Chapter Twenty-Five
ANNIE’S STOMACH FLOODED with acid, while her heart thudded hard in a race to see whether she’d have a heart attack or an ulcer first.
She had given Cole more of her heart than she’d given to any man. She had ripped her chest open for him and let him see the bleeding memories of her past. She’d shown him everything.
But for him, their entire relationship—every day when she’d been agonizing over falling for him—had been playacting. He’d used her for access.
Betrayal wasn’t a large enough word to describe what she felt.
She wanted to go to the deer blind, but the mocking ghost of Cole’s presence would be there. Same at the sacred tree circle.
She wanted to run into the woods and lose herself. She wanted to run so deep that pain couldn’t find her.
There was a different woods past the far edge of the cornfield where she’d never taken Cole or any of her patients. She rarely went there herself. The place had been the site of a Revolutionary War battle. She always felt as if ghosts walked among the trees there.
At the moment, Annie felt like a ghost herself.
Tears rolling down her face, she dove into the corn and headed for the far edge.
Thursday
Dr. Ambrose had prescribed Cole’s meds, so he had to meet with him to discuss what Cole would like to continue and what he’d like to discontinue. Their appointment was at ten o’clock. Other than that, Cole canceled the rest of the exit sessions that had been scheduled for him.
He was grateful for the effort people at Hope Hill had put into making him feel better, but he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to make nice all morning. He didn’t want to see anyone but Annie, and Annie didn’t want to see him.
Cole was ready to get out of there. Not that he would be able stay away.
His plan was to go home, move out of his apartment, and ship his stuff up here. Before coming to Hope Hill, he’d done mostly Internet work, reviewing security protocols for various companies. He could pick up more work like that, and he had money saved from his active-duty days.
He would do whatever it took for Annie to forgive him.
If she made him wait two years, then so be it.
He wanted a chance with her. If he couldn’t convince her, if she still said no, he’d accept her decision. But he wasn’t going to throw away the possibility of a future with her because of their first fight.
Cole walked into Ambrose’s office.
The shrink looked up. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re leaving. Please, have a seat.”
Cole didn’t expect to stay long enough to make sitting down worthwhile. He sat anyway, to be polite. “Just the way it played out.”
The man studied him carefully and poured them both some water, the ice clinking in the carafe. “So, what’s on your mind this morning?”
Annie. Annie had been on Cole’s mind most of the time since he’d met her. Not that he’d tell Ambrose.
“Getting back home,” he said instead.
“Back to the same old same old?”
“I don’t think so. I’d like to think I’ve learned while I’ve been here.”
Ambrose offered an easy grin. “We certainly hope so.”
Cole hesitated a moment before he asked the question that had been bouncing around in his head for the past day or two. “Does PTSD have a memory-loss component?”
“It can. Why do you ask?”
“I keep feeling lately that I should be remembering something that I don’t. It’s right there under the surface. I can almost see it, but then I can’t.”
Interest glinted in Ambrose’s eyes. “Stay. Then we can work on that together.”
“I’ll probably remember on my own. Lying in bed last night, I almost had it. It might come to me if I do some meditation.”
They talked about that, then his meds. He didn’t want to renew his prescriptions, but understood that some of the meds couldn’t be stopped abruptly if he didn’t want withdrawal to knock him on his ass for the next couple of days, even weeks. So they set up a schedule to wean him off the drugs. Ambrose made a pitch that needing pills didn’t mean Cole was weak.
Something Annie would say. Cole tried not to think about the fact that Annie hated his guts now. He’d return. He’d grovel. He’d do whatever he had to, to earn her forgiveness.
Ambrose’s advice on Cole’s future treatment plan took longer than Cole thought it would. Next thing he knew, a full hour had passed.
He thanked the psychiatrist one more time, shook the guy’s hand, and went to pack.
He swung by Annie’s room on the ground floor. Knocked. She didn’t open up. Maybe she had a session.
He pulled out his phone to text her. Can I see you before I leave?
Frustration shot through him when he remembered that she’d lost her phone. She hadn’t given him her new number. He had no way of reaching her before he left.
Maybe it was for the better.
He deleted the message as he headed upstairs to his own room.
She needed time to process everything he’d told her yesterday. He would contact her later. Her e-mail address was up on her animal sanctuary’s website. That’d work.
Cole had lunch at the cafeteria, then drove to the airport through sheets of rain. He dropped his rental and checked in. By the time he made it to gate twenty-seven, the sign was up that his flight had been delayed due to the weather.
He went to grab coffee. He had his friend Derek’s thriller in his suitcase. Maybe he’d finally get to finish the book.
He didn’t. As rain slammed into the terminal windows and the sky darkened, another announcement flashed onto the display screen next to the boarding gate, updating to a longer delay. Cole was fine one second, then knocked sideways the next by the sudden flashback of him running up an Afghan hillside with Matt across his shoulders.
We walked three hundred miles, because the nearest US Army base was in Bagram.
Cole blinked hard, reaching out to steady himself on the armrest of his chair. Who said that?
Then the voice continued. Officially, there are no special ops stationed there, but it’s an unofficial staging base for black-ops missions.
He blinked. Shook his head. Who would know that?
He did. He had said those words. When? He had no memory of the conversation.
He pushed up from the gray plastic chair, strode to the window, and stared into the roiling clouds of the approaching hurricane. A military plane might take off in weather like that, but no way a civilian aircraft was going to. Nobody was flying out of Philly tonight.
Looked like Hurricane Rupert has just made landfall at Chesapeake Bay, coming fast this way.
He paced along the window. The flashbacks wouldn’t leave his head. When had he talked about Bagram? He didn’t discuss Bagram with anyone, ever.
He ran his hand over his shaved head. Why would he say something like that? To whom? He couldn’t untangle the jumble in his mind.
Had he said those words at all, or was it some kind of false memory? Was he now, in addition to flashbacks, hallucinating too?
He almost regretted ever coming to Hope Hill, ever letting the shrinks stir up the past in his head. Almost, because he couldn’t regret meeting Annie.
How many SEALs were at Bagram the last time you were there?
OK, he had not said that. He closed his eyes and could see someone’s lips move, forming the question.
Cole could clearly envision a man’s mouth. But he couldn’t see the face that went with it.
The walls of the terminal closed in on him. He grabbed his phone to call Annie, then swore. He needed her new number, dammit. She was the only person he 100 percent trusted at Hope Hill.
Cole leaned his forehead against the cool window, not hearing the rain outside, but feeling the vibrations as the heavy drops hit the glass. When and where had he been questioned? He wanted to pin down the sudden flashbacks. He needed to recover the memory of the face that went with the lips that asked him questions nobody should have asked him.
The last time he’d been questioned like that . . .
A flashback from one of the endless torture sessions of his captivity slammed into him. Cole broke into pacing again. He needed to work off the excess energy that sought a violent outlet, exhaust some of his murderous rage. He needed a clear head.
When was the last time you were at Bagram? How many troops were there at the time?
Had he answered that? He couldn’t remember. Frustration pumped through him.
Who was the senior brass at the base?
Cole knew the answer. But had he told?
You were shot down in a chopper. Black Hawk? How many of them did the base have?
He stopped as lightning crackled through the darkening sky, the floor shaking the next second. He could actually hear the thunder, but only as if from a great distance, or as if he were deep underwater.
The thought that speared through his mind hit him as hard as if he’d been struck by that lightning bolt. He didn’t remember where or when those questions had been asked, but he clearly remembered lip-reading them.
His hearing hadn’t been injured until they were escaping. The damage had happened in a drag-out, to-the-death fight with one of the guards. So the questioning Cole was remembering so suddenly couldn’t have happened during the six months he’d been a POW.
The memory had to be more recent. When and where?
Hope Hill. His subconscious mind kicked up the answer. Hope Hill had a traitor who dealt in information.
Cole’s mind buzzed like a whole flock of incoming choppers as he thought about all the pills he’d taken while he’d been at Hope Hill. Any number of people around him could have switched out a sleeping pill for something else. What had he been given?
Scopolamine came to mind, used in the twenties by police departments to interrogate suspects. Not only did it loosen people’s tongues, but they couldn’t remember the interrogation afterward. It was banned for police use now. Any evidence gained with the help of scopolamine was inadmissible in court, but the drug was still around, used in small doses to prevent severe motion sickness.
A traitor slash spy could certainly gain access to a couple of pills easily enough. Except that the traitor at Hope Hill was Trevor.
Or was he?
Trevor had had a scar on his lower lip, part of the injury that had put titanium pins in the kid’s neck. But the mouth in Cole’s newly recovered memories, the mouth that had asked him those revealing questions, had been unblemished.
So not Trevor, then.
Cole let that thought settle in for a few seconds.
If Trevor wasn’t the bad guy here, could he have been a victim?
What if Trev too had been drugged and used? What if he too remembered answering traitorous questions? Cole stifled a groan at the implications of his trail of thoughts. What if Trev hadn’t committed suicide? What if the traitor had killed Trev?
Trev had been planning that barn . . .
Cole sent his CO a text. Think we got the wrong guy. It’s not Trevor. Then he added, I’m at the airport. Heading back to Hope Hill.
His CO would get in touch with him as soon as he got the messages. He could be anywhere. He could be over in Yemen with a team right now, rounding up the recipients of the coded Hope Hill information. Cole was on his own.
He grabbed his bag and walked out of the terminal, straight to car rental.
He reached the desk just in time. The parking lot was flooding. He got the last car they signed out before piling the rest on trailers to move to higher ground.
He drove through Philly in driving rain, going at half the speed he could have if the road wasn’t slick, visibility crap, and his mobility limited by his injured shoulder. The trip to Hope Hill took twice as long as it should have, and he found himself grinding his teeth at the delay.
He was soaked to the skin by the time he ran from the parking lot into the building.
He checked Annie’s room first. Still not there. She’d probably decided to stay at her house to make sure her animals were OK during the storm. He wanted to text her, dammit, wanted to make sure she was safe. Instead, he grabbed his phone and started typing messages to his CO. He began with the flashbacks and listed the questions he remembered having been asked.
He was typing out the fifth question, focused on the mouth forming the words, when the full face flashed into his mind at last.
Son of a bitch.
Cole hurried down the hallway as he sent the last message.
Dan Ambrose. It’s the staff psychiatrist.
The door to the hallway with the staff offices hadn’t been locked yet for the night, so Cole simply walked through. Ambrose’s office stood empty.
Right. The guy would have no reason to be here at eight o’clock at night.
Murphy Dolan’s office was empty too. Cole couldn’t see any other staff. Only two offices had the lights on, but nobody sat behind the desks.
Cole ran to the staff break room down the hall. Since the facility was inpatient, they had staff on duty around the clock. Somebody had to be here who could tell him where to find Ambrose.
Cole burst into the break room. The three women sitting at the round table in the corner looked up from chatting over coffee: Libby the reflexologist, Kate the touch therapist, and Margie from the cleaning crew.
“Does anyone know where Ambrose lives? It’s an emergency.”
“Everything OK?” Libby came to her feet.
Kate, too, immediately moved toward Cole. “What can we help with?”
“I need Ambrose’s address. I need to talk to him.”
Kate stopped. “I’m sorry, but we can’t disclose personal information to a patient. I’m sure that whatever is wrong, we can help.”
As the floor vibrated behind him with footsteps, Cole turned in time to see Murphy Dolan stride up to him.
“Where’s Ambrose?” Cole grabbed Dolan by the arm and turned him so when he responded, Cole would be able to read his lips.
“He didn’t show for your session either?” Dolan glanced down at the hand, then over at the women who looked uncertain, clearly worried about Cole’s brusque manner and demands. “Dan didn’t show for any of his afternoon patients. I left him two messages earlier, but he never called me back.”
Dolan ushered Cole out of the break room. The guy sensed a threat, and his first move was to protect the women. Cole could respect that. He meant no harm. Not to them.
He closed the door behind him.
“I came to Hope Hill undercover,” he told Dolan. Cole needed his cooperation to find the psychiatrist. “I think Ambrose has been drugging patients. He’s been getting confidential military information out of them, then passing it on to a connection in the Middle East.”
As Dolan’s eyes narrowed, the phone vibrated in Cole’s pocket.
His CO with a text. Organizing Backup. Cole clicked to call, and when the display showed that the other end picked up, he said, “I’m going to give the phone to Murphy Dolan. You need to tell him I check out. You need to tell him to give us assistance.”
He handed the phone over.
As Dolan listened, the man’s jaw went from tense to tenser. Within five seconds, his eyes glinted with murder.
Then things went from bad to worse.
Cole remembered another question Ambrose had asked.
What’s your relationship with Annie Murray?
Why was Ambrose interested in Annie?
Cole thought of her stalker, her intruder, the hit-and-run that almost pushed her into the reservoir. And so far the police couldn’t pin any of that on her ex. Last Cole had heard, they were still pushing for a confession from Joey and Big Jim.
Cole held his hand out for the phone. “Find and detain Ambrose,” he told Dolan. “The police can help. I need to find Annie.”
Then Cole was running.