slept the sleep of the dead. Except he snored. Nick had insisted on taking the first watch. He was sitting up with his back against the wall near the front door, which had no real lock on it, just a double-hooked latch. Hell, in a way, they all had their backs against the wall.

Claire and Lexi slept in the second small room off this main one in the Hermez daughter’s single bed. Nita was in a sort of sagging cot in that same crowded room. Clarita had fussed over Lexi, washing her hair and combing it out. Then Claire and Nita had washed their hair in rainwater from a barrel out back. All that by lantern light, though they said the village had electricity between blackouts. No wonder Nando had considered two rafts to sell on the black market a gift from God.

Jace just hoped when the urban daughter, Regina, called Gina, showed up for a weekend visit tomorrow she wouldn’t be a flaming commie or want to turn them in. How much were people brainwashed on this island, especially in Havana? In a wood-framed photo, Gina stood before a mural of Fidel and Che Guevara with the words Viva La Revolucion!

Jace had noticed that Heck spent a lot of time staring at the picture as if he knew her. She was easy to look at. Glossy long dark hair and flashing brown eyes. Lithe, young, sexy in trendy clothes that would have done her well on Miami Beach. Her tight T-shirt read in English I’m gaga for Lady Gaga!!! She looked like she came from another planet compared to this fisherman’s house where she’d grown up. He’d seen no photo of the lost son Alfredito or of the family together.

The wind had picked up outside, and Jace saw Nick stand and look out the front window through the open wooden shutters. It was pitch-black outside. Keeping quiet, Jace got up and stepped over the sleeping Bronco, who would be taking the early-morning watch after him and Heck.

Jace whispered to Nick, “I’m awake. I’ll start now.”

Nick nodded and fist-bumped Jace’s shoulder. He moved to take his spot on the floor. Jace thought that they could almost be friends, especially since Nick, WITSEC alias his brother Jack, wasn’t sleeping with Claire tonight.

When Nick lay down with a deep sigh, Jace did some stretching to get his blood moving and his muscles awake. How did things keep spiraling down, getting worse? It was as if they were under some curse.

With his back to the wall, he sat on the floor and became one with the night shadows.

* * *

On Saturday—Claire thought she was losing track of time and her sanity—Nando went fishing since he’d lost his catch when he’d brought them home the day before. Carlita walked to the village to meet the 11:00 a.m. bus their daughter was supposed to be on. See, Claire told herself, time did not stand still, even here where it seemed it should.

“Let’s have a powwow before Carlita gets back with their daughter,” Nick said to their group, and except for Nita, who stayed inside with Lexi, they all went out on the patio. The village of Costa Blanca circled around the fishing dock about half a mile to the east, and they could see some of it from here.

“This girl Gina is obviously way different from her parents,” Nick began. Considering how intent and edgy everyone looked, he felt like he was making a plea in a courtroom. “Who knows what they indoctrinate students with at the university? Nando told Heck that Gina is studying to be a doctor, so she’s probably bright and as modern as it gets around here, maybe a dedicated Communist. No doubt ambitious, though Nando said doctors earn minimal wages.”

Claire put in, “But wanting to go through all it takes to be a doctor for little money makes me think she could also want to help people. She sounds altruistic or at least a people person.”

“Good point, forensic psychologist,” Nick said with a nod and a smile. “I’m remembering why I hired you to figure people out for me, even ones who are gone from this earth. I need—and value—all of your opinions, because we’re still flying blind here.”

“Flying’s my gig,” Jace said. “Like you guys said, we’ve got to get to the internet somehow, so we can send out an SOS for help. And fast, before someone figures out we don’t belong and calls in the—whatever they call them here. Man, I’m starting to feel we’re on an alien planet, like in that old TV show Star Trek.”

“Just hope it doesn’t turn into Star Wars,” Nick said.

* * *

Claire thought it seemed not only a breath of fresh air but a whirlwind that came through the front door with quiet Carlita. Gina Hermez was gesturing with both hands and talking rapid-fire Spanish, until she suddenly switched to English.

“Who says nothing happens outside Havana?” the pretty girl exploded as her big dark eyes jumped from one of them to the other. She propped her hands on her shapely hips before flinging gestures again. “Well, that’s just another government lie, because you are really, really here!”

She wore cutoff jeans and a pink crewneck sweater that might have come from Abercrombie & Fitch. Her glossy raven hair hit below her shoulder blades, and her clear plastic backpack was crammed with books. She spoke strangely accented English, Claire thought—most forensic psychologists were good at placing accents—with a Slavic or Russian tang to her voice, not the usual Hispanic lilt.

“It’s kismet our papa found you,” Gina went on before anyone else could speak. “And where we lost Alfredito. Please, let us sit at the table and talk. And, oh, a bonita little girl...”

Everyone talked at once then, cross-counter introductions, greetings. Nick made some explanation of their plight, using the cover story they had been flying to a vacation when their plane went down, and that the man who owned it was going to be very angry if he caught up with them, so they needed to call a lawyer friend of Nick’s in the States.

“You are a lawyer?” Gina asked. “You know what Shakespeare said—‘First, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Now, you know, we Cubans are well educated, yes? Free education, free health care here, so not all bad, but the joke now is if we could only find breakfast, lunch and dinner, yes, Mama?”

Carlita, who seemed to have next to no English, said nothing but beamed and nodded. It was obvious she adored her daughter but probably didn’t understand her much lately, whether she spoke English or Spanish. What a contrast in the two women, Claire thought, hoping she and Lexi never got that different. The new Cuba versus the old, that was for sure. And, however Gina had got the money, Claire had seen Carlita quickly put some paper bills in a jar. Claire decided she’d tell Nick. When they left here, he could leave some American money for them as well.

“Of course, I can help you find assistance in Havana,” Gina promised, without taking a breath, “but since you are illegal Norte Americanos, sometimes called Yanquis here, and since you not come by legal means, we have to be careful. Oh, it’s my dream to go to your country. Doctors are special there, have more money and respect, yes?”

The one thing Gina said, Claire noted, that didn’t jibe with her good English vocabulary and slight Slavic lilt was that she said jes instead of yes, just the way Heck did.

“That’s true about doctors in the US,” Nick said. “As for Havana, we have friends who can come for us if we can just get them word, then settle things at home about the lost airplane later. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves in any way.”

“Well, they cannot come here to get you, ’specially in Havana, or Raul’s security arrest you,” Gina explained. “Once you contact your friends, you need a rural meeting spot, probably for a boat, not a plane, maybe around where Papa dropped you off. Cuba security can find illegal planes in our airspace.”

“Good advice, because, of course, we don’t want to take the chance of being detained or being publicized or even recognized.”

“Right. I love that you use big words. I need to learn more and more, but I comprendo—understand—what you say. Lucky you have two good Espanol speakers here,” she said with a blinding smile that took in Heck but not Nita.

Claire had been studying Gina intently, trying to psych out her true character and intent. But she also noticed that Heck—who had been introduced to Gina as Berto Ochoa—was all eyes for the senorita. He practically had his tongue hanging out.

“Oh, for sure,” he said, sounding as breathless as if he’d run miles. “Anything I can do to help, work with you, I will.”

Oh, boy, Claire thought. You might know hormones were roiling here. She hoped it could work to their advantage, but what if it didn’t? Matters were already complicated enough considering her own problems with Jace and Nick, not to mention Heck keeping an eye on Nita since she and Bronco were lovey-dovey.

While Carlita, with Nita’s help, put quesadillas on each plate and poured homemade papaya wine, Gina suggested something they hadn’t thought of, something that made Claire hope they could believe and trust her.

“I got to explain something to Berto here—” another smile at Heck “—since he say he is a—what was that?—a computer trekky?”

“A techie,” Nick corrected her.

“Oh, yes. But I think I know a way getting to the internet that is safer than going near the embassy. We have what you call internet cafés, only the lines long and most Cubans believe what they write is watched by—you know—the government,” she added, whispering. “I have a laptop, but it only connects with university areas that been approved and what we call SNet, the Street Net. If you have any money, you should check into a real nice hotel, then rent an hour of worldwide net online, maybe between eight to fifteen dollars, so pretty expensive.”

If this woman thought that was expensive, Claire thought, things were indeed bad here.

Lowering her voice again, Gina went on, “They say others—well, you know, the government—watches that internet for problems, so the hotel, bigger the better, might work best.”

Her voice returned to normal range and she began to gesture again. “See, I was dating a musician, played at the Nacional, best hotel in Havana. Foreign tourists, European, Canadian stay there, not so many Americanos anymore, not for years, since the horrible dictator Batista and his gangsters ruled here, but that might work for you. If there’s any rooms available, if you have some cash. Cash is king here, American dollars, even.”

Nick told her, “We might be able to arrange that. When you head back to Havana tomorrow on the bus, can we all go along, maybe the last bus in the evening?”

“First of all, no streetlights there. Dark for you to be getting around at night. Besides, I have to take a bus at dawn, but I know where I keep you hidden until afternoon. Then you go to the hotel about the time a plane would land and you would arrive. We take another taxi to the airport first, since you got some money.”

This girl was proving herself as bright as she looked, Claire thought, even thinking of little details, but was she after their money or did she really want to help? At least there was just one more night’s sleep here in crowded conditions with the breeze whispering through the old wooden shutters and bad dreams to make her think someone was coming after them.

Claire hated to dwell on dangers, but they’d been through so much. When she first became a Certified Fraud Examiner and Forensic Psychologist, she’d never imagined it would lead to more than interviews of Americans who might have broken the law, even though she’d realized she could be dealing with criminals. And Nick as a criminal defense attorney certainly never planned to be defending his own life.

Later, over a dessert of amazingly little bananas that had been soaked in rum, though Claire made sure Lexi’s was without the liquor, Gina was still talking. “I know where to get some clothes to loan—or is it lend?—you all, except little Meggie, but we will manage. And you won’t have suitcases, but I know where to borrow one or two. Still, once we leave this casa, ’specially when we be in Havana,” she said, looking intently at each of them in turn, “until you get a place to stay, think of it as hiding in the shadows so you not get caught.”

4

After several more rural stops, the bus to Havana became crowded, though they all had seats since Costa Blanca was near the beginning of this line. Nick noted there weren’t many cars on the road until they neared Havana.

“No es facil,” Gina whispered to him and Claire from the seat behind and patted them both on their shoulders as if to buck them up. Lexi was on Claire’s lap, nodding in sleep, and Gina was sitting with Heck. “That’s my motto,” Gina said. “Nothing is easy, even getting around in the city. We’ll get out near where I live.”

Nick had noticed, despite the buzz of voices on the bus, that Heck and Gina had sometimes switched to Spanish, though she’d said she wanted to practice her English. Claire had clued Nick in like he was some idiot about Gina and Heck. At least Heck was smitten, because you couldn’t really tell about her. They needed her to help them, but Nick agreed with his personal forensic psychologist that Gina needed watching. Everyone in Cuba did. No es facil, indeed.

At first the city seemed to him a sprawl of huge, block-like apartment buildings with an occasional blast from the past like an aging Spanish hacienda, some with wash on the line and people watching out the window. Many were smoking. Kids played in the potholed streets, and old men sat on barrels over games of checkers. They passed a series of buildings painted Pepto-Bismol pink. Nick’s stomach was roiling and not from being rattled on this bus. He could use some of that stuff right now, but what couldn’t they use? He’d quietly left one of his smallest bills, fifty dollars, in Carlita’s money jar. He was nervous about flashing big bills—would stores even have change?—to get underwear and a change of clothes for everyone.

Claire poked him in the ribs. At least she had the brains not to say anything. Their Spanish might be sketchy, but they could both translate the words on the huge mural with Fidel Castro’s bearded profile they were passing: Solcialismo o muerta. In other words, Socialism or death. Somehow, that threat was the least of their worries right now.

But when they looked out the other side of the bus, it was pure beauty. They were driving along what Gina called the Malecon, a gorgeous avenue with a seawall and the glittering water just below. People were strolling or just hanging out. He spotted some who must be tourists.

“Caramba! There, there!” Gina said, bending low to look ahead of them. She pointed at a huge, turreted building, blinding white in the sun on an elevated area overlooking the city and the green-and-violet sea beyond. “The Hotel Nacional de Cuba,” she told them, then repeated it to Bronco and Nita, who were sitting behind her. Jace was across the aisle, sitting next to a man who was bringing sunglasses into the city to hawk on the streets. “Later,” she told Nick. “We will go there later, not looking like this, yes?”

“Yes, okay,” Nick threw over his shoulder. He, Jace and Claire had decided that they would go with her tourists-to-the-hotel plan. But first they were going into the heart of the city to the university area.

“Next stop,” she said. “Here, we get out here.” She shouted “Chofe!” to the bus driver over the noise and got up to lead them to the exit. Nick hefted Lexi, and they straggled out into an area where ficus trees lined the avenues and some lovely old buildings cast sharp shadows.

“This way,” Gina said, starting out with Heck at her side. Nick reminded himself he had to tell him not to answer every question Gina asked, despite her charms. They’d been talking about life in the US most of the way here.

His legs were stiff after sitting tense for so long. Gina turned away from the vista ahead with large homes and the huge main university building beyond, leading them toward a run-down-looking place that must have once been beautiful.

Heck turned back to tell them, “Gina says she can take me later to see the small hotel and hacienda my grandfather owned. She said not to get my hopes up that they look like my family said.”

Which, Nick saw, was the name of the game in this area where Gina lived, in what he would call student housing—cheap student housing. Her building must have once been grand but it was falling apart. The broken back gate they went in took them past a long-empty swimming pool with a broken diving board. They had to duck around tropical plants, no doubt once tended, now run rampant like a jungle. They walked in on the ground floor and followed her up three flights of dusty, partly crumbling stairs.

Jace carried Lexi now. She was always clinging to one of them, and Nick could see why. If he was nerved up and Claire looked it too, what must this child be thinking?

“This the old servants’ stairs,” Gina told them. “Wider ones in front, but we not need to see people if they not on canvas.”

“Campus,” Heck corrected her. “You said to tell you if you use a wrong word.”

“Campus, campus,” Gina recited. “I was even thinking for one momentito it might be circus.”

Claire said, “But your English is quite good.”

“I learn most of it from my Russian professor of anatomy couple years ago. English from a Russian, a good joke, yes?”

Nick saw Claire nod. He knew she was relieved to hear the explanation for the girl’s unusual accent. Like him, Claire’s brain had been running wild with suspicions about Russian spies and Cubans following them. That was ridiculous, of course, at least so far, but she had good instincts and she’d whispered to him more than once on the bus that the back of her neck was prickling with her woman’s intuition that they were being watched. He’d just forced a smile and shook his head at her. Of course they were being watched, but just because they stood out on the rural bus.

“No one should be here in my apartment, so no worry,” Gina assured them again as she had when she’d laid out her plan last night at her parents’ house. “My two girlfriends busy with their—their admirers, and Eduardo, he is away until late tomorrow, so you be gone by then, be taken care of.”

Claire’s stare collided with Nick’s. There were two ways to interpret what Gina had just said. But, right now, they had no choice but to trust her.

* * *

Claire nearly collapsed onto the sunken settee in the main room of the apartment Gina shared with two other women and one man. The antique piece was covered with faded and worn red velvet, probably a survivor of the good old days. A few other dark wood furniture pieces looked patched together from somewhere grand, a ball-footed table and five mismatched chairs, a cubbyhole desk that boasted a laptop. Heck hovered over that as if it was a magnet.

“Berto,” Gina said, “I tell you, it only go to university sites unless Eduardo connects to the wires we have to string outside, along rooftops. Under that pillowcase, our telemundo.” She pointed. “But unless he left the packet for the week here, sorry, but little Meggie can’t watch old TV shows today.”

“The packet?” Heck said.

“We pool some money, he take our hard drive to a secret location and get it loaded with mostly American TV. We see game shows, watch things like Homeland, about spies and secret agents, so don’t think we don’t know American things. I told you, I love America.

“Okay, now,” she went on, shrugging off her backpack and disappearing into one of the three doors that must lead to sleeping quarters—and, hopefully, a bathroom. “Here some suitcases you can use, look like you flew into Havana.”

She dragged out three, two of which looked presentable, despite their scuffed surface and small size. “You have to pretend they are heavy—tourists always come and go with heavy ones—but you won’t have much in them. How about I take Lorena and Berto, and we try buy a change of clothes for all of you, then you try look like European or Canadian or something.”

“Or something is right,” Bronco spoke up, though he hadn’t been saying much.

“Berto,” Nick said with a stare at Heck, “we’ll all go out later to see your family’s places, so keep to business now, okay?”

“Oh, sure, boss. I waited my whole life to see those places, wishing I could get them back, so I can stand it a little longer.”

Nick gave Heck two fifty-dollar bills he’d taken out from his plastic money belt this morning and had stuck in the front pocket of his pants. Gina’s eyes widened when she saw them. “Oh, I hope they have money give us back. Maybe we best go into a real shop, not somewhere on the street. We’ll bring back food too, not be gone long. You want nap, is okay to use my friends’ beds. Jenna looking like she can sleep right there,” she said with a nod at Claire. “So—you not answer the door. This plan, it will work. If it does, you think your friends who come get you in a boat will mind one more person? It would kill my parents if I go, but I got to look ahead—just kidding, I think. All of us got to keep our eyes ahead, even if it is a dark road at times.”

* * *

Jace thought things were looking up when their Spanish-speaking trio were back in an hour with a change of clothes for everyone and hot tamales. Gina hauled out cans of a soft drink called TuKola from a tiny refrigerator in the corner. The girl had a good eye for clothing sizes. His jeans fit pretty well, though they were beige. Ironically, they’d got Nick the same outfit, which made them look more like the brothers they were pretending to be. Lexi liked her yellow-and-white-striped dress and kept saying Lily would like it, so she must be remembering some friend of hers from home he hadn’t met. Claire’s outfit was white tennis shoes with a turquoise three-piece slacks outfit, though the blue kind of clashed with her red hair.

With Bronco bringing up the rear and Gina leading, they set out in separate groups, walking a few yards apart to see Heck’s Cuban family’s past property. All wore sunglasses Gina had bought from the man on the bus. Nick carried a map of this area called El Vedado that Heck had bought. “El Vedado, that means ‘the forbidden,’” Heck whispered to Jace, “but don’t know why.”

“Let’s just hope we don’t find out and don’t like the answer,” Jace told him.

* * *

As tired and wary as she was, Claire thought the Vedado was lovely. Some of the mansions dated back to the 1860s, but most were from the 1920s. Many were still kept up, though some were in total disrepair. It was hilly and windy up here, a lovely day that partly lifted her spirits.

Heck, though, she noted, was a mess. He was finally so close to his heritage, one he shared with the now-deceased grandfather he still cherished. Gina was as good as a tour guide—that was, until she led them to a break in an iron fence behind a bougainvillea bush and said, “We cut through here. Good shortcut and beautiful inside. We never stop to pay at the gate—too much.”

Heck said, “But it’s a cemetery. What if we get caught without a ticket? We don’t need to be reported.”

“Is okay,” Gina said with a quick downward slice of her hand. “We cut through here all the time, to university. Berto, it closer to your family house too. The guards at the gate know my friend Francesca, ignore us even if they see us. Come on, everyone through.”

Maybe it was her narcolepsy meds speaking, but once inside, Claire felt she had actually stepped into a city of the dead. She was stunned to see so many life-size stone statues of long-gone people. Several had their arms outspread as if to welcome them. Again, she felt that strange, shivery sense that they were being watched or followed, but it was surely just the marble eyes on them and the blank darkness peering through the grates of elaborate crypts. Even in the warm afternoon sun, she shuddered again. Shadows seemed to reach out, trying to touch them or snag their steps. She took Lexi’s hand and ignored what the child was whispering about someone named Lily.

“Famous Cubans, big monuments here,” Gina told them, pointing this way and that. “Over that way, old-time independence leader General Gomez and Eduardo Chibas’s tomb back there. To protest the cruel government, he killed himself during a radio broadcast before the revolution, so bold and brave!”

Claire saw Nick’s head snap around. Any mention of suicide shook him up.

“When he was buried here,” Gina went on, “a young university student, Fidel Castro, did jump on his grave and make a big speech, started the revolt against the old ways. But we going by the one I want you to see, ’specially you, Jenna, since you have little Meggie,” she said, turning to look closely at Claire.

And maybe not only little Meggie, Claire thought. She was still obsessing over her missed period but tried to tell herself that all this upheaval could have made her body skip it. She still hadn’t told Nick, since he didn’t need another distraction right now.

“Was it someone famous who had a daughter?” Claire asked as they skirted around the site Gina must be referring to. Again, the raised tombs were crowded so close together it felt oppressive, as if all that stonework was leaning in. They seemed to be pretty much in the center of the massive cemetery. Ahead of them loomed the marble figure of a woman clinging to a tall cross with one arm and a baby in her other. Claire gasped. But for a slightly rounder face, the statue looked like her. Nick and Jace both gaped at it, then her.

“Look, Mommy,” Lexi said, tugging on her arm. “It’s you! But you don’t have a baby. And the statue of the little girl with her head bowed standing over by the flowers—that could be me!”

“That’s really somethin’!” Bronco said when the others seemed suddenly voiceless. Nita kept crossing herself. The flowers strewed or carefully placed around the statue reminded Claire of the photos of the floral excess when Princess Diana died. It was almost as if this woman had just died yesterday.

Jace cleared his throat and put in, “They say there are doubles for everyone somewhere. But this lady lived and died a long time ago. Look, Jenna, she was your age now.”

Gina pointed out the woman’s burial vault nearby, one with four huge iron rings.

“This my favorite place in all this Necropolis Cristobal Colon,” Gina said, her voice so solemn. They all stopped, gathered around her. “This the tomb of Senora Amelia Goryi, called La Milagrosa, the miraculous one. She died giving a birth in 1901. Her husband so sad, he devious.”

“Devastated?” Nick prompted, his deep voice shaky.

“That’s it. He have a broken heart and visit the grave many times a day. Always, he knocked with one of those iron rings to wake her up and backing away to keep her grave and statue in sight longest he can. But here’s the thing,” she added, turning to Claire. “When her body exhumed years later, it not one bit decayed. And the dead baby which was buried at her feet was in her arms! So she was holy, not a saint yet, but a special help, a miracle. Many people come here, knock on the tomb and back away, like her husband did, praying she solve their problems.”

Nick put his arm around Claire’s shoulders as if he had to protect her, and Jace stepped closer. She couldn’t help it but still stared into the stone face of the statue. The slant of sun made it look as if her lips were moving. One of Claire’s professors had always made his students memorize that being a forensic psychologist meant “The dead still talk if you know how to listen.”

Claire prayed this statue would not haunt her, not talk to her in dreams. She’d had narcoleptic nightmares in which the dead clutched at her in the night. Her doctor had said that was typical of the disease—and maybe her chosen career—and she’d managed to deal with it. But now, with all this...

Nick’s voice cut through her agonizing. “So, Gina, are you thinking we could rely on this long-dead woman’s favor to get us safely out of here?”

“I hope and pray so. If not, we, the living, we must find the way.”

5

Nick had never seen Heck cry. The guy was usually all business, rational and unemotional, his no-nonsense tech adviser, and for five years he’d relied on him for that. But seeing the small, once-elegant hotel his grandfather had owned and that had been taken away from him in the Cuban revolution moved Nick’s friend to tears. Luckily, it was still named La Rosa, so that and the street name had been enough for Gina to locate it without giving out his family’s real last name.

“It’s a mess,” Heck choked out, glaring across the avenue at the splotchy exterior of the building where blue paint had peeled away like huge scabbed sores. The intricate metal balconies overhanging the Quinta Avenida were rusted and looked dangerous, although laundry hung from some like mismatched flags, and a few had people leaning on the railing and smoking, just watching life go by—and watching them.

Gina put her arm around his waist, and Heck leaned into her. “Many once-grand places like this now,” she told him, her voice soothing. “Lots of families live there, so that helps that they have shelter, yes? Place like this, so many of them, called ciudadelas, like a little city to many people. Best we not go in, yes, Berto?”

“Right, right,” he said as Nick put his hand on Heck’s shoulder. “But to be so close and yet so far.”

“Also,” Gina said, “we not want to stand here staring. Most neighborhoods still have what we call CDRs, you know, a kind of neighborhood watch to report strangers or bad talk. We should move on now.”

“Right,” he repeated. “I dread seeing what’s left of the family home, but I’d still like to walk down to the old hacienda.”

They started off again. Nick hoped Gina didn’t pick up on the fact that Heck was going by the last name Ochoa, and he hoped he hadn’t told her it was his maternal grandfather who once owned these buildings, not his father’s father, in case she checked on that.

Nick was trying to keep an eye on Claire, who had obviously been shaken by the statue in the cemetery, and he kept glancing back to be sure they weren’t being followed. He could tell Jace was really on edge too, but this was the least they could do for Heck. Best he see all this, then put it behind him. If they hadn’t come with him, Nick was afraid he might have gone off with Gina alone, and he didn’t want anyone to be out of his sight here. They had to escape soon. The entire place oppressed him, especially because the odds were good Ames was here somewhere, lurking.

They trekked down what was turning into a lovely avenue, one with fewer cracks and potholes, and little traffic. Suddenly, Lexi said, “I’m tired of walking and Lily is too,” and yanked her hand from Claire’s.

Nick’s gaze slammed into Claire’s. She said, “I guess all this has given our Meggie an imaginary friend.”

“She’s not ’maginary,” Lexi insisted, her voice sassy, “just because you can’t see her, because I can. She has her own talk only I know. Not Spanish. Ours.”

Lexi—holding no one’s hand but pretending to—turned and skipped back to walk with Jace, who was bringing up the rear.

“I can understand her being distraught,” Nick whispered. “She ever do this before?”

“Never. But she’s missing her best friend and cousin Jilly.”

“Jilly, not Lily?”

“Yes. Maybe she’s put that together with her own name, I don’t know. And with all this fear and upheaval, I hope we can keep her under control—keep her being Meggie.”

“Yeah. We could all use an imaginary friend, but as soon as we check into that big hotel, I’m going to try to get us a real friend, namely Rob Patterson. Let’s let Le—Meggie have this friend but try to comfort her and keep her grounded.”

“But grounded in reality?” Claire challenged. “Reality is pretty awful right now. I’m so shaky. I just hope I can help her, calm her.”

“You’re taking your meds?”

“Thank God, I brought extra. Nick, if I run out, I—”

Gina called back from ahead of them, “There it is! And, look, Berto, it looks fine, maybe like the old days, yes?”

Nick saw his friend wipe his eyes again. Ahead of them where Gina pointed, Nick recognized the big hacienda from a photo Heck used to have as a screen saver on his laptop. This large, two-story white building could have stepped intact from the past. Its wood-and-glass windows were thrown wide open on the top floor. The well-kept place sported a filigree of black iron balconies, an orange tiled roof, white curtains fluttering at an upper window, an ornate, gated entry with painted tiles and the musical sound and spray of a fountain within all framed by blooming pink-and-white bougainvillea.

They all stood and stared. Finally, Heck spoke. “Just like it was before my family had it taken away with the hotel and our country house—had our lives taken away. Look, some sort of sign by the gate, there on the wall.”

He walked across the street. Nick could not name the make of the squat black car that sat in the entry on the other side of the closed gate. They all waited nervously as Heck studied the sign and the car. Gina went over and stood next to him. When they came back, Heck said, “A Russian name, a Russian company, a Russian-made car, a Lada. No way we can ask to look inside.”

Gina said, “Some fine old places in this area are being bought by foreign investors who cozy up to—to you-know-who. I think these places once government offices, so it saved them. My roommate Francesca has a special friend like that. He’s rich, from Hong Kong, investing here and other places in the Caribbean. I think most of these people paying the Castros.” Again, though no one but them was visible on the street, she lowered her voice when she said anything about the Castros.

But when her words sank in, Nick jerked alert. “Her special friend is from Hong Kong? Not American?”

“Oh, there a few of those here too, but not legal unless they make good deals with—with you-know-who. There are getting to be more foreign fish in the sea here, like my father says.”

Lexi piped up. “Are we ’lowed to talk about that bad man that took me? He had a house like this with a fountain. And lots of fish swimming inside tanks that ate other fish, but Lily wasn’t afraid of them.”

Claire tugged Lexi away and leaned down to whisper something to her. It hit Nick hard that this could well be the area where Ames would put down roots in Havana. If he could just find out if and where he was in this El Vedado area, he could somehow let Patterson know where to find the bastard, not that the FBI or the marines guarding Guantanamo could swoop in to arrest and deport him.

Nick whispered to Heck, “There has to be a way to learn who is here and where, and I don’t mean Castro.” When Gina came closer again, Nick went on, “Berto, someday, maybe if the US relaxes the embargo and relationships get better, you can come back, visit the place. But we don’t need to be dealing with the Russians that run that business right now.”

“And meanwhile,” Heck said, “we got more important things to do. We shouldn’t be concentrating on getting into someplace, but getting out.”

* * *

Though Claire felt exhausted, she talked Gina out of taking the shortcut through the cemetery again to get back to her student housing. Claire knew she needed to have a firm, private talk with Lexi soon. If it was some comfort to her to have an imaginary friend for a while, perhaps there was nothing wrong with that. But the child seemed not only disturbed but defiant, and that wasn’t like her. Claire had psyched out her own daughter before when times were tough, but not under such daunting circumstances.

She let Nita take Lexi up into Gina’s building with her and Bronco, while she, Nick and Jace hung back by the ruined swimming pool for a quick conference.

Jace, with a pointed look at Claire, said, “I understand longing for old times and people loved and lost. But I hope Heck has his anger about wanting his family’s property back out of his system.”

Claire was grateful Nick decided to ignore that. Or had Jace not meant anything personal by it? Was she the one seeing trouble behind every tree, every house, every tomb?

Nick said only, “Let’s clear out of here, get a taxi to the airport, then one to the hotel. I’m going to follow Patterson’s emergency plan for covert contact. Too bad it has to come from a Havana hotel and not Heck’s laptop in Northern Michigan.”

“We have no choice but to trust Patterson,” Jace agreed. “But the thing is, WITSEC deals in deception, so how do we know he’s really working for Uncle Sam and not your phony ‘uncle’ Clayton Ames?”

Claire put in, “And how do we even know we can trust Gina? I’m reading her that we can, but how ambitious is she? And did she mean it when she said that she’d like to go to the States, except for the fact it would kill her parents? Well, she didn’t mean it like that. I’m even worrying about Lexi. She has to be my first concern, despite the way you men handle things.”

They stopped talking when a strikingly beautiful girl, a bleached blonde, no less, overly made up, more or less slithered down the back stairs and sashayed past them. She ignored Claire but batted her long lashes and smiled at Jace, then Nick. Her skirt was short and looked painted on her ripe body. How she managed such high heels on the broken terrazzo walk was amazing, Claire thought.

She found her voice as the woman disappeared onto the street. “That’s a student living here?”

They’d evidently stayed behind too long, because Gina came down the stairs looking for them with Heck right behind her as if he were her bodyguard now.

“Did you see my former friend Francesca?” Gina asked them, propping her hands on her hips. “Oh, yes, I see by the look on the men’s faces you did. She said she’s moving out for good, right now, didn’t want any of her things. I can sell some, but that means more money for rent every month from the rest of us, and none of us can afford it.”

“She’s not a student, then, is she?” Claire asked, trying to keep the edge from her voice. Why did she always feel she was conducting a forensic psychology interview on this woman for some sort of crime? She hated not being able to trust the person who probably held their safety in her hands.

“Well—she started out that way,” Gina admitted with a shrug. “Before she met her so-called special friend at a paladore—a private restaurant—where she was working at night. Now she good as spitting on her former friends. Truth is, she what is called a jinetera. You see them up where the foreigners go, even on the streets. She did not start out that way, but took her chance.”

Heck said, “But jinetera means a female jockey. She rides horses? That woman?”

Gina frowned and shook her head. “Called that because the foreign men with money—well, you see, she ride them, in more ways than one.”

“A prostitute?” Heck demanded.

“Yes, but not like—not like a whore. Jineteras, they choose real careful, stick with only one man. It’s different here, Berto,” Gina insisted, her voice rising too. “She stay faithful, he buy her nice presents, visit her family. If he’s a rich foreigner, he might take her to his country, like Francesca says she going. That’s why she doesn’t want her stuff. I know one got married.”

Heck swore under his breath and grabbed her arm to spin her slightly toward him. “You never did that, did you? You said you want to go with me. I’m not rich. You don’t think that—”

“Caramba!” she spit out, breaking his hold on her. “You think that, you never speak to me again. I want to be a doctor, help people, trying to help you, all of you. I do not trade myself for anything, even going with you out of here, so—”

Breaking into a sob, she rushed inside with Heck right behind her.

“Oh, great. Just great,” Jace muttered. “This whole gamble could be screwed up by a woman, but it wouldn’t be the first time.” He gave Claire a pointed look.

“I suppose,” Claire put in with a sharp voice, “you never realized that Eve only ate the apple and listened to the serpent in the garden because Adam was too busy somewhere else.”

“Meaning I was gone for my pilot career a lot? You were the one keeping secrets about your narcolepsy.”

“If you had paid more attention, then—”

“Stop it,” Nick demanded. “Both of you, stop it. If we don’t get our act together, you’ll have plenty of time to be mad at each other and me while we rot in a Cuban prison. Now let’s get inside and calm things down. We need to get to the Hotel Nacional in Old Havana, and I need to get on what we can pray is a secure internet connection. We’re all strung out, including Lexi, so let’s shape up here.”

“Yes,” Claire said. “Sorry I came with baggage, Nick,” she said with a glare at Jace. “Speaking of which, let’s get up there and practice pretending those small, scuffed-up suitcases are full of clothes for a lovely Havana vacation.”

“Right,” Jace said. “Honest, I was trained better than losing it under pressure in the service and in the pilot’s seat. I—we—just snapped.”

“Then let’s go in,” Nick said. “Onward and upward—or else.”

6

Jace thought the main building of the International Airport nine miles south of Havana looked like a winged bird of prey waiting to take flight. He wished they could take flight themselves, that he could be at the controls to get them out of here. Despite the fact their plane crash had not been his fault, he had been in the pilot’s seat. Guilt sat heavy on his heart while he and Heck went inside to check the arrival boards in case they were asked about their flight times at the hotel. As he watched planes take off and land, he yearned for the bustle of an airport. Trouble was, he yearned for Claire too when she wasn’t his anymore.

For a while, he’d convinced himself that he’d moved on. Moved on in his career, moved on to Singapore, where he’d spent some downtime at the other end of his Pacific flights. Seeing that knockout woman back at Gina’s student housing had reminded him of the brief affair he’d had there—and made him feel guilty all over again.

But now, being with Claire, seeing her with Nick but wanting to protect her—to have her again—really hit him hard. He had to keep his head in all this, help to get them the hell out of here, but he kept thinking about him and Claire, how fast they’d fallen for each other, how intense it had been, how—

“Okay, everybody, listen up.” Nick’s voice sliced through his agonizing when they rejoined everyone outside the airport between taxi rides. “Remember, we’re Americans, but we’ve flown in from Toronto, Canada. I have our passports if we need them. We’ll have to hire two taxis again, but we’ll be sure the drivers know to keep us together. Hotel Nacional, here we come, and, hopefully, not for a long stay. Meggie, Gina says they have a big swimming pool there.”

“That’s right,” Gina put in, evidently wanting to boost Lexi’s pouty attitude. “And lots of nice music right there at the pool too. Guitars, bongo drums, maracas—a happy salsa beat.”

“Lily likes songs with bad words,” Lexi insisted, crossing her arms over her chest.

Claire said, “Gina doesn’t need to hear about Lily, so can you just keep her a secret?”

“Well, she’s going swimming with us!” Lexi said so vehemently that even passing strangers looked at her. Jace saw Nick bite his lip, but what did he know about handling Lexi? Claire looked like she was going to cry, but she was a psychologist, so she’d better figure this out with her—their—kid. If it was up to him, he’d just tell Lexi enough of that nonsense right now or else. But around here in what might as well be a galaxy far away, what did “or else” mean?

* * *

“What a place!” Bronco said, looking up at the massive hotel when he’d seldom said much since their plane crash. Nick had seen that Nita kind of herded the big guy around, explaining things to him when she could, translating quietly now and then. He only hoped Bronco’s protective instincts were on alert since he was obviously overwhelmed by culture shock. Well, weren’t they all? Nick was really worried about Lexi, but he had to take care of business first.

The Hotel Nacional, they learned at the desk when Nick checked them in using their new passports, had nearly five hundred rooms. Gina had told them it used to be “the place” for Americans before the revolution, but it was now also a major foreign business center in Havana. That not only comforted Nick, since he wanted to get online fast, but it scared him. Who knew if Clayton Ames or his lackeys might be here on business and spot them?

Gina had also told them that the hotel had once become a ghost town, but had been rebuilt in the 1990s with billions of dollars of foreign money. No wonder the cost of a top-floor suite had been outrageous, but they needed room for the seven of them. Gina wasn’t staying but would be back for dinner tonight, and Heck looked forlorn already. Bronco, Jace and Heck would sleep in the living area; Nita and Lexi in one bedroom; and Claire and Nick in the other. But again, Nick thought, please, Lord, don’t let us be here long before we get out of here somehow.

Claire had taken Lexi off to their bedroom to talk to her, so he left Jace guarding them and went downstairs to the lobby with Bronco, alias Cody Carson. They walked toward the bank of laptops guests could pay to use. Ten dollars an hour here, and Gina thought that was expensive.

He’d already paid for the online time, so he just handed the guy in charge his receipt and sat down at a vacant laptop station. His hands were shaking. He should have Heck here, but he’d walked Gina downstairs to say goodbye until later.

In case someone tried to stop him, Nick had not brought the paper Rob Patterson had given him about covert contact. He’d type in the message first, then address it so it couldn’t go out by mistake before he had it just the way he wanted it:

My stock market investments have crashed, but we’ll get through it with your advice. We want to return to your firm. Any thoughts on how to get back in the market? I’d hate losing everything. I’ll keep a low investment profile until I hear from you. Hotel Nacional in Havana is excellent. Jack Randal

He typed in the email address he’d been given by Patterson. It sounded like an investment firm in Chicago. Then he hit Send.

* * *

Claire bought Lexi a bathing suit in one of the first-floor shops, then let her go to the pool with Nita and Bronco. Lexi had promised that, if she could go swimming, she would only whisper to Lily and not repeat anything her friend said. Jace had gone down to the pool too, just to keep an eye on things from the shade, he’d said. Claire took a fast shower, and then Nick took his turn.

When Nick came out of the bathroom, Claire almost hurled herself in his arms. With just a wet towel tied around his waist, he sat on the bed and lifted her onto his lap. “Hang in there, sweetheart,” he tried to calm her, but she knew he was on edge too.

“I know we don’t have time for this, but I—I just needed your arms around me,” she stammered. “I put mine around Lexi to try to comfort her, but she was kind of not there. Stiff. Angry. I mean, I understand but I just couldn’t seem to talk her out of Lily—to help her.”

He rocked her a bit. She clamped him to her. “We’ll get out, get back to normal—whatever that is living under WITSEC protection—until they get their hands on Ames.”

“What if these rooms are bugged?”

“I don’t think so. They’d lose their business if anyone found out and word spread. This is a hub of savvy, greedy foreigners with money the Cubans want, so they have to be careful. At least we won’t stand out here, except for our lousy wardrobes. Want to go down to the pool, get a bite to eat there, keep an eye on Lexi until we hear from Patterson?”

He shifted her closer. Claire could tell he was wavering about making love to her. She wanted that, but the world spun whenever Nick touched her that way, and they needed to be aware and wary. She almost told him she thought she might be pregnant, but there had to be a better time than this for such momentous news.

Clearing his throat, he said, “So Heck should be back by now, and I need to talk to him about our next step online—waiting for my so-called investment banker to contact us with instructions. But if we go down, I can check to see if there’s a reply yet. I’m hoping—praying—he responds fast.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder. “Heck didn’t come upstairs with you?”

“He wasn’t with me. He walked Gina out, said he’d only go as far as the Malecon and be right back. He’d better not be hanging with her longer than that. Go look in the suite for him, and I’ll get dressed.”

She went out but soon came back in. Her slacks around her hips were darker blue where his towel had spread its dampness. “Nick, he’s not here.”

“Let’s go down to the pool to see if he’s there,” he said, not bothering to tuck in his shirttail. “Right now.”

* * *

But Heck wasn’t at the pool. The others hadn’t seen him.

“I really don’t think he’d just go off with her,” Claire said.

Jace, who was with them now, said only, “Guys in love have done stranger things. But—once again—can we trust her? He would be easy to interrogate with his Spanish—and his ties to the old regime.”

“Don’t even think that,” Nick muttered. “Let’s look in the café bar. Maybe he or both of them ducked in there, couldn’t say goodbye to each other even for a few hours. I should have done a better job reading him the riot act about her, but he’s always been so loyal and levelheaded.”

Claire watched the lobby from the door while the two men walked around inside. She overheard a woman with a British accent say, “I heard this bar used to be terribly chic years ago. Look at the pictures on the wall of Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and—oh, what’s her name, over there, she married Sinatra. Oh, that’s right, Ava Gardner. And I heard it was here Sinatra was spotted with gangsters and that shot his reputation.”

“Indeed,” her male companion said. “At least it was only his rep that was shot, since some of the blokes who had monetary interest in this place got shot by Fidel and Che’s firing squads.”

Despite the warmth in here and the strangely comforting smells of cigars, coffee and coconut pastries on a tray near her, Claire shuddered. The statue of Venus in the corner past the bar reminded her of that statue—and her own face—in the cemetery staring at her. She felt slightly nauseous. And where was Heck?

* * *

Since Claire felt a little queasy, Nick walked her up to the room. Jace was sitting in the lobby, waiting for Heck, and Nick planned to go down to join him. “It’s terrible not to have cell phones on us,” Claire said as she lay down.

“Yeah. I’ve seen people with them but they use them like pagers, and Gina said you can’t risk any sort of questionable conversation on them anyway. You just lie here, and I’ll go down and tell Nita to bring Lexi—and Lily—back up here.”

“Don’t even kid about Lily. Nick, I’m worried about Lexi. She’s deeply disturbed. Aren’t we all, but she doesn’t have the resources to handle it.”

“Kids are resilient. Once we get out of here she—all of us—will be fine.”

He kissed her cheek and went out. She heard him lock the hall door. So here she was in a top-floor luxury suite in the best hotel in Havana and all she wanted was to be in some nice little house, safe in Naples with Nick and Lexi. But there were sharks between here and there—sharks here too.

She put her hands gently on her flat, upset stomach. Could there be a child growing there? She could never love another one as much as she loved Lexi—but, of course, she could, especially Nick’s baby. Besides, this might still just be upheaval and nerves and her powerful meds and...

Exhausted, she drifted on the sea for a while, but she sat straight up when she heard the woman’s distraught voice.

“Mrs. Claire? Mr. Nick said you’re here. Where are you?”

Nita! Nita must be back with Lexi.

“Here! In here!”

Claire got to her feet, feeling slightly dizzy. There was something wrong. Nita sounded panicked, and she never raised her voice. Was Lexi hurt in the pool?

She rushed into the living room. She saw only Nita with tears streaming down her face.

“Where is she? Where is she?”

“She being naughty. When we step out of the elevator, she run back in and press the button, saying Lily did it. I try to stop the door, but it close. I hit the button, but the elevator leaving. I watch the numbers. She go down, maybe to second floor, maybe lobby. I wait for that same elevator to come back, and she not there, she not there!”

7

“We’re a pair,” Nick told Jace as they watched for Heck by scanning the faces of people coming toward the hotel. “Two guys whose past careers and current lives depend on keeping cool, calm and collected, and we’re both a wreck. Getting out of Cuba’s starting to vie for first priority with getting rid of just one man, one bastard wreaking havoc on all our lives, and I don’t mean you-know-who, as Gina always says. Not Castro but Ames.”

“And Gina’s you-know-who might be harboring Ames, because he’s probably in cahoots with the Castro brothers for something. At least he’s wanted by the FBI now, a little fact that might save us all and nail him. Man, I hope you’re contacted soon by Patterson. But you don’t think your friend Heck could have run off with a woman he just met, do you? I mean, I gotta admit I practically eloped with our-lady-in-common, but—”

“Claire is not ‘in common,’” Nick interrupted, which really annoyed Jace since he was trying to be supportive. Even though he’d been flying the plane that went down, all of this major mess went back to Nick Markwood. And here Nick was running—ruining—Claire’s and Lexi’s lives too. Jace tried to control his anger, but he had to say something.

“Look, Nick, you and Claire got together pretty fast too. But back to the latest problem. The way Heck stared at that ruined hotel and that private Russian firm sitting there in his family’s beautiful hacienda, who knows, he might want to stay here. And cozying up to Ames—turning on us—could make that come true.”

“I know him, trust him. Something’s wrong. I’m going to the computer room to see if a reply came back yet. Then I’m—not sure what. We can hardly go to the Havana police to report him missing. Be right back. And if you change positions, let our bodyguard Bronco know. He’s still over by the line of taxis, watching for Heck from there.”

Jace checked that Bronco was still there and gave him the high sign to stay put. Taxis here meant mostly cars that looked like they drove out of a 1940s or 1950s movie, so it was a real vintage auto parade in front of the hotel. Jace saw a lavender Ford with huge back fins, big Chevrolets, even some Cadillacs, all shined up, some with parts that didn’t belong to them, that somebody had probably bought in a back alley shop. He noted an occasional square, black Lada, the Russian-made car they’d seen at Heck’s family’s hacienda. And cars that Gina had pointed out, government-owned ones with the distinctive blue license plates, some cruising by, some parked.

Jace edged around the corner of the building where he could see the Nacional’s outdoor hotel patio overlooking the sea. Businessmen and a few couples were having lunch, silhouetted by the harbor and the sparkling water. So deceptively beautiful, so luring, this seemingly benign place. He watched some daredevil boys cannonballing off the seawall of the Malecon, barely missing the jagged rocks to splash into the water. That was more like the daredevil mess they were in, he thought. To get back over the water they had a lot of dangerous snags to avoid.

He heard someone call, “Seth!” and turned. He wasn’t yet used to hearing that instead of “Jace.” It was Lexi’s nanny they were now calling Lorena, looking terrified, in tears.

“Where’s Mr. Jack?” she demanded. Before he could answer, she went on. “Meggie is missing. She trick me, went down somewhere in an elevator. We have to look for her!”

Suddenly, he felt like he’d jumped and hit the rocks.

* * *

Nick was disappointed there was no answer to his email yet. Wasn’t the FBI more efficient than that? It had been—he checked his watch—nearly an hour, but maybe Patterson had to lay plans before sending them instructions. If word came they should go somewhere and Heck wasn’t back, what then?

He decided he’d go up to be with Claire, see how she was feeling since Jace and Bronco were still on watch at the front entry. If only they had a way to contact Gina. She had to be with Heck, hopefully helping with whatever he’d got into. This was so not like him. If he couldn’t trust Heck anymore, what could he do with him when they got to Michigan—if they got to Michigan?

Nick was waiting by the bank of main elevators when one opened and Claire ran out. She gasped to see him, seized his arm in a tight grip and pulled him away into a dead end of the hall behind a cluster of potted palms.

“What’s wrong?”

“Lexi ditched Nita by ducking back into an elevator. I’ve been riding them while Nita looks outside.”

“Damn! Heck’s still MIA too.”

“Maybe she found him and he—No, he’d bring her right back to us. I’m going crazy. What if someone bad sees her, takes her? Why haven’t the hotel people found her? I had to risk telling them she’d gone off on her own. I keep checking in the room.”

“Have you looked out by the pool?” he asked.

“Yes. Nita did too. Where are Jace and Bronco?”

“Out watching the crowd for Heck and/or Gina. Where haven’t you looked? Is there someplace here she’d go to, wanting to feel safe? Lily may do bad things, but not your girl.”

“I—I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost her in more ways than one, and that terrifies me. Maybe—maybe the store where we bought the bathing suit for her. She liked those stuffed animals in there, and I wouldn’t let her have one to lug around and I knew she’d never leave it when we leave here.”

“Let’s go check that out. Did you tell the lifeguards at the pool in case she goes back there?”

“Yes,” Claire said, her voice breaking, her hands gripped together as if in prayer. “That’s when I really lost it, started to cry—when he said he keeps a watch on the kids, because they found one last month drowned at the bottom of that big pool.”

* * *

Claire spotted Lexi the moment she and Nick walked into the beachwear and gift shop. She was so grateful, so relieved, she burst into tears again. Her knees went so weak she almost fell. Standing in the corner, the child had a bright green stuffed toy whale clutched in her arms. But she looked like she wasn’t embracing it but strangling it.

“Meggie,” Claire cried and knelt beside her. She threw her arms around the child and the whale. Nick squatted beside them and propped Claire up.

“Whales are bigger than sharks,” Lexi whispered. “Big enough to kill those sharks we saw, big enough to ride out of here. I want to go home.”

“We will,” Nick promised. “We will. Sorry,” he said when a saleswoman hurried up to them. “She wanted that, and we told her no, but we’ll take it.”

“I thought she with other people here. You want put it on your room bill?”

“Ah, yes, that would be fine. No, on second thought I’ll just pay cash for it.”

Claire lifted Lexi and the whale and headed out into the hall. She overheard the saleswoman telling Nick the price and saw him take what must be his last small American bill out of his pants pocket.

“Lexi,” Claire told her as she carried her over to a wicker bench and sat down beside her, “don’t you ever do that to Nita or me again! And don’t tell me Lily did it. Everyone’s been looking for you!”

“But, Mommy, I didn’t even know where I was. Where are we? Why can’t we be home?”

“Oh, my sweetheart, I’m so sorry about everything. But we’re together. We love you, all of us. We’re a little family now, but—I guess I’ll have to explain things better.”

When Nick came out of the shop, Claire stood and hiked Lexi up as if she was a much younger child with her legs around Claire’s waist and Claire’s arms under the girl’s bottom. That stupid stuffed animal was still in the way, but nothing else mattered now that Lexi was safe, but—actually, it did. Everything mattered to get them out of here.

Nick looked both relieved and desperate. “I’ll tell them at the desk she’s been found,” he said, “but I’ve got to check my email too.” He took Claire’s elbow and steered her farther away from the shop. “Sit in the lobby. Don’t budge. I want to be able to see both of you.”

Claire sat with Lexi on her lap on a leather sofa and kept an eye on Nick too as he went into the adjacent room where she could see little cubicles sheltering laptops. Jace must be frantic over Lexi too, all of them. She needed to tell Nita and him their daughter had been found. She needed a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She needed Nick to hold her. Most of all, maybe more like her daughter than she cared to admit, she needed her sense of safety and sanity back.

* * *

Nick’s stomach was in free fall when he gave his card to the guy in charge, then sat at a different laptop from the one he’d used a little bit ago. He typed in his code, and an email appeared on the screen. Bingo! It was from the fake Chicago firm!

Jack Randal: sorry your investment gamble went in the tank, but we can reinvest. I promise we can “git mo,” to use an old saying around here about getting you more money with interest. Can you handle that ASAP? Let me know if you’re on board with my advice. Investment adviser Robert Patmore.

Gitmo. Guantanamo! That had to be what he meant. Get to Gitmo and the officers there could spirit them out, help them get home—that was, to their WITSEC hideout in Michigan. But the thing was, Guantanamo Bay with its naval detention camp was way on the southeastern end of the island, a long trip away. And Patterson had signed the note with a fake name, but one that echoed his own.

Nick typed a message back: Sounds like good financial advice. ASAP, will do, with all my investments. I realize this could take some time.

He sent the message, then erased Rob’s, wishing he could erase the dangers between here and Gitmo—and without Heck, if he didn’t get back here soon.

* * *

Lexi’s little family reunion in their hotel room wasn’t pretty, Nick thought. Lexi insisted it was all Lily’s fault and that the stuffed whale was named Shark-Killer. Nita kept saying it was her fault, and Bronco kept saying it wasn’t, when a loud knock sounded on the hall door.

Everyone quieted and froze. Nick went over to the door and, pressed to the wall on either side of him, Bronco and Jace waited. “Who’s there?”

“It’s us,” Heck cried. “Open up, boss.”

Still, Nick looked through the spyhole on the door. “He’s with Gina.”

Nick swung the door wide and yanked Heck, then Gina, into the room. He stuck his head out to look up and down the hall, then closed the door and locked it.

Jace began, “Berto, where the hell have you b—”

“I know it took me longer than I planned, but I know where your father’s former friend that cheated him out of some money is here in Havana.” Heck raised his hands as if to ward off an attack. “We got his address, me and Gina, and we walked there, not far from my family’s old hacienda. A guard told us to get away, so we did. It was my idea, but she helped. I had to tell her a few things about him. How he hurt your father—financially, I mean.”

“You found him—how?” Nick demanded. “Are you sure it wasn’t a trap—a setup?”

“It was something Meggie said, how he had those rare fish. Gina and I passed a tropical fish store on the edge of El Vedado. So I said let’s go in, and we made like we wanted to buy some of their pricey stuff. Asked who cleaned tanks in a home visit if we wanted it, all of that. Then I left, and Gina turned it on with the guy, one that cleans the tanks, and he boasted about some American bigwig has an office here in a hacienda. So we walked where he said, looked at the place. It’s offices but Ames must live there. Big. Fancy. Not far from my family’s old place.”

Astounded, taking that all in, Nick said nothing at first. Ames was here. And Heck knew where. He’d used a partial cover story with Gina so she evidently wouldn’t panic at all the gory details. Finally, he asked Heck, “And are you sure no one followed you back?”

Heck and Gina exchanged quick glances. “No one,” he said, “but we spotted a drone. Maybe it was filming the hotel, but maybe not. Couldn’t see who was running it, but someone down on the Malecon, I bet. Funny, but it’s still hovering outside over the front entrance. If we were on the other side of the building, you could see it. We—”

Nick interrupted. “I don’t like the sound of that. Maybe he was looking for us just like we were for him or maybe that guard that ordered you away had you followed. Gina, I see Berto hasn’t clued you in on everything, but we needed to keep secret that we—I—have an enemy here who was my father’s enemy years ago and maybe caused his death. That guy Seth mentioned at the Key West airport who could have tampered with the plane could have been working for that man. Somehow he learned we survived the crash, landed here—I don’t know. Over the years, I’ve learned to put nothing past him. We’ve got to go—now.”

Claire said, “Jack’s right. He’s spied on us with a drone before. But we can’t just run out the front, then.”

“Down the back inside fire-escape stairs and out the back service entry,” Nick ordered. “Grab things fast. We have to go now!”

Nita started to cry again, but Nick was amazed at how solid Claire suddenly seemed. She handed Lexi and the whale to Jace and seized her purse with her meds. They had so little, it didn’t take long to get ready. They streamed out the door, and Nick practically shoved them down the hall toward a sign that read SALIDA/EXIT. Because Jace had Lexi, he pushed him ahead, let them all pass, then locked and closed their hotel door and raced after them. They didn’t get even one night in this place with the inviting beds, he thought.

“And don’t make noise on the stairs! Wait for me at the bottom!” he called after Bronco, and the big man nodded as they headed through the emergency exit.

Nick was barely to the stairs where Heck was holding the heavy door for him. “Sorry, boss. Wanted to help. The drone—I didn’t know he’d be looking for us here too.”

“You did help if we can tell our friends where Ames is. We needed to run anyway. I’ve been given a plan. Go, go!”

Nick saw he had been right. As the heavy door started to close slowly behind him, he saw two men dressed in suits and ties down the hall burst from the elevator and draw guns. They must have inquired at the desk. What else did they know? Nick watched them for one split second through the hazy glass window in the door. Heck tugged at his arm and hissed, “Boss, come on!”

And then Nick saw what scared him as much as Ames’s men. One man produced something from his pocket that opened the door just as the other elevator door slid open to reveal four men who looked like Cuban police.

8

Heck and Nick rushed down the stairs as quietly as they could. The others were below them, whispering, but it echoed in the stairwell.

“I’d like to fire you for being followed back here, but you’ve just made a promotion,” Nick told Heck. “Keep going. We’ve got to get out a back door somehow. Heck, I have to know. You sure you trust Gina?”

“With my life.”

“Well, maybe,” Nick whispered as they heard a door above them in the stairwell slam open with a bang, “you’ve risked exactly that. Run.”

* * *

Claire heard a bang, then heavy, fast footsteps above as Heck and Nick joined the rest of them in the ground-floor stairwell.

“Out. Out!” Nick told them. “Not the lobby. We need to get out back.”

Here! Jace mouthed. Despite the fact he held Lexi in an iron grip, he shoved one of two doors inward. It opened on a plain back hall with a concrete floor. Claire glimpsed mops leaning against the wall, a barrel, a ladder. Jace thrust Lexi into Claire’s arms and pointed. He whispered, “Go!” and, clutching her daughter to her, she ran.

She saw Jace drop behind the others to jam a ladder against the door, but it wouldn’t last long. Would any of them?

They emerged through a back entrance with a delivery bay but no trucks in it now. Looking up for the drone, they darted under a line of trees and ran the only way they could. Nick took Lexi from her, thank heavens. Claire felt dizzy, nauseous. She needed a pill, but not now...

“Palm trees—not much cover,” Gina said, panting as hard as the rest of them.

Nick said, “Stick close to the building. Nothing overhead so far, but we have to get out of this alley before those goons with guns find us.”

“Gina,” Heck said, “I didn’t mean to get you in all this. You want to go, go, in case they catch us.”

“I’m with you. No going back.”

As they sprinted around the corner and then slowed so they wouldn’t draw attention, those last words echoed in Claire’s mind. No going back. “We need to mingle with the crowds on the Malecon, get lost,” Jace said. “Split up into small groups but keep in sight of each other. Stroll, not run. Maybe we can get a couple taxis.”

“How about we go back to my parents?” Gina asked. “I would want to say goodbye if I can escape with you. Please, let me go too. My father could help with his boat, but we cannot put them in danger.”

“We have another contact that may help us,” Nick said. “Someone on our side.”

Claire thought he still didn’t trust Gina. But could they trust anyone on this island, except Gina’s parents? Well, surely the marines at distant Guantanamo miles and hours away. And Gina’s home was in the opposite direction.

* * *

Jace tried not to keep looking back. Anyway, once they blended in with the strolling crowd, he felt calmer. As they slowed their pace, he tried to catch his breath. But his heartbeat kicked up again when three police cars screamed past, heading for the hotel. At least the guys dressed in business suits with guns Nick said he’d spotted were nowhere to be seen.

They stopped under a thick fica tree with the seawall and crashing water on the rocks behind them.

Jace said, “Don’t we need to cross the street to get taxis heading east?”

“East?” Gina said. “Costa Blanca is west.”

“We’re going to trust Gina to keep our secret and her father to help us,” Nick announced. He was holding Lexi and her green whale again. Claire had seen Jace reach for the girl, but Nick had hung on to her.

Jace asked, “You mean hire him to get us where we want to go?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. But, Gina, will he balk taking us to a rendezvous spot, if it means maybe losing you?”

“Rendezvous with who? Another boat? I can ask him, beg him, tell him it’s my chance, but my mother... After losing Alfredito... I will not tell my mother and will only tell him at the last minute. We could take the bus again.”

“No,” Nick said, “we could be trapped in a net that way, if they set up a roadblock or come on board. Let’s move on down farther into the crowd, line up for two taxis. Change I got for Meggie’s whale, even if it’s in pesetas, should get us a good ride. Let’s go before they search the crowd.”

Jace got them one taxi—a two-tone Ford Fairlane Skyliner, it was called. How he wished it was a flying skyliner and he was at the controls, getting them all out of here. The one Heck hailed was an old Cadillac Fleetwood.

Nick, Claire, Jace and Lexi piled in the Ford with Nita to translate while Bronco, Heck and Gina took the Cadillac. Heck had the money for their taxi. “He say he can go only far as Costa Blanca, so he gets back near dark,” Nita translated what the cabbie said to her.

“Tell him that will do,” Nick said.

But as they pulled away, and the engine seemed to cough, Jace wasn’t so sure. And he really got shook when he saw two Cuban policemen emerge from the crowd they’d just left and point after them.

“We’d better change taxis,” he told Nick. “The boys back there may have spotted us.”

“Let’s get a ways out, off the main drag. Lorena, ask him if he can pull off in a block or two and signal so the taxi behind us does too.”

She asked, then translated back. “He have to charge you more, half of what you promise him.”

“Tell him to do it. And I’m giving him a tip with a tip. If he’s stopped, not to say where he heard we were going.”

“Tell him,” Lexi spoke up, though Jace had been grateful she’d kept quiet so far, “this is a whale, but sharks are after us, ever since the water.”

“Meggie, not now,” Claire said to their girl and hugged her, but it wasn’t enough to shut the child up.

“If he doesn’t listen to me, Lily will do something really scary.”

Claire put two fingers over Lexi’s lips as their cab blinked its lights and pulled off into a side street with the other right behind it.

* * *

Nick knew this plan changing taxis he’d hatched so suddenly was a big gamble, but he was afraid to flee straight for Guantanamo. Basically, there was just one main road along the coast that went both east and west. It was possible that the Cuban government had intercepted and decoded the emails and knew they’d be headed toward Gitmo. Or had Ames’s people followed Heck and Gina because they looked suspicious outside Ames’s Havana hacienda—and they’d called the police? Those guys in business suits with guns loose in a huge hotel—pure amoral Ames.

But could they make it to Gina’s house in these two different taxis? His neck was about to break from craning around to watch behind them all the time, and he saw Heck doing the same in the taxi following. If the police located their original taxis, what would the drivers tell them?

But they had no choice, he agonized silently, trying to keep calm. Hitchhiking like they’d seen people do here was ridiculous. Risking the bus? Walking forty miles to Costa Blanca—impossible. The thing was, even if they got back to Nando and Carlita’s house, would that old fishing boat get them clear to the other end of the island? Was it his imagination or were those dark clouds ahead and not just the sharp shadows of sunset?

* * *

By the time they reached Costa Blanca and got out of their taxis to walk the rest of the way to Gina’s house, Claire saw the sun had disappeared in a blinding burst of crimson and gold that was soon devoured by storm clouds on the horizon. Since Gina had decided not to tell her mother she was leaving and to only tell her father just before he got them as far east as he could, she’d been scribbling them a note to explain, to promise she’d be back, that she’d send them money and love them always.

The distraught woman had used her backpack for a makeshift desk on her knees. Jace sat in front beside the driver, and Gina was wedged in next to Claire in the backseat with Lexi in the middle asleep and Nick on the far side. More than once, in tears, though she was writing in Spanish, Gina had whispered to Claire what she was telling her parents.

Strange, but Claire was coming to trust her now like Heck did and Nick still didn’t. So far, Gina didn’t know their destination was the place her country hated, American-held Guantanamo. And Gina wasn’t the only one in tears. Claire was too, and her well-honed forensic psychologist instincts—and her woman’s intuition—told her they could trust Gina.

Since they apparently had not been followed, they thought they were momentarily safe in Costa Blanca. Yet rather than burst in on Gina’s parents and risk getting caught there, they hiked to Gina’s house outside town and sent Gina and Heck in while they waited outside in the windy darkness. Claire carried the whale now while Nick and Jace took turns holding the sleeping Lexi. If only, Claire thought, as she took her narcolepsy pill in the dark with a swig from Nita’s water bottle, Lexi’s dad and stepdad could learn to share the child like that.

They heard footsteps in the darkness. Then Gina, Heck and Nando rounded the corner where they waited, huddled like the refugees they were.

“He will help you,” Gina told them, “but it have to be at dawn he picks you up in Alfredito because of the rocks. Berto and I take you to the spot you waited before. Mamacita, she say you already pay for much gasoline, a fortune she found in her little jar.”

Claire blinked back more tears. Fifty dollars was a fortune? She knew Nick would insist on paying more, and he only had big bills left.

Nick said, “Berto and Gina, does Nando understand we need to go clear to the other end of the island?”

Heck translated for the old man, then explained, “He swear on his son’s soul he get you close as he can. He say there nice little beaches along there to put in. I think he guess where you going but did not say so. He does it for Gina since I told him I come back for her someday.”

Nando nodded through all that, so Claire wondered if he knew what was being said. He might have guessed where they were going, but he’d hardly figured out that his last remaining child intended to go with them.

Claire wiped her tears on the stuffed whale, remembering the last time she’d seen her mother, her father too, though they’d lost him far earlier. She was so exhausted she was losing control. What if she regressed, had a narcoleptic nightmare or, worse, had her muscles lock so she couldn’t move, couldn’t keep up? Would they carry her too?

“Come on,” Gina said, patting Lexi’s lolling head as she slept, then pecking a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I have a lantern, and I’ll lead the way, stay with you the night while Papa goes back in. The breeze is picking up, but we will pray it doesn’t rain on us, yes? Berto has a piece of plastic we can get under, extra one from the fishing boat. Come on, then, and we all get away. Berto says he cannot tell me where we meet that other ship, but we will find it tomorrow.”

Claire thought Gina must know too, unless she thought that some boat or pontoon plane would meet them offshore. After all, they were headed for an American navy base in hostile territory, crawling with marines. Worse, Gina had no clue she was leaving her homeland with people who were not who they said they were. She’d be stuck on a snowbound island in Northern Michigan for much of a brutal winter. But Gina had cast her lot with them, with Heck, and they owed her for her help. Together, they were safe so far.

As they started off down the dark road, following Gina, Claire held hard to the stuffed whale as if it was her lifeline instead of Lexi’s. Jace carried the child, and Nick steadied Claire with a strong hand on her upper arm. She knew she’d messed up the timing on her meds, which needed to be taken regularly. Was any of this even real? How she wished it was all some dreadful nightmare and she’d wake up next to Nick in Naples. But dangers had lurked there too, thanks to their other murder/suicide investigations—and thanks to that monster, Clayton Ames, who still haunted them here.

She fought to keep her balance as they went single file down the twisting path toward the now-familiar stretch of beach. Along the shore, the waves were whispering a warning, hissing at her. Dizzy, light-headed and scared, she thought for a moment she was plunging into the ocean again, bouncing, as their plane belly-landed and sank. She was in the rocking lifeboat. She was being followed by men with guns and by a stone woman who held a dead baby in her arms and stared at her—and that woman was her!

Was she looking in a marble mirror? She saw a woman there who loved two men. And most frightening of all, as her feet slipped in the shoreside sand, she knew she had not only her child with her but was growing one inside her too.

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