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“What doyou mean I can’t come back?” Why had I called Paxon in the first place?
“What did Lynx tell you about the brush pass?”
I held the phone away from my ear, seriously contemplating disconnecting the call. “Paxon,” I seethed. “I am in no mood for games. If there’s something I need to know, just…fucking…tell me!”
“Okay, you don’t have to yell. Saint’s message contained a warning.”
I was ready to scream. Literally scream. If there weren’t hordes of families on the beach wherever I looked, I would have. “What…was…the…warning?”
“Essentially, it said to keep you safe.”
I rolled my eyes, ready to pull my hair out. “That isn’t a warning.”
“Look, you need to talk to Lynx. If you don’t want to talk to him, talk to your dad.”
“My dad? What the hell does my dad have to do with this?”Thirty sets of eyeballs landed their shocked gaze on me. Yes, I’d just yelled, and if half of those eyeballs didn’t belong to children, I would’ve flipped them all off. Instead, I walked in the opposite direction of the water, toward the parking lot.
“Hey, Emme,” I heard someone shout at me. I waved in the direction of the voice and kept going.
“Are you going to answer me?”
“I can’t. Talk to Lynx.”
Beep, beep, beep.The bastard hung up on me.
When I walked into my parents’house, my mom, dad, and Lynx were all seated at the dining room table. I continued past them and was halfway up the stairs when I heard my father ask me to join them.
“Please,” he said, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Paxon’s words replayed in my head.“You need to talk to Lynx. If you don’t want to talk to him, talk to your dad.”
I didn’t understand what my father had to do with this. He’d retired from the state department three years ago, right after my brother died. Before he had, he’d been the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. It wasn’t a stretch to think he would have insight into China, but how much could he possibly have after all this time? And then to further confuse me, I was one of the leading policy writers for Chinese Grand Strategy. If he did have insight, why in the world hadn’t he ever discussed it with me? Maybe because I had specifically asked him not to interfere in my work, but still, it wasn’t just national security at risk.
“Emme,” he said again, walking up to where I stood.
I sat down on the stair, and when he sat beside me, I rested my head on his shoulder. “I feel like you’re hiding things from me.”
When my dad took a deep breath and let it out slowly, he confirmed my suspicions.
“There are things you don’t know about my time at the state department. Partially because you had no reason to, until now, and partially because most of it I wasn’t able to tell you.”
I sat up straight and folded my arms. “I have a feeling I don’t want to know.”
“I think you can piece it together.”
“Who did you really work for?”
My father sighed. “I was with State, but I also consulted with the NSA.”
“On?”
“Cryptography.”
“His code name is Matrix,” said Lynx, who I hadn’t seen standing on the steps below us.
When his eyes and my father’s met, I felt sick to my stomach. It was bad enough that I was learning something I’d never known about my dad in front of a man who was essentially a stranger to me—a stranger who had fucked me senseless just last night—but that Lynx knew more about him than I did, infuriated me all over again.
I stood, walked down the stairs, and got right in his face. “How long have you known?”
