White lies

Even then she was reluctant to take her hand away, and she stood beside him for a long time. A smile kept curving her lips. His personality was so strong that it came through despite his limited means of communication. He wanted the truth about his condition, not vague promises or medical double-talk. He might not know his name, but that hadn’t changed the man he was. He was strong, much stronger than he had been before. Whatever had happened to him in the past five years had tempered him, like steel subjected to the hottest fires. He was harder, stronger, tougher, his willpower so fierce it was like an energy field emanating from him. Oh, he had been a charming rascal before, devilishly reckless and daring, with a glint in his eye that had turned many feminine heads. But now he was… dangerous.

The word startled her, but when she examined it, she realized that it described exactly the man he had become. He was a dangerous man. She didn’t feel threatened by him, but danger didn’t necessarily constitute a threat. He was dangerous because of his steely, implacable will; when this man decided to do something, it wasn’t safe to get in his way. At some time in the past five years, something had drastically changed him and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was. It must have been something cataclysmic, something awful, to have so focused his character and determination. It was as if he had been stripped down to the bare essentials of human existence, forced to discard all his personality traits that weren’t necessary to survival and adopt new ones that were. What was left was hard and pure, unbreakable and curiously resilient. This was a man who wouldn’t admit defeat; he didn’t know what it was.

Her heart was beating heavily as she stood looking down at him, her attention so focused on him that they might have been the only two people in the world. He awed her, and he attracted her so strongly that she jerked her hand away from his arm as soon as the thought formed. Dear God! She would be a fool to let herself get caught in that trap again. Even more now than before, Steve was essentially alone, his personality so honed that he was complete unto himself. She had walked away relatively unscathed before, but what would happen to her this time if she let herself care too much? She felt scared, not only because she was teetering on the edge of heartbreak, but because she was even daring to think of getting too close to him. It was like watching a panther in a cage, standing outside the bars and knowing you were safe, but feeling the danger that was barely restrained.

Making love with him before had been… fun, passionate in a playful way. What would it be like now? Was the playfulness gone? She thought it must be. His lovemaking would be intense and elemental now, as he was, like getting caught up in a storm.

She became aware that she could barely breathe, and she forced herself to walk away from his bed. She didn’t want him to mean that much to her. And she was very much afraid that he already did.

"What do we do?" Frank asked quietly, his clear eyes meeting shuttered black ones.

"We play out the hand," the Man answered just as quietly. "We have to. If we do anything out of the ordinary now, it could tip someone off, and he isn’t able to recognize his enemies."

"Any luck in tracing Piggot?"

"We lost him in Beirut, but we know he hooked up with his old pals. He’ll surface again, and we’ll be waiting."

"We just have to keep our guy alive until we can neutralize Piggot," Frank said, his tone turning glum.

"We’ll do it. One way or the other, we have to keep Piggot’s cutthroats from getting their hands on him."

"When he gets his memory back, he isn’t going to like what we’ve done."

A brief smile touched the Man’s hard mouth. "He’ll raise mortal hell, won’t he? But I’m not taking any chance with the protected-witness program until he’s able to look out for himself, and maybe not even then. It’s been penetrated before, and could be again. Everything hinges on getting Piggot."

"You ever wish you were back in the field, so you could hunt him yourself?"

The Man leaned back, hooking his hands behind his head. "No. I’ve gotten domesticated. I like going home at night to Rachel and the kids. I like not having to watch my back."

Frank nodded, thinking of the time when the Man’s back had been a target for every hit man and terrorist in the business. He was safe now, out of the main- stream … as far as was generally known. A very small group of people knew otherwise. The Man officially didn’t exist; even the people who followed his orders didn’t know the orders came from him. He was buried so deeply in the bowels of bureaucracy, protected by so many twists and turns, that there was no way to connect him to the job he actually did. The President knew about him, but Frank doubted the vice president did, or any department secretary, the Chiefs of Staff or the head of the agency that employed him. Whoever was President next might not know about him. The Man decided for himself whom he could trust; Frank was one of those people. And so was the man in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Two days later, they took the tube out of Steve’s chest because his collapsed lung had healed and reinflated. When they let Jay into his room again she hung over the side of his bed, stroking his arm and shoulder until his breathing settled down and the fine mist of perspiration on his body began to dry.

"It’s over, it’s over," she murmured.

He moved his arm, a signal that he wanted to spell, and she began reciting the alphabet.

Not fun.

"No," she agreed.

More tubes?

"There’s one in your stomach, for feeding you." She felt his muscles tense as if in anticipation of the pain he knew would come, and he spelled out a terse expletive. Her hand moved over his chest in sympathy, feeling the coarseness of his hair as it grew out, and avoiding the wound where the tube had entered his body.