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That’ll do it.
Roberta grabbed Steward’s shoulders and brought her knee up between his legs as hard as she possibly could. The crunch was the single most satisfying sound I’d ever heard. As Steward curled himself into a fetal ball on the ground, Roberta touched the bandage wrapped around her head, winced, and crouched down beside him, “I’m going to put you in the deepest, darkest hole you can imagine,” she told him. “Your sentence is going to be so long there’ll be commas between the digits.”
She stood and turned to the FBI agent who’d been about to handcuff us. “Use them on him,” she said.
“Yes ma’am!” the guy said with feeling, and started cuffing Steward.
It was almost midnight before we were allowed to leave. By then, Agent Calahan had showed up from New York with his boss, Carrie, and the van we’d found in the parking garage with the dead guys from New Jersey had been secured. The APBs on all of us had been lifted and the President had called to say there were going to be medals for all of us. There’d no doubt be more debriefings over the next few months and Kian and JD would probably have to put on suits and go and get grilled by senators in an enquiry again but for now, it was over.
My phone rang. Yolanda. “Have you seen what happened to the markets?” she asked, her voice awed.
I cursed. I’d completely forgotten about the algorithm. Had the markets crashed after all?
Yolanda sent through a graph. There was a sharp dip from when the first news stories had appeared screaming about terrorists, nerve gas and the President. But moments later, when the story had been updated to say the situation was under control, things had started to climb. And then the President had gone on TV to calm the nation and now things were almost back to normal. “What happened?” I asked.
“Without the big disaster to make the dollar drop, things never got bad enough for the algorithm to kick in.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “You know what that means?”
“No. What?”
“The Bainbridges will have spent billions betting against the dollar because they were sure it was going to drop...but it didn’t. They’ve lost all that money!”
I imagined Lucas Bainbridge and the rest of his family watching the news in slack-jawed horror, seeing their fortune dissolve. I started to laugh and, even though it hurt my ribs, I couldn’t stop.
Tanya
We said goodbye to Sierra, the Secret Service agent who’d helped us, and Kian hugged his brothers. Then the team all trooped out into the darkened parking lot, towards where Gina waited with the helicopter.
For the first time, it hit me that the mission was over. I’d cleared my name and—
Maravic was dead. It slowly sank in. Maravic is dead! I felt something lift from me, a cold, crushing weight that had been there since Lev died.
I felt like a helium balloon some kid had let go of: light and free but also completely untethered, in danger of being whipped away by the wind. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have any friends in America. I didn’t have a mission.
I’d never planned a future after Maravic. I’d never thought I’d have one.
Then a huge, heavy hand landed on my shoulder and someone was gently turning me around. I looked up into Colton’s face. “I don’t know what happens now.” I asked in a lost voice.
“That’s okay,” Colton told me. “’Cause I do. You get yourself in that chopper and you come back to Mount Mercy with me. Then I’m gonna throw you down on the bed and—” he leaned in close and told me exactly what he was going to do to me and each filthy word he growled soaked into my brain and rippled down through my body, leaving me trembly. “—and then we’ll get some sleep, and then we’ll get some food.” He drew back a little and those brown and amber eyes burned down into mine. “And whatever happens after that, we’ll figure it out together. That okay?”
I threw myself against him and he wrapped me up in a bear hug. “Yes!” I told him, my voice muffled. “Yes, that’s very okay.”
It was dawn before we neared our destination. I pressed my nose against the window, transfixed. We were flying over a carpet of rolling mist, lit up gold by the rising sun. The peaks of mountains stabbed up through it, islands in a golden sea. And there, emerging from the mist, was the little town of Mount Mercy. I saw beautiful wooden storefronts that looked like something out of an old movie and quiet streets lined with quaint, brick townhouses. Rising above it, a huge mountain draped in pine forests and capped with snow. And part way up, the outcropping that gave the mountain and the town their name, millions of tons of rock that hung over the town but never fell.
