The Phoenix Encounter by Linda Castillo Page B

held on to it with the desperation of a drowning woman hanging on to a float. “I got caught up in the movement,” she snapped. “Is that mysterious enough for you?”
    â€œYou were involved with the rebels before…I left the first time. Tell me something I don’t already know.”
    Letting out a shuddery breath, she sank into the second chair and looked into the fire. “Nothing has changed.”
    â€œEverything has changed, damn it. Don’t lie to me.”
    Her eyes met his, and within their depths he saw the memories, felt them in his heart the way he had a thousand times in the months since he’d last seen her. A young doctor and an American journalist in a strange land surrounded by ugliness and danger. Two people longing for their homeland, but bound by their love of freedom and a responsibility to help those unable to help themselves. Robert andLily had spent their days doing what they could to breathe life into a country dying a slow death of oppression. By day, Robert inoculated children, treating the innocent for disease and malnutrition and neglect. Lily wrote her articles, sending them to newspapers in London, New York and Frankfurt, and visited the orphans, the children whose parents had been killed in the war. The children no one cared about.
    By night, Lily and Robert met in a smoky little pub, exchanging stories, decompressing, laughing on the outside because inside they felt like crying. For a few short hours they escaped the war, talking about all the things they wanted to do with their lives, their hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Surrounded by despair and destruction and hopelessness, they found peace and their own tiny slice of paradise. They fell in love in that dank little pub. The most unlikely of places that led them to something extraordinary and breathtaking….
    Lily shoved the memories away with brutal precision, the way she’d done a thousand times in the last twenty-one months, but she wasn’t fast enough to keep them from cutting her. Instead of giving in to the hot burn of tears, or memories that had been seared into her brain like a brand, she took a deep breath and looked at Robert.
    â€œThings were looking hopeless for the freedom fighters,” she began. “There had been so many good men killed. Families devastated by grief. All because they wanted to be free. DeBruzkya was putting out a lot of propaganda, telling the world how he was going to turn the country around. He’s a very charismatic man. A politician and dynamic speaker capable of rallying huge numbers of people and making them believe him. Facts were hard to come by. People wanted to believe him. They want to believe in the goodness of people. They wanted desperately to believe that he would rebuild their nation. They didn’t have a clue about his firing squads or that he didn’t havethe slightest intention of turning Rebelia into a democracy.”
    Realizing her hands had turned suddenly icy, she held them to the fire and continued. “Most people were so involved with just trying to survive, they didn’t know what was going on with the revolution. But having spent time with the freedom fighters, I knew exactly what was happening. I saw what DeBruzkya was doing. And I knew the single most powerful thing I could do was tell the truth to the people.” She shrugged. “I began putting out a monthly newsletter. At first it was just a way for me to get my thoughts down on paper and exchange ideas with others. But over the months that newsletter slowly evolved into a sort of underground newspaper.”
    Sitting a few feet away, Robert listened intently. He didn’t look happy about what she was telling him. But Lily wasn’t going to let his disapproval influence her one way or another.
    â€œMy newspaper is called the Rebellion, ” she said. “I put it out weekly, updating people on where to find medicine for their