Page 18 of Fixed Asset

Catarina broke first and busted out laughing. Fallon and Mase weren’t far behind. Thankfully, Pete joined us, and I had a reason to put a stop to their stupidity.

“Time to lay your cards on the table, Catarina,” I said through their amusement.

“I don’t have cards,” she quipped.

“Jack’s right. It’s time we had a chat. Let’s take this to the dining room.”

Fallon and Mason heard Pete’s tone and immediately switched from idiots to the professionals they were. It was obvious that Pete had spent his time upstairs not inspecting the bedrooms to assign sleeping arrangements but talking to Shep. Which meant he’d been fully briefed on Cat’s background. Something I was privy to, seeing as my old boss, Wilson McCray, was thorough in his investigation of anyone who worked closely with Takeback.

Catarina turned wary.

Interesting.

Further from that, what was more curious and annoying was she didn’t have a quick and ready comeback for Pete.

I followed Cat and the team into the dining room, commandeering the chair farthest away from the one Cat chose.

Pete cut straight to it. “Why’d you leave the Marshals Service?”

Now, that was a tidbit I was unaware of.

“Is that the real question you want to ask?” Cat shot back.

“For starters. Then we’ll move to why, after years of the CIA approaching you while you were in the Army, then while you were with Homeland, and again while you were with the Sex Offender Investigation Branch, you finally decided to take them up on their offer.”

Cat shrugged. “I was bored.”

Her tone made her sound just that—bored and uninterested.

“You seem to get bored a lot, the way you jumped from command to command. Didn’t stay on a team for more than a workup.”

“Or alternately, my skills were in high demand and the Army moved me where they needed.”

“I could see that,” Pete conceded. “It’s not every day the Army finds themselves a human lie detector with your powers of persuasion.”

What the hell was Pete talking about? That wasn’t in the original dossier I’d read back in Nevada.

“Is that what your source told you? Sorry, but they oversold my skills. I’m observant, not a lie detector. And I didn’t have to persuade—that was always the problem. Our military forgot just because cattle are treated better than women in most of the countries we were in, doesn’t mean they weren’t valuable. All I had to do was ask nicely, show some kindness, and they talked. You know the sad part? They didn’t want the money. They couldn’t risk being caught with it. All they wanted was to feel seen, heard, valued. Once I gave them that, they gave up their men.”

Well, fuck.

“Your intel took out a lot of terrorists.”

“I know,” Cat said proudly.

“Is that why you left the SOIB? The CIA offered to send you to Honduras to try your hand at turning women into informants?”

“Nope.”

She was lying. I saw the same small twist under her left eye I’d seen back in Vegas, when she’d told me she’d wait until we had backup in place before she headed to the auction at the mansion. News flash, she hadn’t waited. Instead of making an excuse about why she was going to be late and driving herself there, she’d gone with Martin and his lackeys.

“Friends don’t lie to friends, Catarina,” I told her.

“Friends? I was unaware we’d all become friends. In that case, tell me, old buddy, why are you in Honduras?”

“We’re here to find a woman named Berta Lanza. She’s a Lenca woman who has managed to assemble a collective of Indigenous women who’ve built a network of safe passage for women and children to flee the country.”

When I was done, Catarina was staring at me with her lips parted, clearly surprised I’d be forthright and end the subterfuge. Now was not the time for a long, drawn-out game of battle chess.