Only two o'clock in the afternoon, but it was the twenty-seventh of December and dusk had fallen in Denmark. The corner tower of Kronborg Castle was stark against the bruised sky. Slivers of icy wind pierced my down jacket. A strand of blond hair pulled free from my knitted cap, whipped across my eyes, forced out tears. A sob escaped me, too. The wind snatched the sound away, silencing my fear but not dulling the ache in my heart. I shoved my hair under the cap and stumbled on. I had to. Up ahead waited the only person who could tell me that Stefan Krajewski was still alive.

And he had to be! Stefan, my lover, had to be alive.

Just four months before, he'd said too many people knew that he was doing contract work for Danish intelligence. He'd spent close to twenty years in covert operations and his time was up. Soon, he'd told me at the beginning of August, he'd move inside.

And he'd move in with me. We'd been in the Allegheny Mountains when he said that. I'd saved up my annual leave, rented a cabin near Clifton Forge for the month of August. The two of us, one bed, no phone for an unheard-of thirty-one consecutive days. And I must have thought thirty-one times--at least once a day--This is what it will be like. Coffee-drenched mornings, sharing a newspaper. Late-afternoon beers, talking over the minutiae of daily life. Evening strolls down to the lake to see if the beavers were having a moonlight swim.

With my body and my soul, I'd loved Stefan for more than a decade, my passion for him never wavering even though we were often separated by the work he did. When we were together, we had everything we needed for happiness except time. Finally, we'd have that, too. The urgency gone, so many hours stretching out before us, we could squander them. That was how I wanted things to be. My cherished fantasy, shattered now by reality.

Six days ago, a plane had exploded over Scotland. Another plane over Scotland! Global Flight 500 had departed Heathrow on December 21, bound for New York's Kennedy Airport. It came apart a half hour later over the Inner Hebrides Islands. And Stefan had disappeared.

I neared the corner of the castle and a row of ancient cannons took shape. The fortress hulked beside me, Denmark's easternmost defense for six centuries. Through the gloom I made out the tall figure of Holger Sorensen, cloaked in a Danish Army parka, standing with his back to the sea. I walked faster, scattering frozen pebbles beneath my boots.

I stopped a yard from him. He was a head taller than my five feet nine and I had to tilt my chin up to see his face. The lines along his cheekbones had deepened since our last meeting. His eyes had faded from blue to gray. And the smile was gone from them, replaced by the consoling expression of a priest prepared to mourn the dead.

I stepped past him, stared unseeing across the water toward the Swedish coastline. Holger's gloved hand was heavy on my shoulder. In a voice weighted with sorrow, he said, "Kathryn."

I'd forgotten Holger always addressed me by my Christian name. These days my friends and colleagues called me by my initials, K.C., and I wrote it as "Casey." The only other person who still used "Kathryn" was my father. And only when he was going to give me bad news.

To stop Holger's next words, I said quickly, "I've seen the passenger list." I took a breath, pushed on. "Stefan's name wasn't on it. He knew Monday was the anniversary of Lockerbie. He wouldn't have flown an American carrier on Monday." I was breathing hard, as if I'd been running. My fingertips moved jerkily along the frost-rimed barrel of a cannon.

Holger didn't speak.

I said, "We warned everyone in the Department not to fly American carriers out of Europe last week."

Holger's voice was soft. "Did you tell Stefan that?"

"I couldn't." Anguish raised my voice still higher. I took another breath. "I didn't have a chance."

He said, "Nor did I."

The mournful cry of an air horn cut through the darkness. The ferryboat was visible a hundred yards offshore, its white hull wallowing toward the docks at Helsingor. A lone seabird rose from the stony beach below us.

Holger said, "It was some time ago you and Stefan made plans that he would join you in Washington for Christmas?"

"October." And stingy fate had doled out only eighteen hours that time.

"You made definite plans?"

"Tentative, of course. Two weeks ago, he sent word to expect him on the twenty-second."

"But you haven't spoken with him since October?"

"He never used phones."

"And when he didn't show up?" Holger asked.

"I knew his trip to the U.S. was no vacation. A lot of things might have delayed him a day. Even two days."

"So at first you didn't blame his absence on the explosion?"

"At first? No." I'd started my Christmas vacation on December 21, on leave from my job at the State Department. When the news started coming in about Global Flight 500, I was sticking bows on a gift for Stefan, a pair of cowboy boots I'd bought from a Western outfitter who sold to real ranch hands. I'd kept an eye on the TV while I struggled to wrap the matching Stetson. Polish by birth, Stefan was smitten with Western regalia.

As I waited for him to contact me, my mind slowly recorded every piece of film from the Hebrides. Long-lens shots of the motley rescue flotilla that had set out from every harbor on the island of Islay. A terse interview with an exhausted diver, his wet suit glistening like black ice. A somber view of the distillery warehouse serving as a makeshift morgue, aged oak barrels stacked against a weathered stone wall. And above it all-- again--the ash-gray sky of Scotland in December.

The explosion hadn't occurred over Scottish soil. The Boeing 747 and all two hundred and twenty-seven aboard submerged in the Firth of Lorne, one hundred and fifty miles northwest of the original disaster. But the words spoken by every newscaster were the same: Lockerbie Two.

Holger's voice prodded me. "But you got no message from Stefan and you feared the worst."

I turned, still avoiding Holger's eyes, studying Kronborg Castle. The weathered bricks were topped by a roof the color of new grass, eerily bright against the murk. The worst. "Yes."

On the twenty-third, I called the airline but they wouldn't release information to me. Frantic, I phoned my contact in TIPOFF, the Department's terrorist lookout program, and she faxed me the passenger list for Global 500. Half the names were of men traveling alone. Any one of them might have been Stefan, working under cover. Too upset to face my co-workers in the office of State's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, I waited until after hours to go to the Department and log on to Intelink, the intelligence community's private Internet. I spent four hours searching electronically. I found only speculation. There was too little data to determine yet if Stefan had been on the plane. I knew I should stay by my phone, wait for his call.

I drifted around my three rooms, carefully evading the packages still sitting on my desk. Christmas Eve came. I moved Stefan's gifts to my bedroom. Then to the back of my closet, out of sight. But, awake before dawn on Christmas morning, I saw that white hat. Saw Stefan, grinning from under it, flamboyant attire no hazard in the life we should have been living.

I met Holger's gaze. "As you said. I feared the worst. I figured you and I needed to talk."

"You traveled to me."

He'd been my teacher once. I answered his unspoken question, my voice flat, parroting a lecture on evasive maneuvers. "Christmas morning I went to Dulles and got an Air France flight to Paris. Changed planes three times between Paris and Goteborg. Rented a car, drove south and crossed to Denmark on the ferry yesterday. Went through that whole business to get you out here today."

Holger's compassionate look was gone, the sudden clarity like a tempered steel gate, clanging shut. The Major--the part of him that served as a reserve officer in the Danish Army-- had pushed aside the Father--the side of Holger that made it possible for him to also serve as a Lutheran priest. He said, "Go home. There's nothing you can do here."

"I'm staying. Till we find out what's become of Stefan."

©1998 by Diana Deverell