The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel Read online

  Also by Taylor Stevens

  The Informationist

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Taylor Stevens

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71714-6

  Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor

  Jacket photograph © 2005 by VisionsofAmerica.com/Joe Sohm/Getty Images

  v3.1

  To those who didn’t survive. May you find in your

  forever sleep the peace that escaped you in life.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  She moved in a crouch, blade between her teeth, all four limbs connected to the earth. She cocked her head, listened, and then continued on again, through the undergrowth and past the body at her bare feet.

  Along the jungle floor, shadows cast against shadows, playing tricks with light, and unnatural stillness replaced the buzz and chatter of the canopy, as if nature held its breath while bearing witness to the violence.

  She paused at the whisper of air that alerted her to movement from behind.

  They’d been smart to track so silently.

  She shifted, ready to face them when they came.

  And they would come.

  The knowledge brought with it a surge of adrenaline.

  Euphoria followed.

  Two emerged from the verdure, dressed in shoddy camouflage and rubber shoes, carrying no firearms, only knives. They came steadily, circling, hunting, eyes glazed with bloodlust, lips turned up in snarls. They wanted her dead, and so they must die.

  She breathed deeply, focus pure, measuring the strength of the threat. Awareness came in waves, a feral instinct that returned nuance with radarlike clarity. Understanding their weaknesses, she launched forward for the first strike.

  Connected.

  A scream shattered the calm.

  Off balance, the first attacker toppled, and in a fluid movement she twisted, pushing off his body to propel herself into the second man.

  He shifted to avoid impact, and the twist of his neck met the slice of her outstretched blade.

  He fell.

  She landed in a crouch and without pause returned to the first. Hand to head. Knife to neck. Swift, through tendons and sinew.

  The fight had taken only seconds, and now in the silence the kill was finished. She stood over the bodies, the sound of her own heartbeat loud in her ears, and after a moment of hesitation she swore. It had been too fast. Too easy.

  Her chest heaved in hatred of the skills that kept her alive, skills that drove her to win, skills that inevitably brought death.

  She dropped to her knees and there, for the first time, stared at the face of the nearest hunter. A vise of recognition gripped her heart. She fell forward onto the body.

  His open eyes were green. His hair was blond, his face longingly familiar.

  Her soul pounded a rhythm: Please not him. Not him. Not him.

  In death, his eyes fixed a piercing accusation. She gaped in mute horror at the liquid of life that had, in seeping from his neck, painted her skin crimson.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Dizzy. Suffocating. Nausea.

  She found air. It came as a burning rush into collapsing lungs, a scream that started from the depths of her soul and ripped through her vocal cords, shattering the stillness, sending a flurry of beating wings through the canopy.

  Head tilted upward, and with the primal shriek of rage and pain still rising, she opened her eyes. Not to the jungle roof but to her bedroom ceiling, patterned, whitewashed, and tinged with the color of dawn coming through the window.

  Vanessa Munroe gasped. Curtains in the room rustled lightly. The call to prayer sounded from minarets across the city and her hand was still gripping the handle of a knife plunged into the other side of the king-size mattress.

  Awareness settled, and she let go of the knife as if scalded, rolling off the bed in the same movement.

  She stared.

  The blade had struck twice and stood in silent witness to the increasing ferocity of the nightmares. The sheets were soaked with sweat. She glanced at her tank top and boxers. Drenched. And Noah, had he not left for work early this morning, would have been dead.

  Chapter 1

  Casablanca, Morocco

  At last, the crowd moved forward.

  He picked up the duffel bag and slipped the strap over his shoulder. Aching and nauseous, he placed one deliberate foot in front of the other, part of the collective escape from transatlantic captivity—down the aisle, out of the belly of the plane, along the Jetway and through the sunlit terminals of Mohammed V Airport.

  Three days of little sleep had brought him here, three days and three lifetimes since that call in the wee hours that had, without warning, provided long-awaited news. He’d sat in the dark, rigid on the edge of the bed, searching his way through possibilities until, certain there was really only one option, he’d picked up the handset once more and placed the call to Morocco.

  I need a favor.

  Those had been his only words. No introduction, no explanation, only the plea.

  “Tell me,” she’d said.

  “I’m coming to you.”

  And that was it. No good-bye, just his unspoken fear wrapped into those words and whispered into the night, across the wires. He’d put down the phone and then, with palms sweating and hands shaking, sat in front of the computer and purchased a ticket.

  He needed that favor and had flown halfway around the world to ask it.

  Now, without thinking, he moved with the throng while inside his head the words of entreaty came and went; rewound and started over; front to back, end to beginning in the same perpetual loop that had not stopped since the call.

  He slowed. Stood in front of a plate-glass window. Stared out over the naked runway while those behind him hurried past.

  Even if h
e tried he could never count the number of airports and train stations that delineated his youth; a collection of visa stamps and endless moves that defined his life as one of eight siblings hopscotching the globe with cult-member parents, together a ragtag group of economy-class vagabonds.

  Into the glass he whispered his name, strange as it was even to him. The sound drifted in a low and hushed tribute to the past that had brought him here, the past that refused to die no matter how long or how often buried.

  Sherebiah Gospel Logan.

  His name was Logan. Only Logan. Always Logan. And to those few who knew the rest, he blamed it on drugs and hippies, which was so much easier than trying to explain what most could never comprehend.

  Desperation had compelled him here, to the one person who did understand, the one capable of burying the past for good. If she so chose. He needed that favor, needed her to say yes, and instead of arriving with something to barter, he’d come a beggar, hat in hand with nothing to offer but their shared bond and the secret dread that her answer would be no.

  His eyes tracked the last of the thinning stream of passengers and the airline crew as they trailed luggage down the hall, and finally his feet again followed.

  He moved through customs and the whole of the border crossing on autopilot, until he came at last to the waiting area, and there among the sea of faces searched hers out. He passed over her once, twice, before finally spotting her with arms crossed and leaning into a column with a grin that said she’d been watching him for a while.

  Vanessa. Michael Munroe. Best friend. Surrogate family. Personal savior.

  She looked nothing like the battle-hardened woman who’d returned from Africa’s west coast eight months ago, now nearly unrecognizable in flowing pants and delicate head scarf, everything about her soft and feminine and the opposite of what he’d expected to find. But seeing her, he could hope again.

  He stood in place while she shoved off the pillar in his direction, smirk indelible, slicing through the crowd nimble and catlike, her gray eyes not once breaking contact until she was within arm’s length.

  And then, in a movement that would have resulted in a broken nose for anyone else, she reached out and tousled his blond hair, laughing that deep carefree laugh of hers that said she was genuinely happy to see him.

  The inward rehearsal and stress that had consumed him the last few days was replaced by the possibility of hope. Logan grabbed her in a bear hug, which she halfheartedly attempted to escape; he spun her full circle, and when he’d finally let go and there was a second of awkward silence, she tousled his hair again.

  “Jesus, Logan,” she said. “From the look on your face, you’d think you’d come to ask me to marry you.”

  He ran a hand through his hair to mitigate the damage and, unable to contain the ear-to-ear grin, said, “Maybe one day I will.”

  “You should be so lucky,” she said dryly, then with a light punch to the shoulder that held his bag, “That all you got?”

  He nodded, the stupid grin still plastered on his face.

  She smiled, hooked her arm in his and, shoulder to shoulder, nearly equal in height, led him away from the crowd, saying, “It’s really good to see you.”

  The lilt of her voice, the uncharacteristic enthusiasm of her touch, gave him pause, and as they continued arm in arm, he turned to catch her eye. She grinned, impishly squeezed his biceps, and then placed her head on his shoulder.

  “You hungry?” she asked. “We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.”

  “I ate on the plane,” he said, and then confused, he hesitated. “How long could it possibly take to get into Casablanca?”

  “Not Casablanca,” she said. “Tangier.”

  The last map of Morocco that he’d seen showed Tangier nearly two hundred miles northeast. He grasped for reasons. “You and Noah broke up?” he said.

  Munroe shrugged and turned ever so slightly, so that she walked backward as she spoke. She flashed him another smile, and in that smile Logan saw a glimpse of the same, odd, telltale stupefaction that hadn’t washed over her face in more than half a decade.

  “Hard to call something that could never be whole, broken,” she said. “But no, things haven’t changed, we’re still together.”

  She smiled yet again, went back to walking side by side, and in the wake of this last, the burden Logan had come to share grew that much heavier.

  He understood from that look what she’d not said with words, and he fought for composure, to prevent the shock of knowledge from escaping to his face. He kept beside her, matching her step for step across polished floors to the lower level, where they’d catch a train into the city.

  Logan said, “Why the move to Tangier?”

  “I like it there,” she said.

  Her words came blank and deadpan. No humor, no sincerity; her unusually indirect way of saying none of your damn business, and so he let it go for now. He’d find another way to probe the extent of the damage behind the smile, to come at it from a different direction, because both as friend and as supplicant, he had to know how hard he could push, how solid the chassis, how twisted the wreckage.

  They reached Casa Voyageurs, the regional train station, and there, Munroe led him through the cool, high-domed terminal to the ticket counter, where she segued into an exchange of Arabic.

  Logan handed her his wallet and she pushed it back. “I’ve got it,” she said. “This isn’t breaking the bank.”

  Tickets in one hand, she took his hand in the other and moved beyond the clean and tidy interior to the outside, to the tunnel and its confusing array of tracks, to the train that would take them north. They were still walking the corridor to the first-class compartment when the car lurched and the train began a slow crawl out of the station.

  Logan paused and, as he’d done so many times in years past, stood watching the platform shrink into the distance. Tracks and walls and city structures began to blur, and he turned toward the empty six-seat berth that Munroe had entered.

  She sat beside the window with her head tilted back and eyes closed, so he dumped the bag on his assigned seat and took the spot opposite her. She opened her eyes a sliver and stretched so that her legs spanned the aisle, resting her feet between his knees.

  Logan said, “I could have flown to Tangier, you know, saved you the trip down and back.”

  She nodded. “But I wanted to have the time alone with you,” she said.

  He faltered and left the unasked “why” hanging in the air.

  She’d handed him an opening, presented the opportunity to unburden himself and say in person what he’d flown across the Atlantic to say, but he couldn’t. Not now. Not with her like this. He needed time to think.

  Munroe paused. It was a small hesitation, but enough that he understood she’d given notice. She was aware he’d parlayed the opening gambit and was willing to go along with him.

  “Noah’s there right now,” she continued. “He’s edgy, jealous.” She turned her eyes back to meet his. “I didn’t want you to have to face that right off the bat.”

  “Doesn’t he know that I’m gay?”

  She flashed a cheesy grin and crinkled her nose. “He knows. But he also knows that I love you.”

  “So that makes me a threat?” Logan said.

  She nodded.

  He sighed.

  The only way his arrival could be deemed a threat was if something else wasn’t right. Under ideal circumstances Logan would ask for details and she would tell; their conversation would flow in that bonded way of confidants that had defined years together. But this wasn’t ideal, not anything close to ideal.

  They settled again into small talk, then gradually into silence as Logan, lulled by the peace of her presence, the rhythm of the wheels against the tracks, and fighting three days of being awake, drifted into the oblivion of sleep.

  It was the subtle exchange of metal on metal that gradually pulled him back. According to the sun’s path, hours had passed.

  Daze
d and disoriented, he turned to Munroe. She was smiling again, that odd telltale smile. She flipped the knife from her palm, her eyes never leaving his as she played the blade across her fingers.

  Logan cursed silently, fighting the urge to stare at the weapon, and said, “Been a while since you’ve carried them.”

  She nodded, eyes still to his, still grinning, the steel continuing to play.

  Logan leaned his head back and closed his eyes—his way of shutting out the pain of seeing her in this state. The knives and all that they symbolized spoke volumes to how far she had fallen.

  The sky was dark when they arrived in Tangier, Morocco’s gateway to Europe. Tangier Ville was the end of the line, and the station, with its clean and polished interior was in turn its own gateway to nighttime streets that birthed life and motion into the humid air of Africa’s northern coast.

  Their destination in the eastern suburb of Malabata was close enough that they could have walked, but instead of footing it as Logan had expected, Munroe flagged a petit taxi. In the glow of the terminal’s fluorescent lights she bantered with the driver over the rate, and Logan sensed disquiet in her haste.

  The ride was but a few minutes, and the vehicle stopped in front of a three-story building that faced the ocean. The apartment block, like most of the others Logan had seen on the journey, was whitewashed, stacked, and topped with a flat rooftop that he knew to be as much a part of the living space as the rooms inside.

  He stepped from the cab and sniffed the salt-tinged breeze.

  Parked against the curb not far from the building entrance was a black BMW, and Munroe swore quietly as she took note of it.

  “He’s already here,” she said.

  Logan lifted the strap of his bag to his shoulder. “I’ve wanted to meet him anyway,” he said.

  She stared at the car and after a long pause walked through the front door with Logan following close behind.

  The stairs from the entrance led to a tiled mezzanine that amplified their footsteps, and they went up again, another half floor, stopping in front of the only apartment on the landing. Munroe turned the key and swung the oversize door wide to a deep and sparsely furnished living area.