Once She Knew Page 24

  Claire stared at him. “Do you always talk like this? Boil it down to plain English, please.”

  Maguire smiled. “I’m not arresting you. I just want to know what happened. Simple enough for you?”

  “Fine. Do we have to do it here?” Claire looked around at the other occupants of the emergency room, a surprisingly large number considering it was now—Claire glanced down at her watch—nearly five o’clock in the morning. The city that never sleeps, indeed. No, don’t think about sleep, not yet. But soon. Please.

  Maguire stood up. “Let me see how long your friend will be upstairs and where they’re going to put him, and then maybe we can find a quiet space somewhere.”

  Claire zoned out again while Maguire conferred with the doctors. He came back and stood in front of her until she noticed him. “Come on.”

  Claire stood up obediently and followed him down a corridor to an office. Based on the piles of forms stacked on the desk, Claire guessed that it belonged to somebody in accounting. She fell heavily into the chair in front of the desk, and Maguire sat behind it, as if he owned the office.

  “All right, let’s start at the beginning. How long have you known Jonathan Daulton?”

  Great. She was going to have to lie right out of the gate: no way was she going to admit to what had happened all those years ago, at least not all of it. “We met briefly about five years ago, when we were on the same panel at a conference. I don’t know if he remembers meeting me, but we had no contact following that until earlier this week . . .” And she was off, starting with Jonathan’s precipitous reappearance in her life, through the comedy of errors that had led to her ersatz kidnapping, and their slow progress to New York, and the information they had amassed along the way, capped off with the events of the past day. Night. Whatever it was. She must have slipped into her class-lecture mode, because the words kept pouring out of her. Whether or not they made any sense, she had no idea. She watched as Maguire made a few notes on a pad of paper he had found on the desk. Very few notes, under the circumstances: if he had been one of her students, she would have been concerned. Maybe he had perfect memory. Or maybe he didn’t want any written record of this whole mess.

  Finally Claire’s narrative trickled to a stop. She sat numbly. Had she covered it all? Had she put their undeniably odd actions in a favorable light? Had she managed to protect Rick’s identity, and to exonerate Leah? She shook her head to try to clear it.

  Maguire was looking at her. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. Daulton appeared at your cabin in the middle of the night, wet, wounded, and incoherent. You want me to believe that was purely by coincidence. Still, you agreed to help him. Why?”

  Ah, that was the question. Trust Maguire to get right to the heart of the matter. Why had she, an intelligent, rational person, allowed herself to get sucked into this idiocy? “To be honest with you, I’m not sure myself. I suppose it was a sort of intellectual arrogance. I knew him personally, if only slightly. I knew he was a writer, and a public figure of sorts. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would shoot people. But the bottom line was, I believed his story.” And because I slept with him. Once. And I couldn’t handle it if I was that wrong about someone, even if I was very drunk.

  “Hmm. In the face of the accusations by the police, the FBI, and that college student, you believed him?”

  Claire shrugged. “Yes. Why else would I have done what I did?” That was a question she was going to be asking herself for a long time. Time stretched, twisted, shifted. Finally she asked, “Bottom line—am I in trouble?”

  Maguire smiled down at his scrawled notes. “There may be some, uh, creative reporting to be done, but I think we can work it out. I guess I have to say I believe your story. Although I should add, for a smart woman, you make some pretty stupid choices.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. Has Philippe told you what his plan was?”

  Maguire sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “He’s not talking. But since you ask me, I’d guess that you and Leah were right—he cultivated Ms. Rankin so that he would have greater access to the conference, behind the scenes. When he learned the score at Greenferne—that Annabeth was going to bring along a gaggle of handpicked students—he saw his opportunity and started working on young Susie, and obviously she fell for it. He knew that security would be tight and everything portable would be searched, so Susie turned out to be the perfect mule—or would have been perfect if she hadn’t been stupid enough to use Professor Rankin’s computer. We may never know all the details.”

  Claire shook her head. “And he would have set off his bra-bomb from somewhere else and kept his hands clean?” When Maguire nodded, Claire said, “Do you know who he’s affiliated with?”

  “Ms. Hastings, there are so many splinter groups out there, we can’t keep track of them all, and new ones pop up all the time. Given his target—a conference devoted to women—I’d say he could be part of some fundamentalist subgroup that doesn’t want to see women gain any rights or power. Or maybe he was acting alone—hard to say. In any case, if he’d been successful today, it would have been a double whammy—a political statement and a blow against women.”

  “What about those guys in the car? What have they said?”

  “They are being a bit more forthcoming—in exchange for being allowed to go home. But they deny any knowledge of a plot. All they’ll say is that Philippe asked them to collect your friend and hold on to him for a bit. He didn’t specify how. If things had gone right, they might have left him somewhere with a story that nobody would believe. Or maybe they were waiting for orders from the boss. Hard to say.”

  Something nagged at Claire. Phone . . . Philippe answering the phone when they had first arrived at his apartment. Claire took a breath. “Just about the time Philippe let us in, his cell phone rang. He answered it, but we were there listening, so all he said was something like, don’t do anything until I tell you. Maybe he was talking to his pals in the car?” Claire shuddered. If they hadn’t arrived when they did, would Philippe have told his cronies to dispose of Jonathan? Too close for comfort. But then, it was even more frightening that this whole plot had been going on right under the noses of everyone, and had come within a few hours of succeeding.

  “So, now what?”

  Maguire shook his head. “You’re free to go. You’re going to be staying in New York a few more days?”

  Claire hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I guess. At the moment, I’m not sure I can find my way across the street, much less back to Maine. Or Northampton. Oh, can you tell me where my car is?”

  “We found it at the parking garage where you left it, and impounded it.”

  “Ah. You found it.”

  “Of course we did—we aren’t totally incompetent. We found it the same day you disappeared, but we weren’t sure where you had gone from there.”

  “What about Jonathan?”

  “I’ll have to interview him once he wakes up, but I think he’s in the clear, after what Susie has told us.”

  “Hallelujah,” Claire responded. “Although I must say you guys lost points with me when you believed the blond airhead’s story in the beginning, rather than keeping an open mind.”

  “There were mitigating circumstances, such as Daulton’s disappearance. But I will admit—off the record, of course—that we were perhaps a bit too quick to accept her statement.”

  “Agent Maguire, there may be hope for you yet. By the way, do you have a first name, or did your mother name you ‘Agent’?” Claire’s fatigue was making her lightheaded.

  “William.” He stood up. “Can I offer you a ride somewhere?”

  Claire stood up as well, wobbling slightly. “Thank you, but I think I’ll hang around until Jonathan wakes up—unless there’s some reason I shouldn’t?”

  “Up to you. You want to make sure he gets his story straight?”

  Claire looked at him in bewilderment, then realized he was making fun of her. “You got it. But, seri
ously, thank you—for everything. Mostly for believing me today, and following through.” Claire shuddered inwardly to think what would have happened if he hadn’t arrived in the nick of time.

  “I told you, I was playing the odds. If you and Jonathan were right, I’d come out smelling like a rose. If you were lying, I would have figured it out soon enough—and made you pay for it.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “My pleasure.”

  * * *

  The next time Claire mustered up a moment of clarity, she found herself in a hospital room staring at Jonathan’s unconscious form. She had no memory of getting there. No way she could have located a particular room in the maze of corridors. Maybe some kind nurse had guided her there. But there she was, and there he was.

  He looked the worse for wear. Someone had scrubbed most of the dried blood off his face, although they’d missed a few patches around his ear. A caterpillar of stitches wove through a small shaved patch at the back of his head. There were a few bruises she hadn’t noticed before, a nasty one on his cheekbone—probably it had been concealed by all that blood. No bandages. All in all, Jonathan looked remarkably intact, considering . . . considering what he might have looked like. Like dead. Jonathan’s knuckles were scraped. Had he fought back?

  Damn, he was a good-looking man.

  She jerked upright in her seat. Where the hell had that thought come from? All right, she’d just spent several intense days with him, under harrowing circumstances. She had pulled his clothes off of him, had patched up his wounds; she had shared a bed with him, more than once. And through all that, she had never taken a good look at him? She was exhausted, drained, deflated . . . and maybe all her defenses were down and she was just being honest with herself. But it was true: he was easy to look at. Undemanding, apart from little things like expecting her to go along with his crazy ideas, such as a fake kidnapping. Easy to get along with. Claire, where are you going with this? As soon as the paperwork was cleared up—and she got about twelve hours of sleep—they would be going their separate ways, and she could finally get back to what she really wanted to do: sit in a freezing cabin in Maine and wrestle with her reluctant manuscript. Right.

  She faded out again, but was startled from her doze by the sound of his voice.

  “Jesus, my head hurts.” He opened his eyes and gingerly turned his head toward her. “Claire?” he said incredulously.

  “I think so.” She didn’t have the energy to smile.

  “What the hell are you doing here? Or, no, back up—where is here? What happened?”

  “Hospital—I’m not sure which one. How much do you remember?”

  “Uh . . . I remember talking to Annabeth at the deli, and then she left, right? I saw you there, and Leah. And after that, not much.”

  Claire shifted her chair so that she could look at his face while she talked. “All right. Annabeth got up and left. She didn’t believe you, you know. And Leah and I were trying to decide whether to join you when these two guys showed up and, uh, sort of helped you into their car around the corner, and took off. I got the license plate. Then Leah and I went back to her place to try to figure out what to do next. And then I called Rick.”

  “He actually talked to you? Wait—where’d you get the number?”

  “When I called from his place—it was on that old phone. I remembered it. And, yes, he picked up.”

  “That’s rare. He’s usually very cautious about answering unfamiliar phone numbers.”

  “Well, maybe he thought it was you calling, but he talked to me anyway. And I told him what had happened. Oh, wait—we never got a chance to tell you about the guy Annabeth gave your note to.”

  “She what?”

  “At the party. Toward the end, she shooed her student groupies away and then showed the note to this guy, and she got real close to him to do it. And when I described him Leah knew who he was, and I told Rick, and I gave Rick the license number on the car. Am I going too fast for you?”

  “No, but maybe you can give me the condensed version, before I pass out again.”

  “Rick found out that the car belonged to the Egyptian embassy. We figured the guy must have been behind grabbing you, and we had to figure out why. Rick thought there was something planned to disrupt the U.N. conference, so Leah and I thought we had better talk to Annabeth. Leah knew she was staying at the Plaza, so we headed over there.”

  “How did you know she’d be alone? And why did you think she wasn’t involved in whatever was going on?”

  “We didn’t, but she was the only option we had. And I refused to believe that a respected academic feminist could be involved in a plot like that. It was a little easier to swallow that Philippe had seduced her, but not much. Anyway, I overheard her conversation with Philippe—that’s the terrorist. He said he was headed home—he probably had a few other things to worry about, like blowing up the First Lady at the U.N.”

  “There really was a plan? She was the target?”

  Claire nodded. “Oh, yes. He confirmed it. Sort of. Not in so many words, but the general principle. But back up: Leah and I talked to Annabeth and convinced her that Philippe was up to no good . . .”

  “And she believed you? Just like that?”

  “We’re very persuasive, particularly as a tag team. And we showed her some stuff Rick sent us. Yes, she believed us—she said she thought the whole thing with Philippe was a little too good to be true, but she was enjoying . . . whatever was going on, and it never occurred to her to think he had any ulterior motive. Anyway, she was willing to go along with us and talk to him, at least for a start.”

  “Christ, Claire—you walked into the home of a possible terrorist, hours before he’s planning a major event? What were you thinking?”

  He seemed seriously upset, poor baby. “Jonathan, how dumb do you think I am? I called the FBI right before we went in. I told them I was me, and that I was still being held captive, but I’d found a phone, and I gave them Philippe’s address and hung up fast. They showed up in time. No problem.” Except the fact that Philippe had pulled a gun on them, and they’d had to sit on him. And if the FBI had arrived a few minutes later, things might have been very different. “And Agent Maguire led the charge. Saved explaining a lot of things.”

  “Did this guy confess to anything?”

  “Not exactly, but there was a twist: Susie was there at his apartment.”

  “He’d kidnapped her too?”

  “No, she was sleeping with him. I think the short version is that he’d picked her to get explosives into the event and close to the First Lady, in—are you ready for this?—her bra.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. I don’t think Susie knew. And then he wouldn’t even admit to knowing anything about your kidnapping, or where you might be. So I told Agent Maguire about what Leah and I had seen, and he tracked down the car, and then he packed us all up and we went over there, but the drivers of the car clammed up on us until we showed them that we had Philippe in another car, and then they decided to save their own derrieres and let us open the trunk. And there you were.”

  Jonathan looked pained. “Are you all right? Do you want a nurse?” Claire asked.

  “No. No, damn it, I’m just mad that I was unconscious for all of it. Did you spill the whole thing to your friendly local agent?”

  “More or less. After all, it was Maguire et alia who swooped in and saved us. Maybe you don’t think it was a good idea, but I was too tired to make up a coherent story and I figured I’d better stick more or less to the truth. Except I left Rick out. I told Maguire that you had a friend who had helped us, but I didn’t give him details, and he didn’t ask for any. I thought you’d want it that way.”

  He was silent for so long that Claire wondered if he had in fact passed out again. Finally he said, “So are we in the clear?”

  “I think so. Maguire took a risk, believing my crazy story, but since it turned out to be true, and somehow we all managed to avert an
international incident, everybody wins. I think he’s willing to forget about our little trek, and that fake kidnapping. And probably a whole lot of other things I can’t remember. I’m tired.” More tired than she could ever remember being. Don’t shut your eyes, Claire, or it’ll all be over.

  “Claire.” At his voice, she struggled to focus on Jonathan, who went on, “I am so sorry. I never meant for all of this . . .”

  She stopped him. “I know you didn’t. Things just sort of happened. And it all worked out. I was telling Leah, we just saved the world before breakfast. Not too shabby.”

  He gave a short laugh, which looked like it hurt. “Listen, when I get out of here, could we . . .”

  Whatever he was going to say was interrupted by the sound of an insistent female voice, and then Annabeth surged into the room, trailed by two nurses, who were trying to tell her that visiting hours hadn’t started, and their patient really shouldn’t be having visitors, and if he was going to have visitors, he shouldn’t have more than one at a time, and he needed his rest, and . . . Annabeth ignored them all. Claire stood up uncertainly, relinquishing Jonathan’s hand.

  “Oh, Claire, here you are. Jonathan, I owe you the most tremendous apology. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would have happened. I am ashamed of myself. Are you ever going to forgive me? Claire, are you all right? You look like warm spit.”

  Claire found enough energy to answer her. “Thank you, Annabeth, I’ll be fine after some sleep. Why aren’t you at the conference?”

  “I’m on my way there now, but I wanted to check in and see how Jonathan was doing.” Annabeth perched on the bed, but turned to Claire. “You talked to that FBI agent?”

  “Yes. I seem to have some vague memory of it. His name’s William, by the way.” Claire drifted toward the door. “I’d better go. If I don’t get some sleep soon . . . Annabeth, I’ll leave you to your apologies. Good luck with the conference. Bye.”