Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) by Sue Duffy

Author:Sue Duffy [Duffy, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780825408236
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Published: 2014-03-06T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

As Cade, Ben, and Anna were led to their seats inside Mann Auditorium, Cade noticed his phone light up inside his coat pocket. Risking a peek at the caller, he grinned at the bushy beard filling the tiny screen but dared not answer the summons. Once they were seated, though, he bent over the silenced instrument and tapped out a quick text: Concert starting. Talk later.

Slipping the phone into his pocket, he calculated the time in Charleston. It would be noon on that Monday. At that hour, his grandfather and Henry were either nosing the Exodus II back into the harbor after a half-day charter. Or O’Brien Charters was headlong into the Gulf Stream with all-day customers tracking wahoo, tuna, maybe a trophy marlin. Cade glanced about the auditorium and smiled to himself at the memory of Ian O’Brien’s last visit to a major concert hall. It had been Avery Fisher Hall in New York a year and a half ago. As clearly as if his grandfather were sitting beside him now, Cade could see him stuffed into a dress shirt barely containing his thick, whiskered neck, his hooked forefinger tugging at the starched and bedeviling constraint. But when Liesl had emerged from the wings and took her place on stage, resplendent in an emerald green gown, both O’Brien men had lost all concept of discomfort—and in Cade’s case, alarm over what had delayed her entrance into the spotlight that night. Now, recalling what that delay had been, the smile vanished from his face.

Where is he? Cade wondered as he scanned the audience, now settled and waiting for Liesl Bower and Max Morozov to appear on stage. Cade was certain that Evgeny Kozlov was there somewhere. Inside, outside. Disguised, most certainly. He would have to be if those he guarded her against were present. Max Morozov’s elusive father. Ivan Volynski, alive or not, because his faithful followers might kill more than their own president out of vengeance. The pretend-postman who carried fake mail and a real gun in his pouch. And all the shadowed ones who’d harassed Liesl with dead-air phone calls and stalkings. They would know and recognize the Russian turncoat who’d forsaken his duty to their cause, in part for the sake of the young woman Cade O’Brien had married.

Cade had come to grips with the hovering threats to his wife, resolving to protect her as best he could. But he knew the insufficiency of that, and that God would have to remain her greatest defender. He’d also reconciled himself to the Russian spy’s singular devotion to the preservation of Liesl Bower. If Kozlov was in love with Cade’s wife, so were others. He’d read it in the unmasked eyes of Max Morozov. Cade also knew that love to be as innocent as Liesl’s returned affections. He’d long forbidden jealousy to take root in him, but couldn’t help savoring Liesl’s every valiant effort to assure him how crazy in love she was with him and him only. Just like the lyrics of a song, he thought.

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