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“Who had the gun on whom?” She mirrored his expression as she gave the passport back to him.
“You have a point.” He tucked the folder in his inside coat pocket, then shrugged out of the coat and tossed it across the bed. “Have a seat. How was letting me go a mistake?”
Lily sat on the sofa, which put a wall at her back. “Because if you’re CIA, or were hired by the CIA, that gave you time to have them sanitize whatever information on you is out there.”
He put his hands on his hips and glared at her. “If you know that, then what in hell are you doing here in my hotel room? My God, woman, I could be anyone!”
For some reason, his scolding struck her as funny, and she began to smile. If he’d been hired to kill her, would he be fussing about her not being careful enough?
“It’s not funny,” he groused. “If the CIA’s after you, you have to be on your toes. Are you a spy or something?”
She shook her head. “No. I killed someone they didn’t want killed.”
He didn’t blink an eye at the fact that she’d killed someone. Instead he picked up the room menu and tossed it into her lap. “Let’s order some food,” he said. “My stomach hasn’t adjusted to this time zone, either.”
Though it was very early for supper, Lily briefly glanced through the menu and made her choice, then listened as Swain phoned in the order. His French was passable, but no one would ever mistake him for a native speaker. He hung up the phone, then came to sit down in one of the blue-patterned chairs. Pulling up his right leg to prop his ankle on top of his left knee, he asked, “Who did you kill?”
“An Italian businessman-slash-hoodlum named Salvatore Nervi.”
“Did he need killing?”
“Oh, yes,” she said softly.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It wasn’t a sanctioned hit.”
“Sanctioned by whom?”
“The CIA.” Her tone was ironic.
He gave her a thoughtful glance. “You’re CIA?”
“Not exactly. I’m—I was a contract agent.”
“So you’ve put your killing ways behind you?”
“Let’s just say I doubt any more jobs will be coming my way.”
“You could hire out to someone else.”
She shook her head.
“No? Why not?”
“Because the only way I could do the job was if I thought it was right,” she said in a low tone. “Maybe it was naive, but I trusted my government in this. If it sent me out, then I had to believe the hit was righteous. I wouldn’t have that same trust with anyone else.”
“Not naive, but definitely idealistic.” His blue eyes were kind. “Don’t you trust them to overlook this Nervi thing?” he asked, and again she shook her head.
“I knew he was an asset. He passed information to them.”
“So why’d you kill him?”
“Because he had some of my friends killed. There’s a lot I don’t know, but—they were retired from the business, raising their daughter, being normal. For some reason they broke into the laboratory complex where we were yesterday—or I think they did—and he had them killed.” Her voice thickened. “Also their thirteen-year-old daughter, Zia. She was killed, too.”
Swain blew out a breath. “You have no idea why they broke in?”
“Like I said, I’m not even certain they did. But they crossed Salvatore somehow, and that’s the only thing I can find happening to any of the Nervi holdings that falls in that time frame. I think someone hired them to do it, but I don’t know who or why.”
