Page 11 of License to Kill

I didn’t have to research at least five of the names on the list. Two belonged to CARD, and one had been on my failed team in the form of Andrew Linsc, the same asshole who’d ignored leads resulting in the death of a little girl. Had he ignored the lead out of pride, or had he been paid off to make sure she couldn’t be recovered?

I could find out. All I needed to do was ask. “Amelia?”

“What’s up?”

“Can you look in that black market system of yours and find out if there was ever a hit on a kid?”

“Sure. It’ll cost me a few bucks, but I can put in a request for that info. The black market ops don’t tend to like when people go after the kids, but they let it through. If I say the hit was for a kid, they’ll let me know if it existed, if that’s all I’m asking for.”

“Michelle Gianni. She was kidnapped out of Pennsylvania. She was found dead. Andrew Linsc was on my team in CARD, and he ignored relevant intel I’d found, which resulted in her death. He’s on your list, so I want to know if he had ignored it to make sure the job got finished.”

Amelia whistled. “I’ll make the request, and I’ll also inquire if he had any connections to that bounty. If so, that will lead to a burn order.”

“Burn order? You mean eliminate and erase? That sort of burn?”

“To a crisp, and we’ll be paid good money for it. Even black market ops have rules—and one of those rules? Don’t fuck around with active FBI investigations that can get the op sunk. And if the op involved the girl for the hit and a black market worker actively screwing the investigation, that breaks the rules. They don’t want to give the FBI direct reasons to go after them. Can I disclose your former status as an FBI agent?”

“I don’t care. But if Andrew Linsc was involved, my rogue ass is taking the fucker down, and I’ll entertain accepting a paycheck for the work. If I can’t work within the law, well, maybe I’ll work outside of it for a while and clean up some of the filth I couldn’t catch while in the FBI.”

“I’ll try to get a working arrangement set up for you, so that even if you do return to work in the FBI, they’ll tip you off so you can quietly close some cases that’ll keep the black market ops going without unnecessarily exposing them.”

Before the Greenwich case, such an idea would have offended me. Times had changed, and so had I. “Pitch me.”

Amelia smiled, retrieved her phone from the table we used as a desk for our laptops, and headed into the main bedroom to call her contact. As always, she closed the door behind her, which was her signal I shouldn’t snoop.

I checked the internet for information on Andrew Linsc. According to his social media, he still worked in the FBI, he was still located in New York, and on the surface, he appeared to be an upstanding agent. He played to the rules, putting only the information the FBI allowed agents to put online.

As I preferred to maintain as much privacy as possible, I avoided social media like it would rise up and eat me. Jake did, too.

Our lack of profiles and interest in the various platforms meant we couldn’t make a mistake and share something we shouldn’t—or reveal our location.

If he worked with criminals to complete crimes from within the FBI, something as simple as his location could be used to help those the FBI wanted to bring to justice.

A small part of me hoped the asshole was innocent.

The rest, seasoned over the years and painfully familiar with traitors and betrayal, expected the worst.

Amelia didn’t leave me waiting for long, and she bounced her phone in her hand. “Yes, he’s associated. Yes, my contact is interested in working with you either in or out of the FBI, and yes, they’ll protect you as they can. You’ll be assigned a code name, they’ll create a method to feed you intel that should fly below the radar, and you’ll be given only the jobs they need to be legally closed if you’re working within the confines of the FBI. Essentially, you’ll be a slightly better educated agent with access to clues you may otherwise miss—clues meant to sink people who have crossed the wrong lines.”

It disturbed me how easy it was to become one of the bad guys, one of the dirty agents flitting through the system.

Even a few weeks ago, I would have cared a lot more about having turned coat.

Well, mostly.

I could, at least, say I worked more for the side of the law than otherwise. Given time, I wondered if that would change.

“Okay. What can you give me on Linsc?”

“I’ll be sent that information within the hour. If the ops have it, we’re getting it. They had not known Gianni was a kid when the hit was put out, and that goes against the rules of that specific market, which directly bars hits against minors. It draws too much FBI attention. So, the person who put out the hit request broke the rules, and then one of the workers, Linsc in this case, cooperated to make sure the hit happened from the inside of the FBI by misdirecting your team. What we don’t know is if Linsc was involved with being assigned to that case.”

“He could have been. We were between cases, and he has enough seniority to request cases that interest him.” I sighed, regretting I couldn’t shrug like I wanted. Between the old and new injuries, it hurt, and I wondered if, given a few weeks and time to heal, I’d return to my old ways of expressing myself. “I was working as an anchor then, and most on the team didn’t like me. Wrong gender.”

“Idiots, all of them. Anyway, hits on active-duty agents like Linsc are handled differently from what was out for you. He’ll get the full burn treatment. First, evidence will be submitted to various branches of the FBI through contacts similar to you. These contacts will make sure the paperwork gets to the right place to burn him out of the FBI. After he’s burned out of the FBI, he’ll be blacklisted in the market I called him out on. Other markets may follow. If he runs, that’s when the black market will issue a hit for him and anyone working with him to discourage anyone in the markets from helping. And since the markets have some cooperation between them, that’ll be US market wide. At that point, we’re free to take him out. We’ll have to commit the perfect murder, though.”

“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder, Amelia. Everyone makes mistakes, and those mistakes are how they get caught.”

“There may be no such thing as a perfect murder, but when enough people work together to cover it up, it may as well be—and nothing is as terrifying as when the black market ops decides someone needs to disappear because of their poor choices. Andrew Linsc will pay for his involvement in that little girl’s death, that much I can promise you. And so will the asshole who put the hit out. You don’t target little kids in that specific market. The operators of that one are family men, and they’re not the kind of family men you cross.”