Wild Card pp-8 Page 3

  “Sorry.” He gave her a slyly playful smile. “Tried to check myself.”

  Marissa threw her hands around his neck and stood facing him on the beach in the chill early morning breeze.

  “You’re hopeless,” she said.

  He shrugged and pulled her gently but irresistibly closer.

  “You’re also fouling up my pace,” she said.

  Felipe pulled her still closer, kissed her in the middle of her forehead.

  “Bringing me down off my targeted heart rate,” Marissa said. And who did she think she was kidding? She fell into his arms, her heart racing right along, her increasingly short breaths having more to do with what Felipe did to her — on and sometimes before contact — than the exertion of their run along the shore.

  He kissed her again, lightly, his lips touching her left brow, her right, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, then brushing down over the corners of her mouth, and further down to her neck as his hand glided up and up over the front of her running jacket.

  Marissa felt ripples of warmth. “Felipe…”

  He tilted his head back, a glint in his dark brown eyes.

  “I think you’re heartbeat feels just fine,” he said, putting his hand right there, cupping it over the firm swell of her breast.

  “Felipe…”

  “Fine as can be,” he said huskily, and raised his other hand to her cheek, stroked her hair back behind her ear with delicate fingertips, a few strands at a time, and then guided her mouth to his mouth, and kissed her long and fully and deeply.

  Her lips parted wide, hungry for him, Marissa felt his hand slide under her jacket and pressed herself against him to make it clear he could keep right on doing what he was, all the while surprised and further excited by her utter lack of modesty and self-consciousness. The early hour aside, this little beach on the Miller-Knox shoreline was a public place, and before Felipe Escalona entered her life that would have her made her far too uptight to carry on like a teenager having her first heavy make-out session. But this was what he did to her, and was how it had been for her since they’d met here almost a month ago to the hour, both out for Sunday morning jogs on the weekend before Easter.

  They were yin and yang, opposites attracting, choose your favorite advice column canard for two very different types of people who seemed to make an ideal fit.

  The only child of a Latino entrepreneur who ran a large San Francisco construction and real-estate development firm of his founding, Marissa was a few months shy of her twenty-first birthday, which would roughly coincide with her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she’d studied toward a BA in business administration and a minor degree in political science. Felipe, who was five years her senior, and whose trace of an accent hinted at his Mexican origins — he’d told her that his parents had immigrated from Guadalajara when he was a boy, and that he’d spent a couple of years in his native country earning a master’s in Spanish language and literature — made his living as a freelance writer of bilingual educational materials, and was presently contracted with a software designer called Golden Triangle to work on a program meant for high school classrooms. Easygoing and spontaneous, his tongue partially in cheek (or so Marissa assumed), Felipe insisted the key to his happiness and productivity was wearing sweatpants in his home office, and claimed the prospect of having to put on a suit and tie five days a week canceled out whatever lure a guaranteed wage might present.

  By sharp contrast Marissa was pragmatic, sober, and normally controlled to an extreme, traits she believed came straight from her father, a man of strict discipline who had raised her as a single parent since she was ten, when terminal uterine cancer had claimed a still-youthful Yolanda Vasquez to deprive Marissa of a mother’s affection. All her life Marissa had found that her success within ruled social and scholastic lines had been the surest way to please him, and pleasing him remained as important to her now as it ever was. She felt the need to channel her considerable energy and intelligence within the structure of an imposed routine, thrived in the academic grid of scheduled classes and exams, and could not envision a career without organizational security and a regular weekly paycheck. On entering the employment market after commencement, she hoped to expeditiously find a position with one of the corporate multinationals that would utilize her specialized academic skills.

  In her amorous affairs Marissa’s patterns of behavior always had been much the same — partitioned and ordered so as not to upset her normal balance. She’d cared for her two previous lovers and enjoyed the physical aspects of those relationships, but in each case the divide between their sexual intimacies and Marissa’s reserved expressions of emotion had left both partners ultimately dissatisfied, and made her wonder if she suffered from an irremediable personality glitch. Yet from the very beginning with Felipe, their sex had been a sort of catalytic conversion, an act of abandon binding her heart and body to his in a wholly fulfilling way she had never believed she would experience.

  Still Marissa knew that she and Felipe were really, essentially different from one another in many ways… just as she undeniably knew she’d fallen in love with him. For three of the past four weekends they had spent together, she had continued to allow that it might be simple infatuation, albeit with a giddy extra charge. But lying drowsily wrapped around Felipe at her Oxford Avenue apartment Friday night, her thoughts getting into a relaxed flow after they had exhausted their passions in bed, Marissa had found it impossible to conceive of losing what he had brought out in her, or sharing it with any other man, and acknowledged then that it was time to release whatever emotional reins she’d persisted in holding onto.

  Being who she was, however, letting go of her emotions did not mean she could simply have them bolt the fences. Marissa needed a framework within which to display and share them, and sought unambiguous definition for her relationship with Felipe if she was to feel altogether comfortable with it. If the two of them were not yet a mutually and openly declared, exclusive, official couple, then maybe what they were having was just a disruptive sidetrack in the well-coordinated progress of her life, a fling that — like the others that had preceded it — would lead nowhere in the end. In those moments late Friday night after he’d brought her to unprecedented pleasure and gratification, taken her as far out of control as she had ever been, Marissa had drifted off to sleep thinking she wanted to take the next step toward romantic legitimacy and introduce him to her father, whose stamp of approval she strongly desired, even while worrying more than a bit that she might be rushing things. But to her relief Felipe had met the idea with enthusiasm when she broached it the next morning, and, seeing no point in further delay, she’d arranged for them to meet for brunch up at the family home in San Rafael later on today.

  Right now though… right now Felipe was once again making it hard to think about later on. Or about anything.

  Not with what he was doing to her.

  He kept his eyes open while they kissed, as did Marissa, their gazes locked, remaining that way until after their mouths came apart.

  “We should quit,” she said, taking a breath, “before we do something against the law.”

  “I won’t snitch.”

  “Somebody might see us.”

  “There’s no one else around.”

  “This is a public beach.”

  “No one’s around,” he repeated. “It’s six A.M.”

  “Right about the time it was when we met.”

  She looked at him.

  He looked at her.

  “I know where,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  Marissa’s heart pounded. And those tingles coming from all the way down inside her…

  “Felipe, this is crazy, we aren’t through with our run,” she said, her last bit of resistance sounding unbelievably lame to her own ears.

  He slid his hand from under her jacket and T-shirt now, wrapped both arms around her waist, and pulled her
hips against him, held her so close their clothes hardly seemed to give them any separation.

  She gasped, swallowed.

  “Omigod.”

  Felipe nodded.

  “Forget about running,” he said. “Let’s go while I can still walk.”

  She understood perfectly what he meant.

  They had driven down from Marissa’s place near the Berkeley campus, leaving her Outback in a sandy access road east of the tunnel that cut through the hills below Richmond Plunge. Tucked into a cove past the marina, the beach was a fairly secluded cul-de-sac pocketed in on its landward side by the split and crumbled remnants of an ancient cliff face, with the road where Marissa parked about midway along its irregular curve on the bay shore. Her usual habit was to trot to the cove from the vehicle and then start her laps in earnest, running to one end of the beach, then the other, and then doubling on back toward the access road to wind things up. She and Felipe had been in that final stage of their run when he had gotten to her with his bottom-pinching seduction, and they could see the road through some waist-high beach grass a short distance ahead to their right.

  Her pulse raced as they walked toward it, holding hands. Felipe had gotten to her all right, gotten her weak-kneed with eagerness. Reaching the foot of the access road, she could feel whatever was left of her inhibitions sailing off toward the white gulls and cloud puffs overhead like helium balloons snipped from their strings.

  Which made the unexpected sight of another parked vehicle a wholly frustrating comedown.

  It was a Saturn wagon, one of those sporty new models designed to resemble sleeked out minivans, and it had been angled onto the side of the road opposite her car a few yards closer to the beach. Standing by the closed rear hatch with his back to them was a guy in a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and an army green field or baseball cap. He was bent over one of those large red-and-white beer coolers as if reorganizing its contents.

  They paused at the foot of the road and exchanged looks.

  “So much for us being alone,” Marissa said, thinking Felipe seemed especially out of sorts. She sighed, let go of his hand to slip her water bottle from its pouch in her runner’s belt, and took a long gulp. “Better have some,” she said and handed him the bottle. “It’ll cool you down.”

  Felipe lifted the water to his mouth and drank without a word, still seemingly unable to quite grasp the idea that there might be more than two early birds roaming the beach in the state of California.

  He was passing the bottle back to Marissa when the guy behind the Saturn straightened from rummaging around in his cooler and turned to look at them.

  His appearance caught Marissa by surprise. For whatever reason — his posture, or the way he was dressed, or maybe because of that oversized two-tone beer cooler — she had assumed he would be a youngish man, but the face under the bill of his cap was far from youthful. In fact it was incredibly ancient. Lined and wrinkled, its cheeks sagging in loose folds of flesh, the slits of its eyes peering at her from above a vulturous nose and scowling lips, it was also infinitely unpleasant…

  Then Marissa noticed what he was holding in his right hand. What he’d drawn out of the cooler, keeping it briefly hidden from sight by his body as he turned. And all at once her surprised reaction jolted up to one of surpassing shock and fear.

  Not at any point in the waking nightmare to come would Marissa be certain whether she realized the man was wearing a mask before she actually saw his weapon, what might have been an Uzi, or something like one. But she knew what was happening the instant she did see it, knew it was her fault, all hers… and knew that none of the protective structures she’d built to contain her orderly little world had kept the truth from breaking through at last.

  The man raised his gun in front of him, and then the rear doors of the station wagon were flying open, and more men were exiting both sides, three of them spilling from the doors, sprinting across the sand toward her and Felipe with miniature submachine guns also in their hands and obvious disguises pulled over their heads — a bearded pirate, a devil’s head, a grinning skull.

  Tears began to flood Marissa’s eyes, further distorting the grotesque Halloween shop faces, but she held them back, checking them almost on reflex, refusing to succumb to panic. This was a public beach, hadn’t that been what she’d insisted? A public beach, where any break in the quiet would stand out. Her voice would carry, and someone might be close enough to hear her scream. Driving, walking, on a bicycle. Close enough to hear.

  Make some noise, she demanded of herself. Come on, make some noise, scream your head off—

  But it was too late, the men from the wagon were on her in a flash, surrounding her, a hand clapping over her mouth to stifle her rising cry for help. “Entra aqui! A prisa!” the one with the old man mask shouted to the others in Spanish, telling them to hurry up. And an instant later she was grabbed by the arms and shoulders and hustled toward the car with the metal bore of a gun sticking into her back. Alongside her, and then slightly ahead of her, Felipe was also jostled forward at gunpoint, stumbling a little as they pushed him toward one of the wagon’s open back doors.

  He turned his head toward her, eyes wide, and started to call out her name, but was punched hard across the face by the man in the pirate mask before it could fully escape his lips.

  They shoved Felipe into the rear of the station wagon as his legs crumpled underneath him, and moments later jammed Marissa through the same door, a gunman climbing into the backseat on either side of them, the others rushing around into the front.

  This is my fault, she thought again mutely. It’s true, it’s my fault, I should have known.

  And then the wagon’s motor came to life, and Marissa was jerked back in her seat as it kicked into reverse, cut a sharp turn away from the beach, and went speeding off in a cloud of spun-up sand.

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  “Trinidad,” Megan Breen said to Nimec.

  “What?”

  “And Tobago,” Megan said. “With Annie.”

  “Huh?”

  “Annie, your lovely and beloved wife.” She regarded him across her desk with mild amusement. “The place I mentioned… on Tobago, not Trinidad… is called Rayos del Sol. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

  Nimec sat with a blank expression on his face.

  “Testing one-two-three, Pete,” Megan said, and pointed to her ear. “Can you read me, or is it cochlear implant time?”

  Nimec frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about your hearing. I’ve noticed it seems to conk out whenever I ask you to do something that conflicts with plans you’ve already locked in on.”

  His frown deepened.

  “I sat here listening to your Caribbean project update for half an hour,” he said. “You want me to run every detail back to you, I’ll be glad to oblige.”

  “Which I guess would make your deafness selective.”

  Nimec crossed his hands in a time-out gesture.

  “We going to talk straight?” he said.

  “I’d be peachy with that.”

  “I’m not getting shipped out to Trinidad. Not with Ricci on our front burner.”

  “Then we’ll shift burners.”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “To him or us?” Megan said.

  Nimec shrugged.

  “Both, I suppose,” he said. “Our lead field op being on indefinite suspension is the kind of thing that leaves everybody betwixt and between. UpLink’s stuck without a replacement, Ricci can’t move on with his life.”

  She looked at him, her large, intelligent green eyes holding steady on his face. Nimec braced for a difficult contest. He’d been in this spot with Meg before, or in similar spots, and didn’t see any easy give in her right now.

  “I’m prepared to occupy a solitary corner of limbo for a while,” she said. “In a sense, we’ve been in it for over a month. Tom Ricci’s got us in a bind with all three branches of governm
ent and every major law-enforcement agency you can name. Even our best friends at the Pentagon have started to distance themselves, which puts our pending defense contracts at risk. And you know the table’s set for us to become the target of a public furor the moment any information about his one-man road show on the East Coast is declassified.”

  “Figure the people whose lives he saved from those terrorists might be a few million exceptions to popular opinion.”

  “And if it had gone the other way, I don’t know that even God in all his mercy could forgive us,” Megan said. “Ricci’s secretive actions could as easily have made those people casualties, Pete. But that’s over and done. He took us out of the decision-making loop by going it alone. Now it’s his turn to wait outside it while we deal with the consequences.” Megan paused. “You need some physical and mental distance from San Jose. A chance to order your thoughts before making a comfortable decision on whether he stays or goes.”

  Nimec held his silence. Behind Megan, her office window gave a curiously smog-bleared view of Mount Hamilton away to the north. He remembered its rugged flank as everlastingly vivid and imposing from Roger Gordian’s office, which was just catercorner up the hall. But then, Meg’s window was just that, a window. Gord’s occupied an entire side of the room from floor to ceiling… really, it might be considered a glass wall. With that much light pouring through, Nimec supposed you would see well into the distance regardless of hazy environmental conditions. Anyway, it was impossible to make comparisons. And unfair. Gord was more or less retired. Megan had gotten a deserved promotion in rank to CEO and was more or less in charge of UpLink International’s corporate affairs. The outlook from her office was the one Nimec had here before his eyes these days, and it remained consistent with the view he’d always appreciated next door. How could Meg be blamed if it wasn’t as impressively crystal clear?

  The simple fact was that, little by little, things had changed. And he’d have to accept it.

  “Bottom line,” he said after a moment, “you’re telling me I need a vacation.”