Just him and his gun.
The sun had come up an hour or so ago, roughly twenty minutes after Kristen and the cook had completed whatever their errand had been. From where he was sitting, he had a view of the door Kristen and the cook had disappeared into earlier. He would have taken a closer look, tried to peek inside, but there was a security camera on the door. It was the only one. Once the target was a few feet past the entryway, Jesse could act without the problem of prying eyes.
He had two roads to go down. Three, really. If Master A came out first or with the cook, he would pop them both and be done. If his target came out with one of the women, he would have a choice to make, but if the sub came out alone, he had a plan.
It was all about waiting now.
Waiting and figuring out how to salvage his career.
Or just accepting that he was a fuck up now and he always had been.
What would his hero father think of him now? There was no way he would be proud, right? He would be like the rest. He would wonder why Jesse Murdoch’s head was on his body when the rest of his team had met such a grisly fate.
Jesse closed his eyes because sometimes he could stop the visions if he thought of something else. Anything but that dank Iraqi prison, smelling of death and blood and piss. Anything but the way poor Alannah had looked at him right before the sword had severed her head from her body.
He’d cared for her and she’d hated him in that moment. She’d hated the fact that she was dying and he wasn’t. She’d believed that he’d turned.
So did everyone else.
Losing this job would be the nail in his coffin, but by god, he would go out being true to himself.
The sun kept rising, but Jesse felt no warmth.
“So what’s the problem?” Alex asked, looking down at the computer screen. It was a mass of 1s and 0s and a bunch of shit that made no sense to him.
Adam yawned, stretching in the early morning light. Apparently he’d been up all night dealing with the horror of 1s and 0s. “It’s weird. If this particular file had been classified, there would be something here I could find, but it’s just gone. Someone deleted this file.”
“Why the hell would they delete a file?” Alex couldn’t understand it. “Do you think Evans did it?”
It was the only thing that made sense. The feds needed every single bit of information they could get. It was precious and to be hoarded like gold. How had they not seen it? Had they let this case go cold? No. He wouldn’t believe it.
There was no way Warren allowed it to happen.
Adam shrugged. “I don’t know, but someone did and they did it from inside the Bureau. If someone had done it from the outside, there would be footprints. I can’t exactly figure out where the deletion comes from. This computer used to be registered to a Tommy Guinn, but now the system is deemed inactive.”
Tommy. God. Tommy had died in the attack on Eve. “Can you tell what the date is?”
Adam pressed a few keys.
“March 15th. Does that date mean anything?” Adam asked.
It was ten days after he’d quit the Bureau. “Not really. I wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know. I need to call some of my contacts. I’ll figure it out.”
Adam stood. “Don’t. Don’t call them. Let’s take a look at this on our own.”
Alex sighed, closing his eyes. “You think this is an inside job.”
“And you’re too close to it.”
Adam was right. “Okay. Let’s go over all the reasons someone on the inside would delete that file. Get Sean out here. Eve is in the shower. She shouldn’t be too long. We have a couple of hours before we have to be at the club. I want to think this through. Text Ian.”
Ian was his damn sounding board. He needed Ian. Damn it. How the hell had Nelson picked the perfect time to separate him from Ian?
“Already did. He’s going to Skype in soon. I’ll put it through the big TV. He can yell at us in HD.” Adam seemed relieved to have something to do. He started gathering wires and cords.
Alex looked down at the files. Was Carmen Garcia a rabbit hole he shouldn’t go down? “What did you find out about her?”
Adam was attaching cords to the big TV in the living room. “Favorite daughter of a high-profile San Antonio family. Her father has been in the Texas state senate. Her brother played college ball for the Longhorns. She had damn near perfect LSATs. Picked Georgetown over Harvard. Not sure that was a great decision, but she wanted to be close to Washington according to the articles I read on her.”