Chapter Fifty-Two #2
“We’ve been ordered to continue day-to-day operations, training, et cetera, but we are also no longer involved with finding the culprits behind hiring the assassins and conducting the killings.”
“Has someone gotten to Watkins?” Gumdrop was the one asking. “Is he tainted by this, somehow?”
Hanley said, “I don’t know. Pace had his suspicions about Watkins since Night Train’s daughter in Witness Protection and Six’s father were ID’d by the opposition.
He said there couldn’t have been more than three or four people in the intelligence community who could have accessed both those pieces of information as quickly as it was apparently accessed. ”
Gumdrop said, “But if Watkins was one of the bad guys in all this, why did he have us out here targeting the killers?”
Hanley wiped his face with a hand. “I don’t know. Maybe someone got to him. Maybe something changed. I asked him to explain himself, but he said he didn’t want to say anything else over the phone.”
“So,” Conductor said, “you are going to talk in person?”
Hanley nodded. “He said I could go up to D.C. later in the week for a meeting. Not today. Not tomorrow. He said he’d let me know.”
“Damn,” Arnold said softly.
Hanley shook his head, still in disbelief. “When I have a face-to-face with Watkins, hopefully I’ll get some answers. In the meantime, I was ordered not to reach out to Pace.” Hanley looked to the phone now. “Angela, what do you think? Could Trey be one of them?”
There was a long pause on the other end. Hanley said, “Angela? Did I lose you?”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. Her voice sounded distracted. “I’m very sorry. I just received a message. I have to report to the DDO’s office. Right now. I’m going to have to hang up.”
Hanley let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m sorry, Angela. I have a feeling you’ll be reassigned, too.”
“Shit,” she mumbled. “I’ll call you back after I talk to—”
Now Hanley was the one who interrupted. “No…you won’t. Thank you for your help, but I guarantee Watkins is going to tell you, at a bare minimum, to steer clear of us.”
“This makes no sense,” Lacy said, her frustration evident, but then she said goodbye, presumably to report to her boss.
When it was just Hanley and his three employees, he said, “I’m going to get in Trey’s face in a couple of days, and I’ll get answers.” After a little sigh, he said, “You all deserve that much.”
“Be careful,” Conductor said. “If he’s working with the killers, confrontation might be dangerous.”
Hanley shook his head. “There’s a lot in this world that scares me. Trey Watkins does not.”
“It won’t be Trey himself you have to worry about,” Gumdrop said. “There are still assassins out there that are unaccounted for.”
The room cleared a minute later. Gumdrop, Conductor, and Bricklayer had files to delete and messes to clean up.
Hanley just sat at his desk, enraged. He and his team had eliminated three top-tier assassins, had saved the lives of two women who could prove helpful in getting to the bottom of whatever conspiracy was infecting the U.S. intelligence community.
And now Trey was stopping them. Stopping Pace, no doubt stopping Lacy.
His fury grew, and the fact that he’d have to wait a few days to even confront Watkins only angered him more.
—
Court sat on the train from Dublin to Belfast, his eyes closed, his body rocking with the vibrations of the tracks.
His headphones in his ears played a George Harrison tune from 1970.
He wasn’t really listening to the lyrics; he’d tuned them out to think of other things, or not to think at all, but then his Signal app buzzed, and he immediately sent the call to his headphones.
“Yeah?”
Sir Donald Fitzroy’s voice was low and serious. “I did what you asked. Got you what you wanted.”
“Give it to me.” Court opened a notetaking app on his phone, prepared to type something in.
But the Englishman said, “Lad…what on earth are you doing?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m going to try to make things better.”
“Better for who?”
Neither man spoke for several seconds. Then Court said, “I’m not really sure.”
“I don’t like this. Not one bit.”
“Then just give it to me and forget I asked for it.”
The older man let out a long sigh. “The thing that always made you different from the rest, it wasn’t your skill, though lord knows you have that in spades. It was your humanity. If you lose that, then nothing you do will be worth anything. You’ll just be another one of them.”
Pleadingly, he said, “Don’t be another one of them.”
“I don’t need a lecture right now. I need some guns, and I need an address.”
“You need a bloody knock in the head if this is what I think this is.”
“I told you. It’s not that.” Angrily, he said, “Give me what I fucking asked for, Fitz. You owe me, and you fucking know it!”
A head turned on the train. A woman stared at him. Court glared back at her until she turned away.
After a long moment, the Englishman said, “You’re going to play that card? That I owe you this?”
“If I have to.”
“Very well. Write this down, but I’m warning you, nothing good can come from it.”
“ ‘Good’ left the chat a long time ago, Fitz.”