Where You Belong by Barbara Taylor Bradford

needed Jake to inform me today about the many women Tony had been involved with before me. I was well aware of his countless affairs; after all, we’d worked together, traveled together on various assignments.
    Naturally Tony had tried to keep these women under wraps, and a secret, because his private life was his private life. It was none of my business, in his opinion. Nor was it Jake’s business either, and so he had striven for privacy.
    However, I could put two and two together and come up with six, just like everyone else. Tony had always underestimated me, and so had Jake. Just because I never discussed Tony’s international sexual dalliances didn’t mean that I didn’t know they existed. I did know, and I didn’t care. After all, I wasn’t in love with him then, not involved in that way. This knowledge hadn’t changed my opinion of him in those days. I thought he was a great guy, a good human being, and naturally I admired his talent as a photojournalist. It was more than that really; I considered it an honor to work alongside him.
    But to think Jake believed I hadn’t known about Tony’s very busy love life . . . how ludicrous that was. I was much smarter than he imagined, than Tony imagined. I suddenly wanted to laugh out loud at the mere idea of it.
    All those women . . . and one in particular whom I had known and disliked. I thought of her now. . . .
    II
    It was April 1996, and for once Tony and I were on assignment without Jake. He had gone to New York to deal with his divorce from Sue Ellen Jones, the famous model, and Tony and I had flown out to the Middle East for our respective news-photo agencies. We were in Lebanon to cover the new hostilities that had erupted between the Israelis and Hezbollah.
    The long civil war was over by that time and things were beginning to mend, beginning to get back to normal, and then the skirmishing had unexpectedly started once more.
    For the first time in fourteen years the Israelis had attacked Beirut directly, using laser-homing Hellfire missiles shot from four helicopter gunships off the coast.
    The Israelis were not the aggressors though. They were actually responding to Hezbollah’s recent bombing of their country. And that war of attrition had started up again because Hezbollah had then retaliated after the missile attack, sending forty rockets smack into the middle of Israel. And so it went. . . .
    One lovely spring day—late in the afternoon, actually—Tony and I were sitting in the bar of the Marriott Hotel in the Hamra district of Beirut. I suppose I’ll never forget that day, because we had had such bad news about a colleague of ours, Bill Fitzgerald of CNS, one of the American cable television networks. He had disappeared several days earlier, and none of us knew what had happened to him. We were all a bit nervous and concerned, and afraid for Bill.
    Two of his crew, who had been with him out on the streets, had seen him grabbed by three young men, who had hustled him into a waiting Mercedes and then driven off at breakneck speed. The two crew members had been alert, and at once they jumped into their car and followed in furious pursuit. But the Mercedes disappeared—into thin air.
    Since then there had been no news about Bill, and none of the terrorist organizations claimed his kidnapping. Who had snatched him, and for what purpose, we did not know.
    But as we sat around in the bar that day, drinking with a group of international correspondents, all of us were offering theories, and speculation was rampant.
    III
    â€œIslamic Jihad,” I had said all of a sudden, glancing around the table at my companions. “They’ve got him.”
    â€œBut why would they have grabbed him?” Tony had asked. “And if it is them, what have they got to gain, Val? Listen, snatching a newsman just doesn’t make sense.”
    â€œIt might. They’ve managed to make use of hostages before,”