Mia was trying to pin her brooch back on her jacket, an awkward process with her keys in one hand. Without looking at him, she said, “I don’t see what these mercenaries have to do with your mission. Or me.”
“They don’t trust the federal government. As far as they’re concerned, they’re true patriots, but they don’t recognize most federal authority.”
“What difference does that make? If they violate the law, they’re subject to arrest, just like anyone else. Their beliefs are irrelevant.” She snapped the brooch into place and looked back up at him, her cheeks rosy. “You should take yourself out for a good dinner. Don’t you have any friends in Washington?”
His last meal. He almost smiled, but any humor disappeared, and what he saw in front of him was an intelligent, capable woman who was potentially—probably—in over her head. Where was she getting her information? And what would she do when she suddenly realized she was underwater? Who would she drag under with her?
“Dr. O’Farrell,” Ethan said as earnestly as he could, “if you let one of these guys suck you in—”
“I’m in a hurry, Major. I have a meeting at the White House in forty-five minutes, and I need to change my clothes and make a few calls. I didn’t expect to see you again before your mission was completed.” Her green eyes softened, allowing a rare, unguarded peek into what wasn’t, Ethan thought, such a cold heart. “Please, Major Brooker. Ethan. Take care of yourself.”
But he recognized her words for what they were—a firm good-night. He was dismissed.
She waited, eyes still on him, until he acknowledged defeat and wished her a good evening.
He walked back down to M Street, the infamous D.C. heat and humidity bearing down on him. He smelled dog crap and car exhaust. He noticed a dead geranium in what had earlier struck him as an attractive flowerpot on a restaurant doorstep.
Preteen boys piled out of an SUV, laughing, ragging on one another. Ethan felt like grabbing them by the ear and letting them in on the real world, telling them to be grateful for their lives of safety and privilege.
But what did he know about these kids? Who was he to judge them, or even Mia O’Farrell?
He was all bluster. He knew—O’Farrell knew—he wasn’t about to leave Ham in the Andes with whoever had him, whoever was using him…whoever was using Mia O’Farrell.
Ethan paused on the busy street. He had a job to do. He might as well get on with it.
He decided to heed O’Farrell’s advice and take himself out for a good dinner before his flight. He’d go alone—the friends he had in D.C. didn’t need to see him right now. If some vigilante mercenary was slipping O’Farrell information, playing her for reasons of his own, her ass would get burned. And maybe not just figuratively. The vigilantes Ethan had run into in Afghanistan were violent fanatics with their own agenda.
But whatever Mia O’Farrell had stumbled into wasn’t his problem. His job was to get Ham Carhill out of Colombia alive and reasonably unbloodied.
Three
Ham Carhill tried not to cough. When he was busy hacking up a lung, he couldn’t hear what was going on around him. And, right now, it seemed to him nothing was going on.
Absolutely nothing.
He couldn’t hear any of the voices he’d come to know during his captivity, men’s voices, speaking Spanish and English or a mix of the two languages. Ham spoke fluent Spanish—the creeps who’d snatched him in Bogotá knew that from the start. It was like they had a nice little dossier on him. Hamilton Johnson Carhill, only son of billionaires Faye and Johnson Carhill of Nowhere, Texas, who would pay to keep the indignity of his kidnapping from hitting the public airwaves even faster than they’d pay to free him.
His parents had opposed his trips to South America, but assumed he was hiking in Patagonia or lying on the beach in Rio. They hoped he’d bulk up on his adventures, get a tan and return home ready to join the Carhill empire.
A cockroach crawled up his shin, but Ham didn’t move to flick it off.
He was on a bare, flea-infested mattress on a cot in a cinder-block hut somewhere in the Andes. The darkness in the single room was nearly complete. He only knew it was a cockroach on his leg because it wouldn’t be anything else. The place was full of them—huge, ugly things that scurried and raided in the dark. He often wondered how such a country, with its startling contrasts of stunning landscapes and stark poverty, of kind and friendly people and incessant violence, could produce the most beautiful emeralds in the world. Precious gems—in particular, emeralds—had become his passion and, in a way, his undoing.
Ham listened, squeezing his eyes shut as if it’d help sharpen his hearing, and for a moment thought he might have gone deaf.
But he was alone in the hut, perhaps alone in the camp.
The handsome, dark-eyed American and the Colombians—they were gone, all of them.