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John looked out toward the oaks. His jaw hardened then jutted. “Nothing glaring. Like I said, just enough for a hunch. One night, I called him around eleven. That would have been around two a.m. in Washington, but the guy was wide awake.”
She sent a scoffing huff. “Nobody sleeps a lot in DC, John.”
“With a local news feed on in the background? Talking about all the cranberry harvest festivals?”
“Oh.” The trend was getting ridiculous. But when the syllable fit…
“Later the next day, you were on the line with him, joking about forgetting what the sky looked like. His response surprised even you for a second.”
She unfurled her arms. Pushed them to the cool stones as she jolted, recalling the same exchange. “Because he joked back that I could stand in the shower and get the same result.” She jerked her stare at John. “I figured he was just referring to the weather in DC.”
“Even though it’d been pouring all day in Seattle?”
“Oh my God.” She shoved all the way to her feet. Stumbled a couple of steps, hands cupping her face. “Oh my God. He—he did know.” Stopped, wheeling back to fire the dispute taking over her mind. “But…how?” Freezing panic set in. “Did I say something by accident? Give something away?”
Franz rose too. Swept over, reaching her after one powerful stride, and hauled her close. “And why would that have been so awful? Your safety has been in the palm of that man’s hand. Your life. And Luke’s. Fuck.”
The man’s wrath, however quietly gritted and tightly coiled, was as welcome as the sun to her psyche. And his body, wrapping around her and against her… Yes. Oh, yes. This. He was her sun right now. Burning into her. Sustaining her. Huge and brilliant and strong for her, as she started shivering from the inescapable truth of this. The truth her own gut confirmed. All the stress she’d heard in Sol’s voice. All the cryptic subtexts she’d wondered about, only to write them off as ramblings due to helping on a worldwide manhunt.
A search for terrorists he already knew about?
Criminals he was helping?
“Was that why you laid into him?” she finally whispered. “During that call, in the garage last night, when you went all Hamilton on his Burr?”
“Burr? Sir?”
It was all the permission she needed for two seconds of a necessary laugh. He joined her, indulging an inhalation of the new day’s air, holding it for several telling seconds before it came back out with leaden meaning.
“I had to string out the call,” he clarified, his voice once more a taut steel cable. “And pounding him was the only realistic choice, given I didn’t have him there to actually take down.”
She supplied the obvious conclusion to that. “Because Ethan was still upstairs, trying to reverse trace the call.”
He slid in a hand, delivering praise in a squeeze to her neck. “My smart, sexy popoki.”
“Was he successful?”
He pushed another breath out—ten times more brutal than the first. “Sort of. We locked the device down to somewhere in the northwest.”
All hail the Titanic of her bloodstream. New iceberg of dread, straight ahead. “So he not only knew where we were but led that crew to us.”
John gathered her even closer. Muttered with dark resignation, “Yeah. Seems that way, beautiful.”
“Asshole.”
“Seems that way too.”
She no longer wondered how or why he’d brandished the word in the garage. She could’ve spat it twenty more times and not be done spewing her wrath. Instead she stepped back, kicked violently at the grass, and sputtered, “But—I still don’t get it. I mean…how? How did he know?”
John grunted. “Better question is, how could he not know? Not with the technological resources at his disposal—the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS—all firing at full thrusters, and all likely crashing into each other because of the global manhunt for these bastards, whoever they are. Nobody would have noticed him performing some extra ‘side searches’, even if they weren’t approved or validated.” His spine stiffened, and he looked ready to jab a new hole of his own into the grass. “And since he’d already checked out my background before I even hit the ground in Vegas, he likely narrowed his searches to all the homes of the guys in the battalion.”
The explanation made sense—but no way in hell did it comfort her. The opposite effect began with a grenade to her heart, then shot panicked shrapnel along her extremities. “Shit. That means he’ll follow us here too.”
Franz shook his head. “Archer made the purchase through a third-party broker, using the name of the nonprofit he already set up. Nothing but a deep paperwork search will trace any of it back to him.” His lips twisted in a wry grimace. “And right now, I don’t think Sol has time for deeply doing anything. He knows we’re onto him. He’s the one running now.”
She let out a whoosh of relief, but only halfway. “For now,” she uttered, truly wondering if this was all going to end up like bad experimental theater, with no clear ending ever supplied. What happened when one couldn’t leave the show and hash out plot opinions over cocktails with their friends? What happened when the plot loop was one’s freaking life? “So…what do we do now?” she asked anyway, hoping he had a much better metaphor for an answer.
“We figure out the rest of the story.” His obstinate tone, joined by his arrogant soldier stance, already had her ditching the off-Broadway experiment for his in-your-face Lloyd Webber overture. “We dig up not only Sol Wrightman’s role in this insanity, but what the hell the insanity is.”
