She pulled herself frantically along the bottom, holding her breath as long as she could. When at last she had to surface, she was terrified to hear splashing behind her even as she gulped in the rotten smelling air. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw a darting light. For a moment she was puzzled. Then it came to her. Bukovsky was in the marsh, behind her and to her left, searching for her with a powerful
flashlight. She could just make out the dark gray bulk of him behind the light. He was carrying a rifle tucked beneath his left arm. She thanked God for the shadowy darkness and the tall reeds. He did not see her as the light flashed over her head. She cowered amongst the reeds, her heart beating so hard that it was all she could hear. Where was the driver? She turned her head in the direction of the resort, realizing that she could, just faintly, see its lights. Then she saw the driver behind Bukovsky. He too carried a flashlight. And a rifle. She could make out the peaked chauffeur’s cap quite clearly. He was between her and the resort. He and Bukovsky seemed to be weaving back and forth, sloshing in intersecting paths along the way she had come. Heart sinking, Clara realized that they were beating the swamp for her as hunters beat the heath for birds. There would be no cowering amidst the reeds, praying that they would pass her in the dark. She would have to flee before them like any hunted creature.
Carefully, quietly, she began to pull herself along, using handfuls of swamp grass for purchase. They were crossing and crisscrossing behind her, lights slicing through the darkness as they moved back and forth, their very silence more menacing than any threats could have been. Clara realized with a sickening sense of fear that Bukovsky would hunt her to the death. Only one of them could emerge alive from that swamp.
To her left she heard a swish and a splash. Head slewing around, she watched in horror as an alligator slithered from a tussock of swamp grass and passed close beside her. Clamping down hard on her tongue, she had to fight back a panicked scream; the memory of the deadlier beasts behind her killed the sound aborning. She would stand a better chance with the alligator than Bukovsky. The alligator paid
her no mind. Heart pounding, Clara hoped his kinsfolk would be as forbearing.
“There she is!” The bright beam of a flashlight blinded her. Bullets whizzed over her head, slamming into the water around her and ricocheting off with a whiny screech. Stomach churning with terror, she dove beneath the surface of the oily black water, scrambling forward on her belly like the gator that had just passed as bullets spat into the water around her, praying that by some miracle she would be spared.
Surfacing, she realized that they were close behind her. The beams from their flashlights crossed and crisscrossed in the darkness. Over the harsh pounding of her heart she could hear their frenzied splashings. Scrambling forward, sobbing with terror, she looked over the acres of black water and blacker mud for a place to hide. The darkness was her ally; shifting shadows and rustling reeds disguised her passing.
The flashlight passed over her again, then froze.
Zzinng! Zzing! Oh, God, they had her pinned in the light! Flinging herself face down in the icy water, she pulled herself toward where the reeds grew thicker in the middle of the channel, at a right angle to their path. She would need a miracle to escape.
Daring a look back, she saw that they were not far behind her. She had managed to elude them for the moment, but she did not delude herself that she could do it for as long as it would take. It was just a matter of time until one of them got a bead on her back and put a bullet through her even as she scrambled frantically to escape. Wouldn’t it be easier just to stand up and let them see her, to end this frantic terror, this misery? At least then maybe she would buy herself a few hours. Instead of being shot to death in this
slimy swamp, maybe Bukovsky would follow his original plan of taking her home to Jollymead to die.
Oh, God, she was so afraid to die! Please save me, she prayed, pulling herself along with desperate strength as the two men behind her closed in. Please save me! Please! Please!
“There she is!”
Clara dived without even bothering to take a breath. With frantic desperation, she changed her direction one hundred and eighty degrees, moving back toward them under the protection of the water and the reeds. They wouldn’t be expecting that. Moving as quietly and quickly as she could, feeling as though she would die if she didn’t breathe soon, she pulled herself along. At any second she expected to feel a bullet ripping into her flesh.
When at last she had to breathe or drown, she poked her head up through the surface. To her amazement, she saw that God had heard her pleas one more time: while she had been submerged, a fog had rolled in.
XXXV
“Clara!”
The hoarse whisper made her shiver with horror. She did not know how long she had laid hidden in the icy swamp; it could have been minutes or hours. All she knew was that they still stalked her, their flashlights turned off now as they sought her in the shifting fog. Some time ago Bukovsky had started calling her name. The mere sound of it on his lips made her shiver with horror.
“Clara!”
Despite the muffling fog, she could hear them sloshing through the marsh. The thick soupy mist distorted sounds as well as blinded her. They could have been ten feet away or a hundred.
“Clara!”
Her name on his lips unnerved her. She knew the voice was Bukovsky’s, but it sounded so horribly familiar that she was having trouble not responding to it. The voice still seemed to belong to Adam Chandler, longtime family friend. She had to fight back panic, senseless, sobbing panic. Her fear was that the fog which she had thought was her savior
had instead merely been the agent to prolong her torment. Her entrapment in the dreadful world of icy mud and terror could only end in her death.
“Clara, you’re being very foolish. Come out and let me take you home.”
It sounded tempting, horribly tempting, whispered in that voice with its slow cadence of Virginia drawl. Clara quivered, holding onto reason with an effort. She must not respond, must not respond.
“Emily is waiting for you at Jollymead, Clara. Let me take you home to your mother.”
Clara had to bite back a scream. He was moving closer to her. The whisper was growing more audible. She could hear the splashing as he moved toward her through the water.
Slowly, carefully, she began easing herself backward, away from the tempting voice that promised only death. She slithered backwards through the ooze like an eel, fleeing from the familiar horror that stalked her. Around her the swamp bubbled and sighed, releasing its gas with tiny pops that made her heart pound through her chest.
“Clara!”
She slithered faster, staring mesmerized in the direction of the sound. Her foot bumped something solid.
“I’ve got her! I’ve got her!”
Clara screamed with mindless terror as the chauffeur whose leg she had bumped into while escaping from the other hunter grabbed for her. His arms slid around her, dragging her up out of the icy mud that had been her protection for so long, hauling her high like a landed fish as she struggled and fought and screamed.
“Hold her, I’m coming!” Bukovsky’s voice was like a torch to the already flaring blaze of her terror. She fought against the arms that struggled to hold her like a wild thing,
kicking and biting and scratching until without warning she was free, falling into the water with an enormous splash while the sound of furious curses filled the air over her head.
“Don’t let her get away!”
She was slithering frantically through the water, but she knew that they were close behind her; she could feel them gaining on her. Reason fled. Stumbling to her feet, sobbing in high-pitched gasps that sounded to her ears like banshee wails in the darkness, she fled like a doe before the hunters. Splashing through the hip-deep water, stumbling, falling, picking herself up to run some more, she felt with an icy, numbing certainty that her death was close at hand. Then she heard the rasping slide of metal against metal as, near at hand, a rifle was readied to fire.
She threw herself into the swamp just as the jet of fire sang over her head. Scrambling forward, bent almost double now, she still fought to elude what she knew was inevitable even as more bullets whined past her.
Her feet touched solid ground. Before she thought, she had scrambled up on a mud bar. It took her above the sheltering reeds.
“There she is!”
Clara heard the cry, the splashings that told her that they were only feet behind her, and scrambled for the other side of the mud bar. But her feet, frozen after hours in the icy water, betrayed her. They slipped and she went sprawling flat on her face.
“You were foolish to run, Clara.”
“No!”
With a little cry of dread, she turned over to find him looming a mere three feet behind her. The fog was lifting now; she could see him clearly. Chandler—Bukovsky, with
his terrifyingly familiar face and those feral yellow eyes gleaming at her through the shifting mist.
“Don’t shoot me! Please! I’ll go with you! I won’t cause you any more trouble, I promise!” She was babbling, scrambling backward across the grassy mud, her terrified eyes fixed on the rifle that he was slowly lifting to his shoulder.
“You’ve been a great deal of trouble already, Clara. I’ll be late for my luncheon now.” The rifle was on his shoulder He was aiming it at her heart.
“No?” Clara cried, cowering. His hand moved on the trigger. With a terrified sob she shut her eyes.
The world exploded around her. Clara screamed, a high-pitched shriek of terror. Panic of the most primitive sort claimed her, and she screamed again and again. … There was another scream, but it was not hers. It was a man’s.
The explosion sounded again. Clara’s eyes flew open. In front of her, almost touching her feet in their mud-and-slime caked sandals, sprawled Bukovsky, his rifle lying useless by his side. His eyes were open. He was looking beyond her with those dreadful yellow eyes, one hand stretched toward her, opening and closing like a bird’s claw. An expression of pure hate crossed his face, then he shuddered and was still.
Gasping, shuddering, Clara looked around to see what it was that had prompted that last blast of evil from Bukovsky’s eyes. To her surprise, she saw the sun was rising at last. Pinwheels of vivid pink and yellow and orange swirled across the sky. Silhouetted against their vividness was the dark figure of a man. He was lowering a rifle.
“It’s all right, Clara,” Jack said grimly. “I’m here.”
Epilogue
Clara spent two weeks in Saint Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, suffering from pneumonia as a result of her night in the swamp. Her right hand, which had gone through the window of the limousine, required seventy-five stitches. It was swathed in white bandages and looked like it should more property belong to a mummy.
She had visitors galore in the hospital. Her mother and Lena were fixtures. Mitch came by nearly every day. Even his mother stopped by twice, bringing an offering of an apple tart each time. The primary topic of conversation was the hunting accident death of Senator Adam Chandler in Georgia. Out stalking deer early in the morning on an impromptu vacation, he had been accidentally shot by his own chauffeur, who had then killed himself in an excess of remorse. A terrible tragedy, and a terrible loss to the nation, everyone agreed.
Clara made no attempt to alter those perceptions. As General Ramsey had told her on his one visit (made when he returned Puff to Jollymead), things were not always what they seemed.
To begin with, Premier Deng was not dead. With foreknowledge that an assassination attempt on the secretary of state would take place—as was then supposed—it had been deemed wiser to postpone the secret summit. The man who was mistaken for Deng and shot (though not killed, or even wounded; as a precaution, he had been wearing a bulletproof vest) was a stand-in for the premier, just as there had been a stand-in for Franklin Conran. The supposed crisis had been seen as an excellent opportunity to trap Bigfoot, as none of the principals in the assassination attempt were aware that it had not succeeded.
Jack had been the first to suspect Adam Chandler. A routine background check had turned up the interesting information that, from the time he was reported Missing in Action to the time he came home from the war, his entire family had died in a series of accidents: His parents killed together in a car accident; his sister and her husband killed in a house fire; his brother falling over a cliff while hiking. Five deaths within eighteen months was peculiar, to say the least. A girl with whom Chandler had been close had also died. By the time Adam Chandler had returned from the war, everyone who had known him intimately was dead.
He had had access to the information that was passed.
Then, just as the meeting in which Michael Ball was arrested had concluded, a piece of false information that had been planted for each of the suspects to pass along had been acted upon. The information was that given to Adam Chandler.
Under increasing duress, the premier’s aide confessed that he had misidentified Michael Ball as Bigfoot. He had greatly feared for his life if he told the truth. The
KGB
had long arms and long memories. But the true possessor of the voice he had heard had been the third speaker. There was no mistaking that Virginia drawl.
Adam Chandler had already left the resort. Orders were
given to pick him up at the airport in Charleston or Washington. Failing that, agents would be waiting at his Georgetown townhouse and his weekend place in Maryland.
Jack had gone back to the villa and missed Clara. It had been nearly three hours before it had occurred to him that she might have left with Chandler. A quick phone call to the Charleston airport had revealed that the plane Chandler had chartered had not yet left.
Jack and General Ramsey and some of his baby green marines had immediately set off to search the road between the resort and the airport. They had found the limousine parked at the side of the road, trunk still open, rear window broken, and had immediately spread out and begun to search the swamp.
Jack had found Clara, who had promptly fainted. He had carried her out of the swamp, and she had been treated at the resort for shock and blood loss. Then she had been airlifted to the hospital in Virginia.
Mary Hammersmith had hanged herself in jail immediately after being arrested for the murder of her husband. It was suspected that she was one of Bigfoot’s “sleepers,” assigned to get close to Hammersmith soon after his recruitment into the
CIA
with no certainty that she would ever be activated. When the activation came, she was ready. When she was no longer useful, she was terminated.
Rostov had been deported. He was protected from prosecution by diplomatic immunity.
And thus the nightmare truly ended.
There was just one fly in the ointment of her giddy relief: the one visitor Clara wanted more than anything in the world to see never came. Jack was conspicuous by his absence.
“Going back to Tennessee, he told me,” General Ramsey
told her when Clara, embarrassed to ask but desperately needing to know, asked about Jack’s whereabouts. “I think he said something about raising chickens.”
The general did not know where in Tennessee. But Clara, her research techniques honed by years of writing novels, took only three hours to find McClain’s Chicken Ranch in the phone book of a little town called Fork Mountain about forty miles west of Knoxville.
“I knew there was a man involved!” Emily squealed when Clara told her, as soon as she was released from the hospital, that she was flying to Tennessee to mend some fences. “Is he
the one
? At last?”
“If he’ll have me, Mother,” Clara said, grimacing at her mother’s excitement.
“He’ll have you if I have to drag him back here by the ear,” Emily said grimly, and Clara had to laugh. The image of her elegant little mother dragging Jack anywhere by the ear was ludicrous—but endearing at the same time.
With her mother’s blessing she made the evening flight to Knoxville. Then she rented a car, bought a map, and headed for Fork Mountain. By the time she finally saw the sign that proclaimed McClain’s Chicken Ranch, it was nearly midnight. She had gotten lost six times.
There was a light in a window around the back. Gathering up the peace offering she had brought and taking a firm hold on her courage, she walked toward it.
The house was huge, an oversized white clapboard farmhouse with gingerbread trim. The light was coming from a window over the back door. Climbing the pair of wooden steps, she knocked before she could lose her nerve. Then she looked through the gap in the curtained window. As she had suspected, the light was in the kitchen. Like the house, it was huge. And it was also full of people.
“Oh no!” Clara murmured, wishing she’d looked before she knocked. Hastily she stepped down from the steps, knowing she had to retreat. She could not possibly talk to Jack in front of all those people.
The door opened. A cheery, dark-haired, middle-aged woman looked out. For a moment she frowned, seeing no one, and then she caught sight of Clara on the verge of flight, looking guiltily up at her. Her eyebrows went up.
“Why, hello,” the woman said.
“Hello.” There was nothing for it but to walk into the light. She couldn’t even hide her ridiculous peace offering behind her back. It was much too big. Why, oh why had she imagined that Jack would be alone? “I—I’ve come to see Jack. He—he is here, isn’t he?”
“He sure is. Come on in, I’m his sister, Janey. My goodness, what’s that you have in your hand? You didn’t bring those for
Jack?”
Clara was already walking into the kitchen. Immediately she was the cynosure of all eyes. At first glance there seemed to be dozens of people in the room. Then the crowd resolved itself into five women and assorted children.
“Look what she brought for Jack!” Janey tittered, and the women at the table, all apparently his sisters from the look of them, hid smiles behind their hands or giggled openly depending on their various natures.
“Roses! For Uncle Jack?” One of the children, a girl of about eleven, piped up. Then she went running out of the kitchen. “Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack! A lady’s here and she’s brought you
roses!”
Clara wanted to sink through the floor.
“Come on in and sit down,” one of the women suggested kindly, standing up and offering her chair.
“Don’t mind us,” another one chimed in. “It’s just so funny that you’d bring Jack
roses”
“It was just a—joke,” Clara explained feebly, moving toward the proffered chair.
“Let me get you a cup of coffee,” Janey said, bustling over to the stove.
“What the hell’s this nonsense Katie’s been—” Jack strode into the kitchen, the little girl who had run for him clinging to his hand, only to stop dead at the sight of Clara. “See? I told you, Uncle Jack,” Katie said importantly. “She’s brought you
roses,
Jack,” one of his sisters pointed out with suppressed hilarity.
Wordlessly Clara held them out. Going red to his ears, Jack took them. His eyes locked with hers. His face worked. Then he let loose with a tremendous sneeze.
“You’re allergic to roses, too?” Clara asked, light dawning in a tremendous flash. No wonder his sisters had reacted with such hilarity.
“I hate roses,” Jack said, scowling and thrusting the gorgeous mass of two dozen, bloodied long stemmed roses at his sister
“And cats and cheese and—”
“Sally, would you shut up, please?” Jack’s tone was more vicious than polite. Sally laughed, but obligingly shut
“Jack, there’s a card with these roses.” Clara’s eyes widened with horror as Janey dug it out. She hadn’t bothered to put it in an envelope. On the flower-edged front, it said simply—
“To Mr. Irresistible,” Janey read aloud. The room erupted in a chorus of giggles. Jack stared at Clara, his eyes turning suddenly emerald. Clara stared miserably at the floor. Never in her life had she suffered such an agony of embarrassment.
“Ladies, could we have some privacy, please?” Jack fixed his sisters with monitory eyes.
“Aren’t you even going to introduce us before you sweep her off her feet, Jack?”
“This is Clara Winston. Clara, as you have no doubt guessed, this gaggle of giggle boxes is my sisters. And they are going to bed.”
The room emptied in a hurry. Giggles floated back to them from the hall. Jack turned and carefully closed the kitchen door. Then he looked at Clara, his arms crossed over his chest, his head cocked to one side. Those eyes still blazed a vivid green.
“Did you mean it?”
“What?”
“That Mr. Irresistible stuff.”
“Yes.”
“Do I take it you’re proposing?”
Clara felt her heart speed up. “Do I take it you’re accepting?”
“If you’re proposing, then I’m accepting.” He grinned suddenly, holding out his arms. “Come here, baby.”
Clara went to him. His arms closed around her. His mouth came down on hers, Clara kissed him back with giddy abandonment. She felt like she’d finally come home.
“You really are my Mr. Irresistible, you know,” she murmured when at last he lifted his mouth from hers. Opening her eyes, she smiled languidly into eyes of emerald green.
“Baby, what I am,” he said, punctuating his words with kisses, “is irresistibly yours.”
And then he kissed her again. As Clara wrapped her arms around his neck, she thought she heard a chorus of giggles from just beyond the kitchen door.