I didn’t want to scare her, and I didn’t want to drag her into my mess.
But still, I felt completely alone. She squeezed my forearm and arched her eyebrows, and I could feel the words bubbling up toward the surface.
I took a deep breath.
“That man—Agent Bennett—he told me he was with the Secret Service, but I’m pretty sure he lied.”
Maribel’s eyes widened. “You think he’s the guy who asked me to do that to your porch?”
I shook my head. “I think he’s with the CIA.”
“What?”
“They could be listening to me right now. Who knows? I found a tracking device on my car earlier.”
“I saw you looking at your car when I was mopping the deck. You think they bugged your things?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m just being paranoid or what, but…” I trailed off, taking a deep, shaking breath. “We were attacked a few days ago.”
Then, everything started tumbling out of my mouth. Her face went from shock to horror as I told her everything—the activist with the fish guts, the car chase, Tony Kowalski in my office, the attack on Mickey, the three goons at the safe house. It felt good to get it off my chest. I didn’t mention Bennett and me, or how I’d come to care about him as more than a bodyguard.
That was personal, and it broke my heart. That betrayal hurt more than any attack from Kowalski ever could.
I looked at her, biting my lip. “Bennett thinks they’re after him, and not me.”
“Well, they wouldn’t have asked me to vandalize your deck if they were only after him. And Mickey—they wouldn’t have attacked him if the CIA was the target.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think they can get to him through me now.”
“You don’t know who’s doing this? Why fish?”
I laughed bitterly. “I have no idea. My first day in the Senate, I got a bucket of fish guts dumped on me. I thought it was just some environmental activist, but now I don’t know. What does that mean? Fish? Is it just because it’s stinky or is there some kind of symbolism that I’m missing?”
Maribel’s eyes were wide. I could sense the fear brimming inside her and I forced my face to stay calm.
“I’m sure it’ll settle down.”
“Do you think they’re watching us now? The CIA? Or the other men?”
I took a deep breath. “I have no idea.”
“Are we safe here?”
I glanced at her and all I could do was shrug. My fear was quickly fading and I was finding it hard to care. I was sick of being terrorized by some unknown evil. I wanted answers. I wanted peace.
“What are you going to do?” Maribel asked softly.
“I’ll go see Mickey tomorrow, and then I’ll probably go back to work. I haven’t been to the office in over a week.”
“You’ll just pretend like none of this is happening?”
“I don’t know what else to do. I just feel… angry. And stupid. I trusted Bennett. I thought he had my best interests at heart, but he was just spying on me.”
“Maybe he cared. He sounded apologetic.”
My heart hardened and I blinked back tears. I hadn’t had a chance to process all my feelings toward Bennett. The betrayal cut me deep, and I didn’t know how to get over it. I knew I was still in danger, but I felt like I couldn’t trust him.
I was so completely alone.
Maribel wrapped her arms around me and held me. Maybe it was because she worked at the nursing home, but her empathy was off the charts. She looked at me like she could sense exactly what I was feeling and understood me completely.
I leaned into her and for the first time in a long time, I let the tears fall. Maribel held me, patted my hair and made soothing noises until her t-shirt was soaked through.
It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t senatorial. It wasn’t grown up. It was ugly, and it felt good. I let it all out, crying until my whole body ached.
The hurt, the fear, the betrayal—it all came out in Maribel’s embrace. She held me through it all, finally pulling away when my sobs quieted down.
“You’ll get through this,” she said softly.
“How do you know?”
“You’re strong, and you’re kind. I mean, I dumped rotten fish on your deck and before you know it, you’re inviting me to stay at your house. That’s not what regular people would do. You have so much forgiveness and goodness in you, I just know you’ll figure it out.”
I sniffled and she took a deep breath.
“And I’ll help.”
“You don’t—”
“Stop,” she said, straightening up. “I need to make it up to you. I took some money to do something awful, and I need to fix that.”
“You’ve already cleaned it up.”
“Cat, stop fighting me. I love your grandfather like my own, and I’ve come to care about you, too. You’re… you’re one of the only people that’s been kind to me. And from what I can tell, you’re in need of a friend.”
I laughed bitterly, wiping my eyes. “I’m in need of a lot more than a friend. A new life and new identity, maybe. A knock on the head, at least. Maybe that would help get some sense into me.”
She smiled at me, squeezing my hand. “We’ll figure it out. Whoever this Kowalski guy is, we’ll find him and we’ll get him to stop.”
“How are we going to do that? I mean, Bennett is highly trained and he can’t even stop them. What chance have we got? Some senator and a nurse at an old folks’ home?”
“Bennett sounds like an idiot,” she said. Somehow, she’d read between the lines and had seen how I felt about him. Her eyes softened and she squeezed my hand again.
I took a deep, shaking breath. “Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
“I have an idea,” Maribel said. Her eyes were gleaming. “It involves you, me, these thugs, and a lot of duct tape.”
“Sounds dangerous,” I laughed.
“It probably is, but it’s better than doing nothing. I owe it to you, and to Arthur. He’d never forgive me if he knew what I did to your porch. We need to do something.”
A smile curled on her lips and I couldn’t help but laugh. Somehow, this day had gone from strange to completely insane. Maribel had gone from a vandal to my partner in crime, and I wasn’t upset about it.
She was right. I couldn’t just go back to work and pretend like nothing was happening. It was time for me to take control of my life again, without Bennett as a crutch.
It was time for me to act.
26
Chris
I walked back to the car with my head spinning. Cat knew I wasn’t part of the Secret Service—she knew I was CIA. The operation was blown wide open, but that wasn’t even the least of my worries.
Sliding into the car, I grimaced at Gary. He pushed his wire-frame glasses up his nose and pinched his lips.
“That looked tense.”
“She knows we aren’t Secret Service.”
“What? How?”
I handed the tracker to him and he grunted.
“She’s smarter than we gave her credit for.”
“Should we call Berk?” He asked, arching an eyebrow.
I sighed. I didn’t want to. I was so close to figuring out what was going on with Blanchet, Kowalski, and the Russians. I knew I was in danger, and I wasn’t ready to leave Cat behind. No matter how mad she was at me, I still felt responsible for all this. Her brother had been attacked because of me. She’d been attached because of me. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
If I told Berk that my cover was blown, he’d take me off the operation faster than I could say ‘Kowalski’.
I shook my head. “Let’s just find a hotel and figure out our next move.”
“I’ve booked us into two rooms at the Holiday Inn in town.”
I grinned. “You knew I wasn’t going to call Berk, didn’t you?”
“I had a feeling.” Gary put the car in gear and we drove toward the hotel. We didn’t say
anything to each other as we checked into our rooms. I dropped my bag off and took my laptop to Gary’s room. By the time I knocked on his door, he’d already set up his laptop on the desk.
“I’ve been trying to piece together what happened between Grandpa Nowak and this Kowalski guy,” he said without preamble. “Something isn’t really making sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, first of all, why Kowalski? Why now? They knew each other for years and then lost touch, and now all of a sudden Kowalski resurfaces? It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Blanchet confirmed that I was the target because I killed Ivanov. I don’t think it has anything to do with Nowak.”
“Right, but even if you are the target, how would they get to you? You have no family, no wife, no friends—no offense,” he said, glancing at me. He was already sitting in front of his laptop tapping on the keys. I set my laptop next to his and pulled up a chair.
“So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking they’ve had eyes on you for a while, and they’re using Senator Crawford to get to you.”
“Why would they think that I care?”
Gary’s fingers paused above the keys and he took a deep breath. He glanced at me and then back at his screen. “They could have found out about… about your first field operation with the CIA.”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
“I’m just saying, there are similarities. The Russians are master manipulators, they could be orchestrating this whole thing to remind you of Bella.”
The second that name passed his lips, my whole body seized up. I’d forced myself not to think about her, not remember the shame of failing my first undercover operation.
It wasn’t just the failure—it was the betrayal. It cut me deeper than I could say.
Gary took a deep breath. “What happened? I’ve only heard rumors.”
I paused, considering brushing him off. I could just grunt and be done with it, turning back to Kowalski and the Russians. I could ignore him.
But something in the way Gary was looking at me made me pause. I’d never spoken to anyone about Bella—not even Zane. The only man who knew what really happened was Berkeley, and I thought I’d carry that secret to my grave.
I took a deep breath. “It was years ago—my first time being undercover.”
Gary turned his head back to his computer, and I silently thanked him for hating eye contact. He nodded for me to continue.
“I… I was tasked with extracting information from a Turkish diplomat.”
“Bella.”
“Yeah, Bella.”
“She was supposed to be an ally but she…” I took a deep breath. “She played me. She had me in the palm of her hand, and I ended up coughing up information that I shouldn’t have.”
“Classified information?”
I nodded. “I thought I was in love.”
The words burned on the way out. They made my mouth taste like ash, the betrayal still stinging in my veins when I thought about it.
“Bella had told me that she wanted to move to the States. She told me she was in danger. She… we were together. I trusted her completely, and then she turned around and used that trust to feed information back to the Turkish government. We ended up on the back foot of some important negotiations.” I snorted bitterly. “I learned not to think with my dick, at least.”
Gary made a noise.
My thoughts turned to Cat, and anger burned in the depths of my heart. How would the Russians have known that about me?
I glanced at Gary, who had started flicking through files on his computer. I took a deep breath. “You think the Russians would have found that out? Berk buried the file.”
“They might have,” he replied. “Even if our file is buried, there are still Bella and her people.”
I nodded. “Does Cat know?”
Gary glanced at me. “I’m not sure. My instinct says no, but I have no proof. I have the feeling she’s a pawn in all this.”
Relief flashed through me, and I tried to hide it. If the same thing happened to me again, I don’t think I’d survive it. Another betrayal would be too much.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, so if we think this through, the Russians would have either planted Cat, or capitalized on her being appointed Senator. They would have known that we would investigate Blanchet’s replacement.”
“Either that, or they acted after we started investigating.”
“Right. So they either masterminded the whole thing, or it was a happy coincidence for them that I was assigned to Crawford.”
“Happy coincidence is a funny way of saying it,” Gary grinned. “But yes. We don’t know exactly what they know.”
“So let’s say it’s a coincidence. They see that I’m in a similar position as my first operation that ended in disaster. They see an opportunity to capitalize. How do they do that?”
“They get the activist to dump fish guts on her as a sort of soft threat.”
I shook my head. “That happened before I was assigned to the operation. They would have had to know that Berkeley was going to put me on it and orchestrate the whole thing.”
“Okay, so they find a weakness with Senator Crawford—this Kowalski guy. The Russians know they can’t get to you, so they find the next best thing.”
“They know from my past that I won’t trust her, so they put her in a position that will force me to protect her—force me to get closer to her.”
“And once they do that, they can attack you.”
I took a deep breath. It made sense. The Russians might not have masterminded this whole thing, but they definitely knew about my past, and they capitalized on an opportunity.
“So why Kowalski? Who is he in all this?” I asked.
Gary frowned, staring at his computer. We both start flicking through his file, looking for any hint as to who is actually coming after me, and what exactly they want.
“Fuck,” Gary said under his breath, leaning back in the chair.
“What?”
He glanced at me, wide-eyed. “I think I got it.”
“What?” I looked at his screen, but all I saw was one of the files that I’ve already combed through—an arrest record for Shorty Nowak—Cat’s grandfather—from 1958.
“Shorty Nowak was arrested right before he moved from Philly to Baltimore,” Gary said, as if it explained everything.
“Yeah, so?” I frowned, reading over the document again.
“Look at this.” He pointed to the second page of the document, where a few things are redacted with big black bars.
“What am I looking for?”
“Not ‘for’, Chris,” Gary said. “It’s ‘what are you looking at’. Why would any of this be redacted or censored? This is public record.”
My eyes widened. “Unless Shorty was an informant.”
“And it wouldn’t be a CI for the local police department to have things censored like this.”
“You’re thinking FBI?”
Gary took a deep breath. “It makes sense. He was a known drug trafficker, and he got arrested by local police. He was released after the charges were dropped, and then he moved from Philly to Baltimore. Got out of the game and stopped snitching. Changed his name, settled down, had kids.”
I combed my fingers through my hair and blew the air out of my nostrils. “Are you sure?”
Gary scoffed. “No. I’m going off a couple black bars on some paperwork from the 70’s. But it makes sense. And it would definitely motivate Kowalski to want some revenge, even after nearly half a century.”
“So the Russians found out Nowak was an informant, and fed that information to Kowalski in the hope that he would threaten Nowak’s daughter?” I arched my eyebrow. “Seems like a stretch.”
“It’s all we’ve got, Chris.”
I sighed, glancing at the black bars on the screen. “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
“I’ll reach out to my contact at the Bureau. It’s a lo
ng shot, but he might be able to confirm that Shorty was a CI.”
I nodded, closing my laptop. “All right. Let me know what you find.”
“Where are you going?” Gary frowned at me as I got up to leave.
“I’ve got something to do.”
“You need backup?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I need to do this alone.”
Gary’s eyebrows inched closer together, but he said nothing. I took that as silent acceptance and walked out the door.
27
Cat
Maribel was asleep on the couch, so I covered her with a throw blanket. I put my hands on my hips and sighed before turning off the television.
I didn’t even try to make sense of the last few hours. It was too much for my brain. Trying to untangle my feelings about Maribel, about Bennett, and about this whole mess I was in was too difficult. My whole head might explode if I thought about it too hard.
It was a bit weird to let Maribel stay after what she’d done… but she had nowhere else to go. She’d been sleeping in her car for the past six weeks. And if I was being honest, I felt better about having someone else at my house with me. Being alone was too scary.
I padded down the hallway to the kitchen and leaned on the countertop. I dipped my chin down against my chest and took a deep breath.
I didn’t know what to think of my life since I’d accepted the position as Senator. The past week had been so far removed from anything I ever imagined possible that I felt like I was living in some weird twilight zone.
I pulled on an old pair of Nikes—these ones were worn smooth on the bottom, and they had gone from white to dark grey. Then, I slipped outside and inhaled the night air.
Crickets chirped as I walked into the backyard. I sat down on an old wicker chair and glanced around the big backyard. I’d grown up in this house. Every inch of it was packed full of memories from my entire life—good and bad ones.
My mother used to play with us in the yard, before she got sick. She’d chase us around, race Mickey and I from one end of the yard to the other. She always let us win.
The Protector: The Complete C.I.A Romance Series Page 30