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But first, I have to push Alix for more, even if it makes me sound like a heartless bastard. “Anything you can remember, any detail, no matter how insignificant it seems.”
Her face goes slack. I meant what I said—any detail might help my private investigator track down the motherfuckers. But I can imagine what she’s recalling when she closes her eyes. I see her belly tighten, like she’s absorbing body blows. I watch her face hollow in remembered pain.
“Okay,” I say, letting her off the hook. I hate myself when I can’t make my voice be as gentle as she deserves. “Let me know if you think of anything that might help.”
She opens her eyes and nods, but the ghosts stay closer than I’d like. I reach across her to the computer keyboard and forward the email from her account to mine. I’m tempted to delete it from her screen forever, so she never has to think about the video again. But she’s a strong and independent woman. She has the right to keep her own emails. And deleting it from her account won’t make it go away.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” she says, and I’m glad she’s thinking again, instead of reliving the past. “How’d they get the footage? Didn’t Sawyer Best say the cameras he found in the dining room were from the CIA?”
It’s a good question and one I should have thought of.Wouldhave thought of if I hadn’t been focused on annihilating the fuckers who hurt her. “Best said he’d only seen equipmentlikethat from the CIA. Which made perfect sense, with Thad Jackson a client.”
Thaddeus Josiah Jackson oversaw the CIA before South Carolina voters elected him to the Senate. His conviction for tax fraud got him booted from the freeport—but he was still around when I added surveillance cameras here at the house.
I had the equipment installed after Alix went AWOL, after the first night she spent here. But there’s no reason to dwell on that now.
She shakes her head, clearly fighting to connect the dots. “You thought a United States Senator installed cameras in yourhome?”
“Jackson’s a paranoid son-of-a-bitch. Belt, suspenders, and an over-the-shoulder holster kind of paranoid. If he caught wind of my adding security, he’d piggyback on it, just in case he could use it to his own advantage down the line.”
“And now you think he’s in business with Jonas and Ansel.”
I shake my head. “He’s more of a fund-revolutionary-armies-in-Africa kind of guy than an illegal-drug-empire fuckwad. Plus, there wasn’t any evidence of the CIA being anywhere near the freeport the night Herzog died. We checked the tapes, remember? No panel van, no receiver set up anywhere close by.”
“But Jackson could have had a receiver in his gallery, couldn’t he? Equipment to pick up surveillance from the bugs in here. Maybe broadcast it somewhere else.”
I shake my head, but a sick certainty starts churning in my gut. “He couldn’t. He cleared out his gallery when I booted his ass.”
I see the instant Alix arrives at the same thought I just had. “But Herzog could. The equipment could be in Herzog’s gallery.”
Not bothering with a reply, I pull up a record on the computer screen. It’s the security login for Herzog’s gallery, the record of when his freeport space has been accessed. There’s a list of entries and exits at the front gate, corresponding access to the warehouse building, to his individual gallery. The visits are frequent for the two and a half years Herzog was a client.
They stop abruptly on the night of June 21.
A red badge in the lower right corner of the screen shows that the gallery is currently locked. As expected, no one is inside the warehouse unit.
Alix has been following along. “How do we get in there?” she asks.
“Every gallery has biometric controls. We’ll need a retina scan and a fingerprint.”
Her lips twist into a wry frown. “And when we can’t get those?”
I turn back to the phone and call Mac again. “Meet me at the warehouse,” I say. “And bring an acetylene torch.”
3
ALIX
* * *
The torch’s brilliant white light cuts through the freeport’s impenetrable lock. The spatter of molten metal sounds like bacon popping in a hot frying pan. The vaporized door smells like a nosebleed, salty iron dripping down the back of my throat.
When the torch cuts out, the corridor is strangely silent. I look up in time to catch Mac’s authoritative glare as he draws his gun. He gestures for Trap and me to stand behind him. Turning sideways, presumably to present a smaller target, he flings himself around the door.
His caution triggers a tripwire in my belly. Up until now, I’ve believed the freeport was a safe haven. No matter how threatening their emails, Jonas and Ansel can’t reach me here.
But I have to remember that Herzog got past Trap’s security. He conned his way into the inner sanctum. He was invited to join the Diamond Ring. No one here saw the danger. No one recognized the threat.
It seems to take Mac an hour to work through the gallery, but a saner part of my brain knows it can only be a minute or two. Nevertheless, I’m relieved when he appears in the doorway again, his weapon holstered.
