“Vanessa, I will let Andy set fire to your hair if you don’t start talking. Now.”
Vanessa knew he was ready to kill her with his bare hands. She had to find the right words. “Listen, Matthew, you hired me to make you bombs, and I’ve done my job well. I’ve stuck with you, helped you.” She raised her hand to touch his face. He froze. “Don’t you know I love you, that I’ve loved you since the moment Ian introduced us in Belfast? Why won’t you believe me?”
“How long have you been with me, Vanessa?”
Where is he going with this?
Before she could answer, he turned to Ian. “How long since you brought her to me, Ian?”
Ian was staring down at her. “Four months and, a week or so—we first met at the Duck and Deer pub in Londonderry.” A look of pain crossed his face. “I thought she’d be perfect for us.”
“Four and a half months. And you’ve been in every hour of our lives since.”
Andy looked up from the phone. “I heard Darius telling you she was trouble. I thought he said that because she wouldn’t sleep with him.”
“Matthew, Ian, you’ve got to listen to me. It’s not my phone. Even though there were deaths tonight at the refinery, it will be offline for weeks, and the world will listen to you, Matthew, finally listen. And look what Andy did—he took down the big oil company systems. We’ll have them under our thumbs by morning. You know I feel the same way as you about how our president is cozying up to the Iranians and all those other Middle East terrorists, you know I do.”
Ian said to Andy, his voice and his eyes dead cold, “Take the phone apart.”
Andy plugged it into his computer and tapped on the keyboard. There was stark silence in the living room except for the sounds of the keys and Matthew’s heaving breathing.
Andy called over his shoulder, “The outgoing texts are automatically deleted, very nice custom program to do that. There’s a single number in the memory, though it’s deleted from the phone itself, too. The number’s been called three times in the past two weeks, but the calls go different places.” He looked at Vanessa. “Who are you talking to? Who’s on the other side of the call?”
“Can you reverse the number?” Matthew asked, never taking his eyes off her, his gun now steady on her chest. Center mass: she’d be dead in less than a heartbeat if he pulled the trigger.
“Yeah.” More tapping. “The number’s cloaked, it bounces off four satellites before it goes through. Phone’s encrypted, Matthew.”
His voice—so soft, so deadly calm. “Where’d you get an encrypted phone, Vanessa?”
She said again, “It’s not mine.”
Matthew kept his eyes on her face. “I know, it belongs to Ian, it belongs to Andy. Could it belong to me as well?”
“Maybe it belongs to Darius, and he’s manipulating you yet again. Maybe he isn’t who you believe he is.”
“Darius? Now, that’s a thought.” He said to Andy, “Call the number, Andy.”
15
PAWN TO E4
26 Federal Plaza
New York, New York
As Nicholas drove the Crown Vic into Manhattan, he could still see the plume of fire from the refinery in his rearview, could still taste the burning oil in his mouth. It was hard to get his brain around all that had happened in such a short time. COE had murdered three FBI agents and Richard Hodges, blown up Bayway, not caring how many people died. And now, the launching of a coordinated attack on the oil companies themselves. He saw Mr. Hodges’s face, the perfect circle in his forehead. He’d been a hero, he’d given them Larry Reeves, a man Nicholas was certain was as dead as all the other workers at Bayway.
The whole case had changed in an instant.
What was COE all about now? Certainly it was now about much more than simply wanting Middle Eastern oil to stop being imported.