The question had him shaking his head. “What?”
“The terrorist you were after when you came to Paris. What happened to him?”
“I captured him.”
“When?” Her eyes had dried. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
“Two days before my…uh…faked death.”
“Then who was the guy with you on the riverbank?”
“Another Mossad agent.”
“What happened to the real Majid Abass?”
This felt a bit like Twenty Questions, but he’d talk until he was blue in the face if that’s what it took to make her understand. “The night I took over his identity, the Mossad killed him. He was injected with a deadly biological poison and buried in the desert. Majid was a loner. An orphan. It was easy to slip into his life.”
“And easy to slip out of your own.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Never believe that. Leaving you was the hardest decision I ever made, but…” He watched the broken white lines on the highway race by.
How could he make her understand? He wasn’t sure the right words existed to describe how the choice between honor and duty and the woman he loved had nearly broken him in two.
“But what?” she prompted.
“Do you remember what you told me about believing in duty and sacrifice and living a life of service to others?”
A muscle ticked under her puffy right eye. She nodded.
“I thought that’s what I was doing. When my ramsad came to me, asking me to save the world, I was so young and naive that I thought I was doing what you would want me to do. I thought I was being the man you would want me to be, sacrificing myself for the greater good and—”
“Are you seriously sitting there trying to convince me you did all this for me?”
“No. Maybe I did it for myself. Maybe I wanted to leave my mark on the world. Maybe I wanted to be able to point at something and say, See? I did that. But if I could go back and do it all over again, I—”
“That’s the rub, isn’t it?” Her voice was quiet. “We can’t go back.”
He swallowed. “Sonya, I—”
“Can I have my phone back, please?”
He blinked, suffering from conversational whiplash. “Sure.” He dug into his hip pocket and handed her the cell phone. “Why?”
“I need to call my boss. Bring him up to speed on my situation.”
“Can it wait until—”
She dialed a number and held the phone to her ear. Okay, so apparently it couldn’t wait.
He listened as she filled the president of Interpol in on what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. She was careful not to mention Black Knights Inc. by name when she told him about the group of Americans who had Lord Asad Grafton in custody. He was grateful for that. Grateful she understood the importance of keeping BKI in the shadows.
Then, his stomach belched up a load of acid so vile he nearly puked when she added, “They’re evacuating me with them to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Would it be possible to have a plane there waiting for me? I’m ready to come home. We have a lot of Intel to go over.”
She listened for a while longer, then nodded. “Thank you, sir. I look forward to seeing you too.”
When she clicked off the phone, he tried to talk to her, but all he managed was her name before she lifted a hand, cutting him off. “I really need you to be quiet. Will you do that for me?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. After a brief hesitation, he said, “Yes. I will do anything for you.”
