White lies

His heart began pounding. His memory had actually supplied a face to go with the name. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew her name, and now her face. The mental picture faded, but he concentrated and found he could recall it, just like a real memory. Just as he’d told Jay, she must be a friend’s daughter, someone he’d met since their divorce.

He relaxed, pleased that the memory had solidified. His seAttal satisfaction made his body feel heavy and boneless, and his chest began to rise and fall in the deeper rhythm of sleep.

"Unca Luke, Unca Luke!"

The childish voices echoed in his head and the movie began to unwind in his mind. Two kids. Two boys, tearing across a green lawn, jumping and shrieking "Unca Luke" at the tops of their lungs as they ran.

Another scene. Northern Ireland. Belfast. He recognized it even as a tingle of dread ran up his spine. Two little boys played in the street, then suddenly looked up, hesitated and ran.

Flash. One of the first two little boys looked up with a wobbly lower lip and tears in his eyes and said, "Please, Unca Dan."

Flash. Dan Rather stacked papers at his newsdesk while the credits rolled.

Flash. A bumper sticker on a station wagon said, I’d Rather Be at Disney World.

Mickey Mouse dancing… Flash… a mouse crawling through the garbage in an alley… Flash… a grenade sailing in slow motion through the air and hitting a garbage can with a loud thump; then a louder thump and the can goes sailing… Flash… a white sailboat with sassy red-and-white striped sails tacking closer to shore and a tanned young man waves… Flash flash flash…

The scenes ripped through his consciousness, and they were truly only flashes, following each other like pages of a book being flipped through in front of his eyes.

He was sweating again. Damn, these free-association memories were hell. What did they mean? Had they truly happened? He wouldn’t mind them if he could tell which ones were real and which ones were just something he’d seen on television or in a movie, or maybe even imagined from a scene in a book. Okay, some of them were obvious, like the one of Dan Rather with the credits rolling across his face. But he’d watched network news many times since the bandages had come off his eyes, so that could even be a recent memory.

But… Uncle Luke. Uncle Dan. Something about those kids, and those names, seemed very real, just as Amy was real.

He eased out of bed, being very careful not to wake Jay, and walked into the living room where he stood for a long time in front of the banked fire, watching the embers glow. Full memory was close, and he knew it. It was as if all he had to do was turn a corner and everything would be there; but turning that mental corner wasn’t as easy as it sounded. He had become a different man in the months since the explosion; he was trying to connect two separate people and merge them into one.

He had been absently rubbing his fingertips with his thumb. When he noticed what he was doing, he lifted his hand to look at it. The calluses were back, courtesy of chopping wood, but his fingertips were still smooth. How much of him was left, or had his identity been erased as surely as his fingerprints had been? When he looked in the mirror, how much of it was Steve Cross-field and how much of it was courtesy of the reconstructive surgery? His face was changed, his voice was changed, his fingerprints gone.

He was new. He had been born out of the darkness, brought to life by Jay’s voice calling him toward the light.

Regardless of what he did or didn’t remember, he still had Jay. She was a part of him that surgery couldn’t change.

The room had taken on a chill as the fire died, and finally he felt the coldness on his naked body. He returned to the bedroom and slipped under the quilt, feeling Jay’s body warmth wrap around him. She murmured something, moving closer to him in her sleep, seeking her usual position.

Instantly desire fired through him, as urgent as if it hadn’t been slaked only an hour or so before. "Jay," he said, his voice low and dark, and he pulled her beneath him. She woke and reached for him, her hands sliding around his neck, and in the darkness they loved each other until he had no room for memories other than those they made together.

Chapter Eleven

They left the cabin early the next morning so they could rendezvous with Frank at Colorado Springs that afternoon. Jay felt a wrench at leaving the cabin; it had been their private world for so long that, away from it, she felt exposed. Only the thought that they would be returning the next day gave her the courage to leave it at all. She knew that eventually she would have to leave it forever, but she wasn’t ready to face that day right now. She wanted more time with the man she loved.

She intended to ask Frank the name of the American agent who had been "killed." He might not tell her, but she had to ask. Even if she couldn’t say it aloud, she needed to know, she had to put a name to her love. She looked at him as he skillfully handled the Jeep, holding it steady even on the snow, and her heart swelled. He was big and rough-looking, not handsome at all with his rearranged features, but just one glance from those fierce yellowish eyes had the power to make her dizzy with delight. How could they ever have thought they could pass this man off as Steve Crossfield?

Their subterfuge was riddled with holes, but she hadn’t seen them until she had been too deeply in love with him to care. They had relied on shock and ur- gency to keep her from asking the pointed questions to which they would have had no answers, such as why they didn’t use blood type or their own agent’s dental records to determine the identity of the patient. She had known at the tune that Frank was hiding something from her, but she had been too concerned over "Steve" to think it was anything more than protecting the details of a classified mission. The truth was that she had been misled so easily because she had wanted to be; after the first tune she had seen him lying in the hospital, so desperately wounded but still fighting with that grim determination of his that burned through unconsciousness, she had wanted nothing more than to be by his side and help him fight.