“Elise let me borrow it for the night.”
“Well, thank her for me.” I turned away from her instinctively to make sure no one had followed me. The third floor still looked deserted. “How is the widow Courville, anyway?” I laughed over my shoulder, waiting for Rowan to catch up to me.
Silence.
“She’s dead, Nat.”
Dead? Did I hear that right?
I started to turn toward Rowan when that familiar report registered in my mind. It felt like someone had hit me with a baseball bat just above my belt on my left hip. The fire spread immediately through my body. The second round hit me exactly where Meg had been shot. I spun around involuntarily as I fell to the ground. The pain was excruciating. I could feel the warm blood soaking my shirt. I kept blinking my eyes, trying to focus. I tried to crawl but my legs would not respond.
Where was Rowan? Why wasn’t she helping me?
She was standing there watching me.
There was no white light, no chapters of my life unspooling at warp speed. There was pain and there was anger. I was helpless, lying on the floor of a shitty parking garage in fucking Baltimore bleeding out because the woman I’d thought I could make a long game with had killed me.
CHAPTER 106
Shock Trauma
It was as easy this time as it had been before. Dr. Curtis Lee arrived wearing his lab coat over his scrubs. He had a large Starbucks coffee cup in his hand and his trusty stethoscope draped around his neck. He entered through the emergency-room doors and nodded at one of the night security guards. He moved confidently down the corridor, following the signs for the elevator. He checked the directory and found the floor he needed.
Predictably, the foot traffic in the ICU was almost nonexistent. He shuffled from the elevator to the nurses’ station and gave his well-rehearsed speech: “I’m an embarrassed and very tired doctor whose late wife will haunt me from the afterlife if I don’t find that damn pen.”
Sympathy always wins. The nurse even offered to help him with his scavenger hunt.
Maybe it was with the Jane Doe GSW? Which room, please?He nodded and carried his coffee down the hall to Jane Doe’s private room.
The lights were dim and the patient was heavily sedated.Such a pretty girl,he mused. Dr. Lee didn’t know what she had done to necessitate a visit from him. But then, he never did.
He put the Starbucks cup on the bedside table and pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket. He pried the plastic lid off the cup and reached in to retrieve his syringe and glass vial. Then he expertly inserted the needle through the rubber seal and drew 10ccs of the toxin into the syringe.
With a gentle touch, he pulled back the covers to expose the woman’s left arm. The IV was already working, so all he needed to do was insert the needle into the extension of the tube; gravity would do the rest. She stirred gently as the contents of the syringe flowed into the solution. He deposited the syringe in the hazardous materials tamper-proof box, placed the vial back in his cup along with the latex gloves, and left Jane Doe to die.
As he passed the nurses’ station, Dr. Lee gleefully pulled the pen from his pocket and triumphantly waved it at the kind nurse.
“It wasn’t in Jane Doe’s room—it was in the one across the hall,” he said, thanking her and waving good night.
The elevator closed and started its descent. He was one floor down when he heard the faint sound of the Code Blue alarm blasting through the ICU. By the time Dr. Curtis Lee said good night to the ER security guard, Megan Marie Fuller had been pronounced dead.
CHAPTER 107
CSTC Headquarters, Maryland
It was a miracle I was still alive.
I was going to be sidelined for a good while, but the doctors were encouraged by my initial recovery. I was on track to be exercising in four weeks, maybe even running in six.
Rowan Anderson was the traitor. She was the spy alluded to at the briefing in North Carolina. The only survivor from Senator Coleman Harrison’s protective detail. How could we all have been so stupid?
She was responsible for Meg’s death. And she had almost pinned Elise Courville’s murder on me, until Sam Starnes put an end to that investigation.
We were all in agreement: The first order of business was to get Haracat al Marrak out of Paris. After that I would make sure Rowan Anderson died a heinous death.
Meg’s death shattered me. I felt responsible for failing her. I’dleft her vulnerable to attack. I’d promised to protect her. I hadn’t, and now she was dead.
As I grieved, my rage would ebb and flow. One moment I’d be melancholy, on the verge of a meltdown, the next almost giddy in the fantasy of putting a bullet through Rowan Anderson’s temple. She was no longer a person to me, just a target for my hatred.
