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This was always the hardest part, even in the simplest, most straightforward of operations, Peter thought, staring at the island from the deck of the newly refitted SS Seven Sins run by Mannion and a crew of the Committee’s finest. Now called the SS Tough Break—someone’s sense of humor at work. It was bad luck to change the name of a boat—Harry would be rolling in his grave very soon.
He’d checked Hans’s munitions work, and the man had done his usual stellar job. Now it was a simple matter of Hans and Renaud getting Harry’s unconscious body to the house and getting back to the boat before the charges went off.
He wasn’t going to think about Genevieve—he couldn’t. He gave her everything he could to get her out of harm’s way, and he simply had to let go of it. Either she’d make it or she wouldn’t. The rest was up to her.
But she was smart, and she didn’t give up easily. His instincts told him she’d make it to the bunker safely, and it would be a simple enough matter to send someone to rescue her, all without leaving a trace. She’d never be able to find him—no one knew about the Committee and the work they did. No one even knew where their headquarters were located.
There was a chance he might never know whether she survived or not. He could live with that—he’d lived with far worse. And in the end, who was she? Just a stray female who’d wandered into his path for a few days, then wandered out. Easily forgettable.
She was nothing, nothing to him at all… And then all his justifications vanished as the island exploded into flames.
The blast hit with almost atomic force. The ground shook beneath them, and Genevieve went flying through the air, her grip on Harry’s arm nonexistent.
It knocked the breath from her, it blocked out consciousness as well. A moment, an hour, later, she opened her eyes to find herself sprawled on the ground in a pool of blood, and Harry and Renaud were nowhere in sight.
The smell of burning chemicals and fire hung heavy in the air, blocking out the thick tropical vegetation, and smoke was shooting up into the sky, great billowing plumes of it. She sat up, looking down at the white T-shirt. It was now dark with blood. Her own.
She must be in shock, she thought absently, counting her limbs, fingers and toes. Everything seemed connected—she touched her head, and her hand came away bloody. Either she’d suffered some kind of brain injury and was about to die, or she’d simply knocked her head. Head wounds always bled like crazy, she reminded herself, struggling to get to her feet. She might as well assume the best and keep moving. She couldn’t just lie here on the path and bleed.
Besides, she could hear the fire now, and the smoke was getting thicker. She didn’t think a semitropical forest would burn that easily, but she wasn’t about to take the chance.
She’d lost any sense of direction, and for a moment she was afraid she was going to walk back into the fire, but Renaud’s path through the heavy growth supporting a burden like Harry was easy enough to make out, and she started after them, wiping the blood away from her eyes with calm determination.
She almost missed them. When she stumbled onto the clearing the seaplane was already there, in Van Dorn Enterprises signature orange-and-black colors. The noise of the engines shut out any other sound, and Harry was already on a stretcher, surrounded by an army of caretakers.
She tried to call out, but the sound was carried away by the wind. She made it halfway across the beach and then her strength failed her, and she sank to her knees in the hot sand.
Renaud was standing to one side, and he was the first to see her. He had his gun out, and she wondered if he was going to kill her.
He said something to one of the men hovering over Harry, and they all turned to look in her direction. And then dismissed her as patently unimportant.
She would’ve liked to march over to one of them, grab him by the lapels of his fancy suit and smack him. Or at least give them a piece of her mind.
But she had nothing left to give. She couldn’t even keep her balance, and she pitched forward onto the sand. It was going to get into her head wound, she thought, and it would be a bitch to clean. But then, maybe that wasn’t going to matter…
The hands on her were rough, but she didn’t, couldn’t protest. They were dragging her across the sand, and while she could have wished for a stretcher like Harry’s, she wasn’t in any condition to complain.
Someone bundled her onto the seaplane, dumping her into a seat and then ignoring her while they tended to their fallen master. She leaned her head against the window, not giving a flying fuck if she bloodied Harry’s precious plane, and closed her eyes as she felt it begin to move.
She heard a sound, and she managed to surface from her fog for a moment, to look out the window. The doors of the seaplane were still open, which seemed impractical to her, and she opened her mouth to say something. When she looked down below.
The island was on fire, the inky smoke shooting toward the sky. Harry’s yacht was moving slowly away from the conflagration, heading out into the clear greeny blue of the Caribbean, when something dark came hurtling out of the sky as they passed directly overhead. A moment later the boat disintegrated, as if it had never existed. There was nothing left but a shower of smoke and dust.
She must have made some sound. A cry, torn from her smoke-damaged throat, as Peter Jensen was wiped from existence as if he’d never been there at all.
Her cry was enough to catch the attention of the man who’d been hovering over Harry’s limp body. A doctor, she thought, wishing she could feel relief, glad that she could feel nothing at all.
“You’re a mess, aren’t you?” the old man said in a heavy German accent. “Looks like you might have a concussion. We should’ve left you behind with a bullet between the eyes like that scumbag, but Mr. Van Dorn said bring you along.”
What scumbag? Renaud? They’d killed him? She tried to say something, anything, when she felt the pinprick in her arm.
“This will either kill you or cure you,” he said. And they were the last words she heard.
13
The dreams were horrible, never ending. Genevieve felt as if she was being smothered, trapped in a nightmare world of blood, fire and pain. She drank the smoke and it silenced her. She bled and she couldn’t move. The flames licked around her, the pain so sharp it blinded her, and death had moved under her skin and settled there.
She could see Hans, revolving slowly in front of her like a carousel horse, the hole in his forehead a silent scream. She could see Peter, but each time she reached out to touch him he disintegrated into dust that sparkled in the sun.
