Louie looked down at the waves breaking against the rocks beneath him and smiled. He was confident that he had made the right decision. To think that he had almost abandoned Claudia when she'd needed him most embarrassed him. Louie had always sworn that he would never be like his own father. Leaving her like that in the airport, pregnant and traumatized, was just the thing his father would have done.

Louie watched the sailboats gently rock back and forth on the water. This place was special. It was too bad they couldn't stay here and raise a family.

Just then Claudia came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. "What are you doing up so early?"

"I got up to go to the bathroom and decided to come out here and look at the water." Louie stood up straight and grabbed her hands. "How great is this place?"

"Much better with you here."

He undid her hands and stood next to her. His arms wrapped around her shoulders and hers wrapped around his waist, they stood there looking out across the bay. With a sigh, Louie said, "It's too bad."

"What?"

"That we're going to have to leave."

"Why?" she asked, her voice filled with disappointment.

"You know why. It's too risky to stay in one place for too long. Especially right now."

Claudia's heart sank as she remembered the difficult road that lay ahead. She had yet to tell Louie what she'd done in the days they were apart and it was beginning to weigh heavily on her. There was no telling how he would react when she told him, although one thing was certain; the longer she waited to tell him the harder it would be. Claudia rested her head against Louie's bare chest, and started to speak but suddenly lost the courage.

Louie noticed something was bothering her and asked, "What?"

She held him tight and asked, "Do you love me?"

"You know I do," he said with a slight laugh.

"I have something I must tell you." She kissed his chest and added, "But I want you to think about what I am going through while I tell you this."

Louie grabbed her by the shoulders and took a step back. He knew Claudia well enough to be warned by her tone. "What did you do?"

She looked him in the eye, wavered, thought she might not have the courage, and then blurted out, "I have been in contact with the CIA."

Louie searched her eyes for the truth. She was not lying to him. In as calm a voice as he could muster he asked, "Why?"

"It is complicated. It started out as a way to say that I was sorry for what happened to the woman. On top of that you know I don't like Abel. I didn't from the moment I met him."

"I don't care about Abel. I want to know what you did."

"After we parted ways, Abel sent several more threatening e-mails. I decided if that was the way he wanted to play I would give the CIA his name and see how he liked it when Mitch Rapp showed up looking for him."

Louie nodded slowly. A part of him admired Claudia for the move. He had warned Abel to watch his step. The man was in no position to threaten them, but he supposed the German was under a great deal of pressure to get the money back. The type of pressure that sometimes causes people to do very foolish things. "The CIA is a big place," Louie said. "Who did you contact?"

"Director Kennedy."

This surprised Louie momentarily. "When you say you've been in contact, what exactly does that mean?"

"We have e-mailed each other."

"How many times?" Louie asked, his chest tightening.

"I sent her four e-mails."

Louie released her shoulders and nearly bit off his own tongue. "Why four?"

Claudia's big brown eyes welled with tears. She could see Louie struggling to contain his anger. She ignored the question and moved onto the part that was really going to send him through the roof. "Please stay calm for a moment so I can get this all out, and then if you want to leave me I'll understand."

"I'm not going to leave you," he said, almost as if he was convincing himself.

Claudia grabbed his hands. "We've always split everything…Right?"

He nodded.

She knew of no easy way to say it so it just came out. "I put five million dollars into a Swiss bank account under Rapp's name."

Louie thought his head was going to implode. "Five million dollars." He was doing everything in his power to stay calm. He loved this woman standing before him. If he didn't care for her, he would have simply chucked her over the wall and taken great joy in watching her head split open as it hit the rocks. "Why?"

"Our baby."

"What does giving Mitch Rapp five million dollars have to do with our baby?" Louie's voice started to rise.

"I wanted to try and make things right…and buy some time."

"Buy some time." Louie frowned. "How does this buy some time?"

"You know he's going to come after us."

"Let him," Louie said in a quiet but angry voice.

Claudia shook her head. "You don't mean that. This is not some normal man. We killed his wife. His pregnant wife. What would you do if some man killed me right now?" Claudia watched him intently for a moment. "We both know you would stop at nothing until you had killed him with your own bare hands. If Mitch Rapp finds us, he will kill us both."

"And you think just because you gave him five million dollars he will forget about us?"

"No," she said, "as I told you, it will only buy us some time."

"Time?" he asked with a frown, still not comprehending what she was after.

Claudia placed his hand on her stomach and said, "I asked for nine months. I asked for him to spare our baby. I want to give birth to our child and hold it in my arms, and then whatever he does to us I will accept." She sensed some understanding in Louie's face. "That five million dollars isn't even ours," she said with disgust in her voice. "I never wanted the job, and we didn't finish it. If I had it my way, we would give him all of the money."

"We need that money," Louie said in a surprisingly calm voice. He was just now comprehending the maternal forces that had been at play. Her words had stirred his own sense of paternity-a need to protect Claudia and their unborn child. He disagreed vehemently with what she had done, and how it may have exposed them, but there was no undoing it. Her motives had been pure.

Louie kissed her on the forehead and said, "I still love you."

Claudia melted in his arms. "Thank you, darling."

They stood there, not speaking, for several minutes and then Claudia said, "Let's go back to bed."

Louie shook his head. "No."

"Why?" she asked, suddenly afraid that he would in fact leave her.

"We need to get out of here immediately. Pack your bags."

66

His first reaction was to think they were being played, fed some fake information that would lead them on a wild-goose chase and waste a lot of time and resources. He also didn't want to associate a single noble characteristic with his wife's killers. In the face of all of that, though, there was the five million dollars sitting in an account under his name. There was also according to Kennedy a very heartfelt confession, apology, and plea written by this woman whom Rapp had seen throwing up on the side of the road near his house. Rapp had been through a lot over the years, experienced a lot of strange things, but this one left him shaking his head. It didn't make any sense. If he had the time he could attempt to sort it out. He could analyze what he knew, investigate what he was unsure of, and ultimately decide what was subterfuge and what was the truth. He could gauge real intentions and weigh the possibility of an ingenious deception on the part of the real killer or killers. He told Kennedy to have Dumond empty all of Abel's bank accounts and keep an eye on the banks. Rapp didn't care how carefully the guy was hiding, when he found out eleven million dollars of his money was gone he would want some answers. In the meantime, though, Rapp needed to focus on reuniting a father and son.