“But there must be . . .”
Frank’s voice again, more hard-edged this time. “There isn’t. Come on, Doctor. Let’s be honest. We both know she isn’t going to wake up. So it’s all a moot point anyway.”
Tracy thought, I’m not going to wake up.
Profound peace overwhelmed her.
She would be with Nick at last.
“WAKE UP!”
Someone was shaking her. Shining a light in her eyes.
She’d been having the most wonderful dream. She and Nick were playing chess, back in the kitchen at Steamboat. Blake wasn’t there—he’d gone out riding—but Jeff was, whispering in Nick’s ear, teaching him how to cheat, or at least how to outsmart his mother. They were both laughing. Tracy didn’t approve but she was laughing too.
Until Althea walked in, her long dark hair billowing behind her, her face a mask of death. Sitting down at the table, she swept away the chess pieces. Tracy watched, frozen, as they clattered to the floor. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
“I hate chess. Let’s play poker.”
And then the kitchen was gone, Nick too, and they were at a table in a casino—the Bellagio?—and Hunter Drexel was dealing. But the cards weren’t playing cards, they were Tarot cards, and Tracy turned over the Lovers and Althea looked at Jeff and started laughing and laughing and then Hunter Drexel grabbed Tracy by the shoulders and shouted:
“WAKE UP! Look at the light! The truth’s right in front of you, Tracy! Wake up!”
Tracy opened her eyes.
Loving, familiar eyes stared back at her.
“It’s you!” she smiled.
And sank back into the darkness.
IT WAS THE LONGEST night of Cameron Crewe’s life. Longer, even, than the night he lost Marcus. He’d been numb then, too shocked to process fully what was happening. He remembered Charlotte sitting beside him at Marcus’s bedside, the two of them holding hands. If someone had taken a photograph then and given it a title, they would probably have called it United in Grief. Except, of course, that grief didn’t unite anything. All it did was destroy. Dismantle. Unravel.
Cameron Crewe hadn’t known that then but he knew it now, watching Tracy fight for her life. Seeing her struggle up into the light, only to lose her footing and tumble back down, helpless, into the darkness.
It was Greg Walton who called him, a full twenty-four hours after Tracy was attacked. Cameron was furious.
“Why the hell didn’t anyone contact me sooner?”
“We didn’t know ourselves,” Greg Walton insisted. “Agent Buck’s in Paris but the FBI have been running their own investigation, separate from what Tracy’s been doing for us. It was the Brits who alerted us. MI6.”
“General Dorrien?” Cameron practically spat out the name.
“Yes.” Walton sounded surprised. “Do you two know each other?”
“No. But Tracy knows him. And she doesn’t trust him an inch.”
“The British think it may have been Hunter Drexel who attacked her. Despite my express instructions it appears Tracy’s been trying to track Drexel alone, off-book. You wouldn’t know anything about that, I suppose?”
But Cameron wasn’t interested in CIA guessing games. Instead he flew his G650 directly into Le Bourget airport, making it from his New York apartment to Tracy’s bedside in under ten hours. Once there, he pulled every string in the book to make sure that Frank Dorrien and any other intelligence officers were refused all further access. Luckily Don Pete
rs, the new U.S. ambassador to France, was a close personal friend. So was Guillaume Henri, the hospital’s largest donor.
“Tracy Whitney’s a friend of mine. I’m the closest thing she has to family,” Cameron insisted to Guillaume. “Nobody sees her but me.”
“Your wish is my command, old friend. She must be quite a woman.”
“She is,” Cameron said.