“I miss your mother, too, Becca. It’s going to be all right. I swear
it to you.”
She pulled back just a bit and looked up at an older man who
looked oddly familiar to her, but that was impossible, wasn’t it?
She was sure she’d never seen him before in her life. The drugs
were still affecting her, holding her brain back, scrambling things,
making her cry. “I’m nobody’s darling girl,” she whispered, and
raised her hand to lightly touch her fingers to the man’s cheek. He
was so handsome, his face lean, his nose thin, straight, his eyes a soft
light blue, dreamy eyes. Now that was strange. Her mother had
told her that she had dreamy eyes, summer dreamy eyes. “I don’t
understand,” she said, frowning up at the man’s face. “Who are
you?”
The man looked as if he would cry with her, but he swallowed,
several times, and cleared his throat. “I’m your father, Becca. I’m
Thomas Matlock. I can’t bring your mother back, but I’m here
now, and I’ll stay.”
“You’re Thomas? You’re the man Adam and Savich are working
for?”
“Well, let’s say they’re helping me out.”
She didn’t say anything then, just frowned a bit, trying to assemble
things in her mind, in her memory, to make some sense of
them, realizing suddenly that she recognized his eyes because he’d
given them to her, realizing– “When he slipped the needle into
my arm that second time,” she whispered, looking directly into his
eyes, “just before I went under, he said right against my ear, ‘Tell
your daddy hello for me.’ ”
His face paled and he grew vague, indistinct, his arms loosening.
She grabbed his shirt with her fist, trying to pull him closer. “No,
don’t leave me, please.”
“Oh, God, I won’t.” Thomas looked up at Adam. “I guess that
says it all.”
“Yes,” Adam said. “At least now we know for bloody sure.”
“Amen to that,” Sherlock said. Then she added, “Why don’t we
all go out to get a cup of coffee while Thomas gets to know Becca
a bit better?”
When she was alone with the man who’d said he was her father,
she looked up at him and said, “Why did you leave us? I don’t even
remember what you looked like I was so young when you left.
There is this old photograph of you and Mom, and you looked so
young and so handsome. Carefree. It’s a wonderful picture.”
He held her very close for a long time, then slowly he said,
“You were all of three years old when it happened. I was a CIA operative,
Becca, and I was very good. There was this other KGB
spy–”
“Krimakov.”
“Yes. I was sent over to what is now Belarus, to stop him from
killing a visiting German industrialist. Krimakov had brought his
wife, as if they were there on some sort of vacation. It was in the
mountains. There was a gunfight and she tried to save him. I hadn’t
seen her, hadn’t even known she was there.” He paused a moment,
memory stark and alive in his eyes. He said simply, “I shot her in
the head and killed her. Krimakov promised me he would kill not
only me but my family. He vowed it. I believed him.
“He managed to escape me. I decided that I would have to kill
him to protect you. When I tried, I found out that he’d simply disappeared.
There was no trace of him. The KGB helped him, obviously,
and he stayed buried until very recently, when I was told he
was killed in an auto accident in Crete. You know the rest.”
“You left us to protect us?”
“Yes. Your mother and I discussed it. Matlock is a common
name. She took you and moved to New York. I saw her four,
maybe five times a year. We were always very, very careful. We
couldn’t tell you. We couldn’t put you in danger. It was the hardest
thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, Becca. Believe me.”
All of a sudden she had a father. She stared at his face, seeing
herself in him, seeing also a stranger. It was too much. She heard