Ethan hadn’t had a painful feeling in his gut then. He’d been totally oblivious that Char was on the trail of a dangerous and violent international fugitive, a man who’d ordered her murder. If anything, news of her Dutch vacation had been a relief. She was having a good time without him. They’d had separate careers, separate lives, for so long. In the two years before her death, they’d been together all of twenty-one days.
Guilt, he thought. That was why he was overreacting to the cracked and dog-eared picture of Juliet Longstreet he’d found in Bobby Tatro’s cinder-block Colombian hut.
When he arrived at LaGuardia, Ethan had just enough time to get through security and on to his flight to Washington. He had clothes waiting for him at his hotel.
He’d left no detail to chance—except the whereabouts of Bobby Tatro.
Mia O’Farrell collapsed onto her four-poster bed without so much as kicking off her shoes. She stared, unblinking, at the plaster ceiling, wishing for nothing more complicated than a hot bath and a tall glass of cold milk. But she didn’t have the energy to move. It was after ten, the end of a very long, upsetting day—no matter how many times she reminded herself that Hamilton Carhill was home in Texas, recuperating from his ordeal after providing actionable intelligence that had saved innocent lives. His secrets were safe. He was safe.
That she’d taken risks to make it happen—that she didn’t have all the answers she wanted—was a problem. But initially, when word had first reached her that Ham had been kidnapped, she hadn’t believed he’d get out of Colombia alive. He was being held by brutal criminals on a remote Andean mountainside, and no one even knew what in blazes he looked like.
Mia lifted her head onto a pillow, to keep the stomach acid from crawling up her throat. She’d fought indigestion since she woke that day. Smarter, she thought, to wait and have her milk after her bath. Having it beforehand would only make her stomach worse.
Her ceiling fan whirred steadily in the quiet night. She wasn’t a hardened Special Forces officer like Brooker or an eccentric genius like Carhill. She wasn’t experienced in power plays and political machinations like President Poe. She was just a smart kid from South Boston.
“Not so smart.”
She didn’t like the note of self-pity in her tone. But if she was so damn smart, why was she lying in bed at ten o’clock with indigestion? Why hadn’t she realized she was being played?
Carhill hadn’t provided many details of his kidnapping and incarceration. He’d said he was too traumatized and needed time. His kidnapping struck Mia and the experts—the very few who knew about it—as a reasonably well but not exactingly planned mission. A forty-eight-hour plan versus a one-month-in-the-making plan.
Her assumption had been that profit was the motive. Greed, not power and secrets. Except Mia wasn’t so sure about that anymore, either.
A profit motive she could understand. As a Texas Carhill, Ham had to have been a prime target for kidnappers-for-ransom in the wild circles in which he operated. He didn’t advertise his background, but if someone shady—someone like Bobby Tatro—did happen to find out about Carhill’s extreme wealth, then it made sense; snatch him, demand a ransom, get paid a fortune and either let him go or kill him. It was straightforward.
But Tatro, only recently out of federal prison, hadn’t had much time to pull off such a complex mission. Someone else must have pointed him to Ham Carhill, helped him put together his team, lured him with the promise of a big payday—except there hadn’t been a ransom. Again, Mia stumbled on that one.
Therein lay the little wrinkle she’d discussed with the president. Bobby Tatro couldn’t have masterminded the kidnapping on his own.
She hadn’t mentioned to John Wesley Poe her fear—her near certainty—that she’d been played by some vigilante psycho.
In some ways, Mia thought, it would have been simpler if they’d all been killed. Tatro and his men. Even Brooker, Carhill. Just close the book on the mission and walk away. No one would expect answers with so many key players dead. But she squeezed her eyes shut, appalled at her thinking. She could never allow herself to become that cold and analytical. That self-serving. Never, never, never.
Hot tears dripped down her temples onto her pillow.
You’re only as good as your last mistake.
She opened her eyes and rolled onto her side. She’d lived in her apartment for more than two years, but it still didn’t feel like home. It was charming, with traditional furnishings, fireplaces in the bedroom and living room, wainscoting in the kitchen, a chandelier in the dining room. It had its own courtyard, lush with ivy and always cheerful, somehow, with its splash of morning sun. She could walk to the shops on M Street and the fancier houses—the places she couldn’t afford—with their carefully designed window treatments that looked so welcoming and yet, artfully but deliberately, obstructed prying eyes.
Mia Frances O’Farrell wasn’t someone who made mistakes. She’d always earned good grades, from kindergarten through graduate school. She’d risen fast in the competitive, high-stakes world of national security, where mistakes didn’t get you a failing grade—they got people killed.