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“Monitoring online behavior and activity. Your CIA buddies believe there might be an uprising brewing inside Colombia.”
“I’m familiar with those theories.”
“It’s all pretty standard stuff. FBI wants to get one of their own in on this, so you’ll need to look for an opportunity to bring someone else in.” He scratches his jaw and leans forward. “There is someone we’re getting closer to. Remember Senator Talbot?”
I narrow my gaze as I nod. The guy has been on our radar for years. We suspect he’s taken kickbacks from both cartels and gun manufacturers for years, but we could never prove it. There’s no doubt he’s in the gun industry’s pocket, but that’s not illegal. Rumors circulate around him, but he’s dismissed it all as fake news and the work of political enemies. He’s also old.
“He hasn’t retired? Guy has to be…” I try to do some quick math in my head.
“Eight-two,” Ryan answers for me. His phone vibrates, and the low hum grows louder as he removes his phone from his shirt pocket. He frowns. “I thought you said Sophia went home?”
“She did. Why?”
“Jack’s on his way here.”
“Why?”
“Wants to meet. He comes up a couple of times a week, but I’m surprised he’d come if Sophia’s down there.”
Both Jack and Ryan are rich fuckers who fly their helicopters more than I drive cars, so I’m not surprised to hear Jack flies to Santa Barbara regularly. But an uneasiness grows within me as I play back my conversation with Sophia.
Ryan texts away on his phone, and the urge to cover for my partner strikes.
“She may have been planning to surprise her family.” But even as I cover for her, my gut tells me I need to get the hell out of here and find her.
CHAPTER22
SOPHIA
A fire ant crawls up my arm, and I flick it away. An ant on the tree disappears beneath a piece of bark. I crouch down, shifting away from the tree, and adjust my night vision binoculars.
Wayne Killington sits in a chair overlooking the pool, drinking what appears to be water. It’s hard to see what my mother saw in him. Of course, the years haven’t been kind. His once thick brown hair has turned gray and thinned. He’s lost his jolly Jimmy Buffett persona. For the last several hours, he’s sat in that chair, lost in the vision of his rectangular lap pool, possibly dozing in and out of sleep.
There are no signs of hired security. I located two cameras on the outskirts of his property in the rear, one on each side of his house, and one over the front door. Shortly after dusk, I disengaged the two rear cameras.
Dad mentioned they’ve been keeping an eye on him, and he’s been laying low. There are no signs of an Arrow detail. My guess is one of the cameras is an Arrow camera and they’re monitoring remotely.
A slight breeze flutters the palm fronds, and stars glitter in the mostly clear night sky. Killington’s property backs up to a golf course. A section of trees and vegetation separates the pristine golf course from the private yards, and it’s in this swatch of sandy earth I sit.
My backpack holds a gun, a syringe, a knife, and pliers. But if I do this correctly, I won’t need to threaten. In the words of one of my Quantico instructors, the best way to interrogate someone is to understand them. You get the best results by speaking to them with understanding.
If I go through the front door, he’s more likely to see me as a friend. If I come upon him while he’s sleeping, I’ll startle him. Would a man like Killington ever fear me? Is that a trump card I could ever play?
Probably not. He’s too arrogant. Prison hardened him. I read the transcript from his parole hearing and don’t believe for a second he found Jesus Christ. No, the man simply fell back on the most reliable way to con a parole board.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that he’d be meeting with someone, either in person or on the phone. Or he’d be working away on a computer, eager to re-enter the business world. Or that he’d have a woman over. But watching him sit by a pool disappoints. It’s too normal.
That man seduced my mother, ruined her marriage, and orchestrated my abduction. His actions prove he never loved my mother. If he had, he wouldn’t have upended my life three years after her death. I’d just begun to return to normalcy after my mother’s tragic death. The pain and loss had finally subsided. I’d scored a role in the school play and was dreaming of college. All that changed when he hired men to kidnap me. He knew our house well and coached them on how to avoid detection. When I was held captive, and he thought I was too drugged to remember, I observed his friendly, neighborly mask morph into one of an unrecognizable sociopath.
The sociopath won’t fear me, but he’ll underestimate me.
Decision made, I move out from the cover of shrubbery and trees, backpack slung on one side, gun bound to my leg in a holster, covered by my pants, another gun in a holster on my waist, and a back-up tied securely in my backpack. A stick cracks beneath the weight of my boot, but Killington doesn’t so much as flinch. My hands sweat inside the black Thinsulate gloves. I grip the bar on the black metal fence that surrounds his property and hoist myself over.
I glance to the back corner, searching for the camera. The absence of a red light appeases me. The cameras remain disengaged.
The floodlight casts my shadow across the travertine. I step softly, heel to toe, in much the way Trevor and Ryan taught me. What started as self-defense classes at my dad’s request expanded into more after my acceptance into the FBI. Trevor said there were things he wanted me to learn, just in case the dipshits at Quantico didn’t teach it right.
Wayne’s head twitches and his resting arm jerks. His eyelids flutter open and his brow wrinkles. I stand still before him, giving the old man’s eyesight time to adjust. I let him take in my outfit of black cargo pants, black boots, and light, form-fitting, long sleeve black top. My auburn hair is pulled back tight, covered by a blonde wig with an angled bob. There’s a skull cap in my backpack, but I removed it for this meeting. I need him to recognize me. His eyes rest on my gloves, which I purposefully wear.
