“You saw it?” Bullard asked, staring at her.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It wasn’t that day. It was like the previous night—or maybe the previous day. I don’t know,” she said. “You know what it’s like on island time. I remember seeing something shoot through the sky and then an explosion. Maybe that’s why I went fishing that day. I did see a lot of parts and pieces, but it was far away. I just kept going. I want to think that, deep inside, I knew, but there is no way to know for sure.”
“It’s okay,” Bullard said.
“But then I found you, and I never really thought about it again.”
“I don’t know anybody who would have had access to rockets,” Bullard said. “I mean, obviously I do, and we have contacts who certainly would have access.” And then he slowly looked at his brother. “Bro, that’s something you would have known too.”
“Hey, I had nothing to do with it,” he said, his hands up. “This is starting to sound like an inquest, but I’m just here to catch up on the reunion. I haven’t been here in forever, and Ice has been keeping me up to date with the news and all.”
“But you were here a little bit ago,” Izzie said.
He looked at her in surprise. “No, I wasn’t,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, you were,” she said. “I remember seeing you outside the gate.”
“When?” he asked, but there was an edginess to his voice.
Fallon stepped up behind him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Blachard said. “What the hell is this?”
“What this is,” Leia said quietly, “looks like betrayal, some of the worst betrayal ever.”
“What do you know about it?” he said, with a sneer.
“I know all about betrayal,” she said. “But I don’t necessarily understand what your role is in all this.”
“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t have a role in this at all.”
But Bullard said, “You knew Deedee. You actually had an affair with her,” he said. “You knew the guys who worked for her, and she had access to a whole number of assassins all down the line.”
“So do many others,” Blachard said, his voice hard and his hands on his hips. Yet he had that look of a cornered rat.
Leia stared at him in shock. “You did it,” she said. “You actually did it. You shot down their plane and set all this in motion. You are responsible for all these men who had been injured or nearly died. How could you do that?”
He stared at her, his jaw working, as he figured out what to say.
When Bullard stepped forward, he asked, “Why? Why are you doing this? I see the hate in your actions, and yet I don’t know what I did to deserve it.”
His brother turned, his face twisting into a vile expression of evil, as he sneered at them. “Five years. Five long hellish years while you got to live a life as a free man, while you supposedly were looking for me. Like hell. You took your sweet time with that, didn’t you?”
Bullard’s face twisted in shock.
“If it had been any of your team, you’d have found them in no time. No, me, your half brother, you were content to let me rot in a cell. I thought of nothing else all those long cold months in solitary. I knew you would tell everyone you were looking but would make me suffer. Well, I planned to make you suffer as soon as I could. It took a while to set up, but, once I did, I realized I could have it all at the same time. Your company and Kingdom Securities. Hell, Ice is a great friend. I could take out Levi and have her too.”
Bullard struggled to see through the rage in his heart and his mind as he studied his broken brother. The years as a prisoner had done more damage than he had suspected. But no one would have guessed this. … Who could?
Izzie stepped forward. “Dad?”
His face worked, as he stared at his daughter. “And you,” he sneered. “You always preferred him to me.”
Her jaw dropped. “He looked after me when you disappeared. You were gone for five years, then suddenly showed up, a changed man,” she said. “You’ve barely spoken to me in years!”
“I was putting things in motion,” he said. “Your uncle here would say that I had gone away to lick my wounds,” he said, “but what I was doing was making plans.”
“What plans?” she asked. “To get back at him? Please don’t tell me that’s what you were doing.”
He glared at her. “What do you care? You’ll just hook up with one of his team members anyway. You’ll never be number one.”
“I don’t need to be number one. I just want to be a good person and to live a decent life,” she said. “But look at you. All you’ve done is hurt people.”
He sneered at her. “And again, you don’t understand. You’re just like your mother.”
She stiffened at that. “I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you.”
He laughed. “Take it however you want, all of you. Because it really doesn’t make any difference anymore.” And, with that, he pulled out a hand grenade, snapping the top off in front of them. Everybody’s gaze was locked on to that grenade. If he dropped it, they would all go up.
Bullard looked at him and said, “Seriously? You’re willing to take what fifteen, twenty people to their deaths, including yourself and your own daughter?”
“If you let me go,” he said, “I’ll disappear again.”
“What? So you can run away and hide, making plans to come back and try to kill all my men and shoot my plane out of the air … again?”
“It cost me a lot of money to set that up,” he said. “How typical that you survived. You’re one of those goddamn golden boys who never ever fails, no matter what it is.”
“Oh, I failed a lot,” he said quietly. “But not at this. I’ve dedicated my life to this work,” he said. “But I can’t fathom spending one ounce of energy to get back at somebody I cared about.”
“I haven’t cared about you since we were little,” he said, “since it became obvious to all that you were bigger and better, like a bright shiny penny for everyone around.” He said it with so much bitterness that everybody just stared at him.
Ice stepped forward and said, “Blachard, is that really how you want to play this out right now?”
“Why not?” he said. “He even comes back from the dead with a gorgeous woman in love with him. Who else does that?” he said, shaking his head. “If I drop this right now, it’s all over for everyone. And I, for one, am totally okay with that.”
“Well, I don’t think anybody else is,” Bullard said.
Leia took a quick look around, and she saw the men assessing options, but it was all about that grenade. She didn’t know very much, but she knew that one of the men in the back of Bullard had a metal box with a lid on it. She looked at the grenade, looked at the box, and reached out a hand behind Bullard’s back. The metal box quickly made its way up to the front. Once she had it in her hand, she looked down at it. “I presume a grenade like that should go into a box like this, huh?”
Blachard looked at it and laughed. “But it’ll never happen,” he said. “I’ll drop it instead, and it’ll go off, like crazy.”