Frame Smiths bearing the American Eagles engraved on the barrel flats. He could see the guns as she opened each holster in turn and checked the cylinders, then reholstered the revolvers and resecured the holster flaps.
As she walked across the Great Room, he saw that she too wore additional armament—the COP Derringer was not to be seen, but the little four-barreled .357 Magnum would be in her purse—the massive black canvas bag she almost invariably carried. But on her belt was a Gerber Mk II, the sheath apparently specially made, black, efficient-looking, the knife’s handle material and the brass double-quillon guard betraying it as the Presentation series variation—just as efficient as the more subdued-looking Gerber Rourke now wore, but prettier.
She wore a shoulder rig he had never seen before—not something designed for concealment, but a field rig. Under her right armpit was a small black-handled knife, hanging upside down in a black leather sheath—he guessed a Gerber Guardian, the tiny boot knife similar in size to his Sting I A. Under her left armpit, balancing the rig, was what he recognized as a stainless steel Walther PPK/S, hanging upside down like the knife, protruding through the upside of the holster a stainless steel-looking—it could have been some type of aluminum—silencer, perhaps six inches long and the approximate diameter of a silver dollar. She saw him looking at it— “I had the silencer specially built—aircraft aluminum but very strong. The baffles need changing after every five hundred rounds or so—there’s no slide lock, but I had the recoil spring altered so it functions perfectly with subsonic ammunition. It’s very quiet that way—almost like a whisper. But with the regular recoil spring, like I have in it now, it handles 95-grain Hollow Points and it sounds about like a belch. I tested it a lot, but never used it in the field. In case we need a relatively silent shot, this should do it.”
He saw Sarah looking at him—she stood beside Natalia.
He walked over to the two women, his right arm around Sarah, his left around Natalia. He drew both women close. There was no need to say what he felt.
Chapter Thirty
Natalia behind him, they had ridden in silence on Rourke’s machine to the hidden aircraft. Like Rourke, she had carried two assault rifles, but both of hers were M-16s. As they worked now to remove the camouflage netting from the prototype F-111, she spoke. “What will you do, John?”
“About what your uncle has to tell us?”
“No—about Sarah and about me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You love her—and she loves you—it’s plain to see for—”
“She said the same thing about you,” Rourke said, stopping what he was doing, looking at her. “That she could tell I love you, and that you love me.”
“And what did you say to her—if I can ask?”
“I told her—well, I guess pretty much what I told you.” He chewed down hard on his cigar. “Paul is a fine man.”
He watched her eyes in the darkness—another day was coming soon, the horizon pink with it in the east, chain lightning crackling across the sky there.
“Is that what you want—for me, for him?” Natalia asked, turning away from the plane, lighting a cigarette for herself.
“No,” Rourke sighed. “I’m just saying it.”
“This is a strange situation, John—silly, sad—all at once. If you had met me before you’d met Sarah, and then met Sarah later, I think we’d be talking about the same thing, wouldn’t we?”
Rourke looked back at the fuselage of the jet. He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I learned some things about myself tonight—when you read my uncle’s letter.”
“Look—”
“No—let me finish.”
Rourke nodded only, lighting his cigar with the battered Zippo that bore his initials—he turned it over in his hands, feeling the engraving for the initials under his thumb. “So say it.”
“How much my uncle loves me—it doesn’t matter that he isn’t really my uncle—he is my uncle. And Paul—I don’t know how it feels to be a Jew, but I am one—half, at least. The way he reached out and held my hand when you read that part of my uncle’s letter. And Sarah—she felt for me, about my mother and father dying. My uncle had always told me it had been an accident.”
“You never checked?”
“I never saw any reason to—I guess that I was naive.”
Rourke walked over to stand beside her, finding her left hand in the darkness, holding it tight.
“And about you—I learned a lot about you,” she whispered. “That you really love me the same way you love her. That I could be a wife, a mother—that because of what I am and what I did sometimes—that—”
Rourke held her against his chest in the darkness.
It was insane. General Varakov had spoken as though the world would end. The lightning tracked across the sky.
But his only thought was that he loved two women—he realized now—equally.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sarah Rourke watched the man she had just met—he was younger than she, she guessed. She fixed a drink for him—Seagram’s Seven and ice—and a drink for herself. Her husband’s taste in liquor was as exciting and varied as his taste in women’s clothing. If someone at the Retreat didn’t like blended whiskey—and it was her favorite blended whiskey— they were out of luck.
“Good thing you’re not a Scotch drinker,” she called out to Paul Rubenstein, forcing a smile.
“Yeah—good thing,” he nodded.
He was sitting in the sofa in what she had learned was called the Great Room. As she picked up his drink and her own, she sipped at hers briefly, studying the kitchen. “A microwave oven—God,” and she felt herself smile. It would be good to cook again. Really cook.
She left the kitchen, walking down the three steps into the Great Room, setting Paul’s drink down in front of him on the coffee table on a coaster, then sitting down at the farthest corner of the couch from him. She tucked her legs up under her, tugging at her borrowed skirt, smoothing it over her thighs—thinking about the woman to whom it belonged. The label in it was a label she had never even considered affording before The Night of The War. And the woman—she rode with her husband through the night, to do something or other that Sarah didn’t quite understand. She sipped at her drink again. Paul Rubenstein seemed nervous to her.
“Is there something wrong?”
He looked at her, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose—it seemed more than a nervous habit with him—a preoccupation.
“No, Mrs. Rourke.”
“It’s Sarah, Paul—call me Sarah, please.”
“Sarah,” he nodded, picking up his drink, taking a swallow of it.
“There’s something bothering you—is it that John left you here to stay with us and—”
“He couldn’t have taken me the way my arm is—no. That just happened. It’s not his fault—so I guess—”
“But there’s something bothering you,” Sarah insisted. As she moved her right hand, setting her drink down on a coaster on the end table nearest her, she saw the picture of herself and the children on the far side of the couch. Near Paul Ruben-stein. She remembered when the picture was taken—they had just—
“I, ahh—” Rubenstein began, interrupting her thoughts.
“What?”
“I gotta talk—I shouldn’t, ahh—” and he exhaled loudly—too loudly. It was as though something were bottled up inside him and just about to escape—she waited, listening, as she moved her hand back from her drink suddenly aware of the fact that for the first time in—how long?—she wasn’t wearing a gun, she was wearing a skirt. She sat on a comfortable couch, in a secure place.
“I think we’re going to be friends, Paul—the children really seemed to take to you. And I think—well—I think, so did I—you can tell me—sometimes just telling somebody is—”
He stood up—too quickly she guessed, because she saw him touch at his left arm as he walked behind the couch and stood beside the glass-front gun case—there were empty spots in the case now. All she could hear was the water as it spilled down the falls at the far end of the Great Room and into the pool there. She had no idea where it came from, or where the excess water went, because the pool seemed less than three feet deep—a mother always checked the depth of water her children would be playing near.
Paul Rubenstein started to talk then. “Before I met your husband,” and his voice sounded slightly breathless to her, pain perhaps, but maybe not his arm. And his words were very hurried. “Well—I was just riding a desk in New York City. I had a girl—but New York isn’t there anymore and neither is she. And I guess—shit—” and he turned around and stared at her, his eyes wide. “If what Natalia’s uncle talked about is right—and maybe the world ends but somehow we just go right on living—what the hell am— “ he turned away, her last glimpse of his face showing her that he seemed to be biting his lips, almost physically holding something back.