Jack stopped.
Blood trickled from Clare’s lip.
Little Brother put the revolver to her forehead and ordered her to kneel.
Index finger to her chin, Clare wiped the trail of red up to its source and, defiant, taunting, placed the finger in her mouth and pulled it away clean.
Warning number two fell on overconfident ears.
“Down now,” Little Brother said. “Or I kill your baby while you watch.”
Clare slid a strap off her shoulder and let her pack drop. She followed the bag down far enough to angle beneath his arm and was up again faster than seemed possible. Vicious, murderous, she struck, hands and knees destroying joints and pressure points in a quiet rage of debilitating grips and jabs that knocked the revolver from his hand and brought him to the ground. She straddled him. Slammed his head back against the rocks and stopped at the click of a cocking hammer.
Big Brother motioned her off.
“Shoot me,” Clare said. “I’ll kill you before I die.”
Focused on her, he didn’t see Jill. None of them saw Jill—not in the way she should have been seen. Her arm came out from behind her back, Baby Eagle in her hand. She two fisted the 9mm, raised the muzzle toward Big Brother’s head and, walking toward him, pulled the trigger in a double tap to the brain.
The reports thundered out in waves along the empty miles.
Big Brother dropped to his knees. What was left of his face headed for the dirt.
Jill reached him as he fell. Put a bullet in his back. Turned the muzzle toward Clare’s knees and fired again in a three-tap sequence that sent Little Brother’s body jerking.
Clare twitched and froze.
Pride, shock, and anger presented a rapid sequence across her face.
Jill lowered the weapon but didn’t release her grip.
In gunpowder-deaf silence, Clare stood and placed a foot on Little Brother where her knee had been when Jill had fired.
Bullet holes seeped inches from her boot.
She glared at Jill’s hands—rather, at the weapon gripped by them—and said nothing. She didn’t need to. Thoughts scrolled across her face like a movie list on a marquee, and the words filled Jack’s head as clearly as if Clare had said them out loud:
Jesus Christ, are you insane?
You brought a weapon.
Against my explicit instructions, you brought a weapon.
And hid it from me.
This is unforgivable.
Jack held his breath, kept perfectly still, afraid to move or speak or blink.
Jill raised the Baby Eagle again and pointed it not at Clare necessarily, but close enough that the threat was real, and the statement behind the threat even more so.
She said, “I know. You were fine without my help. You don’t have to thank me for saving your miserable life, but you might want to acknowledge the skill.”
Clare stared Jill down, silent and unbending.
Jill raised the muzzle higher, lining the sights with Clare’s forehead.
Jack said, “Julia, not here, not this way. Save the fight for another day.”
Jill ignored him. He took a step toward her. She said, “Stay put.”
The seconds ticked on, long and parched and painful.
Clare said, “That was excellent marksmanship, Julia.”
In her voice Jack heard anguish and reluctance and pride.
Jill shifted fast, inches to the right, and pulled the trigger. The report clapped with heart attack–inducing surprise and the bullet missed Clare by a whisper so slight, she would have been dead if she’d wobbled.
She never even blinked.
But Jack saw what Jill hadn’t, saw the flash of fear, and in that flash he understood why they’d made this trip and why Clare wouldn’t be dissuaded.
Jill wiped down the weapon, placed the grip in Little Brother’s palm, strode for her pack, and heaved it onto her shoulders.
Clare watched her go, and then, slowly, without acknowledging Jack, she leaned down, grabbed her gear, and hoisted the bag.
Finger by finger, Jack released his hold on the shiv, then moved toward Little Brother’s body, retrieved the gun, and hefted it in his hand.
He watched Clare and watched Jill, both of them moving on like hikers into the desert the way they had before the stop, as if nothing had changed.
He holstered the weapon in his waistband.
Everything had changed, he knew.
Clare had created a lethal animal that had outgrown its cage.
They were moving to the United States because Clare had lost control.
CHAPTER 21
JILL
AGE: 26
LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS
PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA
NAMES: JENNIFER WHITE
OUT OF THE FOG THE BUZZING CAME, PERSISTENT AND ANNOYING, the same merciless fiend that had chased her dreams for the past two nights. Her eyelids fluttered.
Threads of light outlined a curtain, a door.
The fragrance of old cloth and mildew filled her nose, and her skin registered the heat of a body beside her in bed.
The night rolled into the present.
Annoyance turned to dread.
She bolted upright, fingers fumbling for a phone that danced closer and closer to the nightstand edge, thoughts racing through a jagged sequence.
She had to answer.
No, couldn’t because Jack was beside her.
Wait, the phone was on the nightstand—why the fuck was it on the nightstand?
Shit, shit, shit.
Jack—Jack had put it there—he knew.
She had to answer.
Mental thunder clapped.
She sat tall and, answering with the confidence of no fucks given, said, “What do you have for me?”
“Work, as always,” the Broker said.
The words hitched in her head, and her heart squeezed with the same panic she’d tried to escape in the night. This wasn’t how a bounty offer went. If he had work for her, he would have sent a code first, a link she could follow to an encrypted folder on an offshore server, the contents of which would be mirrored on her screen—no files transferred, nothing she could possess, nothing for packet sniffers to intercept, just a limited look-see at the terms and timing, enough to allow her to determine if the offer agreed with her—and if she accepted, and if it was necessary, then they’d move to the phone.
The Broker had arranged Clare’s takedown.
He most certainly had Clare in his possession.
And now he was toying, setting her up for something.
Or this was a coincidence.
Possibilities and questions and unknowns spun wild in her head, knotting into a tangle so twisted she couldn’t separate one from the other.
The vise tightened. The trap closed in.
She said, “How unusual to receive a call.”
“Indeed. But the work is time sensitive.”
The words filtered through software that disguised his voice and had none of the nuances of human interaction, but she searched them for hidden meaning all the same.
“Send the code,” she said. “I’ll look.”
“The matter is urgent, with a bonus for speedy delivery.”
“I understand,” she said. “Send the code.”
The call disconnected. Blood pumped loud in her ears.
She dropped back against the pillow and stared up at the dark water-stained ceiling. She wanted to crawl back under the covers, sleep for a month, and wake up after an extinction-level event.
Jack, beside her, remained perfectly still, arms beside his body, hands folded atop his chest, the way they did when he went deep down inside his head while waiting out the night in a hidey-hole.
He said, “I read your note and left the rest alone.”
She exhaled long and slow. At least she’d have the opportunity to explain in person before the shit hit the fan. She glanced at him.
He looked like hell. Probably hadn�
�t slept at all.
He said, “Answers would be nice.”
She checked the time: nearly noon. Her brain slowed to a crawl, stuck in mud, spinning through gears, searching for where to even start, and she braced against the coming judgment and condescension and the reaffirmation that she’d never be as good as he was.
The phone vibrated. Notification that the Broker’s code had arrived.
She ignored one train of thought for the other, followed the link, entered her bona fides, and connected to a full bounty packet instead of the summary she’d expected.
But for what was missing, it might as well have been a summary.
The target was male.
The only thing she had to go on for age, height, and race was a single blurry picture that’d been cropped out of a larger photo taken from a considerable distance. In it, he wore sunglasses and a ball cap, which left little to see, but if this was the packet, then it was all the Broker had and all she’d get.
Other details were just as sparse.
His name was Christopher Rivera, aliases unknown, list of known affiliates just as short, list of skills longer—much longer.
This was the Broker offering her a chance to kill one of his own.
The packet provided an address. No date. No explanation as to why that specific location, simply the setting in which the target was expected to show up.
She pondered the implications, weighing them all against the one detail that made her want to vomit all over again. Last known location: Austin, Texas.
“The matter is urgent,” the Broker had said.
She grabbed the bottle from the nightstand, cracked the cap, and glugged the water down while insanity wove a web of tangles impossible to follow or sort through.
She’d been careful.
She’d made sure not to bring work home with her.
She’d gone to great lengths to mask her location and stay anonymous, and yet here they were, with Clare kidnapped and Raymond dead and her face on television and the Broker making a joke out of it all by sending her on a hunt for the very guy who’d likely started it all to begin with. She dropped the phone on the bed, shoved the musty pillow over her head, and screamed into it.
Jack tugged the pillow off her face.
“It’s not that I don’t know what you’ve been doing,” he said. “I just don’t know the details or how they connect to what’s going on right now.”
She grabbed the pillow back, smothered herself again, and screamed louder and harder, then sat up and faced him. “They don’t connect,” she said. “That’s the problem!”
“Of course they do.”
“Not in any way that makes sense.”
“Yet.”
“The call I just got,” she said, “that was a job offer.” She shoved the phone in Jack’s face. “This guy’s my target. A killer with a skill set longer than my arm. A hundred and fifty grand if I can take him out clean by the end of the week. And the only piece of information I have on him, besides this shitty picture, is that he was last seen in Austin.” She paused. “Austin, John. Do the math. This is the guy who took Clare, the one who killed Ray, and . . .” Her throat constricted. Her voice trailed off.
Jack said, “And you don’t know if you’re meant to be his assassin or prey.”
“Yes,” she said. “But it’s more than that, so much more.”
Within her tangled mess of thought, only two possibilities came close to making sense: either the Broker had chosen her because he knew she was connected to Clare, or he’d chosen her because she was closest to the kill, which meant that in spite of every precaution she’d taken to protect herself, the voice on the other end knew who she was or knew where to find her, and she wasn’t sure which of those two was worse.
Jack studied the picture and offered her a third option.
“Guy with these kinds of skills is going to be top line in your dealer’s little black book. Probably not a lot of people he can send to track and take him down.”
She wanted that lifeline but couldn’t accept it.
She said, “He’s valuable. Why would the Broker kill him?”
“Could be personal. Could be he’s been around too long and knows too much. Could be to eliminate the final thread that leads to Clare. Could be anything.”
Jill shut off the screen. “Could be a trap to bring us right into his hands.”
“Could be. You ever carry that phone around your boy toys?”
“No.”
“Ever carry it around Clare?”
She tossed the phone in his lap and, stomach rising, struggling against every word, said, “No, but the guy that this connects to is the same guy who has Clare.”
Jack glowered in angry, accusing silence.
She said, “I didn’t know until Clare’s call yesterday, didn’t know until I heard the voice at the end. It’s the same voice that just called me.”
Jack’s glowering grew darker. “You ever have the phone on at the same time, same place, as your personal phone or any of the burners?”
The question hiccuped in her head. She searched back and thought, really thought, through the past several months. Unable to look him in the eyes, she studied the bedspread. “No,” she said. “But we both know there are other ways.”
Jack said, “Who’s the dealer?”
Jill choked on the answer, couldn’t get the words out.
What had started as a search to satisfy curiosity had opened a portal to another world that felt far more like home than the one she lived in day to day, and what had made rebellious sense in secret a year ago left her with empty shame under the moment’s spotlight.
Jack pulled back slowly, as if he already knew the answer.
Seeking out the Broker to spite Clare was low, even by her standards.
“Aw, Jesus,” he said.
He pressed his hands to his forehead and turned away, took a long, deep breath, glanced up at the ceiling.
She waited as the silence ticked on.
He said, “What the hell were you thinking?”
She opened her mouth.
“No, don’t answer. Don’t even talk.”
He slid his legs to the floor, stood, and paced beside the bed.
She kept quiet, because explaining would only make things worse.
They both knew what the Broker was, if not who he was, not exactly.
The name had come up throughout the years, overheard first in late-night conversations between Clare and Raymond, brought up again in later discussions between Clare and others from her past, like that jackass Santiago outside Fortul. There’d been a powerful, larger-than-life, mysterious air to the way they’d said the name, similar to the way people used Illuminati or Mafia or global elite, unknowable to anyone but the knowing. She was ten when she’d asked Clare what the Broker was.
“A backstabbing traitor, liar, and thief,” Clare had said, and she’d warned her then that one day his path might cross hers, warned her and Jack both, the same way she’d warned them about riptides, burning buildings, and hit men, preparing them to survive in the same way she’d prepared them to survive everything.
Even still, it had taken a few more years of eavesdropping for Jill to actually get it. By then she’d also understood that there was blood in the water and that Clare’s distaste for this person-slash-thing was as much personal as practical, which was why, in spite of everything she doubted about Clare’s delusions, she never doubted that the Broker, on some level, was real.
Jack stopped pacing.
Hands at his sides, he looked down and said, “Accept the contract.”
Jill glanced up, puzzled. “You can’t be serious. We have no idea what he knows or what this contract really is or what the endgame is or how well the target is supported. Meanwhile”—she glanced at the mildewed carpet between bed and wall—“we’ve got what’s in this room.”
“All extraneous,” Jack said. “If this is the guy who took Clare, then he knows where Clare was dropped of
f and into whose hands she was delivered. That’s a heck of a lot more than we know. The contract gives you a legitimate reason to pursue him.”
Jill traced a finger along the frayed bedspread stitching.
She said, “He had the skill to find and capture Clare, got to Raymond before we did, and your plan is to take him alive?”
Noise patterns beyond the door shifted.
Jack slipped toward the window, nudged the curtain aside, and peered out.
He signed to her, hands indicating what his mouth couldn’t. “Cops. Door-to-door. Five minutes. Hurry.”
CHAPTER 22
CLARE
AGE: 54
LOCATION: SOMEWHERE ON THE WATER
PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS
NAMES: UNPRINTABLE
SHE WAITED IN THE DARK, PALMS TO THE FLOOR, BACK TO THE WALL, counting the thuds and scuffles that marked a shift change above.
The floor rose and fell in a soft, rolling heave.
Groaning metal vibrated beneath fingers and cold bare toes.
She stared at the reinforced door, where, if she focused long enough, hard enough, the threads of light danced and warped.
Time marched on, infinite and unending, spiraling into forever.
She’d woken in this frigid black, dehydrated, disoriented, hungry.
Her captors had sedated her in the helicopter, stripped her down, and put her in the prison-like scrubs she wore now. She hadn’t been conscious for the handoff. Three days, possibly four, she’d been in this closet-sized vault, shackled ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist by way of a chain around her middle, suffocating from the odor of her unwashed body and the stench of waste that had yet to be removed from the bucket in the front left corner.
Reprieve had come with interrogation, and then the phone call.
And there’d been darkness again, blinding her to the passage of time.
She was locked away where no human voice could reach her by chance and where, scream as she might, she wouldn’t be seen or heard.
Absolute solitude. An unending wait.
This was the path to mental destruction.
The human brain, isolated and sensory deprived, atrophied like an unused muscle, beckoning psychosis. Madness rode in on its heels.
She cackled at the thought.
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