Trapping Zero. Джек Марс

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      And so it went, returning to silence and tension.

      Say something meaningful, his mind shouted at him. Offer them support. Let them know they can open up to you about what happened. You all survived a trauma. Survive it together.

      “Listen,” he said. “I know that it hasn’t been easy lately. But I want you both to know that it’s okay to talk to me about what happened. You can ask me questions. I’ll be honest.”

      “Dad…” Maya started, but he put up a hand.

      “Please, this is important to me,” he said. “I’m here for you, and I always will be. We survived this together, the three of us, and that proves there’s nothing that can keep us apart…”

      He trailed off, his heart breaking anew when he saw tears spilling down Sara’s cheeks. She continued to stare downward at the table as she cried, saying nothing, with a faraway gaze that suggested she was somewhere other than mentally present with her sister and father.

      “Honey, I’m sorry.” Reid rose to hug her, but Maya got there first. She wrapped her arms around her younger sister as Sara sobbed into her shoulder. There was little Reid could do but stand there awkwardly and watch. No words of sympathy came; any expression of endearment he might offer would be little more than putting a band-aid on a bullet hole.

      Maya grabbed a napkin from the table and dabbed gently at her sister’s cheeks, smoothed her blonde hair from off her forehead. “Hey,” she said in a whisper. “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down for a bit, huh? I’ll come and check on you soon.”

      Sara nodded and sniffled. She rose wordlessly from the table and shuffled out of the dining room towards the stairs.

      “I didn’t mean to upset her…”

      Maya spun on him with her hands on her hips. “Then why did you go and bring that up?”

      “Because she’s hardly said two words to me about it!” Reid said defensively. “I want her to know that she can talk to me.”

      “She doesn’t want to talk to you about it,” Maya shot back. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it!”

      “Dr. Branson said that opening up about a past trauma is therapeutic…”

      Maya scoffed loudly. “And do you think that Dr. Branson has ever been through anything like what Sara went through?”

      Reid took a breath, forcing himself to calm and not argue. “Probably not. But she treats CIA operatives, military personnel, all manner of trauma and PTSD—”

      “Sara is not a CIA agent,” said Maya harshly. “She’s not a Green Beret or a Navy Seal. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl.” She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. “You want to know? You want to talk about what happened? Here it is: we saw Mr. Thompson’s body before we were kidnapped. It was lying right there in the foyer. We watched that maniac cut the throat of the woman from the rest stop. Some of her blood was on my shoes. We were there when the traffickers shot another girl and left her body lying in the gravel. She was trying to help me free Sara. I was drugged. We were both nearly raped. And Sara, somehow she found the strength to fight off two grown men, one of whom had a gun, and she threw herself out of the window of a speeding train.” Maya’s chest was heaving by the time she was finished, but no tears came.

      She wasn’t upset reliving the events of last month. She was angry.

      Reid lowered himself slowly into a chair. He knew about most of what she told him by virtue of having followed the trail to find the girls, but he had no idea about another girl being gunned down in front of them. Maya was right; Sara was not trained to deal with any such things. She wasn’t even an adult. She was a teenager who had experienced things that anyone, trained or not, would find traumatizing.

      “When you showed up,” Maya continued, her voice lower now, “when you actually came for us, it was like you were a superhero or something. At first. But then… when we had some time to think about it… we realized that we don’t know what else you’re hiding. We’re not sure who you really are. Do you know how frightening that is?”

      “Maya,” he said gently, “you don’t ever have to be afraid of me—”

      “You’ve killed people.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Plenty of them. Right?”

      “I…” Reid had to remind himself not to lie to her. He had promised he wouldn’t anymore, as long as he could help it. Instead he only nodded.

      “Then you’re not the person that we thought you were. That’s going to take time to get used to. You need to accept that.”

      “You keep saying ‘we,’” Reid murmured. “She talks to you?”

      “Yeah. Sometimes. She’s been sleeping in my bed the past week or so. Nightmares.”

      Reid sighed dolefully. Gone was the untroubled, content dynamic their small family had once enjoyed. He realized now that things had changed for all of them and between all of them—maybe forever.

      “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted softly. “I want to be there for her, for both of you. I want to be your support when you need it. But I can’t do that if she won’t talk to me about what’s going on in her head.” He glanced up at Maya and added, “She’s always looked up to you. Maybe you can be a role model for her now. I think that getting back into a routine, a shot at normal life, would be good for both of you. At least finish your Georgetown classes. Besides, they’re not likely to let you in if you flunked an entire semester.”

      Maya was silent for a long moment. At last she said, “I don’t think I want to go to Georgetown anymore.”

      Reid frowned. Georgetown had been her top choice of colleges since they’d moved to Virginia. “Then where? NYU?”

      She shook her head. “No. I want to go West Point.”

      “West Point,” he repeated blankly, completely thrown by her statement. “You want to go to a military academy?”

      “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to become a CIA agent.”

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Reid balked. He was certain he had heard her right, but the combination of words that came from her mouth made little sense to him.

      She’s winding me up, he thought. She was expecting an argument and I resisted. This was just youthful angst. It had to be.

      “You… want to be a CIA agent,” he said slowly.

      “Yes,” said Maya. “More specifically, I want to attend the National Intelligence University in Bethesda. But in order to do that, I would first have to be a member of the armed forces. If I go to West Point instead of enlisting, I would graduate as a second lieutenant and be eligible to attend NIU. There I can get a master’s in strategic intelligence, and by that point I’d be over twenty-one, so I could enroll in the agency’s field-training program.”

      Reid’s legs felt numb. Not only was she very obviously serious, but she had already done some thorough research to find her best course of action and education.

      But there was no way in hell that he would ever let his daughter choose СКАЧАТЬ