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“He says his wife was abducted—”
“She was,” Rafael cut in. “He has her and he says he’ll kill her if I don’t do everything he wants.”
“Quiet!” Mo-bot shouted at him. “We’ll tell you when we want to hear from you.”
Jack sighed, his pain audible.
“You sold out your friends for nothing,” he said, and his words hit home. Rafael sagged visibly. “You’ve got blood on your hands, and he still has your wife. What did you think was going to happen? The nice man would keep his word and bring her home if you were a good boy and did as you were told?”
The question seemed to suck all the air from the room. Rafael choked back a series of sobs that made his chest heave.
Private had procedures for such eventualities. Rafael wasn’t strictly part of the agency, but he worked for Private and knew the correct protocols. If he’d come to them when Alison had been taken, they would have worked with the cops and FBI to find her, and would have had a good chance of recovering her by playing on Angel’s need to complete his mission. But now the assassin would probably guess Rafael had been compromised, which would place Alison at greater risk. Whichever way you looked at it, Rafael had made the wrong choice, and Justine wondered whether that realization had sunk in yet.
“Have you informed the police?” Jack asked.
“No,” Justine replied. “We’re going to see what else he knows before deciding what to do.”
“I’ve told you everything,” Rafael protested, his voice breaking pathetically.
“And you’ll tell us again and again and again until we’re satisfied you have nothing else to give,” Sci snapped.
There was another heavy silence.
“It goes without saying, do not let him out of your sight,” Jack said.
“Don’t worry about that,” she assured him before hanging up.
“Tell us again what happened?” Sci said, activating the voice recorder on his phone. His tone was flat, like someone who’d suffered a bereavement. “I want every detail this time. Don’t leave anything out, no matter how small. We need something we can use to find Alison.”
“She went for dinner,” Rafael began, “with friends. Annabelle’s on Sixty-third Street. He must have been following her for a while because he knew to take her when she was near home. We live on the Upper East Side, on a quiet street, and there isn’t much traffic at night. He knew the best place to snatch her.”
Justine couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the man as his voice failed him. Alison’s kidnapping and the use of her as leverage was clearly torture to him. It had pushed Rafael beyond breaking point.
“He called me after he took her,” Rafael said once he had composed himself. “When we met, he told me what he needed. I had no idea what he had planned. I wouldn’t have … Icouldn’t …” He choked out the words then his voice drifted into silence.
“How has he been communicating with you?” Mo-bot asked.
“Sendal,” Rafael replied.
“It’s a secure messaging platform,” Mo-bot explained.
“Why did he target me?” Rafael asked, giving way to self-pity, which was offensive to them in light of the harm his poor judgment had caused others.
“Because you love your wife,” Justine replied dispassionately, as though she was delivering a profile. Her voice did not once betray the depth of her personal feelings about what this man had done. “Anyone could see that in the photos of you together. You were identified as a weak link. Someone they could break.”
Rafael and Alison Lucas regularly featured in New York society pages. She hailed from a notable Manhattan family, so they were an easy target, and the newspapers and magazines were full of useful nuggets of personal information.
Rafael looked away, ashamed.
Mo-bot stood and approached Justine.
“Little conference outside?” She nodded toward Rafael. “I don’t want him listening in.”
Justine followed her into the corridor, which was quiet due to the lateness of the hour. It was shortly after 11 p.m. and the city beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows was shutting down for the night.
Mo-bot closed the door behind them. “If he’s using Sendal we can trace him …”
“But?” Justine asked, noting the pregnant pause at the end of Mo-bot’s sentence.
