CHAPTER 68
Embassy Row
Washington, DC
Special Agent in Charge Rowan Anderson wasn’t the only one mulling over the Nantucket debacle. In the early hours of the morning, Elise Courville was awake in a bedroom somewhere on Embassy Row.
“She looks like a zombie,” Courville had heard her father whispering to his private physician about his daughter’s state.
What would Charles Courville, Ambassador of France to the United States, say if he learned that his daughter played a key part in multiple schemes?
Turning Agent Rowan Anderson against her country; plotting to abduct and kill her philandering husband; and the ultimate double cross: killing the President of the United States.
Courville’s relationship with Anderson was complicated at best. She had to admit that Anderson was smart, but Courville had seen the surprise in the agent’s face when she’d held the gun against her.
Haracat al Marrak had stopped making contact.
He’d never sent a message confirming the mission’s completion on the island, nor had he sent any messages via their contingency method of communication.
None of his network gave any sign of acknowledgment.
This could mean only one thing: Elise Courville was a marked woman.
Like the zombie her father described, she was the walking dead.
There was no place to hide from a man as ruthless as al Marrak. He could kill senators. He could kill presidents. And he could definitely kill the daughter of the French ambassador.
A man had come to her home with a rifle and fired inside it. At first she’d been sure he was aiming for Rowan Anderson, but now she wasn’t at all certain.
While they’d been upstairs at her house, packing those Louis Vuitton bags, Anderson had laid out the terms of their newfound alliance of necessity: We’re the only ones who know the name of the man in Paris. We have to stick together.
At 3 a.m., Elise Courville’s phone vibrated on her bedside table. She was instantly alert. Could it be Haracat al Marrak? Had he finally sent the message she’d been waiting for?
“Merde,” she muttered, venting her disappointment before hurriedly typing her reply:
WILL BE THERE AT 7 A.M.