The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Stevens, Taylor

  She shrugged, as if the implications of such were not even worthy of consideration. “I can take care of myself,” she said. “I don’t need someone to protect me.”

  “And yet you do this willingly, knowing that you’re his tool.”

  Munroe paused, and then turned slightly so that she faced him dead-on. She stared. Long. Hard.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do it willingly, knowing that I’m a tool, because my decisions have nothing to do with reciprocation. I choose to do this because it suits me. I choose to help Logan because I want to. I choose to save his daughter because I can. I choose to care. Do you understand the difference? It’s a choice, Miles, not an obligation. Not a burden. Not emotional blackmail. Not something I have to do simply because Logan needs me. I don’t do it for gratitude or for quid pro quo. What Logan does, how Logan feels, how Logan reacts, has no bearing on my decisions. They’re my choices, not his.”

  Bradford stopped, said nothing more.

  He understood, then, her bond to Logan, her continued love for Noah, and so many of her life’s decisions. Self-preservation for her was instinctive, feral, and wild, inevitably bringing death to those around her, instinct that controlled her body and kept her alive, and she refused to allow that instinct to encroach upon her heart. She acted and loved who she wanted, when she wanted, and how she wanted, and having made those decisions consciously, for reasons that were her own, even against self-preservation, she would abide by them, even if it killed her.

  “Okay,” he said. “I won’t try to stop you or convince you not to go. I’ll get you all the information that I have, get you whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “On one condition.”

  She paused. Stared at him sharply.

  “I’m going with you,” he said. And then as she’d done to him earlier, he quoted her words back. “It’s my choice,” he said. “Not a burden, not an obligation, not emotional blackmail or something that I have to do. I do it because I choose to.”

  * * *

  They gathered at a watering hole off one of the many side streets in San Telmo, near the hostel, nothing more than a room fifteen feet wide, no windows, dim, smoke-hazed and crowded all the way to the bar counter on the end wall. The place was chosen because it was where Logan and Gideon already were when Bradford called, and for what Munroe needed, here was as good as anywhere.

  Munroe stepped into the din, Bradford at her heels, and spotted Logan and Gideon in the front corner. The boys were nursing the local brew, had been for a while by the looks of it, and although Munroe would have preferred they be solid and completely sober, she’d take what she could get.

  Logan spotted them, stood, and motioned them over. They made small talk for the few minutes it took for Heidi to arrive, and then, with the five of them pulled tightly around the table, Munroe said, “Unless one of you has done something really, really stupid, there are factors in play that you’ve failed to mention.”

  There was a shock of silence around the table, and Gideon put his hands up in a defensive position. “I gave you my word,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re going on about, it wasn’t me.”

  “Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Logan said. “Because, for the most part, we haven’t been included in your chain of ‘need to know.’ ”

  Bradford tensed.

  Logan’s sarcasm was an obvious dig at Bradford and the way Munroe had allowed him to usurp Logan’s position on the assignment. Under the table Munroe placed a hand on Bradford’s knee to quiet him.

  She was silent for a moment, not because of Logan’s snipe, but to plot her way through several days’ worth of details to the precise moments that would encapsulate where they now stood.

  “I’ve been inside The Chosen for three days now,” she said. “Welcomed, and for the most part blending into the scenery—close enough to Hannah to snatch and pull her out the front door, which I didn’t,” she said, “in order to limit damage potential.”

  She paused, took a sip of water, and forced silence on the table.

  “Tonight was the go night,” she said, “with everything in place for a clean extraction. But since I’m sitting here and I’m not smiling, you can bet things didn’t go as planned. I’ll give you one guess as to what happened.”

  Gideon looked at Heidi, who looked at Logan, and among the three there was a form of baffled confusion until Gideon said, “They pulled her out?”

  “Yes,” Munroe said. “They pulled her out. Anyone want to tell me why they would do that? I was spending the night one bed over, so I think it’s safe to assume it isn’t me they’re hiding her from. Why’d they pull her out, guys? Why now, all of a sudden, are they spooked?”

  There was a subtle exchange of glances between Logan and Heidi, a sort of knowing between them, and Munroe paused. “What?” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Heidi ran into a group of The Chosen,” Logan said.

  Munroe bit back spite and mulled over this unexpected piece of news, because even out of the blue like this, it still didn’t quite fit. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said finally.

  “They didn’t see me,” Heidi said.

  Munroe nearly stood and pointed her index finger in Heidi’s direction. “I told you to stay away,” she said. And to Logan, “You were aware of this?”

  Logan nodded. “I saw it happen.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday,” he said.

  “You can verify, without a doubt, they didn’t see her?”

  “I would have called immediately,” he said, and Munroe calmed. With Logan so thoroughly vested in finding his daughter, he would be hyperattentive to the details, and so she trusted him completely. More so, if The Chosen had spotted Heidi yesterday, Hannah would have been gone that same night.

  Munroe leaned forward, elbows on the table. “We’re back to the original issue,” she said. “If they didn’t see Heidi, why are they suddenly spooked?”

  She allowed the ambience of the bar to engulf the table, allowed them to mull and stress over the answer to the problem at hand, an answer that so obviously stared them in the face. She waited, hoping that at least one of them might fall into it before she had to articulate it, because if it had nothing to do with any of them, then in her gut she knew the answer, if not the details, and what she needed before she could figure out what to do next were the details.

  Logan spoke first. He was staring at the table, the look on his face reflective of the mental obstacle course his mind was running. “They are preparing for something,” he said. “They’re bracing for a move on Hannah, and they’re getting her out of the way, they just have no idea that it was you.”

  Munroe nodded, wasn’t going to help him out yet, wanted to make sure all three fully grasped the complexities they were dealing with.

  “Why now?” she said.

  “They knew we were coming,” Logan whispered. He said it more to Heidi and Gideon than he did to Munroe, and it came out more as an uncertain question than a statement, but the glances exchanged by the three spoke to the realized horror that passed among them.

  Munroe said, “So here’s the thing. If the three of you are certain—and I mean certain with not an iota of room for error, certain because you know, and not because you’re afraid I’ll break your legs—that this thing has nothing to do with anything that’s happened in the city, then I can work with it, but if it has something to do with any of you I need to know now or we could all end up dead.”

  “It wasn’t anything on my part,” Logan said. Heidi shook her head as the answer, and Gideon put his hands up once more. “Not me,” he said.

  “Okay,” Munroe said, and she was silent for a long while, allowing the weight of the situation to spread. “If it’s not you, then I can posit two possibilities, neither of which matter much to me at this point, but it might be helpful for you to be aware of them. One: someone you’ve talked to, someone in your close circle who knows what yo
u’re up to, has said something they shouldn’t to someone they shouldn’t.”

  She waited a beat. Held up two fingers. “Possibility two,” she said. “The information on where to find Hannah was fed to you deliberately to bring you—something—to their doorstep.”

  The first possibility brought with it a round of sighs that spoke to the high potential for such a calamity; the second resulted in a round of simultaneous response, all three of them answering at once, all three expressing pure incredulity. So Munroe probed at the disbelief.

  “You said your source was Maggie, Charity’s sister,” she said to Logan. “That she’s the one who contacted Charity with the news?”

  Logan nodded.

  “Does Maggie live in Buenos Aires?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been working a lot of contacts for a long time, and Maggie was just one of many—we don’t always know where to find people, just how to get in contact. E-mail. Networking. Friends of friends. That sort of stuff.”

  “It came unexpectedly, though, right? I’ve seen the way siblings react to news of their estranged sisters.” Munroe gave a subtle nod in Heidi’s direction. “I’m guessing Charity’s sister wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of people you’d expect to cough it up, was she?”

  “Correct,” he said.

  “What’s she look like? Does she strongly resemble Charity?”

  Logan paused, as if he wasn’t completely sure, and Gideon answered for him. “No,” he said. “They have different dads.”

  “It would be too much to hope for a photo, huh?”

  Gideon paused and said, “Maggie has dark hair, she’s shorter, and she’s more Asian-looking—I think her dad is half-Japanese.”

  Hannah’s adopted mother.

  Munroe swore silently and said, “But she has really light hazel-green eyes like Charity.”

  The three hesitated, at first as if they were puzzled as to how she could possibly know and then because they realized why.

  “You guys have been the perfect tools,” she said. “And the only reason you’re even close to getting Hannah is because you did the unexpected. You found a way to the inside.”

  Logan was the first to protest. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “Even if Maggie is here, isn’t it possible that she was sincere in wanting to help? It doesn’t have to be a setup. She could have wanted to help her sister, wanted to make things right.”

  “If Hannah were still in the Haven tonight, you might have a valid point.”

  “What could they possibly hope to gain from this?” Heidi asked. “Why would they deliberately invite trouble? It’s completely counterintuitive, and it can’t be a setup without a motive.”

  Munroe turned to Bradford. “She’s very good, Miles. If I had a company like yours, I’d offer the lady a job.” And then to Heidi, “You’ve got to ask yourself, in cases like this in the past, what typically happened when an abducted child was located?”

  “There’s been government intervention, usually police raids on the Havens.”

  “And eventually the dust settles, charges are dropped, and the kids go back home, right?”

  Heidi nodded.

  “Has someone ever infiltrated a Haven to kidnap the kid back?”

  “No.”

  “Is it fair to assume that looking to the past as a guide to the future, they’ve moved Hannah out because they’re bracing for a raid? One that they themselves are trying to provoke?”

  Gideon said, “Are you crazy?” and both Logan and Heidi simply stared at her as if she’d sprouted a horn in the middle of her head.

  Munroe shifted back, the preliminary movement to leaving the table. “Look,” she said. “The biggest mistake you can make is to underestimate your opponent. At this point, it makes no difference to me one way or the other, but it might to you—or to your friends. From a purely analytical, disinterested point of view, The Chosen have expended considerable resources to keep Hannah hidden, and now out of the blue have tipped you off, as if they’re setting the kid up as perfect bait, expecting someone to come looking for her and being able to show a clean bill of health when all hands turn up empty. Is there anything going on in your community? Custody battles? Upcoming TV shows? Something that might make them look bad if it were to come to light?”

  “Maybe,” Heidi said. “I mean nothing specifically, but last I heard from my own connections inside, The Prophet is making a push toward mainstream acceptability and image improvement. As a whole, they’re trying to bury unpleasant issues and show themselves as merely a different sort of church. But people like Charity, they don’t go away, and as long as they’re in the media, the negative spotlight continues to return. It’s possible that The Prophet—The Chosen—the local leadership—would want something flashy, a raid perhaps, something that media outlets couldn’t ignore, as a way to prove that their ex-children are a bunch of crazies, that we’re liars who exaggerate and whose word couldn’t be trusted. It would be a dramatic way to prove that they are being persecuted and vilified.”

  “Well, there you go,” Munroe said. “There’s a motive.”

  “But in that case, why not tell us she’s in Jakarta or Mumbai or even Asunción and send us on a wild-goose chase? Why take us to where she actually is?”

  Munroe shrugged. “Maybe they think you know more than you do and didn’t want to risk you calling their bluff. I mean, from everything I’ve read, The Prophet is a narcissistic nut job. Do his reasons even have to make sense?”

  Munroe stood and Bradford did as well, and she dropped a wad of pesos on the table.

  Heidi said, “But wait, you just leave it at that?”

  “It’s not my fight,” Munroe said. “I’m going after Hannah.”

  Chapter 30

  Munroe and Bradford stepped out of the bar, and Logan followed them, calling for Munroe to wait. She paused on the street corner until he caught up, and when he reached her, he was breathless and strained, and didn’t bother with niceties. “Where did they put her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Munroe said. “I called you guys in as soon as I found out she was gone. I haven’t had a chance to start digging yet. But I know who she’s with, and with that I’ll find her.”

  “Tell me truthfully,” he said. “No padding, no sparing my feelings, no trying to protect me. How bad is it?”

  Munroe blew imaginary strands of hair out of her face, debated against going back inside the bar, where they could sit and she could lay it out for him. But there really wasn’t any point. She didn’t know enough to do anything more than scare him.

  “We’re back at the beginning,” she said. “Not square one exactly—maybe three or four—but at least I have something to work with. No padding. We’re dealing with a whole new animal. An animal with teeth. The Chosen have some strange bedfellows for Sponsors.”

  Logan began to speak and then stopped, as if he was now finally grasping the situation for what it was. “What are they? Military? Police? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Organized crime.”

  His lips drew taut, and he didn’t even pretend to be calm. “I can be an extra set of hands,” he said, “another pair of eyes, one more set of feet on the ground. I can help you.”

  “No,” Munroe said. She crossed her arms. There would be no discussion, no room for argument, no area for debate. Just no.

  “Michael, please,” he said. “Not only am I highly motivated, I’ve done this with you a dozen times. I’m an asset, and you know it—it’s not like I’m some outsider to this game.”

  She paused, put her hands on his shoulders, and held him at arm’s length. Stared at him eye to eye. “You are an asset,” she said. “No question. No doubt. And under any other circumstance we’d be in this together. But not this time. I can’t. It’s too personal to you, and too personal for me.” She paused, fighting for the words to explain the blade of pain that pierced each time she slept.

  “I need you alive,” she said. “
I can’t afford to lose you, and even more than that, Logan, I won’t have your blood on my hands.”

  She paused again, and then in almost a whisper said, “I can’t.”

  She stopped. Cleared her throat and upped the volume. “If you go into this, my attention will turn toward keeping you safe. You will distract me, and what I really need right now, more than anything else, is the ability to focus. It’s in your best interest, Hannah’s best interest, and my own best interest to keep you as far away from this project as possible.”

  Logan took a step back. His face creased with a mixture of frustration and resignation. “Okay,” he said. And then he turned from her toward Bradford, jabbed an index finger in Bradford’s direction, and said, “If anything happens to her, what she just said goes out the window. I’m the Reserves. You’d better fucking call me in.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Munroe said, and she steered Bradford toward the street before the two alpha dogs could tear into each other.

  To go after Hannah meant finding Hannah, and finding Hannah meant the possibility of breaking kneecaps. The vehicle plates led to home addresses, the home addresses to people, and where people lived, information could be forcibly extracted, although ideally, it would never get to that. If things went the way of the backup plan, something said within the Haven and picked up by one of the listening devices would point them in the right direction.

  But so far, things weren’t ideal and hadn’t exactly gone according to plan.

  In the hotel room Munroe headed for the desk. She was in predator mode, hunting and out for blood, and with her back to Bradford she said, “Get some sleep, you’ll need it.”

  Her manner was brusque, and after the display of care and emotion she’d given Logan, probably hurtful. He’d have to deal, and the kinder, gentler moments would have to wait for better times. Bradford wouldn’t fight her over the suggestion of sleep, not only because she was right but also because at the moment there was nothing further he could do. At two in the morning his contacts and connections were all in bed, and what she needed was both quiet and time to listen through several days’ worth of data.