“Turn around.”
His hands came up and he slowly turned, but then he tried for a sucker punch to my middle. An awkward shot for a guy who was on his knees.
I hit him across the side of the head with the butt of my gun and watched him go down.
“Asshole,” I muttered as I leaned down to tug his wallet out of his back pocket.
Jess Anderson, his ID said. He was a private investigator.
Chapter 22
Dominic
I studied the man’s face, waiting for him to come to. There was a trickle of blood near one ear, but otherwise he seemed unhurt. Luke said he had to clock him with his gun butt because the guy tried to hit him. I wasn’t sure how much of what came out of Luke’s mouth I could believe.
Amy was upstairs with Quinn and Olivia, huddled in the pretty bathrobe I’d bought her. She had this tight look on her face that I’d thought would never return to her expression. We were happy. We were buying a house. And she was going to start teaching again in the fall. She was excited about it, already talking about lesson plans and the books she’d read with her students. And then, maybe in a year or two, we’d have a couple of kids.
I wanted to have kids. I didn’t want Amy to start thinking that this sort of thing happened a lot in my world.
“Private detective?” Vincent asked, looking at the man’s ID for the third time. “Why would a private detective be taking shots at you?”
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Did he follow you from Dallas?”
“Had to have,” I interjected. “How else would he have known to look for you here?”
Luke refused to answer.
“Did you tell Vincent about Megan and Hayden?”
Vincent looked up, clearly feeling left out of something.
“Where are they?”
I waited for Luke to answer, but he didn’t. So I filled him in.
“They’ve been taken by someone, but he doesn’t know who.”
“Taken?” Concern immediately burned across Vincent’s face. “Someone got the drop on Hayden? I would have thought that was impossible.”
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” Luke said. “They were with that lady from WikiExpose and then they were gone.”
“Gone? You mean, not with her, or gone completely?”
Luke shot a dirty look in Vincent’s direction. “If they’d simply left the room, do you think I would have rushed all the way back here to get you guys to help me out?”
“No need to be rude,” I told Luke.
He rolled his eyes at me, and then turned his attention to the man out cold and tied to a chair in my motel room. It should have been an odd situation, definitely not normal. But somehow it was beginning to feel sort of normal.
Luke slapped the man’s face, trying to bring him around. Surprisingly, it worked. The man sputtered, sitting up and coughing.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Luke said.
The man focused on me, then Vincent, and finally Luke. His eyes narrowed as he studied Luke.
“You better let me go. My father’s the chief of police here.”
“Yeah? Then why are you a PI?”
The guy looked away, his head a little unsteady on his neck as he tried to straighten up.
“Why were you shooting at us?” I demanded.
The guy—kid, really, he wasn’t much more than twenty, twenty-one—looked at me. His expression changed, slightly, and became less fearful and more defiant.
“I was hired.”
“By who?”
“For what purpose?” Vincent asked.
“You’re the one who was shooting at me.” He smirked. “You missed.”
“On purpose, asshole,” Luke said. “Vincent here is a former member of special ops. He could have hit you with a single shot if he’d wanted to.”
The kid paled, but he remained defiant.
“I could have gotten you. Give me another chance, and I will.”
I chuckled. “Like we would do that. But you do have a nice weapon. Where’d you get it?”
Suddenly the kid sat up a little straighter, tugging against his restraints. “What did you do with it?”
I walked over to the little closet at the back of the room and pulled it out, looking briefly through the scope.
“Don’t mess with that. It’s my dad’s.”
“How old are you?” Vincent asked, his tone soft.
“Nineteen.” His chin fell as a blush burned his cheeks. He was clearly embarrassed. “This was my first big job.”
“Who hired you?” Luke demanded.
“Some guy with the CIA. Garner, something.”
“What’d he look like?”
The kid shrugged. “He hired me over the phone. Had this metallic sounding voice, like he was trying to disguise it. But I told him I couldn’t do it unless he sent me his credentials, so he sent me a picture.”
“What’d he look like?” Luke demanded again.
“White guy. Blond. Handsome.”
Luke shook his head, the color draining from his face. He abruptly left the room, stepping out into the parking lot like he couldn’t breathe inside. Vincent followed, leaving me alone with the would-be sniper.
“What exactly did this Garner tell you?”
“That there were three people in this motel who were a threat to national security. He gave me pictures and told me to shoot if I saw one. He told me to take them out.”
“And that man”—I gestured toward the open door—“was one of them?”
“Yeah.”
“Who else?”
“Another man and a blonde woman.”
“Have you seen either of the other two today?”
“No.”
“Just him?”
“Yeah.”
“And this was all done over the phone?”
“Computer. He called me over Skype, but he had some sort of filter that didn’t allow me to see his face clearly. Said it was for national security. He said he was a really important man with the CIA and that this was a big secret.”
“You kept it well, kid.”
The kid’s eyes flashed to the gun. “I really have to get that back to my dad’s house. He doesn’t know it’s missing.”
I tossed the gun onto the bed, causing the kid to groan with fear, and brushed past him to step out into the early morning air.
“What’s going on, Luke? Where the fuck is Megan?”
Luke focused on me for a long second. “You knew Edgar Olsen. When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Back in November, when I was on the run from these assholes.”
Luke’s eyebrows rose. “You saw him in person?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone else with him?”
“No, man, just Edgar. He’s fucking paranoid. Wouldn’t answer the damn phone. Made me drive all the way to California so no one could track our conversation.”
“What did he tell you?”
I shook my head, running the conversation over in my head.
“I need to know what you know, Edgar. I need to know what Emily stumbled onto before they killed her.”
“They’re everywhere. They might be here, listening to us now.”
“I’m aware.”
Edgar looked around the room, checking out the twenty-something crowd that was undulating to music that was much too loud and much too vulgar to be considered true music. I turned a chair around and straddled it, leaning close to Edgar so that I was the only thing he could focus on.
“Tell me what she told you.”
“What makes you think she told me anything?”
“Because she trusted you. You would have been the first person she turned to with any information.”
Edgar inclined his head slightly. He glanced around the bar again, and then back onto me.
“She said she thought she’d figured out the hierarchy. She knew who was at the top.”
“Did she tell you who?”
“No. But you know how she thought someone in the CIA was involved? She told me she was pretty sure she knew who it was, and you were in danger because this guy was close to someone you know.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. She said he was a friend of a friend of yours in Houston. But she didn’t say who or give me his name.”
“What about the hierarchy? What did she say about that?”
“She thought she knew who was at the top. She said we were close before, when we were in Paris. She said we were so much closer than we realized and that’s why things imploded the way they did. She said she thought she could bring them all down now. She just needed a little more time.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. But I know she had some information. She was going to send it to me, but it never arrived.”
I nodded, wondering if it was possible that what I needed was back in Texas after all.
“That information you gave her months ago,” Edgar said, "the stuff you stole from the CIA?”
“Yeah?”
“That makes you a target. She said she thought that they were watching you and that’s why she couldn’t send the information she’d gathered to you. Otherwise, it would have gone to you before me.”
“Did she have proof? Was someone watching me?”
He shook his head. “But it could be why they set up the kill scene the way they did. I’ve been thinking about it since you described it to me. They were trying to set you up. The call to her sister…that was a coincidence. But the stabbing, your name in her phone…she was too careful for that shit. They set it up. They wanted to draw you out.”
“But if I’m being watched—”
“We might be dealing with two separate groups here, Dom. You’ve got to be careful.”
“I will.”
I watched the wheels turn in Luke’s head as I gave him the highlights.
“Did you steal stuff from the CIA?”
I shrugged. “I have friends there because of Emily, because of that operation. One of them slipped me some things last summer, and I forwarded them to Emily.”
“What were they?”
“Operation reports. Things she probably already had a dozen copies of anyway. She and Edgar were constantly trading information.”
“But these things…Edgar hadn’t seen them first?”
“No.”
“And you gave them to Emily shortly before her death?”
“A few months.”
Luke nodded, turning away from me. Then, without warning, he punched the wall. Vincent and I just sort of looked at each other, wondering what the hell was going on.
“So stupid,” Luke muttered, holding his fist with his other hand.
“What?”
“I think I fucked this whole thing up.”
He started to walk off, but I wasn’t about to let him. I grabbed his arm and forced him to turn back around.
“Where are you going?”
“To see if the Bradfords will let me borrow their private jet.”
“For what? You’re going on vacation now? What about Megan?”
“To go to California and end this damn thing once and for all.”
“Why California?” Vincent asked.
But my stomach was in my shoes as I began to put it all together. I shook my head adamantly.
“Not possible.”
Luke focused on me. “Did he tell you they were after you? Did he make you paranoid, making you stare over your shoulder everywhere you went?”
“He wouldn’t—”
“He’s brilliant,” Luke said, laughing a humorless laugh. “He played me. And he played you.”
I shook my head again. “He helped me. He told me where to find Emily’s notes. That’s why I went there. I assumed he had them, and I knew they were the key to everything.”
“They are. But they’ve been altered.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Vincent demanded.
“He set you up,” Luke said, staring me in the eye. “He wanted you to find those notes. He wanted me to hand them over to the press. He’s been on my ass to do it for months. The virus…that wasn’t him. That was someone else. But Edgar, he wanted this. He wanted Megan to take the notes to someone who would publish them. He wanted the blame for all this to fall on Garner and MacDonald. And me.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Have you seen the notes? Do you realize that they make it look as though I profited from the terrorist attacks in France last year and the ones that took place this last month? Do you really think I’d support the publication of something like that?”
I glanced at Vincent. He was watching the two of us as if he were watching some sort of odd tennis tournament.
“You corrupted the files.”
“Yeah. Because I thought that Garner wanted the files in order to protect himself. But what if he’s the good guy? What if he wanted them to take someone else down?”
“Wait. Garner’s not the bad guy?” Vincent asked.
“No.” I stared at Luke for a long minute. “But what about Peter?”
Luke crossed his arms over his chest. “You think I killed him.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re right.”
Chapter 23
Peter
The bright headlights came from out of nowhere. These highways were often deserted this late at night. I could drive for miles without seeing anyone else. But, suddenly, these lights were directly behind me, blinding me.
I reached for my cellphone. I had to get that information to Megan. I had to let her know what was going on.
I texted as quickly as I could. The headlights were brighter now, coming closer. And then…boom! The car slammed into the back of mine. Everything flew forward, including the phone, wrenched from my hand before I could push send.
It was all I could do to keep the car on the road. I stared at the phone, willing it to pop back up into my hand as the car slammed into the back of me again.
Oh, Megan, you’ve got to find it. He can’t do it all alone.
And then…
The car slammed into the barrier. I relaxed my body, just as he’d told me. My face planted right on the top ridge of the air bag, my nose splitting open and spilling blood everywhere. I felt my wrist snap, too. He’d told me I might be injured, but that at the angle I’d hit that I wouldn’t die. I was hoping he was right.
It was chaos, things flying everywhere. He’d gone through the car and removed projectiles that could do irreparable damage. But my cellphone was loose and it slammed around on the floorboard of the car, likely smashing into a million pieces. I wished I’d thought about getting a message to Megan sooner. Maybe I could have left something on her computer. Or…I don’t know. But I felt like she needed to know what was happening despite the warnings he’d given me.
The crash seemed to happen over such a long period of time, but I know it was probably only a few seconds. Then he was there, wrenching open the passenger-side door.
“Don’t move. The blood is good. Let it drip over the air bag.”
“It doesn’t feel good.”
“I know, brother. We’ll get you out of there and to a clinic. Just bear with me.”
He disappeared, and then he returned with gloves on. He carefully released me from my seatbelt and helped me out of the car. There was glass everywhere. I was afraid that we were messing with the scene too much; that the police would never believe I’d died in this accident. But he didn’t seem fazed.
He helped me to his car. The front end of my car was no longer pristine, but sporting new crush marks all along the front bumper. He set me in his front seat and then went back to the car. I was a little afraid he’d find my phone and the message I hadn’t quite finished sending, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. Another car pulled up and he went over to talk to the driver. Then he was behind the wheel of his own car.
“That’s it?”
“They’ll take care of the rest.”
“What about a body? Where did they find a body that could pass as me?”
“It’s not as hard as you’d think, brother. There are lots of people who donate their bodies to medical science and lots of medical school officials who don’t mind making a little money on the side.”
I shuddered at the thought and he laughed.
“Try not to think about the details, brother. All that matters is that we’ve saved your sorry ass.”
I nodded. But I kept thinking about Megan. She was still grieving the disappearance of her fiancé and now she was going to have to bury a brother. And there was Amber and the baby. I’d always wanted to be a father. It killed me, the thought that some other man might be a father to my child. But if I didn’t do this, there was no telling what kind of danger I’d bring down on all their heads. If I’d just listened to Luke…
“What’s done is done,” Luke said, reaching over to lay a hand on my shoulder. “We do what we have to, to protect the ones we love.”
“You’re right.”
He glanced over at me. “My friend, Edgar, he’ll take good care of you. And you’ll be able to get a little sun out there in California. Maybe you’ll actually stop scaring everyone away with that ghostly white skin!”
“Funny…”
Chapter 24
Megan
I tugged the sweater they’d given me tighter around myself as I paced the tiny room. I felt sick to my stomach, worrying about Luke. They’d said he wasn’t in the hotel, that they hadn’t been able to find him. They said he checked in, but they went to his room and he wasn’t there. They were watching for him, but I knew they wouldn’t find him.
He was hiding. He thought the enemy had gotten to me.
I ran it through my head over and over again. The men who burst into Dante—Luke's house. Did they ever fire at us? Did they ever do anything overtly threatening besides breaking the door down? Had they shot at us?
I couldn’t remember.
But I knew the men at the beach house hadn’t. We took each one out while they were focused somewhere else, caught them by surprise the way we were taught. Take out the enemy before they take you out.
But had they been our enemies?
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