Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

spitting down. She turned on the headlights and finally found the windshield wiper control. Road dirt smeared across the window until Jake reached over and turned on the washer. The glass cleared into two curved views of a gray universe.
    “What do you believe?” Honor asked finally.
    “Fuck believing.” Jake’s voice was cold. “I know that I didn’t steal the amber, much less a panel of the Amber Room.”
    She wanted to doubt him.
    She wanted to believe him.
    She was being asked to choose between two people she loved, Kyle and Jake. Her mind could give her a lifetime of reasons to chose Kyle. Her gut simply rebelled at making either choice.
    “If there were another suspect, any other suspect,” Honor asked almost desperately, “would you believe Kyle was innocent?”
    “Hell, yes! I’ve been going through it in my mind since I heard about the theft, looking for another explanation. Any explanation. I thought the charming son of a bitch was my friend.”
    She opened her mouth and thought better of it. Instead of defending her brother, she listened to her one-night, once-in-a-lifetime lover.
    “At first I couldn’t believe Kyle had screwed me like that,” Jake said. “I even thought he might be in trouble and I could help him. Jesus, was I ever a fool.”
    The pain and self-contempt in Jake’s voice made Honor wince. It was an exact echo of how she had felt after Archer told her who her fishing guide really was.
    “I started asking questions,” Jake said, “and Donovan International came down on my head like a hundred-year flood. Next thing I knew people were offering to kill me unless I shut up and got out of town. I kept pushing. The Donovan clan didn’t like it. They had me thrown out of that half of the world.”
    A seething kind of silence closed over the car. After a few miles, Honor broke it. “What about the woman?”
    “Ellen?”
    “No. Mariyoo whatever.”
    Jake looked startled. “Marry you?” Then he understood. “Oh, Marju . What about her?”
    “If Kyle stole anything—and I’m not saying he did—then isn’t there a chance that she knew what was going on?”
    “Yes.”
    “And?”
    “She says Kyle used her to get to the Amber Room.”
    “That’s not his style.”
    Jake didn’t reply.
    “Damn it, it’s true!” Honor said. “Kyle wouldn’t do something like that, especially to someone he loved.”
    “Lusted. Not the same thing.”
    “No shit,” she said bitterly.
    Jake felt like pounding on the dashboard. The certainty that Honor was slipping away from him had put a deadly edge on his temper. He told himself all the reasons why she had a right to feel used, took a slow breath, and then another.
    He still felt like hammering on the dashboard.
    “What makes you so sure Marju didn’t use Kyle?” Honor asked.
    “No motive.”
    “How about sixty million bucks?”
    “How about the fact that Marju’s connection to the panel came from the Forest Brotherhood?” Jake countered.
    “So?”
    “She’s a heavy-duty Lithuanian patriot. The Forest Brotherhood is a Lithuanian patriotic organization. She might steal the Amber Room from one love, the Brotherhood, and give it to another love, Kyle, but she wouldn’t steal it from him and the Brotherhood both. No motive. Either way, she already had the damned thing, so why steal it from herself in the first place?”
    “What about Snake Eyes?”
    “If he had the Amber Room, he wouldn’t be hanging around here.”
    “The same could be said of everyone.”
    “Except Kyle,” Jake said evenly. “He isn’t here.”
    “Neither is Archer. Does that mean he stole it?”
    “Makes sense to me. Archer is the one who shut down Russia around my ears.”
    A few more miles went by in tight silence.
    “What if Kyle didn’t steal the panel,” Honor said finally, “but is being blamed for it?”
    “Great. Who stole it?”
    “I don’t know! Maybe they all did it and ganged up on Kyle!”
    “They? As in Russia, Lithuania, the United States, and various international crooks of unknown origin, including me?”
    “Easy for you to ridicule, but I don’t hear you coming up with anything better.”
    “I don’t have to. I already have a suspect who is a dead match for the facts.”
    “Your facts need rearranging.”
    Jake swore wearily. “Any one of a thousand people could have stolen the panel, but that doesn’t explain why Kyle and the shipment went missing together, does it?”
    “But someone could have just slipped the