Kevin was silent long enough that she finally had to look back. His face was uncharacteristically vulnerable. Like always, when his features were allowed to relax, he looked a lot more like Daniel.
“You think he’d choose to follow you?” Kevin asked very quietly. “I mean, he just met you. He barely knows you. But… I guess he probably feels like he barely knows me, too, at this point.”
“I don’t know what he’ll want,” she said. “I would never ask him to make that choice.”
Kevin focused on the air a few inches above her head. “I really wanted the chance to make things up to him. To set him up in a life he could live with. I was hoping, after a while, we could be brothers again.”
She had an odd urge to walk across the space between them and put her hand on his shoulder. Probably just because he was still looking like Daniel.
“I won’t get in the way of that,” she promised. She meant it. Whatever was best for Daniel, that was the main thing.
Kevin stared at her for a minute, his face hardening and turning back to normal. He blew out a huge sigh. “Well, damn it, Ollie, I wish I’d just left that Tacoma thing alone. Millions of lives saved—really, what does that add up to in the face of my brother sleeping with Lucrezia Borgia?”
Alex froze. “What did you say?”
He grinned. “Surprised that I know the appropriate historical analogy? I did pretty well in school, actually. I’ve got just as many brain cells as my brother.”
“No, about Tacoma. What do you mean?”
His grin shifted to confusion. “You know all about that—they gave you the file. You interrogated Danny—”
She leaned toward him, unconsciously clutching her computer more tightly against her ribs. “This is about the job you did with de la Fuentes? Does the T in TCX-1 stand for Tacoma?”
“I’ve never heard of TCX-1. The de la Fuentes job was about the Tacoma virus.”
“The Tacoma Plague?”
“I never heard it called that. What’s going on, Ollie?”
Alex yanked open her computer as she climbed onto the foot of the bed. She pulled up the most recent file she’d worked on—her coded case notes. She scrolled through the list of numbers and initials, feeling the bed shift as Kevin put one knee on it, leaning to read over her shoulder.
It felt like a long time since she’d written these notes. So much had happened, and the thoughts she’d attached to these brief lines were faded.
There it was—terrorist event number three, TP, the Tacoma Plague. The letters danced in front of her eyes, only some of them resolving into words in her memory. J, I-P, that was the town in India, on the Pakistani border. She couldn’t remember what the name of the terrorist cell was, only that they originated out of Fateh Jang. She looked at the initials for the connected names: DH —that was the scientist, Haugen; OM was Mirwani, the terrorist, and then P… The other American she couldn’t remember. She pressed her fist to her forehead, trying to force her recall.
“Ollie?” Kevin said again.
“I worked this case—years ago, when the formula was first stolen from the U.S. Long before de la Fuentes got hold of it.”
“Stolen from the U.S.? De la Fuentes got it out of Egypt.”
“No, it was developed in a lab just outside Tacoma. It was supposed to be theoretical, just research. Haugen… Dominic Haugen, that was the scientist.” The story came back to her as she concentrated. “He was on our side, but with the theft, the situation became too sensitive for him to continue where he was. The NSA buried him in a lab somewhere under their control. We had the terrorist cell’s second in command. He gave up the location of the lab in Jammu that was successfully creating the virus from the stolen blueprints. Black ops razed the lab. They thought they had the biological-weapon aspect locked up, but there were members of the cell who slipped through. As far as I know, the department was still working with the CIA on hunting them down a couple of years later… when Barnaby was killed.”
She looked up at him, the wheels in her head spinning so fast that she felt physically dizzy.
“When the CIA called you in, when they burned you—you said there were issues you were trying to track down. What were they?”