Double Impact: Never Say Die & No Way Back by Tess Gerritsen, Debra Webb Read Free Book Online Page A

When he spoke, she could tell by his voice that he was very, very interested.
    â€œWhat did your mother do then?” he asked.
    â€œShe pursued it, of course. She wouldn’t give up. She hounded the CIA. Air America. She got nothing out ofthem. But she did get a few anonymous phone calls telling her to shut up.”
    â€œOr?”
    â€œOr she’d learn things about Dad she didn’t want to know. Embarrassing things.”
    â€œOther women? What?”
    This was the part that made Willy angry. She could barely bring herself to talk about it. “They implied—” She let out a breath. “They implied he was working for the other side. That he was a traitor.”
    There was a pause. “And you don’t believe it,” he said softly.
    Her chin shot up. “Hell, no, I don’t believe it! Not a word. It was just their way to scare us off. To keep us from digging up the truth. It wasn’t the only stunt they pulled. When we kept asking questions, they stopped release of Dad’s back pay, which by then was somewhere in the tens of thousands. Anyway, we floundered around for a while, trying to get information. Then the war ended, and we thought we’d finally hear the answers. We watched the POWs come back. It was tough on Mom, seeing all those reunions on TV. Hearing Nixon talk about our brave men finally coming home. Because hers didn’t. But we were surprised to hear of one man who did make it home—one of the crew members on Dad’s plane.”
    Guy straightened in surprise. “Then there was a survivor?”
    â€œLuis Valdez, the cargo kicker. He bailed out as the plane was going down. He was captured almost as soon as he hit the ground. Spent the next five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp.”
    â€œDoesn’t that explain the missing body? If Valdez bailed out—”
    â€œThere’s more. The very day Valdez flew back to theStates, he called us. I answered the phone. I could hear he was scared. He’d been warned by Intelligence not to talk to anyone. But he thought he owed it to Dad to let us know what had happened. He told us there was a passenger on that flight, a Lao who was already dead when the plane went down. And that the body in the cockpit was probably Kozlowski, the copilot. That still leaves a missing body.”
    â€œYour father.”
    She nodded. “We went back to the CIA with this information. And you know what? They denied there was any passenger on that plane, Lao or otherwise. They said it carried only a shipment of aircraft parts.”
    â€œWhat did Air America say?”
    â€œThey claim there’s no record of any passenger.”
    â€œBut you had Valdez’s testimony.”
    She shook her head. “The day after he called, the day he was supposed to come see us, he shot himself in the head. Suicide. Or so the police report said.”
    She could tell by his long silence that Guy was shocked. “How convenient,” he murmured.
    â€œFor the first time in my life, I saw my mother scared. Not for herself, but for me. She was afraid of what might happen, what they might do. So she let the matter drop. Until…” Willy paused.
    â€œThere was something else?”
    She nodded. “About a year after Valdez died—I guess it was around ’76—a funny thing happened to my mother’s bank account. It picked up an extra fifteen thousand dollars. All the bank could tell her was that the deposit had been made in Bangkok. A year later, it happened again, this time, around ten thousand.”
    â€œAll that money, and she never found out where it came from?”
    â€œNo. All these years she’s been trying to figure it out.Wondering if one of Dad’s buddies, or maybe Dad himself—” Willy shook her head and sighed. “Anyway, a few months ago, she found out she had cancer. And suddenly it seemed very important to learn the truth. She’s too sick