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.
Angela perched on the edge of her seat, hands still tightly grasping the chair’s arms, but now, it was as if she held on to keep from springing into the air. Sawyer was the polar opposite. Trepidation pooled in the pit of his stomach. “What do you mean? Both of us dig?”
“You dig. You find out what’s out there to learn.”
“Field work? In the U.S.?” Sawyer did a double take. He understood Angela had asked to be involved, but this assignment didn’t make sense. Angela didn’t leave the office for work. She didn’t go anywhere dangerous. That was the point of Angela’s job, far, far away from her home base, where she was safe from Pham’s network.
“Yeah,” Jared said. “Get in the field. Dig around. Learn what there’s to learn.” He focused on her. “You can do it.”
“I can do it. Absolutely,” she replied.
“I’ll get you everything we have,” Parker said. “Mylene Hathaway’s full history. Army. National Intelligence Office. The files from the murder investigation. Anything I can find.” Parker turned from their screen to work on his computer. “And I’ll dig on this end. We’ll see if we can find anything that points to Pham’s involvement in the murders.”
Sawyer’s jaw jutted. “What? Now we’re cold-case investigators? I don’t think so.”
“We’re not trying to exonerate Mylene,” Jared said. “We’re researching, trying to confirm Pham’s involvement.”
“We can do that from here.”
Angela glared. “I don’t think so.”
“Parker is in the U.S. We’re here with NSA-level technology—”
“What happens when we prove he’s involved?” Angela asked.
Jared pursed his lips and shrugged as if he hadn’t just suggested the most ludicrous assignment Sawyer had ever heard. “Once we do that, if we’re right, one thing begets the next.”
“Begets? What the fuck, Boss Man? We’re not—”
“There will likely be one of two outcomes,” Parker said, finally sounding the slightest bit data driven. “She’s dead or held against her will.”
“Parker, man, this doesn’t sound like anything we—Angela, especially—need to get near. Right?”
Parker ignored him. “Killing his targets hasn’t been Pham’s typical M.O.”
Were they really having a conversation about Angela working in the U.S. when someone had just attempted to kill her? How was he the only one who didn’t see sky-high red flags?
Jared nodded. “That leaves us with the option of finding her alive.”
“So she’s out there.” Angela released the chair from her death grip, letting hope infiltrate her words. “We can find her.”
Possibility lit her sweet, innocent face in a way that gutted Sawyer. He didn’t want to tell her no. Hell, the two other people in their conversation should be putting their feet down with absolute hell-nos. Sawyer’s heart galloped. There was no way he would gallivant around the world with Angela to find Mylene Hathaway, and there was no way he would endanger Angela to find another of Pham’s victims.
His molars ground again. Jared needed to shut down this half-cocked idea, but he didn’t. “Wait.” Sawyer glanced from Parker to Angela and then to Jared. “We can’t—are you all serious?”
Jared nodded.
Sawyer did another double take. “In what world is this a good idea?”
“In the world we’re living in,” Angela snapped.
“Look, Ange, I didn’t mean—” Honestly, though, he did. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through. If he had been in her position? Yeah, he’d want to do what he could to help someone living in that same hell. But this wasn’t how they needed to handle the situation with Angela. “Neither of us is the right person for this job.”
“It’s the job I need.”
Sawyer waited for Boss Man to back him up, but silence loomed. “I’m not an investigator—”
“Sure you are. I know what you do, Sawyer.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. Titan specialized in getting the job done. What the job might be? Every time, it was different. He’d worked hostage recovery situations as many times as he had infiltrated behind enemy lines. That was Titan’s bread and butter. If it involved helicopters, ammo, and need-to-know intel, Sawyer was your guy. But cold case… research? Intel gathering? He didn’t even know what to call it.
Sawyer shook his head. Angela knew what they did, and she knew enough to understand that out of everyone on the ACES team, he was the least qualified. Hagan liked to figure out puzzles. Liam specialized in surveillance. Sawyer just wanted to get in and get out. He’d walk into hellfire so long as it was on his to-do list.
He rubbed his hands over his face as though he could scrub away the mental contradictions. If his job meant he was supposed to smoke out a missing woman, that shouldn’t have been a problem. But doing so with Angela when they knew precisely nothing? That idea didn’t sit well with him. His eyes pinched shut. “This is a bad idea, boss.”
“You want someone else to go with her?”
Sawyer’s eyes flew open. “I didn’t say that.” He tried to ignore Angela’s glare boring a hole in the side of his head and failed spectacularly. “If we find her, then what?”
“Focus. Bull’s-eye on the problem first.” Jared’s forehead furrowed. “We don’t know what we don’t know. I can’t tell you what we’ll do with it once we know.”
Sawyer scowled. “If she exists.”
“She exists,” Angela hissed.
“If she’s still alive,” Sawyer corrected.
“She is.” Angela’s confidence scared the hell out of him. It was almost enough to quell the anxiety thudding in his chest. “Pham wouldn’t be trying to negotiate—”
“We don’t know that is who he was going to offer up in exchange—”
“Then we find them all,” Angela roared. “Like we should have done before.”
The truth was enough to suck the oxygen from the room. Sawyer didn’t disagree. But that didn’t change his mind about who should do what. He rolled his lips together and stared at Jared. Angela shouldn’t be involved. She was untrained and emotionally too close. For the same reason a surgeon shouldn’t operate on their loved one, Angela shouldn’t search for a victim of the same abductor, even solely to gather intel.
“Spit it out, Sawyer,” Boss Man ordered. “You think I’m wrong? She’s wrong? Whatever you’ve got to say, say it so we can move forward.”
Sawyer glanced at Angela.
“Angela’s not going to bite,” Jared muttered.
Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know that.”
Sawyer ran his hand over his face and into his hair again, where his knuckles tightened. “I don’t understand why you would let her do this.”
“Because I asked, Sawyer,” she said.
“I’ve asked for a hell of a lot of things over the years, and you,” he said to Jared, “didn’t bother entertaining any bullshit requests.” Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “And now something comes along that puts Angela in danger, and you’re all ‘let’s go see what happens’?”
“Her location has been compromised,” Jared pointed out. “She’s gotta go somewhere. Why not go somewhere that no one would expect?”
“Let’s not forget,” Angela added, “I want to do this. I asked to do this. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“Yeah. You can.” The muscles in Sawyer’s jaw ticked. “What if shit hits the fan? What if we find Mylene surrounded by Pham’s ghouls? We’re unarmed. Unprepared.” He motioned to Angela. “Untrained.”
“We’ve talked about that,” Parker said.
“ What ?” Sawyer had walked into the conversation too late, powerless to the decisions made without his input.
“We mitigate the dangers. Prepare for the unexpected, arm you both appropriately, and provide training as needed.”
“Arm us both?” Sawyer repeated incredulously. Had he ever seen Angela hold a weapon?
“Sawyer,” she said. “I’m doing this with or without you.”
Jared didn’t dispute her words.
Frustrated, Sawyer pushed back into his chair. He didn’t have a good understanding of the job requirements and wasn’t making a good argument. No for no’s sake wouldn’t cut it. Suddenly, Sawyer was acutely aware that he was half-dressed. No wonder he wasn’t convincing anyone. He looked like an idiot.
“Give me a chance, Sawyer,” Angela said.
He had a hundred reasons to say no, but damn when her voice pained him. On top of that, this investigation might happen without him. There was no one else he’d rather send in his place. Sawyer rubbed the back of his neck. “So, where would we go?”
Angela’s small smile hit him straight in the chest.
“Her last known location was in North Carolina,” Parker replied. “A little island off the coast called Emerald Isle.”
“That’s where she lived?” Sawyer said.
“No. That’s where Mylene’s husband and sister were murdered. She didn’t live too far from there, though.”
“What the hell are we going to find there?” Sawyer asked.
“Probably not much,” Parker answered. “But it’s a good starting point. From what we know about Pham, if he took Mylene, she wouldn’t be that far from her home base.”
Sawyer needed more convincing. “You’re blowing me away with all the intel.”
“Statistically speaking,” Parker continued, “this is our best bet. We start there. I’ll milk the system for what else the Feds might know but haven’t shared. I’ll see what I can do to eavesdrop on Pham’s communication network. You two will be working the ground game until I have something more for you to follow up on.”
“Sounds like we’ll have nothing to do.” Sawyer chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Boring.”
“First, it’s too much, too dangerous.” Angela sighed. “Now it’s too boring.”
Sawyer didn’t know what his problem was. Angela’s involvement felt grossly unnecessary. Titan could move her to a different safe house, and Senator Sorenson could move heaven and earth so the Feds could follow up on the Mylene Hathaway lead.
Angela rolled her eyes. “Fine. Let’s ask someone else. Camden?”
“No.” He side-eyed her. “You’re not going anywhere—”
“Excuse me?”
“Not going anywhere with Camden .” Sawyer blew out a deep breath. “Don’t cut me off, Ange. You know that’s not what I meant.” Except that was what he meant.
She shrugged. “Camden is always looking for reasons to travel.”
“This isn’t ‘a reason to travel’. It’s putting yourself in danger—”
“Or boredom,” she quipped. “You never know.”
He rubbed his temples. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“Sawyer, look, man. She’s doing this.” Jared studied Sawyer. “You’re the one who’s kept her safe since the day she arrived.”
This week? Barely. Sawyer ground his molars again.
“So what’s it going to be?” Jared asked. “Are you gonna let someone else pick up your responsibilities?”
“I’m not his responsibility,” Angela said, though her voice sounded far away.
Anyone on their team would keep her safe. Sawyer trusted the ACES team with his life every damn time they left on a job. But did he trust them with her life? Yeah. Of course. But at the same time, he couldn’t imagine letting them step into a role that was his. “I’m in.”