The only consolation was that morning was still a few hours off. Which meant he could keep pretending, if only for a little while longer.
After perhaps ten minutes, his date appeared carrying two glasses of red wine. She had discarded her ice-blue dress in favor of a simple spaghetti-strapped camisole and a small pair of men’s boxer shorts from which her thighs emerged and seemed to keep going forever. She was barefoot. Her red hair had been let out of its cage and was now down, framing her face. She had scrubbed off her makeup.
Storm’s original assessment of her — that she was stunning — was in need of an upgrade. She was easily one of the most beautiful women he had ever been near, and she wasn’t even trying.
“Sorry. I just had to get a little more comfortable,” she said, handing Storm one of the glasses.
Now that she was out of her evening wear, she appeared slightly younger than Storm had originally thought. Storm guessed that she was perhaps twenty-seven, the age at which some women are just finally getting around to purging the Jacques of the world out of their system; others, Storm knew, kept at it their whole lives.
They touched glasses and sat next to each other on a padded limestone bench that overlooked the sea.
“It’s lovely up here,” Storm said.
She breathed deeply. “I really ought to use this place more often,” she said.
“If I owned a place like this, I’d probably never leave,” Storm said, taking a small sip of his wine. He let the wine first hit the tip of his tongue, to taste sweetness; then he let it wash over the sides, so he could enjoy the tannins.
Her next words jolted him. “Did you really come up here to lie to me?”
“Excuse me?”
“You, sir, are a man of motion. I heard the stories about your saving the hotel. I saw how you handled Jacque. You would no sooner stay cooped up in a place like this, beautiful as it may be, than you would live underground in a bunker. You are a rover, an explorer. You require movement, action, great deeds. You are the man who saves the world, and you’ll go wherever it needs to be saved at the moment.”
He shrugged, remaining quiet. He knew she was right. But there was no way to respond to such a statement without sounding immodest.
“So why do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Don’t be coy, Mr. Derrick Storm. Other people would hear that a bomb was going to wipe out a section of this city, and their first response would be to run out onto their yachts and get as far away as possible. I am told you ran toward the bomb and defused it. Why? Why are you the one who saves the world?”
“Because someone has to be?”
“Not good enough,” she said. “You can do better.”
Storm took another small sip of his wine. “You are familiar with Einstein and the theory of relativity, yes?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Well, I have no quarrel with the science of that. I have a quarrel with the people who don’t leave Einstein to the physicists. People want to apply relativity to everything, even morality. They would have you believe that there are no absolutes in this world, that everything can only be defined in relationship to everything else. And that’s well and good for them, but not for me. Because if you take that theory too far, then suddenly you’re left with a world where there is no good, no evil, just different points of view.
“So, take the Nazis,” he continued. “If you take moral relativism to its logical conclusion, suddenly you can’t say the Nazis were bad. They were just a group of people who applied their worldview to the extreme, right? Well, that’s not for me. I believe there is such a thing as absolute bad and absolute good. And, yes, there is a full spectrum of shades in between, which is where most people live. But when I see things that are a lot closer to the bad end of the spectrum, and see that people who are a lot closer to the good end of the spectrum are going to be hurt, I feel I have to act.”
“But again, why you?”
“Because I was the guy who was made bigger and stronger than most other guys. Because I’ve been trained in how to use that strength. Because my father remains one of the most decent men I’ve ever met, and I know he’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t use my skills to protect good, innocent people. And mostly because if I don’t respond to these situations, I’m not sure anyone else will, and I can’t live with the guilt of knowing I could have done something but didn’t. It’s some combination of all that, plus a lot of other stuff I can’t think of right now because this wine is going to my head a little bit.”
She crossed her glorious legs and looked at him earnestly. It made her even more attractive to him, if that was possible. “But how do we judge what’s bad and what’s good?”
“With our basic sense of humanity. It’s there, deep down in all of us. Or at least most of us. We just need to have the courage to listen to it and act accordingly.”
“So what happens when you need to be saved? Who does that?”
“I don’t know,” Storm said. “Luckily, it doesn’t happen all that often.”
“Well, if you ever need someone to save you, I’ll be happy to do it.”
“Really?” Storm said, as much bemused as touched. “You have to be careful making offers like that. You never know when someone is going take you up on it.”
She nodded thoughtfully, then held up her empty glass. “Drink up, Mr. Einstein. You’re falling behind.”
Storm tilted back his glass and took a Storm-sized swallow of the red wine. Then another, until the glass was done.
She was smiling at him the whole time. It was a pleasant, sweet smile, until it started going slanty.
Then, Storm realized, it wasn’t just her lips that were getting crooked. Her whole face was. No, wait, it was the whole world.
Nausea hit him harder than any of the waves crashing far below. The glass slipped from his hand and he was dimly aware of it shattering on the marble.
He felt himself going over. He tried to yell, to fight it, to battle the gravity that was taking him over. But nothing in his body would respond. He wasn’t even sure if the yell made it out.
The last thing he was cognizant of before it all went black was her reaching for her phone, picking it up, pressing a few buttons.
“He’s down,” she said into it. “You can come get him now.”
CHAPTER 16
SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
here was a hand in his face. It was large and hairy. Useful looking, if a bit ugly. Its knuckles bore the marks of too many scrapes, too many punches. The palm had a long scar running along it that looked strangely familiar and…
Yes. That’s because it was his own hand. He made an effort to flex it, and it moved. Not only was it his own hand, it was under his own control. This was a good start.
He was in a bed. It was a nice bed, with high thread-count satin sheets and a down comforter that provided ample protection against a blast of air-conditioning from above.
He blinked twice. Sunlight streamed through a set of windows to his left. When he looked out the windows, he could see only clouds. But the clouds were moving.
No. He was moving. He was in a vessel of some kind. A boat. Definitely a boat. It was a large one, but he could still feel the faint motion of the waves, the rumble of engines far below him.
He propped himself up on his elbows.
“There you are,” a pleasant voice sang out.
It was the redhead from the previous night. She was wearing a blue knit top and white shorts that were just long enough to not cause a scandal when she bent over. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She was still stunning, but there was an officious air to her.