A smile spread across the man’s face. “We’ll get to all of that in time, but right now, what I need from you is the formula.”
“So, Henry told you it was complete, but he didn’t give it to you?” she asked with a hint of defiance in her voice.
“You’re a cheeky one. Not quite how I remember you. What’d the Irishman do to you?”
Yes, Aiden had changed her. Somehow, she could feel his strength coursing through her body. She was channeling her Irish knight. “I honestly thought you’d go straight to Henry after we released you on Monday. I was certain you two were in it together. Instead, you took my agents on a field trip to an Irish bar in Boston.” He smirked. “I guess Henry betrayed your trust, too.”
She didn’t believe him. Henry wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.
“Oh. You still think Henry is an innocent bystander in all of this?” He walked toward Henry and jerked his face upright. There was still no flicker of life in those features. He must have been drugged. “No . . . the only innocent one is Katarina. She’s completely clueless, isn’t she? But the fact that Katarina knows of the project’s existence makes her dangerous.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have started the project to begin with,” she responded, but her tremulous voice betrayed her. “You’re going after her again, aren’t you?” Worry sprung through her as her teeth clamped shut.
“Loose ends.” He released his grip on Henry, and Henry’s head just dropped back down like a heavy sack.
“You work for the government. You’re supposed to be about freedom and independence, and . . .” She sealed her lips shut as the man turned toward her, his eyes trained on her. Shit. I shouldn’t know about who they are. He doesn’t know Sophia came to me. She really was trying to help. They should’ve gotten on that plane to Copenhagen.
“Who have you been talking to? What did Eddie say to you?” He re-approached her with heavy steps. She glanced down at his black army boots, which didn’t exactly go with his Ralph Lauren suit.
Eddie. Blame Eddie. Stir up trouble between them. “He told me who you are. J-4-76.” She allowed the words to draw out nice and slow from her lips. “You’re supposed to be about protecting the nation from terrorists and maintaining freedom, but instead, you’re violating world treaties and killing innocent people.”
“Eddie.” The man’s voice thundered in the air the second she finished speaking.
She wasn’t sure why he was so pissed. If he was planning on killing her, why did it matter that she knew the name of the group?
Eddie entered the room, and a look of worry sprawled across his young face. “Yes, sir?”
A blur of movements tangled in front of her eyes.
Blood splattered against the white walls, painting them red with Eddie’s blood. His body, a bullet hole piercing his forehead, crumpled to the floor in one quick motion.
“Oh my God.” As much as she hated Eddie, she hadn’t wished him dead. And it was her fault. She leaned forward as bile rose in her throat.
“Relax—he was another loose end. So we cut him off a little early.” The man shrugged. “He failed his assignment anyway. Henry should never have been able to disappear.” He tucked his gun back in his holster.
Ava watched as the two armed men entered the room and dragged Eddie’s limp body away, business as usual. “Oh God,” she muttered. “I can’t believe you’re supposed to be one of the good guys.” She inhaled a weak and shallow breath.
“I am one of the good guys. Do you know how many terrorist attacks I’ve prevented since 9/11? Do you know how many times I’ve saved thousands of Americans from dying?” He gripped the back of his neck. “Countless lives. If a few people are sacrificed for the greater good, then so be it.”
“So Kat—Katarina is a martyr?” The man was delirious. A prime example of the corruption of power. “You’re insane.”
He shot her a toothy but sardonic smile. His brown eyes deepened as he studied her. “And your sister, Lily, and your parents, Martha and Dennis—they’ll all be martyrs, too, if you don’t help me.”
Ava jerked her head upright and fought against the restraints with more tenacity and fervor than before. “No,” she shrieked, her eyes pooling with tears. Unavoidable tears. “No, please.”
“Families are something we frown upon in the agency. When agents have loved ones, they can be used as weapons against them. It’s too dangerous to have people in your life you care about when you’re an agent.” He smoothed a hand over his military haircut, settling every hair into its proper place. “And your family just might be your downfall.”
“No.” She stopped struggling. “Please, kill me, but don’t hurt them.”
“Your fate has already been sealed. But you will help us, Ava. Or else Lily, Martha, and Dennis will become loose ends.”
The feeling of total and utter defeat overcame her. How could she let her family die?
But if she saved them, what was the cost?
***
“You should have left by now.” Michael approached his fiancée.
Aiden entered her kitchen, glancing over at Kate. “He’s right. It’s too dangerous for you to be here.” He set a stack of paperwork and photos onto the farm table.
“I’m not staying. I just needed to be here to let the guys in.” She pointed toward the corridor, which was connected to the living room.
“Connor. Jake. Good to see you.” Aiden shook his head. “Well, the circumstances are not great but thank you for coming. For helping.” He gave Connor and Jake swift hugs—one arm over the shoulder before a quick release.
Connor and Jake were former Marines. Aiden had spent some time with both of them in Afghanistan, and they all had left active duty around the same time. Michael had kept them connected ever since. Aiden had looked forward to seeing them at Kate and Michael’s wedding in the spring. It was amazing that they were there on such short notice. He knew Jake was FBI, but he somehow managed to dodge his day job whenever any of them needed a favor.
“Can I get you boys anything before I leave?” Kate grabbed her purse from the table.
“We’re good. Thank you.” Connor shot Kate his award-winning smile. He had always been a ladies’ man.
“Please, be careful. I need my groom intact for our wedding.” She pressed up on her toes and kissed Michael on the cheek.
Michael pulled her closer to him and captured her mouth with his, unembarrassed by his audience. “See you soon,” he said to his now-flushed fiancée.
She shot him a smile before focusing on Aiden. “Get your girl back. I’m in the market for a new friend.” She reached for Aiden and hugged him. “Good luck.”
Michael walked Kate out of the kitchen and disappeared from sight.
“So?” Aiden scratched his jaw.
Connor and Jake exchanged looks, before directing their attention back to Aiden. “We hear that you’re planning on bringing down the government,” Connor quipped.
He wasn’t far from the truth. “Just an agency. An agency that doesn’t exist on paper.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard, then.” Typical Connor—always trying to make light of a heavy situation.
“Yeah, and the fact that my long-lost mum runs the thing . . . not a terrible inconvenience,” he said in a gruff voice.
“Excuse me?” Jake shook his head.
Aiden slipped into a seat at the table and pressed his hands on the stack of photos and news clippings. “Where do I even begin?” His attention shifted to Michael as he entered the room. “She okay?”
Michael pushed his hands into his pockets and moved with slow steps. “Yeah, she’s just worried.”
“Can we get back to the part about your mother’s debut appearance?” Connor reached for the black coffee Jake handed him and perked his brows in Aiden’s direction.
Aiden leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He couldn’t believe tomorrow was Monday, making it a week since he first laid eyes on her. “Well, it all began when a gorgeous girl s
howed up in my bar . . .” Despite the heavy weight of his words, he smiled on the inside at the memory of his first conversation with Ava. And then, in a more guttural voice, he continued to explain the events that led up to the moment when Ava was taken.
“Have you told your dad about your mother?”
Aiden studied Jake for a moment before running a hand through his dark hair. “Hell, no. But that reminds me—I should probably give him a call. I haven’t touched base with him recently.”
“I contacted him earlier. I knew he’d be worried.” Michael toyed with a few photos in his hand before pushing them away.
“Thanks.” Aiden’s eyes widened as a thought popped into his head. “What about Ava’s family? They must be wondering where she is by now. She hasn’t had access to her phone all week.”
“I took care of that, as well. I sent her sister and mother a text that appeared to be from her.” Michael reached for his tablet and punched in a security code. “Her parents are in Dubai with her sister Lily right now. Looks like she’s on a photo shoot, so I don’t think we need to worry about them.”
“Lily? As in Lily Daniels? Ava is Lily’s sister?” Connor rubbed his jaw, and his light green eyes darkened with interest. “You’re kidding me, right? She’s like a supermodel—a lingerie-wearing, hot . . .”
“Hey,” Aiden warned, “she’s Ava’s twin. So watch what you—”
“Twins?”
Aiden could practically see the drool forming at Connor’s mouth. “Focus, Connor.” His gravelly voice, accompanied by a death stare, had Connor holding his hands up while nodding.
“No problem,” he responded, but Aiden could see a light twitch of curiosity still apparent in his face. “How do we get your girl back?”
My girl? Is she mine? He liked the sound of it. But would she forgive him for lying to her? He rubbed his hands over his face. First, he needed to save her, and then he could worry about what came next. “Tell me you used your tech-savvy magic to figure out the direction in which Ava was taken?”
“I’ve been working on that. I bounced between surveillance cameras around my parking garage and throughout Uptown Charlotte. I got the SUV heading toward 77 South, but that is as far as I could track it. I put in some calls as soon as I heard from you this morning. There is no plate number in the system that matches what you gave me.” He held his hand up. “Local PD were alerted—”
“As well as the FBI,” Jake offered. “But the number of black Chevy Tahoes is making it hard to narrow down the search. Now, let’s just say she was taken south and out of North Carolina. Once she crosses borders, it becomes a federal case. When Michael contacted me, I made every attempt to assemble a team to set up roadblocks and checkpoints, but I got blocked.”
“What do you mean you got blocked?” Aiden balled his hand into a fist on the table, gritting his teeth in frustration.
“Someone high up must be protecting these Goddamn people,” Jake responded.
Aiden stood up and walked to the bay window, which offered a view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline. The ten-million-dollar home sat on Beacon Street, in the Back Bay area of Boston, close to the Public Garden and Boston Commons. It was even close enough to walk to Fenway Park. Someday, Aiden hoped he’d be able to take Ava to a Red Sox game—or maybe a Patriots game.
“Aiden?” Connor snapped his fingers next to his face.
He spun in Connor’s direction. “We have to find her. I don’t care what bigshots in the government are trying to keep this freaking J-4-76 group safe—I need to find her, and I want to bring the entire lot of bloody bastards down,” he said in a strangled voice.
“And your mom? Are we bringing her down, as well?” Michael asked, rising from the table.
Aiden’s lips drew in a tight straight line. “If she’s involved . . .”
Michael nodded. “We’d better get to work.”
Aiden watched as Michael moved back to the table and retrieved a stack of photos and documents that had been taken from Aiden’s storage unit. “Let’s divide and conquer. Connor and Jake can take a look at what I’ve collected. My work needs a new set of eyes. You try and use your computer skills to figure out where J-4-76’s funding is coming from.”
Aiden exhaled a deep breath. He was grateful Michael was a computer genius. The software the military currently used to help capture terrorists and retrieve intelligence on all enemies throughout the world had been designed by him. If anyone could help Aiden, it would be Michael. “You think they took her back to Aberdeen?”
Michael looked up from his tablet. “No. I’m sure they have multiple offices. And if they truly were taking her south . . .” He shook his head. “Now would be about the right time for your mother to show up. She must know where they’d take Ava. Maybe she is trying to help, and we just don’t know it.”
Aiden thought back to the text he’d received the other night on his burner phone. He was almost positive it had come from his ghost of a mom. She’d been warning him to back off, probably because she knew that anyone who came after J-4-76 was bound to get hurt. Why did she even care? He pinched the thought of his mom from his mind; he couldn’t handle the flurry of emotions she’d conjured inside of him every time her face appeared in his head. “We can’t rely on her. We need to continue to act as if she doesn’t exist.”
“All right.” Michael glanced over at Jake and Connor, who were already sorting through the research that Aiden had compiled over the last six months. “I’m going to set up a code to help trace the money, as well as try and use what we have based on the deposits into Henry’s Cayman Island accounts. The system could take hours—or even days—to work through all of the data. While it does, I think you and I need to make a trip in the morning.”
Chapter Twenty
She was angry that her stomach would growl at a time like this. She shouldn’t want to eat. In fact, there was no way she could eat. But her body was betraying her. She stared down at the plated egg sandwich on her lap. One of the black ops guys had set it there a few moments earlier before leaving. Did they expect her to eat with her hands tied behind a chair? It was clearly some form of torture.
She looked over at the two doors in the room. There was the one she had entered, and the unknown one on the other side of the room—the door she hoped would lead her and Henry to freedom.
She heard a grumbling sound coming from Henry. “Henry,” she whispered, hoping that no one else would hear that he was awake.
Henry’s head bobbed up and down a little before he finally straightened. He squinted his eyes in her direction, blinking against the fluorescent light.
“Are you okay?” Of course he wasn’t okay. What an idiotic question. “Henry?” She kept her voice as low as possible but hoped Henry was not too disoriented to hear.
His mouth dropped open a little, and he moved against his restraints. “Ava,” he mouthed, his brows rising.
And then she saw it.
Guilt.
“I’m so sorry,” he said silently, the S’s hissing like escaped gas. “Are you okay?”
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to process everything. “Right now I am.”
His shoulders sank forward a little as he rotated his neck, working through the kinks and pain of his long, upright sleep. “I should never have chosen you. I’m just so sorry.”
Chosen me? What—for the assignment? “What happened, Henry?”
He grimaced in pain as his body shifted in the seat. “They came to me with orders from the president. They said they needed my help because there was to be a chemical terrorist attack on American soil.” His voice was finally working now, but it was still strained. And he kept it low, as well, hoping to avoid the notice of anyone outside the room. “I said no to the job. I touted quotes from world treaties—from oaths the U.S. made.”
She stared at him, her lips glued in silent shock.
“But they offered me a lot of money. I’m weak . . . I agreed. They didn’t tell me who t
hey were, and I didn’t ask.” He hung his head low in shame. “I had to choose two assistants. They said they would provide me with the third.”
“Eddie.” Her voice was filled with disgust as her eyes flickered over to the blood-stained wall.
Henry looked up at her and nodded. “I didn’t think we’d actually be able to do what they had asked. In fact, I tried to do everything I could not to finish the equation. I worked late hours, toying around in the lab to make it look like I was struggling, but working . . . I knew I had cameras on me.” He swallowed. A hard and guilty gulp. “But you—you were unstoppable.”
She remembered the night of his birthday when he opened up to her about his concern over the project. They should have stopped at that point. But would it have done any good?
“Once you figured it out,” he shut his eyes, “I knew what had to be done.”
“But we had a plan,” she responded as goose bumps snaked across her skin. A growing wariness traveled through her body, from head to toe. “You were going to destroy the evidence and alter the cameras . . . we were going to wait a week, and you were going to tell your boss—these assholes—that the formula could not be completed.” Her voice broke with despair. She’d felt guilty about the project the entire time she had been working on it, but when the president asks you to do something, how do you say no? Especially when you’re told you can prevent a terrorist attack.
“I’m sorry I lied to you, but I knew these bastards wouldn’t back down no matter what I said. I hoped that if I disappeared, they would just come looking for me, and never know that we had actually finished the assignment. I didn’t think they were capable of—of this. I didn’t know they were the true enemy.” Tears flitted down his cheeks.
“How’d they find you?”
“I was hiding out at a beach house in Miami. My plan was to use a fake ID and passport and take a cruise out of Miami to Mexico on Sunday.”
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