Betrayed

by Karen E. Olson

  And then he disappears back through the door we just came out of.

  I have never thought that Ian Cartwright would be sorry for anything, but it does make me pause. What does he think he would have to apologize for?

  ‘Come on, Tina,’ Spencer says, taking my arm.

  We walk a few feet, but I’m at a distinct disadvantage in these shoes. We are well to the side of the building now. There are so many people milling around – the night-time clubbers – that I can’t help but think there is safety in numbers.

  ‘Hold on,’ I say to Spencer as I reach in the backpack and pull out the sneakers. I spot a place to sit, a small brick wall surrounding a patch of greenery and some palm trees, set back a little from the main walkways. I take off the heels and tug on the sneakers, welcoming the way my feet are now allowed to spread out. Spencer sits next to me, his elbows on his knees as he watches the pedestrians and cars pass. South Beach is hopping tonight; we can hear the bass from music in three different clubs nearby.

  I am about to turn to Spencer, tell him we should get going, that we should check the app to see where Zeke’s phone is now, when I see it. A long black car slows down next to the curb in front of the club we were just in. It’s not a BMW – not the BMW – but it sends chills down my spine just the same. Am I going to have this reaction every time I see a black car from now on?

  And then I know that I should always trust my gut instincts.

  Two big men get out of the car. They could be twins: barrel-chested with bald heads, dressed in black suits. They head to the club entrance, chat for a second with the bouncer, then look around.

  I am staring right at the one who sees me. He points, and the two men begin to walk toward us.

  I don’t need to tell Spencer that we have to get out of here. He is up, and we are already running, weaving through the people on the sidewalk. I have the irrational thought that no one would try to shoot us with so many witnesses, with so many possibilities of killing someone else. Is this what Ian apologized for? Did he set them on us in order to save himself? I wouldn’t put it past him.

  I don’t look around, afraid that if I do, I’ll fall. Spencer is keeping up next to me, although I can hear his labored breathing. We’re going to have to stop at some point or he’ll pass out. I’m grateful for all the time on the bike, although running is a different sort of animal, and I can feel it in my lungs, a stitch in my side. My only hope is that the two large men are more out of shape than we are, and it’s possible they didn’t expect us to be so swift.

  We have run at least four blocks, and I can’t help myself. I look around.

  As I feared, I tumble to the ground, rolling on the sidewalk after landing on my knees. I end up on my back, staring up into the faces of a crowd that’s surrounded me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I hear from at least three of them.

  A hand reaches down and grasps mine, helping me up. I am about to thank my good Samaritan when I see who it is.

  Zeke.

  FIFTY-ONE

  ‘Where have you been?’ is the first thing out of my mouth.

  He shakes his head. ‘No time.’ Spencer is standing behind him, and the two of them usher me to the curb and into a waiting car. Zeke gets into the driver’s seat and the car shoots off. It has a lot more power than the rental car. Probably because it’s a Porsche.

  ‘Nice ride,’ Spencer says from the back seat. He’s crammed in the back, but he’s not complaining.

  ‘What happened back there?’ Zeke is asking. I’m looking out the side-view mirror, trying to see if anyone’s after us. ‘We’re OK,’ Zeke tells me when he notices what I’m doing.

  ‘But it’s not exactly as though we’re in a car that’s not noticeable.’ It’s cherry red. ‘How did you find us?’

  ‘I was passing by and saw the commotion.’ He pauses a second, glances in the rear-view at Spencer. ‘You look different. Different, but the same. Are we going back to our roots?’

  ‘Not for long,’ Spencer says. ‘Now that you found us, we can change back.’

  ‘It’s a good look for you,’ Zeke says. Then his gaze settles on my sneakers. ‘That – well, that’s not a great look.’

  ‘I couldn’t run in the heels.’

  ‘You didn’t do a great job in the sneakers, either.’

  I study my knees, which are scraped and bloodied. My hands are scuffed as well, from where I landed. ‘It was Tony’s guys,’ I say. ‘We saw Ian. He told us to leave, but I think he told them we were there anyway.’ That would be typical of him, always playing both sides.

  ‘They were looking for him, too,’ Zeke says softly. The implication of that hits me.

  ‘Tony figured out what he’s been up to?’ I hate it that, after everything, I’m still concerned about Ian. But I am. ‘Will he be OK?’

  Zeke’s grip tightens on the wheel. ‘We went in after him. Right after you made your run for it.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to Daniel?’

  ‘We’re going to get him now.’

  ‘In this?’ Spencer indicates the tiny back.

  But then I see where we are. The parking garage where Spencer and I parked his car. We took the long way around, but ended up where we were originally headed. Zeke parks the Porsche, gives it a little pat on the roof as we go over to Spencer’s car, a fifteen-year-old Honda that is not nearly as conspicuous.

  ‘So where are your people taking Ian?’ I ask just as we’re about to get into the car.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ Zeke’s expression grows dark, but I can’t take it back now, even though I wish I could. He takes out his cell phone. ‘Let’s see just where he is.’

  That’s right. The locator app we downloaded on to Ian’s phone, which Zeke has conveniently put on his own phone. Zeke looks at it, then frowns. ‘That’s not right. Have either of you messed with this?’

  He wants to know if we’ve hacked it. ‘No,’ Spencer and I both say at the same time.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘This shows Ian at Tony DeMarco’s house.’ He holds it up for us to see. He’s right. The dot is blinking on Harbor Point. ‘This isn’t right.’ He steps away from the car, away from both of us and makes a call.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Spencer asks.

  I shake my head. ‘No clue.’

  After a few moments, Zeke comes back, shoving the phone in his pocket. ‘Get in.’ He climbs into the car without saying anything else. We follow suit, although I can see Spencer is bursting with as much curiosity as I am.

  ‘I’m going to bring you to the safe house,’ he explains. ‘You have to stay there.’

  ‘I really wish people would stop telling me what I have to do,’ I say. ‘Maybe you should just tell us what’s going on.’

  Zeke hasn’t started the car yet. He leans back, twisting around so he can look at me head-on. ‘I’m going to drop you off, and then when I get back, I’m going to take you to the airport. Spencer can get documents for you. We can have them in a matter of hours. Go to California. Go to Europe. Go somewhere and disappear for a while.’

  I’ve got a nervous feeling in the pit of my belly.

  ‘I’ll give you a cell phone, and we can be in touch. No computers. You have to stay offline.’

  I’ve done it before; I can do it again. But I still don’t say anything. I don’t know if I can.

  ‘If they find you, you’re dead. You’re not going to be able to escape this. DeMarco is convinced that you and Ian did this together. He thinks Ian is Tracker.’

  Ian. I finally find my voice, but it sounds as though I’m speaking in a tunnel. ‘What happened, Zeke?’

  He takes a deep breath and chews on the corner of his lip, looking from me to Spencer and back to me again. ‘You’re really lucky. Ian, not so much.’

  Dread fills me. ‘What happened to Ian?’

  ‘Those guys? They ran after you, but not too far. You weren’t their primary target right then.’ He pauses. ‘Our guys went in for Ian, but they were to
o late.’

  I hear his words but I can’t seem to understand what he’s trying to tell me.

  He sighs, puts his hand to my cheek. ‘He’s dead, Tina. Ian’s dead.’

  FIFTY-TWO

  Even though I knew what he was going to say before he said it, it is still a complete shock. Ian can’t be dead. I just saw him. I close my eyes and can still feel his breath on my cheek as he said he was sorry. My entire body begins to shake, and I put my hands up over my face. Even though Ian did me so wrong, I loved him once, and I am grieving for the young man I met so long ago, the man who made me feel normal when everything in my life wasn’t normal at all.

  ‘What happened?’ I manage to ask.

  ‘We thought we’d be able to get him out of there.’

  ‘What happened?’ The urgency laces my words. I need to know.

  ‘Those guys went in, but we were too late. Ian was in the back, near the restrooms.’

  Where he’d brought Spencer and me and told us to leave.

  ‘He was shot once. In the head.’

  I can barely breathe. I fold my hands tightly together to keep them from shaking, but it’s futile. ‘But the guys got caught, right? The ones who shot him?’

  Zeke doesn’t meet my eyes. ‘No. They were already gone.’

  How can that be? They were big; they couldn’t just disappear. But the words won’t come out.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Zeke says.

  I give a short snort. I know it’s not my fault. It’s all Ian’s fault for everything he’s ever got himself into. If Tony DeMarco hadn’t killed him, someone else would have, eventually. That charm couldn’t have lasted forever. It didn’t. You can’t play both sides of the fence without someone finding out.

  While I am struggling to sort this all out, Spencer has no such distraction. ‘How is his cell phone in Harbor Point, then?’ he asks.

  ‘Good question,’ Zeke says, his eyes still on me.

  Spencer has taken out one of the laptops and is powering it up. I want to tell him that it’s not going to work here, that we have no Wifi network, but then I remember who he is and what he can do. It’s easier to think about something other than Ian, but then it sucks me back in again, what’s happened.

  While Spencer concentrates on the laptop, Zeke gets out of the car and comes over to my side, opening the door. ‘Get out, Tina,’ he says, but not unkindly.

  I do as I’m told, and he wraps his arms around me. ‘I shouldn’t have told you like that,’ he whispers.

  ‘Does Daniel know?’ I manage to ask.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘He’s just a kid. If they found out about Ian, maybe they found out about him, too, and what he knows.’ I shiver. ‘You have to go get him now, Zeke. And your team. They might not be safe, either.’ I hear the panic rising in my voice.

  ‘I made a call. I’ve got people going over there,’ he says. ‘Everyone’s getting cleared out; everyone will be safe. Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered.’

  I’m not used to someone else making decisions. I’ve been on my own for so long and making my own way, and I don’t like the lack of control.

  ‘This is interesting.’ Spencer gets out of the car, holding the laptop. I move away from Zeke, but he keeps a hand on my waist, as though to ground me. We both look at what Spencer is showing us.

  It’s the cell phone locator, and it’s still showing Ian’s phone at Harbor Point.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Is this right?’

  Spencer nods. ‘Yeah, it’s right. But we’ve been following the wrong phone.’

  ‘What?’ Zeke leans down to look at the laptop more closely.

  ‘It’s not here, dude,’ Spencer says, then hits a key and an alternate screen pops up. ‘It’s here.’

  All he did was a simple reverse number search. Rather than put a name in the search to find the phone number, you do the opposite: a phone number for a name.

  Spencer’s right. We’ve been following the wrong number all along.

  The phone number is Amelie’s.

  ‘Who is she?’ Spencer’s asking, but I’m one step ahead.

  ‘Adriana gave me the number. She said it was Ian’s. At least that’s the number I asked for. I never mentioned Amelie.’ Reality hits me. ‘Amelie is the one we’ve been tracking all along. The one who was outside my hotel room, at the apartment.’ My head is spinning with a million thoughts that I struggle to sort through. ‘She’s the one who ran us off the road.’ Finally, I take a deep breath and it’s clear as day.

  The shadow in my laptop knew about the bank job. Knew about the accounts. Knew everything. I kept wondering who would go after both me and Zeke – and Tony DeMarco. I kept coming back to Ian, but as he so aptly put it, he doesn’t shit where he eats. But it’s more than possible that Amelie does. That she knew about me all along, even though I didn’t know about her. She gave Ian those bank account numbers; she knew about the bank job. It’s possible she did know what happened between Ian and me on Block Island, and everything that happened since was revenge for that. She may have been the one he married, but she’s threatened by me. Enough so that she’d set me up – with the FBI, with Tony. Ian has a hacker son, but so does she. All along, it felt personal. And it is.

  She is Betr@yD.

  I recall how I saw her outside the hotel on Brickell Avenue. I figured she was just stopping for a coffee before work, but what if it wasn’t that innocent? What if she’s been on our trail the entire time?

  Zeke’s eyes grow wide as I hash it out, and he holds his hand up to stop me. ‘It is her, isn’t it? Why didn’t we see it before?’

  ‘Because we weren’t supposed to. Because she has kept a low profile. But we know about her role with the bank job, which was pretty big, when you think back on it. All these years I assumed that she didn’t really know what she was doing. But she must have worked it out, maybe after Ian found me on Block Island. Maybe she found out all about that.’

  ‘That would explain the shadow. That was after you left Block Island.’ Zeke is thinking out loud, too.

  I remember something. ‘I got into Amelie’s computer with the wireless router. Everything looked pretty benign. But what if it’s not? I wasn’t looking for anything there. I saw some pictures, some work stuff. But then I got into that other computer, too, and that seemed a lot more suspicious, so I concentrated on that one. Maybe I should have looked closer at Amelie’s.’

  ‘What happened with the router?’ Spencer asks.

  ‘Ran out of juice, I think.’

  We all exchange a look. But what if it didn’t? What if Amelie found it? What if that was how she got into our laptop as Betr@yD and downloaded the kiddie porn? She turned the tables on us.

  ‘We should assume that Amelie knows someone’s spying,’ Zeke says. ‘But we need to get back into her computer. We have to prove it.’

  ‘I know where we can get another router,’ Spencer says, ‘but it’s better if I go alone.’

  Zeke looks uncomfortable with that, but he finally nods. ‘OK. How long do you think it’ll take?’

  ‘An hour?’

  ‘All right. I’ll take Tina back to the safe house. Meet us back there?’

  I don’t like the idea of that apartment. ‘Why don’t we go back to Key Biscayne? We’ll be closer to where we need to drop the router.’

  ‘Not a good idea. It’s too close to DeMarco. Regardless of what Amelie has done, DeMarco is still after you. We can’t make it easy for him.’

  I think about Ian again. Did he have any clue that Tony would go after him there, at that time? He couldn’t have, otherwise he wouldn’t have been there. Ian was all about saving his own skin. I know the worst about him, but still a sadness rushes through me again. He did not deserve to die.

  And then it strikes me: Amelie did it. She set him up. She might as well have pulled that trigger herself.

  ‘We need to keep an eye on Amelie. What if she tries to leave? We have to make sure we know where sh
e is.’

  ‘We’ve got the cell phone tracker,’ Zeke says.

  ‘But what if she’s figured that out, too? We’ve underestimated her, and she’s come back and caught us every time.’

  ‘I’ll go. Alone. After I drop you at the safe house.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I have to see this through.’

  Spencer holds up his phone. ‘You kids hash it out. I’ll go get the router. Call me when you know where you’re going to be,’ he says as he heads out of the garage on foot. He’s been under the radar, too, and I’m not worried about his survival skills. Especially since he’s not with me or Zeke.

  ‘Do you think he misses his other life?’ I ask, genuinely curious. I don’t really miss my life here, but I do miss Nicole Jones’s life. Sometimes so much it hurts.

  ‘No.’ He says it so definitively that it’s clear they’ve talked about it. ‘You’re not going to give in on this, are you?’ he asks. I shake my head, and he takes a deep breath. ‘OK, I have a place we can go where no one should find us. You might not like it, but we’ll be close by, and I don’t think anyone will think to look there.’

  ‘I promise not to complain,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  FIFTY-THREE

  Zeke doesn’t pay any mind to the ‘For Sale’ sign. He takes out a key and opens the lockbox on the gate of my old house. I watch him from inside the car, where I have been stooped down so no one can see me. He opens the gate, then comes back and we drive through. Besides my quick intake of breath when we first drove up, I have not said a word. He keeps looking at me out of the corner of his eye, expecting some reaction. Between knowing that Ian is dead and this, it’s as though a weight has landed on my chest, and I can’t breathe normally. I take small breaths, trying to keep a panic attack at bay.

  I want to ask him how he got the lockbox key. How we are able to come inside. Because now we are out of the car and going up the front steps. I am having the strongest sense of déjà vu, but of course that’s not it.