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“There is something. God, he’s paranoid!” More typing. “Okay, you know how you said he’s not a rookie? I thought about how he’d hide it from someone like me. I figured maybe he has a completely separate cell phone and laptop, a second identity that’s not connected to him in any way. So I checked the phone companies and there is an unregistered burner phone, bought for cash, that’s been used five times in the last two years, and always at his house. It’s been used to access an account in the Caymans and that account has received five separate payments totaling…a little north of twenty million.”
It felt like all the air was being sucked out of my lungs. Every conversation I’d had with Colton since this thing started replayed in my head. He’d been right. And I’d been so, so wrong. “Let me guess. The payments trace back, through a whole bunch of shell companies, to one owned by Lucas Bainbridge.”
“Checking, checking…yeah, how did you know?”
I thanked her and ended the call. The self-hate, shame and anger started at my feet and bubbled up through my body like acid and I let it, let it fill me and burn me because I deserved it. Only when I couldn’t take anymore did I finally let it out. “FUCK!” I bellowed. The maintenance workers all jumped and stared at me. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
Colton hadn’t been led astray by an expert, devious spy. I had.
I marched back to the chopper. Everyone looked up as I climbed in. “Steward’s dirty,” I said simply. “Colton and Yeshevskaya were right. I was wrong.”
There was silence. Cal and Bradan stared at me. They’d tried to warn me from the beginning and I’d ignored them. But to their credit, neither of them said I told you so. Maybe they could see how much I was tearing myself apart.
“Fucking CIA,” muttered Cal. And that was enough.
“What do we do?” asked Danny. “Can we have Steward arrested?”
I shook my head. “What evidence I’ve got was illegally obtained. Plus, we don’t have time. Colton said Steward was planning some terrorist attack. And that he was going to kill Yeshevskaya once he had her. We’ve got to go get them back…but that’s going to mean raiding a CIA facility.” I looked around at the team. “Even if we can pull it off, we’ll be fugitives.”
They all nodded. No one was abandoning Colton.
“You’re forgetting something,” said Gabriel. “We have no idea where Steward’s holding them. The CIA has hundreds of safehouses and other facilities.”
“I might be able to help with that.” Gina’s voice made us all look up in surprise. “Remember back at the airfield, when I was chatting to Steward’s pilot about their chopper? I might have maybe kinda accidentally on purpose left my phone under a seat.”
So Gina hadn’t been neutral. I wanted to hug her. “I’ll call the Sisters again, get them to track the signal,” I said. “Alright. Let’s go get our boy.”
55
COLTON
I screamed but there was no sound. The pain had short-circuited something in my brain and all sound had stopped, save for a ringing in my ears. The room seemed to be far away, like I was looking out of my eyes from down a long tunnel. Time had lost all meaning. I wasn’t even sure if what I was seeing was real, anymore, or whether my mind had broken completely and I was hallucinating.
The pain…that was real. It felt like my bones were on fire and I was burning from the inside out. I knew now why they used this stuff in interrogations. I was ready to do anything to make it stop. But there was nothing I could do, because this wasn’t an interrogation.
The only thing that kept me going was her. I focused on the frozen sky blue of her eyes, on the way her hair felt against my fingers and the sounds she made as she came.
Steward kept looking at me curiously. I guess I’d lasted longer than I was supposed to. I knew the end was close. I’d never felt my heart hammer so fast and I could feel the blood thundering through my veins. Something was about to give.
The door crashed open and sagged, half of its hinges, but there was no sound. And then I knew I was hallucinating because JD was there, picking Steward up by the front of his shirt and hurling him against the wall, and Gabriel was there, examining the IV and then—ow—pulling it from my arm.
Gabriel leaned over me, saying something, but I still couldn’t hear. He started unstrapping my wrists and ankles from the chair. Behind him, Steward scrambled out of the door and ran.
And then I felt it. Only very faintly, so faintly that I worried I might just be kidding myself. But…had the pain eased, just a little?
