CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Angela’s phone rang. For a single, panicked moment, she thought she’d slept through her alarm. She scrambled to answer the call despite the ungodly hour. “Hello?”
“Up and at ’em,” Sawyer demanded as though it weren’t the middle of the night.
“What?” She fought the invading wakefulness. This had to be a nightmare. “It’s still dark outside.” Not even a crack of daylight shone from around her bedroom curtains. “Go away.”
“You can sleep when you’re dead.”
God, what time was it? She’d been up all night, trying to fall asleep. Now that she had, Sawyer was torturing her. Angela fell back into bed, phone pressed to her ear, and grumbled. “What do you want?”
“Breakfast.”
She groaned. “Microwave a breakfast burrito.”
A knock pounded on her front door. She would have closed her bedroom door if she had had the presence of mind last night. That might have muffled Sawyer’s attempt to roust her. “You’re such a bully.”
He pounded on the door again.
“You’re going to wake the neighbors.”
He scoffed. “I brought coffee.”
Angela rolled onto her side. “You’re lucky I’m a caffeine junkie.”
“That’s what I was counting on.”
She hung up on him, tossed the phone, and tied her robe around her waist. Finger-combing her hair into something that bore less resemblance to a banshee’s, she answered the door and snagged her coffee.
Sawyer followed her inside. “You’re looking well-rested.”
“Bite me.”
He parked against the wall and sipped his coffee while she guzzled hers.
“Sawyer.” Her patience was short. The caffeine hadn’t had nearly enough time to hit her system. “Why are you here?”
“To get you out the door. Go get dressed.”
Angela’s eyebrows arched.
“Go get dressed.” He shooed her toward her bedroom. “Get ready to go Stateside.”
Angela maneuvered past him. What was he talking about? Right now? She had to get dressed to “get ready”? Come on, caffeine. She needed her brain to kickstart. “That’s not helping.”
After a minute of sitting on the edge of her bed, she heard his footsteps approach the bedroom. “You dressed?”
“If you mean not naked, then yes.”
He walked in. “Get out of bed.”
“I’m not in bed,” she protested. All of fifteen seconds had passed. What more did Sawyer expect of her before the sun had risen? “I don’t know what we’re doing, so I don’t know what to wear.”
Sawyer plucked her coffee from her hand—if she were more awake, she’d have protested or at least defended herself—then took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“I don’t think I like you very much right now,” she muttered as he dragged her toward her walk-in closet.
They stopped in the middle of a small room. Shoes lined one wall, dresses another. Angela had her skirts and blouses near a vanity that held accessories. A fainting couch and matching upholstered bench held court in the middle of the space.
Sawyer let out a low whistle. “There’s a ton of crap in here.”
“Not how I’d describe it, but yes.”
“You’re very organized.”
“Very,” she agreed. “But it’s not helping me out right now. I don’t know what we’re doing, so how can I dress for success?” She cringed. The sentiment was true, but her control-freak personality was coming on a little too strong.
Sawyer snorted and turned from the rows of skirts arranged by length. “There’s not an outfit in here that’s going to make everything run smoothly.”
“You don’t know that.” She tugged haphazardly at a couple of options. “We need an agenda. How else am I supposed to know what to wear?”
He snickered. “Who knew you were so dramatic before coffee?” He took a long sip and wandered toward the vanity counter, where he studied the granite as though their day’s agenda were hiding in the flecks of white stone. “Look, I’m sorry I took off like that last night.”
She no longer needed caffeine to wake up. Her brain jolted to an unfamiliar level of hyperawareness. Angela smoothed her hands down the side of her robe as a wave of last night’s abandonment crashed over her. She tried to ignore it. “It’s fine.”
He scrutinized the vanity. “My head went to a dark place, and I just needed to roll.”
She hated he wouldn’t face her. Hated that she wanted him to explain more. But more than that, she wanted to bury the emptiness that arrived when he’d left and kept her tossing and turning all night long.
He looked into the vanity’s oversized mirror and studied her.
“Let’s forget it,” she offered then retreated for her coffee. Angela used the seconds-long reprieve to settle the disjointed tension in her chest and returned to her walk-in closet.
Sawyer perched on the edge of her vanity. He held her gaze and then looked around. “Your closet is the size of a living room, you know that?”
She laughed, happy he’d moved on. “Working for Titan has its perks.” Angela folded herself onto the fainting couch and tucked her legs underneath her. “All right, we’re getting ready to go to the US. Why don’t you tell me everything you know? Then I can get dressed and pack a bag.”
“Parker pinged me. We have briefing books ready and a jet booked to take us to North Carolina.”
Her mouth parted. Booking planes and organizing briefing books? Those responsibilities were her job. “Who did that?”
Sawyer shrugged. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m supposed to do that.”
The corners of his lips lifted upward. “Actually, right now, you’re not.”
Disentangling herself from her regular job was worse than figuring out how to dress for the unknown. She didn’t know how to handle the situation. Jared wouldn’t know the first thing about making transportation arrangements. Parker was too busy. Angela often worked in proximity to Amanda, but their jobs didn’t overlap. Even if they did, Amanda had too much on her plate at the moment.
“Ange.” Sawyer watched her. “You can’t do both jobs well. You have to let Titan do what Titan does.”
She agreed—but who? How? Suddenly, the immensity of her haphazard job switch hit her. Angela pressed her hands against her temples. “Oh my God. What have I gotten myself into?” She didn’t know a damn thing about gathering intel. She knew how to arrange for safe houses—and, oddly enough, that was because she’d studied for it in a way. Her college degree had been in event planning and hospitality. She was an organizer. She could manage agendas and facilities. Could she do what Jared needed her to if she hadn’t spent four years studying? And somehow, she thought she could just hop into the field and investigate? Sawyer had been right.
Their phones pinged. It was too early in the morning for a message to be related to anything other than the job. She hurried out of the closet and found her phone. “It’s Parker.” It was getting close to the middle of the night on the east coast of the US. She returned to the closet and saw Sawyer’s expression had darkened as he glanced up from his phone.
Her stomach lurched. “That look doesn’t bode well.”
Sawyer’s eyebrows arched, apparently in agreement that it wasn’t good.
She opened Parker’s message.
The Feds were sniffing around. Your mother looped them in.
Angela could’ve predicted that would happen, and her mother could’ve held out for longer, but Angela didn’t expect much from the woman who day-traded information.
“Keep reading,” Sawyer grumbled.
Special Agent John Patterson will be in the hotel lobby in an hour to meet with Angela .
“Great. The Feds want to tell me I’m wrong and crazy all over again.” She tossed her phone aside and groaned. “At least that helps me figure out what outfit to wear.”
Sawyer snorted.
The phone pinged again. Angela rolled her lips together. Intuition said that the news would only worsen. “What’s it say?”
Sawyer quickly skimmed the message. His expression landed like a sucker punch into her gut.
“What?”
The muscles in his neck tightened, turning the crank on her punched stomach. “Sawyer?” She didn’t wait and grabbed her phone.
Special Agent John Patterson is a shrink .
Angela’s chin snapped up. “A shrink?”
Sawyer blinked as though the message had been written in an alien vernacular. “What the hell?”
Her breathing quickened. “I cannot believe she’s doing this.”
“Your mother? What—why?”
Angela pressed her fingertips to her temples and calculated when the federal agent would have left the United States if he intended to meet with her in an hour. “She had other plans for me. Remember? Getting married, yada, yada." An ache drilled at the back of her skull. “They can’t keep me from this job.”
“Maybe that’s not why they want you to meet with someone.”
“Wishful thinking.”
Angela sat at the conference table as the orange glow of the morning sun rose over Abu Dhabi. The rich aroma of expensive coffee filled the well-appointed office suite. She tried not to fidget. Every minute felt like five.
Amanda, filling Angela’s typical role, opened the conference room door and escorted their guest inside. John Patterson was lanky. His rumpled suit matched his tired eyes. She stood to greet him as Amanda ushered him into the conference room.
“Angela Sorenson,” Amanda said by way of introduction, “this is Special Agent John Patterson, FBI.”
“John.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for meeting on such short notice.”
They shook. John’s firm, sure grip was far more enthusiastic than she expected for a man who had hopped on an airplane and gotten halfway across the globe before she’d gone to sleep the night prior.
Did her mother and the Feds mean to catch Angela off guard, or was this simply a matter of miscommunication? She’d spent the last hour talking herself into a tizzy and back to a calm, rational explanation. “I’m sorry that you had to take the red-eye. I’m sure we could’ve handled whatever you need to know over a video conference.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but...” John gestured for her to take a seat. “I like to sit face to face.”
The hand motion irked her. This was her world. Angela handled agendas, booked the meeting rooms, and indicated when guests should take their seats. She pivoted. “I’m going to pour myself a cup of coffee.” She walked toward the coffee service set up along the far wall. “Would you like any?”
He seemed to understand her move. But, of course, he was a shrink—for the Feds, no less. The man was likely hyper-analyzing her every breath. “I’m fine,” he said. “Bouncing back to my regular schedule is easier when I avoid caffeine.”
“Sounds like hell.” She fixed herself a larger cup than she needed. “I guess you’re here because of my mother.”
“She had something to do with it,” John acknowledged. “But we’re more interested in the intel that Parker brought to us.” He sat at the table and waited until she returned. “I understand you’d given it to us before, and we dropped the ball.”
Angela smiled sardonically. “Dropped the ball and made me feel like an idiot.”
He nodded, removing a small notepad and pen from his suit jacket pocket. “I’m sure they didn’t mean for that to happen, but I’d like to apologize that it did.”
She settled in the chair across from John. “I know you didn’t fly here to issue apologies.”
He clicked his pen as if to agree.
Angela kept her back straight and chin high. Confidence had always been her shield. It hadn’t let her down even when she had to fake it. “What are you looking for that Parker hasn’t already told you?”
“You’re aware that I am a profiler.”
“That you’re a shrink.” She nodded. “I’m aware.”
John’s lips turned upward. “Guilty as charged but not like you might think.” He weighed her silence and then took it as permission to continue. “We build psychological profiles that are used in a variety of ways. For our purposes, I’d like to see what I can do to help narrow the search for Mylene Hathaway.”
“I’ve already shared everything I can think of.”
“But we haven’t spoken before.”
Tension needled on her forehead. “And what makes you different from the other profilers and analysts who took what I said, shredded it, and made me feel like a first-class idiot?”
Now, it was time for him to wait in silence. Finally, he shrugged. “I’ve never met or worked with most of the analysts you spoke with previously.” He offered a gentle grin. “I’m not your enemy.”
Her mother’s standard operating procedures had turned Angela bitter and slightly paranoid. With that mood compounded by too little sleep and maybe too much coffee, she needed to ease up on the guy. Her stiff shoulders dropped. “Understood. Sorry.”
John nodded with professional understanding. “From what I gather, you’ve had a lot on your plate this week.”
“You can say that again.” She sipped the unneeded coffee. “How can I help? You’re interested in Mylene Hathaway?”
John pressed the top of the pen open and closed. “I want to talk to you about the day Pham’s associates took you.” He click-clicked the pen again. “Is it all right with you if we review the details?”
Angela wanted a pen that clicked too. They could communicate like dolphins and be just as capable of learning anything new. “That has pretty much been talked to death.”
He pressed the top of the pen with his thumb again. Click, click. “Humor me.”
She took a deep breath and recounted everything that she’d said before. This many years later, sharing her recollections of the abduction was robotic. She made sure to add details that hadn’t initially occurred to her years ago but that investigators always asked on follow-up. Weather? Sunny. Sounds? Normal parking lot sounds. Gut feelings or intuition about what was about to happen to her? Nonexistent.
After she wrapped up, Angela waited for the surefire follow-up questions meant to double-check her memories. But John Patterson reread his scant notes.
“Are you recording our conversation?” she asked.
“No, no.” He circled something on his notepad, click-clicked his pen, and laid both objects on the table, squaring them to the edge. “Besides, if I didn’t tell you I had been recording, the ethics on that…” He waggled his hand from side to side. “Not great.”
Angela snorted. Life with her mother had made her a little mistrustful about people in power and their ethics. “Didn’t look like you wrote much.”
“I didn’t.”
Her eyebrows arched.
“I’ve been studying Pham’s case for years.”
Now her stomach tightened. “You’re one of the Feds working on ways to infiltrate his network.”
John Patterson nodded. “And I’ve been told your thoughts on my work.”
Angela flushed. Had he heard her opinion on the ineptitude of the agents studying Pham? “Oh boy.”
“You’re not wrong.” He studied her. “When you said that I can only know as much as I can research, that’s true and infinitely less than someone like you who has lived it.”
Her cheeks warmed again. She nodded, not thrilled that someone had shared her thoughts on his job. Angela didn’t want to knock the man’s work now that he was in front of her. “Please don’t take what I said personally.”
John leaned against the back of the rolling chair and click-clicked his pen. “I didn’t, and you’re right. It’s one of the reasons I’m here, talking to you in person. I don’t want to miss a single detail. An eye tic. A quick intake of breath. My notes are basic and only serve to re-capture your thoughts on Pham, not analyze them.”
“Then what is it that you’re really interested in?”
“I want to analyze what you’re not saying, what you might not even realize you’re avoiding.”
“Well, then, the man you need to see is my therapist.”
“Your appointment this week had some fireworks.”
She snorted. “You can say that again.”
“You don’t seem scarred, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Angela paused, unsure how to explain that her scars were ugly, but they were hers. “I don’t know that anyone could go through everything that I have and not operate outside the lines of what’s expected.”
“Trauma affects everyone differently. Some overreact. A mouse farts, and they dive for cover. Others might slap the woman that had tried to kill them.”
Angela blushed. “I was upset. But, between Sawyer and Ibrahim, I was safe.”
“Ibrahim is a therapist who you regularly see?”
She nodded.
“And Sawyer Cabot is a Titan operative?”
Was that the best way to describe Sawyer in this conversation? He’d acted as her bodyguard so long as he wasn’t on the job when she needed to leave Titan’s premises. But he was also her good friend. “Yes, he’s based here.”
Again, John clicked his pen.
“If Ibrahim has notes on my Pham recollections, you can have them,” she offered, pivoting from the topic of Sawyer.
“That’s not a bad idea. Do I have your permission?”
“On Pham details? Sure. Go for it. I want to do whatever it takes to ensure Pham stays behind bars.” And rescue Mylene Hathaway, but she didn’t want to share that with John Patterson. “Be warned, I’m quite the case study. He might not have notes on Pham. I’m more than enough to keep him busy.”
“Everyone feels like that after living through your kind of hell.”
It was scary that enough people had lived a similar life experience that John could generalize. “We could have him meet you here today.”
The pen clicked again. “That would be helpful.”
An awkward silence spread between them, as if he expected Angela to continue sharing. “I don’t understand exactly what you’re looking for,” she said.
“The most interesting details emerge in casual conversations. Simple ones after simple questions. Like, do you enjoy working here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you feel safe?”
“There are probably fewer safe places in the world, given what my life is like.”
“What’s your life like?”
“You know most everything. Abduction. Captivity. Relocated for work. Someone tried to kill me because my mom blew my cover.”
“Is sarcasm one of the ways you handle stress?”
“That, coffee, and clothes.”
John’s lips flattened. “How familiar are you with different types of shock?”
“I have no clinical expertise. That’s Ibrahim’s bailiwick.”
“How familiar are you with an M-16 rifle?”
Her face skewed. “What? I’m not.”
“Mylene Hathaway,” John segued.
Angela refocused to keep up with the questions.
“You have Titan’s full support with your involvement, wherever that may take you. Whatever circumstances you find yourself in.”
“I know,” she agreed. “And I’ll be with Sawyer.”
“He’s a co-worker?”
Hadn’t they just been over this? “Yes.”
“And a friend?”
“Yes—”
“Romantic—”
“No!” She leaned forward. “Why would you even ask that?”
“How strong would you consider your family’s support network?”
“My what?”
“Your family’s support. Let’s talk about Paul Bane.”
Angela’s mouth opened. “Paul isn’t my family or a part of my life. Even when he was, he wasn’t supportive.” Or even interested in her in any way other than the connection to her mother. But that wasn’t the Feds’ business.
John made a quick note. “How about your parents?”
Her dad was semi-easy to reach, but she hadn’t leaned on him. Most often, the easiest way to reach her mother was the scheduling office. But again, why did the FBI care? “What does this have to do with Pham?”
“Have you ever thought about killing Pham?”
Angela jerked back. “That is none of your business.”
“You want him to remain behind bars?”
“Yes.”
“If you were asked to do something you didn’t want to do, if it came to Pham, would you comply?”
“That depends.”
“Have you ever been high up and thought about falling off?”
Her lips parted.
“Jumping off?” he prompted.
“No.”
“How do you deal with stress, Angela?”
“Well, apparently, I glare at it from across a conference room table.”
John chuckled and wrote a note.
“Let’s circle back to Sawyer Cabot.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“I didn’t get a clear answer. Is he, or has he been, a romantic partner?”
“Are you crazy? No.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“What does any of this have to do with Mylene Hathaway—” Her stomach bottomed out. “Are you doing a psych evaluation on me ?”
Once more, John clicked his pen.
Son of a bitch. This whole meeting was a sham. “Are you kidding me?” She pushed out of her chair. Did Parker know? Boss Man? Sawyer? Humiliation drove daggers up her spine. Did they have concerns about her interest in Sawyer?
Was she interested in Sawyer?
Was Sawyer concerned? Titan? Or had her mother come up with this scheme to understand why Angela hadn’t fallen in line with the campaign plans? That was the only answer that made sense. Heat rippled from her neck into her cheeks. This interrogation had been bought and paid for by her mother.
John tossed his pen onto the table. “What about this makes you uncomfortable?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Everyone who goes into the field needs a risk assessment.”
She knew but had to ask, “Who sent you?”
“We already covered that your mother asked me to visit you.”
Her nostrils flared.
“Angela, what makes you uncomfortable with this discussion?” he asked again. “Given your work at Titan for the last few years, my line of questioning is normal operating procedure.”
“This is not how they’re done.” Her molars gnashed. “Not to mention, they’re never done surreptitiously.”
“I apologize if it came off that way,” he said casually, studying her.
This back-and-forth, she realized, was part of his psych evaluation also. “You want to know what makes me uncomfortable?” she scoffed. “Everything.”
“That’s a throwaway answer. Give yourself a second and see if you have a different answer.”
God, this man infuriated her. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a toddler.”
“I’m aggravating you,” he suggested.
“Yeah, not to be rude, but—”
“Dig into that, Angela. Why not be rude? You’re safe. You have loved ones. A job that you enjoy and protects you—”
She squared her shoulders. The lack of control in this pointless conversation was enough to unravel her, but wasn’t that what John Patterson was looking for? What her mother wanted? Absolutely. “We’re done.”