“You think someone at CIA is dirty.”
“I know a lot of people at CIA are dirty.” Quinn’s voice held a hint of humor. “It’s part of our job description.”
“I’m talking about a traitor.”
“I know.” Quinn grew serious. “And you’ve always had good instincts.”
“Do you know who?”
“If I did, he’d be dead.” Quinn’s cold tone sent a shiver down Amanda’s spine.
“How does MacLear play into this?”
“Surely you’ve figured that out.”
“SSU hasn’t entirely disbanded.”
“No, it hasn’t. And they’re selling themselves out to the highest bidder.” Quinn sounded bemused. “I always figured them for cockroaches, but I had no idea just how indestructible they’d turn out to be.”
Which fit Damon’s story about how he’d come to work for SSU—Quinn had sent him to infiltrate the secret security force and bring the company down from the inside. “Why do you think the hit on me has something to do with Kaziristan?”
“Haven’t you wondered why I wasn’t the one to debrief you after you escaped?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “They said you were on assignment.”
“They
sent
me on assignment.” His voice dropped an octave. “I should’ve been there. You needed me, and they kept me away from you. I’ve spent three years trying to figure out why.”
“And what have you concluded?” she asked, her voice strained by a terrible thought racing through her brain.
Quinn voiced her thought for her. “I think someone big at the CIA knew who took you and didn’t want you to tell what you knew to anyone who could put a kink in his plans.”
She closed her eyes, feeling sick. “Quinn, I don’t know the name of the man who debriefed me. He never told me, and I never asked. I’d never seen him before—”
“He may not have been CIA at all,” Quinn murmured. “He may have been contracted by whoever wanted to hide your captors’ identities.”
“But Mitch Jefferson okayed the interrogation.”
“Jefferson left the CIA last year. Took early retirement.” Quinn’s voice darkened. “Now I’m wondering if that’s just a coincidence.”
Amanda passed a hand over her burning eyes. “I don’t want to believe it. Jefferson seemed like one of the good ones.”
“He could have been a dupe. If the order came from high enough up—”
“How high up?” she asked, appalled.
“Very. Too high for me to reach, which is why I’m bypassing the CIA altogether.” He sounded impatient. “Listen, I can’t stay on this line much longer. You do what Damon asks. Okay? I wouldn’t ask it of you if I thought there was a better way. You’re running out of time, and all those bastards need is to get lucky just once.”
“I’ll do it,” she agreed. She’d already decided she would.
“Go answer the door.” He hung up the phone.
She stared at the phone for a second. Then a soft rapping sound at the front of the house set her nerves jangling.
She did as Quinn asked, opening the door to Damon North. He stood in the doorway, holding a large canvas bag. “You talk to Quinn?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get ready to go.”
Her eyes widened. “Now?”
“If you stick around, Cooper will come back and try to talk you out of it.” Damon motioned for her to let him in the house. “You know you’ve got to do this.”
“Don’t you have to set something up?” she asked as they went back to the guest room to gather her gear.
“Already done.” He set his bag on her bed, unzipped it and pulled out a camouflage coverall. “Here, wear this.”
She looked up from her duffel bag, her hand still on the butt of the SIG Sauer she’d selected from her small collection. “You and Quinn were pretty confident I’d lay my neck on the line for you, huh?”
“You’re not doing this for us. You’re doing it for yourself. You’re the target. We figured you couldn’t give up the chance to finally stop running away.”
She looked down at the pistol in her hand. It was sleek, black and deadly. But it might not prove to be much protection against a small army of ruthless, well-trained men on a mission.
Running away didn’t seem like such a bad option.
But once a person started running, it was next to impossible to stop. Sooner or later, you had to turn around, plant your feet and make a stand. Might as well make hers while she was still in fighting condition.
“Okay,” she said, pulling ammunition from the bag and grabbing the compact Walther she liked to carry in an ankle holster as a backup weapon. She belted the holster around her ankle and rose to face Damon, who was holding the coverall open for her. She stepped into the legs and zipped up the front. “I need somewhere to put my holster.”
Damon pulled a camouflage belt out of the bag. She belted it around her waist and clipped her holster to the belt, then went across the room to the desk by the window.
“What are you doing?” Damon asked as she scrabbled through the drawers.
“I need to leave Rick a note.”
Damon shook his head. “He’ll come after you.”
“He’ll come after me if I leave here without a note.” She found a small notepad and a pen in one of the drawers and jotted a quick note. “I’m telling him I’m going for a long walk and not to expect me back until four.” Rick said he’d be gone a couple of hours, which meant he’d be back around three. She’d get a three-hour head start before he started looking.
If she was lucky, it would all be over by then.
One way or another.
Chapter Fifteen
Maddox Heller’s place in Borland, Alabama, a town about twenty minutes from Maybridge, seemed pretty ordinary at first glance. Nestled at the end of a winding, wooded road, the two-story farmhouse sat on a small clearing about thirty yards back from the road. The front yard was mostly wooded, shaded by towering pines, while behind the house, a natural garden spread out, inviting and abloom with daffodils, hyacinths and tulips.
Rick parked in an empty place in the driveway and walked up the flagstone walkway to the front door, wondering what he’d find inside. Rick had never met Maddox Heller, but the former Marine had been notorious for a while a few years back, shortly after the embassy siege that had led to the long period of instability in Kaziristan.
As the State Department’s chosen whipping boy, Heller had faced a dishonorable discharge and plenty of blame from the media and politicians eager to deflect attention from their own slow reactions to intelligence-agency warnings of impending unrest in Kaziristan.
Then another crisis came along, the news cycle rolled on and Heller had disappeared from the headlines.
Rick knew him only by the newspaper photos he’d seen and the still shots cable news and broadcast stations had put on-screen while sensationalizing his story. He expected to find a slightly older version of the Marine Heller had been when the story erupted.
Instead, he found a cheerful-looking man with sandy hair worn a little long and at least two days’ growth of beard on his smiling face. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt stained with the same grape jelly currently covering the sticky fingers of a dark-haired toddler perched on his hip.
“Sorry about the mess—Daisy’s going through the terrible twos.” Heller started to reach out his hand to shake Rick’s, spotted the jelly goo on his palm and drew back with an apologetic smile. “Iris will be here to take her off our hands in a second—she’s on her way home from the nursery.”
“If this is a bad time—”
“No, come on in.” Heller had a strong Southern drawl, far stronger than his own, which so much time out of Alabama had muted and tempered. “Daisy Mae, your mama’s gonna have to give you a bath in the middle of the day. What do you say to that?”
“Baf!” Daisy patted her father’s face with delight, leaving grape-jelly stains on his cheeks.
“You got any kids?” Heller asked as he led Rick into a comfortable, lived-in den. He grabbed a large pink diaper bag off the sofa cushion and dug inside, still gripping his daughter on his hip. He pulled out a small, flat box and handed it to Rick. “Can you open that and give me a wipe?”
Rick complied, answering Heller’s earlier question as he handed over the wet wipe. “No kids,” he answered, thinking of Amanda. She seemed about the least likely candidate for motherhood he knew, and given his experience with his own mother, who hadn’t been able to take motherhood or marriage to a small-town cop, he wasn’t going to force any woman into a life she couldn’t handle. “Don’t think it’s in the cards for me.”
Heller took the wipe and went to work on the toddler’s sticky hands and face. The little girl struggled to keep away from the wipe, making a game of it. “I’d have said the same thing a few years ago. Until Iris came along.”
“Who made the mess in the kitchen?” A woman’s voice floated in from somewhere near the back of the house, making both Heller and the baby turn in that direction, grins on their faces. A moment later, a slim, pretty woman with dark, wavy hair and bright brown eyes entered the room, her eyes alight at the sight of her family. “I see it was a peanut butter and jelly day!” She held out her arms and the toddler wriggled against her father’s grasp until he set her down. She raced to her mother on plump, churning legs.
The woman picked up the little girl and gave her a big kiss. “Sorry I’m a little late—Lily dropped by with Casey and Seth—” She stopped short, realizing there was someone else in the room. “Oh, hi. You must be Rick. I’m Iris Heller.”
“I told her we were expecting you,” Heller explained.
“I’ll just take Daisy to the bathroom to wash up and then we’ll go outside and play before it starts getting colder.” Iris gave her husband a quick kiss and headed down the hallway, out of sight.
“I didn’t know someone else would be here.”
“Iris knows everything I know at this point, and I assume you’re here to find out what I know, right?”
“Right.”
“So let’s get started.” Heller wiped his hands and face with the wet wipe and tossed it in a nearby trash can. “Jesse faxed me over the sketch of the man who tortured your friend. I’ve got to say, I was a little surprised by it.”
“Why?”
Heller picked up a folder sitting on a nearby desk and opened it, pulling out a fax copy of the sketch. “I think I know this guy. He was a little younger when I knew him, and his hair is longer in this picture, but I’d just about swear it’s a guy I knew named Khalid Mazir.”
Something about the name seemed familiar, but Rick couldn’t place it. “And why’s that surprising?”
“Because the Khalid Mazir I knew was a bright, Westernized kid. His daddy was the deputy minister of finance for the regime in place when al Adar took the embassy under siege. Old Zoli Mazir ended up gettin’ killed a couple of weeks later in a car bombing outside the ministry building.”
Rick had to admit, Khalid Mazir didn’t sound like a likely suspect for an al Adar operative. “Maybe Khalid just looks like this guy.”
“Except for this birthmark.” Heller pointed to a kidney-shaped dark mark just under the left eye of the man in the sketch. “Khalid Mazir definitely had this same birthmark.”