Rory blinked and whipped her focus to the present. Head out of Alabama and back in Puerto Rico.
As if on cue, her brain became aware of her surroundings. The hum of insects, the soothing lull of the ocean, and if she wasn’t mistaken, Jesse Cook playing a sensual Flamenco guitar solo floated through the air. She tracked the sound to speakers hidden in two nearby bushes that had pops of red flowers on them. The music was low, so soft it was as if it were background music in a movie.
“My friends. I want them here. I refuse to eat without them.” She crossed the gray stone pavers and stood behind the chair he wanted her to assume.
When he remained quiet, only nodding toward the chair, she finally relented and sat.
But no food. No way would she fill her stomach when Chris and the others were starving.
“Mofongo.” He pointed to a dish in front of her. “Deep-fried plantains with garlic and crabmeat. Plus, empanadas and many other things to choose from. All excellent.”
“And I said I wouldn’t eat unless my friends do.” She gripped the smooth wood of the chair arms, holding her ground.
It was still fairly warm out for October, but the sky was clear, and stars glittered across the dark canvas overhead.
Carter cut into his food and slowly brought a bite to his mouth—torturing her. Fucker. “Eat,” he said after swallowing whatever delicious morsel he’d waved in her face.
“Not until my friends are free. I won’t back down.” But her eyes fell to the food, and her traitor of a stomach growled loudly. And just to make sure she got the message, punchy pangs commenced inside her abdomen. Geez, was that what pregnant women went through when the baby kicked?
“I didn’t take you and your friends from D.C. if that’s what you’re waiting to ask me,” he stated casually as if discussing traffic.
“Who did, then? Who found out about me, about what I was doing?” She set her forearms on the table, palms going flat on either side of the plate. Fingertips curling in as she tried to ignore the flood of aromas hitting her nose. Don’t take a deep breath.
“The Italian probably knows who you are, and it was one of his teams who was sent after you. He never does anything himself.”
The worst possible answer.
The absolute worst.
“How?” She squeezed her eyes closed and processed Carter’s news that The Italian knew her identity. She’d given up a mission that was dear to her in order to avoid him and keep her family out of danger, and he’d found her anyway.
“Look at me.” A gentle command slid across the table, but she found an unforgiving stare when she peered at him.
Or no, maybe it was apologetic.
He set his napkin to the side of his plate, rose, and slowly unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up both sleeves. “I didn’t betray you. I know that’s what you must be thinking.”
“How could I not?” She was adrift in a sea of what the hells as she tried to map out possibilities.
And each thought kept colliding with another, creating one hot mess of theories and problems her overstressed and overtired brain couldn’t process at the moment.
“If it wasn’t you, one of your men betrayed you. Betrayed me.” She set her hands back on the chair arms and tightened her grip, trying to stay grounded. But fuck roots.
She’d officially been uprooted.
“No one on my team would dare double-cross me. And before you suggest it, if anyone on my staff secretly worked for The Italian, they’d tell him where I lived, and he’d come for me. Because I’m going to assume he doesn’t like me, either.”
Rory stood and set her hands on the table, leaned forward, and commenced panic breathing. “My family. If he knows of me, he might use them to get to me.”
Carter rounded the table, and she spied his dark shoes out of the corner of her eyes. He was close enough to touch her, but she prayed he wouldn’t. He surprised her by setting a gentle hand on her forearm, and she lifted her gaze to his dark eyes. “I sent a team to watch over you and your family as soon as I learned you could be in danger.”
“You did?” she whispered as if she’d lost her voice. “If you knew I was in danger and where I was, why didn’t you tell me?”
He unhanded her and directed his gaze to the ocean, the distant sounds of the waves beyond the stone walls competing with the soft Spanish notes.
“How long have you known? Back in France? Is that why you warned me to stop going after him? You knew he’d discovered my identity?”
“If I’d had any idea back then The Italian was connected to everything, I would have told you,” he growled in a low voice as he whirled around to face her. Anger flared in his eyes. Not angry with her, though. No, she knew that look. He was angry at himself.
“What do you mean? What aren’t you telling me?”
“You know the irony in all of this,” Carter said with a fake smile, “is that my men watched you enter Santiago’s compound, and I had no idea you were walking into the home of my wife’s murderer. We could’ve grabbed him then if only I knew.”
“What?” She sank back down to her chair, lost now more than ever. “I-I don’t understand. I thought—”
“The Italian hired Santiago and his men to murder my wife.”
It took her a second for the shock to wear off before she said softly, “I see you gave up on the idea Danny killed her.”
“No,” he quickly responded. “Danny Fitzpatrick had plastic surgery not long after my wife died, which is why I didn’t get any more hits on him with facial recognition software aside from the one lunch with you. He became a ghost after that, but he’s alive. I didn’t know any of this until a week ago.”
He delivered the news so fast she barely had time to handle the blows that came with it.
No, that couldn’t be right. Danny was a good guy. A friend. There had to be an explanation. The blood rushed from her face. Her heart stammered. “No, Andrew said he died in a diving accident.”
“Convenient, wouldn’t you say?” Carter tossed out a bit of snark with his words.
If her judgment was wrong about Danny . . . then what did that mean about Andrew?
“Danny was ordered to do recon and surveillance of my home. He was also one of the men in my house with Santiago the night Rebecca died.” Carter held up a hand when she opened her mouth to speak. And despite the many questions that flashed through her mind—like how he even knew any of this—she shut up and let him continue. “They fucked with the CCTV footage that night as well as the previous day, removing some sections. I saved all the footage I’d obtained from the city for the week of her death, and even though I knew pieces were missing, I periodically reviewed it. Because I knew in my bones that those assholes had to have slipped up somehow. I was blinded by rage for so long that it wasn’t until I was poring over all of the footage again this summer that I noticed what I’d missed. The reflection in the window of a car parked across the street from my house of Danny exiting my home the day before my wife was killed. That’s the closest thing to solid proof I could get.”
He really had grown obsessed, hadn’t he?
She was also still having a hard time believing a friend she’d trusted with her “Red Robin Hood” identity could be a killer, could work for the likes of Santiago.
“How . . . I . . .” And speechless was more than just an expression.
“It took time to pull a clean image from the reflection and get rid of the pixelation, but once I did, I ran his photo through a special program to try and isolate where else he’d been around the time of her death. Thank God I saved all of that footage from back then.”
Thank God you’re obsessive? Yeah, she supposed.
“And that’s how I discovered he’d been with you in D.C. It should never have taken me years. I owe Rebecca better than that,” he added in a solemn tone. Rory allowed his sadness to sit between them for a few moments. Letting him grieve. Blame himself if he needed to.
“And that’s what prompted you to searc
h for me, which then led to your men seeing me enter Santiago’s compound. But at the time, you had no idea Santiago was involved in Rebecca’s murder. So, when I told you in France Danny had died during a dive while working for Andrew, you thought you’d reached a dead end,” she clarified, more so for herself, finally putting it all together.
“Yes, but if you hadn’t mentioned Danny also worked for Cutter, I wouldn’t have checked into Cutter’s possible involvement with The Italian, and I may not have started tracking your movements last week.”
“So, Danny worked for both Santiago and Andrew Cutter,” she mumbled, still trying to come to grips with this shocking new revelation. But did that also mean Danny worked for The Italian? And did Andrew as well? “I’m guessing if you know all of this, it’s because Santiago told you. You ambushed the CIA’s transport?”
Her head was spinning. Fate, how could she not believe in such a concept?
Carter’s hands disappeared into his slacks pockets, and he circled the table but stood behind his chair instead of sitting.
He nodded. “Aside from a connection between Danny and Andrew Cutter, what else led you to believe I was in immediate danger?” she pressed. “And did you use me as bait to draw out The Italian? Is my family bait right now?” She stood again. “What’s really going on?”
His chest rose and fell with a deep breath, and he steadied his gaze on hers. “I think a chain reaction of events may have begun when Santiago was taken into CIA custody, and it picked up speed after I grabbed him from the CIA.”
Chain reaction? What? “I don’t understand how Santiago being taken by you could jeopardize my safety and lead to my friends and me being taken last Friday. Even if Danny mentioned my name to Santiago at some point, he had no idea what I had been up to for the last three years. Besides, I breached Santiago’s compound long after Danny faked his death. Santiago wouldn’t know I was the one taking down smugglers.”
Carter set a hand to his jaw and slid his palm down the column of his throat. “Actually, it seems that Santiago and The Italian may have known about you for quite some time.”
“What makes you say that?”
“During my interrogation of Santiago last weekend, I forced him to give me access to every file and photo he had saved online in the cloud. One of the images stood out in particular—a photo of two women sitting outside a café, dated almost three years ago. I was fairly certain the woman with the short brown wig and red sunglasses was you. But the other woman . . .”
If Santiago has a photo of me in my disguise with another woman, that woman has to be Jolie. “She was my partner,” Rory interrupted. “Well, eventually, she became my partner.”
“No,” Carter answered, a wave of emotions flicking across his face, “that woman was my wife.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rory felt like she’d just been in a head-on collision. Carter leveled her with a steady gaze as she grabbed on to the arms of the chair and willed her head to stop spinning, her heart to slow down.
She drew in a deep breath. “Wife?”
He leaned over her shoulder and set his phone in front of her.
Rory examined the photo of a woman with long black hair and thick dark glasses sitting next to her at an outdoor café and was overcome with a rush of sadness.
Real names were never used in her line of work, so she’d nicknamed her partner, the woman in the photo, Jolie. Her disguise had reminded Rory of Angelina Jolie from the movies SALT and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Ugh, and Brad Pitt was in that second movie. And now she was reminded of her ex who looked like the actor. And damn, Andrew was still a potential problem, wasn’t he?
Jolie was Rory’s first partner when she officially began going after traffickers. Hell, Jolie was the driving force who’d set her on the mission that had consumed her life for the last three years—targeting The Italian. And after Jolie went missing, Rory had vowed to finish what they had started.
She’d assumed Jolie was dead. The business of taking down smugglers was like swimming with sharks—tricky and unpredictable, and disaster was only one mistake away. But she wasn’t prepared to hear her former partner was Carter’s wife. Jolie is Rebecca Dominick?
Carter reached down and swiped to another photo. A blonde woman with pretty green eyes, who looked a bit more like Charlize Theron than Angelina Jolie, was now on display. But Rebecca had the same bone structure and full lips as the image of her alias, Jolie.
“Where was this photo taken?” he asked, disbelief shredding his tone.
“Cartagena, Colombia,” Rory answered softly.
“Explain,” he issued the quick command.
Rory’s stomach clenched, and tears formed in her eyes as the depth of Carter’s loss and the measure of his despair fully sank in. He had lost his wife due to her conviction that even if she were the only person in the fight, she would do her damnedest to bring down as many smugglers as possible.
“I was new to dealing with wildlife smugglers. They were much more dangerous than antiquities buyers, which I quickly learned.” Every once in a while, the scar at her side still hurt like a fresh wound, and it acted as a reminder of what she’d been through. “I’d been in Colombia once before to plant a tracking device in a shipping crate to identify the smuggler’s trade route’s ending point. On my second trip to Cartagena, I was there to collect additional evidence so that I could turn everything over to the authorities.”
“And what happened?”
“Your wife, well, that’s how we met, and she saved my life,” she announced, letting him take a moment for that news to sink in before continuing her explanation. “A guard grabbed me on my way out. Managed to stab me, but I got away—thanks to your wife. She said she’d been on her way to a meeting with Benicio Josef, the man I was after, when she saw me running not far from the compound. She almost hit me with her car. When she realized the severity of my injury, she took me to the hospital instead of going to her meeting. She was in disguise, as was I. Somehow, my wig stayed on. And we both were too afraid to share our real identities.”
“What in the hell was she doing meeting with a dangerous smuggler?” Carter ran his fingers through his dark locks.
“She said she was sick of corrupt politicians and lack of progress in Washington, so she wanted to take action herself. She’d been tracking the man for a while because he trafficked people as well as animals. On the pretense of being a potential buyer, she’d arranged a meeting hoping to get inside information. After I left the hospital, we met at a café before we both had to leave town, and she professed fate had put me in her path that day, believing had she actually gone to the meeting, she would have wound up dead.”
“I don’t know what to say. Rebecca was aware of my role at the Agency, the kind of men I dealt with. How frustrated I was that so many traffickers were getting away with what they were doing and how powerless I always felt.” He cupped his jaw and looked toward the sky as if blaming himself for inspiring his wife’s crusade.
“She never told me about you,” Rory confessed. “I’m sorry. But I guess she was just trying to help.”
Carter faced her again, his eyes dark and fierce. He kept his gaze on her for a long moment, then grabbed his phone, pocketed it, and returned to the head of the table. “One of Santiago’s men had been tracking her. Maybe they followed her because of me. Or she’d been poking around. Asking too many questions in D.C.” He grimaced with an apology as if sorry his wife was the reason The Italian discovered Rory.
“Rebecca and I began to work together after Colombia. All virtually. We exchanged information over the phone and via emails. Too risky to meet in person. About six months after we first met in Colombia, she disappeared. No answer on her burner. No response to emails. I tried to find her, but I didn’t know anything personal about her. I was terrified our work had gotten her killed. So, I fought like hell to bring down who I believed was responsible. The Italian.” Rory’s nerves were shot to hell, but she needed to hang on. T
o remain strong. “It never occurred to me when you asked for my help tracking down your wife’s killer, that Jolie was actually Rebecca. But maybe The Italian never learned my identity back then since I was in disguise, and that’s why I was never . . .” She swallowed. “Killed.” Like her. “Maybe The Italian only recently found out about me.”
“Or you were both followed from that point on, and The Italian kept you alive for some other reason,” he quickly countered.
His eyes fell to the ground.
Full circle. We are connected. How crazy is this?
“Your targets,” Carter began, his tone rough, “how’d you acquire them?”
“Rebecca had a contact in Intelligence who’d given her a list of twenty-five smugglers. The man in Cartagena was one of many who she planned to go after. When we started going through their files online, checking the Dark Web for commonalities, we discovered they all might work for one man. The Italian.”
“Twenty-five? Twenty-fucking-five.” Carter’s shoulders collapsed, shock crossing his face. Rory wondered if Jesse, or Ella, would react the same way when they learned what Rory had really been up to during the last several years. “Those twenty-five names were open cases. Well, they were my open cases. The CIA didn’t believe they warranted resources or funding—too small of fish to be considered high-value targets—so they were all technically closed. But it pissed me off that none were deemed HVTs, so I kept copies of their files at home, coming back to them whenever I had the chance.” He cursed under his breath, his gaze cutting back to the ocean. “I was her contact without knowing it, wasn’t I? I never thought she’d go through my work files.”
Carter was back on his feet, hands in his pockets as if trying to keep from punching something.
“So, you were after The Italian when you were still at the Agency?” she asked after giving him a minute to cool down.
“No, The Italian wasn’t on my radar when I was there. I hadn’t even heard of him back then. I clearly missed whatever connection you two found amongst all those smugglers the Agency deemed not important enough to go after.”
Chasing Fortune (Stealth Ops Book 8) Page 25