He could tell she didn’t think he was serious.
His cell phone rang, and she jumped a foot in the air, landing sideways on her right ankle. She let out a yelp that sounded like a swearword to Ethan, although he was sure it couldn’t have been. Not the swearing type, Dr. O’Farrell.
He’d turned off his phone at breakfast and left it off, but had deliberately turned it back on when she’d arrived. There was no number on the readout. “Brooker.”
“I was beginning to think you were dead in a ditch.” It was Juliet, and she wasn’t happy. “Where are you?”
“D.C. You?”
“My apartment. I’m flushing dead fish down the toilet.”
“Something’s happened—”
Juliet didn’t seem to hear him. “Unless you’ve got the secretary of defense or a four-star general sitting on you, I want you on the next flight to New York.”
Mia reported directly to the president. Ethan wondered if she’d do.
But he could hear the tension in Juliet’s voice.
“Or,” she went on, not breathless but not in the mood to listen, either, “I can get someone to find you and bring you up here.”
“I don’t need more marshals on my case. Think I killed your fish?”
She let out a breath. “Bobby Tatro had my niece pinned in my bedroom. He killed Juan, our doorman. Tatro was—” She paused a fraction of a second. “He said awful things to Wendy. He enjoys scaring the hell out of people.”
“Is she—”
“I got here before he could break into the bedroom. Wendy bashed in a couple of my fish tanks to distract him. Her father’s on his way now. He’ll take her back to Vermont tonight.”
Mia held her briefcase against her chest with both arms. “Major?”
He didn’t get a chance to respond before Juliet spoke again. “Next flight to New York, Brooker. I mean it. Be here before nightfall.”
After she hung up in his ear, Ethan tossed his phone onto his chair, the elegant surroundings suddenly seeming phony to him, incongruous to the life he led, the man he was.
Mia looked at him with the incisiveness he’d noticed about her during their first meeting in D.C. three weeks ago. John Wesley Poe had been there. The president and O’Farrell had presented the outlines of the mission. Ethan had been aware that Poe’s personal involvement was unusual, unexpected, if not improper. Once Ethan accepted the mission, it’d gone through normal channels for clearance and preparation. But he’d accepted before he knew Ham Carhill was the unnamed American contractor in the hands—ostensibly—of American and Colombian mercenaries.
Ham wasn’t the driving force behind Ethan’s willingness to put his life on the line. Ethan wasn’t all that sure what was. He’d been charging into the unknown since Char’s death, not giving a damn what happened to himself, just pushing for answers to who’d killed her and why, making sure whoever it was faced justice.
For all he knew, Mia O’Farrell was as out of control as he’d been for most of the past year. She was just quieter about it, pushing computer buttons and using a pen instead of going after her enemies herself. He wondered what demons she was facing.
“Tatro?” she asked, her voice tight but composed.
In terse language, Ethan repeated what Juliet had told him. Then he picked up his phone and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket, which hung over a chair, and said without looking at Mia, “If there’s anything else I should know, now’s the time. Anything you haven’t told me, I want it.”
She was silent, her lower lip pulled in under her top teeth.
He didn’t relent. “If you’ve got something to hide, I’ll find out.”
“I resent your implication.”
“The thing about covering your ass is that once you start, you can’t stop. At first you rationalize the lies, the omissions, as the right thing to do. Then the cover-up is the only thing to do. You keep thinking there’s an end, but there never is. Exposure’s always the next breath away. You start to sweat. You get where you can’t sleep. You look in the mirror one day and realize you’re rationalizing hurting people before they can hurt you.”
Mia stayed with her cool and unruffled act, but her fingers were white, pressed fiercely against her briefcase. “I have to go.”
“I’m not stopping until I know what’s going on.”
She walked steadily to the door. “I’m sorry about Tatro and what he did to that girl in New York,” she said. “I wish he’d never made it out of Colombia. But he’s not my responsibility. He never was.”
“You know Tatro didn’t pull off this kidnapping by himself. He’s being manipulated by the same person who’s manipulating you.”
“No one’s manipulating me.” Then she added, the barest whisper, “Not anymore.”
“Mia. Trust me.”
She glanced back at him. “I used to trust everyone.”