dropped her suitcase on the bed, ignoring that potential minefield, while she strolled on by and pulled a chair away from the table. He heard her fidgeting a bit, settling in while she waited for him to explain himself. He didn’t have to look to know she had her right leg crossed over her left, her hands linked in her lap.
Where to begin? He studied his hands, not quite ready to face her. “Do you want a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
Her voice was cool, aloof, and he could feel her big brown eyes studying him. He sighed. It shouldn’t be this hard to talk to his wife. On some level he believed she might understand. Too bad that level was smothered by guilt.
“Just get on with it,” she urged in the unflappable tone that had guided professional and family meetings with equal efficiency. “I want the truth. The whole truth.” She shook her head, the one visible concession to her anger and frustration. “Some sort of reasonable explanation for what you’ve done to us.”
He closed his eyes a moment, pushing a hand through hair that felt too long since he’d abandoned the shorter army regulation cut. “I doubt much of what I’m about to say will sound reasonable.”
The silence stretched between them like a high wire over the Grand Canyon, and he was walking without a net. There’d been no training or experience to prepare him for this crisis. “I did what I believed was necessary to protect you and Frankie.” He’d allowed his professional life to destroy his family. No excuses would suffice and none of the words in his mind felt adequate to the task. On a deep breath, he perched on the side of the bed closer to her chair. “It started before we moved to Washington,” he began, watching the awareness come into her lovely eyes. “Keeping you out of it was essential.”
“Because you planned to become a traitor?”
“Never.” He winced. “Though I knew it was possible my actions would look that way.”
She caught her full lower lip between her teeth. “Your daughter never believed you were capable of treason,” she said. “Unfortunately, by that time, I didn’t share her confidence.”
He deserved that for how poorly he’d handled the situation. “I wanted to explain, to reassure you.” The risks had been too great. Any out-of-character reaction from Sophia would have tipped off the criminals the army had been trying to root out. “You couldn’t have helped me. I looked at it from every angle. If I’d told you anything at all, if you’d reacted too much or not enough, if you’d changed your analysis or assessment, it would’ve gotten all three of us killed.”
“What happened?” She hurled the words at him. “Names and dates, Frank.” She leaned forward, pinned him with those wary eyes. “Give me a clear and accurate picture. Did you know Frankie believed I willfully helped convict you?”
“No!” He pushed to his feet, striding as far from her as the room allowed. He hadn’t understood why his daughter had wound up working in Savannah when Sophia launched the new business in Seattle, but he couldn’t risk getting close enough to either of them to find out. “How could she believe such a thing?”
“You can ask her yourself. Now keep talking,” she said. “Hold back now and I’ll walk right out that door and in my heart you’ll stay dead forever.”
Sophia didn’t make idle threats. If she walked out of this room without the details, without his protection, she’d be dead within the week. Frankie, too. “It’s too dangerous. Please, believe that if nothing else.”
She drummed her fingertips impatiently on her knee.
He crossed the room again, forcing himself to sit down at the table. He could slow down and do this right. “First, I’m not a traitor.” He stopped right there as the emotion choked him. He didn’t know quite how to beg her forgiveness, to uproot the terrible seeds of doubts he’d planted. “The Army Criminal Investigations Command approached me just over two years ago.” Though he knew all deals were off, his voice cracked on exposing her to the black stain that had ended his career. “Before that last deployment. Equipment had gone missing. Locals claimed army personnel were helping move drug shipments. High-value targets disappeared without a trace. While that sounds logical with the honeycomb of hideouts in Afghanistan, no rumors or sightings were getting out. CID asked me to go undercover and appear amenable to cooperating with one particular drug lord. I did what was required of me, as always.”
She gasped, her eyes wide and sad. “The CID didn’t back you up?”
“That was before the treason charge.” He knew she was thinking about the lives lost on that last busted mission. “Cooperating with the drug lord was a test to earn the trust of the criminals CID wanted to net. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by passing that test I put you and Frankie in danger.” He hitched his shoulders against the impossible burden. “Smoothing the way for that drug shipment earned me a rare invitation to Hellfire, an elite circle of retired military personnel that CID had been trying to dismantle for more than five years.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “They named themselves after a missile?”
He nodded. “They’re cocky. Considering what they’ve gotten away with and how they’ve managed to line their pockets, they’ve earned the moniker. As a general willing to cross the line for personal gain, I was a shoo-in. Once I was in, my real goal was to identify the Hellfire leadership and gather evidence against them.”
“Which meant working with them in the short-term,” she said quietly.
“Yes.” He swallowed the lump of guilt in his throat. Good men had died for bad reasons that day. Undercover or not, he’d been ready to serve time as a penance. “And it eventually led to the treason charge.” He cracked his knuckles. “There was a bank account in the Caymans that would’ve made you blush.” His stilted laughter didn’t hold any humor. “Doing bad things for the right reasons is no excuse. I should’ve found another way.”
The CID special agent running his part of the operation assured him there hadn’t been another way, but he would carry those terrible memories forever. On his feet again, Frank paced to the door and back, his mind lost in that cursed patch of dirt and the acrid scents of burning fuel and explosives roiling through the desert air.
With both hands fisting helplessly at his sides, he forced himself to tell her the rest. “We figured out after that fiasco, I wasn’t the only CID recruit. Another team was tracking the drug shipment. Somehow Hellfire learned the shipment would be seized and used the opportunity to blame it on me.”
“Moving illegal drugs is a crime, yes. That doesn’t explain the treason charge.”
He rubbed one thumb hard into the palm of his other hand. “Hellfire scrubbed the op rather than risk exposure. As Hellfire’s newest member, I took the rap for the whole deal, letting the real traitors get away clean, their drug money gushing again like crude oil from a new well less than a week later.”
“Frank, if what you say is true, it wasn’t your fault.”
Of course it was. He looked down to find she’d moved too close, her hands holding his. He wasn’t worthy of her sympathy. Reluctantly, he shifted out of her reach. “The treason charge was manufactured just to ruin me, in case I was inclined to flip on Hellfire.”
“I didn’t want to believe you’d sold information about troop movements and weapons in Kabul, but who
