Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“You sure you’re good?” Natasha stood in front of the bedroom door, blocking Wyatt’s path to the living room.
She needed to ensure he was truly okay after the bomb Charlotte had delivered.
He’d had less than two minutes to process the truth before Harper had knocked on the door, saying she had news.
She’d shot Harper a silent request with her eyes and a tip of the head to give them a second.
“I’ll be fine,” Wyatt assured her.
But would he be fine? He was paler than normal. Eyes a touch red. The veins at the tops of his hands more prominent from repeatedly clenching and unclenching, angrily tucking his fingertips into his palms.
Gray had done the same thing after the helicopter crash, and whenever she visited him, he’d be in bed, hands clenched at his sides as if channeling all his frustration, prepared to hit an invisible enemy.
Natasha took a tentative step his way and secured her arms around his body before he could protest, before he could tell her they had no time. Harper had an image of the guy in the hoodie from the salsa club, and yes, they were needed in the living room, but Wyatt also needed one damn minute.
“You can squeeze me. Tight as you need to,” she offered. He buried his face in her hair near the side of her neck.
His heart pounded fiercely against her chest, but he didn’t cry. He didn’t let go. He just quietly held on to her.
“We should go,” he announced as he pulled away, his voice deep. “Thank you.” His brows pulled tight, and she nodded.
“So, um, what do you have?” Wyatt asked Harper once they were in the living room.
“The image I pulled from Instagram was pretty pixelated since he was in the background of a selfie, but I worked my magic and managed to get a cleaner shot.” Harper magnified the view, and for some insane reason, Natasha closed her eyes.
“Natasha?” Wyatt placed his hand on her shoulder, and that simple act immediately gave her strength. This man had flipped her world upside down these last few days, and most likely, long before tonight.
She swallowed, pushed away her fears that this would be a dead lead, and lifted her gaze to the screen.
A pair of close-set, dark brown eyes stared back at her. Brownish-black hair peeked out beneath the hood on the man’s forehead. A long, straight nose. Thick slanted brows. No remarkable features, but she recognized him instantly.
Natasha’s shoulders sagged under the weight of disappointment. “I know him. And he’s dead. Well, I thought he was.”
“What do you mean?” Wyatt’s hand connected with her back this time. Gentle strokes up and down. Comforting and calming.
She turned to the side so she could look back and forth between both Harper and Wyatt.
“That’s Alexander Rothus, a deceased businessman.
The owner of the house in Romania where your team was sent to try and apprehend The Knight.
At least he was the owner of that house.
He died in a car crash in twenty-sixteen.
Or so I was led to believe. He had no heirs, so the property was turned over to the city and had remained vacant. Well, supposedly vacant.”
“But the CIA believed it was actually The Knight who’d been living there in twenty-nineteen?” Wyatt asked, and she nodded. “You’re sure this guy in the hoodie is a match for Rothus?”
Natasha set her focus on the screen, doubt in her abilities to perform the job creeping into her mind. But . . . “Yes, it’s him.” She inhaled through her nose and let the breath out slowly. “After the Romanians cremated the body and labeled him as an unidentified squatter, I did some digging.”
Wyatt pulled the chair out next to Harper and offered Natasha a seat, but she needed to stay upright, to keep her feet grounded as she faced the fact The Knight had fooled her again.
“Originally, the Agency assumed The Knight must have chosen the house because it was empty, and for the off-the-grid type location with those pre-existing tunnels. And most likely, he paid someone under the table to look the other way while he lived there. I wasn’t able to verify who he paid off, though.
But I did double-check Rothus’s background to ensure The Knight wasn’t actually Rothus, and he’d faked the car crash.
” I triple-checked even. “Since the crash happened in twenty-sixteen around the time the case fell into my lap, I’d been suspicious it may not have been a coincidence. ”
“Fake his death, then a few years later, come back and temporarily hide out on that property in the middle of nowhere . . . maybe.” Harper pursed her lips in thought.
“He’d have to be damn certain no one would recognize him.” Wyatt addressed one of the concerns her COS had countered as a plot hole in Natasha’s theory back in 2019 about Rothus being The Knight.
“Rothus did own multiple properties when he was alive. It’s possible he never called that one his home. But since I wasn’t authorized to go to Romania and poke around without getting fired—”
“You couldn’t show Rothus’s photo to anyone in town,” Harper finished for her. “What about CCTV cameras?”
Natasha’s shoulders slumped. “The closest towns to his house didn’t have the kind of tech I needed to try and see if Rothus was walking around alive after the car crash but before your team went in.
And even when I ran the image we had of Rothus, there weren’t any hits internationally, either.
Or any alternate aliases connected to his face. ”
“I’m betting your boss shut this theory down, then?” Harper knew all too well how things went at Langley, and she’d been right.
“Yeah, and he did have one point.” Natasha had returned to Langley after visiting Wyatt in Colorado and had pitched the idea about Rothus as The Knight to her boss, Dan Jessup. He’d shut her down within minutes, forcing her to move on to a new case.
“It was the fact you even had a picture of Rothus, right?” Wyatt asked. “If Rothus was The Knight’s real identity or even an alias, he’d never leave a legitimate photo of himself online to be traced.”
“Well, it looks like your boss—I’m betting you were dealing with Dan the Man Jessup—was wrong.” Harper swiveled in her chair, setting her eyes on Natasha.
“Don’t even think about beating yourself up. That arsehat of a boss probably reassigned you, then threatened you to back off The Knight or else, right?” Wyatt spoke up, attempting to dispel her doubts, to remove the blame that was going to eat at her.
Bottom line, looking at this new photo of a supposed dead man at the salsa club, meant she should have followed her gut and kept pushing her theory.
“I guarantee that even now if I run the photo of this guy in the hoodie—Rothus or whatever his real name may be—through our facial recognition software program, we’ll turn up with zero leads,” Harper said as she turned back to her computer and began emailing the image to Jessica.
“However he got to Canada, he’d have found a way to protect his face from getting flagged. ”
“Which means there’s absolutely nothing you could’ve done differently after that op in Romania, especially with Dickhead Dan in charge,” Wyatt remarked.
Dan Jessup wasn’t that bad, but he hadn’t been as stubborn as her in pursuit of the truth.
“And having a photo of The Knight probably wouldn’t have helped you find him before.” Wyatt braced her shoulder. He’d slipped back into strong operator mode, pushing his personal issues aside for the sake of the mission. How many times had he done that? How many times had she?
“But that doesn’t mean having his photo now won’t do any good,” Harper said. “Since we know The Knight is connected to the Wards, we can better sift through the Wards’ history and see if he’s in any photos. Maybe get a real name.”
“Didn’t Jessica spend all of last night combing through their past?” Wyatt asked as Harper reached for her phone. “That woman has a crazy good memory about on point with Liam, so maybe she’ll remember seeing him.”
Natasha looked to Wyatt as Harper phoned Jessica and began explaining everything they’d learned so far.
Wyatt scratched the back of his head, his eyes falling to the floor. “If there’s such a thing as a photographic memory, Liam’s got it, but still nothing compared to Elaina.”
“Elaina, right. The adorable girl they adopted.” Natasha smiled. “Alexa told me all about her.”
“I swear Elaina is psychic, and Liam is gonna have his hands full when she’s older and starts dating.
” His voice thickened as he said his last words, and his hands went back to that familiar clenched position at his sides.
He was thinking about his own daughter now.
Eyes drawn closed. Battling emotions that raged quietly beneath the surface.
“Jessica thinks she may have come across a photo of Rothus when he was younger last night.” Harper’s words grabbed their attention, and Wyatt’s hands relaxed at the news.
He was calmer in operator-mode. In his element. She supposed she could relate.
“Jessica’s looking something up now, but I was just thinking—you said the guy in that house was on fire when you entered, right?” Harper looked to Wyatt since he’d been the one to try and brave entering the home as flames ate the structure, trying to get the man out.
God, she still owed him for that. His bravery. His heroics to forge ahead against all odds. He’d risked his life to try and bring The Knight out alive for her.
“Yeah, he was covered head-to-toe in flames. I couldn’t get to him without dying.” Wyatt glimpsed Natasha, apology in his eyes, and she squeezed his bicep, a plea not to blame himself for anything.
“If he was engulfed in flames, how could he have possibly escaped, even if there was a tunnel, without massive scarring? I’m not familiar with the recovery process for burn victims, but if he did survive, wouldn’t he have some burn scars?
Discoloration or change in the texture of skin, at least.” Harper pointed to the screen, Alexander’s picture pulled back up.
“This man’s skin in this recent photo is flawless. Face. Neck. Hands.”
“Best plastic surgeon in the world?” Wyatt proposed.
“I don’t know.” Harper wasn’t buying it, which meant . . .
“You think Wyatt saw someone else on fire that day.” Natasha released Wyatt’s arm and looked toward the drapes that hid the view outside as she worked through an idea.
“Maybe the Romanians did cremate a body, it just wasn’t The Knight’s,” Wyatt said, his tone grave. “It’s highly likely he wants revenge if he lost someone he cared about that day in the explosion.”
“Which means the Wards believed Roland successfully killed The Knight that day. Maybe they even paid off the police to cremate the body quickly.” Shit, that was it, wasn’t it? “The Wards wanted him cremated because The Knight’s real identity could connect back to them.”
“And I think I know why,” Jessica announced over speakerphone. Natasha had nearly forgotten the line was still connected. “I’m sending you a twenty-year-old photo now. Let me know what you think.”
Natasha gripped the back of Harper’s chair as Harper clicked open a secure email from Jessica.
“The photo dates back to two thousand and one,” Jessica explained. “It’s from Kate Ward’s yearbook at the boarding school she attended in Sweden. Look at the man standing behind her.”
Natasha leaned in over Harper’s shoulder as she enlarged the image so they could better see. And holy shit. “That’s him. That’s Rothus.”
“According to the yearbook, his name is Alexander Balan,” Jessica said. “He was the computer teacher and also the chess coach. The photo was taken when Kate won the European chess championship.”
Chess, of course. “What else can you find out about Balan?”
A crackle popped over the line as if Jessica had exhaled a deep breath. “Nothing. I ran his name, and he’s a ghost.”
“Except this picture.” How was that possible?
“Balan must have erased his identity. When I uploaded the recent photo Harper sent me into our database, I got Rothus for a match.” Irritation weaved through Jessica’s tone.
“The only reason I managed to even get ahold of this photo is because this coming summer is the twenty-year reunion of the graduating class of two thousand and one, and the coordinator for the event digitized their yearbook as a gift to those students. Kate was a sophomore at the time of the chess championship in the yearbook, so she wouldn’t have received a copy. ”
“This is a damn lucky break.” Wyatt reached for Natasha’s hand and interlaced their fingers.
Was this what hope and optimism felt like?
“I guess Balan overlooked that detail,” Jessica said. “I’m thinking Balan not only took Kate under his wing in chess club, but he saw potential in her as a hacker. She was probably his protégé while at school.”
Natasha lifted her gaze from the screen, an idea coming to mind. “What if Kate is the brains behind everything, and Felix is just the face and name? The business was in trouble, so Kate reached out to her old coach for help. He was someone untraceable who she trusted.”
“But when Balan went too far . . . Kate realized she had to put a stop to him,” Wyatt added. “And isn’t the queen in chess actually the piece with the most power?”
Natasha frowned. “I’ve spent five years chasing The Knight, but what if Kate has been calling the shots all along?” She glimpsed Wyatt as he squeezed her hand a little tighter. “But we have to stop Balan before he calls checkmate.”