AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And Lori? Is she Homeland?”
“Nah. She was Agency. Met her and Lydia on my last mission. They were partners back then.”
“Lydia was never CIA.”
He secured the clean wrap and tucked his leftover supplies in his bag. “The Brits and Americans have tag-teamed on certain missions off and on for decades. Those two worked together.”
“Any idea what’s up with the watch?”
“Lydia did a lot of wheeling and dealing over the years. I imagine it’s intel.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about your antennas on the windmill?”
He glanced up from his ministrations with a quizzical expression over his readers. “What antennas?”
Lori had been lying, as Moe had suspected. “Never mind. How dangerous is she?”
He glanced toward the door. “On a scale of one to ten? She’s a zero, I suspect, but you never know. All depends on her motivation.”
The screen door banged open, startling them. Lori marched inside, grim-faced and disarmed. Moe held the shotgun aimed at her back. “Sit down,” he ordered. She did, taking a seat next to Gus.
She was sans glasses, and up close, Parker estimated she was in her mid-fifties. Her blue eyes, intelligent and livid with outrage, snapped and narrowed.
Parker sucked in a breath. There was something familiar about her. “Have we met?”
“No.” Curt, uncompromising.
Moe positioned himself at the door’s threshold, keeping an eye and the gun trained on Romalov. “You okay?” he asked Parker.
“Yes.” She held Lori’s calculating stare. “Explain why you want the watch and don’t give me a bunch of excuses. Our team is three minutes out”—a reasonable guess—“and when they get here, you’ll be in cuffs. The only way this works out for you is if you tell me the truth.”
Lori dropped her gaze to Parker’s elevated leg. “Your boyfriend has already threatened me, so save the dramatics. I can’t tell you anything.”
Parker accepted two pills from Gus. “What are these?”
“Good stuff,” he replied. “You won’t be feeling any pain soon.”
Her body ached to take them. That was a no-go, however. She laid them on the table. “I need to keep my wits about me.”
He leaned in, giving her a sincere appraisal. “You can’t think straight if you’re hurting.”
She chuckled, eyeing Lori.Bluff, Parker. Bluff your ass off. “That’s when I do my best work.” She ignored his grunt of irritation. “Lori, or whatever your name is, it’s no skin off my nose if you don’t cooperate. You’re the one who’s going to end up in a CIA black site for the rest of your life.”
Lori’s already challenging expression intensified. “You’re not CIA. What do you know?”
While Beatrice hadn’t explicitly implied who the organization was handling Lydia, Parker felt a single piece fall into place. “On this mission, we’re working closely with them and several other intelligence agencies. I’m authorized to decide the fate of anyone who gets in my way, so keep that in mind.”
Finally, a crack. Fear showed in those all-too-familiar eyes for the briefest of seconds. Parker waited, remaining mute, and Lori dropped her gaze to the table. After a long hesitation, she seemed to resign herself to the fact she was in deep shit. “I want to cut a deal.”
Now they were getting somewhere. Parker smiled and eased forward, interlacing her fingers. Her bluffing skills were still top-notch. “Give me something good and I’ll see what I can do.”
TWENTY-FIVE
When Romalov had shot Parker, everything inside Moe shut down. Just flatlined. His brain, his heart, his gut.
It was one thing for her to be accidentally injured by a falling branch; it was a whole other to see her shot in front of him. Every mission held risk, the chance that someone on the team would be injured, even killed. Knowing it and seeing it were two different things.
The explosion of raw fear inside him threatened to turn him into a vigilante, killing everybody in sight. Even now, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything but red. His brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, his heart was skipping beats. Only his training kept him from blowing a hole in Romalov’s head and lining up Lori for the next round. He didn’t care who was right or wrong, or which side of that line he stood on. The young, damaged boy inside him who’d lost everyone he cared about in the blink of an eye came roaring to the surface, filled with rage and grief, and other emotions he couldn’t even name.
