Chapter 19
The harsh bite of burnt hair still hovered around me as I all but kicked down the cabin door. Inside the authentically rustic space, Wallace sat at the small, wooden dining table, right where I’d left him.
“I quit,” I spat and yanked off my wig, the source of the burning smell.
Luckily, I’d been able to smash out all the embers before they sparked and set my whole head on fire.
The wig was synthetic—a good synthetic—but still, I didn’t know how flammable it was.
I’d run from the burning barn without looking back.
My throat still felt charred from the black smoke, and I could only hope whatever chemical castoff I’d inhaled wasn’t burrowing into my lungs to put down cancerous roots.
Wallace calmly looked up at me, unbothered by my dramatic entrance or appearance.
I hadn’t had time to glance in a mirror while running for my life, but I could feel the ash on my face, the heat from the fire still keeping my cheeks flushed.
I threw the burnt wig on the table, where it landed sprawled like a dead brown animal.
Wallace glanced at it, and then looked back to me.
“Did you get it?” he asked in that steady tone of his. No matter that my heart was still pounding, my ears still ringing from the explosion, the fear of death still speeding through my veins. The job always came first.
His apathy crashed into my anger like gasoline into flame—or like ammonium nitrate into fuel oil, as I’d learned from this very job—and caused me to combust.
I crossed the small room to the table and gripped the back of the chair across from him.
My heavy boots clomped against the cabin floor.
“Did you not hear what I said? I quit. I want out.” I unzipped my thick jacket, thinking some ventilation would help me breathe easier.
I was dressed for the location: deep in the Pacific Northwest woods, fifty miles outside of Portland, where a domestic terrorist group was building chemical bombs to further their cause.
One of those bombs had gone off by accident tonight.
I’d fled the hidden compound with everyone else lucky enough to escape, but I knew when the flames went out and the ash settled, there’d be bodies inside that barn.
I was still reeling over the fact I could have been one of them.
“Did you not hear me?” Wallace repeated my question back to me. “I asked if you got it.” His cold indifference straightened my spine into further defiance.
“Doesn’t matter. The Department of Forestry is going to be all over that place soon, or a wildfire is going to burn down half the forest. You can almost see the flames from here.
” I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb.
My cabin was a solid ten miles from the barn, which was testament to the size of the blaze.
“They’re going to know it was chemical and arrest anyone who made it out alive—which I almost didn’t, by the way,” I bitterly added.
Wallace smoothed his fingers over his mustache and sat forward in his chair. “And you think any of those zealots are going to confess? You’ve gotten to know them.”
He was right. I’d infiltrated their little cult over the past months; I knew them well.
At face value, they didn’t fit the mold.
Young women my age with names like Skye, Lily, and Willow, who wore their hair in blond braids with wildflower crowns.
And their counterparts, the men of the group like Asher, Clark, and Xavier, who built weapons in the name of environmental conservation and plotted to use them against logging companies and GMO testing labs.
To anyone looking, they were a group of passionate college kids who held protests on weekends trying to save the environment, not a hive of ecoterrorists playing chemist deep in the woods.
When I hesitated to answer Wallace, he knew it was because my answer was no. They would not turn on one another and confess. They might even get the fire out before any authorities noticed and bury their dead on their own, and it would all remain secret.
Wallace gave me a stern look. “Did you get it?” he asked, again, with a note of finality like his patience had expired.
The child in me wanted to throw a tantrum. I wanted to refuse and pout and tell him to do his own dirty work. But I had almost just died completing the job and wasn’t about to admit I’d failed when I hadn’t.
I shoved my hand in my coat pocket and yanked out my phone. I tossed it on the table atop my singed wig and glared at him. “Of course I got it. And now I quit.”
He leaned forward to grab the phone and unlocked it with the passcode he’d supplied it with.
I winced when the incriminating video began to play.
Sounds of the minutes leading up to the accidental explosion were already looping through my mind; I didn’t need to hear the recorded version too.
I’d walked through the barn and filmed footage of the gallons of explosives sitting in jugs, the powder kegs, the tubing, and igniters.
I’d been discreet in capturing shots of most everyone there: Willow and Skye packing nails into bins, Xavier and Asher lugging crates from a truck.
Clark in a pair of goggles stirring the mixture that would blow up in his face minutes later.
I was the one who was going to turn on them.
They would have died for one another and their cause, but little did they know that Rain from Seattle was an undercover informant plotting their demise from day one.
Wallace’s mustache twitched up at the corner as the video finished. “Good girl,” he said with a soft smile.
I gnashed my teeth at the phrase. It grated on my nerves and put me in my place every time he said it. But I was done. No more putting myself in danger’s way when it so easily crossed paths with death.
“Okay, job’s done. I want out,” I said and folded my arms over my chest. My heart rate had finally recovered, but I could tell by the look on Wallace’s face, it was about to speed up again.
“Out of what?” he asked.
“This!” I cried and flung out my arms. “Being undercover. Being sent into the woods where idiotic kids blow themselves up by trying to make bombs, or shipyards where drug deals go down at gunpoint, or back alleys were people get stabbed and left to bleed out because they can’t pay a gambling debt. I don’t want to do this anymore!”
Wallace finally stood from his chair. He rounded to my side of the table and leaned back against it with his arms folded. “The work you are doing is important.”
“Says the guy who gets to sit behind a desk and boss me around,” I angrily spat. “You’re not the one out here trying not to get shot and running away from barn fires.”
His face softened with the slightest bit of sympathy. I wouldn’t have caught it if I hadn’t been looking at his hardened features for the past half decade. “You’re right, but you know the agreement.”
“Fuck the agreement. I almost died tonight.”
He flinched at my outburst but quickly recovered.
“And what do you think is going to happen to you if we stop protecting you? You know this isn’t just about staying out of prison.
As long as Olena Nova doesn’t know where that diamond is, you are not safe, remember?
She’s going to keep searching for you until it turns up, or until you turn up dead, so she doesn’t have to kill you herself for sending her to prison. ”
That Goddamned diamond. I wanted it and hated it in equal measure. It was holding me prisoner more than any person. Finding it before anyone else did would solve everything. I’d steal it, sell it, and disappear. Away from the DSA, away from Olena. Poof. Gone.
“Well, where the hell is it? Something had to happen to it that night,” I said.
The familiar frustration of mystery boiled up inside me.
It had been in my hand that night, and then it was just gone.
My best guess was it fell on the floor and someone—not Olena or her henchman—had scooped it up and squirreled it away.
A crooked FBI agent, the crime scene forensics team, maybe the hotel staff who cleaned the room after it was all said and done.
“Do you know where it is?” I asked Wallace.
“I mean, you’d tell me if you did, right?
So I could get out of this whole situation? ”
His dark eyes narrowed for the briefest moment, as if I’d insulted him, before his whole face flattened into his customary scowl. “Of course I don’t know where it is.”
I deflated, although I hadn’t expected him to say yes. A big sigh pushed its way out of my lungs, knowing he was right: I was safer under the DSA’s protection, even if it meant hopping from job to job with a rotating cast of identities.
Wallace sensed my dismay. He clapped me on the back. “How about a little break, hmm? Maybe we put you up in Hawaii for a few days before the next job.”
I grumbled, even though I had to admit it sounded nice. “Make it two weeks and we have a deal.”