The Baby's Bodyguard. Alice Sharpe
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“It can’t be you,” she mumbled.
His shoulders lifted in an elegant shrug and she realized why she hadn’t immediately recognized him. He was so much thinner than the last time she’d seen him, so much more weathered. There were a few scars that hadn’t been there before, too, one by his nose, another along his jaw. His hair, which had been military short, was now shoulder length, wavy and wild.
Her impulse was to reach for him. “Jack! I thought you were dead—”
He caught her arms in strong hands, stopping her momentum. She fell back in her own bucket seat and after swallowing her shock, murmured, “What’s going on?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” But of course Aubrielle popped into her mind. Did he know about her? Was that why he was here?
“I want to know who put you up to it, Hannah. Simple as that. Give me a name and I’m out of here.”
He’d lost her.
There was a rap on Hannah’s window. She looked around to find a very old man with bushy eyebrows peering in at her. She flicked the key to the right and used the switch to power down the window a few inches.
“Everything okay, miss?” he asked, a white handlebar mustache obscuring his lips.
“Everything is fine,” she said. She wasn’t sure what was going on with Jack, but surely it didn’t require outside assistance. “I accidentally hit the horn.”
“You positive?” he persisted, his gaze sliding past Hannah to look more closely at Jack. She doubted he was reassured by what he saw.
With more conviction than she felt, she said, “Yes. Thanks.”
“If you say so,” the old guy said and, leaning his weight on an old wooden cane, shuffled off toward a green sedan, his long raincoat almost dragging on the pavement. Hannah turned back to Jack. “Should I have asked him to call the cops?”
“I’ll call the cops myself just as soon as I find out who helped you.”
“You’ll call the cops? Why would you call the cops?”
“I’ve had months to think,” he said with deadly calm. “Months to realize I was conned and you did the conning. Oh, I know you didn’t actually kill anyone yourself, but the blood of innocent men is on your hands and you know it.”
The relief of realizing his demeanor had nothing to do with Aubrielle quickly gave way to shock as she realized what he was insinuating. “You have to be talking about the ambush down in Tierra Montañosa,” she said, stunned he would think—“Are you saying I had something to do with it?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” he growled.
She took the keys out of the ignition and without consciously deciding to do so, looped a few fingers through the door handle. “I heard you were dead, killed with several other men, buried in a mass grave. How did you get here?”
“I escaped. They butchered the others. As for identifying me—they threw my watch in with the corpses and set the whole thing on fire.” He looked away as though catching his breath. Her own seemed to come in short gasps as her imagination provided images of what he’d just described.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured.
His nod was barely perceptible.
She didn’t know him well, had only spent one night of her life with him, but he’d helped her that night more than he’d ever, ever know, and now she sincerely wanted to return the kindness. He looked as though he needed it.
On the other hand, it was clear he didn’t want anything from her but confirmation of some terrible, ill-conceived suspicion.
“Let me tell you what the Tierra Montañosa government told the Staar Foundation,” she said. “The rebel group who carried out the attack call themselves the Guerrilleros de Tierra Montañosa although they deny they had anything to do with it. I guess they always do that. Their rhetoric is freedom from tyranny, but the truth is they’re a Marxist group. I’ve read about them since, well, since the ambush. They’re terrible people.
They—”
He waved away her dialogue. “You think I don’t know who they are? I was down there to protect people like you from groups like the GTM. It was my job as a bodyguard to know all the organizations and their goals, so don’t try to tell me about them. What I want to know is who gave them the inside information to carry out the ambush at Costa del Rio. They had to have inside help to pull that off. They knew where we were going to be and when we were going to be there. You’re the one who made the arrangements.”
“Yes, I am.”
“So who else knew what they were?”
“Until a few minutes before the convoy left, no one knew but you. There’d been threats, we’d been warned to keep it secret.”
“What about the founder’s son, what’s his name, Hugo Correa?”
“What about him?” “Did he know?”
“No, of course not. You’re not suggesting Hugo Correa had anything to do with the rebels, are you?”
“What’s wrong? Is it politically incorrect to point a finger at a dead man?”
“Mr. Correa isn’t dead.”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Run that by me again.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, damn it. I’ve been back in the States two weeks. My first thought was to enlist the aid of my sister. I found she was in the middle of her own drama and needed my help. When that was over, I discovered she’s pregnant so I left her out of it. As far as Hugo Correa goes, the last I saw of him, he and a couple of the others were being driven away in a truck with about three dozen guerillas pointing assault rifles at their heads. Later we heard they were killed.”
“The foundation had kidnap insurance for its officers so they paid off a huge sum to the rebels to get their people back. We heard the rest of you were going to be used to negotiate the release of jailed GTM members.”
“It didn’t work out that way,” he said softly.
“Mr. Correa and the other man were in the hospital for weeks. Apparently Hugo Correa tried to escape by jumping out of the truck and took a bullet in his leg and it got infected. The other man, a guy by the name of Harrison Plumber, had a digestive disease of some kind. As soon as Hugo got out of the hospital, Santi Correa turned over the day-by-day operations of the foundation to his son and more or less resigned.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. “Ah mi dios,” he mumbled. Looking at her again, he added, “Just tell me who it was.”
“Who what was?”
“Who were you working with? And why? Did you do it for money? What other reason could there be, what else could you possibly want from these people?”
“Of course I didn’t do it for money!” she said, but the word money thundered in her head. Money. “I didn’t do it all,” she mumbled.
“People do terrible things when money is dangled in front of their noses,” he said.
She looked out the window at the ocean across the street. It couldn’t be …
“Hannah?”
She looked at him without really seeing him. She was remembering the day David showed up at her place with a bundle of money he wanted her to keep and had sworn her to secrecy. It had surprised her—their relationship had been a little rocky—and suddenly he was talking about marrying and moving far away….
How could that have anything to