Night's Landing Read online

  “Don’t get carried away. It’s a trying legal matter. Nothing more.”

  “Did Rob see you at the Rijksmuseum last month?” She kept her voice low, but her sarcasm was knifelike. “Did he recognize you? Did you have him shot because of it?”

  The Rijksmuseum. Nicholas recognized now that intercepting her at the renowned Amsterdam museum had been bad timing. He hadn’t realized her son the U.S. marshal was in town. A critical oversight. But he’d only dared surface in the Netherlands for a short time—he wanted to strengthen the bond between them now that he’d reestablished contact with her. It had been a long, trying winter. Seeing her had renewed his sense of hope.

  Yet when they’d stood together three weeks ago in front of Rembrandt’s massive, famous painting, The Night Watch, Betsy had told him—again—that she wanted nothing to do with him.

  “Betsy. Please. I’m not here to argue with you. I made an effort to see you because you were a familiar face, an old friend.” That was the truth, as far as it went. Nicholas smiled tenderly. “We had a pleasant visit when I was here last in November. A cup of coffee. A nice chat about old times. It was a chance encounter—”

  “It wasn’t chance. You arranged it. You manipulated me so that I’d run into you. I wasn’t aware of your legal status, but I am now.” She didn’t soften. “And we were never friends.”

  He attributed her coldness and sarcasm to her desperate fear for her son. He let his gaze drift to the swell of her breasts, the soft shape of her hands. He’d accepted that the chance of a sexual affair was remote, at least while her husband was still alive. Nicholas was a vital man, wealthy, his hair silver now but his body taut, well-conditioned. Stuart Dunnemore was old. Just plain old. He was in his late seventies, but still a force in diplomatic circles, an expert—a visionary—in international conflict resolution. A realist, not a romantic. A pragmatist, not an ideologue. And a good man. He had humility, and he was kind. He’d endured terrible losses, a father dead in a logging accident at thirty-two, a brother killed on the beaches of Normandy, a wife he’d watched slowly waste away from multiple sclerosis.

  Betsy would never leave him. But he wouldn’t live forever, either.

  Right now, Nicholas needed to play on her emotions—her sympathy for him as a former classmate, for the struggling eighteen-year-old she must remember. He was a self-made man. He’d worked hard. He had so much to offer the world. But he couldn’t contribute if he was behind bars.

  The Dunnemores were known for their compassion.

  And they had the ear of the new president of the United States.

  Betsy was right. It wasn’t just friendship that had drawn him to her. Nicholas wanted to convince her to tell her friend, Wes Poe, that their old classmate deserved a break. He’d paid a price for his mistakes. He would use his wealth for good.

  He wanted her to get him a presidential pardon. It would stop the legal proceedings against him dead in their tracks. A pardon wouldn’t exonerate him, but it would keep him out of prison and buy him time to distance himself from his other activities before they, too, caught up with him. Time to take his profits and move on.

  “How is Rob?” Nicholas asked quietly.

  Her eyes glistened with sudden tears—a mother’s tears. They made her seem vulnerable, even more beautiful. He’d wanted Betsy Quinlan for a long time. He had wanted the girl she’d been at eighteen, and he wanted what she could do for him now, as a woman, as a friend and confidante of President John Wesley Poe.

  “Oh, Nicholas. Damn. I must be out of my mind. I don’t approve of what you’ve done, but tax evasion—” She collapsed back against her chair. “It’s not a violent crime.”

  “You’re upset because of Rob. I understand.”

  Even in her early fifties, her skin was translucent, smooth and barely lined, her delicate bone structure the stuff of a man’s dreams. Nicholas wanted to take her hand and comfort her, but he knew better, resisted the instinctive reaction to her tears. A mother’s grief. She gulped in a breath. “He’s holding his own. I want to be there now—” She broke off, biting back a sob.

  “When will you go?”

  “As soon as we can. I told Sarah—” She stopped herself, as if she realized she was venturing into territory that was none of his business. “Travel isn’t as easy for Stuart these days, and he’s in the middle of critical meetings. If Rob were in danger—we’d be there now.”

  “Of course you would.”

  “But his doctors tell us that each day—each hour—that passes without complications is a good sign. They expect him to make a full recovery.” She held her purse close to her chest and got to her feet. “Sarah’s in New York. My daughter. She was at the Rijksmuseum, too.”

  Nicholas had seen her. Pretty, smart. One of his men had delayed her to give him time to speak to her mother—who’d promptly told him she didn’t want him to contact her again.

  “I hope Sarah didn’t see you,” Betsy said. “I hope no one saw you.”

  He leaned back, studying her as he had when he’d sat behind her in a dull philosophy class, wondering if she were a virgin. The word in the dorm halls said she was. The Quinlans were well-to-do, classy people who gave a lot of money to Vanderbilt.

  He sighed, pushing his coffee aside. “Betsy, please believe that I had nothing to do with the shooting yesterday.”

  “I wish we’d never run into each other.” She seemed tired now, spent. “Call the U.S. embassy. Turn yourself in. If you’re innocent, trust the judicial system—”

  “My attorneys—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your damn lawyers!” She took a breath, her tears gone now. “You should have told me right from the start you were on the lam. I shouldn’t have had to find out on my own.”

  He narrowed his gaze on her. “How did you find out?”

  She averted her eyes. “That doesn’t matter.”

  But it did. Charlene Brooker had told her. Betsy had to wonder why an army captain stationed in Germany had contacted her to discuss her relationship with him.

  Did Betsy know that Captain Brooker had been murdered in Amsterdam, two days after the meeting about him?

  “Stay away from me,” Betsy whispered tightly. “Stay away from my family.”

  With a spurt of energy, she jumped up, almost turning over a chair as she made her way back out to the narrow cobblestone street, then quickly disappeared past a cheese-and-bread shop. She was smartly dressed, but she wore shoes that could handle Amsterdam’s many brick and cobblestone walks and streets, reminding him that she wasn’t eighteen anymore.

  A large group of American tourists started rearranging tables, calling loudly, cheerfully, to each other about who would sit where.

  A street musician fired up his accordion and moved in, playing a cheerful tune. The tourists laughed, loving it.

  Janssen paid for his coffee and walked down the street to a small Mercedes that awaited him. The back door opened, and he slid onto the cool leather seat next to Claude Rousseau, his most experienced bodyguard.

  “She won’t say anything,” Nicholas said. “She hasn’t told anyone that we’ve met. She’s not going to now that her son’s been shot. It would only complicate the situation for everyone—her, her husband, her son. The president.”

  “Is she afraid?”

  “Terrified.”

  He sighed, his pulse quickening. Yes, terrified. And yet all beautiful Betsy Quinlan Dunnemore knew was that her old acquaintance from college was a convicted tax evader.

  “Did she believe you?” Rousseau asked.

  “About her son? I don’t know.” That troubled him, because he’d told her the truth. He’d had nothing to do with the shooting. “Have you heard from our man in New York? Does he have any idea what the hell’s going on there?”

  Rousseau shook his head. He was dark haired, angular, good-looking and lethal. Thrown out of the French army. A mercenary, plain and simple. “Nothing.”

  “Be prepared. You might have to go to the
re.”

  Claude smiled. “All of my passports are in order.”

  Janssen knew not to ask how many passports, how many identities, Rousseau—if that was his real name—had at his disposal. Even if Claude would tell him, which he wouldn’t, there was always, for Nicholas, the question of plausible deniability. Some things he was better off not knowing. His people knew it and sometimes didn’t trouble him with details.

  Could his man in New York have taken it upon himself to try to kill Rob Dunnemore?

  If so, he should have finished the job—done it right and killed both marshals. Now it could look like a botched job, which, if his friends or enemies thought he was behind it, would only make Nicholas appear weak.

  The Mercedes pulled out into Amsterdam’s tangle of impossibly narrow streets, many indistinguishable from the sidewalks and ubiquitous bike paths. Janssen settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, picturing himself bike riding in the hills of northern Virginia as a boy, picking wild strawberries on a warm spring day, driving north into Pennsylvania with his father and walking up Little Round Top as his father regaled him with details of the Battle of Gettysburg. It had all sounded so romantic. To Father, the soldiers on both sides exemplified duty, honor, integrity and courage. They were men who’d never given up.

  Nicholas imagined the federal agents hunting him were much the same. He had no illusions they’d forgotten about him. “Failure to appear” was not a good thing. If convicted of the tax charges, he faced a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison—what would taking off to Switzerland before his trial tack onto his sentence?

  Going to trial wasn’t an option.

  Prison wasn’t an option.

  But he could never go home.

  That was what he hadn’t realized, on a soul-deep level, when he’d fled.

  He did now.

  He opened his eyes, saw a Dutch couple riding bicycles with their blond toddlers in little seats on the handlebars. Everything seemed so foreign to him. He felt the familiar lump in his throat. He was, he thought, so far from home.

  Eight

  Sarah passed bellmen and limousines on Central Park South and lingered a few seconds under the awning of the expensive hotel where the news conference touting the joint fugitive task force had been held.

  She could almost see Nate Winter and her brother walking out onto the street in their dark suits, relieved to have that tedious ninety minutes behind them.

  The weather was better today. Cool, partly cloudy.

  And it was later in the day. Afternoon rush hour. Sarah made her way across the busy street. There had to be more cars and more pedestrians on Central Park South now than yesterday at midday.

  For the first time all day, she was—at last—alone. She walked alongside the stone fence overlooking the south end of the park until she came to Fifth Avenue, which ran north along the huge park’s eastern side.

  Her interview with Joe Collins had been short and to the point. Sarah had made it clear that President Poe had checked on her simply as a friend. It wasn’t that big a deal. She didn’t know whether Collins was convinced or not. She spent the afternoon with her brother for five or ten minutes at a time. He was still out of it from his surgery and medications, but when he was awake enough to talk, he told her to go back to Tennessee.

  Sarah had finally told everyone she needed to get out on her own for a while. By herself. No marshals, no FBI, no doctors. No seriously injured brother she was upsetting with her presence.

  What if Rob got into trouble for being the president’s friend? Had he intentionally kept it a secret from his bosses, and now his twin sister had opened her big mouth? In hindsight, Sarah wished she’d taken the phone into the bathroom of her hotel room instead of talking to Wes right there in front of a deputy U.S. marshal. Let Rob be the one to tell his colleagues about their friendship with the president.

  She stopped hard at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance into Central Park, the same one her brother and Nate Winter had used yesterday. Across from her, the Grand Army Plaza split Fifth Avenue. She noticed the bright gold statue of William Tecumseh Sherman on his horse. The “Grand Army” was the Union Army of the Potomac, the plaza named in its honor after the Battle of Gettysburg.

  She’d read about it in a New York guidebook Juliet had thrust at her during a long wait at the hospital while doctors were in with her brother.

  The new leaves on the trees were a fresh spring-green, not as thick as the leaves in Night’s Landing, and when Sarah started down the stone steps, she saw the stretches of lush grass and the thousands of tulips that had been shown repeatedly on the television coverage of the shooting.

  The crime scene tape was gone. Sarah didn’t notice any FBI agents or reporters, but she did see two uniformed NYPD officers on foot.

  Her breathing was shallow, her stomach tight with tension.

  Ducks floated along the pond’s edge. An elderly woman with a cane settled onto a bench as if nothing had happened there, and three animated women in sneakers fast-walked north into the park.

  Normalcy.

  People must have accepted that the sniper had specifically targeted the two marshals, and yesterday’s shooting wasn’t a random act likely to be repeated, at least not with regular New Yorkers in the crosshairs. Maybe with another deputy.

  Maybe with a deputy’s sister.

  Sarah pushed the ridiculous thought out of her mind and continued gingerly down the steps.

  There’d been no warning—no man seen running with a gun, no shouted demands from the bushes. Just Rob jerking with the impact of the first shot, Nate Winter seeing the blood and getting them both to cover.

  She spotted the rock outcropping and realized for the first time that the park was well below street level here at its southeast corner.

  Was the shooter hiding somewhere in the bush now, watching, waiting?

  She warned herself not to succumb to her family penchant for drama and instead tried to absorb some of the get-on-with-life spirit of the tourists and New Yorkers around her.

  But her hands were clammy, and her vision seemed constricted, as if her mind was resisting taking in the details of her surroundings, mixing them with those of what she’d seen on television on the shooting, what she’d been told and had heard in the hospital corridors.

  According to news reports, witnesses hadn’t heard shots fired or noticed anything out of the ordinary, certainly no one crouched in the bushes with an assault rifle. They’d only seen the two men falling, the tall one helping the more seriously injured one to cover behind the rocks, his gun drawn as he shouted instructions to onlookers, then the New York City police officer arriving on his horse, and finally dozens of paramedics and federal, state and city law enforcement officers descending.

  The undergrowth along the pond and on the hillside below Central Park South conceivably could hide a shooter, but how could he get away with a near-instantaneous dragnet dropping on the surrounding area? How could he have avoided being seen crawling under the brush, setting up his weapon? The Pond—that was its name, just The Pond—was a wildlife sanctuary in the heart of the city.

  Sarah reminded herself she wasn’t an investigator or firearms expert. She ran her fingertips along the smooth granite face of the rock outcropping.

  As she forced herself to take a deep breath she noticed a man standing at the stone fence above her on Central Park South. He seemed to be watching her. He wore a black turtleneck and black leather jacket that were a little too warm for the conditions.

  She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

  The clothes. The dark hair that was long in the front.

  She squinted—yes, the angular features.

  She’d seen him before.

  Not in New York. He wasn’t a reporter, a doctor, a marshal.

  Where?

  Amsterdam.

  Sarah expelled the air from her lungs and tried to gulp in more, but her head was spinning. How could it have been Amsterdam?

 
The Rijksmuseum.

  Now she remembered. She’d flown to Amsterdam from Scotland three weeks ago to visit her parents while Rob was there on vacation.

  They’d all gone to the Rijksmuseum together.

  You’re being dramatic again.

  What difference did it make if it was the same man she’d seen at the museum?

  The man above her on Central Park South made eye contact with her briefly, then turned and disappeared across the street.

  Sarah started for a bench, but her knees buckled under her. She felt herself sinking. Damn. I can’t faint.

  “Hold your breath.” Nate Winter walked up behind her, speaking firmly, even sternly. “You’re hyperventilating.”

  “I’m not—I can’t breathe.”

  “It just feels that way.”

  She nodded, doing as he said. He slipped an arm around her middle and stood motionless, silent, for the minute or so it took for her to get her breathing back to normal.

  Feeling foolish, she stepped back out of his arm. “I’m okay now. Thanks.” She was too far away to have made a credible, positive identification of the man—of anyone—up on Central Park South. Thinking she recognized him had to have been a trick of her imagination. A product of the stress of the past two days. “I hope you didn’t hurt your arm.”

  Winter seemed even taller than he had at the hospital. “I didn’t grab you with my injured arm, although I could have. It’s doing fine.”

  “I wouldn’t have fainted.”

  He half smiled. “Of course not.”

  Sarah had no intention of telling him that she may have recognized someone up on the street. New York had a population of eight million—it had to be a common experience for people to think they saw someone they knew and have it turn out to be a perfect stranger. She didn’t even know why she remembered the man from Amsterdam. Because he’d stopped to look at a Dutch painting with her while she waited for her mother?

  Not entirely, she thought. She also had wondered if he might be with the silver-haired man who’d stopped to say hello to her mother in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.