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“I can’t wait to overindulge on that soon, too,” Diana teased, and Sydney grabbed hold of her chair, spinning her back toward the table to face the laptops.
“We’re about to jump back on our call, and you’re distracting her.” Sydney flicked her wrist over her shoulder, letting me know to beat it.
“Fine,” I grumbled, but now eating cake with Diana while naked was at the top of my one-day-we’ll-do-it list.
Returning to the hall, I shook my head, shocked that I’d become a man with a to-do list. I also knew if Diana and I were to marry one day, smashing cake against each other’s faces during the reception would be one of my favorite memories. Another thing Rebecca had never let me do.
I stopped walking, surprised by where my thoughts had drifted.
A pair of boots heading my way pulled my attention back to reality and up to see who they belonged to.
“You’re back.” I frowned. “That mean you didn’t find anything?”
Gray tipped his head, motioning for me to step into the closest room. I followed him, and he shut the door and reached for his phone. “Hopefully you didn’t eat. The photos I’m going to show you might even make a man like you lose his lunch.”
A man like me, huh? Fair enough. Also, not the best way to start the conversation. I needed good news, and clearly he wasn’t about to give me that. “Way to kick things off,” I said while accepting his phone.
Swiping through the photos, the phantom smell of burnt flesh filled my nose, and my stomach turned. I was used to death and destruction, and had lost count of how many lives I’d taken, but if the images were what I thought they were, and Diana’s colleagues had been burned alive, I had no clue how I’d tell her.
Forget those words I’d planned to have with William. Dead men didn’t talk.
“I was just at the coroner’s office here in town. Three unidentified bodies were recovered from a building that’d been on fire at Port Leith. Two women and one man from what they could tell. There’s too much damage to make out their faces, but there are rope-like fibers burned into their skin on their wrists and ankles, suggesting they’d been tied up.”
“Fuck.” Bahar? William? Another female colleague of Diana’s?
“Forensics indicates they were killed before the fire, which happened about one hour after we were attacked in Poland. Still not the news we were hoping for, but at least they weren’t burned alive.”
Processing that information, I swiped to another image. “Pierce Quaid,” I said under my breath. “He’s alive? Where?” The photo on Gray’s phone showed Pierce outside a BMW sedan on a city street. The next image showed that same BMW on fire.
“Not alive anymore. That footage is of Pierce taken in Antwerp this morning. Thirty seconds after he got behind the wheel, it blew up. The Agency’s sending someone to Belgium to get a positive ID and ensure it’s really him.”
“Someone wanted us to see this.”
Gray nodded, shoving his phone back into the pocket of his fatigues. “Looks like Pierce was an insider, but someone’s tying up loose ends.”
“If Pierce was on camera in Antwerp, that’s a false lead they want us to chase. Another diversion.” I folded my arms, searching through the facts in my head of what we already knew to piece together what this new information meant.
“More than likely, but what I’m trying to figure out is if those three people were Diana’s colleagues, why kill them? If they thought their location here was burned”—he grimaced at his choice of words—“why not relocate them elsewhere. They needed the physicists for help, especially since they don’t have Diana.”
“Because maybe it was never about the hostages or the research?” I dragged a hand down my face, mulling over the facts. “What we do know,” I began, “is that someone outsourced the attack in Amsterdam to the Serbians to keep their own hands clean. What if their plan all along was for us to think the lab was destroyed to stop the project, as well as steal the research and the best minds to create their own weapon, but it was actually to hide some other underlying motive?”
“Thwart our efforts to have a weapon so when they use the one they already have against us, we can’t counterattack,” he said, following along. “But what they didn’t anticipate was you being brought in and having the security footage that fucked with their plan before they had a chance to finish it.”
“Judging by the fact they probably murdered the other hostages and have moved mountains to try and get to Diana, she’s the only one they ever gave a damn about.” They just didn’t want anyone to know she was their main target during the lab hit. “They had every intention of pinning this mess on the traffickers and the unsuspecting target who allegedly hired the Serbians, which is why there was a different hacker tied to the encrypted USB in the first place.”
“And that lead is what had us thinking we may be dealing with two threats.” Gray grunted, mirroring my frustration. “More like the first one being an artificial fucking construct. The government would blame them, wrap up the case, and drop their guard, just to get blindsided by an attack.”
I walked through the details in my head over again, trying to make sure we weren’t missing anything. “But because I was brought in, which was the curveball they didn’t count on, they had to change gears and fast. They couldn’t try and block Diana’s rescue from the Serbians or it’d draw attention to the fact they have a man in the White House. And thanks to Diana’s father, they didn’t have to because they had a backup plan to get her back post-rescue.” Thank God for my obsession.
“Only, the group never anticipated we’d win that fight in Poland and learn about the tracker in the glasses. They underestimated our team, including Gwen. If they’re tying up loose ends now, that means they know we’re onto the fact the original plan was a distraction, and they’re short on time. They must also be getting nervous that they can’t get their hands on Diana, which has me wondering if Diana has value to this group beyond her ability to create a way to stop the attack,” Gray theorized. “And if Pierce Quaid was also an insider, it looks like he just became their first sacrificial lamb.”
“And they’ll need a second one,” I said under my breath as Gray’s phone began ringing. “Whoever winds up dead next is either the traitor and another loose string being eliminated, or the alibi for the real one.”
Gray waved the phone between us. “It’s my father,” he let me know, then placed the call on speaker. “Carter’s on the line, too.”
“Craig Paulsen’s been brought in, and he denies any involvement.” Not wasting time on pleasantries, the Secretary cut straight to it. “He’s willing to take a polygraph and have his home searched as well. But Jared Felsely is MIA. The Agency located his Navigator down the street from his office, and right after he exited the vehicle?—”
“The power went out on the street?” I took a chance and guessed.
