Chapter 37
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I cannot stress this enough,” I say, leaning closer across the mahogany desk. “I would rather die.”
Carmine, dressed in an indigo Hawaiian shirt, simply cocks an eyebrow. His hands have been clasped over his stomach for the past hour, leaned back onto his chair like it’s all greatly amusing to him. “The dramatics won’t get you anywhere in the FBI, kid,” he replies.
“It’s a good thing I’m not in the FBI.”
He shrugs. “Tomato, tomahto.”
We’re in a corner office at the FBI Legal Attaché inside the U.S.
Embassy in London, grey skies spewing forth rain and fog with the intensity of a Biblical plague.
You’d think, coming from an agency based in the snow-capped Alps, I’d be unperturbed by bleak weather—but it turns out that I prefer a warm beach and a partly cloudy breeze.
One learns a lot about themselves when they’re finally given the chance.
“Listen, I get it, okay?” Carmine refocuses my attention. “You’re used to that cowboy stuff. But if you want our help, you’ve gotta play by our rules. In this particular circumstance, that means, eh… cozying up to the locals, so-to-speak.”
My mouth settles into a scowl. “You mean getting wrapped so tightly with red tape that I can’t save myself if it comes down to it.”
“Something like that.”
“Does it have to be her?”
We both turn our eyes to the woman sitting beside me, decked out in National Crime Agency attire like she just hit up the gift shop. She glances between us, black ringlets piled high off her medium brown skin, a berry-colored smile cracking her face.
I recognized her the moment she walked into Carmine’s office earlier.
Although I didn’t know her name at the time, she’d approached me weeks before, outside the destroyed pub in south London where I got rid of the Lambeth Boys. She had that hero-worship sparkle I always detested but never understood why.
Now that I do, I hate it even more. Each awestruck glance turns my stomach. I’m no one to look up to, I want to say.
“Care to explain?” Carmine grunts at her.
“Oh—me?” She glances back and forth between us, as if only recently noticing we’re both looking at her. “Aye, my name’s Wilhemina Jones, although—” She laughs and her cheeks dimple even further. “You probably already know that. But my friends call me Willy, it’s faster to get out.”
I frown. “What do your co-workers call you?”
“Jones. Jones is grand,” she replies, the melodic lift of her Scottish accent almost charming if I wasn’t thoroughly irritated by the circumstance.
“Anywho, ah—I served four years with the Police Scotland. It was after I made detective that the NCA recruited me for a classified task force… and, er—they recently made me Task Force Commander.”
“How recently?”
“I was recruited a month ago.”
My jaw threatens to hinge open but I snap it shut, cutting a glare toward Carmine. “You see how insane this is, right?”
“I wasn’t born yesterday.” He kicks his feet up on the desk, rattling everything on it, and takes a drag from his coffee mug that reads I’d Rather Be at the Beach.
“The FBI can’t make arrests on foreign soil—if you want to do anything, y’know—legally, we’ve gotta play nice with King and country.
Be grateful it’s not those smug stunads over at Europol. ”
My ears perk. “You know people at Europol?”
“Unfortunately,” Carmine grunts.
Jones clears her throat and grins when she has our attention again. “I know it’s strange, and you’d be right to think I’m way in over my head.”
“You’re not alleviating my worries,” I grumble.
“Truth be told—” Her smile falters for the first time since she arrived. “—I’m the last one in the task force.”
Well, she’s got my attention.
“I came on to replace someone that’d died,” she continues, “but no one knew the deaths weren’t… accidental until the next. They’ve been picked off, one-by-one, and it’s only me left.”
My stomach churns. “The Consultant at work.”
“Aye—he’s been particularly active in recent weeks, and no one knows why.”
“I thought it was a classified task force? How’d he know who was in it?” I reply.
Her expression hardens. “I’d love to know why, Agent, because half the NCA believes it’s me.”
Sinking back in my seat, my brain sifts the information over and over but comes up empty.
“If you’ve got a connection to him, I might be the only person as motivated as you to put him behind bars,” Jones adds.
“I don’t know about connection,” I reply. “He just wants to kill me.”
“Ah, well, ye’re not the only one.” She gives me a dimpled smile.
“And why hasn’t he?”
Jones being a mole, however illogical, can’t be removed completely from the list of possibilities. If I don’t even trust the FBI agent I asked for help, why should I trust someone who’s been forced on me?
“I’d love to know,” she says. “I can’t help but wonder if he’s underestimated me.” Jones pulls her shoulders back, gaze leveling with mine in something like a challenge. I raise a quizzical eyebrow. “And, if you’re wonderin’, that would be a grave miscalculation on his part.”
The corner of my mouth quirks upward despite myself. “Fine, okay, but stop calling me Agent.”
“What do I call you?”
“Sloane,” I reply easily, slinging one leg over the other.
Carmine claps his meaty hands together. “Heartwarming,” he mutters. “Now can we get down to business? Sloane, if you don’t have something helpful to contribute here, I’m gonna kindly ask you to take a hike.”
“That’s strange, because I recall you coming to me,” I retort.
“My boss is a softie, what can I say?” His chair squeaks as he leans back and forward in a rocking motion. “A squeaky-clean ISA agent with her own agency trailing her attracts quite a bit of attention.”
Jones gapes in my peripheral.
I flick a hand through the air. “It was the Consultant, not the ISA.”
“Really? The trail of bodies you left in your wake speaks otherwise.”
Jones’s bug-eyed stare darts back and forth from me to Carmine.
“Only one of those was mine,” I quip. “And you still haven’t told me why you were trailing us since Colorado.”
“Call it professional curiosity.”
“Alright—” I lean forward, smacking both hands on the desk like I’m preparing to leave. “—if this is how it’s going to go, I’m not interested. I’ll just kill him myself.”
Carmine sighs. “Take it easy, kid. You’re not used to coloring inside the lines, and I’m not used to working with someone I’ve been investigating.”
Anger shoots up my spine, my fingers curling into fists, but I force a long breath in and another out, swallowing it. “You were investigating me?”
“How long did you think you’d be able to traipse around the world assassinating important figures and upheaving governments?” He gives a shrug. “Throwing us a bone every once in a while wasn’t going to make us turn a blind eye—we’re not the CIA.”
“Funny.”
Carmine grins for a fleeting second. “Anyway, we got word that the winds had shifted and decided to give you a heads up.”
“I think you mean, see if you could turn me,” I reply.
“Something like that.”
I open my mouth and clamp it shut. I suppose, in a roundabout way, they did end up turning me. Not that I’d ever let them think they played a part in it.
“Not to sound rude, but—” Jones clears her throat. “—what does this have to do with the Consultant?”
We both turn back to her.
“Everything,” Carmine replies. “Sloane worked for the ISA, the ISA works for the Consultant?—”
I stand before I can even recognize what’s happening. My pulse feels strange, skittering irregularly as the room tilts and the building goes along with it. They’re both watching me, dumbfounded, the puzzle pieces clicking into place behind my eyes.
So, I was right, I’m thinking. This was a suicide mission all along—an ISA-sanctioned suicide mission.
Surviving was rather inconsiderate of me.