TailSpin - Catherine Coulter [146]
Savich said, “Dr. MacLean said your father had mentioned an Anna. It wasn’t difficult to find her and a half dozen of her terrorist friends.”
Jean David’s voice shook a bit. “If only she’d listened to me. I told her Dr. MacLean was blabbing about us. I told her she had to leave the country. I swore I’d join her, but she didn’t leave.”
He looked off into the distance, but Jack didn’t think he was admiring the Caribbean. Jean David said, “You know, I still think of her as Anna. That’s how she introduced herself to me in that coffeehouse in Cambridge.” He gave a sharp laugh, pointed to the single petrel swooping down to the surface of the water. “I know her real name is Halimah, but to me she will always be Anna. She confided in me, praised me, was interested in me, interested in what I thought. And she was so damned beautiful. I fell for her, fell hard. The sex was great, but you know, it was how she spoke to me, how she listened to me, laughed with me, admired everything I said. I fell completely in love with her.”
He turned to look at a huge cormorant that had entered the scene, not six feet from the petrel, hovering a dozen feet above the water, lazily scouting lunch. He spotted a surface fish and dove clean and straight. “I’ve watched him before,” Jean David said. “He’s really good. He’s smart. See, that’s a wrasse he’s got. He never misses.”
“Your parents are a mess,” Savich said. “As Agent Crowne said, we haven’t told them you’re alive.”
“Yes, well, I did what I could, now didn’t I? My father was planning to send me into hiding, God only knows where. He kept making excuses for me, saying it wasn’t my fault, it was this evil woman’s fault, and what did it matter anyway since it was only a bit of American intelligence gone awry. I’m French, he said, who cares?
“But I know my parents, particularly my mother. The disgrace would have been more than she could bear. Hell, I couldn’t deal with it, either.” He shrugged.
Jack said, “You’re saying you tried to kill Dr. MacLean to keep him from talking about Anna?”
Jean David laughed. “Finally, something you’ve got all wrong. Those two attempted hit-and-runs, and the bomb on his plane, I didn’t do those things, I wouldn’t know how. It was Anna’s associates, as she called them. Like I said, Anna didn’t leave the country. She and her friends were doing well here. They believed they could contain any fallout, and so they started off by killing that friend of Dr. MacLean’s. They found out about him because they were already following Dr. MacLean.”
“Anna told you that?” Savich asked.
“She told me everything. Then you arrested her, and she was gone from me, forever. I guess I went nuts. Those guys had three chances to get MacLean and failed. I wasn’t going to fail. But I did. You know, I couldn’t believe that nurse shot me.
“By then I’d already staged my own suicide, of course, to solve the CIA’s problem, my parents’ problem, my problem. Everyone would be happy. Using Ty’s speedboat was the only weak point in the plan, but I had no choice. I had to hope the authorities wouldn’t doubt what had happened and dig too deep. They didn’t. But you did.”
Savich said, “Telling your father you were going to kill yourself, that was an excellent touch. You were gone, your parents were safe.”
There was surprise on Jean David’s face. “You got my father to admit I killed myself? I thought he’d go to the grave with that.”
Savich nodded. “He was devastated, he no longer cared about much of anything because his only son was dead. He saw no reason not to tell me. Your mother, however, didn’t want him to.”
Jean David shrugged. “It was better with me dead than standing trial as a traitor. Trust me on that.
“As for my life, it was over once you took Anna. She is the only woman I have ever loved. I’ll bet you’ve got her jailed and being interrogated as a terrorist in some place like Guan tanamo.”
“She is a terrorist,” Jack said. “What’s even better is we got her group along with her.”
“Yeah, well, I love