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He held up his phone, slid his finger across and a video appeared. Please God the Antz were picking it up.
“What am I seeing?” She frowned, moved closer. It was darkish. Two people meeting in a park. A man and a woman. The video zeroed in on the face of the man and she gasped. Rudy Fillmore. The notorious traitor, who’d sold classified documents to anyone who’d buy them and had filled the airwaves for months. There were two documentaries and a Netflix series made about him.
The camera shifted and she gasped again. It was her! She was handing over documents to the infamous Rudy Fillmore. Unmistakably her, blonde hair bright in the light of a street lamp. She was dressed for running, like she was now. She turned and the likeness was perfect. It was uncanny. Even she would testify that it was her, though it wasn’t and she’d never seen Rudy Fillmore in person.
“That’s a fake,” she said, frowning.
“A good one. A very good one. And this will be sent to every news agency, every political blog, every news program. It’ll be Riley Robinson Traitor, 24/7 for weeks.”
She squinted. Rudy Fillmore had disappeared from the face of the earth six months ago, and reappeared in Moscow a week later, claiming asylum.
“What’s the date of this?”
Sommers turned the cell around and squinted. “January 6th of this year.”
“I was at a conference in Cancun on January 6th. It won’t stand up in court.”
“Maybe not, but by the time you start defending yourself, your name will be trashed, you’ll be a famous traitor, and no one will believe you. That’s what will happen if you talk about this story.”
“About you deepfaking the video? I imagine you asked our section head, Morris Sartan, to do it. When I told Henry Yu, he said he’d take it to his boss, Morris Sartan. Morris would have the skills, you certainly wouldn’t.”
He smirked. “I don’t need those skills. I have other ones.”
Tears trembled on her eyelashes. They were real. “You didn’t have to kill Henry. He was just a messenger.”
“He had to go, and so did you. But if you keep your mouth shut and disappear, I can let this thing go. It’s become bigger than us, anyway.”
A tear fell. Her voice shook. “You might be causing awar,” she whispered. “To protect your reputation.”
He shrugged, and she could see that for him, the meeting was over. He’d secured her silence. If she talked, he’d destroy her. She had to hand over the thumb drive.
It had been a successful meeting and he’d come out on top.
Riley raised her voice. “Did you guys get all that? Are we done?”
And a deep voice rose from a thousand tiny drones, surprisingly clear. Jacob Black. “Oh yeah, we got what we needed. Sommers you fuckhead, you’re going away forever.”
Sommers’ face froze with shock, then turned deep red. He reached out with one meaty hand to grab her wrist and the other reached to his lower back.
“Don’t even think of it, Sommers,” Black’s deep disembodied voice said.
“Look down,” Riley suggested.
Sommers looked down and saw four laser beams centered on his heart so precisely they converged, rock steady, almost in a circle.
“Behind those guns are Navy SEALs, Sommers,” she said. “Make a move and you’re dead. I can absolutely assure you that they are itching to pull the trigger.”
“Better believe it,” Black said, voice deep and resonant and clear. “One twitch and you’re gone to whatever hell awaits a traitor and a man who’d start a world war. We’d be really happy to blow you to that hell, right men?”
Three men growled as Sommers quivered with rage. “You!” he shouted to Riley. “You bitch! You’ve been nothing but trouble. You’ll regret this, I’ll see you—"
But she wasn’t listening. She was running back to the thick copse of trees and Pierce was running toward her, across the little creek with ankle-deep water, catching her up in his arms so tightly she couldn’t breathe. It didn’t make any difference because he was kissing her and she was breathing through him.
Pierce broke the kiss, tilted his head back and Riley was astonished to see tears in his eyes. Big bad warrior, crying?
“Are you crying?”
“No,” he sniffed, wiping his eyes. “Yes. Goddammit, I nearly watched the woman I love killed. I have a right.”
