A Man Overboard Read online

  Joseph dropped onto his side—his young, innocent eyes full of shock and incomprehension—as Vadim’s head blew apart. Bone sprayed like shrapnel throughout the room, and blood and pink tissue splattered stuffed animals and Disney posters. The Russian collapsed to the floor, the soup bowl that was his head staring up at the ceiling.

  Stacey dropped the gun and collapsed beside Joseph, pulling her dress off up and over her head.

  Jack crawled to them, tears blinding his eyes, reaching for Joseph’s hands. Finding one, he squeezed. Joseph’s eyes found his, and they seemed to beg for some kind of understanding, for help. Stacey was wrapping her dress around his neck and pulling it tight, the thin fabric turning red instantly.

  The knife gliding across Joseph’s neck replayed in Jack’s mind, and he thought it was a miracle his head hadn’t come off. Or maybe Vadim had held up at the last possible moment, second-guessing himself.

  “Call an ambulance!” Stacey was screaming.

  The total desperation in her voice snapped Jack out of his stupor. He rushed crazily to his feet and clambered out of the room, blood streaking the walls wherever he touched them for support. “Where is it?” he cried back over his shoulder, a red mist spraying from his mouth as he shouted.

  “Kitchen!”

  He ran down half the stairs and vaulted himself over the banister, landing sprawled out on the carpet below. He scrambled back to his feet, the pain in his body completely lost to the fear of losing his son. No, he told himself. Not after everything he’d been through. Not like this! He found the phone on the wall in the kitchen and dialed 911 so fast that he was afraid he might have hit one of the numbers too many times. But an operator answered, and Jack blurted out the address and what had happened. Without waiting to hear a response, he dropped the phone and rushed back to his son, ignoring his mother-in-law sprawled out on the floor in a puddle of blood, the knife like some horror-movie prop still sticking out of her face.

  When he entered the room, panting and struggling for breath, Stacey was sitting on the floor with Joseph’s head in her lap. She was staring down at him, humming and running her fingers through his hair. Joseph’s eyes were closed.

  Jack dropped to his knees beside them, and Stacey moved her eyes to his. Tears were spilling down her cheeks, but she didn’t stop humming. Jack grabbed Joseph’s hand and held it tight, kissing it and bringing it against his cheek. “Hang in there, buddy. The ambulance is on its way. Just hold on, okay? Everything’s gonna be all right.” But that’s what he’d said before, wasn’t it?

  Five minutes later, when the sound of sirens came storming the estate, Joseph was still alive. Every drop of blood that fell, however, was a drop closer to the unthinkable. Stacey leaned down and kissed his forehead. “Hold on, baby…hold on.” Tears landed on his eyelids.

  When banging sounded on the door downstairs, Jack stood, Joseph’s hand sliding out of his own, and ran to open it.

  Just before opening the door, he had an involuntary thought streak through his brain, one that involved making a run for it. But that was no longer possible with Joseph bleeding out on the floor. It was time to face the music—no matter what song it would be. Maybe, depending on how Joseph was making out, he’d think of something at the hospital, a story that might discourage further attention from the CIA. But then, wouldn’t they be listening to Vadim’s house calls and already know about the 911 call? It didn’t matter. With her son moments away from death, shooting her first husband, seeing her mother killed, and witnessing her second husband come back from the dead all within a five-minute span of time, Jack was sure that Stacey was far from being up to playing make-believe, anyway.

  He opened the door, pointed up the stairs, and watched the men race to save his son’s life. However this was all going to turn out, he only wanted Joseph to live.

  Please, God…

  27

  They were at a hospital in Hartford. Police kept stopping by, trying to figure out what the hell had happened, asking them questions. But neither of them were capable of answering anything even if they wanted to. Not until the doctor came out and gave them the news that Joseph was going to be okay, at which point they both started the slow shift back to the world around them. Stitches and a couple days in the hospital, the doctor had reported. Apparently, he said, the man who did this either hesitated at the last second or never intended to kill their son.

  Jack took her hand in his, and a small smile broke through the weight of all she’d endured. “I guess I have some explaining to do,” she said.

  “When you’re ready. You’ve been through a lot.” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  A tear rolled off her chin, but she didn’t engage the statement. Instead, she grabbed the back of his neck with her free hand and looked for the first time into his eyes with the wonder of his being there. “You’re alive.”

  “Turns out, I’m a pretty decent swimmer. Took me a few days and a generous jelly fish, but I made it.”

  Her eyes broke away from his and dropped to her feet. “I guess you know that I was married before.”

  “Vadim.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Shhhh… We don’t have to talk about this now.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, unable to believe that he was actually holding her again. Tears accompanied his words when he spoke them. “I thought they threw you over, too. I spent three days in the Bahamas wasted out of my mind.” He felt her squeeze him tighter.

  “I need to tell you now,” she sighed, “before the FBI gets here. You deserve to know. God, after all these years, you deserve to know.”

  He looked around the waiting room and was satisfied that no one was listening. “Okay.”

  Not letting go of him, she spoke softly into his ear. “I was married to Vadim before I met you. It was a mistake. I was young, and I found out too late who he really was.”

  “SVR.”

  She seemed surprised that he knew this. “How—”

  “Finish your story, and then I’ll tell you mine.”

  She leaned back, settling into her own seat, and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “It was more than that, though. He had a dark side to him.”

  Really? he almost asked, but he bit his tongue. The way Viktoriya died was nothing to joke about. Neither was his son’s throat being slashed.

  “I was scared,” she continued. “When the CIA turned him…” She stopped herself when Jack didn’t even flinch at that. “How much of this do you know?” she asked.

  “Keep going. I’ll stop you when I hear something that bears repeating.”

  “Okay,” she said, and suspicion pinched her brow. “When the CIA made him a double agent, I knew it might be my only chance to get away, so I convinced him that I should lay low somewhere, made him think I was afraid of the SVR finding out he’d been compromised. I acted paranoid enough to sow some fear in his own mind, and he finally agreed that I should disappear for a while. So I took my mother to Philadelphia. And then I met you.”

  Jack wished he could shake Donny’s hand and tell him with all the pride of a happy husband that he’d been right in his counsel to trust her. Of all the possible theories trying to explain Stacey’s involvement in all this nonsense, the truth had turned out to be as good as it could’ve been.

  Donny… That storm was still brewing.

  “I didn’t tell you because…it didn’t seem fair. To make you worry. And the way you are, Jerry, you would’ve never gotten past it. You’d be looking over your shoulder forever.” She fell silent for a moment. “I should’ve told you before we got married. Given you a choice…but I was afraid I’d lose you…”

  Jack ran his hands through her hair, brushing tears off her face with his thumb. He stared at her for a whole minute, regretting every vengeful thought he’d had against her over the last few days. Love believes all things, hopes all things… Amen.

  But there was still that one thing that needed
knowing. As much as he didn’t want to ask, he understood that the road to full recovery had to start now, whatever the answer was.

  “Stacey,” he began. She looked up into his eyes. “I know about what happened with Vadim in 2007.”

  New tears dropped from her eyes, and shame forced her to divert her gaze once more.

  “Is Joseph my son?” The words came half choked by the long cave they seemed to have traveled from.

  “It was only one time, Jack. I was away for work, and he just showed up at the hotel.” She took her time, still not looking at him. “My mother thought we needed to ‘catch up.’ She took the liberty of telling him where I was. I always thought that she secretly wanted me to leave you and go back to Vadim.”

  Jack held his tongue. Should he tell her the truth?

  She began sobbing, and though Jack wanted to reassure her by taking her hand, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet.

  “He didn’t know about you,” she cried. “And I couldn’t tell him. It was all I could do to get the rings off in time. If he knew about you, he’d kill you. Or me. So I pretended that I was glad to see him and kept asking when he thought it would be safe for me to come back to him, that I couldn’t stand being without him. It made me sick to say, and I could’ve killed my mother. I had to…” She tried keeping pace with the storm of tears, her hands swiping them away as they descended, but some slipped through and dropped to the floor at their feet.

  “Joseph…” It was the only word Jack could get out.

  She shook her head. “It was right around the time I got pregnant, and…” She swore. “I wasn’t sure. I had a test taken after he was born. I had to know. I mean, I didn’t want to know, just in case, but…” She looked up and offered a pathetic attempt at a smile. “He’s your son, Jack.” And then she let out a noise that was one part laughter and one part crying.

  The weight of the world flew off him so fast, that Jack felt like a feather in a twister when he released the breath he’d been holding. He smiled and made his own contribution to the puddle of tears between them. “I would’ve loved him like he was my own, anyway,” he said, embracing her again.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

  “When we were on the boat, you said that you were drunk when Joseph was conceived.”

  “I did?” Shaking her head, she insisted, “I must’ve been confused. I was drunk with him. It was the only way I could do it. But for Joseph’s sake, I had to make myself believe that…” She looked desperately into his eyes, begging him to believe her. “Please, I was confused. You’re his father. I’ll show you the test results.”

  “What about the books and letters you kept hidden in your closet?”

  “You found them?”

  “Well, the guy that came to burn down the house found them…”

  “They burned down our house?” she shouted.

  Some of the cops turned their heads toward them. “Later. Why keep them?”

  “What do you mean later? Did they burn down our house?”

  He looked around. “Shhh. Yeah. What about the letters?”

  It took her a moment to get her mind off the house. “I had to keep them in case he ever showed up. I needed to be able to convince him that I was waiting for him. At least until I could figure something else out.”

  “And what were the books?”

  “Just stupid novels we liked. Before I knew who he really was, we kind of had this hobby…”

  “Finding novels with Soviet plots?”

  She nodded. “It was stupid.” Then she looked at him, her face warming as if she’d just realized he was alive and not simply part of her imagination. “I can’t believe you’re actually here. I thought you drowned. I tried to stop them, but they dragged me out of the room. I was screaming for you to wake up.”

  “What about the suicide note?”

  “They made me. Vadim’s men. After they threw you overboard, they told me who they were, that they were taking me back to Vadim. He knew about you and Joseph, and he wasn’t too happy. They said they’d kill Joseph if I didn’t go along with them.”

  The skin across Jack’s brow furrowed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Did she not know about the CIA’s involvement in all this? He wondered if Johnson and Viktoriya could have been wrong. But there was no way Vadim had the resources to pull this off on his own. Which meant that Stacey didn’t know what the CIA was setting Vadim up for. He guessed no one would ever know. “You convinced him that Joseph was his?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think he ever really believed it. He wanted to, though. I told him I didn’t love you, that I was just using you. I said I was so scared the SVR was going to find me that I needed to disappear, take on a new identity while I waited for him to figure something out. Not sure he really believed that, either.”

  She fell silent, and Jack could almost see the images flashing through her mind. Images of her first husband’s head exploding as she put a few bullets in it. Images of her mother with a steak knife sticking out of her eye. Images of Joseph bleeding all over the place.

  “Do you know that you don’t really have cancer?”

  She didn’t say anything, but Jack could tell she stopped breathing.

  “It was part of the plot to get us on the cruise.”

  “They doctored the mammogram?”

  “It was someone else’s.” He’d tell her about Timonen later. “You’re healthy. No cancer.”

  A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips as she let it sink in.

  “You wanna get some coffee?” There were still a few things they had to go over, like her father and her mother, but another detective had just walked in, and Jack didn’t want to talk to him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold them off much longer, but he only needed a few more minutes.

  “Yeah.” She took his hand and let him pull her up.

  They walked in silence to the cafeteria, Stacey wrapping her arms around her chest self-consciously the whole way. Because she’d been naked from using her dress as a tourniquet when the medics arrived, she had grabbed the first T-shirt and pair of jeans she found. The shirt, it turned out, didn’t do much in the way of concealing what was beneath it, not without the normal undergarments. Jack had offered her his coat, but as Donny had so eloquently put it, he smelled like pickled diarrhea.

  When they reached the vending machine, they got two cups of coffee and sat at a table in a secluded section of the room. Jack told her everything he’d been through, including everything Viktoriya had told him. He figured she’d find out from the FBI eventually, anyway.”

  Disbelief stunned her motionless in the chair. “My mother was KGB?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry. Is this too much right now? You’ve had a lot of curve balls thrown at you in the last two hours. I don’t want to overload you.”

  She wiped a tear away and just leaned back, obviously trying to examine the last five years with this knowledge as its decoder. “Seriously?”

  “I think she blamed herself for what happened at the hotel. I’m sure she planned on following her orders before you were ever put in a compromising position.”

  She frowned. “Is that what you call it?”

  Jack smiled. It was a good sign to see a hint of wit peeking through the pain. “But she never got an opportunity, and you were screwed.”

  She managed to laugh and reached across the table, hitting him on the arm.

  “Ouch! Watch it. Your other husband beat the living crap out of me, remember?”

  “You’re not angry at me?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not jumping for joy, but…” He touched the stitches above his right eye. “It is a better explanation than I expected. For a few minutes, I thought that maybe you wanted to get rid of me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Just a few…tiny minutes.”

  She folded her arms on the table, growing serious. “Jack—”

  He cut her off. “L
isten, I’m just glad that I didn’t lose you. Whatever happened before is irrelevant. That little cheating on your husband with your husband thing… You did what you had to do to protect us. I’ll get over it.” Though saying it made him think about it, and thinking about it didn’t make his voice all that convincing.

  “What if I told you I didn’t remember any of it? Or that he was terrible?”

  “Would it be true?”

  “How do I know? I was wasted the whole time.”

  They smiled, took a sip of coffee, and stared down at the table for a while.

  “I’m so sorry about Donny and Ivan,” she said.

  Jack was, too, but again, the full realization of those losses was still busy forming out at sea. When it struck, it would be one brutal tempest, but for now he was too distracted by all the excitement and at having Stacey and Joseph back. He would deal with losing his friends in its proper time. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her.

  She thought about it for a second, hooking a piece of hair behind an ear. “Yeah.” She squinted. “What’re we going to do? We don’t have a house, right?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ll figure it out once all this settles down. We’ll be fine.”

  She thought about all he’d told her. “What about the CIA? Do you think they’ll still try and…”

  “Nah. The smartest thing for them to do is just leave it alone. The FBI might dig around and get close, but not close enough to make anyone sweat. I think if we keep quiet, if we let the FBI draw its own conclusions, then we’ll be okay. The CIA won’t want to bring unnecessary attention to this thing.”

  “There you are!”

  The deep voice sounded from behind them, making them turn their heads. Joseph’s doctor was walking briskly toward them, a small smile on his face. “You can see him now,” he said once he was beside them.

  Jack and Stacey jumped to their feet, hands locked together, and followed after the doctor. There was a lot they didn’t know, and a lot they would probably never find out, and while there were aspects of the story that didn’t make much sense to Jack, he was through thinking about it for now. All that mattered right now was Joseph—his son.