“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?
“Yes,” Nick said. “Absolutely.”
Isabel got right up into his face. Nick didn’t flinch or back down. “I don’t believe you. People talk and Hector is very plugged into the national security apparatus. How are you going to investigate something this big without tipping him off? He’ll be gone at the first whiff of an investigation. I wish I could just take a gun and kill him. He’s getting away with mass murder and we can’t stop him! What can we do?”
Silence. Utter, complete silence.
“There might be a way,” the robot voice said finally.
* * *
“I don’t like it,” Joe said, crossing his arms. He put a lot of emphasis in his voice, making it deep, using his command voice. The one that had young recruits flinching. Because no way was Isabel doing this.
“I like it,” Isabel said. “Let’s do it.”
Joe heart beat painfully in his chest. He wanted to put his foot down, hard. He wanted to stop this craziness. Isabel was straining at the bit and that was dangerous for Navy SEALs who trained day in day out for years for missions, let alone a beautiful young woman whose most dangerous assignment was wielding sharp knives in the kitchen.
But there was no stopping her.
That was another reason his heart was hammering. This was an Isabel he’d never seen before. Not the gentle, wounded, grieving woman who made him want to wrap himself around her and never let go.
No, this woman was electric, sparks flying off her. Eyes wide, shiny, a flush under that ivory skin. Even her hair crackled. She walked up and down as CIA guy and the ASI team discussed the outrageous plan as if it was in any way feasible.
r /> Which it wasn’t.
She would do this over his dead body.
The only thing was—it looked like she was willing to do just that. Step right over his stroked-out body as if he was invisible and carry out the plan to get Hector Blake, because there was no stopping her.
“Let’s go through this again,” the Senior said. He was good at strategizing, which was fortunate because though Joe was good at strategizing, too, right now his brain was MIA. Whatever electricity had fired Isabel up had been leeched from him because it felt like his very bones were weak. Like someone had zapped him.
It was terror like he’d never felt before. Because they were planning on using Isabel as fucking bait. Bait for the man responsible for the Massacre. And she was up for it, oh yeah. No stopping her, in fact. Joe had tried, he really had, but Isabel wasn’t even listening to him.
The plan was fairly simple so Joe absorbed it through his skin because his head wasn’t working right. It was filled with images of Isabel shot, Isabel knifed, Isabel dead. Fucking Blake finishing off the job he’d started in Washington.
And then someone said something that was like a cattle prod. “Fuck no,” he said. “I’m going to be right beside her.”
Because someone had talked about the ASI guys—and that included him—being in the back and hidden behind bushes and there was no way. Just—no way.
Isabel looked at him impatiently, as if he was a few bricks shy of a load. “The only way this is going to work is if he thinks I’m alone. I mean cosmically alone. I know him down to the ground and if there’s one thing he is, it’s vain. I can get him to talk but he would only talk to me. To Isabel Delvaux, victim. The only survivor of a family he slaughtered. If I play it right—and I will—he’s going to want to brag. How clever he was, how he deceived us all. How no one will ever believe me.”
“No one will believe you because you’ll be dead.” Joe looked everyone in the eye, cool and calm, though his back was covered in sweat. “This is not gonna happen.”
It was as if he hadn’t spoken.