Chapter Twelve
Treadmills whirled. The sound mixed with the heavy footsteps of grown men running to nowhere.
The monotonous rumble surrounded Sawyer and thundered in his head.
He’d thought the run would clear his mind of the memory of Angela under his arm, of the way she leaned against him, and how he kissed the top of her head.
It didn’t, and now he had a headache that pounded in time with the pace of his run.
Boss Man walked into the gym and stopped in front of the row of treadmills. He ignored the men flanking Sawyer’s sides and threw him a look that hit Sawyer like a grenade. Something was wrong. Sawyer smacked the stop button and hopped off the machine before the belt finished revolving.
“Let’s go,” Boss Man barked over his shoulder, not waiting for him to catch up.
Sawyer pulled off his shirt and toweled the sweat from his face, hustling to meet Boss Man’s pace. “Gimme a second.”
“No.”
Sawyer’s gut churned. His pulse jumped and drummed in his ears.
“Good luck,” Hagan called as he passed.
Sawyer needed it. This had to do with Angela and everything that spiraled from the moment Pham’s bullshit had shown up in Abu Dhabi.
The private gym was on the far west side of the same floor as Titan’s office suite. Usually, Sawyer didn’t head toward Boss Man’s office in athletic shorts with only a sweat-drenched shirt wrapped around his neck, but nothing had been normal this week.
Air conditioning and uncertainty poured over him. The hair on his arms stood on end. The silent, sterile hallway closed in around Sawyer. Boss Man wasn’t exactly known for his manners, but that he’d hightailed out of the gym with only an order to keep up gave Sawyer heartburn.
Jared’s office door had been left ajar. Sawyer strode in to find Boss Man behind his desk. Parker was on the big screen facing a different screen in his lair, clacking away on a keyboard.
As Angela sat across from Jared, her lips parted. “Guess I know where Boss Man found you.” Her gaze flitted to his chest then jerked toward Parker.
“All right.” Jared cracked his knuckles. “Let’s go over this again. This time for Sawyer’s benefit.”
Angela sat with a ramrod-straight spine.
Her ankles were crossed underneath her chair.
She didn’t have a hair out of place. Her simple white blouse was starched.
A slender black skirt covered her knees.
Rocking the uptight librarian getup, she didn’t appear any different than usual, except her face made it look like she might shatter.
Parker turned from the other screen and greeted Sawyer with a chin lift. “This is what we know.”
Sawyer kept Angela in his peripheral vision. He wasn’t sure she was breathing.
“Mylene Hathaway,” Parker said as the screen switched to a headshot of a woman in a U.S.
Army uniform. “She was a communications analyst coordinating with the National Intelligence Office, acting as a principal advisor to the director. She played a crucial role in Operation Red Gold, where Pham’s daughter Quy Long was killed. ”
“Mylene Hathaway. That’s who Pham has?” Sawyer looked from the headshot to Jared and back again.
“And no one knew?” He scowled. Mylene Hathaway sounded like someone who would be on the army’s shortlist of missing people.
She was young and beautiful—a poster child for a public-relations nightmare if the public knew she was AWOL. “How is that possible?”
“You know how Pham operates,” Jared growled. “He doesn’t kill the people he wants to hurt.”
“Yeah.” Sawyer nodded. “He inflicts suffering when he kills their loved ones.”
Jared nodded. “The sadistic fuck.”
Parker reappeared on the screen. “We have a mile-long list of people who he has ordered killed in the name of retribution. Most of them… It took years to figure out they were Pham’s victims.”
“Pham did that to Mylene Hathaway?” Sawyer asked.
Parker crossed his arms. “Maybe.”
Maybe wasn’t a very Parker-like answer. He was likelier to mention statistical deviations and binomial distributions. Sawyer glanced at Jared and Angela. “Maybe?”
Jared pursed his lips, and after a century-long second that was answer enough, he confirmed that they didn’t know shit. “Maybe.” He tilted his head to one side, cracking his neck, then the other. “Parker, explain.”
Sawyer braced for an explanation flush with terminology that would go right over his head.
“Mylene Hathaway has been AWOL since the year before Angela’s abduction. She returned from the DNI’s office outside Washington, DC, and, as we understand it, learned that her husband and sister were having an affair.”
Despite Parker’s far less-than-expected technical answer, Sawyer emitted a low whistle.
“Yeah,” Parker agreed. “They were found murdered, and shortly after that, a warrant for Mylene Hathaway was issued but never served.” He cleared his throat. “No one could find her.”
If he didn’t know better, Sawyer would’ve guessed Mylene had knocked off her husband and sister and gone into hiding. Given that Pham was part of the conversation, that was far too easy. Sawyer stole a glance at Angela, who was as still as a statue. “They never found her?”
Angela didn’t answer.
“They did not find Mylene,” Parker confirmed. “There was a manhunt, but it didn’t last long. Bureaucracy and internal politics. She fell off the radar.”
Sawyer shifted in the chair. His thighs stuck to the leather cushion.
He didn’t want to study Angela and her lack of conversation and reaction, but it was unnerving.
“So… it’s a cold case…” He tried to read the room.
Parker and Jared were clearly unimpressed with the military’s investigation.
Angela was stock-still and unreadable. Sawyer ran a hand over his face and sifted through what he knew of Pham.
“So, do we think Mylene killed her husband and sister or not?”
“Someone did,” Jared snarked.
“The evidence points to Mylene,” Parker said.
Then what was the catch? And why the hell was Angela stone-cold and ignoring his questions?
“But,” Parker added, “this is the picture a sketch artist drew after meeting with Angela. After she first reported the unknown woman to the Feds.” A profile sketched in pencil replaced Parker’s face on the screen.
“And this is the sketch from a forensic artist Angela spoke with this morning.” A near replica split the screen.
Side by side, the drawings were shockingly similar.
“Now, for good measure.” A photograph appeared next to the two drawings.
“This is Mylene Hathaway in civilian clothes in a photo dated just before her husband and sister were murdered.”
“Holy crap.” The woman in the photograph was smiling. That was the only difference between the picture and the two sketches drawn years apart. Goose bumps ran down his back. He faced Angela and repeated the obvious, “That’s the same lady.”
“Yes,” Angela finally said. “And she’s been under Pham’s thumb since before he took me.” With her statue-act shattered, she turned to Sawyer. A terrifying storm of devastation and cold fury brewed in her dark eyes. “She’s been there, stuck in hell, with no one trying to find her.”
Sawyer couldn’t fathom the years that Pham had stolen from Angela, but he could hear and see the trauma that bubbled so close to the surface.
Despite that, her fight for control was stronger.
He wanted to comfort her, though nothing he could think of was adequate.
His fleeting thoughts felt selfish and hollow.
Unspoken words—platitudes—caught in his throat.
There was nothing to say about Mylene or the situation.
“What now?” Sawyer managed.
“This is the thing.” Boss Man grimaced. “We know squat.”
“Technically…” Parker reappeared on the screen. “Not squat.”
Jared gave Angela a stern look that promised they weren’t at rock bottom. “Parker has strings to pull.”
“That’s good,” she whispered.
Sawyer leaned back, his skin stuck uncomfortably to the chair. He crossed his arms. “All right. Until Parker works his magic, we know squat. That’s not nothing.” He studied Angela. “It’s a holding pattern.”
Jared nodded, eyeing Angela as though sizing her up for a task. “Parker can only do so much without new intel.”
Sawyer didn’t like the mental gymnastics he could see on Jared’s face.
Nor did he like the way Angela’s position stiffened a degree more.
His glance ping-ponged between them before he finally determined the question that he already knew would have an answer Sawyer would hate. “How do we get more intel?”
“On a years-old cold case that no one wants jurisdiction over?” Jared’s eyebrow arched like Sawyer had asked to search for life on another planet. “There’s not a lot of resources.”
“Yes, there is,” Angela countered. “If Mylene is who Pham wants to trade for a deal.”
“We don’t have any indication that’s who Pham has or is willing to trade in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“I don’t want Pham to trade on Mylene.” Angela clutched the chair arms. “I don’t want him using her for one more thing.”
Jared nodded thoughtfully. “I get that, Angela…”
“But what?” she pushed. “If we tell them what we know, they’ll either continue to ignore me, as they always have, or use it in negotiations.”
“Then where does that leave us?” Sawyer studied Boss Man and tried deciphering what the hell was running through his mind. “If we give whatever we learn to the Feds, we give up control.”
Jared nodded.
“They’ll want to run point,” Sawyer continued. “Which isn’t something you like to do.”
The corners of Jared’s lips quirked, and he gave a slight nod. “This is what I’m thinking.” He studied Sawyer and Angela. “You two go into the field and dig where Parker says to dig.”
“What?” they both said, his voice laden with confusion, hers with hope.