Chapter Thirteen #2
He grinned. “It’s a privately held special ops company that focuses on military and security issues. We have multiple teams. Some are considered ghosts. We’re more off the books than other teams.”
“Oh… so no happy-hour schmooze fests?”
“Yeah, no. We’re not known for networking.”
She laughed.
“There’s a US-based team that is more the face of the company. They’re not all that far from here.”
“But they weren’t the ones to help me out.”
He shook his head and didn’t offer an explanation.
Amelia peeled at her water bottle label. She couldn’t find the edge of it and turned the bottle, lost in thought. She dragged her nail along the wrapper. “Can you tell me more about ghost teams? What do you do? Specifically.”
“Sure. It’s pretty simple. Just a group that works together on security projects.”
“That doesn’t sound very ghostlike.”
He nodded, amused. “We get in and out. No connections. No loose ends. No assignments that can be tracked to anyone else.”
Like Hailey and Jonathan. “That’s very… interesting? Terrifying?”
He laughed. “Both? Guess it depends on who you ask.”
“You and I live in very different worlds.” Though she wasn’t living in her own anymore.
Amelia had passed all the responsibility to Veronica and hadn’t had a moment’s desire to check in.
Veronica would understand that all Amelia’s thoughts had been focused on her sister.
Where was Hailey? Was she scared? Hurt? Was Hailey hoping that Amelia had called the phone number that would fix everything? “Do you know how to find Hailey?”
“There are people working on that.”
That wasn’t an answer. She glared. “You’re certain about that, Cam?”
His expression faltered.
“Because they’ve done a lot to prove she’s dead. Why?” She shook her head. “What on earth would be the reason to arrest me? To build a bullshit case.” Amelia pressed her fingers to her temples. “My arrest wasn’t based in reality. So why? Who are they trying to prove Hailey’s death to?”
Camden raised his shoulders. “I have no idea. The details that were shared with me were… sanitized.”
“Sanitized?” She snorted. “Everything is smoke and mirrors and lies and—” Her stomach turned. She’d had the same thought more than once, but maybe Camden would confirm it. “Did they work for the CIA?”
“It’s not my place—”
“Camden. Come on. Tell me the truth. Or as much of the truth as you can tell me. Please?”
“The begging is killing me, sweetheart. Knowing a specific agency won’t change—”
“You’re the only one who has been truthful. You’re the only one I trust right now. Tell me.”
He held her gaze for an eternity. She didn’t know if answering would break the law or if he didn’t think she could handle the truth.
“They did.” Camden’s eyebrows rose as though to ask if that made any difference.
The CIA. Hailey and Jonathan worked for an intelligence agency. They lived their lives one way and secretly worked on projects they’d never uttered a breath about. “I knew that had to be the case. Nothing else made sense.”
The wind howled around the house. The lights flickered.
Amelia finally found the edge of the water bottle wrapper and tore it free from the glue.
She unwound the wrapper and studied the naked bottle, tilting it to one side then the other, watching the water catch and fill the bottle’s creases.
“I really didn’t know them as well as I thought I did. ”
His eye met hers and wouldn’t let go. “They were the people you knew them as. I promise. The professor. The researcher. The sister and brother-in-law. They were very much those people you knew.”
“I’m not—”
The lights went out. The slow hum of appliances quieted. She shivered. They sat in the dark. He made no move to find a candle or use the flashlight on his phone. Amelia appreciated the cloak of darkness. Right then, she wanted to stay hidden.
Camden eased off his barstool. “You okay?”
“I’m not scared of the dark, if that’s what you’re asking,” she half joked.
“Stay put a second.” He pulled out his cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and opened two kitchen drawers before extracting an elongated lighter from a drawer and a package of four short, fat candles. “A well-stocked safe house always makes life easier.”
He lit two candles and left them on the breakfast bar between them then placed the remaining two on the coffee table. He lit them and returned to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
She shook her head. The turkey sub had filled her up, and since she hadn’t had much of an appetite for prison food, her stomach wasn’t in a rush to digest it.
Camden made a peanut butter sandwich and polished it off before he cleaned up his mess, putting the knife in the dishwasher and peanut butter in the cabinet.
“You’re efficient,” she pointed out.
“And you note things people do and then tell them.”
She laughed to herself. “Guess I do. I never noticed that. Yet somehow I missed that my sister, the person I’m closest to, worked for a bunch of spies.”
The wind picked up again. Camden leaned against the sink counter. Candlelight danced across his features. “It was their job to hide their work from you. They were trained to keep you in the dark.”
“I guess.”
“You sound like you don’t like what they did.”
She shrugged. “It’s not that. It’s the lying.”
“You can’t take offense to it. The people who do their kind of work are looking out for the greater good in the world.
You know what I mean? They wouldn’t sign up for that kind of trouble and make sacrifices that we’ll have no idea about if they didn’t want to leave the place better and safer than they found it. ”
When he put it like that… “Our parents died when we were young, and I think it killed Hailey that she wasn’t old enough to charge out into the world and take care of us.”
“How old were you?”
“I was nine. Almost ten. She was twelve.”
“You said they were in a car accident. Want to tell me what happened?”
Amelia toyed with the water bottle. “Someone was trying to find a gas station and playing with the GPS on their phone while it was raining. Their choice changed the course of so many lives.”
“Damn. I’m sorry.”
That was a dark time, maybe almost as dark as right then. Amelia was hoping Hailey would be found. There wasn’t even a scant hint of hope when their parents died. It had been complete and utter devastation.
“We lived with some family member that CPS found and we’d never heard of.
I think she took us in for the stipend the state paid.
” She balled up the water bottle wrapper in her hands, making it crinkle.
“It wasn’t easy, coming from a life so ideal it could’ve been on a postcard to then living with someone who literally didn’t care.
But we did it. What choice did we have?”
“Not much, I guess.” He opened the refrigerator and retrieved two beer bottles. Camden held them up. After she nodded, he uncapped and handed one over.
“Thanks.”
They took long pulls of the cold beers. She couldn’t have imagined how her day would turn out when she woke up that morning in solitary confinement. Safe and warm, drinking a beer during a power outage wasn’t something she could have dreamt up. “What about your family?”
He smiled. “It’s a big, loud family. Lots of brothers. A dad who’s a good sport about it all and a mother who’s impatiently waiting for grandchildren.”
“None yet?”
“Nope. The woman raised a hell of a brood that would be hard to tie down.”
Amelia laughed. Tied down sounded like an awful punishment, yet she knew exactly what he meant.
She had orchestrated many weddings at which she didn’t think the couple had a snowball’s chance in hell of survival.
Then Amelia thought about Hailey and Jonathan.
They were perfectly matched. Tied down? More like tied together.
“Maybe no one’s tied down when it’s the right match. ”
His index finger tapped against his beer bottle. Camden rolled his bottom lip into his mouth then took a long drink. “Maybe so.”