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Cal gave her a baleful stare. “Mm-hmm.” Gabriel, who still had a bandage around his ear, didn’t look impressed, either.
JD looked surprised when he saw that Tanya wasn’t in cuffs. “You got her under control?”
It was weird: it bothered me that he talked about her and not to her when she was standing right there. But then that’s what we’d all done back at her apartment when she was just a prisoner, a package. I kept forgetting that they hadn’t spent all the time with her I had. “It’s all good,” I told him. “Listen, boss, a lot’s happened. We can’t just hand her over to the CIA. Let us fill you in.”
JD glared at Tanya. “How about you fill me in? She can wait there.” He nodded towards the bar.
Tanya rolled her eyes but nodded to me: it’s okay. She went inside, accompanied by Bradan, Cal and Gabriel. I watched her go, unable to look away until she disappeared through the door.
JD went with them, then came back out to the parking lot carrying three long-neck beers. He handed one to Danny and one to me, then clinked. “Good to have you back, buddy,” he told me. “We were worried about you.”
I let out a long sigh I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and sat my ass down on the hood of the car. It had been a long two days away from them and it felt fucking fantastic to not be on my own, anymore, to not be having to make all the decisions and take all the responsibility I’m not cut out to run around solo. The beer was cold, foaming nectar and I chugged a third of the bottle before I lowered it again. Man, I needed that.
“So what’s going on?” asked JD gently. “Where have you been? Why weren’t you answering your phone? Why can’t we hand Yeshevskaya over?”
I started at the beginning and told them everything. They listened intently, nodding. But as I went on, they began to glance at each other, looking more and more worried. When I finished, they gave each other a look I recognized. It was the same look they’d all given each other when we’d found my bear cub in a cage and, blissfully unaware of Chinese medicine, I’d asked why someone would smuggle a bear. The look said, are you going to tell him, or shall I?
“What?!” I demanded, worried and exasperated.
JD put a hand on my shoulder. “Colton, buddy,” he said softly. “She played you.”
“No, boss!” I frowned, puzzled. Weren’t they listening? “It’s all real, they’re going to crash the dollar!”
Danny looked like a parent forced to explain that Santa Claus isn’t real. “Do you remember what Steward said in the briefing? She’s a born liar. She gets in your head. She’s…” He gestured towards the bar. “She’s a female Gabriel.”
It hurt that they didn’t believe me. I tried to stay calm but I could feel myself scowling. “I’d know if she was lying!”
“Colton, she’s a spy,” said JD gently. “Manipulating people is what she does.”
I was getting mad, now. “It’s not like that! We’re—I got to know her, out there, and—”
“Wait,” said Danny, his face changing. “Did you sleep with her?!”
“I—” I swallowed, feeling my face going hot.
“Jesus,” muttered Danny. “And people used to say I couldn’t keep it in my pants.”
“Look…okay, it happened,” I said. “But we trust each other, now. That’s why she’s not in cuffs.”
The horror on their faces changed to pity, and that was worse. “Colton, mate…” said Danny. “Listen to what you’re saying. She slept with you and now you trust her. That’s why she did it.”
“I—No!” I spat.
“You said she was ready to sleep with Konstantin, just to get some information,” JD reminded me.
“That was—With us it was different! She—” I bit it back. I’d nearly said she really likes me! Jesus, I sounded like a lovestruck teenager. My stomach lurched like I’d just tipped over the hill on a rollercoaster. What if they were right? What if everything I’d thought I’d seen in her eyes had been an illusion?
I fought back stubbornly. “You’re wrong about her,” I told them. “She doesn’t—”—I thought back to how she’d got Danny to take off her cuffs, and how she’d fooled the hunter—“Okay, she lies. But she’s not lying about what’s going on!” I thought desperately. “What about the algorithm, from the stockbroker’s computer?”
“Yeshevskaya said she got it from the stockbroker’s computer,” said Danny. “It’s probably just a prop, a get-out-of-jail-free card she pulls out whenever she gets caught: ‘Look, there’s this huge, world-ending conspiracy going on and only I can help you stop it!’”
“What about Maravic finding us in the forest?” I demanded. “How the hell did he know where we were, unless the CIA told him?”
“You have no idea who those guys in the forest really were or why they were hunting her,” said JD. “That whole story about Maravic could just be a line she spun you. Maybe someone planted a tracker on her, maybe someone followed our plane and saw her jump. You said two of the guys were American: for all we know, the NSA or some other agency is after her, and you killed two of theirs!”
