The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller by Karen Robards

Author:Karen Robards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2017-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

14

Beth. She was Beth, small and terrified, hidden by her mother in a cabinet that smelled of bleach. A shotgun went off, and a man—a bad man—came searching for her, Beth, calling her name in a way that made her skin crawl even now. A huge explosion a hundred times louder than the boom of the shotgun sent the cabinet with her in it catapulting skyward. She must have blacked out, or been knocked unconscious, because her next memory was of lying facedown on a slippery, cold carpet of evergreen needles. She remembered being in pain, her arm and side aching, how much it hurt to breathe. She remembered the strong smell of pine—and the horrible burning smell that was even stronger. Her father—Richard, although that wasn’t his name—crouched beside her, his hand on the side of her neck as, she realized now, he felt for a pulse. It was dark, night, but there was this weird orange light and scary shadows leaping everywhere. Looking past her father, she saw the burning wreck of what had been their house and started to cry. He picked her up and carried her to a car. A strange car, not theirs. They drove away, the two of them.

Without her mother. She didn’t remember saying a word, asking about her mother, anything, and she didn’t remember her father talking, either.

What she did remember was lying in the back seat of that car crying from pain and fear and the horror of knowing that her mother was dead. She’d known that, without question, but she didn’t remember how.

She did remember the car stopping after what seemed like hours and her father carrying her inside a long, low metal building that was so cold her teeth chattered. She remembered lying on a table and a man—a doctor, she thought—giving her a shot.

Then nothing. Nothing for a long time. Her next memories belonged to Bianca St. Ives.

All that came back to her in a flash, as though a lightning bolt had suddenly illuminated a dark and hidden part of her brain. The memories unspooled with a vividness that left her shaken. Still bent over with her head resting on her lap, Bianca tried to make sense of them, to reconcile them with what she knew about herself and her father and their life.

She battled the dizziness, the pain and shock of uncovering this terrible part of her life that she’d somehow totally forgotten, by forcing herself to focus and homing in on what she knew to be true.

Because most of what had been reported in the story in the paper wasn’t.

The names—Sean, Sarah and Beth McAlister—were almost certainly fiction. Probably another of her father’s cover identities extended to cloak the three of them. Her father hadn’t shot her mother. He hadn’t set the house on fire. He hadn’t even been there when any of that had happened.

Another man, a stranger, had murdered her mother, had tried to murder her. That man had caused the house to explode.

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