Текст книги "Midnight Secrets "

Автор книги: Lisa Marie Rice

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Ten

Isabel couldn’t have done it without Lauren.

“I’m not very visual,” she apologized when they sat down in a corner. “I never have been. Unless it’s about food, I’m not very observant.”

Lauren smiled and patted her hand. “My dear, who cares about being visual when you can produce food like that? No one cares. But I am visual so let’s see if we can do something here. You want that, don’t you?”

“Oh God, yes!” Isabel said. A pang of anxiety pulsed in her chest. “More than anything. This man is in my nightmares, night after night after night. People don’t usually repeat their dreams. I’ve done a lot of reading up on it. A repeat dream is rare and is always anchored in reality in some way. So this man, this man I call the Monster, somehow exists in some way. Even though I don’t recognize his face and I never remember it when I wake up.”

Lauren set herself up—a big pad over her knees, several different types of pencils, erasers, charcoal sticks. The tools of her trade just as knives and wooden spoons and pans were Isabel’s. “That’s where I come in. The human face is infinitely variable. Seven and a half billion people in the world and, except for twins, no two faces are alike. But there are also only so many variables. Face shape, cheekbone and chin shape, eyes, nose, mouth. So this is going to be a collaborative experience. You talk, and I listen. I’ve got a big pad because we’re going to strike out a lot. That’s the nature of the exercise. We’ll get a lot of things wrong before getting them right.”

“Like kissing a lot of frogs before finding—”

“A Joe?” Lauren asked, then laughed at the face she made. “Don’t be embarrassed. Joe’s worth kissing a lot of frogs for. He’s a really good guy.”

“Yes.” Isabel sighed. “He is. In a way, he’s the reason I’m doing this, trying to exorcise a face I see in my nightmares. I long to get all of this out of my system because he deserves a sane, whole woman. Right now I’m a mess.”

Lauren was testing the consistency of the pencils on the top left-hand corner. “Don’t worry about it,” she said absently, cocking her head as she studied the results. “Joe will take you any way he can get you. He’s crazy about you. Has been for months, I hear.”

Isabel’s eyes opened wide. When she’d arrived she’d been a massive wreck. “Really?”

Lauren looked up, studied her face. “You didn’t know? We knew the week you moved in that something big was going on with Joe.”

“He didn’t make a move. He didn’t say anything to me. Most guys—” She stopped for a second because she didn’t want to sound boastful. But then Lauren was a beautiful woman. She’d have been hit on a billion times in her life. No one hit on Lauren now, not with big, bad Jacko glowering by her side, but before Jacko they must have, surely. She knew what that was like. Guys who were attracted usually weren’t shy about saying so or doing something about it.

“He was in very bad shape,” Lauren said, her voice gentle. “You might not have noticed because he did his best to hide it, but Joe wasn’t anywhere close to recovery when you moved in. He’d only just begun putting himself back together. Jacko told me Joe said he didn’t have anything to offer a woman until he was in better shape. He had a good job right here at ASI but he fought them hard because he thought he didn’t deserve the job and the salary until he could work as hard as everyone else. Jacko says Joe didn’t dare make a move on you. But surely you noticed that your garden was in fabulous shape, he’d drive you anywhere if so much as a drop of rain fell and that your house was in a great state of repair.”

“Yes, but—” Isabel’s head whirled. And she felt ashamed. Joe hadn’t wanted to make a play for her until he had more to offer? “Didn’t he see what shape I was in?” She met Lauren’s eyes, brimming with sympathy. “You have no idea what I was like. My head would spin for no reason and I had to sit down if I didn’t want to faint. I spooked at loud noises, I didn’t sleep at night but then sleepwalked my way through the day. I was constantly exhausted.”

“You had and probably still have PTSD,” Lauren said gently. “No one better than a soldier to understand that. They all saw horrible things in the war. And frankly, I don’t think Joe cared that you were a mess. I think all he saw was that you’re beautiful and fascinating.” Lauren patted her hand.

Isabel felt like hanging her head. The first month or two she hadn’t noticed much about Joe Harris other than the fact that he was an amazingly helpful neighbor and that she could count on him for just about anything. She’d been in a fog of grief and sadness. But Joe had had his own wounds that hadn’t stopped him from helping her every way he could.

And while he had worked hard to put himself together, she’d just mourned and baked cookies.

“I want to be better,” she said to Lauren. “I want to get myself together physically and mentally. I don’t want Joe to consider me a basket case. I need to move on if we’re to have a hope of being a couple.”

Lauren straightened and held a draftsman’s pencil over the paper. “I think we can make a good start if we can nail this face you see in your nightmares. That would be a really good first step.”

It would.

Isabel struggled at first. She couldn’t pin down the features. And when she did, a wave of dread washed over her. He was a creature of her nightmares but the horror bled into the daytime. She had to fight not to wipe him out of her mind.

Lauren walked her through it. “Shape of face?”

Just thinking of that shadowy form with darkness for eyes made her shiver. “What?”

“What was the shape of his face?”

Lauren’s hand flew over the paper. Twelve face shapes appeared. “So, these are the basic shapes, barring major deformities. Which one?”

Without thinking, Isabel put a finger on one. “This shape.” Long, narrow at the chin, broad in the temples. But she couldn’t have described it. The face still danced just out of reach of her consciousness.

“Okay.” Lauren lifted the sheet away and drew on a new one. “These are some shapes of a mouth.” Full lips, thin lips, top lip fuller, bottom lip fuller, wide, narrow...

“Like that!” Isabel felt a pulse course through her system, because those thin, narrow lips were exactly like those of the man in her nightmares. Again, she couldn’t have verbalized it, but she recognized it.

On another sheet of paper, Lauren drew hair, once Isabel said that the man’s hair was cropped short in an expensive cut and was salt-and-pepper. More salt than pepper.

Lauren fit the hair over the shape of the face Isabel had chosen and added the mouth. A prickle ran up her spine. They were getting there. And the man looked...she cocked her head. He looked somehow familiar.

Up to now she just thought the monster in her nightmares was some kind of composite representing the evil that had carried out the Massacre. Was the monster real?

“Nose,” Lauren said, but before she could start drawing sample noses Isabel surprised herself.

“Long, narrow at the bridge, finely cut nostrils.” Lauren looked up at her then her hands added...exactly the right nose.

Isabel couldn’t breathe.

“Eyes?”

Isabel never saw the eyes in her nightmares but the answer came welling up from a dark place inside her.

“Deep-set, slightly uptilted.” Though Lauren was drawing in black-and-white, she added, “Chocolate brown.”

Because she knew who this was.

Something was cracking inside her, some carapace that had enveloped her since the Massacre. The cracking open hurt. Faster than she could follow, her brain was making connections, filling in the dots. Filling in the holes that had plagued her since that terrible day.

There was a connection between the monster in her nightmares and the monsters that had taken away her life. All these months, her nightmares had been trying to talk to her and she’d been too scared to listen. She’d tucked them away in the back of her mind until they broke out of the walls.

Lauren’s hand stopped moving and she turned her head this way and that, frowning at what her hand had created. “Doesn’t he look...” She glanced up at Isabel. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”

The walls had collapsed and the floods came. Isabel was frozen to the spot, head whirling. She felt dizzy and sick.

“Isabel?”

Lauren’s voice was sharp with worry. She reached out to Isabel but Isabel stood up, swaying. The band around her chest grew tighter.

“Isabel, what’s wrong?” Lauren put a hand on Isabel’s shoulder.

“Hector Blake.” Isabel’s voice was low and raw. The words hurt.

“What?” Lauren glanced down at the drawing she’d made and blinked. “Oh. Yes. Wow. I’ve seen him on TV. It does look like him, doesn’t it?”

But Isabel could barely hear Lauren above the buzzing in her head, so when she spoke, her voice was loud. The group huddled around Felicity’s computer lifted their heads and looked at her.

“Hector Blake!” she shouted. “Uncle Hector.”

Her head felt like it was splitting open.

Joe was right beside her. She hadn’t even seen him cross the room. He opened his arms and she huddled against him because right now her skin wasn’t enough to keep her together. She was shaking so hard she was going to fly apart in a million pieces.

Uncle Hector.

He’d always just...been there. Her parents had been social animals with hundreds of friends and she’d grown up surrounded by people, Uncle Hector included. He wasn’t actually her blood uncle, but their families had been friends for generations and he’d grown up with her father.

She didn’t really like him, never had. He’d always seemed so pompous and self-important, but then she didn’t always like her parents’ friends. She didn’t have to. There were plenty of other people around to like.

She wasn’t even too sure her dad liked him. Her mom certainly hadn’t.

Hector Blake, Uncle Hector.

She was choking, shaking, trying to drag in air. Everyone was standing around her. Lauren and Felicity. Metal and Jacko and one of the two bosses. They were watching her as she fell apart.

No.

She stood straight, stepped back. Joe dropped his arms. He sensed she didn’t want the support. She had to be strong here. When she was standing apart, she wrapped her own arms around herself because she was the only one who could support her. She was the only one who could do this.

Memories were flooding in, an unstoppable flow, that night now clear in her head, so clear it was as if she was reliving it.

“Hector Blake,” she repeated, as if his name were some kind of horrible mantra. And she saw no surprise in anyone’s eyes.

“Tell us, honey,” Joe said.

“That night...” She stopped for a second, breathing heavily, breathing as if it was a job she had to do. No one shuffled their feet or coughed. No one betrayed any impatience whatsoever. They wanted to hear what she had to say and they were willing to wait for it, however long it took.

That gave her courage.

“It was about ten minutes to the time Dad was going to make his announcement. The evening looked completely spontaneous but three days of planning had gone into it, into the timing and what Dad was going to say. Everyone was excited. There was a lot of noise. People screaming, the piped-in music, it was like a wall of noise. But the planners knew that this would be the moment of maximum excitement before Dad made his announcement. And they knew there would be pandemonium when he finally threw his hat into the ring, officially. Dad’s advisors were all smiling, really happy. I’d gone out a couple of times with one of Dad’s press officers and I asked him if all this excitement was fake and he said no. He said a lot of people understood that they were on a trajectory that would take them straight to the Oval Office.”

She’d shaken her head at that and decided then and there that there wouldn’t be a third date. This thirst for power wasn’t something she understood. She barely understood it in her own father, even though she knew that in him, it was mixed up with an idealistic sense of mission. For the aides and hangers-on of the new campaign, there was no mission, no ideals, just the whiff of power.

She met Joe’s sober eyes, dark and steady. He was with her as she stepped into the past, into an unimaginably painful and brutal past.

“All the family was up on the stage except for me and Jack. I think he’d gone to the bathroom. I had to take a call. My agent, calling from New York with an offer. I was talking to her, walking around the podium for an exit because we could barely hear each other, when—” She drew in a deep breath. This part was well-known. “When we were cut off. I was checking my cell, thinking to call her back and then all the lights went out. It was like someone had waved a magic wand and created darkness.”

Her voice had gone up in a tremolo. She clenched her teeth, getting herself back under control. Or at least as much control as she could manage.

“But there were candles on the front tables, an array of them. They were going to dim the lights and they’d threaded the floral arrangements with tea lights. My mom insisted because she loves—” Isabel’s eyes widened in horror. Her mom didn’t love candles anymore. Her mom was in the cold, cold ground. Together with her father and three brothers. Her throat spasmed and she had to cough to loosen it. “Loved. My mom loved candles. There were also big wax bowls with several tea lights inside, surrounded by the floral arrangements. Beautiful. But more than that, they shed light.”

An eerie light, she remembered. Like footlights in theaters in the nineteenth century, lighting faces from the bottom, leaving features indistinct. Leaving the eyes in shadow.

And at the same time the world came to an end.

“There were—there were screams from all around the room. And a ripping sound.”

“AK-47s,” Joe murmured.

“Guns, yes,” Isabel said. “Machine guns. Those were in my dreams. There were men everywhere, it seemed. I couldn’t count them. Dressed in black, with black ski masks and black goggles. What you said was night vision gear. Outside the front tables which were lit by the candles, it was pitch-black. So they could see in the dark and we couldn’t.”

Her heart burned. Such a horrible cowardly thing. Shooting innocent people in the dark when they could see! Not even allowing for the possibility of anyone defending themselves, innocent unarmed people in the dark, against armed men who could see. “People were screaming in the dark, scrambling to get out of the way, and then they started falling. One masked terrorist planted himself on the other side of the tables with candles and opened fire on the podium. As if he were shooting ducks in a gallery in the county fair. Left to right.” She closed her eyes but the scene she’d repressed for months was painted on the inside of her eyeballs. Her memory had come roaring back to life and it was exactly as if she was living it again. “My mom, my kid brothers. Mowed down.” She shook.

Joe put his arm around her and bent low to her ear. “Honey, you don’t have to—”

Joe meant well but he was wrong. Isabel pushed away. “Oh, but I do, I do. Teddy—a bullet shattered his head. He dropped to the floor and there was only mist spattering my mom and Rob. Mom had already been shot but she was still on her feet. She was turning to put herself between the shooter and my father and Rob but the shooter got her in the back.”

How could the memory have been wiped? How could she have possibly forgotten it? Dead people on the podium, her wounded mother, blood pouring from a shoulder onto her pretty cream-colored suit, turning with her arms wide, wanting to catch her kid brother except the only thing she caught was a bullet.

“It sometimes took two bullets, but the guns killed everyone. Methodically, coldly. The gunman was making his way across the podium. Dad was struggling with—with Hector. Dad was trying to get to Mom and my brothers but Hector was holding him. Wait.”

Isabel held up a finger and stared into the distance. No one in the room moved. No one even breathed.

She ran through the sequence in her head. She almost didn’t believe herself, but the events rang true somewhere deep inside her.

“This is what happened. The gunman was picking off the people on the podium, Dad was trying to get to Mom and the boys but Hector was holding him. At that point, another gunman shot the man next to me and he fell on top of me. He was a big man, knocked the breath out of me. The gunman killed the man standing next to Hector. Cyrus Lowry, the former secretary of state. Dad went to school with him. Cyrus fell, the gunman pivoted...” Isabel closed her eyes, saw everything. “Hector was standing next to Cyrus. The gunman all of a sudden pulled his machine gun...up.”

“Like he didn’t want to shoot Blake?” Joe asked.

“Exactly. Exactly as if he had orders not to shoot Hector. And the two exchanged glances. Both nodded. Then the gunman, oh God!” She reached for Joe’s hand, found it. “The gunman brings his gun down, aims and kills Dad. Hector was spared. Deliberately.”

Silence.

“So Blake was last man standing on the podium.” Joe’s voice was harsh. Isabel looked around at her little audience. The women looked shocked, pale. The men looked grim, as if unsurprised at this example of human wickedness.

“Yes. And he turned away, but before he did, he—”

“What, Isabel?” Lauren asked softly. She still held the portrait of an eminently recognizable Hector Blake between two fingers.

“He saw me. I was on the ground, half-crushed by this man, but I was able to lift my head. We were both in the small circle of light thrown by the candles, the rest of the huge hall black and filled with bloody corpses. And...and he saw me. Saw me watching him just as he was turning away. There was still a huge amount of noise. The machine guns were still firing and, though the moans and screams had died down a lot, there was still screaming. So Hector gestured to the man who’d killed everyone on the podium to catch his attention and then pointed at me on the floor. I imagine what he wanted wasn’t immediately apparent because the gunman’s head was swiveling, trying to see what Hector wanted. And Hector’s face tightened...and I have never seen that expression on a man’s face before. Pure malevolent evil.”

Joe nodded. Douglas and Metal and Jacko were listening, looking grim. They were warriors. They’d seen pure malevolent evil before. They knew what she was talking about.

“The gunman is still looking. He doesn’t see me, doesn’t see that I am alive. So Hector checks his watch and makes this gesture—” She twirled her index finger in the air. “And Hector and the gunman run out the door behind the podium. I was drowning in blood and I was trying to get out from under this dead body and there was an explosion and...everything went black. The next thing I knew it was ten days later and I had a concussion that was twelve on the Glasgow coma scale. And I’d lost all memory of that night until—until now.”

“What do we do now, Mystery Man?” Felicity asked in a loud voice.

Mystery Man?

“Depends,” a metallic voice answered. It was one of those anonymized voices, like kidnappers had in the movies. Had someone been kidnapped? Isabel looked around. Had the voice come from Felicity’s computer?

True, Felicity’s computer was magical but now it had developed into a person?

“Is someone inside your computer, Felicity?”

“Sort of.” Felicity didn’t smile. Usually any mention of the magical wizard-like properties of her computer made her smile, but she wasn’t smiling. She looked deflated and sad. “An ex-CIA guy who is investigating the Massacre.”

“Can he see us?”

Felicity nodded.

Isabel walked over and addressed the monitor directly. Who knew who was on the other end? Former CIA. Then he’d have known Hector. “Are you investigating the Massacre undercover? Not officially?”

“Not officially no.”

But unofficially, yes. And presumably Mr. Former CIA knew a lot about what actually happened. So Isabel had to ask the question. And the answer would divide her life into two. She almost wanted to cling to her precarious mental state. Poor Isabel, who was blown up and can hardly stand, what does she know?

Because if she was right...if she was right...

“This is the guy who told me to protect you,” Joe said.

Isabel faced the monitor. “Do I know you? What am I to you?”

“You’re one of the very few survivors of the Massacre. And the only one close to the podium to survive, except for Hector Blake, who in his official statement during the Senate inquest says that he was knocked out and came to after the explosion. He was found with a few cuts and scrapes.”

Isabel hadn’t been called to the Senate inquest. She’d barely just woken from her coma and would have been unable to testify to anything. She hadn’t even been asked.

So. This guy in Felicity’s computer seemed to know a lot. She’d spent so many months in which her memory was a blur. In which putting one foot in front of the other was painful and hard. In which merely surviving seemed to be the most that she could hope for.

These sudden memories were sharp, almost too sharp. She had to ask.

“So tell me. Am I—am I crazy? Or do I remember what really happened? Is my memory reliable?”

“Your memory is reliable, Isabel.”

Isabel stepped back a moment, in shock, and Joe was right there. He had her back in every way there was. She leaned back for a moment, leaned into that wall of strength, then straightened. Whatever happened from now on in had to depend on her strength, not Joe’s.

“Do you have any idea why on earth Uncle Hector—Hector—would be involved in this?”

Everyone exchanged glances. “What?”

“Well, honey,” Joe said gently. “We aren’t in his head. So we don’t know if that was the motive. But the side effect of the Massacre was that three trillion dollars were drained from the United States into holding companies owned by Chinese companies. And that Hector Blake personally gained over a billion dollars. Which is a big motivator.”

A hot wind blew through Isabel, scorching and scouring so hard it felt like her skin was removed. It blew away all her insecurities and anxiety. It blew away the past six months and it blew away all her fears.

She hardly recognized her own voice, hoarse and raw. “Do you mean to tell me that Hector Blake killed my family, orchestrated the Massacre...for money?”

Joe shifted on his feet, watching her carefully. “It looks like—”

“For money,” the mechanical voice said. “But maybe this is also part of a larger plan to destabilize the US economy. Or even destabilize the country.”

Isabel barely heard the mechanical voice. Her mother, father, three brothers. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Hundreds and hundreds of innocent people. Murdered. Murdered for money.

She had no idea she could feel such rage.

Isabel pulled her cell phone out of her purse and started scrolling furiously.

Without looking up she could feel the eyes of everyone on her. “What?” Damn, where was that number? Her fingers were trembling, making the delicate screen jump around.

“Who are you calling, Isabel?” Joe asked. When she didn’t answer, he put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. “Who?”

Aha!There it was! “I’m calling that son of a bitch Hector Blake and I’m going to accuse him of mass murder. And I am going to bring that bastard down!”

“Stop her!” The mechanical voice said, urgency even in the artificial tone, just as Joe snatched her phone from her hands.

Isabel turned to him, fury in her voice. “Give that to me!”

Joe’s face was sad but firm. “Sorry, honey. Ask me anything else and I’ll give it to you, but not this.”

She slapped her hand against his chest, feeling hard muscle. She hadn’t hurt him, but she wanted to. She wanted to strike and scream and hurt. “Give me that phone!”

He was holding it away from her and if she knew anything at all, it was that she had no chance of grabbing it, none at all. He was bigger than her, taller than her, stronger than her.

The way of the world. The biggest guys won.

Tears burned in her eyes but she refused to shed them. She would never cry again. She looked at everyone in the room, looked directly in their eyes, stared at the monitor where this ghost man resided, then looked Joe squarely in the face.

“You’re not going to let him get away with this!” She looked around. “All of you. Hear me, hear what I’m saying. We have to do something. I’m going to call every single reporter I know, and I know a lot of them, including Summer Redding, who runs the political blog Area 8. She’s not afraid of anything, and neither am I!”

Joe’s face was tight, nostrils wide, white lines around his mouth. He wasn’t happy keeping her phone from her. But he was doing it.

“Goddamn it, Joe!”

He just shook his head. Not giving it to you, sorry.

Isabel rounded on Metal. “Joe told me your story, Metal. How you lost your whole family on 9/11, father and brothers. And your mother dying of a broken heart a week later. Your entire family, wiped out. What would you do if you could find the men who did it? Actually come face-to-face with them? What would you do?”

“I’d rip their hearts out,” Metal answered.

“And I will rip Hector Blake’s heart right out of his chest,” she replied, meaning every single word.

Metal let out an audible breath. He was with her.

“Honey, listen—” Joe began.

“If you go to the press now, if you confront Hector Blake without a plan, you are letting him win,” the metallic voice from the monitor interrupted.

Isabel twirled. “What do you mean?”

“I think that the Massacre was just the opening salvo of a bigger campaign. Hector Blake has enormous resources. If you face him alone, you will lose. And your testimony will be lost, too. And we will lose any advantage we have. Right now Blake has no clue anyone is on to him.”

Strong fingers cupped her chin. Joe turned her head toward him. “He’s right, honey. We need to go after him carefully. We don’t know where he has allies. And if he’s got allies in the CIA, we could end up incarcerated, at a black site or dead.”

Isabel stared him in the eyes. “He cannot be allowed to get away with this.” She looked around. “He cannot be allowed to get away with this,” she repeated.

Her bedrock bottom line.

“No, he cannot be allowed to get away with this,” the metallic voice answered. It was really hard to read emotion into the altered voice, created by software, but somehow an underlying determination came through.

“Do you have any hard evidence to bring him to the authorities’ attention?” she asked the computer. She gestured with her thumb to Nick. “I think we can count on Nick to push this through the FBI. It’s the country’s top law enforcement agency. If you’ve got something, they can run with it.”

“Bet your ass,” Nick growled. “If the Massacre was planned and carried out by Americans, they are going down. I won’t rest, none of us in the Bureau will rest, until justice is done.”

“Blake has covered his tracks well.”

“If you’ve found something, others can, as well.”

“Mainly what I have is a money trail. Which could disappear not overnight, but in the course of two minutes.”

“That’s true,” Felicity said. “I can almost guarantee that there will be another set of anonymous accounts where Blake can drain his money and pour it into them. And he can do it fast. A hint of the fact that someone is on to him, and he’ll be gone and it will take months to find him. As a matter of fact, with the right software and with someone who knows what he’s doing, or someone who can hire someone who knows what they’re doing, he could create a shell game, keep the money moving from account to account so that you might know where the money has been but you never know where the money is going to be. So you’ll never nail him.”

Just the thought of Hector moving his blood money around and getting away with mass murder made her sick. Made her shake with rage, as if every cell in her body were alive with fire. And yet if she knew one thing about Hector, she knew he was smart. If Felicity said that it was possible to keep his money moving, then it was on the move.

“He needs to confess,” she said.

“Riiight.” Jacko’s deep voice chimed in full of sarcasm. “All we have to do is ask him. Nicely. And he’ll spill the beans on everything.”

“We won’t ask him,” Isabel said. As she spoke, certainty settled in her bones. She could do this and she was going to do this. “I will.”

“The fuck you will,” Joe said immediately. “You’re staying a continent away from this guy. He killed hundreds of people. He’s not going to stop at killing you. He’s already tried anyway.”

“Joe is right,” Mystery Man said. “Stay out of this, Isabel.”

Isabel’s spine shot up straight as if someone had given her a shot of adrenaline. “Excuse me? Because you all have done such a good job of catching him, exposing him. Look at you, you don’t dare use the CIA and you have to call the FBI in surreptitiously. And Nick is here as a simple citizen, not representing the Bureau. You’re all scared to death that you are going to stumble on a mole or that he will be warned. Has anyone thought that he was going to run for the presidency as my father’s political heir? And he could have won, too. We could have had a mass murderer and traitor as our president! Has anyone thought of that?”

“Every day,” the voice said. “Every fucking day.”

“We have to stop him. Right now. Because if he is part of a conspiracy, they are planning something else. Or else he’s going to be happy with his billion dollars and is going to disappear to a Thai island.”

“We’re going to stop him,” Nick said. “Guaranteed.”

She whirled on him. “You are one man. You’re here alone without the force of the Bureau behind you. I know Joe and his friends called you because that guy—” she pointed a shaking finger at Felicity’s laptop, “—wanted someone from the FBI and Joe knows youre one of the good guys, like he is. Like everyone here is. But you are part of a huge security machine that involves congressional oversight. Ive been around politicians all my life and they talk. They love to talk. Can you guarantee that a juicy bit of news that the man who was supposed to be the next vice president before the Massacre, a possible presidential contender, was behind the Washington Massacre will stay secret? Can you guarantee that?