“Yes, yes we are. I'll tell my shrink all about you,” she teased, “and I'll ring you up as soon as I get to a phone. I must admit, I'm anxious for home, my place.”
“I certainly understand that, but I rather doubt you'll be happy over there in the Colonies for long without me.”
She laughed and socked him with a petting punch to the cheek.
“And I wager that I will ring you up long before I hear from you,” he challenged.
“It's a wager I will take.”
He breathed a great breath, his chest heaving. “Off you go, now,” he quietly said, and she saw a moment's weakness flush over his features as he held her pair of bandaged hands in his.
“The bandages make my wounds look more severe than they are,” she told him. “I'm really in no pain, though I wish more feeling would return.”
He instantly controlled his emotions with a joke. “You jolly well better get more feeling back in those fingers. I want you, touch and all. Time you toddled off now, sweetheart.” He kissed her a final, lingering kiss good-bye.
And toddle she did, staggering a bit under the influence of his intoxicating taste. She parted with him in harmony and in romance. All the way to the airport, he had spoken of working diligently to breathe life into the flame of their newly kindled relationship. She believed he meant every word, but she feared the distance, knowing what distance had done to Parry and her.
Heathrow Airport bustled about her and Richard where he stood waving her off. All she saw remained him, his smile wide and caring, all the rest of reality had faded, blurred, moved about her in slow motion. She thought of what he'd said to her the night before, after they'd made love for what might well be the last dme. “I'm soon to retire,” he had told her, “and I have always thought that a retirement to America might not be a bad idea.” It had sounded like a fishing expedition, to see her reaction.
“I think it a marvelous idea,” Jessica had replied.
“I'd do a bit of consulting, that sort of thing, perhaps even with the FBI, so I might live rather close to your area there, Quantico, Virginia? I've always thought Virginia a pretty sounding place.”
“Are you serious?” she'd asked, beaming. “If you are, I could speak to a few people in key positions at the FBI on your behalf. I could start with my chief, Santiva.”
“You'd do that for me?” he teased.
“You know damned well I would, Richard. It's so right for you. What else would you do in retirement? An active man like you?”
“Fish, hunt, trap wild game like you?” he joked in return. “I'd have to cultivate some bad habits and bad hobbies, for certain.”
“Do you dive?”
“Dive? Do you mean like this?” he buried his head in her bare bosom, both of them laughing.
“Stop it! No, dive, as in dive the ocean?”
“No, but I've always wished to learn. Never found the time, you see.”
“Then you must learn someday, and we'll do some diving together. There's nothing more fantastic aside from… aside from being with you, here, like this.”
He had next gently kissed her, but she pulled away, grabbed a pad of paper, and began jotting notes to herself, plans for his retirement from the Yard and his moving to America.
“You are serious, and not simply making a fool of me, are you?” she asked, looking up from her notes.
He had laughed then at her enthusiasm and replied, “I don't want our relationship to end when you get on that plane tomorrow, Jessie, if that's what you mean.”
“Good. Neither do I.” And now they waved their final good-bye which was not supposed to be their final good-bye, but she feared it might be, feared how he would feel once she left. She hesitated a nanosecond before boarding, her fear of losing him overwhelming, sending gravel through her veins, freezing her to the spot, a nausea replacing the concrete mixture in her blood vessels.
But when she turned to look back, to tell him that she might simply stay another few days, she found that he had done the smart thing: He had disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind, but not really, not ever, she told herself as her frozen legs found movement again. She handed her boarding pass to the flight attendant who looked curiously at her bandaged hands. The hands made her feel as if she were attached to two balloons. “It looks far worse than it is, really,” she assured the attendant.
“I recognize you from your photos in the Times” said the attendant. Then the young woman gasped before asking, “Would it trouble you too much to grant me your autograph for my nephew. Dr. Coran? He collects them, you see. Name is Nigel; Nigel Caulder.”
Jessica managed a half smile and said, “Why would anyone want my autograph?”
“Oh, he's keen on all to do with criminals, criminal detection. You're a hero after that Crucifier thing that was all the rage in the rags.”
With some difficulty, Jessica signed her name for little Nigel on the back of an envelope the woman extended. “Welcome aboard, then,” said the attendant.
Jessica walked the makeshift passageway between the terminal and the Concorde, and there the flight attendant smiled warmly and showed her into the cockpit. She found the cockpit of the largest passenger plane in the air dazzling and mesmerizing. Her interest in airplanes and flight took center stage as she shook hands with the captain and his female copilot, both of whom remarked on her having helped out the Crown. “So you must expect to be treated here as royalty,” Captain Carlisle warned, and there were laughs all around.
The takeoff, and her vantage point, seeing it from over the shoulder of the captain, proved one of the most exciting moments of Jessica's life. However, still weak from her hospital convalescence, she knew she would soon be at peaceful rest.
Some hours later on the flight, Jessica awoke from dozing in the cockpit. Her eyes went direcdy to the stars and the empty darkness that filled the Concorde's windshield. A physical pain like a hot poker, at once took her breath away and attacked her heart, making Jessica gulp, leaving her trembling at all she had been through, at the depth of horror and evil she had seen in London. It brought up a heartache and forlorn desolation like none she'd ever known, and the strength of this monster emotion's grip held her heart in icy fingers. She knew the meaning of this; underlying her nightmare reaction to all that Luc Sante had done, she sensed the truth of her own inner demon. She felt a sense of overwhelming aloneness, coupled with waste and solitude, coming full upon her in the form of never feeling herself in Richard Sharpe's arms ever again. Never being in his embrace again. She feared something would keep them apart, that something would end or poison their love, that she would lose him as she had every man in her life: her father, Asa Holcraft, Otto Boutine, Alan Rychman, James Parry…
The plane sped forward through the blackness of empty sky that revealed only an eerie void-nothing out there… yet everything out there… and it all awaited Jessica Coran's return to America, to Quantico, Virginia-to home.