Say It Again (First Wives)

by Catherine Bybee

  “How do you know I’m not working for him now?”

  “I don’t. Except that having someone shoot at both of us is going a little extreme to gain my trust.”

  “Shooting?” AJ asked.

  Sasha waved him off.

  “Not that I give a flying fuck. I’ve wanted to put a bullet in my own brain more than once. If it wasn’t for Amelia, I would have a long time ago. Now I just want to find out who took her out and make them pay.”

  That was a party AJ could go along with. Making someone pay, that was . . . Suicide, not so much.

  “Seems sloppy of Pohl to kill all your Richter roommates to flush you out.”

  “Killing them is what he does. Or the people he hires us for, anyway. Bullets and execution, that’s his style. Shooting out the wheels of a car is sloppy. Room for error. I didn’t even catch on until Jocey ended up dead. I only found that out when I saw you in the flat in Germany. I recognized you and knew something wasn’t adding up.”

  AJ glanced through the rearview mirror. “How did you know who I was?”

  “You’re Amelia’s brother. The professional car thief that really should find a better way to use your talents.”

  Sasha squeezed his leg. “Professional, huh? And here you thought no one knew.”

  He switched lanes. “What I did twenty minutes ago was anything but . . . Amelia told you I was a thief?”

  Olivia laughed. “I told her. She didn’t want to believe it. But once I found out, I didn’t keep it from her.”

  Damn.

  “She loved you anyway.”

  “How do you know what my sister loved and didn’t?” he asked.

  Olivia stared out the window. “Because she was my only friend. I loved your sister and now she’s dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Claire sat on the sofa, hands on her knees while Sasha reported in on the speakerphone.

  “I’m outside of Alamo rentals.” She rattled off the address. “We need a car. There’s three of us now. I don’t have a lot of time and we need to put some miles behind us.”

  “Who’s the extra wheel?” Neil asked.

  “Olivia, our missing link. Amelia was her best friend. Olivia tried to leave Pohl’s organization and people around her started dropping.”

  “Why the other roommates?”

  “Olivia believes Pohl got word of a friendship from Richter and took them all out one at a time until he hit the right one.”

  “To make her come back,” Neil said.

  “Or teach her a lesson.”

  Claire watched as Neil paced the room. “Get back to Texas. We need to regroup.”

  “And bring a known assassin into Trina’s home. Not in this lifetime. I have no way of knowing what she said is true. Only thing going for her is the fact that we were both dodging bullets.”

  Neil stopped moving. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Are you okay?” Claire jumped in to ask.

  “I don’t have any extra holes. We need a car and time. Oh, and we may have liberated a vehicle from the parking garage of Amelia’s office building.”

  Cooper started to laugh. “Let me guess, AJ.”

  “Yeah,” she huffed. “Might need to run some interference with that one. When the smoke clears, Amelia Hofmann’s condo is going to be found full of bullet holes and DNA. Won’t take long for whoever is behind this to figure out that we’re still alive and for the authorities to find us and make our jobs even harder.”

  “Police and questions.”

  “Right. Since we sent AJ to the office today . . . ,” Sasha said.

  “Someone is going to put this together.”

  “Alex Hofmann said he was hiring someone to look into his daughter’s death. Might be a long shot to reach out to him to keep AJ’s face and name out of anything that comes up. I’m buying twenty-four hours and then I’m headed back to Germany.”

  Claire cringed.

  “Sasha!”

  “I’m going, Neil. With or without a team. The answers are at Richter.”

  “And if that’s Olivia’s plan all along?” Neil asked.

  Yeah, that’s exactly what Claire was thinking.

  “Then sending a team to be there will keep me alive.”

  Everyone in the room tensed.

  “Twenty-four hours, Neil. Plenty of time to come up with a plan. Run away, or toward. You know my direction.”

  Tension rolled off of Neil in hot waves. He turned to Isaac. “Do we have a car?”

  “Already called in,” Isaac reported.

  Neil put his head closer to the phone. “You have a car and twenty-four hours. I want a report every six.”

  “I’m capable—”

  “We need to know you’re alive.”

  For a minute Claire thought Sasha had already hung up. But her voice cracked when she came back on the line. “Copy that.”

  The phone disconnected and Neil snapped. “We need maps, aerial and surrounding areas of Richter. Claire, I need to know every last detail of that campus, cameras, security, lighting . . . everything. Someone get some coffee going. No one is getting any sleep tonight.” He stormed from the room with a slam of the door.

  Claire stood next to Cooper. “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine.”

  They holed up in a tiny town not far from Heritage Airfield, an airport large enough to land a private jet and small enough to avoid hassle.

  “Can we trust her?” AJ asked. His eyes traveled over Sasha’s shoulder to the woman standing in the small kitchenette of the motel room they rented.

  Sasha wished she could answer that question without any skepticism. “Sixty forty,” she told him.

  “I don’t like those odds.”

  “We don’t have much of a choice right now. Friends close and enemies closer.” Much as she hated to say it.

  “I can hear you.” Olivia jumped up to sit on the counter, her legs dangling. “Looks like you guys are all rock and a hard place.”

  Sasha crossed her arms over her chest, expression neutral. “You need to give me something or you’ll be sleeping tied up.” Not a bad option.

  “I don’t do kink.”

  “You do have a bad attitude,” AJ growled.

  Olivia glared. “You would, too, if your friend was killed just to make you submit. Amelia’s death is on my shoulders. The only thing keeping me from putting a bullet in Pohl personally is needing to know who he hired to do the job. I want them, too.”

  AJ ran a hand through his hair.

  “Who does Pohl work for?” Sasha asked.

  “He’s nothing but a pimp. He gathers assignments, farms them out. I never had contact with the actual client.”

  “Just so we’re clear, you’re an assassin.” AJ’s anger was measured by his words.

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “Brilliant deduction, Watson. I’m sure your girlfriend here has already told you that.”

  “My sister would never associate herself with you.”

  “You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? Makes it easier. Truth is, Amelia and I were close at Richter. I left the year before her. We stayed in contact using the senior computer.” Olivia looked at Sasha. “Amelia was gifted in her ability to encrypt messages and use of computers. To the point that by the time she graduated, she’d devised an entire system that erased all correspondence within minutes.”

  “Why the camera at her home?” AJ asked.

  “I disappeared from Pohl’s radar six months ago. I insisted on the camera and recordings to track when she wasn’t home. Just like I did on the flat in Germany. Just like I’m sure you do, Sasha.”

  Sasha nodded toward AJ. Her bare-bones studio flat she almost never slept in had more booby traps than Fort Knox.

  “There isn’t anything I’m going to be able to say to gain your trust. I wouldn’t if I were you.” She pushed off the counter and grabbed a glass before moving to the sink. “Pohl wants me dead. Rogue assassins get their heads patted with shovels. I knew
that less than six months in. He recorded my first assignment. It was a test, he told me. Make sure I could take care of myself while gathering information for his client.” Olivia turned on the water, her back to them. “He set me up. It was kill or be killed.” She lifted the glass in the air after it was full. “I’m still here.”

  Sasha saw what would have been her had Alice not been there to direct her toward other places. “Who do you want dead?” Sasha asked her.

  “Pohl . . . but that’s too easy, isn’t it? Lodovica farms for the man, cultivates and nurtures us. Who’s to say Pohl is the only one she sends sacrificial lambs to? You take her out and then what? The board appoints another who does the same thing?”

  AJ and Sasha exchanged looks. One that said they were both thinking of his mother, who once served on the board of directors of the school.

  Sasha thought about her private conversations with the headmistress, the things she revealed. “The secrets are in the vault.”

  Olivia turned. “What vault?”

  “Lower level. Below the range.”

  “I thought Claire said they’d sealed up the downstairs,” AJ said.

  “That doesn’t mean they cleared everything out first. If they were smart, they did.”

  “Why not just destroy incriminating files?” AJ asked.

  Olivia snorted. “Because it’s impossible to keep all the players in line without all the dirt you have on them. A school as old and dirty as Richter would take a bomb to clean up.”

  AJ sat on the edge of one of the two beds. “I can see why you wouldn’t go to the authorities and blow the whistle on Richter, but what about you, Sasha? Or Claire? Pohl went on television and called you out as a kidnapper and labeled Claire as a troubled teen in need of guidance.”

  “I have enemies. And if they have dirt, or created dirt on Claire as a troubled teen, who is going to listen to her?”

  AJ tilted his head to the side. “What enemies?” AJ asked Sasha.

  She opened her mouth to answer, her father’s name on the tip of her tongue.

  “Seems you have more powerful friends than you ever did enemies. Those same friends who are surrounding and protecting Claire right now. I may not have been involved with my father and all the diplomatic crap he did while serving as the ambassador, or even helped while he worked the Democratic campaign trail . . . but I did witness my fair share of organizations cutting their losses and distancing themselves from bad press. Who is to say that going to the embassy and filing formal complaints won’t blow this whole thing up?”

  Olivia set her glass down with a heavy hand. “The wheels of justice turn slowly. You put this Claire girl up or Sasha, and targets follow them. Dead within six hours. Guaranteed.”

  An itch started in the back of Sasha’s brain. “Legitimate agencies recruit from Richter.”

  “It’s not the legitimate ones we’re concerned with,” Olivia stated.

  “No. But legitimate agencies will want to keep places like Richter going. Look at Claire,” Sasha said to AJ. “Look how quickly she found a place on the team. She’d put any high school graduate in the States to shame. I didn’t like the rules and restrictions, but I’m smarter for them.”

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  “If you bring the militaristic training aboveground, then what do you have?”

  “A military boarding school.”

  “Right. You remove the secrets put in place after the Cold War and you have nothing more than a strict military school you can find all over the world.”

  AJ was staring at her. “I’m following you, Sasha, but I don’t know where you’re going.”

  “The school is on lockdown. Classrooms are boarded up, students are being diverted to PE and self-defense classes. Lodovica knows something is coming. If I were running Richter and thought an investigation was in the pipeline, I’d be building brick walls and calling them abandoned fallout shelters. I’d be preparing the students for changes and maybe even reassigning some students to other schools.”

  “Sounds like the headmistress is more aware of what’s going on than a single AWOL student,” AJ suggested.

  “Lodovica knows me. She knows I was unhappy with Pohl’s offer and thought less of her for it.”

  Olivia walked to the window, looked out the curtain. “Lodovica could care less. She allows Pohl to access anything he needs on his recruits to assure they work for him. I guarantee the man has your prints on a weapon that has already been used.”

  A memory sparked of Brigitte’s anger that Pohl was following after her during her range time. “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “The headmistress is nobody’s friend,” Olivia stated. “God, I could use a cigarette.”

  That itch in her head started to feel like nails on a chalkboard. “Pohl won’t blackmail me now. He’ll just try and kill me.”

  “Easy guess since there were bullets flying through Amelia’s apartment a few hours ago.” Olivia started to pace.

  “He assumes I’ll be dead. No longer a threat to him or the school.” She scratched her head. “But the headmistress doesn’t.” She leaned her head back as that thought took root.

  “Maybe she has more faith in your ability to outsmart Pohl,” AJ said.

  “Or maybe she stacked the deck.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Claire, your game is pinging.” Isaac waved toward her computer.

  She jumped up from her cross-legged position on the floor, shook out her right foot to stop the tingling, and limped to her desk. Cooper followed her and grabbed a rolling stool to sit by and watch.

  Claire deciphered the first sentence, the cloaked code that told her Jax wasn’t writing under duress. What do Han and Denenberg have in common?

  Claire giggled as she responded. They both wanna do Leia.

  “What is it?” Cooper asked.

  “An inside joke. You’d have to know the staff to understand.”

  Claire waited for Jax to respond. She had to write a few words out and then put it together. “Wow.”

  “What is it?”

  “She said that sometime last night over fifteen upperclassmen were removed from campus.”

  “Removed?”

  Another message followed before Claire could respond. “The roommates said they were woken up after lights out, asked to move to another room, and when they returned, they were gone.”

  “Should we be worried?”

  Claire typed in a reply asking if anyone had managed contact through the senior computers.

  Her message popped up. “There are two that have made contact. Said their parents pulled them out.”

  “That’s it? No more explanation than that?”

  Claire shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell ya, Coop. I never had parents. But I have heard that they say ‘Cuz I said so’ when they don’t want an argument.”

  Jax kept typing.

  “Looks like the martial arts studio has moved to a section of the primary school gym.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “No idea.” Claire asked the question to Jax.

  It’s lame, Loki. Princess D is going over stuff we already know.

  Claire looked up at Cooper. “Should I ask her anything else?”

  “Not now. Just tell her to keep her conversations with you private. Don’t tell any of your friends.”

  Claire started typing. “I already told her that, but I’ll tell her again.”

  “I’m starting to notice a theme in our relationship,” AJ leaned over in his seat and whispered in Sasha’s ear.

  “We don’t have a relationship,” she said through stiff lips.

  That struck him as funny although he didn’t dare laugh. Sasha had been hyperfocused since they’d landed in Prague. Now they were on a train headed back into Germany.

  “We travel really well together. I’m told that’s a true test of compatibility. Small spaces and lots of uninterrupted time.”

  The redheaded version of Sas
ha lifted the magazine she was pretending to read. He could tell she was pretending because she’d keep it open on nothing but advertising for long periods of time before turning the page. “Don’t read into us, Hofmann. Compatibility and relationships are for other people.”

  He looked across the small table in front of them. Olivia stared out the window, oftentimes letting her eyelids drop. None of them had slept much the night before and now jet lag was winning the battle, at least with him and the extra baggage. Sasha, on the other hand, was like the Energizer Bunny. Where she pulled her reserves from, he didn’t know.

  “I don’t know about that. You’re the Bonnie to my Clyde.” He was teasing her, trying to get a smile, something out of her that had been missing since they’d visited his parents.

  “He was an ex-con and she was a lovesick puppy who followed him around. We’re hardly that.” She dropped the magazine in her lap. It was late and the train was only half-full, with more people leaving than coming on at each stop.

  “Yeah, maybe that isn’t the right couple.” He went through several couples in his head. Romeo . . . no, that didn’t fit. Fred and Ethel. He shook the thought away. Scarlet . . . “I can’t think of any.”

  “That’s because we’re not. Just drop it, Junior.”

  He placed a hand on her arm. “I get it. In my, ah . . . previous occupation, I didn’t get close to anyone. For obvious reasons.”

  She lifted the magazine, covered her lips as she talked. “We have a few things to talk about when it comes to that.”

  He grinned. “If we don’t have a relationship, what’s there to discuss?”

  The magazine went back to her lap, and she opened it to the same page of advertisements. “You’re right. Forget I said that.”

  He laughed. “Yes, dear.”

  With a haughty finger, she flipped the page. “Don’t even . . .”

  He patted her arm, just because he knew it would get under her skin. “Whatever you say, sweetheart.”

  When her fist clenched, he thought he might need to dial it back a little.

  They exited the train in Berlin and met the van Neil had waiting for them.

  AJ didn’t recognize the driver but Sasha did. She greeted him without using a name and kept silent on their short ride to where they were meeting the rest of the team.